From Kevin Kopelson's Love's Litany

What's love got to do with it?

Tina Turner

Could it be that the "it" to which this perspicuous lyric refers is sexuality? Followers of Michel Foucault consider sexuality to be a vexed and vexing cultural construction formed by, at the very least, three powerful discourses: theology, medicine, and law. The male homosexual, for example, is at once a sinner, an invert, and a sodomite. Unfortunately, most Foucauldians fail to suspect, even though common sense should tell them it must, that another powerful (if nowadays undervalued) discourse inflects sexuality as well: love, or more specifically, erotic philosophy. What does love have to do with sexuality? Leave it to post-structuralists, Tina Turner might snicker, to fail to ask this questionlor to suggest "nothing" as its answer.

Whence that failure and that answer? Why is "love" less fashionable than "sex" or "desire"? Critical theorists tend to see love as an outmoded and incoherent epistemological anomaly that has no place among the discourses that construct sexuality as an epistemological field. According to Roland Barthes, the life of the lover is one of "'philosophical' solitude, love-as-passion being accounted for today by no major system of thought (of discourse)" (Lover's Discourse 210). Even though popular culture is obsessed with love, love is "not contemporary," it is "left aside or disparaged by the actuality of theoretical systems" (Heath 104). According to Julia Kristeva, "today we have no love discourse" and "lack a code of love" because "social consensus gives little or no support to... amatory idealism" (Tales of Love 381, 6, 267). But even if conceptions of love are now passe and fragmentary, they are not necessarily inconsequential. They are active, if residual, cultural elements that have played and continue to play a crucial and underexamined role in the construction of sexuality. As Oscar Wilde, who had more to say about sexuality than he himself realized, once put it: "Do you wish to love? Use Love's Litany, and the words will create the yearning from which the world fancies that they spring" ("Critic as Artist" 399).

This book initiates an investigation of the role played by love in the construction, not of sexuality per se, but of homosexuality. More specifically, it examines a number of erotic texts by lesbian and gay writers (Oscar Wilde, Andre Gide, Ronald Firbank, Virginia WooIf, Gertrude Stein, Marguerite Yourcenar, Mary Renault, and Roland Barthes)--texts that rewrite, and unwrite, romantic love in more or less coherent fashions--in order to describe ways in which these love stories have helped script lesbian and gay sexuality. But why focus on romantic, which is to say nineteenth-century, erotics?

One reason is that romantic erotics is rather amenable to an investigation of ways in which love inflects sexuality. Most nineteenth-century theorists saw love and sex as interrelated. They believed that "true love is the conjunction of concupiscence with affection," that it comprises both "sensual" and "tender" currents (Gay 45). The theorists did not, however, value sensuality as highly as tenderness, which they considered spiritual and therefore nobler--an all-too-familiar notion they cannot be said to have originated. Yet even if nineteenth-century erotics did not conflate love and sex, it would still be the focus of this study. To the extent that any one erotic discourse dominates current thought, it is romantic. The nineteenth century was "profoundly erotic" (Gay 422). It was characterized by a voluminous theorization and a widespread popularization of love that were almost unprecedented. As one historian has observed of the preceding period: "despite the flood of poems, novels and plays on the themes of romantic and sexual love, they played little or no part in the daily lives of men and women of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries" (Stone 272). It is true, of course, that nineteenth-century erotic discourse is based upon earlier discourses (Platonic, Petrarchan, etc.). As Joseph Boone notes, many important nineteenth-century figures, and in particular "figures of total union, of desire and the obstructions engendering desire, and of sexual duality as a hierarchical balance," actually derive from medieval romance literature (38). However, the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie transfigured, or "reinvented," those earlier and predominantly aristocratic discourses--and it is the transfigurations that have survived into the present century (Polhemus 153). Lovers are simply more likely to croon "Isn't it romantic?" than "Isn't it courtly?" And if unadulterated pre-romantic discourses are now barely audible, more recent erotic discourse, as both Barthes and Kristeva note, has fallen on deaf ears. Lovers are simply more likely to croon "Isn't it romantic?" than "Isn't it psychoanalytic?" But what precisely is so "romantic" about love as most of us know it?

Romantic erotics deploys a dazzling array of figures, all of which deserve attention in this type of analysis. Some are celebratory: love as divine, as heroic, as eternal, as enchanting, as providential, as idolatrous, as transcendental. Some are somewhat negative: love as violent, as combative, as poisonous, as enthralling, as infectious, as tyrannical, as sacrificial. Some are relatively value-neutral: the idea that love is rational, that it is a vocation, that it is a potent energy, that it "conquers all." This study, however, focuses on four features of romantic love--features that, as Irving Singer shows, are central to nineteenth-century erotic philosophy and that, as the following readings should suggest, are central to twentieth-century homoeroticism.

First, romantic erotics conceives of love as the merging of two persons who complement one another, as an intersubjective dissolution of polar opposition, or obliteration of "the division between the I and the 'not-I'... in a redemptive state of feeling" (Moglen 29). This complementarity is essentially heterosexual; it is the complementarity of sexual difference. For Schopenhauer, for example, lovers "feel the longing for an actual union and fusing together into a single being... and this longing receives its fulfillment in the child which is produced by them both" (3: 342). The English romantic poets are of like mind. Coleridge believes that "the blending of the similar with the dissimilar is the secret of all pure delight... more than all in the exclusive attachment of the sexes" (2: 107). Likewise, Shelley, in "A Discourse on the Manners of the Ancient Greeks Relative to the Subject of Love," claims that lovers seek beloveds who, being diacritically sexed, complement themselves. Keats's Endymion also represents the quest for "endless bliss" by a male and female who wish only to "melt into" one another (2.807, 815). And novelistic representations of "contrast" as the source of romantic attraction, such as Eliot's description of Maggie and Stephen in The Mill on the Floss as a "twofold consciousness that was mingled into one" (407), also "almost always reduce that 'contrast' to a simple binary opposition rooted in contemporary ideologies of sexual polarity" (Boone 11). This basic heterosexuality of the feature, or figure, is indicative of the extent to which nineteenth-century erotics subscribes to two countervailing and primarily novelistic ideals: marital and adulterous love. It is also indicative, if not determinative, of a hierarchical and antagonistic quality with which, as this study will show, lesbian and gay writers have had to contend. Because "the hierarchy of male and female roles [tends to transform a] love relationship into a battle for mastery and possession," the figure is perhaps best characterized as one "of irremediable division glossed over by surface unanimity," of "sexual dichotomization hidden under the unifying sign of marital harmony" (Boone 191, 196).

It is worth noting that the figure of complementary merger was itself complemented by the less pervasive figure of erotic identification, a figure often associated with Wuthering Heights. "Whatever our souls are made of," Catherine exclaims, "his and mine are the same .... Nelly, I am Heathcliff" (68, 70). The idea of falling in love with a duplicate image, as opposed to a contrasting one, formed a fairly conspicuous part of romantic ideology, and it created, as Robert Polhemus notes, a "contradictory logic of desire [as] both 'like with like' and 'opposites attract'" (99). One might imagine that the concept of erotic identification was more likely to have been transfigured by lesbian and gay writers than was the concept of complementary merger, but in fact, and for reasons this study will touch upon, this does not appear to have been the case. It is also worth noting, if only to illustrate the workings of what Monique Wittig has called "the straight mind," that the figure of complementary merger was neither exclusively heterosexual nor oppressively hierarchical at its inception. It derives from a story recounted by Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium about the origin of desire:

As David Halperin notes, Aristophanes' myth clearly generates "three distinct 'sexualities"'--males attracted to males, females attracted to females, and, consigned to one classification, both males attracted to females and females attracted to males (19). Oddly enough, many critics, even ones who should know better, act as though it only generates heterosexuality. Peter Gay, for example, states that "Plato's engaging tale about the origins of amorous attraction, one half of the once-united bisexual creature desperately desiring the other half from which it had been torn, survived into the nineteenth century as an enduring metaphor for lonely, fragmented beings in search of love's healing power" (330; emphasis added). According to Barthes, "the two halves of the androgyne sigh for each other, as if each breath, being incomplete, sought to mingle with the other" (Lover's Discourse 15; emphasis added). And Kaja Silverman credits Aristophanes with having portrayed a primordial "sexual androgyny " and with believing "that the only resolution to the loss suffered by the subject as the consequence of sexual division is heterosexual union and procreation" 152; emphasis added).

Like complementary merger, the three other features of romantic love with which this study is primarily concerned have heterosexual orientations. Unlike complementary merger, however, they are decidedly Continental. Love-death (Liebestod ), the second feature, conflates the concept of love as metaphysical union, the concept of death as metaphysical union, and the concept of Petrarchan acedia (unhappy mutual love). Love-death is now commonly associated with Wagner's Tristan and Isolde (1865), but it appears in as early a text as Goethe's The Elective Affinities (1809). Wertherism, the third feature, can of course also be traced to Goethe. To the extent that we, like the romantics, associate love with sadness, solitude, and suicide, we have the hapless hero of The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) to thank. The fourth feature of romantic erotics is known as "crystallization," a term coined by Stendhal in De l'amour (1822). The reference is to his famous "Salzburg Bough" metaphor, according to which a lover's penchant to imagine her or his beloved as perfect is analogous to the process by which a bare tree branch, if thrown into a salt mine, becomes encrusted with, and obscured by, beautiful salt crystals. This Continental divide, while not, as this study will suggest, absolutely critical, should be borne in mind. Not every erotic death in Victorian fiction, for example, is a love-death (nor, or course, is every erotic death in nineteenth-century Continental fiction). The deaths of Maggie and Tom in The Mill on the Floss may be somewhat Wagnerian, but the death of Catherine in Wuthering Heights is not. It is, as Boone states, "quite the opposite of the glorified and idealized Liebestod, or death-longing of Continental love literature; her death neither fulfills nor resolves anything" (161).

This study devotes one chapter, and in the case of complementary merger, two chapters, to each of these four features of romantic erotics. Chapter 1 deals with a number of fin-de-siècle deployments of the Liebestod trope. Chapters 2 and 3 concern contemporary and conflicted negotiations of the notion of complementary merger. Chapter 4 describes related rejections of the crystallization figure. And Chapter 5 analyzes a recent resurrection of Werther. This structure should not, however, suggest that these features are unrelated. As the readings themselves acknowledge, love-deaths can be Wertheresque, and crystallizations can involve the type of erotic domination that subtends complementary mergers.

But why focus on literary texts by modern, Western, lesbian and gay writers? First, why lesbian and gay texts? If the important question is "What has love to do with sexuality," why limit oneself to the question "What has love to do with homosexuality"? To be frank, having been subjected to a number of them, I am simply more interested in constructions of homosexuality than in constructions of heterosexuality. A less idiosyncratic reason, however, is that a number of scholars, many of them feminist, have already begun to examine ways in which conceptions of love inflect literary texts that are either explicitly heterosexual or not explicitly homosexual. Nancy K. Miller, for example, has demonstrated that erotic "rhetorics" compete with one another across gender lines in eighteenth-century novels written by men (Heroine's Text 150). Lee Edwards has argued that the late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century textualization of female characters as full-fledged "heroes" rewrote romantic erotics. Rachel Blau DuPlessis has described strategies (such as "reparenting" and "female bonding") that "delegitimate the specific narrative and cultural orders of nineteenth-century fiction--the emphasis on successful or failed romance, the subordination of quest to love, the death of the questing female, the insertion into family life" (34-35). Joseph Boone has shown that "the undermining dialogue of uneasy wedlock, the male quest into a world of alternate possibilities, [and] the sustaining fiction of female community" transformed the history of the erotic novel (330). Although some of the deviations from romantic doxa noted by these scholars do, in fact, anticipate the deviations of lesbian and gay literature ("male quests" can be rather homoerotic, and "female bonds" rather lesbianic), the two sets of deviations are not coextensive. Heterosexuality and homosexuality are not, it need hardly be said, identical constructions. For one thing, homosexuality, like femininity, is a problematic ("unnatural") and therefore marked (overtheorized) category, whereas heterosexuality, like masculinity, is a relatively unproblematic ("natural") and therefore unmarked (undertheorized) one. Of the two, that is, it is homosexuality that requires, and receives, an explanation--which could mean that love's role in the construction of homosexuality is more readily articulated than is its role in the construction of heterosexuality.

Why modern, and postmodern, texts? Homosexuality is a late-nineteenth-century construction. It is by now a commonplace of Foucauldian criticism that homosexual identities, as opposed to homosexual acts, arose only after a number of relatively recent, and primarily sexological, discourses breathed life into them. Men, for example, who from time to time had dabbled in sodomy eventually found themselves called, and called themselves, "inverts" and "homosexuals." More or less insignificant sex acts now expressed discrete sexual essences. Hence, to ask "What's love got to do with homosexuality?" is to pose a question that has little or no meaning prior to the fin de siècle. "Love" may have meant something then (indeed, it meant more then than it means now), but "homosexuality" simply did not.

Why Western texts? Cultural constructions are culturally contingent. Sexuality as we know it is not a universal phenomenon. Our sense that one is either a homosexual or a heterosexual "personage" (to use Foucault's term), that one's essential identity is either "gay" or "straight" (a polar division that is disturbed both by its self-deconstructive tendencies and by the third term "bisexual"), as well as our complex and contradictory justifications (psychological, sexological, sociobiological, etc.) for this sense, are uniquely Western. The notion that gay men are Oedipal wrecks is quite foreign to cultures Freudian theory has not yet come to dominate. The by now outmoded notion, popularized in part by The Well of Loneliness, that lesbians have the psyches of "real" (i.e., heterosexual) men and only desire "real" (i.e., heterosexual) women (who, it goes without saying, never desire them in return) is quite foreign to cultures that have neither devised nor disseminated theories of sexual "inversion." Nor, it should be said, is what we mean by "love" universal. Even if love, as an emotion, makes the world go round (a dubious notion -- feelings are also cultural constructions), love, as theorized by romantic writers, does not go round the world. Liebestod is at home in Bayreuth but not in Beirut. Crystallizations occur in Salzburg and not in Singapore. It may well be, of course, that non-Western cultures have constructed epistemological categories that to Westerners seem "sexual" and "erotic." It may even well be that non-Western "erotics" inflects non-Western "sexuality." However, it would be presumptuous, and imperialistic, to subsume those categories and that inflection, assuming they exist, within the context of this study. In other words, "what has love to do with homosexuality?" is a Western question, posed and answered, howsoever incompletely, by a Western scholar for his Western readers. It may be translatable into, and have some relevance within, non-Western discourses, but there are many other scholars who are in better positions to do the translating and determine such relevance.

And why literary texts? All of the major texts analyzed here, including the theoretical ones by Barthes, are literary. On the one hand, this is due to an ever-weakening disciplinary constraint: literary scholars still tend, and are still expected, to study literature. On the other hand, it resists the blandishments of scholars who would limit lesbian and gay studies to analyses of popular culture. The reason for this somewhat unfashionable focus is that both romantic love and homosexuality are literary effects. Love is a literary effect insofar as a great deal of consequential erotic exposition is novelistic. Modern perceptions of erotic desire are "very much formed and conditioned by the fact that the novel became such an influential art form" (Polhemus 2-3) and by the fact that love is the "governing preoccupation" of the novel (Gay 135). To put it bluntly, both Proust and Freud write on love, but who remembers what Freud says or where he says it? Homosexuality is a literary effect insofar as it is structured by readings of "literary" texts. More "inverted" lesbians, it is safe to say, have read, and recognized themselves in, The Well of Loneliness than have read Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis. And more gay men have read Dancer from the Dance than Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Which, of course, is not surprising. "Literature," for better or worse, has been a privileged site of cultural expression for so long that many modern subjects are predisposed to turn to it for what seems like self-articulation, self-validation, and self-explication. This is expecially true of lesbian and gay subjects, who often find themselves represented unsympathetically--if, indeed, they find themselves represented at all--in non-literary cultural forms.

Of course, romantic love and homosexuality are not solely literary effects. Kristeva's claim that "love crosses the threshold of modern times only in literature" clearly overstates the case (Tales of Love 61; emphasis added). Popular culture (film, television, music) is as preoccupied with love as novels are. It is Tina Turner, after all, who asks "What's love got to do with it?" And if non-literary representations of homosexuality are, in fact, less plentiful and sympathetic than literary ones, they can hardly be described as negligible. "Divine," the shit-eating star of Pink Flamingos, made an indelible impression of thousands of avid fans, many of whom might be surprised to learn that he was named after a character in Jean Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers. In other words, "What has love to do with homosexuality?" is a question that should be examined by looking at non-literary as well as literary texts. This particular examination does restrict itself to literature, but only in order that the literariness of homoeroticism not be lost sight of in an effort to popularize lesbian and gay studies.

The subtitle "The Writing of Modern Homoerotics" does not, however, signify the focus on literature; both literary and nonliterary cultural forms can be read as "writing." Rather, it signifies a commitment to deconstructive modes of analysis--a commitment shared by a number of critics working in lesbian and gay studies. Lee Edelman, for example, has suggested that "a significant project for gay critics must be the study of the historically variable rhetorics, the discursive strategies and tropological formations, in which sexuality is not only embedded but conceived" (202). And Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has proven just how significant such a project can be. Epistemology of the Closet, as Sedgwick herself describes the procedure, typically moves "through a deconstructive description of the instability of a [structuring binarism], usually couched as the simultaneous interiority and exteriority of a marginalized to a normative term, toward an examination of the resulting definitional incoherence: its functional potential and realization, its power effects, the affordances for its mobilization within a particular discursive context, and finally the distinctive entanglement with it of the newly crucial issues of homo/heterosexual definition" (92).

There are several reasons why a project of this nature should take its principal methodological cues from these and other similar directives. First, sexualities are structured like languages. Just as languages are complex equilibria of terms that mutually condition one another, sexualities are complex equilibria of discourses that mutually condition one another. To know a sexuality, in other words, is not simply to know the various discourses that constitute it. It is also to know the ways in which those discourse interact. The Wildean homosexual, as will be seen, recounts an "old" murderous story through a "new" suicidal story of "fatal gay love." The Gidean/Firbankean pederast who unveils his true self forfeits his true power. Woolf and Stein have disjointed conceptions of erotic merger. Yourcenar and Renault mischaracterize pederastic relationships as heroic. Barthes mischaracterizes the Wertheresque lover as (in)significant. Second, as Sedgwick notes, sexualities are radically incoherent. The interactive discourses that constitute them are often contradictory. Lesbians and gays are subjected to both essentialist and constructionist discourses. They believe themselves to have been "born that way" and to have "become that way." But this is only one discursive contradiction among many. The Wildean homosexual is at once victimizer and victim. The Gidean pederast is a non-narcissistic narcissist. The Steinian "ontoerotocist" knows yet cannot know other others. Yourcenar's emporer oscillates between blindness and insight. Barthes's "cruiser" oscillates between masculinity and unisexuality. And finally, the discourses comprising these complex and incoherent equilibria are innumerable. Foucauldians know that theology, medicine, and law construct homosexuality. So, too, as this study argues, does romantic love. But the list of constitutive discourses does not stop there. It includes history (consider the problematic relationship between contemporary pederasty and classical pedagogy), folklore (consider the conflation of homosexuality and hairdressing), economics (consider the use and exchange values of "trade"), and political science (consider the connotations of sexual "liberation"). The list also includes a host of discursive formations that have no such disciplinary credentials. The undisciplined trope of "orgasmic death" has as much to do with Wilde's transfiguration of Liebestod as does the sexological notion of "degeneration." The undisciplined trope of "unveiling" has as much to do with Gidean/Firbankean pederasty as does the psychoanalytic notion of "narcissism."

Although the various modes of analysis used in this study are all deconstructive, they have markedly different emphases. The chapter on Wilde is "new historical" in the broadest sense of the term. It assumes and argues, that literary texts are historically determined and determining elements of cultural systems, that they represent negotiations between writers with communal discursive repertoires and contemporaneous social institutions and practices, and that they are inseparable from other literary and non-literary "texts." Chapter 2, however, on Gide and Firbank, is not especially historical. Rather, it focuses on ways in which two related texts accomodate a number of irreconcilable discursive formations. Chapter 3, devoted to Woolf and Stein, is psychoanalytic--which is not to say that it endorses psychoanalysis. Like Barthes, it displays a decidedly undecided, and critical, attitude toward psychoanalytic theory, which it views not as the (or evan a ) discursive basis of textual and psychic truth, but as a dominant twentieth-century discourse that is only true to the extent that we credit its self-legitimating claims. Both Chapters 4 (on Yourcenar and Renault) and 5 (on Barthes) could be subtitled "Utopia and Its Discontents." They concern discursive, epistemological, and ideological constraints faced by writers who themselves would liberate eroticism from a number of other such restrictions. In other words, they deconstruct deconstructions and hence engage in the kind of critical work deconstructors are always claiming can, and should, be done. This methodological eclecticism is meant, in part, to suggest that a variety of deconstructive heuristics should be brought to bear on questions that arise in lesbian and gay studies. It is also meant to suggest specific heuristics that may be of some use to critics who would like to help answer those questions.

One final methodological strategy should also be mentioned. This study conjoins Gide and Firbank (Chapter 2), Woolf and Stein (Chapter 3), and Yourcenar and Renault (Chapter 4). Some readers may think these literary marriages rather unlikely. Woolf and... Stein? Gide and... Firbank? The readings themselves should justify these particular conjunctions. Gide and Firbank are both frustrated pederasts. Woolf and Stein are both "ontoerotic" Modernists. Yourcenar and Renault are both clear-sighted historical novelists. They should also suggest, more generally, the critical value of reading comparable writers against one another. This study does not, however, conjoin Wilde and Barthes. Instead, it gives them each a separate chapter. As the analyses in those chapters should demonstrate, the two writers have less in common than a number of critics, including the author of this study, seem to suppose. Such are the hidden contradictions of one's erotic subjectivity.

<<Return to Kevin's homepage