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THE CONTAGION OFLIFE: ROSSETTI, PATER, WILDE, AND THE AESTHETICIST BODY

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of The Ohio State University

By Stephen Weninger, MA., M A., M Phil.

*****

The Ohio State University

1999

Dissertation Committee: Approved By: Professor David G. Riede, Adviser Professor Mark Conroy Adviser Professor Susan V^lliams English Graduate Program UMI Number 9951742

Copyright 1999 by Weninger, Stephen

All rights reserved.

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UMI Microform9951742 Copyright 2000 by Bell & Howell Information and Leaming Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.

Bell & Howell Information and Leaming Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1348 Copyright by Stephen Weninger 1999 ABSTRACT

Many studies of the Aesthetic Movement still presume it was fundamentally an idealist over-evaluation of art. It has even been stated that the logical consummation of its

premises is not only an unethical ahistoricism but fascism. This dissertation argues that

these cultural productions, highly responsive to the new biologies, focused on the human body. As such, Aestheticism was no ivory-tower cult of art, but a gesture o f ideological

rebellion against the era's underlying myths of determinism and human perfectibility. Chapter one demonstrates how Rossetti's "Jenny," an interior monologue of a scholar before a sleeping prostitute, foregrounds the body as such and how it subverts the courtly love tradition Rossettian texts seemingly support. The next chapter argues that the painting Dantis Amor similarly dramatizes the lover's melancholy before the intransigent body. Chapter three, a broad reading of Pater's texts, contends that his numerous images of malady and his various grotesquerie are central to his material aesthetics. His short story, "Sebastian van Storck," studied in the following section, typically critiques all philosophies which would abstract corporeality. Chapter five discusses the early modernist turn towards a healthy, masculine aesthetic, against Aestheticism's "decadent" and "effeminate " art. This reactionary strain is discerned in the new Glaskultur, from avant-garde manifestoes to fictional texts like

Herbert Read's The Green Child. The important issues of social ideology raised here are the subject of the remaining pages. First, I explore the neglected links between Victorian Hellenism, the ascendant theories of "Aryanism, " and Prussian classicism. The Aestheticist body, I suggest, was an ignored counterweight to this fantasized affiliation, an imagined anatomy which would play a crucial role in the barbarity of the fascist biocracy. ii The final chapter contrasts the depth model of the body which structures nineteenth-century idealism, high modernism and fascist aesthetics with the palimpsest model favored by Rossetti, Pater and Wilde.

Aestheticism attempted to work out a poetics (and by implication a politics) of the diseased, heterogeneous body as opposed to the "healthy" and "transparent" Victorian body which found new life in early modem thought and ultimately in the corporeal politics of fascism.

ui In memory of my uncle

Dr. Weninger Antal (1902-1993)

IV ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to express (with the usual disclaimers) my deepest thanks to my adviser,

David Riede, who fostered my interest in Aestheticism and directed this work. The unfailing rightness of his comments were matched only by his unsparing kindness. I also benefited from the suggestions of the other members of my committee, Mark Conroy and Susan Williams. Wittingly or not, all usefully reinforced Pater's keen insight that we "hold our theories lightly." Debts, intellectual and otherwise, are owed to many others. Foremost among them are: Mic and Nan Billet, John Covolo, Gosia Gabrys, Elana Gomel, Marie-Paule Ha, and Jim Hsu. VTTA

June 9, 1949 ...... Bom - Bludesch, Austria 1975 ...... M A. Religious Studies, University of Louvain (Belgium) 1982 ...... MA. Language Studies, University of Hong Kong 1986 ...... M.Phil. Modem Literary Theory, University of Hong Kong

PUBUCATIONS

1. Stephen Weninger. "Symbol and Thing in Dante Rossetti's Dantis Amor.” The Journal ofPre-RaphaeliteStu(ües. 8 (1999): 5-16. 2. Stephen Weninger and Elana Gomel. "The Tell-Tale Surface: Fashion and Gender in The Woman in White.” Victorians Institute Journal. 25 (1997): 29-58.

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: English

VI TABLE OFCONTENTS

Page

A bstract...... ii D edication ...... iv

Acknowledgments ...... v V ita...... vi List of Figures ...... vii Chapters. Introduction: The Victorian Dream of Momus ...... I 1. Rossetti, "Jenny," and the Unspeakable Body...... 24 2. Symbol and Thing in Rossetti's Dantis Amor...... 56 3. Pater's Diaphaneite En Corps...... 78 4. Stabat Paten "Sebastian van Storck" and the Desecent to the Mothers ...... 115 5. Romancing the Crystal: Utopias of Transparency and Their Dreams of Pain 155 6. Aestheticism, Hellenism, and the Facist Body Politics ...... 189 7. Wilde in the Flayer's Zone ...... 227 C onclusion ...... 256 Works Cited ...... 304 Appendix: Figures ...... 305

vu LIST OF HGURES

Figure Page

1. D antisAm or (1859) Dante Gabriel Rossetti ...... 306

2. D antisAm or (Study) Dante Gabriel Rossetti ...... 307

3. The BlessedDamozel (1879) Dante Gabriel Rossetti ...... 308

4. [ lock My Door Upon Myself {IS9].) Fernand Khnopff...... 309

5. Goethe in Frankfurt ( 1862) Wilhelm Kaulbach...... 310

6. The Sculptor o f Germany {\933) O. Garvens ...... 311

7. Adolf the Superman: Swallows Gold and Spews Junk (1935) John Heartfield.... 312

8. Illustration from Peter Camper's Dissertation sur les Variétés Naturelles (1791).... 313

9. Discobolos (Greek antiquity) Myron ...... 314

10. The Madonna o f Port Lligat {1950) Salvador Dali ...... 315

11. Untitled{l992) David Wojnarowicz ...... 316

12. Untitled (1992) Kiki Smith...... 317

viu INTRODUCTION: THE VICTORIAN DREAM OF MOMUS

[One would think] that the body is a plain sheet of glass through w hich the soul looks straight and clear, and. save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existenL On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day. all night the body intervenes .... The creature w ithin can only gaze throu^ the pane- smudged or rosy....

Virginia Woolf "On Being 111"

Despite some notable exceptions, studies of nineteenthrcenttuy British Aestheticism (an umbrella term for a constellation of texts from Pre-Raphaelitism to fîn-de-siècle Decadence) are still too informed by early modernism's rejection of its premises as idealist, escapist, unethical, even fascist. My readings of the visual and verbal texts of some key figures—Dante Rossetti, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde—demonstrate how boldly their erotics and epistemology challenged the dominant Victorian models of love and knowledge. Far from being an anemic formalism, Aestheticism was profoundly concerned with the material body which resists such sublimations. It must no longer be regarded as a marginal, ivory-tower cult of art, but an undervalued gesture of ideological rebellion against the era's underlying myths of progress, determinism, and human perfectibility. Even more specifically, it is my purpose to demonstrate the various ways Rossetti, Pater and Wilde challenged a culture which sought to abstract, "see through," or otherwise diaphanize the flesh in order to establish the essence of personal, and eventually racial, identity. 1 shall argue that transparency was not a "mere" metaphor but a pervasive metaphysics, a psycho-philosophical apparatus with its own logic and history which continued to structure numerous narratives well into the twentieth century. This utopian 1 wish is well illustrated in the ancient myth of Momus, the Greek personification of ridicule, who is said to have criticized Hephaistos for not providing human bodies with a window through which we might see the true self. InTristram Shandy^ Laurence Sterne provides a satirical summary:

If the fixture ofM om us's glass, in the human breast, had taken place, nothing more would have been wanting, in order to have taken a man's character, but to have taken a chair and gone softly, as you would to a dioptrical bee hive, and look'd in,—view'd the soul stark naked ___ Those living on the planet Mercury might possess this trait since the heat must have so vitrified their bodies that

all the tenements of their souls, from top to bottom, may be nothing else but one fine transparent body of clear glass—so, that till the inhabitants grow old and tolerably wrinkled, whereby the rays of light, in passing through them, become so monstrously refracted that a man cannot be seen thro' But this is not the case of the inhabitants of this earth;—our minds shine not through the body, but are wrapt up here in a dark covering of uncrystallized flesh and blood ----- (59,60) As Sterne's version of the tale suggests, it is ultimately the human body as such which frustrates the dream of Momus. The body, especially in its malformations and maladies, forms a blind spot or "imperception" (Merleau-Ponty) in the seemingly transparent signifying processes of culture. Aestheticism foregrounds this biological "facticity" (Sartre Being and Nothingness 505). In 1896, William Butler Yeats thought that Decadence (or

late Aestheticism) was leading the arts towards an "almost disembodied ecstasy” which he referred to as "the autumn of the body" (E ssays 194, 191). 1 propose, however, that Rossetti and Pater, like Swinburne before and Wilde after them, called attention to the

body's quiddity by dislocating the fusion of bios and logos, factual body and body image, two realms which Victorian idealism pretended were isomorphic. One of Sigmund Freud's major contributions was to demonstrate how much the ego is "first and foremost a bodily ego," "the projection of an image of a unified body" (19: 26). This anti-Cartesian model was further developed in the theories of Jacques Lacan concerning the role of the specular image in the construction of personality. Central to my

2 discussioa is his observation that our imagined anatomies vary according to the concepts, whether clear or confused, about the body which prevail in any given culture (see his "Some Reflections"). This cultural projection is not always easy to apprehend as the mythologized body is, by deflnition, seemingly original. It is simply "second nature." If

Aestheticism was, to borrow the title of a classic Decadent text, fundamentally a rebours or "against nature," it was not, as is too easily assumed, because it evaded the flesh but precisely because it refused the entrenched Victorian images of the body. Yeats's "autumn of the body" may allude to Huysman's description of Baudelaire following the mind into the "October of the senses." If so, Yeats, by no means uniquely, here fails to note the textual context in which the author ofLes Fleurs du mal is admired by Huysman for his exploration of "the diseases of the mind,—the mystical tetanus, the morbid fever of lust" {AgainstNature 147). What is highlighted is certainly not disembodiment but the infection of the soul by the contagions of the flesh. For better or worse, the very term "aesthetic" has become identified with a brand of diffident ahistoricism or with social, especially gender, control. Thus, the "aesthetic body" conjures images of classical odalisques, the lilac-scented nudes of Cabanel or Leighton, or the air-brushed pin-ups of our own times. Kant's use of aesthesis in The Critique o f Pure Reason for the science which treats "the conditions of sensuous perception" looks to the word's etymological meaning but it was Alexander Baumgarten’s earlier appropriation of the term for a more formalist, disincamated criticism of "good taste" in his Aesthetica (1750) which became widespread.^ Since it is the term's cardinal link to the body—the physicality of art and the centrality of sense impressions—that is my focus, I have chosen instead to use "aestheticist" in order to minimize the aura of immateriality and incorporeality which now adheres to "aesthetic." Many a commentator on the Aestheticist Movement still assume it is a formalist, even idealist, view of art and life. I contend that in their very elaboration of the "artificial" (human artifacts) and in their vociferous unmasking of Victorian notions of what is 3 "natural," these cultural productions called attention to their own material origins. The disgust with the flesh which critics invariably have seen in Aestheticism and Decadence must also be examined as a fascination, even an obsession. My readings of Rossetti's paintings and poetry, for example, point out the ways the material body resists the neo- Platonic visions the artist apparently favors or the ways the courtly love tradition is compromised by his fixation on temporality and death. Pater, too, repeatedly insists that the bodily eye is at work at the very center of any intellectualizing, and he repudiates all abstract theories which are uninfected by the maladies of the senses. "There is no warmth," he writes, "in the spiritual body" (4: 284). As the later chapters will show, there are also important ethical and political ramifications in this incessant juxtapositioning of the beautiful and grotesque in terms like "beautiful disease" or "comely decadence." Until recently, those analyses of Aestheticism which have examined representations of the body have often found either an egregious hedonism,^ sado-masochism, or a puzzling sense of the macabre (morbidity "for its own sake"). Studies such as Mario Praz's classic The Romantic Agony did have the merit of underlining the concern with corporeality which Aestheticist productions reveal. The early Pre-Raphaelites, for example, shocked viewers by ignoring the academic canons which idealized the human figure. Bullen has assembled for us a catena of contemporary reviews which express this revulsion with such ignoble physiognomies and distorted proportions. One prominent critic, Ralph Woraum, spoke for many when he commented (in 1850) that such base external features fail to correspond to the shining transcendent core within human beings: ”the most beautiful soul must have the most beautiful body” (6-10; original emphases). Almost thirty years later, a review of an exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery similarly assumes that an unidealized body must signify a diseased soul. In Burne-Jones' Lous Veneris, the very body is unpleasant and uncomely, and the soul behind it, or through it, is ghastly. It is a soul that has known strange tortures, a body that has writhed with every impulse of sickness instead of health. (Wedmore339)3

It was this perceived grotesqueness or gothicism in Aestheticism which most offended the champions of sanity and muscular spirituality. Declared Charles Kingsley: "I am a thoroughly anti-preraphaelite... and intend someday to get up a Cinque-Cento Club, for the total abolition of gothic art” The best art, in his view, is that in which "the outward is the most perfect symbol of the inward; and therefore a healthy soul can only be expressed by a healthy body" (quoted in Bullen 47). Such comments suggest a parallelism between tropes of transparency, depth, and health, on the one hand, and opacity, surface, and disease, on the other. For idealists, the accident of matter is of little value in comparison to the universal type behind (or "beneath") i t The external appearance of art, states Hegel, "has no immediate value for us; we assume behind it something inward, a meaning whereby the external appearance is endowed with the spirit” What is crucial is that the spirit must ”shine through" just as the soul shines through the eye, the face, and the human figure (Aesthetics I: 19, 20)A A painter's portrait, for example,

must flatter, in the sense that ail the externals... the purely natural side of imperfect existence, little hairs, pores, little scars, warts, all these he must let go, and grasp and reproduce the subject in his universal character and enduring personality the true features which express the inmost soul of the subject. For it is throughout necessary that the outer should explicitly correspond with the soul. The painter must omit the "folds of skin and, still more, freckles, pimples, pock-marks . . (155-156,164). Such details, as reminders of the natural body, must be suppressed (see Schor 125-126) and painters should instead heed the advice given to Browning’s Fra Lippo Lippi: "forget there's such a thing as flesh . .. / Paint the soul, never mind the legs and arms" (1. 182). Pre-Raphaelite art which. de-Platonized our visions (Shaw320) is replete with stark reminders of the body as such. In his often-cited review of Rossetti's "fleshly" work, Robert Buchanan perceived an atmosphere of "insufferable closeness” and for him the "Flesh, merely as Flesh, is too much" (85, 87). The unwashed, working-class bodies of Millais’s Christ in the House o f His Parents (1849-1850), for example, removed the idealist vamish Hegel required. In Household Words, Dickens declared that in this painting Christ's body was odious in its realism and that Mary would stand out as "a Monster" in any vile French cabaret ("Old Lamps for New Ones" 264-65).

For the Aestheticists, the physicality of existence and especially the "unhealthy" body intrudes to block what Ruskin called the "penetrative imagination" (4: 249 f). As we shall see, against such myths of corporeal interiority, Aestheticism either posits a traumatic core in the perceived depth or offers the contrary paradigm of the palimpsest; against the dogmatic distinction between "health" and "disease," it juxtaposes the two categories within a differently imagined anatomy; against the physiognomic sciences which claimed to be able to elicit the body's true confessions, it proposes visions of the intransigent body.^ As an example of Victorian optic confidence, I would cite Thomas Carlyle whose scopophilia and corporeal poetics will play an important role in (Chapter Four. Carlyle is not cautious in proclaiming his position: "The seeing eye! It is this that discloses the inner harmony of things " (5: 105). In varying "degrees of clearness" (163), his chosen heroes see through material reality toward a deep "sacred infinitude of Nescience" (though the terminus is often mystery and silence) (8). Thus, Dante pierces "down into the heart of being" (92). Shakespeare reveals in a thing "its inmost heart, and generic secret: it dissolves itself as in light before him" (104). Goethe "saw the object" and "laid bare the secret" (105; 28:6). Luther's words "cleave into the very secret of the matter" (5: 139). Cromwell possessed the power to see the "sun-clear" internal meaning (218). With piercing clearness, Jean-Paul Richter's "natural strength" lays bare "the inmost heart and core " (27: 142). "To the Poet, as to every other, we say first of all. See” (5: 105).^ 6 "Spiritual Optics" (1852) a sketch of ideas which, according to James Froude, Carlyle considered a precis of his basic beliefs, emphasizes the potential within humanity of this ”inner eyesight" (15,13). With the help of a cleansing light from on high, we might attain celestial serenity, dispensing with error, illusion and "foul realities." Then, the delirious dancing of the universe is stilled, but the universe itself (what ske^cism did not suspect) is still there Nothing that was divine, sublime, beautiful, or terrible is in the least abolished for us as the poor pre-Galileo fancied it might be; only their mad dancing has ceased, and they are all reduced to dignified composure; any madness that was in it being recognized as our own henceforth. (13) As an Aestheticist response to this valorization of vision, one might look to Pater's "Apollo in Picardy." This short fîction, one of the last things Pater ever wrote, typically problematizes the relations between (Greek) ideal and (Gothic) materiality, penetrative eye and resistant matter. The protagonist. Prior Saint-Jean, comes to learn the perils of total vision—"a blaze of new light, revealing, as it glanced here and there, a hundred truths unguessed at before, yet a curse” (8; 143). His blinding flashes of insight rebound back upon

the innermost walls of one's miserable brain, to swell there—that astounding white light!—rising steadily in the cup, the mental receptacle, till it overflowed, and he lay faint and drowning in it. ( 165) This affliction of "the mind's eye" (144) does, to be sure, have the virtue of invigorating his "hard and abstract laws, or theory of the laws, of music, of the stars, of mechanical structure " (163). Now, did he not see the angle of the earth's axis with the ecliptic, the deflexions of the stars from their proper oitits with fatal results here below, and the earth-wicked unscriptural truth!—moving round the sun, and those flashes of the eternal and unorbed light such as bring water, flowers, living things, out of the rocks, the dust? The singing of the planets: he could hear it, and might in time effect its notation. However, any attempt to transcribe "this beam of insight, or of inspiration" (164) must come to naught and the Prior suffers a "strange loss of memory for names and the like." Inanimate objects gain a disconcerting autonomy and animation, breaking free from their logic, so that he sees "winged flowers, or stars with human limbs and faces . . . or mere notes of light and darkness from the actual horizon” (165). It is important to stress that the monk not only fears but desires this déstructuration of the world, when things are divorced from their names. As we shall see, this uncanny experience—which Pater calls "insane realism"—is even necessary.

The immense obstacles facing would-be seers in the nineteenth century are evidenced by the incessant intrusions of the "veil” in Victorian discourse (the relevant texts of Hawthorne, Eliot, and Tennyson being only the best known). "Veil" also has a corporeal valence (in the sense of a membrane or velum) and, indeed, not a few post- Romantics began to project the concealed site of the truth into the body itself.^ Carlyle is merely one among many who associated the ability to "see" clearly with health, a "wild rude Sincerity, direct from nature" (216; also 68, 84, 112, 127, 171, 180, 217). Skepticism, in contrast, blocks vision and is related to insincerity, to "malady" or a "disease of the whole soul" (172,174). A pure and bright core at the depth of the self is required to refashion the umruly body,

to keep the Body unputrefîed. And wonderful it is to see how the Ideal or Soul, place it in what ugliest Body you may, will irradiate said Body with its own nobleness; will gradually, incessantly, mould, modify, new-form or reform said ugliest Body, and make it at last Beautiful, and to a certain degree divine! (12:184)

In The Ethics o f the Dust, Ruskin offers similar advice to his audience of schoolgirls. Virtue, he declares, must be allowed to form a luminescent crystal within us, but his subsequent analogies between secret sins and our ghastly inner machinery cast a shadow across his idealist imagery. Even if we were granted the ability to "see into each other with clear eyes," he declares, we would recoil from the opportunity. It is not advisaWe to be thinking of the shapes of the jawbone, and of the cartilage of the nose, and the jagged sutures of the scalp Still less, to see dirough a clear glass die daily processes of nourishment and decay. (18; 271)

We should, therefore, be grateful to God for having "veiled whatever is fearful in [our] frame under a sweet and manifest beauty” (272).

8 Ruskin perceived and, for the most part, adhered to the cultural association of "ocular delight in purity” with the love of light as a type of truth, whence it seems to him "we admire the transparency of bodies.” He retreats from the gnostic edge, however, by adding that

the most lovely objects in nature are only partially transpaienL I suppose the utmost possible sense of beauty is convey^ by a feebly translucent, smooth, but not lustrous surface of white, and pale warmed, subdued by the m ost pure and delicate greys, as in the finer portions of the human frame. (4:130) However exquisite in itself, transparency is "incompatible” with the highest types of beauty because it "destroys form," the perception of which is paramount. Thus, in the loveliness of human flesh only "so much translucency is allowed as is consistent with the full explication form." "A fair forehead outshines its diamond diadem" (130-131). It is fair to say, nonetheless, that Ruskin valorizes "the physical strength of the physical organ of sight,—the physical purity of the flesh, the actual love of sweet light” (22: 204)—which conventionally suggest wisdom, morality, and order. Transparency implies to him as it did for so many "truth and openness,” so that it was the pure crystal, seeming to "spiritualize” dusty matter, which would provide the central image for his lectures in ethics (4: 132, 134; 18: 193-368 ).»

It was long held that Rossetti, Pater, and Wilde, having all been influenced by Ruskin, shared this spiritual optics. James Hunecker, for example, wrote (in 1932) that Pater’s work strives after "the vision of things behind the veil" (315). It is, in fact, not Pater but his most cited fictive character, Marius, who seeks the kindly power "just hidden behind the veil of a mechanical and material order, but only just behind it, ready perhaps even now to break through" (3: 65). Marius comes to reflect his author only after he understands that such apperception is but a "Great Ideal" and that the world is always further off, as if "viewed through a diminishing glass” (77). As Pater puts it in his early article on Aestheticist poetry, the drive for abstraction and transparency sooner or later must return "with a sharp rebound to the simple elementary passions.” The desire of the eyes 9 must be "towards the body of nature for its own sake, not because a soul is divined through it" (195)*^ The drive to apprehend eidetic essences within the body is a failure to understand that they are our defensive projections and cultural impressions. Indeed, an individual, as Nietzsche observes, could not really bear to view the self complete, "placed as it were in an illuminated glass-case": Does not nature keep secret from him most things, even about his body, e g. the convolutions of the intestines, the quick flow of the blood-currents, the intricate vibrations of the fibres, so as to banish and lock him up in proud, delusive knowledge? Nature threw away the key; and woe to the fateful curiosity which might be able for a moment to look out and down through a crevice in the chamber of consciousness ("On Truth" 175-176)

As it happens, in a number of texts Pater also refers to the urge to peer into the abyss of the body as a kind of "curiosity." Leonardo da Vinci, he comments, probed the human anatomy for its "curious secrets and a hidden knowledge" (84) but in his advance into the body the endpoint always seems to recede, the artist always emphasizing "the more to the less remote” {Renaissance 86).^^ As a result, objects in his works appear through a "strange veil of sight," as if in the "faint light of eclipse” or as if "through water" (87). And what clouds the eye in all its grotesque fascination is the material flesh—"the unveiled structure of man in the embryo, or in the skeleton" (82)—or death which is "the last curiosity" (101). It is this combination of beauty and strangeness which marks Leonardo as "romantic” or "modem" (86). What Pater here underplays is the fact that the probing imagination m ust drive the open secret of the unsymbolized body ever further into metaphoric discourse, even as it compulsively pursues it. Regarding eroticism, Freud writes: "The progressive concealment of the body which goes along with civilization keeps sexual curiosity awake" (7:156). That is to say, "an obstacle is required in order to heighten libido; and where natural resistances to satisfaction have not been sufficient men have erected conventional ones so as to be able to enjoy love" (11: 187). This tension before the erotic body is paralleled by the anxiety 10 experienced by consciousness before the unerotic or abject body. As Hurley notes (regarding the fin-de-siècle gothic), we are repelled by but also drawn towards those narratives which highlight the body as such, the "abhuman." Between the "trembling veil" of the thighs of the prostitute Nana, for example, Zola has a client glimpse "the beast, an unconscious force." He stares hard, "obsessed, to the point where, having closed his eyes in order to see her no more, the animal reappeared in the depths of the shadows, grand, terrible ..." (202). Such texts disturb our habitual idealizations and are reminders that human identity is "enmeshed within the Thing ness of matter, entrapped within a body always in danger of becoming-Thing" (Hurley 32). In the following pages, I will make frequent reference to Lacan and Zizek's productive analyses of la chose freudienne which posit the centrality of this Thing {Das Ding), the pre-symbolic void whose presence is sensed and occasionally glimpsed (though never as such) through tears in the fabric of sign systems (see Lacan Ethics 45-70). My readings explicate the ways Aestheticist texts both screen and admit this unintegrateable Thing ness of the body.^^ For Kierkegaard, the dread of the aesthetic man or woman before this radical Otherness, alarming and fascinating in its "sweet anxiety" [Beaengstelse] {Concept o f Dread 55), is not a positive condition but a debility which must be superseded. It is a disease of physicality which must be cured by religious faith. For the Aestheticist, however, this state can be a genuine ethic, as it would later be for the Existentialists. When he feels this vertigious knowledge penetrate his eyes, his nose, and his mouth, Sartre's Roquentin declares: "And suddenly, suddenly, the veil is tom away. I have understood, I hsLveseen” (126). In this nauseating awareness of contingency, there is "horrible ecstasy" (131) which signals the beginnings of freedom: "I am the thing. Existence, liberated, detached, floods over me. I exist" (98; To Freedom 95). Carlyle seeks a cure for this ecstatic madness by intensifying vision and promoting an ideal of transparency. That is to say, if the glass of perception is spiritually sanitized, the world’s stable, "dignified" core might be gained. In Pater's fable discussed above, II however, the mediating imagination is not only accepted but regarded as wondrous (145). Moreover, along with visions of sanctity and health. Brother Apollyon, the newcomer who inaugurates the story's changes, brings sin and contagion. His maxim—"he who can best cure disease can also most cunningly engender it" (156)—reveals the fundamentally homeopathic basis of his ambiguous magic. The perils inherent in the desire for total mastery of the body are classically illustrated in fictional narratives such as those about the Drs. Frankenstein, Jekyll and Moreau. To be added to this list is the Victorian gothic novel. The G reat God Pan (1894) by Arthur Machen, better known perhaps as the author ofThe Hill o fDreams. Dr. Raymond, a London physician, is determined to lift the veil, a feat the ancients called the "seeing the god Pan," and learn "the most secret forces which lie at the heart of all things" (3, 192-193). The fîrst woman who acquires this Pan-optics by means of his surgical experiment dies of fright after a brief moment of wonder. Her daughter Helen inherits the gothic trait and the series of men who are lured to share her secret die horribly. The association of this unnamable site which "cannot be imagined except under a veil and a symbol" (192-193) with the body is made explicit at the story's conclusion, after Helen's suicide. Her "skin, and the flesh, and the muscles, and the bones, and the firm structure of the human body," (and her gender as well) progressively dissolve into slime. I saw the form waver from sex to sex, dividing itself from itself, and then again reunited. Then 1 saw the body descend to the beasts whence it ascended, and that which was on the heights go down to the depths, even to the abyss of all being. (100) The "house of life thus thrown open,” allows to appear "that for which we have no name, and human flesh may become the veil of a horror one dare not express" (108). This abomination which fascinates while it repels is the Thing which can only be hinted at or seen, in Rossetti's phrase, through an "aspecta medusa.” Indeed, the secrets of the body, whether that of Helen or the Creature, can never be revealed since the symbolic system's very existence depends on its failure to reveal all (Copjec 124-125). 12 Not a small part of Rater’s admiration for Rossetti's art is due to this concern with the bodily self even to the point of morbidity. In particular. Pater values the way Rossetti manages to animate abstractions so that they uncannily acquire eyes and ears and voice. His "House of Life" sonnet-sequence he considers a "haunted house," in that its dreamscapes are not mere figures of speech but an insanely "real country" through which "phantoms of the body"—imagined anatomies, we might say—come to the foie {Appreciations 214, 215). The body is not a taken-for-granted cipher or semantic by-product but a resistant object in its own right which culture cannot completely contain. Psomiades has perceptively argued that this resistance of the perverse body to the speculative eye and its libido sciendi defînes Swinburne's work, but misses this same quality in, say, Rossetti (58-93,89). My first chapter addresses this oversight. The focus is on Rossetti’s infamous but influential "Jetmy," a interior monologue of a scholar before the dormant body of a prostitute (Le Galliene 122-129). The poem has drawn much attention in recent years due to its imbrication of social and gender issues. My intervention in the discussion aims not to supersede but further complicate the issue. My concern is less with the active "male gaze" (Mulvey), with the lack of woman's agency (Anderson), with le regardreciprocal (Sartre), or with the possibilities of mediation through other senses (Irigaray) than with the role of the illegible and non-discursive body in the discourse of desire. The sleep-watcher's idealizing rhetoric is halted by the intrusion of materiality and yet, as we shall see, it is the recalcitrant, repressed body which propels the narrative drive. That is, the body's inability to reveal the secret of what woman wants arouses anxiety but ensures amorous discourse since erotic bliss lies in the transit between clothing and nakedness, temptation and taboo, surface and fantasized depth. The deeper the secret seems, the more stimulated the curiosity. Concurrently, the loss of this opposing, alienating force of the body and its phantoms, as Baudrillard has repeatedly emphasized, is what constitutes the truly obscene. The end of secrecy signals the "irruption of transparency" and the "terroristic visibility of the body" {Revenge o fthe Crystal 163, 150). 13 Rossetti’s painting, D antis Amor^ analyzed in Chapter Two, also highlights the lover's melancholy before the temporally of the body and futility of our cultural ruses. According to an inscription on an earlier study, the work is apparently about "the love which moves the sun and stars. " I argue against such a neo-Platonic reading and propose that it is more concerned with separation, self-mouming and the failures of art. The piece manifests, in short, the dynamic of the sublime and sublimation, eros and thanatos. I suggest that the prime features of Dantis Amor allegorize this confrontation with the negative sublime—absolute negation, annihilation—which must be mediated. The painting’s strong diagonal, for example, is seen to be a figuration of the uncanny dividing line between meaning and non-meaning, symbol and Thing. The blank dial at its center, too, much like the amorphous skull in the foreground of Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors, opens up a non-historical space around which symbolization goes forward. Joyce’s Stephen Hero tries to halt time in the ecstatic moment; Imagine my glimpses at that clock as the groupings of a spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus. The moment the focus is reached the object is epiphanized. (211) The skeptical work of the Aestheticists, however, like that of Joyce himself, radically puts into question this idealist confidence of hypostasizing temporality or reconciling becoming with being.

In the latter half of the chapter, I relate the blank timepiece to certain breaks in Rossetti's poetry—sharp juxtapositions of images, hyphenated words, the crucial caesurae in his favored sonnet form—which in their very blockage of meaning become the articulation points of his erotics and epistemology. Singled out for a detailed discussion is the neglected Rossettian use of the term "breathless" which for him includes both the pause of ecstasy and the shock of the uncanny. Rossettian "breathlessness" refers to the momentary surrender of the symbolic in bliss or in awe. Dantis Amor expresses this fascination before the traumas of time and the melancholic experience before the "unknown

14 God of unachieved desire" in which we "may breathe but for a breathing-space,” unable to see "unveiled the veiled God’s face" (Swinburne "Sonnet"; 1:362 ). Chapter Three is a close reading of the woric of Pater, contending that his images of malady and his grotesquerie—plagues, exhumations, autopsies, dismemberments—are central to his aesthetics and underscore his materialist philosophy. Regarding his style. Max Beerbohm observed that his sentences were "laid out as in a shroud," encasing beauty "in its book, its sepluchre” (I: 129). Whatever his deep sensitivities to art. Pater seemed to him quite blind to "raw life and raw ethics" {Letters 3B-40). I argue that the mortal body is far more implicated in Pater's ontology which, as Dale puts it, revolves around a "disintegrating core / corpse" (348). His frequent displays of disease and morbidity should be taken as a trenchant criticism of the Victorian tendency to efface the sensuous in favor of the spiritual. The full sensuous life, he says, is positively a "contagion" {Renaissance 180). His work was not an abandonment of moral realities as the sympathetic imagination before the body in pain is for him the very starting point of moral action. Pater's earliest extant piece, "Diaphaneite" (1864), is sometimes taken as an urversion of his aesthetic position. This chapter argues, however, that Pater soon abandoned the essay's Platonic and Fichtean rhetoric of the transcendental ego and transparency. He increasingly abjured all metaphors of clarity or pure light which tend to abstract the material self. As in Sterne's version of the tale of Momus, the gaze of the speculative eye is inevitably blocked by the contingent body. Chapter Four analyzes Inter's short story, "Sebastian van Storck," which typically critiques those philosophies which would suppress corporeality. Far from being a Phterian hero, the protagonist is seen to be a failed Aestheticist (not unlike the way Stephen Dedalus is a failed aesthete for Joyce) who prefers the coloriess theories of Spinoza, refusing until the final pages to confront the physical basis of life and accept the mythopoetic Mother whose body is often projected as abject. Abstract systematizing, says Nietzsche referring to Spinoza, is a kind of vampirism, desensualizes the human frame until it is but a bag of 15 bones {Joyful Wisdom 337). I demonstrate how Pater's taie simflarly challenges any such idealist metaphysics and how it illustrates the key Nietzschean dictum that philosophy is always an interpretation o f the body, indeed "a misunderstanding of the body," which fails to take into account the role of suffering and sickness. The body's various ills must be allowed to thicken thought. Our thinking, writes the German philosopher, must be continually bom to us out of our pain, and we must, mother­ like, share with them all that we have in our blood, heart, ardour, joy, passion, pang, conscience, fate and fatality It is great pain only which is the ultimate emancipation of the spirit ... that compels us philosophers to descend into our ultimate depths (6-7) By focusing on the way the body in pain structures "Sebastian van Storck" and his discourse in general, 1 demonstrate how central the notion of malady is to his aesthetics and ethics. Finally, I suggest that along with its neglected companion text, "Duke Carl of Rosenmold," this short story is a subtle defense of Goethean aesthetics against the criticisms leveled by Heinrich Heine in his "Die Romantische Schule." Early modernism was in many respects a reaction against Aestheticism, and the Decadence in particular (even if some of modernism's best works owed them a profound debt) (see Weir and McGrath, for example). Chapter Five is a discussion of the modernist urge to not only rationally reorganize the body politic, but to reshape the temporal body itself. Its dream of Momus to vitrify the unruly flesh is starkly displayed in its works of art as well as its utopian manifestoes (Futurist, Dadaist, Vorticist). Among the myriad fictional representations of this radical strain, I have chosen to examine William Henry Hudson’s late Victorian The Crystal Age (1887) and Herbert Read's forgotten The Green Child (1935), as well as 2üunyatin's influential dystopian novella. We (1924). The issues of social ideology raised in this section of my work, in particular the common accusation that the logical consequence of Aestheticism or Art-for-art's-sake is fascism, are pursued to greater detail in the final two chapters. In (Chapter Six, 1 relate the metaphysics of transparency manifest in both Victorian and modernist aesthetics to fascist poetics of the body by calling attention to their shared obsession with reviving the imagined 16 anatomy of the Greek body. In 1935, E. M. Butler displayed remarkable insight regarding the "tyranny of Greece” over Germany and the dangers inherent in this idealism. There is appearing, he warned, a manic desire to seize and possess Greek beau^ and make it their own; or to outdo it; or failing that to destroy it; or to drag it violently into the present; to unearth the buried treasure; to resuscitate the gods. (335) It is my purpose to show how the Aestheticist body was an ignored counterweight to this fantasy which began in earnest in the Enlightenment and pervaded Victorian aesthetics and anthropology, before finally playing a crucial role in the barbarity of the fascist biocracy. In some respects, my discussion takes its cue from Bahktin’s famous distinction between the "classical" body and the "grotesque” body. The former parallels what 1 refer to as the Greek body, an idealized anatomy which is transparent to ideology and myth. It was this Winckelmannian classical body which was co-opted first by bourgeois standards, then by racist nationalism and eventually by Aryan eugenics. Bahktin’s concept of the grotesque body has some affinities with the Aestheticist body as 1 define it, though without his stress on the issue of class.

The renewed interest in the body at the end of the last century led in one direction to the sensuality of the Decadents, but in another, especially in Germany, to a nostalgia for an Edenic natural body which drew its inspiration from Greek antiquity. In contrast to the visible Decadent body of malady, this body was ubiquitous but at the same time invisible in that one was supposed to see through the naked flesh to an essential type beneath (Mosse Nationality and Sexuality 48-65). The racial consequences of this faith in the positivistic gaze are just as evident in British Victorian texts as in later fascist tracts. Carlyle, for instance, states that to obtain a curative "spiritual optics" we must get "the old Hebrew spectacles off our nose." It is not the Jews, "with their morbid imaginations," who will at last liberate us from anarchy but the Norse, "with their steel swords guided by fresh valiant hearts and clear veracious understanding" (Froude 16). As Hitler loved to repeat, the German is Klar above all. It is this philosophy of the Aryan eye that is parodied by Disraeli when he has a character warn o f the pernicious influence of "Semitic hallucinations" (296).16

The final chapter begins by contrasting the depth model of the body which structures both Victorian idealism and fascist aesthetics with the palimpsest model favored by Rossetti, Pater and Wilde. Explored in detail are the imagined anatomies of Oscar Wilde and Andre Gide which serve as illustrations of the two respective viewpoints. I conclude by challenging Walter Benjamin's oft-repeated statements linking Aestheticism and Decadence to fascism.

18 NOTES

1. Also of importance, especially in the British context, was Characteristics of the Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1703), See, for example, Dowling Vulgarization o f Art 3-17. The new mental sciences during the Victorian period did stress the role of the senses in aesthetics while attempting to establish the conditions of perception. One might say theoreticians like James Scully and Grant Allen sought to biologize Schiller’s notion of the "play drive" [Spieltrieb]. See Ian Small, Conditionsfor Criticism^ chapter three. 2. For many contemporaries, Aestheticism was too materialist and fleshly. Part of the blame for this gratuitous unhealthiness was placed at the feet of John Ruskin, an early champion of the Pre-Raphaelites. Yet, the allegiance is more complex since Ruskin also famously contrasted theoria, the moral appreciation of beauty linked to the "intellectual lens and moral retina" with aesthesis^ the "sensual perception of the outward qualities and necessary effects of bodies." The former faculty does include for Ruskin bodily sensation but it is disciplined and sublimated. The latter is a degraded, even morbid, "animal consciousness" (4:35, 36,42, 57 n 2,47). 3. There were those who understood that depictions of the human form change as much as the caprices of fashion. In herThe A rt o f Beauty (1878), Mary Eliza Hawes writes that "irregular" or "ugly" faces can become charming, even beautiful: "The Pre-Raphaelites have taught us that there is no ugliness in fact, except deformity—nay, even that sometimes is not ugly, celadepend^ for things are all comparative. Do not some people admire a cast in the eye, a slight goiter, even a limp?" (quoted in Psomiades Body's Beauty, 160). 4. Hegel was, however, not in agreement with the materialist speculations of Lavater or Gall who claimed they were perfecting "the science of knowing man." Hegel argues in 19 TTie Phenomenology o f Spirit tbsat the relationship betweea outer and inner is arbitrary. The body is not in itself "a speaking sign" (193,188). 5. In his apologia for the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, William Holman Hunt, denies that they were ever "realists." His revisionary history not only downplays Rossetti’s role, seeing most of his work as a heretical divergence (2:351), but wrongly disassociates Pre- Raphaelitism from the later Decadence. Instead of "guileless Beauty,” the "adorable” face of nature, and "healthy manliness," the Decadents give us what is "sickly and morbid,” "the interior of a slaughter-house” (376; 296, 1: XV). The Impressionists, too, produce "evil-proportioned humanity displaying a series of monstrous developments in lieu of divinely designed muscles" (2:365).

Camillo Boito, an Italian Decadent writer, satirized this pervasive depth model of the body in his short story "II Corpo" (1870). Gulz, an anatomist, seeks not only the foundation of aesthetics but also the truth of existence within the body: "I seek to find how it is determined by matter. As Man's bones, entrails, and tissues explain life, so they explain beauty" (93,92). 6. Another version of the penetrative eye is the Victorian interest in mesmerism and telepathy. The latter phenomena, especially, with its ideals of clarity, immediacy and possession, can be taken as a salient epistemological (or even erotic) metaphor. Not without reason was the phenomenon sometimes known as "lucidity" or "cryptaesthesia"— clear perception (aestheses) of what is hidden or secret {crypto ). Yeats, for example, was somewhat taken with the promise of a "communion of mind in thought . . . without words," such that art might reach beyond things to the "essences of things" {E ssays 192). On this phenomenon, see, for example. Royale. 7. It is in gothic tales like George Eliot's T he Lifted Veil" that this uncanny fact is most boldly confronted (see Sedgwick and Bnihm). The female body in particular became the site of veiling and unveiling. See, for example, Doane, Jordanova 87-110, and Brooks O bjects o fDesire 159. 20 8. Givea the space devoted to crystals in his writings, both as natural phenomena and metaphor, Ruskin like many of his contemporaries had a fascination with these stones which, with rays of light, are exceptions to the rule that the line of nature is curved (4:88). He intended but never completed a "Grammar of Crystallography," which he felt would compliment his architectural studies (26: Ixii; 71). On the other hand, he despised The Crystal Palace (12:417-432; 28:338). The ambiguity of the image of the crystal—transparent but sterile—is illustrated in the use Schopenhauer makes of it in the first part of his major work. The crystal is first said to escape in some measure the lack of "individuality" found in the inorganic realm. Then, he notes that it finds its "exhaustive expression in the rigid form, the corpse of that momentary life" (1: 171-172, 202).

9. In M ariusr the skeptic Lucian cautions a young student of philosophy against the vain hope of finding certitude—"the lost thing"—for one may not recognize the grail-object when one sees it. It is not even clear "what the lost object really is—cup, or flagon, or diadem," or its form or its number. There will be "no inscription on the lost cup, if cup it was" (3: 159, 160, 161).

9. The word appears in many of Pater’s texts, suggesting corporeality, as well as gothicism and Romantic "strangeness.” Thus, the bizarre aspects of Chartres cathedral, its gothic crypts and bodily relics, are discerned only by "the curious eye" (4: 191). Greek temples, though highly abstract, had as many "aesthetic curiosities" as a modem museum, which is to say they were "as full of living breath as the real warm body" (7: 222, 223). Thomas Browne's profound sympathy with the dead and their relics Pater calls "the curiosities of our common humanity" (Appreciations 155). The Child in the House looks upon the experience of bodily pain with "curious reflexion" (8:189). The concept is addressed by Arnold at the start of Culture and Anarchy. There is clearly some influence (Dowling ffe//en/sm 112), but while for Pater curiosity is driven by the body and its veiled depths, for Arnold, it is of value only if it reflects "the desire after 21 things of the mind simply for their own sakes and for the pleasure of seeing them as they are." Otherwise, it relapses into being a "disease” (5:90-91). 10. The idea is repeated by Pater’s Montaigne in Gaston de Latour. Human nature he sees as infinitely variable: "Pursue that variety below the surface!—and lines did but part further and further asunder, with an ever-increasing divergency, which made any common measure of truth impossible" (4:251). The "priceless pearl of truth [lies], if anywhere,. . . in the perception of the concrete phenomenon, and at this particular moment, and from this unique point of view" (253). 11. The term "Thing" should include the sense of alienness it has acquired in the productions of popular culture from horror novels to science Action films (Zizek S u b lim e O bject 135).

12. Machen once expressed regret that the book seems to emphasize gothicism and evil, for his goal was to reveal the beauty and the horror "latent beneath the veil of appearances" available to every person (Palmer 150). 13. For the Romantics, Pan was generally an abstract image. For Keats, he will "bid / Us live in peace" ("Endymion" 4:634-36) and for Wordsworth, he is an "Invisible God," "from all harm / The fold protecting" ("The Prelude" 8: 183-85). For Emerson, he is an avatar of the "Oversoul" ("Pan"). Elizabeth Browning's "The Dead Pan" evidences a shift away from this consoling spirituality towards a pagan physicality, while Robert Browning's treatment includes a psychological aspect. In his "A Nympholept" and "The Palace of Pan," Swinburne adds an element of terror which was later taken up by Decadent and Edwardian prose writers like h^chen, Algernon Blackwood ("The Touch of Pan" and Pan's Garden), E. F. Benson ("The Man Who Went Too Far"), and E. M. Forster ("The Story of a Panic"). On the continent, there was Knut Hamsen's P m (1894). As Forster recognized, the myth of Pan became a hackneyed, Victorian motif in a Georgian time ( 124). On this interesting history, see Merivale.

2 2 14. On the related phenomenon of the chloroformed female body, see Poovey. On the nineteenth century's semiotic mapping of the prostitute's body, see Bell. A number of studies have called attention to the failures of such territorializing narratives. Dipiero, for instance, discusses the way the body of Sade's Justine thwarts the marks of libertine violence (Gallagher and Laqueur247-265). 15. Hitler himself liked to repeat the cliché that the true German isK lar above all, seeing "the way things really are.” Some degenerates may see "meadows blue, skies green, clouds sulphur yellow," but, he states, they must be afflicted with some "gruesome malfunctioning of the eyes." such "art criminals" actually see these things, they have an inherited problem which can be dealt with according to the law (Baynes 1: 480). As Glaser notes, what Hitler actually says is that these artists suffer from "clear vision" ["An Sehvermogen litten"], an interesting slip of the tongue (57). In his personal library, pseudo-scientific treatises on vision were placed near works on sterilization (Lehmann- Haupt 60).

Not surprisingly. Max Nordau believes degenerate artists (e.g. the Impressionists) suffer from "nystagmus, or trembling of the eyeball" (27). Huysman, that paragon of Decadence, also writes that Cezanne was "an artist with diseased eyes," though he crucially adds that in this "exasperated apperception of his sight," the Impressionist "discovered the preambles of a new art" (quoted in Johnson Merleau-Ponty 5).

23 CHAPTER I

ROSSETTI, JENNY,' AND THE UNSPEAKABLE BODY

Obscenity as the absolute proximity' of the thing seen, an internment of the gaze in the screen of vision—hypervision in close-up, dimension in the recoil, the tcûal promiscuity of the gaze with what it sees. A prostitution.

Jean Baudrillard The Revenge of the Crystal

In aestheticism, as in love, it is difficulties that make lovers, obstacles that attract them.

Robert de la Sizeranne English Contemporary i4rr (1898)

No poem or picture by Dante Rossetti is as storied as his "Jenny": labored over for decades, entombed with his young wife and disinterred seven years later, admired by Swinburne as the greatest of his works in "reach and scope of power" (21 ), and prominent among the texts famously pilloried by a reviewer so as to tmsettle the poet's nerves till the end of his life. It was, claimed Rossetti, nothing less than a "sermon," the "most serious thing I ever wrote" (Caine 54, 92). If it is indeed paradigmatic of his oeuvre, it is not, I suggest, due to its pornographic imagination (Sheets), let alone to a "passive Puritanism" (Caine 9), but to the poem's role as a central statement of his philosophy of love, at once a core epistemological text (in line with "The Cloud Confines" or "Rose-Mary"; Riede

L im its 167-78) and a post-Romantic critique of the Matonism with which he is so often associated. Many recent analyses have centered around Jenny's lack of agency and the

2 4 social implications of her becoming an aesthetic commodi^. It has also been often noted that Jenny is asleep and can thus offer no resistance to this aestheticization. 1 contend, however, that the poem foregrounds the non-discursive body itself, unspeaking and unspeakable, which resists any would-be mastering narrative. Indeed, the intractability of the flesh ism ore highlighted in a somnolent state which forces the issue of the body as such.

The body of the prostitute was a—perhaps rhe-emblem of nineteenth-century sexuality. I begin by examining the narrator's attempts to typify this unruly body through conventional poetic images (book, art, flower) soon undone by his striking metaphor of the "toad within a stone" which is at least in part a critique of the Victorian confidence in social evolutionism. I then take up the depth model which subtends the poem's rhetoric and which connects it to Rossetti's other works. All of the narrator's efforts to efface the body through idealist abstractions or dislodge its secrets are seen to collapse before the materially of the body. At the same time, however, the interplay of surface and depth, symbolization and the body's thingness, is seen to be central to the mechanics of desire; it structures the poem. Hnally, I situate "Jenny"—and the sexual and gender issues with which the poem is so often associated—into the courtly love tradition which held such fascination for Rossetti. mastering narratives It is widely acknowledged that this poem is fundamentally a dialogue of the mind with itself, but what needs to be more fully examined is the role of the refractory body in the reflections of the loquacious narrator (see Freedman 37-38; Amanda Anderson). Some lines left out of the final version of "Jenny" put it sharply; How is it that in the loftiest mood. If but thine hand or mine intrude.

25 My being yearns to drink at thine» Golden goblet of poison-wine» Trouble of mine, peril of mine? (Baum; 106-110) All idealizations of either mind or body are halted by the intrusions of materialîQr and this poisonous "thingness" is as inevitable as it is troublesome or threatening. Jenny's aestheticized body cannot conceal thoughts of finitude (11.110-17; 220), contagion (1. 165) and accursed lust (11.284,301-02). Any culturally assigned feminine "grace” may turn out to be a perilous "lure" (11.62-3) for in grace, as Sartre notes, the free body of the other asserts its inaccessibility, simultaneously veiling and unveiling the flesh (519-21). All symbolizations of Jenny's body ultimately fail to screen or integrate the nothingness behind such sublimations. Thus, her "purfled buds" disclose the "sure decay" of the body and of its textualizations—"mere words," as the poem's speaker himself unknowingly admits (1. 121).

In his infamous review, Robert Buchanan recognized but feared the consequences of this mingling of body and mind: Whether [Rossetti] is writing of the holy Oamozel, or of the Virgin herself, or of Lilith, or of Helen, or of Dante, or of Jenny the streetwalker, he is fleshly all over. .. ; never a true lover merging his identity into that of the beloved one; never spiritual, never tender; . . . always self-conscious and aesthetic. (45)

There are tropes in "Jeimy"—book, flower—which do, in fact, display a "spiritual" drive towards identification (in both senses of the term) but there are also images—toad, mirror— which reflect a consciousness of the self as alienated and the body as contingent. Like Rossetti's other erotic texts, the poem espouses and then questions idealist projections of the body by foregrounding, in Buchanan's words, the "Flesh, merely as Flesh" (87). It thereby exposes the drama of alienation within desire. George Bataille draws a useful distinction between "sexuality" per se (animal and reproductive) and "eroticism" or socialized sexuality, the inescapable human substitution of "voluntary play and calculated pleasure for blind instinct of the organs." In this light, "Jenny" is not a sexual text but 26 certainly an erotic one. That is to say, manifesting the presence of human thought—notions of pure and impure, fantasy and taboo, the awareness of temporality and death {A ccursed Share 27, 82; Tears of Eros 23, 45, 33), it keenly illustrates the post-Romantic consciousness of subjective isolation (Spector 89; also McGann 116-17). Like Faust, the poem's narrator feels confined in his library and leaves his prison- house of books in search of more sensual and presumably more direct access to knowledge. After a night of dancing, he fînds himself in the chamber of a woman and commences to treat the sleeping figure as but another of his "serried ranks" of books (1. 25).1 She is a catalogue of discrete parts—face, eyes, throat, hair, bosom—which the speaker attempts to reassemble into a finalized form, a "body of love descended from the heaven of art" (Barthes 112). Such a dematerialization of the body into an atemporal form is what Norman Bryson has termed the "gaze," a penetrative Platonic vision which passes through the transparent body to the image as transcendent eidolon (94). Thus, the "living woman’s ... face" is simplified into "stilled features" within the "gilded aureole" of aesthetics so that they might show to "men's souls — / Whole ages long, the whole world through" what "God can do" (11.232-40). The repeated symbols, however, reveal no stable identities and the text's rapid, even desperate, shifts of topic and tropes rather point to the "glance," the anxious scansion which reveals the organic self and its ”sid> rosa messages of hostility, collusion, rebellion, and lust" (Bryson 94). Moreover, due to the failure of the narrator to achieve any coherent reading, the repressed body returns, an impasse which serves only to intensify the narrative drive. As Barthes acutely observes, in order to utter itself at all, the totalized body needs to display itself as corrupt, fragmentary and finite. It resists the role of master story. The "in sid es and undemecah" are what arouse anxiety, aggression or fantasy and propose desire (112). The true erotic now and then unveils "in great lightening flashes” the scandalous functions of various organs, momentarily abolishing our habitual hierarchy of body parts (Bataille,

27 Critical Dictionary 79-80). It is precisely this semiotic disturbance that Jenny's body reveals in her corporeal text "half-read by lightening in a dream" 0- 52). Before the flawed and incomplete body, the poem's "thoughtful young man" (Rossetti's own term; 619) searches for some ideal identic uncontaminated by exchange and the unreliability of words (Anderson 148,151), only to discover the zone of contagion and "dusty sense" (1.161). While the female body of the beloved is conventionally a book which tells of "pure and eloquent blood" (Donne, "The Extasie" 11.72, 74; "The Second Anniversary" 11.244-46), Jenny's "life-blood" flows through unchaste leaves, "Puddled with shameful knowledge" (11.264-5,269-70). Although she is "a rose shut in a book" (1. 253), her "base pages" bleed across margins and even have the power to affect the reading of a another pure lady's face (11.260-61). Each dead rose-leaf... clings. Pale as transparent Psyche-wings, To the vile text (U. 257-59) Far from demarking a well-deflned border between pure and impure, therefore, the crushed petals of this "living rose" (1.261) mar the corporeal book with a "sanguine stain" (1.270). Just as Desdemona's strawberry-spotted handkerchief was to Othello a sign of anxiety— both "ocular proof” (111. iii. 360) of chastity and sign of corruption—so too Jenny's seemingly straightforward markings only serve to reinforce the anxiety of the narrator before the illegible body. The Victorian language of flowers also proves equivocal. Jenny is both lily (pure) and rose (fallen), at once fresh ("scarce touched with signs") and sickened (11. 116, 112- 13, 110).^ Like her more famous sister (Zamellia, she is to all appearances an urban floret, a fle u r de serre, accessible to all comers. The camellia was a recognizable emblem of the belle courtesane, but Dumas' Marguerite is no more a fixed sign than Rossetti's Jenny. Although she seems a separate species, "a woman who is neither mother, sister, maid, nor wife," her client, Armand, detects "at once in her the virgin whom a mere nothing had turned into a courtesan and the courtesan whom a mere nothing would have turned into the 28 most loving and purest of virgins” (Camille 25, 78). Such a troubling, even horrifying, awareness also pervades Rossetti's poem (1.179). Jenny is potentially interchangeable with any woman (1.177): O f the same lump (as it is said) For honour and dishonour made. Two sister vessels. Here is one. So pure,—so fall'n! How dare to think Of the first common kindred link? (203-05,207-08)

The dynamics of the flower merely recapitulate those of the book so that Rossetti's scholar-John knows (but does not want to know) that what Blake called the "lineaments of Gratified desire” (474) are to be had equally in both wife and whore. It is not, therefore, Jenny's impurity per se which so unsettles the gazer, but her unreadability and the confusion of all regulating boundaries. With its staining petals and "contagious currents” (I. 165),^ her fluid body presents what Kristeva calls the abject, defined not simply by some lack of cleanliness or health but "what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (P ow er o fHorror 4).

the living fossil After all the unanswered questions of "woman's heart" (I. 250)—what Jenny wants-the feminine body, according to the narrator, "alm ost fades from view" (1. 277; emphasis added). In fact, the disturbing images regarding the "toad within the stone" (1. 282) which immediately follow result from the body's refusal to disappear. Although often assumed to refer specifically to male lust, Rossetti's striking metaphor is more profitably read as a symbol for the riddle of desire itself whether male or female—"as to me, even so to her" (1.223)—since, as Sartre points out, desire entails "not only the revelation of the Other's body but the revelation of my own body" (505). This central passage in the poem reasserts the limits of knowledge and critiques idealist models of moral evolution. "Jenny,” 29 especially in its urveisions,'^ makes clear Rossetti's virulent opposition to both Victorian Pelagianism and notions of human perfectibility. Jenny mine, how dar’st thou be In die nineteenth century?— Now when the naked Human AAnd Laughs backward at the years behind. The "goal seems to be won" as "perfect Man [is soon to be] m ind throughout" (Bancroft Manuscript of 1847-48, II. 66-70, 78; Baum) or, as Dumas' narrator expresses this chiliastic view, "the science of good and evil is acquired forever" (25). One early choice for an epigraph for "Jenny" was from Goethe via Shelley: "What, still here! / In this enlightened age too, when you have been / Proved not to exist!" There is truth to William Holman Hunt's remark that Rossetti had no interest "in the question of the antiquity of man and his origin" (1:105) and in William Bell Scott's statement that the poet had "no idea of the changed position of historical forms or cosmogony of religion by geological and other discoveries" (quoted in Sambrook 41, 130). Nevertheless, Rossetti was keenly aware of the philosophical spirit of the age and its confîdent meliorism, if not the specific transcendental physiologies of Herbert Spencer and other like-minded biological moralists. The concepts and metaphors of social evolutionism were extensive in Victorian discourse. A review of Robert Knox's 1850 Lectures on the Races of Men in The Westminster Review (53: 2, 1-40) is archtypical: "we are in a state of constant progress from lesser to greater—from plaiimess to beauty—from stupidity to high intellect—from loathsome animality to high and divine morality." The "law of progress . . . through all eternity" mandates "the ultimate eradication of vicious qualities from man" (2,3,39). The Victorian doctrine of "survivals" (E. B. Tylor's famous term) acknowledged the persistence of the primitive and the irrational (the "unfit") but considered such relics to be exceptions to the rule of progress and social purity. Contrary to this assumption that fossils are inert remnants of bygone eras, Rossetti's toad of "lust" and "sense" is an active üving fossil, present in all ages. It "shall not be driven out" until the end of history (II. 94-97).^ 30 Rossetti's sensual countertext challenges an over-rationalized society's confidence in having outgrown such atavistic drives by unveiling the "intni[sion]” of "overmuch desire” and the "unquiet thought” which drop[sl, like a stone To the old shadow-land unknown. Deep unnumbered fathoms down. (Baum, U. 107,16,12 128-30) By placing the toad within the stone, "Sense and flesh” and the attendant "wrong. . . pain, and doubt” (11. 76-77) at the heart of subjectivity, Rossetti emphasizes that the psyche remains self-divided due to some ontological "transgression” (I. 285), a horrible pre- historical fault in the fabric of life. The liberating "Master's stroke” (294) separating brutish flesh from pure spirit is not an eventual existential fact but merely an eschatological vision. Swinburne perceptively comments that status of "Jenny” as one of the most memorable poems of his generation is due to its bold handling of modem eroticism and the desiring body, the "inner and immutable ground of human nature.” It offers "fresh proof of the sad equality of nature and tragic identity of birthmark”: "lust, alone, aloof, immortal, immovable, outside of death in the darie of things everlasting; self-secluded in absorption of its own desire, and walled up from love or light as a toad in its stone wrapping” (E ssays 96, 98). In Swinburne's reading, lust approaches the status of an organic evolutionary force or mindless ela n v ita l beyond the individual self. Rossetti's toad in the stone is, then, overdetermined. Not to be restricted to male lechery, it alludes to Milton's toad of sin squatting at the ear of Eve, recalls the finite body of R om ans 7: 19, 23 and also suggests the "deaf, blind” (1.291), non-teleological "mighty force” (Baum, 1.82) of evolution.® As the body is conventionally considered the garment of the soul, so the body beautiful is often viewed as a reflection of the purity of the spirit.^ When Jenny's watcher considers her body as an open "book,” an index of the "sure decay" of the interior "soul" (11.253,264,256), he adheres to the contemporary axiom mens sana in corpore sano. For many Victorians, physiology was regarded as the surface hieroglyphic of a more profound 31 meaning or naked truth. The well-formed body might reveal an inner purity, while, conversely, physiological deformities or asymmetries might indicate immorality or racial degeneration. Far from revealing the "naked mind” or "the beautiful secret underneath” (Baum, 1.21), however, Jenny's sweet body (1.49) fails to correspond to societal indices. In Bernini's unfinished sculptural representation of truth in the Galleria Borghese, a female allegorical figure unveils herself while holding a sun. Jenny "ungirdled and unlac'd" reveals but an "awful secret" which "makes a goblin of the sun” (II. 48, 80, 206). It is futile to attempt to excavate the surface materialiQr for some transcendent core. It is vain to dream of a moment When the rind peels from the fruit beneath; When the swoni wears away the sheath; When the Temple-veil is rent in Twain; When the hudc pierces the grain; The last image of an external casing penetrating the kernel is rather curious but in terms of the mind/body question Rossetti is probing quite apt. In The Symposium, the hetcara Diotima says to Socrates: The beauties of the body are nothing to the beauties of the soul, so that whenever he meets with spiritual loveliness, even in the husk of an unlovely body, he will find it beautiful to fall in love with and cherish it. (210 a) Plato's point is, of course, that the body is a contagious husk to which we are unhappily bound "as an oyster to a shell” {P haedrus 250). Rossetti complicates the depth paradigm by insisting that "loveliness" is inexorably spiritual and fleshly, profound and superficial, pure and impure at the very same time. "Sense and flesh . . . pain, and doubt” (Baum, 72-76) resist any idealist extractions and within even the most exquisite or morally hardened body there lurks ever the corrupting toad and "worm, that dieth not" (20). The soliloquist in "Jetmy" seeks the core of certainty and the truth of her desires, the "lodestar" of her reverie (1.21). Such depth-model metaphors are favored by Rossetti even if he uses them only to undermine them (McGann "Significant Details" 88). In "True

3 2 Woman," possibly his last published work {yVorks 654 n), the narrator dreams of peering behind the erotic body's screen of beauty which Hides her soul’s purest depth and loveliest glow; Closely withheld, as all tiungs most unseen,— The wave-bowered peari,—die heart-shaped seal of green That flecks the snowdrop underneath the snow. The second of this three-sonnet sequence explains that her soul must be a "glass facing his Are." That is, she must narcissistically be a mirror reflection of his desire and he must be "her lodestar" (93). Searching for the ideal object of his desires, Jenny’s admirer flnds only surface signiflers which certify nothing but themselves. He seeks within her depths the

precious mythical toadstone and finds instead a toad within the stone. The light does not reflect but "Strikes greyly on her" (1335). However, this very resistance of the body to scopic-epistemological drives is for Rossetti an ineluctable aspect of desire just as a gross irritant is necessary to produce the "wave-bowered pearl." Rossetti commenced work on "Jeimy" in his youth but, he stated, "I felt it was quite beyond me then—a world 1 was then happy enough to be a stranger to" (quoted in Doughty Victorian Romantic 122). The self-assured, at times even light-hearted, tone and evasive tenor of the narration of the "thoughtful young man" of the poem is contrary to the dark skepticism of the more "autobiographical" texts (such as "Willow wood" or "Stream’s Secret"). The poet himself stated that "Jenny" is a combination of "many half-cynical revulsions and feeling of reverie" {W o rks 619). His own voice, I am suggesting, reflects rather what Frederic Stephens (writing in TTie G erm in 1850) regarded as one characteristic of his age: "a humility of knowledge, a diffidence o f attainment." Stephens goes on to cite Emerson: "The time is infected with Hamlet’s unhappiness,—Sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought" (Sambrook 57-63, 58). Indeed, the central psycho-philosophical text of the era, Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit, revolves around the unhappy consciousness and the crucible of self-alienation. I wish here to briefly draw attention to his

33 later discussion in the Phenomenolgy o f die schone Seele or "the beautiful soul” (see especially Wilden 284-93) and its relevance in assessing the speaking voice in "Jenny." In his fundamental self-absorption, the beautiful soul refuses to recognize the self in the other and in his hubris regards the world as a product of his psyche. He dreads "besmirching the splendour" of his inner being of "transparent purity," and thus flees action, existence and relationships which by necessity entail risk and estrangement. Lacking the power of alienation, he denies the universalis of contingency and death. By seeking absolute abstraction in a narcissistic contemplation of his own transcendence, the beautiful soul attempts to efface the material body. He persists in his "self-willed impotence" {Phenomenology 400).

These attributes refer especially to the Romantic sentimental hero and, as we shall see, are most applicable to Pater's Sebastian van Storck, but they also aptly describe Jenny's interlocutor in his role as judging consciousness. He interrogates the dormant figure yet refuses her confession. He calls her a "riddle” (1. 280) but claims "Ah, Jenny, we know your dreams" (1. 365). He opposes his own aesthetic soul to Jenny's cloacal mind, fetishizing her in order to maintain an unproblematic self-identity. Despite the impediments to his vision of mastery, he remains petrified in aesthetic contemplation and refuses action—except in the crucial and damning gesture of laying golden coins in her hair. 1 think 1 see you awake. And rub your eyes for me, and shake My gold, in rising, from your hair, A Danae for a moment there.

Jenny, my love rang true! for still Love at first sight is vague, until That tinkling makes him audible. (11.376-83) As Goethe (in Fcodst II) and Marx both famously recognized, there is a seductive magic or alchemical aura about money. It is invested with the power to transform the natural into the metaphysical and thus stave off decay and death. Possessing the power to subjugate venal materiality, it can thus serve to idealize and contain the grotesque body. In 3 4 a well-knowa pornographic text of the nineteenth century. My Secret Life, Walter places golden coins into a vagina, one of the body's open or gaping "erotogenic" zones (Lacan) which, lacking a specular image, disturb the seamless skin and the barrier between exterior and interior. At the same time, however, the common wisdom acknowledges that lucre is filthy, just so much excrement mined from the bowels of the earth (Freud 12: 187-90; Brown Life Against Death 234-304). The purse of gold of which Jenny dreams is covered with "shrivelled flies" and its "fumes" have power to "shape . . . pictures in the brain" (11. 345-48). Thus, even if money is cathected with sexual power and in the Victorian masculine economy of desire equated with semen (see, for example, Marcus 22-25), a lurking materiality, however repressed, returns. Jenny's patron identifies her with Danae and thus implicitly himself with Zeus whose shower of gold penetrated a seemingly impregnable tower (in some versions, a subterranean vault). The coins are to be the proof of his desire and his status as causal instrument of her bliss. The "vague" vision of her body will be made "audible" and he can be affirmed as the producer and knower of the body's cry (see Lyotard Libinal Economy 40). But for his love to really ring true, he would have to move beyond fear and fascination, and accept the freedom and mortality of the other. That is to say, he would have to love her in a body without use-value. In a regressive move, he puts her back into circulation as a symbol without value except his own. Rather than experiencing self­ alienation through self-expenditure, he puts forth the impotent gift of coins. Ironically, by surrendering to abstract satisfaction, he has forfeited true ecstasy which requires the experience of limits. Unable to accept the corruptibility of his own body and the Thing, the nothingness at the core of all signification, he remains the beautiful soul not implicated in the exchange of desire. The spectator oh extra is confident he can probe beneath the aesthetic appearance and with the help of money discover the enigma of what woman wants. Yet, the object's resistance as object is fundamental to the mechanics of desire which requires both the secret 35 (luring but impossible) and a sense of relatedness (the implication o f the self in the lack of the Other). As Baudrillard observes, the gaze's force lies precisely in it "not being an exchange, but a double moment, a double mark, immediate, indecipherable. Seduction is only made possible through this giddiness of reversibility . . . which cancels all depth" {Ecstasy o fCommunication 61-2). There must be an enigma which impedes interpretation and it is seduction which then allows appearances to circulate as secrets. (63-4) Truth— imme&ate, transparent, legble—is not seductive. Complete knowledge or the fulfillment of all desire would result in stasis, sterili^, and the end of desire as such. By trade, Jenny is, of course, available but it is the pause or anxious hesitation which engenders the text, just as a hindering cerebration arouses what Stendhal famously called "crystallization" (the endowment of the other with ideality).^ Without curiosity and uncertainty desire dies. Attempting to understand the self or the other by means of typologies, societal emblems or master narratives, as in the case of Jenny's scholar-John, cannot lead to enabling alienation. Such calculated analyses will never lead to the true pleasures of passion. There can never be a final revenue . the house o f the body

"Jenny" is a locus classicus of what Leo Steinberg calls the "sleepwatcher," a (usually male) gazer of a dormant rigure. The topos is a long-standing one, to be sure, but the figure of the sleeping beauty attained wide currency during the Victorian era. Burne- Jones's Briar Rose series of 1890, with the suitors fatally ensnared in the protective briar hedge, highlights the precariousness of both watcher and watched. The shift of the title of the folk tale over time, from "The Briar Rose" to "The Sleeping Beauty,” unfortunately reduced this core tension. As a gloss on Rossetti's variation of the motif I would cite a text from a different time and culture, Yasunari Kawabata's extraordinary erotic tale, "The House of the Sleeping Beauties," in which old men spend the night with young women who are drugged 36 or otherwise somnolent. They are not available for intercourse but are put to sleep to be looked at (20) and meditated over. The elderly protagonist, Eguchi, returns to the house repeatedly to leam the meaning of eroticism from the impassive girls. "Asleep and unspeaking, they spoke as the old men wished” (39). Yet, the secret of desire remains elusive. He wonders at the "virgin prostitute" (a reading as oxymoronic as any by that of Jenny's watcher) and sighs that woman are "infinite" (20, 90). Egushi suppresses all thoughts of the individual girl's sorrows and becomes accustomed to the depersonalization: "Any kind of inhumanity, given practice, becomes human” (17,75). One of the girls dies and the mistress of the house of lust tells him not to worry for "There is the other gM," a brutal remark which strikes him to the heart (96). Even more intensely than the narrator in Rossetti's poem, Eguchi ponders the enigma of desire before mortality and views women asfetishized objects. Unlike his younger counterpart, however, his moral awakening is at least suggested at the end. In both cases, the body of the Other withholds its secrets and the narratives derive their power from the very non-fulfillment of male fantasies which are prolonged and heightened by the drama of alienation and insolvability. The myriad tales and illustrations of the sleepwatcher can, furthermore, be related to the mythologies which value involuntary and/or inarticulate voices over independent discourse (Williams 125-26). For example, in Diderot's Les Bijoux indiscrets (1748), the main protagonist, Mangogul, seeks the truth of the body by means of a magic ring which allows the female pudendum to speak. He tries it on his sleeping mistress who awakens and is uncooperative. He can finally elicit the organic voice only after she faints. "Jenny" is, of course, a monologue based not on aurality but on vision. Nevertheless, both kinds of texts share a fundamental metaphor: the desire to go beneath the surface (aural or visual) to an assumed deep-stnicture of the body. Whether the aim is total vision as in "Jenny" ( or, for example, the myth of Gyges) or complete confession (in the sounds of ecstasy or the cries of pain in torture), there is a demand for the body to yield its secrets de profundis. Both are presumed to guarantee the truth. The narrator of "Jenny” is implicated in his era's 37 insatiable drive to read the unvoiced body, the spasmodic theatrics o f Charcot's women at la Salpetriere being only the most analyzed case.^^ Desiring "the pleasure of knowledge" as well as "the knowledge of pleasure" (Heath 177), he represents (to borrow a Foucaultian distinction) modernity's scientiasexualis while the Rossettian philosophy of love is much closer to an ars erotica. The former links truth and sexuality in complete and repeated confession, while the latter opens a cultural qxaceof secrecy, including both temptation and resistance.

Jenny's watcher wishes to halt the anxious oscillation of signs, to erase either the inconsistent surface (to read her as a "read book"; 267) or the traumatic kernel (to dismiss thoughts of "toads" as useless; 1.296). Robert Buchanan, for his part, would eliminate the "animalism” in this poem and art in general. Others would expunge all shame and alienation from sexuality. Herbert Marcuse, for instance, envisioned a new culture when the body would be simply "a beautiful thing” heralding "the mastery of matter" and when sensuality would be "entirely released by the soul" {N egations 116-7). The "biological drive" would become the "cultural drive," or, in other words, the body would not be distinct from its image {Eros 193). But how can there ever be such a mastery of matter or a complete liberation from the anxieties inherent in sexuality and the flesh as flesh? Rossetti's texts, especially "Jenny," cogently display the necessity of, as well as the problems with, such idealization of the body. There is pleasure as well as alienation in the tension between the transcendent and the organic, spirit and flesh, art and nature. It is this very mixture or play of illusion which is intoxicating and seductive. In the postmodern economy of desire, at least according to the pessimistic assessment of Baudrillard inter alia, the order of signs has further separated from the physical and corporeal so that what increasingly remains is merely a tautological network of signs. In a kind of cyber-Platcnism, the body would seem to be increasingly dematerialized. The riietoric of objects which grounded Rossetti's woridview, for example, had at its disposal certain "mirrors" (objects, including other subjects, or historical scenes) 38 which were imagined to reflect the subject. These are purportedly being replaced in postmodernism with a "pure screen" or transparency in which images interpenetrate "with no resistance, and no halo, no aura, not even the aura of [one’s] own body" (E csta sy 17, 27). We may question, however, whether the drama of alienation so manifest in the Rossettian text, its carnalities and its riiythms of surface and secret, has been transformed into a "disembodied gaze without an object, of a gaze without an image" (32). Here we might use Rossetti to read Baudrillard. It was emphasized earlier that the body cannot be reduced to any single narrative for even as open text or passive surface it provokes an endless number of readings. Its very seduction depends, as Baudrillard himself states, on the lure of a core enigma which the body refuses to surrender. This profound secret is, of course, an illusion, albeit a necessary one, generated by the very process of the sexual-epistemological gaze which assigns temporary meanings. Even if the postmodern body is threatened with pure "transparency," it inevitably responds by fashioning its own enigmatic depths and, like Jenny's mirror (11.319-22; discussed below), the more signs and signatures it accepts, the more opaque and seductive it becomes. The body, however passive, Rossetti is saying, m u st generate ever more resistance and thus fantasy. What we read in Rossetti's work is a scenario in which the oscillation of surface and depth or art and nature repeatedly questions clarity, certainty and the control of meaning. Moreover, along with the obsessive concern with secrets and mystery, his oeuvre displays a fascination with moments of metamorphosis. Indeed, his The House o f Life is structured around it: "Part I.—Youth and Change," "Part II —Change and Fate." This fundamental relativism and skepticism is nowhere more boldly expressed than in a fragment which reads: "To know for certain that we do not know / Is the first step in knowledge" (W o rk s 243). I have tried to demonstrate how such a stance mbs against his Platonism which he increasingly left behind along with his early "Art Catholicism" or Ruskinian penetrative imagination. Unlike Puter or Wilde, however, Rossetti continually 39 laments the loss of some definitive axis. The early version of "The Sea-limits" stresses only the limits of the material—"Sense, without Thought, can pass / No stadium further"—while the revision denies any insight into life's mysteries: Secret continuance sublime Is the sea's end: our sight may pass No furlong further {Works 191; seeRiedeL/m/fs 102) Y et, it is in this very impasse that one truly desires and creates. This sentiment is echoed in an apt comment by Lacan on the route of truth which passes not through thought but through the Thing (or the "Real"), that which is unassimilable to the imaginary and resistant to the symbolic. The "true secret," he writes, finds its way through "the inaccessible, cloud of the dream, through the motiveless fascination of the mediocre and the seductive impasse of absurdity." Indeed, truth is "alien to reality, stubborn to the chase, akin to death and, all in all, rather inhuman" {Seminar V II 46; Ecrits 122, 123, 145). For Rossetti, the body ultimately forecloses aestheticization and the way to the "spirit" or to the truths of existence passes through the factual "flesh" which, as I will demonstrate, often functions as the LacanianReal. In "Jenny," the narrator confronts the "cloud" in his own brain (I. 43) and the "thoughtless" female body before him (1.7). In the end, however, he evades the disturbing void in both, that is to say, the inhuman Thing. ^ ^ Rossetti aptly writes elsewhere: Let not thine eyes know Any forbidden thing itself, although It once should save as well as kill: but be Its shadow upon life enough for thee. (209) The Thing cannot be faced directly, but is perceived only by looking awry, or as Rossetti suggests in the title of the poem in which these lines are found, in an "Aspecta Medusa." Only seen after it has been distorted by desire, the forbidden Thing is re presented, often in feminized form, as it is in "Jenny." The sublimations and shifting tropes of the poem's narrator are, therefore, not simply errors but necessary illusions to reveal and then again

4 0 reveal the unbearable. Human eroticism by definition "will always interweave / Life with fresh want, with wish or fear to die” ("Hidden Harmony" 265). The poem's narrator, in Lacan's pregnant phrase, at last "gives up on his desire,” that is to say, through idealizing clichés and the gift of coins he displaces his veridical discourse and forgoes his bliss or jouissance (Seminar VI[3€S). What concerns Rossetti in this central text is neither "romance" nor the pleasures of prostitution but the unhappy body of the other which yet provokes desire: "How strange a thing to be what Men can know / But as a sacred secret!" (93). In "The Buried Life," Matthew Arnold famously declared that although in the most genuine love the heart "lies plain," it cannot find adequate speech. There is ever "an unspeakable desire" for the knowledge within the self, however deeply secreted (246,247). As the erotic body, Jetmy, too, reveals the other as intractable and the self as alien but she is disturbingly eloquent in her silence and in her resistance unveils the truth of our desires. the lady is a thing Rossetti, to borrow Mariaime Moore's well-known phrase, is a "literalist of the imagination," that is to say, one whose poetics offers "imaginary gardens with real toads." By extending this line across his corpus, one sees how central a text "Jetmy" truly is. The apparent depth paradigms and metaphysics of transparency in Rossetti's works can be more accurately viewed when set into the context of his revisionary appropriation of the courtly love tradition.

The Hatonic dream of the semiotic or "transparent" body does appear throughout Rossetti's texts. In "Love's Noctum," for instance, the speaking lover, like Jeimy's client, assigns visions to a dormant woman: "1 know well / What her sleep should tell to-night." As her eyes are "Lamps of a translucent soul" (1. 70), he might penetrate her enigmatic depths:

41 The blackfîiwood sets its teeth Part the boughs and look beneath,— Lilies share Secret waters there, and breathe (72) Yet, the purity represented by the lilies—representative of some transcendent kernel—is undermined by the threatening dentata image and by the admission that without his projected dreams and their "gracious form’s control", he is left with a "Clammy trance" (70,71). Or again, in "The Love-Letter," the speaker peers "into the breast" of the beloved to achieve soul-to-soul fusion to catch "only words" from "the sudden confluence" (78). A poem of the same year expresses the wish to look between "scriptured petals" to gain "the gift of grace unknown" which leads only to hope—"Not less ngr more, but even that word alone" ("The One Hope" 108).

Before further examining Rossetti's corporeal aesthetics, it is necessary to briefly revisit the initial incarnation of the primary Western myth of Love—the tradition of Vamour courtoise (a term coined by Gaston Paris in 1883). As is now well-lcnown, this paradigm developed out of the troubadour and then the stilnovisti poetry of the late thirteenth century. In the f in ' amor (pure or sincere love) model, the poet seeks the love of a lady (often already married) who conventionally maintains her distance so that the resulting narrative obsessively revolves around frustrated desire. In their self-reflections, these erotic texts probe a masculine psychology—or even psychopathology—of love before an idealized yet cruelly indifferent woman. Denis de Rougement's oft-cited Love in the Western World points out that the desire behind such love is not satisfaction but passion (etymologically "suffering") so that one cherishes unhappiness and "love-sickness." We require not "another's presence but... another's absence"; we are in love not with an object but with love itself and desire for its own sake (21,42). The woman is ever other, exotic, indeed impossible, for satisfaction would entail the loss of love while lack defines desire. Romance exists only if amorous progress is hindered by hesitations, psychic hurdles, doubts, or taboo. These obstacles do not serve, it 42 should be noted, merely to intensify the object's desirability but to increase the illusion that without them, the lady would be readily accessible. They conceal the fundamental futility of ever achieving satisfaction. As Pater puts it, this love is defîned "by the absence of the beloved, choosing to be without hope, protesting against all lower uses of love, barren, extravagant, antinomian" ("Aesthetic Poetry" 192). Rey-Flaud, extending these concepts by means of Lacanian theory, observes that this paradoxical relationship between "the mastery of the lady" and "the asymptote of masculine desire" results in what he calls lanevrose courtoise (courtly neurosis) (9). That is to say, the male is completely dependent on the dictates of the lady who is associated with mystery, taboo, and the promise of the secret. His bliss consists in the pleasurable yet painful withdrawal at the moment of transgression. fCs desire is fundamentally impossible. The individual woman ceases to exist—like Jenny, she "almost fades from view"— and is so depersonalized that all such texts seem to be referring to the same Lady. More exactly, she has become a body emptied of substance. She has become only a blank sign, as easily idealized ("Lady Philosophy" or "divine" incarnation) as debased (apathetic femme fatale). Abstracted and sublimated to the point of becoming a remote, "terrifying, inhuman partner," the Lady is a Thing {E thics, 149-50; also Zizek). If the narrator says of Jenny "what thing you are" (1.79), it is not because of a momentary lapse of eloquence or her illegibility alone, but because she also represents the riddle of the sphinx (11. 280-81), the enigma and pain of finite existence. D as D in g , the gaping abyss at the center of signification, can never be faced directly. Hence, the episteme of courtly erotics passed down through philosophical tracts and poetry elevates the desired object to "the dignity of the Thing," swerving the libido around the black hole of meaninglessness towards the feminine object (Lacan 95-96). The widely acknowledged idealization of woman, then, radically "alters" her. Far from "purifying" her, the sublimation transforms her into a figure of radical otherness intractable before all symbolization (2Szek90).

43 The Lady is paradoxically regarded as embodying both transcendent virtue and material evil. On the one band, she represents the dream of oneness and, indeed, an unmediated vision of the Divine. The speaking lovers of Rossetti's texts, for instance, desire in the beloved not merely "the perfect whole" ("The Portrait" 78), but "the meaning of all things that are" and the "heart of all life" ("Heart's Compass" 83). Such naive amorous proclamations are, of course, understood as such by the skeptical Rossettian voice but what should be underlined is that the barriers to such perfected states imagined by the lovers are narcissistic gestures to disavow the Thing and veil the impossibility of such psychic fusions.

The male lover's "instantaneous penetrating sense" seeks a total union in which Lady, I fain would tell how evermore Thy soul I know not from thy body, nor Thee from myself, neither our love from God. ("Heart's Hope" 76) In the Rossettian economy of vision this fusion of flesh and spirit at times results in a confusion of body and soul since the former, if not mapped or aestheticized, may threaten the latter. That is to say, the seamless female "nude" is the site of male bliss. The body "naked," however, represents the latent threat of literality, bearing "une menace unintegree" into the masculine symbolic universe (Rey Flaud 73). Of course, this petrifying void willy- nilly demands sublimating signs. Thus, Jenny's loquacious gazer scans or optically "opens" her dormant body only "to the waist" and veils the pudendum in metaphors and allusions (11.345-48; Sheets 154-55). (The male Priapus must also be "hidden to the waist" by "nicely plac'd" offerings. 11.369-70) The naked thingness of the body, whatever the gender, caimot be faced directly but demands an intervening object, an o b -scen u s, and the acquiescence of the desired object to the mediating imagination. Lacan exemplifies this point by discussing the significance of numerous scatological works in the amour courtoise. In such texts, the unspeakable body of the lady is not at all silent but shockingly responsive, seeming to say: "I am human and mortal, like you . . . can your sublimation 4 4 withstand it?” (215). Yet, this very interplay of amorous signs and unthinkable truth is at the center of this paradigm of desire which requires both anticipation and anxiety. To experience love and bliss—or beau^, for that matter—the encounter must articulate the subject's relation to enjoyment, towards the traumatic kernel of is being, towards something that the subject is never able to acknowledge fully, to become familiar with, to integrate into his symbolic universe. Hence, woman in her culturally assigned role as Thing is "pure lack, causes desire and the imaginary element which veils this abyss, renders it invisible by Ailing it out” (Zzek 178). The problem for many a Rossettian speaker is precisely the "traumatic kernel” of his being or that of the female other who is expected to be a mirror of his own desires. In the search for a spiritual center beneath the symbolic screen, there lurks the fear that the depth is in fact non-existent (more precisely perhaps, non-existence) or that the insides and undemeaths are just as corruptible as the unreliable surface. The counter-formation of a narcissistically perfect epidermis over the pseudo-depth of a "soul” is a crucial defensive move in Rossetti's texts. "What thing unto mine ear / Wouldst thou convey,—what secret thing [?]" he asks the whispering water ("The Stream's Secret" 114). Though the secret revealed may be of nothingness, or "thingness" itself, the mirage of a profound secret is essential for the mechanics of desire. It is the lack of any depth or mystery that is truly terrifying (Zizek 126, 132). What if the beloved's body were, in fact, "Hollow like a breathing shell" ("Love's Noctum" 70)?

Rossetti's depiction of women cogently manifests this dynamic tension. On the one hand, an idealizing vision proposing an exquisite "screen" hiding a "soul's purest depth" ("True Woman. Herself" 93). On the other hand, a suggestion that the aesthetic screen itself creates the illusion of depth in order to conceal the nothingness behind the veil. Although his poems and portraits of women are usually viewed as prime examples of male narcissism or ego projections, they should equally be read as primers of non-possession, unknowability, and inaccessibility. If his visual and verbal works are "mirror texts," they 45 are indeed self-reflective, but they may also, to quote Lacan on the specular object, "fulfill another role, a role of limit. It is that which cannot be crossed" (151). That is to say, they serve as screens against the abyss of the Real and as imaginary obstacles which are required by the asymptotic swerve of male desire. Rossetti's painterly eye has, for the most part, been considered in the light of the concept of "the male gaze," that is, as an attempt to efface difference and suppress the voice or agency of the feminine other. There are, however, blotches or blurs which interrupt

Rossetti's hermeneutic vision. A suggestive instance of such an optic trope of resistance also occurs near the end of "Jenny": And yonder your fair face I see Reflected lying on my knee. Where teems with first foreshadowings. Your pier-glass scrawled with diamond rings. (11.319-22 ) By inscribing their names or initials on the mirror, Jenny's patrons attempt to leave traces of their power and prestige, stigmata of class or tattoos of gender on her self-image (a porno graphies). Yet these cuts, it should be noted, do not themselves reflect but are occulations, blindspots of non-recognition which refract ego-reflections and unifying exchanges. They are like those scratches on the reverse of the mirror exposing the tain (the lusterless substratum required for speculation) which when seen cause the symbolic to falter (see Gasche). By calling attention to themselves and thus to the limits of knowledge, the re-visionary marks in the mirror are traumatic but also potentially creative. They are, in Lacan's phrase, ca vous regarde, that is to say, that which pointedly looks back at the viewing subject. It is here in these gaps and scars that s/he is inscribed. The sanguine and pathological stain is the subject. Rather than inscribing their potency and satisfaction, therefore, the signatures of Jenny's clients mark the loss of identity by puncturing the symbolic field. The narrator envisions a closed, classical body which might reflect the "first foreshadowings" (1.321) of some enlightenment, but he encounters an impasse, hors symbolique and unbearable. 4 6 Jenny as whore is symbolic but not of self-identity, for her mind like her body is not transparent; it "reflects not" (1.167). This impasse blocks desire but, paradoxically, "opens desire to circumvent the blockage" for they "break up the subjectivity of narrative and perception and set in motion an unsystemized thinking about lack and loss" (Saper 43). It is a prime function of art to create but at once to disturb the symbolic screen and thus materialize the Real (which can, of course, never be seen as such). The pulsion of many a Rossettian text lies in the epistemological drive for certainty—an apodictic core of truth, the self-reflection in the other, a fusion with the beloved. The open secret, however, is that there is no depth beneath the play of signs and there is no access to the Other or the Thing- in-itself. There is only the disturbing gaze (Lacan Fundamental Concepts, 103). The various optic tropes in Rossetti—penetrating visions, semiotic or transparent faces and bodies, mirrored surfaces—which were part and parcel of the neo-Platonic and troubadour imagination are inevitably undercut by a melancholic skepticism which at last lends an aura of opacity and mystery (and at times mystification) to his entire corpus. In the courtly love poetry, the clolce-sguardo or "sweet look" of the Lady, for example, not only seduces but also reflects the divine and at times even peers into matter. The eyes of the beloved—or even the ladies themselves—are described in works like Le roman de la rose as mirrors of beatitude or two crystal stones. Luminosity may be equated with consciousness in neo-Platonic photology or the Hegelian tradition (see Gasche 258), but in Rossetti's oeuvre, lucidity and "reflection" are ambiguous at best and ultimately impossible. According to The Enneads of Plotinus, in order to achieve "lustration," the self needs to metamorphize into a stone of beauty and one must chisel this statue until perfect goodness shines with god like splendor in its stainless shrine. Jenny, as a sign of "Sense and flesh," is on the contrary a "stumbling stone" for the narrator who would "write [himself] philosopher" (Baum 76, 81, 105). In his radical inversion of such tropes, Rossetti splits the crystal and the stone only to reveal a dark core of doubt and material

47 desire. If there is a visual analog, it is Andre Masson's Surrealist Gracüva in which the organic flesh of the body is depicted breaking out of its sculptured stone carapace. It is obvious that Beatrice and other Dantesque figures were "Rossetti's alphabet of art" (Holman Hunt 1: 104). But when he marvels at the Vita Nuova, he typically focuses not on the lofty state of the work or its mystic visions but on the process of change and rebirth, on the moment of metamorphosis: "how grew such presence from man's shameful swarm." Of special interest here is his likening of the text to the "dear form" of young femininity having "bud," wondering "how it grew to womanhood," seeming to imply that she has now entered the stage of sexuality ("On the V ita N uo va of Dante" 195).!^ On the one hand, one witnesses the transformation of fallen flesh to transcendent images; on the other, attention is drawn to the mutation from innocent form to desired and desiring creature. Beatrice is, as Rossetti himself admits in the introduction to his translation, more "lovelike" than "lifelike" (297), achieving the status of idealized allegory. But like Rossetti's own Damozels, she is for him also a transformed and transformative being, idealized but also fallen, spectralized, and even sepulchral. She is Lady and she is Thing. In the Preface to her sonnet sequence Manna Innominata, Christina speaks eloquently and perceptively on behalf of Dante's Beatrice, Petrarch's Laura, and, in my

reading, her brother’s idols of beauty and painted ladies. These feminine figures "paid the exceptional price of exceptional honour" reaching us "resplendent with charms, but. . . scant of attractiveness." What she suggests is not only that they are insufficiently spoken for or unnamed, but also that they are over-named into charming abstractions. She laments their inability to speak for themselves and observes that "the Great Poetess" of her day (Elizabeth Barrett Browning) might have been able to take up this task had she been "unhappy instead of happy" (2: 86). In fact, her own brother did focus on this "unhappiness" and alienation in both lover and lady, seer and seen. Y eats perceived this for he nominated as the "happiest of poets" not Dante Rossetti, but William Morris who could imagine "a perfect fullness of natural life." Morris's "vigorous body," guided by "some 48 beast-like instinct," suggests to Yeats a blissful lack of awareness of the intellectual suffering which accompanies self-consciousness (89, 87). Rossetti, in contrast, could never "be happy as we understand happiness" since he desired what he could never attain: a world of "unmixed powers, of impossible purities" (53). In other words, Rossetti's art reveals the resistance of materiality to idealism's dreams of plenitude. "Jenny," most especially, manifests the Rossettian body's refusal to be domesticated. It is, in Dante's phrase,frequenter impeditus, yet serving as a screen for our repeated projections. The body’s facticity drives our mixed interpretations. If you believed the symbol, the symbol was a god. I f you did not, it was the bronze beast of Nineveh being wheeled to a museum, you believed in Jenny, she became a madonna; if you did not, the madonna became Jenny. On every s^ b o l was the double face, the brightness of faith, the darkness o f dissolution. Beauty on one side, death on the other. (Larg 321) In his melancholic pursuit of impossible unities, Rossetti may have, properly understood, "rejected” what seemed natural (Yeats 54), but by doing so, his works called ever greater attention to the seductive intersection of thought and sexuality, imagination and corporeality.

4 9 NOTES

1. With the exception of citations from "Jenny," Rossettian texts will be followed by page numbers referring to the 1911 edition of his works. 2. As Morse notes (YictorianCulture 461), even the seemingly established sign of the lily is ambiguous in his works. In "Love-Lily," it is not a symbol of purity but of the interpenetration of flesh and spirit and in "Barren Spring" it represents temporality and decay.

Rossetti employs the flower image to denounce the abandonment of women once "the bee has had his hour" ("Chimes" 227). See also "On Plucking a Honeysuckle" (199). 3. Jeimy's "contagious currents" refer most obviously to the transmission of venereal diseases but the latter were feared in particular for the supposed stigmata they left in the brain (eventually transmitted to offspring). Kem calls attention to the era's male anxiety that the woman might bear latent traces of former sex partners. He quotes the German theorist, Eduard von Hartmann, who in 1886 warned that the husband of a widow does not "find a blank page but one written on by his predecessor's organism, with whose hereditary tendencies his own must enter into conflict" (156).

4. The earlier version of the poem is less effective in that it is too explicitly philosophical and ironic but I refer to it frequently as a productive gloss on the epistemological turns of Rossetti's final text.

5. Not surprisingly, Darwin's theory of random mutation was read and rewritten as a master narrative of human meliorism. For example. The Descent of Man was soon 50 followed by Henry Drummond's The Ascent o f Man and then Mathilde Blind's feeble epic of the same title.

To John Ferguson McLennan (at one time associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood) current sexual mores and abuses seemed evidence for an orignal promiscui^; "the sin of great cities shows that there are no natural restraints sufficient to hold men back from grosser copartneries" iPrimitiveMarriage-, quoted in Stocking, 69). His sociocultural evolutionism replaced the original conjugal state of the Biblical narrative with a situation characterized by laxity and tyrannical lusL (Quite independently, J. J. Bachofen in his better-known Myth, Religion and Mother Right of 1845-47 also posited an original haeterist or aphroditic stage which gave way first to matriarchal and then patriarchal models.)

6. The traditional association of frogs or toads, as well as serpents, with bestiality and thus sexual appetite is scattered throughout Victorian visual and verbal texts depicting women. Frederick Sandys' Medea (1968) for example, is seen with serpent bracelet and a frog or toad in the foreground. During the Middle Ages, votive toads symbolizing female sexuality were hung beneath the image of St Wilgeforte. The association can, however, be used to great effect. The French decadent writer, Rachilde ( 1860-1953) links the creature to sexuality, gender and death in her powerful tale "Frog-Killer." The modernist poet Gertrud Kolmar appropriated frogs, toads and vipers as a primal trope of feminine sexuali^ (see, for example, her "Troglodyte"). 7. The depth model of truth which is critiqued in this poem and other Rossettian texts is well illustrated by the case of Phryne, the most renowned prostitute of the ancient world and a model for Praxiteles. During her trial for impie^, her lawyer Hyperides stripped her bare before the Aeropagites to prove her irmocence. No incarnation of such beauty, the argument went, could be socially guilty; her exquisite form was a sign of inner innocence despite her occupation. It is not coincidental that the tale of Phryne (whose name means "frog") was a popular subject in the Victorian period. Turner painted her in her bath in 51 1S38 and she was sculpted by Pradier in 1845. Jean-Leon Gerome depicted the voyeuristic courtroom scene in 1861, as did Frederick Leighton in 1882. 8. The most extended critique of the depth model in the Rossettian corpus is "Rose- Mary” which offers in this regard more parallels to "Jenny" than has been noticed. The beryl-stone offers the hope of the naked truth and final vision for in this glass "all things are seen." But there is an essential condition: "None sees here but the pure alone” ( 119, 124). The inverse injunction in "Jenny" is that "no chaste hand may unclose" the leaves of her flower/book (1.267). Like Jetmy, Rose-Mary is a "cankered flower beneath the sun" and her secret sin is "the thing we are" (125-26) which is reflected in what animates the center of the mystical glass: "Hre-spirits of dread desire/ Who entered in / By a secret sin." That is, a "love-linked sin" (122-25). (Jeimy’s heart, too, is linked to "A fiery serpent" 1. 154). Such conventional metaphors—cankered rose of love, secret transgressions, often coupled with worms or snakes—frequently refer to venereal disease. Rossetti, however, like Blake, employs such images to more inclusive epistemological or existential ends. In "Barren Spring," for example, the apple-blossom eventually "breeds the serpent's art" (102). The conclusion of "Rose-Mary," set in the chamber of the beryl-stone, is even more explicit: "Even such a serpent evermore / Lies deep asleep at the world's dark core / Till the last Voice shake the sea and shore" (134). In the mystic chamber, Rose-Mary feels a "clanging swarm" sting her heart and sees before her the alienating figures of "Death and sorrow and sin and shame" (134). She splits the "crystal casket" as she hears a voice: "Thee, true soul, shall thy tmth prefer" (136-37). Knowledge is complete, virtue universal and the human condition transparent only in illusory ideals. The attempt "to seize the inmost Form," as Blake writes, always ends with the destruction of the visionary Crystal Cabinet {Prose & Poetry 488-89).

9. Stendhal refers to the fact that if one throws a leafless bough into the Salzburg salt mine, after a few weeks it will be covered with a "galaxy of scintillating diamonds, the

5 2 original branch no longer recognizable.” Likewise, in "psychic crystallization” the mind assigns perfections to the beloved and without such fantasy, says Stendhal, desire will die. Lyotard stresses that the construction of the body of the prostitute into negotiable signs which render her available, "the remarkable madness of her disappearance as a person,” intensifies desire to the point of vertigo (UbidneU Economy 83-84). 10. In contrast, Dumas' Armand recognizes the need to face (here quite literally) the corrupted body of Marguerite. He must see her corpse and gaze into her eyes which are now no more than two black holes (47,48,53). He is petrified but eventually cured of his grief. 11. See, for instance, Auerbach 41-43, Steinberg Criteria 92-114, and Steiner Pictures 56-90. For examples in Victorian visual act, Bendiner 121-43. 12. In both visual and verbal works, it is often Rossetti's faces (of the self as well as the other) which serve as mirrors. The usual objection to the myriad Rossettian countenances is that the artist, in the well-known words of his sister Christina, narcissistically reads—or more fittingly, creates—his ladies only in their "loveliness” and "not as they are," converting the individual face into his "favoured ideal type” ("In the Artist's Studio"; also Hunt 1: 248). Griselda Pollock, for instance, calls attention to the ambiguity of the idealized blank faces in his paintings but draws some highly dubious distinctions between authentic "portraits" and mere fantasy (a "realm apart"), between "transcriptions of a real person" and "smudged" paintings (122, 132), Rossettian works belonging to the latter negative categories with their "unstable signs" (132-140). Riede notes that after 1859 the Rossettian face tends to be ever more "writeriy" than "readerly," thus heightening the interest of viewer or voyeur and inviting aesthetic completion {Limits 240). My point is that a full treatment of Rossetti's aesthetics cannot be limited to citing the idealization of his "stunners,” but must consider the motivations behind such sublimation and the hallucinating play between this surface and an imagined depth (or an unimaginable lack) and the artist's incessant return to the repressed body. 53 Christina Rossetti declared that her brother painted but "one face" and "one self­ same figure," "not as she is, but as she fills his dreams" ("In the Artist's Studio"). Indeed, in many a text the male "worshipping face” does seek to be "mirrored" in the edenic female ( "Mid-Rapture" 83), narcissistically viewing the other soul as his own ("Lovesight" 75). Y et, one might explore further what exactly Dante Rossetti's "one self-same" dream is. In fact, a number of his specular texts distort and finally demolish the neo-Platonism assumed in readings like that of Christina Rossetti. Note, for example, "The Orchard Pit"—a poem which, his brother remarked, was "long and seriously thought of" {Works 672). The subsequent prose version of this text emphasizes even more the intersection of death and desire, fear and ecstasy, woman at once idealized and debased: "Death's name in her mouth was the very swoon of all sweetest things that be" (609). In this nightmare, the exact site of this fatal seduction is ambiguous for the desired woman is nothing less than a body of parts monstrously displaced: "Life's eyes are gleaming from her forehead fair, / And from her breasts the ravishing eyes of death" (240). The image recalls Shelley's horrifying vision while listening to Byron reading "Christabel" and is only one step from the figure in Magritte's surrealist The R ape with its breasts for eyes, navel for nose and vagina for mouth. 13. It is not the crystal cabinet but the "shadowy sphere" which holds the truth of knowledge and desire ("Bride's Prelude"). As Pound observes in "Yeux Glauques" (evidently referring to Lizzie Siddal; Ruthven 134), the eyes of the Rossettian beloved are no longer the translucent eyes of a Beatrice, reflecting the pleasures of paradise but dimmed "like brook-watery With a vacant gaze." Pound himself was confident that the supernatural can be materialized through art and mystic ways but Rossetti was pessimistic. The looking- glass which seems to afford access to love and life, at last displays only "a shaken shadow intolerable/ Of ultimate things unutterer the frail screen" ("A Superscription" 107). The artist has no "magic mirror" except "the manifest heart" ("The Song-Throe" 195).

5 4 14. William Sharp perceived this moment of transition—"the individuality of approaching womanhood"— in Rossetti's The Girlhood o f Mary Virgin (see Sambrook 260). In letter to his brother in late 1848, Rossetti includes some lines which highlight the moment: Mary had "no fear/ At all, yet wept for a brief period; / Because the fullness of time was come" (1:50-51).

15. This is especially evident in Dante's dream of a "terrible lord" carrying the "sleeping" and nearly naked figure of Beatrice in a blood-covered cloth who then eats the heart of the poet, (312). It is her death which provokes a "great inward longing." (338). As in the amour courtoise, the closer the woman is to death and radical Otherness, the more "divine" and desirable she becomes. This motif again emerges forcefully in Romanticism and Aestheticism and reaches its culmination in the nineteenth-century fin de siècle with its fatal women and masochistic lovers. 16. The secular religion of Vamour courtoise did have an influence on Christina Rossetti as well (Bump), but the differences between her views and those of her brother are instructive. Harrison regards her imbrication of eros and agape, phenomenal and ideal, as foreshadowing the aestheticism of the late nineteenth century (54-55). It seems to me, however, that her neo-Platonic Christianity (21) more often sets the erotic against the Divine. While she moves from the aesthetic to God, her brother shifts from art to secular hope.

Harrison notes the similarities between her work and that of Amau Daniel (165 f) but the latter*s scatological texts problematize the parallelism. On the troubadour texts which undermine the courtly love ideal, see, for example. Bee, Kendrick, Nelli, and Roy.

5 5 CHAPTER2

SYMBOL AND THING IN ROSSEITrS D A Jm S AMOR

Is It still possible to paint when the bonds that tie US to body and meaning are severed? Is it still possible to paint when desire, which is a bond, disintegrates? Is it still possible to paint when one identifies not with desire but with severance, which is the truth of human psychic life , -. ?

Julia Kristeva Black Sun

Rossetti's D antisAm or (1859) [Figure 1] was commissioned as the central panel of a cabinet for William Morris' aesthetic "Red House." It is a curiously anachronistic piece. At first glance, it appears as yet another avatar of Pre-Raphaelite medievalism but at the same time seems a self-conscious Whistlerian "study in blue and gold" (Morse 456).

On the one hand, it recalls a rigid Christian iconography. On the other hand, its flat geometry, bold coloring and strong diagonal look forward to the Symbolist aesthetic of Gauguin's (1888) Vision After the Sermon, evoking yet questioning the possibilities of uniting the differing realms of space, time and the imagination. This equivocation, I will argue, extends into the painting's apparently straightforward meaning. From the inscription on the diagonal in an earlier study [Figure 2] taken from the last lines of the Parcuüsio— "L'amor che muove il sole e I'altre stelle"—one might assume that the painting simply asserts the unifying powers of love. Yet, upon closer examination, the work focuses not so much on some neo-Platonic "love which moves" as on an erotic "love between man and woman that suffers separation" (Ellis 115). Furthermore, both the painting's position in the 56 tripartite 7%e Salutation o f Beatrice and the sundial at its very center highlight the death of the beloved, such that the visual text reflects Dante’s "new perception bom of grieving love" (Rossetti's translation; 346). Like so much of Rossetti's oeuvre, it is a work of self-

mouming which questions the very idealism it displays. Within this new-found perception there also appears, I suggest, an awareness of the limits of representation or art's "failure" before "phantasy sublime" (346). My remarks are, then, concerned with the ways the painting (and, especially in the latter half of the essay, his poems) at once reflect Rossetti's eroto-epistemology and his confrontation with what George Moore called the "great artistic question" of the age: the choice between "the

symbol, or the thing itself' (142). Beyond the well-worn problematic interaction of subject and material object, however, my interest lies in the manner his texts organize themselves as a defense against the sublime "Thing, " that traumatic kernel of intractable "otherness" at the core of human signification. This terrifying void which resists all symbolization fascinates, that is, it induces anxiety but at the same time arouses desire. In my reading, Dantls Amor is both a screen against and a threshold towards this unintegratable Thingness which is unrepresentable as such. The painting expresses, to borrow Rossetti's own appellation of the poetry of Thomas Hake, nothing less than his "tussle .. . with Oblivion"

(630).

horizons lost The diagonal in the painting^ can be fruitfully related to Rossetti's frequent image of the "horizon-line" which, in poems like "The Cloud Confines" or "The Sea-Limits," has been read as a striking metaphor of the human aspiration for transcendence (Spector 102- 07). Partaking of both earthly and supernal realms yet being in itself only a hallucination, the horizon-line is a symbol of both mysterious fusion and the boundaries of vision. The bold slash across Dont is Amor functions as such a line of crisis articulating the desire for an impossible unity. For Plato, love, positioned "between mortal and immortal," has the 57 power to "bind all together into a whole” (Symposium^ 98). Or in Rossetti's words, love is "the last relay / And ultimate outpost of eternity” {W orks 86) through which one might capture the "inner self the perfect whole” (78). Yet, as the central panel of II salute di Beatrice, Dantis Amor is situated at the "outpost” between scenes of life (Dante meeting Beatrice on earth) and eternal after-life (Dante meeting Beatrice in heaven), and its salient figures—the diagonal. Amor personified, the sundial—can be shown to represent death as much as any desired wholeness.

Like Rossetti's other salient tropes of thresholds, screens, relays, or portals, the oblique line in Dantis Amor represents the site of both longing and angst, a boundary which cannot be crossed but is nonetheless, or rather because of this, the object of desire and fascination. It signifies

Love's all-penetrative spell Amulet, talisman, and oracle,— Betwixt the sun and moon a mystery. ("Astarte Syriaca,” Works 226) The "spell" or enchantment for Rossetti does not lie in any actual "penetration,” of course, but, as Pater keenly observes, in love's perceived power to defy "distance, and those barriers which are so much more than physical distance.” It is the "solid resisting substance" which drives the "unutterable desire” {^predations 214, 213). The lover flees towards and from erotic bliss, wishing to transgress but holding back, fascinated before the bar; both "beautiful and paralyzing, medusafying in fact, the severe disjunction that suspends" (Lyotard Ubinal Economy 242). In "For Our Lady of the Rocks," for example, the Rossettian narrator is typically dejected and bewildered in the "occult" space between "imminent" and "Infinite” and since the "the pass is difHcult," we can only "blindly shudder through" the opening (171). This "passage" is, of course, overdetermined, referring to "love" and "birth," but equally to the "dark names" which the poet envisions as thresholds ("The Dark Glass" 86), and ultimately to the moment of the body's "passing." The mind on this edge experiences what Erik Erikson called an "ego chill," that is, a 58 "shudder which comes from the sudden awareness that our non-existence . . . is entirely possible" (111). It is worthwhile to examine briefly how the bar of desire functions in Rossetti's works which so often hesitate in this condition of in-betweenness. According to one school of thought, eros is caught in a double bind. If it is a "relay” to the moment of total pleasure, it also entails, by definition, a necessary barrier to complete satisfaction. The function of the pleasure principle is, in effect, to lead the subject from signifier to si^ufler, by generating as many signifiers as are required to maintain at as low as possible the tension that regulates the whole of the psychic apparatus. (LacanEthics 119) The erotic and its tensions are only perceived through a system of signs one prime function of which is to maintain a harmonious balance, naming and ordering our desires which can be so terrifying in their intensity. The symbolic networic, driven by the pleasure principle, seeks equilibrium, thus displacing and hiding the lack behind it. Nevertheless, there can and must be transgressive signifiers which, however momentarily, derail the balance and throw us into fascination and confusion by revealing the void or the world's "Thingness" in all its monstrosity. Rossetti's oeuvre attempts to lead us to such an edge of (mis)understanding where "The sky leans dumb on the sea" and the mapping of signs is suspended, where "Our past is clean forgot, / Our present is and is not," our identity put into doubt ("The Cloud Confines," 220). In ways I shall discuss, Rossetti's Amor, like many of his personifications and protagonists, entices us to transgress into this limit zone beyond signification, that fearful site or "breathless” moment between life and death. In his words, we pass Through Death to Love," and cannot but find "Death-in-Love." Eros "will always interweave / Life with . . . wish or fear to die" (88, 90, 265). It is here that the erotic is found, neither in cultural signs alone nor in their effacement, neither in ideality nor in materiality, but "in the seam between them, the fault, the flaw" (BarthesPleasure o f the Text 7).

5 9 The infamous "golden bar" of The Blessed Damozel [Figure 3] (both the poem and its illustration) is another example of the ambiguous lure of the horizon-line. The real power of this Rossettian idea may be better grasped in retrospect through a work of the Symbolist painter Fernand Khnopff, / Lock Afy Door Upon Myself ÇIS91) [Figure 4], which is clearly a gloss on Rossetti's painting. Borrowing for his title a phrase from Christina Rossetti's "Who Shall Deliver Me?," the Belgian friend of Bume-Jones transports the Damozel into the lugubrious paradise of the Decadents. In hair, dress, and soulful gaze, the figure does recall a Pre-Raphaelite woman and the cramped background is reminiscent of Rossetti's earlier work, but the deceased damozel now seems not so much among the emparadised as among the undead. The golden bar is here no longer simply the demarcation between heaven and earth as in Rossetti's diptych but a sinister thing, a table- tomb, which renders cupid's arrow useless and withers the Damozel s three lilies in the foreground.

One could say that Khnopff does not really alter the earlier text but brings out its eroto-thanatology and its gothic subtext; the wan-faced figure represents both Lady and Thing. Khnopff s version thus elaborates on the oxymoron present in the very term "golden barriers" and in the lady's expressed wish to love temporally in eternity ("As then awhile, for ever now / Together" 5). In this light, the poem's incessantly declaimed desires for union are, in fact, not only admissions of failure and hopelessness but also testaments to the lure of the grotesque. In a letter, Rossetti quotes Leigh Hunt's comments on the "Dantesque heavens" in his poems (probably including "The Blessed Damozel") set "in the celestial regions,... written in a kind of Gothic manner which I suppose he is pleased to think belongs to the school of Dante" ^Letters 1:39). Rossetti’s painting, especially after the addition of the earthbound lover in the predella with whom we instinctively identify, makes the spectator gaze upwards into the heavens. Khnoppf s rendition, by bringing the dead lover down to almost eye level, places us, like the poem, nearer the dead woman, thus presenting a less idealized, even uncanny, vision of the other and the self. 60 Khnoppf s demon woman sits beneath a bust of Hypnos, twin brother of Thanatos and the god of sleep, whose name is conventionally applied to enthrallment and trances. Pater aptly remarks that in Rossetti's "haunted" House o f Life there is, too, an unutterable desire penetrating into the worid of sleep, however "lead-bound," one of those anticipatory notes struck in The Blessed Damozel, and, in his later work, makes him speak some­ times almost like a believer in mesmerism. (214)^

Rossetti's personifications, he goes on, whether Sleep, Death, "winged Love," or "the hour" are "living creatures, with hands and eyes and articulate voices," assuming "forced and almost grotesque" forms. Especially noteworthy is "his hold on them, or rather their hold upon him, with the force of a Frankenstein, when once they have taken life from him" {Appreciations 208). Far from being a depiction of ideal love, Rossetti's representation of Amor, I will demonstrate, is also such a boundary figure, as haunted and hypnotic as his sky line. For Rossetti, even if the visual demarcation between sea and sky is merely an intentional and vain projection, the desire for such a horizon-line is not only ever-present but inescapable. Our very well-being depends in great measure on such an illusion in love, whether sexual or divine. We require "the horizon of the divine, of the gods, of an opening onto a beyond, but also a limit that the other may or may not penetrate" (Irigaray 17). This idea is prefigured in Pater's Conclusion to The Renaissance when he advises us to choose something—knowledge, a stirring of the senses, a lover, art—which might ”seem[ ] like a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment," even if it is all a "desperate effort" in the face of life's dissolutions and perpetual flight (189; emphasis added). The illusive diagonal of D antisA m or can be read as but one in a series of Rossetti's numerous boundaries and their tropes (horizon, parapet, mirror, erotic trance, sleep) which, in the strongest Paterian sense, discriminate into awareness. The alluring and threatening edge functions much like Barthes polyvalent slash of castration in S/Z: "the surface of the mirror, the wall of hallucination, the verge of antithesis, the abstraction of limit" (107). 61 figuring time If the transversal of D antisAm or suggests time's alienating force as much as love's binding power, the sundial carried by Eros only reinforces this doubleness. We know from all the urversions of the work that the dial should indicate the hour of Beatrice's death and yet it is blank, even though the painting remained in Morris' house for six years.^ In its emptiness as well as its central position, the dial catches the eye, becoming the text's pregnant point or what Barthes referred to as a punctum, a disturbing "cut" or "hole" which startles the viewer{Camera 26-27). Is this incompleteness merely a curious omission or does it suggest something more? The latter, 1 suspect, but, in any case, the "truth" of desire appears, as Lacan repeatedly remarked, in such mistakes or méconnaissances. Thus, the very blankness of the dial is meaning-full. It is a hole in being through which the unrepresentable is glimpsed. The unfigured plate opens a non-historical space, the place of the Thing, which forces the imagination to envision its own annihilation. The Victorians were, in Carlyle's words, the "Sons of Time" (104). For Rossetti temporality was truly a fixation, from the ubiquitous tempus fugit motif, to his lamentations that even "One hour" of the summum bonum is unrealizable ("The Stream's Secret" 114), to his obsessive glances at "the dead hours" and "squandered" opportunities ("Lost Days" 103). One fragment found by his brother is most relevant: "He who knows how much too late it is forbears to look at his watch" (637). Faced with finitude and death, the eye becomes saccadic, desperately seeking to evade such stark reminders. Like the much- discussed amorphous skull in Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors, this sundial is recognized best in a sidelong glance or an "aspecta medusa" (209). Every measurement of time is a rational abstraction which cannot grasp la durée but a clock with no hands (one study of DantisAmor does have hands rather than shadow) is an especially striking and disturbing reminder of the fictiveness of any such regulation. The blank dial forces us to face the autotelic nature of time and find our own significance in its passage. 62 As Kermode observes, our world is not one "with an historical tick which will certainly be consummated by a defînitive tock” (64) and so we require fictions to make sense of existence, positing origins and ends: We re-create the horizons we have abolished, the structures that have collapsed; and we do so in terms of the old patterns, adapting them to our new worlds. Ends, for example, become a matter of images, figures for what does not exist except humanly. (58) By plotting time, we reduce a meaningless reality to human terms, akin to the workings of an "erotic consciousness." The real becomes "a human imaging" of what is at base rather "inhuman” (46; 105). We redeem time not only by assigning ends, Kermode emphasizes, but also by fictionalizing "middles,” charging spots of time with special significance. Chronos (passing time) is transformed into kairos (moments of revelation), a tactic tried by

Joyce's Stephen Hero when he "epiphanizes" the clock in the Ballast Office (211). The dial of Dantis Amor is such a crisis point. While the painting adopts the Dantean narrative of ideal love, the device of the blank dial calls attention to the fictiveness of the representation.

Ultimately, the dial reflects us, that is, our imaginative defenses against and projections of the hour of our death, thus visually expressing Wilde's dictum that "It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors" (17). In Rossetti's "Jenny," for instance, the "clock tick[ing] on the shelf" tells of the fate destined for both the watchful narrator and sleeping prostitute:

Might not the dial scorn itself That has such hours to register? Yet as to me, even so to her Are the golden sun and silver moon In daily largesse of earth's boon. Counted for life-coins to one tune. (40) Not surprisingly, the dial reflects conflicting projections: the gift of life given to all and the bitter passage of time. In DantisAmor, love, too, is caught between "golden sun and silver moon " (which with the inscriptions in the study look very much like "life-coins"), between transcendence and materiality, the ephemeral and the enduring, so that it is we, anxiously pausing before the empty center, who decide the content of the dial. Like the experience of 63 listening to music, a dial might seem "an exquisite pause in time, in which, arrested thus, we seem to be spectators of ail fullness of existence" (Pater Renaissance 118) but the blank face, like the eyes of Gorgo, is also a shock of existential emptiness which must be transfigured. The painting's 5o/iciriMm vacKum is a tabularasa, inscribed with figures by which we express but then eleatically evade the literal fact of death. Time and death are usually disguised by fantasy, grim as the Reaper or gentle as Sleep, but they are, in fact, unrepresentable as such. They might be even more credibly evoked by "spacings, blanks, discontinuities or destruction of representations" (Kristeva B lack Sun 138).

Christ to Cupid

The figure of Amor, an angelic-looking cupid, who holds the dial is an example of a crucial shift in Rossetti's work, evidenced in numerous revisions during the 1850s and 1860s (Riede Critical Essays 128-48), which is relevant to the discussion. During the period in which Dantis Amor was painted, there was a progressive transition from an "art Catholic" to a more secular aestheticism, the latter's "modernity" residing in part. Pater suggests, in such a "deliberate choice between Christ and a rival lover" ("Aesthetic Poetry" 191X4

In the earlier drafts of "A Last Confession," for example, the father buys his daughter "A little image of great Jesus Christ" which represents "the wondrous things of faith." The later texts substitute an image of "a flying Love / . . . in his hands / A dart of gilded metal and a torch" with its "strange old tales" of "Venus and of Cupid." In "A Dark Day" (1853), "God's grace" is altered to "Time's grace." In Dantis Amor, the figure holding the sundial is explicitly a cupid, but in "The Bride's Prelude" (already begun at this time), it is "Theangel's sword" which maries the hour "Upon the dial-plate" (26; emphasis added).5 In such conflations of (Zhrist and Cupid, angel and amor, Rossetti was, in fact, not out of line with Renaissance personifications of eros which also display a psychic tension between caritas and cupitUtas. Although we tend to think of the childlike putto, the 64 iconography included the "il Signor Amore,” a handsome, winged adolescent with flowing garments whose beau^ is described by the Roman de la Rose as "il semble que ce fust uns ange" (Panofsl^ 101, 102). The composite angel-cupid of Dantis Amor, therefore, is a prime example of the competing claims in Rossetti's worit during this period between the sensual idols of faith and the idealized fleshly lover, on the other. The painting reflects this psychological tension in other subtle ways as well. The work itself, as creative artifact, not only supplants the beloved but Anally, in the personifled Agure, represents the transcendent creative self. It has been suggested that many of Rossetti’s personiAcations are Agures for himself (Miller 338).^ The angel-Amor in this painting is, I propose, yet another of such textual alter egos- -an alterdeus, in fact. Idealist aesthetics regarded the work of art as an escape from chance and contingency, indeed as a "blessed god" (Hegel 1:157). Rossetti's text evokes the apotheosis of the artist himself yet in its ambiguous diagonal and the uncanny dial, Dantis Am or displays the anxieties inherent in such a poetic will to self-transcendence as well as the vatic powers of art. This poetic will to power, the subtle shift from cupido (desire) to cupiditas (ambition), is most cogently seen in the way Rossetti's painting appropriates Dante's story of loss and hope, which it ostensibly illustrates, to a rather different end. Let us Arst look at the last sonnet of the Vita Nuova ("Oltre la spera") which begins (in Rossetti's rendition): Beyond the sphere spreads to widest space Now soars the sign diat my heart sends above; A new perception bom of grieving Love Guideth it upward the untnxlden ways. When it upward unto the end, and stays. It sees a lady round whom splendors move In homage; till, by the great right thereof Abashed, the pilgrim spirit stands at gaze. Thereupon, the poet beholds his tripartite vision and concludes by hoping that his spirit might

6 5 go hence to behold the glory of its lady: to wit, of that blessed Beatrice who now gazeth continually on His countenance qui est per omnia saecula benedictus — Lous Deo. (346) The speaker desires to behold his lady who in turn gazes upon the Divine face, a neo-

Platonic tradition of the fin 'amor reflected into the nineteenth-century, from Goethe's "das Ewigweiblichen / zieht uns hinan" to Tennyson's visions of woman "dipt / In Angel instincts, " "Interpreter between Gods and men" ("The Princess," V II1. 301; pp. 325-326). The notion of womanhood drawing man on high is, of course, also conspicuous in Rossetti's visual and verbal texts to the point that the feminine often replaces the divine agency and agape is assimilated into eros (McGann 84). In Beata Beatrix, woman—death rendered "under the resemblance of a trance"—is in the center while Dante and Amor "gaze ominously on one another." It is she, not the artist, who is "conscious of a new world" (1871 letter quoted in Surtees I: 94) and this is true to Dante's scheme: "Beatrice stood, eyes on the eternal wheels / and turning mine hence, I gazed on her instead" (ParacBsio 32: 4-9). But Dantis Amor disturbs this hierarchy for hereBeatrix mediatrix is moved to the

margin and the angiolagiovanissima of the Vita is replaced by the angelic figure.^ If Amor is the "sign" of the poet in Dante's sonnet (the winged poet is a Renaissance trope) or his "pilgrim spirit" (Amor is garbed as a pilgrim in the study), then he should be gazing at the lady. However, the pilgrim-poet (Dante/Gabriel) looks directly at the viewer somewhat like a Mannerist 5prec^er, thereby increasing the tension between story and expression, as well as spectator and painting. Although the figure of the angel has frequently been used as a mediating sign, reconciling heterogeneous categories and gender identities (e.g. Irigaray Ethics 15), the usurping self-projection of Rossetti's allegorical figure in Dantis Amor is a gender-marked gesture of the egotistical sublime. Discussing Rossetti, Miller observes that a common Western structure consists of "a pair potentially subverted by a triangular relation among three persons or images, though it remains precariously balanced" and it is, not surprisingly, often the female who has been the troubling third (343, 344), for "the 66 perilous principle in the world [is] female from the first” (Rossetti Letters 2:850). For him, she is a reminder of corporeality and to deny this external dependence he seeks a non­ material origin or direct filiation (Deleuze 205) through sublimating cultural constructions. In its re visionary reading of Dante, as in its defensively unfigured dial, therefore, Rossetti's Dantis Amor impossibly tries to immortalize a mortal life and thus transform death into life (R a n k e r 39).

breathless moments The painting's representation of this moment of transformation or "trance” (etymologically, a "crossing"), when the desired object is both seemingly eternalized and then spectralized, is also pervasive in Rossetti's verbal texts to which I now turn, in particular the salient gaps and elegaic pauses he employs so frequently in his verse. As a

poet-painter, Rossetti was naturally interested in les transpositions d'art, even if he did not wish his work to be known as "word-painting" {Letters 2: 850). The demarcating lines and interspaces of his paintings find their counterparts in his poetic structures and semantics. And like the "horizon-lines" discussed above, these spaces are both the site of desire and the interval of death. Richard Stein has usefully called attention to numerous such breaks in Rossetti's texts—the discontinuous juxtaposition of images, the recurrent hyphenated words, and the crucial role of the caesura in the center of the Petrarchan sonnet form ( 169, 147, 165). Although he does recognize that these allusive texts may constitute a proto- modemism, demanding a new kind of reading (a "semic” logic more than a linear one), he ultimately regards these halting blanks as Rossetti's "most typical weakness," preventing any "essential unity" or "organic structure of meaning" (160, 162, 169, 188). My final comments focus on these gaps and how, like the oblique slash and empty dial of Dantis Amor, in their very blockage of uni^ and meaning, they often become the articulation point of his texts (Wagner 129-50). The semantic and visual pauses must be considered in light

6 7 of the numerous explicit terms used by Rossetti for these pregnant moments. Rather than obstacles between a dual structure or linear progression, they must be seen as third—and central—terms in their own right. In the early art-catholic poems, such a halt may have a religious aura of secrecy. For example, the octet of the ekphrastic poem on Memling's A Marriage o f St. Catherine^ starts with "Mystery" and the sextet begins: "There is a pause while Mary Virgin turns / The leaf, and reads" (190). But an examination of a few Rossettian texts soon reveals that the hesitation is more often than not charged with a melancholic sense of foreboding or futility, not unlike the pause in reading which leads E*uulo and Francesca to illicit union and finally to everlasting loss (illustrated by Rossetti in 1854and I860).

"For a Venetian Pastoral by Giorgione (In the Louvre)" begins with the "anguish of the solstice," that point at which the sun is furthest from the equator and seems to pause before returning (see Hunt 244). Since there is ecstasy to be found in such anxiety and in the awareness of transience, the speaker desires to remain in the "Hush!" when "the heat lies silent" and singing has ceased. The solstice point is also known as the "tropik," a cognate of "trope," and the poem is a trope of such a re turning in that it expresses a desire to cease naming while in itself attempting such nomination. "Let be," says the narrator and "Say nothing." "Nor name this ever. Be it as it was,— / Life touching lips with immoitaliQr” (188). But such plenitude, what the poem calls "The whole of pleasure," can be fully had only before birth or after life. Some relevant remarks Arthur Symons on the painting in question, FeteChampetre (later determined to be by Titian rather than Giorgione), replay the crucial point of both Rossetti's poem and Pater’s well-known commentary: In... music or the musical intervals of existence, life itself is a sort of listening—a listening to music to time as it flies the happier power in tWngs without are permitted free passage, and have their way with us. (Pater, Renaissance 119)

6 8 It is a pause in music, and life itself waits, while men and woman are for a moment happy and content and without desire; there, content to be beautiful and to be no more than a strain of music. (Symons "The Rossettis” 323-24) Symons then adds that Rossetti's poem likewise expresses the "sovereign oppression of absolute beauty" (emphasis added; 323), a phrase derived from Swinburne {Essays 90). The choice of words connotes a sense of futility or even desperation in the surrender to things and the aesthetic nunc-stans. Such empyrean moments may appear in art without "taint" or "impurity" (I^ter 120) but, as the intermittent terms of melancholy in Rossetti's poem—"anguish," "sighs," sobs," "weep"—suggest, the maintenance of such unchanging states in earthly existence is finally an illusion. What is more, the stasis desired is unnervingly close to death. Indeed, on the heels of the comments quoted above, Symons recalls the contents of the Etruscan sepulchers displayed in Bologna's Museo Civico which weighed heavily on his mind; Here were the bodies of men and women, molded for ever in the gesture of their last moment, and these rigid corpses are as vivid in their interrupted life as the damp corpses in the morgue. (323) Reading this essay, it is hard not to link the ideas of music and morgue together. The impossible wish to possess the moment forever, in fact, "to be no more than music," to be a disembodied voice, or to be "without desire," is to radically interrupt life which by definition is temporal and corporeal. It is "the dead things," notes Pater, "that after all are most entirely at rest" {Plato 22). Obviously, the will towards reifying the epiphanic moment is central to culture. However, there is, as well, a perverse pleasure in vicariously stepping out of time by allowing the darker side of things to "have their way with us" while we experience a sudden, delinear dissolution, which Qement, expanding the musical analogy, has called "syncope." In this swoon of suspension, time seems to halt, and our bipolarities are seemingly annulled. "I die, but I do not die, exactly in the between-the-two, refusing one

6 9 and the other” (261). This bitter-sweet pause is nowhere more poignant than in Rossetti's pervasive use of the erotically (and thanatologically) charged term "breathless." Concerning beau^, Rossetti at one point says confidently, "I drew it in as simply as my breath" ("Soul’s Beauty"; 100), reminiscent of the ease with which, according to the Orphic poems, the soul entered beings in respiration (Aristotle 1.5 .4lOb; p. 43). By the mid-nineteenth century, the term "breathe” had had a hoary aesthetic history and become a hackneyed trope of mimesis, one ultimate effect of which was a dematerialization of poetry (see Tillotson 163-67).^ The Rossettian aesthetic argues precisely the reverse. As Pater observes, his "first condition of the poetic way of seeing and presenting things is particularization" and a "delight in concrete definition," even if there remains a nostalgic or "archaic side" connecting him with those who "fancied they could have breathed more largely" in some former age {Appreciations 208, 216). Human nostalgia is directed towards some golden age but also towards natural things which appear to partake easily of such unconscious union. As a later poet would put it, a flower "breathes" perfectly and knows not desire, whereas we look backwards, always taking our leave: "Here everything is separation \Abstand\, while there it was like breathing[Atem\" (Rilke DuinesianElegies 44-45,46-47). Rossetti's lovers do come close to some fuller, "natural" vision, what he calls their "breathless bowers" ("Love Enthroned" 74) but they are invariably blocked by gross materiality. When Swinburne observes in Rossetti's gloss on Giorgione the "breathless breath of over-much delight," he tellingly adds that it induces "quivers and aches. " It is a "supreme pause of soul and sense” {Essays 90; emphasis added). Since for him the material and the spiritual are impossibly mixed, all idealistic aspirations to fuse one's soul— or "breath" (Gr. pneuma; L. an/ma)—with another's are impeded by the resistant body. In "Heart's Compass," Rossetti can acclaim the beloved as "the meaning of all things that are; / a breathless wonder" but the question which soon follows—"is not thy name Love?"—(83)

70 suggests the futility of such projections since woman is not ail (see Mitchell 144). It is only by a willful suppression of the body that lovers can unite in fantasy.^ In Rossetti's texts, therefore, it is often impossible to say exactly what suspends life for a painfully pleasurable moment and "Holds my breath"—is it "Life or Death" that shapes this "regenerate rapture" (101)? The single stringed instrument of the poem from which these lines are taken ("The Monochord"), like the diagonal of Dantis Amor, replays the irresolvable tensions within bliss. In many a Rossettian poem, the promise of totality lies in the beloved, beyond even heaven which "holds breath and hears / The beating heart of Love's own breast" ("The Portrait" 170). But just as frequently, it is not eternal life or sexual satisfaction but time which "like a pulse shake[s] fierce" ("The Blessed Damozel" 4), or death which fuses with love to "shake [the] soul with change" ("During Music" 195). "Behold, there is no breath: / 1 and this Love are one, and I am Death" (90). The question of representation posed in the epigraph to this chapter—whether painting is possible when one "identifies not with desire but with severance”~is answered in the affirmative by Kristeva in terms relevant to my reading of Rossetti: "between life and death, meaning and nonmeaning, — is an intimate, slender response of our melancholia" ( 137). The mortality of the loved object (and ultimately of the self) initiates a process of mourning in which various objects are transcendentalized. In place of perishability, one turns hopefully to art or "an ideal, a beyond' that my psyche produces in order to take up a position outside itself—eit-xfoKx" (99; see Freud 14: 305-07). We incessantly project illusions to fill the space of non-union and weave signs around the void, for if unmediated, the site of severance and Thingness would be unbearable. "The health of the eye," says Emerson, "seems to demand a horizon" (1: 13). Of course, Rossetti's "slender response of melancholia" has grown increasingly thinner under the pressures of history, so that the artist moves even more self-consciously in his "strange diagonal" (Tennyson, The Princess Conclusion 1. 25; p. 328) between art and life. Dantis Amor which seems at first glance to reflect Dante's firm paradigm of the 71 temporal and the eternal, is, in fact, closer to the modernity o f Pater’s Michelangelo with its hope "based on the consciousness of ignorance—ignorance of man, ignorance of the nature of the mind, its origin and capacities" ^Renaissance 75). Rather than unifying the poles, the modem artist thus gives ever more voice to difference and the loss of faith in any aesthetic ideology. There are horizons to cross but they must by definition remain fascinating in their resistance to possession and in their potential to traumatize. As Bataille observes, poetry is both mediating sign and barrier in its evocation of "inaccessible possibilities." It "reveals the power of the unknown” and conceals "the known within the unknown: it is the unknown painted in blinding colors, in the image of a sun.” Art attempts to mimic that medusafying force inherent in death and the erotic which "oppresses, that takes one's bTeathaMfay” {T7te Impossible 162, 164, 9).

With its bold axis and blinding white sundial, Dantis Amor, provokes insight not through its putative unity or apotheosis but through a painful division. In Rossetti's representation, Dante's Amor darkens love with loss and, like Blake's Covering Cherub, blocks aesthetic totalization. This post-Romantic predicament is well expressed by Paul Celan's call for a death-in-life poetics deploying what he calls, in a term of his own coinage, an aesthetic A/emwe/id!e ("turn” or "reversal" of breath): Poetry is perhaps this; anAtemwende, a turning of our breath, who knows, perhaps poetry goes its way—the way—of art—for the sake of just such a turn? And since the strange, the abyss and the Medusa's head, the abyss and the automaton, all seem to lie in the same direction—it is perhaps this turn, this Atemwende, which can sort out the strange from the strange? It is perhaps here, in this one brief moment, that Medusa's head shrivels and the automaton runs down? Perhaps, along with the I, estranged and freed here, in his manner, some other thing is also set free? (47) In an age prior to the Molochs of history which confronted Celan, Rossetti, Pater and the Aestheticists also sought to discriminate the "strange from the strange" by means of an art for the sake of its own tropings. In different contexts and manner, they pursued self- estrangement and passionate ecstasy by revealing the radically Other or some-Thing.

7 2 Beata Beatrix ia her trance may be Rossetti's fînest illustration of the crossing of life and death, but the uncanniness of the moment is assuaged by her pronounced eroticism: head slightly tilted up, eyes closed, lips parted, the countenance as ecstatic as that of

Bernini's St. Theresa. D antis Amor is less mimetic and perhaps less accomplished, but ft possesses its own poignancy. A fîtting comment on this work's figuration of love is Pater’s poetic gloss on the Dantean crossing from the fleshly body into the "new body" ("forma novella") of immortality:

a dream that lingers a moment, retreating in the dawn, incomplete, aimless, helpless; a thing with faint hearing, faint memory, faint power of touch; a breath, a flame in the doorway, a feather in the wind. (Renaissance 76) In this transcorporation, as it becomes first mere thing and then only breath, the body eludes the mind's grasp and must be figured in tropes of motion and absence. At the same time, for Rossetti as for Dante, the new body in heaven must lose "no tinge of flesh- colour" and it may also haunt the waking life as an articulate phantom (Renaissance 68; Appreciations 214).

If Don/ûA/nor cannot lead the viewer across the divide to its stated synthesis, it is because the text is a trace of the passage of desire itself. By hollowing out an empty space in the narrative of time and idealized objects, the painting is not merely a discourse about love but is itself a gesture of bliss. It is a desire for the ideal which in its very expression displays resistance—lack, time, corporeality, finitude—at its own center. Far from being a monument more durable than bronze, Rossetti reminds us, art is but a "strange" threshold in which we the "mortal hours in vain immortalize" (101). It presents itself, like Stevens' angel of the real, in the middle realm between material and immaterial, between "ashen wing and wear of ore," appearing only for "a moment standing in the door" ("Angel Surrounded by Paysans"). Paradigmatic of Rossettian love, Dantis Amor at once expresses

7 3 a hope for "Love's Hour" when "the dial's thin-thrown shade” might be bom, but speaks bitterly of what-might-have-been as spectres of the "dead hours" which "in many darkened doorways dwell" (118),

7 4 NOTES

1. For other such transversals, see, for example, the lance across The Tune of the Seven Towers, the sexually charged lily o f EcceAncillae, the easel of St. Catherine, or The Wedding o f St. George and the Princess Sabra in which a diagonal bar divides the couple from musical angels. 2. Symons would borrow Pater's insight. There is a "hypnotic quality" in Rossetti's work, he writes, "like that of an unconscious medium, or like that of a woman against whose attraction one is without defense” ("Dante Gabriel Rossetti," 202). The poet is "a sort of medium to forces seen and unseen" ("The Rossettis," 119). Concerning Rossettian females, Swinburne had earlier written that they possessed a magnetic charm, drawing men "by pure force of absorption" (Essays 375). As it was, Rossetti did have some interest in "Hectro-biology" (fe/rerj 1:100) 3. After the abandonment of Red House in 1865, Rossetti removed the entire painting and reframed it with a second version of Dantis Amor. He writes that the new figure (with extinguished torch rather than sundial) "shows the death of Beatrice . . . between the two subjects" and the "subjects are treated from the real and not the allegorical side of Dante's love story" (letters 2: 490-91 n. 4; 491). It is noteworthy that the cupid with an extinguished torch was thought by Lessing to be an ancient figure of death. 4. Pater's Gaston is likewise tom between "modernity” and a portrait of Ronsard, the two being "rival claimants upon him": "Might that new religion [art] be a religion not altogether of goodness, a profane religion, in spite of its poetic fervors? There were 'fiowers of evil,' among the resL It came in part, avowedly, as a kind of consecration of

7 5 evil, and seemed to give it the beauty of holiness" (4: 231). The undisguised allusion to

Baudelaire connects the passage to Pater's own d ilem m a sbefore modernism. 5. One might note the similar poses and functions of the figure of Love in Dante's Dream (1871) and the figure in The Seed of David (1864) in which, Rossetti writes, "An angel — leads by the hand a King and Shepherd" (Surtees 1:5). There is also an angel on a dial (with the wheel of fortune) in Pia de' Tolomei (1868-80) (Surtees 2: 300). The two representations, angel and cupid, are frequently confused. Thus, The Angel of Christian Charity (1893) at the center of Piccadilly Circus is popularly known as Eros. 6. Doughty makes an off-hand comment that the figure of Amor might be read as Rossetti himself at the time of it painting, caught between Fanny (the sun) and Lizzie (the moon) (264). In fact, the female profile in the study more resembles Jane Morris, while the finished version seems closer to Lizzie Siddal. In a more suggestive vein, George Hersey has suggested that in Rossetti's ekphrastic poem on Leonardo's "Our Lady of the Rocks," the poet puts himself in the place of the angeX-Sprecher (see Hollander 147). 7. In Rossetti's Roman de la Rose (1864) and Love's Greeting (c.l861), both accomplished about the time of Dantis Amor, the figure of Amor is to the side and the lovers united in a kiss. 8. Swinburne, for instance, writes that Rossetti's s^le can "breathe unvexed in the finest air" since it is life which "breathes in his poems" (62,64). Or again, in an essay on poetics, John Henry Newman comments that the "very spirit of beauty breathes through every part" of Greek drama and there is in Milton an "inward music which the thoughts of the poet breathe" (4, 26). The poetic mind, therefore, "feels a natural sympathy with everything great and splendid in the physical and moral world.” What the imagination expresses according to this non-Aestheticist view, however, is the pure, harmonious ideal, independent of accident and transience, not "fettered down to the particular and individual" (10, 14). 7 6 9. The impossible gap between temporal works and eternal desires, life and art, is also depicted in Rilke's "Lange du méridien" (Werke 1:497), a poem directed to a sculptured angel on a comer of Chartres Cathedral holding a sundial (a rare combination in medieval iconography). The figure bears some resemblance to Rossetti's Amor but there is no evidence that Rossetti encountered this statue on his journeys to France. Rilke's angel is, like Rossetti's Amor, not a mediating figure but a stem sign of difference for with its indifferent smile it deflects our hours (11. 7-8). Neither guide nor guardian, it marks the deep divide between moment and monument. While the angel's realm is enduring ("Steinemer" 1.12) and balanced ("Gleichgewichte" 1.10), the human condition is temporal and disordered. It is worth mentioning that Rilke in a favorable review of Pater's Renaissance Rilke refers to Rossetti's "memorable sonnets" and "passionate art” (5; 599). Rossetti's "The Kiss" commences not with blissful moment but with "death's sick delay" and the "smouldering senses" which "rob this body of honour", thus fatally qualifying while intensifying the union of "life-breath" and "life-blood" pronounced at the end (76) (see Morse 460-61).

7 7 CHAPTERS

PATER'S DIAPHANEITE E N CORPS

"Ideas arc voids in the body."

Antonin Artaud "Shit to the VCnd"

"A tear is an intellectual thing."

William Blake "I Saw a Monk of Charlemagne"

Published posthumously, "Diaphaneite" is Pater's earliest extant essay, first presented to the Old Mortality in July 1864. The text is replete with allusions to his current enthusiasms—Michelet, Hegel, Hchte, Goethe, Carlyle, Arnold, among others 1—but they sit uneasily together. Nevertheless, there is a recurrent temptation to consider the piece as a model for Pater's conception of the "aesthetic hero" (Bloom x). Monsman regards it as a sort of "Ur-portrait" (Portrcdts 22), indeed, as nothing less than "the germination of Pater's critical, historical, and imaginary portraits'," the very beginning of the Aesthetic Movement ("Fichte" 373). The address does propose a "basement type" which might "regenerate " society (8:254) and not a few of the text’s memorable phrases find their way into the published works. Nevertheless, as I shall demonstrate. Pater severely qualified, eschewed and even repudiated these first ideas. The essay is highly unrepresentative of his oeuvre. To establish my argument, 1 will set Pater’s tropes against the dominant Victorian ocularism which was penetrative above all, seeking a depth of meaning through a lisible or 78 translucent surface. Out of the myriad examples of the Victorian philosophy of the eye, I have selected Carlyle's "Characteristics” (1831) since its visualism and corporeal poetics somewhat parallel the notions in "Diaphaneitè." I contend that the imagery of Pater's subsequent writings, especially his recurrent metaphors of sickness, fever, and insanity (in both senses of madness and unhealthiness) revoke the ideal(ist) tropes of transparency, clarity and colorlessness which dominate his youthful address. A similar role is played by his rather neglected concept of "insane realism,” a gothic quality which he perceives in various writers as diverse as Plato, Wordsworth, and Rossetti. The Aestheticist imagination, a kind of "physical malady" (8: 89), can infect even the most stubbornly abstract philosophies.

The essays of The Renaissance, the evidence will show, already mark a crucial departure from the ideas expressed in "Diaphaneite." The images of the crystal in the early essay, for example, may represent a "purity of balance" (Monsman "Aesthetic Hero" 143) and express Coleridge's perfect realization of artistic form ("lost in the light which yet it contains, embodies, and gives shape to”; 2:238). But "Winckelmann," composed only two years after "Diaphaneite," ends by highlighting this very problem of balance and unity {Renaissance 182). Furthermore, Pater increasingly rejected all metaphors of clarity, pure light, and abstract unities which tended to disembody the self. If the attributes of the diaphanous or "crystal" hero are applied to the German aesthetician, they finally evoke, in Pater's own words, a character of rather "negative quality" {Renaissance 176), devoid of existential and erotic tensions.^ However self-assured, Cariylean rhetoric reveals an uneasy truce between his "spiritual optics" and the human body. There are tensions in Carlyle's discussion of the dandy between a certain ascetic transparency, on the one hand, and a visible stylization, on the other (James Adams). In true masculine health, a deep, unified, natural "Unconsciousness” (28: 2) seems to be ensconced in a transparent body. The dandy's obsession with the decorated surface, by contrast, is unmanly or even pathological. For 79 Cariyle, language, like clothes, is a body wrapped around a body, a ”Flesh-Garment, the Body of Thought" (57), through which the invisible should be revealed. However, his scopic drive is stymied before the dandy's body which resists penetration and is therefore indecipherable to most. Style should be a translucent skin, an "exact type of the nature of the beast" {Letters 9: 228), but this body is a "(stuffed) parchment-skin" (1: 217) upon which the dandy has inscribed devious signs. Impervious to the optic gaze, it is not diaphanous but a thing which reflects rays of light (218). The "physiology of the Dandiacal Body is nowise laid fully open" (220). Although (Zarlyle maintains that ultimately he can clarify its essential core, he does not, cannot in fact, do so. To borrow Kantorowicz's well-

known categories about the king, he seeks the dandy's "first body" but gains only the "second body" of signs which can be variously written and interpreted.^ For the Aestheticists, the body resists the idealist's penetrative eye. For them, depths or secrets are projected, and thus legion, while the body displays not a transcendental essence but symptoms of its materiality. Thus, Wilde has Dorian Gray wondering 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 Uiought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead. {W orks 112)

Ideally, the Carlylean body is ascetic, unified and anti-self-conscious, immune to the "disease" of inquiry (28:2). Pater's aesthetics of contagion, in contrast, anticipates the Decadent response by repeatedly insisting on the self-critical nature of modernity and the value of the unhealthy body for the authentic perception of life through a "multiplied consciousness" {Renaissance 190). He learned from Hegel that, to borrow Eric Heller's words, this "wound" of self-division defines the "Romantic malady" of his age: "a severance of mind from world, soul from circumstance, human inwardness from external condition" (103). 8 0 Cailyle commences his essay with a medical aphorism—"The healthy know not of their health, but only the sick"—and applies it to the "moral, intellectual, political, [and] poetical” aspects of life. Bodily organs function "unconsciously" and if their "separate existence" is foregrounded, whether out of pleasure or pain, they become "false centres of sensibility" (28:1). In such a "paradisiac Unconsciousness," there is "a beam of perfect white light, rendering all things visible . . . no irregular obstruction" yet breaking it "into colours." Self-consciousness is "disease" and the Body Politic, "too conscious of many things" (3), only adds to its own nosology of diseases (21). In an age of (self-)criticism and "Reviewing," literature, especially, is infected with "wide spread maladies," "like a sick thing" obsessively examining its own wounds (23, 25). Comparing this auto­ dissection to a loss of "the old ideal of Manhood," Carlyle implies a parallel between "Werterism," "Byronism," or "Brummelism" (29) and the conventional female invalid of Victorian romance. (Femininity itself was often the "female malady"; see Showalter.) One consequence of the inward turn which (Carlyle considers even worse than this effeminacy is doubt or skepticism, "the black malady," the "chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul" in which the heart [lies] dead, the eye cannot see" (5: 174, 216). In this nosology. Pater would have been among the most severely stricken. It is not at all difficult to draw some pronounced parallels to "Characterisitcs" in the young Pater’s "Diaphaneite.” In the latter, a sick society is said to turn to those who "theorize about its unsoundness" and this rare ethical type is characterized not by "breadth of colour" but by its "fine edge of light" and a "colourless, unclassified purity" attained "without any struggle at all" (8: 248-49). Consequently, such a character prefers "what is direct and clear, lest one's confusion and intransparency should hinder the transmission from without of light that is not yet inward." This "entire transparency of nature" lets through genial forces such that the barriers between inner and outer, self and other

81 evanesce (251). The "clear crystal nature” (253) is already announced in the essay's title, for despite the capricious accent, the term's etymology is not a French noun but a Greek imperative verb meaning "Shine throughl" or "Become transparent!" Yet Pater's subsequent work, to repeat, demonstrates a proclivity for a set of tropes which directly oppose these images of apperception, knowledge and the body. As we shall see (in the fînal chapter), aestheticist images of the palimpsest challenge those depth-model optics which forever seek what is "behind the veil." Some early critics claimed that Pater possessed "no sense but vision,” his imagination "penetrating its way through things visible" (Thomas 79,57). In 1875, a reviewer typically regards him as a Platonist looking through the material to the ideal world of forms instead of "the rich colors of the sensuous" (Seiler 107). On the contrary, not only does Pater consistently argue against such a piercing vision, but he also, much like Goethe, prefers the palette of experience to the simple gray of theory {Faust, Pan /2038-39). For him, chromaticism^ prevents the eye from gliding effortlessly to idealism and abstractions, a peril he further avoids by preferring his colors "embrowned" {Appreciations 154) and his lights "layered," "broken or enmeshed" {Renaissance 172, 174). The metaphors of pure light and faultless crystals which pervade "Diaphaneite” do have the virtue of evoking an intense moral conscience but one that Pater himself suspected is rather inhuman as feeling and passion find no place therein (d'Hangest 1:69). For the New Humanists like T. S. Eliot, Pater's moral philosophy was "suspect or perverse" for the opposite reason: he was simply incapable of seeing the object (aesthetic or otherwise) as it really is. And what interferes with his "clear thinking and clear statement” is for Eliot, as for Carlyle, the body: "whatever is morbid or associated with physical malady" ("Arnold and Pater" 355,353; Sacred Wood 54, 67). The more the body "which suffers and the mind which creates" are kept apart, Eliot declares, "the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions" (54). Matthew Arnold, quoting the "strange language " of Coleridge's "Reason," completes the image: the barrier of style and thinking 82 between a text and its interpreter should ideally ”defecate[ ] to a pure transparency" (5: 1 6 2 ). Pater's texts are decidedly impure, in both senses of the word, that of Eliot's moralizing clarification and of Arnold's chemical hermeneutics. The metaphysics of transparency is central to Pater’s youthful Amoldian description of the diaphanous hero who desires "to be shown to the world as he really is; as he comes nearer and nearer to perfection, the veil of an outer life" fading away (8:250). He is "a relic from the classical age .. . [with] something of the clear ring, the eternal outline of the antique" (251). It is the mind’$ eye which is stressed at the expense of the body: the senses are under the firm control of "the laws of the higher intellectual life” and art is the highest expression of a "perfect intellectual culture" (250). Yet, the term "intellectual" (repeated here a dozen times in two pages) is superseded in Pater's later texts by more physical and emotive categories such as "impression." In M arius, the intellect fades into "a moment only, an impulse or series of impulses" (3: 70-71), and in the "Conclusion" to the Renaissance, the mind is in a constant state of dissolution. Note too, for example. Pater's strong critique of Merimee which calls into question the ideals of apodictic clarity and hard intellectualism. The French writer does reveal the "hollow ring of fundamental nothingness under the apparent surface of things," peeling back the veils of habit with his scalpel, but he is too determined to seek "exact truth" (8: 14, 16). For most of us. Pater would later observe, relics create a "hazy” mental atmosphere, with "soothing light and shade." Merimee, however, has "no half-lights" (15; 20, 37) and reveals characters painfully distinct as if "on some hard, perfectly transparent day." Imprisoned in "pure m ind," he offers us "empty space" (36, 15), clear, impersonal, cold-blooded. His colouring is associated with sunstroke, beneath a sun "in which dead things rot quickly" (27). Quite characteristic of Pater here is the insistence on "atmosphere" and especially "colour" which possesses for him the quality of resisting abstraction and transparency. There is here also the Paterian suggestion that there is value in facing the slow decay of living things, especially the defilement of the unburied corpse (which the Greeks called 83 miasm a, meaning "to stain or to color"; Parker). Just as Merimee displays colorless, blank facts, Coleridge's "grey volumes" express the "colourless, analytic English philosophy" and its pretensions to absolute truth (69,74). Too rarely is there "colour, or charm"—like "the inspiriting of the dead corpses of the ship’s crew" in "The Ancient Mariner" (70,97)— which might induce an "infection" of beauty (95, 102). His "strange and beautiful psychology has . . . not sufficient corporeity" ("Coleridge's Writings" 124). Or again. Pater describes the antinomian proto-Renaissance elements within the medieval mind as "morsels of deeper colour" {Renaissance 17) and points out how the Renaissance concern with the body, "the real matter of the picture," leaches through the "veil" o f the ostensible subjects (39). The flesh of Botticelli's Venus, for example, appears "cadaverous," but this is not at all a negative quality, for

the more you come to understand what imaginative colouring really is, that all colour is no mere delightful quality of natural things, but a spirit upon them by which they become expressive to the spirit, the better you will like this peculiar quality of colour. (45) The unsettling or painful presence of the finite body, the "shadow of death in the grey flesh," is, in fact, crucial for an understanding of a new erotics and a "warmer, lower humanity" (47) developing within the "chilling touch of the abstract" (33). Color, as a recent commentator puts it, is "the bodily, and potentially transgressive form of light," the very "resistance between light and bodies, ideas and surface" (Harphan 96). Aristotle considered it the "boundary" or "limit" of transparency [ôia^ovova] which makes things visible (Aristotle D e A nim a 418b, 419a); Rossetti called it "the physiognomy of a picture," the "body of its life" {Letters 1: 196); Pater, a space o f "fallen light" {Renaissance 104). In terms of the optic metaphors at the heart of Western epistemology, one might say it is an element which resists unity, definition or representation and ensures the claims of "the bodily eye" (4: 230) against the philosophical mind. As we shall see shortly, an excessive "colouring" of passionate corporeality may lead to a kind of "brain­ sick" mysticism or macabre visions {Appreciations 106). That is to say, objects may seem 84 to dissolve and "flake by flake” lose their "natural” sign values as they take "colour and expression" from the perceiving mind (55). But this tyranny of things is the price of pleasure for who, asks Pater, "would change the colour or curve of a rose-leaf for th a t. .. colourless, formless, intangible, being—Plato put so high?" (68). The "red rose" came before things white, "half-real, half-material" (2:17). Pater’s association between color and the body (both intensifying experience by impeding the metaphysical eye) is evident in his semi-biographical "Child in the House." The child begins in innocence, with a soul like "white paper or smooth wax" awaiting two primary impressions: "the coming and going of bodily pain" and the sentiment of beauty (8: 178). Parallel to the youth's "almost diseased sensibility to the spectacle of suffering" is a "capacity of fascination by bright colour and choice form" (181). As a result, he learas to always in-corporate the intellect, setting "real men and women against mere grey, unreal abstractions" (187); the spiritual is incarnated while the accidents of life gain "a sacred colour and significance" (195). The "desire of beauty" and "the fear of death” both gain intensity in the symbiotic relation. The narrator adds that years later the grown child would gaze upon the corpses at the Paris morgue and those at Munich where they lay behind glass, and how these faces would continue to haunt him, "making the broadest sunshine sickly" (190). Or again, the "heaped black mould" of new graves, "dark space[s] on the brilliant grass," would "weigh down jewelled branches of rose bushes in flower" (190-91). The mortal body darkens the knowing eye with its contagion but this is the inescapable "infirmity, if so it be, of our human existence" (187). the body as antibody Pater was undeniably drawn to a life of the mind and metaphysical speculation (he taught philosofAy, after all) (McGrath 73-163), but truly appreciated only philosophies he deemed colorful and poetic. Abstractions were increasingly tempered by his aestheticist concerns. The human body, to borrow his phrase on Winckelmann, always "stained his 85 thoughts with its bloom" {Renaissance 152). The diaphane supposedly achieved a "perfect life," that is to say, ascetic "simplicity" by dint of his/her "nature," "without any struggle at all" (248-49; 250). All of Riter's subsequent work, however, explores certain "rivalries" or complex tensions within cultural periods or individuals—pagan within (Christian, Dionysian within Apollonian, Romantic within Classical—(or just as the individual is a palimpsest of his life experiences, all historical movements carry within them "survivals" of the past. Pater structures his essays around these antagonisms: curiosity and the desire for beauty (da Vinci), sweetness and strength (Michelangelo), sympathy and the awareness of death (Botticelli), and so forth. In Walter Pater. Lover o f Strange Souls, Donoghue argues effectively that Pater himself is an "antinomian" spirit in his "identification of being and thinking" which counters the Enlightenment claim of intellectual mastery over the natural (8, 126). I wish to extend this counter-discourse to Pater's use of corporeal metaphors, whether it is the individual beset by fevered desires or the social body deranged by a contagious outbreak. As he himself writes: "the way to perfection is through a series of disgusts” {Renaissance 81). In his early "Aesthetic Poetry," Pater already discusses the "rebellious flesh” within medieval works and the unstable mix of religion and paganism within the poems of William Morris. The "choice between Christ and a rival lover" effects a "factitious colour and heat" (Bloom 191). So much so that the true object of devotion is "absent or veiled," and reverie is "distracted, as in a fever dream, into a thousand symbols and reflections." As a new "Sibyl," the church used "a thousand secrets" to make the absent object of desire near. That is to say, the dominant ascetic discourse evaded the erotic body so that the atmosphere became "medicated" and bodies nearly translucent—"somnambulistic, frail, androgynous, the light almost shining through them" (192). (Thomas Browne's aptly observed that somnambulists seem "abstracted" souls who move uncomfortably in "their owne corps"; 85). When confronted with passionate love. Pater goes on, these quasi-diaphanous creatures wake with "convulsive intensity," "like a beautiful disease or disorder of the 86 senses” (194, 192)): creatures of sleep may "cross into the dawn”; the moon, scariet and feverish, may close in; the summer season may seem like ”a poison in the blood, with a sudden bewildered sickening of life in all things”; all redness is turned into blood and all water into tears so that the colorless dawn of sanity, comes like relief from physical pain (192, 193, 194). But, Pater is careful to add, such visions, if repressed, will inevitably "return with a sharp rebound" to the primary passions: "anger, desire, regret, pity, and fean and what corresponds to them in the sensuous world.” The attraction lies not with the ideal within or behind a translucent skin but the erotics of the surface: "Desire here is towards the body of nature for its own sake, not because a soul is divined through it” (195).

Vernon Lee, at one time a fervent disciple of Pater, states that the Renaissance is "not a period but a condition" (30), but the question remains what this condition is precisely. For Pater, it is a concern for physical beauty, a devotion to the body, already present as a germ in the ascetic ideal, which has now become an "outbreak” and a "malady

of love." The ancient Venus was "not dead but hidden for a time in the caves of the Venusberg," and has again "come to the surface" {Renaissance xxii, 18, 19-20). Rossetti’s toad has shed its stone wrapping, as it were. For the religious ascetic, according to a favorite Paterian metaphor, the rediscovery of ancient culture must have seemed nothing less than an opening of "an ancient plague pit": "All the world took the contagion of the life of nature and of the senses" (180).^ The "rival new religion"^ with its attention to the "resistant force of solid matter” is seen to bring a deep confusion to the medieval mind but also a "delightful shudder" (4: 240, 182,198). As Renaissance is to medieval, so Romanticism is to Classicism. Like the Renaissance, Romanticism is an "ever-present, enduring principle,” a recurrent style, or a "restless curiosity" {^predations 243,244) but one which adds an element of strangeness to beauty. The classical tended towards a dearth of "curiosi^,” acquiescing to universality and "clearness" (117). Romanticism was anything but "transparent." "Full of secrets, at 87 once dream and threat” (Barthes D egrezero 11), its texts gravitated to the grotesque or the macabre. It could linger over cruel^, pain, "terrible things” (like Heathcliff s opening of Catherine's grave to truly lie beside her), but herein lies its "strength” (242, 246, 247, 248). The early Ruskin, like many of his contemporaries, saw no such dark physicaliQr in classical art which was healthy, "never frightened at anything,. . . always cool,” without "ugly dreams."^ It is the art of modernity which is characterized by "wild writhing" and an "agony of eyes, and torturing of fingers” (19: 417, 418). To some extent. Pater would agree with the Goethean dictum that the "classic" was health and the "romantic” disease, with the crucial addenda that both are ever-present, differing only in degree, and that the marks of unhealth are an ineluctable part of the modem temper and, furthermore, play a crucial role in the aestheticist view of life. As expected, Apollo would then be the "sanest" of the gods and each spring, the Greeks would celebrate a Dionysius "cured of his great malady, and sane in the clear light of the longer year" (6: 227, 7:49). The juxtaposition of "malady" and "sanity" here is indicative of the corporeal dimension Phter bestows on the latter term. Although "sanity" usually refers today to the mind, its corporeal connotation in Pater's texts cannot be ignored. Marius, for example, suffering from an "almost morbid religious idealism," seeks at the temple of Aesculapius "bodily sanity," that is, both a physical and intellectual cure (2: 31,32). Noteworthy is that community's promotion of "the capacity of the eye,” a remedy the patient later discovers in Rato's Phaedrus. Keeping "the eye clear by sort of exquisite personal clarity and cleanliness” is advised in order to master physical desires (37). Not surprisingly, then, the Houses of Birth and Death are situated at a distance lest they defile the place of health, and the fount of healing is kept free from "adhering organic matter," being closer to "a draught of wonderfully pure air than water" (39,40). His residence there reinforces his proclivity for idealism and encourages the value of "mental and bodily sanity" (44-45). The very next chapter, however, is entitled "The Tree of Knowledge,” and begins with the death of his mother and the allure of Pisa with its "rival religion” of the 88 tangible world ( 2 : 46, 47). Soon Marius and his friend Flavian are devouring macabre texts, "that species of almost insane preoccupation with the materialities of our mouldering flesh, that luxury of disgust in gazing on corruption," and begin to understand the "gross lust" of the actual world (63). Marius is again torn between the lure of "unseen things" and the tyranny of outward things. He is drawn to the poetic charm of "clearness of thought," as if "the kinship of that to the clearness of physical light were something more than a figure of speech." And yet, recalling Flavian's death agony, he decides to be an Epicurean "seer of colour," and "it is to the sentiments of the body, the very flesh" that he will cling (50, 57, 128, 129). One might justly describe the entire novel as an oscillation between idealism and materialism, flesh and spirit, insanity and sanity, or, as the novel's subtitle puts it, "ideas and sensations," with Pater underscoring their fusion, or rather their uneasy juxtaposition. In the Preface to the second edition of his P oem s (1854), Matthew Arnold expressed his confidence that classical writers could "cure us of what is, it seems to me, the great vice of our intellect, manifesting itself in our incredible vagaries in literature, in art, in religion, in morals: namely, that it is fantastic, and wants sa n ity," that "great virtue" of the ancients being modernity's "great defect" {Prose 1: 17). The contrary view would be proclaimed in Arthur Symons' "The Decadent Movement in Literature" which, though published years later, can be read back into the Aestheticist foundations of the fin-de-siècle. Decadenceis an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an over­ subtilizing refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversiQr. If what we call the classic is indeed the supreme art—those qualities of perfect simplicity, perfect sanity, perfect proportion, the supreme qualities—then this representative literature of to-day, interesting, beautiful, novel as it is, is really, a new and beautiful and interesting disease. {DramatisPersonae 97)

8 9 Plato's pet monsters Aside from sickness and madness, "insani^” may connote for Pater a certain uneasiness induced by "curiosity," "refinement" (both favorite Paterian terms) or self- consciousness. Having left behind the "unconscious, pleasantly sensuous mind" of the Greeks, the Western philosophical mind will never again be quite so healthy, quite so "sane or natural" (6:31). But the term suggests more: a kind of animistic imagination which Phter calls "insane realism," in which nature is regarded as "living, thinking, almost speaking to the mind of man" {^predations 76). This poetic attribute he sees (in line with the widely disseminated term of E. B. Tylor) as an anthropological "survival" from an earlier, more

"irrational,” stage of cultural evolution. Not only do inanimate,objects seem to be informed with spirits, but abstract ideas apparently have the potential to be incarnated. In both cases, these "pets or monsters [reside] with or within [us]" (4: 194). Phter may have drawn this unusual image from Vico who believed that because the ancients, almost "all body," were deficient in powers of abstraction, they produced "poetic monsters and metamorphoses" (313, 131).

The Greeks had a sense that "just below the mould, and in the hard wood of the trees, there were circulating some spirit of life, akin to that which makes its energies felt within ourselves." Nature is a spirit made visible, a veritable person (7: 96). Likewise, their habit of personifying abstract ideas which appears to us as merely "transparent allegories," can be highly poetic for taking all things literally, a u pie d s de la le ttre , is united to a novel pre-occupation with the aesthetic beau^ of the image itself, the figured side of figurative expression, the form of the metaphor. (99) We have seen how Pater admired Rossetti's "almost grotesque materialization of abstraction." But Wordsworth, too, can allow a "special day or hour" (his famous "spots of time”) to assume a "personal identity, spirit or angel" which acts as an independent power. Such a primitive or poetic cast of mind has two reordering consequences: it raises nature to the level of cognition, and it heightens human awareness of our origins. For 90 Wordsworth, this survival seemed a "relic of Paradise," while for the post-Darwinian Victorian, it appeared as an uncanny living fossil {Appreciations 55, 45, 46, 49; also 10: 100). Pater sees this Wordsworthian scenery—its "personal hold on persons"—even in Mrs. Ward's Robert Elsmere (10: 63). This uncanniness is at the heart of the "romantic” temperament and Pater mentions among his examples the grotesque (trees shrieking as their leaves are tom off), the insanely intense passions expressed in Provencal art, and the gothicism of the nineteenth century. The intermittent eruptions of this spirit are described, once again, as "outbreaks,” or "'feverish' gestures against classical reserve, and an "almost insane” expression of passion (248,250,251). Much of Pater's work aims to correct the common underestimation of this romantic spirit within the classical, as if Greek art had dealt exclusively with human nature in its saniQr, suppressing motives of strangeness, all the beauty which is bora of difficulty, permitting nothing but an Olympian, though perhaps somewhat wearisome calm.

The modem Romantics helped swing the pendulum back, "extracting by a subtle kind of alchemy, a beauty, not without the elements of tranquillity, or dignity and order, out of matter, at first sight painful and strange" (7: 111). Pater’s career as an author can be said to culminate in his Plato and Platonism, the work of which he was most proud. As one would expect, the text is a precis of his lifelong engagement with the Greek philosopher and a summation of Pater's own aesthetics. The facile identification of Pater with "Platonism” (as it is commonly understood) is mercifully less common to d ay an d there is a greater attention to his own iimer rivalries. In their Walter Pater and the Gods o f Disorder, Robert and Janice O'Keefe regard P la to a n d P latonism as "almost embarrassingly Apollonian" but note that the book appeared almost simultaneously with "Apollo in Picardy" (both published in 1893), perhaps the most Gothic of Victorian Apollos (31,133). I wish to argue that Phtefs gothic disordering

91 pervades the academic tome as well, for the study, replete with Pater's characteristic antiocular metaphors and images of disease, stresses Plato's use of "color,” his interest in the erotic body, and the presence of an insane realism. This revisionary Plato is decidedly not Eliatic since he is removed from "the infinite,' those eternities, infînitudes, abysses, Carlyle invokes for us so often" (6: 59). For Pater, Plato is above all a w riter (much as he is today for Derrida), "a master of literature," with "a touch of Thackeray" who would have been "an excellent writer of fiction" (129,132; also 127, 131, 141,164). He "holds his theories lightly" ("Coleridge's Writings" III). His "richly coloured genius" tries to find a compromise between the One ("so empty a thought for finite minds") and the Many {Plato 46). Plato is, to be sure, drawn to the "blank white light of the One—its sterile, formless, colourless, impalpable,' eternal identity with itself" but the world is for him, "as he is by no means colour-blind, by no means a colourless place." Despite the lure of the Parmenidean teachings to close "the bodily eye that he might better apprehend the world unseen," life maintained for him "the liveliest of hue" (47). The Eliatics repressed the imagination, their own bodies becoming intellectual abstractions and their philosophies "rendering not grey only, as Hegel said of it, but all colours alike, in grey " (125). As an artist, Plato's interest lies more in "brilliant chromatic effects" (141).^ For Pater's Plato, all knowledge was, in addition, xa epoxiKa, mediated through the visible, sensible person as Plato was "not always merely a Platonic lover” (134, 136). Even when analyzing seemingly abstract notions like the very essence of personality, his eye is not penetrative like Ruskin's or Carlyle's, but ever

still on its object, on character as seen in characteristics, through these details, which made character a sensible fact, the changes of colour in the face as of tone in the voice, the gestures, the really physiognomic value, or the mere tricks, of gesture and glance and speech. What is visibly expressive in, or upon, persons. (130-131)

In fact, the visible only really exists for Plato because

92 he is a lover, a great lover, somewhat in the manner of Dante. For him, as for Dmite, in the impassioned glow of his conceptions, the material and the spiritual are blent and fused together. While, in that fire and heat, what is spiritual attains the definite visibili^ of a crystal, what is material, on the other hand, will lose its earthiness and impurity. (135) This is true even if in later in life, he became increasingly a "lover of the invisible." For Ruskin, Plato's theoretical faculty does include the senses but regards it primarily allied with "the intellectual lens and moral retina" (4: 36), while in Pater's view it is the imaginative reason, a b o d ily vision which personifies unseen forces (6:140). It is noteworthy that Pater refers by implication to Rossetti when he discusses Plato's sensitivity to the personal and the corporeal. Even more interesting than his use of the same passage for the "Dantean" Plato and for the Dantean Rossetti about the crystal "fusion" of material and spiritual (135; Appreciations 212) is his remark about "Plato's hold on persons, and that of persons on him" (6: 130). In the essay on the Victorian poet, the words refer specifically to Rossetti’s grotesque personifications: "his hold on them, or rather their hold on him, with the force of a Frankenstein, when once they have taken life from him." Moreover, the assignation of voice and limbs to ideas is immediately coimected to the Platonic notion of poetic mania and its "insanity" {Appreciations 208, 209). This uncaimy anthropomorphism works to undermine the transparency suggested by the crystal metaphor. The insane realism Pater perceives in his favored authors manifests the "solid resisting substance" which blocks any totalizing synthesis but, as we have seen, such impediments are required to induce desire as well as dread. The application of the label "realist" for Plato becomes less startling when we understand that by realism Pater means antinominalism in its widest sense.M oreover, Pater sees the philosopher concerned here particularly with the poetic tendency to see abstractions as not only things but well-nigh living persons. Thus, far from being the conventional icon of the "cold-blooded transcendentalism" of the neo-Platonists, Plato is transformed into "the father of all realists." Conversely, the sceptical Montaigne can become a "typical Platonist" (6:51,194). 93 Pater readily admits that Plato pitted himself against the self-conscious philosophy of Heraclitus, whose notions he regarded as "infectious" (15, 22). Yet Pater wants us to see the other, paradoxical Plato, the writer and lover who, his Manicheanism notwithstanding, contributed to "the redemption of matter" and the "dignity of the body" ( 146). There is the conventional Plato attracted to "open and unoccupied space (emptiness, we might say)," to that which purelyis” (32). But as an artist, he invariably fills the "hollow land" of abstractions with sensible colour and form (140), for the knowledge of "Pure Being" is a ""Pure Nothing'" (32). As a lover, he appreciates fair persons even if the body harbors "the seed of disease" (145). As an insane realist, even ideas in themselves may become "animated, living persons, almost corporeal, as if with hands and eyes" (170). Although such figures may degenerate into merely static allegories, such corporeal animation is, in Pater's view, a powerful counter to the philosophical eye which disembodies and renders transparent. It admits of an inexplicable tyranny in things and a "series of disgusts," especially in living bodies, which effect us through both "repulsion and attraction." The enthusiasm of passion, a kind of "magnetism" or possession of one person over another (135, 140), may be a low-grade fever; then again, such fascinations may acquire the monstrous powers of a vampire or a Svengali. crystals without organs "To bum always with this gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life" {Renaissance 189). Pater's most famous phrase has had the unfortunate consequence of associating the author with images of lucid vision, or even adamant crystal, for emphasis has been placed on the first noun ("gem") instead of the second ("flame"), as if he had written "flame-like gem." This is partly due to Pater's decadent descendants who had an intense fascination with precious stones which represented an apparent resistance to temporal decay. To Victor-Emile Michelet (writing in 1894), for instance, the diamond was transcendence realized: 9 4 De la lumière pétrifiée, de la pho^horesceace concentrée, de la dace Wealisee. II vît dans l'intellectuaiité pure, mort à toute sensibilité, mort ^ à toute passion, comme uncouer qui, plonge dans l'absolu, a dépouillé la tendresse et la haine -----(quoted in Pierrot 271)

Appropriately, it is only Dorian Gray's jewelled ring which withstands his catastrophic end and identifies his charred corpse. The crystal has, of course, a long history in Christianity as an ascetic symbol of pure spirit. Teresa of Avila is pictured the soul as an interior crystal palace wherein the divine may dwell and Jacob Boehme held that after the visible world and

bodies disappear only their "heavenly, crystalline matter and form" would persist.(quoted Mashek 160). The image was widespread in Victorian culture, and I will take up a classical case, William Henry Hudson's (1887) The Crystal Worlds in chapter five. For the sake of comparison, I offer here only a couple of examples. Elizabeth Barret Browning's A urora Leigh appropriates the trope for her aesthetics in which stones become fire or crystal in epiphanic states. "Ecstatic souls" are flames which "bum away / This dark of the body" (Book 5; 157), and authentic poetry "bums you through / With a special revelation" (Book 1; 29), reminiscent of Carlyle's ideal of the diaphanous body, in The Ethics o f the Dust he Ruskin aligns the image to the moral conscience (as did Pater's youthful "Diaphaneite"). Although these lectures for adolescent girls do set the stones into time and evolution, they always foresee an immaterial endpoint, "The Crystal Rest," when the anarchic slime is restored to its immaculately virtuous state. However well-wom, this image of lucidity, of perfect equilibrium and access to deeper tmths did not lose its attraction. Carl Jung, for example, refers to the long use of the crystal as a symbol of the union of opposites within the self (209). And T. S. Eliot, who lamented the intmsion of the morbid body between Pater and the object "as it is," cites Blake as a model philosopher who revealed the "essential: "he was naked and saw man naked, and from the center of his own crystal" {Sacred Wood 154, 155). This is not that far removed from Browning's desire for an atemporal ecstasy which she connects to a "palpitating angel in his flesh" (912-15). Such disembodiments in the name of an ideal 95 clari^ or spiritual state are incompatible with Pater's skeptical eye for, in the words of a latter-day decadent, "the passion for the absolute in the soul of a skeptic is like an angel grafted on a leper" (Cioran 192). For Pater (the early "Diaphaneite" aside), total transparency was the fatal temptation of the disembodied mind, so the passage above regarding the crystal fusion of matter and spirit in Plato (applied also to Rossetti and Dante with slight variations) deserves some comment. Hrst, Pater makes it clear that the resulting crystallization is extremely rare for few artists can attain the required level of imaginative heat. Second, there is inevitably debris or "alien matter" left over. As an example, he cites Wordsworth who could vitrify only a part of his material, so that the process seems almost random, "depositing fine crystal here or there" in matter that it caimot "wholly search through and transmute" (Preface to The Renaissance, xxi-xxii). It is only through facets, flaws and shadows that the crystal can be seen. Hence, Wordsworth's "strange, mystic sense of life in natural things" provides resistant strength and color (xxii). Third, any clear perception is hindered by matter caught in time, an "eager and devouring” flame. The things we see are only images we create. In fact, we dissipate things in vision: "each object is loosened into a group of impressions—colour, odour, texture—in the mind of the observer." We should, therefore, reflect less on objects with the solidity language seems to give them, than on "impressions, unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which bum and are extinguished with them" (187). As even the most solid things pass too swiftly for true knowledge and "evanesce into each other by inexpressible refinements of change," Pater's (like Baudelaire's) poetics must concern itself with "the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent" (Appreciations 66; 4: 57), the aesthetic being only a momentary containing "principle of sanity" (2: 135). Finally, it should be recalled that while in the crystallizing process material objects may lose some of their earthiness, abstract ideas may, as we have seen, simultaneously find their uncanny embodiments.

96 Products of cieativî^ may be said to "crystallize" but not the human anatomy which retained for Pater an necessary element of alterity, even alieimess. The body may be treated in the spirit of art but never as an object of art, a distinction to which I will return in chapter five in the discussion of Dorian Gray. Here, 1 might just refer to Marius who at first regards the boyish Cupid of Apuleius as a flawless, ideal type in which the body seems not so much matter as all soul in its "pure brilliancy." Soon, however, the figure seems more like Dante's "Lord of Terrible aspect," that is to say, an actual lover of men which willy- nilly entails lack, resistance to total possession, even sordidness. There is in Paterian characters a "hiddenness of perfect things," a "fatali^ which seems to haunt any signal beauty," intellectual, moral or physical (2:96). The inappropriateness of Harold Bloom's appellation of Pater's aesthetic hero as "The Crystal Man" should be now self-evident. Such a figure suggests those arid neo- Platonic images which Pater came to abhor, an impalpable non entity "closed in indifferently on every side upon itself, and suspended in the midst of nothing, like a hard transparent crystal ball." "Being so pure as this is pure Nothing" (6: 35, 34). Such an Apollonian figure approaches too closely to Emerson's transcendentalist metaphor for the self, the "transparent eye ball," seeing all and being nothing (1: 10). Any "crystal man" would have to be regarded as Wallace Stevens' "glass man" (mentioned by Bloom) who "in a million diamonds sums us up," because he understands that all certainty or "final belief / Must be a fiction." That is to say, such an imagined diaphanous anatomy is recognized as an illusion of oneness and clarity, as fictive as mythic heroes and the dead gods ("Asides on the Oboe"; Poem s 250-251). death by refinement Pater's "love of twilight, of emergence and evanescence” declared Kenneth Budce in 1931, makes him particularly adept at depicting "transitions" (10) and nowhere is this talent more conspicuous than when he deals with the ever-changing human identity and its 97 inevitable transition to nothingness. It is most appropriate that in her The Vanishing S u b ject, an examination of early responses to nineteenth-century empiricist psychology, Judith Ryan begins with Pater. His essays and Action reveal a world in which, to quote a familiar passage from the "Conclusion," the self is a "tremulous wisp," "that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual, weaving and unweaving of ourselves" (188). Pater has many of his subjects, historical and Actional, reAect this gradual existenbal drift into the void. Montaigne, for example, comes to accept the fact that he will decay by degrees, "melt, and steal away from [himself]” (4: 268). Colendge's "continuous dissolution" has "its own "consumptive rcAnements," bring a kind of ecstasy experienced by the Beautiful Soul in Wilhelm Meister (Appreciations 73; "Coleridge's Writing's" 117). The term "reAnement," as well as the related "faint," it should be noted, are overdetermined in Pater's usage. They cormote culture (the "Ane" arts), a delicacy of workmanship (as in the essay on "Style"), or the "intellectual fin e s s e ” of the modem relative spirit (Appreciations 103). But they refer also to the contingency and etiolation of the human body. Thus, Fra Angelico's Virgin is "corpse-like in her reAnement" (Renaissance 163). Da Vinci's women, "faint always with some inexplicable faintness," are "sinister" in the spiritualization of their Aesh (91,97). Da Vinci's The Last Supper is for Pater not the pale Host of medievalism but a representation of actual Aesh and blood, the fresco's very signiAcance contained in the mellow decay. But he then states that the entire group are "ghosts through which you see the wall, faint as the shadows of the leaves upon the wall or autunm afternoon," Christ being "but the faintest, the most spectral of them all" (95). Real things, including the corporeal self, weave and unweave themselves so quickly as to be spectra (Appreciations 96). Pater also locates the evanescing body in Michelangelo's work which expresses modernity's "inward thoughts" in its description of corporeal transmutation at death. In a telling passage to which I have already referred in the last chapter, the fading body is "far off, thin and vague. . . a passing light, a mere intangible . .. thing with faint hearing, faint memory, faint power of touch; a breath, a Aame in the 98 doorway, a feather in the wind" (75-76). While life's colors fade and the light of the senses dim, religion and ritual may serve as "anodynes,” "opiates for the incurable" (161), although Pater, as I have pointed out, considered the aesthetic as homeopathic: it is a consoling fiction (a principle of sanity) but, at the same time, it is a needed reminder of the interpenetration of life and death, animate and inanimate (an insane realism). The most realized expression of Pater’s fascination with corporeal extenuation is his essay on the work of the physician Thomas Browne which he sees as shunning "reasonable transparency" or "classical clearness" (117). He, too, possesses an insane realism as Bacons Idols of the Cave here take on "concrete and personal form" (149). Hydriotaphia or Ume Bitriall and A L etter to a F riend^ especially, juxtapose life and death in that they discover beauty "in the coming of death" and Browne assists at the spiritualizing of the bodily frame by natural process; with wonderful spiritual body had anticipated the formal momentof death; the alert soul, in that tardy delay, changing its vesture gradually, and as if piece by piece. The infinite future had invaded this life perceptively to the senses ---- The function of death is the refinement and detachment from the vulgar aspect of life (153). Pater asks the reader to note the use of the epithets thin and d a rk in these texts (154), yet the texts hardly use these terms at all. In AL e tte r, for instance, "dark" is used only three times and "thin" per se not at all. Pater’s real interest lies in the p ro cess of thinning and in the reAnement of the human body in particular, which becomes an ars moriendi. The letter speaks of the friend's "soft Departure, which was scarce an Expiration" and his consumption a "remarkable Extenuation" such that the compliments of the coffin outweighed its contents {P rose 351,353). What Pater calls Browne's "curiousity shop" of corporeal oddities expresses the romantic principle which saturates his texts with an "aged colour." The body, even as it is spectralized, "embrowns" (154) the works. By associating the emaciating body with the aesthetic sense of life. Pater is, of course, reflecting a nineteenth-century convention: the lyricization of the consumptive body. From L aT raviata to L a B ohem e, from (Camille to Castorp, the tubercular body was 99 moralized and aestheticized as a rareficatioa of the flesh. The process of fading away,

dissolving, and growing "spectre-thin," like Keats" nightingale (or Keats himself), seemed a purification of the body's vulgar parts. The characters o f fiction afflicted with the illness are inevitably

creatures languides, corps longilignes et fragile, vite épuisés mais pleins de grâce, visages émaciés aux joies creuses, mais teints diaphanes, peaux fines et pommettes colorces. Cette beauté décadente d'étres condamnés à nous émouvoir. (Pierret 24) In her demythologization of the disease,/if/nessayMefûp/ior, Susan Sontag points out how much tuberculosis was a disease of time which "dissolved the gross body, etherealized the personality" (19-20). Indeed, the body was refined to an imaginary transparency, the later development of the diagnostic x-ray only reinforcing the fantasy. Thus, in his febrilization of the body, Browne is for Pater a Romantic (uppercase) avant lalettre. The wasting body was a common (not infrequently gender-marked) trope in the nineteenth-century novel. In the Paterian version, it is the selfs rehearsal of death, a spectacle which affords a darker knowledge. This constant awareness of the body's fading can become either a paralysis of the will or a denial of the final denouement, a way to keep the body and lose it, as it were. There is a hope that one might, like the Incredible Shrinking Man, keep dissolving eternally. Living in England, "that veritable home of the consumptive" (4:40), Pater recognized the escapism inherent in the tubercular imagination

which so attracted him. The fascination with the "slow disintegration" of all things leads to a formlessness "quite grey," and in the end to a melancholic "intellectual consumption" (4:110, 112).^'^ Moreover, existence, no matter how "refined," ends with the "inevitable shipwreck" {Renaissance 160) or, in Poe's words, "the painful metamorphosis" {Letters 1: 257). Observe Marius before the corpse of his friend, Flavian, for example. He recalls the dictum of Heraclitus that phenomena only seem durable when, in fact, they are in constant motion. We imagine "a thing stark and dead" that is in reality animated. Y et, he is disturbed over those energetic forces which "harden into non-entity and death," and he is thrown into 100 confusion over "the recurrence of the thing—that unchanged outline below the coverlet” (2: 133, 123). Pater here as in the rest of his oeuvre demonstrates that Wallace Stevens' observation that "something of the unreal is necessary to fecundate the real" iO pus 214) is equally true in the inverse: disturbing glimpses of the Real, especially the body in its Thingness, are a necessary resistance to the sterile unreality of abstraction. To be fruitful, ideas (which Artaud aptly called "voids in the body") must be "stricken into colour and imagery" {Renaissance 89). the maladies of art Pater's "Pascal," left unfînished at the time of his death in 1894, elaborates Pater's notions of a true aestheticist but it does so negatively, that is, by revealing the Port Royalist as an ann-model. The P ensees Pater admires for their skeptical spirit and what he calls their aigreur [bitterness], the agonized soul trying to work through its " a u x b o is with nothingness" (8: 76; d"Hangest 2: 259). Pascal's unhealthy physical condition transform his reflections into "utterances of a soul m alade." They sometimes seem cries of pain rather than thoughts—those great fine sayings which seem to betray by their depth of soimd the vast unseen hollow places of nature, of humanity, just beneath one's feet or at one’s side. (82) Just as the body's interior (here imagined as eviscerated) seems to gain an Artaudian voice in this insane realism, so, too, do theological and philosophical abstractions seem to become almost "personal powers." Wasting away in a "living death," Pascal's works increasingly stress "traits expressive of disease," the postmortem of his brain supposedly confirming the impression. But, in typical fashion. Pater states that it is precisely these afflictions which provide "a new quali^ of that genius, perfecting it thus, by its very defect " (77,78). He quotes the Jansenist: "La maladie est l'état naturel des Chrétiens." "Life itself," Pater concludes, "is a disease of the spirit” (78). Eventually, says the critic, Pascal forced the dilemmas presented by Jansenism into one clear all-or-nothing choice, a dismal worldview allowing "no middle terms" (87). In 101 short, Pascal became a "master of the abstract” (88), suspicious of visible beauty, and thus becoming "an inversion of what is called the aesthetic life" (80). Pascal remained, however, keenly aware of the body's resistance to the will to truth: "Nous avons un autre principe d'erreur, les maladies." Pater counters, in one of his most explicit remarks, that this principle of error is the imagination which is itself "like a physical malady, troubling, disturbing" (89). Another figure, more prominently situated in Pater's work, also serves as a foil of the authentic aestheticist hero: Johann Joachim Winckelmann. A cursory reading of the essay "Winckelmann” which concludes The Renaissance reveals that he is awarded many of the diaphane s qualities, often in identical phrasing: he is "a transparent nature" (149; 8: 251); he is "like a relic of Classical antiquity, laid open by accident to our alien, modem atmosphere" (175; 8: 251); he is a "forgotten" culture fallen into a different cycle (155; 8: 250); he is preteraaturally at home in the Hellenic world of "intellectual light" ( 151). In the end, however, these characteristics are seen as somewhat negative, even inhuman. This is best seen by examining more closely the essay’s description of (jreek art, especially sculpture, which takes up nearly half of the essay. It would seem that Hellenic art is nearly coterminous with the diaphanous and Carlyle's ideal character. It is a "sexless" beauty (176; 8: 253). Its "pure light" and "pure form" have a "sharp bright edge" without "atmosphere” (169,159) which unveils man in his unchanging characteristics. That white light, purged from the angry, bloodlike stains of action and passion, rev ^ s, not what is accidental in man, but the tranquil godship in him, as opposed to the restless accidents of life. (170) The Panathenaic frieze, for example, is "coloudess, unclassified purity of life," the highest expression of indifference to what is changing and relative (174). The bronze "Boy Praying" in the Berlin Museum (Winckelmann's favorite) is an image of man "unperplexed," "his white light taking no colour from any one-sided experience. He is characterless, so far as character involves subjection to the accidental influences of life." 102 Pater then cites a lengthy passage from Hegel's A esth etics regarding the ability of Greek artists to mold themselves "to what they were, and willed themselves to be." Especially noteworthy is that this "key" to the understanding of the Greek spirit is applied immediately to Winckelmann’s "own nature, itself like a relic of classical antiquity" (175). The suggestion is that the German aesthete is himself a piece of statuary, following up on Goethe's own reference to Winckelmann as a "work of art" (141). As an animate fossil, he is not unlike the revenant gods which populate Pater's fictions, for he is a personification of a "forgotten knowledge," now fallen into a new rebirth (155). If this fantasy of Winckelmann as a literalization of Hellenic art is kept in mind, the Paterian critique of his sane temperament which follows comes more into focus. It is the critic's impassive serenity, "the absence of any sense of want, or corruption, or shame" (176), which disappoints Pater. His "childlike” treatment of Greek culture has no "fever" of the conscience (176,177). Refusing to surrender to the Qrranny of sensuous things, he is devoid of "intoxication," fîngering "those pagan marbles with unsinged hands, with no sense o f shame or loss" (177). The only thing that clouds the purity of his conception is his occasional "direct contact" with beautiful young men which can "stain his thoughts with their bloom" (152). This passion (not without its pain. Pater is quick to add) provides a grateful "troubling colour" and a "grave and mellow light" to his works (153, 154). Blinded by his immaculate vision, Winckelmann fails to see the antinomian elements, "wild and melancholy notes" (i.e. the romantic principle), within Greek culture (162). We might say that like a Greek statue, "his eyes are wide, without pupil" ( 1 6 9 ), 17 unmoved by the "irresistible natural powers" which pervade Pater's Hellenism. The latter*s gods were made in our image and their "bleeding by some sad fatality" made them sympathetic, so that humanity was moved "by their wounds, never closed from generation to generation" (160). By contrast, the Winckelmannian divinization

103 of the body as diaphanous, perfectly sane, sexless and indifferent, ends at last in silence, sterility and transparent non-being. Pater's carnal gods, in contrast, are mindful of their own excessive sani^,

troubled with thoughts of a limit to duration, of inevitable decay, of dispossession. Again, the supreme and colouriess abstraction of those divine forms, which, is the secret of their repose, is also a premonition of the fleshless, consumptive refinements of the pale, medieval artists Those abstracted gods, ready to melt out their essence fine into the winds,' who can fold up their flesh as a garment, and still remain themselves, seem alreWy to feel that bleak air.— (179)

As Hegel says in the passage which is the prime source for Pater's musings, the abstraction of the body is the "germ" of the gods' demise, and the human mind, not finding succor in these diaphanous beings, turned inwards ^Renaissance 438 n).

In Pater's felix-culpa aesthetics, we are saved from the insipidness and ennui inherent in the realization of such empty perfection by the rival claims within us. A human life requires a "spirit chafed" (173, 177-78). Winckelmann's criticism excludes the expressions of conflict, accident, evil, or the grotesque at the cost of passion and surprise. In the manner of a Greek statue, he aims for "the type, the general character" ( 178, 172), and in the manner of Carlyle’s "Characteristics," focuses on the translucent body of youthful health in which "the moulding of the bodily organs" is suspended (173). For Pater, modernity is an age not of sculpture but of painting which values texture, "broken or enmeshed light" (174), the "fire of colour" (177), and situation (not character) in all its meandering and accidental detail (later to be a hallmark of the Decadence) (172). On account of (not in spite of) this "mournful maturity," we can find a profounder joy in rediscovering our classical youth "still red with life in the grave" ( 167). 18 The impassionate Winckelmann is "infinitely less" {Renaissance 181) than the true hero of Pater's essay: Johann Wolfgang Goethe. "Diaphaneite" includes his work, with its "thread of pure white light," as an example of the diaphanous (8:254). Often mentioned as a possible source for this passage is Carlyle's laudatory comment on the German poet .104 which quotes Goethe's own words on Shakespeare: ""His characters are like watches with dial plates of transparent crystal; they show you the hour like others, and the inward mechanism also is all visible " (5: 105; also Lewes 302). Undeniably, Goethe was for Pater and his generation—Carlyle, Emerson, Arnold, Lewes, among others—the embodiment of the modem spirit. I will take up the presence of Goethe's material imagination in Pater's Imaginary Portraits in the following chapter. Here, I will only note that his visions of the "inward mechanism" of nature were not always as reassuring as Carlyle believed and often prefigured the nightmare side of the Victorian lifting of the veil. Goethe's modernity, writes Pater, lies in his union of the Romantic spirit and its subjectivity with "Hellenism, in its transparency, its rationality, its desire of beauty" {Renaissance 181). His speculations partake of the new critical spirit because they are "experimental, individual" and heed "form, colour, and passion" {Appreciations 68).^^ Other commentators, too, incessantly refer to Goethe's sensitivity to the demands of the body as well as the spirit. Nietzsche appreciated his joyous attitude towards sensuality (Jh e Will to PoM/er 72). (After all, he was also a self-styled man of science who discovered the human intermaxillary bone and wished to found a philosophical anatomy.) Despite his rather moralistic reading of Goethe, Arnold, for instance, does note his "profound naturalism" (8: 110) which is "fatal to all routine thinking (3: 110) and graphically gives to this "Physician of the iron age" the function Pater had assigned to the diaphanous hero (diagnosing society's sickness): He took the suffering human race. He read each wound, each weakness clear; And struck his finger on the place. And said: Thou ailest here, cmd here! ("Memorial Verses"; 270) His sharp eye sees the terror and "insane distress” (271). With his "plague of microscopes," marveled Emerson, Goethe seemed to "see out of every pore of his skin"

105 (Emerson 4:157). His haptic eye enables him, in his own words, to approach the marbles of antiquity "with feeling eye, feel with seeing hand" (Fifth Roman Elegy; 44-45) whereas Winckelmann fingered them without desire. For Pater as for Goethe, then, Winckelmann personified not the solution but the modem problem: the "balance, unity with one's self" which can no longer be solved through a Hellenic perfection of bodily form (Pater refers to Phryne emerging nude from the sea) or transparency ("the shadows [having] grown too long, the light too solenm") ( 182). Goethe prepared the way for the new analyses of the relations of body and mind, freedom and necessity {Appreciations 66). He confronted the "magic web” of necessity, the

subtle "magnetic system" in which we are inexorably entangled, a motif which Pater then picks up in the "Conclusion" which immediately follows. For Winckelmann, the ideal lay in the sculpted adolescent body of Hellenism with its "sharp edge of light" (159, 169), just as the diaphanous character possessed the "clear ring, eternal outline of the antique" (8: 251). Here, at the end of the last essay in his Renaissance, Pater declares his position without cant: the "clear, perpetual outline of face and limb is but an image o f ours,” merely one "design in a web, the actual threads of which pass out beyond it" ( 186-87; emphases

added).20 The body is "diaphanous" or pervious, but in a sense radically different from the youthful address. What is underlined is the gradual process of our physical dissolution rather than the aspiration towards a state of pure translucence. Far from proposing a new man or "basement type" (8:254) modeled on a recuperated Hellenism, this essay promotes an aesthetic response, however "desperate," to the tragic forces of division in which the individual body of flesh "fines itself down" to "a relic more or less fleeting" (189, 188). The perfect face and limb is a consoling illusion, an imagined anatomy recognized as such, merely one projection among others. Immediately after "Diaphaneite," Pater's philosophical imagery became more skeptical, his eye more wary of transparencies and his poetics more physical. The colorless ideal self gave way to the bodily eye. The world becomes a palimpsest characterized not by 106 clarity but by a layering of "double and treble lights” (172) which accompany doubt, contrast, and friction, in short, "atmosphere." Thus, Pater observes that Raphael has strangely given John the Baptist "a staff of transparent crystal." Set against a rich palette this detail can be read as a sign of sanity, reserve or repression (8: 161; also 2: 37). It assists the modem spirit in its endless process of "clearing . . . the organs of observation" (.Appreciations 68). On the other hand, the intermittent resurgence of the body in an insane realism is also necessary to counter the lure of excessive abstraction.

Virginia Woolf, who knew her Pater well (Meisel), remarks that even in the midst of illness, we must struggle in life and not "stiffen peaceably into glass mounds” (E ssa ys 4: 198). I have argued that the Aestheticist body, in its very facticity, resists the surrender to a lethal unselfconsciousness or idealizing explanations. Among Baudrillard's repeated broadsides against contemporary society's "transparence of evil," that is, the cancerous overgrowth [excroissance] of information and the resultant neutralization of meaning, he refers to what he calls the "revenge of the crystal" by which he means the re-introduction of blind spots into this saturation of signs in order to make things ÿreconcilable. The crystal represents for him the object or the thing itself, without its cultural baggage of origins and ends; in brief, it symbolizes a "radical objectivité."^^ It is a metaphor for the need for "signs that prevent meaning from filtering through, protect us from irradiation, from this erosion of substance in the empty space of truth" (R evenge 190). I have tried to demonstrate how in the Paterian aesthetic it is the body itself which takes its revenge,^^ for as la part maudite par excellence, it introduces a fertile obstruction into all communication. At times, even inanimate objects or mental constructs seemingly acquire corporeality with their own passions and subjectivity. However unnerving, this tyranny of things is part and parcel of the aesthetic life which admits a certain distancing even from our own bodies through what Pater calls "a series of disgusts." Or as Barthes put it more recently, the body only "begins to exist where it repugnates" (Responsibility 210-11).

107 This Paterian poetics of the body is well expressed by a historian of science, George Canguilhem, who argues unequivocally against the medical aphorism which centers Carlyle's "Characteristics " Health, he contends, is not the silence of the organs, illness not an anomaly, since life exists only through disease, "an original flaw” in the body we often fantasize as perfect crystal. "As living beings we are the effect of the very laws of the multiplication of life, as sick men we are the effect of universal mixing, love, and chance" ( 173). The so-called normal or healthy person is, at last, not healthy for his health is "an equilibrium he redeems on inceptive ruptures. The menace of disease is one of the components of health" (179).

106 NOTES

1 - On possible sources for "Diaphaneite," see Inman Pater's Reading 75-16; Monsman, "Pater"; Varty; de Laura. Carlyle's "Hero as Man of Letters," for instance, states that the artist is "an accident in society,” wandering in a world for which "he is as the spiritual light" (5:159).

2. On Pater's own homosexual tensions, see for example, Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality, 92-98, 104-112 and Richard Dollimore's "Critical Impressionism or Anti- Phallogentric Strategy" in Brake and Small, 127-42. Donoghue argues that "Diaphaneite" is replete with homosexual code ("Antinomian Pater" 7). On the models of masculinity in Carlyle and Pater's essay, see Adams Dandies 154- 68. While Adams sees both Carlyle and Pater eschewing the metaphysical in favor of the physical, I am arguing that the former's optic metaphors efface the body, that Pater's tropes of disease are employed to a rather different (more positive) end, and that the somewhat Kingsleyian notion of "health" suggested in "Diaphaneite" was soon abandoned. 3. See his The King's Two Bodies. In an ironic way, Carlyle's ideal body finds its partial incarnation in Sartre's description of the dandy. For Sartre, Baudelarian dandyism is a pathological Platonism, but one which, much like Carlyle's, displays a tension between an ascetic interior self and an impeccable exterior (Baudelaire 123, 186). Like Carlyle's masculine ideal, this insensible body also permits only a "visual" touch (125) and the exterior should be a legible sign of the interior—so much so, if fact, that the shell is body ( 135). The dandy is a masculine body for Sartre and should "dress and behave in a virile manner" (147), So he is puzzled by the hair dyes and the self-conscious clothes and he

109 seems disappointed in Baudelaire's move from the virility of dandyism to more effeminate tastes (147). 4. Color is a key term in numerous essays of Pater for the artist "will not treat coloured glass as if it were clear" {Appreciations 20). The exploratory "Diaphaneite" is closer to Jowett's notion that the highest art is "colourless," a "surface without prominence or irregularities" (quoted in Higgins 77). Later, Pater has Marius reflecting that, thoughts do not access "things as they are," since perceptions distort "like little knots or waves on the surface of a mirror" (2: 142). This contrasts to the anti-Paterian views of the eponymous character of "Sebastian van Storck” (to be discussed in the next chapter) who regards any definite object as but "a troublesome irritation of the surface of the one absolute mind" (4: 103). Joshua Reynolds reiterates a Victorian convention when he observes that virginally white sculptures afford a higher intellectual delight, namely the "contemplation of perfect beauty." If they had been meant for mere sensual pleasure, they would have been colored (Tenth Discourse; 234). For Pater, the equivalent of color in sculpture is incompleteness {Renaissance 59). For Pater, white is related to both innocence and immateriality or death (see, for example, Marius on the "white nights” 2:17,18; also, the rooms of the "The Child in the House"; 8: 174). In his poetic tributes to Pater, "A Friend" and "Walter Pater," Lionel Johnson makes extensive use of the color white (see Donoghue 78-80). 5. As Cioran observes, saints and mystics transfigure, rather than permanently efface, physiology. They first "leap beyond the body," and then rediscover it in a new guise (6, 24). Ecstasy requires the void and vice-versa: "The road to ecstasy and the experience of the void presuppose a will to make a soul a tabularasa, a striving towards psychological blankness. Once it has totally rejected the world, the soul is ripe for a long-term and fecund emptiness.” "Ecstasy is plenitude in a void, a fiill void" (64). 6. See also Renaissance 19,23; G astonde la Tour, 4: 182, 198, 230, 231, 319. 110 7. In The Queen o f the Air, Ruskin perceives "deep corruptions" within Greek religion. Lower forms of religion, with their "strange consistency," also "infected" Christianity effecting a "ghastliness of symbolic conception, passing through fear into frenzied grotesque, and thence into sensuali^" (19:365). 8 . Two years after the book's publication, Andrew Lang (who knew Pater personally) declared that the Brasenose don was "an idealist, no less, or rather more, than Plato" iCriticalHeritage 334). A reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement (1 September 1910), J. Bailey, is far more perceptive in noting that Pater was, indeed, essentially a Platonist but through the years moved from an absolutist neo-platonism to a skeptical Platonism. Noteworthy is the reviewer’s comment that Pater interweaves "the grey, motionless shadows of the Parmenidean unity and the restless, many-sided, many-colored flux of Heraclitus" (Seiler409,410). 9. In Plato and Platonism, Pater more than once refers to the immortals who see beyond the sky to Truth, "the colourless, and formless and impalpable Being" {Phaedrus 247). However, with its figures and imagery, "its manifold colouring, its measured eloquence, its music for the outward ear," Plato's philosophy is for him a "two-sided or two-coloured thing” (3:89). He possesses a "Dantesque sensibility to coloured light" (69). As these few citations attest, the "colour" is a key term in the book, appearing dozens of times.

10. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, a skeptical Mato emerged to counter the idealist one. Most influential of the proponents of the former was George Grote (see Tumer, chapter eight, 369-446). Hegel notes this adoption of Plato by the skeptics {Lectures, 2: 334).

11. Virginia Woolf has a character in The Waves remark on the ephemerality of the aesthetic moment: "The crystal, the globe of life as one calls it, far from being hard and cold to the touch, has walls of thinnest air” (166). She notes in her diary in early 1929, a few weeks before beginning th if novel: "Now is life very solid, or very shifting? 1 am 111 haunted by the two contradictions. This has gone on forever; will last for ever; goes down to the bottom of the world—this moment I stand on. Also, it is transitory, flying, diaphanous.” We human beings "show the light through. But what is the light?” (3:218). 12. Sidney observes that Pater's fictional protagonists are "not hard, not durable, but vulnerable and peculiarly imperiled—men whose joys are painful, whose intense but melancholy lives are brief (103). Emerald Uthwart, for example, far from being adamant, is in the end a soft body on a dissecting table. Irigaray uses the crystal metaphor to express the petrifying phallic gaze: "If we are living, how can we be pure crystal, how can we survive in it?" {ElementalPassions 33). 13. Christianity has "glossed the deformity of death, by careful consideration of the body, and civil rites which take off brutall terminations" (Browne 272). 14. Pater himself was often described in these categories. Symonds, for example, writes to Henry Dakyns (February 20,1873): "There is a kind of death clinging to the man, wh[ich] makes his Music (but heavens! how sweet that is!) a little faint and sickly" (2: 213). Arthur Symons writes to James Dyke Campbell (January 8, 1887) that he can scarcely "conceive [Pater] as a man in the flesh at all, but rather an influence, an emanation, a personality, quite volatilized and ethereal." Henry James saw Pater's death as merely "the extinction of delicacy" (to Gosse 8/10/94) (3: 483). For him. Pater seemed "curiously negative and faintly grey," his texts having no body or person behind them; he is a "mask without a face." As "faint" as one of those "lucent matchboxes," he shines with a "phosphorescence, not a flame" (to Gosse 12/13/94) (3:492). The attempt to find creative inspiration in disembodiment or disincamation has a long history, one salient example being Knute Hamsen's Hunger. In her study of the disincamational imagination, Maud Ellman quotes an anorexic patient's nightmare of being in a cemetery and her body being full of holes "like a sieve, and all organs . . . seep through the holes to the outside until 1 am completely empty inside " (15). This well

112 expresses the horror of the transparent body which may, nevertheless, become a fascination. As EUman comments, we write to starve and not vice-versa, that is, in order to affirm the void (27). 15. In Pater's estimation, Pico della Mirandola, too, allowed his material imagination to be influenced by the "chilling touch of the abstract and disembodied beauty.” Pico, however, did retain a touch of skepticism and his ideas remain "as one alive in the grave" {Renaissance 33, 38).

16. Pater does, of course, enumerate a number of Winckelmann's virtues as a critic; he prefers the physical to the meta physical; he is never "one-sidedly self-analytical"; he appreciates the artistic side of Plato "uninfected” by the spiritual sickness of abstraction. The German's "feverish nursing” of his one enthusiasm allows him to add a physical dimension to purely intellectual pursuits (147,176). 17. In A Vision, Y eats remaries that the eyes of Greek statues, set with gems for pupils, are directionless, "gazing at nothing," while Roman statuary, with holes drilled to represent pupils, possessed "world-considering eyes." 18. There is a noticeable difference in stress between Pater's reading of Greek sculpture 'm The Renaissance (1888) and "The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture" (1895) (7: 187-250). In the later text, he downplays the conception of Hellenic statues as "embodiments, in a sort of petrified language, of pure thoughts" (189). That is to say, although "intellectualized" to the utmost, they address themselves fîrst and foremost "not to the purely reflective facul^, but to the eye" ( 190). They are not "precisely a cold thing" (191). Like museums of modernity, Greek temples had their "aesthetic curiosities" (222) and their statues were "as full of living breath as the real warm body itself" (223). The colourlessness of sculpture he had earlier emphasized is now regarded as having a specific function: "to cool and solemnize its splendour" (224). In T he Marbles of Aegina" (1895) (7: 251-268), he again argues against any one­ sided view of Greek art. The abstract element at work (the Dorian or "European" influence) 113 aimed toward "an order, a sanity, a proportion" which might express the "inward order of human reason, now fully conscious of itself." What Phter stresses is not this sculptural art's diaphanous aspect but its sensuality, what he calls its "chryselephantine character” (251), by means of which a fuller anatomy may break out. 19. When Andre Gide admiringly describes Goethe's work as "permeated by rays," without anguish and its shadows, he is not far from the "diaphanous" in the negative sense I have given it (Autumn leaves 159). Gide's modernist images of the body will be compared to those of Aestheticism, Wilde in particular, in chapter seven. 20. Pater’s "Coleridge" (written in 1866) already evidences Pater’s shift away from the declarations of "Diaphaneite " Coleridge is criticized for his "absolute spirit" which, like many an antique philosophy, sought to "arrest every object in eternal outline” (Appreciations 66). 21. See, for example, Gane 43, 48, 50-52, 178; Baudrillard Fatal Strategies 41; Revenge o f the Crystal 15, 194.

22. Kelly Hurley uses the phrase "the revenge of matter" in her study of the imagined anatomy of the fin-de-siècle. Her notion of the body’s "thingness" in The Gothic Body parallels but is not identical to my own.

114 CHAFTER4

STABAT PATER: 'SEBASTIAN VAN STORCK' AND THE DESCENT TO THE MOTHERS

To look these things squarely in the face would need the courage of a lion-tamer; a robust philosophy; reason rooted in the bowels of the earth. Short of these, this monster, the body, this miracle, its pain, will soon make us taper into mysticism or rise, with rapid beats of the wings into the raptures of transcendentalism.

Virginia Woolf "On Being 111"

Nowhere in his fiction does Walter Pater more concisely delineate the tensions and the temptations of the abstract life than in "Sebastian van Storck." The earlier Marius the Epicurean, as its subtitle declares, does concern itself with the protagonist's oscillation between "sensations" and "ideas." At one point, for instance, Marius admits it is easier "to conceive all material things as a thought than of mind as an accidental element in the world of matter" (3: 71). The idea of the transient body, prone to disease and doomed to death, spoils his intellectual pleasures though he realizes, too, that his apparent apprehension of "the Great Ideal” is brief and never to be repeated (72, 73). Pater's later conte philosophique, however, is a more pointed narrative of one who progressively detaches himself from finite things. So effectively does it analyze the lure of metaphysical theories even over one "so fortunately endowed for the reception of the sensible world" (4: 112), that Oscar Wilde could consider it Pater's "most subtle psychological study" (Seiler 163). 115 Like Pater's other fictions, the story underplays narrative action, focusing instead, as he himself remarked, on "a character, personaiiQr, revealed especially in outward detail" (quoted d'Hangest 2:45). The plot is easily told. Enamored with idealist metaphysics, a young man progressively removes himself from actual human life, preferring to live alone by the sea with his intellectual pursuits. After an especially stormy night, his drowned body washes ashore but an infant he apparently rescued from the flood is found swaddled in his heavy furs.

The story demonstrates illustrates Pater's corporeal aesthetics, even as the text describes in detail the antithetical asceticism of the eponymous character. After an analysis of the text's dominant metaphors which reinforce Sebastian's flight from the body, 1 will discuss the prominence of the mythic figure of the Mother in Pater's imaginary and its repressed presence here through a neglected intertext, "Duke Carl of Roseiunold,” which immediately follows it in Imaginary Portraits. Finally, 1 discuss Goethe's Autobiography and Heine's critique of Goethean aesthetics in "The Romantic School" which may provide a new perspective on the two tales. 1 begin, however, with a cursory look at Pater's reception of Spinoza whose philosophy plays such a central, albeit a negative, role in the story at hand. too much God In "Diaphaneite," Pater lists Spinoza as a progressive thinker, if not a diaphanous hero (8: 252-53). This is hardly surprising given the early essay's laudatory allusions to Fichte's Ideal Scholar who pursues fusion with the Divine Light while progressively etherealizing the individual self. According to one witness. Pater's 1864 address was nothing less than a "hymn to the Absolute" (see Monsman, "Pater," 371). Yet, as 1 argued in the previous chapter. Pater soon distanced himself from such mystic doctrines of Oneness, that "strange passion for nonentity," in whatever guise—Oriental dreams of self­

116 annihilation, Christian asceticism, neo-Hatonism, or Berkeleyan idealism (6:40-41), It is the philosophy of the Dutch lens grinder, however, that Pater increasingly came to cite as the prime example of "hard and ambitious intellectualism" (41). Sebastian van Storck is an avid reader of Spinoza, given to quoting him at every turn and modeling his woridview on his concepts. The pensive youth regards the world as a product of "his own lonely thinking power—of himself." Thus, his "mental eye" finds no resistance in objective things, no matter how "opposite," since all is but "conscious mind." Desire, joy, sorrow, or pain are the result of mental acts; time, art, and culture are accidental perturbations of the One (4: 105,106). Sebastian comes to think all definite forms of being, the worn pressures of life, the cry of nature itself, no more than a troublesome irritation of the surface of the one absolute mind, a passing vexatious thought or uneasy dream there, at its height of petulant importunity in the eager, human creature. (103) Before such an "unimpassioned mind" (104), the creaturely body is easily dismissed and denied. Like all sensuous objects, it has "no proper right to be" (107). Not surprisingly, women, conventionally seen as reminders of the mortal flesh, appear to him unbearably vulgar and incapable of intellectual heights (102,100). He fancies himself merely a thought in the mind of God: "No*, rather a puzzle only, an anomaly, upon that one white, unruffled consciousness!" (109). His self-image as disincamated being motivates his refusal to have his portrait painted which, like his denigration of religious images, is an evasion of persons, things, and history (100,98, 103). This revulsion of self-portraits is an index of his inability to accept his personal disappearance, even as he incessantly claims to desire just that. Fittingly, he also carmot bear to keep a picture which includes a likeness of his mother (89). There is, of course, another Spinoza, the revolutionary materialist, "Benedictus maledictus," rehabilitated by latter-day theorists, 1 but Pater read Spinoza through the lens of German Idealism already imported into British Romanticism, especially via Coleridge. There is little evidence that Pater had much first-hand acquaintance with Spinoza's texts. 117 Small has persuasively demonstrated his specific debts to John Golems' Life o f Spinoza (1706) and especially to James Pollock's Spinozaz His Life and Philosophy (1880) (319). But Matthew Arnold's "Spinoza and the Bible” (1863) in his Lectures and Essays in Criticism and Hegel's critique in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy were also certainly known to him. Despite Spinoza's anti-Christian rejection of final causes, his denial of the "blessedness of sorrow" and his exclusive reliance on the intellectual life, Arnold

nevertheless considers his work to be "the central point of interest" in the history of modem philosophy and "a child of modem Europe" (3: 177, 178, 159). (Considerable space, therefore, is devoted to the extent and nature of his influence on Goethe, then regarded as the representative modem man.) While Gerard Manley Hopkins considered Spinoza's abstract monism "unpregnant," that is to say, incapable of producing disciples (121), Amold saw Spinoza's ultimate value to reside in the fertility of select ideas and expressions for later times, just as Hegel "seized a single pregnant sentence of Heraclitus" and cast it

into modem thought (181). Pater, likewise, feels a deep kinship to those who derive pleasure from the life of the mind, but Spinozist thought exemplifies for him the sterility of an egregious confidence in abstract solutions. "Sebastian van Storck” illustrates the perils of surrendering the self wholly to "that old dream of the anima mundi, the mother of all things" {Appreciations 56). Philosophical systems may be fraitful but only if their practitioners are "loyal to themselves," and thereby discem their "practical conclusion" (4: 107; emphasis added). In the same year Amold's essay appeared. Pater borrowed Hegel's H istory o f Philosophy and the latter's statement that one must first be a Spinozist to philosophize—by "bathing in this ether of the One Substance" (3:257)—is echoed in Pater's "The History of Philosophy" (unpublished and undated manuscript No. 3 in the Houghton Library Collection at Harvard) in which Spinoza, like Hume and Berkeley, is praised as at least introducing one to skepticism. In his published writings (after "Diaphaneite"), however, 118 Pater would critique the "uncompromising demand for absolute certainty” inherent in Spinoza’s treatises (6; 193). Pater would also follow Hegel's objection to Spinozan pantheism and its effacement of individuality, temporality, and becoming since in such a system, there is too little labor of the negative and "too much God” (Hegel 3:288,282). As previously pointed out. Pater employs a consistent set of images to characterize monistic theories which suppress the life of the senses: coldness, hardness, clarity or colorlessness, silence, unimpeded light, transparency. Incorporeal philosophies—those of Marcus Aurelius, the Stoics, or the Hiatics, for example—exude a "cold breath” (6: 144, 49,51) and substitute an "open and unoccupied space (emptiness, we might say)" for "that which really is" (32). To so bypass materiality in order to attain unmediated knowledge of what really is or to recover the lost paradise of immediacy, is, he comments, as impossible as "to become a little child, or enter again into the womb and be bom" ("Aesthetic Poetry," 196). Spinoza's more geome/rico, a formalization ofhuman appetites and corporeal desires into lines and planes, cogently exemplifies for Pater such a negative metaphysics of transparency and its attendant flight from the concrete body (even if he sometimes misreads Spinoza through contemporary philosophy) (Inman, "Sebastian," 459-62). Like his philosophical idol, Sebastian is a consumptive, with "a naturally faint hold on external things” from which he takes a "chilly withdrawal” (4:310). Anticipating Lord Kelvin’s nineteenth-century theory of entropy, he is calmed by the thought of the heated earth cooling forever (96). His mind, with its static "intellectual clearness," is likened to a pallid Artie sun over "the dead level of a glacial, a barren and absolutely lonely sea" (99, 108). Indeed, he admits he can tolerate the perpetually moving sea only as a still, "spellbound world of perpetual ice" (96). And when Sebastian imagines himself dead and envies the departed (94), the traditional collocation of coldness and death^ is made explicit. He is one of those whom Thomas Browne called "too early old" who often "unwish"

119 themselves and desire to live "as it were an abortion" {Hydriotophia; Prose 280). Sebastian frequently expresses his wish to hasten the restoration of "equilibrium" or "tabularasa” through self-effacement (4:110). the vertical imagination Another related group of images present in the short story at hand also symbolize the perils of taking theories or abstractions too seriously, let alone literally: metaphors of flight. By name and temperament, van Storck is a man of the air who lives with "great breadths of calm light above and around him, influenced by, and, in a sense, living upon them" (4:95). In life as in art, he favors things at a distance, "prospects à vol d'oiseau—of the caged bird on the wing at last." His favored residence is "a kind of empty space" to which only birds come, where "one did, and perhaps felt, nothing; one only thought" (89,

90). He avoids at all costs the "highly-coloured scenes" of comradeship, community and the family life depicted in contemporary Dutch art; in short, he flees "the earth earthy- genuine red earth of the old Adam," Pater playing on the triple Hebrew cognates Adam ("man"), adama ("earth") and adorn ("red") (91, 87,88). His preferences are, in Wallace Stevens' phrase, "the pure good of theory," an aesthetics which he believes will afford him "visionary escapes" (89) from the terrestrial sentiments of life in the flesh. The winged poet, of course, was long a commonplace, achieving its apex in the neo-Platonic texts of the Renaissance and its Icarian finale in post-Romanticism. Metaphors of flight can be contextualized within what might be called Western culture's "vertical imagination" in which the upper pole symbolizes light, the ideal, the sacred, or the spiritual (all identified with masculinity), while the lower pole represents darkness, the real, the profane and the material (marked as feminine). Following this metaphysical geography, Deleuze has called Platonism a "philosophy of ascent" or "ascensional psychism" which equates rising with moral purification (fzJgrc o/5en5e, 127, 128). The relevance of this cultural axis to aesthetics and literary criticism has been extensively explored in the 120 phenomenological studies of Gaston Bachelard. In his Air and Dreams^ for instance, he analyzes the images of certain "ascensional" artists who demonstrate a penchant for aerial images which he calls "sublimations." Not narrowly psychological, these sublimations are to be read more generally as philosophical rationalizations. That is to say, consistent tropes of "flight" can in specific cases be interpreted as evasions of individuality and materiali^ in favor of abstract thought. Bachelard's notions can be fruitfully related to Norman O. Brown's definition of sublimation as a neurotic preference for knowledge over experience and a reaction to the horror of biological facts of contingency, separation, and sexual difference. Sublimation, in this view, is ultimately a desperate human attempt to preserve a thoughtful distance between consciousness and the body, especially its "lower" or "interior" functions {Ufe Against Death 168-172). Sebastian van Storck is an "ascensional" figure, at least until his final fall, while Pater’s own poetics are fundamentally "descensional" or speleological. As Lionel Johnson wrote in his eulogy to Pater, he prized "Births of a passionate air," but his works reveal the

"strange rich passage of the dreaming earth" (226). Emerald Uthwart's "intellectual passion," for instance, is said to arrive "like the pressure of wings within him” (8: 219). Even though this "young Apollo” ends disgraced upon an autopsy table, tragically deficient in sensual and emotive qualities, he finds some strength in "descending” into the grave through the power of vision (220-21,240). Note, too, the experience of Gaston de Latour (whose name, like van Storck's, can be read as ascensional) upon the Jean de Beauce tower

At each ascending storey, as the flight of the birds ... swept past him, till he stood at last amid the unimpeded light and air of the watch- chamber . . . some coil of perplexity, of unassimilable thought or fact, fell away from him. (4:201) At once, however, his eye and heart settle on the distant gardens and toilers of the soil. Humanity is revealed not at soaring heights but in his "quiet experience of things" in which he feels more "in touch with the Earth itself," especially 121 by the open grave, as if, reminiscent of some older, deeper, more permanent ground of fact, it whispered then oracularly a certain secret to those who come into such close contact with it. (202) While for Swinburne it is the sea which is "the great sweet mother" ("The Triumph of Time"), the primal material element for Pater is the earth.^ Since for him the human is inexorably associated with humation, the lime and clay of the body, Sebastian's refusal of the "genuine earth of the old red Adam” is a fundamental flaw. Earth for Pater is imaged as the familiar, even familial, place to which all return. If, as Freud claims, home is an antonomasiaforthe maternal body (17:245), in the Paterian imagination both are fused in the metaphor of the earth. In the pseudo-autobiographical "The Child in the House," for example, Florian’s sense of home is a love of the earth. As the "undisputed standing- ground or sleeping place," home is "rest" and "security" (8: 180; see also 4: 203), qualities the boy flnds present in the churchyard (178-79). Marius, likewise, experiences "regeneration" after his descent into the catacombs (3: 104). The sacred solace of the Church must be connected to "that old mother earth" (3:120)^ and all epiphanies rooted "in a deep, down trodden soil of poignant human susceptibilities" (2: 105-106). Later, his performance of burial rites for his ancestors vindicates the "claim over him of the earth below" (3: 208). The recurrent images become more macabre, even ghoulish: "Dead, yet sentient and caressing hands seemed to reach out of the ground and to be clinging about him" (3: 208). Arnold’s Empedocles refers to "our mother Earth's miraculous womb" ("Empedocles on Aetna"). In Pater, it is particularly the tomb which often serves this regenerative function and he applies this symbolism to his narratives of cultural history which are replete with burials and exhumations, interrals and eruptions, deaths and rebirths. Thus, a comely Roman maiden is found uncorrupted in her sepulcher {Uncollected Essays 8) and a marvelous green glass flask is discovered in Greek stone coffin (4: 56). Old graves can always surprise with "fresh contents" (7: 142) and exhumations of saintly persons can be seen as a cure for difficult times (4: 68). The 122 Renaissance's liberation of the body and the haptic eye is described as the opening of a "plague-pit” {Renaissance 180). Pater thus imagines that the experience of the first readers of Pico della Mirandola's sensual early works to be like the discovery of an ancient sepulcher in which the past was still palpable (31-32). Even if the soul flees to the unseen in his later commentaries—influenced by "the chilling touch of the abstract and disembodied beau^" of neo-Platonism—Pico's ideas nonetheless retain their vitality, "as one alive in the grave" (33,38). In fact. Pater uses this favorite image in his very first publication. At moments of cultural "crisis," he writes, there may arise a perceived need for some "human victim [to] be sent down into the grave," and the Diaphane may be deemed worthy of the honor (8: 253).^ Pater's version of Greek tales invariably emphasize this descensional orientation and its folkloric and religious implication of re naissance through death. In his retelling of the story of the Dioscuri, for instance. Pater is sure to note that Polydeuces surrenders his Olympian immortally and "lay in the grave for a day in his brother's stead, but shone again on the morrow (6: 230-231). Dionysus is, too, invariably intimately linked to the natural world below, and Pater's favored avatar of this deity is Dionysus Zagreus, a "romantic,” suffering god (7: 57). He is twice-bom: first from Semele—whose name means "surface of the earth,"—as Pater adds), then from the thigh of Zeus. Eventually, he returns to Thebes to see his mother's tomb which was also his own birth-chamber (25-26, 24, 61).^ Like all "the children of the earth," there is a pitiful, melancholic side to this Dionysus, but "like Hades himself, he is hollow and devouring, an eater of man's flesh—sarcophagus" (44). Perhaps most telling of all, however, are Pater's fictional Apollos who, as we have seen, are hardly Olympian gods of health and order. These beings, more Dionysian than Apollonian,^ are telluric deities, spreading various contagions and fevers of the flesh.

123 magna mater The central role of the earth In Pater’s elemental imagination and its connection to the figure of the Mother are manifest in his comments on the myths of Demeter and Persephone, Merep Kcri Kope (Mother and Girl), which seem to him highly relevant to the modem mind (7: 81). Having fallen into disregard after the Renaissance, their story found new life upon the rediscovery of a medieval version of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter in 1777 and then again after the publication of Frazer’s The Golden Bough in 1890. References to the pair appear in nineteenth-century scientiOc tracts (in Darwin and Agassiz, for instance), but it is in literary works that they attained the widest currency. Within the extensive fictional corpus,^ there are two basic representations. On the one hand, there are texts in which mother and daughter appear as paragons of Victorian sentimentality (e.g. Meredith’s ”The Day of the Daughter of Hades” or Tennyson’s "Demeter and Persephone,” both 1889). On the other hand, there are the darker, more enigmatic females of the Aestheticists depicted in, for example, Swinburne’s "Hymn to

Prosperpine” and "The Garden of Proserpine” (both 1866), and Rossetti's ” Proserpina ” (1881). As indicated by the length of his two part essay, "The Myth of Demeter and Persephone" (7: 81-112, 113-151), Pater was powerfully attracted to the tale. In his Aestheticist version, mother and daughter are chthonic figures (although, as we shall see, their fatality is tempered by a certain domesticity). Demeter, for instance, is envisioned as the goddess of "dark caves, and is not wholly free from monstrous form" (102). Persephone is the keeper of the Medusa's head and Pater links a certain statue of her to Despoena, the terrible "mistress of all that lives" (94, 148). Mother and daughter are each to be read as a "living spirit or person" or tangible, "visible body" (102). In other words, they are yet other embodiments of what Pater refers to as "insane realism.”

124 As Demeter's very name suggests (Act, from F a, "earth" + (trcEp, "mother";

Kerenyi 28), her realm is the ground whose "brooding fertili^" sends forth flowers through

the thinly disguised unhealthfulness of their heavy perfume, and of their chosen places of growth; the delicate, feminine, Proserpina-like motion of all Rowing things; its fruit, full of drowsy and poisonous, or fresh, reviving juices; its sinister caprices also, its droughts and sudden volcanic heats its dumb sleep the sadness which insinuates itself into languid luxuriance. (96) Though rejuvenating and familiar, the earth is at once unhealthy and alien. Her nectar is vital but, like Bacchus, she is a god of excessive ripeness, of "things too sweet" (42). Nature is both Mother and Other. It is this duality which Sebastian, as a narcissistic personality, tries mightily to evade by idealizing the primal condition of Oneness and thereby denying his fleshly origins. The maternal body becomes, to borrow Julia Kristeva's popular term, "abject," and as the sign of immanence and death, it unspeakably occupies for him "the place of that thing, of Das Ding” (Lacan, Seminar VII 67).

Sebastian seeks escape from the abject body through immersion in the apparent perfection of symbolic forms and through the clarity of "theoretic light" (4: 82). His soaring aspirations are not unrelated to his desire for pure transparency, for as epistemological metaphors, flight and vision are parallel. His "mental eye" seeks to ascertain things as they really are (105) and he believes that hispensée de survol may allow him to see All and understand completely, both positions consistently deprecated by Pater. It is true that the soul is described in Marius as a "white bird" (2:26), but the protagonist is painfully aware of his strong urge to be "an idealist" and to construct his inner world only through mental powers (28-29). In the book on Plato, Pater again challenges notions of totalizing knowledge by employing both optic and avian images. He alludes to Plato's famous formulation of the mind as a "half-illuminated cavern," and then likens the caged birds of the Thaetetus to the "flighty, half-contained notions of an imperfectly educated understanding” (6: 133). He quotes the description of poetic mania in the Phaedrus as a 125 State in which one "feels, or finds, his wings [ircepcorai] fluttering upwards, in his eagerness to soar above, but unable, like a bird looking towards the sky, heedless of things below" (172). Likewise, in "A Prince of Courtly Painters," a character likens our existence to to a bird passing just once only, on some winter night, from window to window, across a cheerfully-lighted hall. The bW, taken captive by the ill-luck of a moment, re tracing its issueless circle till it expires within the close vaulting of that great stone church—human life may be like that bird too! (4:14-15) The human mind, like the body, carmot rise indefinitely or become pure spirit. Many a Paterian image and character chart such tensions between the sublimating flights of culture and the gravitational pull of the human body. In his flight, Sebastian is representative of the male solar hero much discussed by mythographers and modem feminist critics. Simone de Beauvoir's description of this figure is most applicable to Pater's aerial seeker of metaphysical truths. Desiring to be "pure Idea, like the One, the All, the absolute Spirit" (146), the hero is horrified to find himself at last where he started. He aspires to the sky, to the light, to the surmy summits, to the pure and crystalline frigidity of the blue sky; and under his feet there is a moist warm, and darkling gulf ready to draw him down; in many a legend do we see the hero lost forever as he falls back into the material shadows—cave, abyss, hell. (147) Hypercerebral and idealist, Sebastian seeks a virginal Mallarmean ozur in which things are effaced by thought and where one may depend "on no womb but one's own” {Oeuvres 74). Yet, just as Mallarme's famous swan is finally trapped in ice by life's "fatale loi" (67), Sebastian necessarily relapses into human contingency as his vaunted "theoretic energy" is at last "chilled out of him" (4: 109). In his obsessive pursuit of the Infinite (103), total freedom (109) and homogenous unity (105), he avoids the admission that such transcendence is a spectral projection, a metaphor not to be literalized. By having his theorems "shape his life for him,directly” (83; emphasis added), he hopelessly attempts to

126 restore the primary consciousness to itself (111). His hypotheses appear to him to reflect the "enlarged pattern of himself" (106). Like Narcissus, Sebastian wishes to possess or, rather,be his own image for in this way he might be not only virginal, unfathered or father of himself, but one with God, a project of self-sufficiency Spinoza called causa-sui (see Brown Life Against Death 118). But symbolic constructs, whether swan, symbol of the Ideal^ and of Liebestod, or stork, sign of maternity and sexual difference, cannot sustain such sublimating flights or shake off the "horror of the earth" (Mallarmé 68). As Joyce

(whose portrait of the young Stephen, the "hawklike man," bears some resemblance to Pater's Sebastian) writes, such apodictic knowledge is never "inshored in the Stork" {Finnegan's Wake 197. 19). In her essay, "Stabat Mater,” Kristeva points out how the discourse of motherhood in Western culture, as a narcissistic sublimation, has tended to de-eroticize the maternal body by displaying it only in its sacrificial suffering. Christianity's cult of the Virgin has, of course, played a central role. Not only is Mary (in her Immaculate Conception) free of original sin, but she also symbolizes an "immortal biology" in her Assumption, called her "Dormition" by the Eastern Church (251,243). This, too, is an assuagement of the body's mortality since sleep is but death by metaphor. Much in this line. Pater domesticates the uimerving otherness of Demeter and her maternal body by projecting upon her the sympathetic image and voice of the suffering mother (see Inman, Pater's Reading, xxix, xli-xlii, 181, 195-96). Thus, in the wasted countenance of a sculpture of Demeter he notices "something of the pity of Michelangelo's mater dolorosa” and in the weary head and "over-thoughtfulness in the brows," something of da Vinci's Virgin (7: 145, 147). 10 Most revealing is his poetic commentary on the Demophoon episode. In this version. Demeter is

the weary woman, indeed, our Lady of Sorrows, the mater dolorosa of the ancient world, but with a certain latent reference, all through, to the mystical person of the earth. Her robe of dark blue is the raiment of her mourning, but also the blue robe of the earth in shadow, so we see it in Titian's landscape; her great age is the age of the immemorial earth; 127 she becomes a nurse, therefore, holding Demophoon in her bosom; the folds of her garment are fragrant, not merely with the incense of Eleusis, but with the natural perfume of flowers and fruit. The sweet breath with which she nourishes the child Demophoon, is the warm west wind, feeding all germs of vegetable life -----(114-15) As nursing Mother, her body, like Mary's, is defined not by speech but by breath, not by sexuality but by milk and tears (Kristeva 249). Typical of matemiQr, states Pater, are tears and the laying on of her hands before sleep or death which are a "sort of natural want" (2: 25). Like the comforting earth. Demeter has a fragrant mantle; like the Stabat Mater, she is "a being of folds" (Kristeva 260). Pater (through the voice of Marius) regards maternity as the central type of all love (2: 26) and his portrayals of Demeter do often echo Swinburne's beneficent "mother and the mate of things" whose tranquilizing words are eased of their "harsh weight / And doubled with soft promise" ("At Eleusis" 1; 209, 214). Yet, his Demeter, like his La Gioconda, never settles into Victorian mawkishness. She has something of the disturbing ambiguity of hieratic goddesses like Rhea who symbolize both plenitude and nothingness, dissolution as well as unity, germination via decay, regeneration through death. She is not unlike Rossetti's gigantic Astarte Syriaca who promises cosmic bliss but strides towards the viewer with "absolute eyes" which unsettle the gaze{W orks 226). Pater's "strange Titaness" (7: 116) is part Christian, and part pagan; here she is De Quincey's Mother of Sorrows, there Swinburne's Our Lady of Pain; here bringer of health, there agent of malady. Before the Dorians and lonians introduced Zeus and the Olympians, the Mother Goddess was at the center of the Eleusian Mysteries in which the initiated ritually descended into and returned from the underworld. Demeter may be the beckoning "divine sorrowing mother" (136), but Persephone, descending into death but with the promise of rebirth, is the suffering intermediary with whom humans may more closely identify. The tranquilizing flower she ingests leads one into that zone of dreams between sleep and wakefulness, life and death. Her beauQr and sweetness are meant "to make man in love, or 128 at least in peace^ with death" (149). But like her mother, she is a dual being. As Persephone, she is a sign of summer, but as Kore, harbinger of winter. As one who descends into the underworld, she exudes a gothic aura, but as one who has also returned to the surface, she is a revered figure of awe since she possesses some ultimate knowledge of the undiscovered country. She is compact of sleep, and death, and flowers but narcotic flowers especially,—a revenant who — has eaten of the pomegranate, and bears always the secret of decay in her, of return to the grave, in the mystery of those swallowed seeds; sometimes, in later works, holding in her hand the key of the great prison-house, but which unlocks all secrets also. ( 148) The pomegranate itself is such a double sign. It is a symbol of decay but also one of hope and regeneration so that Michelino, as Pater observes, painted Dante with this fruit, while Botticelli put "it into the childish hands of Him, who, if man go down into hell, is there also " (150-151). Indeed, the role of the Ktope or "girl-child" as intermediary between divine and human often parallels not only that of the Virgin but even that of the male AoYoa.ll Like the Madonna, Kore may plead for a "warmer, lower humanity"

{Renaissance 45, but like the Son, she descends into Hades and is "risen from the dead" (7: 136). 12

Such symbolizations of ancient mythic figures are. Pater observes, not a debasement but a way by which they can become culturally and psychologically relevant for modem times (91, 151). In fact, in his description of Persephone Pater recalls some of the attributes he assigned to the Mona Lisa who is for him "symbol of the modem idea" {Renaissance 99; d'Hangest 1: 254-57, 364 n. 21): "Her shadowy eyes have gazed upon the fainter colouring of the under world, and the tranquillity bom of it, has passed into her face” (7: 149). Persephone has the influence of "subdued light" (51), while da Vinci's lady is set amidst "faint" lights and her thoughts and experience are "wrought out from within upon the flesh" {Renaissance9S). The former figure, we are reminded, was for the school of Praxiteles Aphrodite-Persephone (7:149), while the latter expresses "the animalism of 129 Greece [and] the lust of Rome" (7:96). Both are descensional figures who have "been dead many times." One descends into the earth to gain the key that "unlocks all secrets”; the other dives into seas, and learas "the secrets of the grave" (^Renaissance 99).

Goethe: anti-Spinozist A full account of the deep, if indirect, influence of Goethe on Pater is beyond the scope of this work. The aim of my comments here is to demonstrate how Pater subtly uses Goethe, in "Sebastian van Storck" in particular, to counter desensualizing philosophies of the Absolute. The philosophy of Spinoza "shed its mathematical shell" and fluttered about in Goethe's poetry, Heine remarked (Prose 174). For Pater, Goethe was far more descensional, an artist of relativity and time^^ who transformed abstract ideas into sensual form; not merely the sage of vision, the self-described Augenmensch, but the poet of long shadows. After a brief look at the images of the Mother in Faust, I will take up the well- known anecdote of Goethe ice-skating cited at the conclusion of the Imaginary Portrcuts which has an overlooked relevance to "Sebastian van Storck," in particular to my reading of the narcissistic body of the ascetic young scholar. 1 conclude by suggesting that Pater's short story is a response to Heine's critique of Goethe's purported "Indifferentism." Due to the sensational nature of Werther and negative comments in the press, Goethe was long considered an immoral writer. It was only after his death in 1832 that more positive voices were heard, including Sarah Austin's Characteristics o f Goethe (1833), the first book of critical studies on the poet (see Simpson 2-16). With Carlyle's near hagiographie work, Goethe became pre-eminent among the figures of the new age. He was, declared Carlyle, "the first of the modems," (Reminiscences 2: 180), the greatest contemporary man (27:401; also 373,394). For Amold, likewise, the German was "the clearest, largest, the most helpful thinker of modem times," "a strong tower to which the doubter and the despairer might mn and be safe" (8: 275). By radically underplaying Goethe's devotion to natural sciences—botany, geology, optics, osteology—and his revel in 130 nature's variety, Amold created a rather moralistic and stoical character (Simpson 50-52). Pater's Goethe, however, is not an apathetic "ascensional” poet of Olympian certainty, but the prototype modem artist interested in nature's transformative forces (he coined the term "morphology"), the individual self, and the existential body Wilde later refers to this Goethe when in his university notebook he writes that Goethe was "the first Darwinian" (Smith and Helfand 157).

Pater does criticize Goethe for sometimes succumbing to the temptations of "over­ much science" {Renaissance 89). Nevertheless, one can fînd "the tme illustration of the speculative temper" in Goethe, "to whom every moment of life brought its share of experimental, individual knowledge, by whom no touch of the world of form, colour, and passion was disregarded" ("Coleridge's Writings" 108). He is exceptional in that he embodies a blending of Hellenic rationality and Romantic subjectivity, Aufklarung and Individualitàt, the union of Helen and Faust of which the art of the nineteenth century is "the child, the beautiful ladEuphorion" {Renaissance 181).^^ He is the "Reconciler" of the competing claims of a most "distracted and divided age" (Carlyle 27; 434). Among the attributes Pater admires in Goethe is his refusal to be a Schone Seele or Beautiful Soul, one of those " other-worldly' natures" who cannot forego the lure of abstraction: a taste for metaphysics may be one of those things which we must renounce, if we mean to mould our lives to artistic perfection. Philosophy serves culture, not be the fancied gift of absolute or transcendental knowledge, but by suggesting questions which help one detect the passion, and strangeness, and dramatic contrasts of life. (183-84) Spinoza's "hard and ambitious intellectualism" (6: 41), let alone Sebastian's "rigid intellectual gymnastic" (4: 83, 108), must give way to Goethe's model of a "watchful, exigent intellectualism" whose major task is not to theorize or define or solve but "to feel itself alive" {Renaissance 182-183). Before looking at the specific passages in question and their specific relevance to "Sebastian van Storck," it is useful first to glance briefly at what

131 exactly the Spinozaa influence on Goethe was, and how the philosopher's ascensional metaphysics is countered by the poet's myth of descent. Amold concludes his essay on Spinoza and Goethe with an ascensional trope; to reach the divine, one requires "the wings of a genuine sacred transport, of an 'immortal longing'" and these wings Spinoza had (182). It is true that at the end of Goethe's capital work, Faust rises toward the MaterGloriosa, "Virgin, Mother, Queen" (I. 12102), but this redemption comes about only after harrowing descents which shatter the self. In his Autobiography, Goethe himself explains that Spinoza's influence lay not in the particular content of his theories, but in his calming world view. That is to say, the formal philosophy was a "sedative" for his sometimes unruly passions. The mathematical method was exactly opposite to the artist's style, but he claims it allowed him to balance understanding and sense, flesh and spirit (2:200). In addition, while Goethe was obsessed with metamorphosis, Spinoza's world was static beneath its apparent changes. As George Brandes comments (in his woric on Goethe): For [Spinoza], the universe was merely a matter of extension and thought; he never rose to the living and fruitful infinite which history and natural science show as ruling in boundless space. Conceptions such as evolution and progress were foreign to him. The world, as he conceived it, seemed crystallized, (quoted in McFarland 25)^^ Sebastian similarly formalizes materiality to the point that in his imagination it is static and sterile, "empty" and "resistless" (4:90,93). As noted, near the conclusion of The Renaissance Pater makes use of Euphorion as a symbol for the union of Romantic and Hellenic principles in Goethe and for his "child," nineteenth-century art (181). What Pater does not mention here is that in the source poem the glorious child sprouts wings and impetuously soars before falling to his death, crying out for his mother. A few pages earlier (165), however, in a discussion of the difficulty in balancing the ideal and its sensible embodiments. Pater does refer to a more pointedly descensional passage in Faust, Part It. the strange "Descent to the Mothers." In order to

132 conjure Helen, Faust must undertake a fearful journey into the "deepest depths'* (11.6489, 6220,6226) by means of a magic key (recall too the key belonging to Pater's Persephone; 7: 149). The thought of the Mothers unsettles Faust, but, true to his reputation, he at once agrees since "the thrill of awe [Schaudem] is man's finest quality." Mephistopheles replies: Descend then! [ could also say: ascend! It's all the same. Escape from the created Into the unbound realm of forms. Delight in what long since was dissipated. (11.6272,75-78; Jantz 14-15) Pater projects this scene back into antiqui^ so that the Mothers, who "mould and remould the typical forms of human history," preside over the "perfect animal nature" of Greek culture. His point, as I see it, is that the ideal cannot be had without its material incarnations. To be effective, it must be deeply cotmected to and generated out o f "natural laws" (165). Even if the rare "finer lime and clay" of the Hellenic human form cannot be recuperated, the importance of sensual embodiment is stressed. Although his discussion of the episode of Faust's descent to the Maternal is brief, it is a most revealing illustration of the myths of death and rebirth to which Pater so frequently turns. In Appreciations, there are some remarks which I would like to borrow as a further commentary on Pater's spatial metaphors and on his reading of the Goethean Mothers. The passage is lengthy but worth quoting in full as it will be seen to bear relevance to "Sebastian van Storck." Pater is discussing those Wordsworthian passages where one senses a single all-pervading mind [in things], of which man, and even the poet's imaginative energy, are but moments—that old &eam of the anima mundi, the mother of all things and their grave, in which some had desired to lose themselves, and others had become indifferent to the distinctions between good and evil. It would come, sometimes, like the sign of the macrocosm to Faust in his cell: the network of man and nature was seen to be pervaded by a common universal life: a new, bold thought lifted him above the furrow, above the green turf of the Westmoreland graveyard, to a world altogether different in its vagueness and vasmess (56)

133 Wordsworth's one mind in which the individual is but a passing moment is highly reminiscent of Sebastian’s Spinozanism, with the important exception, however, that the Lake Poet’s pantheism is infected with the aestheticist malady which Pater calls an "insane realism" (see previous chapter). In Pater’s view, to remain at the level of pure, homogenous Oneness or within an exaggerated mysticism is fatal, psychologically and ethically. Heine accused Goethe of just such an effacement of the individual self, an indifference to ethical distinctions, and an amoralist disregard for action. Pater’s Goethe, on the contrary, is a man of "various energy" and, above all, a man of "integrity" {Renaissance 147). It is Pater’s gnostic Hollander, in fact, who deHnes himself by

detachment, disinterestedness, and "intellectual indifference" (101,104).

Apollo in furs Book Sixteen of Goethe’s Autobiography is crucial to a fuller reading of Pater's Imaginary Portraits for it encompasses a discussion of Spinoza and the question of ethical action (taken up in "Sebastian van Storck”) as well as the well-known narrative of Goethe’s skating (used at the conclusion of "Duke Carl of Rosenmold"). The final intertext which draws all these works together is Heine’s essay, "The Romantic School," which may be a prime motivation for Pater's two tales.

Goethe's chapter begins with his renewed interest in Spinoza and his discovery of an article on the Dutch Jew in Bayle’s Dictionary. He does not much like the piece but finds it foregrounding a productive contradiction: the philosopher is an abominable atheist, yet a decent man. The author, comments Goethe, has forgotten the biblical injunction "By their fruits ye shall know them" (2: 232, 234). Many religious and learned tracts, he writes, simply proclaim "All is Vanity," and call on us to "deny ourselves," but only a few anticipate this commandment by performing "one grand act of total self-renunciation." In the desire to mold themselves to eternal and immutable ideas, he continues, there is something superhuman, indeed, "even ih-human (monstrous)" (235). Goethe then 134 counsels us that he himself has never taken Spinoza's philosophy verbatim et literatim (236). In direct contrast, Sebastian van Storck has his theorems form his life "directly” (83). Goethe's famous dictum that "Gran. . . ist alleTheorie” (Faasr, / 2038-39) finds its personification in the novice metaphysician whose ideal is to find refuge in a formless world "quite evenly grey" (4: 110). He is one of those renunciants for whom wisdom consists in anticipating the emptiness of non-existence by "the suppression of ourselves" (4; 106-07). His first principle is "Detachment: to hasten hence; to fold up one's whole self, as a vesture put aside," to restore a "tabularasa, then, by a continual effort at self- effacement” (110; 108).

Just a few pages later in Book Sixteen, Goethe recounts the famous skating incident. In Pater's rendition:

A hard winter had covered the Main with a firm footing of ice. The liveliest social intercourse was quickened thereon. 1 was unfailing from early morning onwards; and, being lightly clad, found myself, when my mother drove up later to look on, fairly frozen. My mother sat in the carriage, quite stately in her furred cloak of red velvet, fastened on the breast with thick gold cord and tassels. Dear mother,' 1 said, on the spur of the moment, give me your furs, 1 am frozen.' She was equally ready. In a moment 1 had on the cloak. Falling below the knee, with its rich trimming of sables, and enriched with gold, it became me excellently. So clad 1 made my way up and down with a cheerful heart.

Pater adds the recollection of Goethe's mother "There skated my son, like an arrow among the groups. Away he went like a son of the gods" (153) (Goethe 2: 241). Goethe as this Apollo in furs is well illustrated in Wilhelm Kaulbach's engraving Goethe in Frankfurt, completed fox Female Characters o f Goethe (Munich 1862; published in Britain in 1867 with commentary by G. H. Lewes). [Rgure 5] What has not been noted is that this anecdote may have some bearing on "Sebastian van Storck." The Dutchman's story commences with a winter scene and "the furred dresses of the skaters.” Sebastian is "the most graceful performer" on the frozen river, and is 135 watched by the mothers of marriageable daughters (4:81,82-83). Although the young man carefully avoids having his likeness depicted in art, an artist does manage to sketch him skating "with his plume of squirrel's tail and fur muff” (82). This is not to say, of course, that Sebastian is to be identified with the young Goethe; rather the opposite. The imagery should, however, make us vigilant to other clues in and correlations between the narratives. For instance, might there be a significant link between the fact that the fur-clad Goethe is the "fulfillment of the Resurgeun on Carl's empty coffin" (153) and that Sebastian’s death delivers the young child swaddled in heavy furs? Do the two narratives share Pater's favored mythic structure of death and rebirth? If the story of Duke Carl is concerned with the individual and cultural conditions for renaissance, might the previous tale also address these? One approach would be to examine the function of the furs. Ever since Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs (1880) and Freud's commentaries (11: 147-58), pelted garments have most often been read as a metonym for sexual desire, especially the symbolization of the mother’s simultaneous absence and imagined return. By mastering the fetish, one may affirm the denial of lack and master desire, thus rendering himself "master of the thing" (Lacan Ecrits 103-04). More broadly, one might say that the fur also represents animality or corporeally and a metonymic escape from human consciousness. Mortal anxieties are assuaged by a fantasized return to the mother's embrace. The maternal dream, as Rimbaud says directly, is "the warm carpet. The cottony nest where children... sleep their gentle sleep full of white visions ("Entrennes des orphelins"; 20). As well as erotic raiment, furs are, then, also a symbolic defense against biological facts, fetishes which screen the physiological through fantasy. As Nietzsche famously put it in The Joyjul Wisdom, "The man under the skin' is an abomination and monstrosity, a blasphemy of God and of love to all lovers" so that "we artists" employ the dreams of culture to coolly climb up into our turrets of fantasy (97,98). Virginia Woolf (in the lines I have used as the epigraph to this chapter) also observes that the body's Thingness drives us 136 into mysticism or makes us "rise, with rapid beats of the wings, into the raptures of transcendentalism." The figuration of Marius's spirit as a "white bird," for example, is a defense against snakes, reminders of the beastly and the visceral which force us to "peep into the lower side of the real world" (2:26,27). The face of a great serpent, with no grace of fur orfeathers, so different from quadruped or bird, has a sort of humanity of aspect in its spotted and clouded nakedness. There was a humanity, dusty and sordid and as if far gone in corruption, in the sluggish coil.... (28). The repugnance of the body without its graceful armors, of the "man without a skin" as it were, at once leads to Marius’s confession that he is frequently tempted to idealistically constmct the world by means of his sublimating intellect (28-29).

In Gaston de Latour, Montaigne habitually wears an old mantle (belonging here to his father, not mother) since it seemed "to envelope me in him." The cloak is the symbol of a hundred natural perhaps somewhat material, pieties. Parentage, kinship, relationship through earth,~the touch of that was everywhere like a caress to him Everywhere it was as if the earth in him turned kindly to earth. (4:267-68) The masculine coding here is an anomaly or deflection for, as we have seen, the Pater nal garment is usually feminine. The earth, its caresses and tactility, are Mater ial. Moreover, cloaks, whether furs or earthy mantles, are potentially Nessian garments. Neo-Platonic tracts envisioned humans bom "trailing clouds of glory," in Wordsworth's well-known phrase. Pater, however, writes that we come into the world "not in nakedness," but clothed "in a vesture of the past, nay, fatally shrouded, it might seem, in those laws or tricks of heredity which we mistake for our volitions” (6: 72). This late passage expands upon the "magic web" of Darwinian necessity described in "Winckelmaim" and the Conclusion. However subtle, this inseverable tissue is "woven through and through us," bearing in it "the central forces of the world." Appropriately, it is the romances of Cloethe which are offered as the prime examples of the modem reflection on these natural laws and their "fatal combinations” ^Renaissance 185). 137 In psychological theory as ia myth, lower depths or interiors are related to the terrors of the unknown or the unnamable, and both genres express the mandatory confrontation of these projected deeps or insides for psychic health. Freud, for example, describes human consciousness as "the surface of the mental apparatus" (19: 19), but then states that the ego itself is a "bodily ego" [Korper-Ich], that is, a mental projection of the surface of the body (19: 25-26). What is noteworthy is that the skin is troped as a psychological membrane, partly protecting carapace, partly mediating filter. Didier Anzieu has explored the psycho physiology of the corporeal surface and proposes a novel metaphor for the human psyche in his book. The Skin Ego. The specifics of the theory need not detain us, except to note the productivity of his description of the narcissistic personality and the applicability of this imagined anatomy to Sebastian. The "skin ego" is an imaginary space which contains both fantasies and pathologies. The imaginary velum normally has two sides and allows the intercourse between both internal and external realities, but narcissism short-circuits this free play as the narcissist desires to be self-sufficient. The "shared skin" is a sign of carnal ambivalence and dependence to be overcome. The individual may, for instance, seek invulnerability by fusing with the symbolic maternal skin. In narcissistic fantasy, the mother does not share a common skin with the child, but gives her skin to him and he dresses himself in it triumphantly; this generous maternal gift (she divests herself of her skin to guarantee him protection and strength in life) has a beneficent potential: the child imagines he is callrà on to fulfill a heroic destiny (which indeed, as a result, he may). This double covering (his own joined with that of his mother) is brilliant, ideal; it provides he narcissistic personality with an illusion of invulnerability and immortality. ( 124) This mantle of infantile omnipotence, as various myths and their elaborations in modem mental sciences remind us, must be sundered through a certain crisis (e^mologically a "cutting") if the individual is to be truly whole. What is lacking in the narcissist's

138 orthopedic idend^ is, Kristeva aptly points out, the requisite "descent into the foundadon" of such a symbolic construct in which the inside and outside collapse and the body’s abject Thingness is exposed, as if the skin, a fragile container, no longer guaranteed the integrity of one’s ’own and clean self,’ but scraped or transparent, invisible or taut, [give] way before the dejecdon of its contents ___ {PowersofHorror 53) Marius, for example, does undergo a series of such traumas. In his late "mournful" occupadon of interring his ancestors, he is "carried out of himself as never before.. . as if the claim over him of the earth below had been vindicated." He realizes that one must at last "re descend one’s life" and confront "the act of final detachment" (3: 208, 209). Death, he muses, is the "last act" of his drama or life’s dénouement (209), but he has experienced many previous "rehearsals."20 Having long recognized that his persistent dreams of Oneness were, in fact, idealist projecdons, his concluding "detachment" is as dmely as ripe fruit. In contrast, Sebasdan’s "first principle ” of detachment (4 :110-111; 99) drives him to refuse the experiential and sensual side of life. He lacks the existendal will to "descend" (rather ironic, given his residence in the "Nether lands"). Athena was said to have used the flayed skin of Medusa as a protecdon on her shield. Sebasdan employs his idealist fantasies to defend against a castrating knowledge. But his unfailing ascedc repression of the body’s lack (his own as well as the mother’s) forces it to resurge in the, form of the monstrous which then fascinates. Whatever their value, such psychological metaphors do have the demerit of sometimes eroding into reductive pathographies. Moreover, such readings of Pater's portraits, and of "Sebasdan van Storck" in particular, may give the misleading impression that his characters are without positive traits. Sebasdan is hardly an aesthetic hero, but his story is not simply one of ethical failure. In his life of Goethe, Lewes underlines the and- Wertherism of the skating episode by declaring "No thought of suicide in that breast!" ( 142). Pater’s own Eislaufer may be at base a kind of and-Goethe but he is not, I contend, 139 suicidal as some would claim (e.g. Small, "Sources,” 319). The key to a fuller appreciation of the young man and his story lies, as I mentioned earlier, in the textual echoes shared by the stories of Sebastian and the Duke, Goethe’s autobiography and Heine’s essay, "The Romantic School."

With some justice, one might say that "Duke Carl of Rosenmold" is the fictional parallel of Pater's essay on Winckelmaim whose real hero is Goethe. Both texts chart epistemic cultural shifts, in particular a renewed worship of the body. Duke Carl seeks to bring the Aufklarung to Germany and even if he himself is called the "northern Apollo" (4: 128), the light he brings is a reflected one. Failing to go to Italy or Greece, he imports the derivative French model. Some of the narrative details are, in fact, reworkings of Heine’s essay which Pater knew well. French classicism, for example, is said to hold some originality, but Heine laments that the Germans modeled their "clumsy temple of art after the bepowdered Olympus of Versailles" (81). Pater echoes the sentiment in his own image of an "Apollo in the dandified costume" of Louis XIV (4: 124). Both refer to the "artificial" flowers produced by the Gallic movement (Heine 80; Pater 128). Heine calls the work of Lessing a "jejune enlightenment ” (83), while Pater refers to the French movement as an "intercalary,” not "méridien," light (132). Both German and Englishman consider Lessing and Herder voices in the desert heralding the arrival an "Apollo ” who towers over them (Heine 120, 121).

Despite his deep admiration for Goethe, Heine devotes considerable space to a criticism of what he perceives to be the Olympian poet’s "Indifferentism," apparently derived from Spinoza’s philosophy. Heine argues that Goethe ignored the momentous questions of freedom, politics, or human progress (108-09) and compares his artistic productions to beautiful statues, desirous but barren. His poems "do not, like Schiller's, beget deeds. Deeds are the offspring of words; but Goethe’s pretty words are childless." Like the statues of the ancient gods in the Louvre, Goethe’s works are exquisite but

1 4 0 motionless, hard and cold, separated from "our warm, restless life" ( 110). Though Faust does reveal Goethe's aversion to abstract spiritualism, his fundamentally apathetic art is said to hinder the "political regeneration of our fatherland" (111).^^ Heine then expands his point with an anecdote which I take to be a likely source for the name of Pater's protagonist. Wild swans migrate between Hanover and Africa. Once, an arrow, probably of African origin, was discovered embedded in a dead swan. The poor bird, with the arrow in its breast, had returned to its northern nest to die. But many a swan, when pierced by such an arrow, may not have the strength for such a journey and so remains in the desert, longing for its cool home in the north ( 127). Pater inverts the imaginative geography so that the son of the north is fatally wounded, perhaps due to some "inherited satiety" or physical disease (4; 106,112), and is unable to make his way back to the warm south, his maternal home (Madame van Storck is of Spanish Catholic decent; 82), which represents the realm of images, sensuality, smiles, tears and the "worship of sorrow" {Renaissance 180).22 Sebastian (whose namesake was pierced with arrows) is a renunciant whose "thirst for martyrdom, for those wonderful, inaccessible, cold heights" of asceticism has a kind of "moral charm" (10:62), but his intellectual arrogance, a kind of "consumptive nihilism" (2:139), blinds him to the claims of finite forms. It bears repeating that Pater was not opposed to philosophical theorizing as such, only if it led to a "mortal coldness of temperment" and a "flight from all that was positive." He is quite explicit: There have been dispositions in which that abstract theorem has only induced a renewed value for the finite interests around and within us It has allied itself to the poetical or artistic sympathy which feels challenged to acquaint itself with and explore the various forms of finite existence all the more intimately, just because of that sense of one lively spirit circulating through W1 things (4: 107-08) Far from achieving a Goethean "balance, unity with one's self" {Renaissance 182), Sebastian is fixated on the Infinite and devalues "all defînite forms of being" (4: KB). He makes all effort to hasten the restoration of what he repeatedly refers to as "equilibrium" (106, 108, 110, 111).23

141 Sebastian does have "enthusiasm," "passion” even, but it is misdirected for it is confined to ideas; his is an ''intellectual malady” (99; emphasis added). Goethe, however, a man of considerable speculative gifts, did not allow his culture to remain "behind the veil," but expressed them aesthetically (that is, "artistically" but also "sensually") (Renaissance 184). His work insisted on the limitation [Beschrankung] of the ideal to concrete forms (10: 32; Renaissance 144). This key trait of being able to body forth thoughts into contemporary symbols, what Carlyle called his "figurativeness," was seen to be the very center of Goethe's genius (26:208). Sebastian, as a modem Narcissus, in contrast, desires only a sterile reflection of the self-same, not the contentions of material embodiment. To resist the transmutation of ideas into finite forms is to be "virginal in psyche, and to be a psychic virgin is to be closed to the image" (Berry-Hillman 28). Art, in Pater's view, does surround us with an etherealizing "ideal world," but "the real world" is discernible through the medium (4: 127). Thus, he claims Dutch genre pieces idealize but they do not thereby diminish the "sense of the real" (87). Sebastian, of course, hoped to refine objects to a pure transparency, thus reducing reality to absolute zero (90). This wish for a transparent, impersonal world is crystallized in the young man's treatise-notebook which begins with a Spinozan saying also paramount for Goethe, namely, that the true lover of God or human being must not expect to be loved in return (see Autobiography 2: 200). This

bold assertion defined for [Sebastian] the ideal of an intellectual disinterestedness, of a domain of unimpassioned mind, with the desire to put one's subjective side out of the way, and let pure reason speak. (4: 104; see also 6:49) This is a parody of Heine's "indifferent" Goethe. For Pater, the German poet is certainly not the mouthpiece of eighteenth-century reason, but a peculiar "union of the Romantic spirit, in its adventure, its variety, its profound subjectiviQr of soul, with Hellenism, in its

142 transparency, its rationally, its desire of beauty" (^Renaissance 181). The anodyne for the "disease" of Romanticism, as he once called it, was what William Gladstone called "reverence," something which was to the Greek mind and life what the dykes in Holland are to the surface of the country; shutting off passions as the angry sea, and securing a broad open surface for the growth of every tender and genial product of the soil. (449-50) Sebastian appears to some onlookers to similarly represent a "quaint new Atticism" (4:84). If so, however, it is a narrowly defined one which excludes the fundamental Greek sensuality, let alone the often "insane” passions of Romanticism which haunted Goethe. Freud famously likened ego construction to the draining of the Zuider Zee (22: 80), but Sebastian pursues a radical catharsis which would purge his life and body of all sensual pleasures, sexuality, and suffering or in favor of a perfectly empty ataraxia. True joy, he declares, is an amorintellectualis, "but the name of a passion in which the mind passes to a greater perfection or power of thinking; as grief is the name of the passion in which it passes to a less" (4: 105). Arnold responded to this proposition (taken from Spinoza's Ethics; 175) in his essay by citing Dante's assertion that the gift of sorrow "remarries us to

God" (3: 177). In the chapter of M zriujr entitled "Sunt Lacrimae Rerum," Pater similarly writes that it is a certain "grief in things," our power of compassion, which anchors us "even in the dissolution of a world, or that dissolution of self" and partakes of the moral sense (3: 183, 184). The pathos of Pater's story is that Sebastian was "fortunately endowed for the reception of the sensible world" (7; 112), but sought escape through the euclidean mind which for Pater is nothing less than a "false intellectual conscience" (10:32). Sebastian is passive and aloof but is said to have possessed a certain sensitive or "over-delicate" nature (4: 115). He is not the sweet Sebastian of Guido so beloved by Wilde, to be sure, but

143 neither is he the masochistic Sebastian later posed by Mishima. His tragic flaw lay in a constitutional incapabiliQrof admitting the claims of the body and necessary relationship of ideas to the material universe.^ In Pater's reading, Spinoza's ascensional pantheism encourages such a desensualization. As an example of an alternative model which did not deny the body. Pater points to Giordano Bruno's "lower pantheism." Like Spinoza, Bruno considered things to exist only insofar as they are known, there being no substantial difference between the earthly and the divine, flesh and spirit, necessity and freedom (4: 303-4). He, too, sought the one, universal mind. Yet, according to Pater, he never abandoned the realm of the senses. Rather than share Sebastian's Spinozist desire for a transparent world, Bruno saw the divine imagination "darkly, more bearably by weaker faculties, in words, in visible facts, in their shadows merely" (318). In fact, Bruno's theory is "a visible person talking with you" (315), so that he partakes of an insane realism who prepared the way for Bacon and Darwin (309). However abstract, his ideas were still able to "penetrate the temperment" and "touch the animal spirits" (312). My comments have addressed the cormection between Sebastian's faith in the unlimited mind and the narcissistic dream of omnipotence, imagined as a re union with the Great Mother. For psychic health, this pre-birth fantasy—aptly termed by Ehrenzweig as "dedifferentiation"—must be overcome through the inteijection of time and death. To fixate at the stage of the manic fusion, however pleasurable, leads to paralysis. Like much of his work. Pater's cautionary tale follows the myths in reminding us that first, that one must accept mortality and its psychological implication of Stirb und werde ("Die and become") (Goethe; see Arnold 6: 56; 8: 157-58). Second, Pater asserts that there is nobility in the human resistance to this unmodifiable necessity {Renaissance 185). The first, Sebastian accepted "in theory," that is to say, rather than accept the wound of castration, he wished to preserve the psyche within the carapace of an idealized transcendentalism. The second he consistently denied. The pathos and dignity of resistance Pater sees in the constant Dutch 144 straggle against the threat of devastating floods, in "the constantly renewed , . . labour, necessary to keep the native soil, fought for so unselfishly." Sebastian simply refuses to share in "the uncertainty of the individual life" (4:93), Recall that Faust gains a true sense of beauty, death and ultimately redemption, when he recognizes love and grandeur in the human construction dams and dikes, however futile. This is the highest wisdom I own. The best that mankind ever knew; Freedom and life are earned by those alone Who conquer them each day anew. Surrounded by such danger, each one thrives. Childhood, manhood, and age lead active lives. At such a throng I would fain stare. With free men on free ground their freedom share. Then to the moment say: Abide, you are so fair! (11. 11573-82; trans. Kauffman 469) Faust sees at last that genuine liberation is found through suffering and defiant resistance. Sebastian's ideal freedom is an autistic "beatific calm” (109) achieved through reflection of the Infinite since the world is fundamentally without purpose (111-10). Pater's writings, however, consistently emphasize that some "absolute ground " can be had in the very sharing of our grief: "In the mere clinging of human creatures to each other. . . amid the effects even of what might appear irredeemable loss, I seem to touch the eternal" (3: 184. 185).

This being said, Sebastian's ultimate sacrifice at the end of the tale, though not much commented upon by Pater, leaves open the possibility of a change of heart. Previously, the young man believed that Spinoza's ideal of "transcendental disinterestedness" ("Coleridge's Writings" 127; Sketches and Reviews 104) demanded "absolute selfishness" so that he gave scant thought to the communal labor required to maintain the seawalls. He claims to have "died to self" but, again, it is only in theory (4: 109). If there is, in fact, final self-awareness, it leads not only to a surrender of the ideal ego but tragically coincides with his literal death. Even if his final accession to the

1 4 5 imperatives of gravity is as unnoticed as the plummet of Breughel's Icarus, one cannot

exclude the possibiliQr of an ethical renewal in which compassion overcomes intellectual indifference. For personal maturation, one must abandon the surface ego and descend to the dark site of Otherness where identity is suspended and the body's miraculous monstrosity confronted.^ For most of his existence, Sebastian wished to remain "dedifferentiated," or as he himself put it, "make 'equation* between himself and what was not himself" (114). This is an evasion of the unidealized Mother, the Lady of the Depths, who encompasses all—life, strife, love, loss, abjection, death. She must be embraced for re-differentiation to be accomplished. Only then, according to Ehrenzweig, can "vertical integration " join "surface imagery to its unconscious matrix" (195), even if the gap or wound between ego and ideal, self and non-self, can never be healed. Moreover, he adds, one must become the Mother and arrogate her double function. Nietzsche, likewise, writes that "intellectual pregnancy engenders the character of the contemplative" who is a "masculine mother" {Joyful Wisdom 105). There is, in fact, a sense in which Sebastian might be said to have symbolically accomplished this, living up to his name and delivering the child.^ Pater was extremely aware of his own name. In school, his mates called him "the Pater." As it happened, he neither knew his own father, nor ever became a father. Monsman has suggested that Pater sought to regain the lost paternal presence through narrative autobiography and that some of his protagonists (Marius or Demeter, for example) function as both male and female, father and mother {Art 79-105; also Levy 46, 64,81). In the short story at hand, the young man symbolically appropriates both genders, but beyond the usual sense of the androgyne or the "feminized soul." In his final self­ surrender, he may be said to accept life in all its fullness and at last allows what he had long refused; "to be or do any limited thing" (112). In short, to be an individual, differentiated

146 being. Like Homunculus, the crystallized man of Faust, Part II (11. 6860, 8464-74), he must shatter the glass womb, the vitriHed armor, he has carried around and finally merge with the elements. "Sebastian van Storck" is, as its author observed, a study of "personality" through "outward detail.” But the move (to borrow Coleridge's categories) from the Spinozist "It is" to the Goethean "I am” is also an aestheticist commentary on cultural history, thus paralleling its companion text, "Duke Carl of Rosenmold." Eighteenth-century prose. Pater observes, had valorized an aggressive intellectualism, a certain "transparency" which claimed to perceive a uniformity and a universalism in things (10:11). Through reason and science, the Enlightenment sought to formalize the heterogeneity of existence. In her valuable Bojy Criticism, Barbara Stafford demonstrates how the era's moralism demanded not only granunatical but even genetic conformity. The strongest resisting force to this delusion of omnipotence, she points out, was a certain Epicurean or experimental strain whose insistence on anomaly, otherness, and natural excess would resurge in Romanticism and, I would add, the insane realism of Aestheticism which aided "the rising tide of thought and feeling" to "overflow barriers" (Pater 10: 14). Stafford's comments on eighteenth- century neo-Platonic valorizations of system, the normative body, and a supposedly uncontaminated aesthetics, is a fitting gloss on Pater’s tale of the would-be philosopher of the One and the Pure: Reproductive sex, like infectious illness, introduced a wound, blemish, of divisive fracture into the originally seamless white, and spotless integument of being. After the Fall, animality, carnality, and dis­ figuring disease fragmented and stained the once-intact skin and soul of prelapsarian Adam. Only the abstracted ideal, the unearthly fiction, the artificial person calculatingly fabricated by means of a geometrical art, could escape discoloring by this hereditary vice. Conversely, the Romantic grotesque was bom when, in weighing the likelihood of success in the production of such superhuman automaton, the artist stopped to estimate his chances of failure ___ when he reckoned the incongruity of his aspiration and gauged the infinite distance separating the one from the many. (468)

147 In the post-Romantic age, there were vociferous calls to tame or eradicate the monstrous maladies unleashed by the Romantic spirit. Despite the various homunculi—Pygmalions, Coppelias, Eves of the Future—which appeared, the mending of social fractures and the cure of the degenerative maladies threatening the body politic was now seen to lay primarily in the reformation of minds, or even better, of actual bodies. In turn blatant and insidious, such ethnological assumptions subtended Victorian discourse. In Culture and Anarchy, for instance, Matthew Arnold wrote: Science has now made visible to everybody the great and pregnant elements of difference which lie in race and in how signal a manner they make the genius and history of an Indo-European people vary from those of a Semitic people. we English — seem to belong naturally to the movement of Hellenism. (5: 173; emphasis added) By substantiating social, national and racial distinctions, the Enlightenment dreams of sanitation and taxonomy might still be fulfilled. Under the sanctions of science, abstract ideals might be naturalized and utopian fictions of transparency realized. It is to the Aestheticist resistance to this dangerous literalization of myth and metaphor that 1 now turn.

148 NOTES

1. On the impact of Spinozan thought on current criticism, see Christopher Norris' Spinoza and the Origins o f Modern Critical Theory (1991). Contrary to Pater's use of Spinoza to personify the perils of an incorporeal Idealism, Gilles Deleuze looked to Spinoza for a new philosophical model of the human body (the "Body without Organs") which refuses to privilege the mind over the body. Norman O. Brown, too, discusses Spinoza's interest in the body's "capacity for polymorphous communicative interaction with other bodies" {Apocalypse 128) and his allegiance to the pleasure-principle {Life Against Death 46-47). 2. The narrator of "The Prince of Courtly Painters" gazes upon "that glacial point in the motionless sky, like some mortal spot whence death begins to creep over the body!" (4: 38).

In Marius, Marcus Aurelius, too, regards the self as "a name only, or not so much as that," and seeks surcease of sensible images and the "toilsome ministry of the flesh." As such, he is like one already dead (2:212). 3. See Dowling, "Walter Pater and Archeology." In his analysis of Pater's spatial architexture. Jay Fellows argues that Pater's ground is not merely unstable, but an abyss 103-142). I agree that, like Pascal, Pater sought to avoid, even feared, the void but according to the scheme 1 am employing, he could be said to fear falling upwards, not an unusual motif in poetry (see Bachelard Air and Dreams 106). 4. In Gaston de Latour, Pater translates "Notre Dame de Sous-Terre" rather literally as "Our Lady under the Earth" (4: 186).

149 5. His example is Charlotte Corday and her assassination of Marat. Carlyle's description in The French Revolution is usually offered as the likely source for the image: she emerges "from her secluded stillness^ suddenly like star; cruel-lovely, with half- angelic, half-daemonic splendour; to gleam for a moment, and in a moment be extinguished" (4: 172). I would, however, call attention to another productive intertext as well: Plato's Republic. According to Eric Voegelen (52 f), the metaphor of descent structures the work, from the opening word (kotePev: "I went down"), to Socrates' redeeming descent to Hades in the Prologue, to Er's journey to the underworld at the end of the Epilogue. The recurrent motif alludes to our critical choice of ethical models in times of decision. Most importantly, as the Pamphylian myth at the text's conclusion makes clear, at death all humans choose an ethical model of life during the final descent to Hades. Wisdom lies in our selection of our own daemon. Pater's essay offers his Diaphanes as paradigms of self-lustration. 6. It is noteworthy that just as Dionysus was "twice-bom," so Sebastian's namesake is said to have experienced a double resurrection, miraculously surviving his trial by arrows before being martyred at last. 7. Karl Otto Muller includes the legends of Apollo dying and descending to the infernal realms (1:328). 8. Other examples: Meredith's "The Appeasement of Demeter" (1887), the "Proserpine" of Richard Watson Dixon (a Pre-Raphaelite) and Helen Hunt Jackson's

"Demeter" (1892). 9. In Octave Feuillets The Story o f Sibylle which Pater read in 1876, the eponymous character has a recurrent wish to ride on the back of a swan, functioning here as a sign of idealism. She is converted from her rabid anti-Catholicism after she sees an o N x rescue a drowning man. On Pater and Feuillet, see Inman, Walter Pater's Reading 281-96.

150 10. Dowling points out that some of these phrases are taken directly from Charles Newton's A History o f Discovery (1862-63) and that among other things. Pater omits mention of the many votive breasts found at the site ("Walter Pater" 223,228). The mixing of pagan and Christian works both ways, of course. Michelangelo, writes Pater, gives to the Madonna in The Holy Family (in the Uffizzi Palace in Florence) "much of the uncouth energy of the older and more primitive Mighty Mother " {Renaissance 37). As Donald Hill notes, the latter is a title of Cybele, the Phrygian nature goddess, sometimes associated with Demeter (332). 11. On Persephone's engagement o f both realms, see Foley 83-84. 12. Pater also uses the discourse of Christian typology in his "A Study of Dionysus." The god's connection to seasonal changes, "a type of second birth," serves as an analogy between "the resurrection of nature, and something else, as yet unrealized, reserved for human souls" (7:49). This pathetic being suffers, dies and is rejuvenated, like a shoot out of the hard, dark earth (49-50).

13. Vernon Lee, a one-time disciple of Pater, borrowed this image for her own study of the Renaissance. Though her moralistic stance eventually distances her from her mentor, her discussion in this text of the rediscovery of antiquity does make much use of Paterian metaphors. She writes, for instance, that the medieval "distress of the soul" and the Hellenic "flourishing body" are best seen in the composite soil of the Pisa graveyard. Earth from Calvary is mixed with pagan sarcophagi which now become Christian tombs. The seeds of renewal remained buried in rotting vegetation for a millennium, but at last the old civilization is "exhumed" from putrifaction (172-73). Pater's positive "contagion of life" found in the "plague pit" becomes Lee's "horrible moral gangrene" (28), though she does add that this "evil" was a necessary stage in the production o f a better good (52). Oscar Wilde borrows the same metaphor of Euphorion for nineteenth-century English art (see his "The English Renaissance"). 14. On Goethe's revolutionary "chronotopic eye," see Bakhtin, Speech Genres 10-59. 151 15. McFarland points out that Brandes here borrows from Renan's Nouvelles etudes d'histoire religieuse (1884) (25). 16. On some possible sources for the Descent to the Mothers in classical literature, see Jantz. His study sets the episode into some of the categories I have been using: the ambivalence of the maternal, the earth-sky axis, and the human confrontation with temporality. 17. Pacteau cites Carlyle's praise of his wife: "She wrapped me round like a cloak to keep all the hard and cold world off me" (152; see also chapter seven, "Skin Deep," 145- 59). In her "The Erl King," a powerful revision of Goethe's well-known poem of 1782, Angela Carter imagines nature as masculine, and it is a pater dévorons at that. The female narrator regards nature as a "tender butcher," a vampire with white skin which envelops her. She goes "back and back to have his fingers strip the tattered skin away and clothe [her] in his dress of water, this garment that drenches [her], its slithering odour, its capacity for drowning" (367,368,369). 18. The phrase is from Adorno's study of Proust who, he says, in art as in life, kept his "fur coat" on as a protection against pain. It was Proust pere, a public health official who apparently coined the phrase "cordonsanitaire” (316). 19. Pater calls the "many-coloured earth" Demeter’s garment and refers us to the "great modem pantheist poet" and his description of the earth as the "garment of God" (7:97). He also quotes Goethe's metaphor of earth as "the Living Garment" woven by the "Loom of Time" in Marius (2:133). (The image was also used by Carlyle). 20. In the Timaeus, Plato writes of life as a rehearsal [peXere] of dying, that is, not so much meditation as repeated practice for a performance (what the French aptly call repetition). See Taylor, Plato 179 n. 1; Lacoue-Barthe, Le sujet 207-210. 21. In the Preface to her book on Goethe, Austin had defended Goethe's "perfect indifferency (using the word in Locke's sense)" as neither apathy nor selfishness (see 152 Simpson 103-04). As Simpson points out, the Goethean notion may also have some relation to Arnold's "disinterestedness," although the later texts like Culture and Anarchy stress more communal action and social responsibilities (104-08). 22. In "Duke Carl," too, there is a question whether "a physical cause might lie beneath [his] strange restlessness, like the imperfect reminiscences of something that had passed in an earlier life" (4:133). Hints of post-Darwinian theories about the inheritance of acquired characteristics are dropped throughout Pater's works. In his belief that the body and soul are deeply linked. Pater also often alludes to a parallelism between maladies of the body and the mind. Thus, like Sebastian, Amiele (whose Journal irttime Pater reviewed in March 1886, the same time "Sebastian van Storck" appeared) has a physical "consumptive tendency" which is said to reinforce his mental temperment, so that he is "intellectually a poitrinaire” {Essays The Guardian; 10:21). Concerning philosophical idealists and their fear of the senses, Nietzsche aptly writes that the body lured them out of "the cold realm of ideas,' to a dangerous southern island, where they were afraid that their philosopher-virtues would melt away like snow in the sun" {Joyful Wisdom 336).

23. This term most likely derives from Pollock who ends his study of Spinoza by reminding us that there is "no such thing as a fixed equilibrium either in the world without or in mind" (408). 24. A post-mortem revealed that Sebastian was already infected with a disease "begotten by the fogs" (consumption) (7:115). In an ironic way, his body would have, in fact, refined itself down according to the dictates of his ascetic philosophy. When Pater states that Sebastian had a "passion for Schwindsucht” (4:93), he means first that he had a rage or mania for etiolation or disappearance, but he is also stressing his physical and intellectual "consumption" (4:93; ). Furthermore, Pater's use of this term is an additional piece of textual evidence that Pollock's study was a primary source (though Small does not cite it). Pollock quotes Hegel's similar witticism on the death of Spinoza: "Abgrund der 153 Substanz . . . in dem Allés nur dahin, schwindet, allés Leben in sich selbst verkommt; Spinoza ist selbst an der Schwindsucht gestorben" (396 n. 2). ("Abyss of substance . . . in which everything fades away [schwindei\, ail life withers away into itself; Spinoza himself died of consumption [Schwindsucht]”) 25. Modem psychology’s concept of the unconscious can be seen emerging in German Romanticism (including Bachofen’s theory of matriarchy). Goethe, especially, was of paramount importance to Freud’s development. See Ellenberger, especially 199-223,465- 66; Wittels 3-46.

26. One must be wary of the easy analogy between creative labors and physical birth. See, for example, Auerbach, "Artists and Mothers.” 27. Ehrenzweig (200-201) offers another example from Goethe's (never-completed) sequel to Mozart’s The Magic Flute in which a child is buried by the Queen of the Night. The small casket soon becomes transparent and the baby is reborn as a spirit which soars away into the infinite sky. 28. Thomas Browne has commented on the obvious relationship between having progeny and the acceptance of our own rinitude: A man may "behold his grave in his own issue" iReligio Medici; 89).

154 CHAPTERS

ROMANONG THE CRYSTAL: UTOPIAS OF TRANSPARENCY AND THEIR DREAMS OFPAIN

Abstract utopia is all too compatible with the most insidious tendencies of society — It considers actual or imagined differences as stigmas indicating that not enough has yet been done; that something has still been left outside its machiner} , not quite determined by its totali^— . The racial difference is raised to an absolute so that it can be abolished absolutely. - . . Theodor Adorno Minima Moralia

P. E. More, one of the so-called New Humanists of the early twentieth century, wrote that the quintessential Aestheticist spirit was one "emptied of the wholesome intrusions of the world . . . reduced to sterile self-absorption, its enchantment of beauty alembicated into a faint Epicureanism." The source of this virus, he adds, was the "insinuating mind" of Dante Rossetti (Seiler422,421). This view that Rossetti-Paterism is a retreat into a rarefied realm unhappily lingers still. Contrary to this received idea, Aestheticism did not idealize transparency, but, as these last two chapters insist, a thread of modernism which only seem ed to derive from it certainly did and in this it partook of a utopianism expressed in both Victorian Hellenism and in the corporeal politics of fascism. A full treatment of the issue of Aestheticism and social ideology is beyond the scope of this work. My intervention in the complex debate will be limited to a discussion of the metaphysics of transparency and two contrary imagined anatomies which do, of course, have serious political implications. On the one hand, there is the modernist body, founded

155 on the ideal of technological perfection and even a kind of transparency (in post-modern terms, a "virtuality"). On the other hand, there is the Aestheticist body, as I have defined it, highlighting malady, contingency, and opaqueness. 1 will argue that a certain radical strain in modernism is far more consonant with fascist discourse in its call for an aesthetic that is healthy, masculine and pure (in contrast to Aestheticism's "degenerate” and "effeminate” art). I will be concerned with the early modernist dreams of rationally reorganizing the body and the body politic. After an overview of the modernist urge to diaphanize or otherwise refashion the flaccid, amorphous body depicted in fin-de-siècle culture, there follows an analysis of some Victorian and early modernist utopias whose dreams of Momus attempt but fail to abstract human corporeality. 1 conclude with a discussion of the body in pain which resists semiotic transparency and of the sentiment of pity which is characteristic of a genuine Aestheticist poetics. How Victorian Hellenism is related to the imagined anatomies of modernism and the fascism will be taken up in the next chapter. Modernism is not authoritarian, let alone, fascist per se, of course. The vicious persecution of its main practitioners as peddlers of Entartung [degeneracy] by Kultur Ministers and Commissars is legendary. But fascism can also be revisioned as a consequence of modernism’s own internal tensions. As Andrew Hewitt points out, fascist modernism is not just a branch of modernism, not a quirk nor an exception; it is instead -theoretically if not empirically—/Ae single most pressing issue for theories of the avant-garde, for it raises also the question of the possibiliQr of a postmodern avant-garde. (43) My interest in "fascist modernism” lies in the congruence of early modernist avant-garde images of corporeality, on the one hand, and the rhetoric of the totalitarianism, whether Socialist or National Socialist, on the other. At the symbolic center of Communism lay the sublime body of its Leader. Displayed in a crystal sarcophagus (supposedly inspired by the tale of the Sleeping Beauty), the empty corporeal shell witnessed the need for a continual

1 5 6 re-embodiment of Lenin in the new Soviet Man.^ Mutatis mutandisr fascism was also, as the French fascist writer Drieu La Rochelle once called it, a "restoration" and a "revolution” of the body (Griffin 203). The revolutionary art of our century did not always entail revolutionary politics, nor was the modernist avant-garde inherently liberal. In point of fact, the latter frequently had manifest political aspirations which did not necessarily exclude repressive means. As Boris Groys and Vasely Todorov have convincingly argued, totalitarian art, Nazi or Bolshevik, was not simply a regression to a nineteenth-century kitschy realism, but was a social incarnation of avant-garde dreams. In these polities, an "ideo-logos” was realized as "physio-logos" (Todorov 48). The various manifestoes—Dadaist, Futurist, Constructivist— display a will to power, and their radical visions of the aesthetic state were ultimately realized to horrific effecL Thus, Marinetti could assert that with fascism the Futurist program was fulfilled {Untameables 12). Italy, Germany, and Russia of the 1930s were all modernist aesthetic phenomena in that these total states shared with avant-gardism a desire to move beyond "individual bourgeois decadence," indeed, to conquer history itself. In short, they sought to establish a new earthly kingdom. As Mircea Eliade remarks, modernity was a "revolt against historical time, freighted as it is with human experience, to a place in the time that is cosmic, cyclical, and infinite" (153). The notion of the aesthetic state is hardly new. The dream of a society being ruled by a cenacle of scholars, sages and artists informs many a utopia, from Plato's Republic to Herman Hesse's Catalia. But fantasies of an actual Kunstertum or a real-life "Bohemia" found especially fertile ground in the nineteenth-century cult of art (Chytry 222-24), sometimes to rather comic effect.^ Many a commentator has suggested that the Romantic and post-Romantic apotheosis of the artist bears a special responsibility for the emergent

157 cult of the heroic leader which foreshadowed the despotism which decimated our century. The idolized genius creating monuments of art* Isaiah Berlin writes, led eventually to Napoleon whose art is the making of states and peoples. If self-realization is aimed at as the ultimate goal, then might it not be that the transformation of the world by violence and skill is itself a kind of sublime aesthetic act? Just as the artist imposes his will on his materials, the leader shapes the masses into some fearful symmetry. In a fascist society, the prime material object which is pressed into blocks is the human body (Theweleit 2:201-202). Thus, in a 1933 caricature in the satirical journal Kladderadaisch [Figure 6], Hitler appears as the Master Sculpture, transforming the labile masses into the New Man. Berlin concludes:

Once the assumption is made that life must be made to resemble a work of art, that the rules that apply to paints or sounds also apply to men, that human beings can be looked on as so much human material,' a plastic medium to be wrought at will by the inspired creator, the notion of individuals as each constituting an independent source of ideals and goals—an end in himself—is overthrown. {Crooked Timber 194)

Such a statement typically misses a crucial distinction. In this literalization of the artistic analogy, people are regarded as things, as implements, as means to achieve justified ends. They are at last fashioned into, quite literally, objects of art, a fatal move allegorized in

Oscar Wilde's novel, as we shall see. This aesthetic model is fundamentally different from the Aestheticist project and its Kantian ethics which aims to "treat life in the spirit of art," that is to say, to "make life a thing in which means and ends are justified." Nietzsche famously declared that it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon can the world be justified {Birth o f Tragedy, 42). Aestheticist work, however, is a protest against any obsession with ends, artistic or not {Appreciations 62, 60, 61). As Berlin himself so eloquently insisted repeatedly, the belief that by the employment of the right means we might at last rediscover the perfect end-pattem in history is not only utopian but apocalyptic.

158 the modernized body It is a commonplace in cultural studies that the modem imagination in the first part of the twentieth century was in orientation synchronic and spatial (see, for example, Frank and Spencer). The modem spirit, declared T. E. Hulme, disgusted with the "accidental characteristics of living shapes," was fundamentally geometric. Perturbed by the opaci^ of appearances, it was to seek "absolute values" in the linear beauty of "dead crystalline forms." While the work of Romanticism and its descendants were "damp" and "vague" (he singles out Swinbume), the imminent classical revival would be "dry" and "hard" (126, 128, 133)—a direct inversion of Pater's binarisms.^ In the urge towards abstraction, the temporal body is an impediment to be renounced or radically reshaped. Clement Greenberg's well-known comment on cubism might be read as an illustration of this eviscerating visualism: "The world was stripped of its surface, of its skin, and the skin was spread flat on the flatness of the picture plane" (172). Weary of the organicism of the previous years and their "human strata of infemal biologies" (Lewis Blast / 61), the new planar body emptied its interiors while simultaneously scraping its skin clean. In the new corporate style, the decorative surface was simply dross to be stripped away. Detail was a symptom of a feminine atavism or an excrescent decadence. Ornament, as Alfred Loos famously put it, was crime.^ Huime's visions of an organic geometry can be traced directly back to Wilhelm Worringer's influential work. Abstraction and Empathy (1911). Although the English translation did not appear until 1953, its contents were widely disseminated by Hulme, among others. This study is worth a comment or two since it theorizes so lucidly the modernist shift of perspective on the body which is the subject of this chapter. Furthermore, the text makes extensive use of the image of the crystal which finds it way into many a modernist utopia of transparency .5 Worringer posits two poles of human artistic experience: the urge to abstraction [Abstractionsdrang] and empathy [Emfithlung}. The latter (which had formed the basis of 159 numerous nineteenth-century aesthetic theories) is said to discover beau^ in the organic. Mimetic works, such as Realism or Impressionism, express this sense of oneness with nature. The impulse to abstract, in contrast, derives from a sense of dread or awe before the contingencies and arbitrariness of existence (similar to the Romantic "sublime," though Worringer does not mention the term). This aesthetic urge \Kunstwolleri\ finds beauty not in the vital forces of nature but in "the life-denying inorganic, in the crystalline. . . in all abstract law and necessity" (4). After centuries of the dominance of empathy, Worringer perceives at the beginning of the twentieth century an epochal shift in Western art to the reign of abstraction.

Repose from the chaos of temporal phenomena can be gained by "de-organicising the organic" or "eternalizing" an object through the aesthetics of abstraction ( 134,17). Two points need to be noted. First, following Alois Riegl (Mashek 147-153), Worringer valorizes mathematics and greatly admires the structure of crystals which is the "first and eternal law of form in inanimate matter, and comes closest to absolute beauty" (20). (The importance of this imagery will become clear shortly.) Second, Worringer insists that humans do not derive these principles of regularity from inert matter. Rather, these laws are "implicitly contained in our own human organization" (20). That is to say, they emanate not from our projecting intellect but from "the deepest roots of [our] somato psychic constitution." The "morphological law of crystalline-inorganic matter" resides in the "preconditions of the human organism." Lest we miss the biological cormection, Worringer suggests that crystalline forms may be some kind of evolutionary bridge between our organic bodies and inorganic matter. The longing for the pure unity of the crystal may be the stirring of a dim corporeal memory (35). As the sample of fictional texts below will demonstrate, this desire to eternalize the transient is most evident in the dream of an anatomy as pure or translucent as crystal.

160 purged of the maladies of existence. The organic body is variously envisioned as a machine, regularized into lines and planes, emptied into an airy transparency, or eternalized as an irrefragable object of art. English Vorticism, for example, vehemently attacked the continuing influence of what Wyndham Lewis called the "Time Cult," evidenced in the temporal philosophy of Henri Bergson or the art of James Joyce. This sentimental obsession he relegated to a passé aesthetics. His own art—"Burying Euclid deep in the living flesh" (Michel 40)—would help reform the "lymphatic," "vegetable humanity" pervading British culture. In fact, Bergson was frequently regarded as a sort of philosophical Pater. Milton Babbit likewise considered the French philosopher ofl'évolution creatice as an anti-humanist who fostered the "two great permanent maladies of human nature: anarchy and irrationality" (455). Not surprisingly, Aestheticism was a prime target of Lewis's bromides. In the first issue of Blast, Lewis excoriates the "Chaos of Enoch Ardens, laughing Jetmys, Ladies with Pain, good-for-nothing Guineveres." His subsequent praise of hairdressers for their ability to trim nature's "aimless growths" into cleaner angularities, thus beginning the work of correcting "the grotesque anachronisms of our physique," might be taken as simply an epater-le-bourgeois declaration. But he soon declares his position without cant: "the actual human body becomes of less importance every day " (19, 25, 141). In the modem "physiognomy," it has been simply "superceded" {Caliph's Design 40). Our will to perfection demands that we "order, regulate, disinfect and stabilize" life's redundancies {Blast 38). His interest in living flesh, as T. E. Hulme later remarked, was restricted to "abstract mechanical relations," which is to say it was non-existent ( 106).^ Similarly, the Futurist manifesto of the machine and light asks: Who can still believe in the opaciQr of bodies, since our sharpened and multiplied sensitiveness has already penetrated the obscure manifestations of the medium? Why should we forget in our creations the doubled power of our sight capable of giving results analogous to those of the x-rays? (Chipp 290)

161 In her invaluable Screening the Bodyy Lisa Cartwright discusses the ways that x- rays (discovered by Roentgen in 1895) became a major cultural metaphor, an aesthetic at once gothic and modem which reflected a certain image of the body ( 107-142; also Kevles 116-144, 261-296). Initially an uncanny sign of disease and death, the x-ray became, especially with the addition of animation, a fetish of health and sexuality. Lovers presented x-ray photographs of themselves to their partners to show their "deeper" affections (an erotics most famously treated in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain). But the x-ray image was also an apparatus of visual politics. The Third Reich, for instance, would emphasize that the technology was Nordic (modem, "Jewish" art being flat and superficial). The German radiologist Robert Janker even made a cinematic x-ray of a larynx reciting Nazi propaganda, thereby uncannily revealing the fascist corporeal aesthetic (142). In John Heartfield's photomontage, Adolf, der Ubermensch: Schluckt Gold und redet Blech [Adolf, the Superman: Swallows Gold and Spouts JunkJ(l935) [Figure 7], Hitler's x-rayed torso reveals a swatzika heart and a belly full of gold. Among the works at a 1934 exhibition in Prague, it was this image to which the German government most objected. When it was finally removed, Heartfield responded with another satirical image, asserting that the more such works are repressed "the More Visible Reality Becomes!" Heartfield's entire oeuvre makes traumatically apparent the suffering body which the regime would render invisible (Pachnicke 25). As a material illustration of the utopian body of transparency, the x-ray could suggest, then, a dioptics of state terror, nowhere better articulated than in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Cancer Ward. The story takes place in the early 1950s, when the Stalinist police concocted the "plot of the Kremlin doctors" and planned a purge of the "those in white gowns." Never carried out due to the timely death of Stalin, the campaign nevertheless cast suspicion upon all physicians and their activities. X-rays seemed particularly horrific in their invisible, indefensible penetration. Through the soft skin,

1 6 2 through the stomach and the intestines, through the blood flowing in the arteries and veins, through the lymph, the cells, the spine and small bones, more layers, vessels and skin of his back, through the trestles of the table, throu^ the one-and-a-half-inch planks of the floor, through the foundations and the earth flU and farther and farther and farther, descending to bedrock, poured the harsh x-rays, — inconceivable to the human mind. (7 ^ The imagination of this new technology as erotic gesture, revolutionary technique, eugenic propaganda or political terror was well prepared for, as Cartwright notes, by a certain vision of the human body within a wider philosophy of the eye (113). While decadents like Wilde or Huysman were dismissed as "impotent voyeurs" morbidly seeking out the ”cloacamaxinuz" of history, truly modem men like the Futurists were "Lords of Light" who would destroy "the materiality of bodies" (Marinetti 63, 77; Chipp 293). The age belonged not to organic tissue but to linear metal, not to shadows but to sharp light, not to contemplation but to action and war—"the only true hygiene," as Marinetti put it (Let r M urder 105). However outré, such declarations were symptomatic of a broader state of mind which considered objectification or "dehumanization" (Ortega y Gasset) as the modem diagnosis {Blast 1 141).'^ The modernist euclidean mind and its will to abstraction, as mentioned, was not unrelated to the rise of a social messianism which demanded a new kind of human being. The brave new architecture of crystal buildings and geometrical spaces, for instance, devalued the human figure which was to live in them. The clean paper sketches ofles villes radieuses rarely included the beings who would supposedly reside in them. And when architects and urbanists did consider the human form, they called explicitly for a new sanity or hygiene (e.g. Richard Neutra's "houses of health"; 223) and a new rationalist anthropology. It should come as no surprise that a leading architect. Le Corbusier, could discuss a rationalized, standardized, and de-sexualized body of the future which he called the Modulor. Emst Bloch, one of this century's major philosophers of the utopian urge, remaries that modernist glass architecture failed because 163 even with the greatest transparency, it shows no content, no burgeon and no ornament-forming blossom of some content. To be sure, this abstractness connects superbly with glass, and could be strangely created in it, ground emptiness in air and light, newly cosmic from nothingness. The problem, as he sees it, is that the New Man envisioned by the avant-garde did not yet live up to the potential of his glass environment. Bloch’s disappointment over the failure of the new style is highly revealing; the utopia of the glass building needs shapes that deserve transparency. It needs configurations that retain the human being as a question and the crystal as an answer that has to be mediated yet, an answer that still has to be opened. (189,190; emphases added) The implication is that the realization of utopian fantasies of transparency would necessitate the breeding an idealized subject, a New Adam worthy of such domiciles.^ Indeed, when the Dadaists in their Manifesto demanded "cities of light," they foresaw them peopled with heliotropic men and women whose bodies could absorb light. The philosopher of Cosmism, Nikolai Fyodrov, forecast a future corporeality in which the human anatomy would approach the biomass of the eye and, like plants, men could feed on light (Todorov 52, 59-67). Both major forms of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes were determined to create this being. On the one hand, this implied obliterating the traces of history and the refuse of bourgeois democracy. Yet, at the same time, it was an attempt to enter the realm of eternal repetition by re-creating a mythologized past. Homo Soveticus was to reincarnate the transparent Citizen of Rousseau while Nazi-Nordic Man claimed descent from the ancient Greeks (a crucial link to be examined in the next chapter). This entailed the fashioning of other identities which would define them, of course, and with well-known results: the fascist order "reconstructed feminine nature’ only to enslave it, the Jew’ in order to exterminate him" (Le Rider 3(X)). Such radical—and necessarily fatal—attempts to materialize what were merely metaphors and idealist projections were grounded in an eschatological wish to conflate 164 social reaiiQr and ideological narrative. Modernist artists like Lewis, Pound, Lawrence, Marinetti, or Mayakovsky also lapsed into this perilous mythical way of thinking. Fictions degenerated into myths, which is to say, they were no longer recognized as Actional (Kermode Sense o f an Ending 104). There was in this Glaskultur a "will to render transparent, to lay bare, to demystify" expressive of "a utopia that fully and progressively identifies the human with the linguistic" (Cacciari 188). The Aestheticist resistance to this move from Action to reality, which had already manifested itself in some Victorian works, will be taken up shortly. Here 1 offer only a brief illustrabon of a telling shift in rhetoric indicative of this new-found arrogance. I earlier discussed the ways the horizon-line

fascinated and saddened Rossetti (see chapter 2). It functioned poetically as the line of desire which lured but ipsofacto impeded crossing. Pater, too, understood how difficult it is to "forget the distant horizon" and concentrate on the here and now {Appreciations 104). As it happens, the horizon metaphor would also play a role in early twentieth-century Russian avant-garde texts (see Groys 82-89). The painter and theoretician Kazimir Malevich, for instance, made it part of his new cultural order. In stark contrast to the English Victorian, however, the Russian artist was convinced that his penetrative vision had "destroyed the ring of the horizon and got out of the circle of facts" (83). the politics of transparency The wish for a social reality that is totally ordered and transparent, without crime or corporeal imperfections, is by no means unique to early modernism. This will to truth and its illusions of logic and clarity is an immemorial human desire and lies behind much Western metaphysics. But for some current theorists, Jean Baudrillard most especially, this utopian urge appears to have reached an apogee in postmodern visual culture whose seemingly perfect translucence allows us to revel in our own corporeal absence. With the assistance of prosthetic technologies, we have increasingly de-realized the world with the

165 hope of evading material misery, otherness, disease and death {Perfect Crime 10,37; also Freud 21: 92). As Marinetti had prophesied, the machine, a "huge invisible arm" which externalizes the human will, seems to have mastered space and time itself.^ Baudrillard's arguments concerning postmodern cyberculture, as I have intimated in previous chapters, can be productively extended backwards. The project of transparency he perceives in contemporary virtuality cannot be isolated from the disembodying eye of other periods: the Enlightenment's rationalization of the body, nineteenth-century idealism's diaphanous self, or early modernism's radiological utopias. To actually live in a state of total illumination is, of course, impossible since such a state of perpetual meaning would be a true horror, "a kind of epilepsy" of presence (Baudrillard 53). This is precisely a key message of Aestheticism whose corporeal art aims to interpose itself before all naive liftings of the veil. We have seen, for instance, how Pater's concept of insane realism does momentarily undo the symmetries of art and nature, life and death. Yet, complete transparency would be a kind of "hyper-sanity," as it were, which would eliminate all traces of the contingent body in time. Rossetti reminds us that pleasure resides not in such an emptiness but in the melancholic chiaroscuro of meaning or in an ecstatic breathlessness as the self is only momentarily lost We have seen how the effectiveness of his DantisAmor lies in the accident of the unfigured dial through which the body's Thingness is glimpsed obliquely. Rossetti's rendition of the courtly love tradition. too, foregrounds the process of seduction in which the body's very alienation, its opacity, allows play within poem and picture. The erotic charge lies in the suspension of desire, not in its utopian realization which would be static and empty. It is in this transparency, this charnel house of signs of the body disincamate, that pornographic images move (it is, indeed, transparency itself that is pornographic, not the lascivious obscenity of the body). (Baudrillard 127) Thus, Jenny's secret lies not in any self-evident legibility, what Baudrillard calls a "white seduction," but in its opposite, the alluring but intractable "black magic of otherness." The 166 body, as Rossetti's poem repeatedly insists, impedes our obscene narrative drive towards absolute clarity. The flesh provides depth and contrast and a contagious mystery; it leaves tell-tale traces, "viruses, lapses, germs and catastrophes" (124,40). It is, above all, the eighteenth-century which has accrued such images of visual purity in our imaginary: Enlightenment, Auflclarung, le siècle des lumières. Out of the myriad instances of what Buci-Gluckmann has aptly termed this "madness of vision" (Jay 47-48), I propose to briefly examine Rousseau's philosophy of the eye, for it anticipates the utopian visions of early modernism and affords an instructive contrast to the insane realism of Aestheticist and Decadent texts which stress the insufficiency of vision and its potential for despotism. Jean Starobinski has demonstrated the salience of the metaphor of the veil in Rousseau's social dream of Momus. In this version of Platonism, the soul, once "delivered from the body," may behold the "unveiled truth" (76). Rousseau describes his own confessional heart as "transparent as crystal" (254) which is there for all to read, even if others render him opaque by false judgments, veils, and masks. The Rousseauist ideal would be a divine invisibiliQr like that provided by the ring of Gyges for it would permit transcendent vision. The crystal, Starobinski points out, seems innocent and the ideal metaphor for the penetrative eye since it is adamant yet pervious to light: "The gaze penetrates it, but the stone itself is a gaze, a very pure gaze" which traverses other objects (255). Indeed, in Institutions chemiques, Rousseau, like some socially minded Dr. Frankenstein, dreams of fashioning a diaphanous homunculus and of vitrifying corruptible flesh into objets d'art. As the animal body "is glass and can return to glass” one could aestheticize cadavers, hideous remnants of the body's Thingness into "clear, shiny vases o f beautiful, transparent glass,” tinted with a "milky white color heightened by a slight tinge of narcissus" (256). The ideal polity would then be an expansion of this desired clarity, which is to say, people might at last see into each other's hearts without obstruction. Rousseau laments that 167 humans have lost this edenic transparency, although he suggests that the ideal state might still be attainable (15-20). The political implications of such metaphors are manifest in his distinction between the theater and the feast. While the former is the site of individuality, opacity and alienation, the latter is a translucent collective, allowing the spectators to participate in spectacle. All true happiness is, then, public happiness. The greatest pleasure is "to see an entire people" unfold their hearts "to the rays of supreme pleasure" which, he says, may revolve around a charismatic figure (95,102-03). Foucault comments that such lyric ideas in Rousseau about the visibility of bodies compliments well Jeremy Bentham's technique of power, the Panopticon. What in fact was the Rousseauist dream that motivated many of the revolutionaries? It was the dream of a transparent society, visible and legible in each of its parts, the dream of there no longer existing any zones of darkness It was the dream that each individual — might be able to see the whole of socie^, that men's hearts should communicate, their vision be unobstructed by obstacles, and that opinion of all reign over each. {PowerlKnowledge 152) Complete openness seems to establish truth and benevolence, ^ ^ but as history has shown only too well, it also involves forced confession and silent terror. Robespierre appropriately envisioned a legislative hall which would seat twelve thousand spectators, for under "the eyes of so many witnesses neither corruption, intrigue nor perfidy would dare show itself" (Bruhm 68). The link between the Committee and the Rousseauist vision was perceived by the ever perspicacious Heine. Robespierre, he remarks, was "the hand of Jean-Jacques Rousseau—the bloody hand that from the womb of time drew forth the body whose soul Rousseau had created" {Prose 171). cities of quartz It has been rightly ^ d that while utopias seemed possible, even likely, in the Victorian age, the issue at the end of the twentieth century is how to avoid attempts at their realization. It was dreams of earthly paradises that engendered our unimaginable nightmares. As Berlin puts it, rationalist plans for utopias founder "precisely because they 168 are rational, because they are plans"; "the road to the gates of Paradise is necessarily strewn with corpses" {Crooked Timbers 179). In this section, I will briefly revisit some classic Victorian and Modernist utopias to demonstrate, first, how central the metaphysics of transparency was to these fantasies and, second, the antinomian role of the material body in impeding such visions of total lucidly. By definition, all such ideal communities are endowed with perfect well-being and a pervasive rationali^ which allows neither illness, nor vice, nor squalor. In such solarian societies,

all shadows are forbidden; only light is admitted. No trace of dualism: utopia is by essence anti-Manichean. Hostile to anomaly, to deformity, to irregulari^, it tends to the affirmation of the homogenous, of the typical, of repetition and orthodoxy. (86) As this passage from Cioran's History and Utopia implies, these imagined states of perfect unity and sanity are almost by definition perfectly luminous. Indeed, they are more often than not figured as translucent glass or crystal. Moreover, it is the imperfect or deformed body, in pleasure but especially in pain, which invariably emerges as the dark flaw which refuses to be eliminated. Archtypical is Mustapha's well-known declaration in Brave New World that one has theright to "grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer... to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind" (240). The nineteenth century's unbounded faith in the progressive elimination of pain and sorrow through technology is most demonstrated in Chemyshevsky's Fourierist fantasy. What Is To Be Done? (1883). Included in his prophecies of a radiant future is a new architecture which, the author believes, is suggested by only one current building: the structure on Syndenham Hill known as the Crystal Palace. More relevant to our discussion of the myths of transparency than this text, however, is Dostoevsky's powerful critique of this architectural Victorian symbol in the first part of his Notes from the Underground. For Dostoevsky, this structure, which he visited in 1862, is an index of a vain desire to end existential struggle and an obscene indifference to human pain. In the Crystal Palace, 169 suffering is "inconceivable," since suffering is doubt and negation. "What sort of crystal palace would it be if any doubt were allowed?" (24) The glass building represents for him an intolerable nothingness; even self-flagellation seems to him preferable to such total blankness (25). "Perhaps," the underground man says, "suffering is just as advantageous to him as well-being? Man sometimes loves suffering terribly, to the point of passion" (24). Another salient illustration of the politics of transparency and the resistant body can be found in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s classic We (first published in English in 1924) which exerted its influence on both Huxley and Orwell. The novel is most likely aimed specifically at the modernist vision vilipended by Dostoevslgr's Underground Man (see Jackson 150-57). But it is also directed at the Bolshevik ideology of human perfectibility and the widespread faith in technology (or "Taylorism," as it was known, after the efficiency theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor; see especially Banta). Zamyatin's dystopia is rigidly rational and even mathematical (numbers replace names, for instance) and everything seems "to have been cast of the same immovable and everlasting glass." Indeed, even the sidewalks are glass and the transparent buildings allow unhindered views of the tenants (5, 7). While the ancient opaque houses had fostered a "pitiful cellular psychology," these pure structures allow an open and unified society ( 19). Not unexpectedly, love and passion are maladies which have been purged and all sexuality is regulated since it interferes with logical analysis (14,4). Ideal polities must be unclouded by such "insanities" (81). When the narrator, D-503, looks into the mirror, he is disturbed by the fact that the human body is as illogical and illegible as the ancient domiciles: "human heads are opaque and there's no way to see inside except through those tiny little windows, the eyes" (28). The resistant body of a woman, 1-330, catalyzes his dissent and his questioning of this old dream of Momus (56, 59). Her eyebrows appear to him as an irritating X on her face which cannot be deciphered (52). Of course, therein lies her seduction. "You can love only something that refuses to be mastered," she informs him 170 (71). Life had seemed like "transparent and permanent crystal" (115), but the authentic I which he now recognizes is highly discomforting. It is, in fact, closer to cholera (88). I feel myself. But it's only the eye with a lash in iL the swollen finger, the infected tooth that feels itself, is conscious of its own individual being. The healthy eye or finger or tooth doesn't seem to exist. So it's clear, isn't it? Self-consciousness is just a disease. (124) As he lays his cerebral head into I-330's lap, it is likened to a "crystal, dissolving in her" (126). In the end, however, he submits to the mandates of the Great Benefactor and the root illness, the imagination itself, is extirpated via an x-ray lobotomy. Perfect equilibrium and tranquillity are restored. Sebastian van Storck had narcissistically desired to return to the protective maternal shell. Zamyatin's protagonist moves beyond even this for with this operation he refuses the humanity of his lover and his maternal associations, embodying at last the ideal subjectivity of the totalitarian state: a conscious unconsciousness.

Intentionally or not, the earlier A Crystal Age (1887) by William Henry Hudson, whose work often seems so Aestheticist, is just as proficient in describing the fatal consequences of actualizing the transparent utopia. Following Samuel Butler's Lamarckian correction of Darwinism, Hudson's society was intended to illustrate the vital endpoint of human progress via the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Like the denizens of Zamyatin's society, the Crystallites live in perfect equilibrium, without illness, strife, or struggle. Their voices are Aeolian (132) and their perfectly adapted bodies are themselves works of art. These sublimated men and women appear as androgynous beings who closely resemble each other (15, 168), as if they had all emerged from a Bume-Jones painting. Indeed, when Smith, the narrator, first encounters this perfected race, he includes Bume-Jones in the list of great persons of his own world, along with George Eliot, Lord Tennyson, Darwin, and Herbert Spencer (24). He himself, he sheepishly adds, is not an artist (59). In a letter, Hudson once declared that at the core of A Crystal Age lay the conviction that any utopia would have to be desexualized. There is "no millennium, no rest, no 171 perpetual peace, till that fury has burnt itself out" (Garnett 174-75).^^ In the novel, procreation, as well as all decision-making, is the provenance of the patriarch of the House, "the Father," while the community rejoices in the freedom of communal subservience. Devoid of all curiosity which is said to lead only to noisery, they seek his will "until as in a clear crystal without (law shining with coloured light, or as in a glassy lake reflecting within itself the heavens and every cloud and star, so is he reflected in [their] minds" (81). Smith admits that in his old life he had heard much about "sweetness and light and Philistines" but feels that he did not truly comprehend the import of these images. Now, before the "crystal purity of heart" of these people who embody the aesthetic state, "angelic women and mild-eyed men with downy, unrazored lips," he comes to understand how truly unlovely he had been. He can only hope to absorb "a little sweetness and light" and attain their enduring bliss (248,249).

Smith is slowly acclimatized to the crystal life. He comes to accept, for example, the inhuman logic of being punished for falling ill (Hudson here following the law of Butler's Erewhon) (233). In a period of depression, however, his repressed corporeality does return and he dreams that his ghastly body lies upturned while weeping onlookers shudder at the sight of blood on their "sacred, shining floor" (250). How this neutered society deals with disease and the confrontation with death is brilliantly conceived by Hudson: the residents project them onto one archtypical Woman who can then be sentimentally admired. The Mother, a kind of Victorian avatar of Demeter, is afflicted with an incurable illness and is secluded in a chapel-bedroom where she is "worshipped" (170, 171). The novel only makes explicit the cultural dictum that woman's noble duty is to suffer and be still and that feminine sympathy is as everlasting as it is virtuous. This Mater Dolorosa does, in fact, remind Smith of Guido's Coronation o f the Virgin (178-79) and she is soon described as the cultural successor to the primal Suffering Mother, Astarte (187). In contrast to the blank faces of the other Crystallites, her visage

172 bears "marks of passion," a "petulant, almost scornful mouth, and half-eager, half-weary expression of the eyes" which "seemed rather to belong to that imperfect world" he had known before (176). In short, she is condemned to carry vestiges of the anaesthetic human body now effaced through evolution. The Crystallites are not immortal, of course, but they pass away with but a momentary pang. The Mother alone must face "that great blackness of the end ever before the mind." The knowledge of mortality is her penal^ for having known eroticism and procreation (191-92). Even the Father does not experience this pain for it would only "cloud his serene spirit" (194).!^ Smith comes to loathe his own habit of introspection which only aggravates "the malady it is intended to cure," that is to say, bodily love which he can no longer experience (279). The secret of permanent tranquillity, he concludes, must be the total denial of erotic desires. He drinks a potion he believes to be a cure; it is, in fact, a lethal poison. Perhaps the boldest-and most bizarre—rendition of a utopia of transparency, however, is Herbert Read's The Green Child (1935) which is most obviously an elaboration of the ideals laid out in Worringer's treatise. Like Hudson's Crystallites, this subterranean race of humanoids are devoid of strife, sin, passion, and the fear of death. With their translucent skin draped with diaphanous robes, these creatures, too, display no overt signs of gender and, as in many a utopia or dystopia, copulation has been reduced to functional reproduction (171). Solitary thought and physical stasis constitute the highest stage of life to which all aspire. Time is neither measured nor heeded (167, 171, 179). Illness is unknown.

The socie^'s most prestigious employment is the manufacture and especially the polishing of crystals. In fact, crystallography structures their science, their philosophy and their aesthetics (174-175). As we have come to expect, this ontology entails a loathing of the body. These beings considered the organic and vital elements of their bodies as a disgusting horror, and above all the human breath was the symptom of an original curse which could only be eradicated after death. Death was no horror to 173 them, but nothing exceeded their dread of corruption and decay; that, to them, was a return to the soft and gaseous, to the very element of their weakness and disgrace. After death, the body is laid in a trough of petrous water in which it eventually becomes "white and hard, until the eyes were glazed under their vitreous lids, and the hair become like crisp snail-shells, the beard like a few jagged icicles." Fulfilling Rousseau's imagined chemical experiment, the posthumous body is literally turned into a luminescent work of art. When the organic body takes on the mathematical exactness and perfection of a crystal, then it is said to find its final immortaliQr and crystal beatitude (177). Carnality, then, like variety, creation, and destruction, is for them a source of error and chaos. Absolute good lies in unchanging Order, as revealed in crystalline structures (181, 183). True wisdom resides in the awareness that "the body is infected by the soul." Bliss is the body undisturbed, when it "has no sense or desire, but aspires after fixed and harmonious being," when the flesh "takes on a state of crystalline purity. Purest knowledge itself is not a shifting process of perception, but a final state of existence" (192). At the conclusion of Wuthering Heights, the corrupting bodies of the passionate lovers, Heathcliff and Catherine, nourish a tree whose living branches intertwine over their graves. In Read's cold version of this convention, the bodies of the protagonist Olivero and Siloen, the Green Child of the title, are vitreous sculptures placed in the one trough to share a crystal harmony (194-95). This society has realized in life Sebastian van Storck's desire for perfect equilibrium or Ruskin's eschatological "Crystal Rest." In contrast, Aestheticism reveled in experience precisely because of our "shifting process of perception." It saw modernity as a spirit of relativity, not of absolutes. Life's aim is, then, not to apprehend the One and the All, but to focus on the transitory and the contingent. Objects, including our own minds and anatomies, formed or dissolved by our very vision, flee as we attempt to grasp them {Appreciations 66-67). Far from envisioning a body adamant and eternally immobile, the Aestheticist self is a kinetic web, incessantly woven and unwoven, through which the laws 174 of necessi^ are insinuated. Read's Utopians anticipate with ecstasy the petrifaction of the body which would at last partake of the crystal’s fîxed laws and proportions ( 194). The soul, which fills us with infectious "loves, and lusts, and fears, and fancies" (193), must be purged so that, in Rossetti's terms, one can be a stone without a toad. Aestheticism, in contrast, endows these necessary laws with a tragic nobility and, what is more, insists that life's splendors are only intensified set against the various contagions of life. The various epochs of rest fail to recognize this, so that its dreamers, like its residents, "sleep before evening" {Renaissance 189). pain to pity to appreciation The early modernist visions of utopian societies and perfected bodies were prepared by nineteenth-century idealist philosophy and art which sought to spiritualize aesthetic appreciation and thus make transparent the profanely imperfect body. (The crucial links between these and the era's ethnologies will be discussed in the next chapter.) In his discussion of this refusal of the flesh, Pierre Bourdieu points to the theories of Schopenhauer, as well as Kant, as prime sources for this sublimated asceticism soon considered nobler and even ethically superior to mere physical pleasures {Distinction 486- 94). But, 1 would respond, Schopenhauer is discerning in his comments on the inescapable thwarting of these spiritualized longings by bodily desires. Whatever frustrates our will, he writes, however disagreeable, has the virtue of impressing itself "upon us instantly, directly and with great clarity." And the example he offers is a version of the maxim which structures Carlyle's "Characteristics": while we are unconscious of the healthiness of our body as a whole, we become keenly aware of the site which materializes itself in pain. Unlike Carlyle, however, Schopenhauer concludes that "the negativity of well-being and happiness" stands "in antithesis to the positivity of pain." The crucial point I wish to highlight is that we require pressure to make life and mind palpable, just as the body would expand or etiolate without it {Essays 41, 42-43). 175 The body in pain makes visible and tangible the transparent body. Physical malady, writes Cioran, is a "crisis of reflexivity. Tissues begin to be aware of themselves, individual organs acquire consciousness and separate from the rest of the body." In this way, the mind’s apparent mastery or silencing of the body is put into question. Corporeal muteness or the imaÿned void within the self is merely "a dream of pain that has not come true" {Tears and Saints 113, 104). This concept is finely illustrated in H. G. Wells' The Invisible Man (1897) which is yet another retelling of the age-old wish of Gyges to see all and yet not be seen, to be, in Plato words, "like a god among men" {Republic 360 b-c). Considering invisibility the ultimate agent of power and freedom, the eponymous character begins a reign of terror (66, 91). Finally apprehended, this "thing unseen" attains the visibility of glass only when beaten, a process which is likened to "the slow spreading of a poison." The crushed torso and albino face with eyes like garnets finally appear only in death ( 108).

In her widely discussed analysis of human suffering and its relation to discourse. The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry reminds us that both states, a visible heightened sensitivity and an invisible or silent body-ground, structure human existence. The body is its pains, a shrill sentience that hurts and is hugely alarmed by its hurt; and the body is its scars, thick and forgetful, unmindful of its hurt, unmindful of anything, mute and insensate. (31) It is at once sublime and grotesque, divine and profane. As pain increases, it tends to erase the contents of consciousness and the body is more "vocal" and "visible." At the same time, however, the paradoxical truth is that physical pain is fundamentally inexpressible. As with the "sublimity of soul there is no contagion" (V^lde 951). Indeed, Scarry's study aims to demonstrate how pain annihilates communication^^ and "actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned" (4). Illness, says Virginia Woolf, requires not only a new language, "more primitive, more sensual, more obscene, but a new hierarchy of the passions" (4:194-95). 176 To communicate bodily suffering', we turn out of necessity from factual description towards inventive tropes and Scarry effectively theorizes this profound relationship between pain and the processes of the imagination (161-73)20 Creative works, once appropriated by society, tend to efface the abject, yet they may also call attention to the body as such and its horizon-line of death. Even the most conventional art can screen biological realities and elevate suffering to a metaphysical powers and. "to the gods in the nakedness of physical immediacy" beyond all cultural mediations (Marcuse 98-99). At the same time, works of the imagination may also question such idees reçues^ The tensions of art before the ambiguous energies of bodily pain are eloquently expressed by Henry James near the conclusion of The Wings o f the Dove (the title borrowed from Pater's epigraph to Renaissance). Merton Densher admits to himself that he had not only never faced the facts of Milly Theale’s illness, had not only, with all the world, hovered outside an impenetrable ring fence, within which there reigned a kind of expensive vagueness, made up of smiles and silences and beautiful fictions and particular arrangements, all strained to breaking; but he had also, with everyone else, as he now felt, actively fostered suppressions which were in the direct interest in everyone’s good manner, everyone's pity, everyone's really quite generous ideal. It was a conspiracy of silence, as the cliché went, to which no one had made an exception, the great smudge of mortality across the picture, the shadow of pain and horror, finding in no quarter a surface of spirit that consented to reflect it. (352-53) The task is to hold a mirror to the medusan facts of corporeality without trivializing human pain. The dilemma, in the words of one of James' many artist-narrators, is to paint the body "in the glass case" and at once "render to the full the shining, interposing plate" (Tales 11: 28). We saw earlier how Pater's rhetoric calls attention to the maladies of the body whose chromatic stains resist the philosophical mind and render the glass visible. Pain and the empathetic response forfend the abstraction of the material body into an intellectual "puzzle" or "theorem," as Sebastian van Storck put it (4: 109, 106). For the Aestheticist. the impressions of beauty itself is inseparable from pain. Pater's semi-autobiographical 177 child, for example, has "an almost diseased sensibility to the spectacles of suffering” and the "pain in things" (8:181, 182). Marius, too, possesses this sensitivity, witnessed in his reaction to the appalling spectacles of the Roman arena and the Stoic indifference to cruel^ (2: 244). He comes to understand that even the most perfect of societies, conspire as they will, cannot silence a "certain grief in things." Our only defense against this mortal predicament is a general "power of compassion—humanity's standing force of self-pi^." The future belongs to those who "have most of the power of sympathy" (3: 183, 184). However "imperfect," the compassionate gesture itself defines our humanity (3: 176). Despite its fundamental incommunicability, therefore, the corporeal experience of pain unites us to others. The aesthetic assists in the formation of a compassionate body of subjects (see Eagleton Ideology o f the Aesthetic 28). Aestheticist criticism aimed to incorporate this empathetic eye. It is remaritable, for instance, that Swinburne's admiration of "Jenny" ultimately rests not on the poem's verbal accomplishment but on its expression of the "compassion of human fellowship and fleshly brotherhood" {Essays 94). Or again, Wilde's last writings are replete with comments on pity and the its relation to the artist's life but it is in Pater that one finds the most explicit theorizing. In his review of John Addington Symonds' Renaissance in Italy (1875), he perceived what he believed to be an excessive emphasis on the era's violence. The age's new-found liberty did not generate so much savagery, he responds, as "a sympathy with life everywhere even in its weakest and most frail manifestations" {Renaissance 198). Thus, for Botticelli, "morality is all sympathy" (43). This ethics of the body he also sees in Michelangelo's depiction of the ”Pieta, pity, the pity of the Virgin Mother" which is directed not towards some disembodied spirit but towards the body as thing, the "stiff limbs and colourless lips" (74). Through this appreciation of the human form even at the hour of death. Pater concludes, the Florentines managed to avoid the macabre of northern cultures. They were saved by

178 a tender pi^ for the thing itself. They must have often leaned over the lifeless body, when all was at length quiet and smoothed out. After death, it is said,... the lines become more simple and dignified; only the abstract lines remain, in great indifference. They came thus to see death in its great distinction. Then following it perhaps one stage further, dwelling for a moment on the point whereall this transitory dignity must break up, and discerning with no clearness a new body, they paused just in time, and abstained, with a sentiment of profound pity. (73-4) This sympathetic art focused on the projected horizon-line between vitality and nothingness, the point of transition at which the body was about to become an abstracted object. Pater's well-known maxim about the appreciation of beauty "quickened by the sense of death" ("Aesthetic Poetry" 198) is, then, more than trite mawkishness. His epicurean poetics was profoundly pathetic, since it aimed at "not pleasure only, but fullness of Life, and insight'. . . including noble pain and sorrow even " (2: 156-7).^! Those who would see art or life through abstract theories sacrifice "a thousand possible sympathies, . . . things only to be enjoyed through sympathy." To appreciate "exquisite physical impressions," to apprehend "the aspect of things; with their aesthetic character, as it is called," requires an imaginative susceptibility to things. It is only by entering into the "full stream of refined sensation," he claims, that we attain true freedom of mind and heart (3: 24, 26, 27, 28). Pater makes it clear that this hyperacuity of the senses demanded by the gem-like flame carmot be restricted either to objects of art or a frivolous pursuit of pleasure. The sympathetic imagination or the "impassioned contemplation" of art is to lead us to a "higher morality" which respects others as ends in themselves: "To treat life in the spirit of art, is to make life a thing in which means and ends are justified" (62). Coming across a horse being led to slaughter. Pater's Marius is moved to see it as a potent symbol of our fate (3: 176). In contrast. Wells' Dr. Moreau, a perverted aesthete, tortures sentient beings without scruple in the name of a utopian ideal:

179 You cannot imagine the strange colorless delight of these intellectual desires. The thing before you is no longer an animal, a fellow-creature, but a problem. Sympathetic pain—all I know of it I remember as a thing I would used to suffer from years ago. (75) Moreau's remark not only echoes the common belief that lower life forms are less susceptible to pain, but also suggests the contemporary wisdom that sickly European effetes would do well to acquire, in Marinetti's words, a "renovated consciousness" in order to see human torment as nothing more than "the suffering of electric lamps, which, with spasmatic starts, shriek out the most heart-rending expressions of color" (Chipp, 290). The phrase unintentionally parallels Pater’s troping of chromaticism for a sensitive sensuality which prevents a colorless transparency. The relation of aesthetics to ethics and the role of human pain in both are stressed in the "Postscript" to Appreciations. The true aesthetic critic, one who wishes to treat life in the spirit of art, will understand how a profound sense of pity may "soften " the grotesque (241, 245, 250). And yet this very sympathetic sense enables one to confront the tragic laws of necessity. The modem critic, like Romanticism at its best, reaches a genuine pathos; for the habit of noting and distinguishing one's own most intimate passages of sentiment mtdces one sympathetic, begetting, as it must, the power of entering, by all sorts of finer ways, into the intimate recesses of other minds. (254)

This is not the scopophilia of Ruskin's "penetrative imagination" or Carlyle's "spiritual optics," however. Aestheticist criticism reveals not some transcendental truth or essential core but those pathetic situations which are ultimately bereft of either communicability, explanation or remedy (3:27). Pater's proposed faculty is perhaps drawn from Vico's notion fantasia. We cannot, says Vico, regain the "poetic metaphysics" of former ages since they had a "wholly corporeal imagination." As our refined civilization has moved far from this sensuality through our endless abstracting, it seems now beyond our powers "to form the vast image of this mistress called 'Sympathetic Mature'" ijhe New Science 119, 117,118). We can only create an answerable style through the imagination. Fantasia is not

180 a faculty^ to acquire factual knowledge, as critical as historical verification is, but a talent to imaginatively "descend" into the experience of other individuals and other ages. As Isaiah Berlin describes it, it is analogous to knowing what it is to be poor, to belong to a nation, to be a revolutionary, to be converted to a religion, to fall in love, to be seized by nameless terror, to be delighted by a work of art. This gift is necessary we are to revitalize the past, to hear men’s voices, to conjecture (on the basis of such evidence as we can gather) what may have been their experience, their forms of expression, their values, outlook, aims, ways of living; without this we cannot grasp whence we came, how we come to be as we are now, not merely physically or biologically and, in a narrow sense, politically and institutionally, but socially, psychologically, morally; without this there can be no self-understanding. (Crooked Timber 64, 65) We must not be misled by Pater's diffident style or refîned tastes into ignoring the crucial extension of pathos from aesthetics into his ethical thinking (Donoghue 318). Pity or sympathy is what marked him for his contemporaries as socially progressive (Young 47; also 93-95). One might perhaps offer an analogy; Aestheticist criticism is to art as pity is to the body. This is perhaps what is suggested by Pater's collocation in his 1875 review of Symonds' book: "Sympathy, appreciation, a sense of latent claims in things” (Renaissance 198). He adopted the second term for the 1889 collection of his essays, but he might have with good reason called his book Sympathies.

181 NOTES

1. See Groy, Total Art 66-68; Todorov 90; Zizek "Two Bodies." On the metaphor of the body and the head of state, see Marin's Portrait o f the King, as well as Kantorowicz's classic The King's Two Bodies. 2. The composer George Bizet, for example, envisioned a "purely artistic government," with a senate consisting of "Beethoven, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Giorgione—and a few others of this rank" (Lockspeisor 128). Or again, we smile at that warrior-dandy D’Aimunzio at Rume in 1920 decorating Toscanini and his orchestra as an "Orphic Legion." But can we dismiss so lightly Rcasso's notorious 1935 remark that there "ought to be absolute dictatorship of painters . . . a dictatorship of one painter . . . to suppress history, to suppress a heap of other things” (Buchloh 114)? 3. Isaiah Berlin uses the same metaphors to describe the totalitarian state's desire to rationally organize all of life: it advocated a "dry light against the flickering flame, . . . implacably opposed to all that is turbid, musty, gushing, impressionistic" {Crooked Timber 159). The "physiognomy" of the two orientations is summarized by Lewis: the classical is "something solid," "universal," and "geomteric," while the romantic is "dishevelled, ethereal, misty," "drifting dust” without a logical pattern, "idiomatic," "gaseous and nebulous." The former relies upon the intellect, the latter upon "the bowels and the nerves" {Men Without Art 155).

18 2 4. Lewis' pamphlet on architecture. The Caliph's Design^ also considers all ornament as rubbish and advocates reducing "everything to the box." If design or style can be likened to clothes, he writes, the preference is for nakedness or even the skeleton (25). To be sure, there were avant-garde works which neither adhered to the aesthetic or political programs of a Lewis or a Le Corbusier nor were cut to the pattern of Valery's cerebral M. Teste. For example, Apollinaire observed that since anatomy "no longer existed in art, [Picasso] had to reinvent it, and carry out his own assassination with the practiced and methodical hand of a great surgeon" (Chipp, 232). Kevles argues that Picasso and Braque were responding to a visual culture radically altered after Roentgen's invention (123-126). Mention, too, may be made of Surrealism's écriture corporelle which, like

Exitentialism, nauseated the modernist body. In their "exquisite corpses," Bellmerian dolls, and even Duchampsian ready-mades (see Krauss 108f), the Surrealists did not easily follow the shift to the model of transparency. The women surrealists, especially, displayed what Gisele Prassinos referred to as "entrailles extérieures" (outer bowels), thereby often parodying their male counterparts erotic poses. An interesting poetic parallel to Pater's anthropological anti-transparency is Max Jacob's "l"homme de cristal." The French modernist, like Pater, moves from an earlier reliance on the mental eye (intellectualism, abstraction) to the sensuous eye which seeks palpable qualities and turns especially to the human body itself. The crystal man becomes aware of the futility of abstract idealism and the need to in corporate the transcendent. One becomes permeable only by being "soluble" {DernierPoerms 78); the diaphanous is finally to be found in the body's very dissolution. In English literature, perhaps the most noteworthy corporeal artist was James Joyce whose work is pervaded by Aestheticist and Paterian themes. Ulysses, he wrote more than once, was "an epic of the body" which examined its "insides" (Budger 21; Letters 146; Potts 158-59).

183 5. "The passion for transparency," declared Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, "is one of the most spectacular features of our time" (Findeli 5). It should again be emphasized that transparency not only influenced the choice of new materials and techniques but was at the center of a new Kulturpolitik. The Bauhaus, for instance, adopted the crystal as a salient symbol. Bruno Taut, for instance, envisioned (in 1920) "absolutely palpable Utopias" in which everything was incorporated into the "great crystal form" (Whyte 155,162-163). An important earlier influence was Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915). The aesthetics of transparency also permeated the Russian avant-garde (see Bowlt; Kevles 130-132). 6. Lewis did recognize that the human body is "slippery as an eel and explicit as an anatomy lesson." He was opposed to the general "back-to-the-bcxly" movement which he rightly perceived often served as a cover for a "down-to-the-soul" metaphysics. Unfortunately, Lewis marks the external (art) as masculine and classical and the internal (nature) as feminine and "romantic," and "decadent" (Men Without Art 128-129). Interestingly, he blames Greek naturalism for starting the decadent trend (104,96). 7. See Poggioli (68-77). On the relation of Vorticism and Futurism, see Perloff The Futurist Movement 162-93. 8 . In Fables o fAggression, his study of the works of the Wyndham Lewis, Frederic Jameson perceives there a certain obsession with rooms and building interiors. These spaces seem to assume an animate life of their own in a ways which remind us of Pater's insane realism. Thus, an "abject little room" stirs the memory and the feelings of pity of the eponymous character of Tarr, to the extent that he can not seem "to move an eyelid or a muscle without wounding or slighting something" (see 42-45). 9. The body, Marinetti muses, may even develop new organs: a kind of prow may emerge "from the outward swell of the breastbone" of aviators, or the human heart may be finally restricted to its distributive function, now merely "a kind of stomach for the brain" {Let's Murder 98, 99, 100).

18 4 It is most revealing what Marinetti (before World War I) selects as the sharpest Futurist image and the most "noble example of synthetic violence." He is delighted to discover that the Japanese have invented a new potent explosive which has its principal agent coal made of human bones. The corpse-fîlled Manchurian plains provide the corporeal commodities for an "absolutely Futurist commerce." Fathers, sons, fellow citizens are "vomited out of Japanese artillery." "Do we seem too brutal?" he asks. "That is because we speak under dictation from a new sun" (90,91). 10. Rousseau's vision of the transparent society is partly incarnated in H. G. Wells' Men Like GodSy in which the evolved race is ever "clear and frank and direct," without irony or insincerity. Indeed, they are telepathic (95, 58). Not only is the narrator's guide called "Crystal" but the utopia is itself described as "a bowl of crystal," the road to which is also made of glass (288, 120, 17). As we have come to expect, the human interlopers are described as germs and contagion (163-64). This convention of corporeality as virus also later structures Karel Capek's 1937 political drama. The White Plague, though its author had no idea how literally German fascism would take such metaphors of health and disease. Telepathy is a common utopian fantasy. Language and corporeal gestures are seen as burdens to be bypassed. Such a dream of pure presence is linked to ocularity in a recent popular novel. Neanderthal (1996). A community of "innocent, naive, trusting" Neanderthals (202) which have somehow survived in a remote valley possess "remote viewing," a modified telepathy in which one sees what another sees. In this "beatific existence" (200), "communication occurs in its purest form. The individual is submerged in the group" (201). "Their ethos is communal. There is no individuality, no sense of self, no /. Why should there be, how could there be, when the psyche can move out of the body, when the mind exists in the collective?" (200). There is, of course, no aggression in this "pure" and "mystic" people who have powers which we too may have once possessed (209, 223). 185 11. la the Phenomenology^ Hegel employs the same terms to critique the "beautiful soul" (which I related to the narrator of "Jenny"). The object of such a consciousness is tautological its own "perfect transparency." Feeding on itself, this world of abstraction evaporates into a "transparent purity." Hegel most likely had in mind Novalis and the Rousseau of the Reveries (see Starobinski 262). 12. It is worth recalling the response of Rousseau to the intrusion of the imperfect body into the space of ideal transparency in book seven of the Confessions, As he is about to kiss Zulietta, he notices a malformed nipple. He beats his brow and looks harder to ascertain whether this nipple does not, in fact, match the other. Seeing not the idealized image of desire but the individualized body, he feels revulsion. The beloved is now "a sort of monster, the outcast of nature, men, and love" (271). 13. It is noteworthy that the "Ancient House" (displayed in a museum), is not transparent but filled with color and music. Contrasted with the utopia's "splendid, transparent, eternal glass,” it appears to most as so much chaos (27, 28). After a visit, the narrator dreams of objects oozing with a "fatally sweet horror" (32). As Carl Proffer observes, the color yellow, in particular, is a potent symbol for freedom, the non-rational, and rebirth (see Kem 95-105). It also represents the body, especially the corpse (173, 179, 199). As 1 have argued. Pater's corporeal chromaticism opposes the sterile ideals of the diaphanous (see chapter three). 14. The mirror is, as one would expect, an instigator of self-reflection. Sartre admits that at one time he followed Rousseau in a desire for a translucent consciousness, "a pitiless clarity; it was an operating theater, hygienic, without shadows, without dark comers, without microbes under a cold light." Before his mirror, however, the obscene body returns. As Alain Bursine comments, this is a "literally insignificant return of the organic and even the inorganic, of the geologic, of the primitive, of an upsurge of the aquatic in the reflection of the face" (see Jay 280-281).

1 8 6 The ihetoric of the mirror appears most famously ia. Nausea, Roquentin sees not his face in the mirror but a "white hole," a "grey thing," an unreadable map (16, 17). His visage appears as nature minus humanity (18). Most people, the narrator states, do not allow their "abstract souls" to "be touched by the sense of a face" (120). 15. In his 1906 Preface, however, Hudson does admit that "earthly excellence can come about in no way but one, and the ending of passion and strife is the beginning of decay" (vii-viii). A few years later, he argues against both the current anxiety over degeneration and the faith in eternal progress. Whether more refîned or more crude, there will be, he writes, "the new order art, the new literature, and the new music." Revealingly, he avoids mentioning any ideas of the New Man {CollectedMachen 373, 374).

16. In Ursula Le Guin's unsettling tale, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" (in The Wind's Twelve Quarters), the very existence of a utopian society depends on the suffering of one small child brutalized in a dark cellar. Should the child be rescued, the residents are aware, the utopia would come to an end. 17. Appropriately, this very indifference to sexuali^ urges incites the desires of one of the human characters (40). Marinetti looks forward to a future in which humans are inoculated against the disease of amore. We must liberate ourselves from eroticism and rid the "friction of the epidermis" of mystery {Let's Murder 100). 18. Sartre notes that however agonizing, this invasion of mind by the body's facticiQf fascinates the reflective consciousness {Being and Nothingness 518-19). Pater's fictionalized self in "Child in the House" looks upon some sudden pain with "curious reflexion" and later puzzles over its spell over him (8: 189). 19. Scarry's work is especially perceptive on the dynamics of torture. The victim's verbal confession, she contends, only objectifies the fact that pain progressively destroys the speaking self. This loss of one's symbolic world is an object of contempt to the perpetrators. As the prisoner becomes all body, mere sentience, the torturer becomes all 187 voice, distancing himself from the flesh (35-57). As the other approaches death, the torturer gains more symbolic life. Artaud makes essentially the same point when he writes that cruelty^ is "a consciousness which gives to the exercise of every action in life its color, its cruel touch, since it must be understood that to live is always through the death of someone else” (4:96; quoted in Barber 52). 20. Lyotard sees an inextricable relation of suffering and thinking itself {The Inhuman 18-22). 21. Young calls attention to a passage in chapter five of George Eliot's Adam Bede in which the rector, the Reverend Adolphus Irwine, is described as ""large-hearted,” "epicurean, if you will, with no enthusiasm, no self-scourging sense of duty, but yet... of a suffîciently subtle moral fiber to have an unwearying tenderness for obscure and monotonous suffering" (Young 67; Eliot 66).

188 CHA PTER6

AESTHETICISM, HELLENISM AND THE FASCIST BODY POLITIC

we are growing more Greek by the day; at first, as is only fair, in concept and evaluations. , _ but one day, let us hope, also in our bodies!

Friedrich Nietzsche The Will to Power

For many Victorians, there was a model upon which an ideal state and the physiognomy of its denizens might be founded: Greek antiquity. Because the Hellenic world had historically realized their utopian visions of sweetness and light, or so it seemed to them, it might provide a pattern not only for their aesthetics, but for their ethics and even their emergent ethnologies. Too frequently, this neo-classical revival is regarded as a charming, if benighted, fascination which faded gracefully with the Edwardian age. In this chapter, I wish to call attention to the lasting political ramifications of this idealization of Hellenism and, in particular, to the valorization of the Greek body which was identified with health, strength, purity, and transparency. It was this imagined anatomy which was first mythologized as the origin of the Anglo-Saxon European and then, most horrificly in German fascism, regarded as some sort of template for a corporeal perfection which might actually be restored. In their own fashion, both the vitrified flesh of modernist utopias and the steeled bodies of the Nazi warrior state pursued the Hellenic body in its Winckelmannian reine und kiare Harmonie. After a cursory glance at the Aestheticist protest against such an idealized Hellenism, I focus specifically on the Doric style which was rapidly politicized, serving 189 first national narratives of imperial adventures and later appropriated by racial theories and eugenic programs. Nineteenth-century Dorianism became a subset within the now disreputable idea of "Aryanism," a vague theory of nation and race which appealed to myriad Victorian thinkers and artists. 1 will limit myself primarily to two texts which indicate the crucial convergence of aesthetics and racial science. First, I will look at Frederic Leighton's Aryan aesthetics as expressed in his addresses to the Royal Academy and satirically summarized by Benjamin Disraeli in his novel, Lothcdr. I will then examine the work of Robert Knox who also structures his racial science fiction around classical aesthetics. Such texts not only look back to Enlightenment treatises but ominously forecast the bio-aesthetics of fascist Germany. The last section of the chapter is devoted to the major Aestheticist figure of the fin-de-siècle, Oscar Wilde, whose empirical (and very Paterian) notion of the human body can be read as a critique of all such attempts to employ the canonical Greek body as a literal model for life.

Olympian dreams

The dominant version of Hellenism during the Victorian era is well described in some remarks by F. T. Palgrave in 1870: A certain high pleasure, as the end of all art, is uniformly kept in view; hence the last impression left is always beauty; never die grotesque, or the piquant, or the baldly natural, or die repulsively powerful, as in modem art. It is unfantastic; it is moderate; it is sane, (quoted in Turner 51) The preference for a serene, sublimated Greek art over the "naturalness" or insane realism of modem work was widespread. "The Greek," Ruskin has stated, "lived, in all things, a healthy, and, in a certain degree, a perfect life. He had no morbid or sickly feeling of any kind" (5:230). Best known, perhaps, is Matthew Arnold's idealist rendition of a Hellenism which never will or can be "sick or sorry" (3:222; also 227-228), invested as it is with an "aerial ease, clearness, and radiancy" (5:167). This embodiment of sweetness and light is

190 opposed by "Hebraism" which is self-divided, tormented with guilt and the maladies of medievalism. Beyond a nostalgia fora golden age, such declarations express a fervent hope that the Greek ideal might be somehow reborn, at least in English gentlemen. Such idealizations did not characterize all Victorian conceptions of Greek art and culture, of course. Next to these idyllic depictions there were the daricer views of Nietzsche or "evolutionary humanists" such as Pater and Gilbert Murray (see Turner 16-17). Influenced by the earlier revisionary writings of Heine, Burckhardt and Grote, the latter group perceived a farouche, even grotesquely "pagan" Greece. Like Goethe's Klassiche Walpurgisnachi, these works asserted that the conjuration of the ancient world was a phantasmagoria which could be neither recalled nor repeated. The tranquil Greece of

Lessing, Winckelmann, Palgrave, or Arnold, they insisted, is but a wishful projection, a "Sangraal" which must be recognized as such ("Coleridge's Writing's 132). The spiritualized Greek, observed Murray, has been succeeded "especially in the works of painters and poets, by an aesthetic and fleshly Greek in fine raiment, an abstract Pagan who lives to be contrasted with an equally abstract early Christian or Puritan" (xiv-xv). The Aestheticist challenge to a bright and shining Hellenism has been much worked over. Before focusing on the era's specific fascination with the Dorian mode, 1 would here call attention only to the two camps' divergent perspectives on the Greek body. In the dominant idealist view, the Greek nude became associated with the purity of vision, even a sort of transparency (Pemiola). In a revealing act of will, Arnold thrice copies in his Note- B ooks Pater's comment on Hellenism's "transparency" and "rationality" (373, 515, 521; Renaissance 181). This disincamation of beauty and the body was in no small measure due to the neo-Platonic influence of Winckelmannian aesthetics which sought to ontologize all of material existence. One sees this spiritualizing tendency reflected in Winckelmarm's preference for minimalist, diaphanous sketches of the human form, "hair breadth contours, empQ^ outlines, disembodied silhouettes, monadic unities, and central' forms drained of distinguishing characteristics" (Strafford 249). As we have seen. Pater repeatedly rejects 191 such desensiializations and the tenacious habit of abstracting the vital body. The Victorian idealist image of the Greek anatomy and its "sharp bright edge” is at base only a utopian screen, a willful blindness to the somber side o f human existence in the flesh. The "clear, perpetual outline of face and limb," whether in Winckelmann's drawings or Lavater’s physiognomic silhouettes, is "but an image of ours" {Renaissance 159, 186-87). Furthermore, the Enlightenment aesthetics of Winckelmann which so charmed the late nineteenth-century is based on a Platonic philosophy of depth or "inwardness" which was mistakenly attributed to the ancient Greeks (Strafford 251). In contrast to this belief in some preexistent and permanent essence, the Aestheticist concern was with the opaqueness of the temporal body and the imaginative nature of its representations. The Venus of Milo, for instance, is to Pater not a symbol or a type of an inexpressible transcendence beyond its own beauty. "The mind begins and ends with the finite image." The object's spiritual power and meaning "saturates and is identical with" its sensual embodiment. Greek culture may have attained a level of self-awareness but it was careful not to pass beyond its "happy limit." That is to say, they were not yet "excessively inward," a characteristic of the exaggerated idealism which would dominate Western metaphysics. Like the sympathetic art of the fifteenth-century Florentines which hesitated before the horizon-line signaled by the corpse, the Greeks evidence a "delicate pause" before the body's "perfect animal nature" {Renaissance 164,165). They desired the natural body for its own sake, not because a soul was divined through it. This contrast between the corporeal depth-model and the Aestheticist palimpsest body will be treated again in my discussion of Wilde and Gide in the final chapter. muscular antiquity For Pater's generation, "Dorian" was both a homosexual codeword (see, for example, Dellamora "Dorianism") and a reference to a tribe or aesthetic order of ancient Greece. My concern here is more with the latter, in particular with the misguided extension 192 of this linguistic, historical, or aesthetic term to an anthropological, political, and even a biological category. The paramount position of the Dorians within Greek antiquity was championed by Friedrich Schlegel at the end of the eighteenth century but the wide interest in Dorianism was almost single-handedly inaugurated by Karl Ottfried Muller's influential The History and Antiquities o f the Doric Race (translated into English in 1839). A few details are enough to give a general sense of the book. It is said that the Dorians traced their lineage to Hercules and their culture to Apollo. These two Olympian figures dominated their pantheon to the extent that, wherever possible, the Dorians exterminated the rites of Demeter and Dionysus who were felt to be totally alien to their male, militarized culture (1: 155, 179, 302). 1 Of absolute importance to their severe philosophy and politics was good order [Koopoa] (2; 1-3). Venerating the purity of their origins, traditions, and character, the

Dorians were ever vigilant against the contaminating influences of their "Asiatic" neighbors (4, 5). Particular derision was directed towards the Athenian and Ionian democracies which, due to a lack of manly virtue and to a deleterious association with foreigners, deteriorated into despotism (5, 9). Tyranny, they thought, would arise whenever and wherever Dorian principles were abandoned or undermined ( 1: 177). Delphi, for instance, once a Doric city, was inundated with Asiatic and "effeminate" visitors due to its being a popular sanctuary. Consequently, its inhabitants became "lazy, ignorant, superstitious, and sensual" (2:414). Corinth, too, degenerated into debauchery and vice after it lost its Doric foundations (409). The Dorians claimed their culture to be the most "natural," one that arose from their character, their ascetic ideals and their vaunted discipline (269, 270). It could be said that the Doric sQrle emerged from their imagined anatomy—the body, naked, unadorned, and hardened by labor (382). Ointments, dyes, and fine garments were banned, for their beauty was to be "of a severe kind, and remote from all feminine tenderness" (317-18, 280, 281). In short, the race bore "the stamp and character of themale sex" (401; original emphasis).^ 193 Pater considered Muller's tome a "passably romantic” work touched with a certain "air of coldness" (6: 199-200). In some of his comments here and elsewhere. Pater does seem to repeat Muller’s appreciation of the Dorians, but overall his position is ambivalent at best. The Doric concentration on "an order, a sanity, a proportion" Pater appreciates as a salutary "European" tendency (7:251,253,254,255). More problematically, Doric culture is said to embody Plato's design for a polity of inward order and harmony, with all the perils such an obsession suggests. The Dorians' Pythagorean philosophy of music is so pervasive, for example, that it would seem to be "mastering, remoulding, men's very bodies," in line with the demands of "the perfect mystic body.” The entire society is a finely tuned instrument responsive "to the lightest touch, of the fingers of the law" (6: 56, 72). Dedicated to a fundamental "corporate sentiment," the Dorian state employed whips and rods "as it were dignified by rules of art," and became a "land of noble slavery" (206, 207). Not a few readers have been appalled by Pater's words here and infer that he himself, at least in principle, is recoounending the introduction of such disciplinary measures into British institutions (see, for instance, Shuter 86-87; Rawson 362-3, Keefe 129-132). I would respond that his numerous other comments on the Dorian way of life temper these harsh remarks and even criticize the Dorian program. To their credit, says Pater, the Dorians display the unveiled human form without shame and their stem logic may regulate the potential excess of a undisciplined culture, even if they did repress sensuality (7: 262; 6: 24, 57). The Dorian corporeal type even became "a spectacle, aesthetically, at least very interesting, like some perfect instrament shaping to what they visibly were, the most beautiful of all people, in Greece, in the world" (218). Their very armor seemed perfectly molded to their flesh (255). But at what cost? Such a community. Pater writes, would be sadly bereft of artistic innovation and stifle "Aristophanic cries” (274), let alone the pitiful screams of a Philoctetes. Moreover, the Dorian philosophy pursued by fanatical idealists can be remorseless in the pursuit of its utopian goals (273). The proportionate, symmetrical Spartan body demands some 194 monstrously cruel "arts" (219) and their remedy for the sick body politic, to "shape men anew" (25), moves rather easily into "an orgiastic, an unintellectual, or even an immoral service" (239,238). Above all, the differentiated, accidental body must be assimilated into "the beautiful body of the State." In this rage for order, individuals become but clogs in a machine, performers in a uniform exercise, bred animals. (251,273, 238). Doric ethics, like its aesthetics, therefore, however fascinating, is repellent (279). Most instructive are the words Pater puts into the mouth of a Spartan youth responding to a query about the aims of such a state: "To the end that 1 myself may be a perfect work of art, issuing thus unto the eyes of all Greece" (232). The aestheticization of the body, that is, the imaging of the human anatomy as flawless art, as a piece of sculpture in particular, is a problem which we have seen before with Winckelmann's classicism, and then with the modernist urge to abstraction. Sculpture seems to crystallizes diaphaneite for it "unveils man in the repose of his unchanging characteristics." That is to say the "white light" of this artistic form, purged of the "bloodlike stains of action and passion," seemingly reveals not what is accidental in humanity, but its "tranquil godship" {Renaissance 170). The very secret of its power derives from this abstraction of the imperfect flesh into transparency, erasing all which would detract from the display of the "supreme types of humani^"—traces of the accidental, the pathetic, and especially the grotesque (172-175). Sculpture was highly eroticized by mainstream Victorianism, to be sure, but in this idealized sexuality, the phenomenal body was universalized and sanitized of such markers of deviation. V^nckelmann, in Pater’s view, mistakenly sought to inoculate himself from life's various contagions and turbid fevers by partaking of the serenity and repose of the sculpturesque, its edle Einfeld und stille Grosse [noble simplicity and quiet grandeur] (176, 178). In this, Winckelmann was being faithful, or so he thought, to the example of Greek luminaries who, according to Hegel, were "ideal artists themselves, cast each in one flawless mould, works of art" (175). The Utopians of Hudson and Read, too, aestheticized 195 the corruptible body into a crystal, perfectly synunetrical and lucent. As we shall see, it is Wilde's version of "Dorianism" which finally unveils the nightmare condition of being an object of art. Returning to the Dorians, we note how they tended to treat the body as a kind of sculpture. While the daring, dexterous and "centrifugal"^ arts of Athens produced chaotic, even monstrous representations—"the hand developing hideously into a hundred hands, or heads" (6: 104)—Doric art stripped, simplified, and petrified the body. In their aesthetic economy, "everything discordant or useless was pruned off with an unsparing hand" (Muller, 2:400). Intent on refashioning the asymmetrical, fluid body into an ordered wodc of art, says Pater, the Lacedaemonians cut and carved their manly youth like diamonds (6:

266). As we shall see, this armorization of the male exterior, which parallels the fascist body elaborated by Klaus Theweleit in his Male Fantasies{\9TT)y is a hysterical defense against the chthonic interior cavi^ projected as feminine. In Nietzsche's perceptive phrase, the Apollonian mode, "simple, transparent, and beautiful," is a "perpetual military encampment" screening the terrible knowledge of the Dionysian abyss {The Birth of Tragedy 59,35). That is to say, such an aestheticization of the organic attempts to preempt nature's laborious and flawed, even grotesque, handiwork. Like Sebastian van Storck, the Dorians would hasten the restoration of "equilibrium" through corporeal effacement. Like the Futurists-Vorticists, they would prune the lymphatic flesh into a reassuring artifice. Like Read's Utopians, they would be diaphanous crystals before the onslaught of corruption. As Pater puts it, time as such is itself a kind of artist, trimming pleasantly for us what survives of the rude world of the past. Now Plato's method would promote or anticipate the work of time in that matter of vulgarities. (6:274) The Aestheticist position does not follow this "Platonist" Plato of being, but the

"art-for-art's-sake" Plato Pater treated in his tome, and, most of all, the Heraclitean philosophy of becoming manifest in evolutionary theory, according to which social institutions, races, laws, and the monuments of art, all "have their origins and end, are 196 themselves ripples only on the great river of organic life”^ ((275; 21). Thus, the uto^an goal of establishing a totally regulated City of the Perfect is doomed not only to failure but to tragedy. Despite his admiration of Plato, therefore. Pater himself does not really know what to make of The Republic with its questionable goals o f a static uniQr which will arrive when the flesh of the elite rulers are again spun of gold. He passes along Plato's rhetorical gesture; "Can you suggest a way of getting them to believe this m ythosl" (248). He can only conclude that this woric, so full of "paradox and hazardous theory," must be some kind of humorous exercise (266). But what an odd jeu du corps it is!^ Before taking up the concept of Aryanism which easily enfolded within itself discussions of Dorianism, it is important to émphasize how strong was the Paterian resistance to all such utopian schemes. He distrusted those who envisioned societies perfected by progress as much as those who would restore some primal Rousseauist community. For him, the positing of an idealized alphapoint is as illicit as projecting a chiliastic horizon. Human history is neither linear nor cyclical, neither teleological nor devolutionary, but is structured by transition, accident and suddenly resurgent "survivals."

It is hopelessly composite, a palimpsest of heredity and freedom, history and myth, life and death. In the nineteenth century, cultural history was often likened to a human life span with antiquity imaged as a (lost) childhood. The Paterian response is that it is as impossible to "come face to face" with a past age as it is to return to being a child or to enter again into the womb and be reborn. Under our "mixed light," we can only throw it into relief through the sympathetic imagination, what Vico called fantasia. "Such an attitude towards Greece, aspiring to but never actually reaching its way of conceiving life, is what is possible for art"

("Aesthetic Poetry," 196). The calamitous effects of stepping across time or trying to regress to a cultural "childhood" is treated in a number of Pater's texts. In "Denys L'Auxerrois," the arrival of the eponymous character, a pagan god and melancholic revenant, spurs new organisms but 197 also inaugurates a cancerous growtk of nature. The result is a Garden of Eden but one wild and promiscuous to the point of degeneration (4: 62, 63, 66). Thought first to be an Apollonian figure of light and healing, Denys announces the contagions of the common flesh. (He has, for instance, a fondness for "oddly grown or even misshapen, yet potentially happy, children”; 62). Disinterring the remains of his mother’s body, he puts

them into "a hollow space prepared secretly within the grave of another." Far from transparent, the world is to him "curdled to the centre" (74). Noteworthy too is "Bnerald Uthwart" which was published about the same time as Pater’s "Lacedaemon" (the latter incorporated into Plato and Platonism). Billie Inman, for one, points out how the tale allegorizes the contemporary debate between heredity and environment, and the ill-suitedness of Dorianism to modem life ("John ’Dorian’ Gray" 91, 102). As a boy. Emerald is soft and sensuous and is likened to a blank slate awaiting inscription. Unfortunately, subjection to an unsparingly severe education encourages his excessive desire to conform (8:204; see Shuter 11-12), and this submissiveness leads him

to a tragic fate. While his "unconscious simplicity" seemed to promise a new Apollo, bright and hard (220,222), he never does attain the Dorian ideal which. Pater seems to suggest, can never, or perhaps should never, be realized (Inman 91). Emerald’s very body resisted incorporation into some perfectly malleable Platonic uni^. Emerald’s corpse first appears to a pathologist as a model of physiology, a Winckelmannian sculpture in the "extreme

purity of the outlines." But the postmortem probing reveals implacable human imperfections—"cardiac derangement" and an "imaginative temper in excess" (8: 245), not unlike Sebastian van Storck's inherited sensibility, an over-delicate nature which frustrated his hopes to be a transparent cipher (4: 112, 115). The human predicament is perhaps

suggested by the very name of Pater’s protagonist. Emerald Uthwart. The desire to be an adamant, translucent stone is inevitably thwarted by the soft geometries of the organic body.

198 Greek-Aryan-Pfordic As mentioned earlier, Hellenism was not merely an aesthetic model but also, especially by the Edwardian years, an ethical, social, and even biological ideal to be imitated. R. W. Livingstone's The Greek Genius and Its Meaning to Us (1912), for instance, illustrates such an imbrication of aspects. Particularly revealing is his repeated defense of Greek antiquity against the pernicious interpretations of Aestheticist studies. The Greeks, robust and moral, he writes, were not interested in "subtler maladies, living in the poisonous air of its sick-rooms or in a delicate odour of decay " (163; the quoted phrase is Pater's). Neither aesthetes nor symbolists who fixated on the mysterious, they were sincere, direct and lucid. Reading their literature, therefore, we look "at a picture which is a faithful portrait; a gazing in a crystal that reveals life not cloudily or confusedly, but with the colour exact and the lines unblurred” (43). While modems create morbid works suitable for "invalids or aging persons," the Greeks reflect a humanity perfectly healthy, sane and "normal" (180, 171, 170). In their art, if you "look straight at Man, you see that he is at bottom not like the Cuchulain of Mr. Yeats, or the Salome of Wilde, but—a human being." Sophocles could no more pen a Salome, it is said, than Pheidias sculpt a deformed hunchback (180, 168). Livingstone's foray into anthropology (and politics) is tame compared to other contemporary texts. One writer, for instance, even claimed that these ancient artists highlighted for us specific imitable "idealist" variations in human evolution and "unless the English-speaking races return in some measure to the artistic ideals of Greece, they are in the long run doomed" (quoted Turner Greek Heritage 33-4, 102). Even these isolated remarks begin to suggest the potential for disaster when the quaint identiEcation of the fields of Eton and the plains of Marathon is extended into social policy and national politics. In hindsight, it seems almost inevitable that the increasingly idealized notions of Hellenism would become entangled with the reams of ethnological studies of "race," a term then used in confusing and self-contradictory ways.^ My specific interest here is with how 199 the application of (fanciful) Hellenistic standards of beauty to the human body in the eighteenth century was fused in the following centuries with Aryan racial anthropolo^es to produce at last the fascist Greco-Prussian body. The Indo-European Aryans, according to Victorian philologists and ethnologists, conquered and absorbed the original "Pelasgic" peoples, eventually forming the Dorian and Ionian Greeks of antiquity. "Aryan" became a racial portmanteau including a variety of peoples and language, but for many northern Europeans, it more narrowly came to signify "Saxon," "Teutonic," and "Nordic." The convoluted arguments for the racial connection of ancient Greeks and modem Anglo-Saxons is beyond the scope of this work. The point to be stressed is that many European nations, including the British, sought to authenticate their cultures by establishing physical ("racial”) links to the glory that was Greece. The theory of Aryanism, at once mystic and "scientific," seemed to offer an avenue.^ By the 1840s, Britain, like the rest of Europe, witnessed a vibrant pro-Germanism in which the Teutons were seen, implicitly or explicitly, as a superior race which re­ animated Western traditions. For example, Thomas Arnold, the famous Headmaster of Rugby, greatly admired the Teutons for their uncontaminated bloodlines and their admirable sense of morality, a rather common belief which derived in part from a misprision of the Germania of Tacitus (Poliakov Aryanism 231; History o f Anti-Semitism 126). Charles Kingsley was another vocal Germanophile who lauded their purity and collective strength. In the preface to Hypatia (1853), for instance, he observes that the invasions of the Roman empire by the Germanic tribes brought a healthy discipline and a needed renewal of the race. With their "bodies untainted by hereditary effeminacy,” they recomposed the "mangles limbs of the Old World" (xii, xiii). A goldenhaired character in his The Roman and the Teuton (1891) declares: "I am a gentleman who has a gens,' a Stamm, a pedigree, and I know from whom I spring .... I am a son of the Gods. The blood of the Asas is in my veins" (49).

200 As did his father, Matthew Arnold admired the moral sense of the German nation, but he was more wary of the Teutonomaniacs” (see Faver^ 14). The younger Arnold's frequent analyses of national characteristics are highly instructive as they display the double focus which is my interest: the simultaneous search for racial foundations for specific cultures and the wish to establish afiliation between one's race and ancient Greece. Numerous tracts of the nineteentb century had already drawn a distinction between Celtic (Romano-Gaulic) andTeutonic (Saxon-Nordic). Against the grain of many scholars, including his own father, Arnold assigned to the Celts qualities like "intelligence" and "lucidity," traits which he saw lacking in the Teutons. Moreover, these characteristics were precisely those apparently perfected in the Hellenes. But there was an impediment in the British reappropriation of their Hellenic heritage: the Semitic. Here Arnold followed the lead of Ernest Renan, Alphonse Pictet, among others and became entangled in racial theories as questionable as they were common.^ For Arnold, to be fair, both "Hellenism" and "Hebraism" (the ethical and religious sense instilled in the English through Protestantism) are required for an advanced Western culture. Nevertheless, he expresses confidence in the ability of ethnological sciences to declare the "true natural groupings" of humanity, and in particular the "native diversity" between the Indo-European (read Aryan) and the Semitic (3: 300, 301). We have, he writes, vainly tried to make ourselves Semitic when "Nature has made us Indo-European." Therefore, science must specify the relevant "natural laws" and make visible the instincts and forces of Hellenism already present within the British people (369). Through the right application of scientific principles, we might "re unite ourselves with our better mind" which, once ascertained, must be preserved through "a law of measure and control" (386). Through these scientific social policies, the Anglo-Saxon race might then embody Hellenic lucidity and, presumably, "the consciousness of the divine, which, according to universal tradition, the Greeks brou^t with them as a common inheritance from the seat of the Aryan

201 races to Greece" {Note-books 84; original emphases). Such isolated statements begin to suggest how Arnold's notions of "Hellenism"^ and "Indo-Europeanism" overlap with his less mentioned views on Aryanism per se (see also Hersey 66-69). Arnold at least claimed that the "Semitic" was the ethical equal of the "Hellenic," but the Judeo-Christian aura which still clung to his Hebraism was soon lost within increasingly radical aesthetic, historical, and eugenic tracts which idolized the Aryans. The ideal for many Victorian adherents of racial anthropology was not just a recuperation of the Greek spirit and its "better mind," but a reshaping of the actual body upon the Procrustean bed of a fantasized antique anatomy. Enlightenment science had annexed aesthetic canons by means of which it could establish human types, a move which came to define modem racism. The individual body supposedly indicated a specific racial type, a type which in turn was determined by a subjective artistic ideal (Mosse Final Solution 2, 17-34). For European race theoreticians, including the true founder of modem anthropology, Johann Blumenbach, the ideal was Greek sculpture, against which even the Causcasian race, considered the most beautiful of modem peoples, fell short. As my first illustration of this new Aryan-Heilenic poetics of the body, 1 tum to the aesthetics of the eminent Victorian, Sir Frederic Leighton, Baron of Stretton. As president of the Royal Academy, Leighton delivered a series of addresses to its students (beginning in 1879). He commences the third lecture (December 10,1883) by recognizing the dangers of overgeneralizing about the "occult Chemistry of Nature" (68, 86) but forges ahead undaunted. Influenced by his reading of the race theories of Artur de Gobineau and the writings of F. Max Muller, Leighton provides a sketch of Aryan history (including the usual notions about the lack of artistic impulse in the Jews) (78). Race, he states, is the most important factor in creative work, followed by social environment and physical conditions (69). The spirituality^ one sees in the ancient Greeks is only partly Aryan but its physicality is wholly Aryan, a trait wonderfully mirrored in its sculpture (92). The only later echo of this ideal balance, he tells his audience, is to be found in the daughters of 202 another Aryan race—"your own" (89). It would seem that in life as in art, this renowned painter and sculptor, envisioned a collection of bodies that were "Polykleiten, Praxitelean, Pheidian" (Hersey 72).® Leighton's Aryan aesthetics is caricatured in Benjamin Disraeli's highly popular Lorhatr (1870). This rather allegorical novel is a kind of Bildungsrormn in which the protagonist of the title works his way through many doctrines, including Aryanism whose textual spokesman is the artist Gaston Phoebus (his surname alluding to the "solar hero" analyzed by F. Max Muller). According to Phoebus/Leighton, genuine aesthetic principles are "ARYAN principles." The finest art will be in a land inhabited by a firstrate race, and where the laws, the manners, the customs, are calculated to maintain the health and beauty of a firstrate race. In a greater or lesser degree, these conditions obtained from the age of Pericles to the age of Hadrian in pure Aryan communities, but Semitism has destroyed art; it taught man to despise his own body, and the essence of art is to honour the human frame. (106) The Aryan future, then, is dependent on the restoration of the ancient past. Moreover, any return of the golden age would necessitate a return to an aesthetics and ethics based not so much on the Greek spirit as much as on the (literally restored) Hellenic body. Phoebus faults Lothair for his excessive mental introspection and psychologizing. Rather than seeing things as they are, the young man still suffers from "Semitic hallucinations" (296): "To a man who observes, life is as different as the existence of a dreaming psychologist is to that of the animals of the field." Excessive reflection is but a contagion, a flawed secretion of the brain (308). The satisfaction of human desire requires friction, an incurable otherness, of course, but the extreme lucidity of Aryanism would purge such maladies. Phoebus calls for a life of pleasure, but it is definitely not the epicureanism of Aestheticism which is ever infected with a melancholic awareness of self-alienation and flnitude. An Aryan race, he comments, would act "unconsciously" (297). Consequently, books, inducements to

203 reflect, to imagine and thus to demythologize, are to be banned. In this body culture, anything the written word can teach can be had more immediately and permanently by corporeal attributes; voice, hand, and eye. The essence of education is the education of the body. Beauty and health are the chief sources of happiness. Men should live in the air; then exercises should be regular, varied, scientific. He should develop and completely master the whole muscular system. ( 107) Only through a new body culture under state ministry can a new artistic and societal renaissance be inaugurated. In addition, the fashioning of the New Man will take a strong will and extreme measures. Disraeli's satire of current ethnologies and eugenics deserves to be quoted at length. Such a strong and perfect type as the original Aryan must be yet abundant among the millions, and may be developed. But for this, you want great changes in your laws. It is the first duty of a state to attend to the frame and health of the subject. The Spartans understood this. They permitted no marriage to probable consequences of which might be a feeble progeny; they even took measures to secure vigorous ones. The Romans drowned the doomed the deformed to immediate destruction. The union of races concerns the welfare of the commonwealth much too nearly to be entrusted to individual arrangement. The fate of a nation will ultimately depend upon the a strength and health of the population Laws should be passed to secure all this, and some day they will be. But nothing can be done until the Aryan races are extricated from Semitism. (108) Near the books conclusion, a Syrian called "Paraclete" reveals to the reader Disraeli's position and restores the Araoldian dictum that both poles of the binarism is required if cultural anarchy is to be prevented. Aryan and Semite, states the Syrian, are of the same blood and origins. Humanity's best hope for an authentic wisdom lies in the fusion of Hellene and Hebrew (316). My other example of the era's bio-aesthetics inherited from Enlightenment neo- classicism is the historically important The Races o fMen (1850) written by Robert Knox, a Scottish anatomist who was earlier implicated in the Burite and Hare body-stealing scandal. "Race is everything," he typically asserts, "the keystone to all human actions and human destinies" (14, 234). But his text also provides a clear illustration of the ever-growing collocation of art and anthropology. While Leighton looked to race to establish his artistic 204 prejudices, Knox employs aesthetic preferences to authenticate his racial bias. Interestingly enough, his work is at least in part a retort to "the romances of Disraeli" (140) who had excessively praised the Jewish race in his fiction.^ At one point, before going off to Holland to study the features of the Jewish face, Knox rushes to the British Museum in order to check some Coptic busts he can use as comparisons (135-36). But it is in the book's concluding chapter that the aesthetic structure of what he calls his "transcendental anatomy" discloses itself. The main concern of Knox's project is with the physiological history of the "Saxons" (he prefers "Scandinavians") who are about to dominate the earth (15). All races, however, including this one, are mixed and as such are doomed to disappear since hybridity works at cross purposes with immutable natural laws which relentlessly seek integrity and perfection (235). (He does not consider the ominous next logical step of seeking to purify one's own race). The crucial last passages of the book relate nature's drive towards a unified perfection to the one racial community to date which has approached this perfection: the Greeks of antiquity. Although they, too, were contaminated through miscegenation, they did approximate, and at times equal, the physical splendor of their art (268). Knox suddenly and revealingly swerves into an extended discussion of the centrality of exterior form in the appreciation of beauty. The interior, he states, is thankfully concealed by nature as she strives for perfection. Beauty resides in the exterior, "all within is frightful and appalling to human sense—never beautiful, but the reverse, always horrible"

(277): ... that dreaded interior, sure emblem of dissolution and death. It is the feeling of dissolution, of annihilation, which instantly seizes unconsciously on the mind of the spectator: an unknown dread of a something which must happen to him, although he were never told it—a dread of dissolution, that most dreaded of all events" (278)

205 By this concealment, nature can call forth "that other grand feeling of the soul—the contemplation of eternal ever-reviving, ever-returning youth—the youth of the universe" (278). His justification for this digression gets to the heart of the m atter the introduction of the disquisition into a theory of the beautiful was forced upon me by the necessi^ of connecting the history of race with the perfect; to trace to it the laws of formation, leading to the perfect. The laws of nature order and ultimately symmetrize the messy variegation of the organic, including the de formed inferior races (298). The ideal physiognomy is one which is "perfected"—by which Know clearly means "aestheticized"—in short, exquisitely proportioned according to the Western classical canon of beauty. The textual description of nature's regularizing forces is reminiscent of the "supreme types" which Pater saw as the aim of Greek artists. Their sculpture, it is stated in The Renaissance, finds the secret of its power in presenting these types, in their broad, central, incisive lines. This it effects not by accumulation of detail, but by abstracting from it. All that is accidental, all that distracts the simple effect upon us of the commonness of the world, it gradually purges away. (170,172) Knox states: "The perfect type of man was discovered by the ancient sculptors of Greece.. . . Towards this, nature constantly tends” (28; also 270). The end of humanity, its final perfection, is apparently the crystal state of rest enjoyed by beautiful statues. In fact, Knox is following the tradition laid down in the previous century. Peter Camper, like Charles White after him, had published anthropological treatises which included tables tracing the "ascent" of humankind from ape to homo europaeus who represents the last stage before the true ideal: the Greek statue (see Gould Flamingo Smile 287; Mosse Final Solution Illustration 1). [Figure 8] the body gives pause In his analysis of the epochal Western tum to abstraction, Worringer states that the modem European distinguishes himself from "Gothic man. Ancient Oriental man, primeval American man" by returning to his roots, the fundamental "psychic stmctures" of the 206 classical age (123). As the subtext of his treatise makes clear, the traces of Hellenism within Western modernism were not simply aesthetic but also psychic, even somatic. What Worringer neatly sidesteps is the established tradition of consciously elevating the imagined anatomy of Greek art into the ideal type. As I have emphasized, the work of some early modernists, however anti-classical in appearance, partook of a common metaphysics of transparency, a phenomenology which eviscerated the organic body. Such bloodless anatomical fantasies, once politicized, helped prepare the ground for the inhuman body fetishized by German fascism. The art of the Third Reich did make use of modernist devices (Taylor and van der Will 128 f) but the dominant mode was a rather coarse Dorianism which was, as its chief architect Albert Speer admitted, a classicism "multiplied, altered, exaggerated and sometimes distorted to the point of ludicrousness” (42,69). As far back as the eighteenth- century, Germany had looked to ancient Greece to help forge its national identity (Vertinsky 333) but a racial as well as a cultural bond between Greek and German was increasingly asserted. Nineteenth-century theories of Aryanism and the new social biologies provided the Western valorization of the aesthetic Greek nudes with the sanctions of science. Then, in twentieth century Germany, there arose a pervasive cultural appeal to the body, both as literal fact and as metaphor. The gymnastic movement, for example, spearheaded by Friedrich Ludwig Jahn early in the previous century, gained further ground (Mosse Image of Man 40-55) and a utopian nudism, known as FreikorperkuUur [open-air or bare body culture], was promoted by both socialists on the political left and racial hygienists on the right. Like the well-established "rational racism" (Poliakov 145), this idealized physicality appealed for its authority to current anthropology but also to Greek antiquity. As a main journal. Die Schoneit, stated, the aim was to manifest the "Greek spirit in a new German manner" (Tay 1er and van der Will 30; generally 14-52). This rediscovery of the human body in Germany merged the Winckelmannian

2 0 7 ideal, now part of middle-class respectability, with a nostalgia for the "natural" body. The classical body, stripped of eroticism, became the transparent body of nationalist ideology. Hitler's Mein Kampf expresses this fantasized corporeality. The text's extensive discussion of education reform is uncannily close to Disraeli's caricature of Leighton. The German gymnasium. Hitler writes, by "sinning against the body" is a mockery of the Greek model. If the intelligentsia is degenerated by intellectual learning, it becomes susceptible to racial contamination and Kulturboischewisnuts (253). It is not the function of the folkish state "to breed a colony of peaceful aesthetes and physical degenerates " (410). It is not dedicated to the "inoculation of mere knowledge, but to the breeding of absolutely healthy bodies," "tough as leather, and hard as Krupp steel" (408, 543). The phrase by Juvenal so admired by Kingsleyan Victorians, mens sana in corpore sano, is now part of an unbalanced logic; A decayed body is not made the least aesthetic by a brilliant mind What makes the Greek ideal of beauty a model is the wonderful combination of the most magnificent physical beauty with brilliant mind and noblest soul The mind, too, if it is healthy, will as a rule and in the long run dwell only in the healthy body. ( 406; original emphases) The shining mind to be glimpsed in the ideal physique is not, of course, the intractable, diseased intellect of the individual nor Arnold's "consciousness of the divine" but the "typical," corporate mind. Like the "noble soul," it reflects the sublime body of the state—the ascetic "mystic body" Pater saw and rejected in Dorianism. It is in this context that one must understand the declaration of an SS periodical that Nordic nakedness "can only be convincing when it makes transparent the revelation of something divine" (Taylor and van der Will 42-43). How hypnotic this notion of the collective soul really was is seen in some comments by Carl Jung in 1934 concerning the "Aryan unconscious." Unlike the overly-conscious Jewish race, he writes, Aryans possess the germ of an "unheard of tension and energy" which National Socialism is more suited to perceive than Freudian (Jewish) therapies (Poliakiv 373-4 n 137). Aesthetic productions are to assist with this 206 revelation of the cultural soul. Thus, as Hitler observes, Greek-Nordic art does not express any subjective "inner experience" (merely a "melancholy fashion"), but the racial will. "To be German, " he liked to repeat, "is to be clear" and the new age is one of utmost claii^ and logic ((Baynes 1:567,587). By this he means that the New Man can now see the true state of things, but the metaphor also suggests the transparency of the new cultural body since nature has revealed its end "in all its lapidary simplicity" (531). He declares: The sculptors of classical antiquity, who endowed the human body with form of wonderful beauty, has given to the whole world beyond his description an idea of what according to later, so-called exact scientific research is correct, that is to say, is real. (Lehmann-Haupt 97) If the times were, as one Reich spokesman put it, "once more able to be Greek" (see Adams 177), it was because the folkish state could overcome the morbid self­ reflections, effeminate passons and instinctual desires of Romantic decadent individualism. The lucent Greek or Germanic heroes, Alfred Rosenberg proclaimed in his wildly popular The Myth o f the Twentieth Century (1930) adhere to "the law of the father" (15). Since >\Tnckelmann, there was a gaze turned toward the light and "the intelligible." The other—romantic—current was fed by the secondary movements indicated at the end of the Iliad by the feast of the dead It was fortified by the chthonian gods, established against the Olympian Zeus. Speaking of death and its enigmas, it venerated the mother- goddesses, the first among them Demeter, and it finally blossomed in the god of the dead—Dionysos romanticism shuddered with adoration and, as always darker veils were placed before the sky- god's radiant face, it plunged ever more deeply into the instinctive, die unformed, the demonical, the sexual, the ecstatic, the chthonian— into the cult of the Mother. ( 12-13) It bears mentioning that Rosenberg does not recommend blindly copying the heliotropic body of Winckelmannian aesthetics. His book makes it very clear that there is one defining difference between the classical body of Greece imagined by the Enlightenment and the post-Darwinian German incarnation. Winckelmann, as well as Kant and Schiller, were universalists who lacked the "lucid Nordic racial consciousness" (170), failing to understand that all aesthetics must be based on "specific blood" (65). Since the path of art thus lies through nature, the "inner radiance" or "tensions" (recall Jung's words) must 209 be "ruthlessly" embodied (213). The Aryan sun myth theorized by Max Muller has become in Rosenberg a literal "law of nature and biology" (77). One need not—indeed, cannot— overcome nature. Mein Kampfxs straightforward on this: one can but lift one comer of nature's "immense gigantic veil of eternal riddles and secrets." With a rudimentary knowledge of her immutable laws, however, one can conquer those who do not (287). the ghost within the stone The imagined anatomy of fascist classicism was nowhere more on display than in its sculptures, the regime’s preferred art form, for here the healthy, flawless body of Nazism could be fully celebrated. In the work of its chief sculptor, Amo Beker, for example, the conventional Greek nude is given exaggerated muscle, size, and proportion imtil it is transparently the Nordic type (for illustrations, see Adam 142, 152-55, 222-23, 284). The contrast between the two views of classicism, fascist and Aestheticist, is exemplified by their respective views on a specific work: the famed bronze of a discus thrower by Myron. [Figure 9] Leni Riefenstal's Olympia—Feast o f Nations, the propagandistic film of the 1936 Berlin Olympiad, begins with superimpositions of images of Greek statuary and naked German athletes. Among the dramatic sequences is one of Myron’s Discobolus fading into a loinclothed discus thrower (Erwin Huber). This sculpture, celebrated by Pliny and Quintilian, was intensely admired by Hitler who eventually purchased it for the nation in 1938. (It was returned to Italy a decade later). It seemed to perfectly embody the Greek- Nordic athlete: muscled exterior which can barely contain the furor teutonicus within. Unfazed by the Zeitgeist, such a work expresses the eternal Volk and modem Germany’s "natural kinship" with Aryan antiquity (Hitler478). In ’The Age of Athletic Prizemen," Pater typically asserts at once that Greek art, even sculpture, is touched by the gothic or romantic spirit which was so castigated by Rosenberg. As is his wont, the Victorian critic is fascinated by art which seems to him to 210 explore this mixed condition and reflect certain transition points within cultural history. The marbles of Aegina, for instance, hint at but do not yet fully express the awareness of the body's animali^ (7:269-70). James Eli Adams, in his discussion of this essay, notes three narrative pauses which interest Paten that between two physical motions, that between youth and maturity, and Greek culture's tense balance between self-consciousness and anti­ self-consciousness (Dandies 179). I would like to take up the full import of the second two, for, it seems to me, these imply the uncanny zone between (spiritual) self and (physical) body, between culture (sublimation) and the Thing (the negative sublime). We see again the disturbing yet pitiful site of the Paterian-Rossettian horizon-line before which art hesitates in fascination. In one sculpture in the British Museum, Pater sees a delicately muscled youth, though long dead, still "in motion,” an "active soul, or permanent thought, of him, as he most liked to be" (7:272). The interrupted step which is depicted is a metonymy for the aesthetic halt to the body's inevitable decay. But it is Myron's Discobolus with its "contagious pleasantness" (281) that Pater singles out for an in-depth analysis. Even if during his trip to Italy in 1882 Pater saw another version (unearthed a century earlier), he certainly knew of the copy in the British Museum (Donoghue 170). What intrigues him most about the work is its balance of motion and rest, inner and outer. At first, his comments seem to confirm the Aryan declarations of Phoebus/Leighton about the disposability of the mind in Aryan culture. The flgures here, he writes, remind us of "young animals, delighting in natural motion." The sculptor means to assign value not to expression of mind, in any antagonism to, or invasion of, the body; to mind as anything more than a function of the body, whose healthful balance of unction it may so easily perturb;—to disavow that insidious enemy of the fairness of the bodily soul as such. (286) It is as if some cooling wind had "congealed the metal, or the living youth, fîxed him imperishably in that moment of rest" between the motions. This exemplary work of art is "a thing to be looked at rather than to think about" (287, 288), embodying the "unspoiled

211 body of youth" at that "perfect, because unconscious, point of good fortune, as it moves or rests just there for a moment, between the animal and spiritual worlds" (288). What is represented is "the type, the rectified essence," "the essential moment" of the youth's exercise of their natural powers (289-90). Note the similarities to the comments of Oswald Spengler in The Decline o f the West according to which the Greek art of sculpture prefers motives of brief, briefest, pause between two movements, the last moment Myron's athlete throws the discus — devoid equally of duration and direction, disengaged from future and from past. TheDiscobolus, he says, renders only external form, "without relation of any sort to the inner organs, let alone any soul ." Such a piece reflects Greek life which was lived "ahistorically, somatically" (1:263,265,264). But Pater's appreciation is not this Nordic-Germanic adulation of Polykleites' canonical body. One work of art can project different, even contrary, anatomies. Pater perceives in these sculptures a strong impression of romanticism which dims the brilliance of any Apollonian light. He repeats the image in his description of one about to hurl his

discus in "Apollo in Picardy," his gothic version of the legend of Apollo and Hyacinth written about the same time as the critical essay. The athlete disrobes and crouches, his whole body in that moment of rest, full of the circular motion he is about to commit to it, he seemed—beautiful pale spectre—to shine from within with a light of his own, like that of the glowworm in the thicket, or the dead and rotten roots of the old trees. The light that shines within the seemingly perfect athletic body is not the gleam of idealism but the ghostly glow of corruption. The disc which "seems to bum" as it flies, slices through the face of the beautiful youth (8:167,168). According to Pater, statues do exemplify an eternal type: "Assuredly they have no maladies of soul anymore than of the body." Yet, however "unconscious," there emerges for the Aestheticist critic a sense of real physical pain and "capacity for thought, of painful thought, in them, as they seem to be aware wistfully" (7:283,297). Aestheticist criticism 212 allows what Rosenberg and Spengler would purge: a wistful awareness of temporality and the chthonian abyss. The marble piece is arrested in its eternal hiatus, but their "perfection" is ultimately incompatible with corporeality or consciousness. Pater, like some melancholic Condillac, assigns the mindless mass of stone thoughts not only of its own perfection but also of pain. In a Medusan reversal, la maladie de la pensée organicizes the marble. To borrow Bakhtin's words, the grotesque body which "fecundates and is fecundated, that gives birth and is bom, devours and is devoured, drinks, defecates, is sick and dying" breaks the boundaries of the classically imagined body {Rabelais 3 19). While in the fascist imaginary, the sculpted classical body is hardened and sealed. Pater's critical appreciation adds a line which cracks the smooth surface of the idealist images of Lessing, Winckelmann, or Beker: "look into, look at the center of, the blossomlike cavity of the opened mouth" (288). This opening is a non-reflective fault or cleavage in our imagined anatomy, a site of interchange between inside and outside which is one in a list of bodily borders which mark the limits of our naturalizing signs (e.g. the aural aperture, slit of the eye, nostrils, vagina, tip of the penis, anus) (Lacan E&its 314-315). The classical body, whether in Victorian idealism or racial aesthetics, did not, needless to say, go unchallenged. Before examining the important response of Oscar Wilde, 1 would call attention to Thomas Mann's powerful critique in Death in Venice. The protagonist, Gaston von Aschenbach, is representative of the modem European soul (10) who studies the flattened surface of life, renouncing any "sympathy with the abyss. " That is to say, his Apollonian woridview asserts the "purity, symmetry, and simplicity" of life, defying bodily pain and passion ( 17,15). Viewing life through Hellenic eyes, he envisions Tadzio, the male object of his admiration, as "the noblest moment of Greek sculpture," with its "pure and godlike serenity” (30-31). Like Pater's Discobolus, the youth seems to repose in a perfection close to the perfection of nothingness (36). He bears a head of "&os.

213 with the yellowish bloom of Parian maifole” and is likened to Hyacinth and Narcissus (35, 56, 58). He seems nothing less than an emergent pagan god, conjuring the very birth of forms (39). His armpits are as smooth as a statue's, smooth as the glistening hollows behind the knees, where the blue networks of veins suggested that the body was formed of some stuff more transparent than mere flesh beauty's very essence; form as divine thought, the single and pure perfection which resides in the mind. (50) Like Hegel's Beautiful Soul, like Sebastian von Storck, like the utopian crystallites, Aschenbach equates the world with his own thoughts, its universal laws with the powers of his individual mind. His awakened desire, however, brings a "monstrous sweetness" and a "shuddering curiosity" (74). Just as Pater expresses a special interest in the curious "blossomlike cavity" of the mouth of the Discobolus which is a gateway to the chthonic interior, Aschenbach notes that the classical body of Tadzio is marred by imperfect teeth, rather jagged and bluish, without a healthy glaze, and of that peculiar brittle transparency which the teeth of chlorotic people often show. He is delicate, he is sickly," (40) Like the gothic revenants of Heine or Pater, the young man brings with him the disease of self-alienation, violent dreams, and eventually death in his role as a "pale and lovely Summoner" (83). Aschenbach, the "disciplined warrior" who had eariier ridiculed an aging dandy (21-22), can exalt in the senses at last but only by descending into the harrowing abyss of being. As we well know, the aesthetic classical body did not die in Aschenbach's Venice, or in Rhodenbach's Bruges, or in the modernist turn towards abstraction but was reshaped and galvanized in the forge of Aryan fantasies and racist nationalism. At the opening of the Haus der Deutsches Kunst in 1937, Hitler declared that the times were creating a "new type of human being," a Qrpe modeled on classical forms. Never was mankind closer than now to AntiquiQr in its appearances and its sensibilities. Sport contests and competitions are hardening millions of youthful bodies, displaying them to us more and more in a form and temper that they have neither manifested nor been thought to possess for perhaps a thousand years. (Clark 67) 214 The aesthetic anatomy of classicism that the Aestheticists recognized as a subjective projection or illusion, the fascist utopia sought to materialize in Aryan bodies. This goal was one, perhaps the central, aspect of a wider naturalization of myth. At the 1935 Nuremberg rally, dozens of searchlights were used to form the luminous walls of a "crystal palace." The architect, Albert Speer, was later taken aback when he realized that such Nazi ritual and rhetoric were "meant to be taken literally” {Spandau Diaries 428, 262; my emphasis). 1 turn now to Wilde's The Picture o f Dorian Gray which is a potent critique of this naturalization of signs, in particular the utopian dream of extending the presumed perfection of art into the human body. In the final chapter, I will then contrast Wilde's poetics of the body with that of the decadent-tumed-modemist, Andre Gide. We can then be in a better position to reread Walter Benjamin's much-repeated contention that the logical consummation of art-for-art's-sake is fascism and that fascism can be defined as the aestheticization of politics. life is art, life as art In Wilde's well-known novel, Basil Hallward's portrait of Dorian Gray assumes the sitter's corporeality. The other half of the Faustian exchange, however, is that Dorian himself becomes a work of art. Lord Heruy Wotton, like the painter Basil Hallward, revels in artistic "idolatry," describing Dorian as an Adonis of ivory and gold displaying a Winckelmannian harmony (94, 165, 24). The handsome youth possesses the "air of a young Greek martyr" and the beauty of "old Greek marbles " (28, 41). His very person "took the place of and assumed the office of art; was indeed . . . a real work of art" (55). Dorian himself is very much aware that he is being viewed as little more than "a green bronze," an "ivory Hermes, a "silver faun," or a painting (34). "Well, as soon as you are dry," says Basil light-heartedly, "you should be varnished, and framed" (35).

2 1 5 The narrative is given its initial impulse by Dorian's jealousy of that "beauty that does not die," which is to say, his own beauty reified before him on canvas. His envy of artwork is impelled by his imagining his own aging body, the "day when his face would be wrinkled and wizen, his eyes dim and colourless, the grace of his figure broken, and deformed" (35). In fact, throughout the tale, as great as his interest in art is his fascination with the corruptible flesh which he is able to study vicariously. With "almost scientific interest" (81 he feels compelled to examine the picture which he repeatedly refers to as "the thing" (80,88,97,99), the same word he uses about Basil's corpse (123, 129). The ornate curtain which veils the picture, formerly used as a pall for the dead, now conceals something worse: that which brings the horrors of death but never dies. In terms I have borrowed from Lacanian psycholo^, the picture is a representation of the unrepresentable Thing which both attracts and paralyzes. His narcissism is never without a corresponding curiosity in the Thing.

He would examine with minute care, and sometimes with a monstrous and terrible delight, the hideous lines that seared the wrinkling forehead, or crawled around the heavy sensual mouth. — (103) In his search for novelty, new sensations and the "element of strangeness," Dorian obsessively returns to the abject body which stands in such stark contrast to his own immutable classical features. He is enamored with those states when through the brain "sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and the instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques" (105, 104). Even if he is wont to ward off this side of life with various "means of forgetfulness," he comes back to the picture out of pride and fascination

( 111). At first, Dorian is disappointed in those who do not reflect his aesthetic self. Most obvious is his dismissal of Sibyl Vane who "is nothing without her art" (75) and whose act of suicide derives its significance from its similarity to Greek tragedy (84); only in death does she pass again "into the sphere of art" (90). As the story progresses, however, Dorian increasingly pursues not the beautiful, that which is the same, but the ugly, that which is 216 other and resistant, because it makes things "real." In Chinatown and the East End, he gazes intensely upon the "grotesque things" on their mattresses—"the twisted limbs, the gaping mouths, the staring lustreless eyes" (143) which seem to him to hold some secret. Coarseness, suffering, immorality and evil come to seem more vivid than "all the gracious shapes of Art" (141). His own aesthetically perfect body is imaginable only in the face of

the grotesque body he denies. As the story nears its conclusion. Lord Henry keenly defines art as "a malady" (148) but fails to comprehend the Paterian term. Dorian at least begins to glimpse its meaning and ponders the line from Handet, "Like the painting of a sorrow, / A face without

a heart.” The elder man can only respond "If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart" (161). For him, Dorian lives an aesthetic life because heis an artistic work. Thus, when he goes on to remark that "nothing has been hidden from you. And it has all been to you no more than the sound of music," he echoes Pater's description of Mona Lisa. Despite Dorian's protests that he has changed. Lord Heiuy replies: Yes, you are the same At present you are the perfect type ----- You are quite flawless now You are the type of what the age is searching for, and what it is afraid it has found. I am so glad you have never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or produced anything outside of yourself. Life has been your art. (162). For Basil, too, Dorian had incarnated that Winckelmannian "Greek spirit, harmony of soul and body" (24), that abstract, essential "type" Pater saw in Greek statues. But Dorian could never live up to this "Dorianism,"^^ that is, being a Greek god (88) and realizing in the flesh the Victorian Hellenic fetish. Lord Henry expresses this hope for Dorian, envisioning for him a sensuous life which might "give expression to every thought, reality to every dream," overcome all "the maladies of medievalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal" (29). Dorian now knows that human nature cannot be so sculpted or sanitized. The ego is not "simple, permanent, reliable, [or] of one essence." A human being was

217 a complex multifonn creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted wi& the monstrous maladies of the dead. (112) In his review of the novel. Pater criticizes the protagonist's move from "a higher to a lower degree of development” {Uncollected Essays 127). But the lines quoted above signal Dorian's incipient awareness of the complex dynamics of the mind and body caught in history. His portrait was supposed to be pure corporealiQr but, like the Gorgon, such Thingness cannot be looked upon directly. That is to say, however uncanny, it is still a representation of an imagined anatomy, which means that it must be made of both fleshliness and imagination, a palimpsest of physical sensation and delirious fantasy. Thus, he gazes at the image for its physicality but it is often "His own soul. . . looking out at him from the canvas and calling him to judgment" (97). Wilde uses the gothic genre to unsettle the lines between image and object, psyche and soma, symbol and Thing. This is what Dorian suggests when he finally admits that "culture and corruption" are indissolubly united (158). Even a purest of artwork cannot evade the processes of material transformation and decay. In Dorian's case, his classical body cannot remain autonomous since it is implicated in temporality, self-alienation and desire. To face the facticity of our anatomy, we must dis figure it, that is to say, shatter the semiotic transparency of its habitual representations. Like the amorphous skull in Holbein's The Ambassadors, Rossetti's dial in DantisAntor, or the shadow-tracing in Poussin's E t In Arcadia Ego, Wilde's narrative foregrounds the body's Thingness which challenges easy symbolization. Discussing the "skiagraphy," or tense split which this causes in the body of the reading subject, Schefer notes: "Pictures maintain a fiction of a place: a window through which a patch of color watches the enigmatic body floating free, away from painting's geometry" {Enigmatic Body 30). In Wilde’s classic Doppelganger tale, Dorian separates his beautiful soul from the contagions of physical life. In this grotesque schizophrenia, his body is no longer an empty signifier, but revealed in all its materiali^ 218 and elevated to the status of Thing. This extreme intensity brings both pleasure and terror. If he, somewhat ironically, sees the portrait as an "unjust mirror" (166), it is not only because it recalls the human corporeality he would efface, but also because it is reminder of the impossibility of being perfectly identical with one's own image. In another tale of a narcissistic artist and a vivified art by that philosopher of transparency, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, this sense of otherness and resistance is absent. In his libretto, Galatea touches herself and says "Me." Then Pygmalion (transported): "Me." (W atea (still touching herself): "It's me." (Taking several steps and touching a marble): "This is no longer me.” (Pygmalion covers her with ardent kisses) Galatea: "Ah! Me again..." (LXXXIV) Dorian similarly attempted to embody a crystalline homogeneity by being a "Qrpe" which would unite thought and expression, essence and existence. He would, like Sebastian van Storck, restore "the primary consciousness to itself" (4: 111); he would be a perfect Greek sculpture. But, as Wilde remarks elsewhere, T ruth in Art is not any correspondence between the essential idea and the accidental existence; it is not the resemblance of shape to shadow, or of the form mirrored in the crystal to the form itself. If there is "an ultimate type for Life and Art," he says, it is suffering, which is the true path towards a unity of body and soul (920, 919). The utopian vision of the aesthetic, sculpturesque body avoids this dream of pain. "A pedestal may be a very unreal thing. A pillory is a terrific reality" (937). By the final chapter, Dorian's unwillingness to face the past and memory results in his inability to experience either pleasure or pain which, as Dickens' "Haunted Man" also realizes, means a loss of the self. Wilde adheres to the Aestheticist position on pain which I discussed in the previous chapter. Pain makes the body visible. It is the means by which we exist, because it is the only means by which we become conscious of existing; the remembrance of suffering in the past is necessary to us as the warrant, the evidence, of our continued identity. (884) 219 Dorian's picture embodies the survival of his memory, conscience, the sense of sin, and pity. It is pain, says Wilde, which prevents us from being "colorless" (transparent), for by its curiosiQr and physicality it "intensifies the assertion of individualism and saves us from the monotony of the type" (1Q23).1®

220 NOTES

1. The military orientation is echoed in one Doric title for their chief god: not Apollon [A jto ^o v ] but Apellon [AjteXXcv] which means "averter" or "defender" (1: 312). He was also the giver of health, sometimes known as Paean, physician of Olympus, whose song was sung at the end of a plague. The two appellations go hand in hand for although Apollo might prevent disease, he could also bring sudden death, more fîtting to a warrior god (1: 308-309). Nietzsche makes the observation that Apollo, the god of luscence and healing, is, in fact, a screen against the terrors of existence {The Birth o f Tragedy 29-30). Rather strangely, the Dorians were seen as Scotsmen or Highlanders of the south so that the Doric dialect was transcribed using Scottish inflections (Jetdqms 167-68). 2. Plato's aesthetics and ethics, in Pater's view, are also characterized by manliness.

Its classical art is self-conscious, constructive, ordered, economical, temperate. The art it opposes—self-forgetful, random, exaggerated, promiscuous, pathetic and passionate— approaches some of the qualities Pater assigns to romanticism or modernity (6:281). 3. Pater's well-known dichotomy between "centrifugal" and "centripedal" also suggests his doubts about the end result of a Doric art. The "centrifugal" arts of Athens or Ionia value variety, individualism, experimentation, the "endless play of undirected imagination; delighting in brightness and colour, in beautiful material, in changed form everywhere" (7:252). Noteworthy is the fact that Pater assigns the misshapen Hephaistos as the patron of this worldview which prizes the cosmetic and ornamented body (254). The Spartan mode, however, admires Doric Koapoo, simplification and condensation in both society and human physicality. Its aim is an abstract Parmenidean calm, a saniQr of mind

221 and body, a "cure of disease and of the sense of sin" (253, 254). Pater notes that an integrated life needs both, but it is evident that his sympathies and his aesthetics are on the side the free play and grace of the Athenian way. 4. The philosophy of Plato played important roles in the visions not only of the aesthetic state but also of the oligarchic state. In his recognition of the repressive aspects of theRepublic, Pater followed not Jowett but Grote who considered the political treatise as a "military bureaucracy" which eliminated the "old individual Adam." (Tumer 395). In regards to the discussion of modernism and utopias in the previous chapter, it is worth citing Wells' remark that Plato possesses "profound intuitions” regarding social engineering (Modern Utopia259). Some theorists, most notably Richard Crossman {Plato Today) and Karl Popper (Jhe Open Society and Its Enemies.) link Platonism to fascism. 5. One "race" could, for example, incorporate a variety of skin hues and body shapes. The same fuzziness adhered, for instance, to "Semitic" which might and often did apply to most of the nations and "races' of Europe. Despite the semantic confusion, the notions were ubiquitous. In his well-received lectures at the Royal Institution, The Science o f Language, F. Max Muller introduced the term "Aryan" as a linguistic term to replace the unwieldy "Indo- European." Just two years later in Thomas Henry Huxley's "The Aryan Question and Prehistoric Man," the word is marked as a biological category. Huxley himself was not a racial purist and Muller, to his credit, would reject the broader use of "Aryan," which, he vainly insisted, means "neither blood nor bones, nor brain nor skull" (quoted in Hankins 18). 6. The notions bandied about were so nebulous that a mythical relationship between the British Saxons and the Semitic race could be posited. The "British Israelites," regarding themselves as more Hebraic than the Jews themselves, saw no conflict with the rising confirmation of their Teutonic or Aryan origins. (See, for example, Poliakov 40-45.)

2 2 2 "Indo-Gennanîc” was used to mean "Indo-European" as early as 1810 (Olender 151 n 46). The term and concept of "Aryan" can be traced back to at least 1820 in the work of Johann-Gottfried Rhode (Poliakov, History o fAnti-Semitism 313-15). 7. Note, for example, Arnold passing comment on Artur de Gobineau, a prime progenitor of our century's racial lunacy (Faver^ 166). To be fair, it should be noted that Arnold's faith in physiological sciences was tempered by his belief in the "substantial unity of man" (3: 340, 330). He is also critical of Eugene Bumoufs La Science des Religions (1872) which argued that Christianity was derived from Aryan (Vedic) sources. For Arnold, religion can not be reduced to either physics or metaphysics (241). The dilemma of being in a culture that is both Hebraic and Hellene also occurred to Arnold pere. In a 1832 letter, Thomas Arnold had mused that perhaps God revealed religious knowledge to the Jewish race, but intellectual knowledge to the Greeks (Poliakov 231).

8 . Leighton's own art, in topic and execution, adheres to his Aryanism. His idealized work emphasizes the proportionate body of Greece from which animality has been eliminated. Thus, in Daedalus and Icarus ( 1869), the young lad, as a solar hero, is a hairless statue. Swinburne comments that his Ariadne, though well executed, seems a model of wax and his Actaes reveals a "painful trinmess suggested of vapour-baths," the limbs reflecting not strength but "the lower loveliness of limbs that have been steamed and scraped" ("Notes on Some Pictures of 1868" Essays and Studies 361). Hersey argues that Leighton's aesthetics anticipate the corporeal ideals of National Socialism (69-80). It might be added, however, that Leighton denigrates the artistry of the Teutons. They have a certain strength, a "masculine sincerity," but their woric is "ungainly," at times "repellent". Like his contemporaries, he does recognize their ethical sense (266-67,310). 9. Disraeli responded to Aryanism with his own brand of judeomania and Lothair might be read as a response to Knox's profoundly anti-Semitic treatise. Disraeli's racial theories may even have had an unintended influence on the work of Artur de Gobineau. In 223 Coningsby (1844), mongrel breeds are said to be doomed to extermination according to the "irresistible laws of Nature" (273). Semites, however, are said to be Caucasian and, what is more, unlike Saxon or Greek, are an "unmixed race" and thus part of "the aristocracy of Nature" (242,241). On this aspect of Disraeli, see Poliakov’s History o f Anti-Semitism 3: 323-37. 10. On the general German view of the Dorians, see Rawson 306-43. Gothicism and medieval iconography continued to be used, of course, but it was the Greek model that served to illustrate the ideal virility of the nation (Mosse Nationality and Sexuality 15, 94- 97). Rykwert discusses two relevant pieces concerning modem "Pmsso-Dorianism":

Martin Heidegger's "Origin of the Work of Art" (1935) and a 1934 essay by Gottfried Benn (380-82). In his Introduction to Metaphysics ( 1935), Heidegger writes that as "the most metaphysical nation," it is the task of Germany to move Western culture into "the primordial realm of the powers of being" exemplified by the Greeks. German and Greek he considers "the most powerful and most spiritual of all languages" (31,32, 47). In a 1966 interview, he again comments on "the inner relationship of the German language with the language of the Greeks and with their thought" (see Rabinbach 104-128). 11. Hersey's The Evolution o f Allure pays special attention to the importance of imagined body proportions which underwent a crucial shift first in nineteenth-century art, then in fascist sculpture. He usefully traces the history of the canonical body, from the Greeks, to the Renaissance, to Durer and Lomazzo, down to contemporary American culture. His bio-aesthetic theories, however, are unconvincing. His prime claim is that the body images of Western art have helped determine biological adaptations; aesthetic figures urge breeding for beauty. This easy conflation of aesthetic preference and sexual selection is easily refutable. First, the time-frame involved, two and a half thousand years or so, is hardly one that is workable within evolutionary terms. Secondly, he neatly elides other social and psychological functions of sexuality. 224 Lehmann-Haupt makes the point that Karl Marx, too, appealed to classicism for authentication. How his materialist interpretation might be seen to adumbrate the bio- aesthetical hermeneutics of the Nazis is seen in this quote; "If we consider the gods and heroes of Greek art without religious or aesthetic prejudices, we find in them nothing that could not exist in the pulsations of nature. Indeed, these images are artistic only as they portray beautiful human, mores in a splendidly integrated form" ( 10). 12. Alfred Rosenberg and his Office of Indoctrination were highly suspicious of those Hellenophiles (including Heidegger) who stressed Greek philosophical ideals to the detriment of race The Nordicists suppressed any re-emergence of "Erasmian, that is West European-cosmopolitan humanism" (see Rabinbach 110-111). 13. In the book on Plato, Pater writes that the Dioscuri remained eternally "lovers of youth, "enstarred types of it, arrested thus at the moment of miraculous good fortune as a consecration of the clean, youthful friendship" (6:231). 14. Even true believers of Aryanism and racial anthropology could have doubts. George de la Lapouge (1854-36) was a French craniologist who almost lived long enough to witness the realization of his uncanny presentiments. He writes in 1899: "I am convinced that in the next century people will slaughter each other by the million because of a difference of a degree or two in the cephalic index." The "last sentimentalists will be able to witness the most massive exterminations of peoples" (quoted Poliakov 270). 15. As his university notebooks make clear, Wilde had an interest in current scientific issues and was familiar with the work of Darwin, T. H. Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and W. K. Clifford, among others. I cannot agree with the editors' position that as an epistemological subjectivist, infiuenced by Hegelian idealism, Wilde was fundamentally opposed to Pater's materialism (58, 71). Their viewpoint is based on the questionable conviction that these notebooks contain his "unchanging first principles" (42). 16. Inman argues that Pater may have felt that "Dorian," the term and its meaning, had

2 2 5 been deformed and sullied by Wilde's novel. Thus, "Lacedaemon," written soon after, can be read as an attempt to rehabilitate Dorianism rather than as some fanciful wish to recreate a new Hellenism ("John 'Dorian* Gray"). 17. Dorian believes that the picture's destruction will kill memory, that "horrible malady" (166, 143). Although the Greeks thought it impossible to alter the past, Wilde would later write in De Prqjundîs, it can be done—but only through repentance (W orks 933).

18. Lord Henry declares that he can "sympathize with everything but suffering." There is "something terribly morbid in the modem sympathy with pain" (44). After Reading Gaol, Wilde spoke of the nobility of pity.

226 CHAPTER?

WILDE IN THE FLAYER'S ZONE

Children sense [the materialiQr of existence] in the fascination that issues from the flayer's zone, from carcasses, from the repulsively sweet odor of putrefaction, and from the opprobrious terms used for that zone . . . . An unconscious knowledge that whispers to the child what is repressed by civilized education; this is what matters, says the whispering voice. Theodor Adorno Negative Dialectics

To be a type is impossible; to desire to be one is inhuman; to attempt to eugenically create one is monstrous. This final chapter aims to underline the ways in which the stereo­ typed corporeality which led to fascist ideology was challenged by the variegated, flawed Aestheticist body. Aestheticist art, Wilde writes, is "Individualism and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its value. For what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit" {W orks 1091). My approach to the important issue of Aestheticism's relation to "the aestheticization of politics," in Benjamin's celebrated phrase, will be to contrast two poetics of the body: the depth model pervasive in both Victorian idealism and utopian modernism, on the one hand, and the Aestheticist palimpsest body, on the other. The former, exemplified in particular by the work of Andre Gide, is seen to be dietorically consonant with fascist corporeal politics while the latter is a

227 subverting countertype and a defamiliarizing body of resistance. I begin with a brief discussion of the palimpsest image which articulates the Rossettian, but especially the Paterian, view of knowledge, cultural history, and the body. the monk and the scholar In "The Palimpsest," an outline for a tale never written, Rossetti tells of a theologian and a classical scholar, both involved in the interpretation of a certain palimpsest. The former focuses on the Patrician text apparent to all and, fearing he will die before the subtractive writing is revealed, kills his rival who, in his fînal act, triumphantly shows his murderer the scroll on which the Early Father has been acidically removed. Only the pagan poetry beneath remains {W orks 616). This brief fable foregrounds the competing claims of sacred and secular and the question of the durability of all inscription, but most especially the problem of seeking apodictic origins. The despair of the monk is due to his awareness that the Word is underlain by another, more profane text. As we have seen, Rossetti's poetry is pervaded by images which occlude the penetrating eye or screen objects of desire. Human existence is a "sealed seedpot" (220) or an intractable tangle of "superscriptions" (107). The soul of the beloved can be known only "as a sacred secret" (107) and the other's body as such is imaged as either implacable thing or a hollow "breathing shell" (70). All the various textual pursuits in The House o f Life lead only to tautologies and mazy error (McGann, "Betrayal of Truth"). A contrary position is represented by Elizabeth Barret Browning who believes that art can enable the core "spiritual significance" behind the "parcel-man, doublet of flesh" to "bum through / The hierogyphics of material shows" {Aurora Leigh Bks. 3 and 7; 86, 266): Let who says The soul's clean white paper,' rather say, A palimpsest, a prophet's holograph. Defiled, erased, and covered by a monk's,— The apocalypse, by a Longus! poring on 228 Which obscene text, we may discern, pertiaps. Some fair, fine trace of what was written once. Some upstroke of an alpha and omega Expressing the old scripture. (I; 27) The ecstatic soul or the artist's "crystal conscience" (5: 169) might "bum away / This dark of the body" (5; 157). For Rossetti, any inner light is shadowed by "survivals" of our lowly origins, the toad within the stone. His work reverses Browning's depth-model aesthetic; human spirituality is unimaginable without its fleshly embodiment, just as a watermark is non-existent without its parchment Pater admires Rossetti's abiliQr to fuse the soul (the "dhftz within") with its "natural" expression: this gift of transparency in language—the control of a s^le which did but obediently shift and shape itself to the mental motion, as a well- trained hand can follow on a tracing paper the outline of an original drawing below i t {Appreciations 206). The templates beneath are not truly "originals," but are themselves mediations, and creative work does not present things as they are but rather projects another constructed world above the relative "realities of its time." It "sublimates" another "still fainter and more spectral" reality, "literally an artificial or earthly paradise " ("Aesthetic Poetry" 190). There can be no access to the natural or the original. The modem artist, for instance, viewing all under "mixed lights," can never perceive classicism per se but only the Hellenism of Chaucer, or of the Middle Ages, or of the nineteenth century. Besides, "the most attractive form of the classical story is the monk's conception of it" (Aesthetic Poetry," 196). Except in more Aestheticist works like the Anir to Reflection, Coleridge maintained a steady faith in the depth model. But, Pater responds, since theology is "a great house, scored all over with hieroglyphics by perished hands," our momentary decipherings can only elicit faded tmths, shadows of shadows which are "twice removed from reality." The substance, if substance there be, resides in our perpetual stmggle as readers and re-writers ("Coleridge as a Theologian" 109, 110; see also Uncollected Essays 159). The Romantic philosopher-poet Platonically believed that the surface is a lisible "physiognomy" of a "hidden tmth" and that an ideality within things will necessarily rise "at some time to the 229 surface of the human mind." This common theory that there is "latent intelligence winning a way to the surface," from primal chemistry to crystal forms to animality and finally to consciousness, is, in Pater's view, part and parcel of the German idealist pursuit for "'things behind the veil'." Such laws of depth must be recognized as a "conscious invention of the artist" {Appreciations 80,73,78, 81-82,79), just as the exterior outline of the body is an image of ours {Renaissance 186-187). Platonism longs for essential ideas and original forms, the "insoluble, immovable granite" beneath the altering surface of life. Pater's Heraclitean worldview responds that even the "granite kernel of the earth" constantly shifts in its substance (27,20).^ The need of the monk to "go below the surface, and bring up the supposed secondary, or still remote meaning," some "diviner signification" is simply magical thinking, a veritable "mad-house-cell" (26, 27). Thus, Renaissance scholars uncovered in antiquity not some secreted essence but a sensuality which like a virus lay dormant within the ascetic body. With its outbreak, it soon became a "rival religion" (19).

The mutability and renewability of all texts—artistic, theological, or philosophical— are likened by Pater to the workings of living tissue. The presence of earlier more "poetic" thought in Plato's later work, for instance, we should view not as a "carved comer of some older edifice" but rather "like minute relics of eariier organic life in the very stone he builds with." The seemingly new is, in fact, "a palimpsest, a tapestry of which the actual threads have served before, or like the animalframe itself, every particle of which has already lived and died many times over" (6:7,8). If texts resemble metamorphic bodies, the human brain and anatomy are metaphoric texts. The walls of the individual mind, says Pater, are inscribed with "ancient, half­ obliterated inscriptions" (66) for it is influenced by "the mind of the race" and "the character of the age" which is expressed through layers of linguistic and cultural signs. Individual bodies are shot through with material circumstances as well, "remote laws of inheritance, the vibrations of long-past acts reaching [us] in the midst of the new order of things in 230 which [we] live"{Appreciations 67). Our physical life is a "design in a web, the actual threads of which pass out beyond it" {Renaissance 187). We are, then, subject to a bewildering imbrication of "nature and socie^ ceaselessly playing upon [us]." The human body and its productions incarnate the "principle of lapse, of waste" (6: 15). There is no "truth of eternal outlines ascertained once and for all, but a world of fine gradations and subtly linked conditions shifting intricately as we ourselves change" {Appreciations 68). Pater’s well-know rendition of the Mona Lisa symbolizes this key poetics of the layered body. If she is representative of "the modem idea," it is because she is impossibly mixed, just as Dorian was incurably tainted with the maladies of heredity and culture, memory and desire. She is herself a palimpsest, "sweeping together thousands of experiences." But the spirituality and the sins and the "secrets of the grave" she has known, she can never divulge. Her mystic beauty is "wrought out from within upon the flesh" and her consummate knowledge has "tinged her eyelids and hands." {Renaissance 98, 99; emphasis added). Thus, expressions of her inner "significance" (to use Browning's term) move outward but get only so far as the back of her eyelids and the unspeaking surface of the body. It is we who imagine what these might be and trace on the surface our fantasized "impressions." Like us, she is what Freud called a "mystic writing pad" (19:227-232). This Aestheticist poetics of the body is also displayed in Pater's novel. Marius finds beneath the "dry surface" of the manuscripts of Marcus Aurelius not philosophical answers but some "poetic protest" which is antithetical to the texts' very theses. What is "behind the veil" is never revealed (3:47,49,51). What does become apparent to the young scholar is that the Roman philosopher looks through the body towards some abstract significance, treating it as merely a "diseased point of thought, or moral dullness" (56). Let the injured body "speak for itself," he contemptuously writes in his Meditations (33, 127). By contrast, the young Epicurean delights in the senses and by appreciating the phenomenal body is able to sympathize with those in pain. In the catacombs beneath the house of Cecilia, for example, he is moved by the stacked tombs, the stones for which have been 231 taken from pagan graves, "the inscription sometimes a pcdimpsesty the new epitaph being woven into the faded letters of an eariier one" (100). Likewise, in the faces of the living children at the Christian home he sees the reali^ of the dead children buried below their feet (102, 132). Rome itself seems to him a "strange medley of superstition, that of centuries' growth, layer upon layers, of the curiousities of religion." It is constructed of complex strata of monuments and tombs, "layer upon layer o f dead things and people" (2; 184, 204).

It has been suggested that a prime trait of postmodernism is its denial of the age-old "fantasy of interiori^, that pathological itch to scratch surfaces for concealed depths" (Eagleton, Against the Grain 143; also Deleuze Logic o f Sense). A focus on the surface was, however, also a hallmark of Aestheticism, and the Decadence, in particular. In Wilde's aesthetics, especially, truth is not an eidetic inner essence, but a matter of stylistic surface. Nature does not interest him, he remarked, as it has "neither intellect nor passion— the only two things that make surface possible" (W o rks 981; Letters 774). What defines the human for Wilde is the accidental: "dress, manners, tone of voice, religious opinions, personal appearances, tricks of habit" (975). For this demythologization of the natural he was viewed as a monstrorum artifex. The cultural tensions between surface and depth parallel those of "ascension" and "descension" discussed above (see chapter four). In the discourse of the body, outer is to inner as upper is to lower. The first of each pair refers to Bakhtin's "classical" body— spirituality, type, purity, abstraction, macromass and maleness—while the latter signals the "grotesque" corpography: "the micromass, the bacillae of social diseases, the dissipating hybridity of the female, or the unconscious of the male, transformed into negativized bodily flows, amorphous and bestial" (Theweleit 2:378). The historical misogyny in the binarism is self-evident but the gap between idealized anatomy and material body is experienced by

232 both genders, albeit in modified forms (Bryson Visual Culture 234). Moreover, the confrontation between the two levels, foregrounded in gothic texts like Dorian Gray, produces pleasure as well as anxie^. In the Victorian construction of masculini^, this manichean dilemma is negotiated by projecting into the body's core an essential puriQr. This transparency, in turn, promotes the growth of a strong cordon samtaire which offers protection against viscous effeminacy and contaminating degeneracy. Our souls, says Charles Kingsley, "secrete their bodies, as snails do shells" {Letters 2:172). Presumably, then, the healthiest bodies would secrete the hardest carapaces. For a model of the disciplined body, Kingsley looked to the Greeks, especially their statuary, though, like Arnold, he tempers his Hellenism with an evangelical asceticism. As Symons observed, muscular Christianity included "all that is brightest in Hellenism, all that is purest in Hebraism" {In the Key o f Blue 94). As it happened, this Victorian "intensification of the body” (Foucault), whether in vigorous Christian soldier, armored knight or sculptured Dorian, prepared the ground for Marinetti's machine-body and the fascist brute warrior.

The steely skin of Victorian virili^ was further fortified in the utopianism of early modernism. Recall again Wyndham Lewis championing polished surfaces and exterior ossature. The "hippopotamus' armoured hide, a turtle's shell, feathers and machinery" is, he writes, a necessary defense against the "jellyfish that floats in the center," the "naked pulsing and moving of the soft inside of life—along with the elasticity of movement and consciousness" {Men Without Art 99; Tarr 299). Not surprisingly, statues are most admired since they achieve the state of "LIVING plastic geometry" {Blast I 140). Like all good art, they possess rigidity (Worringer’s Starrheit) and have ”no inside” {TarrSOO). Before pursuing this corporeal tropography as exemplified in the work of Gide and its contrast to Wilde's Aestheticism, a brief excursus on the work of Theweleit on the fascist imaginary is necessary. In his groundbreaking MaleFantasies (1977), Theweleit has ingeniously analyzed the body images within the narrative fantasies of the proto-fascist 233 Freikkorps during the inter-war period. The specific object relations psychologies he employs (that of Melanie Klein^ Michael Balint, and especially Margaret Mahler) do not concern us here as much as the muscular poetics of the fascist ego which he sees in these diaries, novels and contemporary cultural productions. The officers' identities, he demonstrates, revolve around a potent misogyny which, in turn, drives their racist ideologies. In this imaginary, women are more often than not depicted variously as fluid, bloody pulp, bodily filth and pain. The male, in contrast, is a warrior whose "physique has been machinized, his psyche eliminated" (2: 162). The threatening feminine force, a primitive relic of der Urmensch, must be repressed, that is, contained within a hardened epidermis: the man of steel [seeks] to pursue, to damn in and to subdue any force that threatens to transform him back into the horribly disorganized jumble of flesh, hair, skin, bones, intestines, and fillings that calls itself human. (2:160) The armored skin is his ego (2:164), such that he realizes the Futurist dream of the metalization of the human body (see also Foster). The historical consequences of such a psycho-aesthetic structure are only too evident: the amorphous, effeminized enemy-mass within can be projected onto the socially inferior or the racially contaminated. Healthy and moral men, wrote Max Nordau in his famous compendium of 1892, must "dam up the invading mental malady" (of degeneration), crush "the anti social vermin” and "piteously beat [them] to death with clubs" (556, 557). Nordau's metaphors of depth and disease, like those favored by Victorian anti-decadent philohellenes, foreshadow the rhetoric of fascist demagoguery. Hitler, for example, decries the release of a "flood of slime and ordure" to the cultural surface after the Hrst World War (475). The fascist (Christoph Steding declares in 1938 that "in the aftermath of the decomposition of the Germanic-Nordic substance within Europe,"

234 there was a "forcing up to the surface of wild, demonic, ruthless, bestially savage primordial forces." Of course, the cause of this disease ravaging the body of Europe is its "inner Semitization" \Yerjudung\ (Griffin 152,153).

G ide vid e

By selecting Gide's texts as representative of a modernist poetics of the body which so often parallels fascist mythology, I am in no way suggesting that he himself was fascist (whether racist and anti-Semitic is another story). Suspicious of orthodoxies, Gide often advocated a "critical sense" and the "force of individualization" to counter fascism {Journals 2: 259, 248). He is of special interest, nevertheless, precisely because his imagined anatomies are more ambiguous and conflicted than, say, Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, Marinetti, or Drieu La Rochelle. Most readings of Gide's corporeal imagery situate them in his homosexuality or in what one reader has called his "odd hygiene of desire" (Hytier 14), an attempt to fuse the Dionysian with the Puritan. But there are also serious political lessons to be learned from his metaphors which reveal his attempts to reconcile his dream of a "thoroughly natural" civilization with his sprawling "constant sensuality" {Journals 2:366).

Gide's first fictions were attempts to promote the new classicism by subjugating his fin-de-siècle romanticism. Marshlands (1895), for instance, is replete with images of stagnation, waste and disease, terms routinely applied to the Decadents in general but Oscar Wilde in particular. The voluminous vitriol directed toward Wilde was due no doubt to his overt sexual preferences, but his "anti-naturalism" and his perceived lack of "depth" was also at odds with the current culture of the "healthy" body.^ Gide's attitude towards Wilde—and the Aestheticist body—was highly ambivalent. In 1891, Gide writes to Valery that Wilde is "an admirable man, admirable," but a year later

2 3 5 concludes that Wilde has done him "nothing but hann” (Correspondence 139; Journal 1889-1939 28)The Biglish dandy is a "terrifying man, the most dangerous product of modem civilization" (Delay 391).^ For Wilde the body is famously a body of stylistic artifice, cosmetics and masks which undermines categories of subjective depth. His life, he notes, was a "twice-written scroll / Scrawled over" with texts concealing "the secret of the whole" (709). Sinceri^ is "absolutely fatal" (1048); it is s^le which is vital. Gide, an essentialist, despises this veneer as "artistic hypocrisy” which makes the dandy’s true desires unknowable. He falls into what Henry James called \^ d e 's "trap for the literalist" (Letters 3i 373) by assuming that the Wildean personality could be directly determined, and that like Dorian Wilde would wish to be one with his image. Gide laments that we caimot know—or be—the portraits we are creating in life. "Rather than recounting his life as he has lived it," the artist must live his life as he will recount it. In other words, the portrait of him formed by his life must identify itself with the ideal portrait he desires. And, in simpler terms, he must be as he wishes to be. (1:12). What is maddening for Gide is that the Wildean soul, like his body, is not isomorphic with his image but formed instead of endless layers of ornament and "false jewels." Wilde's "affected aestheticism" is an "excuse" or "pretext," or even "motivation," which is itself only a pretense. The aesthete's style, in short, only hides "the secret of the depths of his flesh" (Journals 2:24). He writes to Paul Valery in 1891: Wilde is religiously contriving to kill what remains of my soul because he says that to know an essence, one must eliminate it: he wants me to miss my soul. The measure of a thing is the effort to destroy it. Each thing is made up only of its emptiness. (Mallet 90) In the following year, Gide dedicates to Valery a poetic contemplation on the nature of signs which reveals his own poetics of the body. In this monologue. Narcissus seeks knowledge of "the exact form his soul possesses" and is nostalgic for the original Platonic realm of forms, "crystalline and paradisiac." The work of art can at least reflect this harmonious, asexual state of being. It is itself 236 a crystal—partial paradise in which the Idea flourishes anew in its superior puri^; in which the natural and necessary order has arranged all forms within a reciprocal and symmetrical dependence ----- In this idealist physics, signs and symbols are again "transparent and revealing" and the artist can fuse with what he desires (46,49,50). For Gide, all matter, including the body, is "infinitely porous, compliant to every conceivable law, obedient, transparent" {Fruits o f theEarth 24). In an autobiographical text, he describes an ecstatic experience in which his very flesh becomes diaphanous. After a swim, he revels in the mythological waiting for the god's naked and engulflng flame. My body, shot through with rays, seemed to enjoy some chemical benefaction; I felt myself become porous as a beehive ----- {If It Dies 285) We have seen how, by contrast, the melancholic Aestheticist body is a critical injunction against this idealist etiolation and optic mastery. James Joyce points to this very Wildean quality which he himself adopted: "The crystalline world wane[s] chagreenold and doriangrayerinitsdudhud" (F/miegan's Wake 186.7-8). It is The Immoralist which is the key text of Gide's agonic relationship with Wilde since the hedonistic Menalque is partly modeled on Wilde (though partly on Gide himself). Of particular interest here, the drive for the erotic body and psychic integration is troped as an evacuation of a diseased interior self which reveals a pure, natural core. The narrating voice is not to be simply equated with that of the author, of course, and Gide does conunent on usefulness of lamaladie {Jotmuüs 2:98-99),^ but his work as a whole is anti- Aestheticist

The novel's salient metaphor is stated succinctly by the homiletic narrator. "I am going to speak at length of my body," even to the point of effacing the "mind's share" (30). The main character, Michel, suffers from conditions which were conventionally attributed to decadent aesthetes: nervous disorders, hyperesthesia, "morbid sensitivity," and excessive cerebration (30,55,37). In his progression towards health, "layers of acquired

2 3 7 knowledge peel away from the mind like a cosmetic and reveal» in patches, the naked flesh beneath, the authentic being there." The "old Adam," the "secondary, learned being" of education is a husk which "must be stripped away."

And 1 would compare myself to a palimpsest; I shared the thrill of a scholar who beneath a more recent script discovers, on the same paper, an infinitely more precious ancient text. What was it, this occult text? In order to read it, would I not have to erase, first, the more recent ones? (51-52) Thus, the "sickly studious being" must be reviled and erased, in favor of a "hotter blood," to be gained by "not thinking at all" (52). Michel manifests a desire for a natural, prelapsarian body, beautiful in that it is not "already transcribed, interpreted." Needless to say, this conception of the palimpsest body is rather different from that of Aestheticism. Gide's Michel, like Leighton/Phoebus or the fascist athlete-warrior, seeks a body without the disease of self-consciousness (despite his suspicion that at bottom there is no original "new being," but only another inscription of "faded letters") (52). For the Aestheticist, in contrast, the body is permanently afflicted with the maladies of the living and the dead. It is hybrid, heterogeneous and self-divided.

Michel's desire for a "perfectible being," exalting "his will," and his shouts of "A new being! a new being!" (52) ominously anticipate Der neue Mensch of fascism or the New Soviet Man (also a "new biological type"; Trotsky Literature and Revolution 255). Indeed, much in the spirit of the Victorian Teutonomaniacs, Michel soon fixates on the "barbaric grandeur" and "crude morality" of the Goths in their "wilder and unspoiled existence" who could impose with strength the needed organic harmony. He dreams of "new races" (83, 163) and "such lands where every force was so well controlled, every expenditure so compensated, every exchange so strict, that the slightest waste became evident " (72). He comes to believe that more rustic peoples, far from the metropolis and

238 "liberated from the works of art," "live" or "sing" their art, "not embalming] it in works" (158). The metaphors of speech (Derrida's "logocentrism" or "presence") go hand in hand with the optic images of transparency. For Michel, the metaphors of the body shift easily to the body politic. He describes the degenerate artistic culture as

rising like a secretion to the surface of a people, at first a symptom of plethora, the superabundance of health, then immediately, calcifying, opposing any true contact of the mind with nature, life, forming a rind in which the hindered spirit languishes, withers and dies. Such a culture, he concludes, "bom of life, ultimately kills life" (93) and art is a mass of "things stained, things infected by disease and somehow marked by mortaliQr" (102)— which just happens to be Wilde's prime meaning in his tale of Dorian's portrait. Nordau employs a strikingly similar image to forecast the eventual victory over contemporary degenerates, "too worn out and flaccid," who cannot compete with healthy men who have "clear heads, solid stomachs and hard muscles" (557, 541). Humanity is a massive and constant lava flow, he writes, in which "the outer crust cracks in cold, vitrified scoriae, but under this dead shell the mass flows, rapidly and evenly, in living incandescence" (540). Vorticism's art of the "wild body," too, dreamt of liberating the pure primitive energy at the core of existence which had become cancerous after its contact with the artificial culture of Europe—"the black core of Life," "the black, nervous fluid of existence flows and forms into hard, stagnant masses in the white, luminous body" {Blast 1 133,136). For Gide's Michel, as for Nordau and Lewis, culture has become a scabrous barrier between mind and nature, and we may imagine him, like Josef Goebbels, now reaching for his gun. What is more, proving that Michel has read his Theweleit, the cultural enemy within is marked as feminine, just as it is within the Freikorps fantasies. As Michel grows healthier (or more like the mythic Aryan), his lover Marceline declines into a sickness

239 which "marked her* soiled her. She was a tainted thing” (116). The ill woman recognizes that thisKorperkultur, however beautiful it may be, is at base "inhuman" and "eliminates the weak" (164; 150). "As it should," AÆchel responds coldly (150). Even if Michel's fetishization of physical health, moral sanity, and the transparent utopian co m m unitydoes not completely correspond to Gide's own more nuanced position, there are troubling traces of the rhetoric in his own worldview. During the Second World War, for instance, Gide laments that the victory in the previous conflagration had merely "put [France] to sleep in decadence" because of which she became a "soft," "aging nation, numbed with comfort, listless and languid" (2: 260, 262,315). Indeed, even in the midst of the First World War, Gide writes that Latin culture, whatever its appeals, is a "mostly artificial and em p^ culture" which must give way to "a new civilization": a "thoroughly natural Greek civilization" (1:205). Though he was not totally indifferent to the rise of Hitlerism, he did nothing, refusing, for example, to sign a 1933 anti-fascist declaration because he could not ''completely” approve of it (2: 175). For a final comparison between the imagined anatomies of Gide and Wilde, I turn to their responses to the non-discursive body, that is to say, the body as corpse which momentarily loses its cultural codings and stands in for the Thing. First Gide. Near the end of his journals there is a lengthy reflection of the body/soul problem initiated by the sudden recollection of an experience before a stillborn child. Gide painfully recalls having to hold down his sister-in-law's legs as the doctor extracted a dead fetus. He is confronted with "amorphous fragments," the "mass of bloody, soiled remains"—the body elevated to the status of the Thing. He mumbles inaudibly to the maid, "Get that out of the way." He is amazed later, "when I saw it again, which for me already had no name in any language,' cleaned up, dressed, bedecked with ribbons" which now covered the emptied cranium. He remains "lost in thought over before that little face with the broken forehead carefully hidden; before the innocent flesh" which he had earlier thought to throw "onto a manure pile." The "substance .... did not 240 seem to be made of human flesh, but rather some ethereal substance, some translucent and nacreous paraffin, some immaterial pulp: it seemed like the flesh of a Eucharistie host" (2: 362-3; original emphases).^

Now Wilde. In 1898, he mentions attending a brilliant liturgical service at Notre Dame, and afterwards walking to the Morgue (at that time nearby on the He de la Cite). Seeing a woman of the lowest classes on the zinc slab, he notes that she has at least gained some modicum of nobility here. "There is nothing horrible in death. Death is solemn. Now waxworks are horrible, if you like" {More Letters 201).

For Gide, the Thing of No Name needs to be invested with signs and religious mythologies before it can be faced. Pulp has been paradoxically fmmaterialized and flesh become a translucent screen which reveals a transcendent, even divine, depth.^ For Wilde, in contrast, visiting the morgue after the mass, the body has no more need of such garments, its nobiliQr lying not even in its nakedness but in its resistance, its very rejusal of clothes. Like a poem, the body here does not mean but simply is, Wilde suggests, and like the body of Madeline Usher, cannot remain long buried within idealizing discourse. We can give it words, of course, but must remember it is our own intellect and passion which speaks, else it is the horrifying voice of the corpse of Foe's Valdeman "I am dead."

For Wilde, while the dead body is noble in decay, wax figures are abominable in their pretended atemporality and incorruptibility. Ceroplasty is a technique of exact reduplication, a fusing of the image and the thing itself, which is critiqued in Dorian Gray. No wonder he admired Rachilde's decadent masterpiece. Monsieur Venus (1884) in which

Raoule, the artist-protagonist, preserves her lover's body as a hybrid doll, part machine, part organic tissue, for it exposed the fakery in the era's "culture of the copy" (Schwartz). The obscenity of mannequins for Wilde lay not in their artificiality as such, but in their transparency. That is to say, these copies do not allow the projection of absence, the alienation, the drama and curiosity of the body. Recall Marius reverently pausing before the "little waxen figure" of a dead child (3:188) or Pater's semi-autobiographical child viewing 241 the dead behind glass windows. These "waxen" faces stayed with the child for many days, making even the "sunshine sickly" (8: 190). Wax replicas, in contrast, are devoid of this psychic contagion for in their emptiness they lack, in Baudrillard's apt phrase, "the watermark of the imaginary" {Ecstasy o f Communication 30-31).^ The anatomies of Gide and Wilde are both imagined, a fact the former denies and the latter declaims. In his angst, Gide, in line with other early modernists, would empty the body of its disease and disorder, harden it, set a crystal within in, and call it natural. Aestheticism, like Dorian's picture, exteriorizes the body and extols the role of the imagination in its social construction. Art, says Wilde, takes the body as it does life—"as part of her rough material, recreates it, and refashions it in fresh forms . . . , invents, imagines, dreams " (978). Not a mirror within the economy of sameness, art is more like a painted veil which makes and unmakes the individuated and alien body (981). In the Wildean view, natural bodies will always remain "unfinished copies" (982) and can never be reformed into perfect "aesthetic" duplicates through discipline or breeding. Against the ethnologists and craniologists, he further declares that all "great archetypes" are the result of a relative art, not some determinate nature. His reply to the Nazi bio-aesthetic project to establish types might repeat his comments about the Japanese, that is, that there is no such thing as a natural race or nation. All ethnicities—English, Irish, German, Jewish—are "a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art" (988). Appropriately enough, he immediately reminds us that Hellenic art never does tell us what the Greeks, in fact, were. Hardly incarnations of divine ideals, these humans were undoubtedly as frivolous, artificial, and cosmetic as those of the fin de siècle. He muses: Athenian ladies laced tightly, wore high-healed shoes, dyed their hair yellow, painted and rouged their faces and were exactly like and fully fashionable or fallen creatures of our own day. (969) What is meant, therefore, by his much quoted phrase that life imitates art, is, first, that nature does not produce perfect types according immutable laws and, second, that the random forces of nature cannot be channeled on behalf of one artistic ideal. Wilde saw his 242 work as a "spirited protest" against this mythology. One currently popular anatomy, he claims for example, a "curious and fascinating type of beauty," was the invention of Rossetti: "long ivory throat, the strange square-cut jaw, the loosened shadowy hair" (970, 982). Henry James had also seen this Rossettian type on canvas so that when he fîrst saw Jane Morris walk into a room, she seemed "an apparition of fearful and wonderful in intensity” just emerged from a painting (Edel 287).^ Aestheticism declared that in ever- shifting ways art influences "what we see, and how we see" (Wilde 986). The fascist

"eugenics of sight" (Virilio 112) went much further in its insistence that its subjective aesthetic visions were literally true. German Romantics like Wilhelm von Humboldt believed that only the Greeks were able to actually translate the individual into an abstract ideal (Mosse Image o f Man 28) and it was the Greek statue that crystallized this ideali^ for Winckelmann and his descendants. Victorian idealism, utopian modernism and fascism hoped to restore this imagined isomorphism between individual and type. Thus, both Victorian and fascist art could only accept the "natural" body if it was sanitized, desexualized and universalized. Before display, it had to be properly composed so that it was hairless, smooth, and without flaw. As one Nazi critic put it, the athletic body was to be sculpted "according to the Nordic race, following the example of antiquity... combining the ideal of beauty with a life force that transcends the individual" (173). The body was to be diaphanized so that pure soul or racial essence could shine through. Nations, like individuals, remarks Wilde, seek calm and repose in art, forgetting that "the singer of life is not Apollo but Marsyas" (987). Indeed, as I have tried to demonstrate, Aestheticism and Decadence are characterized by a heightened sensitivity to the contagions of corporei^, even to the point of obsession and excess. This fascination with malady was deprecated as morbid degeneracy by the zealots of sanity who could only dream of bodies symmetrical and sufficiently sublimated. Modernists like Gide or Valery imagined a humanity "confined to the skin and consciousness," replacing the 243 "physiological machinery" within with some Epical essence (see Auden 361). But this process of exfoliation ends not with some superman but with a pitiful l'homme ecorche. Indeed, the contest between Apollo and Marsyas became a Paterian trope for the contention between, respectively. Classicism and Romanticism (8:47). Wilde similarly observes that much modem art is defined by the cry of Marsyas—Baudelaire, Verlaine, even Burne-Jones and Arnold (936). The parameters of this parable of the flayer should be expanded so that poles would include Victorian Hellenism and fascist neo-classicism on the one side, and Aestheticism-Decadence on the other.

embodying the ideal Linda Dowling has challenged the received opinion that Aestheticism was a retreat from history, and re-examines the work of Ruskin, Wilde, and Morris for whom art was potentially an agent for social renewal. O f special relevance to my argument is her emphasis on Pater's corporeal individualism which opposed the universal subjectivity of the Enlightenment His Studies o fthe Renaissance, she contends, should be read as a political tract for it expresses a "desire for a more liberal and comely way of conceiving life" (1, 76 f). She goes on to demonstrate how Paterian aesthetics reverses Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education o f Man, which was a prime document for notions of the aesthetic state.^ While the German Romantic aimed to refer concrete experience back to abstractions (even if he did advocate the rights of the body at play). Pater advocated what Marius called an "anti-metaphysical metaphysics" which incessantly warned of the seductions of system and ideal orders (85). His entire ouevre sought to "escape from abstract theory to intuition, to the exercise of sight and touch" {Renaissance 147). As a materialist discourse of the body, the Aesthetic Movement exhibited a certain implacability to the very formalist ideologies which inscribed it. Its assertion of aesthetic autonomy must be considered as a kind of politics of negativity (Eagleton Ideology 2-3, 370). Unfortunately, this prime feature was lost in the debates over "aesthetics" which was 244 long dictated by the political right (Burke, Coleridge, Arnold, and Eliot). Victorian Benthamites, too, were pugnacious ia their attacks against the position that art was to be valued for its own sake. Rossetti, Pater, and Wilde, among others, contrarily asserted that the Aestheticist philosophy of art is not a flight from life but its very model since human existence hardly requires justification beyond its own self-delight (6S). Early modernism repeatedly defined Aestheticism-Decadence as a form of Romantic irrationality. Subsequently, philosophers (Bertrand Russell, most famously) and various critics, perceiving fascism as a tragic aberration within a fundamentally rational Western culture, then aligned the Aesthetic Movement with fascism, a collocation which stubbornly persisted. Hysterical hero-worship, insane mythologies, sentimental folkishness, ferocious Genüitlichkeit—ail were certainly part of the fascist aesthetic which shaped the mystic body of the Reich. But the easy association of Romantic principles with fascism ignores how much the latter was a prcrfbund perversion of the former (Glaser 58-76). In its quest for absolute similarity, for example, fascism ruthlessly eliminated all exception, chance, otherness, and individualism—all of which were at the heart of Romantic modernity. Fascism's spell of transparency acted as a kind of adhesive which fused particular and universal, history and nature, art and biology. As Adorno observes, the acceptance of such facts as immediately presented constituted an accession to an "illogical logic," for any rationality that eradicates the imagination is at base an irrationality ^Negative Dialectics 348, 349,387). It remains only to take up Walter Benjamin's celebrated maxim that "the aestheticization of politics" is the very definition of fascism {Illuminations 242). Benjamin's theory, I suggest, is highly confusing when applied to British Aestheticism, at least in the version I have been discussing. This is so primarily because it conflates the art- for-art's-sake movement with idealist aesthetics and even the modernist utopias of the

245 Futurists which, as I have contended, were polar opposites to the views of Rossetti, Pater and Wilde. A ll politics—fascist, communist, democratic—have aesthetic dimensions; the question to be pursued is what kind. In his essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Benjamin discusses the loss of art's "aura." In the past, there was a certain distancing or sense of uniqueness attached to objects of art which were experienced in the rituals of interpretation. The era of modem technology, however, brought with it an ubiquitous urge to seize an object immediately through its likenesses, "to pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura." All things would seem to be universally equal (222, 223). This shift is socially significant, according to Benjamin, since it entails a move into the political realm. It is also a new poetics of the body, as he suggests when he quotes a remark by Pirandello to the effect that in the new cinematic arts the body loses its corporeality. Benjamin illustrates his ideas by drawing an analogy between painter and magician, on the one hand, cameraman and surgeon on the other. The former pair maintain some respectful distance between them and the object/patient, but the latter penetrate the body with impimi^ (229). Fascism, says Benjamin elsewhere, fuses two discourses: providing politics with an aura, it ends in "an uninhibited translation of the principles of I'art pour I’art to war itself" ("Theories of German Fascism" 122). As his exposition makes clear, however, he is thinking of the gross application of art to life by liteialists who equate aesthetic illusion with reality and "aestheticize" all, including war. His target is really the Futurist Lords of Light and their hopes for metallized skins, the Vorticist fantasies of the wild body, the eugenic dreams of Aryan athlete-warriors—in short, those who seek to insanely realize their imaginative visions in the creation of a New Man. These dreams of materializing abstractions willy-nilly entail a de-realization of human life and its suffering. Faced with violence and bloodshed, "the surroundings became a problem, every wire entanglement an antimony, every barb a defînition, every explosion a thesis." Such artists, concludes Benjamin, wish "to recreate the heroic features of German Idealism." Their "metaphysical 246 abstraction of war signifies nothing other than a mystical and unmediated application of technology to solve the mystery of an idealistically perceived nature " Thus* they seek to overcome the bridge between self and other, sign and meaning, by literalizing their ideals and by apprehending some inner depth or "innermost existence" (126-27, 123). This is typical of Romantic mystics like Jules Langbehn, protofascists like Stefan George, Wyndham Lewis, or Marinetti, and reactionaries like D'Annunzio who envisioned an aesthetic state, but the notions do not easily apply to art-for-art's-sake artists like Rossetti, Pater, or Wilde who in their materialist poetics of the body vehemently refused such false reconciliations. In point of fact, the discussion of the previous pages should make it clear that pace Benjamin fascism was certainly not the first to introduce aesthetics into politics. Its murderous corporeal politics, for example, was the logical consequence of the ever- increasing desire to realize the idolized Greek body of art, which received its first major impetus in the Enlightenment. The conjunction of nineteenth-century nationalism, racial science, and political demagoguery allowed fascism to proceed with the lunacy of implementing its bio-aesthetic program. This allegiance of science and politics to an artistic vision cannot be overstressed. The virile, Hellenistic type juxtaposed with the dark and misshapen villain, the Aryan of Greek proportions versus the ill-proportioned Jew, made racism a visually centered ideology. And this stress on the visual is, in turn, made it easy for people to understand the thrust of the ideology. (Mosse Toward the Final Solution 233). Thus, in a 1941 Paris exhibition, "Le Juif et la France," a massive nude sculpture, The Perfect Athlete (by Albert Bouquillen), was erected at the very center of the display to remind visitors of their once and future corporeality (Mosse Image o f Man 66, 175; Cone 155).^ 1 Such visualities were indispensable to the authentication of Nazi bio-power, especially if done in the "grand style" iMein KampfAlS, 476, 479) (the phrase is also Arnold's; 1:5,188-191). Once human beings could be visually evaluated as either aesthetic or non-aesthetic, as transparent types, or referred to as simply "eidetic images" (Mosse 247 Image of Man 78), concrete bodies could be rendered fungible and invisible. The Commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolph Hoss, tended his garden while countless human beings shuffled by on their way to their deaths. If the aesthetic is understood in its e^mological sense as a discourse of the body, we can fairly say that any total "aestheticization of politics" ultimately requires the literal embodiment of politics within each individual. That is to say, abstractions and stereotypes must seep down into the cultural habitus and then into the very marrow of subjects until the symbolic is the somatic. Said one who was there, "The German way or, rather, that which is German sits closer than ever to the body, it constricts one, and at times takes one's

breath away" (Mosse Nazi Culture 383). Pacified by the drive for self-preservation and lulled by the utopianism of what Schiller called "idyllic idealism," men and women became compliant and thoroughly aestheticized (Glaser 82-83). In his gnomic book. Minima MoraUa, Adomo writes with unusual lucidly that fascism was "absolute sensation" (237). If the abstract ideals of aesthetics were to be forced into existence, the emptied silhouettes

of Winckelmann's Greeks and the pristine sculptures beloved by Victorian and Wilhelmian culture would have to be fleshed out and filled with blood. Such a fusion of idea and phenomenon, concept and thing, is the fundamental form of ideology {Negative Dialectics 148). In corporeal politics, the lessons are clean the identity of art and anatomy invariably ends in catastrophe. Aestheticism stressed the individual and idiosyncratic subject, drawing an antagonistic diagonal between meaning and materiality, the body in its Thingness and its image, while simultaneously affirming their enthralling interaction. There is no Ideal without the corresponding resistance of Spleen. Fascism, by contrast, identified mythical fantasy and corporeal fact, interior racial essence and exterior proportions. Benjamin first claims that fascism united decadent theory (including Wilde's) and its own monumental praxis but then admits that this is inherently contradictory, for Decadence had no interest in the monumental ("Andre Gide" 134-35; see Hewitt Fascist Modernism 76). Besides, 248 Decadence was seen as not only unpatriotic but downright dangerous to the racial health of the state (see Mosse Nationality and Sexuality 106-109). Benjamin rightly points out, however, that fascist monumentalism aimed to penetrate all of social life ( 134). This becomes even truer when we recall Robert Musil's trenchant observation that the "most striking feature of monuments is that you do not notice them. There is nothing in the world as invisible as monuments" (quoted in Murzoeff 91). The fascist state was the truest, and therefore the most horrific, realization of the utopian crystal state. As Valery once remarked, such a state is an enormous glass eye can see only numbers and abstractions (quoted in M o m o Notes 153). The individual bodies of

its denizens were living types, some embodying a diaphanous Aryan essence, others only filth and contagion. To a degree still not often admitted, Aestheticism spoke for a resistant countertype, for the body appreciated for its own sake, not because some soul was divined through it. Ignored or disbelieved was the Wildean claim that the movement was a genuine "realism" which had no desire to escape from the bondage of the earth ("The English Renaissance" 9, 6). The Aestheticist body was no defense, however, against the apostles of health and Hellenism once they were joined by scientific racists and political idealists. A century earlier Heine, whose views of Greece so influenced the Aestheticists, had already warned the French against the Teutonic "Kantians, Hchteans, and natural philosophers" who would arrive with a thunderclap "the likes of which in the world's history was never heard before." A "drama will be enacted in Germany in comparison with which the French Revolution will appear a harmless idyll" {Prose 402). Beneath Victorian optimism there was, in Tennyson's words, a "quiet sense of something lost": human uniqueness, personal identity, the consolations of nature, the comforts of faith. By the fin de siècle, this widespread cultural despair included a sense that the body itself was under threat. The perceived signs of cultural degeneration and biological devolution motivated an intensified search for a total solution in politics as well as in art. This alliance of art, science and politics eventually resulted in a Kunstpolitik in which 249 aesthetic ideals were taken not only as social or national goals, but biological realities. My aim has been to problematize the easy association of art-for-art's sake and fascism by scrutinizing instead some potent links between fascist bio-aesthetics and nineteenth-century idealist aesthetics, in particular their shared Hellenolatry. Aestheticism was a counterweight to the idealist fixation on sanity and lucidity, the obsession with apologies, and the nostalgia for Hellenism. Robert Browning, a poet also accused of dwelling on malady and morbidity, addresses the issue at hand in a monologue set in a Florentine gallery. The Olympian pieces arouse the beholder's envy as they display the self "as you wished you were, / As you might have been, as you cannot be." They are perfect—how else? they shall never change: We are faulty—why not? we have time in store. The Artificer’s hand is not arrested With us; we are rough-hewn, no-wise polished; They stand for our copy, and, once invested With all they can teach, we shall see them abolished. Any immortal perfection which adheres to art objects, the poet reminds us, depends on us. We need not pattern our bodies after their symmetries for they are doomed to permanent rest while we are marvelously incomplete. Why eagerly seek that "joy which is crystallized forever"? Aestheticism's aim was simply this: to make us "self-acquainters" (1:660). Wilde follows Rossetti and Pater in emphasizing the point that what distinguishes modernity from classicism is this knowledge of the body in time. The lovers in Giorgione's famous idyll were celebrated by all three. Yet, as Wilde reminds us, the figures are arrested in permanent languor, just as Dorian is damned in his nunc starts'. The image stained upon the canvas possesses no spiritual element of growth or change. If they know nothing of death, it is because they know nothing of life, for the secrets of life and death belong to those, and those only, whom the sequence of time affects, and those who possess not merely the present but the future, and can rise or fall from a point of glory or of shame. Human narration and subjective intentionaiity are required to "show us the body in its swiftness and the soul in its unrest" ( 1026). Essentially incomplete itself, interpretation reveals secrets of which a material object knows nothing. Moreover, like Rossetti and 250 Pater, Wilde asserts that not only art but the human body as well demands the projection of meaning (1029). There is no toadstone, no bright essence, no defining type, to be found at the core of the palimpsest body. In a poetic passage unmistakably Paterian in its riiythms and allusions to La Gioconda, Wilde describes heredity, that "terrible shadow": We live the lives of the dead, and the soul that dwells within us is no single spiritual entity, making us personal and individual ----- It is something that has dwelt in Aarful places, and in ancient sepluchres has made its abode. It is sick with many maladies, and has memories of curious sins. It is wiser than we are, and its wisdom is bitter It fills us with impossible desires, and makes us follow what we know we cannot gain. Its gifts, however, are many, bringing with it strange temperments and subtle susceptibilities, gifts of wild ardours and chill moods of indifference, complex multiform gifts of thoughts that are at variance with each other, and passions that war against themselves. What is this that permits such self-understanding, wondrous impressions, the contemplative life and the sympathetic mind? It is, in fact, the imagination which is simply "concentrated race-experience" (1040, 1041). The body provokes, even demands, imaginings against itself.

251 NOTES

1. A similar image is used by Gaston de Latour who hopes that the present pavement which was once in movement, "might become again for him, molten lava." Later, it is said that a teacher should move men's minds "like the volcanic earth as if in travail" of a new birth. "The immoveable earth, as we term it, beneath one's feet!—Why, one almost felt the movement, the respiration of God in it" (4:184,190,316,311). 2. Gosse detested Wilde's lack of reality (Charteris 310). Lionel Johnson caustically refers to Wilde as "this nameless thing," a "living body, hiding its dead soul" (74). Henry James calls him an "unspeakable animal" {Letters 3; 372-3). Lewis dismisses him as that "fat Dublin buffoon" {Men Without Art 143). But such descriptions were easily outdone by

Wilde's bizarre nephew, Arthur Cravan (nee Fabian Lloyd), poet manqué and performance artist, who, in his journal Miaintenant, describes an apparition of Wilde in the form of a beautiful elephant "in the green madness of Africa, amid the music of the flies making mountains of excrement." Cravan castigates the Decadent; "You bum, you good for nothing, with your rotting face, you shovel load of shit, water-cress from a urinal, you faker, old queen, great cow!" (Stokes Oscar Wilde 4-5). 3. Ellman remarks that the core document of the Gide-Wilde relationship is an absent one, for Gide removed the relevant passages after their first encounter (356). Wyndham Lewis, following Mario Praz, regards Gide as a decadent. What Pater was to Wilde, he states, V^lde was to Gide, and this line is distinguished by its "exquisite palsies or languors of decay," excessive moralism, and "diabolics" {Men Without A rt 142- 148; Romantic Agony 379-383).

2 5 2 4. It is interesting that the day before Gide's diary entry about the value of illness, he mentions that he has returned to his reading of Pater's Greek Studies (2: 98). Gide was encouraged to read Pater by his friend Charles du Bos who had studied at Oxford and considered writing a book on Pater. 5. He would no doubt share the view of his friend and mentor, Valery, who writes to him that the Eucharistie drama is the perfect art since the "Flesh [is] tom, then annihilated by the power of Thought alone." Enrst, the "small death that catches the throat. . . then the Being." In a rather bizarre but revealing metaphor, goes on to declare that since with such an effect the Mass outdoes Poe, it is "the masterpiece of Preparation, The House o f Usher of all the existing centuries" (Mallet 4/u/re Gide-Paul Valery Correspondences 142-143; English translation is Mallet's Self-Portraits 91, 92). Noteworthy, too, is Gide's use of the tale of another infant, Demophoon (Triptolemus), son of the queen Metaneira in his political appraisal of the Soviet Union. Demeter, disguised as a nursemaid, held the child (representing for Gide "the future race of mankind") over hot coals with only "apparent cruelty" to make him a god. Unfortunately, she was interrupted and a part was left vulnerable. In this scene, writes Gide, "something superhuman" was being prepared, "something glorious beyond hope" for she was on the verge of forging "the superman" ["tout le surhumain"] (Return from the U. S. S. R. 9). How do we read this metaphor? Incomplete revolution or failed Nietzschean individualism? Embodiment of human limits or fascist Ubermenschl Indeed, it is this very ambivalence and distancing in Gide's words that Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin found disturbing. In a letter to Max Horkheimer in 1938, Benjamin comments on Gide's review of Celine's vicious Bagatelle pour un massacre (NRF, April 1, 1938), drawing attention to an injudicious description of the possible effects of such a text as "banal passions". Notes Benjamin, "the word banal says it all" (Kaplan Reproductions o f Banalities 48-49) for while Gide is insightful on the text's intention, he is shockingly blind to its consequences.

253 The now famous use of the term "banali^” in reference to the Holocaust is also prefigured in a letter to Hannah Arendt by Karl Jaspers (October 19, 1946). The Nazi crimes, he writes, must not be viewed in its "satanic greatness” but "in their total banality” (62). 6 . See also Gide's Autumn Leaves in which a young surgeon botches a birth which results in ”a bundle of gory flesh” (18). On the contrast between Wildean anti-essentialism and the Gidean depth model, see DoUimore "Different Desires.” 7. Inman makes a convincing case that Pater indirectly attacked Rachilde in his fierce condemnation of Margaret of Valois (4: 285) ("John Dorian' Gray” 97-100). The phenomena of anatomical dolls and wax figures has been much studied in recent years, most prominently by feminist critics. See, for example, Jordanova, Gillman (179-90), Bronfen, Gonzalez-Crussi. The interest in ceroplasty is not unrelated to the revival of embalming in the nineteenth century, an aestheticizaton of the dead body which at times included tableaus mourant (Schwartz 98,103).

8. In "The Pre-Raphaelites in England” {Galaxy, 1876), Justin McCarthy observed that there existed in London not only Pre-Raphaelite painters, poets and novelists, but also "pre-Raphaelite hair, eyes, complexion, dress, decoration, window curtains . . . pre- Raphaelite anatomy. . . ” (quoted in Bullen 192). 9. In 1890, Jules Langbehn published his RembrandtalsErzieher, a wildly successful book which declared the necessity for Germans to become "artists.” As a naturally "aesthetic" people, the Germans could thus restore the natural man. Like the work of Paul de Lagarde and Guido von List, Langbehn's mystic text was permeated with an irrational anti-modemism. Obviously, his folkish artist, an "organic man,” is the polar opposite from the Aestheticist corporeal ideal. See, for example, Mosse, Mass and Man 198-206 and especially Stem 97-180. 10. Some examples; Bell-Villada remarks that the "Olympian inhumanity" of art-for- art's-sake (very widely understood) "can shade further into an amoral nihilism and indeed 254 on occasions has fused much too readily with fascism" (5); Tindall regards Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann as "symbols of the decadent society that produced the Nazis" (20); Stoddard describes Dorian Gray's hedonism as "crypto-Nazi" (35). 11. The exhibition represented the ultimate Aryan victory by a giant plaster of a mother with infant, her foot holding down a caricatured Jew holding a globe. The allusion to the Virgin Mary crushing the serpent with her heel could not have been missed (Cone 235 n 5).

255 CONCLUSION

The still mood, the disembodied mood, is on us... and we enjoy this momeniaiy alleviation (it is not often that one has no anxiety) when the walls of the mind become transparent.

Virginia Woolf The Waves

The contemporary world of cosmetic surgery, biological engineering, transsexuality and so-called body dysmorphic disorders (in both genders) seems rather far removed from the last centiuy's worries over hysteria, neurasthenia, muscularity, and racial degeneration. Postmodern corporeality is characterized by the transformability of the individual body (Lipovetsky 244), not the mastery of the communal body which so defined Victorian idealism and early modem utopianism. Nevertheless, such changes should not blind us to continuities. Transparency and corporeal lisibility, master tropes of a previous age, are the scientific facts of our time. Imaging technologies since Roentgen's discovery of the x-ray have actualized the dream of the transparent body which has literally become a text to be read as we pursue the Genome Project. What we witness in both eras are the challenges, euphoria and anxieties of a culture confronting its own imagined anatomies.!

Most relevant to my argument is the current debate regarding the supposed erasure of corporeality within an ever-expanding cyberculture. Already a decade ago. Whole Earth R eview sought responses to the question "Is the body obsolete?". This projected disincamation, as I have suggested, can be read as an intensification of the Victorian metaphysics of transparency which itself developed out of an Enlightenment image of the body. For some, the replacement of physical presence by the "pattem-identity" of 256 information networks (Hans Moravie) induces either euphoria or resignation before a biological self which, in a popular term drawn from William Gibson's Neuromancer, has become merely "meat." For others, it portends dire consequences. Jean Baudrillard, most vociferously, warns that such an obscene etiolation of the physical self may lead to new forms of terror {Revenge 163,27). But can the body be so easily domesticated? The keen body consciousness in contemporary Western societies cannot be adequately explained by reference to affluence or narcissism, as relevant as these are. Some cultural critics perceive the obsession as a belated and reactive sign that "the (natural) body in the postmodern condition has disappeared, and what we experience as the body is only a fantastic simulacra of body rhetorics." What remains, according to Arthur and

Marilouise Kroker, is a "panic body," an inscribed surface upon which we project our anxieties (22). Theorists like the Kiokers and Baudrillard seriously undervalue these signs of the body's resistance within popular culture (the body piercing, tattooing, and scarification of "modem primitivists " or the resurgence of freak shows; Vale and Juno) as well as a powerful trend in the productions of the avant-garde. Hot a few postmodern works foreground the body in its pleasures and perils, challenging the doxa that the body is irrelevant or destined for obsolescence.^ In this they parallel Aestheticism's audacious refusal of the metaphysics of transparency and the idealist fusion of the body and its representation. The unmediated, material self simply cannot be completely repressed or erased. Pause, suspense, alienation, even revulsion, are too much a part of desire and fantasy, and even if such veils could be removed, the result would be not only in a diminution of the erotic urge but eventually, as Heim argues, the loss of ethical responsibility. Resistance and the radically other defines our very humani^. "The fleshly world" is worth knowing not despite but precisely for "its distances and for its horizons" (77-78,80).

257 A nt has always afforded alleviating moments of transcendence but, especially today, it also assumes a responsibility to thwart the utopian drive towards pure simultaneity. It may make

enigmatic what is clear, render unintelligible what is only too intelligible, make the event itself unreadable. Accentuate the false transparency of the world to spread a terrible confusion about it, or the germs or viruses of a radical illusion....

The dream of immediacy must be contested with passion, with physical presence, and with an awareness of pain (Baudrillard The Perfect Crime 104. 121).^ My study began by revisiting Rossetti's "Jenny" in which the dormant form of the prostitute refuses to provide the narrator with a coherent narrative. The poem's Aestheticist foregrounding of the contentious body can be fruitfully contrasted with other more "aesthetic" works. The early modernist, Paul Valery, for example, was also attracted to the theme of the sleepwatchei^ but his treatment is rather less self-conscious than Rossetti's. In his "La Dormeuse," the woman is a secret "mass” [amas] of flesh which is yet "golden" [dore] and her "fearful rest" [reposredoutable] charged with gifts. The shape of her passive body presents a happy geometry to the lover's observing eyes (Oeuvres 1: 121-122).^ For a closer analog to the eroto-epistemology proposed in "Jenny,” one should rather look to the work of Marcel Piroust who knew of the work of the Pre-Raphaelites and penned a brief article on Rossetti.^ Proust's The Captive [La Prisonnière] (1924), the sixth part of his continuous novel, is worth a quick look since his version of the Sleeping Beauty theme has a distinct Aestheticist resonance. The male narrators of Rossetti's poem and Proust's book both desperately seek to uncover the sleeper's true desires, and they both use the sleepwatcher scenario to expound their philosophies of love and of mind.^ Like Jenny, Albertine is idealized as a flower (84,86, 147), and then a child (87, 149) but the salient metaphors of Proust's speaker are those which refer to nearly dead things. Thus, the inert Albertine is said to be a creature that breathes only, that is to say, restricted to the merest of 258 physiological functions, lacking the positive attributes of speech or even silence ( 147). It is her somnolent state, declares the narrator, which makes love possible (85). When she actively speaks, he cannot "penetrate so far into herself," and when her eyes are open they disturb the continuity of her face (89, 87). It is when she is deep in sleep, that "undiscovered country" (86),^ when she is an "unconscious and unresisting object of dumb nature," (89), that she seems completely in his possession. He is fascinated by her total detachment. The Other has become "a kind of coloured ceramicised, vitrified figurine" in which he can read, "without understanding anything about it, the cause o f[his] desire” (Barthes A Lover's Discourse 72). Proust pushes this drama to its climax—literally, as Marcel uses Albertine's inert body for pleasures "less pure" (88). The body, no matter how passive or malleable, maddeningly withholds its true sentiments and memories (148) but this very resistance structures desire and its narration.^ Thus, Marcel concludes that it is not Albertine that is the captive but he himself (and by extension all human beings) (527). The material world, "that close, impassable prison- w air as Marius calls it (3:72), only appears transparent in the illusions of art, mysticism or erotic bliss. The "golden mass" of Valery's dormeuse may seem to possess a pure line ["7a forme au ventre pur”] (122) but, Proust cautions, "we do not possess a line, a surface, a mass unless it is occupied by our love" (233) and, what is more, any confession which rises from the depths of a seemingly "translucent element" is one which we can never understand (492). If we can know the beloved at all, it is only "as a sacred secret" (Rossetti "True Woman"; 93). Like Jeimy's watcher, Valery's narrator attempts to master the body of the other through art. Marcel, however, eventually realizes that this illusory tactic, famously adopted by Swarm towards Odette, operates only at the level of taste and intellect. Such an aesthetic detachment from both pleasure and pain differs radically from the Aestheticist curiosity he tries to describe (525). His Rossettian view is that "we love only that in which we pursue something inaccessible, we love only what we do not possess,"

259 and admits that he could never possess Albertine. (523) Marcel at last sees himself as a spectator refused admission to a theater, his face pressed to the glass panes of the door, ignorant of the drama being staged within (524). My reading of Rossetti has attempted to develop theoretically his conviction that while we persistently seek to perceive the other’s luminous core—his/her "lodestar"—there lurks an intractable alterity, the "toad within the stone" in both viewer and viewed. Proust repeats the point when he has Marcel acknowledge that Albertine's body finally seems to him like a stone which encloses "the salt of immemorial oceans or the light of a star," and he can in truth touch "no more than the sealed envelope of a person who inwardly reaches to infinity" (526-27). Albertine, like Jenny, confronts us "with a cruel and fruitless pressure" and resembles "if anything, a mighty^ goddess of Time" (527). The simultaneous elevation of woman to both the Eternal Feminine and a Ggure of time is manifest, I argued in chapters three and five, in both Rossetti's Dantis Amor and Pater's "Sebastian van Storck." Beneath the surface sentimentalities, these texts display a certain transformative energy which unsettle the Victorian dogmas of domesticity. The gender biases granted, woman is here placed at the intersection between the conventional and the chthonic, the erotically sublimated and the darkly sublime (see Auerbach 63-65). In the early art-catholic poems, such as "For A Virgin and Child," Rossetti projects onto the body of the mythic Mother a vision of the "ended pang of knowledge” for "She hath known all " (190). The Blessed Virgin appears to be simply a counter-model to the fallen woman portrayed in Found or "Jenny." Yet, as Arma Jameson observed in her Legends o f the Madonna (1852),^^ Mary has always assumed the ambiguous attributes of a long genealogy of women, including Eve, Astarte, Demeter and Aphrodite. Thus, while she (much like the angel-cupid figure of Dantis Amor) seems to mediate and unify sacred and profane, as a creature of flesh and blood she impedes access to the transcendent (Kristeva Desire in Language 251).

260 As mentioned in chapter two, this tension of access and denial, presence and absence, is prominent in Rossetti's "For Our Lady of the Rocks," a poetic gloss on da Vinci's well-known painting.

Mother, is this darkness of the end. The Shadow of Death? and is that outer sea Infinite imminentEtemity ? And does the death-pang by man’s seed sustained In Time's each instant cause thy face to bend Its silent prayer upon the Son, while He Blesses the dead — ?

Mother of grace, the pass is difficult. Keen as these rocks, and the bewildered souls Throng it like echoes, blindly shuddering through. (171) The polyvalent "pass" includes references to the opening da Vinci set into the back of the

grotto, to life's brief journey, to the threshold of death, and to the Mater Mediatrix herself. The poet questions whether the portal through which we must pass leads to the divine or merely to the grotesque Thingness of existence. The hollowed space at the center of Rossetti's ekphrastic poem is more subtle than the blank dial of Dantis Amor, but the image may serve to further illustrate the perennial lure of transparency. As we have seen, a direct Momusian knowledge of what lay behind the veil, however fascinating, would spell sterility and death. Schefer, discussing the diaphanous beings displayed in Correggio's The Mystical Union (c. 1526), remarks how monstrous such sublime forms truly are for they present something well beyond our experience. Casting our eyes around us, it's not invisible objects that we encounter (this is the mysterious default of transparent bodies—that is, bodies beneath bodies and which impart continuity to the wodd—.. . . These flat universes of color, of figures, zones without movement in which the anatomy of the world is primarily the simultanei^ of all its parts, are thus not quite laid out for a human gaze. The vision of transparent bodies unleashes a disturbing awareness of the Thing, but it is this very uncanniness as much as the seductions of simultanei^ and wholeness which provokes our fascination {Enigmatic Body 17). Understood in this sense, we might be

261 permitted to add a perverse ambigui^ to Rossetti's remark to Ford Madox Brown about the retrieval of the manuscript buried with his wife: "there is a great hole right through all the leaves of Jenny ^which was the thing I most wanted" {Letters 2:752). In Modern Painters II, Ruskin comments that landscape paintings need luminous "portals of escape" which point to the "infinite hope" of the pure light beyond (4: 83,81). As demonstrated above (in chapter six), there is a plethora of Victorian and eariy modernist texts, both visual and verbal, which exaggerate this wish for some transparent egress. 1 ^ I would like to use a slightly later work, however, to illustrate the point: Salvador Dali's The Madonna o f Port Uigat (1950). [Figure 10] The issue of chronology aside, the choice may be somewhat surprising given this artist's penchant for representing the human anatomy in viscous, mutilated, and putrefying states, as well as his distinctive palimpsest optics. Nevertheless, his mystic theories of art and his view of the sublime body restate most vividly the Victorian ideal of transparency embedded in Ruskin's remark. Under the influence of Freud, Dali's work of the 1930s represented bodies full of compartments (e.g. Venus de Milo with Drawers and The Anthropomorphic Cabinet). The self is depicted as a material case full of secret niches which, according to the artist, are accessible to psychoanalysis or intuitive artists who possess "absolute vision" (most modem art, in his view, is simply too skeptical and "decadent") (Neret 79). The sublime body lacks even this degree of hiddeness; it is fully transparent. In Dali's The Last Supper (1955), the corpus Christi is a diaphanous presence hovering over the apostles. The Madonna of Port Lligat is more solid—with the conspicuous exception of the square opening carved right through her torso. Apropos another painting in which his beloved Gala is again eviscerated, Dali explained that as a child he once saw an insect devoured by ants to the extent that only its shell remained: "Through the holes in its anatomy one could see the sky. Every time I wish to attain purity, I look at the sky through the flesh" (76). The divine body, then, must be of a Praxitilean beau^, and all artistic representations of a suffering and wounded Christ are categorically rejected (Rodman 39). Ruskin would not 262 have gone so far, of course, although he too feels uneasy with any strong corporealization of angels or saints, let alone Christ (4:327).^^ Showing a Byzantine Christ to schoolgirls, for example, he has them note how the gilded face is "deep cut into horrible wrinkles; an open gash for a mouth, a distorted skeleton fora body." He is befuddled how such a figure can represent "a Redeeming DeiQr" (though he does recognize the influence of changeable images; Erh/cy o f the Dust 148, 149).

Dali and Ruskin's poetics of the sublime body, with their significant differences, both stand in stark contrast to the Aestheticist vision. Ford Madox Brown's unfinished Take Your Son, Sir! (1852-92) is not a religious picture but to the uninitiated the Pre- Raphaelite piece may at first glance appear as a modem, if grotesque. Madonna and Child, especially as the mirror behind her head can be first mistaken as a halo. The mother presents to the viewer an infant who seems to emerge from the folds of her dress. While the blank belly of Dali's Madonna recalls the speculum sine macula of the theologians, the flesh-like folds of the cloth over the abdomen of Brown's carnal Mother reflects of human vulnerability. The halo-mirror behind the mother's head which is discovered to reveal the father further implicates the spectator in the scene. Dalian aesthetics devalues this sense of physical identification and, consequently, the melancholic friction between the sacred and the profane, life and death, transparency and opacity, so well expressed, for example, in the last line of Rossetti's poetic gloss: "the bitterness of things occult" (171). The poet defended this line by pointing to this tension, the "momentary contact with the immortal which results from sensuous culmination and is always a half-conscious element of it" {Letters 2: 727). In his comments on the representation of the sublime body, Dali singles out for special opprobrium the gothic crucified Christ of Gmnewald, the center panel of the Isenheim Altarpiece (Rodman 39). The viewer is immediately stunned by the corpse's Thingness which arrests any idealizing transparency (see Harpham 137-200). It should come as no surprise that the deepest appreciation of this masterpiece is to be found in the 263 text of a Decadent, X. K. Huysman. Durtal, the protagonist of his La Bas (1891), praises Grünewald for making the spiritual tangible within a degenerate body. This chamelly charged image of the divine refutes the various post-Raphaelite "debonair Golgothas." This lockjaw Christ was not the Christ of the rich, the Adonis of Galilee, the exquisite dandy, the handsome youth of the curly brown tresses, divided beard, the insipid doll-like features, whom the faithful have adored for centuries. This was the vulgar Christ — clothed, through humility, in the most abject of forms. (14) This representation does afford "an escape from the senses into the infînite," not by etiolating the body, however, but by stigmatizing it. The eye may be drawn to the transcendent whiteness of the Virgin's cloak, but through the gesturing Baptist, it is magnetically pulled back to the "humanly vulgar" corpus. As the British Pre-Raphaelites also demonstrated, ignoble physiognomies can be highly evocative. Huysman's reverence before this "morgue Redeemer" and "sewer Deity" (11-12, 14; Grünewald 4, 3) is an Aestheticist counter to Ruskin’s revulsion over the Byzantine icon. Pater (perhaps recalling Ruskin's remark on landscape painting cited above) writes that one characteristic trait of Marius is his longing for escape—for some sudden, relieving interchange, across the very spaces of life... for a lifting, from time to time, of the actual horizon. It was like the necessi^ under which the painter finds himself, to set a window or an open doorway in the background of his picture. Marius perceives such an opening when he gazes upon the "virginal beauty" of mother and child in Cecilia's house (3; 107). For one alleviating moment the walls of the material world do seem transparent. But Pater's own corporeal poetics consistently cautions against over emphasizing such extratemporal reconcilations. The sympathetic imagination desublimates the experience and halts the movement towards immateriality. Thus, even as the pair in Cecilia's house remind him of the "virile character of the best female statuary of Greece," their expression of human pathos is "foreign" to that style (3: 106). T he opened

264 heaven," Pater writes elsewhere, "is but a dream" ("Coleridge's Writing" 126). His memorable descriptions of distinctive women. Renaissance Madonnas or Greek goddesses, especially, stress how much human sensuality tempers such mystic moments. The "uncouth energy” of Michelangelo's Doni Madonna, for example, he considers a borrowing from the older, pagan "Mighty Mothers” {Renaissance 37) such as Demeter who is, in her turn, "our Lady of Sorrows, the mater dolorosa of the ancient world" (7: 114). The latter is Aestheticist in so far as that she is identified not with any aerial transparency but with earth, with shadows, and with sensual objects: the folds of her garment are fragrant with incense, flowers and fruit, and her "sweet breath is the warm west wind, feeding all germs of vegetable life; her bosom, where he lies, is the bosom of the earth.” Unlike the opened tabernacle of Dali's Madonna, this body is "reserved and shy, offended if human eyes scrutinize too closely its secret chemistry” (115). Here are no Platonic portals to the infinite but "dark caves" and "secret places" latent with "monstrous forms ' (102). It is da Vinci's Mona Lisa, of course, who is for Pater the prime symbol of the Aestheticist sensibility for she makes visible the panoply of our bodily passions and its various maladies. She is not simply some "ideal lady, embodied and beheld at last" {Renaissance 98). She is, according to Gautier in a text which inspired Pater, a veiled Isis "full of the promises of unknown voluptuousness," but who withholds her secrets. Her smile simultaneously "refuses and promises," as if an alien nature was looking at us "through the holes of a mask" (9:43,262). Being both spiritual and sensuous, of St. Anne and Leda, she thus points to that third possibility sought by Pater's Gaston de Latour

which might acknowledge "the resistant force of solid matter of human experience, in its strange mixture of beauty and evil, its sorrow, its ill-assorted fates, its pathetic acquiescence” (4: 198). Her remoteness and gross opacity contrast markedly with those diaphanous "white Greek goddesses and beautiful woman of antiquity" {Renaissance 98).

265 Therein lies the "revolutionary importance" of Pater's prose portrait (Yeats, Oxford Book o f Verse xxxi). What Pater could not have foreseen, of course, was that the Mona Lisa would become a transparent cliché of mass culture.

In "The Aesthetic Life," Pater discusses the possibilities of a modem spirit which he calls "the new Gioconda." As Adams notes, this undated draft raises issues of individual identity and sense perception which beleaguered his thinking. Why, he asks, has the age not found some

point of contact body and soul, in the last perfection of their delicate power [,] that insane soul (if you will) as all deeply wrought soul seems ever insane in that sane body as the lineaments of a portrait, some exquisite [anoeos\ there, defining the unique the original physiognomic note of our day.

Through the allusions to contemporary pseudo-science one witnesses Pater again questioning the Victorian ideal of mens sana in corpore sano (Adams 223-224). He then points to the necessary imbrication of art and life—in the terms of my argument, image and anatomy—when he states that "men become like what they look upon with the inward preferences and recognition [,] unconscious resemblances which seemingly accidental are true effects" (quoted 225). As we have seen. Pater’s published texts made much use of this dynamic interaction of mind and body, beauty and desire, sane and insane. Any "insane realism" in which ideas and objects may eerily become animate or bodies become things serves to arrest the mind’s slide towards abstraction. Due in no small measure to Pater, La Gioconda herself came to be perceived in this light. For instance, even that theorist of utopian transparency, Ernst Bloch, observes that "in the ripples of her gown, the weightiness of the dreams of her eyelids, the congealed, uncanny, paradoxically non­ transparent ether in her smile" she seems to become the very landscape around her ("The Representation of Wish-Landscapes" 284). Like all Aestheticist figures of femininity, from Rossetti’s Liliths to Joyce's Our Lady of the Cherries, she is no neo-Platonic Venus Coelestis but a Venus Vulgaris of nature.

266 Transparency, for Rossetti an erotic, and for Pater a religious and philosophical, category soon became an explicitly political and anthropological one. Some comments by William Holman Hunt in his self-serving reminiscences of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement are indicative of the convergence between the Victorian extirpolation of animality and the fetishism of progress, health and racial typing. Troe artists, he declares, should like priests remove the veil hiding the effeminacy and degeneracy of the "alien fringe” (i.e. Decadence) and demonstrate "the everlasting digniQr of the natural proportions of the human form" (1: xv; 2: 296 f). The aim is "to paint varying Qrpes of healthy beauty with that unaffected iimocence of sentiment essential to a heroic Race" (2:300). He concludes by warning the nation against denying differences in blood or nature's drive toward perfection (362,353, 364).

This mastery of the body through the idealization of one or more of its representations is not new, of course. What is noteworthy, however, is the increasing cooperation of art, "nature," and science in the hope of realizing one mathesis universalis.

This aesthetic and scientific idealism may not have been a systematic philosophy but it was a pervasive ideology, a cultural metaphor with profound political ramifications. The idea of a "pure humanity," the classicist Ludwig Curtius observed, was no "pale abstract theory, but a moral command, directed at each individual, for the reconstruction of his personal life" (quoted in Stem xxiv). This idealist ideology, Berlin points out, was a manic self-prostration before some "true inner essence," whether perceived in the blood or the shape of the skull {Crooked Timber 197-198), but what needs to be added is that the template for the New Man was the Greek body as it was variously interpreted by Winckelmann, Arnold, Leighton, Knox, Rosenberg, et al. Aestheticism, foregrounding the body's composition as an unstable palimpsest of cultural meanings, was an unheeded counterweight to the incipient despotism of this transparent body. What Christina Rossetti called its "vulgar optic" (3: 223) was a revolutionary response to the new biologies against the myths of progress and 267 perfectibility, while the Victorian idolization of the Greek body and utopian modemism's crystalline fantasies were a counterrevolution which stoked the fires of a nascent fascism in their obsessions with purity, health and hygiene. I would like to conclude by briefly looking at the works of three contemporary figures—the visual artists Kiki Smith and David Wojnarowicz and the writer J. G. Ballard— not because they are Aestheticists sans savoir, but because they partake of a shared economy in which corporeity and its mediations are dramatized. Most germane to my discussion are their images of anti-transparency which manifest important confluential currents in Aestheticist and Postmodern poetics of the body. Ballard is much concerned with the collision of man and machine, in particular the effect technologies have upon our imagined anatomies. In texts like Crash ( 1971) and The Atrocity Exhibition (1990), he reminds us that the more abstract and calculating a culture becomes, the more the human body will resist by inventing new and more "obscene" perversions. In the face of any impending autumn of the body, human eroticism will create a "new alphabet of sensations" (99) and the instinctual, in Freud's words, will ramify "like a fungus" in the dark, luxuriating into "ever more extreme forms" (14:146-158). In The Crystal World (1966), Ballard tells the tale of a cosmic accident which results in a West African forest and everything in it, living and non-living, gradually turning into crystal. What was a utopian trope of perfection for Hudson and Read, is here an apocalypse, but one whose deliquescent beauty mesmerizes the human imagination. As a main character understands, the crystalline state disengages an archaic memory or infantile dream of oneness (69, 83). Motion and time engender disease—in fact, ere "diseases”—which lead to death. Thus, by annihilating temporality, the crystal experience promises to restore one to a Platonic zero point at which time and space, life and death are reunited (83,85,175). The sick and dying from the local leper colony dance into the forest

268 to be vitrified where their bodies will be transformed into opalescent mummies (138). By surrendering their individual, physical identities, they believe they will achieve immortality (169). This haunting tale effectively addresses our nostalgia for impossible unities and what happens when the symmetrical perfection of objects meets the soft geometries of our bodies. The gleaming illusion of the prism, Ballard says, represses the libidinal and the leprous which defines our humanity. Like the Aestheticists, he reminds us too that the contingent body, its pains and scars, are essential not merely for self-consciousness but also for the formation of a sympathetic community. Whatever the dreams of Momus, transparent bodies simply cannot be read. Furthermore, as we have seen, such an invisibility is willy-nilly appropriated by mass ideologies. Such Apollonian beauty is potentially curative and consoling, for it arrests life, and therefore decay. If, however, sickness is rejected for the sake of life, then hypothesized life, in its blind separation from its other moment, becomes the latter, destructiveness and evil, insolence and braggadocio. (Adorno MinimaMoralia 77-78). My discussion of the political ramifications of the metaphysics of transparency centered on fascism and its co-option of the Greek body of idealist aesthetics. It is not at all difficult, however, to contemporize the salient issues. There are similarities, for instance, between the response to syphilitics at the end of the last century and to AIDS patients at our own fin-de-siècle (Showalter Sexual Anarchy 188-203). Our civilization is no different than any other in its wish, in the words of J. S. Mill, to keep out of sight "the spectacle, and even the very idea, of pain" (18: 130). At the same time, however, it should be stressed that pain, like health, beauty and gender, is psycho-culturally constructed, having its own histories and meanings (see Morse The Culture o f Pain). The alien and taboo body made invisible was the subject of "Corporeal Politics,” a

269 controversial exhibition in 1992-93 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. One untitled piece by David Wojnarowicz (who died of AIDS in 1992) depicts the bandaged hands of a marginalized self crying out to be seen. [Figure 11] It reads in part: 1 can't abstract my own dying any longer. 1 am a stranger to others and to myself and 1 refuse to pretend that I am familiar or that I have a history attached to my heels. 1 am glass, clear empty glass 1 am a blank spot in a hectic civilization 1 feel like a window, maybe a broken window. 1 am a glass human.... (55). Another untitled work on display was by Kiki Smith [Figure 12] who, as it happens, was deeply influenced by Grunewald's altarpiece (Posner 8,36). This piece, one of a series of variations, consists of a series of empty glass containers etched with the names of hylic secretions—sweat, urine, oil, semen, blood, diarrhea, vomit, saliva, tears, milk, pus, mucous. The gothic inscriptions provide an innervating macula in an otherwise invisible space. The words, the artist once remarked, are intended to "come out of your body," saturated with personal and political significance (quoted 15).^^ If Wojnarowicz foregrounds the body that a sanitized society would render transparent. Smith reminds us that the repressed facts of physicality must and will shadow the idealizations of sublimation. Aestheticist art assists in provoking the gaze and shattering the "crystal stopper" which prevents the emergence of the body as such (Lacan Four Fundamental Concepts 273). The Aestheticist assumption here is that our anatomies have no meaning in themselves. Individual or communal, diaphanized or abjected, they are reflective projections. The opaque body is to be appreciated, therefore, as an end in itself. By contrast, in the art-for-nature's-sake poetics of Victorian idealism or modem fascism, it was innately teleological and a sign of a determining essence. None of the three postmodern artists would deny the curative role of cultural symbols, of course. As Nietzsche often stated, Apollonian works redeem the eye from the

270 honors of existence, throwing a lucent veil of beauty over Dionysian disorder {Birth o f Tragedy, 6 0 , 131,145). Artists have the task of devising illusions lest we perish of the truth. They demonstrate how to

withdraw from things until one no longer sees much of them, in order to see them at all—or to view them from the side, and as in a frame—or to place them so that they partly disguise themselves and only permit of perspective views—or to look at Üiem through coloured glasses, or in the light of the sunset—or to furnish them with a surface or skin which is not fully transparent. {Joyful Wisdom 233) We cannot live, then, without some portals of escape or a "lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment" (Pater Renaissance 189). The holes in Henry Moore's titanic madonnas are exemplary in this regard. Yet, at the same time, an abrogation of the senses on behalf the pure spirit and the Apollonian body is meaningless, even dangerous, without the dissonant realms of Dionysus, Pan, or Marsyas. Nietzsche alludes to the latter's unidealized, grotesque body in a striking notebook entry: What is aesthetically insulting in the iimer human being, the human being stripped of its skin: bloody clumps of matter, filSty intestines, entrails, the whole sucking pumping monster—shapeless or ugly or grotesque, shocking to the sense of smell. And therefore thought away into oblivionl Whatever continues to emerge from the body arouses shame (vomit urine phlegm semen) This body veiled by the skin The human being, to the extant that he is not a merely formal configuration [Gestalt], nauseates himself—he does everytiiing in order not to have to think about it.... We shall leant to rethinknauseal (quoted Krell, 190-191). Modernism long dictated the parameters of the debate over the aesthetic, such that Rossetti on love. Pater on art, and Wilde on everything, were assumed to be shamelessly concerned only with the elevation of sight and the perfection of forms. Their metaphors of malady and the unveiled body seemed to us either maudlin and too faint-hearted, on the one hand, excessively morbid on the other. In our post-modern times, may now be more sensitive to the Aestheticists' attempt to resensualize art and life. They were at the heart of a paradigm shift from the eye to the body, from optic confidence to haptic relativity. Jonathan Crary trenchantly marks this modulation:

27 1 This opacity or carnal density' of the observer loomed so suddenly into view that its full consequences and efforts could not be immediately realized. But it was this ongoing articulation of vision as nonvericUcal, as lodged in the body, that was a condition o f possibility both for the artistic experimentation of modernism and for new forms of domination, for what Foucault calls the technology of individuals.' ("Modernizing Vision" 96) An acute sense of this new corporeity can be seen in Pater's comments on the relations of body and mind, freedom and necessity, in the final essay of The Renaissance. We modems, he asserts in "Winckelmann," carmot regain the limpid serenity of Hellenism, any more than we can realize what in his youth he had called the "clear crystal nature” of Idealism ("Diaphaneite"; 8: 253). What has "penetrated" us through and through—like "rays" forming the "central forces of the world"—is a heightened awareness of the limits of the individual body. It is this bewildering resistance which gives both nobility and an edge of melancholy to our creative endeavors. And yet, he concludes, "Who, if he saw through all, would fret against the chain of circumstance which endows one with those great experiences?" {Renaissance 185).

272 NOTES

1. One telling example is to be found in the reflections of a bodybuilder who is quite explicit about the desire to transform a body which he perceives as all-too-natural and mortal; "I hated the flawed, weak, vulnerable nature of being human as I hated the Adam's apple that bobbed beneath my chin. This attempt at physical perfection grew from the seeds of self-disgust" (Fussell 138).

Schwartz points out that the current unease with one’s body has its roots in the nineteenth century ("The Three Body Problem"). 2. Thesucces-de-scandale of two recent exhibitions, one in Great Britain, the other in Germany, is most revealing. The controversial works from the Saatchi collection (presented at the Royal Academy in 1997; at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999) which so captured the public's imagination addressed the representation or repression of the organic body by modem society. Among the displays were: a cow sliced and pickled in giant vitrines (Damien Hirst); a hyperreal corpse of the artist's father reduced to four feet (Ron Mueck); a video-tape of a larynx viewed through a dinner plate at a set table (Mona Hatoum). Even more provocative, however, was "Anatomy on Display, and It's All Too Human," an exhibition held at Mannheim's Museum of Technology the following year. Human corpses (volunteered by their former inhabitants), were plasticized into "anatomical artwork" (after a method recently developed by Dr. Gunther von Hagens). A runner was seen arrested in mid-stride, his muscles streaming behind like windblown cloth. A skeleton held aloft his own skin like a sack while another body was stretched to disclose its inner structure. Needless to say, the show was widely denounced as macabre, irreligious, and criminal (one's body may presumably be donated for science but not for art). Commented 273 one Catholic theologian (Johannes Reiter): "He who styles human corpses as a so-called work of art no longer respects the importance of death" (quoted in The New York Times, January 6,1998). Many viewers, nevertheless, claimed to have regained a sense of wonder and a renewed appreciation of our fragile frames. Some visitors inquired about donating their own bodies.

It seems that Baudrillard would regard such openings of the body as a continuation of the obscenely neutralizing representation of the sexual order: "Who knows," he sarcastically comments, "what profound pleasure in visual dismemberment, in mucous, and its smooth muscles awaits to be uncovered [in the very interior of the body]?" {Revenge o f the Crystal 149).

3. Sinunons argues that Sade's texts point to alternative Epicurean visions which resist assimilation by the acorporeal ideology of cyberspace. 4. See, for example, his "Au Bois Dormant," "La Rieuse," and "Anne." 5. The passive female body in Valery's "Intérieur" is likened to transparent glass (I: 147). Also worth mentioning is William Gass's observation that the name of Valery's most famous creation, M. Teste, alludes not only to tete, but also teste (will, witness) and, most appropriately, testes cerebri (the optic lobes) (164). 6. Proust had access to Rossetti's work through Robert Sizeranne's La Peinture anglaise contemporaine and Michael Rossetti's Ruskin; Rossetti; l*re-Raphaelitism (both 1899), as well as the scattered remarks in Ruskin's writings. The House of Life was translated into French in 1887; Pater's Imaginary Portraits {with an introduction by Arthur Symonds) in 1899; The Renaissance and Marius the Epicurean only in 1917 and 1922 respectively. Proust's article, "Dante Gabriel Rossetti et Elizabeth Siddal," appeared in 1903 (essay appended to Pleiade edition of Contre Saint-Beuve 470-474). 7. Just as Rossetti, especially in the earlier versions of "Jenny," makes reference to

2 7 4 current scientific issues, Proust here makes extensive use of scholariy discourse, drawn from various scientific fields (see Bowie 50). Jenny's body calls attention to basic flaws in progress, moral and evolutionary; Albertine's face hold "races, atavisms, vices” (88). 8. As the phrase unwittingly suggests, she is well-nigh dead in her state. Indeed, Marcel once describes her so, wrapped in her shroud-like sheets. In one scene, as he muses on the links between love and death before her body rigid as stone, he tellingly keeps his fur coat on (491-492) (see above, chapter 5, note 18). Fraser comments that such scenes underline "the turpitude of the physical, the unknowing play of the inert, the perverse unreachability of the object" (164). 9. As Bal notes in her valuable study, with Proust philosophe "the deepest secrets are not to be found in the depths" (178) and his visual imagery plays a key role in his poetics of resistance.

10. The point is also made by Henry Adams in his and Chartres and Joseph Campbell in his The Masks o f God.

11. Elsewhere, Ruskin writes that one looks not at but through the sky which is a "transparent body of penetrative air" but one which "trembles" and "quivers" with spots of veiled light and shade (3:337). One passage from Marinetti's "Geometric and Mechanical Splendor" (1914) offers a good summary of the modernist idolization of transparency and hygiene. The essay argues against a passeist aesthetics based on "memory, nostalgia, the fog of legend produced by remoteness in time, the exotic fascination produced by remoteness in space, the picturesque, the imprecise, rusticity, wild solitude, multicolored disorder, twilight shadows, corrosion, weariness, the soiled traces of the years, the crumbling of ruins, mold, the taste of decay, pessimism, phtheses, suicide, the blandishments of pain, the aesthetics of failure, the adoration of death" {Let's Murder the Moonshine 105). 12. Dali's exquisite workmanship, as well as his clever, if often grim, humor attenuates the horrors he is displaying (Picon 141). Surrealism was, of course, generally much 275 interested in the body and woriced to dissolve the era's dominant imagined anatomy Most conspicuous, perhaps, were the disjointed and displaced dolls of Hans Bellmer who was very influenced by Jean Lhermitte's L'Image de notre corps (1939). In the navel of one of his dolls, he placed a Momusian peep-hole. 13. Ruskin is not always consistent on this. He perceived a negative impersonality in the Greek sculptural ideal (4:329) and was also an early advocate of the work of the Pre- Raphaelites. It was assumed that he sympathized with their anti-academic corporeali^. One caricature, for instance, has him bypassing a Madonna and a stunner to present an apple to an old hag. The cartoon is reproduced in The Burlington Afagaune (December I960) (Bell Victorian Artists 38).

Numerous northern Protestants, including Dickens, objected to the consistent display of bodies in the art of Italy (see Premble). Sizeranne noted that the Pre-Raphaelites generally omitted the sky so that the spectator's thought would not "lose itself in enchanting distances" (211). 14. In the hospital chapel for which the work was probably commissioned, the sick and dying would have found solace in the brilliantly white garments of the Virgin but would have more strongly identified with a deformed being with reptilian limbs near St. Anthony ("the hosanna of gangrene, the song of triumph of decay," Huysman calls him) and most of all with the sieved body of Christ himself {Grünewald 9).

15. Paul Hindemith's musical symphonic work, Mathis der Maler (premiered 1938), was inspired by the career and productions of Grünewald. When Wilhelm Furtwangler wanted to perform the piece earlier in Germany, the Nazi regime forbade it. The controversy over the Crucifixion by Ludwig Gies (1887-1966) is also of some relevance the discussion. His work, intended for Lubeck Cathedral (in 1921) shocked many with its ignoble proportions. The work was demolished, then reset in 1937 in order to be included in the Nazi exhibition of Degenerate Art, before again being destroyed the following year (see Taylor and Will 92-93). 276 16. Similarly, while Dali’s Christ of The Last Supper is transparent, that of Pater absorbs "like some rich tincture in his garment, all that was deep-felt and impassioned in the experiences of the past” (3: 135). In this sense, the Mona Lisa, summing up all "thoughts and experiences" and "all modes of thought and life" {Renaissance 98, 99), is a secular icon which combines Christian and pagan elements. 17. See Panofsky Studies in Iconology 142-143. If Pater nominates Mona Lisa as the icon of Aestheticism, it is Pascal who is put forth in Pater’s last work as a symbol of its radical "inversion." For all his gifts, the Jansenist is a renunciant who, like the Actional Sebastian van Storck, tries to remove himself from the suffering body and sets all—beauty, art, life, truth—into leneant (8:79,80). The invisible is fatally valorized over the visible. 18. Some of her works most relevant to my discussion: a glass Stomach (1985); an exquisite composition constructed of 230 lead-crystal sperm {Untitled, 1988-1990); a Marsyasian Madoima (V7r^/n Mz/y, 1992); Pee Body (1992) and Train (1993) in which fluids expelled from the abject body are displayed in the form of glass beads.

277 WORKS CITED

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3 0 4 APPENDIX Rgure I. D a n tisA m o r Daate Gabriel Rossetti 306 m

R gure 2. Dantis Amor (Study) Dante Gabriel Rossetti 307 .:y

Figure 3. The Blessed Damozel (1879) Dante Gabriel Rossetti 308 Figure 4. / lock My Door Upon iWv.ve//( 1891 ) Fernand Khnoppf 309 R gure 5. Goethe in Frankfurt ( 1862) Wilhelm Kaulbach 310 %

Figure 6. The Sculptor o f Germany O. Garvens 311 R gure 7. Adolf the Superman: Swallows Gold and Spews Junk (1935) Joha Heartfield 312 Figure 8. Illustration from. Peter Camper's Dissenarion sur les Variétés Maiurelles ( 1791) 313 Rgure9. D/5c

Figure 11. Untitled{1991) David Wojaarowicz 316 ».

Rgure 12- Untitled (^19^) KUd Smith 317