Modern Men: Mapping Masculinity in English and German Literature, 1880-1930

Modern Men Mapping Masculinity in English and German Literature, 1880-1930

MICHAEL KANE

CASSELL London and New York

For my mother

Cassell Wellington House, 125 Strand, London WC2R OBB 370 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10017-6550 First published 1999 © Michael Kane 1999 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0 304 70309 5 Hardback 0 304 70310 9 Paperback Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kane, Michael, 1966Modern men: mapping masculinity in English and German literature, 1880-1930/Michael Kane. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-304-70309-5 (hardcover).—ISBN 0-304-70310-9 (pbk.) 1. English literature—Male authors—History and criticism. 2. English literature—20th century—History and criticism. 3. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 4. German literature—Male authors—History and criticism. 5. Literature, Comparative—English and German. 6. Literature, Comparative—German and English. 7. Masculinity in literature. 8. Men in literature. I. Title. PR120.M45K36 1999 810.9'353—dc21

99-20681 CIP

Typeset by BookEns Ltd, Royston, Herts. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddies Ltd, Guildford and King's Lynn

Contents

Preface

v

Part I The 'Double' Introduction 1 Jekyll and Hyde 2 After dualism: Nietzsche 3 Dorian Gray

3 17 27 42

Part II The Other — Narcissus and Salome Scapegoats 4 The trials of Narcissus: Wilde 5 The deaths of Narcissus: Hofmannsthal 6 The death of Salome

57 61 71 86

Part III The Nationalization of Narcissus National narcissism 7 Insiders/outsiders: Conrad's The Nigger of the Narcissus and Stoker's Dracula 8 North, South, East, West: Musil, Mann, Hofmannsthal

109 120 141

Part IV Kampf or Male Bondage War, men and 'meaning' 9 Fighting men: Lawrence and London 10 Kampf: Walser, Kafka, Brecht

165 175 188

Conclusion: after patriarchy

212

Index

228

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Preface

I first thought about writing this book ten years ago when I came across a number of intriguing similarities between English and German literary texts of the modern period during my final year of undergraduate studies at University College, Dublin. Then I read a book by Klaus Theweleit called Manmrphantasien (Male Fantasies), a detailed study of the writings of some right-wing soldiers who had fought in the First World War, many of whom subsequently became Nazis.1 Theweleit dealt with fascinating material concerning the psycho-sexual complexes of Fascist men and addressed some wider issues concerning men, gender, sexuality and culture in general. This prompted me to wonder whether similar complexes might not be found in men who were neither Nazis nor necessarily German. Theweleit's book helped me see that modern masculinity itself was my subject, and that this was a subject worthy of serious academic study. As I prepared my Masters thesis for University College, Dublin, and continued this as a doctoral dissertation for the University of Bern I came across a number of fascinating books dealing with various aspects of my topic. The subject of masculinity had suddenly become extremely topical. It continues to be so, as men struggle to come to terms with the demise of patriarchal society and the implications of this for their relations with each other and with women and for their sense of their own identity. Most recently, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has focused his attention on what he calls la vision "phallonarcissique"' and la cosmologie androcentrique' (phallo-narcissistic vision and androcentric cosmology), the male perspective on the world which has been, and to a large degree continues to be, the dominant way of seeing things, a perspective which is so dominant that it is regarded as natural2 Bourdieu argues that the notions of masculinity and femininity and the fact of male domination seen to be natural from the 'phallo-narcissistic' point of view are, however, supremely artificial, cultural

vi

Preface

products which are constantly, and almost unwittingly, reproduced by cultural means in a culture in which 'phallo-narcissism' is all pervasive. It is hoped that this book, by examining some of the cultural products of European men around the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, will reveal some of the ways in which the myths of 'phallo-narcissism' were reproduced, questioned or modified as well as some of the contradictions inherent in that point of view. In his book Male Impersonators Mark Simpson has shown how 'male narcissism is becoming more and more "manifest" in popular culture' and how contemporary culture is saturated with male homoeroticism. Male narcissism and homoeroticism have, however, always been central, if hidden, features of patriarchal culture, as Bourdieu's use of the term 'phallo-narcissism' and Simpson's (and my own) reading of Freud suggests. This study should, like Simpson's book, serve as a 'critique of "common-sense" notions which segregate homosexuality and heterosexuality, masculine and feminine'.3 These terms are not as clearly separate from one another as many, particularly those men who are terrified of both 'homosexuality' and 'femininity' (or rather of the stigma attached to these words), would like to think. A further central concern of this book is the connection between 'Gender and Nation', to cite the title of a recent book by Nira Yuval-Davis. Enoch Powell, according to Yuval-Davis, once defined 'the nation' as 'two males plus defending a territory with the women and children'.4 That is an apt definition in terms of my argument: with the decline of the patriarchy and the crisis of masculinity around the last turn of century, many men looked to the nation as the saviour of their threatened masculinity and idealized the nation above all as a homosocial community of men whose fears and confusions about their own identity, and in particular about their own masculine identity, might be projected onto all territories outside the borders of that idealized masculine nation. This book re-examines some of the canonical works of modernist literature in English and German with regard to the issues of masculinity, relations between men, national identity and patriarchy which were, I argue, major preoccupations of male writers as they attempted to come to terms with, or react against the decline of patriarchal power due to the rise of modernity itself as well as of feminism. The book is divided into five parts which correspond roughly to the five decades between 1880 and 1930. The first part deals with the leitmotif of the 'double' in Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Friedrich Nietzsche's Ecce Homo and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. The leitmotif of the 'double' in the writings of these three men is linked to a

Preface

vii

radical critique of philosophical dualism on the one hand as well as to a fundamental scepticism about the notion of 'identity' on the other. The image of the 'double' seems to illustrate graphically how all those qualities traditionally deemed to belong to 'another world' — another social class (the proletariat), another race (foreigners), another gender (the feminine) — are discovered to be a repressed part of the self which had been projected onto others, but which has come back to haunt that self. The 'double' is thus evidence of a crisis of identity based on exclusive identification with one particular class, nation and gender. One almost automatically associates narcissism and homosexuality with the image of a man pursuing or being pursued by his 'double'. Both Otto Rank and Sigmund Freud argued that the dualism of body and soul is an expression of man's narcissistic desire for immortality. It would not be surprising then if the collapse or questioning of dualism were accompanied by intimations of narcissism and homoeroticism which, according to Rank and Freud, had to some extent been satisfied by dualism itself. The second and third parts are concerned with strategies that were employed in order to overcome this crisis of belief and of masculine identity. The subject of Part II, The Other: Narcissus and Salome', is the attempt to reproject those confusions troubling masculine identity onto scapegoat others, namely onto the figures of 'the degenerate', 'the criminal', 'the decadent', 'the homosexual' as well as onto women in general. I first look at the connection between the trials of Oscar Wilde and the popularity of a book by Max Nordau called Entartung (Degeneration). The second chapter here deals with the successive attempts of the young Hugo von Hofmannsthal, apparently influenced by news of Wilde's trials, to overcome his own narcissistic and aesthetic tendencies. The popularity of the figure of Salome at the fin de siecle is then seen as both an indication of the fascination with the 'manly woman' as well as of the renewed intensity of the desire to demonize women as agents of anarchy and evil. The third part, The Nationalization of Narcissus', is concerned with a further strategy employed in order to overcome the crisis of masculine identity, namely with the attempt to re-emphasize the boundary between the inside and the outside of the nation and to identify with the corporate body of the nation, idealized as a community of men, as a male body, which would be clearly distinct from a threatening, foreign and feminine realm of confusion and specifically of gender confusion. The texts dealt with here are Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the Narcissus, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Robert Musil's Die Verwirrungen des Zoglings Torlefl, Thomas Mann's Tonio Kroger and Der Tod in Venedig as well as some short works of Hofmannsthal. In the fourth part, the enthusiasm at the outbreak of the First World War is

viii

Preface

seen as enthusiasm for a new sense of male community and a celebration of the opportunity for the expression of traditional masculinity. In some works of literature not connected with the war, though written around this time, an intense relationship between men is given physical expression in a kind of sadomasochistic game. The suggestion is made here that there is a link between this and what Leed has called the 'desire for a confrontation of human wills' which fuelled the general enthusiasm for war in 1914. Works of D. H. Lawrence, Jack London, Robert Walser, Franz Kafka and Bertolt Brecht feature in this part. The concluding part, 'After Patriarchy', reviews some of the literature of the 1920s on the subject of patriarchy and matriarchy as well as of the implications of these for relations between men. The historical background for this part is of course the rise of Fascism, to some extent perhaps to be understood as a paranoid attempt to restore the homosocial patriarchy and exorcise it of its own fears and confusions by projecting these onto others who could be isolated and exterminated. Many, many thanks to Professor Tom Docherty, Professor Seamus Deane, Dr Maeve Cooke, Professor Hugh Ridley, Professor Dr Dr Ernest Hess-Luttich, Professor Dr Wolfgang Pross and to Caitriona Leahy for their advice, criticism and encouragement, as well as to the German Academic Exchange Service and the Swiss Eidgenossische Stipendienkommission for their research grants.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

Klaus Theweleit, Mannerphantasien, 2 vols (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1980). Pierre Bourdieu, La Domination Masculine (Paris: Seuil, 1998), p. 12. Mark Simpson, Male Impersonators (London: Cassell, 1994), p. 9. Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 1997), p. 15.

Parti

The 'Double'

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Introduction

Speculations: from Plato to postmodernism Though 'doubles' had of course appeared in literature before 1880 — one thinks immediately for example of Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Double, Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and E. T. A. Hoffmann's Der Sandmann — the 'double' was a literary motif which was particularly characteristic of the 1880s.1 The occurrence of the 'double' in Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, in Friedrich Nietzsche's Ecce Homo and in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray will be dealt with in the chapters of this part. Let me begin by asking three questions, which I hope will have been answered to some degree of satisfaction by the end of Part I, and by indulging in some speculations, which should be rejected or endorsed clearly and in more detail in the course of this part. First the questions: Why the popularity of the motif of the doppelganger in the 1880s and 1890s? Has the figure of the 'double' something to do with (male) sexuality? What has it to do with nationalism and war? Now for the speculations: One is perhaps immediately inclined to speculate that the motif of the 'double' has something to do with either some or all of the following: a. b. c. d. e.

schizophrenia or a splitting of the ego as a result of a crisis of identity; male fantasies of appropriating the female domain of giving birth; narcissism; homosexuality; philosophical dualism.

Whatever the medical definition of schizophrenia, I will certainly be arguing that the appearance of the 'double' is indicative of a crisis of identity of the

4

The 'Double'

white upper-class male towards the end of the nineteenth century and attempting to link this to (e), a questioning of the foundations of that identity in philosophical dualism, as well as to the related topics mentioned under (b), (c) and (d), i.e. male fantasies of giving birth, narcissism and homosexuality. All of these issues are either dealt with specifically or suggest themselves in those most famous narratives concerning 'doubles' of the late nineteenth century, R. L. Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray as well as in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Both these novels and Nietzsche's philosophy have in the twentieth century acquired something of the status of mythology; as modern myths they have supplied hugely influential models of masculine self-understanding and identification for generations of modern men — all the more influential because as myths they have tended to be received uncritically/innocently, almost on an unconscious level. The male fantasy of appropriating the female domain of giving birth is, as Elaine Showalter argues, one of the most persistent male fantasies in the patriarchal era. 'While fantasies of male self-creation and envy of the feminine aspects of generation were not new,' she writes, 'they re-emerged with particular virulence in the 1880s'.2 At what is often regarded as the dawn of our patriarchal historical era, Socrates, himself often regarded (by Western men inclined to model themselves in his image, or him in theirs) as one of the first forefathers of the long line of the Western male cultural canon, spoke of 'begetting spiritually', of giving birth to something other than babies.3 Philosophers give birth to ideas and books, and books to philosophers. A philosopher's true offspring are conceived, it seems, without the contamination of heterosexual intercourse, by men, for men, with men and without women. In the Judeo-Christian tradition there has, until very recently, been no doubt about the gender of the divine being who gave birth to the world: he is, one must admit, a truly almighty father who needs no female partner to become a father. Persuading women of the masculinity of the supreme being constituted quite a coup, to say the least, for men who could thus claim 'We were here first'. But what if men themselves actually gave birth to or created this male god? This is what Jeanette Winterson suggests in her parodic version of both the Book of Genesis and the Frankenstein story where Noah appears to have created 'the Unpronounceable by accident out of a piece of [Blackforest] gateau and a giant electric toaster'.4 If the notion that God was a man was an understandable result of men's narcissism and womb-envy, so also was Socrates' comparison of philosophical activity with women's ability to give birth, an idea which proved remarkably popular with men over the centuries. In particular, since the Romantics, men have liked to compare their cultural production with both God the Father's unaided creation of the universe and women's production of new human

Introduction

5

beings from their bodies. Mary Shelley was evidently acutely aware of this when she wrote Frankenstein.5 One of the most favoured mythical figures of the Romantics was Prometheus, who rebelled against the gods and dreamed of fashioning out of clay, in Goethe's poem of 1774, 'Menschen/Nach meinem Bilde' (people in my image).6 This was in no small measure the dream of the 'self-made men' of the nineteenth century, a dream of not submitting to being created by a superior god or born of a 'mere' woman but of creating/giving birth to oneself and one's surroundings. What has this to do with the texts to be dealt with here? Stevenson's novel is about one man's production of another man/monster in a laboratory. What Jekyll produces or gives birth to is his 'double', who is, if one may pardon the pun, no Dolly.7 In Wilde's Dorian Gray an artistic 'creation', a portrait of a man, painted by a man, actually acquires a life of its own. Nietzsche was particularly fond of the metaphor of giving birth and used it self-consciously and extensively, almost camping it up as a female impersonator, as we shall see. It appears then that the 'double' does indeed have something to do with male fantasies of giving birth. Perhaps the reason for the 'particular virulence' of male fantasies of self-creation or self-reproduction in the 1880s was a realization that patriarchy itself and male patriarchal identity were in crisis. The image of two men as closely attached to one another as 'doubles' seems to suggest either a man's narcissistic fascination with his mirror image or an intense, erotic relationship between two men, or both. Given that for nearly two thousand years men have successfully modelled the supreme being in their own image one might suggest that male narcissism is neither a recent product of advertising and the fault of Calvin Klein and his ilk, nor a perversion of 'normal' male sexuality, but has always been a central feature of masculinity in the patriarchal era. Male narcissism is most clearly an issue in Wilde's Dorian Gray, but it is perhaps also of relevance to Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as well as to Nietzsche's philosophy, as we shall see. If the patriarchy itself was a marvellous expression of male narcissism, it also not only promoted but institutionalized the notion that men should primarily love not only themselves but masculinity itself — and other men. Whether this love was to be expressed emotionally, physically, sexually or purely symbolically, and how, depended, one might say, on local cultural conditions. One central tenet of patriarchal thought has been that some form of practical, intellectual or spiritual knowledge is the exclusive preserve of men, is in fact born of men (fertilized by the knowledge of other men) and is something which is passed on directly from one generation of men to the next without the intervention of women. This knowledge is understood to be mediated by cultural intercourse between men and indeed often by rites of initiation involving the symbolic or actual sexual intercourse of one generation of men

6

The 'Double'

with the next. Thus the sacredness of the pedagogical and erotic relationships between older and younger men seen in, for example, ancient Greece. One has only to look at Elisabeth Badinter's list of various rites of male initiation in different patriarchal cultures to see how central this notion of 'C'est 1'homme qui engendre 1'homme', that it is men who give birth to men, has been; and how frequently this has involved more or less explicit (homo)sexual relations.8 Christianity, one might suggest, while completely suppressing any sexual aspect of relations between men, emphasized and held as sacred spiritual, indeed Platonic, love between men in a religion of pure brotherly love and adoration of a father figure. Thus, far from being pure of any 'taint of homosexuality', patriarchal thinking is so saturated with it that it institutionalizes the love of men for men, the admiration of the male body and the masculine intellect and loves nothing more than to express this either sexually or symbolically or both. One might further argue that the oppressive power of the institution of patriarchy is increased the more the sexual element is repressed and the symbolic is emphasized, the more patriarchal culture tends to institutionalize what Luce Irigaray has termed 'hom(m)osexualite'.9 One should therefore not be surprised if a crisis of that patriarchal culture should bring to light not only male fantasies of giving birth but also suggestions of male narcissism and homosexuality for, as the foregoing suggests, such ideas were always situated at the core of patriarchal thinking, loath though it might have been at times to admit this to itself. Such thinking remains, at some level, with us along with other unresolved bits of patriarchal thought. The homoerotic aspect of the 'double' and of men creating/giving birth to other men has been rendered most explicitly in recent times in, for example, the fiction of William Burroughs as well as in a pornographic parody of the Frankenstein story, in which a mad scientist trawls Victorian London for the perfect male member to append to his creation.10 As far as the texts to be dealt with here are concerned: the subject of erotic relations between men is most evident in Wilde's Dorian Gray, but it is perhaps also of relevance to Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and to Nietzsche's thought, as we shall see, and became something of an embarrassing issue during Wilde's trials — as did all relationships between men in the aftermath of those trials and their fixing of the new label and stigma of 'homosexuality' in the popular psyche, as we shall also see. The subject of philosophical dualism is treated critically in these stories about 'doubles' as well as in Nietzsche's philosophy. Indeed 'doubles' and dualism appear in these texts not merely as vaguely similar but as inherently interrelated. The appearance of Jekyll's 'double' is the direct result of his attempt to separate good and evil; Dorian attempts to separate the soul from

Introduction

7

the body, exchanging their characteristics, so that his soul will age while his body does not, and giving his soul to the famous portrait. A hugely influential, pervasive habit of thought in the West, institutionalized by the Platonic and the Judeo-Christian tradition, dualism entails not just the notion that the body and the soul (or the mind) are two separate entities and that one is better or more important than the other, or even that one is good and the other is bad. Implied here is also the separation of a spiritual world from a material world, their opposition and the hierarchical prioritizing of one over the other. As spirit was clearly separate from and opposed to matter, so was good clearly separate from evil. Other pairs of conceptual opposites could of course be aligned with these hierarchical binary oppositions, and were. A historian of Greek philosophy writes that 'the Pythagoreans, as convinced moral dualists, drew up two columns under the headings of good things and bad things. In the good column, along with light, unity and the male came limit; in the bad column, with darkness, plurality and the female, is placed the unlimited.'11 Thus men might arrive at the satisfying conclusion that the male was light, unity, limit and goodness and the female was darkness, plurality, the unlimited and badness. It was no doubt the strength of this argument which assured dualism such a central position in Western thinking. Armed with this conceptual tool, not only had Western man a clear gender role with which to identify as well as of course another with which he might identify women, he could also set out to map and conquer the world. What has this to do with the 'double'? The psychoanalyst Otto Rank neatly links the motif of the 'double' with both dualism and narcissism. Indeed it is Wilde's Dorian Gray which persuades him of the link with narcissism. The 'double', Rank suggests, is always the person's soul. Man himself created his 'double' when he came up with the idea of equipping himself with an immortal soul by which he might counteract his fear of death and fulfil his narcissistic desire to live forever. So the dualist notion that soul and body are separate entities results from narcissism. A man's insistence on the existence of his 'double' may be interpreted, according to Sigmund Freud, as a renewed attempt to split into two parts, one of which will be immortal, in order to counter a renewed threat to his life, to which he is narcissistically attached - or indeed as a reaction to a threat of castration of those bodily parts to which men are also rather narcissistically attached. The appearance of the figure of the 'double' in literature is thus, according to Freud, to be seen as a result of a crisis affecting man's narcissism, threatening him with castration or even death. In other words, one might say that the 'double' can be interpreted as a symptom of a crisis of dualist thinking (a crisis of the separation of body and soul, etc., which man had already postulated to safeguard his narcissism, in Rank's and Freud's terms). Dr Jekyll discovers that

8

The 'Double'

all those qualities he had regarded as the opposite of and clearly distinct from his own reside in his 'double', his other self; 'This too', he is forced to recognize, 'was myself. His own moral dualism, which had flattered his narcissistic image of himself as respectable gentleman, has come undone. The 'double' might be said then perhaps to 'deconstruct' dualism in the sense of Barbara Johnson's definition of deconstruction: the differences between entities (prose and poetry, man and woman, literature and theory, guilt and innocence) [one might add mind and body, inside and outside, native and foreign, etc.] are shown to be based on a repression of differences within entities, ways in which an entity differs from itself.12 The appearance of the 'double', one might say, signifies the return of the repressed, of all that had been repressed and projected upon some supposedly distinct Other — typically women, foreigners, the 'lower orders'. In our own fin de siecle, relativist, multicultural, postmodern, post-industrial, post-national and supposedly post-patriarchal global society, all traditionally underlined hierarchical 'differences between entities' are subject to 'spontaneous deconstruction'. Dualism is, if not quite dead, at least on the retreat. One is no longer quite so inclined to oppose one identity (be it national, gender or racial) to one other, but rather to speak of one's own plural identities, much as Dr Jekyll predicted. The corollary of this is perhaps that nowadays one tends to find more reference to 'multiple personality disorder' than to 'doubles'. Pluralism appears to be gaining ground over the absolutist, exclusive thinking of dualism. This is a good thing — as long as it leads to greater democracy, equality and clearer thinking and not to complete impotence and paralysis of thought and action. This last state of theoretical and practical paralysis, and the fact that it gives free rein to the exploitative practices of multinational late capitalism totally unhampered by any concern with democracy, equality or freedom, is what is feared by Frederic Jameson to be the real meaning of 'postmodernism', 'the cultural logic of late capitalism'. Jameson writes of 'the abolition of critical distance' 'in the new space of postmodernism'. 'We are submerged/ he writes, 'in its henceforth filled and suffused volumes to the point where our now postmodern bodies are bereft of spatial co-ordinates and practically (let alone theoretically) incapable of distantiation ... ,'13 What we need, according to Jameson, are 'maps' so that 'we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion' (p. 91). Certainly the demise of dualism makes mapping more difficult: it is no longer so easy to divide the world simply into two spaces belonging

Introduction

9

respectively to 'us' and to 'them', nor indeed to say who 'we' are, to circumscribe neatly 'our' 'identity'. It should not be surprising, therefore, if some should have seen the demise of dualism at the turn of the century as a threat and have sought to resurrect those old reassuring hierarchical binary oppositions and to draw a clear boundary between the terms of those oppositions as between the people identified as belonging on one or the other side of that boundary, a boundary which, again as we shall see, was all too often drawn to coincide with the boundaries of the nation as well as that notional one between the genders. Thus the crisis of dualism, patriarchy and identity evident in the 'double' could conceivably lead to a renewed emphasis on nationalism and an alliance between this and patriarchy. Such reactions to the crisis will be the subject of Parts II and III.

Historical parameters and borders If Plato and postmodernism lie somewhat beyond the historical perimeters of the subject of this book, the issues of patriarchal power and of dualist oppositions of 'inside' and 'outside' of, for instance, (male-dominated) nationstates and empires as well as feelings of spatial, social and sexual confusion were certainly of great interest during the period 1880-1930. Maps and geopolitical borders acquired great significance not just literally but also metaphorically in an age when the map of the world was being redrawn according to the whim and the greed of the European powers, now seriously engaged in a scramble for empire. As the nation-state and the empire acquired something of a cult following and began to replace dying religions as an object of 'belief and identification, the geopolitical border acquired something of the status of most favoured metaphor. Everybody from psychiatrists to churchmen used the metaphor. In England, according to Elaine Showalter, psychiatrists identified a new kind of male neurotic, the 'borderliner'. Andrew Wynter's popular medical text, The Borderlands of Insanity (1877), described the potential degeneration of borderline men in 'Mazeland', 'Dazeland' and 'Driftland', whose minds felt the lack of 'directing' or 'controlling power'.14 Daniel Pick describes how Cesare Lombroso, professor of psychiatry in Turin, sought to influence the framing of a penal code for the recently created kingdom of Italy by presenting, initially, 'a series of diagrams, tables and charts concerning the organic anomalies to be found in the criminal' and finally a 'series of maps [showing] the frequency and distribution of various crimes in

10

The 'Double'

Italy'.15 As Daniel Pick comments, 'it was as though the opening of the congress proceedings (like the genesis of Lombrosianism) focused the outline of the criminal body and by the conclusion that body had been transposed to a map of the nation'. Lombroso's efforts to single out criminals by, among other things, the shape of their ears lay clearly under the influence of a new dualist opposition inspired by Darwin's theories. While one might imagine that the spread of Darwin's theories concerning the 'origin of species' would have seriously upset any kind of dualism and in particular that maintained by the Christian tradition, it actually supplied, or rather was interpreted as supplying, a new and rather dangerous binary opposition and metaphorical mapping device, namely the opposition between the fittest, destined by natural selection to survive, and the 'degenerate', likely to get in their way and impede the progress of evolution. By the late nineteenth century, intellectual discourse in the West had become positively saturated with the language and thinking of 'evolutionism', which Tom Gibbons defines as 'the highly questionable employment of biological theories of natural selection, which Darwin himself never stated in any clear or final form, in realms of thought unconnected with biology'. The phrase 'the survival of the fittest', the inspiration behind everything from late nineteenthcentury social Darwinism to 1980s Thatcherism, was first coined by Herbert Spencer, 'the first thorough-going evolutionist' as well as 'probably the most influential systematic philosopher of the second half of the nineteenth century'. For Spencer, absolutely everything in history and in the universe was determined by the 'law' of evolution: ' "the transformation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous", or, in other words, of whatever is undifferentiated and indistinct into whatever is more distinct and individual'.16 If evolution was understood as the development from the homogeneous and simple to the heterogeneous and complex perhaps the reverse process was also possible: dissolution or degeneration - a return to simple (borderless) homogeneity, the opposite of the forward march of evolution and progress. Thus the great task was, according to many scientists and thinkers of the day, to draw a clear boundary between 'degenerates' and the more wholesome specimens of humanity, for it was feared that if such 'degenerates' were not separated from the rest of the population they might bring about the degeneration of the entire nation. This new dualist opposition between the 'fit' and the 'degenerate' could be easily added on to the ancient dualist scheme of things, thus reinforcing all those other binary oppositions. The attitude of all too many Western men and the prevailing cultural attitude of the time (and still, to some extent, of ours) could perhaps be summed up with the following set of oppositions:

Introduction

good light unity male limit mind spirit culture high 'fit'

11

bad darkness plurality female unlimited body matter nature low 'degenerate'

To this schema it was also all too easy to add the opposition between 'us' and 'them', or between 'native' and 'foreign' and of course in particular that between 'colonialist' and 'colonized'. Just as competition between European nations - for markets, technologies, arms, colonies - demonstrated their relative 'fitness' with regard to each other and their position in the evolutionary race, their colonization of distant lands and peoples provided proof (to themselves) of their superiority in terms of fitness over those they colonized. It was no doubt the widespread popularity of Darwinism which inspired to a large extent what Eric Hobsbawm describes as 'the novelty of the nineteenth century': non-Europeans and their societies were increasingly, and generally, treated as inferior, undesirable, feeble and backward, even infantile. They were fit subjects for conquest, or at least for conversion to the values of the only real civilization, that represented by traders, missionaries and bodies of armed men full of firearms and fire-water.17 The ideology arising from the phrase 'the survival of the fittest' not only served to justify the status quo — those in power were destined for superiority because they were simply fitter — but also encouraged yet more intense colonization and exploitation of others - in order to demonstrate one's greater fitness and evolutionary superiority. This was of course a supremely masculine affair: it was not women but men who interpreted Darwin's theories as an exhortation to demonstrate their fitness and hence their superiority through aggressive competition. A demonstration of superior fitness was a demonstration of superior 'manliness', as the traditional pattern of dualist thinking, illustrated above, suggested. Those defeated in the struggle for the survival of the fittest and superiority had therefore been shown to be not only less fit but also less manly, more womanly, and thus quite evidently inferior. This whole complex of thought was of supreme importance for the modern construction of masculinity, as we

12

The 'Double'

shall see. One should also note that these ideologies of the 'survival of the fittest' and of 'manliness' were adopted most enthusiastically by those men for whom life was no longer by any means a struggle for 'survival' and whose bourgeois and upper-class urban existence did not have much to do with traditional notions of rural, rugged masculinity, where an ability to withstand physical hardship and to demonstrate physical prowess actually were a definite advantage. The phrase 'survival of the fittest' suggested, as mentioned above, that those 'at the top', those (men) in power, were destined to be so as a result of their innate superiority. This held of course not just for the relation between the imperial power and the colonized but also for relations of power within the imperial power itself. Those 'at the bottom' of such a society, the 'lower orders' were evidently by nature inferior, less evolved on the path of human perfection than those 'at the top'. It was thus not quite as easy, as one would have liked, to draw a boundary separating the fit from the degenerate coinciding with the boundaries of the nation. Not only the poor and the lower orders' but also criminals, the sick and the mentally unstable were embarrassing evidence of degeneracy within the nation. And they were breeding! Degeneracy was after all hereditary. What was more, some parties were even suggesting the abolition of the natural distinction between those 'at the top' and those 'at the bottom' and the replacement of social hierarchy with social equality. The levelling and 'international' nature of socialism and anarchism was perceived by many as the great danger, a danger conceived specifically in terms of degeneration. Tom Gibbons writes: After 1880 it was increasingly argued that evolutionary progress could be maintained only by the creation of a new evolutionary aristocracy, that egalitarian societies based upon nineteenth-century ideals of liberal democracy were consequently 'decadent', and that a new, authoritarian and hierarchical social structure was urgently necessary.18 The belief that hierarchy and authority were 'fit' and egalitarianism was degenerate allowed the Victorian psychiatrist Henry Maudsley to compare 'the psychosomatic chaos of insanity to a world where present day demands for democracy and socialism had been conceded in their entirety'.19 Conservatives could find confirmation of their fears that demands for equality threatened to reverse the progressive march of evolution in the fact that Friedrich Engels published a tract apparently supporting just such a return to an earlier stage in the 'evolution' of society. In Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigentums und des Staats (1884) (The origin of the family, of private property and the state) Engels neatly related the evolution of society to the

Introduction

13

problems of dualism, social and sexual inequality and patriarchy. The institution of monogamy, he argued, coincided with that of patriarchy, private property and slavery. Before this reigned polygamy, matriarchy and communal property. The hierarchical binary opposition of man and woman, of male and female, Engels suggested, forms the pattern of all other binary oppositions and inequalities, and this had to be confronted and dissolved if other forms of oppression were to be overcome. While Engels looked back with nostalgia to a 'primitive' age of matriarchy, polygamy and communism, others were rather more inclined to hail contemporary norms regulating social and sexual affairs as evidence of evolutionary progress and feared any deviation from these was a degenerate regression to a state of undifferentiated sexual chaos. Even those who were willing to concede that perhaps patriarchy had been preceded by matriarchy and many were, especially after the publication of Johann Jakob Bachofen's Das Mutterrecht (Matriarchy) (1861) - were persuaded of the superior virtues of patriarchy and considered any concessions to the demands of feminists as a degenerate first step of a return to an earlier, and hence inferior, stage of evolution. The narrative of evolution was, of course, only a convenient cover for men's fears that concessions to feminists might also reduce their own monopoly of power. Sexuality itself was thought of in terms of evolution. Thus Richard von KrafftEbing was willing to entertain the thought that bisexuality might have preceded the development of 'mono-sexuality' in evolutionary history, but considered any 'return' to such a state and disruption of the correct heterosexual development of 'mono-sexuality' symptomatic of degeneration.20 Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) was an influential contribution to a late nineteenth-century discourse concerned to produce what Michel Foucault terms a 'scientia sexualis'.21 It was, after all, an early translation of Psychopathia Sexualis which introduced the word 'homosexual' into the English language, a word which had been coined in 1869 by a certain Karoly Benkert, who argued against the extension of Prussian laws against sodomy to unified Germany.22 The significance of the new 'scientia sexualis' was, as Foucault points out, that it replaced the religious notion of 'sin' (which anyone could be tempted to commit) with precise categories of 'perversions' and coupled this with the discourse concerning heredity, evolution and degeneration to produce a 'sexual identity' which was 'incorporated' in individuals and could be described and diagnosed by science and medicine. While 'the sodomite' had been a sinner, 'the homosexual' could now be regarded as a distinct and degenerate species.23 Attempts were made to describe, measure and classify this 'species' 'scientifically'. Krafft-Ebing's approach was eminently scientific or even zoological: 'Excepting an abnormally broad pelvis (100cm)', Krafft-Ebing wrote of one of his subjects, 'there was nothing in his character or

14

The 'Double'

appearance that lacked the qualities of the masculine type' (p. 235). Cesare Lombroso, according to Richard Davenport-Hines, 'coupled homosexual desire with criminality as elements detrimental to the progress of civilization: born criminals and born perverts needed asylum treatment rather than penal servitude'.24 The coining of the new label 'homosexual' and the designation of 'the homosexual' as degenerate and criminal led to a new series of problems and contradictions in men's attitudes to their relations with each other. Up to now the attention of the Christian churches, of the law and of society in general had been focused on 'sodomy' or 'buggery', which were originally understood to mean any kind of sexual 'debauchery' and only subsequently acquired the meaning of anal penetration of women and animals as well as of men.25 Under the term 'homosexual' a whole range of practices and affections, which had hitherto been variously defined or undefined, were subsumed and deemed degenerate. Everything from the adolescent activities of schoolboys to even purely 'Platonic' intense friendships between men became suspect. This was a direct contradiction of a patriarchal tradition, and indeed of a tradition of Victorian literature, which had promoted, celebrated and blessed a love 'passing the love of women' as well as considering normal and indeed masculine a certain amount of 'horseplay' between men.26 The rather schizophrenic, self-contradictory attitudes of twentieth-century men regarding their relations with each other, male-bonding and homosexuality are a direct result of this conflict between a tradition which continues to hold before them the ideal of the male—male relationship, and a tradition which tells them that not only sexual or physical, but even emotional male—male relationships are symptoms of hereditary psychological and physical degeneration. Heredity was the key to the new dualist opposition between those who were 'fit' (and not only would but should survive) and those who were 'degenerate'. Surely one could then do society a favour and reduce the number of degenerate criminals, of the feeble-minded, of perverts, as well as of antiauthoritarian anarchists and socialists, by discouraging the degenerate from reproducing and encouraging the fit only to reproduce with each other? In 1883 Sir Francis Galton, Darwin's cousin, coined the term 'eugenics' to denote the 'breeding of human beings who were hereditarily endowed with noble qualities'.27 According to Tom Gibbons, 'between that date and 1914 public discussion of alleged racial, physical, moral, sexual and literary degeneration reached obsessive proportions in England, and remedies were frequently sought in proposals for "eugenic reform".'28 Heredity was the key, and it could be used to lock up undesirables and prevent them from infecting the fit, natural heirs to the earth.

Introduction

15

Notes 1. Karl Miller, Doubles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 1, p. 209. 2. Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy (London: Virago, 1992), p. 78. 3. Plato, The Symposium, trans, by W. Hamilton (London: Penguin, 1951), 208c-209e: Those whose creative instinct is physical have recourse to women, and show their love in this way ... but there are some whose creative desire is of the soul and who long to beget spiritually, not physically, the progeny which it is the nature of the soul to create and bring to birth.' 4. Jeanette Winterson, Boating for Beginners (London/Melbourne: Mandarin Paperbacks, 1990), p. 85. 5. In fact both Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and E. T. A. Hoffmann's Der Sandmann (1816) were written at a time when men were not merely inclined to apply the metaphor of giving birth to their artistic activities but also beginning to experiment with the reproduction of life through both artificial insemination and the manufacture of mechanical robots. 6. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, 'Prometheus', Gedichte (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 1967), p. 37. 7. I refer to the recently successfully cloned sheep. 8. Elisabeth Badinter, XY de I'identite masculine (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1992). See the entire chapter entitled 'C'est 1'homme qui engendre l'homme' for a survey of rites of male initiation. 9. See Luce Irigaray, 'Des marchandises entre elles' and 'Le marche des femmes', in Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1977). 10. See W. S. Burroughs, The Wild Boys (1969), in A William Burroughs Reader, ed. John Calder (London: Pan, 1982), pp. 232—5; and Ron Oliver and Michael Rowe, 'Monster Cock', in Flesh and the Word 3, ed. John Preston and Michael Lowenthal (New York/London: Penguin, 1995), pp. 55-74. 11. W. K. C. Guthrie, The Greek Philosophers (London: Routledge, 1967), p. 36. Pierre Bourdieu draws up a much longer set of oppositions which the patriarchal culture of the Mediterranean area has assumed to be related to, and even synonymous with, the opposition between male and female: see La Domination Masculine (Paris: Seuil, 1998), p. 17. 12. Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. x—xi. 13. Frederic Jameson, 'Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism', in Postmodernism, a Reader, ed. Thomas Docherty (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), pp. 62-92, p. 87. 14. Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, p. 10.

16

The 'Double'

15. Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 141. 16. Tom Gibbons, Rooms in the Darwin Hotel (Nedlands: University of Western Australia University Press, 1973), p. 4. 17. E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1875-1914 (London: Abacus, 1994), p. 79. 18. Gibbons, Rooms in the Darwin Hotel, p. 24. 19. Pick, Faces of Degeneration, p. 211. 20. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, ed. C. G. Chaddock (London: F. A. Davis Co., 1892), pp. 226ff. 21. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualite, 1, La volonte de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), p. 77. 22. Richard Davenport-Hmes, Sex, Death and Punishment: Attitudes to Sex and Sexuality in Britain since the Renaissance (London: Collins, 1990), p. 116. See also Colin Spencer, Homosexuality: A History (London: Fourth Estate, 1995), pp. 290ff. 23. Foucault, La volonte de savoir, pp. 155, 165. 24. Davenport-Hines, Sex, Death and Punishment, p. 119. 25. Davenport-Hines, Sex, Death and Punishment, pp. 57f. 26. See Jeffrey Richards, '"Passing the love of women": manly love and Victorian society', in Manliness and Morality: Middle-class Masculinity in Britain and America 1800-1940, ed. J. A. Mangan and J. Walvin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), pp. 92—122. See also Davenport-Hines, Sex, Death and Punishment, Ch. 4, 'Dance as they desire: the construction and criminalization of homosexuality', pp. 105—55. 27. Quoted by Seamus Deane in 'Irish national character 1790-1900', Historical Studies, 16 (1986): 90-113. 28. Which reached a peak in the years immediately preceding the First World War. Gibbons cites such titles as Havelock Ellis's The Problem of RaceRegeneration (1911) and The Task of Social Hygiene (1913). Gibbons, Rooms, p. 34.

1 Jekyll and Hyde

Binary oppositions It is perhaps at this point that we may enter into a discussion of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), for the story turns to some extent on the question of heredity, or rather of an inheritance.1 It is after all only due to his concern about Dr Jekyll's will (p. 38) in which the eminent doctor leaves a 'quarter of a million sterling' to the hideous Mr Hyde that the lawyer Mr Utterson begins to investigate the 'strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde'. Utterson is troubled by the impropriety of the relationship this will establishes between his respectable, upper-class client and a particularly rough member of the degenerate criminal classes. Utterson becomes convinced that Dr Jekyll has been the victim of blackmail, for how else could a man of his station be connected with the abominable Hyde? In other words, the existence of a connection between Jekyll and Hyde threatens to collapse that crucial new dualist opposition between the 'fit' and the 'degenerate', referred to above. For there is no question but that Hyde is 'degenerate' and Jekyll's opposite in every way. Jekyll is a 'tall, fine build of a man'; Hyde is 'more of a dwarf (pp. 66f.). While nobody is quite capable of describing Hyde, the impression he leaves is a 'haunting sense of unexpressed deformity' (p. 50). The fact that he cannot be described is perhaps an indication of his allegiance to a world other than that of clear, precise limits, of light, the good, unity, the male and the 'fit'; Hyde belongs to the bad side of the conventional list of dualist oppositions (see above). Hyde is associated with the dark London fog constantly mentioned in the narrative; with plurality, shapelessness, a lack of clear boundaries or limits - he 'had never been photographed; and the few who could describe him differed widely' (p. 50); Jekyll describes him as 'the slime of the pit' which 'seemed to utter cries and voices; ... the amorphous dust ...; that what was dead, and had no shape' (p.

18

The 'Double'

95). In fact Hyde has all the qualities which the Pythagoreans and conventional, patriarchal, moral and sexual dualism associated with 'the female'. (I will return to this later.) Jekyll's identity is opposed to Hyde's lack of identity just as Jekyll's morally upstanding nature is opposed to Hyde's amorality. These oppositions are further linked to the conventional opposition between the upper classes of the white, male rulers of the earth and the dark, dirty, dangerous and degenerate 'lower orders' when Jekyll's handsome residence is contrasted with Hyde's home in Soho. Jekyll's house remains a symbol of traditional, patrician authority amidst a sea of decay: Round the corner from the by street there was a square of ancient, handsome houses, now for the most part decayed from their high estate, and let in flats and chambers to all sorts and conditions of men: mapengravers, architects, shady lawyers, and the agents of obscure enterprises. One house, however, second from the corner was still occupied entire; ... the door of this, ... wore a great air of wealth and comfort, though it was now plunged in darkness except for the fan-light . . . . (p. 40) Hyde's residence reveals him to be an agent of that decay threatening Jekyll's house: As the cab pulled up before the address indicated, the fog lifted a little and showed him [Mr Utterson] a dingy street, a gin palace, a low French eating-house, a shop for the retail of penny numbers and two-penny salads, many ragged children huddled in the doorways, and many women of different nationalities passing out, key in hand, to have a morning glass, and the next moment the fog settled down again upon that part, as brown as umber, and cut him off from his blackguardly surroundings. This was the home of Henry Jekyll's favourite; of a man who was heir to a quarter of a million sterling, (p. 48) At least the flat-dwellers on Jekyll's square were 'all sorts and conditions of men'-, Hyde appears to hail from a ghetto of alcoholic, foreign women and ragged children. Thus the geographical assumptions of conservative dualist thinking are apparently confirmed: there is a clear, if threatened, border between the world of the good, white, upper-class male ruler of the earth and the world of the bad, dark, degenerate, probably foreign and female lower orders. But, not only does Dr Jekyll leave his fortune to hideous Mr Hyde, they are, as we know, one and the same man! For those who were inclined to think that the Dr Jekylls and the Mr Hydes of this world belonged to two distinct species

Jekyll and Hyde

19

this was quite a scandal. Dr Jekyll's discovery of his 'other self threatens to throw that neat structure of binary oppositions into complete disarray.

Identities and texts Jekyll himself is aware of the implications of this for the notion of identity. If one did not clearly fit into one of the two categories offered by society one's identity was no longer so simple and clear. Jekyll claims to have discovered that 'man is not truly one, but truly two' and proceeds to hazard a guess that 'man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens' (p. 82). Notions of identity and unity might, in other words, have to be thrown out the window. It is therefore quite appropriate that the text of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde itself dissolves into a series of different texts or narratives: the tale begins with the 'Story of the Door' and ends with 'Dr Lanyon's Narrative' followed by 'Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case'. Elaine Showalter notes how Jekyll's split personality is also mirrored in the facts surrounding the original publication of the story: Stevenson wrote two drafts of the novel, the Notebook draft and the Printer's Copy; the fragments or 'fractions' of the manuscript are scattered among four libraries ... ; and Longmans published two Jekylland-Hyde-like simultaneous editions, a paperback shilling shocker and a more respectable cloth-bound volume.2 There is constant reference to letters, sealed documents and signatures throughout the entire story and it is their legitimacy and the identity of their authors that the lawyer attempts to determine and that the plot of the novel questions and undermines. An envelope found on Carew's body, and addressed to Utterson (p. 47), leads the police to the lawyer who in turn leads them to Hyde's house; Dr Jekyll shows Utterson a letter he claims to have received from Hyde (p. 52); Utterson shows his head clerk, Mr Guest, 'a great student and critic of handwriting', this letter and Guest remarks on the resemblance between the writing on it (supposedly Hyde's) and that on a dinner invitation from Dr Jekyll (p. 54); Utterson receives a sealed envelope containing another enclosure, likewise sealed, 'not to be opened till the death or disappearance of Dr Henry Jekyll' (p. 58); finally he finds a large sealed envelope beside Hyde's body in the laboratory containing several enclosures including (a) a new version of Jekyll's will, now leaving all to Mr Utterson, (b) a note, in which Jekyll writes of his 'nameless situation' and (c) a confession with which the story ends (that is, after Dr Lanyon's narrative has been read). The

20

The 'Double'

fragmentation of the text into subtexts both mirrors the fragmentation of Jekyll's own identity and emphasizes the textual, mediated nature of any human perception of 'reality'. Reality must be read and interpreted all the time; there is no single, linear narrative which explains everything for all time, or, as Nietzsche argued, there are no facts, only interpretations. Just as there is not one identity, but many, there is not one narrative but several. Hyde is described less as a person with a definable, if evil, identity than as a thing which dissolves the notion of identity altogether. As mentioned above, Jekyll regards Hyde as 'the slime of the pit [which] seemed to utter cries and voices' (p. 95). 'Cries and voices' suggests that Jekyll thinks of him not as one person but as a multitude. As Jekyll appears the epitome of identity, stability and stiffness, Hyde is associated with fluidity, a 'sea of liberty' (p. 86). The effect of Jekyll's drug is to shake 'the very fortress of identity' (p. 83); as Hyde he was 'conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a mill race in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul' (p. 83). Hyde 'relaxed the grasp of conscience' (p. 87) and is allowed to indulge in unnamed pleasures forbidden to Jekyll. Thus Hyde is really what Freud would later term the 'unconscious' or the 'id', an impersonal, anarchic and amoral amalgam of all the desires the 'ego' represses in order to conform to the conventional morality of society. Those desires which bourgeois, patriarchal society considered 'undesirable' - anything which did not have to do with working towards the accumulation of wealth, power and respectability — were projected upon those it considered inferior: not only women, but the 'degenerate lower orders', criminals, foreigners and colonial peoples, who thus became the site of the unconscious of 'respectable society'.

Sadism, masochism and narcissism of bourgeois male self The division of the male bourgeois self (women in general, as we shall see later, were often considered amoral, thus less apt to repress, quite in line with that projection) into a respectable component and a repressed component furthered the development of a kind of sadistic relationship within the self as well as outside the self. 'Undesirable' desires had to be beaten down; the self had to punish the self — and this out of what one might term a masochistic desire to serve (motivated by a narcissistic desire to conform to) the bourgeois male's 'superego', those ideals of respectability he had adopted from society, and in particular from the father, as his own. Behind the facade of the stable identity of the bourgeois male, one might suggest, lurked a tangled knot of narcissistic, sadistic and masochistic relations with regard to itself as well as to the outside world.

Jekyll and Hyde

21

Thus Jekyll considers that his 'problem' arose not as a result of his 'sinfulness', but rather as a result of his exaggerated desire to conform to an image of himself as an utterly respectable gentleman: he had always had, he says, an 'imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public'; It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations, than any particular degradation in my faults, that made me what I was and, with even a deeper trench than in the majority of men, severed in me those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man's dual nature. (p. 81) His desire to conform led him to 'conceal [his] pleasures', committed him to a 'profound duplicity of life' (p. 81) and ultimately to attempt to amputate by chemical means those parts of himself which did not conform to his narcissistic image of himself as entirely respectable. Thus he discovers Hyde, his hidden self, who also becomes an object of a kind of narcissistic desire. After Jekyll first takes his drug he runs to find a mirror to see what he looks like: The evil side of my nature ... was less robust and less developed than the good which I had just deposed. ... Hyde was ... smaller, slighter and younger than Henry Jekyll. . . . And yet when I looked upon that ugly idol in the glass, I was conscious of no repugnance, rather of a leap of welcome. This, too, was myself, (p. 84) This is perhaps a peculiar type of narcissism, a narcissistic attachment not to one's own beauty but rather to one's ugliness. Hyde's ugliness is however somewhat compensated for by his youth. Dr Jekyll becomes truly fascinated and infatuated with his mirror image and will henceforth find himself constantly checking his appearance in mirrors to see whether he is having a 'bad hair day'. Indeed, it is the presence of a mirror, a 'cheval-glass', in Jekyll's laboratory, which proves to be a source of puzzlement to the discoverers of Hyde's (Jekyll's) body. 'What did Jekyll ... what could Jekyll want with it?', asks Mr Utterson (p. 71). Jekyll's fascination with mirrors is thus highlighted as a clue which might be important for the solution of the mystery. As indeed it is. For the mirror suggests a narcissistic relation of the self with the self, a relationship of desire within the self which contradicts the notion of the self as something simple, stable and self-identical. Man's ability to look at himself, whether by means of a mirror or by means of (self-)consciousness, is an indication both that 'man is not truly one, but truly two' and that there may be more to masculine desire than is conventionally assumed. Jekyll describes his relationship with himself almost as a sadomasochistic

22

The 'Double'

affair between a respectable doctor and a young, depraved criminal. Hyde, he writes, was 'knit to him closer than a wife' (p. 95): I, who sicken and freeze at the mere thought of him, when I recall the abjection and passion of this attachment, and when I know how he fears my power to cut him off by suicide, I find it in my heart to pity him. (p- 96) 'Abjectly and passionately attached7 to one another, these two men pursue 'pleasures' together which are always associated with pain. While Jekyll initially seeks to indulge in 'undignified' pleasures, Hyde's pleasures are 'monstrous'. Hyde enjoys 'drinking pleasure with bestial avidity from any degree of torture to another' (p. 86); Jekyll 'projected and shared in the pleasures and adventures of Hyde' (p. 89). Jekyll describes the delirious pleasure he (they) derived from violence: With a transport of glee, I mauled the unresisting body, tasting delight from every blow; and it was not till weariness had begun to succeed that I was suddenly, in the top fit of my delirium, struck through the heart by a cold thrill of terror. ... I ... fled from the scene of these excesses, at once glorying and trembling, my lust of evil gratified and stimulated, my love of life screwed to the topmost peg. (pp. 90f.) The use of words such as 'pleasure', 'delight', 'delirium' and 'excesses' appears to indicate that the violent pleasures of Jekyll and Hyde are also somehow sexual.

Jekyll's mate Elaine Showalter is also of the opinion that Jekyll's relationship with his double is rather suggestive of a sexual relationship: 'Unable to pair off with either a woman or another man,' she writes, 'Jekyll divides himself and finds his only mate in his double, Edward Hyde.'3 This suggests that Jekyll's creation of a 'double', his crisis and disintegration is due to a prohibition on his finding of (or inability to find) a partner and on his sexual union with this 'Other', thereby helping him to define/delimit his 'self. Other people are troubled by the impropriety of their relationship, but Jekyll protests that he does 'sincerely take a great, a very great interest in that young man'. Showalter notes how Mr Utterson's suspicion that Hyde was blackmailing Dr Jekyll would have 'immediately suggested homosexual liaisons' to the contemporary reading public.4 She writes: 'Jekyll's apparent infatuation with Hyde reflects the latenineteenth-century upper-middle-class eroticization of working class men as ideal homosexual objects' exemplified in Edward Carpenter's dream of being

Jekyll and Hyde

23

loved by 'the thick-thighed hot coarse-fleshed young bricklayer with the strap around his waist'.5 The first chapter of The Strange Case is called The Story of the Door', the door in question being Jekyll's back door, to which Hyde has a key. Hyde is described as 'unspeakable', 'the most famous code word of Victorian homosexuality'.6 There is, according to Showalter, 'a series of images suggestive of anality and anal intercourse' in the narrative: Hyde travels in the 'chocolate-brown fog' that beats about the 'back-end of the evening'; while the streets he traverses are invariably 'muddy' and 'dark'. Jekyll's house, with its two entrances, is the most vivid representation of the male body. Hyde always enters it through the blistered back door, which, in Stevenson's words, is 'equipped with neither bell nor knocker' and which bears the marks of 'prolonged and sordid negligence'.7 Of course, whatever the significance of the door having neither bell nor knocker, if one admits that 'fin de siecle images of forced penetration through locked doors, private cabinets, rooms and closets permeate Utterson's narrative',8 one has to admit also that Utterson is doing the 'penetrating', the investigating, followed closely by the reader, who wants to get to the 'bottom' of the mystery as well. To return however to the relationship between Jekyll and Hyde: it seems, according to this interpretation, that two apparently mutually contradictory suggestions are being made in the narrative: namely, that Hyde is a real other person, a young criminal with whom Dr Jekyll has illicit and improper relations; and that Hyde is Jekyll's own hidden criminal sexuality which demands an outlet from time to time. What is true in both cases is that Jekyll hides Hyde, attempts to control him, except for those occasions when he enjoys being controlled by him.

The 'dark side of patriarchy' One must however ask whether Jekyll's 'duality' is a result simply of Jekyll's or even Stevenson's own, personal sexuality or does it still have something to do with a crisis of identity of contemporary bourgeois men and the threatened collapse of that structure of oppositions on which that identity was based. While Showalter begins her discussion of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde with some rumours concerning Stevenson's personal sexual preferences, she also writes, quite rightly, that what is important is not 'Stevenson's real sexuality' but rather:

24

The 'Double' his sense of the fantasies beneath the surface of daylight decorum, the shadow of homosexuality that surrounded Clubland and the nearly hysterical terror of revealing forbidden emotions between men that constituted the dark side of patriarchy. In many respects The Strange Case of Dr jekyll and Mr Hyde is a case study of male hysteria, not only that of Henry }., but also of the men in the community around him. It can most persuasively be read as a fable of fin-de-siecle homosexual panic, the discovery and resistance of the homosexual self.9

The point, which must be stressed, is then in the end not that, in contemporary parlance, 'Stevenson (or even Jekyll) was gay' (for that would be to repeat precisely what Foucault termed the 'incorporation des perversions' and 'specification des individus' practised by nineteenth-century scientists), but rather that the culture to which he belonged, and not a safely specified and cordoned off 'gay culture', but mainstream, patriarchal culture, a culture, as Showalter suggests, itself saturated with 'forbidden emotions between men', was aware of and not a little obsessed by the possibility of sexual intercourse between people of the same sex, and specifically between men. It was after all only sexual acts between men that the Labouchere Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 criminalized. The increased awareness and obsession with the possibility of any kind of sexual behaviour between men was the result on the one hand of the late nineteenth-century scientific and medical discourse concerned to describe and classify something which came to be known as 'sexuality' and on the other hand of the topical nature of precisely that 'identity' question we find in Stevenson's novel. As the persuasive force of the religious ban on 'sodomy' and sexual relations between men lost much of its power with the decline of the influence of religion, the subject became a matter of scientific, medical and legal concern, perhaps for no other reason than that the Judeo-Christian ban (on sex, not on love between men, which it might be said to have institutionalized) had left behind such a powerful taboo which had to be justified or simply reformulated in the language of the modern state - in science and in law. The fact that 'homosocial' and actual or 'sublimated' 'homosexual' relationships - whether of the kind usual in ancient Greece or of the kind symbolized in the rituals of exclusively male clubs and institutions — have always been a central and especially valued and 'hallowed' feature of patriarchal societies in particular renders the whole late nineteenth-century discourse concerning 'homosexuality' all the-more absurd and contradictory, as it was supposedly in order to defend the good name of an intrinsically homosocial and at some level homoerotic patriarchy that 'homosexuality' had to be routed out. This

Jekyll and Hyde

25

precisely at a time when the religious forms of the patriarchy, symbolizing a certain special relationship between men, were dying out and leaving male 'identity' somewhat adrift. The realization that 'identity' itself was problematic, not a fact but an act, a realization prompted by a contemporary questioning and undermining of boundaries between classes, sexes and nations, and by the shaking of the foundations of the patriarchy itself — and hence a questioning of the 'identities' of those belonging to or identifying themselves with those categories - could lead to the conclusion that the relation between an individual and his/her 'identity' was just that — a relation, implying 'difference' and the possibility of desire. The self-identification of an individual as an English upper-class man could be seen as a 'performative statement', not simply stating what was the case but stating and performing what the individual desired - 'Englishness', 'upper-class-ness' and 'male-ness'. At the end of the nineteenth century men's relations to all these categories, their national, class and sexual 'identities' could no longer be regarded as unproblematic. Traditional patriarchal male 'identity' relied on other distinctions to shore it up, but these were being washed away by the tides of social change, regarded by many as a great threat to a sense of 'identity' based on a position of power and repression. Regarding change as a threat of course implies a certain insecurity already within that 'identity', a relation of desire within and to that 'identity', a relation which was, as we said, always central to the patriarchy itself and one likely to reassert itself and acquire renewed prominence when the patriarchy was in decline. The conventions of bourgeois masculinity demanded that Dr Jekyll be a model of stability and unambiguous identity. All ambivalence had to be repressed and projected upon those bourgeois masculinity regarded as inferior — criminals, the 'lower orders', foreigners and of course women. It is thus highly appropriate that Jekyll's other self appears to hail from this foreign, outside territory. The 'Other', the 'outside' sex, class and race could be gendered, made the object of sexual desire and of power, could be described as inferior/weak/subordinate/passive/'feminine'/childish/primitive/playful/imaginative/'camp'/the site of ambivalence and difference/otherness, as long as this hierarchical self/other opposition held sway. 'Identity' could desire 'difference', the inside the outside, as long as difference could be seen as existing outside, as being different from the masculine bourgeois self, thus confirming masculine identity's identity with itself. In discovering his own 'heterogeneity within' and imagining that 'man will ultimately be known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens' (p. 82), Dr Jekyll might be said finally to have discovered his own 'femininity', as that was conventionally defined as the opposite of univocal, patriarchal, masculine, rational, clearly bounded,

26

The 'Double'

homogeneous 'identity' and was traditionally seen, along with other subordinate groups, as the site of the irrational, unlimited, confused and heterogeneous, as the 'unconscious' in fact, the 'double' of the 'conscious' to which all the mastery-threatening confusions of the conscious mind of the bourgeois male had been repressed. It is thus rather appropriate that a film version of Stevenson's story should have been made with the title Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde.10

Notes 1. Page numbers refer to Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (London: Penguin, 1979). 2. Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy (London: Virago, 1992), p. 109. 3. See Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, Chapter 6, 'Dr Jekyll's Closet'. Showalter also notes how the apparently unavoidable sexual connotations of Jekyll's relationship with Hyde have been suppressed in most of the numerous film versions which introduce women into a story purely about men. This suggests an awareness of, and a conscious effort to 'hide', the implications of the original story. 4. Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, p. 112. 5. Ibid., p. 111. 6. Ibid., p. 112. 7. Ibid., p. 113. 8. Ibid., p. 110. 9. Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, p. 107. Showalter reminds us that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick termed the genre to which Stevenson's novel belongs 'the paranoid gothic', a genre in which a male figure feels persecuted by his double and in which there is some 'unspeakable secret' binding them to one another. The term 'homosexual panic' also stems from Sedgwick, who explains how she innocently coined the phrase to describe what was happening in Gothic novels (men suddenly becoming aware of and terrified of their own homosexual desire) before she learned that the same phrase was being used in the USA as a defence claiming diminished responsibility in cases of homophobic violence — 'queer-bashing'. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 18-21 10. Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde (Hammer Studios, 1971), mentioned by Elaine Showalter in the chapter of Sexual Anarchy entitled 'Dr Jekyll's Closet'.

2

After dualism: Nietzsche

'Ich bin ein Doppelganger' You might ask why one would want to include Friedrich Nietzsche in a discussion of 'the double' and modern masculinity. Firstly, Nietzsche specifically identified himself as a 'doppelganger' and related his double existence, if indirectly, to the question of gender. Secondly, Nietzsche's vituperative attack on metaphysical and moral dualism is linked to a questioning of the notion of 'identity' very similar to that found in Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and also, again, to the issue of gender identity and sexual dualism. Friedrich Nietzsche's thinking was intimately bound up with his (changing) notions regarding men and women, masculinity and femininity, philosophical dualism and his awareness of his own 'duality', his awareness of himself as his own 'doppelganger'. His oracular and playful pronouncements on the subject of his own gender identity are particularly interesting when one considers the extent to which generations of men adopted a certain image of Nietzsche as an ideal male role model. What, one wonders, were such would-be 'Supermen' identifying with? At the very beginning of Ecce Homo Nietzsche describes himself as 'in jeder Hinsicht' (in every respect) a 'doppelganger' due to his 'doppelte Herkunft,' the double background he has inherited from his father and mother. 'Ich bin,' he writes, 'als mein Vater bereits gestorben, als meine Mutter lebe ich noch und werde alt' (As my father I am already dead, as my mother I live on and grow old). Nietzsche's dual nature thus appears to consist of the two parts 'dead man' and 'living woman': he is both man and woman. Further: as his own dead father he sees himself as 'decadent'; as his own living mother he is the opposite of a 'decadent'. 'Ich kenne Beides, ich bin Beides' (I know both, I am both), he says, and 'ich bin ein Doppelganger'.1 What is interesting here is that Nietzsche appears to associate his own

28

The 'Double'

vitality, his own 'fitness' for life, with his identification with his mother; decadence is what he associates with his father and his own identification with him. Nietzsche's association of vitality here with his mother and his own 'feminine' side, his own 'femininity', is a reversal of the positions of two of the terms of that list of dualist oppositions, which, it was suggested earlier, were so central to patriarchal thinking. While the opposition between the 'fit' and the 'degenerate' was usually grafted on to the list of oppositions beginning with light' and 'dark' and ending with 'masculine' and 'feminine', suggesting an association of 'fitness' with 'masculinity' and 'degeneracy' with 'femininity', Nietzsche appears here to associate the 'feminine' with 'fitness' and the 'masculine' with 'degeneracy'.2 That may surprise those inclined to consider Nietzsche an out and out misogynist, yet it is an eternally recurring motif in his work, counterpointed indeed by some pretty misogynist statements. Perhaps it is then the battle between his identifications with his father and with his mother, between 'masculinity' and 'femininity', which is indeed the secret, as he suggests here in Ecce Homo, of his double existence as well as the source, at some more or less unconscious level, of his fascination for so many men.

Dionysus Nietzsche's transvaluation of all cultural and sexual values is already evident in Die Geburt der Tragodie (The Birth of Tragedy) (1872) when he claims to rediscover and revalues the Dionysian aspect of ancient Greek culture. This was a somewhat indirect attack on some of the sacred assumptions of nineteenth-century, bourgeois, patriarchal culture, which liked to model itself and its male youth on an idealized version of the culture of ancient Greece. While for nineteenth-century, bourgeois culture Greece was the embodiment of law and order and restraint, indeed of all those values on the 'good' side of the list of dualist oppositions such as light, the limit and the masculine, Nietzsche claimed that this was only one aspect of Greece, the aspect associated with the god Apollo and with the Socratic, Platonic tradition. There was however, according to Nietzsche, another aspect of Greece which was associated with the god Dionysus, god of wine, music, orgiastic intoxication and lack of restraint, and, according to Bachofen, of women, indeed of all those qualities on the 'bad' side of the list of dualist oppositions - lack of clarity, plurality and the 'feminine'. Die Geburt der Tragodie is a celebration of Dionysus and Nietzsche identifies himself again and again with this god who stands for the opposite of everything nineteenth-century, bourgeois, patriarchal culture held sacred. Indeed at the end of Ecce Homo

After dualism: Nietzsche

29

Nietzsche signs himself 'Dionysus gegen den Gekreuzigten' (Dionysus versus the crucified one). In a sense Nietzsche is employing a traditional view here — opposing male 'identity', singularity, homogeneity, the limited', the 'Apollonian' (to use Nietzsche's term), to female 'difference', plurality, heterogeneity, the 'unlimited', the 'Dionysian', hysteria, etc. - but it is the second term of the opposition which is valued by Nietzsche - the female, the plural, the different, etc. - and valued not because its existence maintains the opposition, and so preserves and flatters the 'identity' of male identity, but because the second term collapses the opposition and dissolves that 'identity' altogether. Similar to Stevenson's Mr Hyde, Dionysus and the orgiastic festivals associated with his cult dissolve 'the very fortress of identity'; as Dr Jekyll was of the opinion that 'man will ultimately be known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens', Nietzsche considered: 'Unser Leib ist ja nur ein Gesellschaftsbau vieler Seelen' (our body is merely a social structure of many souls), and suggested that one should say 'es denkt' (it thinks) rather than 'ich denke' (I think).3 Further: when Nietzsche sought to reinstate Dionysus as a kind of male mother of tragedy and great art in Die Geburt der Tragodie in a sense he was also attempting to replace a patriarchal myth of the origin of bourgeois culture with a matriarchal one. For Nietzsche appears to have borrowed the opposition between Apollo and Dionysus from Johann Jakob Bachofen, who, in his Mutterrecht (1861), had described the contrast between patriarchy and matriarchy as that between Apollo and Dionysus.4

Truth as woman Nietzsche's radical overturning of the patriarchal values and assumptions of nineteenth-century bourgeois society is also clearly evident in his famous statement that 'truth is a woman'. His Jenseits von Gut und Bose (Beyond Good and Evil), published the same year (1886) as Robert Louis Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde, begins with the question: 'Assuming truth is a woman, what? — are there not grounds for suspecting that all philosophers, in so far as they were dogmatists, understood women badly?'5 That is a direct attack on the patriarchal (and Christian) assumption that 'truth' is an exclusively male preserve, that 'truth' ultimately resides with a male, paternal godhead and the corollary that 'falsehood' is the preserve of women. The phrase 'truth is a woman' could well have been appropriated as a slogan by fin-de-siecle feminists - that is if Nietzsche were not so fickle in his feminism. Later on in the same book, as Christine Garside Allen points out, 'woman' must be 'repressed', 'kept under control', locked up lest it fly away', 'possessed', 'predestined for service' and 'kept afraid of man'.6 Nevertheless, the

30

The 'Double'

rhetorical question at the outset proposes that 'truth' is a 'woman' and as such is not to be reduced to any kind of (male) dogma. Dogma is of course Nietzsche's most constant target of attack. That is why his own writings themselves cannot be reduced to any kind of dogma - except that 'dogma of any kind is to be avoided'. As Steven Aschheim writes, 'Nietzsche's work cannot be reduced to an essence nor can it be said to possess a single and clear authoritative meaning.'7 Nietzsche's writings subvert not just everything else but also themselves in a perpetual motion of 'Selbstuberwindung' — self-overcoming. Like Oscar Wilde, and indeed like Walt Whitman, Nietzsche was not afraid to contradict himself: in fact all three might be said to have adopted a principle of self-contradiction as a means of achieving a kind of freedom beyond the reductionist logic of dogma and dualism.8 What Nietzsche means by dogma is Platonism and Christianity in Europe as well as the Vedanta teachings in Asia. What he sets out to attack is the basic belief of metaphysicians, namely: 'der Glaube an die Gegensatze der Werthe' (the belief in the oppositions of values) ($2, p. 10), that is precisely all kinds of dualism which divide the world up into two opposing camps. Nietzsche explains what he means by 'Jenseits von Gut und Bose' thus: We are fundamentally inclined to argue that most false judgements are the ones we can do least without, that without logical fictions, without measuring reality according to the purely invented world of the unconditional, self-identical, without a constant falsification of the world through numbers the human being could not live, — that a renunciation of life would be a denial of life. To accept untruth as a condition of life: that indeed means to resist in a dangerous manner customary values; and a philosophy which dares to do this situates itself just by this beyond good and evil.9 If this is the 'truth' that is 'woman', Nietzsche is conforming to the terms of traditional patriarchal sexual dualism, equating 'woman' with a slippery area of ambivalence, where truth and falsehood, good and evil are not so easily distinguished. At the same time, of course, he is reversing the values associated with the terms of the traditional opposition, valuing this 'womanly truth' of ambivalence over the 'manly truth' of absolutist dogma. As Jacques Derrida writes of Nietzsche's equation of 'truth' and 'woman', Temme est un nom de cette non-verite de la verite' (woman is a name for this non-truth of truth).10 This is perhaps the truth that is woman: 'non-truth' of 'truth', the 'truth' of nonidentity (of truth), the 'truth' of difference or Derrida's differance. Nietzsche is saying two things here: that one lives by forgery; but that that is no reason not to forge ahead, while remaining aware of the 'womanly' absence of phallic 'truth'. Nietzsche's attack on philosophical dualism is also an

After dualism: Nietzsche

31

attack on the sexual dualism so often associated with it, on the conventional opposition between masculine self-identical truth and feminine non-identity and plurality, for in claiming that the latter is 'true' he demotes 'masculine selfidentical truth' to the status of an illusion which dissolves in the 'Universal feminine' of moral, sexual and every other kind of ambivalence. If 'truth is a woman' perhaps man is an illusion.

Female elephant, 'penseur de la grossesse', male mother Nietzsche, one might suggest, in becoming a philosopher of 'womanly' truths, becomes himself a 'womanly man' of the kind George Bernard Shaw welcomed in his essay on Ibsen. Nietzsche was, as mentioned above, constantly given to making playful, oracular pronouncements on the subject of his own ambivalent gender identity. Again and again Nietzsche seems to appropriate that apparently unquestionably 'feminine' condition of pregnancy for himself and for his fellow supermen — indeed imitating the way Socrates spoke of male pregnancy in The Symposium. C. G. Allen quotes from The Genealogy of Morals: As for the 'chastity' of philosophers, finally this type of spirit clearly has its fruitfulness somewhere else than in children ... Every artist knows what a harmful effect intercourse has in states of great spiritual tension and preparation.11 She quite rightly points out how Nietzsche here seems to reinscribe the matter/spirit, body/soul opposition and hierarchy which elsewhere he sets out to demolish. He appears here to value spiritual production over physical reproduction in a surprisingly Platonic idiom. The reference to the philosopher's 'fruitfulness somewhere else than in children' echoes Socrates' remark in The Symposium mentioned earlier. Again and again Nietzsche plays with the idea of his own pregnancy; in Ecce Homo we read of the eighteen months between the conception and birth of Also sprach Zarathustra: 'Diese Zahl gerade von achtzehn Monaten diirfte den Gedanken nahelegen, unter Buddhisten wenigstens, dass ich im Grunde ein Elefanten-Weibchen bin' (This number of precisely eighteen months might suggest, at least to Buddhists, that I am really a female elephant).12 Inspired by such comments, Jacques Derrida describes Nietzsche as 'le penseur de la grossesse' (the thinker of pregnancy),13 and as a footnote to this quotes from Le Gai Savoir (The Gay Science): all this conjointly is maternal love, — it is to be compared to the love of the artist for his work. Pregnancy has made the female gentler, more

32

The 'Double' expectant, more timid, more submissively inclined; and similarly intellectual pregnancy engenders the character of the contemplative, who are allied to woman in character: - they are the masculine mothers. Among animals the masculine sex is regarded as the beautiful sex.14

Neither 'giving birth' nor 'beauty' then should be attributed solely to womankind; philosophers and thinkers are 'masculine mothers'. Was Nietzsche then a 'womanly man'? Lou Andreas-Salome thought she recognized something 'feminine' about the man and recorded her impression in her book on Nietzsche: 'There are two species of genius', he said one day, 'those who above all want to create, and who create; and those who love to let themselves be fertilized, and who give birth'. It is certain that he belonged to this second category. There was something feminine in his temperament, but taken to an incomparable degree of grandeur!15 If Nietzsche liked to think of himself giving birth, one wonders by whom he wished to be fertilized. Lou Andreas-Salome also recalled talking with Nietzsche about the risque subject of bisexuality, after which conversation they found it difficult to look each other in the eye.16 'Sadomasochist an sich selber' In this context the same woman described Nietzsche particularly appropriately as a 'Sadomasochist an sich selber', a sadomasochist with regard to himself. This is perhaps the phrase which best characterizes the 'philosopher of cruelty' and of 'Selbstuberwindung', of self-overcoming, and is also perhaps precisely that with which so many modern, would-be 'Nietzschean' men have identified. Were such men then not really also identifying unconsciously with what Lou Andreas-Salome described as bisexuality, by which she appeared to mean both a combination of the conventional psychological characteristics of both genders as well as an ambivalence regarding sexual orientation? Nietzsche has left us with an amusing, playful, piece of photographic 'evidence' of his own 'masochism'. The famous 'Peitschenbild' (whip-picture), scrupulously orchestrated by Nietzsche, shows Paul Ree and himself apparently working like horses pulling a hay-cart containing Lou AndreasSalome in front of a painted romantic alpine backdrop in a photographer's studio.17 They are all, of course, fully clothed. Paul Ree's left hand rests on the shaft of the cart, just in front of Nietzsche's genitals, while his right hand is about to assume a Napoleonic pose. Lou Andreas-Salome crouches in the cart brandishing a whip. For once a photograph shows Nietzsche enjoying himself:

After dualism: Nietzsche

33

his eyes regard the camera with a sidelong glance of 'frohliche Wissenschaft' (gay science) while Paul Ree looks rather pained and Lou smiles pleasantly for the camera. Truth' as a woman — with a whip? In his Psychopathia Sexualis Richard von Krafft-Ebing considered 'sadism' and 'masochism' exaggerations of the innate psychical characteristics of men and women respectively.18 What is truly perverse is either a male masochist or a female sadist: The masochistically inclined individual seeks and finds an equivalent for his purpose in the fact that he endows in his imagination the consort with certain masculine psychical characteristics - i.e. in a perverse manner, in so far as the sadistic female ideal constitutes his ideal.19 Nietzsche, it seems, loved to flirt with precisely that which Krafft-Ebing feared — polymorphous perversity, strange mixtures of physical and psychical sexual components which Krafft-Ebing attempted to reclassify and reassemble as the 'forms' of male and female. The 'Peitschenbild' suggests that there is more than one way of interpreting the old woman's famous injunction to Zarathustra 'Du gehst zu Frauen? Vergifi die Peitsche nicht!' (You're going to see women? Don't forget the whip!').20 The reason why Lou Andreas-Salome's description of Nietzsche as a 'Sadomasochist an sich selber' seems so appropriate, of course, is that she thus stresses the centrality of Nietzsche's relationship with himself, the relationship between the doppelganger's selves. The souls of the social structure of the self are, according to Nietzsche, commanding and obeying souls: 'Bei allem Wollen handelt es sich schlechterdings um Befehlen und Gehorchen, auf der Grundlage, wie gesagt, eines Gesellschaftbaus vieler "Seelen"' (all wanting is absolutely a matter of commanding and obeying, on the basis, as we said, of the social structure of many 'souls') (Jenseits, #19, p. 27). Sadistic and masochistic with regard to his other self, he conforms to both the conventional masculine and conventional feminine roles as seen by Krafft-Ebing. As Nietzsche said of himself in Ecce Homo, he is in every respect a doppelganger, much like Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde. Decadent and anti-decadent, degenerate and fit, moral and amoral, repressed conservative and wild anarchist, Apollo and Dionysus, man and woman, sadist and masochist - everything about Nietzsche is split into extremes and involved in a perpetual, internal sadomasochistic Kampf (fight/struggle). Hence, one might suggest, the forcefulness and immediacy of his style: he is engaged in an abrasive argument above all with himself. Hence also his dual, antagonistic identifications in Ecce Homo with both Christ, the crucified Ecce Homo, and Dionysus. Nietzsche identified himself, as Derrida says, above all as 'le combat qui s'appelle entre les deux noms' (the fight which is called between the two names).21

34

The 'Double'

This relationship of the self with the self is implied in Zarathustra's philosophy and attitude of 'Selbstiiberwindung', which in some respects uncannily resembles a Christian philosophy of self-discipline, asceticism and self-flagellation. For Zarathustra 'Selbstiiberwindung' is necessary to accelerate the evolution of the 'Ubermensch'. In a Darwinian battle for survival and for evolutionary superiority only the fittest warriors stand a chance, and these are the men that Zarathustra loves: 'Meine Briider im Kriege! Ich liebe euch von Grund aus, ich bin und war Euresgleichen' (My brothers in battle, I love you from the bottom of my heart, I am and was your like).22 These warriors must be 'Sadomasochisten an sich selber' too, but then all soldiers have to be — 'manly' 'womanly' men, deserving of Zarathustra's love.23 In Ecce Homo Nietzsche also speaks of his own warrior nature: 'Ich bin meiner Art nach kriegerisch' (I am by nature warlike).24 He speaks of the resistance which every strong character needs and must search out; 'jedes Wachsthum verrath sich im Aufsuchen eines gewaltigeren Gegners - oder Problems: denn ein Philosoph, der kriegerisch ist, fordert auch Probleme zum Zweikampf heraus' (all growth is to be seen in the search for a stronger opponent — or problem: for a philosopher who is warlike also challenges problems to a duel) (p. 272). Of the well-constructed person he writes: 'was ihn nicht umbringt, macht ihn starker' (what does not kill him makes him stronger) (p. 265). Thus indeed writes a 'Sadomasochist an sich selber'. All Nietzsche's talk of whips, warriors, cruelty and hardness is of course put in a rather different light by the story of his collapse in Turin in 1889: On the morning of 3 January Nietzsche had just left his lodgings when he saw a cab-driver beating his horse in the Piazza Carlo Alberto. Tearfully, the philosopher flung his arms around the animal's neck, and then collapsed.25 Thus Nietzsche displayed another aspect of his duality: Nietzsche, the hard softie.

Naked men Apart from perversely indulging in sadomasochism with regard to himself, declaring truth to be a woman and even identifying with pregnant women, Nietzsche also constantly associated physical beauty with the naked male body. Associating truth with women and beauty with men was rather a heretical reversal of the official attitudes of nineteenth-century, bourgeois, patriarchal and heterosexist culture. Yet Nietzsche constantly refers to male beauty. That extract from Die Frohliche Wissenschaft dealing with 'mannliche

After dualism: Nietzsche

35

Mutter'/'meres masculinesV'male mothers' quoted above ends with the apparently unconnected remark: 'Bei den Thieren gilt das mannliche Geschlecht als das schone' (Among animals the male sex is the beautiful sex).26 The only connection between male mothers and male beauty is that both ideas suggest a fairly flagrant transgression of contemporary conventions regarding the opposition between masculinity and femininity according to which only women become pregnant and women and not men are beautiful. In Morgenrothe Nietzsche asks: 'Was ist unser Geschwatz von den Griechen! Was verstehen wir denn von ihrer Kunst, deren Seele - die Leidenschaft fur die mannliche nackte Schonheit ist!' (What is all our talk of the Greeks! What do we understand of their art, the soul of which is — passion for male naked beauty!)27 The argument of Joachim Kohler's biography of Nietzsche, Zarathustras Geheimnis, is that this Greek passion for male naked beauty was a passion which Nietzsche shared. According to Kohler, Nietzsche found a living object for this passion on his travels in Italy when he glimpsed some of the skinny-dipping male youth of Sicily. Kohler suggests that the models for Zarathustra's Ubermenschen were the same young men who modelled in various classical poses displaying their 'male naked beauty' for the camera of Wilhelm von Gloeden in Taormina in the 1880s.28 Zarathustra's, Nietzsche's secret, according to Kohler, was that he was attracted by the 'wrong' sex; he loved men. Nietzsche's passionate attack on Christianity, bourgeois culture and all philosophies which denigrated the body and encouraged the repression of desires of the flesh is perhaps then to be understood to some extent as the desperate attempt of a man with un-Christian and un-bourgeois proclivities to overcome his own Christian, all too Christian conscience. Kohler suggests that when Nietzsche famously said 'Gott ist tot', rather than 'God does not exist', he was referring to the death of his own father, the pastor, when Nietzsche fils was only four years old, and attempting to keep this particular paternal ghost of Christian conscience at bay.29 Of course one could suggest that this desire for 'male naked beauty', however much it might have been frowned upon by his Christian father, was a desire precisely for this dead God, this absent father. In the (somewhat worryingly banal, medicalizing and personalizing) terms of psychoanalysis, Nietzsche's lack of a father might go some way to 'explaining' his alternating identifications with femininity and with a particularly misogynist form of masculinity as well as the passion for 'male naked beauty'. The danger of this is that it might simply reduce Nietzsche to a sexual 'case'. But then one could argue that the reason for the resonance of the phrase regarding the 'death of God' among contemporary men, and their reason for identifying with Nietzsche, was a general, pervading sense that the pillars of patriarchy were crumbling and that they too were fatherless sons.

36

The 'Double'

While Kohler gives his book the title Zarathustms Geheimnis (Zarathustra's secret), Zarathustra, one must say, does not make much of a secret of his love of men. In fact he preaches a gospel of male—male, brotherly love. Zarathustra, as we saw above, loves his 'Bruder im Kriege'; he teaches: 'Der Freund sei euch ... ein Vorgefiihl des Ubermenschen. ... in deinem Freunde sollst du den Ubermenschen als deine Ursache lieben' (May your friend be to you a presentiment of the Ubermensch. In your friend you should love the Ubermensch as your cause).30 Zarathustra's philosophy of brotherly love might sound almost Christian if it were not for the fact that these men-gods are taught not to be ashamed of their bodies but of any clothes which might cover up their 'male naked beauty': 'You wish to wear no clothes before your friend? It should be an honour for your friend that you give yourself to him as you are? But he tells you to go to the devil for it! ... Yes, if you were gods you would be ashamed of your clothes.'31 The gods who are ashamed of clothes are Greek — or their Sicilian descendants. Zarathustra also likes it a bit rough with his friends. His initiates are told: 'In seinem Freunde soil man seinen besten Feind haben' (In one's friend one should have one's best enemy) (p. 67); 'Also sicher und schon lasst uns auch Feinde sein, meine Freunde! Gottlich wollen wir wider einander streben! — ' (Therefore let us also be surely and beautifully enemies, my friends! Like gods we want to strive against (wrestle with) each other!) (p. 127). Nietzsche's use of the adverb 'gottlich' (godlike) here suggests that these wrestling Ubermenschen should ideally have no clothes on, rather like Gerald and Rupert during their romp in the library in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love.

International sadomasochism While in the Teitschenbild' Nietzsche attempted by theatrical flagellation to whip up anarchic laughter, the nation-state indulged in self-flagellation to steel itself and its boundaries and became more aware of the purpose of such steeling - war. Military discipline became the order of the day for men in both Germany and Britain. Between 1874 and 1890 German military spending was quadrupled; the British doubled their naval expenditure in the 1880s.32 But war against whom? That was not yet clear. There was hostility and rivalry between the English and the French; between the French and the Germans; between the Austrians and the Russians; and between the Russians and the English. And there was fear in all quarters of the threat of revolution and anarchy, i.e. the removal of hostilities from geographical frontiers (and hence the removal of such frontiers themselves) to the body politic itself. Nietzsche's unsystematic and anti-systematic philosophy was very often

After dualism: Nietzsche

37

systematized, institutionalized and nationalized by those in favour of war; his individualist, sadomasochist pose and habit of flirting with his own 'boundaries' was transferred to the nation-state or empire and its boundaries. This was of course heresy to the Zarathustra who taught that the state was a lie and that 'dort wo der Staat aufhort, da beginnt erst der Mensch' (where the state ends, only there begins the person) (p. 59). Steven Aschheim writes that soon after the beginning of the First World War 'a London bookseller dubbed the war of 1914 the Euro-Nietzschean War', as if Nietzsche had personally caused the war.33 That was not of course the case, but, as Aschheim continues, 'Nietzsche's manly posture and his admonitions to live dangerously crucially affected turn-of-the-century attitudes towards a coming war' (p. 129). Perhaps war would be the answer to Nietzsche's instruction to '"live dangerously", facilitate the search for heightened, authentic experience, and overcome the pervasive decadence?' (p. 132). Indeed Aschheim postulates that Nietzsche may even really have been a direct cause of the war, as he was popular among the Serb student members of the Young Bosnia Movement. The assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Gavrilo Princip, according to Aschheim, was 'fond of reciting Nietzsche's short poem, Ecce Homo: "Insatiable as flame, I burn and consume myself"' (p. 134)! Great numbers of educated German soldiers took Nietzsche's Also sprach Zarathustra with them into the battles of the First World War (p. 135). Nietzsche's influence on European men and the construction of modern European masculinity was enormous. That a philosopher, and a philosopher of such unsystematic and irreducible complexity and ambivalence, should have exerted such an influence is extraordinary. Yet the message which European men attributed to Nietzsche was perhaps rather simple: God was dead, morality was obsolete, life had no 'meaning' apart from as a violent, senseless struggle for power. The message included, importantly, a nostalgia for the heroic masculinity of the Greeks, their 'passion for male naked beauty' and a celebration of a quasi-sadomasochistic Kampf with oneself as well as between warrior-like male friends. In the wake of dualism, violent intensity was the thing. This might be said to have promoted a fundamentally ambivalent radicalism without content: it did not matter what you said as long as it was said with intensity and carried through with violent force. This was the new masculinity, a desperate masculinity for fatherless boys in a post-patriarchal era. God the father was dead; there was no father figure with whom one could or should identify - except of course Nietzsche himself, that would-be 'male mother'. The 'new man' could identify with the Nietzsche of macho poses, the philosopher of 'cruelty' and intensity, usually without consciously realizing that he was identifying with precisely the epitome of his own gender and sexual ambivalence. As Lou Andreas-Salome perceptively remarked: 'Insofern

38

The 'Double'

als grausame Menschen immer auch Masochisten sind, hangt das Ganze mit einer gewissen Bisexualitat zusammen' (In so far as cruel people are always also masochists, this all has to do with a certain bisexuality) (see above). Modern men may have identified with Nietzsche's sadomasochist posturing as a means of proving their own threatened 'masculinity'; what they really proved, however, was their own identification with Nietzsche's frequent identifications with and attempts to 'overcome' 'femininity'. What was all too often forgotten was the playfulness, the 'frohliche Wissenschaft' and fundamental ambivalence of this 'male mother' - a mother perhaps as much of 'camp' as of Kampf. Case 106J of Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis: 'A young butcher. When arrested he wore underneath his overcoat a bodice, a corset, a vest, a jacket, a collar, a jersey, and a chemise, also fine stockings and garters.'34

Notes 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, in Nietzsche's Werke, Vol. XV (Leipzig: A. Kroner, 1911), pp. 9-15. I cite this edition here as this paragraph, where Nietzsche uses the word 'Doppelganger' to describe himself, is omitted here in the Kritische Studienausgabe. Jacques Derrida also cites Nietzsche's description of himself as a 'doppelganger' in Otobiographies (Paris: Galilee, 1984), p. 68. 2. In the paragraph substituted in the Kritische Gesamtausgabe for the one where he describes himself as a doppelganger, Nietzsche writes: 'Wenn ich den tiefsten Gegensatz zu mir suche, die unausrechenbare Gemeinheit der Instinkte, so finde ich immer meine Mutter und Schwester, - mit solcher canaille mich verwandt zu glauben ware eine Lasterung auf meine Gottlichkeit' (If I look for the deepest contrast to me, the incalculable commonness of the instincts, I always find my mother and my sister, — to believe myself related to such canaille would be blasphemy to my divinity.) Ecce Homo, Nietzsche, Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Vol. VI iii (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter and Co., 1969), p. 266. 3. Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Bose, Nietzsche, Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Vol. VI ii (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter and Co., 1968), #19, p. 27 and #17, p. 25. 4. See Jacques Le Rider, Modernite viennoise et crises de I'identite (Paris: PUF, 1990), pp. 126-9. 5. 'Vorausgesetzt, dass die Wahrheit ein Weib ist —, wie? ist der Verdacht nicht gegriindet, dass alle Philosophen, sofern sie Dogmatiker waren, sich schlecht auf Weiber verstanden?' Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Base,

After dualism: Nietzsche

6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

39

Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Vol. VI ii (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter and Co., 1968), p. 3. Christine Garside Allen, 'Nietzsche's ambivalence about women', in The Sexism of Social and Political Theory, ed. Lorenne Clark and Lynda Lange (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1979), pp. 119, 120. Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany: 1890—1990 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1992), p. 3. Aschheim writes of how the protean nature of Nietzsche and his works 'led divergent European-wide [sic] audiences to fuse him with a broad range of cultural and political postures: anarchist, expressionist, feminist, futurist, nationalist, nazi, religious, sexual-libertarian, socialist, volkisch, and Zionist' (p. 7). At the end of his essay The Truth of masks' Wilde warns against taking what he has written too seriously: 'Not that I agree with everything that I have said in this essay; there is much with which I entirely disagree'. He also asserts that 'in art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true.' Oscar Wilde, Complete Works (London, Glasgow: Collins, 1966), p. 1078. Whitman wrote the following: 'Do I contradict myself? / Very well, then, I contradict myself; / (I am large - I contain multitudes)', II. 1321-3, 'Walt Whitman', in Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, (Philadelphia: D. McKay, 1900), p. 92. Nietzsche declares: 'Ich WILL keine "Glaubigen", ich denke ich bin zu boshaft dazu, um an mich selbst zu glauben ... .' (I WANT no 'believers', I think I am too mischievous/malicious to believe in myself ...). Ecce Homo, 'Warum ich ein Schicksal bin', $1, Nietzsche's Werke (Leipzig: A. Kroner, 1911), Vol. XV, p. 116. 'Wir sind grundsatzlich geneigt zu behaupten, dass die falschesten Urtheile ... uns die unentbehrlichsten sind, dass ohne ein Geltenlassen der logischen Fiktionen, ohne ein Messen der Wirklichkeit an der rein erfundenen Welt des unbedingten, Sich-selbst-Gleichen, ohne eine bestandige Falschung der Welt durch die Zahl der Mensch nicht leben konnte, — dass Verzichtleisten auf Leben eine Verneinung des Lebens ware. Die Unwahrheit als Lebensbedingung zugestehen: das heisst freilich auf eine gefahrliche Weise den gewohnten Werthgefuhlen Widerstand leisten; und eine Philosophic, die das wagt stellt sich damit allein schon jenseits von Gut und Bose.' Nietzsche, Jenseits, #4, p. 12. Jacques Derrida, Eperons/Spurs, trans, by Barbara Harlow (Chicago/ London: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 50. Quoted by Garside Allen, 'Nietzsche's ambivalence', p. 122. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Nietzsche, Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Colli and Montinari, Vol. VI iii (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1969), p. 334.

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The 'Double'

13. Derrida, Spurs/Eperons, p. 64. 14. Derrida, Spurs/Eperons, p. 149. 15. "'Il existe deux especes de genies", dit il un jour, "ceux qui veulent avant tout creer, et qui creent; et ceux qui aiment a se laisser feconder, et qui enfantent". Il est certain qu'il appartenait a cette seconde categorie. Il y avait dans son temperament quelque chose de feminin, mais porte a un degre de grandeur incomparable!' Quoted from Lou Andreas-Salome, Friedrich Nietzsche, by Christine Garside Allen in 'Nietzsche's ambivalence about Women', pp. 127, 128. 16. Joachim Kohler quotes the following (from Lou Andreas-Salome: In der Schule bei Freud): 'Insofern als grausame Menschen immer auch Masochisten sind, hangt das Ganze mit einer gewissen Bisexualitat zusammen. Und es hat einen tiefen Sinn - Als ich zum ersten Mai im Leben mit jemandem dies Thema besprach, war es Nietzsche (dieser Sadomasochist an sich selber). Und ich weiss, dass wir hinterher nicht wagten, uns anzusehen.' (In so far as cruel people are always also masochists, all this has to do with a certain bisexuality. And it has a deep significance — The first time I ever discussed this subject it was with Nietzsche (this sadomasochist with regard to himself). And I know that we did not dare look at each other afterwards.) Joachim Kohler, Zarathustras Geheimnis (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1992), p. 338. 17. Photograph reproduced in Joachim Kohler's biography, Zamthustras Geheimnis. 18. Though he does suggest that the masochist nature of women may have been acquired through adaptation to their role in society. 19. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, ed. Chaddock (London: F. A. Davis Co., 1892), p. 139. 20. Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, Nietzsche, Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Colli and Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1968), Vol. VI i, p. 82. 21. Derrida, Otobiographies, p. 52. 22. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, p. 54. 23. See for instance Mark Simpson's analysis of late twentieth-century war films 'Don't die on me, buddy: homoeroticism and masochism in war movies', Male Impersonators: Men Performing Masculinity (London, New York: Cassell, 1994), pp. 212-28. See also Steven Zeeland, The Masculine Marine: Homoeroticism in the U.S. Marine Corps (New York, London: Harrington Park Press, 1996); and of course Klaus Theweleit, Mannerphantasien, 2 vols (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1980). 24. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Nietzsche, Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Colli and Montinari, Vol. VI iii, p. 272.

After dualism: Nietzsche

41

25. Ronald Hayman, Nietzsche, a Critical Life, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980), pp. 334f. 26. Nietzsche, Die frohliche Wissenschaft, Nietzsche, Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Colli and Montinari (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 1973), Vol. V ii, #72, p. 106. 27. Cited by Kohler, Zarathustras Geheimnis, p. 487. 28. Kohler, Zarathustras Geheimnis, pp. 312ff. 29. Kohler, Zarathustras Geheimnis, p. 402. 30. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, p. 74. 31. 'Du willst vor deinem Freunde kein Kleid tragen? Es soil deines Freundes Ehre sein, daS du dich ihm gibst, wie du bist? Aber er wunscht dich darum zum Teufel! ... Ja, wenn ihr Cotter waret, da diirftet ihr euch eurer Kleider schamen.' Nietzsche, Zarathustra, p. 68. 32. Norman Stone, Europe Transformed (London: Fontana, 1983), p. 72. 33. Steven Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy, p. 128. See Aschheim's entire chapter entitled 'Zarathustra in the trenches', pp. 128-63. 34. Case 106J in Krafft-Ebing's Psi/chopathia Sexualis, p. 165.

3

Dorian Gray

A question of identity If Nietzsche was, far more than is generally imagined, a 'womanly man', so also, legend has it, was Oscar Wilde. Or perhaps he was a manly womanly man? At his arrival in America in January 1882, according to Richard Ellman, he surprised reporters there by his appearance: Rather than the Bunthorne they expected, a man arrived who was taller than they were, with broad shoulders and long arms and hands that looked capable of being doubled into fists. ... His voice astonished the representative of the New York Tribune by being anything but feminine, burly rather.1 The 'identity' of Oscar Wilde was, similar to that of Nietzsche, protean: his most outstanding characteristic was perhaps his subversion of any notion of a fixed, predictable 'identity', his reserving for himself the right to surprise. To define', as Lord Henry says, 'is to limit'. Yet, if few other writers in English have subverted the notion of 'identity' so radically, perhaps none has failed so disastrously in this project. For Wilde's 'identity' was defined apparently for posterity during his trials in 1895. Demonized by some, lionized by others, his 'identity' is all too clear to everybody; Oscar Wilde is, depending on the point of view, 'that homosexual writer', 'the gay writer', or simply, ignoring his writing altogether, 'the homosexual', 'the queer', 'the gay hero/saint/martyr', 'the first gay man' and creator of 'gay identity' and so on. The fact that so many men who identify themselves as 'homosexual', 'queer' or 'gay' immediately identify with Oscar Wilde and seek to model their identity on him is understandable - as he is still perhaps the most famous 'homosexual' in the history of the English-speaking world, indeed certified as such by the British criminal justice system. Yet there

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is something very un-Wildean about this desire for fixed identities and clear boundaries. Asked in a 'recent' interview what he thought of the declaration of identity involved in 'coming out', Wilde responded: Are you telling me that you do to yourselves, of your own volition, that which it took the full majesty of the law, the gutter press, the Marquess of Queensberry and the Government of the day, to do to me? That you put yourselves in the dock and drag your own private life out for the world to see?2 In Wilde's story of the 'double', The Picture of Dorian Gray, one finds a questioning of the notion of identity similar to that found in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as well as in Nietzsche's writings. Dorian asks: Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities. Such at any rate was Dorian Gray's opinion. He used to wonder at the shallow psychology of those who conceive the Ego in man as a thing simple, permanent, reliable and of one essence. To him man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and of passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead.3 'Methods by which we can multiply our personalities' constantly crop up in Wilde's work. Examples are the 'Bunburying' in The Importance of Being Earnest or the essay The Truth of Masks'. Wilde's questioning of the notion of 'identity' was a reaction against a particularly modern determination to define, categorize and label everything scientifically and, in the term of Zygmunt Bauman, to 'exterminate ambivalence'.4 Maintaining the ambivalence of undefined identities serves to subvert the tendency to classify everything according to the dualist opposition of order and ambivalence, again an opposition which in traditional patriarchal thinking was associated with the opposition between male and female, light and darkness, good and bad as well as with the new dualism of fit and degenerate. 'Resistance to definition', writes Bauman, 'sets the limits to sovereignty, to power, to the transparency of the world, to its control, to order.'5 Wilde's Truth of Masks' is closely related to Nietzsche's truth as woman, a notion of truth which dissolves the traditional and modern oppositions of dualism. As Declan Kiberd writes, 'the Wildean moment is that at which all polar oppositions are transcended'.6 One could argue that Wilde's questioning of fixed identities was motivated by a desire to escape two defining and limiting labels which might have been stuck on his own person by his contemporaries. The modern discourses of race

44

The 'Double'

and sexuality stood at the ready with a loaded label gun. Perhaps Wilde did not want to be simply 'Irish', 'homosexual' and neatly marginalized as doubly degenerate. Which is not to say that he wanted to be 'English' or 'straight' either, but to transcend such polar oppositions and be free to play with the masks and personalities of a 'complex multiform creature'. Like Nietzsche, Wilde was aware that he was a 'Gesellschaftsbau vieler Seelen'. Of his complex identifications in The Picture of Dorian Gray, for example, he wrote: 'Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be in other ages, perhaps'.7

Moral, all too moral? One could read The Picture of Dorian Gray as evidence of a crisis of identity resulting from the author's discovery of the joy of unconventional sex and his consequent difficulty in identifying with any of the available, conventional male role models. Wilde's thirty-second birthday was in October 1886, and it was during the following year that his first homosexual affair developed - with Robert Ross. Wilde seems at first to have wished to commemorate the date of the 'transformation' (Ellmann's word) of his life in the novel. For in the first version of that story, published in Lippincot's Magazine (20 June 1890), Dorian stabs the painter of his portrait on the 'eve of his own thirty-second birthday' — 7 October — and so commits himself to a life of obscure depravity. In subsequent editions the month was changed to November, and the birthday to the thirty-eighth, as if Wilde, like Basil Hallward in the story, had put too much of himself into the portrait and wished to erase some of the more obvious traces of autobiography/self-portraiture.8 The Picture of Dorian Gray remains however in some sense a picture of Wilde's transformation in 1886. Though denounced on its publication as an immoral book, it seems initially at least to be a far more moral tale than Robert Louis Stevenson's case study of the 'double', The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. To the critics' charge that Dorian Gray was an immoral book, Wilde replied that it was too moral, as perhaps it was, and he summed up the moral thus: 'all excess as well as all renunciation brings its own punishment'. Ellmann comments: The difficulty is that the book contains no renunciant, and while Dorian Gray does say that Anchorites and hermits are as bestial as sybarites, the point cannot be regarded as fictionally demonstrated.' 9 Dorian's death at the end of the story seems to come as punishment for an immoral, sybaritic life. But what is the moral of this apparently moral fable? If Wilde originally compared his love for Ross to Dorian's murder of Basil, that would suggest Wilde was contributing to the genre Sedgwick has termed the 'paranoid Gothic' of 'homosexual panic',

Dorian Gray

45

depicting a paranoid sadomasochistic relationship between two men, or between the self and its double, one of whom seeks to escape the implications of this relationship ultimately by killing the 'other' - not perhaps what one might expect from Oscar Wilde. Initially the story appears to be an all too moral fable about the corruption of the flower of English youth by a dreamy painter and a cynical society wit and his subsequent depravity and death. While the interests of Basil and Lord Henry in young Dorian in the opening passages are clearly homoerotic, the models evoked for their relationships and the relationships themselves are 'Platonic'. Basil declares that Dorian defines for him: the lines of a fresh school, a school that is to have in it all the passion of the romantic spirit, all the perfection of the spirit that is Greek. The harmony of soul and body — how much that is! We in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar, an ideality that is void. Harry! if you only knew what Dorian Gray is to me! (pp. 32—3) Basil's interest is thus both 'Platonic' — in the sense of 'repressing the sexual' — and 'anti-Platonic' as he criticizes the dualism of separating body and soul. Lord Henry is enthralled by the 'exercise of influence' and similarly vaguely evokes 'Greek' art and manners (p. 60). This is ever so slightly risque but lofty stuff which educated English gentlemen could indulge in without for a moment suggesting that they would like to have SEX with the object of their admiration and love.10 Nevertheless, Dorian is corrupted by them: made narcissistically aware of his own beauty by Basil's portrait and corrupted morally by Lord Henry's 'influence' and gift of a morally dubious literary example of French decadence. Real depravity only enters the picture (if you will pardon the pun) when Dorian crosses the threshold separating the society of lofty artists and slightly decadent aristos from an underworld of poverty, crime and the possibility of illicit SEX. The nature of Dorian's 'sins', committed in the London underworld of Mr Hyde, is only obscurely hinted at: Curious stories became current about him after he had passed his twentyfifth year. It was rumoured that he had been seen brawling with foreign sailors in a low den in the distant parts of Whitechapel, and that he consorted with thieves and coiners and knew the mysteries of their trade. His extraordinary absences became notorious, and, when he used to reappear again in society, men would whisper to each other in corners, or pass him with a sneer, or look at him with cold searching eyes, as though they were determined to discover his secret, (pp. 173—4)

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The 'Double'

It seems likely that Dorian's 'secret' was also Wilde's 'secret' - that he indulged in 'indecent acts' with men of the 'lower orders'. One must remember that, as Alison Hennigan writes, 'the fact that Wilde's sexual partners were predominantly drawn from the lower classes' was sufficient to 'freeze the blood in English veins'.11 Perhaps Wilde's (and Dorian's) worst sin, in the eyes of society, was not so much his homosexual activity as his betrayal of his class. Meanwhile, back in the attic, Dorian's portrait has changed utterly into quite a 'terrible beauty'. Finally, beautiful but sinful Dorian stabs his own portrait and dies with his true degenerate Hyde-like face, 'withered, wrinkled and loathsome of visage'. In The Picture of Dorian Gray Wilde thus appears to be not just anticipating but endorsing society's condemnation of his 'depravity', labelling himself as a 'wrinkled and loathsome' degenerate. Funnily enough, Wilde appears to continue to stand over his own self-condemnation. In his recent interview he declared: In the period before my arrest I allowed myself to become a corrupt pleasure-seeker, a slave to my own appetite. I betrayed my wife and family. I betrayed my gifts, my country and my ancestors. I thought only of how to satisfy my lust and was always on the look-out for new ways of indulging it.12 Here speaks a high moralist indeed.

Plurality and parody To classify The Picture of Dorian Gray as belonging to the genre of the 'Paranoid Gothic of homosexual panic' might however be too reductive a reading of a book that teasingly (and, let it be said, rather irritatingly) tries out, plays with and lays aside a variety of genres and periods, styles, personae, identities and their related philosophies including their various rationalizations and formulations of male relationships without coming to any real conclusion as to which genre, persona, philosophy or form of relationship is ultimately preferable. Just as Dorian has 'nine large paper copies' of a 'poisonous book' 'bound in several different colours' to suit his various moods and fancies, Wilde's book itself has several different colours. This is a confusing book. Perhaps it may best be described, appropriately enough for a novel dealing with the 'double', as two novels: the moral fable and the amoral parodic deconstruction of itself? That Wilde himself wished to defend himself against the charge that he had written a far too moral book as well as against the charge that Dorian Gray was

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47

an immoral book is suggested by the fact that in 1891 Wilde added the famous preface which included the line: 'There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.' We saw how homoerotic relationships appear to be both idealized by the lofty talk of 'the Greeks' and demonized by the Gothic Horror associated with Dorian's activities in the underworld and with his Jekyll-and-Hyde-like end. It is, however, difficult not to read what may be termed the Gothic, and apparently all too moral narrative of The Picture of Dorian Gray as a parody of the Gothic mode of Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which is therefore not to be taken too seriously. Dorian even does away with Basil's corpse with the aid of some strange 'powders', which smell rather like Jekyll's. The parody is also evident in the image of the portrait itself, hidden up in the schoolroom, as well as in the denouement, where Dorian, still youthful and beautiful, stabs the portrait which is now abominably deformed and thereby kills himself, suddenly returning his youthful image to the portrait and becoming himself 'withered, wrinkled and loathsome of visage', quite the Mr Hyde in fact. That Wilde was consciously imitating or parodying Stevenson's story is all the more likely as he had played around with it before in The Decay of Lying', where Vivian relates how a friend of his, coincidentally called Mr Hyde, finds himself acting out in 'reality' a scene in Stevenson's novel. There is also within Dorian Gray a parody of sentimental realism: the plot of Sibyl Vane and her vengeful brother James who eventually catches up with the man, called 'Prince Charming', who jilted his sister and was responsible for her death of a broken heart seems to come straight out of Dickens. The reader of the episodes concerning the pathetic Sibyl would require a heart of stone, to alter a comment of Wilde, not to laugh out loud. Then there are the essentially theatrical scenes of social satire, of clever quips over lunches and dinners with society aunts, where Lord Henry's wit flourishes. And finally there are also the 'decadent' chapters taken straight out of Huysmans' A Rebours. Dorian Gray, like Huysmans' character des Esseintes, turns from the study of perfumes to the study of precious stones, religious vestments, music and in each case a purple passage lists ad nauseam the luxuries Dorian collects and peruses. Dorian becomes a collector of objects as of personae, just like des Esseintes, and just like Wilde himself. Indeed it was as a collector of costumes and styles that Nietzsche characterized the nineteenth-century, decadent 'europaischer Mischmensch'.13 One might conclude that The Picture of Dorian Gray consists of several irreconcilable parts and messages; that it should therefore be read rather as a series of parodies than as a single narrative and that as such it withdraws or defers any credence it might be felt Wilde was giving to any of these cultural models, definitions and styles. 'Greek love', 'decadence', 'dandyism', 'criminal

48

The 'Double'

degeneracy' are all offered as possible styles and conventions with which a man of unconventional desires might, but, in Dorian Gray, does not in the end identify. Michael Patrick Gillespie notes how the text of Dorian Gray resists reduction to one single identity/meaning: Multiplicity within the discourse invites a similar pluralism in reactions to the work: readings that simultaneously present a variety of meanings and do not simply resolve reactions into a single response. Dorian Gray refuses to submit to hegemonic or even to hierarchical meanings, for the discourse continually disrupts emerging patterns of interpretation to enforce the validity of a range of diverse perspectives.14 This refusal to submit to interpretation, to 'hegemonic or even to hierarchical meanings', could no doubt itself be interpreted as Wilde's effort to escape definition and criminalization as 'a homosexual' (and even as 'an Irishman'). 'From a label', says Lord Henry, 'there is no escape.' The problem is, however, exactly that this very elusive behaviour, attempting to subvert all definition and identity, becomes itself recognizable and definable as 'camp', the style of a new 'gay' 'identity', and thus defeats itself.15 Is the label 'gay' usurping the role of 'femme' as a new 'nom de la nonverite de la verite'? As soon as 'camp' is adopted by or is simply recognized as the 'identity' of those of a particular 'sexual orientation' it loses its revolutionary potential, suggesting merely that 'gays' are unnatural, artificial people rather than that all 'identities' are artificial, constructed roles. Susan Sontag describes the nature of 'camp' thus: Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It's not a lamp, but a 'lamp'; not a woman, but a 'woman'. To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theatre.16 Everything is in quotation marks, everything is constructed, all identities are roles, from culture there is no escape back to 'nature'. That is a modern, existentialist attitude at least as much as it is a 'gay' one. Wilde's 'camp' is an attempt not to adopt but to escape not just one label but all labels, not to set up a dualism of homo- and heterosexuality but to transcend this emerging opposition as well as all others. His playfulness is opposed to all fixed notions of 'identity' and 'truth'. 'A truth in art', as he said, 'is that whose contradictory is also true.' He may have been the writer who invented 'gaiety', but this is a 'frohliche Wissenschaft' intended not just for 'gays' but for the world.

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The Double, dualism and narcissism In his psychoanalytic study of the Double, Otto Rank comes up with some interesting conclusions regarding the connection between the Double, dualism and narcissism which have implications for culture at large. Citing Wilde's Dorian Gray, in which Dorian's narcissism is most obviously linked to his perception of his double, Rank suggests that the relationship between literary characters and their doubles are in fact always narcissistic. Again and again he has found that the double appears as an impediment to men's love of women. In stories of doubles there are constant echoes of the threat of the monster to Frankenstein in Mary Shelley's tale: 'I will be with you on your wedding night'. Dorian's narcissism, according to Rank, is the secret of all those characters who claim to be pursued by their double, a secret which again and again prevents their marrying their female sweethearts. At the same time, the double of mythology and literature frequently represents an embodiment of a person's soul. Many cultures have regarded reflections in mirrors, painted or photographic images, or shadows as images of a person's soul, and indeed the soul itself. In Wilde's story, Dorian's portrait does indeed become his soul and displays the ugliness of Dorian's secret dirty deeds. What then is the connection between the double as narcissistic image of the self and the double as the soul? Rank argues that the belief in the existence of the soul as a kind of second immortal self was the result of a narcissistic desire to deny the power of death and thus to live forever. The fact that belief in the existence of the soul is and has been a feature of so many different cultures is proof of how common narcissism is. What one finds in literary texts dealing with doubles therefore is quite a normal narcissism resulting from a normal fear of death or of other threats to the ego, exhibited, however, to a pathological degree. Rank appears to legitimate a broader interpretation of the meaning of the belief in the soul when he writes that: even today the essential content of the belief in the soul — as it subsists in religion, superstition and modern cults — has not become other than that [a kind of (narcissistic) belief in immortality which energetically denies the power of death].17 Under 'modern cults' one could perhaps include any kind of (not necessarily 'religious') belief or ideology based on a dualist separation of 'body' and 'soul', 'good' and 'evil', 'fit' and 'degenerate' or whatever. Like the dualist opposition of body and soul, these oppositions also serve to protect men's narcissism. When these beliefs are threatened, one could add, this narcissism must find an outlet elsewhere, perhaps in a more explicit form, such as the double.

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The 'Double'

It is interesting to note that the double appears to be primarily if not solely a male phenomenon.18 In literature it is above all men who have strange encounters with their doppelganger. This perhaps has something to do with the fact that in patriarchal culture women are expected to be physically narcissistic, while men's narcissism is expected to be taken up in more 'spiritual' concerns such as matters of the 'soul', cults, the production of culture and ideologies. Men are in fact not supposed to be narcissistic at all; narcissism is effeminate and childish. Yet Rank's study of the double can be interpreted as suggesting that men's spiritual and intellectual concerns, the substance of patriarchal culture, can be revealed to be inspired by men's oh-so-effeminate narcissism. Perhaps the double is primarily a male phenomenon because any hint of actual physical narcissism (and possible connotations of 'homosexuality') is particularly problematic for men in a culture which demands that men's physical narcissism be denied in order that their spiritual and intellectual narcissism serve to promote the culture of patriarchy. Women, having fewer problems with their own narcissism, are less likely to have guilt-laden encounters with their doubles. Dorian Gray, the cult of the dandy and aesthete and the very name of Oscar Wilde are associated with open male narcissism, equated at the time and since with male 'effeminacy'. This 'open narcissism' was perhaps infinitely preferable to the 'closeted narcissism' of patriarchal authority, which of course felt threatened by Wilde's display of anarchic, self-affirming narcissism. One recalls the story told by the 37-year-old Wilde to 22-year-old Andre Gide (who had just written on the subject of Narcisse), a story which Wilde called The Disciple', an appropriate title and an appropriate story for an established writer to tell a young writer: When Narcissus died, the flowers of the field were desolate and asked the river for some drops of water to weep for him. 'Oh!' answered the river, 'if all my drops of water were tears, I should not have enough to weep for Narcissus myself. I love him.' 'Oh!' replied the flowers of the field, 'how could you not have loved Narcissus? He was beautiful.' Was he beautiful?' said the river. 'And who should know better than you? Each day, leaning over your bank, he beheld his beauty in your waters.' 'If I loved him', replied the river, 'it was because, when he leaned over my waters, I saw the reflection of my waters in his eyes.'19 The point was', according to Richard Ellman, 'that there are no disciples . . . . People are suns, not moons.' Wilde wanted everybody to be a sun, to be a Narcissus, a privilege until then reserved for the few fortunate enough .to have the means. Aristocratic narcissism for all.

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Concluding remarks to Part I At the beginning of this part I asked three questions: why the popularity of the motif of the doppelganger in the 1880s and 1890s?; has the figure of the 'double' something to do with (male) sexuality?; what has it to do with nationalism and war? I will now attempt to give some sort of coherent response to these questions. In response to the first question: the 'double' appears to be a symptom of the collapse of a set of dualist oppositions, a series of assumptions and a system of belief and identification that one might subsume under the name of 'patriarchy'. What Nietzsche diagnosed as the 'death of God' signified the end of the division between this world and that essentially 'other' world, the next, and thus between the body and the soul, a division which, according to Rank and Freud, had been created by man's primitive narcissism, and which had been petrified by the religion of which Nietzsche pronounced the death. The boundary between a community and its 'outside' was being erased by the increased ease of travel and communication across this boundary, by what Nietzsche termed 'the gradual rise of a fundamentally supranational and nomadic kind of person', by the dwindling of unmapped parts of the earth, of the symbolic frontier between the 'civilized' world and the rest of the world. This boundary was also being undermined by the arguments of international socialism and anarchism. After Darwin the animal kingdom could no longer be considered as essentially 'other' than the world of 'man', no matter how much one wanted to keep it at bay with the new dualism of 'fit' and 'degenerate'. The 'world of man' was also under attack from women, no longer inclined to accept exclusion therefrom, and the definition of 'man' based on his difference from women was being shaken by this attack as well as by murmurs about 'matriarchy' and the erosion of traditional models of masculine identification based on other supposedly absolute dualist distinctions allowing the projection of the 'feminine' on some clearly demarcated and excluded 'outside'. Divisions of class were being upset by the decline of aristocratic wealth and privilege, the rise of bourgeois and petit-bourgeois wealth, of mass education and the progressive enlargement of the franchise. On all these fronts what had been defined as 'other' - other world, other race, other class, other species, other sex, other culture - could no longer be held to be 'essentially' other and thus held at arm's length. Those qualities which had not only been projected on the 'other' but repressed in the 'unconscious' of the 'self return to haunt the conscious 'self in the shape of a terrifying and socially embarrassing 'double' such as the Mr Hyde of Stevenson's story or Dorian's portrait. In response to the second question: the image of the 'double' seems inevitably to lead to 'diagnoses' of 'narcissism' or 'homosexuality' but the fact

52

The 'Double'

that these texts deal with such broad issues as 'identity' and dualism allows one to resist the minoritizing effect of such diagnoses - the point is not that Stevenson or Nietzsche or Wilde were 'homosexuals' - and to suggest that male identity perpetually constitutes itself 'narcissistically' or 'homoerotically'. Further, as such narcissism, as Rank and Freud argued, lies at the origin of the dualist separation of body and soul, and, one can perhaps add, of all systems of belief and ideology, it is not surprising that this original moment of 'narcissism' should again become visible when those dualist systems of belief and identification were crumbling — as, we noted above, was the case at the end of the nineteenth century. A further sexual feature we encountered in this discussion of the 'double' is 'sadomasochism' - the split self's sadomasochistic relationship with itself. This again should be regarded as the result of the dissolution of the dualist ideologies supplying a clear boundary between the 'self and the 'other', along which such sadomasochism, one could argue, could normally be played out. As the distinction was eroded between those who are conventionally permitted a certain degree of sadism - the white, patriarchal, male master of the earth - and those of whom a certain degree of masochism is conventionally expected - the subordinated race, class or sex — the masochism projected upon that subordinate 'outside' returns to haunt the disintegrating 'self. As do all the other qualities conventionally termed 'feminine' and attributed to women — and to other subordinate and excluded 'species' as well as to the unconscious. Such qualities as 'the irrational', 'the ambivalent', 'the unlimited', 'the material', 'the physical' or 'the sexual', and the 'morally ambiguous and vaguely criminal', conventionally assigned to women, are all rediscovered in man's 'double'. In response to the third question: as this crisis of a particular type of masculine 'identity' was brought about by the dissolution of a series of conceptual as well as geographical boundaries and frameworks, it would not be altogether surprising if a solution to this crisis were to be sought in the redrawing of these or of other boundaries and frameworks, in a renewed devotion of masculine narcissism to the construction of a dualist ideological structure clearly separating 'inside' from 'outside' — such as the 'nation' — and a removal of the sadomasochism of the split self to the boundaries of that ideological structure where it might more 'healthily' express itself - in the masculine theatre of war.

Notes 1. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Penguin, 1988), p. 151. 2. See Mark Simpson's presumably fictional 'Interview with Oscar Wilde', in

Dorian Gray

3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

53

Mark Simpson, It's a Queer World (London: Vintage, 1996), pp. 205-10, p. 208. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (London: Penguin, 1985), pp. 1745. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1991), p. 7. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, p. 9. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), p. 41. Kiberd deals with the anti-imperial aspect — in particular in connection with the relationship between Britain and Ireland — of Wilde's 'deconstruction' of opposites here. Cited by Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, p. 301. See Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, p. 260. Ellmann, Wilde, p. 303. See for example Jeffrey Richards, ' "Passing the love of women": manly love and Victorian society', in Manliness and Morality: Middle-class Masculinity in Britain and America 1800—1940, ed. J. A. Mangan and J. Walvin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), pp. 92-122. Alison Hennigan, 'Aspects of literature and life in England', in Fin de Siecle and its Legacy, ed. M. Teich and R. Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 207. Mark Simpson, 'Interview with Oscar Wilde', p. 209. Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Bose, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Colli and Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter and Co., 1968), Vol. VI ii, #223. Michael Patrick Gillespie, 'Picturing Dorian Gray: resistant readings in Wilde's novel', English Literature in Transition, 35 (1, 1992). One might reasonably object that one is re-enacting here precisely that nineteenth-century medical trend Foucault spoke of — reducing Wilde's entire personality/identity to 'his sexuality'. Susan Sontag, 'Notes on "Camp"', in Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1961), p. 280. Otto Rank, The Double, a Psychoanalytic Study, trans, and ed. by Harry Tucker, Jr. (North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 1971), p. 84. See Harry Tucker's 'Introduction' to Rank's study; Otto Rank, The Double, a Psychoanalytic Study, p. xxi. Cited by Richard Ellman, Oscar Wilde, pp. 336-7.

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Part II

The Other - Narcissus and Salome

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Scapegoats

In Part I, we saw how the motif of the 'doppelganger' occurred in works of Stevenson, Nietzsche and Wilde and drew on the reflections of Rank and Freud on the subject of the 'double' and 'dualism'. Connotations of 'narcissism' and 'homoeroticism' seem unavoidably linked to the very notion of the 'double', the same 'narcissism', which, according to Freud, leads to the desire for immortality, the invention of an immortal soul and, we can add, the construction of associated dualist/idealist philosophies and ideologies. This narcissism was most explicit in Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, where the eponymous hero falls in love with his own image and attempts to separate his soul from his body in order that he may remain eternally young-looking. It was argued that the narcissism evident in the motif of the doppelganger was the result of the collapse of ideologies — such as religion — and modes of identification in which this narcissism is usually expressed. If narcissism itself is thus a constant — the same libidinal energy whether expressed in evidently 'narcissistic' modes of behaviour or in dualist metaphysics or ideology — then one can legitimately ask which was the more narcissistic, Oscar Wilde himself, put on trial in some no small sense, as we shall see, more for his attitude of narcissistic individualism than for 'homosexual' acts, or the society which sentenced him? It has been said, by Wilde's biographer, Richard Ellman, for instance, that Wilde's trials in 1895 marked the end of the 'Nineties'. This part will treat the fate of Oscar Wilde as somehow paradigmatic of a society concerned to overcome precisely the kind of crisis of which the 'double' was a 'symptom', a crisis of belief, motivation and identification, a crisis which need not necessarily have been a crisis at all, which might have been avoided — to alter a phrase of George Bernard Shaw writing about Ibsen — if the Gospel of Wilde had been understood and heeded. Wilde became in the eyes of 'society' the embodiment of a narcissistic attitude as well as of a thorough-going ambivalence which

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'society' decided it could not live with and had to abandon — by scapegoating someone who might represent its own ambivalence. Narcissus became a common character in fin-de-siecle literature as men attempted to put a name on and exorcize their own (sexual and other) confusions. Salome was similarly a favourite name for the confusions and ambivalence of the age, and, of course, conveniently, a woman, and as such a ready-made scapegoat for the confusions of men. Part II will focus its attention on the treatment of these two figures in the literature of the fin de siecle. To return, for a moment to the subject of Part I: a term eminently appropriate to the phenomenon described there is perhaps Rene Girard's 'crise mimetique' (mimetic crisis). Girard, like Freud, uses a triangular model to describe the workings of (male) desire. At the apex of Girard's triangle stands the (male) 'mediateur'/'modele', whose desire for the (female) 'objet' is imitated by the (male) 'sujet'. According to Girard, the distance between the 'sujet' and the 'mediateur' is as crucial for the formation of desire as it is for the configuration of the triangle. At one extreme, the 'mediateur' is external, a supremely distant religious or historical model for the subject to imitate. At the other, the 'mediateur' is internal — not belonging to the realm of metaphysics, but to the world of the subject, no longer just a model but a rival or an obstacle to the subject's desire. As the apex of the triangle has collapsed to the same level as the subject and object, the triangle is no longer a triangle at all but a line between subject and object, interrupted and blocked by the 'mediateur'. In the past few centuries of literature Girard reads a progressive approach of the 'mediateur' to the level of the subject — from when the 'mediateur' was outside of time altogether to the stage when one has several 'mediateurs' close by and a consequent 'decomposition of the personality of the subject', as, he says, is the case with Dostoevsky and Nietzsche.1 Here one finds, he argues, both 'le desir sans objet' (desire without an object) — as the subject is involved in a sadomasochistic struggle with the 'mediateur', now a rival or a double, part of the subject himself - and the total disintegration of the 'unity of the personality of the subject' — a unity which, he argues, depends on the maintenance of the metaphysical distance between the subject and the 'mediateur'. This is a fascinating model, useful for understanding what is going on here - and all the more fascinating and useful if one abandons Girard's assumption that the hierarchical triangular configuration - where the 'mediateur' is some distant God-like being to be imitated — is somehow 'better', more 'normal' or 'healthier' than what appears to be the more democratic, if more confused, arrangement of the horizontal line. Girard describes the stage where one finds 'doubles' and sadomasochism as a 'crise mimetique' whose resolution is found only through the selection and expulsion of a scapegoat upon whom the sins of the community are conferred,

Scapegoats

59

and who may be at the same time both a victim and a god, as he may personify the new 'mediateur'. The violence and rivalry of 'homo lupus homini' is exorcized and the community is founded with its rites (ritual re-enactments of the expulsion of the scapegoat) and prohibitions. The hierarchical triangle/ pyramid is re-erected. As in his highly influential work, The Golden Bough (1890), J. G. Frazer found it customary for the ancient Greeks ritually to choose and slaughter scapegoats, Jacques Derrida, in 'La Pharmacie de Platon', finds Plato doing the same with art and writing, and states clearly Plato's purpose in so doing: 'La ceremonie du pharmakos se joue done a la limite du dedans et du dehors qu'elle a pour fonction de tracer et de retracer sans cesse. Intra muros/extra muros' (The ceremony of the pharmakos is played out at the limit of the inside and the outside which it traces and retraces incessantly).2 Rituals involving scapegoats have the purpose of tracing and retracing the boundary between inside and outside, of defining those who belong inside the walls of respectable society and those who belong outside those walls. The ritual was not obsolete in Frazer's own time. At the end of the nineteenth century, art and artists became suspect and closely allied, in the minds of some critics, with criminals, anarchists and madmen. It was perhaps above all Max Nordau's Entartung (Degeneration) (1892—3) which established the notion that there was a link between art and degeneration and picked out a whole range of contemporary artists and writers (including Wilde) as potential scapegoats for the confusions of the time. Tom Gibbons attributes to Frazer's Golden Bough, among other such studies in comparative religion, 'a renewed emphasis on the Eucharist as the central idea of Christian worship', that is on the sacrificial aspect of Christianity, as well as a marked shift towards Anglo-Catholicism in the Church of England and an increasing number of conversions to Roman Catholicism during the 1890s.3 Gibbons sees this as part of the general rise of religious transcendentalism, occultism and philosophical idealism in 'full-scale ideological reaction from the scientific materialism, atheism, determinism and pessimism of the mid-nineteenth century', a reaction which took place during the last quarter of the century.4 In Parts II and III I will be looking at this reaction and at how it involved a rejection of the 'double', of the 'other' within the self, to 'another world' geographical and political as well as metaphysical - in order to redraw those boundaries perceived to be rapidly dissolving, boundaries not just between 'this world' and 'the next', but also between the self, sex/gender, class, nation and their 'outside'. 'In periods of cultural insecurity,' writes Elaine Showaiter, 'when there are fears of regression and degeneration, the longing for strict border controls around the definition of gender as well as race, class and

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The Other — Narcissus and Salome

nationality becomes especially intense.'5 Such cultural insecurity and longing for strict border controls as well as the search for new gods and new victims are no doubt a central feature of any historical period, and perhaps even ineluctable aspects of the human condition, but these influences could well be said to have become particularly intense around 1900, and to have remained so over the first half of this century, those years permanently stamped on European memory as a period of ideologies, dictators and mass slaughter.

Notes 1.

2. 3. 4. 5.

See Rene Girard, Mensonge romantique et verite romanesque (Paris: Grasset, 1961), and To Double Business Bound' (Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). Jacques Derrida: 'La Pharmacie de Platon', in La Dissemination (Paris: du Seuil, 1972), p. 153. See Tom Gibbons, Rooms in the Darwin Hotel (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1973), pp. 12f. Ibid., p. 1. Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy (London: Virago, 1992), p. 4.

4

The trials of Narcissus: Wilde

Wilde and Nordau: degeneration, clothes and philistine cattle In the discussion of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray above, it was suggested that one possible interpretation of the story, which Wilde himself to some extent endorsed, was that it was a self-condemnatory, moral fable, an identification in anticipation with the 'moral' outrage of the father of his beloved Lord Alfred Douglas, the Marquess of Queensberry, and also with the anti-decadent diatribe of Max Nordau. In Wilde's tale Narcissus and the artist, Dorian and Basil, must die. The first English translation of Max Nordau's1 Entartung (1892—3), Degeneration, was published in February 1895 - conveniently coinciding with both the summit of Wilde's societal success as well as the climax of the Marquess of Queensberry's rage which led him to deliver a bouquet of vegetables to the stage door on the opening night of The Importance of Being Earnest and to leave his card at the Albemarle Club addressed apparently To Oscar Wilde, posing Somdomite'.2 Nordau's book is dedicated to the Italian pioneer of criminal anthropology, Cesare Lombroso, and seeks to apply Lombroso's analysis of 'degeneration' and 'criminality' specifically to the practitioners of art and literature. In the dedication Nordau writes: 'Degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists and pronounced lunatics; they are often authors and artists'. The suggestion that artists and men of letters were by nature 'degenerate' was first made by Cesare Lombroso (1836-1909) in L'Uomo di Genio (1888). In this book, translated by Havelock Ellis into English in 1891, Lombroso claimed that 'the signs of degeneration are found more frequently in men of genius than even in the insane'.3 Works such as The Insanity of Genius (1891) by The Times theatre critic J. F. Nisbet, Hereditary Genius (2nd edition, 1892) by Francis Galton and The Criminal (1890) by Havelock Ellis made the same connection

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The Other ~ Narcissus and Salome

between artists and 'degeneration'. Nordau's Degeneration was, in Gibbons's words, 'the Age of Evolutionism's most influential work of literary criticism', and was moreover a work whose enormous popularity in England 'appears to have been a direct result of the trial of Oscar Wilde with which publication of the first English translation may well have been designed to coincide'.4 Nordau classifies such artists as Whitman, Huysmans, Zola, Ibsen, Nietzsche and Wagner among a huge number of others as various manifestations of 'degeneracy'. He sees France, however, as the original home of 'degeneration'. This was not a new idea in Germany: J. M. Fischer points out that in 1871 the German psychiatrist Karl Stark had published a book on the subject of Die psychologische Degeneration des franzosischen Volkes, ihr pathologischer Charakter, ihre Symptome und Ursachen (The psychological degeneration of the French people, its pathological character, symptoms and causes).5 Fin de siede, according to Nordau, is a French phenomenon, a phenomenon which he links to the weakness of the French after the loss of so much blood during the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars and the French defeat in 1870 as well as to the effect on the nerves of the growth of large towns, the development of railways, electricity and steam power. Nordau attacks Wilde not for 'somdomy' but for 'egomania', on the 'psychology' of which he writes a great deal, as indeed he does on all forms of 'degeneration' — a habit which earned him the label 'graphomaniac' from one contemporary English reviewer.6 Nordau writes: The egomania of decadentism, its love of the artificial, its aversion to nature, and to all forms of activity and movement, its megalomaniacal contempt for men and its exaggeration of the importance of art, have found their English representative among the 'Aesthetes', the chief of whom is Oscar Wilde.7 For Nordau, Wilde's egomania was evident from his clothes: It is asserted that he walked down Pall Mall in the afternoon dressed in doublet and breeches, with a picturesque biretta on his head and a sunflower in his hand, the quasi heraldic symbol of the aesthetes, (p. 317) This is too much for Nordau, who would rather be a 'philistine' than an 'egomaniac': Phasemakers are perpetually repeating the twaddle, that it is a proof of honourable independence to follow one's own taste without being bound down to the regulation costume of the Philistine cattle, and to choose for clothes the colours, material and cut which appear beautiful to one's own self, no matter how much they may differ from the fashion of the day.

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63

The answer to this cackle should be that it is above all a sign of antisocial egomania to irritate the majority unnecessarily, only to gratify vanity, or an aesthetical instinct of small importance and easy to control — such as is always done when, either by word or deed, a man places himself in opposition to this majority. He is obliged to repress many manifestations of opinions and desires out of regard for his fellow creatures; to make him understand this is the aim of education, and he who has not learnt to impose some restraint upon himself in order not to shock others is called by malicious Philistines, not an Aesthete, but a blackguard, (pp. 317f.) And all for Hecuba! If it had been left to Nordau, Wilde would have been put in prison for no greater crime than wearing a doublet and breeches. Of course he was. The predilection for strange costumes', Nordau asserts, 'is a pathological aberration of a racial instinct.'

The press, the new authority, The Soul of Man under Socialism There is perhaps something new and sinister about a critic's readiness to side with the 'Philistine cattle', a pride in vulgarity such as is promoted by the popular press, the influence of which was coming into its own at the fin de siecle. The journalist W. T. Stead, writing in 1910 declared: The simple faith of our forefathers in the Allseeing Eye of God has departed from the Man in the street. Our only modern substitute for Him is the press. Gag the press under whatever pretexts of prudish propriety you please, and you destroy the last remaining pillory by which it is possible to impose some restraint upon the lawless lust of man ... The Divorce Court is the modern substitute for the Day of Judgment, not because of the decrees it pronounces, but because of the publicity which it secures.8 Stead here welcomes what might be termed the birth of the popular press out of the grave of a puritan god. As the legitimation of laws against the 'lawless lusts of man' faded away, the popular press could found a cult in its memory, if only because it might be popular and sell papers in a world which had lost its (religious) bearings and sense of 'identity'. According to Wilde: 'In the old days men had the rack; now they have the Press.' In a long digression in The Soul of Man under Socialism, Wilde echoes Stead's claim, from an entirely different point of view: 'What is there behind the leading-article but prejudice, stupidity, cant and twaddle? And when these

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The Other - Narcissus and Salome

four are joined together they make a terrible force, and constitute the new authority. ... We are dominated by journalism.'9 The press is 'the new authority' and democracy has been found to be 'the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people'. Wilde's essay argues for socialism because it is only socialism and the abolition of private property which will encourage 'true, beautiful, healthy Individualism': The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from the sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody. ... The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism — are forced, indeed, so to spoil them. (p. 1079) Thus, one might argue, also spake Zarathustra, while he still could, though not so enthusiastically of socialism. Wilde's Ubermensch is an artist, more anarchic even than the criminal; Wilde, like Nietzsche, sees tyranny being exercised over the body and the soul not just by 'Prince' and Tope' but by 'the people' as well. He does not argue that the artist is to be the new 'authority': his word, like Zarathustra's, is not to be taken as gospel: Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value. For what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine, (p. 1091) Wilde's argument is against all submission to authority. Indeed he comes to the conclusion that: The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all' (p. 1098). Wilde's Soul of Man under Socialism might be said to promote individualism and narcissism, rather than conventional socialism. But this is still a political defence of narcissism: narcissism as defiance of authority. And that, as we have seen, was what society found so disturbing about Wilde.

Degenerate, decadent and perverted tendencies Nordau indicts Wilde, however, on behalf of the new authority, the new democratic majority, inheritors of the power and authority of the declining aristocracy. The majority is, it seems, all of a body, not an aggregate of bodies, a body which moreover must eradicate any anarchic 'vermin' ('Ungeziefer')10 threatening its unity. Nordau's language is far from restrained:

The trials of Narcissus: Wilde

65

He who considers civilized behaviour a good, which has value and which is worth defending, must mercilessly press his thumb on anti-social vermin. To him who shares Nietzsche's enthusiasm for the 'freely roaming lecherous beast of prey' we shout: 'Get out of society! Roam far from us! ... We have no room for the lecherous beast of prey and if you dare to appear amongst us we will mercilessly beat you to death with cudgels.' Even more decisively are the excrement-scooping band of pigs of professional pornographers to be opposed.11 Apart from beating the 'enemies of society' to death this doctor also suggests a more systematic way of dealing with society's undesirables: Only thus can the sickness of our time be effectively treated: the leading degenerates and hysterics must be labelled as sick; their imitators must be exposed and branded as enemies of society; society must be warned against the lies of these parasites.12 Are these 'degenerates' to be forced to wear some form of sign on their sleeves to indicate their 'degeneracy'? 'Cudgels', 'branding', 'enemies of the people': this is very Nazi language for a Hungarian Jew, living in Paris and witness to rising anti-Semitism (which would lead Nordau to found, with Theodor Herzl, the Zionist movement), demonstrating perhaps the classic Fascist mechanism if threatened with persecution, persecute someone else. Nordau's definition of 'entartete Kunst' (degenerate art) was easily and enthusiastically adopted by an otherwise unsympathetic party. Fischer writes that it is not to be denied that Nordau supplied slogans and arguments for parties from which he would have distanced himself, had he experienced the consequences.13 Adolf Hitler claimed Nordau's holy war against degenerate art as his own in Mein Kampf: Theatre, art, literature, cinema, the press, posters and shop displays are to be cleansed of the symptoms of a rotting world and put in the service of a moral idea of the state and of culture. . . . Before the turn of the century a certain element began to infiltrate our art, an element which up to then had been utterly foreign and unknown.14 In 1937 two large art exhibitions were opened almost simultaneously in Munich - one of which was called the 'Grofie Deutsche Kunstausstellung' (Great German Art Exhibition) and the other was the 'Schandausstellung' (Exhibition of Shame) displaying works of 'Entartete Kunst'.15 There were seven English editions of Nordau's book in the space of four months, from the first edition in February 1895. Wilde's trials may be said to have begun when he received Queensberry's card on 28 February of the same

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The Other — Narcissus and Salome

year and ended on 25 May, the Queen's birthday. Undoubtedly Nordau's bestseller fanned the flames around Wilde's stake. In the spring of 1895 Punch complained that 'Morbid sickliness surrounds us in our lives, our books, our art'. A reviewer in The Academy expressed disgust at the 'blackest Horrors' of the 'Ibsenites and Tolstoi-ites and Pornographists and Dirt-eaters' he had formerly admired and called for 'Glorious bonfires of bad books!'.16 In one English review of Nordau's Degeneration a critic wrote: Gladly would we replace the divine right of instinct as an article of faith by a wholesome revival of the obsolete and unscientific doctrine of original sin. These literary phenomena may be pure madness, but for all Max Nordau's theories there is something to be said just now for a reintroduction of the devil. Mephistopheles has been too much forgotten of late.17 Perhaps the reintroduction of a Christian hierarchy would solve the problem of decadent anarchy. Fears concerning 'degeneration' and 'decadence' were also specifically linked to fears regarding issues of gender and sexual practices. George Gissing wrote of 'sexual anarchy', while Punch, in response to the feminists' challenge to traditional gender roles, the advent of the so-called 'manly woman' and the 'womanly man', and no doubt also with the Wilde affair in mind, proclaimed in April 1895: 'A new fear my bosom vexes;/ Tomorrow there may be no sexes!'.18 The paintings of Aubrey Beardsley were denounced by the critic Harry Quilter as 'perverted' for their depiction of 'manhood and womanhood ... mingled together ... in a monstrous sexless amalgam, morbid, dreary and unnatural'.19 There was a series of sexual scandals in England in the years preceding the Wilde trials — from the sensational series on child prostitution by W. T. Stead entitled 'The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon' in 1885 to the expose of the Cleveland Street male brothel in 1889 - which, according to Showalter, changed the level of public awareness about sexuality and engendered a fierce response in social purity campaigns ... and demands, often successful, for restrictive legislation and censorship. They were occasions when gender roles were 'publicly, even spectacularly, encoded and enforced'.20 'Notions of homosexual "degeneracy"', writes Gibbons, 'doubtless reinforced in the popular mind the important link already made by Lombroso and Nordau between biological degeneration on the one hand and literary decadence on the other.'21 Cesare Lombroso 'coupled homosexual desire with criminality as elements detrimental to the progress of civilization'.22 Homosexuals 'were

The trials of Narcissus: Wilde

67

defined as Egotists — as those centred in Self — who seemed to reject the patriarchy of Christianity as they rejected the patriarchy of the family'. There were hysterical fears that homosexual activities were on the increase. In 1890 the House of Commons was warned: There is no doubt that of late years a certain offence — I will not give it a name — has become more rife than it ever was before.'23 Some British physicians viewed 'homosexuality' as the product of overrefinement and too much 'civilization'. After Wilde's conviction, The British Medical Journal declared: The intellectual development of man has destroyed the pristine balance between the various functions of the body, and civilization, with its artificial conditions of existence, has [stimulated] the growth of perverted tendencies.'24 Wilde seemed resigned to accept such nonsensical medical opinions when in 1896 he petitioned the Home Secretary from Reading Gaol, writing that 'the terrible offences of which he was rightly found guilty are forms of sexual madness', and begging 'that he may be taken abroad by his friends and may put himself under medical care so that the sexual insanity from which he.suffers may be cured'.25

The aftermath Wilde was the perfect scapegoat — an Irishman, circulating in but not quite belonging to aristocratic circles, an artist and flamboyant aesthete — not a politician. Davenport-Hines even suggests that Wilde's trials and conviction served the ulterior purpose of deflecting attention away from the prime minister of the day, Lord Rosebery, and fobbing off claims that a cover-up was in operation concerning homosexual doings in high places.26 Harry Quilter celebrated 'the fall of the great high priest of aestheticism' which ensured that 'the newest developments of blasphemy, indecency and disease receive only half-hearted and timid approval'.27 Philistinism, in the words of DavenportHines, 'was given a fillip'. Wilde had judged things according as to whether they were 'beautiful' or 'ugly'; the new criterion of judgement was whether they were 'healthy' or 'unhealthy'. According to one novelist, 'Wilde, together with all he stood for, was "unhealthy" '.2S Books and art generally came to be seen as 'unhealthy' and dangerous. Thomas Hardy stopped writing fiction altogether after the publication of Jude the Obscure in 1895 was greeted with uproar, condemned by the Pall Mall Gazette, as 'dirt, drivel and damnation'. English literary taste turned to the adventure stories of such writers as Sir Rider Haggard and Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins. Wilde's trials and conviction made his name synonymous not only with 'literary decadence', 'degeneration' and 'aestheticism' but also with 'homosexuality' which through his name could be associated with the aesthetic

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movement. Each of these terms could henceforth be used as a stick to beat the other. Wilde personified, in Foucault's word, incorporated that neologism 'homosexuality' and it became difficult to see him in any other terms. Davenport-Hines notes, and one cannot resist quoting this in full, how the violence which the name 'Wilde' excited was shown during the First World War when a teenager was discovered by his father reading The Picture of Dorian Gray: he seemed to choke. The purple deepened on his fat cheeks. He turned to me with an expression of such murderous hate that I stepped towards the wall. 'You filthy little bastard!' he screamed ... 'Don't you dare speak to me ... you ... you scum!' He hurled the book at my head ... he struck me across the mouth. 'Now ... you pretty little bastard ... you pretty little boy' (and as he said the word 'pretty' he sent his voice high and shrill, in a parody of the typical homosexual intonation) 'watch me!' ... My father opened the book, very slowly, cleared his throat, and spat on the title page. Having spat once, he spat again; the action appeared to stimulate him. Soon his chin was covered with saliva. Then, with a swift animal gesture, he lifted the book to his mouth, closed his teeth over some of the pages, and began tearing them to shreds ... I could conceive no crime that could possibly cause any man's name to be so hated [and asked] 'What did Wilde do?' 'What did he do?' He shook his head; the crime was too terrible to pass his lips, 'oh, my son ... my son!' he groaned. And sinking onto the bed, he burst into tears. The next morning the father returned to his son's bedroom to explain the crime of Oscar Wilde. 'It's unfit for a decent man to say', he said, before writing something on a scrap of paper and issuing a final threat: 'If ever I catch you reading a book by that man again, or if ever I so much as hear you mentioning his name ... I'll cut your liver out.' After he had left the son read the paper: what his father had written was: 'ILLUM CRIMEN HORRIBILE QUOD NON NOMINANDUM EST'.29 Strangely enough, Nordau, despite his talk of cudgels and vermin, was one of the first to sign a protest of French literati against Wilde's sentence. Perhaps Nordau, after the Dreyfus affair, was becoming disenchanted with the violent majority with which he had wished to identify himself. It was a bit late for second thoughts.

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Notes 1. Max Nordau, a German-Hungarian Jew, physician and author, had in his youth strangely changed his name from Sudfeld to Nordau. See J. M. Fischer, 'Dekadenz und Entartung: Max Nordau als Kritiker des Fin de Siecle', in Fin de Siecle: Zu Literatur und Kunst der Jahrhundertwende, ed. by R. Bauer, E. Heftrich, H. Koopmann et al. (Frankfurt/M.: Klostermann, 1977). 2. Both 'somdomy' and 'sodomy' were in the process of becoming obsolete, being replaced by the neologisms 'homosexual' and 'homosexuality', introduced into the English language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, by an early translator of Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, and originally invented, according to Elisabeth Badinter, in 1869 by a Hungarian, Dr Benkert, who went on to plead for the repeal of the Prussian law outlawing sexual acts between men. Badinter also suggests that the isolation and naming of 'homosexuality' was not something 'imposed from outside', but came about rather as the result of good intentions - both of those wishing for recognition of a particular form of sexual desire and activity as constitutive of a legitimately different 'identity', and of some enlightened psychologists and medical men brave enough to broach a taboo subject. See Elisabeth Badinter, XY de I'identite masculine (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1992), pp. 155f. 'Ironie de 1'histoire, ce sont, pour une large part, les homosexuels eux-memes et les sexologues qui se voulaient reformistes qui enfermerent les "deviants" dans 1'anormalite' (ibid., p. 157). 3. Tom Gibbons, Rooms in the Darwin Hotel (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1973), pp. 35f. 4. Gibbons, Rooms, p. 36. 5. J. M. Fischer, 'Max Nordau', p. 103. 6. Janet E. Hogarth, 'Literary degenerates', The Fortnightly Review, JanuaryJune 1895. 7. Max Nordau, Degeneration (London: Heinemann, 1895), p. 317. 8. Cited by Richard Davenport-Hines in Sex, Death and Punishment (London: Collins, 1990), pp. 181-2. 9. Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism, in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (London and Glasgow: Collins, 1966), pp. 1079-1104, p. 1094. 10. This is also, as it happens, the word Kafka uses to describe what Gregor Samsa turns into in 'Die Verwandlung'. 11. 'Wer die Gesittung fur ein Gut halt, das Werth hat und verteidigt zu werden verdient, der muss unerbittlich den Daumen auf das gesellschaftsfeindliche Ungeziefer driicken. Wer mit Nietzsche fur das 'frei schweifende

70

12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

The Other — Narcissus and Salome liisterne Raubthier' schwarmt, dem rufen wir zu: "hinaus aus der Gesittung! Schweife fern von tins! ... Fur das liisterne Raubthier 1st bei uns kein Platz und wenn du dich unter uns wagst, so schlagen wir dich unbarmherzig mit Kniippeln todt." Und noch entschiedener gilt es gegen die kothloffelnde Schweinebande der berufsmassigen Pornographen Partei zu nehmen ... .' Max Nordau, Entartung, Vol. II, pp. 556f., cited by Fischer, 'Max Nordau', p. 104. 'Das ist die Behandlung der Zeitkrankheit, die ich fur wirksam halte: Kennzeichnung der fuhrenden Entarteten und Hysteriker als Kranke, Entlarvung und Brandmarkung der Nachaffer als Gesellschaftsfeinde, Warnung vor den Lugen dieser Schmarotzer.' Nordau, Entartung, p. 561, cited by Fischer, 'Max Nordau', p. 103. Fischer, 'Max Nordau', p. 106. Theater, Kunst, Literatur, Kino, Presse, Plakat und Auslagen sind von den Erscheinungen einer verfaulenden Welt zu saubern und in den Dienst einer sittlichen Staats- und Kulturidee zu stellen. . . . Schon vor der Jahrhundertwende begann sich in unsere Kunst ein Element einzuschieben, das bis dorthin als vollkommen fremd und unbekannt gelten durfte.' Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, quoted by J. M. Fischer, 'Max Nordau', p. 105. See Peter Reichel, Der schone Schein des Dritten Reiches: Faszination und Gewalt des Faschismus (Frankfurt / M.: Fischer, 1993), pp. 360f. Cited by Tom Gibbons, Rooms, p. 37. Janet E. Hogarth, 'Literary degenerates', The Fortnightly Review, JanuaryJune 1895, p. 591. Cited by Elaine Showalter in Sexual Anarch]/ (London: Virago, 1992), p. 9. Quoted by Richard Davenport-Hines, in Sex, Death and Punishment, p. 126. Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, p. 3. Gibbons, Rooms, p. 37. Davenport-Hines, Sex, Death and Punishment, p. 119. Davenport-Hines, Sex, Death and Punishment p. 125, and cited by Davenport-Hines, p. 128. Cited in ibid., p. 119. Cited in ibid., p. 120. See ibid., pp. 136ff. Rosebery had also aroused the fury of Queensberry. Davenport-Hines writes that Queensberry at one point intended to horsewhip Rosebery for the unhealthy influence he had exercised over his eldest son, Lord Drumlanrig. Cited in ibid., p. 139. The novelist was Croft-Cooke, cited by Davenport-Hines, in ibid., p. 140. The teenager was Beverley Nichols, whose story is cited by DavenportHines in ibid., p. 142.

5

The deaths of Narcissus: Hofmannsthal

Hofmannsthal: death as the 'cure' for decadence A figure of fin-de-siede Vienna who bears comparison with Wilde as something of a 'high priest of aestheticism' is Hugo von Hofmannsthal, described by Karl Kraus as an 'Edelsteinsammler aller Literaturen' (collector of the precious stones of all literatures).1 However, Wilde's thoroughly ambivalent and never too serious aesthetic and comic pose, his anarchic undermining of all dualist oppositions, perhaps above all his conviction for an 'unnameable' crime, the whole complex of art, 'decadence', 'degeneration' and indeed 'homosexuality' mentioned above, all apparently became 'problems' for Hofmannsthal's selfdefinition as an artist, problems which he embodied in several Narcissus-like characters, who, like Dorian Gray, are punished with death. While Wilde's killing of Dorian Gray was, it appears, intended to be taken only half-seriously and half as a parody, the deaths of Hofmannsthal's characters are seen rather less equivocally. Hofmannsthal appears to need to exorcize, again and again, the Wilde in himself. Hofmannsthal's verse drama fragment, Der Tod des Tizian (The death of Titian), appeared the same year as the first volume of Nordau's Entartung (1892), which also happened to be the year the young Hofmannsthal left school. The play is set in 1576, when the 99-year-old Titian dies in his villa near Venice, but it seems to be about both the death of the artist and the end or abandonment of a particular style of life associated with him, symbolized in the drama by a high fence which surrounds the villa's garden preserving its inhabitants, Titian and his disciples, from the pernicious influence of the town. In the course of the drama it is suggested that this aristocratic and artistic narcissism is to be abandoned.

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Thus the young Hofmannsthal begins his career as a writer and artist by describing an attempt to overcome the very aestheticism and decadence with which he is associated and indeed with which the language of this verse drama as well as of much subsequent work is saturated. In 1929 Hofmannsthal explained how he had intended to complete the unfinished fragment Der Tod des Tizian: after the death of the artist (Titian) all his disciples were to be brought into contact with the 'Lebenserhohung' (heightening of the sense of life) affecting the whole town through the imminence of death as a result of the plague. It was all to lead to a kind of Todesorgie' (orgy of death).2 Only the contact with death, the danger of imminent death would bring 'Lebenserhohung', a bit of excitement, to these tired young people. A year later death still seems to offer the only possibility of 'Lebenserhohung'. In Hofmannsthal's very popular Der Tor und der Tod (The Fool and Death) (1893), Claudio, the fool, recognizes that he has been up to now 'Wie auf der Biihn ein schlechter Komodiant' (like a bad comic actor on the stage) and finally welcomes death, declaring 'Erst da ich sterbe, spur ich, dafi ich bin' (only now that I am dying do I feel that I exist).3 In 1894 Hofmannsthal made the following note: The Fool and Death'. What is actually the cure? - That death is the first true thing that he (Claudio) meets ... whose deep truth he is capable of comprehending. An end of all lies, relativisms and illusions. From this everything else is transfigured.4 Hermann Broch writes that from Der Tod des Tizian and Der Tor und der Tod of the 18- and 19-year-old right up to the Jedermann of the mature writer, the figure of Death is constantly given a central and crucial role; only Death gives meaning to everything else and Death appears to signify 'sittliche Reinigung' (moral cleansing).5 That sounds ominous, but of course it was a feeling not restricted to Hofmannsthal: by August 1914 it appeared to be a widespread belief. In 1893 Hofmannsthal committed himself to joining the Dragoner-Regiment 6 as a volunteer for a year, which he did at the end of September 1894. To his friend Karg von Bebenburg he wrote: It will seem strange to you, but I am actually looking forward to serving ... a naive, totally non-intellectual way of passing one's life and at the same time fulfilling one's inescapable duty. My usual existence, because I am almost completely free to shape it myself and yet am not mature, has a downright artificial, illusory character.6 Of course his romantic ideas about military service were to be somewhat disappointed by the actual experience.7 Nevertheless, he would eulogize the

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army again in 1914, and see in it an ideal model of community for the rest of society. A significant part of the 'problem', as Hofmannsthal saw it, was that his great-grandfather had been Jewish. Hermann Broch places great emphasis on the role assimilation had played in Hofmannsthal's family history as well as in his own character.8 Out of a desire for the achievement of complete assimilation, the young Hofmannsthal had been saturated by his father with the culture of the Gentile haute bourgeoisie and aristocracy of Germany and Austria to an exaggerated degree. Broch writes of the 'zweistufiger Narzifimus' (twofold narcissism) of all assimilated minorities, who are likely to be proud and narcissistic not only in the way of all members of the aristocracy and haute bourgeoisie but especially so on account of the effort involved in achieving their assimilation. The young Hofmannsthal was indeed, by all accounts, rather narcissistic. The only obstacle to his flourishing cultural narcissism was that the culture he had been assimilated to was in decline. By the late nineteenth century Vienna, according to Broch, had something 'museal', museum-like, about it. The Habsburg monarchy and empire, under the leadership of the ageing Franz Josef, was a sentimental and backward-looking anachronism. Vienna, writes Broch, was the centre of the 'Wertvakuum', value-vacuum, of the epoch. It seems then that Hofmannsthal was from the beginning, in describing the deaths of Narcissus-like characters, attempting to leave behind this assimilation to a doomed, if decorative aristocratic culture and searching for an alternative such as the army. Hofmannsthal himself however wondered if his 'problem' was not simply the fact that he had Jewish blood in his veins. In 1893, the same year Hofmannsthal volunteered for military service, he wrote in his diary: What if all my inner developments and struggles were nothing but troubles resulting from my inherited blood, uprisings of the Jewish drops of blood (reflection) against the Germanic and Latin blood and reactions against these uprisings.9 Six years later he again associated his tendency to reflect with his Jewish heritage, writing of a 'jiidische Denkungsweise . . . , die so etwas entsetzlich blutloses furs Leben untiichtiges ... in sich hat' (a Jewish way of thinking which has something dreadfully bloodless and inadequate for life in it).10 This shows the extent to which Hofmannsthal had internalized anti-Semitic racial theories of the day, which conclusively 'proved' that the Jews were a degenerate and decadent people as well as innately 'effeminate'. One highly influential proponent of this thesis was Hofmannsthal's young compatriot, Otto Weininger, himself of Jewish background, who was in 1903 author of both Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character), a book which suggested that Jews

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and women were similar and infinitely inferior to Aryan men, and of his own death. Perhaps death, or at least joining the army, would cure Hofmannsthal of his decadent Jewishness and narcissism?

Narcissus' uncanny, ambivalent, Oriental femininity, homosexual panic and death Death is also the fate of the hero of Das Marchen der 672. Nacht (The tale of the 672nd night) (1895), a rich and beautiful youth given to admiring himself and the beautiful objects which adorn his house, rather like Dorian Gray, or Huysmans' des Esseintes.11 In fact it has been suggested that Hofmannsthal's tale is in some sense a reaction to contemporary newspaper reports of the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895 and that society's condemnation and rejection of Wilde, the supreme aesthete, for what it saw as an abominable sexual predilection and activity was something which shocked Hofmannsthal rather more profoundly than he was prepared to admit directly. Eugene Weber draws attention to the fact that Hofmannsthal appears to have modelled the Kaufmannssohn, the merchant's son of the tale, directly on Dorian Gray. Just as Wilde modelled Dorian on Huysmans' des Esseintes, almost quoting from Huysmans, Hofmannsthal practically cites Wilde word for word. Hofmannsthal's Kaufmannssohn admires 'die Formen der Tiere und die Formen der Pflanzen ...: die Delphine, die Lowen und die Tulpen, die Perlen und den Akanthus' (the forms of the animals and the forms of the plants ...: the dolphins, the lions and the tulips, the pearls and the acanthus); Dorian's fancy is tickled by 'ecclesiastical vestments ... decorated with ... acanthus leaves ... lions ... tulips and dolphins'.12 It appears then that in this tale Hofmannsthal was making a somewhat hidden direct reference to Wilde's Dorian Gray, and this around the same time as newspapers were reporting on Wilde's trials in London. Das Marchen der 672. Nacht is the tale of a young, rich son of a merchant, described by Le Rider as 'a perfect example of a narcissistic personality',13 who suddenly leaves his rich residence for some obscure reason and wanders apparently aimlessly around the streets of the poor quarter of town in the dreamlike, or even uncanny second part of the tale. Somehow ending up in a soldiers' barracks, he drops a jewel he had bought on his wanderings and it falls under the hooves of a horse being tended by one of the soldiers. The merchant's son bends down to pick it up, is kicked by the horse and dies shortly thereafter. Weber draws attention to the similarity between the last sentences in Hofmannsthal's tale and those in Wilde's Dorian Gray. Hofmannsthal concludes with the sentence: 'Zuletzt erbrach er Galle, dann Blut, und starb mit verzerrten Ziigen, die Lippen so verrissen, daS Zahne und

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Zahnfleisch entbloSt waren und ihm einen fremden, bosen Ausdruck gaben' (Finally he coughed up bile, then blood and died with distorted features, his lips so torn that his teeth and gums were exposed and gave him an alien, evil expression). Wilde wrote: 'He was withered, wrinkled and loathsome of visage. It was not until they examined the rings that they recognized who it was.'14 Hofmannsthal's tale can be interpreted as another description of an attempt to escape the confines of a narcissistic, aristocratic and decadent existence and to assimilate to 'real life'. The references to Dorian can be seen as merely establishing the family resemblance between the Kaufmannssohn and the quintessential decadent aesthete. Volke also suggests that the Kaufmannssohn's ignominious end, kicked by a military horse, reflects Hofmannsthal's realization, during his voluntary military service, of how cruel 'real life' could be.15 The death of the aesthete-narcissist seems the only resolution conceivable for Hofmannsthal. Jacques Le Rider thinks there is more to the tale than an attempt by Hofmannsthal to indict and overcome his own aestheticism. He sees the story as evidence of a 'crise de 1'identite masculine' affecting not just the Kaufmannssohn, or even just Hofmannsthal but turn-of-the-century Viennese and European men in general. The tale, he writes, is 'the story of a crisis of sexual identity of a male character who feels that he has been invaded by femininity' (p. 99). The second part of the tale strikes one as uncanny precisely because the merchant's son wanders around his own town as though he were in a foreign city he has never seen before. At the beginning of his essay on 'das Unheimliche' (the Uncanny) (1919), Sigmund Freud observes the semantic slippage between the apparent opposites 'das Heimliche' and 'das Unheimliche', between the word signifying the domestic, the familiar, the native (and one might perhaps add the 'masculine' for men here) as well as the hidden or secret, and that signifying the 'unhomely', unfamiliar, the alien, the foreign (and perhaps what men consider the 'feminine'16) and the somehow uncanny, hidden or secret. The experience of the uncanny is, one might say, the result of precisely such semantic slippage; it is the quasi-physical sensation which arises when the familiar becomes somehow strange and the strange somehow familiar. It arises thus from the dissolution of the boundary between what one had been accustomed to consider native and what one had been accustomed to consider alien. At the outset Freud has made clear that this phenomenon is alien to himself. He goes on to cite repetition of the same and the appearance of a 'double' in literature as instances of the uncanny and to explain these in terms of a male fear of castration and a recurrence of 'primitive narcissism' which often, he claims, leads to an overcompensatory 'doubling' of the penis,

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or of its symbols, in dreams. Freud considers this 'primitive narcissism' normal in the child and among 'primitive peoples', but, one supposes, normally overcome in the civilized European adult male, who has, again one supposes, acquired and has no fear of losing the power — which will naturally be symbolized in patriarchal societies by the male genitals - so narcissistically desired by male children and 'primitive peoples'. Thus, one might say, Freud redraws the boundary between the 'Heimliche' and the 'Unheimliche', returning to his position at the beginning of the essay that the experience of the uncanny was alien to him personally, now suggesting that it is a childish and primitive and thus foreign problem - as it should be if it signifies an anxiety about a lack of masculine power and mastery, i.e. balls. Freud's essay is illuminating, providing one does not arrive at the conclusion that Freud is simply writing coldly about testicles and their removal. For Freud, as, of course, for men who live in patriarchal societies generally, i.e. for the men whose fantasies and fears Freud is interpreting, testicles are power, their absence is powerlessness, which is simply a reiteration of the meaning of patriarchy itself — that men have power while women do not. The uncanny is then evidence of a fear of losing one's masculine power (testicles) and becoming powerless (feminine). It has to do with narcissism in so far as it is a sign that the male's habitual narcissistic identification with power has been disturbed, and hence what Freud sees as evidence of a 'regression' to 'primitive narcissism' is due to that habitual narcissism becoming apparent as it activates mechanisms for its own self-defence, and the restoration of that identification with power. That power appears to be precisely the power to draw both literal boundaries — between the native, that territory over which one can claim some kind of sovereignty or mastery, and the foreign - and conceptual or linguistic boundaries — to classify and categorize. What we call uncanny is really any kind of 'ambivalence' that threatens that position of mastery, the 'natural' attribute of men. 'Ambivalence, the possibility of assigning an object or an event to more than one category,' Zygmunt Bauman writes, 'is a languagespecific disorder: a failure of the naming (segregating) function that language is meant to perform.'17 The typically modern practice, the substance of modern politics, of modern intellect, of modern life, is the effort to exterminate ambivalence: an effort to define precisely - and to suppress or eliminate everything that could not or would not be precisely defined' (pp. 7f.). Of course ambivalence cannot simply be 'exterminated'; indeed Bauman suggests it is the 'alter ego' or 'the other' of modernity itself, upon which the classifying, boundary-drawing 'self of modernity depends for its own constitution and self-definition: The other of modern intellect is polysemy, cognitive dissonance, polyvalent definitions, contingency; the overlapping meanings in

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the world of tidy classifications and filing cabinets' (p. 9). We shall return to this issue when we come to look at Hofmannsthal's language crisis in his Brief des Lord Chandos below. To return, however, to Das Marchen der 672. Nacht. It appears that one can indeed concur with Le Rider that the Kaufmannssohn undergoes a crisis of sexual identity. In the course of the tale he loses all mastery over himself, his fate and the world and thus becomes powerless, passive and, in the eyes of that world, hence 'feminine'. His narcissism has, one assumes, been disturbed and is eventually destroyed by something. What apparently instigates the young man's return to the town (causality here is rather unclear) and inaugurates this most uncanny second part of the tale is the arrival of an anonymous and threatening letter, which imputes some abominable but unspecified crime, 'irgendein abscheuliches Verbrechen', to the beautiful young man's favourite manservant while he was in the service of his previous master, the Persian ambassador. The young man was particularly devoted to this servant as the man had shown particular devotion to his new master. According to Jacques Le Rider, this man exerts a strong, seductive homoerotic influence over the Kaufmannssohn (p. 100). In the first part of the tale the young man is torn between his identification with paternal images (the riches and status he has inherited from his father) and what Le Rider terms his 'feminisation', shown in his being intimidated by the gaze and mere presence of his servants. Le Rider speculates that the anonymous letter which imputes some abominable crime to the manservant and which so disturbs the Kaufmannssohn similarly pointed to his own 'feminization', in so far as it was an 'accusation of homosexuality' implicitly implicating the Kaufmannssohn himself. Both Le Rider and Weber suggest that the incident of the letter was inspired by contemporary newspaper stories about the trials of Oscar Wilde, whose troubles began with the arrival of the Marquess of Queensberry's card apparently addressed To Oscar Wilde, posing Somdomite'. Weber cites a report of the affair printed in the Neue Freie Presse of 8 April 1895, where Hofmannsthal could read the following: One of the biggest scandal trials for years in England, Oscar Wilde's accusation of slander against the Marquess of Queensberry, came to an early end yesterday, thank God, after three days' hearing. Oscar Wilde ... considered an ideal, sensitive poet, has however constantly caused offence by his personal vanity and craving for admiration. The Marquess of Queensberry has now accused Wilde of a criminal, immoral act, which also compromised his son, Lord Alfred Douglas. The letters from Lord Douglas to Wilde and his ode dedicated to him, read on the second day,

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The Other — Narcissus and Salome left a deathly silence in the court. ... Oscar Wilde was arrested yesterday afternoon in a hotel in Chelsea.18

Hofmannsthal's first notes for Das Marchen der 672. Nachi date from the 19 April 1895. In a letter Hofmannsthal sent his father on 9 August 1895 that summer he wrote explaining that he did not intend the tale to 'mean' any more than any small article in the daily papers 'meant'.19 Weber writes that all the clues suggest that the tragic fate of Oscar Wilde made quite an impact on Hofmannsthal, that it really shook him.20 This is all the more likely if one takes into account the apparently rather homoerotically charged friendship 17-year-old Hofmannsthal had begun with the 23-year-old poet, Stefan George. The friendship ended abruptly (and then petered on for a few years before ending abruptly for good) after the exchange of letters and poems dedicated to each other, then an apparently insulting and now missing letter Hofmannsthal sent to George which led to George challenging Hofmannsthal to a duel. George even wrote to Hofmannsthal's father. It was all rather intense and upsetting for young Hofmannsthal.21 If it is indeed the case that Hofmannsthal was inspired by what was happening to Wilde at the time, then Das Marchen der 672. Nachi is, like Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (the 'straight' plot, sans parody), part of that genre Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has termed the 'paranoid Gothic' of 'homosexual panic'. Having become aware of his own homosexual libido, the hero of such narratives flees this socially unacceptable part of himself, often projected as a 'double', who also appears a prospective sexual partner, until he dies a violent death as punishment for his socially reprehensible desires. In Hofmannsthal's tale the Kaufmannssohn is kicked to death by a horse in a soldiers' barracks he had strayed into. Having become a Tremder', an alien, foreigner or stranger, in his own town, he dies with a 'fremden, bo sen Ausdruck', a foreign, evil expression on his face. One is reminded of the rumours which spread about Dorian Gray after he had passed his twenty-fifth year, that he had been seen brawling with foreign sailors in a low den in a distant and ill-reputed part of Whitechapel. Hofmannsthal's tale is, unlike Dorian Gray, set in the distant past and in a distant Eastern land, not in contemporary Vienna - as if Hofmannsthal wanted to place as much distance as possible between himself and what could be interpreted as the sexual confusion and anxiety of the Kaufmannssohn. Hofmannsthal did however describe Vienna as a Torta Orientis', of the geographical as well as of an 'inner Orient', of 'das Reich des Unbewufiten' (the realm of the unconscious).22 This equation of the Orient with the 'unconscious', the irrational, etc. is of course a time-honoured strategy of 'Orientalism'. Hofmannsthal's introduction to Tausend und eine Nacht (The Thousand and

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. 79

One Nights) (1907) seems in this sense indeed rather 'orientalist'. Here he wrote: In our hearts' youth, in the loneliness of our soul we found ourselves in a very large town which was mysterious and threatening and full of temptation, like Baghdad or Basra. The temptations and the threatening aspects were strangely mixed; it had an uncanny effect on our hearts and we were full of desire; full of dread and loneliness, we were lost and yet were driven forwards by courage and desire, driven along a labyrinthine path between faces, possibilities, riches, sinister, half-concealed faces, half-open doors, procuring and evil stares into the enormous bazaar surrounding us ... .23 Here he associates the East with youth, the experience of the uncanny, ambivalence, a multiplicity of (apparently sexual) possibilities and thus with difficulties of topographic as well as cognitive, emotional and sexual 'orientation'. He also writes of the 'grenzenlose Sinnlichkeit' (limitless sensuality) and of the linguistic 'Vieldeutigkeit' (polysemy) which he claims is to be found in 'orientalische Poesie' in general and in the Thousand and One Nights in particular and views these now in his more mature years as positive, no longer threatening qualities. Whether uncanny and nightmarish or joyful, childlike and Utopian, the scene of the dissolution of all boundaries is regarded as typical of the East, something one can wax sentimental about as long as one maintains one's mastery over it. This was written around the same time as Hofmannsthal, in Der Dichter und diese Zeit (The poet and this time), described modernity in much the same terms as he used for Tausend und eine Nacht: The essence of our epoch is ambiguity and uncertainty. It can only rest on slippery ground and is conscious of the fact that it is slippery, while other generations believed in the fixed and stable.24 In the tale, written when Hofmannsthal was only about 21, this ambivalence was still, however, nightmarishly threatening, and the only resolution conceivable to the young Hofmannsthal was death. Ambivalence of all kinds remained a problem that Hofmannsthal sought to deal with in various ways, as we shall see below.

Chaos, Sprachkrise and death again If for Hofmannsthal within the walls and fences of the aristocracy lay the ennui of perpetual self-consciousness, without lay the ultimately no less problematic

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threat of dissolution, madness and death. We saw how Hofmannsthal was given to apocalyptic notions of death as cure and transfiguration, the only absolute which could bring about 'Ein Ende aller Liigen, Relativitaten und Gaukelspiele' (an end of all lies, relativisms and illusions), including, as we saw, embarrassing sexual ambivalence. Hofmannsthal's flight from the world of palaces and poetry and his search for 'real life' led him to join the army as a volunteer. After his year's service (1894-95) he returned to his university studies, but during his studies he had to return to the army a couple of times. His experiences of 'real life' in remote military outposts of the empire qualified his romantic ideas somewhat. He used the time to read much. In letters he wrote of how the experience was changing his outlook. According to Volke he now began to see 'real life' as chaos.25 Having apparently abandoned aristocratic and aesthetic containment, order and form in Der Tod des Tizian, in favour of real, chaotic life, he now began to hanker after an aesthetic form which would restore order to 'real life' and ban all that confusion and ambivalence, including the sexual ambivalence of the Kaufmannssohn. This ambition would ultimately lead to his conservative and nationalist political activism from the First World War to his ominous apocalyptic talk of a 'konservative Revolution' in his speech Das Schrifltum als geistiger Raum der Nation (Writing as the spiritual space of the nation) (1927). In the mean time, his perception of chaos and formlessness all around culminated in what he variously described as a 'seelische Krise', 'Lebenskrise' or a 'Sprachkrise' (a crisis of the soul, a life-crisis or language crisis), which finds its expression most famously in Ein Brief (A letter) (1902), written when Hofmannsthal was 28 years old.26 The letter, dated 22 August 1603, was supposedly sent by a 26-year-old nobleman by the name of Philipp Lord Chandos to Francis Bacon to explain why he has renounced all further literary activity. Lord Chandos, the fictitious author of the letter, declares that he has completely lost the ability to speak or even think coherently about anything whatsoever. First he finds he cannot use abstract words; then he cannot make, or even tolerate hearing, ordinary, everyday judgements, such as that so and so is a good or bad person or whatever. Lord Chandos appears to be in the grip of a universal scepticism, doubting everything and unable not to doubt everything — indeed quite the attitude recommended by Francis Bacon's own empiricist philosophy of science. Hermann Rudolph suggests Hofmannsthal's intensive reading of Bacon inspired much of the letter.27 Bacon's scepticism vis-a-vis the authority of tradition, the truth-value of what had simply been handed down, lay behind not just the Enlightenment but the subsequent development of science through the nineteenth century and the consequent 'twilight of the idols', in Hofmannsthal's own lifetime hailed by Nietzsche, another universal sceptic, who questioned the existence of such a

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thing as a stable, unified self. Of great influence in contemporary Vienna was Ernst Mach, who coined the phrase 'das unrettbare Ich' (the unrescuable self) and whose empiricism reduced the individual to the meeting point of bundles of sensations. Le Rider attributes to Ernst Mach a 'deconstruction of metaphysics' which left the 'self without any foundations whatever (p. 59). Le Rider also claims Hofmannsthal's journals contain passages which seem to have been directly influenced by Mach (p. 60). In Bin Brief Hofmannsthal was thus both describing and attempting to overcome a recent philosophical crisis — which was, Le Rider argues, as much a crisis of the notion of identity, and of the possibility of knowledge of the world as a crisis of language — by historicizing it and situating it at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Of course such a crisis does not occur in a vacuum, is not merely a theoretical and hypothetical crisis in the rarified air of philosophy. Rudolph insists on the social and historical aspect of Hofmannsthal's so-called language crisis and explains that such a problem can arise during a period of massive societal change and great social mobility when an entire traditional 'Bedeutungszusammenhang', context of meaning, falls asunder and is not yet replaced by another. As models of social behaviour and means of social 'orientation' are put into question by social change so also are society's traditionally sanctioned interpretations of the world, which constitute the identity both of that society and of the world it by convention regards as 'reality' as well as the language which formulates this conventional interpretation. Thus a change in the relationship of the parties to such a convention will put into question this interpretation/language as well as the identities of those no longer able to identify with these conventions, interpretations, languages. One could certainly describe the period Hofmannsthal lived in as precisely one characterized by great mobility and uncertainty and it is certainly true that Hofmannsthal's Lord Chandos experiences a crisis of language. The important point is, however, that this crisis of language is a symptom of a crisis of identity and in particular of the patriarchal, masculine identity of men of the ruling classes, an identity which assumed a position of mastery over the world which could be confidently expressed in language. Lord Chandos cannot speak because he has lost his masculine position of mastery. Apart from the 'crisis' itself, what is interesting about Ein Brief is the resolution or at least the modus vivendi arrived at by Lord Chandos. This consists firstly in renouncing any further literary activity, and secondly in a kind of mysticism, a conversion to an incommunicable faith — an artificial resuscitation of the idols, one might say. The intellectual would appear to have turned quite anti-intellectual: Lord Chandos claims he now leads an untroubled and 'thoughtless' existence which is also not without its 'good moments'. He

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attempts to describe these moments — by saying they are indescribable. Chandos concludes his letter to Bacon by explaining that he will not be writing any further books — neither in English nor in Latin — as the only language in which it might be possible for him to think or write is a language of which he does not know a single word and a language with which he may perhaps give account of himself from his grave to an unknown judge. In the Chandos letter Hofmannsthal is once again apparently writing the death notice of the artist, and again this death is peculiarly seen in religious and apocalyptic terms. Chandos speaks of 'Offenbarung' (revelation), of 'eine iiberschwellende Flut hoheren Lebens' (a flood of higher life), which he occasionally experiences in his 'thoughtless' life - i.e. in his intellectual and artistic death. Of his volunteering for military service, we remember, Hofmannsthal wrote how he was looking forward to a naive, thoughtless existence simply serving and doing his duty. Der Tod des Tizian was intended to end with a Todesorgie' which would bring 'Lebenserhohung'; of Der Tor und der Tod Hofmannsthal said death was the cure which would bring 'Verklarung' (transfiguration). One cannot help noticing a pattern in which, over a period of ten years so far, death in general and of the artist in particular is being regarded as desirable, purgative, revelatory, transfiguring. Ten years further on (1912) this attitude is almost parodied in Hofmannsthal's description of the final scene of his adaptation of the medieval morality play Everyman: Now the devil springs up and wants to take Everyman with him. Faith tries to block his path and they fight ... Everyman appears from above. His face is transfigured, he wears a long snow-white gown and a cross in his hands. Behind him angels have appeared and below, on the middle level, where Faith is standing, a rectangular grave has appeared. Two of the angels carry a sheet in their hands. Without a sound they spread it over the grave, covering the blackness of the night with white. ... only Faith stands there and angels sing God's praise. Then it became completely dark, bells rang out, the dark gave way to a strong light before which there can be no secrets and which fell evenly on the whole structure, the whole stage and the great crowd of people [in the audience] slowly beginning to move, and the play was at an end.28 Unfortunately this was no parody; Hofmannsthal was deadly serious. What could follow this but a truly apocalyptic war with plenty of opportunities for men to recover - for a while at least - a sense of purpose, orientation, mastery, masculine identity? Might this not be a real Todesorgie', an orgy of death with plenty of opportunity for sacrifice?

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Notes 1. Karl Kraus, Die Fackel, Jahrgang 1, Nr. 1 (1899), pp. 25f. For Wilde's influence on Hofmannsthal cf. Eugene Weber, 'Hofmannsthal und Oscar Wilde', Hofmannsthal-Forschungen, 1 (Basel 1971): 99-106. 2. Letter to Walther Brecht cited by Werner Volke, Hofmannsthal (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1967), p. 38. 3. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Der Tor und der Tod, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gesammelte Werke: Gedichte und lyrische Dramen, ed. H. Steiner (Stockholm: B. Fischer, 1946), pp. 199-220. 4. Aufzeichnungen, p. 106, cited by Volke, Hofmannsthal, p. 45: '4.1.94 — "Der Tor und der Tod". Worin liegt eigentlich die Heilung? - DaS der Tod das erste wahrhafte Ding ist, das ihm (Claudio) begegnet ... dessen tiefe Wahrhaftigkeit er zu fassen imstande ist. Ein Ende aller Lugen, Relativitaten und Gaukelspiele. Davon strahlt dann auf alles andere Verklarung aus.' 5. Hermann Broch, 'Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit', in H. Broch, Kommentierte Werkausgabe, ed. Paul Michael Lutzeler, Vol. 9/1, Schriften zur Literatur: Kritik (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1975), pp. 111-284, p. 194. 6. Cited by Volke, p. 51, from Hofmannsthal-Bebenburg, Briefwechsel, p. 55: 'Es wird Dir sonderbar vorkommen, aber ich freue mich eigentlich auf's Dienen . . . wegen der naiven geistlosen Art, sein Leben hinzubringen und mit diesem Hinbringen eine unentrinnbare Pflicht zu erfullen, wahrend meinem gewohnlichen Dasein dadurch, dafi ich es fast vollig selber gestalten darf und doch kein reifer Mensch bin, mitunter etwas recht gekiinsteltes anhaftet, etwas scheinmafiiges.' 7. Cf. Volke, Hofmannsthal, pp. 54f. 8. Cf. Broch, 'Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit'. 9. Cited by Jens Rieckmann, '(Anti-)Semitism and homoeroticism: Hofmannsthal's reading of Bahr's novel Die Rotte Kohras, The German Quarterly, 66(2), Spring 1993, pp. 212—21, p. 214: 'Wenn meine ganzen inneren Entwicklungen und Ka'mpfe nichts wa'ren als Unruhen des ererbten Blutes, Aufstande der jiidischen Blutstropfen (Reflexion) gegen die germanischen und romanischen und Reactionen gegen diese Aufstande.' 10. Rieckmann, '(Anti-)Semitism and homoeroticism', pp. 214—15. 11. Hofmannsthal, 'Das Marchen der 672. Nacht', Hofmannsthal, Gesammelte Werke: Die Erzahlungen, ed. Steiner (Stockholm: B. Fischer, 1946), pp. 9—35. 12. Weber, 'Hofmannsthal und Oscar Wilde'. 13. Jacques Le Rider, Modernite viennoise et crises de I'identite (Paris: PUF, 1990), p. 99. For Le Rider's interpretation of the tale see pp. 99-107. 14. Cited by Weber, 'Hofmannsthal und Wilde', pp. 104f.

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15. Volke, Hofmannsthal, p. 59. 16. Freud notes how often neurotic men consider female genitalia, which as Freud says are after all the entrance to the original 'Heim' of everybody, as somehow 'unheimlich'. Here also, he observes, the 'Unheimliche' (uncanny/unhomely) is what was formerly 'heimisch' (homely). 17. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), p. 1. 18. Cited by Weber, 'Hofmannsthal und Oscar Wilde', p. 105: 'Einer der grossten Skandalprozesse, welcher in England seit Jahren vorgekommen ist, eine Verleumdungsklage des Schriftstellers Oscar Wilde gegen den Marquis Queensberry, fand gestern nach dreitagiger Verhandlung gottlob ihren friihzeitigen Abschluss. Oscar Wilde ... gait als ein idealer, feinsinniger Poet, doch hat seine personliche Eitelkeit und Gefallsucht stets Anstoss erregt. Der Marquis Queensberry hat nun Wilde einer verbrecherischen Unsittlichkeit beschuldigt, durch welche auch sein Sohn Lord Alfred Douglas, compromittiert wurde. ... Die am zweiten Tage verlesenen Briefe des Lord Douglas an Wilde und seine an diesen gerichtete Ode brachten ein Grabesschweigen im Gerichtssaale hervor. ... Oscar Wilde wurde noch gestern nachmittags in einem Hotel in Chelsea verhaftet.' 19. Cited by Weber, Hofmannsthal, p. 105. 20. Weber, Hofmannsthal, p. 106. 21. See Volke, Hofmannsthal, pp. 32—3 and Rieckmann, '(Anti-)Semitism and homoeroticism', pp. 218—19. 22. Cited by Hartmut Zelinsky in 'Hofmannsthal und Asien', Fin de Siecle, ed. Bauer et al (Frankfurt/M.: Klostermann, 1977), pp. 508-66. 23. Hofmannsthal, Tausend und eine Nacht', Gesammelte Werke: Prosa II, ed. Steiner (Frankfurt/M.: S. Fischer, 1951), pp. 311-20, p. 311: 'In der Jugend unseres Herzens, in der Einsamkeit unserer Seele fanden wir uns in einer sehr groSen Stadt, die geheimnisvoll und drohend und verlockend war, wie Bagdad und Basra. Die Lockungen und die Drohungen waren seltsam vermischt; uns war unheimlich zu Herzen und sehnsiichtig; uns graute vor innerer Einsamkeit, vor Verlorenheit, und doch trieb ein Mut und ein Verlangen uns vorwarts und trieb uns einen labyrinthischen Weg, immer zwischen Gesichtern, zwischen Moglichkeiten, Reichtiimern, diistern, halbverhullten Mienen, halboffenen Turen, kupplerischen und bosen Blicken in den ungeheuren Bazar, der uns umgab ... .' 24. Hofmannsthal, 'Der Dichter und diese Zeit', Prosa II, pp. 264—98, p. 272: 'Das Wesen unserer Epoche ist Vieldeutigkeit und Unbestimmtheit. Sie kann nur auf Gleitendem ausruhen und ist sich bewuSt, daS es Gleitendes ist, wo andere Generationen an das Feste glaubten.'

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25. See Volke, Hofmannsthal, pp. 54f. 26. Hofmannsthal, 'Bin Brief, Prosa II, pp. 7-20. 27. Hermann Rudolph, Kulturkritik und Konservative Revolution. Zum kulturellpolitischen Denken Hofmannsthals und seinem problem-geschichtlichen Kontext (Tubingen: M. Niemeyer, 1971), p. 43. He refers here to Stefan H. Schultz, 'Hofmannsthal and Bacon. The sources of the Chandos letter', Comparative Literature, 8, (1961). 28. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 'Das alte Spiel von Jedermann', Gesammelte Werke: Prosa III, ed. Steiner (Frankfurt/M.: S. Fischer, 1964), pp. 114-32, pp. 131-2: 'Nun kommt der Teufel angesprungen und will Jedermann abholen. Da tritt ihm der Glaube in den Weg und sie streiten ... von oben tritt Jedermann hervor. Sein Gesicht ist verklart, er tragt ein langes schneeweiSes Gewand und einen Kreuzstab in Ha'nden. Hinter ihm sind Engel hervorgetreten und unten auf dem mittleren Geriiste, daran Glaube steht, hat ein viereckiges Grab sich aufgetan. Zwei von den Engeln tragen ein Laken in Handen, das haben sie lautlos in das Grab gebreitet, die nachtige Schwarze mit einem Weifi verhullend. ... nur Glaube steht da, und Engel singen Gottes Lob. Dann wurde es vollig dunkel, Glocken lauteten, das Dunkel wich einem starken geheimnislosen Licht, das auf das ganze Geriiste, den ganzen Schauplatz und die grofie sich langsam aufbewegende Menschenmenge gleichma'Sig fiel, und das Spiel war zu Ende.'

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The death of Salome

In order for men to recover their virility, women must first return to their natural place. Only the re-establishment of sexual frontiers will liberate men from their anxiety regarding their identity. Then the massive repression of their original bisexuality will do the rest.1

Hofmannsthal's Der Kaiser und die Hexe During Hofmannsthal's search for a solution to crises of identity, masculine identity, orientation and language, one option he appears to have considered was to reaffirm the distinction between male and female as bluntly as the title of Der Kaiser und die Hexe (The emperor and the witch) (1897) suggests.2 The Kaiser of the piece will be free of the charms of the charming 'Hexe' if he refrains from touching her for seven days. The play is set on the evening of the seventh day when the Kaiser struggles with and heroically resists temptation. What makes the 'Hexe' a 'Hexe' is her seductive, unrestrained (and barely clothed) sensuality and sexuality. The thought that he might be part of a sexual 'Reigen' (round dance) such as that so shockingly depicted in Arthur Schnitzler's play of the same name (1896) as well perhaps as the fear of contracting some sexually transmitted disease drives the Kaiser to dementia. That eternally returning 'Reigen' aspect of modernity is thus projected onto and repudiated in the figure of a sensuous and promiscuous woman, a figure who is evidently intent on robbing men, even a Kaiser, of all their power over themselves and others. The Kaiser resists temptation and by sunset the temptress has lost all her power over him and turns into a wrinkled old woman to whom nobody pays any attention. On hearing this the Kaiser calls his valet, embraces him, then

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kneels down to praise the Lord. Now he may devote himself anew to his imperial duties, one of which consists in restoring two outcast men — a man condemned to death and an old blind man - to honourable society. The Kaiser who had thrown down his crown for the sake of a woman escapes the threat of anarchy and 'ermannt sich' (pulls himself together, mans himself) — ready to rule again himself and others — by turning woman into witch. The patriarchy has, in other words, been saved. Der Kaiser und die Hexe thus almost seems a response to Nietzsche's remark in Jenseits von Gut und Base: The weak sex has never before been treated by men with such respect as in our time - that is, just like the lack of respect for old age, part of the democratic tendency .. .'.3 Der Kaiser und die Hexe could also be seen as a response to Johann Jakob Bachofen, who, in his highly influential Das Mutterrecht (Matriliny/Matriarchy) (1861) wrote the following: The progress of sensuality corresponds everywhere to the dissolution of political organizations and to the decadence of political life. In the place of rich diversity, the law of democracy, of the indistinct mass, and this liberty, this equality impose themselves, which distinguish life according to nature from organised civil society and which attach themselves to the corporeal and material part of human nature.4 Is not Bachofen's opposition of patriarchy and matriarchy, hierarchy and democracy, the spiritual/intellectual and the corporeal, male political society and female sexual anarchy precisely what we find in Hofmannsthal's Der Kaiser und die Hexel The Kaiser 'ermannt sich', regains power over himself and over his dominion, by projecting all those confusions threatening his power onto woman.

Woman, modernity, crowds, anarchy and revolution According to Daniel Pick, contemporary commentators saw a particular relation between the 'periodicity of the female body' and 'social atavism, the relapse into "blood letting" and anarchy'.5 Gustave Le Bon, in his Psychologie des foules (Psychology of crowds) (1895), considered the phenomenon of the crowd essentially modern. This essentially modern phenomenon was also essentially feminine: The simplicity and exaggeration of the emotions of crowds means that the latter know neither doubt nor uncertainty. Like women they immediately go to extremes.' He explains why knowledge of the psychology of crowd behaviour is useful: 'Knowledge of the psychology of crowds is today the last resource of the man of state who wishes not to govern them - the matter has become rather difficult - but at least not to be governed

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too much by them'.6 Le Bon thus conflates male fears of modernity, 'the masses' and femininity. What is common to all three, it seems, is that they threaten the sense of male power and control. Women were seen by crowd theorists of the late nineteenth century 'as not only the passive victims, but also the active agents of revolutionary disorder'.7 It was not only social theorists who gendered 'the masses' as feminine. In Zola's Germinal (1885) it is a crowd of revolutionary, proletarian women which is described as a 'flood', a 'torrent', a 'deluge', an apparently unstoppable force which vents its anger by castrating a baker. Magazines and newspapers of the time persistently described the proletarian and the petit-bourgeois masses in terms of a feminine threat.8 And these newspapers and magazines themselves were in turn castigated as constituting a feminine 'mass culture' by proponents of an exclusively masculine 'high culture'.9 'Modernism', writes Huyssen, 'constituted itself through a conscious strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination by its other: an increasingly consuming and engulfing mass culture', frequently regarded as somehow feminine in nature (p. vii). In the system of dualist oppositions set up in such a patriarchal culture woman is not just the opposite of man but is aligned with all those qualities threatening masculine power and control, thus with the 'unlimited', the 'irrational' as well as 'anarchy' and 'chaos'. This identification of women with chaos could sometimes also even work as a point in their favour in the writings of more revolutionary men of the fin de siecle. The wild 'Lulu' of Frank Wedekind's Erdgeist (1894) and Die Biichse der Pandora (1904), for example, is cherished as the anarchic spirit which is going to blow the bourgeois world apart.

"Mater' vs. Spirit Often coupled with the opposition between 'male' hierarchy and 'female' anarchy was the opposition between the spiritual and the material. Threatened with extinction by the worldly philosophies of the nineteenth century, the boundary between material and spiritual realms needed to be redrawn in order to support other boundaries and distinctions, in particular that much threatened boundary between the sexes. The restoration of philosophical dualism could serve to restore the patriarchy and its primary dualistic opposition of man and woman. One Joseph Le Conte, for example, in his Evolution: Its Nature, Its Evidences, and its Relation to Religious Thought (1888-91) wrote the following: 'Spirit must break away from physical and material connection with the forces of Nature as the embryo must break away from physical umbilical connection with the mother.'10 Mater equals matter; pater

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equals higher things. One notes how woman is automatically associated with 'mass', this time in the scientific/philosophical rather than the social/political sense. Woman belonged to the material world; the spiritual world belonged to man. In his much talked about Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character) (1903) Otto Weininger made the same equation: 'Women are matter, which can assume any shape'. Religious, spiritual and intellectual pursuits are the preserve of men only. Women, according to Weininger, 'must really and truly and spontaneously relinquish coitus. That undoubtedly means that women as women must disappear, and until that has come to pass there is 'no possibility of establishing the kingdom of God on earth'.11 Manliness, in other words, is next to Godliness. Weininger understood male and female as extremes of character type which never occur in pure form in nature, every man and every woman having varying quantities of what he so scientifically termed 'M' (masculinity) and 'W (femininity). Weininger considered pure and absolute 'maleness', however, rather superior in every way to 'femaleness'. 'M' is, for Weininger, consciousness, 'subject-hood', freedom, the rational, the logical, the moral and chastity; 'W is, naturally enough, the opposite of all these: unconsciousness, 'object-hood', slavery, the irrational, the a-logical, the amoral and sexuality.12 Weininger's book was thus an extreme rationalization of patriarchal thinking, of the patriarchal system in which, according to Elisabeth Badinter, the hatred of the feminine self, by far the most widespread, quite naturally engenders an oppositional sexual dualism. The affirmation of the difference is a reaction to the loss of identity and to the undefined, a reaction which reinforces masculinity. By opposing the sexes and assigning them different functions and spaces, one thinks one is expelling the ghost of internal bisexuality. In fact one is only splitting oneself and exteriorizing the part of the self which has become foreign, an enemy.13 Weininger's book both recognizes this 'ghost of internal bisexuality' — the presence in most people of different quantities of what he considers the essential character attributes of both genders - and attempts to banish it - by reasserting the superiority of 'masculine' qualities over 'feminine' ones. This, as Badinter suggests, is pretty much how men are inclined to think of themselves in a patriarchal system, however loath they might be to admit as much in public discourse. Privately aware of their 'internal bisexuality', of the existence within themselves of traits which might be considered 'feminine', they constantly seek to repress these embarrassing 'feminine' traits and to show that they are men (i.e. not women). The result is the split personality of patriarchal masculinity and a lifelong battle between man's desired image of himself - man

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— and his enemy within and without — woman. One is reminded of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The fact that Weininger suggested in public that most men were not as entirely 'M' as might be desired, in other words the fact that he dared to write about how men thought privately about their regrettable 'internal bisexuality', probably contributed in large measure to the popularity of his book. His book was particularly topical for other reasons too. In a chapter on 'emancipated women', Weininger argues that only women possessing a large amount of 'M', of masculinity, have ever and will ever emancipate themselves in order to pursue essentially masculine goals. Such women, however laudable, can never be quite as good as their male counterparts as they are always at least half 'W'.14 Further: while even the 'highest woman is far below the lowest man' (p. 404), according to Weininger, many men are really not much better than women. This has to do with the quantity of 'W coursing through their veins, or, to put it another way, as Weininger does, the extent of their 'Jewishness'. 'Jewishness' is for Weininger, himself of Jewish descent, pretty much the same as 'femininity', an essentially inferior form of being. The task of modern men, according to Weininger, is to cleanse themselves of any taint of 'Jewishness' and 'Womanliness' in order to ascend to a higher state of pure 'M'. One can see why, as George L. Mosse writes, the book was 'one of the most influential racial tracts of the twentieth century, profoundly affecting the views of Adolf Hitler and many other racists'.15 Weininger's book was extremely popular, especially after his melodramatic suicide in the Beethovenhaus in Vienna. In an essay in The Little Review in 1919 called 'Women and Men', Ford Madox Ford recalled the international impact of Weininger's book: It was toward the middle of '06' that one began to hear in the men's clubs of England and in the cafes of France and Germany — one began to hear singular mutterings amongst men. Even in the United States where men never talk about women, certain whispers might be heard. I remember sitting with a table of overbearing intellectuals in that year, and they at once began to talk — about Weininger. It gave me a singular feeling because they all talked under their breaths.16 Presumably they were talking under their breath because they were talking less about women than about their own 'internal bisexuality' - about the 'women' in themselves — and about how much more desirable 'M' was than 'W. Similar success and popularity was enjoyed by a treatise Uber den physiologischen Schwachsinn des Weibes (On the physiological imbecility of woman) (1900) by one Paul Julius Moebius, of which there were nine editions between 1900 and 1908. Of 'woman' Moebius wrote: 'One can define her by

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situating her half-way between idiocy and normal behaviour. ... Compared to that of man, the behaviour of woman seems pathological like that of the negroes compared to that of the Europeans.'17 No doubt this was music to some people's ears. Another notorious misogynist of the time was August Strindberg, whose rage against contemporary feminists Declan Kiberd claims was based 'not so much on his need to humiliate women as on his compulsion to take massive revenge on the woman in himself'.18 In the play Damascus Strindberg grieved 'Wenn ich in die Hohe wollte, zog mich die Frau herab' (When I wanted to reach the heights, woman dragged me down).19 Like Nietzsche, and indeed like Weininger, Strindberg both identified himself with and virulently denounced woman. It is certainly ironic, as Kiberd notes, 'that Nietzsche, from whom Strindberg derived this cult of masculine will, should have been privately embraced in notes and diaries by Strindberg as the "husband" from whom the dramatist received a "tremendous outpouring of seed" '.20 Such ideas concerning the nature of 'woman' were relatively widespread at the fin de sie.de.. In 1912 Hofmannsthal wrote to Richard Strauss attempting to persuade him of the seriousness of the character of Joseph in a projected collaboration on the subject of Joseph and Potiphar's wife: The motif of refusal, the motif of the 'chaste Joseph' [as Strauss had called him], what is it other than the magnificent and uncanny basic motif of Strindberg's life's work — the struggle of the genius and heightened intellect in man with the evil and stupidity, the desire to drag down, to soften of woman?21 These statements concerning women's inherent 'imbecility', their nonspiritual and non-intellectual nature were made against a background of, and were surely to some extent a reaction to, the demands of women for access to higher education as well as to public and intellectual life. In 1895 'an Oxford BA' complained in The Fortnightly Review that English women were being admitted to Gottingen university in Germany but not to Oxford, Cambridge or Dublin. In 1896 the Oxford Union 'voted overwhelmingly against admitting women to the BA degree' and 'there were riots at Cambridge in opposition to women's admission'.22 Elisabeth Badinter writes that in France, between the years 1871 and 1914, a new type of woman appeared who threatened sexual boundaries: Universities made space for them on their benches. They became teachers, doctors, lawyers and journalists. ... On every level of the social hierarchy they [men] felt threatened in their identity by this new creature who wanted to do as they did, to be like them .. ,23

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No hitherto male preserve seemed safe from the attack of women. Barbey d'Aurevilly was worried that 'One day Marie d'Agoult will be at the Academy of Moral and Political Science, George Sand at the Academic francaise, Rosa Bonheur at the Academy of Fine Art and it will be us, the men, who will make the jam and the pickles'.24 In Germany, writes Horst Fritz, 'the proportion of women in the workplace grew, particularly in the factories and in 1892 amounted to almost 30 per cent'.25 Another cause of anxiety for men was the fact that the kind of work they were engaged in themselves was becoming less and less an occasion for the display of traditionally masculine qualities and they were becoming more and more simply dispensable cogs in ever larger industrial and bureaucratic machines. Badinter relates how the writer Barres described bureaucrats pejoratively as 'demi-males' aspiring to nothing more than security, 'just like women', and contrasted these with the men of long ago who lived with guns in their hands in a perpetual 'corps-a-corps viril avec la nature'.26 It is then perhaps not so surprising that men should have felt that their traditional 'identity' was under threat and, rather 'hysterically', have attempted to prove that women were the opposite of men in every way, that they were by nature both 'hysterical' and stupid.

Good women and bad women: Gissing's Demos and Hauptmann's Bahnwarter Thiel Of course women were not always simply consigned to the lowest depths of Hades, though this does seem to have been the most popular destination for fin-de-siecle women. Some female figures have always traditionally been removed to the upper stratosphere - the Virgin Mary or Dante's Beatrice, for example. A common feature of such figures is that they are as untainted by sexuality as their counterparts in the underworld are immersed in it. In George Gissing's Demos (1886) we find two women belonging to two such utterly different spheres. The upper-crust young Englishman, Hubert Eldon, has been led astray from his proper passion for the pure and simple Englishwoman, Adela, by a wicked and seductive Frenchwoman. The French woman is referred to thus: His mind's eye pictured a face which a few months ago had power to lead him whither it willed, which had in fact led him through strange scenes, as far from the beaten road of a college curriculum as well could be. It was a face of foreign type, Jewish possibly, most unlike that ideal of womanly charm kept in view by one who seeks peace and the heart's home.27

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This wicked and rather exciting woman naturally had a 'face of foreign type', there being only two types of faces - the English and the foreign — and was 'possibly' Jewish. The 'ideal of womanly charm kept in view by one who seeks peace and the heart's home' is rather more English: As he turned the corner of the building his eye was startled by the unexpected gleam of a white dress. A girl stood there; she was viewing the landscape through a field-glass, and thus remained unaware of his approach on the grass. ... Her attitude, both hands raised to hold the glass, displayed to perfection the virginal outline of her white-robed form. She wore a straw hat of the plain masculine fashion; her brown hair was plaited in a great circle behind her head, not one tendril loosed from the mass; a white collar closely circled her neck; her waist was bound with a red girdle. All was grace and purity; the very folds towards the bottom of her dress hung in sculpturesque smoothness; the form of her half-seen foot bowed the herbage with lightest pressure, (p. 79) Hubert's folly in consorting with that dangerous, foreign and possibly Jewish woman was matched by Adela's in her marriage with the socialist activist Richard Mutimer, and his German socialist books. Happily Hubert and Adela are able to marry after Richard's violent death. Foreign women and foreign politics have, it seems, no place in small town England. The threat of 'Demos' is seen to derive from both — French, or 'possibly' even Jewish women and German socialism. Gissing's response to this threat is the union of an English country gentleman and the quintessentially English woman in white. George Mosse has analysed the development through the nineteenth century of such female symbols of the nation as Britannia and Germania, 'who embodied both respectability and the collective sense of national purpose'. 'Nationalism — and the society that identified with it — ', he writes, 'used the example of the chaste and modest woman to demonstrate its own virtuous aims. In the process, it fortified bourgeois ideals of respectability that penetrated all classes of society during the nineteenth century.'28 James Cough's Britannia (1767) provided Britain with a female image of industry and frugality which was opposed to licentious France ' "where vice usurping reigns"' (p. 98). Both 'Britannia' and 'Germania' established themselves as formidable female bastions of conservatism defending their nations against the revolutionary cries of the French 'Marianne' during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. Such female symbols of the nation helped reinforce the distinction between the sexes, giving women a definite role model to follow not the one of Marianne on the barricades, but rather one of seated and sexless repose. Interestingly, while Germania and Britannia were clothed preferably in

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medieval or pastoral garb, their male counterparts, nameless soldiers or warriors, were often depicted almost or totally naked. These male figures actually posed a threat to bourgeois respectability, Mosse suggests, modelled as they were on the sculpture of ancient Greece and appealing to an appreciative male homoerotic gaze. Mosse also describes how quite a cult developed around the figure of Queen Luise of Prussia, the wife of Friedrich Wilhelm III, whose early death in 1810 made her eligible to be transformed at the end of the century into something of a 'Prussian Madonna'. Suddenly images of this woman lying on her deathbed, with the face of the Madonna and a crucifix in her hands, were to be seen everywhere on popular medals and miniatures. This was a sublime model of passivity for all Prussian women to follow: the only good woman is a dead woman. It could be said that Gerhart Hauptmann's short story Bahnwarter Thiel (1888)29 is based on this contrast between the good woman, who is 'very, very good' and the bad woman who is 'very, very bad'. Bahnwarter Thiel, a 'barrier watchman' at a railway crossing, is married to first the one, 'ein schmachtiges und kranklich aussehendes Frauenzimmer' (a frail and sickly-looking woman) (p. 37), who dies in childbirth, and then to the other, 'ein dickes und starkes Frauenzimmer', a 'Kuhmagd' (a fat and strong woman, a dairymaid) who brings with her 'eine harte, herrschsuchtige Gemiitsart, Zanksucht und brutale Leidenschaftlichkeit' (a hard, domineering disposition, shrewishness and brutal passion) (p. 38). Parallels are suggested in the story between the domineering nature of Thiel's second wife, who wears the trousers in the marriage and is jealous of Thiel's love for the child of his first marriage, and the demonic power of the trains, heralds of modernity which thunder by the railway crossing, intruding upon Thiel's peace. The negligence of the wicked foster-mother and the wheels of the train are appropriately both responsible for the death of Thiel's beloved little boy from his first marriage, as well as for Thiel's subsequent madness and his murder of this domineering woman and her child. A strong woman drives a sensible, innocent man off the rails. Speaking of Jean Veber's early twentieth-century painting 'Allegorie sur la machine devoreuse des homines', the art collector and critic, Eduard Fuchs, said: Woman is the symbol of that terrifying, secret power of the machine which rolls over anything that comes under its wheels, smashes that which gets caught in its cranks, shafts and belts, and destroys those who attempt to halt the turning of its wheels. And, vice versa, the machine, which coldly, cruelly and relentlessly sacrifices hecatombs of men as if they were nothing, is the symbol of the man-strangling Minotaur-like nature of woman.30

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Women of the turn of the century had, it seems, to choose between these two models fashioned for them by men - deathlike passivity or monstrous activity.

Nietzsche contra Wagner As Elisabeth Badinter argues, such sexual dualism is intimately related with a masculine hatred of the 'feminine self and with the attempt to banish the ghost of 'internal bisexuality'. Of course it is not only women who are likely to be treated as the scapegoat-victims of this ritual exorcism. Men who hate their 'feminine selves' need other men as scapegoats for their own hated and feared 'femininity'. A considerable proportion of men's activities is devoted to competing with each other - in the workplace, in battle, in sport, in sexual 'conquest' — with the purpose of demonstrating the superior 'masculinity' of one man or group of men over another, inferior, and hence naturally 'feminine', not-quite-so-male individual or group. It is a natural consequence of the conventional values of patriarchy that the worst thing a man can say about another man is that he is 'like a woman'. That is precisely what Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about his one-time idol, Richard Wagner, after their dramatic and permanent breach. In his old age, Wagner, wrote Nietzsche, was completely 'feminini generis'.31 Presumably connected with this is the fact that his music has the effect of a 'continued use of alcohol'.32 Wagner himself was fascinated by 'the sexual question'. He spent the last three days of his life working on an essay entitled 'On the Feminine in the Human', in which he wrote: 'Culture and Art, too, could only be perfect if a product of the act of that suspension of the divided unity of male and female'. While this might suggest that Wagner was quite happy to accept that 'internal bisexuality' so feared by some men, the same man had written on 23 October 1881 the following sentence in his diary: 'In the mingling of races the blood of the nobler males is ruined by the baser female instinct: the masculine element suffers, character founders, whilst the women gain as much as to take the men's place'.33 The key to the dramatic breach between Nietzsche and Wagner, and indeed to Nietzsche's subsequent description of the composer as 'feminini generis', may be, as Joachim Kohler claims, that Wagner began to spread rumours concerning Nietzsche's sexuality. After Wagner's death Nietzsche wrote to his friend, Peter Cast, expressing his indignation at the fact that Wagner had corresponded with his (N's) doctors informing them of his conviction that Nietzsche's problems were the result of 'unnatural indulgences' and hinting at 'Paderastie'.34 That would perhaps explain Nietzsche's concern to ascribe

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femininity to Wagner, for calling Nietzsche's sexuality into question was much the same, according to the conventions of the day, as calling his masculinity into question. Describing Wagner as 'feminini generis' was thus Nietzsche's way of getting his own back. Perhaps this incident would also explain a great deal of Nietzsche's vitriolic attacks on what he called 'effeminate' or 'degenerate'. We saw earlier how much Nietzsche playfully identified himself with woman. One wonders then how he could turn around and use 'feminini generis' as a stick to beat his former god. This is the same problem we had with Strindberg and Weininger: why did these men, having identified, or continuing to identify themselves with womankind, become such notorious misogynists? With what in women did they identify themselves? With that submissiveness, sensitivity and passivity traditionally attributed to bourgeois woman but no longer in vogue, among either men or women? Did they then reject the 'woman in themselves' so violently because they saw how unfashionable such 'feminine qualities' were becoming? Yet who was responsible for their becoming unfashionable if not supremely these 'womanly men' themselves? Perhaps it was, in Nietzsche's case, hatred of the dominant view of the direction of his sexual desires as 'effeminate' which drove him to turn the tables and describe his detractors as 'effeminate'.35 Perhaps the fear of being described himself as 'effeminate' or 'degenerate' caused him to adopt 'femininity' as a term of abuse and to use it himself against his detractors, as well as to develop, along with others, that 'cult of the masculine will'. Was it that late nineteenthcentury medicalization of 'homosexuality' which made Nietzsche so obsessed with masculine 'health'? In any case, Nietzsche now criticizes Wagner for what he formerly praised in him. In Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (1876) Nietzsche compared the effect of Wagner's music to encountering a pleasantly warm current while swimming in a lake.36 Shortly after the publication of this eulogy to Wagner relations between Nietzsche and Wagner became cooler until the complete break came with the publication of Menschliches, AHzumenschliches (Human, all too human) (1878—80). Wagner began corresponding with Nietzsche's doctor concerning his 'friend's' health and sexual activity in October 1877 and, according to Kohler, Nietzsche found out about this correspondence in April 1878. One can perhaps understand then why Nietzsche, in Nietzsche Contra Wagner (1889), six years after the composer's death, insists that he is no longer in favour of swimming in Wagner's warm pool. Here he compares the effect of the 'unending melody' of the new music to walking into the sea, gradually losing one's footing and finally giving oneself up to the element. Listening to Wagner, in other words, means losing active control and becoming passive and submissive (i.e. 'feminine'). Now Nietzsche is inclined to favour the older

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music, which demanded that one dance, not swim or float around, and hence be constantly conscious and alert to the rhythm.37 In the theatre (Wagner's music being theatrical, of course) one becomes 'Volk, Heerde, Weib, Pharisaer, Stimmvieh, Patronatsherr, Idiot - Wagnerianer' (common people, a herd, woman, Pharisee, voting swine, patron, idiot - and Wagnerian) (p. 420). Thus while Nietzsche is rebelling against Wagner, the overbearing father figure, rebelling against his own submissiveness and against the man who abused his submissive love, he equates the effect of Wagner's influence with the effect of alcohol, giving oneself up to the watery element and, significantly, becoming a woman. Nietzsche no longer wishes to be Wagner's devoted disciple, to be treated as subordinate; he equates subordinate with 'feminine', and rejects femininity. For Nietzsche, as for many men, frailty's name, his frailty's name is 'woman'. One must not give oneself up to the sea; the waves must be ruled; the sirens must be passed.38

The New Woman: Shaw, Ibsen, Strindberg, Huysmans According to George Bernard Shaw, 'all good women are manly and all good men are womanly'.39 In his preface to the third edition (1922) of The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1st edition 1891) Shaw makes the claim that the carnage of the First World War might have been avoided: 'Had the Gospel of Ibsen been understood and heeded, these fifteen millions might have been alive now; for the war was a war of ideals.'40 A typical Ibsen play, according to Shaw, 'is one in which the leading lady is an unwomanly woman, and the villain is an idealist'. Shaw supported the wives, who, like Nora, slammed the front door on the 'Doll's House': The sum of the matter is that unless Woman repudiates her womanliness, her duty to her husband, to her children, to society, to the law, and to everyone but herself, she cannot emancipate herself.'41 However, other men, notes Shaw, feared the consequences of such emancipation and women's suffrage, consequences in particular for the sensitive seat of masculine power: As I write, it is only two days since an eminent bacteriologist filled three columns of The Times [28 March 1912] with a wild Strindbergian letter in which he declared that women must be politically and professionally secluded and indeed excluded, because their presence and influence inflict on men an obsession so disabling and dangerous that men and women can work together or legislate together only on the same conditions as horses and mares; that is, by the surgical destruction of the male's sex. (p. 102) The letter Shaw mentions was favourably mentioned in an editorial of the same

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issue of The Times opposing women's suffrage. Man's active part in the world needed to be jealously guarded against such penis-envious women. It was clear to such men as Wright that it was not mere votes women sought, but testicles. Similar fears regarding the loss of testicles are evident in Strindberg's play, The Father (1887), in which the Captain is driven to madness by his wife casting doubts on whether he is actually the father of their daughter, and having the 'cartridges' removed from his guns and his 'pouches' emptied. The famous play, Miss Julia (1888), also turns on the threat posed by New Women to those 'pouches' of men's power. Miss Julia is laced with references to the story of Salome and John the Baptist. It is set on midsummer eve, midsummer's day being the feast of John the Baptist, and the reading that night at church is of that very story, or so Kristin tells Jean while putting on his tie and almost choking him. Miss Julia exclaims at one point: 'So you think I can't stand the sight of blood? You think I'm so weak? How I'd love to see your blood, and your brains on a chopping block! I'd like to see your whole sex swimming in a sea of blood, like this creature here. I think I could drink out of your skull, dabble my feet in your chest and eat your heart roasted whole.' In Strindberg's variation on the Salome theme, however, Jean/John survives while Julia/Salome kills herself. Everywhere at the fin de siecle there were images of women wielding swords and men who had lost their heads, their crowns, or worse.42 The stories of Judith and Holofernes, Salome and John the Baptist thrilled and excited, frightened and confirmed the fears of fin-de-siecle artists and audiences. It was no doubt to some extent a certain masochistic flavour that attracted many male artists to these sadistic, powerful women. The rise of such femmes fat ales', writes Declan Kiberd, 'has been explained in psychological terms — in the belief that their masculine element appealed to the latent homosexuality in passive males. The masterful woman allowed a man to indulge in illicit passion without his having to commit a public violation of the sexual code.'43 But the flirtation with castration and decapitation also served as a warning to men of the dangers of female emancipation. One could indulge in masochistic fantasies about submitting to phallic women and, at the same time, warn other men about what women could do to them, if they acquired power. J. K. Huysmans' quintessence of decadence, des Esseintes (in A Rebours}, has in his possession the two chefs-d'oeuvres of Gustave Moreau, the painter who may be said to have started the Salome fever. Des Esseintes becomes rapturous before this artist's Salome and sees in her 'la deite symbolique de 1'indestructible Luxure, la deesse de l'immortelle Hysterie, la Beaute maudite,

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... la Bete monstrueuse' (the symbolic deity of indestructible Luxury, the goddess of immortal hysteria, cursed Beauty, the monstrous beast), who poisons everyone who approaches her, sees her or touches her.44 This monstrous, though of course rather sexy, beast and goddess of immortal hysteria originates, it appears, from the fantastic and strange decor of Moreau's painting, from the Far and Vague East. In other renditions, in accordance with the race theories of the time, Salome was made to appear distinctly Jewish.

Wilde's Salome As if to emphasize the exotic otherness of Salome, Wilde wrote his play about her in French. It is a peculiar work for other reasons too. While one might have expected Wilde to have parodied and overturned some of the conventions regarding Salome, he actually plays along with them to a surprising degree, even to the extent of apparently supplying a misogynist, patriarchal parable. The play is however full of ambivalence, of Wilde's own ambivalence about women and men, sex and spirituality. Wilde began work on the play in November 1891. It was banned in England, as was any play with biblical characters, and only once produced during the author's lifetime — in Paris in 1896, while Wilde was in Reading. After Max Reinhardt's production at the Kleines Theater in Berlin in 1901, the play was immensely popular in Germany and had 'at one time, more performances in Germany than any other play by a British [sic!] dramatist, not excepting Shakespeare'.45 Richard Strauss adapted the play to compose an opera, the performance of which in Berlin was only finally allowed on condition that the star of Bethlehem should appear in the sky as Salome died, 'presumably indicating', as Barbara Tuchman writes, 'the posthumous triumph of the Baptist over unnatural passion'.46 What contributed to the play's popularity was, no doubt, in no small measure the fact that it offered the titillating striptease of the dance of the seven veils in a respectable, high-cultural context. The play invites the audience to identify with and share Herod's lust for his nubile niece and stepdaughter. Salome is woman as the essence of corporeality and sexuality, a sexual object for the male gaze. Her seductive powers combined with her strong, independent will are however revealed to be dangerously lifethreatening to any man who gets in her way or succumbs to her charms. A turn-of-the-century male audience could appreciate this as an object lesson in how seductively sensual and utterly sexual woman, if given too much power, would cut off man's superior intellectual and spiritual power, i.e. his head, as well as those other bits by which he defined his superior masculinity.

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The threat posed by two formidable, self-willed women, Salome and her mother, Herodias, causes the men of the play to close ranks. The points of view of Herod and his supposed enemy and prisoner, Jokanaan, merge when it comes to their attitude to the women: they are monstrous. Jokanaan responds to Salome's advances with a less than charming rejection of all her sex: Back! Daughter of Babylon! By woman came evil into the world. ... I will not listen to thee. I listen but to the voice of the Lord God.47 Despite the fact that Herod has killed his brother, taken his brother's wife as his own and lusts after his niece and step-daughter, Jokanaan's wrath is directed principally at Herodias. While Herodias wants to get rid of this man who insults her so voluminously on every occasion, Herod comes to admire him and half believe in his prophetic outbursts. When Salome triumphantly takes Jokanaan's severed, bloody head in her hands and kisses his mouth, Herod is horrified: 'She is monstrous, thy daughter, she is altogether monstrous. In truth, what she has done is a great crime. I am sure that it was a crime against an unknown God' (p. 574). Herod's and the play's concluding words are 'Kill that woman!', and his soldiers rush forward to crush Salome under their shields. All through the play the 'monstrous' desire of women is contrasted with the bonds of spiritual, romantic and even sexual love between the men. Jokanaan rejects Salome because he is already betrothed in a sense to another man, his Lord God. Herod respects and admires Jokanaan and is increasingly inclined to believe in him and his God as he is disgusted by the women. Some of the most touching words of the play are spoken by the page of Herodias after the death of the man he loved, the young Syrian who was infatuated with Salome and killed himself in order to distract Salome from Jokanaan: He was my brother, and nearer to me than a brother. I gave him a little box of perfumes, and a ring of agate that he wore always on his hand. In the evening we used to walk by the river, among the almond trees, and he would tell me of the things of his country. He spake ever very low. The sound of his voice was like the sound of the flute, of a flute player. Also he much loved to gaze at himself in the river. I used to reproach him for that. (p. 560) Even Herod was not unaware of the charms of the young man: 'I am sorry he has killed himself. I am very sorry, for he was fair to look upon. He was even very fair. He had very languorous eyes' (pp. 561-2). When Salome is killed at the end of the play, the brotherhood of men, the supremacy of Caesar and of a patriarchal deity have apparently been consolidated - at the expense of woman. On the other hand, Oscar Wilde's allegiances are no doubt somewhat

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divided in the play. It is not perhaps merely a play contrasting the 'lustful love' of women for men with the 'spiritual love' of men for men, though that contrast is certainly present in the Bible story as it is, to an even greater extent, in the play. Wilde appears with Salome to be indulging himself writing poetry expressing both 'lustful' and 'spiritual' loves. If there is a contrast here between pagan (and feminine) lust and Christian (and masculine) spiritual love, both are celebrated in the play, even if 'that woman' is condemned in the final words of the play. We have seen the bonds of mutual affection between the men in the play - the page, the Syrian, Herod and Jokanaan himself - and how they appear to depend on the exclusion of dangerous woman. But it is safe to assume that Wilde also, if not principally, identified with Salome's lust for the male body - and with her fate. There is even a photograph which many have assumed to depict Oscar Wilde scantily clad as Salome bending rather bulkily down to touch the severed head of Jokanaan.48 If the dance of the seven veils is a striptease revealing in the end the body of Oscar Wilde, one could conclude that the violence and murder of Salome at the end are there rather less in order to serve a misogynist desire to inflict violence on women than to satisfy Wilde's own masochistic penchant for punishment and for martyrdom.49 Wilde's Salome is thus, like all his productions, a far more ambiguous affair than it at first seems. Yet, while it is likely that Wilde identified with his Salome, the 'straight' import of the play tends to confirm patriarchal male fears of female sexuality and of what could happen when women got their way.

Conclusion In these pages we have found woman identified with various undesirables — the ephemeral nature of modernity itself, the crowds of mass society, revolution, chaos, metaphysical evil, the material as opposed to the spiritual world, unrestrained sensuality and sexuality, the irrational, lack of consciousness/conscience, the effects of alcohol, 'degeneration', the violence of modern technology, modern music, and in many cases both desired and rejected for these attributes. It seems that the name of anything that was desirably undesirable was automatically woman — not by any means a new phenomenon, as the revival of the biblical story of Salome and John the Baptist suggests. None the less, the revival of this story at the fin de siecle as well as the many writings along similar lines we have looked at is evidence of an intensification of the already strongly misogynist trend in Western history at this particular time when women were beginning to rebel in an organized fashion against such misogynist classification. The threat posed by such rebellion was perceived by many as a physical attack on the male body, specifically on the

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genital area of that body, a perception which provided some excitement and titillation for those men from whose fantasies it derived, as well as graphic justification for the defeat of this rebellion. The currency of such notions as 'degeneration' and decadence and the desire for 'regeneration' made almost inevitable the association of 'degeneration' with women as well as with 'effeminate' men and the association of 'regeneration' with a new valorization of 'masculine' qualities and of the male body.

Notes 1. 'Pour que les hommes retrouvent leur virilite, il faut d'abord que les femmes retournent a leur place naturelle. Seul le retablissement des frontieres sexuelles liberera les hommes de leur angoisse identitaire. Puis le refoulement massif de leur bisexualite originaire fera le reste.' Elisabeth Badinter, XY de I'identite masculine (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1992), p. 35. 2. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Der Kaiser und die Hexe, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben: Gedichte und lyrische Dramen, ed. Herbert Steiner (Stockholm: Bermann-Fischer, 1946), pp. 329— 72. 3. Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Base, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Colli and Montinari, Vol. VI ii (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1968), #239, p. 181: 'Das schwache Geschlecht ist in keinem Zeitalter mit solcher Achtung von seiten der Manner behandelt worden als in unserm Zeitalter - das gehort zum demokratischen Hang ... , ebenso wie die Unehrerbietigkeit vor dem Alter'. 4. Cited by Jacques Le Rider, Modernite viennoise et crises de I'identite (Paris: PUF, 1990), p. 126: 'Le progres de la sensualite correspond partout a la dissolution des organisations politiques et a la decadence de la vie politique. A la place de la riche diversite, la loi de la democratic, de la masse indistincte, et cette liberte, cette egalite s'imposent, qui distinguent la vie selon la nature de la societe civile organisee et qui se rattachent a la part corporelle et materielle de la nature humaine.' 5. Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 94. 6. Gustave Le Bon, La psychologie des joules (Paris: Librairies F. Alcan et Guillaumin, 1907), p. 8: 'La simplicite et 1'exaggeration des sentiments des foules font que ces dernieres ne connaissent ni la doute ni 1'incertitude. Comme les femmes, elles vont tout de suite aux extremes'/'La connaissance de la psychologie des foules est aujourd'hui la derniere ressource de 1'homme d'Etat qui veut, non pas les gouverner — la chose est

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7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

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devenue bien difficile, - mais tout au moins ne pas etre trop gouverne par elles.' Pick, Faces of Degeneration, p. 92. Huyssen, After the Great Divide (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 52. Huyssen, After the Great Divide, see Chapter 3: 'Mass culture as woman'. Quoted by Bram Dijkstra in Idols of Perversity (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 216. Quoted by Dijkstra in Idols of Perversity, p. 220, from Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character}, (Munich: Matthes and Seitz, 1980), pp. 293 and 343. David Luft, 'Otto Weininger als Figur des Fin de Siecle', in Otto Weininger: Werk und Wirkung, ed. by J. Le Rider and Norbert Leser (Vienna: Oesterreichischer Bundesverlag, 1984), p. 74. Badinter, XY, pp. 189f: 'Dans le systeme patriarcal, la haine du soi feminin, de loin la plus repandue, engendre tout naturellemment un dualisme sexuel oppositionnel. L'affirmation de la difference est une reaction a la perte d'identite et au flou qui renforce la masculinite. En opposant les sexes, en leur assignant des fonctions et des espaces differents, on pense eloigner le spectre de la bisexualite interieure. En verite, on ne fait que se scinder en exteriorisant la partie de soi devenue etrangere, voire ennemie.' Otto Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter (Munich: Matthes and Seitz, 1980), Chapter 6: 'Die emanzipierten Frauen'. George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: Fertig, 1985), p. 145. Cited by Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity, p. 218. Cited by Badinter, XY, p. 35: 'On peut la definir en la situant a mi-chemin entre la sottise et le comportement normal. ... Compare a celui de rhomme, le comportement de la femme parait pathologique comme celui des negres compare a celui des Europeens.' Declan Kiberd, Men and Feminism in Modern Literature (London: Macmillan, 1985), p. 34. Cited by Horst Fritz in 'Die Damonisierung des Erotischen in der Literatur des Fin de Siecle', Fin de Siecle: Zu Literatur und Kunst der Jahrhundertwende, ed. R. Bauer et al. (Frankfurt/M.: Klostermann, 1977), p. 449. Quoted by Kiberd, Men and Feminism, p. 57. Letter dated 13.IX.(1912), Hofmannsthal — Strauss Briefwechsel, ed. F. and A. Strauss (Zurich: Atlantis, 1952), p. 195: 'Das Motiv der Ablehnung, jenes Motiv des "keuschen Josephs" . . . , was ware es anders als das grandiose und unheimliche Grundmotiv von Strindbergs ganzem Lebenswerk - vom Kampf des Geniehaften, gesteigert Intellektuellen im Mann mit dem Bosen, Dummen der Frau, dem Herabziehen-Wollen, Verweichlichen-Wollen?'

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22. 'University Degrees for Women', The Fortnightly Review, 1895, pp. 895903, and Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy (London: Virago, 1992), p. 7. 23. Badinter, XY, p. 31: 'L'universite leur a fait une place sur ses banes. Elles deviennent professeurs, doctoresses, avocates ou journalistes. ... Du haut en has de 1'echelle sociale, ils se sentent menaces dans leur identite par cette nouvelle creature qui veut faire comme eux, etre comme eux ...' 24. Cited by Badinter, XY, p. 31: 'Un jour, Marie d'Agoult sera a 1'Academic des sciences morales et politiques, George Sand a 1'Academic francaise, Rosa Bonheur a l'Academie des beaux-arts, et c'est nous, les hommes qui feront les confitures et les cornichons.' 25. Horst Fritz, 'Die Damonisierung des Erotischen', p. 445: 'Der Anteil der Frauen am Erwerbsleben wa'chst besonders in den Fabriken, und betragt 1892 bereits fast 30%'. 26. Badinter, XY, p. 32. 27. George Gissing, Demos: A Story of English Socialism (New York: AMS Press, 1971), p. 75. 28. George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, p. 90. 29. Gerhart Hauptmann, Bahnwarter Thiel, in Samtliche Werke, ed. Hans-Egon Hass, Vol. 6 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963), pp. 35-68. 30. Cited by Huyssen, After the Great Divide, p. 78. 31. Nietzsche, Der Fall Wagner (1888), in Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Vol. VI iii, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1969), p. 45. 32. Nietzsche: Nachschrift zu Der Fall Wagner, p. 38. 33. The Diary of Richard Wagner 1865—1882: The Brown Book, presented and annotated by Joachim Bergfeld, trans, by George Bird (London: Gollancz, 1980), p. 202. 34. Joachim Kohler, Zarathustras Geheimnis (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1992), p. 184. See also pp. 174-87. 35. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 134. 36. Nietzsche, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1967), Vol. IV i, p. 4. 37. Nietzsche, Nietzsche contra Wagner, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Vol. VI iii, pp. 419f. 38. See Otto Greiner's painting 'Ulysses and the Sirens' (1902), reproduced in Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity, p. 263, and also Charles Dana Gibson 'In the Swim' (1900) in ibid., p. 270. 39. Quoted by Kiberd, Men and Feminism, p. 61.

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40. George Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, in Wisenthal, Shaw and Ibsen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), p. 97. 41. Shaw, The Quintessence, p. 130. 42. See Dijsktra, Idols of Perversity, Chapter XL 43. Declan Kiberd, Men and Feminism, p. 21. 44. Huysmans, A Rebours (Paris: Union Generale d'Editions, 1975), p. 117. 45. Alan Bird, The Plays of Oscar Wilde (London: Vision Press, 1977), p. 60. Sander L. Gilman writes that 'during the 1903-4 season alone, 248 performances of his (Wilde's) dramas were seen on the German stage, including 111 performances of Salome. Sander L. Gilman, Disease and Representation. Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS (Ithaca/NY, London: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 158. 46. Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower (New York: Macmillan; London: Hamilton, 1966), p. 324. 47. Wilde, Salome, in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (London and Glasgow: Collins, 1967), pp. 552-75, p. 559. 48. Reproduced in Ellman's biography and attributed to Collection Guillot de Saix, H. Roger Viollet, Paris. Showalter also refers to this photograph as depicting Wilde dressed as Salome. The person in the photograph has subsequently turned out to be not Wilde at all, but a real woman! 49. See Ellman on the trials. One of Wilde's favourite paintings, reproduced in Ellman's biography, was San Sebastian by Guide Reni, Sebastian being, as Ellman points out, practically the patron saint of fin-de-siede 'homosexuals', and the Christian name Wilde took for his alias in France.

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Part III

The Nationalization of Narcissus

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National Narcissism

Freud, narcissism and the nation In 'Zur Einfuhrung des Narzifimus' (1914) Sigmund Freud begins by attributing the first clinical use of the term 'Narcissism' to P. Nacke, who, in 1899, chose the term to describe a mode of behaviour in which an individual treats his or her own body as otherwise the body of a sexual object is treated.1 Freud suspects however that narcissism is not restricted to those society regards as abnormal, such as 'homosexuals', but is a basic part of the regular sexual development of the human being. In this sense, he writes, 'Narcissism would not be a perversion, but the libidinous complement of the egoism of the drive for self-preservation, a certain amount of which is correctly ascribed to every living being.'2 According to Freud, every child is narcissistic and remains so until criticized by parents, teachers and society in general. At this point a 'conscience', an 'Ichideal', is formed as the image, suggested by society, of the ideal self after which the individual should try to model her/his actual self. The narcissism of the child has not been abandoned, according to Freud, but merely transferred to this ideal image which has been suggested by society. Further, as Freud argues, 'large amounts of fundamentally homosexual libido were thus enlisted to form the narcissistic "Ichideal" and are diverted and satisfied in the maintenance of this ideal'.3 So the 'Ichideal' imposed by society merely replaces the self-sufficient image of the child as the object of narcissistic sexual desire. The separation of the critical 'Ichideal' from the 'Ich', the ego, leads also to repression and the formation of the scapegoat 'Unconscious'. For Freud this is not just a matter of individual psychology but also a social, even national affair: he has already pointed out that the formation of the new object of narcissistic desire is due to the influence exercised by society (parents, teachers, public opinion) upon the child. Freud is thus able to argue that the 'Ichideal' offers a significant insight into mass psychology. The 'Ichideal',

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supplied by society in the place of the object of 'simple' narcissism, is the common ideal of a family, of a class, of a nation. This common, social ideal draws upon and ties up narcissistic and homosexual libido. Not fulfilling this ideal, however, means that this narcissistic and homosexual libido is not satisfied and therefore becomes free, leading to guilt and social Angst.4 The relationship between a man and his religious, political or moral ideals and/or the persons who represent these ideals is, according to Freud, a libidinal or sexual relationship, specifically involving 'homosexual libido', and it is a relationship whose physical, sexual expression is not, as Freud notes, necessarily repressed. What binds a group of men together - be it a nation, an army, a class or a political party - is the devotion of their narcissistic and homosexual libido (whether expressed physically or not) to a common ideal. Dissatisfaction with this ideal, Freud argues, liberates 'homosexual libido', which turns into guilt and social angst presumably only because of the stigma particular societies attach to the actual, as opposed to the symbolic, expression of 'homosexual libido7 and the guilt it imposes on those who do not subscribe to the collective (narcissistically or homoerotically inspired and sustained) ideals. Using Freud's theory one might then suggest that the question at the end of the nineteenth century was what was to be done with narcissistic and homosexual libido once it had been released from its traditional bondage to religious, metaphysical and social hierarchical ideals through the spread of rational and materialist thought, and the huge expansion and economic hegemony of the middle classes? If God was dead, what superior power did king/queen and Kaiser represent, entitling their exalted position as collective 'Ichideal' as well as the imposition of taxes of narcissistic and homosexual libido on their subjects? One might thus understand the narcissistic and homosexual connotations of the figure of the 'double' we encountered in Part I, a figure which was also, it was suggested, evidence of a collapse of traditional dualistic structures of belief, of traditional, collective ideals. It is possible to suggest further that the answer in the process of being found at the turn of the century to the question of whither to direct this liberated homosexual libido was: to the 'nation', the 'Fatherland', the 'Empire'. As the aristocracy and the ideal of loyalty thereto declined so the notion of the 'nation' and the ideology of nationalism blossomed. Narcissistic and homosexual libido was to be nationalized. The choice facing men at the end of the nineteenth/beginning of the twentieth century, to put it bluntly, though still in Freud's terms, was between an anarchic release of narcissistic and homosexual libido and a nationalist/ imperialist, proto-Fascist redirection or corporate mobilization of narcissistic and homosexual libido, a collective alternative which would have the advantage of reducing guilt and social angst.

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The homogenization of the nation As male narcissism was to be nationalized the 'nation' in its turn was to be militarized, and thereby unified, homogenized. Conscription was seen as a means of unifying the nation and making it visible as one uniform and uniformed body — of men. One can see this policy in action in the words of General von der Goltz, for whom the nation in arms policy was to be the answer to the pressing question of 'how to completely fuse the military life with the life of the people, so that the former may impede the latter as little as possible, and that, on the other hand, all the resources of the latter may find expression in the former'.5 In England too the state became the subject of heightened devotion. This devotion was also invariably accompanied by social Darwinism. In 1899 the philosopher Bernard Bosanquet declared: 'The state is the fly-wheel of our life'. In 1902 H. G. Wells welcomed the development of a new, authoritarian and hierarchical kind of society, suggesting that this was the 'expression of a greater Will', and recommended 'good scientifically caused torture' as a punishment for crime as well as the 'merciful obliteration of the unfit, and the total extinction of the world's inferior races'.6 Beatrice Webb observed in her diary (16 Jan. 1903) that human breeding 'is the most important of all questions, this breeding of the right sort of man'.7 Not long before Webb made her diary entry, in 1901, a certain Willibald Hentschel suggested that a hundred 'Ario-Heroiker' (Aryan heroes) be brought together with a thousand Nordic women in special eugenic breeding colonies to beget a 'neue volkische Oberschicht' (new top layer of the Volk}.& Ernst Hackel wrote that: by the indiscriminate destruction of all incorrigible criminals, not only would the struggle for life among the better portions of mankind be made easier, but also an advantageous artificial process of selection would be set in practice, since the possibility of transmitting the injurious qualities would be taken from those degenerate outcasts.9 As Zygmunt Bauman writes, modern genocide is not an 'uncontrolled outburst of passion', but rather an 'exercise in rational social engineering, in bringing about, by artificial means, that ambivalence-free homogeneity that messy and opaque social reality failed to produce'.10 We tend to think that, whatever people may have said, the only place such eugenic ideas were put into practice was Germany under Nazi rule. Bauman reminds us however that such ideas were used in the USA in the Johnson Immigration Act of 1924 to separate the 'dangerous classes' who were 'destroying American democracy'; that in 1922 Calvin Coolidge argued that 'the laws of biology had demonstrated that

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Nordic peoples deteriorate when mixing with other peoples'; and that between 1907 and 1928 21 states of the USA enacted eugenic compulsory sterilization laws (p. 36).

The male body of the nation The state thus exalted in terms of super-healthy homogeneity was often described specifically in terms of its virility or criticized for its lack of it. There is', wrote Teddy Roosevelt, 'no place in the world for nations who have become enervated by the soft and easy life, or who have lost their fibre of vigorous hardness and masculinity.'11 The nation, one should note, was naturally imagined as a masculine body. Americans feared that the decline of the frontier lifestyle and the increasing 'Europeanization' of America constituted the 'feminization' of culture and of the American male. After the disappearance of the American frontier the genre of the 'Western' was invented as a fictional space for masculinity to play in. The first 'Western' was apparently Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902), which was followed by the publication of fifteen other novels of the same genre in less than a year. The cowboy of fiction (and later of film) began his career as role model for literally millions of young and not so young men. Similarly enormously influential was Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan series, published from 1912 onwards and which sold over 36 million copies!12 As Badinter observes, in the twentieth century 'America has been without cultural rival in imposing on the whole universe its images of virility, from the cowboy to Terminator via Rambo' (pp. 198f.). It was not only in America that the nation itself was seen as male and that that which threatened it was seen as female. This was a view common in Europe too. In France, Zola complained of the declining virility of a feminized France and the masculinity crisis 'found positive expression in the affirmation of virile values, physical, cultural and moral'.13 Around the same time in England the translation of Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra in 1896 reinforced Francis Galton's belief in eugenics, his 'scientific advocacy of the superman'. It was in this period that sport came to be officially organized and promoted as the great regenerator of the virility of the nation. Participation in sports was seen as an antidote to the degenerate, feminizing effect of modern life. Sport involving competition, aggression and violence was considered the best initiation into virility.14 The first Olympic Games in 1896 was an invocation of Greek ideals of masculinity which also made sport an affair of national pride and prestige. Mark Girouard has shown how the cultivation of sport in public schools in England sought to inculcate its participants with national military values.15

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This ideal of virility and its alliance with the ideal of the nation were derived from the rediscovery of the sculpture of Hellenic antiquity described by Johann Joachim Winckelmann in the eighteenth century, and invoked by Walter Pater at the end of the nineteenth. 'Lithe and supple figures, muscular and harmonious,7 writes George Mosse, 'became the symbols of masculinity, the nation and its youth/ 16 There was some irony, he says, in the fact that Winckelmann, 'a homosexual', should have supplied the model for the male national stereotype. There was also considerable concern, in some circles, to maintain that this national ideal of male physical beauty was devoid of any (homo)erotic content. In 1896 one French commentator asserted that admiration of perfect physical (male) beauty did not mean one wanted to have sexual relations with the object of one's admiration, and cited Winckelmann, the poet August von Platen and Michelangelo, to support his argument!17 In both England and Germany the image of naked soldiers bathing was to become a constantly recurring epiphany in the literature of the First World War, an almost religious image of health, innocence and natural beauty set against the sickness and ugliness all around.18 This 'unphobic' appreciation of the male body was facilitated and even encouraged by the preceding years of increasing official emphasis on national ideals of virility, and on health and physical beauty as intrinsically male qualities. In Germany the turn-of-the-century 'rediscovery of the [male] body' and the cult of physical exercise, nude bathing and sunbathing, initially a revolt on the part of young men against the pruderie of bourgeois culture, soon found its naive energies and desires channelled towards a political end — the regeneration of the nation. George Mosse describes how the the leaders of the German youth movement invoked the capacity of male eros to create a true spirit of camaraderie which would be a base from which to renew the to beget a 'neue volkische Oberschicht' (new top layer of the Volk}.& Ernst role of eroticism in male society) (1915), drawing on his own experiences in the youth movement, claimed that 'male—male eros' was responsible for the formation of the community and the state.19 However, despite such open invocation of the power of 'mann-mannlicher Eros', the movement was rather shaken by a homosexual scandal in 1911.20 Mosse argues that 'modern nationalism was built upon the ideal of manliness'; 'nationalism tended to encourage male bonding, the Ma'nnerbund, which by its very nature presented a danger to that respectability the nation was supposed to preserve'; 'male eros tended to haunt modern nationalism'.21 All this idealization of masculinity, the male body and male bonding in sport, youth groups, nationalist and paramilitary groups was, in other words, flirting dangerously with illicit sexuality, appealing to desires which it pretended to satisfy symbolically, desires which it of course claimed were not involved at

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all. Mosse's subject here is precisely the subject of this part of this book, the 'nationalization of Narcissus'. Currency of the term 'Mannerbund' (no English equivalent: group of men bound closely together) began in Germany in the year 1902.22 Hans Bluher's interpretation of the 'Mannerbund' as an erotic bond was, naturally, approved of by some, not least of course by Thomas Mann in his speech 'Von deutscher Republik', and fiercely attacked by others. The sociologist Johann Plenge, for instance, described Bluher as the propagandist of an 'Affenbund [von] Onanisten und Paderasten' (a band of apes, onanists and pederasts), linking his pernicious influence with that of a Teil des jiidischen Literatentums' (part of the Jewish literati). Plenge sought to defend the true nature of the 'Mannerbund', which consisted in 'Kameradschaft, Solidaritat und Briiderschaft, und im Verhaltnis zum Fiihrer wie ahnlich zum Lehrer, in echtem Gefolgschaftsgeist und Treue' (cameraderie, solidarity and brotherhood and true allegiance and loyalty to the leader as to the teacher).23 From 1902 on the idea of the 'Mannerbund' led by a charismatic Fiihrer became increasingly widespread and popular in Germany, and in the Weimar Republic it was seen by many as an alternative to the unloved parliamentary politics of the time.24 The term 'Mannerbund' was also taken up with enthusiasm by Nazi ideologists and apologists. One such wrote: The Mannerbunde of the army and the SA, of the SS and the Arbeitsdienst are all extensions of the Hitler Youth into manhood. Their fundamental educational task is one and the same. In and through their structures the political German person is to be formed. ... Common to them all is also the priority of physical education and the education of the will. Intellectual schooling and especially cultural education take a back seat.25 Heinrich Himmler was particularly aware of and obsessed with the 'temptations' inherent in the Mannerbund, as well as being at the same time one of its principal promoters, and undertook a crusade to stamp out any hint of homosexual activities in the SS and police.26 Juergen Reulecke goes so far as to suggest that without some understanding of the 'Mannerbund' syndrome one cannot understand the history of German mentality in the first half of the twentieth century (p. 10). The homophobic version of the Mannerbund put men in something of a double bind: on the one hand it said - masculinity and male physical beauty is desirable; on the other — you must not desire it. Klaus Theweleit calls this a 'double double bind', which he formulates thus: 'du sollst Manner lieben, aber du darfst nicht homosexuell sein. Und: du sollst das Verbotene tun, wirst aber dafur bestraft (wenn die Machtigen es wollen)' (you should love men, but you are not allowed to be homosexual. And: you should do what is forbidden, but

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you will be punished for it (if the powerful so wish).27 Theweleit is writing about the situation of military men in Fascist Germany. But was this 'double double bind' something which only affected German men? Or is this not rather the 'double double bind' imposed on all men by patriarchal thinking in homophobic times?

The homophobic, homosocial community To return for a moment to Oscar Wilde: W. B. Yeats remembered W. E. Henley, one of Wilde's fiercest attackers and leader of an anti-decadent army, admitting: 'I told my lads to attack him [O.W.] and yet we might have fought under his banner'.28 This ambivalence of Henley shows how close the two sides were: Wilde was not imprisoned for having homosexual libido, but for what he did with it, for his political orientation. One recalls the applause which Wilde's speech in the dock received concerning 'the love that dare not speak its name'.29 This did not of course save him from being convicted. The publicity surrounding Wilde's trials ensured that men involved in intense male friendships and all kinds of 'Mannerbunde' would have constantly and actively — or even aggressively — to demonstrate to others and to themselves that they had nothing to do with 'homosexuality'. The demonstration of homophobia thus became in the twentieth century the condition of simple friendship between men and of all homosocial bonds. In Freud's terms, the condition for the socially legitimate expression of narcissistic and homosexual libido was its public denial — and the more or less aggressive projection onto others — of the nature of what it was expressing.30 In 1907 the Eulenburg scandal broke in Germany. The conservative but pacifist, artistically-minded Prinz Philipp zu Eulenburg, close friend and adviser to Kaiser Wilhelm II, was excluded from court circles ostensibly for homosexual activities. The trials of Eulenburg were perhaps the German equivalent of the trials of Oscar Wilde in England in that they heightened public awareness of what that neologism 'homosexuality' involved and fears that feelings perhaps hitherto unexpressed but also unnamed could now be in danger of being named, and deemed degenerate and criminal. In an era so conscious of the stigma 'homosexual', close friendship between men became suspect — and remains so today.31 Prominent 'homosexuals' were made to represent and, to use Foucault's word, incorporate 'degeneration' and 'decadence'. Not surprisingly 'homosexuality' was frequently seen as a 'disease' rife among foreigners. The English viewed it as a French habit; the French described it as 'le vice allemand'. The Eulenburg affair provided a field day for the English and French newspapers and particularly for their cartoonists.32 Eulenburg's friend,

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the Kaiser, egged on by his military advisers, was to prove his own manliness by a display of macho militarism, a display which ultimately led to the First World War. The fact that this cult of manliness could itself be deemed collective homoeroticism did not disturb the logic of those involved in the exclusion of individuals for homosexual activities. Indeed one could claim that such scapegoats were required precisely in order to disclaim the charge of 'homosexuality' those involved felt liable to be levelled against themselves, as Mosse suggests was the case with Himmler and his Mannerbund. This was in fact what happened to Wilde and Eulenburg, who were both framed in order to shield their superiors — a British Prime Minister and the Kaiser of Germany — from the same charge. In reality, modern homophobia did not really set up an opposition between 'homo-' and 'heterosexuality' at all, but between a 'healthy' 'homosocial' 'homoeroticism' — or 'hom(m)osexualite', to use Luce Irigaray's term — and a 'sick' 'homosexuality'. The fact that the boundaries between these notions were totally arbitrary and could be drawn anywhere by anyone inclined to do so gave men a further reason to join together in homosocial Mannerbunde: there is safety in numbers. This mechanism, one might suggest, enhanced the attraction for men of corporate bodies of men as it made taboo the attraction of the bodies and minds of individual men. In 1914 Hugo von Hofmannsthal was able to declare with enthusiasm: 'wir, das Land, die Armee, der Staat sind heute wie niemals ein Leib' (we, the country, the army, the state are today as never before one body). One male body politic. No more confusions. Or at least these confusions were to be banished to the borders of the empire, soon to be a front for a chaotic battle against chaos. In this part I shall be looking at works such as Conrad's The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', Stoker's Dracula, Musil's Die Verwirrungen des ZogUngs Torlefi, Thomas Mann's Tonio Kroger and Der Tod in Venedig and some short works of Hofmannsthal as furnishing in various degrees literary evidence of what I have called here 'the nationalization of Narcissus'.

Notes 1. Sigmund Freud, 'Zur Einfuhrung des NarziSmus', in Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke chronologisch geordnet, ed. Anna Freud, Vol. X (London: Imago, 1946), pp. 137-70, p. 138. 2. Freud, 'Zur Einfuhrung des NarziSmus', pp. 138-9: 'NarziSmus ... ware keine Perversion, sondern die libidinose Erganzung zum Egoismus des

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3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

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Selbsterhaltungstriebes, von dem jedem Lebewesen mit Recht ein Stuck zugeschrieben wird.' Freud, 'Zur Einfuhrung des Narzifimus', p. 163: 'Grolie Betrage von wesentlich homosexueller Libido wurden so zur Bildung des narziStischen Ichideals herangezogen und finden in der Erhaltung desselben Ableitung und Befriedigung.' Freud, 'Zur Einfuhrung des Narzifimus', p. 169. Cited by Brian Bond, War and Society in Europe 1870-1970 (London: Fontana, 1984), p. 67. Quoted by Tom Gibbons, Rooms in the Darwin Hotel (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1973), p. 25 and p. 28. Quoted by Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 34. Jiirgen Reulecke, 'Das Jahr 1902 und die Urspriinge der MannerbundIdeologie in Deutschland', in Mannerbande, Mannerbunde: Zweibandige Materialiensammlung zu einer Ausstellung des Rautenstrauch-Joest Museums fur Volkerkunde in der Josef-Haubrich Kunsthalle Koln, ed. by G. Volger and K. von Welck, Vol. I (Cologne: Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum, 1990), pp. 3-10, p. 4. Quoted by Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, p. 31. Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, p. 38. Quoted by Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy (London: Virago, 1992), p. 10. Elisabeth Badinter, XY de I'identite masculine (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1992), pp. 37f. Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, p. 10, citing Michelle Perrot. Elisabeth Badinter, XY, p. 142. Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot (Yale University Press, 1981). See also Eric Dunning, 'Sport as a male preserve', in Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning, Quest for Excitement (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986); Michael Klein, 'Sportbiinde — Mannerbunde?', in Mannerbande, Mannerbunde, ed. Volger and von Welck, Vol. 2, pp. 139-48; Peter Becker, 'FuSballfans. Vormoderne Reservate zum Erwerb und zur Erhaltung mannlicher Macht und Ehre', ibid., pp. 149—56. George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality (New York: Fertig, 1985), p. 14. Mosse, Nationalism, p. 14. See Paul Fussel, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York/London: Oxford University Press, 1975), Chapter VIII: 'Soldier Boys', especially the section headed 'Soldiers bathing', pp. 299-309. See also Klaus Theweleit, Mannerphantasien, Vol. I, (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1980), pp. 539f.

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19. Hans Bluher, Familie und Mannerbund (Text of a lecture summarizing Die Rolle der Erotik, given in the 'Berliner Sezession' on 10 April 1918) (Leipzig: Der neue Geist, 1918), p. 11. 20. Mosse, Nationalism, pp. 55—8; on homoeroticism in England, pp. 62f. 21. Mosse, Nationalism, p. 64. 22. The year of publication of Heinrich Schurtz's Altersklassen und Mannerbunde. Cf. Reulecke, 'Das Jahr 1902'. 23. Cited by Reulecke, 'Das Jahr 1902', p. 7. 24. Reulecke, 'Das Jahr 1902', p. 7. See also Klaus von See, Tolitische Mannerbund-Ideologie von der wilhelminischen Zeit bis zum Nationalsozialismus', Mannerbande, Mannerbunde, pp. 93—102. 25. Quoted by Reulecke, 'Das Jahr 1902', pp. 9f.: 'Die Mannerbunde des Heeres und der SA, der SS und des Arbeitsdienstes sind allesamt Verlangerungen der HJ in das Mannesalter hinein. Ihre erzieherische Kernaufgabe ist ein und dieselbe. In ihren Ordnungen und durch sie soil der politische deutsche Mensch geformt werden . . . . Gemeinsam ist ihnen alien auch die Vorherrschaft der leiblichen und Willenserziehung. Geistige Schulung und insbesondere Bildung stehen zuriick.' 26. For Himmler's mystical version of the Mannerbund see Reinhard Greve, 'Die SS als Mannerbund', Mannerbande, Mannerbunde, pp. 107-12. 27. Klaus Theweleit, Mdnnerphantasien, Vol. 2 (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1980), p. 334. 28. Cited by Alison Hennigan, 'Aspects of literature and life in England', in Fin de Sie.de and its Legacy, ed. M. Teich and R. Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 194, from Yeats, Autobiographies. Hennigan: 'His [Henley's] ambivalence would have come as no surprise to many homosexual men of the period from whom the saga of Henley's obsessively ardent and fiercely destroyed friendship with Robert Louis Stevenson might well have drawn a weary smile of recognition.' 29. See Jeffrey Richards, '"Passing the love of women": manly love and Victorian society', in Manliness and Moraliiy, ed. J. A. Mangan and James Walvin, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), pp. 92-122. 30. Thus even in our post-Wilde, homophobic age one finds, under certain circumstances, in certain contexts, that men still 'mess around' with each other physically — from on-the-pitch 'real' camaraderie and embraces and after-the-match ritual drunken collective 'mock' striptease and 'mock' 'initiation ceremonies' of football and rugby players to strange initiation ceremonies (involving, for instance, masturbation in a coffin before an allmale audience) for initiates of American college fraternities, and this all without considering they are 'committing' a 'homosexual act' (that is what 'homosexuals' do). The context is all important for the endurance of this

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belief: ritual, 'mock' ritual or 'serious ritual'; sport or play; the consumption of large quantities of alcohol - all 'rituals' which miraculously transform activities which in any other circumstances would be seen by the same people to prove that their participants were 'homosexual', into activities which prove their participants are 'real men' and 'not homosexual'. The magic words which are recited over the transsubstantiation appear to be simply 'not homosexual'. Thus one arrives at a peculiar situation where men can enjoy a certain amount of physical intimacy with each other, as long as this is in a certain ritual context or even as long as it is clear that no 'love' and not even too much tenderness is involved, or love each other with a passion 'passing the love of women' as long as they do not have too .much physical or any sexual contact and still be convinced that this has nothing to do with 'homosexuality', and continue to define and marginalize other men as 'homosexuals'. To cite Kinsey: 'Males do not represent two discrete populations heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white, for nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into pigeon-holes. The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects. The sooner we learn this concerning human sexual behaviour, the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the reality of sex.' Quoted by Declan Kiberd, Men and Feminism in Modern Literature (London: Macmillan, 1985), p. 30. 31. On how modern homophobia still destroys relationships between men see Badinter, XY, pp. 179-80. 32. See James D. Steakley, 'Iconography of a scandal: political cartoons and the Eulenburg affair in Wilhelmin Germany', in Hidden from History, ed. M. B. Duberman, M. Vicinus and G. Chauncey Jr. (London: Penguin, 1991). See also Isabel von Hull, The Entourage of Kaiser Wilhelm II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

7

Insiders/Outsiders: Conrad's The Nigger of the Narcissus and Stoker's Dracula

Fantasies of invasion and expulsion There may be a wide gulf separating these two novels published in 1897 in terms of literary quality or simply good writing as well as in terms of genre and the expectations of their respective readerships, but thematically they are not so far apart at all, indeed they are strikingly similar. In brief both are what one might call fantasies of invasion and expulsion; both deal with the threat posed to a community of men by someone who is defined as an 'outsider', and indeed with the constitution of that very community through the final redrawing of the boundary between 'insiders' and 'outsiders'. James Wait, the 'nigger' of the ship Narcissus, threatens the ethos and saps the morale of the ship's company by not 'pulling his weight/Wait'; Dracula, the Transsylvanian vampire, sucks the very lifeblood of the community. The community thus threatened and thus constituted is in both cases understood by extension to be England or Britain as a whole. The concerns of each novel were moreover not restricted to England or Britain at the end of the nineteenth century but were part of a European discourse on the subject of 'degeneration', 'decadence' and a perceived threat of anarchy accompanying the arrival of modernity itself. The common response across Europe to such perceived threats was a renewed emphasis on loyalty to and identification with the nation-state or empire as the ultimate

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guarantor of identity, and of masculine identity in particular, in this modern world of flux, as well as an underscoring of the distinction or boundary between the community as empire or nation-state and its 'outside'. This was an ideology which would culminate in the so-called 'Great War'.

The 'nigger' In Conrad's novel the threat posed by the presence of the 'nigger', James Wait, on the ship Narcissus is both clearly political and vaguely 'metaphysical'. Wait disturbs the comradely hierarchy of the ship's company by adopting an aristocratic individualist attitude inappropriate to his position as newcomer to that hierarchy. He was 'naturally scornful, unaffectedly condescending'.1 Even his first words - when at the end of a roll-call he calls out his name (Wait!) are initially misunderstood as an impudent command from a nobody who is seen to draw attention to himself as an individual and to disrupt and delay the efficient course of events in which individuals at this level of the hierarchy are not important. Once at sea he refuses to play his allotted role in this society by shirking hard work and pretending to be sick. As he gains the sympathy of other members of the crew, his influence spreads to infect morale on the ship and a short-lived disorganized mutiny erupts. The dissatisfaction which leads to this mutiny is whipped up by an inadequate revolutionary called Donkin, who appears to be something of a lesser doppelganger of the 'nigger', an 'enemy within' corresponding to the invading enemy, and described as the 'pet of philanthropists and self-seeking landlubbers', the 'deserving creature who knows all about his rights, but knows nothing of courage, of endurance, and of the unexpressed faith, of the unspoken loyalty that knits together a ship's company' (p. 6). The unmanly appearance of this would-be revolutionary sets him apart from the rest of the crew: 'His neck was long and thin; his eyelids were red; rare hairs hung about his jaws; his shoulders were peaked and drooped like the broken wings of a bird' (p. 5). The threat to the body politic is thus seen to derive from the egoism and insubordination of 'outsiders' — arrogant, deceitful 'niggers' who 'shirk hard work' - and the silly political ideas about 'rights' and 'equality' endorsed by 'insiders' — 'philanthropists and self-seeking landlubbers' as well as scrawny, unmanly and inadequate 'shirkers'. It appears that in The Nigger of the Narcissus Conrad was referring specifically to contemporary agitators for reform at sea as well as on land, namely Samuel Plimsoll, mentioned at one point by Knowles and after whom the Plimsoll mark (indicating a maximum permissible load on British ships) was named, and Frank Podmore, a co-founder of the Fabian Society after whom

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Conrad may have named the cook of the Narcissus. It is likely that such 'antiLiberal barbs' would have been appreciated by readers of W. E. Henley's conservative New Review, in which the novel was serialized.2 To support this political message Conrad lends the 'nigger's' blackness a cliched and racist metaphysical significance, describing Wait as some kind of 'prince of darkness', a 'black idol' (p. 64) who 'seemed to hasten the retreat of departing light by his very presence' (p. 21). The influence of this decadent prince of darkness seduces the crew away from the path of truth and plunges them into a world of uncertainty and falsehood. He persuades everyone to half-believe his 'unmanly lie' (is this lie then 'womanly' ?) — that he is seriously sick — and then, when the crew knows this to be a lie, fools them again by really becoming sick and claiming he is well. Jimmy is constantly identified with falsehood, but what is so pernicious about this falsehood is that it is not merely the opposite of truth but that it undermines 'truth' altogether. Black Jimmy threatens the white man's 'black and white' vision, which views everything dualistically in terms of polar opposites such as black/white, good/ evil, true/false, inside/outside, native/foreign and so on. Wait so confuses the 'true' and the 'false' that the men are, figuratively as well as literally, 'all at sea'. The narrator describes Jimmy's influence thus: in the confused current of impotent thoughts that set unceasingly this way and that through the bodies of men, Jimmy bobbed up, upon the surface, compelling attention, like a black buoy chained to the bottom of a muddy stream. Falsehood triumphed. It triumphed through doubt, through stupidity, through pity, through sentimentalism. ... He was demoralising. Through him we were becoming highly humanised, tender, complex, excessively decadent: we understood the subtlety of his fear, sympathised with all his repulsions, shrinkings, evasions, delusions — as though we had been over-civilised, and rotten, and without any knowledge of the meaning of life. (p. 85) There appears to be a natural kinship between the blackness of James Wait's skin, obscurity, lack of clarity, falsehood, metaphysical evil, confusion, impotence, decadence and 'over-civilization', and they are all lumped together.3 Jimmy thus embodies very many of the confusions of the fin de siecle mentioned earlier. Jimmy's falsehood seems at times to have infected the whole universe and to be in league with the unhelpfully calm sea. Indeed Old Singleton, the learned and savage patriarch' (p. 3) believes there is a causal connection between the calm and Jimmy's long-drawn-out death. Jimmy's 'dead weight' is delaying the ship and the course of commerce. But eventually land is sighted and 'for the first time that voyage Jimmy's sham existence seemed for a moment forgotten in the face of a solid reality' (p. 90). Once his body has been

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thrown overboard, the wind rises and the brotherhood can sail home to that other great ship: a mighty ship bestarred with vigilant lights - a ship carrying the burden of millions of lives - a ship freighted with dross and with jewels, with gold and with steel. ... A ship mother of fleets and nations! The great flagship of the race; stronger than the storms and anchored in the open sea. (pp. lOOf.) Presumably the lessons of the Narcissus could be applied there too: decadents, degenerates and socialists must be jettisoned in order that the nation 'Narcissus' may sail on. Rule Britannia! Conrad's Nigger of the Narcissus is thus a contribution to a discourse concerned to consign to the past and to the 'outside' (of the nation/ community): (1) a crisis of motivation, values, of 'direction' and 'orientation' consequent upon the nineteenth century's deconstruction of traditional beliefs (from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche); (2) Darwinist-inspired fears regarding physical, mental, sexual and racial 'degeneration' (from Lombroso to Havelock Ellis); which for many was linked with (3) democratization, internationalism, socialism and the threat of anarchy; as well as with (4) artistic 'decadence' and 'degeneration' (Nordau). All of these concerns came to something of a head during the trials in 1895 of Oscar Wilde, who was of course, along with Nietzsche, one of the principal 'deconstructors' of the opposition between truth and falsehood, art and life. Not only were these worries to be consigned to the past and foreign territories; there was a desire to regenerate and remotivate the population at large by replacing the increasingly redundant 'grand recit' (great narrative), to use Lyotard's phrase, of religion, which had had its day as the discourse legitimating such oppositions as true/false and good/evil, etc., with a new 'grand recit' of intensified nationalism and imperialism, the inevitable and even desired denouement of which would be the First World War. Twice in the preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus, Conrad describes his artistic aim as being to reveal the 'solidarity' 'which binds men to each other'. And indeed it is the solidarity which binds men to each other which is at issue in The Nigger: as one contemporary reviewer remarked, 'the only female in the book is the ship itself'.4 It seems further that this masculine solidarity 'inside' had to be pitted against some 'outside'/'outsider'. While Conrad sought this mysterious 'solidarity' in the merchant navy's battle with the sea, others wished to encourage a sense of national solidarity through mass identification with the navy of the empire. In 1897, the same year that The Nigger of the Narcissus was published, Alfred von Tirpitz launched his great battle fleet challenging the British rule of the waves. The arms race

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began. The British Navy League had been founded in the mid-1890s to raise public support for the navy; the German Navy League was founded in 1898 and quickly surpassed its British counterpart in its propaganda campaign and in its membership.5 At issue was indeed national 'solidarity'. In the words of Cecil Rhodes: 'who will avoid civil war must be an Imperialist'; in those of the Kaiser's friend, Prinz Eulenburg: To keep the masses from revolt, we must have a forward policy'. Tirpitz himself claimed the navy was the 'answer both to educated and uneducated social democracy'.6 Promoting a sense of solidarity with the imperial mission abroad, in other words, would distract people from the real inequalities at home. From about 1893 onwards the British had regarded war as 'fairly imminent, inevitable and not undesirable'. The British 'neo-Darwinians' wrote that war was not simply a passing affliction, but a glorious and inevitable mode of progress, sanctioned by a law of nature. The nation had become great through war and the nation which did not and could not make war would deteriorate and cease to exist as a nation. ... The progress of humanity required the maintenance of the race struggle, physical, industrial, political, in which the weaker powers would go under, while the strongest and fittest would survive and flourish, because it was desirable that the world should be peopled, governed and developed, as far as possible, by the races which could do the work best.7 The outbreak of the Boer War in 1899 was welcomed by many in England as an opportunity to demonstrate this belief. W. E. Henley, self-styled leader of an anti-decadent 'regatta' and one of Oscar Wilde's fiercest attackers, whose New Review had serialized The Nigger, joined the chorus of jingoism with his poem 'Remonstrance' asking 'Where is our ancient pride of heart?', and cheering 'Rise, England, rise!' and 'Strike, England, and strike home!'8 In the midst of all the excitement about the demonstration of national and racial superiority on the evolutionary ladder the more perfectly developed specimens of humanity, the British, put women and children in concentration camps. The Boer War also led to the discovery that a shocking number — 60 per cent — of the young British recruits were themselves not anything like perfectly developed specimens of humanity but were scrawny, undernourished individuals, rather like Conrad's Donkin, who showed clear signs of coming from generations of poverty, poor working and living conditions and who were physically unfit for military duties. The solution to this sad state of affairs, according to Robert Baden-Powell, was Scouting for Boys (1908).9 To return however to Conrad: what I want to suggest is that The Nigger of the Narcissus is a contribution to a European discourse concerning decadence and degeneration and to the rise (across Europe) of an ideology of 'national

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solidarity', which Conrad happens to urge upon his adopted Britain, an ideology which emphasizes an unquestioning commitment to 'solidarity', duty and hard work and the wearing of a 'stiff upper lip' in the fulfilment of a collective task imposed from 'above', however apparently unappetizing it may be, an endorsement of essentially military values whose real motive appears to be the overcoming of individual loneliness and a personal, national and indeed masculine crisis of motivation. Unfortunately Conrad's 'solidarity which binds men to each other' must almost of necessity, in order to constitute itself, represent some 'outsider' as a 'disease eroding the vigour of the corporate body' and excoriate 'compassion, sentimental pity and tenderness to suffering as capitulations to decadent egoism', as Benita Parry writes.10 Conrad will unravel this 'black and white' ideological 'yarn' (and express his horror at the excesses of Belgian imperialism in the Congo) in Heart of Darkness11 — though perhaps only to spin it again to Kurtz's 'intended' and the folks back home but for the moment the challenge presented by James Wait was in fact just what was required in order to reinforce the national brotherhood and exorcize it of the threat to its unity of disenchantment, degeneration, decadence and simple dissent.

The vampire: invader and immigrant Bram Stoker's Dracula is another tale of exorcism, also published in 1897, and of which over a million copies were sold soon after publication. The tale of a descendant of Attila the Hun leaving his Eastern European home to acquire a few houses in London so that he might practise his English, infect the women of England with his disease and suck the nation's blood and of his being chased back to his castle and finished off for good seemed to grip the English reading public by the jugular, 'terrorizing and titillating'12 its readers. The story begins with Jonathan Marker's account of his journey eastwards via Vienna and Buda-Pesth [sz'c] where: The impression \ had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East', which means for him 'the traditions of Turkish rule'.13 To emphasize the patriotic nature of his ultimate task, Stoker has Jonathan depart from Bistritz for Dracula's castle on the eve of St George's Day. An old woman presents him with a rosary to aid him in his struggle with the dragon.14 In fact, once inside Dracula's castle, Jonathan very quickly comes to rely on such religious and specifically Catholic paraphernalia to protect him from the Count. Bram Stoker's Dracula is perhaps an English version of Huysmans' tale of occultism La Bas (1891), where La Bas is plainly far removed from England to 'one of the wildest and least known portions of Europe' (p. 8). What belongs 'down there', in those geographical nether regions, comes,

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however, to haunt England. Dracula explains to Jonathan how he has studied English life in books and magazines and how he now longs 'to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is' (p. 31). In Dracula's library Jonathan finds a map of England with rings marked on it: one east of London 'manifestly where his new estate was situated' (p. 36); and two others in Exeter and at Whitby on the Yorkshire coast. It turns out that Dracula has acquired several 'ghastly refuges' in various parts of London, including Piccadilly, where he has boxes of Transylvanian soil 'enriched by the blood of men, patriots or invaders' (p. 33) deposited. These last boxes of 'imported earth' must later be sanitized by such modern household disinfectants as garlic and communion hosts in order to deprive Dracula of his literal pieds-a-terre in England. Thus Stoker's Dracula could be said to constitute an early example of what has been termed 'invasion literature', common in England during the years preceding the First World War. The term includes such works of popular fiction as Erskine Childers's The Riddle of the Sands (1903), William Le Queux's The Invasion of 1910, serialized in the Daily Mail in 1906, and Guy du Maurier's play An Englishman's Home (1909).15 Simple immigration is, of course, often unreasonably put on a par with military invasion, and fears of invasion are to this day all too often mobilized to oppose immigration. The link between invasion and immigration is inspired by an obsession with the maintenance of a clear boundary between 'us' and 'them' along the same lines as those clearly drawn lines on maps which do not necessarily correspond with any natural feature of the landscape but which none the less separate one nation-state from another. Thus the nationalist opposition of 'inside' and 'outside', of 'us' and 'them', transformed arbitrary political divisions into quasi-natural distinctions, and this all the more intensely as distinctions between classes and communities within these boundaries were eroded. Jules Zanger seeks to link Dracula with 'a number of popular apprehensions which clustered around the appearance in England of great numbers of Eastern European Jews at the end of the century'.16 Between 1881 and 1900 the number of Jews living in England increased by 600 per cent due to pogroms and anti-Semitic legislation in Russia. The Bishop of Stepney spoke of 'the Jews coming in like an army, eating up Christian gentiles ...' (p. 34). Zanger proceeds to relate how Jews have been associated with vampirism and the 'blood libel' since their earliest appearances in the West (p. 37). He documents how over the course of the latter half of the nineteenth century Jewish communities all over Europe were constantly accused of murdering Christians, supposedly in order to obtain their blood. In England a popular theory held

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that Jack the Ripper was a Jewish kosher butcher or ritual slaughterer (shochet) (p. 42). While it therefore seems quite likely that many readers would have made the connection between Dracula and 'the swarming Jews of Whitechapel',17 Stoker did not restrict himself to appealing to an anti-Semitic audience by unequivocally stating that Dracula was a Jew, but rather sought to project a considerable variety of fears regarding the state of England and the English themselves onto the figure of the immigrant 'foreigner', 'outsider', 'stranger', 'alien', whose origin is not clearly defined. It was the eternal homelessness of the Jews, Zygmunt Bauman suggests, rather than their religion, which has led them so often to be the victims of a more general xenophobia and 'heterophobia'. Bauman writes: The objects of antisemitism occupy as a rule the semantically confusing and psychologically unnerving status of foreigners inside, thereby striding a vital boundary which ought to be clearly drawn and kept intact and impregnable; and the intensity of antisemitism is most likely to remain proportional to the urgency and ferocity of the boundarydrawing and boundary-defining drive.18 It is this 'boundary-drawing and boundary-defining drive' to separate the 'inside' from the 'outside', 'us' from 'them' that we (!) find in Dracula, and, as is usual with such exercises, the 'outside' becomes the imagined repository of anything deemed undesirable which exists 'inside'.

Madmen, degenerates, animals, criminals and slimy strangers

The place Jonathan's firm of solicitors has purchased for the vampire at Carfax happens to be next door to the mental asylum where Dr Seward supervises the ravings of the demented Darwinist Renfield, who is somehow mysteriously linked to the bloodthirsty blow-in. The implication appears to be that the minds of the insane are just such 'boxes of imported earth' as the Count's baggage and that this alien's purpose is to infect the nation with foreign insanity. This was not an uncommon view: even in 1924 it was seriously suggested in a book called The Borderland that unchecked immigration was making Britain 'a dumping ground for the unfit ... it is a strange irony that once a lunatic is on the sea his only landing-place appears to be England, which has thus become the asylum of the world'.19 Fears that madness was on the increase as much as other diseases affecting the nation's health, other stigmas of degeneration on a race destined to evolve towards biological perfection, were widespread in the latter quarter of the nineteenth century.20 'If lunacy

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continues to increase as at present', The Times editorialized in April 1877, 'the insane will be in the majority and, freeing themselves, will put the sane in asylums.'21 A strange parallel is drawn between the mental patient's madness and Dracula's masterful cleverness: while Renfield feeds flies to spiders, spiders to sparrows, sparrows to himself and himself eventually to his 'master', Dracula, as well as treating other humans as a predator treats its prey, lands at Whitby in the form of a dog and can transform himself at will into the shape of a bat, or even into the shapelessness of a mist. From this one might draw a number of conclusions: firstly that Renfield, the mentally degenerate, fulfils much the same function as Donkin, the physically degenerate and 'the enemy within' in The Nigger of the Narcissus; secondly that Renfield's methodical placing of himself in the food chain as well as Dracula's transformations threaten to erase the boundary between human and animal nature, a boundary apparently not as distinctly drawn in the mad and the foreign as in the native intellect; thirdly that as the notion of 'degeneration' was conceived as the opposite of the progressive march of evolution away from 'the origin of species' through ever more complicated differentiations between species and between the human species and other species, Dracula and Renfield are here demonstrating their degeneracy in Darwinist terms by slipping over these boundaries as easily as they slip over other boundaries. One might further draw a parallel between this threat to the maintenance of the boundaries between species (as to other boundaries, as we shall see) and James Wait's threat in The Nigger of the Narcissus to the clarity of the boundary between truth and falsehood, and so to all certainty. Zygmunt Bauman argues that in a modern world obsessed with order and the ability to classify and to draw clear boundaries, the 'stranger' becomes the bearer par excellence of all the ambivalence and lack of clarity thus marginalized. Bauman writes: The friends/enemies opposition sets apart truth from falsity, good from evil, beauty from ugliness. It also differentiates between proper and improper, right and wrong, tasteful and unbecoming. It makes the world readable and thereby instructive. It dispels doubt.22 The 'stranger', however, is an unknown quantity who disturbs this neat opposition of 'inside' and 'outside' and a member of 'the family of undecidables — those baffling yet ubiquitous unities that, in Derrida's words ... , "can no longer be included within philosophical (binary) opposition, resisting and disorganizing it ..."' (p. 55). The 'stranger' 'undermines the spatial ordering of the world ... , the staying-together of friends and the remoteness of enemies' (p. 60) and is a person afflicted with the 'incurable sickness of multiple incongruity'. The 'bane of modernity',

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He may well serve as the archetypal example of Sartre's le visquex [sic] or Mary Douglas's the slimy — an entity ineradicably ambivalent, sitting astride an embattled barricade (or, rather, a substance spilled over the top so that it makes it slippery both ways), blurring a boundary line vital to the construction of a particular social order or a particular life-world, (p. 61) In reality of course the 'stranger' is no more and no less 'slimy' or 'ambivalent' than the friends, the 'insiders' or the enemies, the 'outsiders'; this is merely the attribute projected upon the stranger by the 'insiders' in order to rid themselves of any taint of slimy ambivalence. Bauman argues further that the modern national state 7s designed primarily to deal with the problem of strangers, not enemies' and by 'deal with' he means 'eliminate' or at least 'attempt to eliminate' (p. 63). This is also, as we shall see, the project of the friends in Stoker's novel, once they have projected all their own 'sliminess' onto the illegal immigrant. But first more of Dracula's 'sliminess': as well as declaring madness a foreign import, Stoker suggests criminality originates elsewhere than on English soil. The Count, described as the 'father or furtherer of a new order of beings' (p. 389), is 'a criminal and of criminal type. Nordau and Lombroso would so classify him' (p. 439). The vampire, again according to Van Helsing, is known everywhere that men have been. In old Greece, in old Rome; he flourish in Germany all over, in France, in India, even in the Chersonese; and in China, so far from us in all ways, there even is he, and the peoples fear him at this day. He have the wake of the berserker Icelander, the devil-begotten Hun, the Slav, the Saxon, the Magyar, (p. 307) Abroad apparently lay a veritable sea of congenitally criminal vampires.

Sex and disease Dracula's criminality and animal 'nature' are evident in his 'unnatural' taste for human blood. His first English victim is Lucy Westenra, who retains only a Vague memory of something long and dark with red eyes' (p. 130) and two 'little white dots with red centres' (p. 127) on her throat after their meeting. Soon it becomes clear that she has contracted 'that devil's illness' (p. 456) as she weakens and becomes mysteriously 'bloodless'. It is difficult not to infer two things from the description of this incident: firstly that there is more to Dracula's taste for human blood than just a 'straightforward' taste for human blood and that this something more is both sexual and so 'abominable that it

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can only be hinted at; and secondly that this sexual 'crime' is being linked to the spread of an infectious disease, for the vampire's victims automatically become vampires themselves with those give-away 'little white dots with red centres' on their throats. Long after Lucy's death, Mina is discovered in a 'terrible and horrid position': Kneeling on the near end of the bed facing outwards was the white-clad figure of his [Marker's] wife. By her stood a tall thin man, clad in black. His face was turned from us, but the instant we saw it we all recognized the Count in every way, even to the scar on his forehead. With his left hand he held both Mrs Marker's hands, keeping them away with her arms at full tension; his right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white nightdress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man's bare breast, which was shown by his torn-open dress. The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten's nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink, (p. 363) It appears from the horror expressed at this 'terrible and horrid position' that Mina is indeed being instructed not just in vampirism but in 'horrid' acts of 'sexual degeneracy'.23 After the innocent Mina has been caught in this compromising position, and rescued, though a little late, she considers herself 'Unclean, unclean!' and declares: 'I must touch him [her husband, Jonathan] or kiss him no more. Oh, that it should be that it is I who am now his worst enemy, and whom he may have most cause to fear' (p. 366). To which all one can say is that this is a bit of an overreaction if all they were doing was having a drink together. So in addition to the charges of illegal immigration and of having a degenerate congenital kinship with madness, criminality and wild animals, Dracula is also charged with sexual transgressions, to wit, unashamed promiscuous behaviour with several women, indulgence in and promulgation of horrid deviant sexual practices and the transmission of sexual disease. James Twitchell argues that the vampire only really entered Western popular culture in the seventeenth century 'as a logical way to account for the geometric progression of deaths caused by the plague bacteria'.24 The plaguelike sexual disease of the fin de sie.de was syphilis, which was apparently the cause of Bram Stoker's own death in 1912. The disease was described by one commentator as an 'invisible demon' and by another in 1919 as 'the enemy of man, the enemy of woman, the enemy of the child, the enemy of the home, the enemy of the nation, and the enemy of the Empire'.25 Already in this externalization of syphilis as 'the enemy' lies implicit a projection of the

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disease onto not only foreign territory but also foreign people, and anybody considered an 'outsider' — a phenomenon with which we are in these days of AIDS all too familiar. Susan Sontag informs us that the 'military metaphor in medicine first came into wide use in the 1880s, with the identification of bacteria as agents of disease. Bacteria were said to "invade" or "infiltrate" '.26 Syphilis was naturally a favourite metaphor for anything regarded as undesirable: democracy for anti-democrats; the Jews for anti-Semites; 'miscegenation' for advocates of 'racial purity'. Such projections of the disease on the 'outsider' also had implications inside. Davenport-Hines writes: The physical reality of syphilis was distorted not only to degrade those with the disease, but to frighten people away, to quote an Anglican clergyman of 1889, from the 'dangerously narrow borderland between fastness and positive vice'. Dread of venereal disease was stimulated as a matter of public policy: the sexual act was forced to connote danger.27 That 'narrow borderland between fastness and positive vice', between moral 'health' and 'sickness', was no idle metaphor, but was conceived literally and geographically. In The Times in 1895, the soldier Lord Malmesbury complained: not only our young soldiers but also young England is being demoralized. Bring in again the Contagious Diseases Act and help the struggling humanity of the rising generation to be able to defend our shores and keep Englishmen as they were in the olden days.28 It is doubtful whether the Contagious Diseases Act would have stopped Dracula at his point of entry but one can appreciate the kind of real fears this fictional character could embody. In an essay published in The Nineteenth Century and After in 1908 Stoker himself 'launched an all-out attack on literary "works of shameful lubricity" that were "actually corrupting the nation"' and advocated 'continuous and rigid' censorship.29 'Women', he wrote, 'are the worst offenders in this form of breach of moral law.' The author of Dracula considered not just sex but 'the sexual impulses' dangerous: 'A close analysis will show that the only emotions which in the long run harm are those arising from the sex impulses, and when we have realized this we have put our finger on the actual point of danger.'30 If Stoker was not trying to be funny, this last phrase as well as the call for 'rigid' censorship must surely be regarded as a classic Freudian slip - of the pen, or of the wagging finger.

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Dracula's 'devil's illness' attacks not just the young women of England, as we have seen, but also the young men. Lucy's bloodless condition after her interview with the vampire requires 'transfusion' of blood from the three men who had proposed to her. First is her fiance, Arthur, of 'stalwart proportions', an example of 'strong young manhood': As the transfusion went on something like life seemed to come back to poor Lucy's cheeks, and through Arthur's growing pallor the joy of his face seemed absolutely to shine. After a bit I began to grow anxious, for the loss of blood was telling on Arthur, strong man as he was. (p. 161) Just as Dracula sucks the blood or vitality out of the women, the women, his female agents, drain the men. Dr Seward, after his own contribution, comments: 'No man knows until he experiences it, what it is to feel his own life-blood drawn away into the veins of the woman he loves' (p. 167). Showalter suggests that the female vampire represented the oversexed wife or the New Woman whose insatiable sexual demands were feared by men. In that case, the political and sexual liberation sought by feminism is being seen as a dangerous foreign disease, disseminated (!) among the nation's women by a wicked agent provocateur. A gynaecologist of the time declared that 'just as the vampire sucks the blood of its victims in their sleep, so does the woman vampire suck the life and exhaust the life of her male partner'.31 One should, it appears, be almost as wary of women (whether feminists or not) as of foreigners. Foreign women are of course particularly dangerous — and tempting — for the young English man. During his stay in Dracula's castle Jonathan Marker himself has a close encounter with three foreign temptresses, one of whom approaches him: I could feel the movement of her breath upon me. Sweet it was, in one sense, honey sweet, and sent the same tingling through the nerves as her voice, but with a bitter underlying the sweet, a bitter offensiveness, as one smells in blood. ... The girl went on her knees and bent over me, fairly gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth. Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed about to fasten on my throat. Then she paused, and I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and could feel the hot breath on my neck. ... (p. 54)

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Jonathan and the reader are spared an indulgence in masochistic pleasure32 ironically by the entrance of the Count, who declares This man belongs to me' (p. 55). The next morning Jonathan awakes in his own bed and concludes that the Count must have carried him there and undressed him. Interestingly this scene and specifically the phrase uttered by Dracula, This man belongs to me', appear to have constituted the seed in Stoker's mind from which the whole novel grew. It seems that over the course of several years Stoker repeatedly wrote this phrase in his notes for the novel.33 In the influential 1932 film version with Bela Lugosi this scene was made more explicit: Dracula drugs his visitor with wine and 'imperiously waves the three ghostly vampire women away as he himself bends over and envelops his victim'.34 Jonathan became aware of his host's interest in him soon after his arrival at the castle when he cut himself shaving: the blood was trickling over my chin. I laid down the razor, turning as I did so half-round to look for some sticking plaster. When the Count saw my face, his eyes blazed with a kind of demoniac fury, and he suddenly made a grab at my throat, (p. 38) The last time the Count bade Jonathan 'Good Night' he blew him a kiss, 'with a red light of triumph in his eyes, and with a smile that Judas in hell might be proud of (p. 69). These elements of the novel incline one to agree with Christopher Craft who argues that the novel's 'opening anxiety ... derives from Dracula's hovering interest in Jonathan Marker' and that the 'sexual threat that this novel first evokes, manipulates, sustains, but never finally represents is that Dracula will seduce, penetrate, drain another male'.35 Craft also suggests that this 'homosexual' threat, fear and desire is constantly displaced and disguised throughout the novel in encounters which, if they are to be interpreted as sexual at all, are apparently heterosexual, whose real meaning is however rather to be found in relations between men than in relations between men and women. From the opening episodes between the Count and Jonathan one certainly does get the impression that this foreigner is 'haemosexually' interested not just in the women of England but in the men too.36 Particularly after the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895, confusion of 'sexual identity' (the notion of such a thing as a fixed, and definable, 'sexual identity' was of course the invention of the last quarter of the nineteenth century) and anything approaching 'homosexuality' was another internal demon targeted for exorcism or deportation to foreign territory. Bram Stoker himself was evidently interested in the issue and used the inevitable metaphor of the 'borderline' to express his concern when he wrote:

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the ideal man is entirely or almost entirely masculine and the ideal woman is entirely or almost entirely feminine. Each individual must have a preponderance, be it ever so little, of the cells of its own sex, and the attraction of each individual to the other sex depends upon its place on the scale between the highest and the lowest grade of sex. The most masculine man draws the most feminine woman, and vice versa; and so down the scale till close to the borderline in the great mass of persons, who, having only developed a few of the qualities of sex, are easily satisfied to mate with anyone.37 This from a man who had at the age of 24 written, and at the age of 28 (in 1876) sent a rather gushing letter to Walt Whitman in which he wrote: 'How sweet it is for a strong healthy man with a woman's eyes and a child's wishes to feel that he can speak so to a man who can be if he wishes father, and brother and wife to his soul'.38 How does this square with his notions of 'the ideal man' cited above? After the Wilde trials the denial and deportation of any hint of 'homosexual desire' became particularly urgent and homosexual behaviour was not infrequently attributed wholesale to foreigners; it certainly - at least to the 'healthy' English man — was not an English habit. Arnold White, writing in 1916, claimed Germany wanted 'to abolish civilization as we know it, to substitute Sodom or Gomorrah for the New Jerusalem, and to infect clean nations with Hunnish erotomania'.39 The infectious disease White was referring to was homosexuality, the 'doctrine of the German Urnings'. The practice of drawing amazingly precise geographical boundaries around 'homosexual desire and practices' and thus between a native territory free of any taint of such 'perversity' and a foreign realm where 'perversity' was possibly or probably given free rein (at least in the imaginations of the boundary-drawers) was, of course, neither entirely new, nor unique to England. Stoker's Dracula hails from a region just about within what Sir Richard Burton, in his Terminal Essay' to his translation of Thousand Nights and a Night (188588), labelled the 'Sotadic Zone': 1.

2.

There exists what I shall call a 'Sotadic Zone', bounded westwards by the northern shores of the Mediterranean (N. Lat. 43) and by the southern (N. Lat. 30) ... including meridional France, the Iberian Peninsula, Italy and Greece, with the coast-regions of Africa from Marocco to Egypt. Running eastwards the Sotadic Zone narrows, embracing Asia Minor, Mesopotamia and Chaldaea, Afghanistan, Sind, the Punjab and Kashmir.

The Nigger of the Narcissus and Dracula 3. 4.

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In Indo-China the belt begins to broaden, enfolding China, Japan and Turkistan. It then embraces the South Sea Islands and the New World where, at the time of its discovery, Sotadic love was, with some exceptions, an established racial institution. Within the Sotadic Zone the Vice (pederasty) is popular and endemic, held at the worst to be a mere peccadillo, whilst the races to the North and South of the limits here defined practise it only sporadically amid the opprobrium of their fellows who, as a rule, are physically incapable of performing the operation and look upon it with the liveliest disgust.40

As Joseph Boone argues, Burton was merely restating popular Western notions about the East and 'articulating a widespread perception that had hitherto been filtered through codes of vague allusion'.41 The delimitation of a geographical 'Zone' where all the moral and conceptual boundaries of the West were supposedly dissolved served not only the exclusion of practices threatening these boundaries, but also the titillation of the West in Orientalist literature and the promotion of the East as a destination of 'sexual tourism', where Westerners might allow themselves indulgence in fantasy or in reality in 'exotic' pleasures they would not allow themselves or others 'at home'. Once defined as 'exotic', as 'the Other', 'the foreign' par excellence, the East could embody all the sexual ambivalence, as well as every other kind of ambivalence, the West had marginalized in the course of the project of modernity as described by Bauman. All the absolute categories and distinctions of Western modernity, including the recent homo/heterosexual opposition, could be imagined as 'still' (in terms of the evolutionary narrative) in a state of flux, as merging deliriously and dangerously in this 'slimy' 'Other', a geographically delimited 'unconscious' for the accommodation of anything the Western 'ego' cared to repress. An 'erotomania' which is neither exclusively homosexual nor heterosexual, and thus again threatens conceptual boundaries, does perhaps indeed describe what Dracula is attempting to 'infect' 'clean' England with — something terribly, vaguely sexual and tempting which is linked to madness, criminality and the spread of disease.

The ambivalence of the cure To cure the nation of these diseases and all these undesirable qualities, which after all, as I have been at pains to suggest, were internal concerns, what was

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required was one scapegoat foreigner, who must be shown to be the bearer of all these ills and to have come 'inside' from the 'outside' prior to being deported back to where he belongs. However, while the novel is about the fear and seductive attraction of 'Hunnish erotomania' and the threat of venereal diseases deriving from such promiscuity and while these are seen as foreign imports - from which the Aliens Act and the Contagious Diseases Act, or, in the case of Dracula, garlic and communion hosts, might protect the natives of England - in the text of the novel this 'Hunnish erotomania', promiscuity and 'borderline' bisexual behaviour, is replicated on the English side and is indeed part of the 'cure' itself. But this English 'erotomania' is dressed up in religious and patriotic — and misogynist — mumbo-jumbo. After Lucy's death, Arthur feels that since the 'operation' (the blood transfusion) he and Lucy had been really married and that she 'was his wife in the sight of God'. Nobody dares say anything of the other 'operations', though Van Helsing later laughs at the implication that 'this so sweet maid is a polyandrist'. As well as this playful suggestion that Lucy's morals were perhaps rather loose and that three men enjoyed intimate relations with her in a short space of time, these 'operations' could actually be seen as an exercise in male-bonding, the homosocial/sexual object of which is doubly disguised by the apparently non-sexual nature of the 'operations' as well as by the fact that the ostensible object of their attentions is an unconscious woman.42 After the transfusions the men are 'blood brothers', though one is not absolutely sure that it was really their blood which mingled in Lucy's body. A similar scene occurs later, when despite all their efforts Lucy has become a fully fledged vampire and has to be done away with - by driving a 'round wooden stake, some two and a half or three inches thick and about three feet long' (p. 275) through her heart. The men stand watching as her fiance does the job: The Thing in the coffin writhed; and a hideous, blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions; the sharp white teeth champed together till the lips were cut and the mouth was smeared with a crimson foam. But Arthur never faltered. He looked like a figure of Thor as his untrembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake, whilst the blood from the pierced heart welled up and spurted up around it. His face was set, and high duty seemed to shine through it; the sight of it gave us courage, so that our voices seemed to ring through the little vault, (p. 277) As Showalter says, 'the sexual implications of this scene are embarrassingly

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clear'. It is difficult not to see this as a 'gang-rape' with an 'impressive phallic instrument'.43 The purpose of this 'gang-rape', one might add, is really the constitution and bonding of the homosocial 'gang', or what Jonathan Marker himself describes as 'our little band of men' (p. 485). This 'gang' of 'blood brothers', this 'little band of men' is understood by extension to be the nation itself, a national community of men who are threatened by degenerate, 'pervy' foreigners as well as by the weakness and slipperiness of women. In Dracula the attempt to defend the native male against his own insecurities requires the constitution of a national, misogynist Mannerbund, and the projection of men's sexual fears and desires onto alien territory. The threat of invasion appears to be equated with a threat of 'polymorphous perversity', a confusion of the 'sexual identity' and even the rape of the native male - dangers which can be flirted with in the sadomasochistic encounter with the male 'outsider' before ultimately being reprojected onto him when his defeat will show him to be the passive (read 'feminine') victim and the 'insider' victor to have rescued and enhanced his threatened virility. If Dracula threatens the native male with a demonstration of his superior and the native's inferior power through rape one would imagine that his defeat will involve a similar humiliation. The final showdown with Dracula on his home territory is however conspicuously toned down by comparison with the 'gang-rape' of Lucy mentioned above. For some unexplained reason no 'round wooden stake, some two and a half or three inches thick and about three feet long', such as that used on Lucy and on the three female vampires, is used on Dracula, nor is there any long description of the plunging arm and the spurting gore. The obvious ambiguity might be too offensive when it came to the male vampire, who was after all supposed to be their chief quarry.44 All we see is 'the sweep and flash of Jonathan's great knife' as it sheared through Dracula's throat while 'Mr Morris' bowie knife plunged into the heart' (p. 484). Rather an anticlimax after almost 500 steamy pages.

Conclusion My argument has been, once again in sum, that both Conrad's The Nigger of the Narcissus and Stoker's Dracula, both of which were first published in 1897, were attempts to overcome a whole complex of phenomena associated with the terms 'decadence' and 'degeneration', the primary concern of the one being political anarchy and of the other apparently sexual anarchy; both project these fears onto one clearly distinct scapegoat 'outsider' whose existence and difference helps to bond a community of men together and redraw the

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boundary between 'inside' and 'outside' which had been threatened with extinction - apparently by this very 'outsider', though in actual fact by the arrival of modernity itself and its accompanying political, social and sexual revolutions and transformations. Acknowledgement This chapter is a slightly altered version of an article published in the Modern Language Review, January 1997, vol. 92, no. 1, pp. 1—21. Notes 1. Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the Narcissus, a Norton Critical Edition, ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York: Norton, 1979), p. 10. Following page references refer to this edition. 2. Norris W. Yates, 'Social comment in The Nigger of the Narcissus', Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the Narcissus, Norton Critical Edition, ed. Robert Kimbrough, pp. 258-62 (reprinted from PMLA, 79 (March 1964), pp. 183-5). 3. On Conrad's use of racist cliche in The Nigger see Eugene B. Redmond, 'Racism, or realism? Literary apartheid, or poetic licence? Conrad's burden in The Nigger of the Narcissus', in J. Conrad, The Nigger of the Narcissus, Norton Critical Edition, pp. 358—68. 4. Daily Mail, 7 Dec. 1897, quoted by John Batchelor, The Life of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 65. 5. See Brian Bond, War and Society in Europe 1870—1970 (London: Fontana, 1984), pp. 64ff. 6. See Norman Stone, Europe Transformed (London: Fontana, 1983), Chapter 2, '(ii) National Efficiency and "Sammlungspolitik"'. 7. A. J. Marder, quoted by Tom Gibbons, Rooms in the Darwin Hotel (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1973), p. 29. 8. Quoted by Karl Beckson, London in the 1890s: A Cultural History (New York, London: Norton, 1992), p. 372. 9. See Beckson, London in the 1890s, pp. 377-8. 10. Benita Parry, Conrad and Imperialism (London: Macmillan, 1983), p. 61. 11. See Brian W. Shaffer, '"Rebarbarizing civilization": Conrad's African fiction and Spencerian sociology', PMLA, 108 (1, January 1993): 45-58. 12. As Jules Zanger phrases it in 'A sympathetic vibration: Dracula and the Jews', English Literature in Transition, 34 (1, 1991): 33—44 (p. 33). 13. Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. Maurice Hindle (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 7. Following page references are to this edition.

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14. 'Dragon' is, of course, one of the possible interpretations of the name Dracula, along with 'son of the devil'. See Florescu and McNally, Dracula, a Biography of Vlad the Impaler (London: Hale, 1974). 15. Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower (London: Macmillan, 1966), p. 380. See also Brian Bond, War, pp. 77f. 16. Jules Zanger, 'A sympathetic vibration', p. 33. 17. Zanger, 'A sympathetic vibration', p. 40. 18. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 34. 19. Quoted by Elaine Showalter, The female Malady (London: Virago, 1987), p. 110. 20. See Daniel Pick, ' "Terrors of the night": Dracula and "degeneration" in the late nineteenth century', Critical Quarterly, 30 (4, 1988): 71-87. Cf. also Daniel Pick, faces of Degeneration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 21. Cited by Showalter, The female Malady, p. 102. 22. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 54. 23. In Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), James B. Twitchell notes how much has been made of this scene in filmed versions, especially in Frank Langella's production. 24. Twitchell, Dreadful Pleasures, p. 106. 25. The commentators were Lord Ranksborough and Lord Downham, both cited by Richard Davenport-Hines, Sex, Death and Punishment (London: Collins, 1990), p. 163. 26. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1978), pp. 65f. 27. Davenport-Hines, Sex, Death and Punishment, p. 161. 28. Cited by Davenport-Hines, Sex, Death and Punishment, p. 178. 29. Maurice Hindle, Introduction to Dracula, ed. Maurice Hindle (London: Penguin, 1993), p. xiv. 30. Cited by Hindle, Introduction to Dracula, pp. xivf., from Bram Stoker, The censorship of fiction', The Nineteenth Century and After, Vol. LXIV, JulyDec. 1908. 31. Cited by Showalter, Sexual Anarchy (London: Virago, 1992), p. 180. 32. This is an indulgence which threatens the conventional Victorian boundary between the genders, as Christopher Craft argues in '"Kiss me with those red lips": gender and inversion in Bram Stoker's Dracula', Representations, 8 (1984): pp. 107-33 (p. 108). 33. See Christopher Frayling, Vampyres. Lord Byron to Count Dracula (London and Boston, MA: Faber, 1991), p. 301.

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34. Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, p. 182. Dracula, says Showalter, 'is the most popular of all the fin-de-siecle stories for film: by 1980 133 full-length film versions had been recorded', many of which, she maintains, had heavy undertones of homoeroticism. 35. Christopher Craft, '"Kiss me with those red lips'", pp. 109-10. 36. The coinage 'haemosexuality' is Christopher Frayling's, the seventh part of whose book Vampyres is thus headed. 37. Quoted by Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, p. 8. 38. Bram Stoker, Dracula, p. 496. The correspondence between the young Stoker and Whitman is printed as an appendix to Maurice Hindle's edition. 39. Quoted by Davenport-Hines, Sex, Death and Punishment, p. 148. 40. Quoted by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 183. 41. Joseph A. Boone, 'Vacation cruises; or, the homoerotics of Orientalism', PMLA (February 1995): 89-107 (p. 92). 42. This is indeed also Christopher Craft's argument in 'Kiss me', p. 128. 43. Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, p. 181. 44. Christopher Craft is of the same opinion in 'Kiss me', p. 124. One might, however, regard this difference between the treatment of Lucy and Dracula as evidence that the men, including Dracula, really have more regard and less pent-up aggression for each other than for the women in the story.

8

North, South, East, West: Musil, Mann, Hofmannsthal

The geographical confusions of young Torlefi While one empire was worried about uppity niggers and oversexed vampires, another was concerned about imaginary numbers and the stirrings of the unconscious. Robert Musil's Die Verwirrungen des Zoglings Torlefi (The confusions of young Torlefi) (1906) is set in a boarding school in the East of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, 'an der Strecke, welche nach RuSland ftihrt'1 (on the line to Russia), where the confusions of young adolescent Torlefi stem from the transgression and questioning of social, sexual, imperial and mathematical boundaries and are resolved by an ironic recognition, if not of the validity of these boundaries, at least of their practicality. The novel, one might suggest, performs for its writer a kind of 'writing cure' in so far as it is an attempt to work through and ultimately, though without any great conviction, resituate and exorcize some contemporary confusions — not just those of a young Robert Musil embarking on a literary career, but the confusions of contemporary Vienna and of modernity itself — in (a) 'an adolescent phase', i.e. a 'marginal age', and one that has been supposedly left behind; and (b) a marginal place, somewhere near the eastern border of the Austrian Empire, which is also left behind as the adolescent returns in the end to the capital, and to manhood; as well as of course in (c) a work of literature, which in so far as it is completed, closed, is again left behind — behind a boundary separating 'art' and 'life'. While the intellectual confusions of young Torlefi appear to crystallize around the logic-defying square root of minus one, what is really at issue is geography, the mapping of space and the drawing of boundaries to distinguish between places, things and ideas — and keep them apart. Removed from the

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familiar, charted world of his parents and the imperial capital to unfamiliar, uncharted provincial surroundings Torlefi is literally deprived of his bearings at an age when 'orientation' in an uncharted adult world becomes problematic anyway. What TorleS comes to realize is that the geography he had learned as a child — the map of the world showing clear unambiguous borders — is not a faithful representation of the landscape, but an ideological one which may have its practical uses as an aid to orientation in a world where things are not always as they appear. Hence TorleS's obsession with 'Grenzen' (borders) and Musil's emphasis on the crossing of certain boundaries between physical spaces in the novel. In a passage reminiscent of Joseph Conrad's Marlow's 'penetration' to the 'heart of darkness' and indeed of Jonathan Harker's penetration to the heart of Transylvania, TorleS and his friend Beineberg find a passage through the dark woods, which brings them face to face with what they like to style and fetishize as the utterly and exotically Other — divided from themselves by a physical boundary, the crossing or 'penetration' of which is loaded with sexual significance: The far bank was covered with dense trees which ... seemed threatening like a black, impenetrable wall. Only after careful searching did they find a narrow, hidden path that led straight in. From the dense, luxuriously thriving undergrowth a shower of drops fell every time they brushed it with their clothes.2 They eventually find their way to the prostitute with the Slavic name of Bozena, who resides in the obscure and ill-reputed margins of an obscure, provincial village, itself on the farthest-flung margins of the empire. Bozena likes to tease the young gentlemen by telling them of 'goings-on' in the high society of the imperial capital she used to work for, hinting specifically at liaisons between Beineberg's mother and uncle. TorleS suddenly sees the sexless image of his own mother threatened and equally suddenly the boundary between his parents' upper-middle-class, metropolitan world of apparent clarity and moral propriety and a marginal, dark underworld of supposed impropriety populated by subaltern classes and peoples, a boundary which was so ceremoniously underlined as it was transgressed, threatens to dissolve and leave no recognizable bearings by which TorleS might navigate his course through the world. This episode is followed by another longer episode which constitutes the 'action' of the novel and whose significance for TorleS's inherited geography is similar. Reiting reveals that he has discovered who has been behind a series of petty thefts from the schoolboys' lockers. The culprit, he claims, is a certain Basini, whose name sounds uncannily like an Italian equivalent of Bozena. Both

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are fortunately non-Germanic names and indicate an origin in nations commonly characterized by holders of more Germanic names as the geographical site of dubious morals. TorleS's first reaction is, however, utter disbelief as Basini's parents are wealthy, respectable people. What links Basini and Bozena in TorleS's mind is the threat constituted by the sayings or doings of both to that boundary he thought was absolute between his own upperclass background and a criminal(ized) underclass and underworld. To discuss the fate of Basini, Torlefi, Reiting and Beineberg go up to the 'rote Kammer' (the red room) — their secret den in the attic of the school — the approach to which is described in similar terms to those used to describe the approach to Bozena's residence. Many obstacles obstruct access to the 'den' and it is clear that the boys have constructed a significant boundary around a space they wish to define as significantly different from that which surrounds it. The walls of the 'rote Kammer' are covered with blood-red material and there is a loaded revolver for extra atmosphere. Thus the interior decoration of their 'den' is an attempt to imitate the exciting 'underworld' which is at other times the object of their 'sexual tourism'. While the excitingly dangerous criminal sensuality they courted with Bozena was safely removed from the school and marginalized from Austrian and bourgeois society, this room, so religiously guarded, is evidence that this region of 'excitingly dangerous criminal sensuality' is the artificial construction and fetish of that society itself. The 'rote Kammer' at the heart of a school of the Austrian imperial establishment will also be, much like Conrad's 'heart of darkness', the site of an illusion-shattering and profoundly disorientating realization that not only are the two apparently separate worlds of TorleS's (and Marlow's) geography not so separate at all, but also that it is the self-styled paragons of virtue and 'civilization' who are the real 'savages' and 'criminals' and not those they have marginalized and stigmatized as 'savages'. Both Musil's and Conrad's narratives display a scepticism widespread in 'modernist' literature regarding the sustaining ideologies of modern Western 'civilization' and expressed at the dawn of the 'modernist' period most famously and influentially by Nietzsche in Die Geburt der Tragodie (1872), in which he argued provocatively that some of the most admired products supposedly of much admired Greek 'civilization', the tragedies, derived from what the end of the nineteenth century could only regard as most 'uncivilized' Dionysian feasts, characterized by anarchic, wild orgies of sex and violence. For Torlefi the possibility of someone of his own class being guilty of petty theft is magnified until it becomes of earth-shattering significance: Then it was possible that a gate led from the bright world of daily routine, that was all he had known until now, to another gloomy,

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burning, passionate, naked and devastating world. That between those people whose lives move as in a transparent and stable construction of glass and iron in a well-ordered fashion between office and family and others, the fallen, bloody, wild and dirty, those who err through confused alleys full of shouting voices there is not only a bridge but their boundaries collide secretly and closely and can be traversed at any moment.3 The problem, once again, is not Basini, but the threat he poses to the maintenance of a boundary between two 'worlds', the one of transparent clarity, moral probity, normality Torlefi thought he belonged to and a dark exotic world of 'the fallen, bloody, wild and dirty' — quite the respective spheres of Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Basini's misdemeanour, like Bozena's gossip, undermines a whole ideological geography which is in the process of disintegrating in Torlefi's mind. Aloud, however, he utters the simple and utterly condemnatory 'Basini is a thief ... he doesn't belong to us any more' (p. 47). Basini must be punished and expelled from the community, in classic scapegoat fashion, not for his own sins but to appease the confusions of his judge, and to enable him to redraw a conceptual and geographical boundary which is crucial for his way of thinking. What surprises Torlefi is that his friends display no such moral indignation, but rather revel in the power they have acquired over Basini through their discovery. They make of him a slave on whom they perform sadistic experiments in the 'rote Kammer'. This morally questionable behaviour of those he had assumed would be his allies further confuses TorleS's geography and black and white notions of who belongs where. For their behaviour involves quite the opposite of the distance between the 'two worlds' Torlefi's suggested expulsion would effect and implicates them in the same realm of dubious morals to which TorleS wished to consign Basini definitively. TorleS stands by and watches with detached curiosity as the other boys sadistically beat Basini in the 'rote Kammer', until he suddenly realizes to his consternation that his position as neutral spectator has been compromised by the fact that he has become sexually excited by their sadism. TorleS is at first appalled by the revelation that Reiting is using Basini for his own sexual purposes — appalled less, one imagines somehow, by the fact that Reiting is raping Basini on a regular basis, than by the fact that Reiting is involved in a taboo homosexual activity, again something supposedly belonging to the other world of the 'wild and dirty'. It is perhaps interesting, though not very edifying, to see how Reiting himself seeks to free himself of the stigma normally attached to the participants in such activity. Basini explains to TorleS that Reiting has to beat him before having sex with him — not because Basini

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offers any physical resistance but to allay Reiting's own fears about the (homosexual) significance of his actions. Reiting has apparently told Basini that 'if he did not beat him he would have to believe he was a man and then he would not be allowed to be so soft and tender towards him'. But having been beaten, Basini has become his object (Sache) and he need not worry about having sex with him (p. 101). Basini must be transformed into an object before and after he may be treated as a sexual object, the 'equivalent' of a woman, who is, according to this logic, already a subordinate, submissive object for the aggressive subject male. TorleS's initial horror at the idea of Reiting engaging in sexual activity with Basini turns into a fascination with the body of the other boy (Basini, of course, not Reiting), the source of whose fascination is not any particular physical beauty, but, one suspects, the fact that he has clearly become an available sexual object, the use of whose body as an object will apparently not compromise the status or the perceived 'sexual identity' of the subject user, because the relationship is clearly one of exploitation. TorleS's fascination with Basini eventually turns into a sexual relationship which is not as violent as the one between Reiting and Basini, but as devoid of 'love', affection or any inkling of mutual respect or fellow feeling, and based, it seems, purely on curiosity on the part of TorleS. One cannot help suspecting that TorleS's coldness is as much a sanitizing measure as Reiting's violence, the purpose of which is the protection of the subject from the stigma of 'real' homosexuality while performing pretty real homosexual acts with a person who is stigmatized. In addition to and parallel with his sexual confusion, Torlefi has been having problems in maths class. That an imaginary, impossible number — the square root of minus one — should be used as the unit of calculation to arrive at a real result baffles him. The only explanation his teacher can supply is to point to a volume of Kant and speak of 'Denknotwendigkeiten' (necessities of thought). In TorleS's mind the conundrum of the square root of minus one and the Bozena and Basini affairs coincide to produce one inextricable and inexplicable problem. All three are evidence that the rational, male, bourgeois order is not so insulated and distinct from the irrational, female or foreign 'lower orders' as he had been brought up to think, and it is, one might suggest, the clash between these socially and linguistically sanctioned conventional categories and distinctions and his own experience of a world which does not quite fit this language and this map which leads to TorleS's language crisis towards the end of the novel. As the map of the world to which he thought he belonged dissolves so also does the language through which he had attempted to express his identification with that world. As this relation of identification founders, the boundaries of his ego threaten to explode as the identity of both ego and the

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world with which he identified are discovered to have been based on a false notion of themselves as sovereign rational subjects ruling over a distinct subordinate and irrational object world. Of the ego and the world, as after Ernst Mach's analysis, 'il ne reste plus que des "elements", sensations et complexes de sensations (couleurs, sons, pressions, espaces, durees)' (there is nothing left but 'elements', sensations and complexes of sensations (colours, sounds, pressures, spaces, durations)).4 What happens in the red room of an Austrian boarding school at the end of the nineteenth century comes dangerously close to dissolving the opposition between the subject and object, the relationship of power upon which the empire rests. The 'object', presumed to be 'outside', beyond the pale, geographically, socially and sexually - ideally Slav, belonging to the underclass and a woman — is discovered 'inside' the establishment 'subject' — an Austrian, upper-middle-class male, fortunately with an Italian name, who must be toyed with and then expelled, as indeed happens to Basini, in order that the establishment's rule and territory be re-established. The real crime here is apparently allowing oneself to become a victim, and thus revealing one's 'natural' affinity with other subordinates. Reiting's sadism appears to meet with much less disapproval than Basini's masochism, perhaps because a certain amount of sadism was considered the natural attribute of the rulers of the earth, as Krafft-Ebing had considered it the natural attribute of men in general (as opposed to the 'natural' masochism of women). At the same time of course what happens here is an illustration of the normal working of empire and hierarchy, where even the natives of the nation holding sway over other nations, and even the metropolitan bourgeois 'subjects' are more or less on the margins of an 'inside' ultimately situated in the body of the emperor himself, to whom they are 'subject', and where each rank of the hierarchy may consider all subordinate ranks as 'objects' - 'subject to them' while they themselves are objects, 'subject' to the whim of their superiors. The distinction between inside and outside, subject and object, does not simply coincide with the borders or even the peripheral, marginal(ized) regions of the empire, but is replicated along an infinite series of concentric circles, the centre of which is the emperor, or the brain, or the dominant part of the brain of the emperor. Thus each 'individual', including the emperor, is both subject and object, straddles a boundary between 'inside' and 'outside', and replicates the sadomasochistic relationship of power within as well as around her/himself. It was not just a question of a sadistic master/centre and a masochistic slave/ margin, for, as Freud argued in his Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (1905), the two 'perversions' were linked, the roles interchangeable.5 At the beginning of the novel the school was described as a training ground for the ruling classes of the empire. Musil draws attention to the analogy

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between the behaviour of a class of the school and the workings of the state: 'jede Klasse ist in einem solchen Institute ein kleiner Staat fur sich' (each class in such an institute is a little state of its own) (p. 41). Between 1937 and 1941 Musil noted in his diary the contemporary relevance of his story, describing Reiting and Beineberg as the dictators of the day in nucleo.6 TorleS has seen through those 'feine leicht verloschbare Grenzen' (fine, easily erased boundaries) around the individual, separating 'inside' from 'outside', 'subject' from 'object', 'native' from 'foreign', 'upper class' from 'lower class', 'male' from 'female', 'rational' from 'irrational' which these dictators would later attempt to fortify by murdering millions of scapegoat Basinis. His memory, in the midst of his confusions, of his childish wish to be a little girl (p. 86), is perhaps an indication not just of the flimsy nature of these boundaries, but also of a hesitation in identifying with all the conventional attributes of 'masculinity' or 'femininity' - activity or passivity, super- and subordination, power and powerlessness. Having seen through these boundaries, however, he accepts them as Kantian 'Denknotwendigkeiten' (necessities of thought), identification with the 'inside of which is necessary for survival in the society in which he lives, if he does not want to become a Basini himself. Torlefi finally leaves the institution but nevertheless conforms to the forms of the society he has seen through, albeit with an aesthetic-ironic distance. He too, the intellectual artist, has been marginalized, however much he tries to justify himself as belonging to an artistic elite 'above all that', while his friends - Reiting and Beineberg - go on to become the dictators of the 1930s. One wonders whether Torlefi will still half-heartedly outwardly identify with their regime. On leaving the school, Torlefi retains the memory that there are fine, easily erased boundaries around the person (p. 140) and it is around the location or the absence, the erasure or the drawing of these boundaries that the intellectual plot of the novel turns. These boundaries around the person, which are lightly traced and thus lightly affirmed at the end of the novel, appear to be understood both as geographical boundaries and as moral limits, conceptual, cultural and social distinctions, identification with which might be said to legitimate a person's sense of identity. Musil's Die Verwirrungen des Zoglings Torlefi is not just the story of one adolescent's 'identity crisis', though it masquerades as such, but reflects the crises of cultural, social, sexual, political identifications of a particular class in a modern world where to many even/thing seemed in a state of flux, relative, and nothing stable enough to be identified with. Having experienced this very modern crisis, Torlefi appears to wish to forget it again and, with a certain ironic detachment, half-heartedly, though to all outward appearances, identifies with a territory circumscribed by boundaries he knows to be based on hypocrisy and indeed which sustains an ideology which excludes and projects onto others the confusions troubling that territory.

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There is a remarkable parallel between the progress and the resolution of Musil's narrative and that of Conrad's Heart of Darkness where Marlow, having completely seen through the 'civilizing mission' of imperialism and its 'black and white' sustaining hierarchical opposition of 'white civilization' versus 'black savagery', returns to Brussels only to become an agent in the perpetuation of this ideological myth himself, as he tells a 'white lie' to 'the Intended' to protect her from the truth regarding her intended spouse and 'white civilization'. In a sense at the end of Musil's novel T6rle6 simply leaves his confusions behind on the eastern margins of the empire in the care of his doppelganger — Slav prostitutes, pathetic 'homosexuals' with Italian-sounding names — and these in turn in the care of Reiting and Beineberg. TorleS's aesthetic of distance requires a redrawing of those fine, easily erased boundaries and the placing of a physical distance between himself and the geographical site of his confusions, although those confusions themselves had precisely put into question those boundaries and that distance between 'inside' and 'outside', centre and margins.

Tonio Kroger and Death in Venice

Geography and 'orientation' are more obviously of central importance in Thomas Mann's Tonio Kroger (1903) and Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice) (1912), where mere points of the compass are loaded with such significance that it seems that all one would need to answer the major dilemmas in life is a good compass and a Thomas Mann novella. Both these novellas ascribe the geographical direction of the journeys undertaken by their artist anti-heroes to the prevailing influence of one or the other of their parents. Like their author himself, both these artists attribute the artistic streak to their maternal heritage. Their mothers are also both, significantly, foreign. Tonio's father had picked up his beautiful, 'dunkle und feurige' (dark and fiery) wife, 'die so wunderbar den Fliigel und die Mandoline spielte' (who played the piano and the mandolin so wonderfully), from 'ganz unten auf der Landkarte' (right down at the bottom of the map) (p. 121), and it is from her that Tonio derives not just what he regards as his deviant, quasicriminal artistic tendencies, but also his very name, which his classmates consider 'befremdend' (disconcerting/alienating)7. Aschenbach's ancestors had been officers, judges, civil servants, men who had led their strict, decently meagre lives in the service of the king and of the state (p. 462), and he regards 'Zucht' (discipline) as something he has inherited from his father's side (p. 464). Of his mother we are told that she, the daughter of a Bohemian bandmaster, had introduced 'rascheres, sinnlicheres Blut' (racier, more sensual blood) into

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the family (pp. 462f.). It is from her that he derives not just his artistic tendencies but also the 'Merkmale fremder Rasse in seinem Ausseren' (features of foreign race in his external appearance) (p. 463). Thus the artistic, the 'bohemian', the sensual and even the criminal are aligned with not just the feminine but also the foreign, the alien and in particular with the Latin South and the Slav East, precisely the ideological geographical division between 'two worlds' which Musil's young TorleS came to see through, though in the end let stand. The marriages of Mann's artists' parents are figured almost as invasions of the native, healthy male by the not so healthy, foreign, musical female. The sons appear to regard themselves as occupied territories. One is reminded of the sentence Richard Wagner wrote in his diary on 23 October 1881: 'In the mingling of races the blood of the nobler males is ruined by the baser female instinct: the masculine element suffers, character founders, whilst the women gain as much as to take the men's place.'8 Invaded by femininity, and having left his father's house in the North to lead a wandering, bohemian existence around the South, Tonio asks his Slav female friend in Munich 'Is the artist a man at all?' and he compares himself and all artists with the Pope's castrati singers. Real men do not write books, it seems. Even in his childhood, Tonio had betrayed his 'femininity' by accidentally playing the female part at dancing school as well as by his sentimental enthusiasm for literature, while healthy young boys, such as the one he loved, went in for more 'manly' activities. Hans Hanssen was 'ein frischer Gesell, der ritt, turnte, schwamm wie ein Held' (a fresh fellow who rode, did gymnastics and swam like a hero). The fact that Hans does not seem to have a brain in his head appears to endear him even more to the anti-intellectual intellectual, Tonio, who declares his love for life as something entirely opposed to intellect and art and who insists that a noncriminal would never write novellas. Tonio, and Thomas Mann, are speaking here under the influence of such luminaries of the discourse concerning 'degeneration' as Cesare Lombroso, who in L'Uomo di Genio (1888) claimed that 'signs of degeneration are found more frequently in men of genius than even in the insane',9 and Max Nordau, who in dedicating his Entartung (1892—3) to Lombroso wrote: 'Degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists and pronounced lunatics; they are often authors and artists'. Indeed Tonio almost sounds like a parody of Nordau when he declares: 'Das Reich der Kunst nimmt zu, und das der Gesundheit und Unschuld nimmt ab auf Erden' (the empire of art is expanding and the empire of health and innocence is shrinking on Earth). It appears now in retrospect that Thomas Mann's reason for casting such aspersions on the 'masculinity' of the artist, as well as Tonic's linking of the artistic with the criminal temperament, had much to do with Thomas Mann's homosexual desires, and with his internalization of the law criminalizing 'homosexuality', as of the stereotype equating 'homosexuality' with

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'femininity'. Heinrich Dietering has suggested that the adventures of the flesh Tonio embarks upon in the South were specifically modelled on Oscar Wilde's character Dorian Gray's rumoured adventures in the London underworld, the implication in both cases, though never quite spelled out, being that both were sexual tourists in a forbidden homosexual underworld. Dietering also suggests that Tonio's link between the artist and the criminal may have had much to do with the reception of Dorian Gray in German translation in 1901 in which Wilde was referred to principally as a 'homosexual writer' and in which the story of the trials and imprisonment was revived.10 Wilde's trials were of course the crucial event, enabling the popularization of a link between literary and artistic 'decadence' and aestheticism, the Darwinist scientific, medical and ultimately political discourse concerning 'Entartung', 'degeneration' and that other neologism of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, 'homosexuality'. The narrator of Tonio Kroger tentatively suggests that it was perhaps the blood of his mother which drew him to the South, and that 'vielleicht war es das Erbteil seines Vaters in ihm ... , das ihn dort unten so leiden machte' (perhaps it was the inheritance of his father in him ... which made him suffer so much down there) (p. 140). 'Down there' could be interpreted as referring to the lower parts of Tonio's own body, as well as to the 'nether regions' of the map. Is his father, or the memory of his father, really threatening him with the fate of the Pope's singers, with castration? In a letter to Otto Grautoff in 1895 the young Thomas Mann wrote: 'Ich habe mich letzter Zeit nahezu zum Asketen entwickelt ... Ich sage, trennen wir den Unterleib von der Liebe!' (I have almost become an ascetic recently ... I say, let us separate the lower parts of the body from love). At the end of 1896 'down there' in Naples he was still wondering how to cut himself free of his own nether regions: 'Woran leide ich? An der Geschlechtlichkeit ... wird sie mich denn zugrunde richten? ... Wie komme ich von der Geschlechtlichkeit los?' (What am I suffering from? From sexuality ... will it be the death of me? ... How do I get away from sexuality?).11 For Tonio, the South is the body, as it is art, his mother, femininity, sensuality, 'base instincts' and a sexuality he never comes to terms with (no doubt because the direction of his desires would have been termed deviant by others and particularly by his father). The North, on the other hand, is purity, the soul and of course his father, and a 'life' he can declare his love for once he has left his troublesome lower body 'down there'. Mann's aesthetic of distance from 'life', from the body and its desires, his body and his desires, an aesthetic apparently rejected by Tonio in his long discussion with Lisaweta, is converted in Tonio Kroger into a distance measurable in terms of kilometres travelled northwards, towards a 'life' that is pure, or southwards towards a 'life' that is the polar opposite of this imagined purity. Predictably Tonio rejects Lisaweta's suggestion that he return to Italy,

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making the remark in passing that he cannot suffer all those fearfully lively people 'mit dem schwarzen Tierblick' (with the black animal look) down there, and has rather decided on a journey northwards following, as he says, the 'nordliche Neigung von meinem Vater' (the Northern inclination of my father) (p. 158). The only justification he gives for his choice of Denmark is that Hamlet was set there. Perhaps the reference to Hamlet is relevant, in so far as Shakespeare's play concerns a son avenging the crimes of his mother and her lover and setting the ghost of his father to rest and thus about the reconciliation of father and son through a victory over feminine 'frailty', Hamlet's own, as well as his mother's. A year after Tonic's father's death, we remember, his mother ran off to Italy with an Italian musician. One has the impression the narrator is almost on the point of calling out 'Frailty, thy name is woman'. On his way to Denmark Tonio returns to his 'Vaterstadt' and wanders about as in a dream. His 'Heimatstadt' (home town) is strangely 'unheimlich' (unhomely or uncanny). The ultimate insult comes when he is questioned by the police of his 'Vaterstadt' as a suspected con artist, an event which confirms his own theories regarding the criminal nature of the artist. He finds himself a foreigner in his native town, but then that was always the case due to his contamination by his mother's foreign influence. And so he goes further North, in search, it would seem in terms of the geography of the story, of the pure, unadulterated paternal and masculine principle — and apparently finds it in an apparition uncannily resembling his first love — the blond and blue-eyed picture of healthy, Nordic masculinity, Hans Hanssen — who appears to be married to the spitting image of his second love, the equally blond and blueeyed Ingeborg Holm. Tonio watches this couple like a criminal from his place of hiding, admiring their Aryan purity, the 'Gleichheit der Rasse und des Typus, dieser lichten stahlblauaugigen und blondhaarigen Art' (sameness of race and type, this light, steel-blue-eyed and blond-haired type), and he writes to his Slav friend that his love will always be for blond and blue-eyed life, as opposed, we are to understand, to brown-haired and brown-eyed, degenerate, foreign art and artists. Hans Hanssen was modelled on Thomas Mann's own first love, the blond and blue-eyed fellow schoolboy Armin Martins, as well as on Paul Ehrenberg, the latest object of his affections, with whom he had violent arguments in late 1903 as he began to think of marrying the woman he did marry in 1905, Katia Pringsheim.12 It seems that this conversion from homoerotic to heteroerotic attachments, or rather to marriage and bourgeois 'normality', is what Tonio Kroger is enacting in order to bring about in reality. According to Hermann Kurzke, Mann always put homosexual love on the artistic, bohemian and vaguely criminal side and heterosexual love on the

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'burgerlich' and conventional side of his personal list of oppositions. In his essays and speeches Mann was not silent on the issue; indeed he constantly brought up the subject of 'homoeroticism', sometimes urging, quite bravely, its acceptance as a 'normal' part of human experience. But he did waver between different conventional evaluations of 'homosexuality' or 'homoeroticism'. In his 1925 essay 'Uber die Ehe' (Concerning marriage) for example, Mann, having begun to celebrate the liberation of homosexual desire he claimed to see evident among the younger generation, and to find encouraged by the discoveries of psychoanalysis, proceeds to deny this path of desire any access to the realm of the ethical, as, he writes, 'mit Fug und Recht ist die Homoerotik erotischer Asthetizismus zu nennen' (homoeroticism is with complete justification to be named erotic aestheticism);13 assuming what he imagines to be is the position of his audience vis-a-vis both homoeroticism and aestheticism, a Protestant Work Ethic for which both are sins of extravagance not in conformity with the capitalist duties of thrift and marriage. He thus manages to 'normalize' 'homoeroticism' on the one hand and reject it on the other, because 'we' must not allow ourselves too much of a good thing. This when a couple of years previously, in 'Von deutscher Republik' (Of the German republic) (1922), he had suggested that a healthy, Whitmanian, Republican homoeroticism of the love of brothers and comrades would serve as the basis of the new Weimar Republic, and before that again, in his war writings 'Friedrich und die GroSe Koalition' (Frederick and the great coalition) (1915) and Betmchtungen eines Unpolitischen (Reflections of an unpolitical man), had favourably contrasted the healthy, Germanic tradition of the homoerotic Ma'nnerbund of warriors with the effeminacy of the French.14 With Tonio Kroger, however, we are back with the idea of 'homoeroticism' as 'erotic aestheticism' — tempting, but something that one must resist or overcome. Yes, Mann does try to integrate his homosexual desires into the decent, bourgeois 'normality' of the North in the first episode with Hans Hanssen, an innocent little childish 'crush', out of which he will soon grow. He can celebrate this homoeroticism so touchingly only because it is going to be left behind. At the end he can again declare his continued love for the Hans Hanssens of the world, as long as they are accompanied by Ingeborg Holms, as he has arrived at a position by which he can integrate his 'homosexuality' into a 'more normal' 'bisexuality' and which permits him to love men as well as women, since he has left his lower body and 'all that' behind 'down there' in the South anyway and this is hence a 'pure' love which is not sexual at all. Indeed, Tonio's love for this couple who resemble his first loves seems to stem less from his bisexual libido than from his love for the conventional and 'biirgerlich' institution of marriage, which requires that he overcome his wayward sexual desires.15 Thus Tonio Kroger's journey north is a journey

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away from the 'Bohemian', the 'feminine', the 'foreign' and the 'homosexual', which are all lumped together, as if there was a natural affinity between all these categories, and left behind in the South, towards the 'biirgerlich', the 'masculine', the 'native' and the 'heterosexual' (or perhaps rather the institution of marriage), the elusive essence of which appears to be buried somewhere around the North Pole. The journey northwards itself, in so far as it is a journey towards the father and the 'masculine principle', away from the feminine South and East, could be interpreted as 'homoerotic', in the real sense of the word, symptomatic of a desire for pure and unproblematic self-identical sameness, and for that consubstantiation of the son with the father which is the homosocial essence of 'phallogocentrism'. One could further read the repetition of leitmotifs in the novella as an expression of this narcissistic desire for sameness and homogeneity. Interestingly, in his essay on The Uncanny' Freud interpreted the compulsion to repetition as a symptom of 'Kastrationsangst', which often led, he noted, to the doubling or multiplication of phallic symbols in dreams, thus enacting a strategy for evading the feared threat of castration and deprivation of what are, in a patriarchal society, the physical symbols of power — testicles. Karl Werner Bohm writes that the sexism and fear of the feminine evident in Mann's early work is not a 'genuine homosexual fear but a general masculine fear, which is in essence a fear of the loss of power, of power and control over the world and one's own body'.16 Bohm is quite right to emphasize that what is at issue here is masculine power, and holding on to it — a power that Tonio is in danger of losing if he identifies too much with what he stigmatizes as 'feminine' and 'homosexual'. The leitmotifs in Tonio Kroger give the novella an almost religious, 'charming' character. The novella enacts in some sense an exorcism: feminine and foreign 'difference', art and degeneration, are dumped 'down there' during this prayer to the father and to the Burger. While Tonio Kroger travelled northwards from Munich, Gustav von Aschenbach's strange encounter with a beardless and sinister foreigner in the same town led him to undertake a journey southwards and ultimately to his death in disease-ridden Venice, where he watches his beloved Tadzio disappearing into the 'Nebelhaft-Grenzenlose' (foggy, borderless region) (p. 550).I7 Both the cholera epidemic and the tempting Tadzio come from the East. The epidemic comes from that tropical marsh Aschenbach had initially envisaged visiting and the description of its journey westwards reminds one of Dracula's journey across Europe to terrorize England. Tadzio comes from Poland. Both lead to Aschenbach's dream or nightmare of a Dionysian orgy, a scene of 'grenzenlose Vermischung' [borderless/unlimited mingling) where the sound of the flute is accompanied by shrill cheering and shouting. Thus we are

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brought back to the Dionysian birth of tragedy and of all art. But Dionysus appears to be an Eastern 'male mother' that Aschenbach, Apollo and indeed Western civilization must deny and keep east of a certain line if they are not to lose all control over themselves and sink into the sea. Mann appears to have been a little upset by the reaction of some of his contemporaries to Der Tod in Venedig, who saw it, not surprisingly, as a diatribe against art, beauty and homosexuality. Stefan George claimed Mann had 'das Hochste in die Sphare des Verfalls hinabgezogen' (pulled down the highest to the sphere of decadence).18 In his letter to Carl Maria Weber of 4 July 1920, Mann explained, with what sounds like a certain amount of regret, how what started as a 'trunkenes Lied' (drunken song), as a lyrical description of his feelings for the boy he observed on the Lido in Venice while on holiday in 1911, turned into a 'sittliche Fabel' (moral fable). It is, however, a strange version of morality that requires the support of racism, misogyny and homophobia. My point here is merely that in the course of these undeniably beautiful and subtle novellas, Thomas Mann, out of a desire to overcome his own tendency to decadence and aestheticism, and indeed his own sexual desires, makes some disturbingly unsubtle equations linking art and artists, decadence, degeneration, homosexuality, femininity, the 'decline of the West', disease, decay and the peoples of the lands east and south of his 'Vaterstadt'. Thus Aschenbach's and Tonio Kroger's respective journeys served to promote a rather misogynist, racist and homophobic expatriation of all the confusions, social, sexual, ethical and philosophical, which reigned at home and were really the offspring of Western modernity itself, not of 'der fremde Gott' (the foreign god) (p. 540), nor indeed of musically-gifted foreign women. The same desire to overcome decadence would lead Thomas Mann, even ten years after the outbreak of the First World War, to send his literary offspring, Hans Castorp, almost with a kick, away from the 'Zweideutigkeiten' (ambiguities/double entendres) of the Magic Mountain and of peacetime, into the thick of the 'Weltfest des Todes' (world feast of death) with the vague and naive hope expressed in the question 'Wird auch aus diesem Weltfest des Todes, auch aus der schlimmen Fieberbrunst, die rings den Himmel entzundet, einmal die Liebe steigen?' (Will one day love also rise from this world feast of death, from the bad feverish heat that ignites the sky all around?).19 Of course this was a faithful picture of the atmosphere of euphoria surrounding the outbreak of the First World War and of the naive hopes with which many young men would rush to their deaths in the belief that the war would somehow restore their threatened masculinity to health.

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Hofmannsthal's nation While Mann was suggesting that the artist was the bearer of all the ills of the nation and really an agent of foreign corruption and disease, Hofmannsthal was developing a cult of the artist as the saviour of that same nation from the ills of modern civilization. We saw earlier how the young Hofmannsthal constantly dealt with Narcissus-like characters and seemed to see in death a possible 'cure' for the 'problem' of narcissism and for a crisis of identity; we saw also how he appears to have been affected by news of Wilde's trials and how he turned to the army for salvation. Hofmannsthal's cult of the artist was to be an integral part of his cult of the nation which he developed particularly in the years preceding the outbreak of the First World War and continued to advocate even in the late 1920s. The marriage of artist and army in the church of the nation appears to have been Hofmannsthal's answer to his own particular crisis of masculine identity. In Die Briefe des Zuruckgekehrten (The letters of the returned one) (1907) the writer of the letters explains how, after years spent abroad in the South Seas, in his homesickness he entertained a rather romantic notion of the homeland he had decided to return to.20 On his return, however, the writer of these letters finds himself undergoing a 'Krise eines inneren Ubelbefindens' (crisis of inner nausea) (p. 343) and constantly refers to his nausea since his return not just to Germany or Austria, but to Europe. Of the homeland he has returned to he says: 'Hier ist es nicht heimlich' (here it is not homely) (p. 342). He is disgusted by his business affairs and by his own money, and he realizes that he longed to return to the South Seas 'like the one who is seasick longs for dry land'. In Uruguay and on the islands of the South Seas people seemed somehow more real to him. He gives other examples of real people: bandits, gold-diggers, prisoners of penal colonies, poor farmers and sailors are all more real than the contemporary German bourgeois. Whereas Thomas Mann's anti-intellectual Tonio Kroger sought 'reality' in the Burger, Hofmannsthal's character sees it everywhere lout in the Burger; his anti-intellectual stance is coupled with an anti-bourgeois, Romantic Primitivism. He is cured for a while of his nausea by a chance visit to an art exhibition, where he admires about sixty pictures by Vincent van Gogh. In front of these paintings he experiences something of an epiphany. Without a hint of irony he relates how he went straight to a business meeting where he was able to achieve more than his company's directors could ever have hoped. Colonial business seems to thrive on a bit of art appreciation. In December of 1906 Hofmannsthal delivered his lecture Der Dichter und diese Zeit (The writer and the present time) in Munich, Frankfurt, Gottingen and Berlin. This is where he wrote:

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The essence of our epoch is polysemy and uncertainty. It can only rest on what is slippery and is aware that it is slippery, whereas other generations believed in the fixed and stable. A gentle, chronic dizziness pulsates in it.21 In the midst of this 'dizziness' he claims to detect 'eine versteckte Sehnsucht nach dem Dichter' (a hidden desire for the writer) (p. 278) on the part of the contemporary reading public. Readers are looking for the same thing in books as they once sought before at smoke-shrouded altars, he claims. He compares the relationship of the writer and the reader to that between a priest and the believer, the magician and the one who is enchanted and even to the relationship between the Platonic beloved and his lover. The 'Dichter' can apparently offer both his blood and his body to satisfy the physical, religious and erotic needs of his public. 'Lesen', he says, is 'ein religioses Erlebnis' (reading is a religious experience) (p. 296). Thus Hofmannsthal is beginning to delineate what is at once a leading religious and political role for the writer. The writer will spirit away all the disturbing aspects of modernity. Hofmannsthal criticizes other poets for not providing the food they are supposed to give to a hungry populace: 'Den zersplitterten Zustand der Welt wollten sie fliehen und fanden wieder Zersplittertes ' (they (the readers) wanted to flee the fragmented state of the world and only found more fragments) (p. 287). The contemporary reader finds only 'ein Verzichten auf Synthese, ein Sich-Entziehen, eine unwiirdige und unbegreifliche Resignation' (a renunciation of synthesis, a withdrawal, an unworthy and incomprehensible resignation) (p. 290). The writer as religious and political leader will however apparently provide the harmony that is lacking in modern life. Hofmannsthal furthered his claim to religious and political leadership with his revival and adaptation of a fifteenth-century English morality play — Everyman. The simple play about the death of a rich man lent itself to Hofmannsthal's disgust at a society where money seemed the highest common value, which was evident in Die Briefe des Zuruckgekehrten, and to his nostalgia for the stability of medieval communities, a version of which he hoped to bring about by the staging of Jedermann. Hofmannsthal's play was actually performed before the High Altar of the Kollegienkirche in Salzburg in 1922, and has been performed on the Domplatz in Salzburg annually as part of the Salzburg Festival, which Hofmannsthal hoped would establish itself as a kind of cultural community. It is of course a little ironic that the patrons of the Salzburger Festival should have to pay through the nose in order to see this morality play on the vanity of human riches. In 1938, the new rulers of Austria put an end to Hofmannsthal's ritual; they had their own rituals to replace it.

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Hofmannsthal describes with some glee the way his play actually stagemanaged the masses, and transformed them into one body: Bells were rung loudly and continuously. At this the entire large crowd became quiet and it was as if one felt each and every one of them becoming quiet. In the mean time it had become dark. In the giant, barely lit space these thousands of people who had come together by chance, and whose faces were the only bright things in the dusky darkness, became at a stroke one being, the people.22 We are here perhaps not so far from the kind of choreography of the masses as 'ornament' which Siegfried Kracauer viewed as an ominous leitmotif of films of the Weimar Republic. Kracauer wrote: Absolute authority asserts itself by arranging people under its domination in pleasing designs. This can also be seen in the Nazi regime, which manifested strong ornamental inclinations in organizing masses. Whenever Hitler harangued the masses, he surveyed not so much hundreds of thousands of listeners as an enormous ornament consisting of hundreds of thousands of particles.23 In the face of what he perceived as the chaos of modernity, and an accompanying threat of anarchy, Hofmannsthal was beginning to seek a realization of aesthetic form in political reality, an aestheticization of politics not dissimilar from that which Walter Benjamin attributed to the Fascists, though of course Hofmannsthal, like many others who entertained similar ideas, would not have had any time for the thugs who actually tried to realize this ambition after his death. There was, however, surely a kinship between Hofmannsthal's desire for form in politics and the forms with which Fascist regimes seduced onlookers. Hofmannsthal was to welcome the outbreak of the First World War, and was not the only one to do so, for the simple reason that it seemed to him that the war immediately created a sense of a homogeneous community. In 1914 he wrote: 'wir, das Land, die Armee, der Staat sind heute wie niemals ein Leib' (we, the country, the army, the state are today as never before one body).24 If a return to religion was one means of reinvesting a world divested of all 'higher' value and meaning with such 'higher value and meaning', and replacing 'chaos' with 'form', the elevation of the nation to a metaphysical plane and the glorification of war was another. In 1911 Hofmannsthal began working on anthologies of German and Austrian writers and he compared his work as anthologist with that of the brothers Grimm who nourished the idea of a united German Volk and a German nation in its infancy as the land was overrun by Napoleon's army. He continued this work as anthologist during and after

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the war, viewing this activity in political terms, as a means of fortifying the nation against the forces of disintegration. Again and again he emphasized the connection between language, literature and the nation. In a lecture he gave in Zurich in 1917, entitled 'Osterreich im Spiegel seiner Dichtung' (Austria in the mirror of its literature), he insisted on the central importance of poetry and literature in the construction of a national myth and national consciousness. Hofmannsthal's idea of the 'nation' was an eminently conservative one, so conservative as to set itself against the ethos and the achievements of the French Revolution. Like many others, Hofmannsthal hoped the war would clear the way for a new kind of society, but what he meant was a return to pre1789, antediluvian innocence — and ignorance: he wrote of the need for a new authority which would be in accordance with a reawakening of the religious sense as well as of the need for the conversion of the masses into a Volk.25 Thus Hofmannsthal could welcome the outbreak of the First World War as an event which would help melt down the anarchic masses of individuals with individual interests and forge a unified community, a Volk. On 28 July 1914, the same day he went to join his regiment in Istria, he scribbled a note expressing his enthusiasm and joy to a friend.26 To another he wrote: 'Kam dieser Krieg nicht, so waren wir verloren - und wohl Deutschland mit uns' (if this war had not come we would have been lost, and Germany with us).27 He saw the army as a model of political and moral unity for the rest of society, a healthy alternative to a decadent political system of routine parliamentary business. Disappointed with the outcome of the war and with the kind of society that emerged from it, Hofmannsthal made what in retrospect seems an extremely ominous prophecy in the speech he gave at the University of Munich on 10 January 1927, 'Das Schrifttum als geistiger Raum der Nation' (Writing as the spiritual space of the nation). Here he claims to detect a growing movement against the revolutionary transformations which had occurred in the sixteenth century, against the Renaissance and the Reformation; he welcomes the advent of a 'konservative Revolution' (conservative revolution) 'on a scale hitherto unknown in European history'. The aim of this conservative revolution, according to Hofmannsthal, is 'Form', 'a new German reality in which the whole nation could participate'.28 The search for form requires, it seems, a counter-revolution countering not merely the revolutionary developments of recent modernity or even the French Revolution but the Renaissance and the Reformation as well. Hofmannsthal died before he could fulfil such an ambitious task, and before he could see what happened when others carried out this 'konservative Revolution' on a scale with which European history is unfortunately now acquainted.

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War and the writer: Musil and Mann To return however to the First World War: Musil, as one would expect, exercised a considerably larger amount of restraint and clear-headedness than many others when it came to writing about the war. In his essay 'Europaertum, Krieg, Deutschtum' (Being European, war and being German) (September 1914) he both expressed regret that Europe should come to this and admitted a certain regard for the heroic qualities associated with war.29 He proceeds to claim that such heroism really always characterized an 'oppositionelle europaische Minderheit' (oppositional European minority) of intellectuals. Musil is not prepared to abandon his position of critical distance and opposition to jump on any nationalist bandwagon, but he does nevertheless appear to be enjoying the atmosphere. (Was that irony when he wrote 'denn wir haben nicht gewufit, wie schon und briiderlich der Krieg war' (for we did not know how beautiful and brotherly war was) ?) In November 1914 Mann sought to identify himself and his art with the war effort - and indeed one could say with Aschenbach's paternal heritage before it was contaminated by foreign, musical females, tempting Polish boys, Italian strawberries and Indian cholera — as well as with an outspoken conservatism, which stood in opposition to the civilization he associated with the achievements of the Enlightenment. In his essay 'Gedanken im Kriege' (Thoughts in times of war) (November 1914) he asked whether art was on the side of civilization (i.e. of the Enlightenment, democracy, etc.) or of culture (which for Mann was the opposite of those silly French ideas) and decided naturally that art is on the side of culture. Not only that, art is related to religion, sexual love — and war. A true artist has all the qualities of a good soldier.30 Mann certainly does rather go over the top (no pun intended) in this comparison of the artist with the soldier. It is also interesting to note how Mann finally, playing on the vocabulary of Tonio Kroger, decides it is now more relevant to talk of the contrast between the soldier and the civilian than of that between the bohemian and the Burger. We remember how he had associated the bohemian with irresponsible aestheticism and deviant sexual desires. But now the wild, unconventional, quite anti-bourgeois life of the soldier can be celebrated and Mann can integrate his 'bohemian' side, and everything that implies, with the ascendant power of the military, which Mann idealizes because of its all-male, and hence homosocial character (bourgeois, in Tonio Kroger, we remember, signified convention and heterosexual marriage). In 1915 Hofmannsthal wrote a patriotic eulogy of Trinz Eugen, der edle Ritter' (Prince Eugene, the noble knight); Mann produced his essay Triedrich und die grofie Koalition' (Frederick and the great coalition). Here you can read that Frederick the Great's 'notion of soldiering':

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was anti-feminine to the extent that it excluded the softness of love and marriage. He did not want his officers to marry; they were to be warmonks like their king. He explained this with a joke: the gentlemen were to find their pleasure with their sabre and not with their -. With the sabre! In 1778 not one of the seventy-four officers of a regiment of dragoons was married.31 Mann seems rather tickled by the idea of deriving his sexual pleasure from a sabre, as he is by the idea of men at war. Mann's, and not just Mann's, enthusiasm for the war was motivated in large part by the promise it seemed to offer of a bit of excitement 'with the boys', an escape from bourgeois convention, as well as from women. In short, the war seemed to offer Mann a means for the integration of those problematic parts of his self into political respectability, a nationalization, in no uncertain terms, of Narcissus.

Notes 1. Robert Musil, Die Verwirrungen des Zoglings Torlefi, in Musil, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Adolf Frise (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978), Vol. 6, pp. 7-140, p. 7. 2. Musil, Die Verwirrungen des Zoglings Torlefi, p. 27: 'Das jenseitige Ufer war mit dichten Ba'umen bestanden, welche, . . . wie eine schwarze, undurchdringliche Mauer drohten. Erst nach vorsichtigem Suchen fand sich ein schmaler, versteckter Weg, der geradeaus hineinfuhrte. Von dem dichten, uppig wuchernden Unterholze, an das die Kleider streiften, ging jedesmal ein Schauer von Tropfen nieder.' 3. Musil, Die Verwirrungen, pp. 46—7: 'Dann war es auch moglich, dafi von der hellen, taglichen Welt, die er bisher allein gekannt hatte, ein Tor zu einer anderen, dumpfen, brandenden, leidenschaftlichen, nackten, vernichtenden fuhre. DaS zwischen jenen Menschen, deren Leben sich wie in einem durchsichtigen und festen Bau von Glas und Eisen geregelt zwischen Bureau und Familie bewegt, und anderen, Herabgestossenen, Blutigen, ausschweifend Schmutzigen, in verwirrten Gangen voll briillender Stimmen Irrenden, nicht nur ein Ubergang besteht, sondern ihre Grenzen heimlich nahe und jeden Augenblick iiberschreitbar aneinanderstossen.' 4. Jacques Le Rider, Modemite viennoise et crises de I'identite (Paris: PUF, 1990), p. 59. 5. Like Krafft-Ebing, Freud, in his Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (1905), views 'Sadismus' as implicit in normal male sexuality and for the attributes 'male' and 'female' is ready to substitute 'active' and 'passive'. For Freud, however, the 'most conspicuous characteristic of this perversion is the fact

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6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

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that its passive and active forms are regularly found in the same person'. He is inclined to relate this pair of apparent opposites (sadism and masochism) to the unity of the apparent opposites of masculinity and femininity in bisexuality. Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. V (London: Imago, 1942), pp. 58ff. Musil, Tagebucher, p. 441, quoted by Uwe Baur in 'Zeit und Gesellschaft in Robert Musils Roman, Die Verwirrungen des jungen Torless', in Musil Studien 4: Vom Torless zum Mann ohne Eigenschaften, ed. Uwe Baur and Dieter Goltschnigg (Munich/Salzburg: Fink, 1973). Thomas Mann, Tonio Kroger, in Thomas Mann, Stockholmer Gesamtausgabe: Ausgewahlte Erzahlungen (Stockholm: Fischer, 1945), pp. 117-96. The Diary of Richard Wagner, 1865—1882, The Brown Book, presented and annotated by Joachim Bergfeld, trans. George Bird (London: Gollancz, 1980), p. 202. See Tom Gibbons, Rooms in The Darwin Hotel (Nedlands: Western Australia University Press, 1973), pp. 35f. Heinrich Dietering, 'Der Literat als Abenteurer: Tonio Kroger zwischen Dorian Gray und Der Tod in Venedig', Forum: Homosexualitat und Literatur, 14 (1992): 5-22. Quoted by Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Thomas Mann und die Seinen (Frankfurt/ M.: Fischer, 1990), p. 24. See Ignace Feuerlicht, Thomas Mann and homoeroticism', The Germanic Review, 57 (1982): 89-97. Thomas Mann, 'Uber die Ehe', Thomas Mann, Stockholmer Gesamtausgabe: Reden und Aufsatze I (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1965), pp. 128-43, p. 134. Hans Wifikirchen, 'Republikanischer Eros: Zu Walt Whitmans und Hans Bliihers Rolle in der politischen Publizistik Thomas Manns', in 'Heimsuchung und sufies Gift': Erotik und Poetik bei Thomas Mann, ed. Gerhart Harle (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1992), pp. 17-40, p. 19. On Bluher and Mann's 'Von deutscher Republik' see also Bernd Widdig, Ma'nnerbunde und Massen: zur Krise der mannlichen Identitat in der Literatur der Moderne (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1992). Hermann Kurzke, Thomas Mann: Epoche — Werk — Wirkung (Munich: Beck, 1985), p. 103. Karl Werner Bohm, Zwischen Selbstzucht und Verlangen: Thomas Mann und das Stigma Homosexualitat (Wiirzburg: Konigshausen und Neumann, 1991), pp. 133f. I wonder about this distinction between a genuine and a nongenuine 'homosexual' sexism, indeed between a 'homosexual' and a 'heterosexual' sexism? Thomas Mann, Der Tod in Venedig, Stockholmer Gesamtausgabe: Ausgewahlte Erzahlungen, pp. 455-550.

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18. Quoted by T. J. Reed in his introduction to Thomas Mann, Der Tod in Venedig, ed. T. J. Reed (London: Oxford University Press, 1971). 19. Thomas Mann, Stockholmer Gesamtausgabe, Der Zauberberg, 2 vols., Vol. 2 (referred to above as Z II) (Stockholm: Fischer, 1943), p. 572. 20. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 'Die Briefe des Zuruckgekehrten', in Hofmannsthal, Gesammelte Werke, Prosa II, ed. Steiner (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1951), pp. 321-57, pp. 328f. 21. Hofmannsthal, 'Der Dichter und diese Zeit', in Prosa II, pp. 264-98, p. 272: 'das Wesen unserer Epoche ist Vieldeutigkeit und Unbestimmtheit. Sie kann nur auf Gleitendem ausruhen und ist sich bewufit, daS es Gleitendes ist, wo andere Generationen an das Feste glaubten. Ein leiser chronischer Schwindel vibriert in ihr.' 22. Hofmannsthal, 'Das alte Spiel von Jedermann', in Gesammelte Werke, Prosa III, ed. Steiner (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1964), pp. 114-32, p. 119: 'Glocken wurden gelautet, kraftig und anhaltend. Da wurde die ganze grofie Masse still und es war, als fuhlte man das Stillwerden jedes einzelnen. Indessen war es auch ganz dunkel geworden. In dem riesigen, kaum erleuchteten Raum wurde aus den Tausenden von zufallig zusammengekommenen Menschen, deren Gesichter das einzige Helle in dem dammrigen Dunkel waren, mit einem Schlag ein Wesen, die Menge.' 23. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler (Princeton University Press, 1947), p. 103. 24. Hofmannsthal, 'Boykott fremder Sprachen?', in Prosa III, p. 184. 25. Hofmannsthal, 'Krieg und Kultur' (1915), in Prosa III, pp. 503-5, p. 504. 26. Card to Ottonie Gra'fin Degenfeld, quoted by Volke, Hofmannsthal, p. 140. 27. Quoted by Volke, Hofmannsthal, p. 140. 28. Hofmannsthal, 'Das Schrifttum als geistiger Raum der Nation', in Prosa IV, ed. Steiner (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1955), pp. 390-413, p. 413. 29. Musil, 'Europaertum, Krieg, Deutschtum' (September 1914), in Gesammelte Werke II, pp. 1020-22, p. 1020. 30. Thomas Mann, 'Gedanken im Kriege', in Politische Schriften und Reden 2 (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1960), pp. 7-20, pp. 8f. 31. Thomas Mann, Triedrich und die grofie Koalition: ein Abrifi fur den Tag und die Stunde', in Politische Schriften und Reden 2, p. 32: 'Sein Begriff von Soldatentum ... , war antifeminin in dem Grade, dafi es die Weichheit von Liebe und Ehe ausschloS. Er wollte nicht, dafi seine Offiziere heirateten; sie sollten Kriegsmonche sein wie ihr Konig. Die Motivierung gab er als Witz: Die Herren, sagte er, sollten ihr Gliick durch den Sabel machen und nicht durch die —. Durch den Sabel also. Im Jahre 1778 war unter den vierundsiebzig Offizieren eines Dragonerregiments nicht einer verheiratet.'

Part IV

Kampf or Male Bondage

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War, men and 'meaning'

The hopes and enthusiasm which accompanied the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 now seem truly extraordinary. The populations of European nations exploded with euphoria - or mass hysteria - at the news. Tor many participants', writes E. J. Leed, 'August 1914 was the last great national incarnation of the "people" as a unified moral entity. ... August was a celebration of community, a festival, and not something to be rationally understood.'1 There are countless accounts of the euphoria and sudden sense of community that broke out among the hitherto amorphous crowds of individuals going about their business in the anonymity of modern European cities. Edith Wharton described the change of atmosphere in Paris in the last days of July 1914 thus: Only two days ago [Parisians] ... had been living a thousand different lives in indifference or antagonism to each other, as alien as enemies across a frontier . . . . Now [they were] ... bumping up against each other in an instinctive community of the nation.2 With the clear definition of an outside enemy, and of the frontier between 'us' and 'them', people could suddenly rejoice that they belonged together. Stefan Zweig described the situation in Vienna in similar terms: As never before, thousands and hundreds of thousands felt what they should have felt in peacetime, that they belong together; a city of two million, a country of nearly fifty million, felt in that hour that they were participating in a moment which would never recur; and that each one was called upon to cast his infinitesimal self into the glowing mass, and there to be purified of all selfishness. All differences of class, rank and language were flooded over at that moment by the rushing feeling of

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fraternity. Strangers spoke to each other in the streets, people who had avoided each other for years shook hands ... Each individual experienced an exaltation of his ego; he was no longer the isolated person of former times, he had been incorporated into the mass, he was a part of the people, and his person, his hitherto unnoticed person had been given meaning.3 Walter Scheller wrote: 'My first impression was that war changed men, and it also changed the relationship between men.'4 Another witness wrote: 'On the streets and avenues men looked each other in the eye and rejoiced in their togetherness'.5 It is specifically the 'relationship between men, one notes, that the outbreak of the war transformed: the war enabled men to 'rejoice in their togetherness'. With what now seem incredibly naive, great expectations many volunteered; many 'fell'; many became disillusioned but many did not, and some even remained uncritically nostalgic for the war in later peacetime. Leed suggests that 'a large portion of the enthusiasm for war was fuelled by a search for some avenue of escape from privacy' and that 'the motive that thrust many out onto the streets, into the recruiting offices, and onto the parade grounds and barrack yards was precisely a longing to throw off a too narrow and confining identity.' He relates how for Carl Zuckmayer 'the declaration of war meant that the trend "toward liberation" from the "pettiness and littleness" of the bourgeois family, which had formerly been expressed in the youth movement, would "no longer be confined to Sunday outings and sports".'6 War would be the complete opposite of a bourgeois world increasingly subject to rationalization, regulation and routine, of a bourgeois world of convention and normality in which many men felt trapped. For some, and perhaps really for a great many, the war held out a promise of an escape from simple boredom. Months of sitting in muddy trenches would, of course, not do much to satisfy this hope. Initially, however, the military life appeared instantly to provide 'a life replete with palpable meanings, clear precise goals and nonconflicting demands', an antidote to 'the diseases that were felt to be inherent in civil society: indecision, aimlessness and loneliness'.7 One can perhaps generalize and suggest that what the war seemed to offer in August 1914 to almost everyone, whatever their political standpoint, was the promise of something completely different, a complete break with the status quo and the possibility of clearing the ground either for something completely new or for the restoration of something very old indeed. For conservatives the war seemed to offer an escape from modernity, from the onward march of what Thomas Mann disparagingly called 'Zivilisation', from a society in which the democratic ideas of the Enlightenment and the

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French Revolution were gaining a hold and where 'the social question' and 'the woman question' were demanding answers. Leed writes that many Europeans believed the war would help them leave behind an 'industrial civilization with its problems and conflicts' and enter a sphere of action ruled by authority, discipline, comradeship and a common purpose.8 The war held out the possibility of a return to a sense of community among men based on (a) a clear definition of the boundary between 'inside' and 'outside', 'friends' and 'enemies', i.e. char relationships of allegiance, (b) feudal or strictly hierarchical relationships of allegiance and property, and (c) feudal relationships of allegiance between men, whose role as warriors was clearly distinct from the domestic duties of women - a return, in other words, to the security of the unquestioned authority, blind belief and hierarchical structures of the patriarchy. This would be a symbolic battle to defend the patriarchy against the encroachment of modern 'anarchy' and 'chaos'. Many supposedly more progressively-minded writers and artists however rejoiced in the 'anarchy and chaos' that war would bring. Steven Aschheim quotes the Futurist manifesto of 1909, resonant, as he says, 'with postNietzschean themes, images and passion': We want to exalt movements of aggression ... the forced march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist ... We want to glorify war - the only cure for the world - and militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for women.... We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.9 Also influenced by Nietzsche as well as by the Futurists themselves, though considerably more critical of militarism and jingoistic patriotism, were the Dadaists, who embraced 'anarchy and chaos', and even that of the war, because it seemed to promise the overnight destruction and razing to the ground of the hierarchical structures of patriarchal authority. In his 'First Dada speech in Germany' (February 1918) Richard Huelsenbeck claimed of the Zurich group of Dadaists: We were against the pacifists, because the war gave us the possibility of existing in all our glory. . . . We were for the war, and Dadaism is still for the war. Things must bang against each other: it is not nearly violent enough yet.10 Before the outbreak of the war many Expressionists wrote with relish and in truly apocalyptic terms - in many cases, as Aschheim suggests, under the heady and none too clear influence of Nietzsche - of the destruction war would bring. One thinks for example of Georg Heym's 'Der Krieg' (1911),

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which ends with an atmospheric and joyful evocation of fire spilling through the dark night on Gomorrah.11 Gomorrah no less! This is strong stuff indeed. Albert Ehrenstein similarly honoured the god of war and appears to have enjoyed putting the following words into his mouth: I pour out the arid time of war, Stick Europe in the sack of war. Bullets hack down your women, Spread on the ground, Are the testicles Of your sons, Like the pips of gherkins.12 In his poem 'Weltende' (The end of the world) Jakob von Hoddis described the end of the world with cruelly sarcastic Schadenfreude. And so on. It is hard to deny that what many Expressionist poems actually expressed was a combination of a certain sadistic pleasure in the imaginary infliction of pain on the bourgeois with apocalyptic hopes of the renewal of mankind through some extremely violent process of purification. In this respect the standpoint of many Expressionist poems is really not that different from that of the work of supposedly much more conservative figures, such as Thomas Mann and Hofmannsthal or indeed Yeats and Eliot. In Jedermann Hofmannsthal castigated the world of the capitalist pretty much as a modern version of Gomorrah whose only salvation lay in death. In his Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) Thomas Mann appeared to endorse the 'Weltfest des Todes' (world feast of death) as the only way out of stagnation. William Butler Yeats bewailed the loss of any values 'higher' than those of petit-bourgeois capitalism in his poems 'No Second Troy' and 'September 1913' and celebrated the return of such values as well as of traditional male warrior-heroism during the Irish 'Easter Rising' of 1916 in his poem 'Easter 1916'. T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland (1922), another 'Easter poem', beginning, as we remember, in April, 'the cruellest month', is both a very long prayer and an attempt to enact a ritual purification of the modern world via death by drowning. Only death, understood in terms of religious sacrifice, appears capable of reinvesting a meaningless modern world with 'meaning'. But this is to jump ahead a little: Mann's Zauberberg and Eliot's The Wasteland were published after the war — and evidence that certain illusions concerning 'sacrifice' and 'salvation' which were floating around before the outbreak of the First World War were still lingering around — and not just in Germany — in the 1920s. To return to the outbreak of the war: E. J. Leed endorses Hannah

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Hafkesbrink's suggestion that the war was 'conceived as a distinctively noneconomic field of endeavour' and thus as a ' "moral" project, in contrast to the amorality of the marketplace'.13 Killing people would apparently be a far more 'moral' activity than simply exploiting them. Vague metaphysical 'meaning' and apocalyptic religious ideas could be enlisted in a war against bourgeois, capitalist normality. In Germany, Nietzsche's oracular Also sprach Zarathustra was 'the most popular work that literate soldiers took into battle for inspiration and consolation', with Goethe's Faust and the New Testament not far behind.14 What was needed above all was 'regeneration', a regeneration of 'meaning', of a sense of direction, which had been lost with the arrival of modernity and the decline of the great legitimating narratives of religion, patriarchy and hierarchical authority. To parody, but I hope not illegitimately, the situation around the outbreak of war in August 1914: almost everybody appears to have been of the opinion that something was 'rotten in the state of Denmark', and that what was required to remedy the situation was a good dose of death. This desirable death was constantly lent a religious, not necessarily Christian significance. Eliot's poem was influenced by Frazer's work of comparative religion The Golden Bough; Mann's 'Weltfest des Todes' sounds like a pagan orgy. The interest in death and sacrifice appears to have been a last-ditch reaction against the complete secularization of society by the progress through the nineteenth century of the ideas of the Enlightenment valuing reason and scientific knowledge over authority and superstition. In a world where the kind of significance offered by religious and metaphysical interpretations was no longer available, death — as shorthand for the religious and metaphysical — and significance were yoked unceremoniously together again. From the 'heap of broken images' Eliot wrote about, all that could be rescued was apparently a certain sadomasochist relationship (for we are talking about pleasure in the experience or infliction of pain) with this 'meaning' — i.e. death, pain — at its centre. Death and the experience of physical pain also had the advantages that they are direct, unmediated experiences in a modern world where such experiences are increasingly hard to come by. Modern technology and bureaucracy had the effect of placing a huge distance between men and between men and the results of their actions. The longing for direct experience, unmediated by things or the technology of communication,' writes Leed, 'was a dominant prewar theme in discussions of the impact of machines upon men': Direct experience is a code for 'authentic experience'. The insatiable desire for authenticity, for a direct confrontation of human wills, dominated the enthusiasm for war and shaped the expectations of those

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who went into combat just as it was present in the enormous appetite of the age for any relic of authentic (preindustrial) life or for anything that imitated organic forms or materials.15 'Direct experience', 'authenticity/ apparently demands a 'direct confrontation of human wills'. A good fight between men would perhaps restore 'direct experience', and thus restore a sense of meaning to life. As men increasingly worked in situations where the physical strength of their bodies was no longer required, while the dominant model of masculinity continued to be based on an image of physical strength and force, it was perhaps inevitable that men would view the war as an opportunity to demonstrate their virility in traditional terms, indeed in the terms that had been promoted during their formative years through school sports, the boy scout and the youth movement. Opportunities for demonstrating traditional virility were becoming increasingly scarce. Maurice Barres, according to Elisabeth Badinter, made fun of the new race of bureaucrats, describing them as ' "demimales" qui n'aspirent qu'a la securite, comme des femmes' (demi-males who aspire to nothing but security, just like women), and contrasting them with men of old 'qui vivaient "le fusil a la main", dans "le corps-a-corps viril avec la nature"' (who lived with guns in their hands in a virile body-to-body contact with nature).16 Direct experience in physical combat, in 'le corps-a-corps viril avec la nature' would, it was hoped by many men, make of 'demi-males' real men again. If men looked upon the war as a means of recovering and demonstrating their virility, they also sometimes looked upon it as an ersatz father figure. At the end of Thomas Mann's Zauberberg, a novel partly about Hans Castorp's search for a father on whom he might model himself, the war itself appears as his only worthy father-substitute. Ernst Jimger later wrote of his generation: 'Der Krieg ist unser Vater, er hat uns gezeugt im gliihenden Schofie der Kampfgraben als ein neues Geschlecht, und wir erkennen mit Stolz unsere Herkunft an' (The war is our father, he begat us in the glowing lap of the trenches as a new race, and we proudly recognize our origin).17 Perhaps the war would do the job fathers traditionally held in the patriarchy, but bourgeois fathers no longer seemed up to, the job of giving boys access to masculine identity and 'meaning', and separating them from their mothers? If this masculine 'meaning' was, as I am suggesting, linked especially around the time of the First World War to a sadomasochistic derivation of pleasure from pain (whether experienced or inflicted) that was perhaps because this lost and now to be restored 'meaning' had always had to do with sadomasochistic relationships, relationships of power between men as well as between men and women in a patriarchy. Indeed one might claim that in a patriarchal society the

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relationships of power between men are more charged with sadomasochism than the relationships between men and women, as the latter relationship of power is the more strictly regulated by the conventions of patriarchy — a certain amount of sadism being conventionally expected of men and masochism of women in their dealings with each other. This strange metaphysical 'meaning' meant perhaps nothing other than either the possession of power (ultimately only imaginable in the almighty power of a — naturally male — godhead) or the possession of a close relationship with that imaginary masculine omnipotence through one of his male representatives. Only this relationship between men endows status, 'meaning', identity - power — in fact all the attributes one associates with masculinity in a patriarchy. Power in the patriarchy, one must remember, is masculinity. What Pierre Bourdieu calls the 'androcentric' way of looking at the world automatically associates women with weakness and vulnerability; men are constantly faced with, and face themselves with, the challenge of hiding their despised, feminine vulnerability and of demonstrating their supposed invulnerability and do this classically through displays of violence, violence displayed primarily for the benefit of other men. Bourdieu sums up the situation nicely: Virility must be validated by other men in its truth of actual or potential violence, and certified by the recognition of one's belonging to the group of 'real men'. ... Virility ... is an eminently relational notion, constructed before and for other men and against femininity, in a sort of fear of the feminine, and above all of the feminine in oneself.18 Men demonstrate to other men their positions of power relative to other men in physical or symbolic combat. In a sense whether they win or lose does not matter: either way they have demonstrated their relationship to power, a relationship of mutual recognition. The losers are forced to recognize the victors who recognize the losers in their recognition of them; the losers realize they have a certain power over the victors in so far as the victors need the recognition of the losers in order to be recognized and be victors. All this at the point of a sword (or indeed of a penis, for the issue here is the relative masculinity/power and femininity/powerlessness of the combatants) whether real or symbolic. This analysis of violent relations between men as at some level a sadomasochistic game of recognition is derived from Hegel's dialectic of 'Herr' and 'Knecht' and from Sartre's translation of this into the language of existentialism. In L'Etre et le Neant (Being and nothingness) Sartre describes all human relations as sadomasochistic - the self being eternally addicted either to persuading another person to recognize itself or to achieving a certain amount of recognition through recognizing someone else. Sartre regards here all

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relationships of the self with others, whether of the same or of the opposite sex, as implicitly sexual and constantly and unavoidably drifting between the Scylla and Charybdis of sadism and masochism.19 This view of human relations as inherently sadomasochistic is constantly expressed in existentialist philosophy and literature from Nietzsche to Beckett. In the following I wish to draw attention to what seems to me to be a particularly frequent recurrence of the motif of a highly charged, and apparently sexually charged, physical/psychological/intellectual battle or 'Kampf between men in the works of some writers writing in German and English around the time of the First World War and into the 1920s. There is, I suggest, a parallel to be drawn between this motif of 'Kampf' and the enthusiasm for the First World War, whether or not the writers whose works I will be dealing with themselves shared the enthusiasm for the actual war. As others threw their sadomasochistic energy, one might suggest, into the national project of war some individuals gave a more individualistic and ultimately more honest expression to the same energy. The fact that these supposedly 'straight' men described sadomasochistic and implicitly sexual relations between men is also perhaps an indication of their awareness that relations between 'straight' men are not always as 'straight' as society assumes, or pretends to assume. It should also be noted here that in this motif of Kampf and sadomasochism we are really returning to the motif of the doppelganger, having looked in the mean time at attempts to externalize the inner sadomasochistic conflict by drawing a clear boundary between 'inside' and 'outside' and ascribing the undesirable traits of the doppelganger to the outsider — to 'the artist', 'the homosexual', 'the woman', 'the Jew', 'the foreigner' — whose identity could be thus constituted, isolated and treated sadistically. But that inner sadomasochism had of course not been abolished: it had merely expressed itself in an intensified concern with boundary-drawing and acts of violent exclusion. More honest and more admirable writers remained true to their own selves and their own inner conflicts rather than resorting to the easy and all too common defence mechanism of finding a scapegoat and joining in a collective ritual act of expulsion and boundary-drawing.

Notes 1. E. J. Leed, No Man's Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 39-40. 2. Quoted by Leed, No Man's Land, pp. 44-5. 3. Quoted by Leed, pp. 42—3.

War, men and 'meaning 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

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Quoted by Leed, No Man's Land, p. 42. Binding quoted by Leed, No Man's Land, p. 43. Leed, No Man's Land, p. 58. Leed, No Man's Land, p. 55. Leed, No Man's Land, p. 41. Quoted by Steven Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany: 1890-1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press), p. 133. 'Wir waren gegen die Pazifisten, weil der Krieg uns die Moglichkeit gegeben hatte, uberhaupt in unserer ganzen Gloria zu existieren. ... Wir waren fur den Krieg, und der Dadaismus ist heute noch fur den Krieg. Die Dinge mussen sich stoSen: es geht noch lange nicht grausam genug zu.' Richard Huelsenbeck, 'Erste Dadarede in Deutschland', Dada Berlin: Texte, Manifest, Aktionen, ed. K. Riha (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1977), p. 17. Menschheitsdammerung: ein Dokument des Lxpressionismus, ed. Kurt Pinthus, (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1988), pp. 79f. 'Ich schutte aus die diirre Kriegszeit/Steck' Europa in den Kriegssack./... Geschosse zerhacken euere Frauen,/Auf den Boden/Verstreut sind die Hoden/ Eurer Sohne/Wie die Korner von Gurken.' Alfred Ehrenstein, 'Der Kriegsgott', Menschheitsdammerung, pp. 84f. Leed, No Man's Land, p. 61. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy, p. 135. Leed, No Man's Land, p. 63. Elisabeth Badinter, XY de I'identite masculine (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1992), p. 32. Quoted by Stefan Breuer, Anaiomie der konservativen Revolution (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993), p. 32. Pierre Bourdieu, La Domination Masculine (Paris: Seuil, 1998), pp. 58—9: 'La virilite doit etre validee par les autres hommes, dans sa verite de violence actuelle ou potentielle, et certifiee par la reconnaissance de 1'appartenance au groupe des "vrais hommes". ... La virilite ... est une notion eminemment relationelle, construite devant et pour les autres hommes et contre la feminite, dans une sorte de peur du feminin, et d'abord en soimeme.' Sartre writes: 'Ainsi le sadisme et le masochisme sont-ils les deux ecueils du desir . . . . C'est a cause de cette inconsistance du desir et de sa perpetuelle oscillation entre ces deux ecueils que Ton a coutume d'appeler la sexualite "normale" du nom de "sadico-masochiste". ... toutes les conduites complexes des hommes les uns envers les autres ne sont que des enrichissements de ces deux attitudes originelles ... . Ces attitudesfondement peuvent demeurer voilees, comme un squelette par la chair qui 1'entoure; c'est meme ce qui se produit a 1'ordinaire; la contingence des

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Kampf or Male Bondage corps, la structure du projet originel que je suis, 1'histoire que j'historialise peuvent determiner 1'attitude sexuelle a demeurer ordinairement implicite, a 1'interieur de conduites plus complexes: en particulier il n'est pas frequent que Ton desire explicitement les Autres "du meme sexe". Mais, derriere les interdits de la morale et les tabous de la societe, la structure originelle du desir demeure, au moins sous cette forme particuliere de trouble, que 1'on nomme le degout sexuel.' Jean-Paul Sartre, L'Eire et le Neant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), pp. 475-8.

9

Fighting men: Lawrence and London

Lawrence's The Prussian

Officer

D. H. Lawrence's story The Prussian Officer' first appeared in August 1914, appropriately enough, under the title 'Honour and Arms'.1 In this story Lawrence describes the sadistic behaviour of the Prussian officer of the title towards his orderly and the eventual violent revolt of the orderly against his superior officer. It is a peculiarly ambivalent story in that while Lawrence may have intended to criticize the sadism of the military, this sadism is treated with a disturbing amount of relish, apparently because it establishes an intense bond between the two men. Emile Delavenay suggests that the common thread running through the collection of stories entitled The Prussian Officer is Lawrence's discovery that 'La cruaute est de la sexualite pervertie' (cruelty is perverted sexuality) and quotes Lawrence writing that: 'soldiers, being herded together, men without women, never being satisfied by a woman, as a man never is from a street affair, get their surplus sex and their frustration and dissatisfaction into the blood, and love cruelty'.2 The narrator of The Prussian Officer' appears to criticize this love of cruelty — and at the same time to share it. The narrator does indeed — at least in part — sympathize with the young, innocent orderly for whom his young, innocent sweetheart is the only refuge from the sadism of his superior officer.-This homely image of the relationship between the soldier and his sweetheart is, however, treated very briefly in comparison with the treatment of the intensity of the relationship between the officer and the orderly, around which the story turns. The relationship between the orderly and the Captain claims the attention and the fascination of the narrator and the reader from the beginning. Thus we are soon told that:

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The orderly felt he was connected with that figure moving so suddenly on horseback: he followed it like a shadow, mute and inevitable and damned by it. And the officer was always aware of the tramp of the company behind, the march of his orderly among the men. (p. 8) The vague mystery surrounding this 'connection', which is never made quite explicit, draws the reader into the story. The eroticism of the relationship between the two men is intensified by the fact that it is never given explicit physical or linguistic expression either by the Captain or by the narrator of the story. The reader is however made aware that this is an intensely physical relationship by the constant reference to the men's bodies which the narrator describes almost lovingly: the Captain 'had a handsome, finely-knit figure, and was one of the best horsemen in the West', his orderly 'having to rub him down, admired the amazing riding-muscles of his loins' (p. 8); the orderly, 'a youth of about twenty-two, of medium height, and well built', had 'strong, heavy limbs, was swarthy, with a soft black, young moustache'. There was 'something altogether warm and young about him' (p. 9). As if to highlight the ambivalence of his attitude to the 'relationship', the narrator's standpoint alternates between the perspective of the officer and that of the orderly. The reader is given access to the consciousness (and subconscious) of both. The officer's 'passion' is described with some sympathy: Gradually the officer had become aware of his servant's young, vigorous, unconscious presence about him. He could not get away from the sense of the youth's person, while he was in attendance. It was like a warm flame upon the older man's tense, rigid body, that had become almost unliving, fixed. ... as the young soldier moved unthinking about the apartment, the elder watched him, and would notice the movement of his strong young shoulders under the blue cloth, the bend of his neck. And it irritated him. To see the soldier's young, brown, shapely peasant's hand grasp the loaf or the wine-bottle sent a flash of hate or of anger through the elder man's blood, (p. 9) The narrator also shows sympathy for the terror of the orderly — while at the same time apparently attributing some 'deep7 significance to the young man's terror and to the development of a relationship between the two men based on this terror: once, when a bottle of wine is knocked over and 'the red gushed out onto the tablecloth' the officer cursed and his eyes 'held those of the confused youth for a moment': It was a shock for the young soldier. He felt something sink deeper, deeper into his soul, where nothing had ever gone before. ... And from

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that time an undiscovered feeling had held between the two men. (pp. 9— 10) The 'gushing out' of red liquid here is of course highly suggestive of both an ejaculation of semen and a violent act involving the spilling of blood, particularly suggestive as it is being constantly hinted that both are what lie at the heart of that 'undiscovered feeling between the two men'.3 The 'deep' significance the narrator attributes to the orderly's terror is that 'something' penetrates to the depths of the young man's soul, 'where nothing had ever gone before'. The young man has up to now repeatedly been described as 'unthinking'. Now, as if Lawrence was deliberately modelling his story on Hegel's description of the relationship between 'Herr' and 'Knecht' (master and servant), the orderly 'comes to consciousness' through being made aware of his vulnerable, subordinate position. The officer grows more frustrated, irritable and sadistic; he tortures the young man verbally as well as physically. He feels a 'thrill of deep pleasure' seeing his orderly on the verge of tears and with blood on his mouth after he had 'slung the end of a belt in his servant's face' (p. 12); his 'heart gave a pang, as of pleasure, seeing the young fellow bewildered and uncertain on his feet, with pain' (p. 14) after he has repeatedly kicked him. Mirroring the young man's 'coming to consciousness' as the result of his experience of constant humiliation and brutality, more and more of the narrative deals with the orderly's consciousness and perspective. The 'relationship' becomes a battle of wills, of consciousnesses, as well as a physical affair with heavy sexual overtones. The orderly, having been the 'object' of physical brutality and repressed sexual desire for long enough, is determined now to become a 'subject'. The final showdown between the two men is an intensely physical (and sexual) affair. The scene is set with constant reference to heat, the heat of the day as well as the heat of the 'flames' constantly 'leaping' in the bodies of the orderly and the officer: The Captain passed into the zone of the company's atmosphere: a hot smell of men, of sweat, of leather' (p. 20); 'The young soldier's heart was like fire in his chest, and he breathed with difficulty' (p. 20); The flame leapt into the young soldier's throat' (p. 21); The orderly plodded through the hot, powerfully smelling zone of the company's atmosphere' (p. 21). The heat intensifies even further just before the climax: A hot flash passed through his belly, as he tramped towards his officer. The Captain watched the rather heavy figure of the young soldier stumble forward, and his veins, too, ran hot. This was to be man to man between them. ... The Captain accepted the mug. 'Hot!' he said, as if amiably.

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The flame sprang out of the orderly's heart, nearly suffocating him. (p. 22) The physical and sexual nature of the coming climax is further hinted at by repeated use of the words 'body' and 'naked': There, in the half-shade, he saw the horse standing, the sunshine and the flickering shadow of leaves dancing over his brown body' (p. 21); The orderly stood on the edge of the bright clearing, where great trunks of trees, stripped and glistening, lay stretched like naked, brown-skinned bodies' (p. 21); The Captain watched the glistening, sun-inflamed, naked hands' (p. 22). Finally the orderly seizes his opportunity and knocks the Captain off his horse — and he now experiences not just the pleasure of revenge but a pleasure closely related to that the Captain had derived from torturing him. The roles are reversed — narrator and reader can now identify with, and indulge, the justified sadism of the orderly with a clear conscience. This victim (the Captain) 'deserves what he gets' and both narrator and reader have every right to derive pleasure from his pain. The murder scene is described in such terms that it sounds like a perverse sexual consummation of the perverse 'relationship' between the Captain and his orderly: the orderly presses his body with passion against the body of the Captain; he experiences exquisite tension; he finds it pleasant to feel the Captain's 'hard jaw already slightly rough with beard' in his hands; his blood exults in his thrust; the heavy convulsions and hard twitchings of the Captain's body cause his own body to jerk. All that is missing here is a description of the 'gushing out' of fluids, but we had that earlier. Lawrence himself clearly sees this scene as a consummation of the intense, violent relationship between the two men. After their deaths 'the bodies of the two men lay together, side by side, in the mortuary' (p. 29). In death, as in life, they remain thus strangely 'connected', married by their violent 'man to man' struggle. This is surely an interesting perspective on the military life, evoking, precisely in August 1914, in almost explicit sexual terms, that 'direct confrontation of human wills' Leed wrote about.

Men in love 'Now,' said Birkin, 'I will show you what I learned, and what I remember. You let me take you so -' And his hands closed on the naked body of the other man. ... So the two men entwined and wrestled with each other, working nearer and nearer. ... He [Birkin] seemed to penetrate into

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Gerald's more solid, more diffuse bulk, to interfuse his body through the body of the other, as if to bring it subtly into subjection ... .4 'Is this the Bruderschaft you wanted?', asks Gerald, once the two men have recovered their breaths and put their clothes on. This rather risque wrestling scene lies at the heart of Lawrence's Women in Love, the novel in which we learn very early on that the hearts of each of these two men 'burned for the other' (p. 37) and which ends with Birkin's protesting his need for 'eternal union with a man' (p. 541) in addition to his relationship with Ursula.5 This 'union' is given intense, if not 'eternal', physical, if not quite (though very nearly) sexual, expression in the two men's naked, playful 'Kampf, the object of which is neither violence nor victory but the physical intimacy of the combatants. The narrator repeatedly uses sexual terms to describe the two men's innocent sport: Birkin, we are told, seemed to 'penetrate', 'interpenetrate', 'enter' Gerald's flesh. Through fighting with no clothes on the two men achieve the kind of physical union conventionally associated with the sexual intercourse of man and woman: they achieve a 'oneness of struggle'; become a 'tense white knot of flesh', a 'white interlaced knot of violent living being', a 'physical junction of two bodies clinched into oneness' (p. 305). The men are liberated from their modern ennui and normal, oppressive consciousness of themselves as separate beings and in their trance-like state, 'mindless at last', become momentarily 'one'. Their union is sealed by a spontaneous and tender clasp of hands just before they regain 'normal consciousness' and put on their clothes. The wrestling, we are told when it is finished, 'had some deep meaning to them — an unfinished meaning' (p. 307). The reader is thus led to entertain the hope that this 'meaning' might be 'finished' later on in the book.6 It seems that only a 'a real set-to', as Birkin calls it (p. 307), is capable of doing for two men what sex does for a man and a woman. It seems also that for Lawrence only the context of a good fight, such as we find in 'The Prussian Officer' and in Women in Love, could legitimate the kind of physical contact between men that he was interested in. Thus he concluded his essay on the 'Education of the People' (1918/20) by invoking the 'old passion of deathless friendship between man and man' which would exist in 'womanless regions of fight'.7 In what he describes as Lawrence's fantasy of a kind of masculine 'unanisme heroique' Emile Delavenay hears echoes of the drums of Mussolini's Fascism.8 It would be a real shame, one cannot help thinking, if that is where Birkin's admiration of the male physique and repressed desires for other men had to land. Of course it did not have to land there. There is nothing intrinsically Fascist in two grown men having a naked romp in a library. They are after all just two individual men giving some kind of expression to their repressed

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desires. During the First World War at least, and hence during the period when he was working on Women in Love, Lawrence retained an intensely individualist attitude, and refused to identify with the nationalism of the masses around him.9 The friendship - even the suggested 'Brtiderschaft' - of Birkin and Gerald as well as whatever they get up to in the privacy of Gerald's library is a personal matter to do with their individual needs and desires in relationships. The danger of Fascism only comes when the scene is developed into a political dogma requiring all men to go so far — and no further — in a collective and precisely limited expression of repressed desires in 'womanless regions of fight'. It is an important part of the argument of this book that the nationalism of the war and the Fascism of the years thereafter did indeed appeal to men with much the same desires as Birkin and Gerald, holding out the tantalizing promise of an institutionally sanctioned 'Briiderschaft' and close physical contact with other men, an escape from the restrictions of bourgeois society, bourgeois clothes and bourgeois sexuality. Lawrence himself saw there was a connection between the desires of his wrestlers and the seductive power of Fascism. Richard Somers, the central character of his Kangaroo (1923), plays with the idea that one of the great ideologies of the 1920s, Fascism or communism, might satisfy his desire for emotional and physical closeness with other men. While he and his wife are in Australia, members of two opposing groups of men, the Fascist 'Diggers' and the Communist 'General Confederation of Labour', make not merely political but also erotic overtures to Somers, which he finally rejects, having been sorely tempted. Somers thus seems only to escape the temptations of these great political 'Mannerbiinde' of the time by dismissing with a cynical (and not terribly convincing) quip both homoerotic and heteroerotic bonds of any kind: as men and women are not having much success in their relationships there is not much hope for relationships between men either. This is a sensible point warning against idealizing same-sex relationships over others, and an abrupt, if not terribly convincing return to common sense. At least Somers, the writerhero, for whatever reasons, has not frivolously abandoned his independence for the vague homoerotic promises of Fascism. What is interesting about the novel is that Lawrence depicts the attraction of Fascism as resting primarily on its appeal to repressed male homosocial/homosexual desire: it is solely Somers' interest in Whitman's 'love of comrades', in 'mate love', which attracts him to the 'Diggers'. To return however to The Prussian Officer' and Women in Love: Lawrence portrays outright violence in the one case and the playful violence of sport in the other as means through which men can enjoy some kind of desired close physical contact with one another. One might wonder why fighting - and not

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simple sex - should be chosen as a means of enjoying physical closeness. Perhaps this has to do with a need to compensate for the perceived femininity of such a desire for physical contact with men through engaging in what patriarchal thinking considers a supremely masculine activity, i.e. fighting? Further, patriarchal thinking, it was suggested in the introduction to this section, actually promotes sadomasochist relations between men, in so far as it equates masculinity with power and requires constant proof of the possession of power/masculinity in relation to and for the benefit of other men. We must also not forget that desire for a 'direct confrontation of human wills' mentioned by Leed as contributing in large part to the enthusiasm for the First World War. This was influenced of course by the popularity of the Darwinian notion of the 'survival of the fittest' as well as by the fact that the modern, increasingly bureaucratic world made relations between people, and between men in particular, increasingly indirect. One can surmise that, not just for Birkin and Gerald but in the case of very many men, the decline of patriarchally sanctioned close bonds between men gave rise in a world of alienation to a desperate desire to break through the indirect relations of bureaucratic man and re-establish these bonds. Perhaps taking off all one's clothes and rolling around on the ground together would be a way of coming into direct contact with another man? Instead of describing this as 'sex', one could call it 'sport', a 'wrestling match' or a 'real set-to'. The desire for this uniquely legitimate form of close physical contact between men could lead to interest in the institutions which provide opportunities for such violent physical contact and/or close male bonds - soldiering, battle, war, Fascist 'Mannerbunde' and, more harmlessly, sport. It could of course also be expressed at the more anarchic and safer level of just two naked men wrestling in a library.

Shaggy men and muscle-bound dogs, cowboys and the American dream The relations between shaggy men and muscle-bound dogs in the harsh, merciless environment of the cold north of North America far from the norms of civilization and in such 'womanless regions of fight' as Lawrence dreamed of are what concern Jack London in such novels as The Call of the Wild (1903), White Fang (1906) and the short stories 'Batard' (1904) and 'Love of Life' (1907). Stripped of the apparel of civilization, men become as dogs and wolves; they wear animal skins to attempt to keep the cold at bay. In this hostile state of nature the struggle - the fight, 'Kampf - for day-to-day survival becomes all there is. The return to a 'state of nature' — whether considered innocent or bloody and violent, or indeed both at the same time as in the 'innocent violence' of the

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Wild West — is of course a classic Romantic and American theme stretching from the dreams of escaping European civilization which inspired some of the first colonists (one thinks for example of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe] to nineteenth and twentieth-century dreams of escaping American civilization and civilization altogether (from Twain's Huckleberry Finn to the appearance of the 'Western' in popular literature and cinema to Kerouac's On the Road and even Burroughs's The Wild Boys}. Writing about the 'topography of masculinity in America at the turn of the century' Mark Seltzer notes that 'the closing of the frontier ... in 1893, apparently foreclosed the regeneration of men through "the transforming influence of the American wilderness"'. In 1899 Theodore Roosevelt addressed members of a men's club on the subject of The Strenuous Life' and argued that confronting the wilderness regenerated 'that vigorous manliness for the lack of which in a nation, as in an individual, the possession of no other qualities can atone'.10 The regeneration of masculinity became a national affair and 'confronting the wilderness' was promoted as a means of overcoming the decadent and feminizing influence of civilization. This very often also involved or implied the escape of men and boys from women and the civilizing influence of women to an all-male world of adventure, danger and violence, where intense relationships between men would be of primary importance (while the appearance of the odd token woman and token heterosexual relationship would serve to deflect any charge of deviance from the sexual mores of the civilization these men had escaped from).11 It is interesting that it was precisely in the years leading up to the First World War that the literary figures of the cowboy and of E. R. Burroughs's Tarzan were invented and enjoyed huge popularity.12 The America of the imagination, the mythological America, and indeed consequently the real America, has in the twentieth century constantly been conceived by men everywhere as an adventure playground for boys and men, a playground where men could play at being boys and men, love (and endlessly write about loving) being and playing at being and playfully fighting boys and men - and really love boys and men. Of course there is nothing 'wrong' with that as long as it is honestly acknowledged, as long as women have the space and power to play too and as long as it is not accompanied by an intense and politically effective misogyny, the self-contradictory knots of homophobia, or the glorification of real violence as 'fun'. Jack London's stories of the adventures of men and dogs in the hostile environment of an icy wilderness were written around the same time as the literary figures of the cowboy and of Tarzan were born and could be said to belong in the same context of an American attempt to regenerate and reconstruct a hardened masculinity threatened by the spread of effeminate civilization.

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The first thing we learn about Buck, the hero of Jack London's The Call of the Wild, is that he did not read the newspapers - which may have had something to do with the fact that his father, Elmo, was a 'huge St Bernard' and his mother, Shep, 'had been a Scotch shepherd dog'.13 The novel traces the progressive 'decivilization' (London's word) of a domestic pet who is stolen and sold to become a working dog in the 'Arctic darkness', who comes to terms with the brutal working conditions obtaining there and finally abandons 'civilization' altogether when he has 'touched noses' with his new friend, his 'wild brother' (p. 138), a wolf. London describes the dog's 'ecstasy' as he is unleashed from the selfconsciousness attendant upon decadent civilized existence: There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck ... He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint and sinew in that it was everything that was not death . . . . (pp. 76-7) The comparison of this big dog returning to the wild with a 'war-mad' soldier and indeed with an artist 'caught ... in a sheet of flame' is, to say the least, interesting. One is reminded of the 'ecstasy' which gripped Europe at the outbreak of the First World War. London again intimates that he is not just writing about dogs but about men, and reminds us that men are animals when Buck dreams of an almost naked 'primitive' man whose body hair is 'matted into almost a thick fur' (p. 86). Shortly before the end of the story this Vision of the short-legged hairy' man comes to Buck more frequently (p. 124) and this vision was 'closely akin' (p. 125) to the sounding of the call of the wild which Buck eventually obeys. Buck's naked man is also closely akin to Tarzan: 'the hairy man could spring up into the trees and travel ahead as fast as on the ground, swinging by the arms from limb to limb, ... never falling, never missing his grip' (p. 125). London's Call of the Wild is thus in a sense a call to men to tear off their clothes and swing from tree to tree. The natural world that Buck returns to is no pastoral scene of harmony but is consistently described as a violent, bloody place where no law holds but the Darwinian 'survival of the fittest', or as London puts it, the 'Law of Club and Fang'. Buck fights his way to 'mastership' over the other working dogs; he enjoys the 'thrill of battle' (p. 78); and the bloody dogfights are described with some relish by London. With what seems very much like admiration

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London relates how Buck's new world of pain and deprivation affects him physically: His muscles became hard as iron, and he grew callous to all ordinary pain. He achieved an internal as well as external economy. ... the juices of his stomach extracted the last least particle of nutriment; and his blood carried it to the farthest reaches of his body, building it into the toughest and stoutest of tissues, (p. 63) Buck thus develops what sounds very much like the 'Korper als Panzer' (body as tank), the body as a steeled fighting machine, that Klaus Theweleit discovers as the obsession of certain German soldiers fighting the First World War.14 A very masculine, body-builder's masochism, a Nietzschean sadomasochism with regard to one's own body, is what London is admiring here, one might suggest, and one that is coupled with pretty gory violence. An extract from one of the many descriptions of dogfights is exemplary: Dave and Sol-leks, dripping blood from a score of wounds, were fighting bravely side by side. Joe was snapping like a demon. Once, his teeth closed on the foreleg of a husky, and he crunched down through the bone. Pike, the malingerer, leaped upon the crippled animal, breaking its neck with a quick flash of teeth and a jerk. Buck got a frothing adversary by the throat, and was sprayed with blood when his teeth sank through the jugular. The warm taste of it in his mouth goaded him to greater fierceness, (p. 67) Substitute men for dogs here? London does precisely that in the strange short story 'Batard', in which the fiercely passionate hostility between one man and his dog is played out unto the death of both parties, rather as in Lawrence's 'Prussian Officer' - except that it is rather more difficult to suggest repressed homosexual desire is the cause of such irrational hate when one of the parties is a dog. In a fierce dogfight between man and dog, Leclere (the man), preferring to use his fists and teeth rather than reach for his knife or rifle, 'buried his teeth to the bone in the dog's shoulder'. London writes: It was a primordial setting and a primordial scene, such as might have been in the savage youth of the world. An open space in a dark forest, a ring of grinning wolf-dogs, and in the centre two beasts, locked in combat, snapping and snarling, raging madly about, panting, sobbing, cursing, straining, wild with passion, in a fury of murder, ripping and tearing and clawing in elemental brutishness. (p. 27) Given such scenes as this it is hard not to feel that Jack London is celebrating

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violence and cruelty as it has seldom been celebrated before or since and that George Orwell was understating the case when he remarked that 'there is something in London [that] takes a kind of pleasure in the whole cruel process'.15 It should come as no surprise that London invented the 'boxing novel' (The Game (1905); The Abysmal Brute (1913))! It is not all simply blood and gore in The Call of the Wild however. Shortly before the end Buck experiences for the first time 'love that was feverish and burning, that was adoration, that was madness' and the object of this love is a man. John Thornton 'had saved his life, which was something; but, further, he was the ideal master' (p. 108). This love of master and slave is expressed in the manly 'corps a corps' of mock battles: Buck knew no greater joy than that rough embrace [of his master] and the sound of murmured oaths, and at each jerk back and forth it seemed that his heart would be shaken out of his body so great was its ecstasy. ... [Buck] would often seize Thornton's hand in his mouth and close so fiercely that the flesh bore the imprint of his teeth for some time afterward. And as Buck understood the oaths to be love words, so the man understood the feigned bite for a caress, (pp. 108-9) If both these characters were men, and as one can see this is very nearly the case, one would be reminded of the 'gladiatorial' love-making between Birkin and Gerald in Lawrence's Women in Love. The actual 'call of the wild' is sounded by a 'long, lean timber wolf whom Buck chases with a similar mixture of feelings as was evidenced in his love for Thornton: Every movement advertised commingled threatening and overture of friendliness. It was the menacing truce that marks the meeting of wild beasts that prey. ... Buck did not attack, but circled him about and hedged him in with friendly advances. ... in the end Buck's pertinacity was rewarded; for the wolf finding that no harm was intended, finally sniffed noses with him. (p. 127) Buck is torn between these 'two loves' until Thornton dies and he is free to join his 'wild brother' and his pack of wolves.

'Liking it rough' in politics too

In some ways Jack London's novel about the beginning of the world revolution, The Iron Heel (1907), echoes The Call of the Wild. In this for the most part most reasonable and persuasive book about the desirability, feasibility and reasonableness of a world socialist revolution, the chaos of the

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Chicago Commune is described in similar terms and with a hint of the same relish as the 'Wild'. The Chicago Commune is described as a huge and slightly exhilarating dogfight. Chicago itself is a jungle: This was warfare in that modern jungle, a great city. Every street was a canyon, every building a mountain. We had not changed much from primitive man, despite the war automobiles that were sliding by.16 The novel ends with a short chapter entitled The Terrorists', cut off in midsentence, which begins to relate how 'the struggle' goes on after the failure of this uprising. One cannot help feeling, however, that the good cause of the revolution has been somewhat compromised by this redirection of sadomasochist energy and simple quest for masculine excitement from the interpersonal sphere of 'the wild' to the realm of politics. But this does of course happen in real life. One should recall again Leed's phrase about the desire for a 'direct confrontation of human wills' which inspired much of the enthusiasm for the First World War.

Notes 1. D. H. Lawrence, 'The Prussian Officer', in D. H. Lawrence, The Prussian Officer and Other Stories (London/New York: Penguin, 1945), pp. 7-29. A contemporary reviewer drew a comparison between the brutality of the officer of the story and that of the contemporary German officer in his 'bombardment of unfortified places' and 'massacring of helpless civilians'. See the unsigned review in Outlook, 19 December 1914, in D. H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage, ed. R. P. Draper (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), pp. 81-3. 2. Emile Delavenay, D. H. Lawrence: L'Homme et la Genese de son Oeuvre, Les annees de formation: 1885-1919 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1969): original English text given in Vol. 2, p. 763, of translated text quoted in Vol. 1, p. 248. 3. It also echoes a similar significant episode in Herman Melville's similar story of repressed homosexual desire between the ranks of an all-male hierarchy — Billy Budd — in which the 'Handsome Sailor' spills a bowl of soup and 'the greasy liquid streamed just across his [Claggart's] path'. Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor, The New and Definitive Text, ed. Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 72. 4. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (London/New York: Penguin, 1960), pp. 304-5. 5. Lawrence's original but abandoned prologue to the novel was much more

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7.

8. 9. 10.

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12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

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explicit about Birkin's physical desires for men's bodies. See the 'Prologue to Women in Love', in Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished and Other Prose Works by D. H. Lawrence, collected and edited with an introduction and notes by Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore (London: Heinemann, 1968), pp. 92-108. Alfred Andris also sees the sexual as very close to the surface in the description of the struggle and points out that the 'Ringkampf can be divided into similar phases as the sexual act — '1. Vorspiel (foreplay); 3. Phase der willkiirlichen Bewegungen (phase of voluntary movements); 4. Phase der unwillkiirlichen Bewegungen und Muskelkontraktionen (phase of involuntary movements and muscular contractions); 5. Entspannungsphase (phase of relaxation of tension).' All that is missing is actual penetration (2). There is, however, as we noticed above, enough 'seeming' penetration. Alfred Andris, 'Homosexualitat im Werk von D. H. Lawrence', in Forum: Homosexualitat und Literatur, 15 (1992): 5-40, pp. 24-5. D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the people', in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, edited and with an introduction by Edward P. McDonald (London: Heinemann, 1936), p. 665. Delavenay, D. H. Lawrence, p. 611. See Delavenay, D. H. Lawrence, pp. 285-95. Mark Seltzer, The love-master', Engendering Men, ed. Boone and Cadden (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 140-58, p. 140. Seltzer entitles his section dealing with Jack London 'Men in Furs', appropriately enough, and writes of 'S/M in the Klondike' (p. 155). This is pretty much the argument of Leslie Fiedler writing about Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn in his Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Criterion Books, 1960). Elisabeth Badinter, XY de I'identite masculine (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1992), pp. 40-1. See also pp. 196-204. Jack London, The Call of the Wild, White Fang and Other Stones, ed. Andrew Sinclair (New York/London: Penguin, 1993), p. 44. See Klaus Theweleit, Mannerphantasien (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1980), Vol. 2. Quoted by James Dickey in his introduction to Jack London, The Call of the Wild, White Fang and Other Stories, ed. Sinclair, p. 11. Jack London, The Iron Heel London/New York: Amereon, 1976), p. 205.

10

Kampf: Walser, Kafka, Brecht

There is a similarity between the men of Lawrence and London and the men described in Robert Walser's novel Jakob von Gunten (1909),1 in Franz Kafka's short story Beschreibung eines Kampfes (Description of a struggle) (written 1903-4) as well as in two plays by Bertolt Brecht, Baal (1918) and Im Dickicht der Stadte (In the jungle of the cities) (1924): these men need abrasive physical or even intellectual conflict with other men and see this conflict or Kampf in some way as an expression of love. In Walser's novel a strange kind of relationship develops over a series of encounters between a young boy and the principal of his school; their blossoming relationship appears against the background of and as a reaction to a crisis of identity associated with modern city life. Kafka's Beschreibung eines Kampfes is really the description of several 'struggles' between pairs of men; Kafka seems to be making a philosophical point about all relationships between men very much along the lines of what Sartre would say later in L'Etre et le Neant. The relationships between men, and the relationships between men and women, in two early plays of Brecht will be treated in the context of male bonding and of what Luce Irigaray says about Thom(m)osexualite'.

Jakob von Gunten Jakob von Gunten is a very modern novel, reflecting in its fragmentariness, in its lack of a continuous narrative, the modern condition itself. In several of his anecdotal fragments Jakob gives some fragmentary impressions of city life. Jakob's descriptions illustrate Baudelaire's comment that 'La modernite, c'est le transitoire',2 and this is apparently what Jakob loves about the city. There are so many things happening simultaneously here they cannot be arranged in a linear narrative at all. Everything, all sense of identity, is relative and in a

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constant state of flux in Jakob's city. A similar impression is given by the description of the role-playing which forms a large part of the 'curriculum' of the school: the students are required to act out all kinds of roles in all kinds of situations; they simulate begging, fighting and even pretend to be aristocratic ladies for the pleasure of their teacher. They are supposedly learning how to act in real life, but 'life', thus described, becomes really just a series of arbitrary — and absurd — conventional signs and gestures. But that is the lesson of relativist modernity: traditional models of identification/identity have been revealed to be just that, roles that people play in imitation of other people's role-playing. If life is an absurd theatre, all roles, including those of the genders, are interchangeable. At the same time the novel is a reaction against the modernity it describes. Jakob's final decision to join his teacher, Herr Benjamenta, for a life of adventure in the desert seems to propose a solution to the difficulties posed by the fragmentary and lonely nature of modern European life, a solution which consists in their departure from European civilization and return to a medieval model of identification/relationship between men - the feudal relationship of 'Ritter' and 'Knappe' (knight and his squire). Jakob's decision, having run away from his well-to-do, aristocratic family, to enter a school where he would learn to become a servant is a symbolic and real rejection of his (immediate) background, as radical as that of any 'existentialist'. He has decided to start life as it were from scratch, to abandon the role in the narrative he would normally inherit. And indeed he does not intend to progress from this tabula rasa he has made of his self. In the very first paragraph Jakob declares unequivocally that he wishes to make himself as 'klein' (small) as possible, that he intends to remain 'eine kugelrunde Null' (a zero as round as a ball) in later life (pp. 7—8). The funny thing is that Jakob's existentialist rejection of all the authority of his immediate background is accompanied by his desire to submit himself utterly to a new authority — the regime of the school, a life of service and Benjamenta himself. Jakob's masochism is evident in the strange curriculum vitae he hands his teacher (pp. 51—2). He mentions here his great desire 'streng behandelt zu werden' (to be treated strictly) and 'Hochmut ... am unerbittlichen Felsen harter Arbeit zerschmettern zu diirfen' (to be allowed smash his arrogance on the merciless rock of hard work). What Jakob desires is apparently some experience of physical pain and psychological humiliation. His desire for such harsh terms of service harks back to the life of his feudal ancestors, the 'Krieger' and 'Ritter' (warriors and knights), rather than to their modern descendants, mere 'GroSrate und Handelsleute' (local politicians and business people). This nostalgia for medieval times and relationships is a leitmotif of the novel and of Jakob's psychology.

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Through Jakob's declaration in his cv of his masochist inclinations he has finally managed to make an impression on the head of the school, Herr Benjamenta, and that has been his intention all along.3 With Benjamenta Jakob henceforth enjoys a relationship based on little games of mutual humiliation and provocation, games in which Herr Benj amenta is only too willing to play along. In his conversations with Jakob, Herr Benj amenta alternately adopts the roles of all powerful master - the role to which he, as principal of the school, is conventionally entitled - and humble slave to master Jakob. At one point he bares his soul, 'confesses' his affection for Jakob and at the same time almost begs Jakob to abuse his confidences. Jakob remains silent but feels that 'Von diesem Augenblick an war etwas Bindendes zwischen uns getreten' (From this moment on there was something binding us to each other); 'Jedenfalls besteht zwischen uns beiden ein Verhaltnis, aber was fur eins?' (In any case a relationship exists between us two, but what kind of relationship?) he wonders (pp. 94-5). When Jakob threatens to leave the school to look for work Benj amenta finally explains what kind of 'Verhaltnis' he has in mind: he tells Jakob 'ich liebe zum ersten Mai einen Menschen' (for the first time in my life I love somebody). In the same breath Benjamenta asks Jakob to laugh at him and then warns him that he can still punish him (p. 129). Just as Benjamenta alternates between playing the roles of master and slave in this relationship, so also does Jakob. Despite his declared intention of remaining 'etwas sehr Kleines und Untergeordnetes im spateren Leben' (something very small and subordinate in later life), Jakob has some fantasies of being really 'grofi'. In one dream he has become an immensely fat glutton, who is also a sadist. The tears of his defeated opponents and the sighs of the poor are sources of pleasure for him. He calls for various allegorical figures to serve him and abuses them, one by one: Wisdom, an old man, crawls up to kiss his boots; a young girl, Childlike Innocence, begins to kiss him, nervously aware of the presence of his whip beside him; he takes great pleasure in whipping Eagerness, a 'superbly built working man', in the face. Finally God himself appears and the fat man asks 'what, you too?'. At this point Jakob wakes up, bathed in sweat (pp. 87-9). One cannot really imagine anyone more 'grofi' than this God-defying glutton. The overweening ambition and the sadism, for surely that is what it is, of this dream is matched by another fantasy where Jakob again imagines himself enjoying a position of absolute power, this time as a fifteenth-century army colonel who has the power to decide whether a captured deserter be hanged or released. The colonel gives the sign for the deserter to be hanged, then has him released and Jakob describes again how this man fell at his feet and kissed his shoes. As army colonel, Jakob is the 'Herr des Tages' (lord of the day) and half of Europe depends on his whim (pp. 108-9).

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Interestingly, Jakob's masochistic tendencies are evident in another military fantasy. If in the first he dreamt of being an omnipotent and arrogantly sadistic colonel, this time he imagines himself at the other end of the hierarchy altogether — as an ordinary foot soldier in Napoleon's army on the march to Russia (pp. 135-8). Jakob really is, as he says himself, '(s)einer Natur nach ein ausgezeichneter Soldat' (by nature an excellent soldier), indeed just the kind of soldier Theweleit describes in his Mannerphantasien. Jakob longs for the physical hardship and pain, the 'soldatische Zucht' (soldierly discipline), that will make his body 'zu einem festen, undurchdringlichen, fast ganz inhaltlosen Korper-Klumpen' (into a solid, impenetrable, lump of a body, almost completely without content), into a mindless 'gefugige Maschine' (obedient machine), itself only 'der kleine Bestandteil' (a small component) of a machine of a great enterprise; pain will have forged him and his 'Kameraden' 'zu etwas zusammenhangend Eisernem' (into something joined together made of iron). Surely this is precisely the 'Korper als Panzer' (body like a tank) Klaus Theweleit writes about as one of the fantasies of some male soldiers fighting in the First World War. Theweleit describes Ernst Jiinger's 'neuer Mensch' (the new man dreamt of by the Expressionists) as 'fathered by Kampf, organized by military drill', a man 'whose body has been mechanized and whose psyche has been eliminated', a man who is 'truly the progeny of the military drill-machine, fathered without the aid of woman, without parents' who only has relationships with other 'new men', with whom he 'allows himself to be joined to form the macro-machine of the troop'.4 Soldierly discipline is precisely the kind of regime Jakob was seeking when he abandoned his privileged background to enter the 'Institut Benjamenta' to learn to work as a kind of slave. With his love of uniforms and of drill and his sadomasochist inclinations, Jakob is indeed 'by nature an excellent soldier'. One could perhaps compare him with many of the marines in Steven Zeeland's book The Masculine Marine. Apparently a sign in a marine 'boot-camp' instructs new recruits to 'SURRENDER MIND AND SPIRIT TO HARSH INSTRUCTIONS AND RECEIVE A SOUL'.5 That sounds uncannily like Jakob's declaration of his intentions in his cv. From Jakob's fantasies and from his declaration at the outset of his intention of remaining 'klein' it is clear that Jakob swings between extremes of imagining himself as either extremely 'klein' and powerless or as extremely 'grofi' and almighty and that the confirmation of his position at either of these extremes, his identity in whichever role, requires the collaboration of at least one other person as master or slave in what one can only describe as a sadomasochist game. The relationship between Jakob and Benj amenta has been described as both a fantasized ersatz father-son relationship and as implicitly sexual. Schmidt-

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Hellerau interprets Jakob's dream of Benjamenta on a horse with a long sword hanging by his side (p. 162) as a fantasy about the length of Benjamenta's penis. She also notes with a significant exclamation mark that when Benjamenta throws himself with all his might on the terrified Jakob (p. 142), Jakob responds by biting Benjamenta's finger, which to Schmidt-Hellerau clearly stands (!) for something else. One could add that Benjamenta repeatedly uses the metaphor of having 'entkleidet' (undressed) himself or having exposed his 'BloSe' (bareness), in the sense of having exposed his vulnerability, before Jakob. Schmidt-Hellerau explains this relationship between Benjamenta and Jakob as the fantasy of an individual caught in a particular kind of Oedipal relationship in which the 'feminine' attitude of a young boy towards his father is strengthened by the fact that a 'weak' father has left him in a symbiotic relationship with his mother, who, through her contradictory messages signalling alternately smothering love and rejection, places the son in a 'double bind'. The father does not pose a threat (of castration) to the cosy symbiotic relationship of mother and son; the son triumphs (is 'grofi') in his Oedipal victory over his supposed rival, the father. The more the son triumphs, the more he must fear his come-uppance, i.e. castration (being made 'klein'); at the same time he eventually feels smothered (also 'klein') by this relationship with the mother and wishes for the intervention of a strong ('grofi') father, who by his threat of castration would break up the quasi-incestuous relationship between mother and son and offer an alternative model for identification than that supplied by the mother, a means, in other words of becoming 'groS' himself and no longer being 'smothered' and kept 'klein' by the mother. In short, smothered by the relationship with one parent, the son desires the one he cannot have, i.e. the one with the father. Thus Schmidt-Hellerau manages to deal with both Jakob's need for a loving relationship with a father figure and his obsession with being either 'klein' or 'grofi' Such an Oedipal constellation, one might suggest, will be common in an age when the patriarchy is in decline. Freud himself, the discoverer of the Oedipus complex, wondered whether the so-called normal Oedipus complex was perhaps not 'the most common one at all': A more detailed examination reveals in most cases the more complete Oedipus complex, which is a double one, a positive and a negative one, resulting from the original bisexuality of the child, i.e. the boy does not only have an ambivalent attitude to his father and a tender object choice for his mother, but he behaves at the same time like a girl, he displays the tender, feminine attitude towards his father and the corresponding jealous-hostile attitude towards his mother.6

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Freud's belief that this was the 'more complete' and perhaps more common Oedipus complex suggests that Jakob's habit of swinging between the extremes of sadism and masochism, the extremes of conventional masculinity and femininity, is not so uncommon among men. Jakob waxes nostalgic as he imagines the golden age of 'das alte patriarchalische Zeitalter' (the old patriarchal epoch), the age of Abraham (p. 77). The relationships between men in the good old days of patriarchal times seem to be the model for the relationship Benjamenta proposes to Jakob, and which Jakob eventually accepts. Benjamenta complains of his 'Entthronung' (dethronement) (p. 159) and only Jakob's loyalty as his subject and 'Knappe' (squire) is capable of restoring him to his former, rightful glory. Benjamenta proposes what appears to be a kind of marriage to Jakob, asking him: do you want to go with me, will we stay together, start something together, undertake something, dare something, do something, will we two, you the small one and I the big one, try together to see how we manage life?7 Jakob postpones his decision for a while, if only, as it seems, to place Benjamenta in further torment. At the very beginning of the next paragraph Jakob informs us of the death of Benjamenta's sister, who had also been making certain advances on Jakob. This obstacle to the blossoming relationship between Jakob and Benjamenta has now been abruptly and appropriately, as the ironic juxtaposition of the news with Benjamenta's proposal suggests, removed. Benjamenta and Jakob are left to walk off, as Schmidt-Hellerau writes, hand in hand into the desert (p. 103).

A strange romance: Kafka's Beschreibung eines Kampfes Kafka wrote two versions of Beschreibung eines Kampfes, one in 1904 and another in 1909, neither of which was published in his lifetime.8 The fact that there are two 'descriptions' is altogether appropriate for this tale of doppelganger which itself dissolves into several parallel tales of further doppelganger in the middle. The narrative appears to divide itself automatically against itself, within itself, undoing (or duplicating) its own identity as it proceeds. In the story we read first of the narrator's nocturnal walk through Prague with a strange 'acquaintance' he has just picked up. In the course of their walk a relationship develops rapidly between them, or so at least the narrator tells us:

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I looked at my acquaintance with loving eyes. In my thoughts I protected him against rivals and jealous men. His life became dearer to me than my own. I found his face beautiful, I was proud of his good fortune with women and I took part in the kisses which he had received this evening from the two girls.9 The speed with which this relationship has developed is absurd, and intended to be appreciated as such. Nevertheless the relationship thus described appears to be charged with more than just casual friendship: the narrator admires the face of his acquaintance, looks with loving eyes upon him and is ready to protect him from 'jealous men'. When he says 'I took part in the kisses' it seems possible that he is imagining himself in the position of the women kissing his acquaintance. In the later version the narrator is willing to let the girls kiss his acquaintance as long as they do not 'steal' him from him: 'er soil immer bei mir bleiben, immer, wer soil ihn beschutzen wenn nicht ich' (he should stay with me always, always, who will protect him if I don't) (p. 104). At one point the narrator so desires to please his acquaintance that he contorts his tall body so that his new friend will not feel small beside him. His contortions do not escape the notice of the acquaintance who (in 'Version B') turns around to find with some surprise the narrator's 'head at the seam of his trousers' (p. 107). Suddenly and inexplicably the narrator fears his acquaintance might attack him; he tries to run away and slips on the ice. The acquaintance catches up with him, bends down and 'mich mit weicher Hand streichelte. Er fuhr an meinen Wangenknochen auf und nieder und legte dann zwei dicke Finger an meine niedrige Stirn' (caressed me with his soft hand. His hand moved up and down my cheekbones and then he laid two thick fingers on my low forehead) (p. 57). The first part of Kafka's Kampf reaches a climax - and ends - with the acquaintance making passionate love to the narrator under the statue of saint Ludmila on the Charles Bridge in Prague: 'I have always loved', said my acquaintance pointing to the statue of saint Ludmila, 'the hands of this angel on the left. Her tenderness is without bounds . . . . But from this evening on I am indifferent to these hands, for I have kissed hands.' - At this point he embraced me, kissed my clothes and pushed with his head against my body.10 Quite as unexpected and absurd as is this sudden expression of affection is the beginning of the next part of the story, headed 'II: Belustigungen oder Beweis dessen, daS es unmoglich ist zu leben. 1. Ritt' (Amusements or proof of the fact that it is impossible to live. 1. Riding). The narrator relates how he jumped on the shoulders of his acquaintance and began to ride him as if he were a horse, punching him in the back with his fists and kicking him in the

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stomach with his boots to overcome any resistance he might have been inclined to show (p. 61). The roles have, in other words, been abruptly reversed: the same narrator who, by the end of the first part, was confusedly suffering the advances of the acquaintance is now quite on top of things — and on top of his acquaintance. It seems that by expressing his affection for the narrator at the end of the first part, the acquaintance has placed himself utterly in the power of the same narrator, who immediately, exaggeratedly and absurdly avails himself of the opportunity to abuse his new position of power. Once he has acquired this position of power vis-a-vis an other person the narrator's megalomania knows no bounds: he is an almighty god and the Other, i.e. the rest of the world, is his creation. In Sartre's terms (see above) Kafka's narrator has won this sadomasochistic game of recognition and moves on 'unbekummert' (without a care in the world) to the next 'amusement' — not before he lets us know how he has annihilated and abandoned his acquaintance, who has fallen on the ground and is badly wounded. A touching end to a relationship indeed! Of course Kafka is being heavily sarcastic here. The subtitle of this section, 'Beweis dessen, daS es unmoglich ist zu leben' (proof of the fact that it is impossible to live), suggests that this is what all human relationships are like and that this is to be seen as tragic as well as comic. The narrator continues on his little walk in his new capacity as lord of all creation. His power soon fades however and he has to sleep in a tree because he — who only a moment ago could literally move mountains — is afraid of ants. His confidence, overweening pride and sense of power dissolve so rapidly here, one assumes, because he is no longer the object of the love and recognition of the acquaintance, which he had parasitically absorbed to swell his own ego before abandoning his host and embarking on a search for a new source of love and recognition. Not only does he lose his power over the Other, the outside world, but .over himself as well, and he is afraid. Reduced to this state of powerlessness the narrator suddenly sees four naked men about to carry an immensely fat man across a river. The fat man evidently enjoys a similar position of power to that previously enjoyed by the narrator himself — power over the four naked men who drown in the attempt to carry him across the river. As the fat man floats down the river on his stretcher, the narrator follows his progress with interest 'denn wahrhaftig' as he says, 'ich liebte ihn' (for truly, I loved him) (p. 69). Very shortly after this confession of love the story is interrupted again in order to tell a further story, which is in turn interrupted immediately after one of the men involved has told the other man how much he admires his appearance and which ends abruptly after one of the men embraces the other. Thus we have an indication of the beginning of a further erotic attachment

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between the male narrators/characters of the story, all of whom are either lovers or the beloved in the series of relationships between pairs of men. The blossoming relationship between the fat man and the young man in the church is again not only interrupted but is also described as a relationship of power: the young man in the church has submitted himself to the fat man by telling him how much he admires his attire and his skin. What is most interesting about this part is that here this love' is clearly put in the context of a desperate desire on the part of one man for recognition on the part of another man as a real human being. The young man begins his story by announcing: 'Es hat niemals eine Zeit gegeben, in der ich durch mich selbst von meinem Leben iiberzeugt war' (There has never been a time when I could convince myself of my own existence) (p. 75). Later this young man again expresses his fear about not being 'real', suggesting 'dafi es vielleicht gut ware, in die Kirche zu gehn und schreiend zu beten, um angeschaut zu werden und Korper zu bekommen' (that it would perhaps be good to go to the church and to pray at the top of one's voice, in order to be looked at and to get a body) (p. 89). In order to get a body the young man needs to be perceived by others, to be recognized, and ultimately to be loved. This section ends with the young man in the church kissing the fat man and the fat man finally remarking that, despite his dislike of touching human bodies, he had to embrace the young man (p. 90). At this point of his narrative, however, the fat man, who has been floating down the river all this time, suddenly disappeared over the edge of a waterfall. Having thus lost his second friend and source of his recognition in as absurd a fashion as he had lost the first, the original narrator suddenly feels that his head is 'so klein, wie ein Ameisenei' (as small as an ant's egg) and he begs passers by to measure his arms and legs and to tell him how big he is (p. 91), reminding us of how vulnerable he felt and of how he lost all sense of his own size after he abandoned his first 'acquaintance'. Thus ends the long subdivided middle part of Kafka's Beschreibung eines Kampfes, the part entitled 'amusements or proof that it is impossible to live'. Now the narrator returns to his first 'acquaintance', the same who had embraced him, kissed his clothes and pushed his head against his body at the end of Part I and whom the narrator subsequently 'rode' until he was half-dead in his first 'amusement'. The acquaintance tells the narrator of his problems in love, to which the narrator abruptly replies that he will have to kill himself. Equally abruptly the acquaintance bares his chest for the narrator's admiration. The narrator is suitably impressed: 'Seine Brust war wirklich breit und schon' (his chest was really broad and beautiful) (p. 95). Part of the narrator's reaction to being made acquainted with this broad and beautiful chest is his exaggeratedly confidential announcement: 'Ich bin verlobt, ich gestehe es' (I

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am engaged, I admit it) (p. 95). It seems the narrator is simultaneously admitting that he is physically attracted to his acquaintance and attempting to keep this erotic attraction at bay by announcing that he is really 'heterosexual'. The narrator continues however to admire the physical features of the 'acquaintance'. In the last five paragraphs of the story the narrator's tone becomes abruptly sentimental as he describes how they sat together on the hill above the town; how 'wir durften uns lacherlich und ohne menschliche Wurde benehmen, denn wir mufiten uns nicht schamen vor den Zweigen iiber uns und vor den Baumen, die uns gegeniiber standen' (we could behave ridiculously and without a thought for human dignity, for we did not have to be ashamed in the presence of the leaves above us and the trees opposite us) (p. 96); how the acquaintance took out a knife and stuck it playfully in his left upper arm; how the narrator 'sucked a little at the deep wound' (p. 96) and how they eventually went on their way through the night and the snow, the acquaintance leaning on the narrator for support. From this attempt to paraphrase the story one may draw some conclusions. One could suggest: (1) that a constantly recurring leitmotif of the story is the development of a strange 'relationship' between two men (the narrator and the acquaintance; the narrator and the fat man; the fat man and the young man in the church); (2) that the 'relationships' are described in terms of alternating antagonism/fear and devotion; (3) that the 'relationships' are also described in terms of alternating positions of dominance and submission; (4) that in each of the stories one man admires the physical features of the other; (5) there are extraordinary abrupt physical expressions of affection of one man for the other; (6) that these are often interrupted by a new story or new turn of events, as if the narrator were constantly trying to escape a certain scenario. One wonders whether this might be the result of the 'homosexual panic' that was mentioned in the discussions of doppelganger above, where the return of repressed homosexual libido was the cause of paranoia? According to Ruth Tiefenbrunn this story 'is the description of the panic experienced by a latent homosexual when he first discovers his deviant orientation'.11 Whatever one feels about Tiefenbrunn's talk of 'deviance' and her 'personality category' of 'the homosexual', one is inclined to endorse her interpretation of the relationships between men described in Beschreibung eines Kampfes as somehow sexual. Furthermore these relationships or encounters might very often be characterized as 'sadomasochist', involving a mixture of pleasure and pain and the more or less playful adoption of roles of master or slave. This is not at all unusual in Kafka's work: he constantly gives scenes of violence between men a strong erotic flavour. One recalls for instance the episode in Der Prozefl

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(The Trial) where K hears 'sighs' behind a door and opens it to find his two guards, Franz and Willem, being whipped and ordered to strip naked by a third man, 'in einer Art dunkler Lederkleidung, die den Hals bis tief zur Brust und die ganzen Arme nackt liefi' (in a sort of dark leather garment which left a large part of his chest and the entirety of his arms naked).12 One may also recall the execution of K, stripped half-naked in a quarry by two men who stand cheek to cheek right in front of his face as one of them plunges a knife deep into his heart.13 In Das Urteil (The Judgement) (written September 1912, published 1913) an absurd Kampf develops between Georg Bendemann and his father while he is undressing the old man and trying to put him to bed. Absurdly the old man gains the upper hand and equally absurdly sentences Georg to death by drowning, a sentence which Georg carries out himself by promptly jumping into the river and drowning. Kafka wrote to Max Brod that while writing the final sentence - 'In diesem Augenblick ging iiber die Brucke ein geradezu unendlicher Verkehr' (at this moment unending traffic passed over the bridge) — he was thinking of 'eine starke Ejakulation' (a strong ejaculation).14 Sexual pleasure derived from a fantasized final defeat in a Kampf with his father? And this masochistic pleasure exhibited for the benefit of his future fiancee, to whom the story was dedicated? The conclusion to be drawn from such passages is, one might suggest, not that 'Kafka was a homosexual' or indeed that 'he was a sadomasochist' but that, like Sartre and Nietzsche, he saw all relationships as relationships of power and essentially and apparently unavoidably sadomasochist affairs. This sadomasochism of human relationships is treated with the ironic distance of tragicomedy by Kafka, but at the same time such relationships are seen as not only unavoidable but also desirable - as the only 'relationships', the only kind of contact possible with the Other. The young man in Beschreibung eines Kampfes needs the attention of others to persuade himself of his own reality, 'in order to get a body'. Once alone the narrator arrives at the verge of terror and madness and cries out for someone to measure his arms and legs as he has lost all sense of proportion. Without anchorage in particular social relationships — where he would be defined in a relatively stable position in relation to the other as 'gro6' or 'klein' - the narrator vacillates 'schizophrenically' between both extremes, rather like Walser's Jakob or indeed like Dostoevsky's Mr Golyadkin. In order to escape from one's existential loneliness - a loneliness which derives from an 'existentialist' abandonment of, or simple sense of alienation or exclusion from, collective identities and the collective sadomasochism of 'us vs. them thinking' and establish 'real' contact with the Other, whether this Other be male or female, one must apparently engage in some sadomasochism. Mark Anderson sees the closing scene of Beschreibung eines Kampfes, in which the 'acquaintance' bares his chest and sticks a knife in his arm, as 'an

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attempt to get beyond the surface of clothing to the "reality" of the body, pain and blood'.15 It is also of course another in the series of desperate attempts to establish some kind of direct contact between two men which constitutes the Description of a Struggle. One is reminded again of that insatiable desire for 'authenticity and a direct confrontation of human wills', which, according to Leed, 'dominated the enthusiasm for war and shaped the expectations of those who went into combat'.16 Kafka himself did not fall prey to the illusion that the war would bring about this 'authenticity' of a 'direct confrontation of human wills'; he wrote of his 'Hafi gegen die Kampfenden' (hatred of the fighters).17 But a huge number of others did. The false sense of community which engulfed nations at the outbreak of war in 1914 was not for Kafka, who remained true to his own most modern sense of not belonging anywhere, of not sharing in a collective identity, the collective sadomasochism of communities and nations.18 Kafka's obsession and identification with literature appears to have been a commitment to a view of his self as 'writing in progress', an unending, perhaps narcissistic, 'process', as a 'floating signifier' of no fixed abode, no fixed masculine identity in the patriarchal world. Thus he described himself in Brief an den Vater (Letter to the Father) as an 'in Wahrheit enterbten Sohn' (in truth a dispossessed son).19 His constant 'Hochzeitsvorbereitungen' (wedding preparations) and equally constant abandonment of these plans are to be understood as part of this literary 'process' towards an 'identity', towards taking a definite place as 'heterosexual married man' in patriarchal society, a process which cannot however finally end, for that would put an end to life as process, as literature and thus to his writing and his self. 'Sisyphus', claimed Kafka, 'war Junggeselle' (Sisyphus was a bachelor).20 One can perhaps thus understand why Kafka saw marriage - a commitment to a fixed, heterosexual identity - as threatening to his literary work, his literary subversion of fixed identities. Rather than transferring personal confusions to the border between the nation or empire and its outside - as many did - Kafka continued his Kampf within himself and in his work, a wrestling match between doppelganger, between men, apparently erotically charged, necessary for his writing which was in turn necessary for his own survival, as he often remarked, and which was 'threatened' by the prospect of 'normal' married life. If the term 'Sadomasochist an sich selber' (sadomasochist with regard to himself) is appropriate in Nietzsche's case, surely it is also an appropriate description of the author of Beschreibung eines Kampfes, Das Urteil or Der Prozeft.

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'Diese pure Lust am Kampf (This sheer pleasure of combat): Brecht and Irigaray It was the wildness that interested me in this Kampf. During those years (after 1920) I derived much pleasure from sport, and particularly from the sport of boxing . . . . Thus in my new play a pure, unadulterated Kampf was to be fought out, a Kampf without any cause other than the pleasure of combat, with no other aim than to determine who was the 'better man'. ... In my play this sheer pleasure of combat was to be looked at.21 This is how Bertolt Brecht attempted in 1954 to explain his interest in writing Im Dickicht der Stadte (In the jungle of the cities) (1924). Brecht's play is subtitled 'Der Kampf zweier Manner in der Riesenstadt Chicago' (the Kampf of two men in the giant city of Chicago) and the title itself echoes a phrase at the end of London's novel about Chicago, The Iron Heel: There was warfare in that modern jungle, a great city. ... We had not changed much from primitive man.' 22 In his piece Brecht displays a boyish delight, similar to that of Jack London, at the opportunity afforded by the 'modern jungle' of the city for 'primitive man' to indulge one of his deepest desires — to fight another 'primitive man'. The Kampf in Im Dickicht der Stadte is a peculiarly abstract affair. There are however constant references to physical combat: the wood trader Shlink announces that he is opening a Kampf against the librarian Garga; Garga uses the language of the boxing ring and speaks of Shlink's 'Knockout' (Sc. 9); Garga speaks of 'die letzten DegenstojSe' (the last thrusts of the rapier) at the climax of the fight in the tenth scene. But what actually takes place is what the antagonists describe as a 'metaphysischer Kampf (metaphysical combat), a duel in which the weapons are insults, money, goods and women, the object of which appears to be the forceful subjugation of the 'soul' and not just the body of the other man, or rather the sheer pleasure to be derived from a Kampf. What the meaning of the Kampf is for Shlink remains unclear until the tenth scene. At the beginning of the play Shlink, a prosperous wood trader, opens the Kampf by offering Garga, a poor librarian, money for his opinion as to the quality of a certain book. Garga proudly declares 'Ich bin keine Prostituierte' (I am not a prostitute) and refuses to sell, apparently fearing that he would thus be selling his soul to the other man. Shlink and his men get Garga into trouble with his boss and by the end of the first scene Garga has lost his job. Shlink informs Garga that he has also 'bought' Garga's girlfriend, Jane. This is the absurd beginning of a three-year-long Kampf between the two men. Having humiliated this utter stranger, Shlink then hands over his entire

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business to the librarian to enable him to get his revenge. Shlink apparently wants to play for a while the role of the slave in this master/slave scenario, and he declares: 'Von heute ab bin ich Ihre Kreatur' (From this day on I am your creature).23 Garga immediately takes control of the business and the once prosperous Shlink sinks to the position of the lowest of the low, supporting Garga's family by carrying coal while being barely tolerated by them. Even when Garga tires of the Kampf, Shlink's masochism remains unsatisfied; he continues to demand further humiliation: GARGA: I have other things to do in life apart from wrecking my shoes kicking you. SHLINK: I beg you to show no consideration either to my worthless person or to my intentions.24 Shlink has thus managed to establish a connection, a relationship with another man, the bonds of which appear to be all the stronger because they are based on games of domination and humiliation. Before he dies, Shlink explains that what he wanted the Kampf to establish was simply this connection with another man, as we shall see. In the meantime one should note that women figure in all this — quite in accordance with Luce Irigaray's theory of 'hom(m)osexualite' - merely as goods of exchange establishing the connection between the two men. In the first scene Shlink used Garga's girlfriend, Jane, in order to humiliate Garga and get him to join the Kampf; Shlink's relationship with Marie, Garga's sister, similarly maintains the connection between the two men. The point that women are merely goods of exchange between men is really driven home in the final scene when, after Shlink's death, Garga sells another man the wood business for six thousand 'wenn du die Frau noch mitnimmst' (if you take the woman as well) (Sc. 11, p. 207). Marie instructs the men to make the contract and, as the stage directions tell us, 'the men sign'. This is a significant stage direction in the context of this piece which revolves around a 'contract' between two men, a contract in which women are really assimilated to merchandise. The 'contract' in question is at one point even referred to as a marriage contract between the two men. Garga boasts: 'In my dreams I call him my hellish spouse. ... One day I will be his widow.'25 In this play Brecht has, one suspects entirely unwittingly, uncovered what Luce Irigaray describes as the 'loi du fonctionnement social' (the law of social functioning),26 the 'hom(m)osexualite' (p. 168) of the patriarchal economy. 'A la limite/ she writes, 'les marchandises — voire leurs rapports — sont' 1'alibi materiel du desir de relations entre homines' (At the limit the goods [including women] - or their relations - are the material alibi of the desire for relations between men) (p. 176):

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Reigning everywhere, but forbidden in practice, 'hom(m)osexualite' is played out across the bodies of women, as matter or sign, and heterosexuality is up to the present nothing but an alibi for the good functioning of the relations of man with himself, of the relations between men.27 According to Irigaray the exchange between men of women and goods symbolizes a relationship between men, a sexual relationship which is at the same time taboo and may not actually take place — for that would reveal and undermine the real structure of the whole symbolic order of patriarchal power and economics (p. 189), and indeed deprive the symbolic and economic exchange of much of its 'value' and 'meaning'. Once the penis, she writes, becomes simply a means to pleasure, and even to pleasure between men, the Phallus loses its power, for 'mere pleasure' is what the patriarchy only allows women, while the men get on with more serious business (p. 190). This is what Irigaray means by 'hom(m)osexualite' - the centrality of the symbolic expression (in patriarchal economics and politics) of male homosexuality combined with the repression of the actual (sexual) expression of male homosexuality. This is what Brecht's piece reveals - unintentionally, one suspects. Brecht himself is not suggesting one distance oneself from the perverse course of society's 'hom(m)osexualite'. He is too involved in it himself; he is 'innocently' (and also cynically) enjoying it — even in 1954 he writes of the 'pure Lust am Kampf (sheer pleasure of the Kampf) — and he suggests at the outset that the audience enjoy it. However, in the abrupt tenderness of the tenth scene Shlink himself reveals the real motive behind the strange Kampf when he openly declares his love for Garga. 'Nimm dich zusammen,' he says, 'ich liebe dich' (pull yourself together, I love you) (p. 200). Garga has understood Shlink's strategy Tuhlung zu bekommen' 'Durch die Feindschaft' (of getting contact by means of hostility) and that 'wir Kameraden sind, Kameraden einer metaphysischen Aktion' (we are comrades, comrades of a metaphysical operation) (p. 200). Through his initial absurd aggression Shlink has managed to draw Garga back into a 'jungle' where some kind of animal warmth, even the warmth generated by fighting, is possible between men. Shlink's speech rather reminds one of Jack London: I have observed the animals. Love, the warmth of the closeness of bodies is our only mercy in the darkness! But the union of organs is all there is, it doesn't bridge the rupture of language. ... Yes, the isolation is so great that there isn't even a Kampf. The forest! Humanity comes from here. Hairy, with the teeth of apes, good animals that knew how to live. Everything was so easy. They simply tore each other to pieces. I can see

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them clearly, how they stared into the white of each other's eyes, with quivering flanks, bit each other in the throat, rolled down, and the bleeding one lying between the roots, that was the defeated one, and the one who had trampled the most of the undergrowth down, that was the victor!28 What Shlink really wanted was to overcome modern isolation and alienation and to experience the love of another man and the closeness of another man's body - in a good fight. But the two men do not 'get together': Garga abandons Shlink; Shlink dies and Garga signs a contract with another man and goes on to play the strange game in New York. This all rather reminds one of Brecht's earlier piece Baal (1918) and of the relationship between Baal, the poet, and Ekart, his sidekick. Women pass through Baal's hands like alcohol down his throat; he also 'steals other men's women' to make a point to the other man. His friend Ekart complains: 'Dich liefien meine Geliebten kalt, du fischtest sie mir weg, obgleich ich sie liebte' (My lovers left you cold, you fished them away from me, although I loved them). Baal candidly retorts: 'Weil du sie liebtest. ... weil du rein bleiben solltest. Ich brauche das. Ich hatte keine Wollust dabei, bei Gott!' (Because you loved them. ... because you must remain pure. I need that. I didn't derive any pleasure from it, by God!) (p. 58). A few minutes later the two men are wrestling, while Sophie, the apparent object of desire, in fact merely the object to be exchanged as an expression, a mere linguistic sign, of 'hom(m)osexuar desire, exclaims 'Jesus Maria! Es sind Raubtiere!' (They're savage animals!) (p. 59). Baal presses his body against Ekart and says: 'Jetzt bist du an meiner Brust, riechst du mich? Jetzt halte ich dich, es gibt mehr als Weibernahe' (Now you are at my chest, do you smell me? Now I'm holding you, there is more than the closeness of women) (p. 60). From now on Baal constantly says 'Ich liebe dich' to Ekart and he finally jumps on him, strangles and stabs him because a woman is sitting on his lap! Just before he is stabbed Ekart asks Baal helplessly: 'Warum soil ich keine Weiber haben? ... Bin ich dein Geliebter?' (Why should I not have any women? ... Am I your lover?) (p. 76). One cannot help noticing the similarity between the scenarios of Baal and Im Dickicht der Stadte. Love between men can be expressed, it seems, only through violence.29

Concluding remarks to Part IV I could go on - to write about Doblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929)30 or Beckett's En attendant Godot (1952) for instance. The point of this section has,

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however, already been made and sufficiently illustrated and can now perhaps be summed up. In the writings of such different writers as Walser, Kafka, Lawrence, London and Brecht from such a range of countries as Switzerland, the Czech part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, England, the United States and the German Weimar Republic, the works of writers taken to be somehow representative of modernity, modern literature and the modern condition, and not generally seen as representing the mere marginal interests of a (gay) minority of men, are to be found scenes of what one must surely call 'sadomasochism' between men (and dogs), scenes where the violence of a Kampf is being used in order to establish and give expression to some kind of 'connection' or 'relationship' between the male combatants. The relationships between Lawrence's Prussian officer and his orderly, Gerald and Birkin, London's dogs and men, Walser's Jakob and Benjamenta, the characters of Kafka's Beschreibung eines Kampfes, Brecht's Shlink, Garga, Baal and Ekart are relationships of a love which, even if it does speak its name, can only or tends only to express itself in violent terms. That violence may certainly be attributed to the influence of a homophobia prohibiting any other kind of physical contact between men other than the physical contact involved in violence. Lawrence's 'The Prussian Officer' is most clearly such a case of the repression of (homo)sexual desire leading to real violence. In other cases the violence appears to be also related to the influence of Darwinism and a view of the world as a place where even 'love' (whether between persons of the same or of different sexes) is contaminated by the 'struggle for survival' and the 'survival of the fittest'. This is what lies behind not only London's but also Brecht's and Kafka's depictions of sadomasochist scenarios. In London's writing about 'the Wild' the cruelty and violence involved in the law of the 'survival of the fittest' is a source of something very close to sexual excitement; the same might be said of Brecht's Ira Dickicht der Stadte. Here the Kampf of the Darwinian state of nature itself is fetishized to such an extent that it is no longer just a pale imitation or representation of what one might be inclined to interpret as its real meaning, i.e. sex; here sex becomes subordinate to the fetish, 'a good fight'. In Kafka's work the sadism of men is treated with an irony that produces a great deal of ambivalence: it is treated as both sexually titillating and tragic at the same time. This ambivalence is evident for example in the title of the section of Beschreibung eines Kampfes where the narrator 'rides' his acquaintance almost to death - 'Belustigungen oder Beweis dessen, dafi es unmoglich ist zu leben' (amusements or proof of the fact that it is impossible to live). In this section it has also been suggested that there is a link to be made between these scenes of sadomasochism between men in modern literature and the widespread enthusiasm at the outbreak of the First World War. Once again

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I emphasize that my purpose in writing about Kafka, London, etc. is not to say something about the individual psychology of these writers, to say that they were 'perverts', 'sadomasochists', '(closet) homosexuals' or 'homophobic homosexuals'; my purpose is rather to attempt to say something about modern men in general by looking at a fairly representative group of modern male writers, those that have been taken to be canonical representatives of literary modernism and the 'modern condition' and indeed have been (and still are) put forward in schools and universities as role models for future generations of men. The point is that one has constantly found a desire on the part of modern men for some kind of physical and 'metaphysical' 'contact' with other men and that this 'contact' frequently occurred in the context of sometimes playful, sometimes serious violence. This must be seen in the context of that desire for 'direct' or 'authentic' experience, for a 'direct confrontation of human wills' that Leed suggests 'dominated the enthusiasm for war',31 a desire which resulted from the increased alienation of men from each other resulting at least in part from the development of the modern 'technology of transportation and communication', as Leed suggests, but also of course from the decline of the patriarchy which had symbolically as well as in political reality represented such a direct contact (and contract (of marriage)) between men. The fact that any attempt to re-establish that contact and re-sign that contract will involve intimations of 'homosexuality' and instances of (sometimes homophobic) sadomasochism should not surprise — as these constituted the foundations of the old 'lost' patriarchy, at the heart of which lay (and lies) Irigaray's 'hom(m)osexualite'. Further: both the 'decline of the patriarchy' and the related 'Entzauberung' (demystification), to use Max Weber's expression, of the world by the progress through the nineteenth century of materialist thought, science and technology, left a vacuum where 'meaning' had been, the 'meaning' of the grand legitimating narrative of patriarchy and male authority and identity, told and retold in mythical, religious, literary and cultural forms. If there had never been such a thing as war, writes Stefan Breuer, the generation of men that was 'coming of age' around 1914 would have had to invent it. Breuer cites Ernst Junger: The war was to give it to us, greatness, strength, solemn ceremony. To us it seemed to signify manly action, a gay shooting match on flowery, blood-bedewed meadows. There is no more beautiful death in the world 32

It was not an uncommon expectation that the war would replace that lost 'great, strong and ceremonial' 'meaning'. The beneficent provider of 'meaning', the war itself conveniently became a substitute father figure in post-patriarchal times: 'Der

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Krieg', wrote Junger, '1st unser Vater, er hat uns gezeugt im gluhenden SchoSe der Kampfgraben als ein neues Geschlecht, und wir erkennen mit Stolz unsere Herkunft an' (The war is our father, he begat us in the glowing lap of the trenches as a new race and we recognize with pride our origin).33 Breuer writes of the 'mobilization of apocalyptic models of thought' and of the respect for violence as persistent effects of the First World War in Germany and considers that the 'konservative Revolution' which hastened the end of the Weimar Republic consisted to a large degree of an attempt 'to hold onto this apocalypse of 1914 and to make it continue' (p. 38). He also observes that the apocalyptic interpretation of experience is part of the Judeo-Christian tradition and notes the 'intensification of religious consciousness' evident in writings about the war. This was an intensification and a revival, one may add, of enthusiasm for the Judeo-Christian patriarchal tradition which set great store by the notion of sacrifice, of the beneficial effects of ritual violence, the patriarchal tradition of 'hom(m)osexualite' ... of the sadomasochist relations between father and son, between men. Norbert Bolz finds striking similarities between, of all people, Ernst Jiinger and Walter Benjamin, as well as between other philosophical figures of the right and the left in the inter-war period in Germany, such as Lukacs, Bloch, Heidegger and Schmitt. The similarities are to be found precisely in the apocalyptic notions of the salutary effect of violence and death.34 Bolz writes of Carl Schmitt's 'political existentialism' (p. 76) in which the central issue of politics is simply Teindbestimmung', the clear definition of enemies (p. 59). For Schmitt the enemy is 'der anerkannte Andere: der Bruder' (the recognized Other: the brother): 'Der Feind steht auf meiner eigenen Ebene. Aus diesem Grunde mufi ich mit ihm, kampfend, auseinandersetzen, um das eigene MaS, die eigene Grenze, die eigene Gestalt zu gewinnen' (The enemy stands on my level. For this reason I must clash with him, fighting, to establish my own measure, my own boundary, my own form) (p. 64). This sounds a little like London's 'Law of Club and Fang', or the absurd arbitrariness of Shlink's Teindbestimmung'; it also reminds one of Kafka's narrator's confusion regarding his own size when he did not have anybody to clash with. During the 1920s, talk of Teindbestimmung' kept the experience of the front of the war alive and fetishized it as a desirable experience well after the war was over and indeed ensured that it would not be long before another war. Breuer suggests one good reason why many of the structures of the 'konservative Revolution' were a specifically German affair: while the Allied Forces returned to victory and stability, the German soldiers returned after the war to both defeat and revolution (pp. 46—7). Of course that is true. But what about the apocalyptic interpretation of experience and the apparent desire for a 'Gewaltkur' (cure in and through violence) evident for example in Eliot's The

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Waste Land (1922) or indeed the fascination exerted by Fascism in Lawrence's Kangaroo (1923)? In that latter work in particular we find that obsession with 'masculinity and homosociality' which Breuer lists as another leftover of the First World War (p. 37). Breuer writes of the retrospective idealization of the community of men at the front and the soldiers' feeling that they had returned to a society dominated by women, that the peace was a 'Dolchstofi der Frau' (stab in the back from women) and that the Weimar Republic signified an 'elimination of masculine authority' (p. 42). He cites the opinion of Hans Freyer that whenever and wherever men are gathered together there is a 'schweigender Bund zwischen ihnen, ein organisches Verstehen von tausend Dingen, ein Trieb zu fuhren und zu folgen' (an unspoken bond between them, an organic understanding of a thousand things, an instinctive desire to lead and to follow) and, of course, 'eine Lust am Kampf und Zusammenhalt' (pleasure in combat and solidarity) (p. 44). A salient feature of the manliness of the men of the 'konservative Revolution', Breuer argues, was a fundamental inability to deal with fear, to experience nothingness, coupled with a constant need to deny their own weakness or vulnerability (pp. 45—6). 'Frailty, thy name is woman!', one must remember, is one of the central tenets of patriarchal thinking, and of course fighting, Kampf, is the way of proving that one is 'a man', that is 'not a woman'. That was certainly not an exclusively German issue, though the defeat at the hands of the Allies and the humiliating terms of the Treaty of Versailles certainly led to an intensification of the need on the part of many German men to recover and prove their conventional masculinity in a continuation of the Kampf, a misogynist, homophobic, homosocial and thus supremely 'hom(m)osexual' battle against fears of their own conventional femininity (i.e. powerlessness, passivity)35 and for the maintenance or revival of patriarchal securities, of the notion of masculine identity and authority that the patriarchy had handed down and of the 'hom(m)osexual' relations between men not only sanctioned but blessed by the patriarchal tradition. The popularity of Kampf certainly had much to do with men's desires to prove their masculinity in the most traditional terms but it also resulted, as we have seen in case after case, from men's desire to overcome their isolation and alienation from each other in a modern world of increasing isolation and alienation, in which traditional patriarchal bonds between men were being eroded and relations between men were also being made ever more difficult by the outbreak and spread of homophobia. It has been seen how Kampf, playful or even real violence, was frequently used as a medium to express not hatred but love between men, to establish emotional and physical contact with other men. One must remind oneself that the desire for some kind of 'contact', of love

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between men in the absence of the 'ceremonies of innocence' (to use a phrase of W. B. Yeats) of the patriarchy did not have to lead to war and Fascism. It could also, of course, lead, in one who was not afraid of 'angst' and the 'experience of nothingness', to such theatre and poetry as this: Vladimir: Look at me. Estragon does not raise his head. Violently: Will you look at me! Estragon raises his head. They look long at each other, recoiling, advancing, their heads on one side, as before a work of art, trembling towards each other more and more, then suddenly embrace, clapping each other on the back. End of embrace. Estragon, no longer supported, almost falls.26

Notes 1. Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten (Zurich: Suhrkamp, 1978, 1985). 2. Quoted by Jacques Le Rider, Modernite viennoise et crises de I'identite (Paris: PUF, 1990), p. 35. 3. I am not alone in applying the term 'masochism' to Jakob. Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau also reads Jakob's determination to remain 'klein' as an expression of masochism: Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau, Der Grenzganger: Zur Psycho-Eogik im Werk Robert Walsers (Zurich: Ammann, 1986), p. 75. 4. Klaus Theweleit, Mannerphantasien, Vol. 2 (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1980), pp. 161-2. 5. Steven Zeeland, The Masculine Marine: Homoeroticism in the U.S. Marine Corps (New York: The Haworth Press, 1996), p. 145. 6. 'Man gewinnt namlich den Eindruck, daS der einfache Odipuskomplex iiberhaupt nicht das haufigste ist . . . . Eingehendere Untersuchung deckt zumeist den vollstandigeren Odipuskomplex auf, der ein zweifacher ist, ein positiver und ein negativer, abhangig von der urspriinglichen Bisexualitat des Kindes, d.h. der Knabe hat nicht nur eine ambivalente Einstellung zum Vater und eine zartliche Objektwahl fur die Mutter, sondern er benimmt sich gleichzeitig wie ein Madchen, er zeigt die zartliche feminine Einstellung zum Vater und die ihr entsprechende eifersuchtig-feindselige gegen die Mutter.' Cited by Schmidt-Hellerau, Der Grenzganger, p. 50, from Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke, ed. by Anna Freud, Vols. I-XVIII (London: Imago 1940-68), Vol. XIII, p. 261. 7. 'willst du mit mir gehen, wollen wir zusammenbleiben, zusammen irgend etwas anfangen, etwas unternehmen, wagen, schaffen, wollen wir beide, du der Kleine, ich der GroSe, zusammen versuchen, wie wir das Leben bestehen?' Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten, pp. 148f.

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8. Both versions, 'Version A' and 'Version B', of the story are presented in Franz Kafka, Beschreibung eines Kampfes und andere Schriften aus dem Nachlass, (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1994). The following is based primarily on the earlier Version A. 9. 'Ich sah meinen Bekannten mit liebevollen Augen an. In Gedanken schutzte ich ihn gegen Gefahren, besonders gegen Nebenbuhler und eifersiichtige Manner. Sein Leben wurde mir theuerer als meines. Ich fand sein Gesicht schon, ich war stolz auf sein Gliick bei den Frauenzimmern und ich nahm an den Kiissen theil, die er an diesem Abend von den zwei Madchen bekommen hatte.' Kafka, Beschreibung eines Kampfes, Version A, pp. 52-3. 10. '"Immer liebte ich", sagte mein Bekannter auf die Statue der heiligen Ludmila zeigend, "die Hande dieses Engels, links. Ihre Zartheit ist ohne Grenzen . . . . Aber von heute abend an sind mir diese Hande gleichgiiltig, das kann ich sagen, denn ich kufite Hande." — Da umarmte er mich, ku6te meine Kleider und stiefi mit seinem Kopf gegen meinen Leib.' Kafka, Beschreibung eines Kampfes, p. 60. 11. Ruth Tiefenbrunn, Moment of Torment: An Interpretation of Franz Kafka's Short Stories (Southern Illinois University Press, 1973), p. 54. 12. Franz Kafka, Der Prozefi, (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1979), pp. 74-5. 13. Kafka, Der Prozefl, p. 194. Giinter Mecke writes of the similar configuration of a 'man between two men' in Die Verwandlung. Giinter Mecke, Franz Kafkas offenbares Geheimnis - eine Psychopathographie (Munich: Fink, 1982), p. 109. 14. Isolde Trondle, Differenz des Begehrens: Franz Kafka — Marguerite Duras, (Wiirzburg: Konigshausen und Neumann, 1989), p. 64. 15. Mark Anderson, Kafka's Clothes: Ornament and Aestheticism in the Habsburg Fin de Siecle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 49. 16. E. J. Leed, No Man's Land (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 63. 17. Quoted by Klaus Wagenbach, Kafka (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1964), p. 95. 18. Wagenbach writes that among the writers of Prague only Kafka avoided for the entire length of his life any refuge, which a community, party or group might have offered. Three years before his death Kafka wrote in his diary: 'Dieses Grenzland zwischen Einsamkeit und Gemeinschaft habe ich nur aufierst selten iiberschritten, ich habe mich darin sogar mehr angesiedelt als in der Einsamkeit selbst'. (I have only extremely rarely crossed this borderland between loneliness and community. I have even settled down there more than in loneliness itself.) Wagenbach, Kafka, p. 50, quoting from Kafka's Tagebucher 1910-1923, p. 548.

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19. Quoted by Wagenbach, Kafka, p. 50. 20. Quoted by Fritz J. Raddatz, Mannerangste in der Literatur: Frau oder Kunst (Hamburg: Carlsen, 1993), p. 114. 21. 'Es war die Wildheit, die mich an diesem Kampf interessierte, und da in diesen Jahren (nach 1920) der Sport, besonders der Boxsport mir SpaS bereitete, ... sollte in meinem neuen Stuck ein "Kampf an sich", ein Kampf ohne andere Ursache als den Spafi am Kampf, mit keinem anderen Ziel als der Festlegung des "besseren Mannes" ausgefochten werden. ... In meinem Stuck sollte diese pure Lust am Kampf gesichtet werden.' Bertolt Brecht, 'Bei Durchsicht meiner ersten Stiicke' (1954), Bertolt Brecht, Fruhe Stiicke (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1967), pp. 10-11. 22. Jack London, The Iron Heel (London/West Nyack, NY: Amereon, 1976), p. 204. Brecht makes no mention of Jack London here, the man who, with The Game (1905) and The Abysmal Brute (1913), invented 'the boxing novel'. Of course Brecht makes no mention here either of his 'zeitweise intime Freundschaft' (at times intimate friendship) with Arnolt Bronnen which Fritz Raddatz claims was the basis of Im Dickicht der Stadte. See Raddatz, Mannerangste in der Literatur, p. 184, and also John Fuegi, The Life and Lies of Bertolt Brecht (London: HarperCollins, 1994), pp. 92-9. 23. Bertolt Brecht, Im Dickicht der Stadte, in Fruhe Stiicke, Sc. 2, p. 152. 24. 'GARGA Ich habe mehr im Leben zu suchen, als an Ihnen meine Stiefel krumm zu treten./SHLINK Auf meine geringe Person sowie auf meine Absichten bitte ich Sie keine Riicksicht zu nehmen.' Brecht, Im Dickicht der Stadte, Sc. 5, p. 173. 25. 'Ich nenne ihn meinen hollischen Gemahl in meinen Traumen.... Ich werde einmal seine Witwe sein.' Brecht, Im Dickicht der Stadte, Sc. 5, p. 170. 26. See Luce Irigaray, 'Des marchandises entre elles' and 'Le marche des femmes', Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1977), p. 189. 27. Tartout regnante, mais interdite dans son usage, rhom(m)osexualite se joue a travers les corps des femmes, matiere ou signe, et 1'heterosexualite n'est jusqu'a present qu'un alibi a la bonne marche des rapports de 1'homme a lui-meme, des rapports entre hommes.' Irigaray, Ce sexe, p. 168. 28. 'Ich habe die Tiere beobachtet. Die Liebe, Wa'rme aus Korpernahe, ist unsere einzige Gnade in der Finsternis! Aber die Vereinigung der Organe ist die einzige, sie uberbriickt nicht die Entzweiung der Sprache. ... Ja, so grofi ist die Vereinzelung, daS es nicht einmal einen Kampf gibt. Der Wald! Von hier kommt die Menschheit. Haarig, mit Affengebissen, gute Tiere, die zu leben wu6ten. Alles war so leicht. Sie zerfleischten sich einfach. Ich sehe sie deutlich, wie sie mit zitternden Flanken einander das Weifie ins Auge anstierten, sich in ihre Halse verbissen, hinunterrollten, und der Verblutete zwischen den Wurzeln, das war der Besiegte, und der am

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29.

30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

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meisten niedergetrampelt hatte vom Geholz, das war der Sieger!' Brecht, Im Dickicht, p. 201. Raddatz suggests that Brecht's fascination with hardness and coldness in his theatrical theory as well as in his life — a principle quite in accordance with Nietzsche's dictum 'Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich starker' (what does not kill me, makes me stronger) — is in actual fact 'an attack on the world out of fear of fear'. Raddatz, Mannerangste in der Literatur, p. 169. See Bernd Widdig, Mannerbiinde und Massen (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1992), pp. 167-71, for example, on the sadomasochistic relationship between Franz Biberkopf and Reinhold in that novel. Leed, No Man's Land, p. 63. 'Der Krieg muSte es uns ja bringen, das Groiie, Starke, Feierliche. Er schien uns mannliche Tat, ein frohliches Schutzengefecht auf blumigen, blutbetauten Wiesen. Kein schonrer Tod ist auf der Welt. ...' Quoted by Stefan Breuer, Anatomie der konservativen Revolution (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993), p. 35. Quoted by Breuer, Anatomie, p. 32. Norbert Bolz, Ausgang aus der entzauberten Welt: Philosophischer Extremismus zwischen den Weltkriegen (Munich: Fink, 1991). This is of course an extremely condensed version of Klaus Theweleit's argument in Mdnnerphantasien. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, in Samuel Beckett, Dramatische Dichtungen in Drei Sprachen (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1981), p. 414. Maybe Beckett's ability to face up to the 'experience of nothingness' and his attempts to make his audience face up to this experience are just another version of modernist macho sadomasochism?

Conclusion: after patriarchy

Patriarchy - the issue from the French Revolution to postmodern times The one thing we know about the mysterious Godot Beckett's characters are waiting for is that he is male. Whatever the colour of his beard — Vladimir interrogates the 'Garcon' on this point for a moment — he is a patriarchal figure whose presence or absence is all important for the lives of Vladimir and Estragon. They have nothing else to structure their lives around apart from their 'waiting for Godot'. This suggests that the concern with the issue of patriarchy and the crucial question (for men) of how to live after the end of patriarchy, which has been, I suggest, the concern of all the texts dealt with here, continued to be of vital interest to men even into the 1950s. That it is still an issue is evident in our daily 'postmodern' lives, in the political and literary debates of the last years of the twentieth century, as well as in the attention paid in recent literature to the 'crisis of masculine identity' and the masculine response to feminism at the last turn of the century, of which this study is itself a part. That 'masculine identity' and men's (so often 'repressed' and perversely 'sublimated') fears and desires are still a minefield, still usually scrupulously avoided as an embarrassment, is indicated for example by the body of evidence assembled and the questions posed by Elisabeth Badinter in her XY de I'identite masculine and by Mark Simpson in his Male Impersonators.1 Questions such as how it ever happened that men have come to regard the reins of public life as their more or less exclusive birthright, that they regard themselves (whatever their actual position of power or powerlessness) as somehow more closely related to a political, financial, scientific, religious or metaphysical centre of power than women, how and whether this is to be justified or contested, what would happen if men no longer held this partly imagined, partly real position of power — all these questions might be said to

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have been thrown up by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution with its demands for 'Liberte' and 'Egalite' and its implied 'deconstruction' of the hierarchical structures of power of the patriarchy. Even if the third part of the revolutionary programme was Traternite', the dream of equality and brotherhood between men, the supposedly all-embracing principle of 'Egalite' seemed to point to inevitable consequences for the future roles, identities and relationships of women and men in society. In her Vindication of the Rights of Women: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792), for instance, Mary Wollstonecraft argued against the essentialist notion of the existence of an absolute link between, to cite the title of Otto Weininger's work of 1903, sex and character. Instead she considered that 'the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being, regardless of the distinction of sex'.2

Bachofen, Nietzsche, Engels, Freud Questions concerning sex, gender, sexuality, patriarchy and matriarchy became the subject of heated debate as patriarchal notions began to lose their almighty influence with the arrival of modernity and feminism and the questioning of all traditional 'certainties' around the end of the nineteenth century. In 1861 Johann Jakob Bachofen's Mutterrecht (Matriliny) drew attention to the specifically patriarchal basis of the contemporary organization of society by contrasting it with what was in his opinion an utterly different, primitive form of societal organization, namely matriarchy. The terms 'matriarchy' and 'patriarchy' gained a certain currency in the discourse of intellectual men around the turn of the century and into the 1920s. Although Bachofen himself was convinced of the advantages of the patriarchal form of societal organization, Nietzsche's hymn in praise of Dionysus in Die Geburt der Tragodie (1872) may, it seems, also be interpreted as a hymn in praise of matriarchy, as Bachofen had described the opposition between patriarchy and matriarchy in terms of an opposition between Apollo and Dionysus, 'der Frauengott' (the women's god).3 Friedrich Engels was also influenced by Bachofen's work in his Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigentums und des Staats (The origin of the family, private property and the state) (1884), in which he depicted the ideal communist economy of 'primitive' matriarchal times.4 Sigmund Freud was aware that the society he was attempting to describe, the society whose members he was attempting to cure, was a patriarchal society, as is clear in his myth of the 'Urhorde' in his Totem und Tabu (1913). According to this myth, the first revolution of the brothers of a clan against a tyrannical primal father had led not to freedom, but to feelings of guilt on the

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part of the brothers and to a discovery of their 'Vatersehnsucht' (desire for the father) which in turn led them to transform the dead tyrannical father into an all-powerful god. Thus, according to Freud, a fatherless society was gradually transformed into a patriarchally organized society - as a result of men's ambivalent feelings, not only of hate and jealousy but also of love, towards their fathers. While Freud's analysis of what he recognized specifically as a patriarchal society could be seen to have revolutionary consequences for that society, he did not wish himself to change anything, but rather to have merely described scientifically 'the way things are'. This was after all what he was extremely good at doing. It could perhaps be argued however that his conservatism led him to write, in Totem und Tabu as well as elsewhere, the legitimating narrative of patriarchy: describing patriarchy as 'the way things are' and taking the norms of patriarchy to be universal norms tends to lead to the classification of 'alternatives' to these 'norms' as 'deviations' which need to be cured. Freud criticized colleagues who attempted to derive a revolutionary praxis from psychoanalytical theory.

Revolutionary psychology: Otto Gross, Raoul Hausmann, Mathilde Vaerting, Alfred Doblin Along with Wilhelm Reich, Otto Gross was one of those who suffered Freud's disapproval for this reason. The son of an extremely conservative Austrian criminologist, a radical thinker and associate of bohemian circles of writers and artists, Otto Gross lived a stormy life of drugs and 'free love', sweeping up Frieda von Richthofen, D. H. Lawrence's future wife, and her sister in 1907 for example. He also wrote radical psychoanalytical articles.5 In 1913 a series of articles of his appeared in the Expressionist weekly Die Aktion. Here he gave his radical interpretation of the meaning of psychoanalysis: the psychology of the unconscious was, he claimed, the philosophy of revolution; its vocation was to make people internally capable of freedom. He compared the effect of Freud's discovery of psychoanalysis with that of Nietzsche's transvaluation of all values.6 In particular he argued that the coming revolution would be a revolution against patriarchy and for matriarchy.7 In another article he cited Freud's idea that everybody is fundamentally bisexual in the first stage of life, disagreed with Freud that in later life one side of bisexuality simply had to be repressed and suggested that with progress it would no longer occur to anyone to repress a part of their nature.8 All this proved to be too much for his father, who had his son arrested in November 1913 and committed to a mental asylum in Austria. This led to uproar among Otto's Expressionist friends. An edition of Die Aktion as well as

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one of the Munich-based Revolution were dedicated to the case of Otto Gross and his father. The father finally relented and Gross was released in July 1914. He met Kafka in Prague in 1917 and Kafka was apparently enthusiastic about working with Gross on a publication to be entitled 'Blatter zur Bekampfung des Machtwillens' (Pages for the battle against the will to power).9 Before he died in 1920 Gross had expressed in the clearest terms an opinion which remains a basic axiom of contemporary gender studies: namely 'dass die psychischen Typen "Mannlichkeit" und "Weiblichkeit", so wie wir sie heute kennen, ein kiinstlich geschaffenes Produkt, ein Resultat der Anpassung an bestehende Verhaltnisse sind' (that the psychic types 'masculinity' and 'femininity', as we know them today, are artificial products, a result of conforming to the status quo).10 The Dadaist Raoul Hausmann opened his essay 'Zur Weltrevolution' (On the world revolution) (1919) with the following statements: We are experiencing these days the most immense revolution in all areas of human organization. Not only is the capitalist economy being dissolved, so also is all truth, order, law, morality and all masculine and feminine too.11 Like Gross, Hausmann also argued that the revolution must necessarily be one against 'Vaterrecht' and for the introduction of 'Mutterrecht'. Again like Otto Gross, Hausmann argued that the revolution and the emancipation of women must also bring with it the liberation of natural homosexual desire. The repression, within the bourgeois family, of homosexuality, coupled with the institution of monogamy, according to Hausmann, was part of a 'mannliche Beherrschungstechnik gegeniiber der Frau' (a male strategy for ruling over women) (p. 52). This sounds very much like Irigaray's argument concerning 'hom(m)osexualite'. Elsewhere Hausmann argued for the right to do as one pleases with one's own body, a right which must include, among rights and guarantees for unmarried mothers (in a society which has abolished bourgeois marriage), 'das prinzipielle Recht auf jede Form und Art sexueller Beziehungen, sowohl der Frauen mit Mannern, als auch die gleichgeschlechtlichen Beziehungen' (the right to every form and kind of sexual relationship, relationships between men and women as well as same-sex relationships) (p. 38). While these radical men enthused about matriarchy, one woman, Mathilde Vaerting, was rather more sceptical and clear-headed. In the first volume of her Neubegriindung der Psychologie von Mann und Weib, Die weibliche Eigenart im Mannerstaat und die mannliche Eigenart im Frauenstaat (New foundation of the psychology of man and woman: feminine character in a man's state and masculine character in a woman's state) (1921), Vaerting wrote: 'Wir stehen

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heute ... in der Phase des Ubergangs von der Mannerherrschaft zur Gleichberechtigung der Geschlechter' (we are today in the phase of transition from male rule to the equality of the sexes).12 For Vaerting this indeed entailed a dissolution of all masculine and feminine as, according to her Trinzip der Umkehrung in der eingeschlechtlichen Vorherrschaft' (principle of reversal in one sex rule), all those qualities automatically attributed to women in a patriarchy, or 'Mannerstaat' as she calls it, would be attributed to men in a matriarchy or Trauenstaat'. What is termed masculine and feminine is simply a function of the position of power of one sex over the other. As the relative positions of power of the sexes change, so the qualities automatically attributed to one sex will simply be transferred to the other. Armed with this extremely clear principle she writes, for example, that 'die Anschauung uber die GroSe der Intelligenz einer Klasse, Kaste oder eines Geschlechts ist ein reines Machtprodukt' (opinions regarding the size of the intelligence of a class, caste or of a sex are pure products of power) (p. 77). She also wrote that 'das herrschende Geschlecht hat die Tendenz, der Gottheit des eigenen Geschlechts den ersten Platz zu sichern' (the ruling sex tends to reserve the highest position for the divinity of its own sex) (p. 104). In Vaerting's eyes 'matriarchy' would simply be the mirror image of 'patriarchy': men and male children would be disadvantaged and suffer in exactly the same ways as women and female children are disadvantaged and suffer in the patriarchal system (pp. 3f.). Thus viewing matriarchy as in all likelihood no better and no worse than patriarchy, Vaerting places all her hope not in a return to matriarchy but in the absolute equality of the sexes. According to Vaerting's principle, equality would mean that members of both sexes would possess all the qualities traditionally divided into 'masculine' and 'feminine' traits. Alfred Doblin was another who saw and welcomed the approach of equality and the dissolution of gender differences. In his essay 'Der Geist des naturalistischen Zeitalters' (The spirit of the naturalistic age) (1924) he saw the decline of the patriarchy and the elision of differences between the sexes as one of the results of the new technological age: The old patriarchal notions are going; they belong to a more rural, geographically restricted period. The masculine sense of superiority is being shaken. ... What contributes to this most is the fact that both sexes are doing similar work; with the new kind of work the sexes hardly exist any more. ... The sexes are resembling each other more and more.13 The 'Bubikopf, the boyish hairstyle fashionable among women of the Twenties, no doubt helped Doblin form this opinion.

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"Manly women' and "womanly men': Shaw, Joyce, Woolf Lest anyone think that such matters were only of interest in Germany one should recall, for instance, that George Bernard Shaw had, in The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891), supported Nora in slamming the door on the Doll's House and suggested that 'unless Woman repudiates her womanliness ... she cannot emancipate herself'.14 In his preface to a later edition (1922) Shaw claimed that the carnage of the First World War might have been avoided 'had the Gospel of Ibsen been understood and heeded' (p. 97). 'All good women are manly and all good men are womanly' he also wrote.15 Shaw's Saint Joan (1923/4) was one dramatic manifestation of this ideal of 'manly woman'. This was an ideal to which his fellow Irishman, James Joyce, also adhered. Leopold Bloom, the hero of Joyce's Ulysses (1922), is the quintessence of just such a 'womanly man': a modest, multifaceted, peace-loving, wandering Jew of Hungarian extraction living in Dublin who brings his wife her breakfast in bed and indulges in masochistic fantasies. It is clear that his wife, Molly, apart from embodying a very distinctly Joycean version of 'the eternal feminine', 'wears the trousers' in the marriage. In the course of the novel both Leopold and Molly, who are held up in the novel as the ideal modern man and woman respectively, have transsexual fantasies. That other great exponent of experimental modernism in the English language, Virginia Woolf, similarly held that 'it is fatal to be a man or a woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly'.16 The eponymous hero/ine of Orlando (1928) manages, over the course of a few centuries, to be both. Patriarchy or matriarchy and relations between men: Lawrence, Joyce, Eliot D. H. Lawrence wrote an essay on 'Matriarchy', in which he welcomed what seemed to him to be inevitable in the near future with the ascent of the 'New Woman', for the peculiar reason that he expected matriarchy would liberate men from their responsibilities as 'heads of families' and property owners, and 'give the men a new foregathering ground, where they can meet and satisfy their deep social needs, profound social cravings which can only be satisfied apart from women'.17 Here he cited the example of 'the Pueblo Indians of the Arizona desert' who 'still have a sort of matriarchy' (p. 551). While the man marries into the woman's clan and all his property becomes hers, the real life of the man is not spent in his own little home, daddy in the bosom of the family, wheeling the perambulator on Sundays. His life is

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passed mainly in the khiva, the great underground religious meetinghouse where only the males assemble, where the sacred practices of the tribe are carried on ... (p. 551) 'Matriarchy' understood thus sounds rather like 'having your cake and eating it'. In Kangaroo (1923) Lawrence's writer hero, Richard Somers, newly arrived in Australia, flirts with the two great political 'Mannerbiinde' of the 1920s - the extreme right and the extreme left - and representatives of these groups flirt unashamedly with him, offering their undying love if he will only pledge himself to them. What attracts Somers to both groups — and indeed what ultimately repels him from them — has nothing to do with their ostensible politics but rather with his desire - and his fear and suspicion of his desire - for the company of men, for 'a new bond between men'.18 While the left offers the homoerotic brotherhood of equal comrades, the leader of the proto-Fascist 'Diggers', the eponymous Kangaroo, offers a homoerotic patriarchal constellation: 'Man again needs a father', says Kangaroo, 'not a friend or a brother sufferer, a suffering Saviour. Man needs a quiet, gentle father who uses his authority in the name of living life, and who is absolutely stern against antilife' (pp. 110—11). One wonders to what extent the appeal of actual Fascism in the Twenties and Thirties was derived from this constellation of desire for a 'new bond between men', for brotherhood and for a father figure. Strange to say, perhaps, but a vaguely homoerotic paternal—filial bond between two men who are not blood-related is also the subject of Joyce's Ulysses, mentioned above in connection with the 'manly woman, womanly man' theme. The plot of the novel concerns the wanderings around Dublin and eventual meeting and 'bonding' of two men, Leopold Bloom, who is in search of a son, and Stephen Dedalus, who is in search of a worthy father. One could argue that it is their 'marriage' (the consummation of which is symbolized by the question and answer 'intercourse' of the penultimate episode during which the two men urinate under the stars in the dark of Bloom's garden, 'their sides contiguous, their organs of micturition reciprocally rendered invisible by manual circumposition')19 which is celebrated by Molly in the final episode of Ulysses, that great ode to limitless love and joy. Using Walter Ong's distinction between a 'materna lingua' (mother tongue) and a 'patrius sermo' (father speech), Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar claim that Joyce's 'revolution of the word', his style of 'densest concentration, hard', 'with its proliferation of puns and parodies': transforms what Helene Cixous calls 'the old single-grooved mothertongue' into what we are calling a patrius sermo only comprehensible by those who, like Merlin and like Joyce himself, can translate what has been

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'scribbled, crost and crammed' on the margins of literature into a spell of power.20 It is, however, really going too far to claim Ulysses transformed 'a comment on Homer's epic into a charm that inaugurated a new patrilinguistic epoch'.21 Rather, one might suggest, Joyce, a little bit like Lawrence, invokes a kind of matriarchy, over which Molly presides, which would allow men to show their feelings of love - 'the word known to all men' - for one another.22 Gilbert and Gubar are more accurate in their assessment, in the same essay, of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), whose 'wastings', they argue, 'are epitomised by the hysterical speech of women who can "connect nothing with nothing"' (p. 84). The Waste Land does indeed appear to be an attempt to 'inaugurate a new patrilinguistic epoch' by 'shoring fragments' of 'great literature' written by men over the course of the patriarchal centuries against the poet's 'ruin' at the hands of a Medusa-like modernity. An attempt to salvage the patriarchal 'tradition' for the sake of the self-empowerment of the 'individual (male) talent', it ends with a prayer - and the whole poem is an incantation and a prayer — a prayer for salvation from some other world, not at all, I suggest, to be compared with the resolution proffered by Ulysses.

From a 'fatherless society' to the 'Mannerbund': Federn, Bliiher Meanwhile similar questions concerning the type of relations between men that was to be desired and in what political structures these relations might find their expression were being debated in the German-speaking lands, the issue having become particularly topical after the revolution and sudden dissolution of the monarchies of the German and Austrian empires. In his article for Der Aufstieg, 'Zur Psychologic der Revolution: die vaterlose Gesellschaft' (On the psychology of the revolution: the fatherless society) (1919), Paul Federn attempted to render Freudian psychology useful for the revolution, and suggested that it is 'die Stellung des Kindes zum Vater, die die Grundlage alles Autoritatsrespekts in ihm bildet' (the position of the child in relation to the father which forms the basis of all respect for authority in him)23 and that 'die allgemeine Vatereinstellung war schuld, da$ die soziale Ordnung sich so lange erhalten konnte' (it was the fault of the general attitude to the father, that the social order could persist for so long) (p. 12). This 'Vatereinstellung' was, he argues, disturbed and the revolution furthered by disappointment with the behaviour of figures of authority during the war as well as by the actual death of so many fathers in the trenches. The problem he sees facing 'die Aufrichtung einer nicht patriarchalischen Gesellschaftsordnung' (the setting up of a non-

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patriarchal social order) is however: 'die Kongruenz der Familie mit dem gestiirzten, patriarchalisch gebauten Staate und ihre Inkongruenz mit einer Bruderschaftsorganisation' (the congruity between the family and the overthrown, patriarchally structured state and the incongruity between it and an organization of brotherhood) (p. 17). After referring to Freud's myth of the primal horde in Totem und Tabu Federn expresses rather prophetically the fear that the revolution will ultimately lead to reaction as those who have usurped one father figure will be inclined to wait around for the appearance of another father figure (p. 28). This was exactly the tendency Siegfried Kracauer recognized in many of the films of the Weimar Republic.24 It is perhaps remarkable how Federn - and of course he is not alone in this — sees the whole dilemma as a choice facing men between a 'patriarchalische Gesellschaftsordnung' and a 'Bruderschaftsorganisation'. Women are left out of the equation altogether: the aim of the revolution is to replace patriarchy with 'fraternite', the rule of brothers. In his speech on the subject of 'Familie und Mannerbund' (April 1918), Hans Bliiher attempted to summarize the message of his Die Rolle der Erotik in der mannlichen Gesellschaft (The role of eroticism in male society) (1915), a message which programmatically excluded women from the political realm. Bliiher's argument was that while the family depended on 'mann-weiblicher Eros' (male—female Eros), male society depended on the effects of 'mann-mannlicher Eros' (male-male Eros) which was expressed in Mannerbunde.25 Bliiher refers back here to Heinrich Schurtz, whose Altersklassen und Mannerbunde (1902) broached the subject and supplied the term of the Mannerbund (male bond/ alliance/association), which some national socialist ideologues later enthusiastically took up.26 Bliiher's emphasis on and affirmation of the 'Rolle der Erotik', and specifically of 'mann-mannliche Erotik' in male society did not go uncontested — but it was also not so far from Freud's less programmatic ideas of the role of homosexual libido in society (in Zur Einfiihrung des Narziflmus (1914) and Massenpsychologie und Ichanalyse (1921), for example). The family, according to Bliiher, is the area of responsibility of woman who is, by nature, not a political animal but is rather associated with the noncommittal social interaction of the herd (p. 12). Man's nature, on the other hand, inclines him to the enduring bonds of the Mannerbund, which is closely allied to the basic principles of the political state, 'Herrschaft und Macht' (rule (mastery) and power): He who wishes to replace mastery and power by administration is ignorant of the essence of human politics and is using, without being aware of the fact, a herd theory. ... The times will be all the flatter and drier the more alliances for a particular purpose rule: joint-stock

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companies, syndicates and bureaucracy; all the more thoughtless the more it accepts the rule of women, all the deeper and stronger the more power is in the hands of the Mannerbund and of kingship. ... The question remains open as to whether these thoughts are conservative or revolutionary, they are probably both.27 Indeed! The war was not yet over and he was already talking of a 'konservative Revolution'!

A nation of men, once again: Mann, Hofmannsthal, Benn Thomas Mann read Bliiher and was enthusiastic.28 Bliiher's influence is still to be heard in Mann's public conversion to democracy and to the German republic when he spoke in Berlin in October 1922 of the erotic and indeed /zomoerotic basis of the state and even played with the idea of handing over to 'dem jungen Gotte (Eros) die Prasidentschaft dieses neuen Reiches' (to the young god (Eros) the presidency of this new Reich}.29 Mann's enthusiasm for the republic is filtered here through his reading of Walt Whitman, whose hymns to the American republic and to the love of comrades and brothers lent themselves rather more easily than Bliiher's conservatism to a speech in support of republican ideals.30 Mann's frankness is certainly to be welcomed when he publicly invoked 'jene Zone der Erotik' (that zone of eroticism), in which the law of sexual polarity, believed to be universally valid, proves to be invalid and in which we see the same with the same, mature masculinity with aspiring youth ... or young masculinity with its own reflection bound together in passionate community.31 I am inclined to wonder, however, whether there are any women in this republic of Eros at all? Mann's conversion to democratic ideas appears to have primarily involved a conversion from one structure regulating relationships between men — the patriarchal, hierarchical one — to another — the brotherhood. The theme of Mann's Der Zauberberg (The magic mountain) (1924) could be related to the 'son-in-search-of-a-father, father-in-search-of-a-son' theme in Joyce's Ulysses. Hans Castorp is faced with a choice between several likely candidates: Settembrini, Naphta and Peeperkorn. His choice is finally made for him - with the outbreak of the First World War. This recalls the sentence that Ernst Jiinger wrote: 'Der Krieg ist unser Vater .. ,'.32 Mann ends his novel, and this in 1924 one must remember, with apocalyptic hopes about the salvation of all the fatherless and directionless Hans Castorps of the world through the orgy of death that is war. The narrator of Der Zauberberg asks, ominously:

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'Wird auch aus diesem Weltfest des Todes, auch aus der schlimmen Fieberbrunst, die rings den Abendhimmel entzundet, einmal die Liebe steigen?' (Will love one day rise also from this world festival of death, also from the awful fever heat that lights up the evening sky all around?)33 Molly Bloom's 'Yes' to life and love at the end of Joyce's Ulysses is rather more appealing. If Mann suggested that Eros, and specifically that form of Eros which binds men to each other as brothers and comrades, might form the basis of a Republic, Hofmannsthal invoked literature or 'Schrifttum' as the force that binds a rather more conservative notion of the nation (of men) together. The argument of his speech given in the University of Munich in January 1927 entitled 'Das Schrifttum als geistiger Raum der Nation' (Writing as the spiritual space of the nation) might be compared to T. S. Eliot's attempt to forge an identity, to save his masculine sense of power and control and to 'inaugurate a new patrilinguistic epoch' by 'shoring up' 'fragments' of literature against his ruin. Here Hofmannsthal spoke of turning back the clock to pre-Enlightenment, pre-Revolutionary and even to pre-sixteenth-century times and ominously referred to a conservative revolution on a scale hitherto unknown in European history.34 In 1934 Gottfried Benn looked back in nostalgia to an even earlier age in his essay 'Dorische Welt: eine Untersuchung tiber die Beziehung von Kunst und Macht' (Doric world: an examination of the relation between art and power). Here he wrote in praise of a civilization which had arisen out of matriarchal, feminine times to enthrone men as lords of creation, enshrine masculine values and worship the male body. With lyrical enthusiasm Benn wrote: Doric is every kind of anti-feminism. Doric is the man who locks up the supplies in the house and forbids women from watching the games: she who crosses the Alpheios will be thrown from the cliff. Doric is the love of boys, so that the hero stays with the man, the love of the war campaigns, such couples stood and fell [together] as a [solid] rampart. This was erotic mysticism ... ,35 Of course the love of boys was never officially introduced as one of the institutions of Hitler's state. Fascism was however the supreme attempt to turn back the clock after the end of patriarchy and to bond men to each other in some sort of extremely homosocial but equally extremely homophobic Mannerbund by means of mass ritual, vague appeals to vague homoerotic desires and some vague mythological past, and the drawing of a clear boundary between this select male community and the rest, who had simply to be exterminated. If this was really all to some extent the result of well and truly perversely sublimated 'homosexual libido', together with an intense misogyny and anti-feminism

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intensified by the decline of the patriarchy and dissolution in reality of its absolute distinctions between 'masculine' and 'feminine', a misogyny above all concerned to expel anything stigmatized as 'feminine' from the self, then one might be rather tempted to make an enormous understatement and suggest that all that inhumanity might have been avoided had such men, in G. B. Shaw's words, learnt the Gospel of Ibsen, and come to terms with their own 'womanly-manly' natures — and stopped seeking political outlets for their 'homosexual libido'.

A more complex Oedipus; a less Fascist man? With much more sense and sense of humour than Gottfried Benn, Robert Musil envisaged a far less strident reaction to feminism and the 'new woman'. In his short essay 'Der bedrohte Odipus' (1930) he wrote of the increasing obsolescence of the traditional Oedipus complex in an age where men and women increasingly wore much the same types of clothes.36 In a society where women and men both wore trousers, Musil considered little boys just as likely to desire to return to the laps of their fathers as to the laps of their mothers. Even Freud himself, one should remember, had his doubts about the simple Oedipus complex and wrote of a more common and more complete double Oedipus complex resulting from the original bisexuality of the child.37 This is, of course, too often forgotten or suppressed in the popular version of Freud. When Freud's doubts about the simple Oedipus complex were mentioned earlier in connection with Robert Walser, it was suggested that this more complex Oedipus complex was, as Freud himself suggests, rather more typical of modern men than is generally assumed. Thus one might argue that the world would be a much better place and much carnage might be avoided if men only learnt to come to terms with the complexity of their natures and desires and ceased to project embarrassing elements of them onto others or to 'sublimate' them in political (or religious) structures which oppress themselves as well as women. The projection upon others of men's own embarrassing confusions as well as the 'sublimation' of the same in oppressive political structures is what this study of modern and modernist men has been about and it is with the coming together of precisely those strategies in the politics of the Fascist state that this study ends. After that appalling chapter in our history one would hope that men would have at least learned how not to behave.

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Towards an acceptance of ambivalence and a revival of an ars erotica At the beginning of this concluding chapter I suggested that all the confusions surrounding masculine identity at the turn of the century and in the first few decades of the twentieth century were never resolved and are actually still with us. I wish to emphasize this again and again refer to the recent evidence assembled by Elisabeth Badinter in XY de I'identite masculine and to Mark Simpson's analyses of manifestations of contemporary culture in his Male Impersonators. There has been in the past and there continues to be profound hypocrisy in the narratives men have told and continue to tell themselves and others about themselves and others, about their relationships with other men and their relationships with women, about 'heterosexuality' and 'homosexuality' and this hypocrisy has had, I suggest, serious political and social consequences. Michel Foucault was one who saw through these false narratives concerning 'sexuality', itself, he argued, a bourgeois 'construct', aimed at preserving an exclusive sense of 'identity', Foucault argued that our culture has been and continues to be saturated with far too much 'scientia sexualis'; what we lack is an 'ars erotica'. Perhaps once we have left behind our obsession with the classifications of late nineteenth-century 'science', with 'sex', 'sexuality', 'sexual identity', 'hetero-' and 'homosexuality', 'sexual orientation', 'normality' and 'deviance', 'passive' and 'active', 'masculine' and 'feminine' and so on and so forth, once we forget the obsession with power and control over the other (and over the other in the self) of such 'science'; and maybe once we also forget 'patriarchy' and even 'matriarchy'; abandon all dualist philosophies of 'us' vs. 'them' and forget as well the fetishization of 'the survival of the fittest' and the 'hom(m)osexualite' which may be irrationally fuelling our exploitative capitalism and will to power - maybe once we have left all this ideological baggage behind us then we may begin to relax with a sense of our own human dignity as equal brothers and sisters and appreciate the non-exclusive, non-classificatory spheres of 'eros' and 'art', develop an aesthetics of living and learn to love ourselves and each other in a non-exclusive, non-possessive way, in all our complexity and ambivalence, all our intermingling of 'masculine' and 'feminine', (so often confused with) power and vulnerability?

Notes 1. Elisabeth Badinter, XY de I'identite masculine (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1992); Mark Simpson, Male Impersonators (London, New York: Cassell, 1994). 2. Quoted by Jane Moore, 'Promises, promises: the fictional philosophy in

After patriarchy

3.

4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

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Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in The Feminist Reader, ed. Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), p. 158. See Johann Jakob Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht: eine Untersuchung uber die Gynokratie der alien Well nach ihrer religiosen und rechtlichen Natur, 2 vols (Basel: Benno Schwabe & Co., 1948), Vol. 1, pp. 44-8 and Vol. 2, pp. 591606. See also Jacques Le Rider, Modernise viennoise et crises de I'identite (Paris: PUF, 1990), pp. 126-9. See the extract from Friedrich Engels' Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigentums und der Staat in Das Mutterrecht von Johann Jakob Bachofen in der Diskussion, ed. Hans-Jurgen Heinrichs, (Frankfurt/M.: Qumran, 1987), pp. 331-42. See Jennifer E. Michaels, Anarchy and Eros: Otto Gross (Bern, Frankfurt/M., New York: Peter Lang, 1983); Le Rider, Modernite viennoise, pp. 126-9. On Gross and the 'Nietzscheism' of the avant-garde see Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany: 1890—1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 57-9. Otto Gross, 'Zur Uberwindung der kulturellen Krise', Die Aktion, 2 April 1913, p. 384. Otto Gross, 'Zur Uberwindung der kulturellen Krise', p. 387. Otto Gross, 'Anmerkungen zu einer neuen Ethik', Die Aktion, 1913, p. 1142. Michaels, Anarchy and Eros, p. 164. Cited by Michaels, p. 52, from Otto Gross, Drei Aufsatze uber den inneren Konflikt. 'Wir erleben heute die ungeheuerste Revolution auf alien Gebieten des menschlichen Organisierens. Nicht nur die kapitalistische Wirtschaft, sondern auch alle Wahrheit, Ordnung, Recht, Moral, auch alles Mannliche und Weibliche ist in Auflosung.' Raoul Hausmann, 'Zur Weltrevolution', in Hausmann, Texte bis 1933, Vol. 1, Bilanz der Feierlichkeit, ed. Michael Erlhoff (Munich: Edition Text und Kritik, 1982), p. 50. Mathilde Vaerting, Neubegriindung der Psychologie von Mann und Weib, Vol. 1: Die weibliche Eigenart im Ma'nnerstaat und die mannliche Eigenart im Frauenstaat (Berlin: Frauenselbstverlag, 1975), p. 134. 'Die alten patriarchalischen Vorstellungen gehen verloren; sie gehoren einer mehr landlich gebundenen, ortlich beschrankten Periode an. Das mannliche Uberlegenheitsgefuhl wird erschiittert. ... Aber vornehmlich tragt zu dieser Erschutterung bei das gleichmaSige Arbeiten beider Geschlechter; es gibt bei der Arbeit der neuen Art kaum noch Geschlechter. ... Die Geschlechter ahneln sich an.' Alfred Doblin, 'Der Geist des naturalistischen Zeitalters', Die Neue Rundschau, December 1924, p. 1288.

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14. George Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, in Wisenthal, Shaw and Ibsen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), p. 130. 15. Quoted by Declan Kiberd, Men and Feminism in Modern Literature (London: Macmillan, 1985), p. 61. 16. Quoted by Kiberd, Men and Feminism, p. 32. 17. D. H. Lawrence, 'Matriarchy', Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished and Other Prose Works lay D. H. Lawrence, ed. Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore (London: Heinemann, 1968), pp. 549-52, p. 552. 18. D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo (London: Heinemann, 1955), p. 199. 19. James Joyce, Ulysses (London: Bodley Head, 1967), p. 825. 20. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, 'Sexual linguistics: gender, language, sexuality', The Feminist Reader, ed. Belsey and Moore, pp. 81-99, p. 94. 21. Gilbert and Gubar, 'Sexual linguistics', p. 94. 22. See Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), pp. 380—94, for a discussion of the theme of 'Fathers and Sons' in Irish modernist literature. 23. Paul Federn, 'Zur Psychologic der Revolution: die vaterlose Gesellschaft', Der Aufstieg, 12/13 (1919): 7. 24. See Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler (Princeton University Press, 1947), Ch. 10, 'From rebellion to submission'. 25. Hans Bliiher, Familie und Mannerbund (Leipzig: Der neue Geist, 1918), p. 11. 26. See Jiirgen Reulecke, 'Das Jahr 1902 und die Urspriinge der MannerbundIdeologie in Deutschland', Mdnnerbande, Mdnnerbunde, ed. G. Volger and K. von Welck, (Cologne: Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum, 1990), Vol. 1, pp. 3-10. 27. 'Wer Herrschaft und Macht durch Verwaltung ersetzen will, verkennt das Wesen des menschlichen Staatstumes und benutzt, ohne es zu wissen, eine Herdentheorie. ... Eine Zeit ist um so flacher und trockener, je mehr die Zweckverbande herrschen: die Aktiengesellschaft, die Syndikate und die Biirokratie; umso leichtfertiger, je mehr sie die Herrschaft der Frau duldet, umso tiefgriindiger und starker, je mehr die Herrschaft in den Handen des Mannerbundes und des Konigtums liegt. ... Die Frage bleibe offen, ob die vorgetragenen Gedanken konservativ sind oder revolutionar, wahrscheinlich sind sie beides.' Bliiher, Familie und Mannerbund, p. 36. 28. See Thomas Mann's letter to Carl Maria Weber of 4 July 1920, Thomas Mann, Briefe: 1889-1936, (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1961), pp. 176-80. 29. Thomas Mann, 'Von deutscher Republik', Gesammelte Werke, Vol. XI; Reden und Aufsdtze 3 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1960), p. 847. 30. See Hans WiSkirchen, 'Republikanischer Eros', ed. Gerhart Harle, 'Heimsuchung und sufies Gift': Erotik und Poetik bei Thomas Mann

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31.

32. 33. 34.

35.

36. 37.

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(Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1992), pp. 17-40. See also Widdig, Mannerbiinde und Massen (Opladen: West deutscher Verlag, 1992) pp. 55-72. 'in der das allgiiltig geglaubte Gesetz der Geschlechtspolaritat sich als ausgeschaltet, als hinfallig erweist und in der wir Gleiches mit Gleichem, reifere Mannlichkeit mit aufschauender Jugend ... oder junge Mannlichkeit mit ihrem Ebenbilde zu leidenschaftlicher Gemeinschaft verbunden sehen.' Thomas Mann, 'Von deutscher Republik', p. 847. Quoted by Stefan Breuer, Anatomie der konservativen Revolution (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993), p. 32. Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg (Stockholm: Fischer, 1943), Vol. 2, p. 572. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 'Das Schrifttum als geistiger Raum der Nation', Prosa IV, Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben, ed. Herbert Steiner (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1955), pp. 390-413, pp. 412-13. 'Dorisch ist jede Art von Antifeminismus. Dorisch ist der Mann, der die Vorrate im Haus verschliefit und den Frauen verbietet, den Wettspielen zuzuschauen: welche den Alpheios iiberschreitet, wird vom Felsen gestiirzt. Dorisch ist die Knabenliebe, damit der Held beim Mann bleibt, die Liebe der Kriegsziige, solche Paare standen wie ein Wall und fielen. Es war erotische Mystik ...' Gottfried Benn, 'Dorische Welt: eine Untersuchung uber die Beziehung von Kunst und Macht', Samtliche Werke, Vol. IV, Prosa 2, ed. Gerhard Schuster (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1989), pp. 124-53, p. 137. Robert Musil, 'Der bedrohte Odipus', Gesammelte Werke, ed. Adolf Frise, Vol. 2, pp. 528-30, p. 530. This was mentioned in connection with Robert Walser in Chapter 10 above.

Index

Allen, Christine Garside 29, 31 Anderson, Mark 198 Andreas-Salome, Lou 32, 33, 37 anti-Semitism 65, 73, 126-7, 131 Aschheim, Steven 30, 37, 167

Broch, Hermann 72—3 Brod, Max 198 Burroughs, Edgar Rice 112, 182 Burroughs, William 6, 182 Burton, Sir Richard 134

Bachofen, J. J. 13, 29, 87, 213 Baden-Powell, Robert 124 Badinter, Elisabeth 6, 89, 91, 92, 95, 112, 170, 212, 224 Barres, Maurice 92, 170 Baudelaire, Charles 188 Bauman, Zygmunt 43, 76, 111, 127, 128-9 Beardsley, Aubrey 66 Bebenburg, Karg von 72 Beckett, Samuel 172, 203, 208, 212 Benjamin, Walter 157, 206 Benkert, Karoly 13 Benn, Gottfried 222, 223 bisexuality 13, 32, 38, 86, 89-90, 152, 214 Bloch, Ernst 206 Bliiher, Hans 113-14, 220-1 Boer War 124 Bohm, Karl Werner 153 Bolz, Norbert 206 Bonheur, Rosa 92 Boone, Joseph 134 Bosanquet, Bernard 111 Bourdieu, Pierre 171 Brecht, Bertolt 188, 200-3, 204 Breuer, Stefan 205-7

camp 38, 48 Carpenter, Edward 22 Childers, Erskine 126 Cixous, Héléne 218 Conrad, Joseph 120-5, 137-8, 142, 143, 148 conservative revolution see konservative Revolution Coolidge, Calvin 111 cowboys 112, 182 Craft, Christopher 133 D'Agoult, Marie 92 D'Aurevilly, Barbey 92 Dadaists 167, 215 Darwin, Charles 10, 11, 51 social Darwinism 10, 11, 111, 204 Davenport-Hines, Richard 14, 67, 68, 131 deconstruction 8, 213 Defoe, Daniel 182 degeneration 10-12, 14, 17-18, 59, 61-8, 71, 73, 123, 127-8, 149 degenerate art 61—3, 65—8 sexuality 13-14, 130 see also Nordau, Max Delavenay, Emile 175, 179

Index Derrick, Jacques 30, 31, 33, 59, 128 Dietering, Heinrich 150 Doblin, Alfred 203, 216 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 3, 58, 198 Douglas, Lord Alfred 61 Douglas, Mary 129 Dreyfus affair 68 Du Maurier, Guy 126 dualism 3-8, 6-11, 17-19, 27-31, 43, 48, 51-2, 57, 86-102, 128, 135, 144, 147 narcissism and 7, 49-50, 51-2 Ehrenberg, Paul 151 Ehrenstein, Albert 168 Eliot, T. S. 168, 169, 206, 219, 222 Ellis, Havelock 61, 123 Ellman, Richard 42, 44, 50, 57 Engels, Friedrich 12, 213 eugenic reform 14 see also Galton, Sir Francis Eulenburg, Prinz Philipp zu 115-16, 124 Expressionists 167-8, 214

229

Fritz, Horst 92 Fuchs, Eduard 94 Futurist manifesto 167 Galton, Sir Francis 14, 61, 112 Gast, Peter 95 George, Stefan 78, 154 Gibbons, Tom 10, 12, 14, 59, 62, 66 Gide, André 50 Gilbert, Sandra M. 218-19 Gillespie, Michael Patrick 48 Girard, Réné 58-9 Girouard, Mark 112 Gissing, George 66, 92—3 Gloeden, Wilhelm von 35 Goethe, J. W. 5, 169 Goltz, General Colmar von der 111 Gough, James 93 Grautoff, Otto 150 Gross, Otto 214-15 Gubar, Susan 218-19

Häckel, Ernst 111 Haggard, Sir (Henry) Rider 67 Hardy, Thomas 67 Fascism 65, 114-15, 157, 179-80, 181, Hauptmann, Gerhart 94 207, 218, 222, 223 Hausmann, Raoul 215 Federn, Paul 219-20 Hawkins, Sir Anthony Hope 67 female symbols of the nation 93—4 Hegel, G. W. F. 171 femininity 7, 11, 18, 20, 25-32, 38, 42, Heidegger, Martin 206 Henley, W. E. 115, 122, 124 48, 51, 73, 75, 77, 86-102, 112, 149, 151, 154, 160, 171, 182, 192, Hennigan, Alison 46 207, 215 Hentschl, Willibald 111 First World War 37, 72, 157-60, 199 heredity 13-14, 17 enthusiasm for 165-72, 204, 205-6 Herzl, Theodor 65 as ersatz father figure 170, 205—6 Heym, Georg 167 Fischer, J. M. 62, 65 Himmler, Heinrich 114, 116 Ford, Ford Madox 90 Hitler, Adolf 65, 90 Foucault, Michel 13, 24, 68, 115, 224 Hitler Youth 114 Frazer, J. G. 59, 169 Hobsbawm, Eric 11 Freud, Sigmund 7, 20, 51, 57, 146, Hoddis, Jakob von 168 213-14, 219-20 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 3 Narcissism and the nation 109—10 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 71-85, Oedipus complex, complete 86-7, 91, 116, 155-8, 159, 168, version 192—3, 223 222 Uncanny, the 75-6, 153 anti-Semitism 73-4 Freyer, Hans 207 army volunteer 72-4 Friedrich Wilhelm III, King of Prussia 94 art as cure for modernity 155—6

230

Index

death as cure for decadent narcissism 71-4, 82 homosexual panic 78 language crisis 79—82 orientalism 78-9 Strauss, Strindberg and women 91 war writings and conservatism 116, 157-9 Wilde trials 74, 77 hom(m)osexualité see Irigaray, Luce homophobia 116, 154, 204 homosexual panic 24, 44, 78, 197 homosexuality geography of 134-5, 148 invention of 13—14 Huelsenbeck, Richard 167 Huysmans, J. K. 47, 62, 74, 98, 125 Huyssen, Andreas 88

Le Rider, Jacques 75, 77, 81 Leed, E. J. 166, 167, 168, 169, 178, 181, 186, 199, 205 Lombroso, Cesare 9—10, 14, 61, 66, 123, 129, 149 London, Jack 181-6, 200, 202, 204 Lugosi, Bela 133 Luise, Queen of Prussia 94 Lukàcs, Georg 206 Lyotard, J.-F. 123

Mach, Ernst 81, 146 male bonding 14, 113-16, 136-7 (see also Irigaray; Männerbund) fantasies of giving birth 3—5 nudity 34-6, 94, 113, 178-9 rites of initiation 5-6, 118-19 n.30 Mann, Thomas 114, 148-54, 159, 166, Ibsen, Henrik 62, 97 168, 169, 170, 221-2 invasion literature 126 First World War 159-60 homosexuality 151-4 Irigaray, Luce: hom(m)osexualité 6, 116, 188, 201-2, 205, 206, 224 Tonio Kröger and Death in Venice 148-54 Wilde trials 150 Jameson, Frederic 8 Männerbund 113-16, 137, 152, 180, Johnson, Barbara 8 181, 218, 220-3 Joyce, James 217, 218-19, 221, 222 Martins, Armin 151 Jünger, Ernst 170, 191, 205-6, 221 matriarchy 13, 51, 213-18 see also Bachofen, J. J. Kafka, Franz 188, 193-9, 204, 206, 215 Maudsley, Henry 12 Kerouac, Jack 182 Kiberd, Declan 43, 91, 98 Michelangelo 113 misogyny 7, 29, 86-102, 154, 160, 182, Kinsey, Alfred 119 n.30 207 Köhler, Joachim 35-6, 95 konservative Revolution 206—7, 221, 222 Moebius, Paul Julius 90 Moreau, Gustave 98—9 Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve see Sedgwick, Mosse, George L. 90, 93-4, 113-14, Eve Kosofsky 116 Kracauer, Siegfried 157, 220 Musil, Robert Krafft-Ebing, Richard von 13, 33, 38 Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Kraus, Karl 71 Törleß 141-8 Kurzke, Hermann 151 First World War 159 Oedipus complex 223 Labouchère Amendment 24 Lawrence, D. H, 36, 175-81, 184, 185, narcissism, national 52, 57, 109—16 204, 207, 214, 217-18 see also dualism; male bonding; Le Bon, Gustave 87-8 patriarchy Le Conte, Joseph 88 Le Queux, William 126 Navy Leagues, British and German 124

Index New Woman, the 51, 91-2, 97-8, 132 Nietzsche, Friedrich 3, 20, 27-38, 47, 51, 52, 58, 62, 64, 65, 80, 87, 91, 95-7, 112, 123, 143, 167, 169, 172, 184, 198, 199, 213, 214 beauty of men 34-6 Dionysus and Apollo 28—9, 33, 153-4, 213 Doppelgänger 27—8 First World War as Euro-Nietschean War 37 legacy 37-8 male mother 31-2 sadomasochism 32, 36 truth as woman 29—31 Wagner and femininity 95—7 Nisbet, J. F. 61 Nordau, Max 59, 61-8, 71, 123, 129, 149 Olympic Games 112 see also sport Ong, Walter 218 orientalism 78-9, 135 Orwell, George 185 Oxford Union 91 Parry, Benita 125 Pater, Walter 113 patriarchy 212—4 love of men for men 5—6, 14, 24-5 see also Irigaray; male bonding; Manmrbund male narcissism and 4—5 Pick, Daniel 9-10, 87 Platen, August von 113 Plenge, Johann 114 Plimsoll, Samuel 121 Podmore, Frank 121 political existentialism 206 postmodernism 8 Princip, Gavrilo 37 Pringsheim, Katia 151 Prometheus 5 Queensberry, Marquess of Quilter, Harry 66, 67

61, 65, 77

231

Rank, Otto 7, 49-50, 51 Rée, Paul 32 Reich, Wilhelm 214 Reinhardt, Max 99 Reulecke, Jürgen 114 Rhodes, Cecil 124 Richthofen, Frieda von 214 Roosevelt, Theodore 112, 182 Rosebery, Lord A. P. P. 67 Ross, Robert 44 Rudolph, Hermann 80—1 SA (Sturmabteilung) 114 sadomasochism 20—2, 32—4, 36—8, 52, 146, 168, 170-2, 175-208 Sartre, J.-P. 129, 171, 188, 195, 198 scapegoats 5 7-60 Scheller, Walter 166 Schmidt-Hellerau, Cordelia 191—3 Schmitt, Carl 206 Schnitzler, Arthur 86 Schopenhauer, Arthur 123 Schurtz, Heinrich 220 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 44, 78 see also homosexual panic Seltzer, Mark 182 Shakespeare, William 151 Shaw, G. B. 31, 57, 97-8, 217, 223, Shelley, Mary 3, 5, 6, 49 Showalter, Elaine 4, 9, 22, 23, 59, 66, 132, 136 Simpson, Mark 212, 224 socialism 11, 123 Socrates 4, 31 Sontag, Susan 48, 131 Spencer, Herbert 10 see also survival of the fittest sport 112, 119 n.30, 181, 200 SS (Schutzstaffet) 114 Stark, Karl 62 Stead, W. T. 63, 66 Stevenson, R. L. 3-6, 17-26, 47, 51, 52, 144 Stoker, Bram (Dracula] 120, 125-38, 142 Strauss, Richard 91, 99 Strindberg, August 91, 96, 98 survival of the fittest 10, 12, 181, 183, 204, 224

232 syphilis

Index 129-31

Tarzan 112, 182 Theweleit, Klaus 114, 184, 191 Tiefenbrunn, Ruth 197 Tirpitz, Alfred von 123-4 Tuchman, Barbara 99 Twain, Mark 182 Twitchell, James 130 Uncanny, the

75-7, 153

Vaerting, Mathilde 215-16 Veber, Jean 94 Volke, Werner 75, 80 Wagner, Richard 62, 149 Nietzsche and femininity 95—7 Walser, Robert 188-93,198,204 Webb, Beatrice 111 Weber, Carl Maria 154 Weber, Eugene 74, 77-8 Weber, Max 205 Wedekind, Frank 88 Weininger, Otto 73-4, 89-90, 91, 96 Wells, H. G. 111

Wharton, Edith 165 White, Arnold 134 Whitman, Walt 30, 62, 134, 152 Wilde, Oscar 3, 4, 5, 6, 30, 42-9, 57, 61-8, 71, 74, 116, 150 Salome 99-101 trials 61-8, 115, 123, 133 Hofmannsthal 77-8 Mann 150 Nordau 61-8 Wilhelm II 115-16 Winckelmann, J. J. 113 Winterson, Jeanette 4 Wister, Owen 112 Wollstonecraft, Mary 213 Woolf, Virginia 217 Wynter, Andrew 9 Yeats, W. B. 115, 168, 208 Young Bosnia Movement 37 Zanger, Jules 126 Zeeland, Steven 191 Zola, Emile 62, 88, 112 Zuckmayer, Carl 166 Zweig, Stefan 165-6