Ibba NG.Phd. Thesis. Final Copy. SEP2015
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Nicola Giacomo Ibba Queer Posthumous Writing: a Comparative Study of E.M.Forster’s Maurice and Umberto Saba’s Ernesto PhD in Comparative Literature University College London 2015 I, Nicola Giacomo Ibba confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. 2 Abstract My thesis is a comparative study of Edward Morgan Forster’s Maurice (written in 1913-14 and published in 1971) and Umberto Saba’s Ernesto (written in 1953, left unfinished and published in 1975). This work aims to propose a reading of queerness in relation to their posthumous publication. Most specifically, I call queer posthumous writing a sub-genre that reflects a specific authorial choice to keep separate the queer text from the rest of the oeuvre. I look at the hybrid space occupied by Saba and Forster – between mainstream literary acclamation and exclusion through queerness – to understand how the two authors negotiate their position. The solution both find is to locate the “unpublishable” novels in the future, thus creating a textual afterlife where oeuvre and queer writing can be reunited. In order to understand this negotiation, I look at how cultural and social discourse on sexuality and queerness were expressed when Forster and Saba were writing. I argue that Maurice is political in trying to present a specific model of the homosexual as an “average” man who is unfairly denied his rights by society and thus needs to find an alternative viable way to exist as a subject. In the same way, I study the Italian context, and I analyse the questione sessuale after the unification (1861) to see where Saba formed his ideas about sexuality and how he renegotiates them in Ernesto, where the focus is not on identity but on sexual activities. Accordingly, this thesis is a comparative analysis of the novels as much as an investigation of the complex historical, social and cultural milieu that produced them. Primarily informed by queer theory, it proposes a reading of the novels and an historical and cultural account of discourses on sexuality that are necessary to contextualise them and their authors. 3 Contents Introduction 6 Chapter 1. Theoretical approach and methodology 1.1 Introduction 14 1.2 Queer theory/queer theories: origins and evolution 15 1.3 Michel Foucault’s legacy for queer theory 21 1.4 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and the centrality of the marginal 24 1.5 Antisocial thesis: Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman 29 1.6 Not here, not now: José Esteban Muñoz’s queer futurity 33 1.7 Outside Anglo-American Academia: queer theory and the national question in the Italian context 34 Chapter 2. From homophilia to sexual scandals: debates on sexuality in late nineteenth-century Britain 2.1 Introduction 40 2.2 German sexology and its introduction in Britain 40 2.3 Homophile Victorian Britain 44 2.4 British literary sexologists and the American poet: John Addington Symonds, Edward Carpenter and the influence of Walt Whitman 50 2.4.1 John Addington Symonds 50 2.4.2 Edward Carpenter 58 2.4.3 The Wilde trials and the end of Homophile Britain 63 Chapter 3. Minor, gay or queer fiction? Scholarly literature on Maurice since its publication 3.1 Introduction 68 3.2 Heterocentric early readings: Maurice as minor fiction 71 3.3 Maurice as a positive homosexual novel 75 3.4 Masculine love 81 3.5 Queer at last 86 3.6 Into the canon: but which one? 89 3.7 Coda 92 3.8 Conclusion 93 Chapter 4. Homosexual characters and queer choices: E.M. Forster’s Maurice 4.1 Introduction 95 4.2 A mediocre man 97 4.3 Hellenism: deconstruction of a cultural trope 113 4.4 Outside class: masculine love and the possibility of queer 122 4.5 Conclusion 133 Chapter 5. Sex/Sexuality/sexology: Italian questione sessuale in the nineteenth and twentieth century 5.1 Introduction 136 5.2 Cesare Lombroso and Paolo Mantegazza: the Posivitist School 136 5.2.1 Cesare Lombroso 138 5.2.2 Paolo Mantegazza 140 5.3 La Voce and the Convegno per la questione sessuale (1910) 142 4 5.4 Aldo Mieli’s Rassegna di Studi Sessuali: homosexuality on the scene 144 5.5 Legislation on sexuality: from the Napoleonic code to the Rocco Code 147 5.6 Trieste: crossroad of cultures 148 5.7 Fin de siècle Vienna’s notions of sexuality: Otto Weininger and Sigmund Freud 154 5.7.1 Otto Weininger 155 5.7.2. Sigmund Freud and the theories of sexuality 158 5.8 Fascism, virility and homosexuality 161 5.9 Homosexuality and the law 164 5.10 The Postwar years: 1945-1953 166 5.11 Conclusion 169 Chapter 6. Literary Review on Saba’s Ernesto 6.1 Introduction 170 6.2 Ernesto as the final chapter of Il Canzoniere: essays 1970s-1980s 173 6.3 Conclusion 186 Chapter 7. Ernesto and the possibilities of queer desire 7.1 Introduction 188 7.2 Desiring and acting: beyond identity 189 7.3 On/against pederasty 195 7.4 Heterosexual experience 202 7.5 Heteronormativity and social pressure 205 7.6 Confession/absolution 208 7.7 Class difference 213 7.8 The impossibility of delineating an identity: Quinto Episodio 214 Chapter 8. Queer posthumous writing 8.1 Introduction 220 8.2 E.M.Forster and closet/desire/literary failure 223 8.3 Literary/biographical legitimation 230 8.4 Polishing/changing/fitting 236 8.5. Umberto Saba: Ernesto as rascal 240 8.6. Pregnancy and motherhood of Ernesto 241 8.7. “Questioni di linguaggio” (language matters) 243 Conclusion 254 Works cited 257 Ackowledgements 271 5 Introduction In 1972, Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote a review of the first Italian edition of Maurice in which he accused Edward Morgan Forster (1879 -1970) of committing a moral error in not publishing the novel during his life and blamed English society for pushing him not to.1 Pasolini continues by focusing on the body of Alec – the gamekeeper with whom Maurice has a relationship in the second part of the novel – and reads Alec as the embodiment of the working class male and Maurice as a middle class man who is characterized by a distance from the body. He then considers how sex symbolizes the possibility of breaking social conventions and the class system.2 In his review of Marc Daniel and André Baudry’s Gli Omosessuali (1971),3 Pasolini returns to Maurice and compares it to Umberto Saba's Ernesto4 – at that time still unpublished – to argue for the political value of a sexual attraction to young boys of a lower social class as a refusal of the bourgeois system of integration and assimilation: Il ‘momento politico’ dell’omosessualità va ricercato altrove, e non importa se ai margini, ai margini estremi della vita pubblica. Ricorrerò all’esempio dell’amore tra Maurice e Alec, nello stupendo romanzo di Forster del 1914 e all’amore tra l’operaio e lo studentino in un altrettanto stupendo (ma inedito) racconto di Saba. Nel primo caso, un uomo dell’alta borghesia inglese, vive, nell’amore del ‘corpo’ di Alec, che è un servo, un’esperienza eccezionale: la ‘conoscenza’ dell’altra classe sociale. E cosí, rovesciando i rapporti, l’operaio nello studentello triestino.5 (The ‘political moment’ of homosexuality needs to be sought elsewhere, even if at the margins, at the extreme margins of public life. I will give the example of the love between Maurice and Alec, in Forster’s marvellous novel of 1914 and of the love between a labourer and a young student in Saba’s equally marvellous (but unpublished) short story. In the former, an English man of the upper middle-class lives, in the love of the ‘body’ of Alec, who is a servant, an exceptional experience: ‘knowledge’ of the other social class. And 1 Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Edward Morgan Forster, Maurice”, in Walter Siti and Silvia de Laude, eds., Saggi sulla letteratura e sull’arte, Milano: Mondadori, 1999, Vol. 2, 1688. 2 Pasolini, “Maurice”, 1688. 3 Marc Daniel and André Baudry, Gli omosessuali, Firenze: Vallecchi, 1971. 4 Umberto Saba (1883–1957) was born Umberto Poli and chose his nom de plum Saba in 1910. 5 Pier Paolo Pasolini, Scritti corsari, Milano: Garzanti, 1975, 261. 6 in the same way, reversing the roles, the labourer in the young student from Trieste). The parallel drawn by Pasolini struck me for the contraposition between centrality and marginality, and the relation he establishes between the political value of homosexuality and social order. Pasolini’s comments about Forster’s moral error and the body as a means to knowledge resonated in my mind. Despite not being entirely convinced by Pasolini’s essentialist eroticization of poverty and the lower class, nevertheless I was intrigued by the comparison between Maurice and Ernesto, and by the association between the novels and the rejection of the social system. I wondered if, and how, Forster and Saba wanted to offer this mapping of homosexuality as marginal. The dichotomy between the marginal and the central offered by Pasolini was not satisfactory to explain the complexity of the two novels that the authors considered unpublishable, but the link revealed a possible space for research. Were Forster and Saba trying to present a case for sexuality through a political narrative of homosexuality? And, if so, how did they dramatize it in fiction? I soon became interested in investigating the similarities and differences between the two novels which, at first sight, seem easily comparable: both depict two characters who form queer subjectivities, both were written by acclaimed authors, and both were unpublished during their lifetimes.