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Journal of Homosexuality Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wjhm20
Floating Call Boys and Agile Homosexuals: Homophobia/Venice/ History a
John Champagne PhD a
Department of English, Penn State Erie–The Behrend College, Erie, Pennsylvania, USA Accepted author version posted online: 14 Jan 2014.Published online: 02 May 2014.
Click for updates To cite this article: John Champagne PhD (2014) Floating Call Boys and Agile Homosexuals: Homophobia/Venice/History, Journal of Homosexuality, 61:7, 923-939, DOI: 10.1080/00918369.2014.870844 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2014.870844
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Journal of Homosexuality, 61:923–939, 2014 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0091-8369 print/1540-3602 online DOI: 10.1080/00918369.2014.870844
Floating Call Boys and Agile Homosexuals: Homophobia/Venice/History JOHN CHAMPAGNE, PhD
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Department of English, Penn State Erie–The Behrend College, Erie, Pennsylvania, USA
Because works of nonfiction are always composed of literary tropes and metaphors, they have to be read critically for the ways in which their truth claims are potentially structured by ideologies and stereotypes. This essay reads passages from Richard Sennett’s sociological analysis Flesh and Stone, The Body and the City in Western Civilization and Joseph Brodsky’s memoir Watermark in order to demonstrate how these alleged works of nonfiction shore up some dishearteningly familiar literary stereotypes of male homosexuality and participate in a tradition, dating from the 19th century, of linking the city of Venice with homosexuality and death. KEYWORDS homophobia, decay, Sennett, stereotypes
homosexuality,
Venice,
Brodsky,
Sun-girt City, thou hast been Ocean’s child, and then his queen; Now is come a darker day And thou soon must be his prey —Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills” (1910, p. 294)
In her summary of a discussion held at the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute “Venice, the Jews, and Italian Culture,” Gretchen Starr Lebeau noted the ways in which 19th-century Venetian travel literature deploys and relies for its appeal on tropes of “decay, decadence, and illness.” Although Lebeau’s comments were specifically in reference to works Address correspondence to John Champagne, Department of English, Penn State Erie–The Behrend College, 4951 College Drive, Erie, PA 16563, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
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by Charles Dickens (1998) and W. D. Howells (1883), John Ruskin (2009) also contributed significantly to this view of Venice, the word “decay” appearing frequently in his The Stones of Venice. Describing the Venetians, William Beckford wrote, “Their nerves, unstrung by disease and the consequence of early debaucheries, impede all lively flow of spirits in its course” (cited in Redford, 1996, p. 113). Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (2004) represents perhaps the most famous 20th-century example of this kind of literature; significantly, though, it adds a new figure into the mix—the homosexual. Although there is a long tradition in Western art of linking male homoerotic desire with decay, illness, and even death—noteworthy examples from the visual arts include the “dying slaves” Michelangelo sculpted for the uncompleted tomb of Pope Julius II, the ubiquitous portrayals of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, and, at least according to some critics, the “sick Bacchus” of Caravaggio (Posner, 1971)—it is surely not a coincidence that it is in Mann’s 19th-century novella that the homosexual “appears” as a pathological (and) “Venetian” subject. To ventriloquize Foucault, what in earlier periods of history was a “temporary aberration”—the sodomite, whose pleasure in sexual submission to another male was likely, in a culture where male and female were perceived as opposites, to be construed (if it continued beyond a certain age) as an “evil” or “sinful” identification with the feminine—became in the 19th century a personage (Foucault, 1976, p. 59).1 (For a rich analysis of sodomy in Renaissance Florence and the inappropriateness of equating sodomy with homosexuality, see Rocke, 1997; on decay and homoeroticism in Victorian literature, see Hanson, 1997.) While the sodomite was simply the juridical subject of the act of sodomy—an act in which any of the children of Adam might choose to engage—the homosexual was a “case history,” with a distinct type of personality, a family history, “an indiscreet anatomy,” a distinct morphology, etc. (Foucault, 1990, p. 43).2 In other words, given in particular 19th-century sexological discourse’s construction of the homosexual as a “sick” sexual subject, as well as the tendency in some quarters to see Venice as decadent, promiscuous, “in decline” since, in some historical accounts, as early as the 16th-century shift in the center of maritime trade from the Mediterranean to the North Atlantic, it is no coincidence that Aschenbach should choose La Serenissima for his final spring vacation. (For one analysis of the construction in literature of Venice in decline, see Perosa, 2003.) Robert Calimani argues, for example, that the peace of Passarowitz, signed in July of 1718 between the Ottoman Turks on one side and Venice and the Austrian Habsburgs on the other and which ceded Venetian possessions in the Aegean to the Turks, signaled the beginning of the end: “From that day on the Republic slipped into golden decline” (1987, p. 222). Other Italianists might object that this version of Venice is peculiarly “Northern European” and not one Italians often share—Luchino Visconti and Calimani to the contrary (S. Parussa, personal communication, October 27, 2008). For even 18th-century Venice—reputed
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by some to be a decaying republic—produced the brilliance of the Tiepolos, Canaletto, and Goldoni. (Ruskin [2009] actually dates the commencement of Venice’s decay to an even earlier period, “the death of [doge Tommaso] Mocenigo,” in 1423 [p. 302]). I do not mean to simplify Mann’s novella, with its rich and complicated rereading of Plato’s (2006) Phaedrus, its rumination on the tension between the Apollonian and Dionysian impulses in Western culture, and its relationship to Mann’s own biography—the latter explored in Robert Aldrich’s The Seduction of the Mediterranean, which also provides an analysis of the historical “queering” of Venice (1993, pp. 4–6). And any account of the queering of Venice needs also to include the way, in a kind of Foucauldian “reversediscourse,” a proto-homosexual figure like John Addington Symonds found happiness in Venice, first with his friend and biographer Horatio F. Brown and later, gondolier Angelo Fusato (Symonds, 1984; Sorensen, 2013). But a facile interpretation of Death in Venice might draw an equation between cholera as a sickness of the body and homosexuality as a sickness of the soul, with Venice acting as the breeding ground or Petri dish for both types of infection.3 Hayden White’s (1978) insistent reminder that historiography necessarily relies on literary tropes alerts us to the possibility of locating this figurative linking of Venice, homosexuality and decadence in works of nonfiction, too. In this essay, I will analyze two contemporary works from two different nonfiction genres—Richard Sennett’s Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (1996), a historical and sociological analysis, and Joseph Brodsky’s Watermark (1993), a memoir—as a contribution to a genealogy of the figure of the decadent homosexual in Venice. Such an analysis reminds us of how allegedly factual accounts of homosexuality can be structured by pre-existing homophobic stereotypes. The difference in these two genres suggests the ubiquity of the stereotype, though both texts claim in different ways to be representing historical facts. And like many histories, they attempt to erase the traces of their figuration in an attempt to shore up their truth claims about homosexuality in particular. A critical reading of both texts, then, reveals the ways in which they figure fiction as history, and vice versa. Both of these texts were published in the 1990s; both are likely to be familiar to Italianists in particular. A resident at the American Academy in Rome in 1981, Brodsky was posthumously honored in Italy by a 2011 tribute co-presented by the fellowship fund that bears his name, John Cabot University (an American university in Rome), The Casa delle Letterature/Comune di Roma, and the University of Rome La Sapienza; his Memorial Fellowship Fund grants two yearly fellowships that allow recipients to work and live in Italy for three months. Given the relative paucity of work in “queer” Italian studies in the United States in particular, both Sennett’s and Brodsky’s texts warrant further analysis. While the kind of critique I present here may strike some readers as familiar, I would venture to guess that it is
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still relatively uncommon in Italian studies, at least based on the admittedly anecdotal evidence of my own experience. Brodsky’s homophobia seems in particular to have gone largely unremarked. In bringing together in a single essay an analysis of works from two different genres, my intention is not to flatten that difference but to illustrate a certain “convergence” between a sociological text and a memoir. What can and cannot be said in a work of sociology is determined by disciplinary protocols, themselves always contradictory, contested and in a state of historical flux. Sennett’s work is somewhat controversial in this regard in that he is attempting to perform historical sociology, and while I will highlight one of the dangers of a not careful enough reliance on work from outside one’s specific field of expertise (in Sennett’s case, history), his attempts to work across disciplines are often intellectually engaging and admirable. Memoir, however, is usually understood by everyone but the most naïve of readers as a more “active” remodeling of the actual than sociological analysis; however, we might define that highly contested phrase “the actual.” A number of memoir writers have struggled with their obligations to what they themselves perceive as the literal truth (Gornick, 2002; Shields, 2011; Didion, 2012; D’Agata & Fingal, 2012).4 Here is one of Joan Didion’s oft-cited remarks on the subject: Perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow. (2012)
It is memoir’s privileging of, and recourse to, feeling, however, that might, however inadvertently, provide the conditions of possibility for the expression of homophobia in the psychoanalytic sense of an unconscious fear. While writing is decidedly not an unconscious process, the recognition that the meaning of a text is not reducible to the author’s conscious intentions is hardly new (Wimsatt & Beardsley, 1954). More of what I mean by the term homophobia will become apparent as I move through the two texts under consideration. Readers who wish to pursue further this particular avenue might consult Dollimore (1991, pp. 233–275) Tomsen and Mason (2001), and Sedgwick (1985), for example. Writing this essay, I deliberately chose not to employ a vocabulary highly specific to my own discipline, queer (literary and film) studies, because I wanted initially to speak to a truly cross-disciplinary and heterogeneous audience of listeners who, while interested, are not specialists. My reading originated in the National Endowment for the Humanities institute I reference above. What my initial audience shared was not a single common disciplinary location, (and some, in fact, were artists rather than academics),
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but rather a lively interest in Venetian Jewish culture and its history. Over the course of the institute, I came to represent, as problematic as such representation always is, the voice of the homosexual Other. While aware of the perils of this position, I also realized that my having been constituted as a subject in and of difference allowed me to read these texts in a way that was “foreign” to my colleagues. My decision to try to place this essay with the Journal of Homosexuality was a deliberate attempt on my part to speak to an audience of readers who, while critically invested in the analysis of representations of the homosexual, are not necessarily literary scholars or even sociologists by training. This accounts, at least in part, for the tone I adopt here. Although I may sometimes seem to be taking both Sennett and Brodsky to task personally, I understand their texts as symptomatic of larger sociocultural and historical patterns and thus seek to extend the concept of homophobia beyond individual pathology to what Dollimore has called a sociopolitical critique (1991, p. 234n1). Richard Sennett’s “The Fear of Touching,” a chapter of his Flesh and Stone that analyzes the Jewish ghetto of Renaissance Venice, provides an interrogation of the historical tendency in the West to treat “seduction and infection” as inseparable. Sennett highlights, for example, the ways in which Jews and courtesans were linked in the Venetian imagination such that “difference haunted the Venetians and yet exerted a seductive power” (1996, p. 215). Yet Sennett himself seems both repelled and seduced by another other: the homosexual Venetian prostitute. In his book, Sennett claims that, in Venice, “there was a flourishing homosexual culture devoted to cross-dressing, young men lounging in gondolas on the canals wearing nothing but women’s jewels” (1996, p. 223). Leaving aside why someone “devoted” to crossdressing might be content to float down the Grand Canal dressed only in, say, a pair of earrings, we still might doubt the veracity of Sennett’s claim (the source of which is not cited). Sennett plays fast and loose with chronology, and so it is difficult to know when this alleged homosexual subculture supposedly flowered and flourished, but Sennett implies that it existed prior to the founding of the Venetian ghetto in 1516. In fact, according to Sennett, the subculture’s open flaunting of sexual mores was a causal factor in the decision to enclose the Jews. This portrait of attitudes and practices related to sodomy bears little resemblance to the one drawn by Guido Ruggiero (1989) in his The Boundaries of Eros, which reminds us that convicted sodomites were sometimes beheaded and/or burned in St. Mark’s Square (first, beheaded and burned; subsequently, just burned). Ruggiero does note that in the 15th century “it appears that [a homosexual subculture] had become more public and perhaps more widespread” than in the previous century (1989, p. 135), and “with the fifteenth century, that subculture became more socially diverse and thus more visible and threatening, especially in its attractiveness to the upper
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social levels” (1989, pp. 137–138). But according to Ruggiero, that visibility led not to open and public displays such as male prostitutes in gondolas but rather “a new wave of aggressive repression” (1989, p. 138). (On the prosecution of sodomy in Venice during the Renaissance, see also Crompton, 2003, pp. 247–251.) Sennett argues that it was precisely the sight of these floating callboys that set off a sex panic whereby “the Venetian attack against the Jews intertwined with [a] revulsion against body sensuality” (1996, p. 224). But rather than see any connection between the punishment for sodomy and the illtreatment of Venetian Jews, Sennett instead contrasts the two, reminding us that the squalor of the ghetto was “far, far removed from rich boys dressed only in jewels gliding past the Ca D’Oro on the Grand Canal” (1996, p. 233). By failing to discuss the history of the prosecution of sodomy, Sennett implicitly divides the “innocent” Jews from the “guilty” homosexuals, the former being made to pay for the sins of the latter. Apparently, naked crossdressing boys so outraged the Venetian cittadini that they locked the Jews in the ghetto. Clearly, Sennett is attempting to highlight the contradictions of Venetian society, its ambivalent relationship to sensual pleasure and its tendency to cope with that ambivalence through scapegoating. But by ignoring the real historical circumstances facing convicted sodomites and focusing instead on fantastic scenarios of floating call boys, Sennett reinforces that very familiar stereotype—the decadent homosexual—and contrasts him with his opposite—the long-suffering Jew. While, as Sennett argues, the moralists may have railed against both “the Jews with their bags of money and the boys gliding naked on the canals,” the sociologist (i.e., Sennett) fails to remind us of the bodily violence done to both (1996, p. 237). And, in explicitly contrasting the homosexual with the Jew—the one “far, far” away from the other—he projects onto the former one of the stereotypes typically applied to the latter: male prostitutes are described by Sennett as “rich.” (1996, p. 233). No evidence, however, is offered to support this assertion. Notice also the way in which “homosexual subculture” becomes first “young men” (1996, p. 223) and then “rich boys” (1996, p. 233). What are we to make of this escalating infantilization of homosexuality: a however inadvertent equating of homosexuality with pedophilia, or the sociologist gone camp, “boys” actually referring here to adult men (as in the phrase “chorus boy”)? Finally, Sennett’s contrasting of homosexuals with Jews is blind to the possibility that someone might engage in homosexual activity and be a Jew—a possibility Ruggiero suggests was not lost on the Venetian senate as early as 1443 (1996, p. 87). Unfortunately, a careful reader will suspect that Sennett is not a reliable source for historically accurate information. For example, because he does not always distinguish between political invective and more reliable historical sources—see, for example, his uncritical citation of Johannes Burchard’s
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account of the infamous chestnut supper allegedly attended by the Borgia pope, Alexander VI—it is difficult to find his argument convincing (1996, p. 237). (For a critique of Burchard, see Bradford, 2004.) There is, in Giorgio Bassani’s (1977) The Garden of Finzi-Continis, a passage where the unnamed narrator contrasts his friend Giampiero Malnate’s view of homosexuals as “poor bastards” and “obsessed’ creatures” with his own insistence that “love justifies and sanctifies everything, even homosexuality; and more: that love, when it is pure, completely without material interest, is always abnormal, anti-social, et cetera, just like art . . . useless” (1977, p. 179). The narrator then notes that, about homosexuality, Malnate “had very simple ideas: like a true goy.” According to our unnamed narrator’s logic, then, Joseph Brodsky, in his depiction of homosexuality in his memoir Watermark (1993), is more goy than Jewish. Bassani’s novel queerly asserts that Jewish identity is primarily a relation of affiliation to and with the Other, while Brodsky offers up the dishearteningly familiar image of the homosexual as sick, depraved, bitchy, flighty, and obsessed with sex. Watermark is a collection of 48 first-person vignettes, ruminations on the author’s many encounters with the city of Venice, one of its more “subtle”—depending on who is reading and how—through-lines being homosexuality. Specifically, on page 36, we learn that the Russian poet Mikhail Kuzmin was “an avowed homosexual.” A few pages later, Brodsky mentions his dislike for both Mann’s Death in Venice (2004) and Visconti’s movie of the novella (1993, p. 39). Ten or so pages later, we are at a party complete with “a bunch of giggling, agile, homosexual youths inevitable these days whenever something mildly spectacular takes places” (Brodsky, 1993, p. 50). After a brief respite, we encounter more homosexuals, the nameless, faceless, sycophantic “gay English charges” surrounding Brodsky’s editor in a Chinese restaurant in New York (1993, p. 100), their “effete but eager faces” hanging on Brodsky’s every word as he tries to describe why he travels to Venice in the winter (1993, p. 101). Finally, in the second to last vignette, we are in the famous Café Florian with Cecil Day-Lewis and his (unnamed) wife, Stephen Spender and his (unnamed) wife, and Wystan Auden and Auden’s “great love, Chester Kallman,” who chases after “a wellbuilt sailor” passing by the window of the café, Kallman leaving behind Auden “without so much as a ‘See you later’” (Brodsky, 1993, p. 133). Even from this cursory account, it should be clear that Watermark (1993) is unfortunately a virtual catalogue of homophobic stereotypes. The homophobia of Brodsky’s text isn’t even subtle or illusive and, as a result, does not need to be teased out by the reader. It thus significantly mars what is at times a beautifully written, complicated, and rich attempt to capture something of the magic of Venice so many writers have struggled to put into words. Because a certain amount of heterosexual ressentiment is so obvious in the passages cited above—agile homosexuals?—I will not analyze all
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the representations of homosexuality in Watermark in detail but instead will linger over just two particular vignettes. The description of the evening at Café Florian is noteworthy not simply for its familiar portrait of the long-suffering homosexual laughing through his tears at his lover’s open infidelity—“hot pursuit” of the hunky sailor apparently occurred smack in the middle of a funny story Auden was telling, and, while Auden continued to laugh, “a tear ran down his cheek”—but for the fact that Brodsky himself was not even present at this soiree (1993, p. 133). Brodsky’s “creative nonfiction” here is “borrowing” from fiction, recreating what was apparently a story told to him by Stephen Spender as if Brodsky had witnessed it firsthand. To those who might naively suggest that Brodsky’s account is simply a factual retelling of an anecdote and not particularly tinged by Brodsky’s own homophobia, we might argue that whatever Spender told Brodsky has necessarily been shaped by the latter’s sensibilities (which apparently include well-built sailors and hot pursuits). But even more to the point, unless one rereads the story carefully, it is not at all clear immediately that Brodsky was not present. Rather, the story at first seems to be one of Brodsky’s own memories and is deliberately presented as if it could be, as it is framed by a “real-life” first-person account of Brodsky walking through San Marco and staring into a window of the Florian: “I walked toward it and looked inside,” he tells us, at which point he “sees” the three (un)happy couples, the Spenders, the Day-Lewises, and the Kallman-Audens (1993, p. 133). Following the scene of Auden laughing through his tears, the window goes dark for Brodsky, the narrative returning to Brodsky’s present. The “memory” is thus sutured into his walk through San Marco, a glimpse of a past that is not Brodsky’s own but, through the techniques of creative nonfiction, could have been. What appears at first, then, to be one of Brodsky’s memories, is actually his fantastic recreation of a memory of Spender’s—a fact that is itself masked by the way the “event” is presented to us. Given the structure of the book—its division into vignettes, some of which are connected to each other in time and space, others of which are not, some of which are presented chronologically, others of which are not—it is very easy for the reader to get lost in Brodsky’s memories—or, in this case, pseudo-memories, which, because they contain historical personages, risk becoming history. In narrating the story of the lovelorn Auden, Brodsky does provide us with the (ambiguous) temporal cue “It was 195?” (1993, p. 132), but only the reader who remembers the details of Brodsky’s biography—for example, that he was born in 1940 (he tells us on page 36 that he was 26 in 1966)—will remember that he was not likely present at this event. Even the “was” could be read as metaphorical—as if the interior of the café resembled one from the 1950s. And while Brodsky does not list himself as among those present at the evening in question, he sets the scene up as if it is one he saw through
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Florian’s window. The fact that the whole vignette is a single long paragraph that is narrated chiefly in Brodsky’s first-person voice contributes to the illusion that he was literally present that evening in 195?—as does the fact that it is only at the end of the anecdote that we learn that its source is Stephen Spender and not Brodsky himself. The cue “Stephen told me years later” is deliberately withheld from us so as to further evoke the sense that we are being given access to another one of Brodsky’s own memories rather than a story that was told to him by someone else (1993, p. 133). Spender’s voice, in fact, interrupts Brodsky’s narration, revealing simultaneously that Brodsky is not the source of the anecdote and reminding us—if we hadn’t realized it in the first place—that the event being described occurred years before Brodsky’s first appearance in Venice. (The only other instances of direct discourse in this vignette are Brodsky’s account of words he speaks to himself, making the “Stephen told me” all the more startling.) This cue, however, itself further confounds the temporality of the story, for “years later” is ambiguous. It could mean that Spender related the anecdote to Brodsky years after the fact, which must have been the case, but it could also mean that Spender related the tale to Brodsky more than once, and that, years later—after having recounted the story the first time—Spender added the detail that Auden laughed through his tears. Or it could even confuse the reader further, suggesting that Brodsky was, in fact, present at the initial meeting, and, “years later,” Spender was simply reminding him of Auden’s tears. While, taken out of context, some of the temporal cues might seem more obvious, because one does not usually expect to read other people’s memories in a memoir—particularly memories introduced as if they could be the author’s own—they are not. The temporality of the whole book is, in fact, deliberately ambiguous, the way the temporality of memory often is. The first vignette, for example, begins “many moons ago the dollar was 870 lire and I was thirty-two,” leaving the reader who is unfamiliar with Brodsky’s biography finding it difficult to locate precisely the temporality of this narrative (1993, p. 3). Why this temporal ambiguity? Perhaps the vagaries of memory help to shore up a very familiar image from Venetian travel literature, the image of the eternal, unchanging yet perpetually in decline Venice—which apparently has always been a haven for randy homosexuals. In other words, the “form” of Brodsky’s narrative, its recourse to the endlessly recursive temporality of memory—and not just its content—is homophobic in that it encourages us as readers to accept as “factual” what is clearly ideology—the ideology of homophobia. For what is the point of this anecdote except to reinforce the stereotype of Venice as the breeding ground of homosexual vice—vice Brodsky pretends in this instance to have witnessed firsthand? Poor Auden. Given the amount of skirt-chasing Brodsky himself does in this book, it seems more than a bit hypocritical to focus with
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such disapprobation on Kallman’s hot pursuits. (Were the text less homophobic in other respects, we as readers might be more willing to grant Brodsky a bit of irony in this regard. It is certainly true that Brodsky is, at times, self-deprecating in Watermark, but his frequent and often downright nasty references to homosexuals—the completely gratuitous swipes at young gay men in particular—read more like the projection and defensive mechanisms that accompany a phobia rather than attempts to deconstruct stereotypes. Or perhaps Brodsky is just envious of all the sex those gay Venetians seem to be getting. Without straying too far into psychobiography, we might still be struck by the number of times Brodsky himself seems to be inhabiting in Watermark [1993] the stereotype of the “bitchy queen” he appears to loathe.) In another vignette, the account of the party at the Venetian palazzo predominated by several agile homosexual youths, Brodsky redeploys the familiar equating of Venice with homosexuality, decay, decadence, and death. Describing the nameless owner of the palazzo, Brodsky writes, “The most obvious thing about this forty-year-old—a slim, short creature in a gray double-breasted suit of very good cut—was that he was quite sick. His skin looked post-hepatitis, parchment yellow—or perhaps it was just an ulcer” (1993, p. 49). The other “obvious” thing Brodsky notes about this “creature” is that he is an effeminate dilettante. Unlike his more manly ancestors, “He was no navy man; he was a bit of a playwright and a bit of a painter.” But Brodsky saves the majority of his homophobic vitriol for someone he describes as “the premises’ major domo,” “a rather distraught and spiteful middle-aged queen—very blond, very blue-eyed, very drunk” who presides over (Brodsky’s phrase) a gaggle of giggling young homos (1993, p. 50). The ambiguity of this vignette is such that it is impossible to determine if this spiteful blond is the sick palazzo owner’s lover or simply some kind of caretaker for the palazzo. Brodsky tells us that the domo’s days in the palazzo were numbered—thus explaining why he loathed everyone—but why his days were numbered is ambiguous: is the new owner throwing him out, or is he so sick that he is bound to die soon, thus requiring his bitchy blond lover to leave the premises too? In any case, at the end of the vignette, Brodsky fantasizes a scene in which the mean old blond queen makes love with a giggling gay boy (just one?) in the palazzo’s monstrously decorated master bedroom: “The cherubs’ faces were terribly grotesque: they all had these corrupt, lecherous grins as they stared—very keenly—downward upon the bed. They reminded me of that stable of giggling youths downstairs” (1993, p. 57). (If the domo is simply a caretaker, Brodsky’s fantasy fails to account for how he is managing to make love in the master bedroom.) He adds that the room was furnished solely with a portable television. Brodsky reassures us, however, that he “felt no repulsion” at this thought because, after all, television, gay sex, and the palazzo itself are all equally barren: they “couldn’t in nature give birth to anything” (1993, p. 58).
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In its blatant fear and loathing of both homosex and homosexuals, Brodsky’s account of the palazzo party verges on camp, at least to readers who are not from places where homosex is still a crime. (Recall that the 2008 Gay Pride marches in Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Bulgaria were being disrupted by violence from homophobes.) But what is particularly noteworthy about this vignette is that it is precisely—and not just “metaphorically”—homophobic. Brodsky once again uses the mask of nonfiction to project onto a group of people he literally knows virtually nothing about a scene straight out of Visconti’s 1969 film The Damned or even Death in Venice (2004) itself, with its cast of grotesques, including the heavily made up and coiffed Aschenbach near the novella’s—and film’s—conclusion. He assumes automatically that any “normal” reader would, in fact, find the scene he describes repulsive, for example, and, with more than just a hint of jealousy, he conjures a scene of sexual decadence that can’t possibly end in, say, the burden of an unwanted child. And although this scene is completely a product of the author’s imagination, it is narrated as if it really happened—Brodsky failing to note, however, that he “felt no repulsion,” not over something that actually happened but at his own fantasy (1993, p. 58). Apparently Brodsky is so homo repressed that even his own homoerotic fantasies don’t move him, even to repulsion. More to the point, however—once again, Venice is presented as the site of an icky commingling of homosexuality, decadence, and decay. Particularly disturbing is the use of these tropes in two texts—Sennett’s and Brodsky’s—that claim to be nonfiction. Both Sennett’s chapter and Brodsky’s memoir use nonfiction as an alibi to shore up the truth claims of their highly dubious and homophobic readings of Venice, readings that symptomatically replicate the very historical tendency Sennett wants to counter—Venice as a repository of fears and fantasies related to being contaminated by the Other. Given the dominant homophobia of Western culture, it is not all that unusual that Venice, a city whose mythology invites the traveler to lose him or her self—in the streets interrupted by bridges and canals, in food, in wine, in art, in the various other invitations to sensuality the city provides—should figure so strongly in the West’s imagination as the site of infection. According to Leo Bersani (1988), homosexuality in general (and anal sex in particular) represents as desirable the fantasmatic loss of the self in the Other. Homophobia is a virulent response to a fear of that loss. Brodsky’s palazzo vignette symptomatically confesses that fear, for, as the narrator imagines the major domo and one of his young cohorts wriggling and writhing (Brodsky’s words) in the sheets, he simultaneously feels the pleasure and danger of the disappearance of the self. For the vignette ends with a series of complicated, ambiguous sentences that perhaps suggest that Brodsky himself experienced that disappearance through the illusion of homosex. The fantasy of the wriggling major domo and his young friend gives way in Brodsky’s imagination to the observation
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that the ancient Venetian mirrors that line the upper rooms of the palazzo refuse to return Brodsky’s reflection, as if he didn’t exist. He himself, or his self, are among the things included in the nothingness that is generated by homosex. “That happened only once,” he reassures himself, “although I’ve been told there are scores of places like this in Venice” (1993, p. 58). In this postmodern moment, some might argue that my critique of Sennett and Brodsky is a “reactionary” call to shore up the binaries “literature/historiography” or “memory/history,” or even “real/imaginary,” an attempt to return us to the good old days when deconstruction did not trouble our sense that these oppositions could contaminate one another. The premise of deconstruction, however, is that there were no “good old days”; historiography was always “literary” in its use of tropes, and memory always had a basis in history, as even the most private recollection is shaped by historical forces greater than the individual. My reading is, in fact, an attempt to show how both Sennett’s history and Brodsky’s memory are troubled by an Other they both seek to acknowledge and simultaneously contain. Through an attentiveness to the tropes Sennett and Brodsky employ, one can read their texts for the symptoms of that double-movement of acknowledging the existence of homosex and then denying it legitimacy by dismissing it as decadent, immature, and unproductive. (For a very different account from Brodsky’s of the “non-productivity” of homosex, see Champagne, 1995.) As a tool, deconstruction calls for the reversal and displacement of binary oppositions—not their obliteration. It reminds us to note what effects emerge when one temporarily inverts culturally and historically constructed binary oppositions in an attempt to see how the two halves of the binary are implicated in one another. As Gayatri Spivak has argued, the historian and the teacher of literature “must critically ‘interrupt’ each other, bring each other to crisis, in order to serve their constituencies; especially when each seems to claim all for its own” (1988, p. 241). Only an extremely naïve reader would submit that literature is the same as historiography, memory the same as history. This conflating of the two terms does not bring either to crisis but rather shores up the truth-claims of both, leaving in place, for example, the sovereign subject and his will to know. If one were to claim that Brodsky is attempting, in the vignette set in the Café Florian, to deconstruct the binaries “memory/history,” we might also note that the way this deconstruction is accomplished is through the proper name “Stephen Spender.” That is, Brodsky turns his memory into history (again, not a reversal but a conflation) by dropping a name, one that tells us we have moved from Brodsky’s individual fantasies into the realm of what Nietzsche (1988) terms “monumental” history, the history of great men like Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, and, presumably, Joseph Brodsky. It is thus no coincidence that the wives of Spencer and Day-Lewis go unnamed, for monumental history is no place for women. “Stephen told me” thus reads as an extremely self-interested attempt by Brodsky not to deconstruct the binaries “memory/history,” but to insert himself into the history of great
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male writers via his own memory. Notice that this insertion does not bring to crises the truth claims of either creative nonfiction or historiography, memory or history. In fact, each serve to shore up the authority of the other. That “great men” like Stephen Spender and Joseph Brodsky might be homophobic is masked; Brodsky is simply repeating what Spender saw: what really happened one night at Florian. Another possible response: Deconstruction is a tool. If, in fact, Sennett’s or Brodsky’s texts can be read as deconstructing the binaries “literature/historiography” or “memory/history,” in this particular case, the tool is being used to reinvigorate homophobia. Perhaps we need to remember that a tool itself does not determine its uses and, in the wrong hands, can produce unanticipated results. An interesting contrast to Sennett’s and Brodsky’s portrayal of Venice is one offered by Bassani’s (1977) The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. While Bassani’s novel does not take place in Venice, Venice figures in the narrative—as home to the two (unmarried) Finzi-Contini uncles and the university where Micòl, the Finzi-Contini daughter, studies. Venice is thus a place of “liberation,” but not of the sexual kind implied by Sennett and Brodsky. In Venice, Micòl is free to pursue her studies despite Mussolini’s 1938 anti-Jewish laws and to date men on her own terms. The two maternal uncles, members of the Scuola Spagnola, are reminders of the tragedy of the Spanish expulsion and subsequent diaspora (perhaps foreshadowing the fate of the Finzi-Continis under Italian fascism) but also a testament to the Sephardic culture that managed to flourish in Venice despite the restrictions of the ghetto. About Venice, Micòl’s father, Professor Ermanno, has written two essays, both of which emphasize the richness of the city’s Jewish past, including figures such as rabbi Leone da Modena and poet Sara Coppia Sullman (called in the novel “Sara Enriquez [or Enriques] Avigdor; Bassani, 1960, p. 121). This Venice of the intellectually vibrant Jewish ghetto is, in fact, “far, far removed” from fantasies of floating, naked male hustlers. While Sennett writes sympathetically about the Jews and Brodsky was himself Jewish, neither seems to have encountered Bassani’s attempts— here and in The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles (1960)—to note the relationship between prejudice against homosexuals and anti-Semitism (Cestaro, 2004, p. 8). Given Nazi persecution of both Jews and homosexuals, it is tragic that Brodsky in particular seems incapable of seeing beyond the stereotypes he employs. To readers whose lives have been structured by homophobia and/or anti-Semitism, Bassani’s fiction reads as far more truthful than either Sennett’s or Brodsky’s history.
NOTES 1. Clearly, this is only one way to construe the historical relationship between (homo)sex and gender (inversion), and I would concede that Foucault’s formulation concerning the gender difference between the sodomite and the homosexual is less convincing than his argument that the sodomite and
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the homosexual were different types of subjects. Sedgwick’s (1990) critique of Foucault in this regard is particularly on the mark. Queer theorists continue to try to disentangle the historical dis- and rearticulation of gender and sex. For a recent example, see Wiegman (2012), who asks us to attend to the ways in which queer theory sets its sights on sex and yet seems always to return to an analysis of gender. 2. Since 1976, when Foucault first published his account of how, in the 19th century, and, as a result of “une spécification nouvelle des individus” (1976, p. 59; a new specification of individuals, italics in the original) the homosexual became a personage, a great deal of ink has been spilled attempting to figure out what Foucault meant by this term (in the original, un personnage) and whether or not he was historically correct. For a good survey of these debates, see Ferguson (2008). Complicating the problem is the fact that italicization and punctuation are not always the same between the French original and its English translation, and, in a passage on which so much depends, apparently small details may, in fact, have an impact on our understanding. For example, in the phrase cited above, “new” is italicized in the original French but not in the English translation (1990, p. 43), leaving us to ask whether Foucault is speaking of a new specification of individuals or a new specification of individuals. It would take me too far afield of my topic to discuss in detail my quarrels with the various ways in which some historians have critiqued this passage in Foucault in order to make the claim that we can speak of homosexuals prior to the 19th century. Briefly: I find unconvincing Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon’s (2005) argument that literary and sexual conservatives (this is how they frame those whom they critique) have tended to write a history of sexuality “that privileges difference over similarity” (p. 1609), as the traces of a (conservative) universal humanism that by definition privileges similarity are still to be found in plenty of histories of sexuality. Additionally, I understand the “new” 19th-century specification of individuals of which Foucault speaks as predicated upon his account of disciplinary society, which finds its conditions of possibility in the Enlightenment. (Discipline and Punish is, among other things, a genealogy of the subject of the Enlightenment and the relationship between the emergence of that subject and the historical transition in Europe from feudalism to capitalism.) I would also suggest that what Foucault is referencing here is a subjectivity and not an identity, as some of his critics argue; Goldberg and Menon (2005), for example, write of “Foucault’s epoch-making distinction of a before and after homosexual identity” (p. 1610). The difference between a sinful (or evil) subject and an abnormal one is the difference between both the sodomite and the modern homosexual, as well as between a religious and a secular positing of the subject. (On the emergence of the normal as a 19th-century phenomenon, see Canguilhem, 1991.) The two categories, sinful and abnormal, are not homologous, and of course one of the ways traditional history collapses the difference between the two is via a rigorously ahistorical humanism. Another way I might frame my objection: prior to the Enlightenment, the field of knowledge we today call sexuality could not have existed. (On the relationship between the Enlightenment and the development of separate fields of knowledge that, by the time of the German university, came to be constituted as disciplines, see Pollock, 2007.) If, in order to “queer” the Renaissance, for example, we need to dispense with a metaphor like “The Enlightenment” and the idea that what it meant to be a disciplinary subject in the 19th century is decidedly different from what it meant to be subject to God and his representatives on earth, the monarchy and the papacy, what we lose may be more than what we gain. Yes, we certainly can write histories that emphasize the similarities between, for example, feudalism and capitalism, between medieval methods of organizing pictorial space and Albertian perspective, but what it means to construct such histories at present, when neoliberals are celebrating the end of history and “the annihilation of space by time” (Marx, 1858) remains unexplored by Goldberg and Menon, whose ludic postmodern understanding of queerness, and concurrent claiming for themselves the theoretical vanguard, implicitly requires them to reject “totalizing narratives” such as Marxism and other critiques of the Enlightenment, Foucault’s included. (Obviously, no Enlightenment means no critique of Enlightenment.) In the highspeed critical universe called up by Goldberg and Menon, it is impossible to speak of something like “our modern notions of identity,” because any such generalization is impossible; this is the grounds of their critique of the work of David Halperin (Goldberg & Menon 2005, p. 1613). We seem to have gone from Eve Sedgwick’s (1990) perfectly reasonable insistence that we recognize, as Ferguson (2008) puts it, “the coexistence of different and even contradictory models of homosexuality, itself the result of historical accretion” (p. 5) to the queer as the figure of an unhistoricized undecideability who has broken free of spatio-temporal constraints and defies any totalization. To defer such a critique, Goldberg and Menon rather disingenuously stake out their positions as one that would not endorse “either those [modes of knowing] that regard the past as wholly other or those that can assimilate it to a present assumed identical to itself” (2005, p. 1616). Neither of these can fairly be attributed to any of the historians whose work they critique in their essay. Ferguson, on the other hand, must keep interrupting his own critique of Foucault
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with phrases such as “identity in the Middle Ages could not be construed in psychological terms not yet invented” (2008, p. 8). Precisely—if the homosexual subject is a discursive formation whose conditions of possibility include a scientia sexualis (Foucault, 1990, p. 51) that coalesces in the 19th century, it cannot be expected to be found prior to then. A reader of an earlier draft of this essay was concerned that my recourse to Foucault, and, subsequently, Spivak might be considered “recherché” (as if we need to speed up and move beyond what has apparently already become yesterday’s news); not particularly troubled by this charge, I will risk “totalizing” and offer the hypotheses that it is impossible to think the modern sexual subject of the West minus psychoanalysis. 3. I thank Lisa Schwartz for providing me with the anecdote on which this “hypothetical” reading is based. According to one of Schwartz’s undergraduate professors, in Mann’s novella, cholera is the sickness of the body, and homosexuality is the sickness of the soul. For a compelling reading of the novella that tries to unpack “the simultaneously homophobic and homoerotic discourse that runs throughout,” see Hayes and Quinby (1983, p. 187). 4. I thank my colleague Kim Todd for bringing some of the most recent contributions to these debates to my attention.
REFERENCES Aldrich, R. (1993). The seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, art, and homosexual fantasy. London: Routledge. American Academy in Rome. Features, In Rome, “A Tribute to Joseph Brodsky” (RAAR ‘81) on Two Evenings, 17–18 March. (2011). March 2. Retrieved from http://www.aarome.org/news/features/in-rome-a-tribute-tojoseph-brodsky-raar-81-on-two-evenings-17-18-march Bassani, G. (1960). The gold-rimmed spectacles. London: Faber and Faber. Bassani, G. (1977). The garden of the Finzi-Continis (William Weaver, Trans.). San Diego, CA: Harcourt. Bersani, L. (1988). Is the rectum a grave? In D. Crimp (Ed.), AIDS: Cultural analysis, cultural activism (pp. 197–222). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bradford, S. (2004). Lucrezia Borgia. New York, NY: Penguin. Brodsky, J. (1993). Watermark. New York, NY: Noonda. Canguilhem, G. (1991). The normal and the pathological. Brooklyn, NY: Zone. Calimani, R. (1987). The ghetto of Venice (Katherine Silberblatt Wolfthal, Trans.). New York, NY: M. Evans. Cestaro, G. P. (Ed.). (2004). Queer Italia. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Champagne, J. (1995). The ethics of marginality, a new approach to gay studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Crompton, L. (2003). Homosexuality & civilization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. D’Agata, J., & Fingal, J. (2012). The lifespan of a fact. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Dickens, C. (1998). Pictures from Italy. London: Penguin. (Original work published 1913) Didion, J. (2012). Excerpt from “On keeping a notebook.” Pen Center USA, Mark Blog. Retrieved from http://www.penusa.org/blogs/mark-program/bookmarkkeeping-notebook-joan-didion Ferguson, G. (2008). Introduction. In Queer (re)readings in the French Renaissance (pp. 1–54). Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Foucault, M. (1976). Histoire de la sexualité, 1, La volonté de savoir [History of sexuality, 1, The will to knowledge]. Paris: Gallimard.
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Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punish (Alan Sheridan, Trans.). New York, NY: Vintage. Foucault, M. (1990). The history of sexuality, volume one: An introduction (Robert Hurley, Trans.). New York, NY: Vintage. (Original work published 1978) Goldberg, J., & Menon, M. (2005). Queering history. PMLA, 120(5),1608–1617. Gornick, V. (2002). The situation and the story: The art of personal narrative. New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux. Hanson, E. (1997). Decadence and Catholicism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hayes, T., & Quinby, L. (1993). The aporia of bourgeois art: Desire in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. In A. F. Marotti, R. R. Mautner Wasserman, J. Dulan, & S. Mathur (Eds.), Reading with a difference: gender, race, and cultural identity (pp. 185–203). Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Howells, W. D. (1883). Venetian life. Leipzig: Tauchnitz. Lebeau, G. St. (2008, July 3). Summary of Murray Baumgarten and Shaul Bassi oral presentation. The ghetto and modern literature. National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, “Venice, the Jews, and Italian culture,” Venice, Italy. Mann, T. (2004). Death in Venice (Michael Henry Heim, Trans.). New York, NY: HarperCollins. Marx, K. (1858). The Grundrisse, Notebook V . Retrieved from http://www.marxists. org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch10.htm Nietzsche, F. (1988). On the uses & disadvantages of history for life. In R. J. Hollingsdale (Trans.), Untimely meditations (pp. 59–123). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1983) Perosa, S. (2003). The wings of the dove and the coldness of Venice. Henry James Review, 24(3), 281–290. Plato. (2006). Phaedrus. In C. D. C. Reeve (Ed.), Plato on love (pp. 88–153). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Pollock, G. (2007). Liquid modernity and cultural analysis, an introduction to a transdisciplinary encounter. Theory, Culture & Society, 24(1), 111–116. Posner, D. (1971). Caravaggio’s homoerotic early works. Art Quarterly, 34, 301–324. Redford, B. (1996). Venice & the grand tour. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Rocke, M. (1997). Forbidden friendships, homosexuality and male culture in Renaissance Florence. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Ruggiero, G. (1989). The boundaries of Eros, sex crime and sexuality in Renaissance Venice. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Ruskin, J. (2009). The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Stones of Venice, volume II . (Original work published 1867) Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/ 30755/30755-h/30755-h.htm#FnAnchor_133 Sedgwick, E. K. (1985). Between men, English literature and male homosocial desire. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Sedgwick, E. K. (1990). Epistemology of the closet. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Sennett, R. (1996). Fear of touching. In Flesh and stone, The body and the city in Western civilization (pp. 212–251). New York, NY: Norton.
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Shelley, P. B. (1910). Lines written among the Euganean hills. In C. H. Page (Ed.), British poets of the nineteenth century (p. 294). Boston, MA: Sanborn. (Original work published 1904) Shields, D. (2011). Reality hunger, a manifesto. New York, NY: Vintage. Sorensen, L. (2013). Symonds, John Addington. Dictionary of art historians. Retrieved from http://www.dictionaryofarthistorians.org/symondsj.htm Spivak, G. (1988). In other worlds. New York, NY: Routledge. Symmonds, J. A. (1984). Angelo Fusato. In Phyllis Grosskurth (Ed.), The memoirs of John Addington Symonds (pp. 271–283). New York, NY: Random House. Tomsen, S., & Mason, G. (2001). Engendering homophobia: Violence, sexuality and gender conformity. Journal of Sociology, 37, 257–273. doi:10.1177/144078301128756337 Wimsatt, W. K., Jr., & Beardsley, M. (1954). The verbal icon: Studies in the meaning of poetry. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press. White, H. (1978). Tropics of discourse: essays in cultural criticism. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wiegman, R. (2012). Object lessons. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Journal of Homosexuality Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wjhm20
Floating Call Boys and Agile Homosexuals: Homophobia/Venice/ History a
John Champagne PhD a
Department of English, Penn State Erie–The Behrend College, Erie, Pennsylvania, USA Accepted author version posted online: 14 Jan 2014.Published online: 02 May 2014.
Click for updates To cite this article: John Champagne PhD (2014) Floating Call Boys and Agile Homosexuals: Homophobia/Venice/History, Journal of Homosexuality, 61:7, 923-939, DOI: 10.1080/00918369.2014.870844 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2014.870844
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Journal of Homosexuality, 61:923–939, 2014 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0091-8369 print/1540-3602 online DOI: 10.1080/00918369.2014.870844
Floating Call Boys and Agile Homosexuals: Homophobia/Venice/History JOHN CHAMPAGNE, PhD
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Department of English, Penn State Erie–The Behrend College, Erie, Pennsylvania, USA
Because works of nonfiction are always composed of literary tropes and metaphors, they have to be read critically for the ways in which their truth claims are potentially structured by ideologies and stereotypes. This essay reads passages from Richard Sennett’s sociological analysis Flesh and Stone, The Body and the City in Western Civilization and Joseph Brodsky’s memoir Watermark in order to demonstrate how these alleged works of nonfiction shore up some dishearteningly familiar literary stereotypes of male homosexuality and participate in a tradition, dating from the 19th century, of linking the city of Venice with homosexuality and death. KEYWORDS homophobia, decay, Sennett, stereotypes
homosexuality,
Venice,
Brodsky,
Sun-girt City, thou hast been Ocean’s child, and then his queen; Now is come a darker day And thou soon must be his prey —Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills” (1910, p. 294)
In her summary of a discussion held at the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute “Venice, the Jews, and Italian Culture,” Gretchen Starr Lebeau noted the ways in which 19th-century Venetian travel literature deploys and relies for its appeal on tropes of “decay, decadence, and illness.” Although Lebeau’s comments were specifically in reference to works Address correspondence to John Champagne, Department of English, Penn State Erie–The Behrend College, 4951 College Drive, Erie, PA 16563, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
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by Charles Dickens (1998) and W. D. Howells (1883), John Ruskin (2009) also contributed significantly to this view of Venice, the word “decay” appearing frequently in his The Stones of Venice. Describing the Venetians, William Beckford wrote, “Their nerves, unstrung by disease and the consequence of early debaucheries, impede all lively flow of spirits in its course” (cited in Redford, 1996, p. 113). Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (2004) represents perhaps the most famous 20th-century example of this kind of literature; significantly, though, it adds a new figure into the mix—the homosexual. Although there is a long tradition in Western art of linking male homoerotic desire with decay, illness, and even death—noteworthy examples from the visual arts include the “dying slaves” Michelangelo sculpted for the uncompleted tomb of Pope Julius II, the ubiquitous portrayals of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, and, at least according to some critics, the “sick Bacchus” of Caravaggio (Posner, 1971)—it is surely not a coincidence that it is in Mann’s 19th-century novella that the homosexual “appears” as a pathological (and) “Venetian” subject. To ventriloquize Foucault, what in earlier periods of history was a “temporary aberration”—the sodomite, whose pleasure in sexual submission to another male was likely, in a culture where male and female were perceived as opposites, to be construed (if it continued beyond a certain age) as an “evil” or “sinful” identification with the feminine—became in the 19th century a personage (Foucault, 1976, p. 59).1 (For a rich analysis of sodomy in Renaissance Florence and the inappropriateness of equating sodomy with homosexuality, see Rocke, 1997; on decay and homoeroticism in Victorian literature, see Hanson, 1997.) While the sodomite was simply the juridical subject of the act of sodomy—an act in which any of the children of Adam might choose to engage—the homosexual was a “case history,” with a distinct type of personality, a family history, “an indiscreet anatomy,” a distinct morphology, etc. (Foucault, 1990, p. 43).2 In other words, given in particular 19th-century sexological discourse’s construction of the homosexual as a “sick” sexual subject, as well as the tendency in some quarters to see Venice as decadent, promiscuous, “in decline” since, in some historical accounts, as early as the 16th-century shift in the center of maritime trade from the Mediterranean to the North Atlantic, it is no coincidence that Aschenbach should choose La Serenissima for his final spring vacation. (For one analysis of the construction in literature of Venice in decline, see Perosa, 2003.) Robert Calimani argues, for example, that the peace of Passarowitz, signed in July of 1718 between the Ottoman Turks on one side and Venice and the Austrian Habsburgs on the other and which ceded Venetian possessions in the Aegean to the Turks, signaled the beginning of the end: “From that day on the Republic slipped into golden decline” (1987, p. 222). Other Italianists might object that this version of Venice is peculiarly “Northern European” and not one Italians often share—Luchino Visconti and Calimani to the contrary (S. Parussa, personal communication, October 27, 2008). For even 18th-century Venice—reputed
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by some to be a decaying republic—produced the brilliance of the Tiepolos, Canaletto, and Goldoni. (Ruskin [2009] actually dates the commencement of Venice’s decay to an even earlier period, “the death of [doge Tommaso] Mocenigo,” in 1423 [p. 302]). I do not mean to simplify Mann’s novella, with its rich and complicated rereading of Plato’s (2006) Phaedrus, its rumination on the tension between the Apollonian and Dionysian impulses in Western culture, and its relationship to Mann’s own biography—the latter explored in Robert Aldrich’s The Seduction of the Mediterranean, which also provides an analysis of the historical “queering” of Venice (1993, pp. 4–6). And any account of the queering of Venice needs also to include the way, in a kind of Foucauldian “reversediscourse,” a proto-homosexual figure like John Addington Symonds found happiness in Venice, first with his friend and biographer Horatio F. Brown and later, gondolier Angelo Fusato (Symonds, 1984; Sorensen, 2013). But a facile interpretation of Death in Venice might draw an equation between cholera as a sickness of the body and homosexuality as a sickness of the soul, with Venice acting as the breeding ground or Petri dish for both types of infection.3 Hayden White’s (1978) insistent reminder that historiography necessarily relies on literary tropes alerts us to the possibility of locating this figurative linking of Venice, homosexuality and decadence in works of nonfiction, too. In this essay, I will analyze two contemporary works from two different nonfiction genres—Richard Sennett’s Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (1996), a historical and sociological analysis, and Joseph Brodsky’s Watermark (1993), a memoir—as a contribution to a genealogy of the figure of the decadent homosexual in Venice. Such an analysis reminds us of how allegedly factual accounts of homosexuality can be structured by pre-existing homophobic stereotypes. The difference in these two genres suggests the ubiquity of the stereotype, though both texts claim in different ways to be representing historical facts. And like many histories, they attempt to erase the traces of their figuration in an attempt to shore up their truth claims about homosexuality in particular. A critical reading of both texts, then, reveals the ways in which they figure fiction as history, and vice versa. Both of these texts were published in the 1990s; both are likely to be familiar to Italianists in particular. A resident at the American Academy in Rome in 1981, Brodsky was posthumously honored in Italy by a 2011 tribute co-presented by the fellowship fund that bears his name, John Cabot University (an American university in Rome), The Casa delle Letterature/Comune di Roma, and the University of Rome La Sapienza; his Memorial Fellowship Fund grants two yearly fellowships that allow recipients to work and live in Italy for three months. Given the relative paucity of work in “queer” Italian studies in the United States in particular, both Sennett’s and Brodsky’s texts warrant further analysis. While the kind of critique I present here may strike some readers as familiar, I would venture to guess that it is
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still relatively uncommon in Italian studies, at least based on the admittedly anecdotal evidence of my own experience. Brodsky’s homophobia seems in particular to have gone largely unremarked. In bringing together in a single essay an analysis of works from two different genres, my intention is not to flatten that difference but to illustrate a certain “convergence” between a sociological text and a memoir. What can and cannot be said in a work of sociology is determined by disciplinary protocols, themselves always contradictory, contested and in a state of historical flux. Sennett’s work is somewhat controversial in this regard in that he is attempting to perform historical sociology, and while I will highlight one of the dangers of a not careful enough reliance on work from outside one’s specific field of expertise (in Sennett’s case, history), his attempts to work across disciplines are often intellectually engaging and admirable. Memoir, however, is usually understood by everyone but the most naïve of readers as a more “active” remodeling of the actual than sociological analysis; however, we might define that highly contested phrase “the actual.” A number of memoir writers have struggled with their obligations to what they themselves perceive as the literal truth (Gornick, 2002; Shields, 2011; Didion, 2012; D’Agata & Fingal, 2012).4 Here is one of Joan Didion’s oft-cited remarks on the subject: Perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow. (2012)
It is memoir’s privileging of, and recourse to, feeling, however, that might, however inadvertently, provide the conditions of possibility for the expression of homophobia in the psychoanalytic sense of an unconscious fear. While writing is decidedly not an unconscious process, the recognition that the meaning of a text is not reducible to the author’s conscious intentions is hardly new (Wimsatt & Beardsley, 1954). More of what I mean by the term homophobia will become apparent as I move through the two texts under consideration. Readers who wish to pursue further this particular avenue might consult Dollimore (1991, pp. 233–275) Tomsen and Mason (2001), and Sedgwick (1985), for example. Writing this essay, I deliberately chose not to employ a vocabulary highly specific to my own discipline, queer (literary and film) studies, because I wanted initially to speak to a truly cross-disciplinary and heterogeneous audience of listeners who, while interested, are not specialists. My reading originated in the National Endowment for the Humanities institute I reference above. What my initial audience shared was not a single common disciplinary location, (and some, in fact, were artists rather than academics),
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but rather a lively interest in Venetian Jewish culture and its history. Over the course of the institute, I came to represent, as problematic as such representation always is, the voice of the homosexual Other. While aware of the perils of this position, I also realized that my having been constituted as a subject in and of difference allowed me to read these texts in a way that was “foreign” to my colleagues. My decision to try to place this essay with the Journal of Homosexuality was a deliberate attempt on my part to speak to an audience of readers who, while critically invested in the analysis of representations of the homosexual, are not necessarily literary scholars or even sociologists by training. This accounts, at least in part, for the tone I adopt here. Although I may sometimes seem to be taking both Sennett and Brodsky to task personally, I understand their texts as symptomatic of larger sociocultural and historical patterns and thus seek to extend the concept of homophobia beyond individual pathology to what Dollimore has called a sociopolitical critique (1991, p. 234n1). Richard Sennett’s “The Fear of Touching,” a chapter of his Flesh and Stone that analyzes the Jewish ghetto of Renaissance Venice, provides an interrogation of the historical tendency in the West to treat “seduction and infection” as inseparable. Sennett highlights, for example, the ways in which Jews and courtesans were linked in the Venetian imagination such that “difference haunted the Venetians and yet exerted a seductive power” (1996, p. 215). Yet Sennett himself seems both repelled and seduced by another other: the homosexual Venetian prostitute. In his book, Sennett claims that, in Venice, “there was a flourishing homosexual culture devoted to cross-dressing, young men lounging in gondolas on the canals wearing nothing but women’s jewels” (1996, p. 223). Leaving aside why someone “devoted” to crossdressing might be content to float down the Grand Canal dressed only in, say, a pair of earrings, we still might doubt the veracity of Sennett’s claim (the source of which is not cited). Sennett plays fast and loose with chronology, and so it is difficult to know when this alleged homosexual subculture supposedly flowered and flourished, but Sennett implies that it existed prior to the founding of the Venetian ghetto in 1516. In fact, according to Sennett, the subculture’s open flaunting of sexual mores was a causal factor in the decision to enclose the Jews. This portrait of attitudes and practices related to sodomy bears little resemblance to the one drawn by Guido Ruggiero (1989) in his The Boundaries of Eros, which reminds us that convicted sodomites were sometimes beheaded and/or burned in St. Mark’s Square (first, beheaded and burned; subsequently, just burned). Ruggiero does note that in the 15th century “it appears that [a homosexual subculture] had become more public and perhaps more widespread” than in the previous century (1989, p. 135), and “with the fifteenth century, that subculture became more socially diverse and thus more visible and threatening, especially in its attractiveness to the upper
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social levels” (1989, pp. 137–138). But according to Ruggiero, that visibility led not to open and public displays such as male prostitutes in gondolas but rather “a new wave of aggressive repression” (1989, p. 138). (On the prosecution of sodomy in Venice during the Renaissance, see also Crompton, 2003, pp. 247–251.) Sennett argues that it was precisely the sight of these floating callboys that set off a sex panic whereby “the Venetian attack against the Jews intertwined with [a] revulsion against body sensuality” (1996, p. 224). But rather than see any connection between the punishment for sodomy and the illtreatment of Venetian Jews, Sennett instead contrasts the two, reminding us that the squalor of the ghetto was “far, far removed from rich boys dressed only in jewels gliding past the Ca D’Oro on the Grand Canal” (1996, p. 233). By failing to discuss the history of the prosecution of sodomy, Sennett implicitly divides the “innocent” Jews from the “guilty” homosexuals, the former being made to pay for the sins of the latter. Apparently, naked crossdressing boys so outraged the Venetian cittadini that they locked the Jews in the ghetto. Clearly, Sennett is attempting to highlight the contradictions of Venetian society, its ambivalent relationship to sensual pleasure and its tendency to cope with that ambivalence through scapegoating. But by ignoring the real historical circumstances facing convicted sodomites and focusing instead on fantastic scenarios of floating call boys, Sennett reinforces that very familiar stereotype—the decadent homosexual—and contrasts him with his opposite—the long-suffering Jew. While, as Sennett argues, the moralists may have railed against both “the Jews with their bags of money and the boys gliding naked on the canals,” the sociologist (i.e., Sennett) fails to remind us of the bodily violence done to both (1996, p. 237). And, in explicitly contrasting the homosexual with the Jew—the one “far, far” away from the other—he projects onto the former one of the stereotypes typically applied to the latter: male prostitutes are described by Sennett as “rich.” (1996, p. 233). No evidence, however, is offered to support this assertion. Notice also the way in which “homosexual subculture” becomes first “young men” (1996, p. 223) and then “rich boys” (1996, p. 233). What are we to make of this escalating infantilization of homosexuality: a however inadvertent equating of homosexuality with pedophilia, or the sociologist gone camp, “boys” actually referring here to adult men (as in the phrase “chorus boy”)? Finally, Sennett’s contrasting of homosexuals with Jews is blind to the possibility that someone might engage in homosexual activity and be a Jew—a possibility Ruggiero suggests was not lost on the Venetian senate as early as 1443 (1996, p. 87). Unfortunately, a careful reader will suspect that Sennett is not a reliable source for historically accurate information. For example, because he does not always distinguish between political invective and more reliable historical sources—see, for example, his uncritical citation of Johannes Burchard’s
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account of the infamous chestnut supper allegedly attended by the Borgia pope, Alexander VI—it is difficult to find his argument convincing (1996, p. 237). (For a critique of Burchard, see Bradford, 2004.) There is, in Giorgio Bassani’s (1977) The Garden of Finzi-Continis, a passage where the unnamed narrator contrasts his friend Giampiero Malnate’s view of homosexuals as “poor bastards” and “obsessed’ creatures” with his own insistence that “love justifies and sanctifies everything, even homosexuality; and more: that love, when it is pure, completely without material interest, is always abnormal, anti-social, et cetera, just like art . . . useless” (1977, p. 179). The narrator then notes that, about homosexuality, Malnate “had very simple ideas: like a true goy.” According to our unnamed narrator’s logic, then, Joseph Brodsky, in his depiction of homosexuality in his memoir Watermark (1993), is more goy than Jewish. Bassani’s novel queerly asserts that Jewish identity is primarily a relation of affiliation to and with the Other, while Brodsky offers up the dishearteningly familiar image of the homosexual as sick, depraved, bitchy, flighty, and obsessed with sex. Watermark is a collection of 48 first-person vignettes, ruminations on the author’s many encounters with the city of Venice, one of its more “subtle”—depending on who is reading and how—through-lines being homosexuality. Specifically, on page 36, we learn that the Russian poet Mikhail Kuzmin was “an avowed homosexual.” A few pages later, Brodsky mentions his dislike for both Mann’s Death in Venice (2004) and Visconti’s movie of the novella (1993, p. 39). Ten or so pages later, we are at a party complete with “a bunch of giggling, agile, homosexual youths inevitable these days whenever something mildly spectacular takes places” (Brodsky, 1993, p. 50). After a brief respite, we encounter more homosexuals, the nameless, faceless, sycophantic “gay English charges” surrounding Brodsky’s editor in a Chinese restaurant in New York (1993, p. 100), their “effete but eager faces” hanging on Brodsky’s every word as he tries to describe why he travels to Venice in the winter (1993, p. 101). Finally, in the second to last vignette, we are in the famous Café Florian with Cecil Day-Lewis and his (unnamed) wife, Stephen Spender and his (unnamed) wife, and Wystan Auden and Auden’s “great love, Chester Kallman,” who chases after “a wellbuilt sailor” passing by the window of the café, Kallman leaving behind Auden “without so much as a ‘See you later’” (Brodsky, 1993, p. 133). Even from this cursory account, it should be clear that Watermark (1993) is unfortunately a virtual catalogue of homophobic stereotypes. The homophobia of Brodsky’s text isn’t even subtle or illusive and, as a result, does not need to be teased out by the reader. It thus significantly mars what is at times a beautifully written, complicated, and rich attempt to capture something of the magic of Venice so many writers have struggled to put into words. Because a certain amount of heterosexual ressentiment is so obvious in the passages cited above—agile homosexuals?—I will not analyze all
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the representations of homosexuality in Watermark in detail but instead will linger over just two particular vignettes. The description of the evening at Café Florian is noteworthy not simply for its familiar portrait of the long-suffering homosexual laughing through his tears at his lover’s open infidelity—“hot pursuit” of the hunky sailor apparently occurred smack in the middle of a funny story Auden was telling, and, while Auden continued to laugh, “a tear ran down his cheek”—but for the fact that Brodsky himself was not even present at this soiree (1993, p. 133). Brodsky’s “creative nonfiction” here is “borrowing” from fiction, recreating what was apparently a story told to him by Stephen Spender as if Brodsky had witnessed it firsthand. To those who might naively suggest that Brodsky’s account is simply a factual retelling of an anecdote and not particularly tinged by Brodsky’s own homophobia, we might argue that whatever Spender told Brodsky has necessarily been shaped by the latter’s sensibilities (which apparently include well-built sailors and hot pursuits). But even more to the point, unless one rereads the story carefully, it is not at all clear immediately that Brodsky was not present. Rather, the story at first seems to be one of Brodsky’s own memories and is deliberately presented as if it could be, as it is framed by a “real-life” first-person account of Brodsky walking through San Marco and staring into a window of the Florian: “I walked toward it and looked inside,” he tells us, at which point he “sees” the three (un)happy couples, the Spenders, the Day-Lewises, and the Kallman-Audens (1993, p. 133). Following the scene of Auden laughing through his tears, the window goes dark for Brodsky, the narrative returning to Brodsky’s present. The “memory” is thus sutured into his walk through San Marco, a glimpse of a past that is not Brodsky’s own but, through the techniques of creative nonfiction, could have been. What appears at first, then, to be one of Brodsky’s memories, is actually his fantastic recreation of a memory of Spender’s—a fact that is itself masked by the way the “event” is presented to us. Given the structure of the book—its division into vignettes, some of which are connected to each other in time and space, others of which are not, some of which are presented chronologically, others of which are not—it is very easy for the reader to get lost in Brodsky’s memories—or, in this case, pseudo-memories, which, because they contain historical personages, risk becoming history. In narrating the story of the lovelorn Auden, Brodsky does provide us with the (ambiguous) temporal cue “It was 195?” (1993, p. 132), but only the reader who remembers the details of Brodsky’s biography—for example, that he was born in 1940 (he tells us on page 36 that he was 26 in 1966)—will remember that he was not likely present at this event. Even the “was” could be read as metaphorical—as if the interior of the café resembled one from the 1950s. And while Brodsky does not list himself as among those present at the evening in question, he sets the scene up as if it is one he saw through
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Florian’s window. The fact that the whole vignette is a single long paragraph that is narrated chiefly in Brodsky’s first-person voice contributes to the illusion that he was literally present that evening in 195?—as does the fact that it is only at the end of the anecdote that we learn that its source is Stephen Spender and not Brodsky himself. The cue “Stephen told me years later” is deliberately withheld from us so as to further evoke the sense that we are being given access to another one of Brodsky’s own memories rather than a story that was told to him by someone else (1993, p. 133). Spender’s voice, in fact, interrupts Brodsky’s narration, revealing simultaneously that Brodsky is not the source of the anecdote and reminding us—if we hadn’t realized it in the first place—that the event being described occurred years before Brodsky’s first appearance in Venice. (The only other instances of direct discourse in this vignette are Brodsky’s account of words he speaks to himself, making the “Stephen told me” all the more startling.) This cue, however, itself further confounds the temporality of the story, for “years later” is ambiguous. It could mean that Spender related the anecdote to Brodsky years after the fact, which must have been the case, but it could also mean that Spender related the tale to Brodsky more than once, and that, years later—after having recounted the story the first time—Spender added the detail that Auden laughed through his tears. Or it could even confuse the reader further, suggesting that Brodsky was, in fact, present at the initial meeting, and, “years later,” Spender was simply reminding him of Auden’s tears. While, taken out of context, some of the temporal cues might seem more obvious, because one does not usually expect to read other people’s memories in a memoir—particularly memories introduced as if they could be the author’s own—they are not. The temporality of the whole book is, in fact, deliberately ambiguous, the way the temporality of memory often is. The first vignette, for example, begins “many moons ago the dollar was 870 lire and I was thirty-two,” leaving the reader who is unfamiliar with Brodsky’s biography finding it difficult to locate precisely the temporality of this narrative (1993, p. 3). Why this temporal ambiguity? Perhaps the vagaries of memory help to shore up a very familiar image from Venetian travel literature, the image of the eternal, unchanging yet perpetually in decline Venice—which apparently has always been a haven for randy homosexuals. In other words, the “form” of Brodsky’s narrative, its recourse to the endlessly recursive temporality of memory—and not just its content—is homophobic in that it encourages us as readers to accept as “factual” what is clearly ideology—the ideology of homophobia. For what is the point of this anecdote except to reinforce the stereotype of Venice as the breeding ground of homosexual vice—vice Brodsky pretends in this instance to have witnessed firsthand? Poor Auden. Given the amount of skirt-chasing Brodsky himself does in this book, it seems more than a bit hypocritical to focus with
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such disapprobation on Kallman’s hot pursuits. (Were the text less homophobic in other respects, we as readers might be more willing to grant Brodsky a bit of irony in this regard. It is certainly true that Brodsky is, at times, self-deprecating in Watermark, but his frequent and often downright nasty references to homosexuals—the completely gratuitous swipes at young gay men in particular—read more like the projection and defensive mechanisms that accompany a phobia rather than attempts to deconstruct stereotypes. Or perhaps Brodsky is just envious of all the sex those gay Venetians seem to be getting. Without straying too far into psychobiography, we might still be struck by the number of times Brodsky himself seems to be inhabiting in Watermark [1993] the stereotype of the “bitchy queen” he appears to loathe.) In another vignette, the account of the party at the Venetian palazzo predominated by several agile homosexual youths, Brodsky redeploys the familiar equating of Venice with homosexuality, decay, decadence, and death. Describing the nameless owner of the palazzo, Brodsky writes, “The most obvious thing about this forty-year-old—a slim, short creature in a gray double-breasted suit of very good cut—was that he was quite sick. His skin looked post-hepatitis, parchment yellow—or perhaps it was just an ulcer” (1993, p. 49). The other “obvious” thing Brodsky notes about this “creature” is that he is an effeminate dilettante. Unlike his more manly ancestors, “He was no navy man; he was a bit of a playwright and a bit of a painter.” But Brodsky saves the majority of his homophobic vitriol for someone he describes as “the premises’ major domo,” “a rather distraught and spiteful middle-aged queen—very blond, very blue-eyed, very drunk” who presides over (Brodsky’s phrase) a gaggle of giggling young homos (1993, p. 50). The ambiguity of this vignette is such that it is impossible to determine if this spiteful blond is the sick palazzo owner’s lover or simply some kind of caretaker for the palazzo. Brodsky tells us that the domo’s days in the palazzo were numbered—thus explaining why he loathed everyone—but why his days were numbered is ambiguous: is the new owner throwing him out, or is he so sick that he is bound to die soon, thus requiring his bitchy blond lover to leave the premises too? In any case, at the end of the vignette, Brodsky fantasizes a scene in which the mean old blond queen makes love with a giggling gay boy (just one?) in the palazzo’s monstrously decorated master bedroom: “The cherubs’ faces were terribly grotesque: they all had these corrupt, lecherous grins as they stared—very keenly—downward upon the bed. They reminded me of that stable of giggling youths downstairs” (1993, p. 57). (If the domo is simply a caretaker, Brodsky’s fantasy fails to account for how he is managing to make love in the master bedroom.) He adds that the room was furnished solely with a portable television. Brodsky reassures us, however, that he “felt no repulsion” at this thought because, after all, television, gay sex, and the palazzo itself are all equally barren: they “couldn’t in nature give birth to anything” (1993, p. 58).
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In its blatant fear and loathing of both homosex and homosexuals, Brodsky’s account of the palazzo party verges on camp, at least to readers who are not from places where homosex is still a crime. (Recall that the 2008 Gay Pride marches in Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Bulgaria were being disrupted by violence from homophobes.) But what is particularly noteworthy about this vignette is that it is precisely—and not just “metaphorically”—homophobic. Brodsky once again uses the mask of nonfiction to project onto a group of people he literally knows virtually nothing about a scene straight out of Visconti’s 1969 film The Damned or even Death in Venice (2004) itself, with its cast of grotesques, including the heavily made up and coiffed Aschenbach near the novella’s—and film’s—conclusion. He assumes automatically that any “normal” reader would, in fact, find the scene he describes repulsive, for example, and, with more than just a hint of jealousy, he conjures a scene of sexual decadence that can’t possibly end in, say, the burden of an unwanted child. And although this scene is completely a product of the author’s imagination, it is narrated as if it really happened—Brodsky failing to note, however, that he “felt no repulsion,” not over something that actually happened but at his own fantasy (1993, p. 58). Apparently Brodsky is so homo repressed that even his own homoerotic fantasies don’t move him, even to repulsion. More to the point, however—once again, Venice is presented as the site of an icky commingling of homosexuality, decadence, and decay. Particularly disturbing is the use of these tropes in two texts—Sennett’s and Brodsky’s—that claim to be nonfiction. Both Sennett’s chapter and Brodsky’s memoir use nonfiction as an alibi to shore up the truth claims of their highly dubious and homophobic readings of Venice, readings that symptomatically replicate the very historical tendency Sennett wants to counter—Venice as a repository of fears and fantasies related to being contaminated by the Other. Given the dominant homophobia of Western culture, it is not all that unusual that Venice, a city whose mythology invites the traveler to lose him or her self—in the streets interrupted by bridges and canals, in food, in wine, in art, in the various other invitations to sensuality the city provides—should figure so strongly in the West’s imagination as the site of infection. According to Leo Bersani (1988), homosexuality in general (and anal sex in particular) represents as desirable the fantasmatic loss of the self in the Other. Homophobia is a virulent response to a fear of that loss. Brodsky’s palazzo vignette symptomatically confesses that fear, for, as the narrator imagines the major domo and one of his young cohorts wriggling and writhing (Brodsky’s words) in the sheets, he simultaneously feels the pleasure and danger of the disappearance of the self. For the vignette ends with a series of complicated, ambiguous sentences that perhaps suggest that Brodsky himself experienced that disappearance through the illusion of homosex. The fantasy of the wriggling major domo and his young friend gives way in Brodsky’s imagination to the observation
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that the ancient Venetian mirrors that line the upper rooms of the palazzo refuse to return Brodsky’s reflection, as if he didn’t exist. He himself, or his self, are among the things included in the nothingness that is generated by homosex. “That happened only once,” he reassures himself, “although I’ve been told there are scores of places like this in Venice” (1993, p. 58). In this postmodern moment, some might argue that my critique of Sennett and Brodsky is a “reactionary” call to shore up the binaries “literature/historiography” or “memory/history,” or even “real/imaginary,” an attempt to return us to the good old days when deconstruction did not trouble our sense that these oppositions could contaminate one another. The premise of deconstruction, however, is that there were no “good old days”; historiography was always “literary” in its use of tropes, and memory always had a basis in history, as even the most private recollection is shaped by historical forces greater than the individual. My reading is, in fact, an attempt to show how both Sennett’s history and Brodsky’s memory are troubled by an Other they both seek to acknowledge and simultaneously contain. Through an attentiveness to the tropes Sennett and Brodsky employ, one can read their texts for the symptoms of that double-movement of acknowledging the existence of homosex and then denying it legitimacy by dismissing it as decadent, immature, and unproductive. (For a very different account from Brodsky’s of the “non-productivity” of homosex, see Champagne, 1995.) As a tool, deconstruction calls for the reversal and displacement of binary oppositions—not their obliteration. It reminds us to note what effects emerge when one temporarily inverts culturally and historically constructed binary oppositions in an attempt to see how the two halves of the binary are implicated in one another. As Gayatri Spivak has argued, the historian and the teacher of literature “must critically ‘interrupt’ each other, bring each other to crisis, in order to serve their constituencies; especially when each seems to claim all for its own” (1988, p. 241). Only an extremely naïve reader would submit that literature is the same as historiography, memory the same as history. This conflating of the two terms does not bring either to crisis but rather shores up the truth-claims of both, leaving in place, for example, the sovereign subject and his will to know. If one were to claim that Brodsky is attempting, in the vignette set in the Café Florian, to deconstruct the binaries “memory/history,” we might also note that the way this deconstruction is accomplished is through the proper name “Stephen Spender.” That is, Brodsky turns his memory into history (again, not a reversal but a conflation) by dropping a name, one that tells us we have moved from Brodsky’s individual fantasies into the realm of what Nietzsche (1988) terms “monumental” history, the history of great men like Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, and, presumably, Joseph Brodsky. It is thus no coincidence that the wives of Spencer and Day-Lewis go unnamed, for monumental history is no place for women. “Stephen told me” thus reads as an extremely self-interested attempt by Brodsky not to deconstruct the binaries “memory/history,” but to insert himself into the history of great
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male writers via his own memory. Notice that this insertion does not bring to crises the truth claims of either creative nonfiction or historiography, memory or history. In fact, each serve to shore up the authority of the other. That “great men” like Stephen Spender and Joseph Brodsky might be homophobic is masked; Brodsky is simply repeating what Spender saw: what really happened one night at Florian. Another possible response: Deconstruction is a tool. If, in fact, Sennett’s or Brodsky’s texts can be read as deconstructing the binaries “literature/historiography” or “memory/history,” in this particular case, the tool is being used to reinvigorate homophobia. Perhaps we need to remember that a tool itself does not determine its uses and, in the wrong hands, can produce unanticipated results. An interesting contrast to Sennett’s and Brodsky’s portrayal of Venice is one offered by Bassani’s (1977) The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. While Bassani’s novel does not take place in Venice, Venice figures in the narrative—as home to the two (unmarried) Finzi-Contini uncles and the university where Micòl, the Finzi-Contini daughter, studies. Venice is thus a place of “liberation,” but not of the sexual kind implied by Sennett and Brodsky. In Venice, Micòl is free to pursue her studies despite Mussolini’s 1938 anti-Jewish laws and to date men on her own terms. The two maternal uncles, members of the Scuola Spagnola, are reminders of the tragedy of the Spanish expulsion and subsequent diaspora (perhaps foreshadowing the fate of the Finzi-Continis under Italian fascism) but also a testament to the Sephardic culture that managed to flourish in Venice despite the restrictions of the ghetto. About Venice, Micòl’s father, Professor Ermanno, has written two essays, both of which emphasize the richness of the city’s Jewish past, including figures such as rabbi Leone da Modena and poet Sara Coppia Sullman (called in the novel “Sara Enriquez [or Enriques] Avigdor; Bassani, 1960, p. 121). This Venice of the intellectually vibrant Jewish ghetto is, in fact, “far, far removed” from fantasies of floating, naked male hustlers. While Sennett writes sympathetically about the Jews and Brodsky was himself Jewish, neither seems to have encountered Bassani’s attempts— here and in The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles (1960)—to note the relationship between prejudice against homosexuals and anti-Semitism (Cestaro, 2004, p. 8). Given Nazi persecution of both Jews and homosexuals, it is tragic that Brodsky in particular seems incapable of seeing beyond the stereotypes he employs. To readers whose lives have been structured by homophobia and/or anti-Semitism, Bassani’s fiction reads as far more truthful than either Sennett’s or Brodsky’s history.
NOTES 1. Clearly, this is only one way to construe the historical relationship between (homo)sex and gender (inversion), and I would concede that Foucault’s formulation concerning the gender difference between the sodomite and the homosexual is less convincing than his argument that the sodomite and
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the homosexual were different types of subjects. Sedgwick’s (1990) critique of Foucault in this regard is particularly on the mark. Queer theorists continue to try to disentangle the historical dis- and rearticulation of gender and sex. For a recent example, see Wiegman (2012), who asks us to attend to the ways in which queer theory sets its sights on sex and yet seems always to return to an analysis of gender. 2. Since 1976, when Foucault first published his account of how, in the 19th century, and, as a result of “une spécification nouvelle des individus” (1976, p. 59; a new specification of individuals, italics in the original) the homosexual became a personage, a great deal of ink has been spilled attempting to figure out what Foucault meant by this term (in the original, un personnage) and whether or not he was historically correct. For a good survey of these debates, see Ferguson (2008). Complicating the problem is the fact that italicization and punctuation are not always the same between the French original and its English translation, and, in a passage on which so much depends, apparently small details may, in fact, have an impact on our understanding. For example, in the phrase cited above, “new” is italicized in the original French but not in the English translation (1990, p. 43), leaving us to ask whether Foucault is speaking of a new specification of individuals or a new specification of individuals. It would take me too far afield of my topic to discuss in detail my quarrels with the various ways in which some historians have critiqued this passage in Foucault in order to make the claim that we can speak of homosexuals prior to the 19th century. Briefly: I find unconvincing Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon’s (2005) argument that literary and sexual conservatives (this is how they frame those whom they critique) have tended to write a history of sexuality “that privileges difference over similarity” (p. 1609), as the traces of a (conservative) universal humanism that by definition privileges similarity are still to be found in plenty of histories of sexuality. Additionally, I understand the “new” 19th-century specification of individuals of which Foucault speaks as predicated upon his account of disciplinary society, which finds its conditions of possibility in the Enlightenment. (Discipline and Punish is, among other things, a genealogy of the subject of the Enlightenment and the relationship between the emergence of that subject and the historical transition in Europe from feudalism to capitalism.) I would also suggest that what Foucault is referencing here is a subjectivity and not an identity, as some of his critics argue; Goldberg and Menon (2005), for example, write of “Foucault’s epoch-making distinction of a before and after homosexual identity” (p. 1610). The difference between a sinful (or evil) subject and an abnormal one is the difference between both the sodomite and the modern homosexual, as well as between a religious and a secular positing of the subject. (On the emergence of the normal as a 19th-century phenomenon, see Canguilhem, 1991.) The two categories, sinful and abnormal, are not homologous, and of course one of the ways traditional history collapses the difference between the two is via a rigorously ahistorical humanism. Another way I might frame my objection: prior to the Enlightenment, the field of knowledge we today call sexuality could not have existed. (On the relationship between the Enlightenment and the development of separate fields of knowledge that, by the time of the German university, came to be constituted as disciplines, see Pollock, 2007.) If, in order to “queer” the Renaissance, for example, we need to dispense with a metaphor like “The Enlightenment” and the idea that what it meant to be a disciplinary subject in the 19th century is decidedly different from what it meant to be subject to God and his representatives on earth, the monarchy and the papacy, what we lose may be more than what we gain. Yes, we certainly can write histories that emphasize the similarities between, for example, feudalism and capitalism, between medieval methods of organizing pictorial space and Albertian perspective, but what it means to construct such histories at present, when neoliberals are celebrating the end of history and “the annihilation of space by time” (Marx, 1858) remains unexplored by Goldberg and Menon, whose ludic postmodern understanding of queerness, and concurrent claiming for themselves the theoretical vanguard, implicitly requires them to reject “totalizing narratives” such as Marxism and other critiques of the Enlightenment, Foucault’s included. (Obviously, no Enlightenment means no critique of Enlightenment.) In the highspeed critical universe called up by Goldberg and Menon, it is impossible to speak of something like “our modern notions of identity,” because any such generalization is impossible; this is the grounds of their critique of the work of David Halperin (Goldberg & Menon 2005, p. 1613). We seem to have gone from Eve Sedgwick’s (1990) perfectly reasonable insistence that we recognize, as Ferguson (2008) puts it, “the coexistence of different and even contradictory models of homosexuality, itself the result of historical accretion” (p. 5) to the queer as the figure of an unhistoricized undecideability who has broken free of spatio-temporal constraints and defies any totalization. To defer such a critique, Goldberg and Menon rather disingenuously stake out their positions as one that would not endorse “either those [modes of knowing] that regard the past as wholly other or those that can assimilate it to a present assumed identical to itself” (2005, p. 1616). Neither of these can fairly be attributed to any of the historians whose work they critique in their essay. Ferguson, on the other hand, must keep interrupting his own critique of Foucault
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with phrases such as “identity in the Middle Ages could not be construed in psychological terms not yet invented” (2008, p. 8). Precisely—if the homosexual subject is a discursive formation whose conditions of possibility include a scientia sexualis (Foucault, 1990, p. 51) that coalesces in the 19th century, it cannot be expected to be found prior to then. A reader of an earlier draft of this essay was concerned that my recourse to Foucault, and, subsequently, Spivak might be considered “recherché” (as if we need to speed up and move beyond what has apparently already become yesterday’s news); not particularly troubled by this charge, I will risk “totalizing” and offer the hypotheses that it is impossible to think the modern sexual subject of the West minus psychoanalysis. 3. I thank Lisa Schwartz for providing me with the anecdote on which this “hypothetical” reading is based. According to one of Schwartz’s undergraduate professors, in Mann’s novella, cholera is the sickness of the body, and homosexuality is the sickness of the soul. For a compelling reading of the novella that tries to unpack “the simultaneously homophobic and homoerotic discourse that runs throughout,” see Hayes and Quinby (1983, p. 187). 4. I thank my colleague Kim Todd for bringing some of the most recent contributions to these debates to my attention.
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