Modern Men

Mapping Masculinity in English and German Literature,

1880-1930

MICHAEL KANE

CASSELL
London and New York
 For my mother

Cassell
Wellington House, 125 Strand, London WC2R OBB
370 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10017-6550

First published 1999

© Michael Kane 1999

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in

any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 0 304 70309 5 Hardback
0 304 70310 9 Paperback

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kane, Michael, 1966-
Modern men: mapping masculinity in English and German
literature, 1880-1930/Michael Kane.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-304-70309-5 (hardcover).—ISBN 0-304-70310-9 (pbk.)
1. English literature—Male authors—History and criticism.
2. English literature—20th century—History and criticism.
3. English literature—19th century—History and criticism.
4. German literature—Male authors—History and criticism.
5. Literature, Comparative—English and German. 6. Literature,
Comparative—German and English. 7. Masculinity in literature.
8. Men in literature. I. Title.
PR120.M45K36 1999
810.9'353—dc21 99-20681
CIP

Typeset by BookEns Ltd, Royston, Herts.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddies Ltd, Guildford and King's Lynn
 Contents

Preface v

Part I The 'Double'

Introduction 3
1 Jekyll and Hyde 17
2 After dualism: Nietzsche 27
3 Dorian Gray 42

Part II The Other — Narcissus and Salome

Scapegoats 57
4 The trials of Narcissus: Wilde 61
5 The deaths of Narcissus: Hofmannsthal 71
6 The death of Salome 86

Part III The Nationalization of Narcissus

National narcissism 109
7 Insiders/outsiders: Conrad's The Nigger of the Narcissus
and Stoker's Dracula 120
8 North, South, East, West: Musil, Mann, Hofmannsthal 141

Part IV Kampf or Male Bondage

War, men and 'meaning' 165
9 Fighting men: Lawrence and London 175
10 Kampf: Walser, Kafka, Brecht 188

Conclusion: after patriarchy 212

Index 228
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 Preface

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

products which are constantly, and almost unwittingly, reproduced by cultural

means in a culture in which 'phallo-narcissism' is all pervasive. It is hoped that
this book, by examining some of the cultural products of European men around
the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, will
reveal some of the ways in which the myths of 'phallo-narcissism' were
reproduced, questioned or modified as well as some of the contradictions
inherent in that point of view.
In his book Male Impersonators Mark Simpson has shown how 'male
narcissism is becoming more and more "manifest" in popular culture' and how
contemporary culture is saturated with male homoeroticism. Male narcissism
and homoeroticism have, however, always been central, if hidden, features of
patriarchal culture, as Bourdieu's use of the term 'phallo-narcissism' and
Simpson's (and my own) reading of Freud suggests. This study should, like
Simpson's book, serve as a 'critique of "common-sense" notions which
segregate homosexuality and heterosexuality, masculine and feminine'.3 These
terms are not as clearly separate from one another as many, particularly those
men who are terrified of both 'homosexuality' and 'femininity' (or rather of the
stigma attached to these words), would like to think.
A further central concern of this book is the connection between 'Gender
and Nation', to cite the title of a recent book by Nira Yuval-Davis. Enoch
Powell, according to Yuval-Davis, once defined 'the nation' as 'two males plus
defending a territory with the women and children'.4 That is an apt definition
in terms of my argument: with the decline of the patriarchy and the crisis of
masculinity around the last turn of century, many men looked to the nation as
the saviour of their threatened masculinity and idealized the nation above all as
a homosocial community of men whose fears and confusions about their own
identity, and in particular about their own masculine identity, might be
projected onto all territories outside the borders of that idealized masculine
nation.

This book re-examines some of the canonical works of modernist literature in

English and German with regard to the issues of masculinity, relations between
men, national identity and patriarchy which were, I argue, major preoccupa-
tions of male writers as they attempted to come to terms with, or react against
the decline of patriarchal power due to the rise of modernity itself as well as of
feminism.
The book is divided into five parts which correspond roughly to the five
decades between 1880 and 1930. The first part deals with the leitmotif of the
'double' in Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,
Friedrich Nietzsche's Ecce Homo and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.
The leitmotif of the 'double' in the writings of these three men is linked to a
 Preface vii

radical critique of philosophical dualism on the one hand as well as to a

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

seen as enthusiasm for a new sense of male community and a celebration of the
opportunity for the expression of traditional masculinity. In some works of
literature not connected with the war, though written around this time, an
intense relationship between men is given physical expression in a kind of
sadomasochistic game. The suggestion is made here that there is a link
between this and what Leed has called the 'desire for a confrontation of human
wills' which fuelled the general enthusiasm for war in 1914. Works of D. H.
Lawrence, Jack London, Robert Walser, Franz Kafka and Bertolt Brecht feature
in this part.
The concluding part, 'After Patriarchy', reviews some of the literature of the
1920s on the subject of patriarchy and matriarchy as well as of the implications
of these for relations between men. The historical background for this part is of
course the rise of Fascism, to some extent perhaps to be understood as a
paranoid attempt to restore the homosocial patriarchy and exorcise it of its
own fears and confusions by projecting these onto others who could be
isolated and exterminated.

Many, many thanks to Professor Tom Docherty, Professor Seamus Deane, Dr

Maeve Cooke, Professor Hugh Ridley, Professor Dr Dr Ernest Hess-Luttich,
Professor Dr Wolfgang Pross and to Caitriona Leahy for their advice, criticism
and encouragement, as well as to the German Academic Exchange Service and
the Swiss Eidgenossische Stipendienkommission for their research grants.

Notes

1. Klaus Theweleit, Mannerphantasien, 2 vols (Reinbek bei Hamburg:

Rowohlt, 1980).
2. Pierre Bourdieu, La Domination Masculine (Paris: Seuil, 1998), p. 12.
3. Mark Simpson, Male Impersonators (London: Cassell, 1994), p. 9.
4. Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 1997), p. 15.
 Parti

The 'Double'
This page intentionally left blank
 Introduction

Speculations: from Plato to postmodernism

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

white upper-class male towards the end of the nineteenth century and
attempting to link this to (e), a questioning of the foundations of that identity
in philosophical dualism, as well as to the related topics mentioned under (b),
(c) and (d), i.e. male fantasies of giving birth, narcissism and homosexuality. All
of these issues are either dealt with specifically or suggest themselves in those
most famous narratives concerning 'doubles' of the late nineteenth century,
R. L. Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray as well
as in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Both these novels and Nietzsche's
philosophy have in the twentieth century acquired something of the status of
mythology; as modern myths they have supplied hugely influential models of
masculine self-understanding and identification for generations of modern men
— all the more influential because as myths they have tended to be received
uncritically/innocently, almost on an unconscious level.
The male fantasy of appropriating the female domain of giving birth is, as
Elaine Showalter argues, one of the most persistent male fantasies in the
patriarchal era. 'While fantasies of male self-creation and envy of the feminine
aspects of generation were not new,' she writes, 'they re-emerged with
particular virulence in the 1880s'.2 At what is often regarded as the dawn of
our patriarchal historical era, Socrates, himself often regarded (by Western men
inclined to model themselves in his image, or him in theirs) as one of the first
forefathers of the long line of the Western male cultural canon, spoke of
'begetting spiritually', of giving birth to something other than babies.3
Philosophers give birth to ideas and books, and books to philosophers. A
philosopher's true offspring are conceived, it seems, without the contamination
of heterosexual intercourse, by men, for men, with men and without women. In
the Judeo-Christian tradition there has, until very recently, been no doubt
about the gender of the divine being who gave birth to the world: he is, one
must admit, a truly almighty father who needs no female partner to become a
father. Persuading women of the masculinity of the supreme being constituted
quite a coup, to say the least, for men who could thus claim 'We were here
first'. But what if men themselves actually gave birth to or created this male
god? This is what Jeanette Winterson suggests in her parodic version of both
the Book of Genesis and the Frankenstein story where Noah appears to have
created 'the Unpronounceable by accident out of a piece of [Blackforest] gateau
and a giant electric toaster'.4
If the notion that God was a man was an understandable result of men's
narcissism and womb-envy, so also was Socrates' comparison of philosophical
activity with women's ability to give birth, an idea which proved remarkably
popular with men over the centuries. In particular, since the Romantics, men
have liked to compare their cultural production with both God the Father's
unaided creation of the universe and women's production of new human
 Introduction 5

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

with the next. Thus the sacredness of the pedagogical and erotic relationships
between older and younger men seen in, for example, ancient Greece. One has
only to look at Elisabeth Badinter's list of various rites of male initiation in
different patriarchal cultures to see how central this notion of 'C'est 1'homme
qui engendre 1'homme', that it is men who give birth to men, has been; and
how frequently this has involved more or less explicit (homo)sexual relations.8
Christianity, one might suggest, while completely suppressing any sexual
aspect of relations between men, emphasized and held as sacred spiritual,
indeed Platonic, love between men in a religion of pure brotherly love and
adoration of a father figure.
Thus, far from being pure of any 'taint of homosexuality', patriarchal
thinking is so saturated with it that it institutionalizes the love of men for men,
the admiration of the male body and the masculine intellect and loves nothing
more than to express this either sexually or symbolically or both. One might
further argue that the oppressive power of the institution of patriarchy is
increased the more the sexual element is repressed and the symbolic is
emphasized, the more patriarchal culture tends to institutionalize what Luce
Irigaray has termed 'hom(m)osexualite'.9 One should therefore not be surprised
if a crisis of that patriarchal culture should bring to light not only male
fantasies of giving birth but also suggestions of male narcissism and
homosexuality for, as the foregoing suggests, such ideas were always situated
at the core of patriarchal thinking, loath though it might have been at times to
admit this to itself.
Such thinking remains, at some level, with us along with other unresolved
bits of patriarchal thought. The homoerotic aspect of the 'double' and of men
creating/giving birth to other men has been rendered most explicitly in recent
times in, for example, the fiction of William Burroughs as well as in a
pornographic parody of the Frankenstein story, in which a mad scientist trawls
Victorian London for the perfect male member to append to his creation.10 As
far as the texts to be dealt with here are concerned: the subject of erotic
relations between men is most evident in Wilde's Dorian Gray, but it is perhaps
also of relevance to Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and to Nietzsche's
thought, as we shall see, and became something of an embarrassing issue
during Wilde's trials — as did all relationships between men in the aftermath of
those trials and their fixing of the new label and stigma of 'homosexuality' in
the popular psyche, as we shall also see.
The subject of philosophical dualism is treated critically in these stories
about 'doubles' as well as in Nietzsche's philosophy. Indeed 'doubles' and
dualism appear in these texts not merely as vaguely similar but as inherently
interrelated. The appearance of Jekyll's 'double' is the direct result of his
attempt to separate good and evil; Dorian attempts to separate the soul from
 Introduction 7

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

all those qualities he had regarded as the opposite of and clearly distinct from
his own reside in his 'double', his other self; 'This too', he is forced to
recognize, 'was myself. His own moral dualism, which had flattered his
narcissistic image of himself as respectable gentleman, has come undone.
The 'double' might be said then perhaps to 'deconstruct' dualism in the
sense of Barbara Johnson's definition of deconstruction:
the differences between entities (prose and poetry, man and woman,
literature and theory, guilt and innocence) [one might add mind and
body, inside and outside, native and foreign, etc.] are shown to be based
on a repression of differences within entities, ways in which an entity
differs from itself.12
The appearance of the 'double', one might say, signifies the return of the
repressed, of all that had been repressed and projected upon some
supposedly distinct Other — typically women, foreigners, the 'lower orders'.
In our own fin de siecle, relativist, multicultural, postmodern, post-industrial,
post-national and supposedly post-patriarchal global society, all traditionally
underlined hierarchical 'differences between entities' are subject to 'sponta-
neous deconstruction'. Dualism is, if not quite dead, at least on the retreat. One
is no longer quite so inclined to oppose one identity (be it national, gender or
racial) to one other, but rather to speak of one's own plural identities, much as
Dr Jekyll predicted. The corollary of this is perhaps that nowadays one tends
to find more reference to 'multiple personality disorder' than to 'doubles'.
Pluralism appears to be gaining ground over the absolutist, exclusive thinking
of dualism. This is a good thing — as long as it leads to greater democracy,
equality and clearer thinking and not to complete impotence and paralysis of
thought and action. This last state of theoretical and practical paralysis, and the
fact that it gives free rein to the exploitative practices of multinational late
capitalism totally unhampered by any concern with democracy, equality or
freedom, is what is feared by Frederic Jameson to be the real meaning of
'postmodernism', 'the cultural logic of late capitalism'. Jameson writes of 'the
abolition of critical distance' 'in the new space of postmodernism'. 'We are
submerged/ he writes, 'in its henceforth filled and suffused volumes to the
point where our now postmodern bodies are bereft of spatial co-ordinates and
practically (let alone theoretically) incapable of distantiation ... ,'13 What we
need, according to Jameson, are 'maps' so that 'we may again begin to grasp
our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to
act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our
social confusion' (p. 91).
Certainly the demise of dualism makes mapping more difficult: it is no
longer so easy to divide the world simply into two spaces belonging
 Introduction 9

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

Historical parameters and borders

If Plato and postmodernism lie somewhat beyond the historical perimeters of

the subject of this book, the issues of patriarchal power and of dualist
oppositions of 'inside' and 'outside' of, for instance, (male-dominated) nation-
states and empires as well as feelings of spatial, social and sexual confusion
were certainly of great interest during the period 1880-1930. Maps and
geopolitical borders acquired great significance not just literally but also
metaphorically in an age when the map of the world was being redrawn
according to the whim and the greed of the European powers, now seriously
engaged in a scramble for empire.
As the nation-state and the empire acquired something of a cult following
and began to replace dying religions as an object of 'belief and identification,
the geopolitical border acquired something of the status of most favoured
metaphor. Everybody from psychiatrists to churchmen used the metaphor. In
England, according to Elaine Showalter,

psychiatrists identified a new kind of male neurotic, the 'borderliner'.

Andrew Wynter's popular medical text, The Borderlands of Insanity (1877),
described the potential degeneration of borderline men in 'Mazeland',
'Dazeland' and 'Driftland', whose minds felt the lack of 'directing' or
'controlling power'.14

Daniel Pick describes how Cesare Lombroso, professor of psychiatry in Turin,

sought to influence the framing of a penal code for the recently created
kingdom of Italy by presenting, initially, 'a series of diagrams, tables and charts
concerning the organic anomalies to be found in the criminal' and finally a
'series of maps [showing] the frequency and distribution of various crimes in
10 The 'Double'

Italy'.15 As Daniel Pick comments, 'it was as though the opening of the
congress proceedings (like the genesis of Lombrosianism) focused the outline
of the criminal body and by the conclusion that body had been transposed to a
map of the nation'.
Lombroso's efforts to single out criminals by, among other things, the shape
of their ears lay clearly under the influence of a new dualist opposition inspired
by Darwin's theories. While one might imagine that the spread of Darwin's
theories concerning the 'origin of species' would have seriously upset any kind
of dualism and in particular that maintained by the Christian tradition, it
actually supplied, or rather was interpreted as supplying, a new and rather
dangerous binary opposition and metaphorical mapping device, namely the
opposition between the fittest, destined by natural selection to survive, and the
'degenerate', likely to get in their way and impede the progress of evolution.
By the late nineteenth century, intellectual discourse in the West had become
positively saturated with the language and thinking of 'evolutionism', which
Tom Gibbons defines as 'the highly questionable employment of biological
theories of natural selection, which Darwin himself never stated in any clear or
final form, in realms of thought unconnected with biology'. The phrase 'the
survival of the fittest', the inspiration behind everything from late nineteenth-
century social Darwinism to 1980s Thatcherism, was first coined by Herbert
Spencer, 'the first thorough-going evolutionist' as well as 'probably the most
influential systematic philosopher of the second half of the nineteenth century'.
For Spencer, absolutely everything in history and in the universe was
determined by the 'law' of evolution: ' "the transformation of the
homogeneous into the heterogeneous", or, in other words, of whatever is
undifferentiated and indistinct into whatever is more distinct and individual'.16
If evolution was understood as the development from the homogeneous and
simple to the heterogeneous and complex perhaps the reverse process was also
possible: dissolution or degeneration - a return to simple (borderless)
homogeneity, the opposite of the forward march of evolution and progress.
Thus the great task was, according to many scientists and thinkers of the day,
to draw a clear boundary between 'degenerates' and the more wholesome
specimens of humanity, for it was feared that if such 'degenerates' were not
separated from the rest of the population they might bring about the
degeneration of the entire nation.
This new dualist opposition between the 'fit' and the 'degenerate' could
be easily added on to the ancient dualist scheme of things, thus reinforcing
all those other binary oppositions. The attitude of all too many Western
men and the prevailing cultural attitude of the time (and still, to some
extent, of ours) could perhaps be summed up with the following set of
oppositions:
 Introduction 11

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

shall see. One should also note that these ideologies of the 'survival of the
fittest' and of 'manliness' were adopted most enthusiastically by those men for
whom life was no longer by any means a struggle for 'survival' and whose
bourgeois and upper-class urban existence did not have much to do with
traditional notions of rural, rugged masculinity, where an ability to withstand
physical hardship and to demonstrate physical prowess actually were a definite
advantage.
The phrase 'survival of the fittest' suggested, as mentioned above, that
those 'at the top', those (men) in power, were destined to be so as a result of
their innate superiority. This held of course not just for the relation between
the imperial power and the colonized but also for relations of power within the
imperial power itself. Those 'at the bottom' of such a society, the 'lower orders'
were evidently by nature inferior, less evolved on the path of human
perfection than those 'at the top'. It was thus not quite as easy, as one would
have liked, to draw a boundary separating the fit from the degenerate
coinciding with the boundaries of the nation. Not only the poor and the lower
orders' but also criminals, the sick and the mentally unstable were embarrassing
evidence of degeneracy within the nation. And they were breeding!
Degeneracy was after all hereditary.
What was more, some parties were even suggesting the abolition of the
natural distinction between those 'at the top' and those 'at the bottom' and the
replacement of social hierarchy with social equality. The levelling and
'international' nature of socialism and anarchism was perceived by many as the
great danger, a danger conceived specifically in terms of degeneration. Tom
Gibbons writes:
After 1880 it was increasingly argued that evolutionary progress could
be maintained only by the creation of a new evolutionary aristocracy,
that egalitarian societies based upon nineteenth-century ideals of liberal
democracy were consequently 'decadent', and that a new, authoritarian
and hierarchical social structure was urgently necessary.18
The belief that hierarchy and authority were 'fit' and egalitarianism was
degenerate allowed the Victorian psychiatrist Henry Maudsley to compare 'the
psychosomatic chaos of insanity to a world where present day demands for
democracy and socialism had been conceded in their entirety'.19
Conservatives could find confirmation of their fears that demands for
equality threatened to reverse the progressive march of evolution in the fact
that Friedrich Engels published a tract apparently supporting just such a return
to an earlier stage in the 'evolution' of society. In Der Ursprung der Familie, des
Privateigentums und des Staats (1884) (The origin of the family, of private
property and the state) Engels neatly related the evolution of society to the
 Introduction 13

problems of dualism, social and sexual inequality and patriarchy. The

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

appearance that lacked the qualities of the masculine type' (p. 235). Cesare
Lombroso, according to Richard Davenport-Hines, 'coupled homosexual desire
with criminality as elements detrimental to the progress of civilization: born
criminals and born perverts needed asylum treatment rather than penal
servitude'.24
The coining of the new label 'homosexual' and the designation of 'the
homosexual' as degenerate and criminal led to a new series of problems and
contradictions in men's attitudes to their relations with each other. Up to now
the attention of the Christian churches, of the law and of society in general had
been focused on 'sodomy' or 'buggery', which were originally understood to
mean any kind of sexual 'debauchery' and only subsequently acquired the
meaning of anal penetration of women and animals as well as of men.25 Under
the term 'homosexual' a whole range of practices and affections, which had
hitherto been variously defined or undefined, were subsumed and deemed
degenerate. Everything from the adolescent activities of schoolboys to even
purely 'Platonic' intense friendships between men became suspect. This was a
direct contradiction of a patriarchal tradition, and indeed of a tradition of
Victorian literature, which had promoted, celebrated and blessed a love
'passing the love of women' as well as considering normal and indeed
masculine a certain amount of 'horseplay' between men.26 The rather
schizophrenic, self-contradictory attitudes of twentieth-century men regarding
their relations with each other, male-bonding and homosexuality are a direct
result of this conflict between a tradition which continues to hold before them
the ideal of the male—male relationship, and a tradition which tells them that
not only sexual or physical, but even emotional male—male relationships are
symptoms of hereditary psychological and physical degeneration.
Heredity was the key to the new dualist opposition between those who
were 'fit' (and not only would but should survive) and those who were
'degenerate'. Surely one could then do society a favour and reduce the number
of degenerate criminals, of the feeble-minded, of perverts, as well as of anti-
authoritarian anarchists and socialists, by discouraging the degenerate from
reproducing and encouraging the fit only to reproduce with each other? In
1883 Sir Francis Galton, Darwin's cousin, coined the term 'eugenics' to denote
the 'breeding of human beings who were hereditarily endowed with noble
qualities'.27 According to Tom Gibbons, 'between that date and 1914 public
discussion of alleged racial, physical, moral, sexual and literary degeneration
reached obsessive proportions in England, and remedies were frequently
sought in proposals for "eugenic reform".'28 Heredity was the key, and it could
be used to lock up undesirables and prevent them from infecting the fit, natural
heirs to the earth.
 Introduction 15

Notes

1. Karl Miller, Doubles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 1, p. 209.

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

15. Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

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

Binary oppositions

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

95). In fact Hyde has all the qualities which the Pythagoreans and
conventional, patriarchal, moral and sexual dualism associated with 'the
female'. (I will return to this later.)
Jekyll's identity is opposed to Hyde's lack of identity just as Jekyll's morally
upstanding nature is opposed to Hyde's amorality. These oppositions are
further linked to the conventional opposition between the upper classes of the
white, male rulers of the earth and the dark, dirty, dangerous and degenerate
'lower orders' when Jekyll's handsome residence is contrasted with Hyde's
home in Soho. Jekyll's house remains a symbol of traditional, patrician
authority amidst a sea of decay:
Round the corner from the by street there was a square of ancient,
handsome houses, now for the most part decayed from their high estate,
and let in flats and chambers to all sorts and conditions of men: map-
engravers, architects, shady lawyers, and the agents of obscure
enterprises. One house, however, second from the corner was still
occupied entire; ... the door of this, ... wore a great air of wealth and
comfort, though it was now plunged in darkness except for the fan-light
. . . . (p. 40)
Hyde's residence reveals him to be an agent of that decay threatening Jekyll's
house:
As the cab pulled up before the address indicated, the fog lifted a little
and showed him [Mr Utterson] a dingy street, a gin palace, a low French
eating-house, a shop for the retail of penny numbers and two-penny
salads, many ragged children huddled in the doorways, and many women
of different nationalities passing out, key in hand, to have a morning
glass, and the next moment the fog settled down again upon that part, as
brown as umber, and cut him off from his blackguardly surroundings.
This was the home of Henry Jekyll's favourite; of a man who was heir to
a quarter of a million sterling, (p. 48)
At least the flat-dwellers on Jekyll's square were 'all sorts and conditions of
men'-, Hyde appears to hail from a ghetto of alcoholic, foreign women and
ragged children. Thus the geographical assumptions of conservative dualist
thinking are apparently confirmed: there is a clear, if threatened, border
between the world of the good, white, upper-class male ruler of the earth and
the world of the bad, dark, degenerate, probably foreign and female lower
orders.
But, not only does Dr Jekyll leave his fortune to hideous Mr Hyde, they are,
as we know, one and the same man! For those who were inclined to think that
the Dr Jekylls and the Mr Hydes of this world belonged to two distinct species
 Jekyll and Hyde 19

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

Identities and texts

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

fragmentation of the text into subtexts both mirrors the fragmentation of

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

Sadism, masochism and narcissism of bourgeois male self

The division of the male bourgeois self (women in general, as we shall see later,
were often considered amoral, thus less apt to repress, quite in line with that
projection) into a respectable component and a repressed component furthered
the development of a kind of sadistic relationship within the self as well as outside
the self. 'Undesirable' desires had to be beaten down; the self had to punish the
self — and this out of what one might term a masochistic desire to serve
(motivated by a narcissistic desire to conform to) the bourgeois male's 'superego',
those ideals of respectability he had adopted from society, and in particular from
the father, as his own. Behind the facade of the stable identity of the bourgeois
male, one might suggest, lurked a tangled knot of narcissistic, sadistic and
masochistic relations with regard to itself as well as to the outside world.
 Jekyll and Hyde 21

Thus Jekyll considers that his 'problem' arose not as a result of his
'sinfulness', but rather as a result of his exaggerated desire to conform to an
image of himself as an utterly respectable gentleman: he had always had, he
says, an 'imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than
commonly grave countenance before the public';

It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations, than any

particular degradation in my faults, that made me what I was and, with
even a deeper trench than in the majority of men, severed in me those
provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man's dual nature.
(p. 81)
His desire to conform led him to 'conceal [his] pleasures', committed him to a
'profound duplicity of life' (p. 81) and ultimately to attempt to amputate by
chemical means those parts of himself which did not conform to his narcissistic
image of himself as entirely respectable. Thus he discovers Hyde, his hidden
self, who also becomes an object of a kind of narcissistic desire. After Jekyll
first takes his drug he runs to find a mirror to see what he looks like:

The evil side of my nature ... was less robust and less developed than the
good which I had just deposed. ... Hyde was ... smaller, slighter and
younger than Henry Jekyll. . . . And yet when I looked upon that ugly
idol in the glass, I was conscious of no repugnance, rather of a leap of
welcome. This, too, was myself, (p. 84)

This is perhaps a peculiar type of narcissism, a narcissistic attachment not to

one's own beauty but rather to one's ugliness. Hyde's ugliness is however
somewhat compensated for by his youth. Dr Jekyll becomes truly fascinated
and infatuated with his mirror image and will henceforth find himself
constantly checking his appearance in mirrors to see whether he is having a
'bad hair day'. Indeed, it is the presence of a mirror, a 'cheval-glass', in Jekyll's
laboratory, which proves to be a source of puzzlement to the discoverers of
Hyde's (Jekyll's) body. 'What did Jekyll ... what could Jekyll want with it?',
asks Mr Utterson (p. 71).
Jekyll's fascination with mirrors is thus highlighted as a clue which might be
important for the solution of the mystery. As indeed it is. For the mirror
suggests a narcissistic relation of the self with the self, a relationship of desire
within the self which contradicts the notion of the self as something simple,
stable and self-identical. Man's ability to look at himself, whether by means of
a mirror or by means of (self-)consciousness, is an indication both that 'man is
not truly one, but truly two' and that there may be more to masculine desire
than is conventionally assumed.
Jekyll describes his relationship with himself almost as a sadomasochistic
22 The 'Double'

affair between a respectable doctor and a young, depraved criminal. Hyde, he

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

Jekyll's mate

Elaine Showalter is also of the opinion that Jekyll's relationship with his double
is rather suggestive of a sexual relationship: 'Unable to pair off with either a
woman or another man,' she writes, 'Jekyll divides himself and finds his only
mate in his double, Edward Hyde.'3 This suggests that Jekyll's creation of a
'double', his crisis and disintegration is due to a prohibition on his finding of
(or inability to find) a partner and on his sexual union with this 'Other', thereby
helping him to define/delimit his 'self. Other people are troubled by the
impropriety of their relationship, but Jekyll protests that he does 'sincerely take
a great, a very great interest in that young man'. Showalter notes how Mr
Utterson's suspicion that Hyde was blackmailing Dr Jekyll would have
'immediately suggested homosexual liaisons' to the contemporary reading
public.4 She writes: 'Jekyll's apparent infatuation with Hyde reflects the late-
nineteenth-century upper-middle-class eroticization of working class men as
ideal homosexual objects' exemplified in Edward Carpenter's dream of being
 Jekyll and Hyde 23

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

The 'dark side of patriarchy'

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

his sense of the fantasies beneath the surface of daylight decorum, the
shadow of homosexuality that surrounded Clubland and the nearly
hysterical terror of revealing forbidden emotions between men that
constituted the dark side of patriarchy. In many respects The Strange Case
of Dr jekyll and Mr Hyde is a case study of male hysteria, not only that of
Henry }., but also of the men in the community around him. It can most
persuasively be read as a fable of fin-de-siecle homosexual panic, the
discovery and resistance of the homosexual self.9
The point, which must be stressed, is then in the end not that, in contemporary
parlance, 'Stevenson (or even Jekyll) was gay' (for that would be to repeat
precisely what Foucault termed the 'incorporation des perversions' and
'specification des individus' practised by nineteenth-century scientists), but
rather that the culture to which he belonged, and not a safely specified and
cordoned off 'gay culture', but mainstream, patriarchal culture, a culture, as
Showalter suggests, itself saturated with 'forbidden emotions between men',
was aware of and not a little obsessed by the possibility of sexual intercourse
between people of the same sex, and specifically between men. It was after all
only sexual acts between men that the Labouchere Amendment to the Criminal
Law Amendment Act of 1885 criminalized.
The increased awareness and obsession with the possibility of any kind of
sexual behaviour between men was the result on the one hand of the late
nineteenth-century scientific and medical discourse concerned to describe and
classify something which came to be known as 'sexuality' and on the other
hand of the topical nature of precisely that 'identity' question we find in
Stevenson's novel.
As the persuasive force of the religious ban on 'sodomy' and sexual
relations between men lost much of its power with the decline of the influence
of religion, the subject became a matter of scientific, medical and legal concern,
perhaps for no other reason than that the Judeo-Christian ban (on sex, not on
love between men, which it might be said to have institutionalized) had left
behind such a powerful taboo which had to be justified or simply reformulated
in the language of the modern state - in science and in law. The fact that
'homosocial' and actual or 'sublimated' 'homosexual' relationships - whether of
the kind usual in ancient Greece or of the kind symbolized in the rituals of
exclusively male clubs and institutions — have always been a central and
especially valued and 'hallowed' feature of patriarchal societies in particular
renders the whole late nineteenth-century discourse concerning 'homosexu-
ality' all the-more absurd and contradictory, as it was supposedly in order to
defend the good name of an intrinsically homosocial and at some level
homoerotic patriarchy that 'homosexuality' had to be routed out. This
 Jekyll and Hyde 25

precisely at a time when the religious forms of the patriarchy, symbolizing a

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

homogeneous 'identity' and was traditionally seen, along with other

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

Notes

1. Page numbers refer to Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr

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

After dualism: Nietzsche

'Ich bin ein Doppelganger'

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

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

Dionysus

Nietzsche's transvaluation of all cultural and sexual values is already evident

in Die Geburt der Tragodie (The Birth of Tragedy) (1872) when he claims to
rediscover and revalues the Dionysian aspect of ancient Greek culture. This
was a somewhat indirect attack on some of the sacred assumptions of
nineteenth-century, bourgeois, patriarchal culture, which liked to model itself
and its male youth on an idealized version of the culture of ancient Greece.
While for nineteenth-century, bourgeois culture Greece was the embodiment
of law and order and restraint, indeed of all those values on the 'good' side of
the list of dualist oppositions such as light, the limit and the masculine,
Nietzsche claimed that this was only one aspect of Greece, the aspect
associated with the god Apollo and with the Socratic, Platonic tradition.
There was however, according to Nietzsche, another aspect of Greece which
was associated with the god Dionysus, god of wine, music, orgiastic
intoxication and lack of restraint, and, according to Bachofen, of women,
indeed of all those qualities on the 'bad' side of the list of dualist oppositions
- lack of clarity, plurality and the 'feminine'. Die Geburt der Tragodie is a
celebration of Dionysus and Nietzsche identifies himself again and again with
this god who stands for the opposite of everything nineteenth-century,
bourgeois, patriarchal culture held sacred. Indeed at the end of Ecce Homo
 After dualism: Nietzsche 29

Nietzsche signs himself 'Dionysus gegen den Gekreuzigten' (Dionysus

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

Truth as woman

Nietzsche's radical overturning of the patriarchal values and assumptions of

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

rhetorical question at the outset proposes that 'truth' is a 'woman' and as such is
not to be reduced to any kind of (male) dogma.
Dogma is of course Nietzsche's most constant target of attack. That is why
his own writings themselves cannot be reduced to any kind of dogma - except
that 'dogma of any kind is to be avoided'. As Steven Aschheim writes,
'Nietzsche's work cannot be reduced to an essence nor can it be said to possess
a single and clear authoritative meaning.'7 Nietzsche's writings subvert not just
everything else but also themselves in a perpetual motion of 'Selbstuberwin-
dung' — self-overcoming. Like Oscar Wilde, and indeed like Walt Whitman,
Nietzsche was not afraid to contradict himself: in fact all three might be said to
have adopted a principle of self-contradiction as a means of achieving a kind of
freedom beyond the reductionist logic of dogma and dualism.8
What Nietzsche means by dogma is Platonism and Christianity in Europe as
well as the Vedanta teachings in Asia. What he sets out to attack is the basic
belief of metaphysicians, namely: 'der Glaube an die Gegensatze der Werthe'
(the belief in the oppositions of values) ($2, p. 10), that is precisely all kinds of
dualism which divide the world up into two opposing camps. Nietzsche
explains what he means by 'Jenseits von Gut und Bose' thus:
We are fundamentally inclined to argue that most false judgements are
the ones we can do least without, that without logical fictions, without
measuring reality according to the purely invented world of the
unconditional, self-identical, without a constant falsification of the world
through numbers the human being could not live, — that a renunciation of
life would be a denial of life. To accept untruth as a condition of life: that
indeed means to resist in a dangerous manner customary values; and a
philosophy which dares to do this situates itself just by this beyond good
and evil.9
If this is the 'truth' that is 'woman', Nietzsche is conforming to the terms of
traditional patriarchal sexual dualism, equating 'woman' with a slippery area of
ambivalence, where truth and falsehood, good and evil are not so easily
distinguished. At the same time, of course, he is reversing the values associated
with the terms of the traditional opposition, valuing this 'womanly truth' of
ambivalence over the 'manly truth' of absolutist dogma. As Jacques Derrida
writes of Nietzsche's equation of 'truth' and 'woman', Temme est un nom de
cette non-verite de la verite' (woman is a name for this non-truth of truth).10
This is perhaps the truth that is woman: 'non-truth' of 'truth', the 'truth' of non-
identity (of truth), the 'truth' of difference or Derrida's differance.
Nietzsche is saying two things here: that one lives by forgery; but that that
is no reason not to forge ahead, while remaining aware of the 'womanly'
absence of phallic 'truth'. Nietzsche's attack on philosophical dualism is also an
 After dualism: Nietzsche 31

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

Female elephant, 'penseur de la grossesse', male mother

Nietzsche, one might suggest, in becoming a philosopher of 'womanly' truths,

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

expectant, more timid, more submissively inclined; and similarly

intellectual pregnancy engenders the character of the contemplative,
who are allied to woman in character: - they are the masculine mothers. -
Among animals the masculine sex is regarded as the beautiful sex.14
Neither 'giving birth' nor 'beauty' then should be attributed solely to
womankind; philosophers and thinkers are 'masculine mothers'.
Was Nietzsche then a 'womanly man'? Lou Andreas-Salome thought she
recognized something 'feminine' about the man and recorded her impression in
her book on Nietzsche:
'There are two species of genius', he said one day, 'those who above all
want to create, and who create; and those who love to let themselves be
fertilized, and who give birth'. It is certain that he belonged to this second
category. There was something feminine in his temperament, but taken
to an incomparable degree of grandeur!15
If Nietzsche liked to think of himself giving birth, one wonders by whom he
wished to be fertilized. Lou Andreas-Salome also recalled talking with
Nietzsche about the risque subject of bisexuality, after which conversation they
found it difficult to look each other in the eye.16

'Sadomasochist an sich selber'

In this context the same woman described Nietzsche particularly appropriately

as a 'Sadomasochist an sich selber', a sadomasochist with regard to himself.
This is perhaps the phrase which best characterizes the 'philosopher of cruelty'
and of 'Selbstuberwindung', of self-overcoming, and is also perhaps precisely
that with which so many modern, would-be 'Nietzschean' men have identified.
Were such men then not really also identifying unconsciously with what Lou
Andreas-Salome described as bisexuality, by which she appeared to mean both
a combination of the conventional psychological characteristics of both
genders as well as an ambivalence regarding sexual orientation?
Nietzsche has left us with an amusing, playful, piece of photographic
'evidence' of his own 'masochism'. The famous 'Peitschenbild' (whip-picture),
scrupulously orchestrated by Nietzsche, shows Paul Ree and himself
apparently working like horses pulling a hay-cart containing Lou Andreas-
Salome in front of a painted romantic alpine backdrop in a photographer's
studio.17 They are all, of course, fully clothed. Paul Ree's left hand rests on the
shaft of the cart, just in front of Nietzsche's genitals, while his right hand is
about to assume a Napoleonic pose. Lou Andreas-Salome crouches in the cart
brandishing a whip. For once a photograph shows Nietzsche enjoying himself:
 After dualism: Nietzsche 33

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

This relationship of the self with the self is implied in Zarathustra's

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

Naked men

Apart from perversely indulging in sadomasochism with regard to himself,

declaring truth to be a woman and even identifying with pregnant women,
Nietzsche also constantly associated physical beauty with the naked male
body. Associating truth with women and beauty with men was rather a
heretical reversal of the official attitudes of nineteenth-century, bourgeois,
patriarchal and heterosexist culture. Yet Nietzsche constantly refers to male
beauty. That extract from Die Frohliche Wissenschaft dealing with 'mannliche
 After dualism: Nietzsche 35

Mutter'/'meres masculinesV'male mothers' quoted above ends with the

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

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

International sadomasochism

While in the Teitschenbild' Nietzsche attempted by theatrical flagellation to

whip up anarchic laughter, the nation-state indulged in self-flagellation to steel
itself and its boundaries and became more aware of the purpose of such
steeling - war. Military discipline became the order of the day for men in both
Germany and Britain. Between 1874 and 1890 German military spending was
quadrupled; the British doubled their naval expenditure in the 1880s.32 But war
against whom? That was not yet clear. There was hostility and rivalry between
the English and the French; between the French and the Germans; between the
Austrians and the Russians; and between the Russians and the English. And
there was fear in all quarters of the threat of revolution and anarchy, i.e. the
removal of hostilities from geographical frontiers (and hence the removal of
such frontiers themselves) to the body politic itself.
Nietzsche's unsystematic and anti-systematic philosophy was very often
 After dualism: Nietzsche 37

systematized, institutionalized and nationalized by those in favour of war; his

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

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

Notes

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, in Nietzsche's Werke, Vol. XV (Leipzig: A.

Kroner, 1911), pp. 9-15. I cite this edition here as this paragraph, where
Nietzsche uses the word 'Doppelganger' to describe himself, is omitted
here in the Kritische Studienausgabe. Jacques Derrida also cites Nietzsche's
description of himself as a 'doppelganger' in Otobiographies (Paris: Galilee,
1984), p. 68.
2. In the paragraph substituted in the Kritische Gesamtausgabe for the one
where he describes himself as a doppelganger, Nietzsche writes: 'Wenn ich
den tiefsten Gegensatz zu mir suche, die unausrechenbare Gemeinheit der
Instinkte, so finde ich immer meine Mutter und Schwester, - mit solcher
canaille mich verwandt zu glauben ware eine Lasterung auf meine
Gottlichkeit' (If I look for the deepest contrast to me, the incalculable
commonness of the instincts, I always find my mother and my sister, — to
believe myself related to such canaille would be blasphemy to my
divinity.) Ecce Homo, Nietzsche, Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio
Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Vol. VI iii (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter and
Co., 1969), p. 266.
3. Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Bose, Nietzsche, Werke: Kritische Gesamtaus-
gabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Vol. VI ii (Berlin: Walter
de Gruyter and Co., 1968), #19, p. 27 and #17, p. 25.
4. See Jacques Le Rider, Modernite viennoise et crises de I'identite (Paris: PUF,
1990), pp. 126-9.
5. 'Vorausgesetzt, dass die Wahrheit ein Weib ist —, wie? ist der Verdacht
nicht gegriindet, dass alle Philosophen, sofern sie Dogmatiker waren, sich
schlecht auf Weiber verstanden?' Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Base,
 After dualism: Nietzsche 39

Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Vol. VI

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

13. Derrida, Spurs/Eperons, p. 64.

14. Derrida, Spurs/Eperons, p. 149.
15. "'Il existe deux especes de genies", dit il un jour, "ceux qui veulent avant
tout creer, et qui creent; et ceux qui aiment a se laisser feconder, et qui
enfantent". Il est certain qu'il appartenait a cette seconde categorie. Il y
avait dans son temperament quelque chose de feminin, mais porte a un
degre de grandeur incomparable!' Quoted from Lou Andreas-Salome,
Friedrich Nietzsche, by Christine Garside Allen in 'Nietzsche's ambivalence
about Women', pp. 127, 128.
16. Joachim Kohler quotes the following (from Lou Andreas-Salome: In der
Schule bei Freud): 'Insofern als grausame Menschen immer auch
Masochisten sind, hangt das Ganze mit einer gewissen Bisexualitat
zusammen. Und es hat einen tiefen Sinn - Als ich zum ersten Mai im
Leben mit jemandem dies Thema besprach, war es Nietzsche (dieser
Sadomasochist an sich selber). Und ich weiss, dass wir hinterher nicht
wagten, uns anzusehen.' (In so far as cruel people are always also
masochists, all this has to do with a certain bisexuality. And it has a deep
significance — The first time I ever discussed this subject it was with
Nietzsche (this sadomasochist with regard to himself). And I know that we
did not dare look at each other afterwards.) Joachim Kohler, Zarathustras
Geheimnis (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1992), p. 338.
17. Photograph reproduced in Joachim Kohler's biography, Zamthustras
Geheimnis.
18. Though he does suggest that the masochist nature of women may have
been acquired through adaptation to their role in society.
19. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, ed. Chaddock (London: F. A. Davis Co.,
1892), p. 139.
20. Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, Nietzsche, Werke: Kritische
Gesamtausgabe, ed. Colli and Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1968), Vol. VI
i, p. 82.
21. Derrida, Otobiographies, p. 52.
22. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, p. 54.
23. See for instance Mark Simpson's analysis of late twentieth-century war
films 'Don't die on me, buddy: homoeroticism and masochism in war
movies', Male Impersonators: Men Performing Masculinity (London, New
York: Cassell, 1994), pp. 212-28. See also Steven Zeeland, The Masculine
Marine: Homoeroticism in the U.S. Marine Corps (New York, London:
Harrington Park Press, 1996); and of course Klaus Theweleit, Manner-
phantasien, 2 vols (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1980).
24. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Nietzsche, Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Colli
and Montinari, Vol. VI iii, p. 272.
 After dualism: Nietzsche 41

25. Ronald Hayman, Nietzsche, a Critical Life, (London: Weidenfeld and

Nicolson, 1980), pp. 334f.
26. Nietzsche, Die frohliche Wissenschaft, Nietzsche, Werke: Kritische Gesamtaus-
gabe, ed. Colli and Montinari (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 1973), Vol. V ii,
#72, p. 106.
27. Cited by Kohler, Zarathustras Geheimnis, p. 487.
28. Kohler, Zarathustras Geheimnis, pp. 312ff.
29. Kohler, Zarathustras Geheimnis, p. 402.
30. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, p. 74.
31. 'Du willst vor deinem Freunde kein Kleid tragen? Es soil deines Freundes
Ehre sein, daS du dich ihm gibst, wie du bist? Aber er wunscht dich darum
zum Teufel! ... Ja, wenn ihr Cotter waret, da diirftet ihr euch eurer Kleider
schamen.' Nietzsche, Zarathustra, p. 68.
32. Norman Stone, Europe Transformed (London: Fontana, 1983), p. 72.
33. Steven Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy, p. 128. See Aschheim's entire
chapter entitled 'Zarathustra in the trenches', pp. 128-63.
34. Case 106J in Krafft-Ebing's Psi/chopathia Sexualis, p. 165.
 3

Dorian Gray

A question of identity

If Nietzsche was, far more than is generally imagined, a 'womanly man', so

also, legend has it, was Oscar Wilde. Or perhaps he was a manly womanly
man? At his arrival in America in January 1882, according to Richard Ellman,
he surprised reporters there by his appearance:
Rather than the Bunthorne they expected, a man arrived who was taller
than they were, with broad shoulders and long arms and hands that
looked capable of being doubled into fists. ... His voice astonished the
representative of the New York Tribune by being anything but feminine,
burly rather.1
The 'identity' of Oscar Wilde was, similar to that of Nietzsche, protean: his
most outstanding characteristic was perhaps his subversion of any notion of a
fixed, predictable 'identity', his reserving for himself the right to surprise. To
define', as Lord Henry says, 'is to limit'.
Yet, if few other writers in English have subverted the notion of 'identity' so
radically, perhaps none has failed so disastrously in this project. For Wilde's
'identity' was defined apparently for posterity during his trials in 1895.
Demonized by some, lionized by others, his 'identity' is all too clear to
everybody; Oscar Wilde is, depending on the point of view, 'that homosexual
writer', 'the gay writer', or simply, ignoring his writing altogether, 'the
homosexual', 'the queer', 'the gay hero/saint/martyr', 'the first gay man' and
creator of 'gay identity' and so on. The fact that so many men who identify
themselves as 'homosexual', 'queer' or 'gay' immediately identify with Oscar
Wilde and seek to model their identity on him is understandable - as he is still
perhaps the most famous 'homosexual' in the history of the English-speaking
world, indeed certified as such by the British criminal justice system. Yet there
 Dorian Gray 43

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

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

Moral, all too moral?

One could read The Picture of Dorian Gray as evidence of a crisis of identity
resulting from the author's discovery of the joy of unconventional sex and his
consequent difficulty in identifying with any of the available, conventional
male role models. Wilde's thirty-second birthday was in October 1886, and it
was during the following year that his first homosexual affair developed - with
Robert Ross. Wilde seems at first to have wished to commemorate the date of
the 'transformation' (Ellmann's word) of his life in the novel. For in the first
version of that story, published in Lippincot's Magazine (20 June 1890), Dorian
stabs the painter of his portrait on the 'eve of his own thirty-second birthday' —
7 October — and so commits himself to a life of obscure depravity. In
subsequent editions the month was changed to November, and the birthday to
the thirty-eighth, as if Wilde, like Basil Hallward in the story, had put too much
of himself into the portrait and wished to erase some of the more obvious
traces of autobiography/self-portraiture.8 The Picture of Dorian Gray remains
however in some sense a picture of Wilde's transformation in 1886.
Though denounced on its publication as an immoral book, it seems initially
at least to be a far more moral tale than Robert Louis Stevenson's case study of
the 'double', The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. To the critics' charge
that Dorian Gray was an immoral book, Wilde replied that it was too moral, as
perhaps it was, and he summed up the moral thus: 'all excess as well as all
renunciation brings its own punishment'. Ellmann comments: The difficulty is
that the book contains no renunciant, and while Dorian Gray does say that
Anchorites and hermits are as bestial as sybarites, the point cannot be regarded
as fictionally demonstrated.' 9 Dorian's death at the end of the story seems to
come as punishment for an immoral, sybaritic life. But what is the moral of this
apparently moral fable? If Wilde originally compared his love for Ross to
Dorian's murder of Basil, that would suggest Wilde was contributing to the
genre Sedgwick has termed the 'paranoid Gothic' of 'homosexual panic',
 Dorian Gray 45

depicting a paranoid sadomasochistic relationship between two men, or

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

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

Plurality and parody

To classify The Picture of Dorian Gray as belonging to the genre of the

'Paranoid Gothic of homosexual panic' might however be too reductive a
reading of a book that teasingly (and, let it be said, rather irritatingly) tries out,
plays with and lays aside a variety of genres and periods, styles, personae,
identities and their related philosophies including their various rationalizations
and formulations of male relationships without coming to any real conclusion
as to which genre, persona, philosophy or form of relationship is ultimately
preferable. Just as Dorian has 'nine large paper copies' of a 'poisonous book'
'bound in several different colours' to suit his various moods and fancies,
Wilde's book itself has several different colours. This is a confusing book.
Perhaps it may best be described, appropriately enough for a novel dealing
with the 'double', as two novels: the moral fable and the amoral parodic
deconstruction of itself?
That Wilde himself wished to defend himself against the charge that he had
written a far too moral book as well as against the charge that Dorian Gray was
 Dorian Gray 47

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

degeneracy' are all offered as possible styles and conventions with which a
man of unconventional desires might, but, in Dorian Gray, does not in the end
identify. Michael Patrick Gillespie notes how the text of Dorian Gray resists
reduction to one single identity/meaning:
Multiplicity within the discourse invites a similar pluralism in reactions to
the work: readings that simultaneously present a variety of meanings and
do not simply resolve reactions into a single response. Dorian Gray
refuses to submit to hegemonic or even to hierarchical meanings, for the
discourse continually disrupts emerging patterns of interpretation to
enforce the validity of a range of diverse perspectives.14
This refusal to submit to interpretation, to 'hegemonic or even to hierarchical
meanings', could no doubt itself be interpreted as Wilde's effort to escape
definition and criminalization as 'a homosexual' (and even as 'an Irishman').
'From a label', says Lord Henry, 'there is no escape.'
The problem is, however, exactly that this very elusive behaviour,
attempting to subvert all definition and identity, becomes itself recognizable
and definable as 'camp', the style of a new 'gay' 'identity', and thus defeats
itself.15 Is the label 'gay' usurping the role of 'femme' as a new 'nom de la non-
verite de la verite'? As soon as 'camp' is adopted by or is simply recognized as
the 'identity' of those of a particular 'sexual orientation' it loses its
revolutionary potential, suggesting merely that 'gays' are unnatural, artificial
people rather than that all 'identities' are artificial, constructed roles. Susan
Sontag describes the nature of 'camp' thus:
Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It's not a lamp, but a 'lamp';
not a woman, but a 'woman'. To perceive Camp in objects and persons is
to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in
sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theatre.16
Everything is in quotation marks, everything is constructed, all identities are
roles, from culture there is no escape back to 'nature'. That is a modern,
existentialist attitude at least as much as it is a 'gay' one.
Wilde's 'camp' is an attempt not to adopt but to escape not just one label
but all labels, not to set up a dualism of homo- and heterosexuality but to
transcend this emerging opposition as well as all others. His playfulness is
opposed to all fixed notions of 'identity' and 'truth'. 'A truth in art', as he said,
'is that whose contradictory is also true.' He may have been the writer who
invented 'gaiety', but this is a 'frohliche Wissenschaft' intended not just for
'gays' but for the world.
 Dorian Gray 49

The Double, dualism and narcissism

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

It is interesting to note that the double appears to be primarily if not solely

a male phenomenon.18 In literature it is above all men who have strange
encounters with their doppelganger. This perhaps has something to do with
the fact that in patriarchal culture women are expected to be physically
narcissistic, while men's narcissism is expected to be taken up in more 'spiritual'
concerns such as matters of the 'soul', cults, the production of culture and
ideologies. Men are in fact not supposed to be narcissistic at all; narcissism is
effeminate and childish. Yet Rank's study of the double can be interpreted as
suggesting that men's spiritual and intellectual concerns, the substance of
patriarchal culture, can be revealed to be inspired by men's oh-so-effeminate
narcissism. Perhaps the double is primarily a male phenomenon because any
hint of actual physical narcissism (and possible connotations of 'homosexu-
ality') is particularly problematic for men in a culture which demands that
men's physical narcissism be denied in order that their spiritual and intellectual
narcissism serve to promote the culture of patriarchy. Women, having fewer
problems with their own narcissism, are less likely to have guilt-laden
encounters with their doubles.
Dorian Gray, the cult of the dandy and aesthete and the very name of Oscar
Wilde are associated with open male narcissism, equated at the time and since
with male 'effeminacy'. This 'open narcissism' was perhaps infinitely preferable
to the 'closeted narcissism' of patriarchal authority, which of course felt
threatened by Wilde's display of anarchic, self-affirming narcissism. One recalls
the story told by the 37-year-old Wilde to 22-year-old Andre Gide (who had
just written on the subject of Narcisse), a story which Wilde called The
Disciple', an appropriate title and an appropriate story for an established writer
to tell a young writer:
When Narcissus died, the flowers of the field were desolate and asked the
river for some drops of water to weep for him. 'Oh!' answered the river,
'if all my drops of water were tears, I should not have enough to weep
for Narcissus myself. I love him.' 'Oh!' replied the flowers of the field,
'how could you not have loved Narcissus? He was beautiful.' Was he
beautiful?' said the river. 'And who should know better than you? Each
day, leaning over your bank, he beheld his beauty in your waters.' 'If I
loved him', replied the river, 'it was because, when he leaned over my
waters, I saw the reflection of my waters in his eyes.'19
The point was', according to Richard Ellman, 'that there are no disciples . . . .
People are suns, not moons.' Wilde wanted everybody to be a sun, to be a
Narcissus, a privilege until then reserved for the few fortunate enough .to have
the means. Aristocratic narcissism for all.
 Dorian Gray 51

Concluding remarks to Part I

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

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

Notes

1. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Penguin, 1988), p. 151.

2. See Mark Simpson's presumably fictional 'Interview with Oscar Wilde', in
 Dorian Gray 53

Mark Simpson, It's a Queer World (London: Vintage, 1996), pp. 205-10, p.
208.
3. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (London: Penguin, 1985), pp. 174-
5.
4. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge, Polity Press,
1991), p. 7.
5. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, p. 9.
6. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), p. 41. Kiberd deals with the anti-imperial
aspect — in particular in connection with the relationship between Britain
and Ireland — of Wilde's 'deconstruction' of opposites here.
7. Cited by Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, p. 301.
8. See Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, p. 260.
9. Ellmann, Wilde, p. 303.
10. See for example Jeffrey Richards, ' "Passing the love of women": manly
love and Victorian society', in Manliness and Morality: Middle-class
Masculinity in Britain and America 1800—1940, ed. J. A. Mangan and J.
Walvin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), pp. 92-122.
11. Alison Hennigan, 'Aspects of literature and life in England', in Fin de Siecle
and its Legacy, ed. M. Teich and R. Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990), p. 207.
12. Mark Simpson, 'Interview with Oscar Wilde', p. 209.
13. Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Bose, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Colli and
Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter and Co., 1968), Vol. VI ii, #223.
14. Michael Patrick Gillespie, 'Picturing Dorian Gray: resistant readings in
Wilde's novel', English Literature in Transition, 35 (1, 1992).
15. One might reasonably object that one is re-enacting here precisely that
nineteenth-century medical trend Foucault spoke of — reducing Wilde's
entire personality/identity to 'his sexuality'.
16. Susan Sontag, 'Notes on "Camp"', in Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation
(New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1961), p. 280.
17. Otto Rank, The Double, a Psychoanalytic Study, trans, and ed. by Harry
Tucker, Jr. (North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 1971),
p. 84.
18. See Harry Tucker's 'Introduction' to Rank's study; Otto Rank, The Double,
a Psychoanalytic Study, p. xxi.
19. Cited by Richard Ellman, Oscar Wilde, pp. 336-7.
This page intentionally left blank
 Part II

The Other - Narcissus and

Salome
This page intentionally left blank
 Scapegoats

In Part I, we saw how the motif of the 'doppelganger' occurred in works of

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

'society' decided it could not live with and had to abandon — by scapegoating
someone who might represent its own ambivalence. Narcissus became a
common character in fin-de-siecle literature as men attempted to put a name on
and exorcize their own (sexual and other) confusions. Salome was similarly a
favourite name for the confusions and ambivalence of the age, and, of course,
conveniently, a woman, and as such a ready-made scapegoat for the confusions
of men. Part II will focus its attention on the treatment of these two figures in
the literature of the fin de siecle.
To return, for a moment to the subject of Part I: a term eminently
appropriate to the phenomenon described there is perhaps Rene Girard's 'crise
mimetique' (mimetic crisis). Girard, like Freud, uses a triangular model to
describe the workings of (male) desire. At the apex of Girard's triangle stands
the (male) 'mediateur'/'modele', whose desire for the (female) 'objet' is imitated
by the (male) 'sujet'. According to Girard, the distance between the 'sujet' and
the 'mediateur' is as crucial for the formation of desire as it is for the
configuration of the triangle. At one extreme, the 'mediateur' is external, a
supremely distant religious or historical model for the subject to imitate. At the
other, the 'mediateur' is internal — not belonging to the realm of metaphysics,
but to the world of the subject, no longer just a model but a rival or an obstacle
to the subject's desire. As the apex of the triangle has collapsed to the same
level as the subject and object, the triangle is no longer a triangle at all but a
line between subject and object, interrupted and blocked by the 'mediateur'. In
the past few centuries of literature Girard reads a progressive approach of the
'mediateur' to the level of the subject — from when the 'mediateur' was outside
of time altogether to the stage when one has several 'mediateurs' close by and
a consequent 'decomposition of the personality of the subject', as, he says, is
the case with Dostoevsky and Nietzsche.1 Here one finds, he argues, both 'le
desir sans objet' (desire without an object) — as the subject is involved in a
sadomasochistic struggle with the 'mediateur', now a rival or a double, part of
the subject himself - and the total disintegration of the 'unity of the
personality of the subject' — a unity which, he argues, depends on the
maintenance of the metaphysical distance between the subject and the
'mediateur'. This is a fascinating model, useful for understanding what is going
on here - and all the more fascinating and useful if one abandons Girard's
assumption that the hierarchical triangular configuration - where the
'mediateur' is some distant God-like being to be imitated — is somehow
'better', more 'normal' or 'healthier' than what appears to be the more
democratic, if more confused, arrangement of the horizontal line.
Girard describes the stage where one finds 'doubles' and sadomasochism as
a 'crise mimetique' whose resolution is found only through the selection and
expulsion of a scapegoat upon whom the sins of the community are conferred,
 Scapegoats 59

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

nationality becomes especially intense.'5 Such cultural insecurity and longing

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

Notes

1. See Rene Girard, Mensonge romantique et verite romanesque (Paris: Grasset,

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

The trials of Narcissus: Wilde

Wilde and Nordau: degeneration, clothes and philistine cattle

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

between artists and 'degeneration'. Nordau's Degeneration was, in Gibbons's

words, 'the Age of Evolutionism's most influential work of literary criticism',
and was moreover a work whose enormous popularity in England 'appears to
have been a direct result of the trial of Oscar Wilde with which publication of
the first English translation may well have been designed to coincide'.4
Nordau classifies such artists as Whitman, Huysmans, Zola, Ibsen, Nietzsche
and Wagner among a huge number of others as various manifestations of
'degeneracy'. He sees France, however, as the original home of 'degeneration'.
This was not a new idea in Germany: J. M. Fischer points out that in 1871 the
German psychiatrist Karl Stark had published a book on the subject of Die
psychologische Degeneration des franzosischen Volkes, ihr pathologischer Charakter,
ihre Symptome und Ursachen (The psychological degeneration of the French
people, its pathological character, symptoms and causes).5 Fin de siede,
according to Nordau, is a French phenomenon, a phenomenon which he links
to the weakness of the French after the loss of so much blood during the
French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars and the French defeat in 1870 as well
as to the effect on the nerves of the growth of large towns, the development of
railways, electricity and steam power.
Nordau attacks Wilde not for 'somdomy' but for 'egomania', on the
'psychology' of which he writes a great deal, as indeed he does on all forms of
'degeneration' — a habit which earned him the label 'graphomaniac' from one
contemporary English reviewer.6 Nordau writes:
The egomania of decadentism, its love of the artificial, its aversion to
nature, and to all forms of activity and movement, its megalomaniacal
contempt for men and its exaggeration of the importance of art, have
found their English representative among the 'Aesthetes', the chief of
whom is Oscar Wilde.7
For Nordau, Wilde's egomania was evident from his clothes:
It is asserted that he walked down Pall Mall in the afternoon dressed in
doublet and breeches, with a picturesque biretta on his head and a
sunflower in his hand, the quasi heraldic symbol of the aesthetes, (p. 317)
This is too much for Nordau, who would rather be a 'philistine' than an
'egomaniac':
Phasemakers are perpetually repeating the twaddle, that it is a proof of
honourable independence to follow one's own taste without being bound
down to the regulation costume of the Philistine cattle, and to choose for
clothes the colours, material and cut which appear beautiful to one's own
self, no matter how much they may differ from the fashion of the day.
 The trials of Narcissus: Wilde 63

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

The press, the new authority, The Soul of Man under Socialism

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

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

Degenerate, decadent and perverted tendencies

Nordau indicts Wilde, however, on behalf of the new authority, the new
democratic majority, inheritors of the power and authority of the declining
aristocracy. The majority is, it seems, all of a body, not an aggregate of bodies,
a body which moreover must eradicate any anarchic 'vermin' ('Ungeziefer')10
threatening its unity. Nordau's language is far from restrained:
 The trials of Narcissus: Wilde 65

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

year and ended on 25 May, the Queen's birthday. Undoubtedly Nordau's best-
seller fanned the flames around Wilde's stake. In the spring of 1895 Punch
complained that 'Morbid sickliness surrounds us in our lives, our books, our
art'. A reviewer in The Academy expressed disgust at the 'blackest Horrors' of
the 'Ibsenites and Tolstoi-ites and Pornographists and Dirt-eaters' he had
formerly admired and called for 'Glorious bonfires of bad books!'.16 In one
English review of Nordau's Degeneration a critic wrote:
Gladly would we replace the divine right of instinct as an article of faith
by a wholesome revival of the obsolete and unscientific doctrine of
original sin. These literary phenomena may be pure madness, but for all
Max Nordau's theories there is something to be said just now for a re-
introduction of the devil. Mephistopheles has been too much forgotten
of late.17
Perhaps the reintroduction of a Christian hierarchy would solve the problem of
decadent anarchy.
Fears concerning 'degeneration' and 'decadence' were also specifically linked
to fears regarding issues of gender and sexual practices. George Gissing wrote
of 'sexual anarchy', while Punch, in response to the feminists' challenge to
traditional gender roles, the advent of the so-called 'manly woman' and the
'womanly man', and no doubt also with the Wilde affair in mind, proclaimed in
April 1895: 'A new fear my bosom vexes;/ Tomorrow there may be no
sexes!'.18 The paintings of Aubrey Beardsley were denounced by the critic
Harry Quilter as 'perverted' for their depiction of 'manhood and womanhood
... mingled together ... in a monstrous sexless amalgam, morbid, dreary and
unnatural'.19
There was a series of sexual scandals in England in the years preceding the
Wilde trials — from the sensational series on child prostitution by W. T. Stead
entitled 'The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon' in 1885 to the expose of the
Cleveland Street male brothel in 1889 - which, according to Showalter,
changed the level of public awareness about sexuality and engendered a
fierce response in social purity campaigns ... and demands, often
successful, for restrictive legislation and censorship. They were occasions
when gender roles were 'publicly, even spectacularly, encoded and
enforced'.20
'Notions of homosexual "degeneracy"', writes Gibbons, 'doubtless reinforced
in the popular mind the important link already made by Lombroso and Nordau
between biological degeneration on the one hand and literary decadence on
the other.'21 Cesare Lombroso 'coupled homosexual desire with criminality as
elements detrimental to the progress of civilization'.22 Homosexuals 'were
 The trials of Narcissus: Wilde 67

defined as Egotists — as those centred in Self — who seemed to reject the

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

The aftermath

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

movement. Each of these terms could henceforth be used as a stick to beat the
other. Wilde personified, in Foucault's word, incorporated that neologism
'homosexuality' and it became difficult to see him in any other terms.
Davenport-Hines notes, and one cannot resist quoting this in full, how the
violence which the name 'Wilde' excited was shown during the First World
War when a teenager was discovered by his father reading The Picture of Dorian
Gray:
he seemed to choke. The purple deepened on his fat cheeks. He turned to
me with an expression of such murderous hate that I stepped towards the
wall. 'You filthy little bastard!' he screamed ... 'Don't you dare speak to
me ... you ... you scum!' He hurled the book at my head ... he struck me
across the mouth.
'Now ... you pretty little bastard ... you pretty little boy' (and as he
said the word 'pretty' he sent his voice high and shrill, in a parody of the
typical homosexual intonation) 'watch me!' ... My father opened the
book, very slowly, cleared his throat, and spat on the title page. Having
spat once, he spat again; the action appeared to stimulate him. Soon his
chin was covered with saliva. Then, with a swift animal gesture, he lifted
the book to his mouth, closed his teeth over some of the pages, and
began tearing them to shreds ... I could conceive no crime that could
possibly cause any man's name to be so hated [and asked] 'What did
Wilde do?'
'What did he do?' He shook his head; the crime was too terrible to pass
his lips, 'oh, my son ... my son!' he groaned. And sinking onto the bed,
he burst into tears.
The next morning the father returned to his son's bedroom to explain the
crime of Oscar Wilde. 'It's unfit for a decent man to say', he said, before
writing something on a scrap of paper and issuing a final threat: 'If ever I catch
you reading a book by that man again, or if ever I so much as hear you
mentioning his name ... I'll cut your liver out.' After he had left the son read
the paper: what his father had written was: 'ILLUM CRIMEN HORRIBILE
QUOD NON NOMINANDUM EST'.29
Strangely enough, Nordau, despite his talk of cudgels and vermin, was one
of the first to sign a protest of French literati against Wilde's sentence. Perhaps
Nordau, after the Dreyfus affair, was becoming disenchanted with the violent
majority with which he had wished to identify himself. It was a bit late for
second thoughts.
 The trials of Narcissus: Wilde 69

Notes

1. Max Nordau, a German-Hungarian Jew, physician and author, had in his

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

liisterne Raubthier' schwarmt, dem rufen wir zu: "hinaus aus der Gesittung!
Schweife fern von tins! ... Fur das liisterne Raubthier 1st bei uns kein Platz
und wenn du dich unter uns wagst, so schlagen wir dich unbarmherzig mit
Kniippeln todt." Und noch entschiedener gilt es gegen die kothloffelnde
Schweinebande der berufsmassigen Pornographen Partei zu nehmen ... .'
Max Nordau, Entartung, Vol. II, pp. 556f., cited by Fischer, 'Max Nordau',
p. 104.
12. 'Das ist die Behandlung der Zeitkrankheit, die ich fur wirksam halte:
Kennzeichnung der fuhrenden Entarteten und Hysteriker als Kranke,
Entlarvung und Brandmarkung der Nachaffer als Gesellschaftsfeinde,
Warnung vor den Lugen dieser Schmarotzer.' Nordau, Entartung, p. 561,
cited by Fischer, 'Max Nordau', p. 103.
13. Fischer, 'Max Nordau', p. 106.
14. Theater, Kunst, Literatur, Kino, Presse, Plakat und Auslagen sind von den
Erscheinungen einer verfaulenden Welt zu saubern und in den Dienst einer
sittlichen Staats- und Kulturidee zu stellen. . . . Schon vor der
Jahrhundertwende begann sich in unsere Kunst ein Element einzuschieben,
das bis dorthin als vollkommen fremd und unbekannt gelten durfte.' Adolf
Hitler, Mein Kampf, quoted by J. M. Fischer, 'Max Nordau', p. 105.
15. See Peter Reichel, Der schone Schein des Dritten Reiches: Faszination und
Gewalt des Faschismus (Frankfurt / M.: Fischer, 1993), pp. 360f.
16. Cited by Tom Gibbons, Rooms, p. 37.
17. Janet E. Hogarth, 'Literary degenerates', The Fortnightly Review, January-
June 1895, p. 591.
18. Cited by Elaine Showalter in Sexual Anarch]/ (London: Virago, 1992), p. 9.
19. Quoted by Richard Davenport-Hines, in Sex, Death and Punishment, p. 126.
20. Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, p. 3.
21. Gibbons, Rooms, p. 37.
22. Davenport-Hines, Sex, Death and Punishment, p. 119.
23. Davenport-Hines, Sex, Death and Punishment p. 125, and cited by
Davenport-Hines, p. 128.
24. Cited in ibid., p. 119.
25. Cited in ibid., p. 120.
26. See ibid., pp. 136ff. Rosebery had also aroused the fury of Queensberry.
Davenport-Hines writes that Queensberry at one point intended to
horsewhip Rosebery for the unhealthy influence he had exercised over his
eldest son, Lord Drumlanrig.
27. Cited in ibid., p. 139.
28. The novelist was Croft-Cooke, cited by Davenport-Hines, in ibid., p. 140.
29. The teenager was Beverley Nichols, whose story is cited by Davenport-
Hines in ibid., p. 142.
 5

The deaths of Narcissus:

Hofmannsthal

Hofmannsthal: death as the 'cure' for decadence

A figure of fin-de-siede Vienna who bears comparison with Wilde as something

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

Thus the young Hofmannsthal begins his career as a writer and artist by
describing an attempt to overcome the very aestheticism and decadence with
which he is associated and indeed with which the language of this verse drama
as well as of much subsequent work is saturated. In 1929 Hofmannsthal
explained how he had intended to complete the unfinished fragment Der Tod
des Tizian: after the death of the artist (Titian) all his disciples were to be
brought into contact with the 'Lebenserhohung' (heightening of the sense of
life) affecting the whole town through the imminence of death as a result of
the plague. It was all to lead to a kind of Todesorgie' (orgy of death).2 Only
the contact with death, the danger of imminent death would bring
'Lebenserhohung', a bit of excitement, to these tired young people.
A year later death still seems to offer the only possibility of
'Lebenserhohung'. In Hofmannsthal's very popular Der Tor und der Tod (The
Fool and Death) (1893), Claudio, the fool, recognizes that he has been up to
now 'Wie auf der Biihn ein schlechter Komodiant' (like a bad comic actor on
the stage) and finally welcomes death, declaring 'Erst da ich sterbe, spur ich,
dafi ich bin' (only now that I am dying do I feel that I exist).3 In 1894
Hofmannsthal made the following note:
The Fool and Death'. What is actually the cure? - That death is the first
true thing that he (Claudio) meets ... whose deep truth he is capable of
comprehending. An end of all lies, relativisms and illusions. From this
everything else is transfigured.4
Hermann Broch writes that from Der Tod des Tizian and Der Tor und der Tod of
the 18- and 19-year-old right up to the Jedermann of the mature writer, the
figure of Death is constantly given a central and crucial role; only Death gives
meaning to everything else and Death appears to signify 'sittliche Reinigung'
(moral cleansing).5 That sounds ominous, but of course it was a feeling not
restricted to Hofmannsthal: by August 1914 it appeared to be a widespread
belief.
In 1893 Hofmannsthal committed himself to joining the Dragoner-Regiment
6 as a volunteer for a year, which he did at the end of September 1894. To his
friend Karg von Bebenburg he wrote:
It will seem strange to you, but I am actually looking forward to serving
... a naive, totally non-intellectual way of passing one's life and at the
same time fulfilling one's inescapable duty. My usual existence, because I
am almost completely free to shape it myself and yet am not mature, has
a downright artificial, illusory character.6
Of course his romantic ideas about military service were to be somewhat
disappointed by the actual experience.7 Nevertheless, he would eulogize the
 The deaths of Narcissus: Hofmannsthal 73

army again in 1914, and see in it an ideal model of community for the rest of
society.
A significant part of the 'problem', as Hofmannsthal saw it, was that his
great-grandfather had been Jewish. Hermann Broch places great emphasis on
the role assimilation had played in Hofmannsthal's family history as well as in
his own character.8 Out of a desire for the achievement of complete
assimilation, the young Hofmannsthal had been saturated by his father with
the culture of the Gentile haute bourgeoisie and aristocracy of Germany and
Austria to an exaggerated degree. Broch writes of the 'zweistufiger Narzifimus'
(twofold narcissism) of all assimilated minorities, who are likely to be proud
and narcissistic not only in the way of all members of the aristocracy and haute
bourgeoisie but especially so on account of the effort involved in achieving their
assimilation. The young Hofmannsthal was indeed, by all accounts, rather
narcissistic. The only obstacle to his flourishing cultural narcissism was that the
culture he had been assimilated to was in decline. By the late nineteenth
century Vienna, according to Broch, had something 'museal', museum-like,
about it. The Habsburg monarchy and empire, under the leadership of the
ageing Franz Josef, was a sentimental and backward-looking anachronism.
Vienna, writes Broch, was the centre of the 'Wertvakuum', value-vacuum, of
the epoch. It seems then that Hofmannsthal was from the beginning, in
describing the deaths of Narcissus-like characters, attempting to leave behind
this assimilation to a doomed, if decorative aristocratic culture and searching
for an alternative such as the army.
Hofmannsthal himself however wondered if his 'problem' was not simply
the fact that he had Jewish blood in his veins. In 1893, the same year
Hofmannsthal volunteered for military service, he wrote in his diary:
What if all my inner developments and struggles were nothing but
troubles resulting from my inherited blood, uprisings of the Jewish drops
of blood (reflection) against the Germanic and Latin blood and reactions
against these uprisings.9

Six years later he again associated his tendency to reflect with his Jewish
heritage, writing of a 'jiidische Denkungsweise . . . , die so etwas entsetzlich
blutloses furs Leben untiichtiges ... in sich hat' (a Jewish way of thinking which
has something dreadfully bloodless and inadequate for life in it).10 This shows
the extent to which Hofmannsthal had internalized anti-Semitic racial theories
of the day, which conclusively 'proved' that the Jews were a degenerate and
decadent people as well as innately 'effeminate'. One highly influential
proponent of this thesis was Hofmannsthal's young compatriot, Otto
Weininger, himself of Jewish background, who was in 1903 author of both
Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character), a book which suggested that Jews
74 The Other - Narcissus and Salome

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

Narcissus' uncanny, ambivalent, Oriental femininity,

homosexual panic and death

Death is also the fate of the hero of Das Marchen der 672. Nacht (The tale of the
672nd night) (1895), a rich and beautiful youth given to admiring himself and
the beautiful objects which adorn his house, rather like Dorian Gray, or
Huysmans' des Esseintes.11 In fact it has been suggested that Hofmannsthal's
tale is in some sense a reaction to contemporary newspaper reports of the trials
of Oscar Wilde in 1895 and that society's condemnation and rejection of
Wilde, the supreme aesthete, for what it saw as an abominable sexual
predilection and activity was something which shocked Hofmannsthal rather
more profoundly than he was prepared to admit directly.
Eugene Weber draws attention to the fact that Hofmannsthal appears to have
modelled the Kaufmannssohn, the merchant's son of the tale, directly on Dorian
Gray. Just as Wilde modelled Dorian on Huysmans' des Esseintes, almost quoting
from Huysmans, Hofmannsthal practically cites Wilde word for word.
Hofmannsthal's Kaufmannssohn admires 'die Formen der Tiere und die Formen
der Pflanzen ...: die Delphine, die Lowen und die Tulpen, die Perlen und den
Akanthus' (the forms of the animals and the forms of the plants ...: the dolphins,
the lions and the tulips, the pearls and the acanthus); Dorian's fancy is tickled by
'ecclesiastical vestments ... decorated with ... acanthus leaves ... lions ... tulips
and dolphins'.12 It appears then that in this tale Hofmannsthal was making a
somewhat hidden direct reference to Wilde's Dorian Gray, and this around the
same time as newspapers were reporting on Wilde's trials in London.
Das Marchen der 672. Nacht is the tale of a young, rich son of a merchant,
described by Le Rider as 'a perfect example of a narcissistic personality',13 who
suddenly leaves his rich residence for some obscure reason and wanders
apparently aimlessly around the streets of the poor quarter of town in the
dreamlike, or even uncanny second part of the tale. Somehow ending up in a
soldiers' barracks, he drops a jewel he had bought on his wanderings and it
falls under the hooves of a horse being tended by one of the soldiers. The
merchant's son bends down to pick it up, is kicked by the horse and dies
shortly thereafter. Weber draws attention to the similarity between the last
sentences in Hofmannsthal's tale and those in Wilde's Dorian Gray.
Hofmannsthal concludes with the sentence: 'Zuletzt erbrach er Galle, dann
Blut, und starb mit verzerrten Ziigen, die Lippen so verrissen, daS Zahne und
 The deaths of Narcissus: Hofmannsthal 75

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

or of its symbols, in dreams. Freud considers this 'primitive narcissism' normal

in the child and among 'primitive peoples', but, one supposes, normally
overcome in the civilized European adult male, who has, again one supposes,
acquired and has no fear of losing the power — which will naturally be
symbolized in patriarchal societies by the male genitals - so narcissistically
desired by male children and 'primitive peoples'. Thus, one might say, Freud
redraws the boundary between the 'Heimliche' and the 'Unheimliche',
returning to his position at the beginning of the essay that the experience
of the uncanny was alien to him personally, now suggesting that it is a childish
and primitive and thus foreign problem - as it should be if it signifies an
anxiety about a lack of masculine power and mastery, i.e. balls.
Freud's essay is illuminating, providing one does not arrive at the
conclusion that Freud is simply writing coldly about testicles and their
removal. For Freud, as, of course, for men who live in patriarchal societies
generally, i.e. for the men whose fantasies and fears Freud is interpreting,
testicles are power, their absence is powerlessness, which is simply a reiteration
of the meaning of patriarchy itself — that men have power while women do
not. The uncanny is then evidence of a fear of losing one's masculine power
(testicles) and becoming powerless (feminine). It has to do with narcissism in so
far as it is a sign that the male's habitual narcissistic identification with power
has been disturbed, and hence what Freud sees as evidence of a 'regression' to
'primitive narcissism' is due to that habitual narcissism becoming apparent as it
activates mechanisms for its own self-defence, and the restoration of that
identification with power.
That power appears to be precisely the power to draw both literal
boundaries — between the native, that territory over which one can claim some
kind of sovereignty or mastery, and the foreign - and conceptual or linguistic
boundaries — to classify and categorize. What we call uncanny is really any
kind of 'ambivalence' that threatens that position of mastery, the 'natural'
attribute of men. 'Ambivalence, the possibility of assigning an object or an
event to more than one category,' Zygmunt Bauman writes, 'is a language-
specific disorder: a failure of the naming (segregating) function that language is
meant to perform.'17 The typically modern practice, the substance of modern
politics, of modern intellect, of modern life, is the effort to exterminate
ambivalence: an effort to define precisely - and to suppress or eliminate
everything that could not or would not be precisely defined' (pp. 7f.). Of
course ambivalence cannot simply be 'exterminated'; indeed Bauman suggests
it is the 'alter ego' or 'the other' of modernity itself, upon which the classifying,
boundary-drawing 'self of modernity depends for its own constitution and
self-definition: The other of modern intellect is polysemy, cognitive
dissonance, polyvalent definitions, contingency; the overlapping meanings in
 The deaths of Narcissus: Hofmannsthal 77

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

One of the biggest scandal trials for years in England, Oscar Wilde's
accusation of slander against the Marquess of Queensberry, came to an
early end yesterday, thank God, after three days' hearing. Oscar Wilde
... considered an ideal, sensitive poet, has however constantly caused
offence by his personal vanity and craving for admiration. The Marquess
of Queensberry has now accused Wilde of a criminal, immoral act, which
also compromised his son, Lord Alfred Douglas. The letters from Lord
Douglas to Wilde and his ode dedicated to him, read on the second day,
78 The Other — Narcissus and Salome

left a deathly silence in the court. ... Oscar Wilde was arrested yesterday
afternoon in a hotel in Chelsea.18
Hofmannsthal's first notes for Das Marchen der 672. Nachi date from the 19
April 1895. In a letter Hofmannsthal sent his father on 9 August 1895 that
summer he wrote explaining that he did not intend the tale to 'mean' any more
than any small article in the daily papers 'meant'.19 Weber writes that all the
clues suggest that the tragic fate of Oscar Wilde made quite an impact on
Hofmannsthal, that it really shook him.20
This is all the more likely if one takes into account the apparently rather
homoerotically charged friendship 17-year-old Hofmannsthal had begun with
the 23-year-old poet, Stefan George. The friendship ended abruptly (and then
petered on for a few years before ending abruptly for good) after the exchange
of letters and poems dedicated to each other, then an apparently insulting and
now missing letter Hofmannsthal sent to George which led to George
challenging Hofmannsthal to a duel. George even wrote to Hofmannsthal's
father. It was all rather intense and upsetting for young Hofmannsthal.21
If it is indeed the case that Hofmannsthal was inspired by what was
happening to Wilde at the time, then Das Marchen der 672. Nachi is, like
Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (the 'straight' plot, sans parody), part of that
genre Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has termed the 'paranoid Gothic' of
'homosexual panic'. Having become aware of his own homosexual libido,
the hero of such narratives flees this socially unacceptable part of himself, often
projected as a 'double', who also appears a prospective sexual partner, until he
dies a violent death as punishment for his socially reprehensible desires. In
Hofmannsthal's tale the Kaufmannssohn is kicked to death by a horse in a
soldiers' barracks he had strayed into. Having become a Tremder', an alien,
foreigner or stranger, in his own town, he dies with a 'fremden, bo sen
Ausdruck', a foreign, evil expression on his face. One is reminded of the
rumours which spread about Dorian Gray after he had passed his twenty-fifth
year, that he had been seen brawling with foreign sailors in a low den in a
distant and ill-reputed part of Whitechapel.
Hofmannsthal's tale is, unlike Dorian Gray, set in the distant past and in a
distant Eastern land, not in contemporary Vienna - as if Hofmannsthal wanted
to place as much distance as possible between himself and what could be
interpreted as the sexual confusion and anxiety of the Kaufmannssohn.
Hofmannsthal did however describe Vienna as a Torta Orientis', of the
geographical as well as of an 'inner Orient', of 'das Reich des Unbewufiten' (the
realm of the unconscious).22 This equation of the Orient with the 'unconscious',
the irrational, etc. is of course a time-honoured strategy of 'Orientalism'.
Hofmannsthal's introduction to Tausend und eine Nacht (The Thousand and
 The deaths of Narcissus: Hofmannsthal . 79

One Nights) (1907) seems in this sense indeed rather 'orientalist'. Here he
wrote:
In our hearts' youth, in the loneliness of our soul we found ourselves in a
very large town which was mysterious and threatening and full of
temptation, like Baghdad or Basra. The temptations and the threatening
aspects were strangely mixed; it had an uncanny effect on our hearts and
we were full of desire; full of dread and loneliness, we were lost and yet
were driven forwards by courage and desire, driven along a labyrinthine
path between faces, possibilities, riches, sinister, half-concealed faces,
half-open doors, procuring and evil stares into the enormous bazaar
surrounding us ... .23

Here he associates the East with youth, the experience of the uncanny,
ambivalence, a multiplicity of (apparently sexual) possibilities and thus with
difficulties of topographic as well as cognitive, emotional and sexual
'orientation'. He also writes of the 'grenzenlose Sinnlichkeit' (limitless
sensuality) and of the linguistic 'Vieldeutigkeit' (polysemy) which he claims
is to be found in 'orientalische Poesie' in general and in the Thousand and One
Nights in particular and views these now in his more mature years as positive,
no longer threatening qualities. Whether uncanny and nightmarish or joyful,
childlike and Utopian, the scene of the dissolution of all boundaries is regarded
as typical of the East, something one can wax sentimental about as long as one
maintains one's mastery over it.
This was written around the same time as Hofmannsthal, in Der Dichter und
diese Zeit (The poet and this time), described modernity in much the same terms
as he used for Tausend und eine Nacht:
The essence of our epoch is ambiguity and uncertainty. It can only rest
on slippery ground and is conscious of the fact that it is slippery, while
other generations believed in the fixed and stable.24

In the tale, written when Hofmannsthal was only about 21, this ambivalence
was still, however, nightmarishly threatening, and the only resolution
conceivable to the young Hofmannsthal was death. Ambivalence of all kinds
remained a problem that Hofmannsthal sought to deal with in various ways, as
we shall see below.

Chaos, Sprachkrise and death again

If for Hofmannsthal within the walls and fences of the aristocracy lay the ennui
of perpetual self-consciousness, without lay the ultimately no less problematic
80 The Other — Narcissus and Salome

threat of dissolution, madness and death. We saw how Hofmannsthal was

given to apocalyptic notions of death as cure and transfiguration, the only
absolute which could bring about 'Ein Ende aller Liigen, Relativitaten und
Gaukelspiele' (an end of all lies, relativisms and illusions), including, as we saw,
embarrassing sexual ambivalence.
Hofmannsthal's flight from the world of palaces and poetry and his search
for 'real life' led him to join the army as a volunteer. After his year's service
(1894-95) he returned to his university studies, but during his studies he had to
return to the army a couple of times. His experiences of 'real life' in remote
military outposts of the empire qualified his romantic ideas somewhat. He used
the time to read much. In letters he wrote of how the experience was changing
his outlook. According to Volke he now began to see 'real life' as chaos.25
Having apparently abandoned aristocratic and aesthetic containment, order
and form in Der Tod des Tizian, in favour of real, chaotic life, he now began to
hanker after an aesthetic form which would restore order to 'real life' and ban
all that confusion and ambivalence, including the sexual ambivalence of the
Kaufmannssohn. This ambition would ultimately lead to his conservative and
nationalist political activism from the First World War to his ominous
apocalyptic talk of a 'konservative Revolution' in his speech Das Schrifltum als
geistiger Raum der Nation (Writing as the spiritual space of the nation) (1927).
In the mean time, his perception of chaos and formlessness all around
culminated in what he variously described as a 'seelische Krise', 'Lebenskrise' or
a 'Sprachkrise' (a crisis of the soul, a life-crisis or language crisis), which finds its
expression most famously in Ein Brief (A letter) (1902), written when
Hofmannsthal was 28 years old.26 The letter, dated 22 August 1603, was
supposedly sent by a 26-year-old nobleman by the name of Philipp Lord
Chandos to Francis Bacon to explain why he has renounced all further literary
activity. Lord Chandos, the fictitious author of the letter, declares that he has
completely lost the ability to speak or even think coherently about anything
whatsoever. First he finds he cannot use abstract words; then he cannot make,
or even tolerate hearing, ordinary, everyday judgements, such as that so and
so is a good or bad person or whatever. Lord Chandos appears to be in the
grip of a universal scepticism, doubting everything and unable not to doubt
everything — indeed quite the attitude recommended by Francis Bacon's own
empiricist philosophy of science. Hermann Rudolph suggests Hofmannsthal's
intensive reading of Bacon inspired much of the letter.27
Bacon's scepticism vis-a-vis the authority of tradition, the truth-value of
what had simply been handed down, lay behind not just the Enlightenment but
the subsequent development of science through the nineteenth century and the
consequent 'twilight of the idols', in Hofmannsthal's own lifetime hailed by
Nietzsche, another universal sceptic, who questioned the existence of such a
 The deaths of Narcissus: Hofmannsthal 81

thing as a stable, unified self. Of great influence in contemporary Vienna was

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

attempts to describe these moments — by saying they are indescribable.

Chandos concludes his letter to Bacon by explaining that he will not be writing
any further books — neither in English nor in Latin — as the only language in
which it might be possible for him to think or write is a language of which he
does not know a single word and a language with which he may perhaps give
account of himself from his grave to an unknown judge.
In the Chandos letter Hofmannsthal is once again apparently writing the
death notice of the artist, and again this death is peculiarly seen in religious and
apocalyptic terms. Chandos speaks of 'Offenbarung' (revelation), of 'eine
iiberschwellende Flut hoheren Lebens' (a flood of higher life), which he
occasionally experiences in his 'thoughtless' life - i.e. in his intellectual and
artistic death. Of his volunteering for military service, we remember,
Hofmannsthal wrote how he was looking forward to a naive, thoughtless
existence simply serving and doing his duty. Der Tod des Tizian was intended
to end with a Todesorgie' which would bring 'Lebenserhohung'; of Der Tor
und der Tod Hofmannsthal said death was the cure which would bring
'Verklarung' (transfiguration). One cannot help noticing a pattern in which,
over a period of ten years so far, death in general and of the artist in particular
is being regarded as desirable, purgative, revelatory, transfiguring.
Ten years further on (1912) this attitude is almost parodied in
Hofmannsthal's description of the final scene of his adaptation of the medieval
morality play Everyman:
Now the devil springs up and wants to take Everyman with him. Faith
tries to block his path and they fight ... Everyman appears from above.
His face is transfigured, he wears a long snow-white gown and a cross in
his hands. Behind him angels have appeared and below, on the middle
level, where Faith is standing, a rectangular grave has appeared. Two of
the angels carry a sheet in their hands. Without a sound they spread it
over the grave, covering the blackness of the night with white. ... only
Faith stands there and angels sing God's praise. Then it became
completely dark, bells rang out, the dark gave way to a strong light
before which there can be no secrets and which fell evenly on the whole
structure, the whole stage and the great crowd of people [in the audience]
slowly beginning to move, and the play was at an end.28
Unfortunately this was no parody; Hofmannsthal was deadly serious. What
could follow this but a truly apocalyptic war with plenty of opportunities for
men to recover - for a while at least - a sense of purpose, orientation, mastery,
masculine identity? Might this not be a real Todesorgie', an orgy of death with
plenty of opportunity for sacrifice?
 The deaths of Narcissus: Hofmannsthal 83

Notes

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

15. Volke, Hofmannsthal, p. 59.

16. Freud notes how often neurotic men consider female genitalia, which as
Freud says are after all the entrance to the original 'Heim' of everybody, as
somehow 'unheimlich'. Here also, he observes, the 'Unheimliche'
(uncanny/unhomely) is what was formerly 'heimisch' (homely).
17. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge: Polity, 1991),
p. 1.
18. Cited by Weber, 'Hofmannsthal und Oscar Wilde', p. 105: 'Einer der
grossten Skandalprozesse, welcher in England seit Jahren vorgekommen
ist, eine Verleumdungsklage des Schriftstellers Oscar Wilde gegen den
Marquis Queensberry, fand gestern nach dreitagiger Verhandlung gottlob
ihren friihzeitigen Abschluss. Oscar Wilde ... gait als ein idealer,
feinsinniger Poet, doch hat seine personliche Eitelkeit und Gefallsucht
stets Anstoss erregt. Der Marquis Queensberry hat nun Wilde einer
verbrecherischen Unsittlichkeit beschuldigt, durch welche auch sein Sohn
Lord Alfred Douglas, compromittiert wurde. ... Die am zweiten Tage
verlesenen Briefe des Lord Douglas an Wilde und seine an diesen
gerichtete Ode brachten ein Grabesschweigen im Gerichtssaale hervor. ...
Oscar Wilde wurde noch gestern nachmittags in einem Hotel in Chelsea
verhaftet.'
19. Cited by Weber, Hofmannsthal, p. 105.
20. Weber, Hofmannsthal, p. 106.
21. See Volke, Hofmannsthal, pp. 32—3 and Rieckmann, '(Anti-)Semitism and
homoeroticism', pp. 218—19.
22. Cited by Hartmut Zelinsky in 'Hofmannsthal und Asien', Fin de Siecle, ed.
Bauer et al (Frankfurt/M.: Klostermann, 1977), pp. 508-66.
23. Hofmannsthal, Tausend und eine Nacht', Gesammelte Werke: Prosa II, ed.
Steiner (Frankfurt/M.: S. Fischer, 1951), pp. 311-20, p. 311: 'In der Jugend
unseres Herzens, in der Einsamkeit unserer Seele fanden wir uns in einer
sehr groSen Stadt, die geheimnisvoll und drohend und verlockend war,
wie Bagdad und Basra. Die Lockungen und die Drohungen waren seltsam
vermischt; uns war unheimlich zu Herzen und sehnsiichtig; uns graute vor
innerer Einsamkeit, vor Verlorenheit, und doch trieb ein Mut und ein
Verlangen uns vorwarts und trieb uns einen labyrinthischen Weg, immer
zwischen Gesichtern, zwischen Moglichkeiten, Reichtiimern, diistern,
halbverhullten Mienen, halboffenen Turen, kupplerischen und bosen
Blicken in den ungeheuren Bazar, der uns umgab ... .'
24. Hofmannsthal, 'Der Dichter und diese Zeit', Prosa II, pp. 264—98, p. 272:
'Das Wesen unserer Epoche ist Vieldeutigkeit und Unbestimmtheit. Sie
kann nur auf Gleitendem ausruhen und ist sich bewuSt, daS es Gleitendes
ist, wo andere Generationen an das Feste glaubten.'
 The deaths of Narcissus: Hofmannsthal 85

25. See Volke, Hofmannsthal, pp. 54f.

26. Hofmannsthal, 'Bin Brief, Prosa II, pp. 7-20.
27. Hermann Rudolph, Kulturkritik und Konservative Revolution. Zum kulturell-
politischen Denken Hofmannsthals und seinem problem-geschichtlichen Kontext
(Tubingen: M. Niemeyer, 1971), p. 43. He refers here to Stefan H. Schultz,
'Hofmannsthal and Bacon. The sources of the Chandos letter', Comparative
Literature, 8, (1961).
28. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 'Das alte Spiel von Jedermann', Gesammelte
Werke: Prosa III, ed. Steiner (Frankfurt/M.: S. Fischer, 1964), pp. 114-32,
pp. 131-2: 'Nun kommt der Teufel angesprungen und will Jedermann
abholen. Da tritt ihm der Glaube in den Weg und sie streiten ... von oben
tritt Jedermann hervor. Sein Gesicht ist verklart, er tragt ein langes
schneeweiSes Gewand und einen Kreuzstab in Ha'nden. Hinter ihm sind
Engel hervorgetreten und unten auf dem mittleren Geriiste, daran Glaube
steht, hat ein viereckiges Grab sich aufgetan. Zwei von den Engeln tragen
ein Laken in Handen, das haben sie lautlos in das Grab gebreitet, die
nachtige Schwarze mit einem Weifi verhullend. ... nur Glaube steht da,
und Engel singen Gottes Lob. Dann wurde es vollig dunkel, Glocken
lauteten, das Dunkel wich einem starken geheimnislosen Licht, das auf das
ganze Geriiste, den ganzen Schauplatz und die grofie sich langsam
aufbewegende Menschenmenge gleichma'Sig fiel, und das Spiel war zu
Ende.'
 6

The death of Salome

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

Hofmannsthal's Der Kaiser und die Hexe

During Hofmannsthal's search for a solution to crises of identity, masculine

identity, orientation and language, one option he appears to have considered
was to reaffirm the distinction between male and female as bluntly as the title
of Der Kaiser und die Hexe (The emperor and the witch) (1897) suggests.2 The
Kaiser of the piece will be free of the charms of the charming 'Hexe' if he
refrains from touching her for seven days. The play is set on the evening of the
seventh day when the Kaiser struggles with and heroically resists temptation.
What makes the 'Hexe' a 'Hexe' is her seductive, unrestrained (and barely
clothed) sensuality and sexuality. The thought that he might be part of a sexual
'Reigen' (round dance) such as that so shockingly depicted in Arthur
Schnitzler's play of the same name (1896) as well perhaps as the fear of
contracting some sexually transmitted disease drives the Kaiser to dementia.
That eternally returning 'Reigen' aspect of modernity is thus projected onto
and repudiated in the figure of a sensuous and promiscuous woman, a figure
who is evidently intent on robbing men, even a Kaiser, of all their power over
themselves and others.
The Kaiser resists temptation and by sunset the temptress has lost all her
power over him and turns into a wrinkled old woman to whom nobody pays
any attention. On hearing this the Kaiser calls his valet, embraces him, then
 The death of Salome 87

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

Woman, modernity, crowds, anarchy and revolution

According to Daniel Pick, contemporary commentators saw a particular

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

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

"Mater' vs. Spirit

Often coupled with the opposition between 'male' hierarchy and 'female'
anarchy was the opposition between the spiritual and the material. Threatened
with extinction by the worldly philosophies of the nineteenth century, the
boundary between material and spiritual realms needed to be redrawn in order
to support other boundaries and distinctions, in particular that much
threatened boundary between the sexes. The restoration of philosophical
dualism could serve to restore the patriarchy and its primary dualistic
opposition of man and woman. One Joseph Le Conte, for example, in his
Evolution: Its Nature, Its Evidences, and its Relation to Religious Thought (1888-91)
wrote the following: 'Spirit must break away from physical and material
connection with the forces of Nature as the embryo must break away from
physical umbilical connection with the mother.'10 Mater equals matter; pater
 The deaih of Salome 89

equals higher things. One notes how woman is automatically associated with
'mass', this time in the scientific/philosophical rather than the social/political
sense. Woman belonged to the material world; the spiritual world belonged to
man.
In his much talked about Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character) (1903)
Otto Weininger made the same equation: 'Women are matter, which can
assume any shape'. Religious, spiritual and intellectual pursuits are the preserve
of men only. Women, according to Weininger, 'must really and truly and
spontaneously relinquish coitus. That undoubtedly means that women as
women must disappear, and until that has come to pass there is 'no possibility
of establishing the kingdom of God on earth'.11 Manliness, in other words, is
next to Godliness. Weininger understood male and female as extremes of
character type which never occur in pure form in nature, every man and every
woman having varying quantities of what he so scientifically termed 'M'
(masculinity) and 'W (femininity). Weininger considered pure and absolute
'maleness', however, rather superior in every way to 'femaleness'. 'M' is, for
Weininger, consciousness, 'subject-hood', freedom, the rational, the logical, the
moral and chastity; 'W is, naturally enough, the opposite of all these:
unconsciousness, 'object-hood', slavery, the irrational, the a-logical, the amoral
and sexuality.12
Weininger's book was thus an extreme rationalization of patriarchal
thinking, of the patriarchal system in which, according to Elisabeth Badinter,

the hatred of the feminine self, by far the most widespread, quite
naturally engenders an oppositional sexual dualism. The affirmation of
the difference is a reaction to the loss of identity and to the undefined, a
reaction which reinforces masculinity. By opposing the sexes and
assigning them different functions and spaces, one thinks one is expelling
the ghost of internal bisexuality. In fact one is only splitting oneself and
exteriorizing the part of the self which has become foreign, an enemy.13

Weininger's book both recognizes this 'ghost of internal bisexuality' — the

presence in most people of different quantities of what he considers the
essential character attributes of both genders - and attempts to banish it - by
reasserting the superiority of 'masculine' qualities over 'feminine' ones. This, as
Badinter suggests, is pretty much how men are inclined to think of themselves
in a patriarchal system, however loath they might be to admit as much in
public discourse. Privately aware of their 'internal bisexuality', of the existence
within themselves of traits which might be considered 'feminine', they
constantly seek to repress these embarrassing 'feminine' traits and to show that
they are men (i.e. not women). The result is the split personality of patriarchal
masculinity and a lifelong battle between man's desired image of himself - man
90 The Other — Narcissus and Salome

— and his enemy within and without — woman. One is reminded of The Strange
Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The fact that Weininger suggested in public that
most men were not as entirely 'M' as might be desired, in other words the fact
that he dared to write about how men thought privately about their
regrettable 'internal bisexuality', probably contributed in large measure to the
popularity of his book.
His book was particularly topical for other reasons too. In a chapter on
'emancipated women', Weininger argues that only women possessing a large
amount of 'M', of masculinity, have ever and will ever emancipate themselves
in order to pursue essentially masculine goals. Such women, however laudable,
can never be quite as good as their male counterparts as they are always at
least half 'W'.14 Further: while even the 'highest woman is far below the lowest
man' (p. 404), according to Weininger, many men are really not much better
than women. This has to do with the quantity of 'W coursing through their
veins, or, to put it another way, as Weininger does, the extent of their
'Jewishness'. 'Jewishness' is for Weininger, himself of Jewish descent, pretty
much the same as 'femininity', an essentially inferior form of being. The task of
modern men, according to Weininger, is to cleanse themselves of any taint of
'Jewishness' and 'Womanliness' in order to ascend to a higher state of pure 'M'.
One can see why, as George L. Mosse writes, the book was 'one of the most
influential racial tracts of the twentieth century, profoundly affecting the views
of Adolf Hitler and many other racists'.15
Weininger's book was extremely popular, especially after his melodramatic
suicide in the Beethovenhaus in Vienna. In an essay in The Little Review in 1919
called 'Women and Men', Ford Madox Ford recalled the international impact of
Weininger's book:
It was toward the middle of '06' that one began to hear in the men's clubs
of England and in the cafes of France and Germany — one began to hear
singular mutterings amongst men. Even in the United States where men
never talk about women, certain whispers might be heard. I remember
sitting with a table of overbearing intellectuals in that year, and they at
once began to talk — about Weininger. It gave me a singular feeling
because they all talked under their breaths.16
Presumably they were talking under their breath because they were talking less
about women than about their own 'internal bisexuality' - about the 'women'
in themselves — and about how much more desirable 'M' was than 'W.
Similar success and popularity was enjoyed by a treatise Uber den
physiologischen Schwachsinn des Weibes (On the physiological imbecility of
woman) (1900) by one Paul Julius Moebius, of which there were nine editions
between 1900 and 1908. Of 'woman' Moebius wrote: 'One can define her by
 The death of Salome 91

situating her half-way between idiocy and normal behaviour. ... Compared to
that of man, the behaviour of woman seems pathological like that of the
negroes compared to that of the Europeans.'17 No doubt this was music to
some people's ears.
Another notorious misogynist of the time was August Strindberg, whose
rage against contemporary feminists Declan Kiberd claims was based 'not so
much on his need to humiliate women as on his compulsion to take massive
revenge on the woman in himself'.18 In the play Damascus Strindberg grieved
'Wenn ich in die Hohe wollte, zog mich die Frau herab' (When I wanted to
reach the heights, woman dragged me down).19 Like Nietzsche, and indeed like
Weininger, Strindberg both identified himself with and virulently denounced
woman. It is certainly ironic, as Kiberd notes, 'that Nietzsche, from whom
Strindberg derived this cult of masculine will, should have been privately
embraced in notes and diaries by Strindberg as the "husband" from whom the
dramatist received a "tremendous outpouring of seed" '.20
Such ideas concerning the nature of 'woman' were relatively widespread at
the fin de sie.de.. In 1912 Hofmannsthal wrote to Richard Strauss attempting to
persuade him of the seriousness of the character of Joseph in a projected
collaboration on the subject of Joseph and Potiphar's wife:

The motif of refusal, the motif of the 'chaste Joseph' [as Strauss had called
him], what is it other than the magnificent and uncanny basic motif of
Strindberg's life's work — the struggle of the genius and heightened
intellect in man with the evil and stupidity, the desire to drag down, to
soften of woman?21

These statements concerning women's inherent 'imbecility', their non-

spiritual and non-intellectual nature were made against a background of, and
were surely to some extent a reaction to, the demands of women for access to
higher education as well as to public and intellectual life. In 1895 'an Oxford
BA' complained in The Fortnightly Review that English women were being
admitted to Gottingen university in Germany but not to Oxford, Cambridge
or Dublin. In 1896 the Oxford Union 'voted overwhelmingly against
admitting women to the BA degree' and 'there were riots at Cambridge in
opposition to women's admission'.22
Elisabeth Badinter writes that in France, between the years 1871 and 1914, a
new type of woman appeared who threatened sexual boundaries:

Universities made space for them on their benches. They became

teachers, doctors, lawyers and journalists. ... On every level of the social
hierarchy they [men] felt threatened in their identity by this new creature
who wanted to do as they did, to be like them .. ,23
92 The Other — Narcissus and Salome

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

Good women and bad women: Gissing's Demos and Hauptmann's

Bahnwarter Thiel

Of course women were not always simply consigned to the lowest depths of
Hades, though this does seem to have been the most popular destination for
fin-de-siecle women. Some female figures have always traditionally been
removed to the upper stratosphere - the Virgin Mary or Dante's Beatrice, for
example. A common feature of such figures is that they are as untainted by
sexuality as their counterparts in the underworld are immersed in it.
In George Gissing's Demos (1886) we find two women belonging to two
such utterly different spheres. The upper-crust young Englishman, Hubert
Eldon, has been led astray from his proper passion for the pure and simple
Englishwoman, Adela, by a wicked and seductive Frenchwoman. The French
woman is referred to thus:
His mind's eye pictured a face which a few months ago had power to lead
him whither it willed, which had in fact led him through strange scenes, as
far from the beaten road of a college curriculum as well could be. It was a
face of foreign type, Jewish possibly, most unlike that ideal of womanly
charm kept in view by one who seeks peace and the heart's home.27
 The death of Salome 93

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

medieval or pastoral garb, their male counterparts, nameless soldiers or

warriors, were often depicted almost or totally naked. These male figures
actually posed a threat to bourgeois respectability, Mosse suggests, modelled
as they were on the sculpture of ancient Greece and appealing to an
appreciative male homoerotic gaze.
Mosse also describes how quite a cult developed around the figure of Queen
Luise of Prussia, the wife of Friedrich Wilhelm III, whose early death in 1810
made her eligible to be transformed at the end of the century into something of a
'Prussian Madonna'. Suddenly images of this woman lying on her deathbed, with
the face of the Madonna and a crucifix in her hands, were to be seen everywhere
on popular medals and miniatures. This was a sublime model of passivity for all
Prussian women to follow: the only good woman is a dead woman.
It could be said that Gerhart Hauptmann's short story Bahnwarter Thiel
(1888)29 is based on this contrast between the good woman, who is 'very, very
good' and the bad woman who is 'very, very bad'. Bahnwarter Thiel, a 'barrier
watchman' at a railway crossing, is married to first the one, 'ein schmachtiges
und kranklich aussehendes Frauenzimmer' (a frail and sickly-looking woman)
(p. 37), who dies in childbirth, and then to the other, 'ein dickes und starkes
Frauenzimmer', a 'Kuhmagd' (a fat and strong woman, a dairymaid) who brings
with her 'eine harte, herrschsuchtige Gemiitsart, Zanksucht und brutale
Leidenschaftlichkeit' (a hard, domineering disposition, shrewishness and brutal
passion) (p. 38). Parallels are suggested in the story between the domineering
nature of Thiel's second wife, who wears the trousers in the marriage and is
jealous of Thiel's love for the child of his first marriage, and the demonic power
of the trains, heralds of modernity which thunder by the railway crossing,
intruding upon Thiel's peace. The negligence of the wicked foster-mother and
the wheels of the train are appropriately both responsible for the death of
Thiel's beloved little boy from his first marriage, as well as for Thiel's
subsequent madness and his murder of this domineering woman and her child.
A strong woman drives a sensible, innocent man off the rails.
Speaking of Jean Veber's early twentieth-century painting 'Allegorie sur la
machine devoreuse des homines', the art collector and critic, Eduard Fuchs,
said:
Woman is the symbol of that terrifying, secret power of the machine
which rolls over anything that comes under its wheels, smashes that
which gets caught in its cranks, shafts and belts, and destroys those who
attempt to halt the turning of its wheels. And, vice versa, the machine,
which coldly, cruelly and relentlessly sacrifices hecatombs of men as if
they were nothing, is the symbol of the man-strangling Minotaur-like
nature of woman.30
 The death of Salome 95

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

Nietzsche contra Wagner

As Elisabeth Badinter argues, such sexual dualism is intimately related with a

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

femininity to Wagner, for calling Nietzsche's sexuality into question was much
the same, according to the conventions of the day, as calling his masculinity
into question. Describing Wagner as 'feminini generis' was thus Nietzsche's
way of getting his own back.
Perhaps this incident would also explain a great deal of Nietzsche's vitriolic
attacks on what he called 'effeminate' or 'degenerate'. We saw earlier how
much Nietzsche playfully identified himself with woman. One wonders then
how he could turn around and use 'feminini generis' as a stick to beat his
former god. This is the same problem we had with Strindberg and Weininger:
why did these men, having identified, or continuing to identify themselves
with womankind, become such notorious misogynists? With what in women
did they identify themselves? With that submissiveness, sensitivity and
passivity traditionally attributed to bourgeois woman but no longer in vogue,
among either men or women? Did they then reject the 'woman in themselves'
so violently because they saw how unfashionable such 'feminine qualities' were
becoming? Yet who was responsible for their becoming unfashionable if not
supremely these 'womanly men' themselves?
Perhaps it was, in Nietzsche's case, hatred of the dominant view of the
direction of his sexual desires as 'effeminate' which drove him to turn the tables
and describe his detractors as 'effeminate'.35 Perhaps the fear of being described
himself as 'effeminate' or 'degenerate' caused him to adopt 'femininity' as a
term of abuse and to use it himself against his detractors, as well as to develop,
along with others, that 'cult of the masculine will'. Was it that late nineteenth-
century medicalization of 'homosexuality' which made Nietzsche so obsessed
with masculine 'health'?
In any case, Nietzsche now criticizes Wagner for what he formerly praised
in him. In Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (1876) Nietzsche compared the effect of
Wagner's music to encountering a pleasantly warm current while swimming in
a lake.36 Shortly after the publication of this eulogy to Wagner relations
between Nietzsche and Wagner became cooler until the complete break came
with the publication of Menschliches, AHzumenschliches (Human, all too human)
(1878—80). Wagner began corresponding with Nietzsche's doctor concerning
his 'friend's' health and sexual activity in October 1877 and, according to
Kohler, Nietzsche found out about this correspondence in April 1878.
One can perhaps understand then why Nietzsche, in Nietzsche Contra
Wagner (1889), six years after the composer's death, insists that he is no longer
in favour of swimming in Wagner's warm pool. Here he compares the effect of
the 'unending melody' of the new music to walking into the sea, gradually
losing one's footing and finally giving oneself up to the element. Listening to
Wagner, in other words, means losing active control and becoming passive and
submissive (i.e. 'feminine'). Now Nietzsche is inclined to favour the older
 The death of Salome 97

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

The New Woman: Shaw, Ibsen, Strindberg, Huysmans

According to George Bernard Shaw, 'all good women are manly and all good
men are womanly'.39 In his preface to the third edition (1922) of The
Quintessence of Ibsenism (1st edition 1891) Shaw makes the claim that the
carnage of the First World War might have been avoided: 'Had the Gospel of
Ibsen been understood and heeded, these fifteen millions might have been alive
now; for the war was a war of ideals.'40
A typical Ibsen play, according to Shaw, 'is one in which the leading lady is
an unwomanly woman, and the villain is an idealist'. Shaw supported the
wives, who, like Nora, slammed the front door on the 'Doll's House': The sum
of the matter is that unless Woman repudiates her womanliness, her duty to
her husband, to her children, to society, to the law, and to everyone but
herself, she cannot emancipate herself.'41 However, other men, notes Shaw,
feared the consequences of such emancipation and women's suffrage,
consequences in particular for the sensitive seat of masculine power:

As I write, it is only two days since an eminent bacteriologist filled three

columns of The Times [28 March 1912] with a wild Strindbergian letter in
which he declared that women must be politically and professionally
secluded and indeed excluded, because their presence and influence inflict
on men an obsession so disabling and dangerous that men and women can
work together or legislate together only on the same conditions as horses
and mares; that is, by the surgical destruction of the male's sex. (p. 102)

The letter Shaw mentions was favourably mentioned in an editorial of the same
98 The Other — Narcissus and Salome

issue of The Times opposing women's suffrage. Man's active part in the world
needed to be jealously guarded against such penis-envious women. It was clear
to such men as Wright that it was not mere votes women sought, but testicles.
Similar fears regarding the loss of testicles are evident in Strindberg's play,
The Father (1887), in which the Captain is driven to madness by his wife casting
doubts on whether he is actually the father of their daughter, and having the
'cartridges' removed from his guns and his 'pouches' emptied. The famous
play, Miss Julia (1888), also turns on the threat posed by New Women to those
'pouches' of men's power.
Miss Julia is laced with references to the story of Salome and John the
Baptist. It is set on midsummer eve, midsummer's day being the feast of John
the Baptist, and the reading that night at church is of that very story, or so
Kristin tells Jean while putting on his tie and almost choking him. Miss Julia
exclaims at one point:
'So you think I can't stand the sight of blood? You think I'm so weak?
How I'd love to see your blood, and your brains on a chopping block! I'd
like to see your whole sex swimming in a sea of blood, like this creature
here. I think I could drink out of your skull, dabble my feet in your chest
and eat your heart roasted whole.'
In Strindberg's variation on the Salome theme, however, Jean/John survives
while Julia/Salome kills herself.
Everywhere at the fin de siecle there were images of women wielding swords
and men who had lost their heads, their crowns, or worse.42 The stories of
Judith and Holofernes, Salome and John the Baptist thrilled and excited,
frightened and confirmed the fears of fin-de-siecle artists and audiences. It was
no doubt to some extent a certain masochistic flavour that attracted many male
artists to these sadistic, powerful women. The rise of such femmes fat ales',
writes Declan Kiberd, 'has been explained in psychological terms — in the belief
that their masculine element appealed to the latent homosexuality in passive
males. The masterful woman allowed a man to indulge in illicit passion without
his having to commit a public violation of the sexual code.'43 But the flirtation
with castration and decapitation also served as a warning to men of the
dangers of female emancipation. One could indulge in masochistic fantasies
about submitting to phallic women and, at the same time, warn other men
about what women could do to them, if they acquired power.
J. K. Huysmans' quintessence of decadence, des Esseintes (in A Rebours}, has
in his possession the two chefs-d'oeuvres of Gustave Moreau, the painter who
may be said to have started the Salome fever. Des Esseintes becomes rapturous
before this artist's Salome and sees in her 'la deite symbolique de
1'indestructible Luxure, la deesse de l'immortelle Hysterie, la Beaute maudite,
 The death of Salome 99

... la Bete monstrueuse' (the symbolic deity of indestructible Luxury, the

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

Wilde's Salome

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

The threat posed by two formidable, self-willed women, Salome and her
mother, Herodias, causes the men of the play to close ranks. The points of view
of Herod and his supposed enemy and prisoner, Jokanaan, merge when it
comes to their attitude to the women: they are monstrous. Jokanaan responds
to Salome's advances with a less than charming rejection of all her sex:
Back! Daughter of Babylon! By woman came evil into the world. ... I will
not listen to thee. I listen but to the voice of the Lord God.47
Despite the fact that Herod has killed his brother, taken his brother's wife as his
own and lusts after his niece and step-daughter, Jokanaan's wrath is directed
principally at Herodias. While Herodias wants to get rid of this man who
insults her so voluminously on every occasion, Herod comes to admire him
and half believe in his prophetic outbursts. When Salome triumphantly takes
Jokanaan's severed, bloody head in her hands and kisses his mouth, Herod is
horrified: 'She is monstrous, thy daughter, she is altogether monstrous. In
truth, what she has done is a great crime. I am sure that it was a crime against
an unknown God' (p. 574). Herod's and the play's concluding words are 'Kill
that woman!', and his soldiers rush forward to crush Salome under their shields.
All through the play the 'monstrous' desire of women is contrasted with the
bonds of spiritual, romantic and even sexual love between the men. Jokanaan
rejects Salome because he is already betrothed in a sense to another man, his
Lord God. Herod respects and admires Jokanaan and is increasingly inclined to
believe in him and his God as he is disgusted by the women. Some of the most
touching words of the play are spoken by the page of Herodias after the death
of the man he loved, the young Syrian who was infatuated with Salome and
killed himself in order to distract Salome from Jokanaan:
He was my brother, and nearer to me than a brother. I gave him a little
box of perfumes, and a ring of agate that he wore always on his hand. In
the evening we used to walk by the river, among the almond trees, and
he would tell me of the things of his country. He spake ever very low.
The sound of his voice was like the sound of the flute, of a flute player.
Also he much loved to gaze at himself in the river. I used to reproach him
for that. (p. 560)
Even Herod was not unaware of the charms of the young man: 'I am sorry he
has killed himself. I am very sorry, for he was fair to look upon. He was even
very fair. He had very languorous eyes' (pp. 561-2). When Salome is killed at
the end of the play, the brotherhood of men, the supremacy of Caesar and of a
patriarchal deity have apparently been consolidated - at the expense of
woman.
On the other hand, Oscar Wilde's allegiances are no doubt somewhat
 The death of Salome 101

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

Conclusion

In these pages we have found woman identified with various undesirables —

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

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

Notes

1. 'Pour que les hommes retrouvent leur virilite, il faut d'abord que les
femmes retournent a leur place naturelle. Seul le retablissement des
frontieres sexuelles liberera les hommes de leur angoisse identitaire. Puis le
refoulement massif de leur bisexualite originaire fera le reste.' Elisabeth
Badinter, XY de I'identite masculine (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1992), p. 35.
2. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Der Kaiser und die Hexe, Hugo von
Hofmannsthal, Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben: Gedichte und lyrische
Dramen, ed. Herbert Steiner (Stockholm: Bermann-Fischer, 1946), pp. 329—
72.
3. Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Base, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Colli and
Montinari, Vol. VI ii (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1968), #239, p. 181: 'Das
schwache Geschlecht ist in keinem Zeitalter mit solcher Achtung von
seiten der Manner behandelt worden als in unserm Zeitalter - das gehort
zum demokratischen Hang ... , ebenso wie die Unehrerbietigkeit vor dem
Alter'.
4. Cited by Jacques Le Rider, Modernite viennoise et crises de I'identite (Paris:
PUF, 1990), p. 126: 'Le progres de la sensualite correspond partout a la
dissolution des organisations politiques et a la decadence de la vie
politique. A la place de la riche diversite, la loi de la democratic, de la
masse indistincte, et cette liberte, cette egalite s'imposent, qui distinguent
la vie selon la nature de la societe civile organisee et qui se rattachent a la
part corporelle et materielle de la nature humaine.'
5. Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989), p. 94.
6. Gustave Le Bon, La psychologie des joules (Paris: Librairies F. Alcan et
Guillaumin, 1907), p. 8: 'La simplicite et 1'exaggeration des sentiments des
foules font que ces dernieres ne connaissent ni la doute ni 1'incertitude.
Comme les femmes, elles vont tout de suite aux extremes'/'La
connaissance de la psychologie des foules est aujourd'hui la derniere
ressource de 1'homme d'Etat qui veut, non pas les gouverner — la chose est
 The death of Salome 103

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

22. 'University Degrees for Women', The Fortnightly Review, 1895, pp. 895-
903, and Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy (London: Virago, 1992), p. 7.
23. Badinter, XY, p. 31: 'L'universite leur a fait une place sur ses banes. Elles
deviennent professeurs, doctoresses, avocates ou journalistes. ... Du haut
en has de 1'echelle sociale, ils se sentent menaces dans leur identite par
cette nouvelle creature qui veut faire comme eux, etre comme eux ...'
24. Cited by Badinter, XY, p. 31: 'Un jour, Marie d'Agoult sera a 1'Academic
des sciences morales et politiques, George Sand a 1'Academic francaise,
Rosa Bonheur a l'Academie des beaux-arts, et c'est nous, les hommes qui
feront les confitures et les cornichons.'
25. Horst Fritz, 'Die Damonisierung des Erotischen', p. 445: 'Der Anteil der
Frauen am Erwerbsleben wa'chst besonders in den Fabriken, und betragt
1892 bereits fast 30%'.
26. Badinter, XY, p. 32.
27. George Gissing, Demos: A Story of English Socialism (New York: AMS
Press, 1971), p. 75.
28. George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, p. 90.
29. Gerhart Hauptmann, Bahnwarter Thiel, in Samtliche Werke, ed. Hans-Egon
Hass, Vol. 6 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963), pp.
35-68.
30. Cited by Huyssen, After the Great Divide, p. 78.
31. Nietzsche, Der Fall Wagner (1888), in Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische
Gesamtausgabe, Vol. VI iii, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter & Co., 1969), p. 45.
32. Nietzsche: Nachschrift zu Der Fall Wagner, p. 38.
33. The Diary of Richard Wagner 1865—1882: The Brown Book, presented and
annotated by Joachim Bergfeld, trans, by George Bird (London: Gollancz,
1980), p. 202.
34. Joachim Kohler, Zarathustras Geheimnis (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt,
1992), p. 184. See also pp. 174-87.
35. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1990), p. 134.
36. Nietzsche, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische
Gesamtausgabe, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter &
Co., 1967), Vol. IV i, p. 4.
37. Nietzsche, Nietzsche contra Wagner, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Vol. VI iii, pp.
419f.
38. See Otto Greiner's painting 'Ulysses and the Sirens' (1902), reproduced in
Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity, p. 263, and also Charles Dana Gibson 'In
the Swim' (1900) in ibid., p. 270.
39. Quoted by Kiberd, Men and Feminism, p. 61.
 The death of Salome 105

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

The Nationalization of
Narcissus
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 National Narcissism

Freud, narcissism and the nation

In 'Zur Einfuhrung des Narzifimus' (1914) Sigmund Freud begins by attributing

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

supplied by society in the place of the object of 'simple' narcissism, is the

common ideal of a family, of a class, of a nation. This common, social ideal
draws upon and ties up narcissistic and homosexual libido. Not fulfilling this
ideal, however, means that this narcissistic and homosexual libido is not
satisfied and therefore becomes free, leading to guilt and social Angst.4 The
relationship between a man and his religious, political or moral ideals and/or the
persons who represent these ideals is, according to Freud, a libidinal or sexual
relationship, specifically involving 'homosexual libido', and it is a relationship
whose physical, sexual expression is not, as Freud notes, necessarily repressed.
What binds a group of men together - be it a nation, an army, a class or a
political party - is the devotion of their narcissistic and homosexual libido
(whether expressed physically or not) to a common ideal. Dissatisfaction with
this ideal, Freud argues, liberates 'homosexual libido', which turns into guilt and
social angst presumably only because of the stigma particular societies attach to
the actual, as opposed to the symbolic, expression of 'homosexual libido7 and
the guilt it imposes on those who do not subscribe to the collective
(narcissistically or homoerotically inspired and sustained) ideals.
Using Freud's theory one might then suggest that the question at the end of
the nineteenth century was what was to be done with narcissistic and
homosexual libido once it had been released from its traditional bondage to
religious, metaphysical and social hierarchical ideals through the spread of
rational and materialist thought, and the huge expansion and economic
hegemony of the middle classes? If God was dead, what superior power did
king/queen and Kaiser represent, entitling their exalted position as collective
'Ichideal' as well as the imposition of taxes of narcissistic and homosexual
libido on their subjects? One might thus understand the narcissistic and
homosexual connotations of the figure of the 'double' we encountered in Part I,
a figure which was also, it was suggested, evidence of a collapse of traditional
dualistic structures of belief, of traditional, collective ideals.
It is possible to suggest further that the answer in the process of being found
at the turn of the century to the question of whither to direct this liberated
homosexual libido was: to the 'nation', the 'Fatherland', the 'Empire'. As the
aristocracy and the ideal of loyalty thereto declined so the notion of the
'nation' and the ideology of nationalism blossomed. Narcissistic and
homosexual libido was to be nationalized.
The choice facing men at the end of the nineteenth/beginning of the
twentieth century, to put it bluntly, though still in Freud's terms, was between
an anarchic release of narcissistic and homosexual libido and a nationalist/
imperialist, proto-Fascist redirection or corporate mobilization of narcissistic and
homosexual libido, a collective alternative which would have the advantage of
reducing guilt and social angst.
 National Narcissism 111

The homogenization of the nation

As male narcissism was to be nationalized the 'nation' in its turn was to be

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

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

The male body of the nation

The state thus exalted in terms of super-healthy homogeneity was often

described specifically in terms of its virility or criticized for its lack of it. There
is', wrote Teddy Roosevelt, 'no place in the world for nations who have
become enervated by the soft and easy life, or who have lost their fibre of
vigorous hardness and masculinity.'11 The nation, one should note, was
naturally imagined as a masculine body. Americans feared that the decline of the
frontier lifestyle and the increasing 'Europeanization' of America constituted
the 'feminization' of culture and of the American male. After the disappearance
of the American frontier the genre of the 'Western' was invented as a fictional
space for masculinity to play in. The first 'Western' was apparently Owen
Wister's The Virginian (1902), which was followed by the publication of fifteen
other novels of the same genre in less than a year. The cowboy of fiction (and
later of film) began his career as role model for literally millions of young and
not so young men. Similarly enormously influential was Edgar Rice
Burroughs's Tarzan series, published from 1912 onwards and which sold over
36 million copies!12 As Badinter observes, in the twentieth century 'America
has been without cultural rival in imposing on the whole universe its images of
virility, from the cowboy to Terminator via Rambo' (pp. 198f.). It was not only
in America that the nation itself was seen as male and that that which
threatened it was seen as female. This was a view common in Europe too. In
France, Zola complained of the declining virility of a feminized France and the
masculinity crisis 'found positive expression in the affirmation of virile values,
physical, cultural and moral'.13 Around the same time in England the translation
of Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra in 1896 reinforced Francis Galton's belief
in eugenics, his 'scientific advocacy of the superman'.
It was in this period that sport came to be officially organized and promoted
as the great regenerator of the virility of the nation. Participation in sports was
seen as an antidote to the degenerate, feminizing effect of modern life. Sport
involving competition, aggression and violence was considered the best
initiation into virility.14 The first Olympic Games in 1896 was an invocation of
Greek ideals of masculinity which also made sport an affair of national pride
and prestige. Mark Girouard has shown how the cultivation of sport in public
schools in England sought to inculcate its participants with national military
values.15
 National Narcissism 113

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

all. Mosse's subject here is precisely the subject of this part of this book, the
'nationalization of Narcissus'.
Currency of the term 'Mannerbund' (no English equivalent: group of men
bound closely together) began in Germany in the year 1902.22 Hans Bluher's
interpretation of the 'Mannerbund' as an erotic bond was, naturally, approved
of by some, not least of course by Thomas Mann in his speech 'Von deutscher
Republik', and fiercely attacked by others. The sociologist Johann Plenge, for
instance, described Bluher as the propagandist of an 'Affenbund [von]
Onanisten und Paderasten' (a band of apes, onanists and pederasts), linking his
pernicious influence with that of a Teil des jiidischen Literatentums' (part of
the Jewish literati). Plenge sought to defend the true nature of the
'Mannerbund', which consisted in 'Kameradschaft, Solidaritat und Briiderschaft,
und im Verhaltnis zum Fiihrer wie ahnlich zum Lehrer, in echtem
Gefolgschaftsgeist und Treue' (cameraderie, solidarity and brotherhood and
true allegiance and loyalty to the leader as to the teacher).23
From 1902 on the idea of the 'Mannerbund' led by a charismatic Fiihrer
became increasingly widespread and popular in Germany, and in the Weimar
Republic it was seen by many as an alternative to the unloved parliamentary
politics of the time.24 The term 'Mannerbund' was also taken up with
enthusiasm by Nazi ideologists and apologists. One such wrote:
The Mannerbunde of the army and the SA, of the SS and the Arbeitsdienst
are all extensions of the Hitler Youth into manhood. Their fundamental
educational task is one and the same. In and through their structures the
political German person is to be formed. ... Common to them all is also
the priority of physical education and the education of the will.
Intellectual schooling and especially cultural education take a back seat.25
Heinrich Himmler was particularly aware of and obsessed with the
'temptations' inherent in the Mannerbund, as well as being at the same time
one of its principal promoters, and undertook a crusade to stamp out any hint
of homosexual activities in the SS and police.26 Juergen Reulecke goes so far as
to suggest that without some understanding of the 'Mannerbund' syndrome
one cannot understand the history of German mentality in the first half of the
twentieth century (p. 10).
The homophobic version of the Mannerbund put men in something of a
double bind: on the one hand it said - masculinity and male physical beauty is
desirable; on the other — you must not desire it. Klaus Theweleit calls this a
'double double bind', which he formulates thus: 'du sollst Manner lieben, aber
du darfst nicht homosexuell sein. Und: du sollst das Verbotene tun, wirst aber
dafur bestraft (wenn die Machtigen es wollen)' (you should love men, but you
are not allowed to be homosexual. And: you should do what is forbidden, but
 National Narcissism 115

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

The homophobic, homosocial community

To return for a moment to Oscar Wilde: W. B. Yeats remembered W. E.

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

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

Notes

1. Sigmund Freud, 'Zur Einfuhrung des NarziSmus', in Sigmund Freud,

Gesammelte Werke chronologisch geordnet, ed. Anna Freud, Vol. X (London:
Imago, 1946), pp. 137-70, p. 138.
2. Freud, 'Zur Einfuhrung des NarziSmus', pp. 138-9: 'NarziSmus ... ware
keine Perversion, sondern die libidinose Erganzung zum Egoismus des
 National Narcissism 117

Selbsterhaltungstriebes, von dem jedem Lebewesen mit Recht ein Stuck

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

19. Hans Bluher, Familie und Mannerbund (Text of a lecture summarizing Die
Rolle der Erotik, given in the 'Berliner Sezession' on 10 April 1918) (Leipzig:
Der neue Geist, 1918), p. 11.
20. Mosse, Nationalism, pp. 55—8; on homoeroticism in England, pp. 62f.
21. Mosse, Nationalism, p. 64.
22. The year of publication of Heinrich Schurtz's Altersklassen und
Mannerbunde. Cf. Reulecke, 'Das Jahr 1902'.
23. Cited by Reulecke, 'Das Jahr 1902', p. 7.
24. Reulecke, 'Das Jahr 1902', p. 7. See also Klaus von See, Tolitische
Mannerbund-Ideologie von der wilhelminischen Zeit bis zum Nationalso-
zialismus', Mannerbande, Mannerbunde, pp. 93—102.
25. Quoted by Reulecke, 'Das Jahr 1902', pp. 9f.: 'Die Mannerbunde des
Heeres und der SA, der SS und des Arbeitsdienstes sind allesamt
Verlangerungen der HJ in das Mannesalter hinein. Ihre erzieherische
Kernaufgabe ist ein und dieselbe. In ihren Ordnungen und durch sie soil
der politische deutsche Mensch geformt werden . . . . Gemeinsam ist ihnen
alien auch die Vorherrschaft der leiblichen und Willenserziehung. Geistige
Schulung und insbesondere Bildung stehen zuriick.'
26. For Himmler's mystical version of the Mannerbund see Reinhard Greve,
'Die SS als Mannerbund', Mannerbande, Mannerbunde, pp. 107-12.
27. Klaus Theweleit, Mdnnerphantasien, Vol. 2 (Reinbek bei Hamburg:
Rowohlt, 1980), p. 334.
28. Cited by Alison Hennigan, 'Aspects of literature and life in England', in Fin
de Sie.de and its Legacy, ed. M. Teich and R. Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990), p. 194, from Yeats, Autobiographies. Hennigan:
'His [Henley's] ambivalence would have come as no surprise to many
homosexual men of the period from whom the saga of Henley's
obsessively ardent and fiercely destroyed friendship with Robert Louis
Stevenson might well have drawn a weary smile of recognition.'
29. See Jeffrey Richards, '"Passing the love of women": manly love and
Victorian society', in Manliness and Moraliiy, ed. J. A. Mangan and James
Walvin, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), pp. 92-122.
30. Thus even in our post-Wilde, homophobic age one finds, under certain
circumstances, in certain contexts, that men still 'mess around' with each
other physically — from on-the-pitch 'real' camaraderie and embraces and
after-the-match ritual drunken collective 'mock' striptease and 'mock'
'initiation ceremonies' of football and rugby players to strange initiation
ceremonies (involving, for instance, masturbation in a coffin before an all-
male audience) for initiates of American college fraternities, and this all
without considering they are 'committing' a 'homosexual act' (that is what
'homosexuals' do). The context is all important for the endurance of this
 National Narcissism 119

belief: ritual, 'mock' ritual or 'serious ritual'; sport or play; the consumption
of large quantities of alcohol - all 'rituals' which miraculously transform
activities which in any other circumstances would be seen by the same
people to prove that their participants were 'homosexual', into activities
which prove their participants are 'real men' and 'not homosexual'. The
magic words which are recited over the transsubstantiation appear to be
simply 'not homosexual'.
Thus one arrives at a peculiar situation where men can enjoy a certain
amount of physical intimacy with each other, as long as this is in a certain
ritual context or even as long as it is clear that no 'love' and not even too
much tenderness is involved, or love each other with a passion 'passing the
love of women' as long as they do not have too .much physical or any
sexual contact and still be convinced that this has nothing to do with
'homosexuality', and continue to define and marginalize other men as
'homosexuals'.
To cite Kinsey: 'Males do not represent two discrete populations
heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep
and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white, for nature rarely
deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories
and tries to force facts into pigeon-holes. The living world is a continuum
in each and every one of its aspects. The sooner we learn this concerning
human sexual behaviour, the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding
of the reality of sex.' Quoted by Declan Kiberd, Men and Feminism in
Modern Literature (London: Macmillan, 1985), p. 30.
31. On how modern homophobia still destroys relationships between men see
Badinter, XY, pp. 179-80.
32. See James D. Steakley, 'Iconography of a scandal: political cartoons and
the Eulenburg affair in Wilhelmin Germany', in Hidden from History, ed. M.
B. Duberman, M. Vicinus and G. Chauncey Jr. (London: Penguin, 1991).
See also Isabel von Hull, The Entourage of Kaiser Wilhelm II (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982).
 7

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

Fantasies of invasion and expulsion

There may be a wide gulf separating these two novels published in 1897 in
terms of literary quality or simply good writing as well as in terms of genre
and the expectations of their respective readerships, but thematically they are
not so far apart at all, indeed they are strikingly similar. In brief both are what
one might call fantasies of invasion and expulsion; both deal with the threat
posed to a community of men by someone who is defined as an 'outsider', and
indeed with the constitution of that very community through the final
redrawing of the boundary between 'insiders' and 'outsiders'. James Wait, the
'nigger' of the ship Narcissus, threatens the ethos and saps the morale of the
ship's company by not 'pulling his weight/Wait'; Dracula, the Transsylvanian
vampire, sucks the very lifeblood of the community. The community thus
threatened and thus constituted is in both cases understood by extension to be
England or Britain as a whole.
The concerns of each novel were moreover not restricted to England or
Britain at the end of the nineteenth century but were part of a European
discourse on the subject of 'degeneration', 'decadence' and a perceived threat
of anarchy accompanying the arrival of modernity itself. The common
response across Europe to such perceived threats was a renewed emphasis on
loyalty to and identification with the nation-state or empire as the ultimate
 The Nigger of the Narcissus and Dracula 121

guarantor of identity, and of masculine identity in particular, in this modern

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

The 'nigger'

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

Conrad may have named the cook of the Narcissus. It is likely that such 'anti-
Liberal barbs' would have been appreciated by readers of W. E. Henley's
conservative New Review, in which the novel was serialized.2
To support this political message Conrad lends the 'nigger's' blackness a
cliched and racist metaphysical significance, describing Wait as some kind of
'prince of darkness', a 'black idol' (p. 64) who 'seemed to hasten the retreat of
departing light by his very presence' (p. 21). The influence of this decadent
prince of darkness seduces the crew away from the path of truth and plunges
them into a world of uncertainty and falsehood. He persuades everyone to
half-believe his 'unmanly lie' (is this lie then 'womanly' ?) — that he is seriously
sick — and then, when the crew knows this to be a lie, fools them again by
really becoming sick and claiming he is well. Jimmy is constantly identified
with falsehood, but what is so pernicious about this falsehood is that it is not
merely the opposite of truth but that it undermines 'truth' altogether. Black
Jimmy threatens the white man's 'black and white' vision, which views
everything dualistically in terms of polar opposites such as black/white, good/
evil, true/false, inside/outside, native/foreign and so on. Wait so confuses the
'true' and the 'false' that the men are, figuratively as well as literally, 'all at sea'.
The narrator describes Jimmy's influence thus:
in the confused current of impotent thoughts that set unceasingly this
way and that through the bodies of men, Jimmy bobbed up, upon the
surface, compelling attention, like a black buoy chained to the bottom of
a muddy stream. Falsehood triumphed. It triumphed through doubt,
through stupidity, through pity, through sentimentalism. ... He was
demoralising. Through him we were becoming highly humanised, tender,
complex, excessively decadent: we understood the subtlety of his fear,
sympathised with all his repulsions, shrinkings, evasions, delusions — as
though we had been over-civilised, and rotten, and without any
knowledge of the meaning of life. (p. 85)
There appears to be a natural kinship between the blackness of James Wait's skin,
obscurity, lack of clarity, falsehood, metaphysical evil, confusion, impotence,
decadence and 'over-civilization', and they are all lumped together.3 Jimmy thus
embodies very many of the confusions of the fin de siecle mentioned earlier.
Jimmy's falsehood seems at times to have infected the whole universe and
to be in league with the unhelpfully calm sea. Indeed Old Singleton, the
learned and savage patriarch' (p. 3) believes there is a causal connection
between the calm and Jimmy's long-drawn-out death. Jimmy's 'dead weight' is
delaying the ship and the course of commerce. But eventually land is sighted
and 'for the first time that voyage Jimmy's sham existence seemed for a
moment forgotten in the face of a solid reality' (p. 90). Once his body has been
 The Nigger of the Narcissus and Dracula 123

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

began. The British Navy League had been founded in the mid-1890s to raise
public support for the navy; the German Navy League was founded in 1898
and quickly surpassed its British counterpart in its propaganda campaign and in
its membership.5 At issue was indeed national 'solidarity'. In the words of Cecil
Rhodes: 'who will avoid civil war must be an Imperialist'; in those of the
Kaiser's friend, Prinz Eulenburg: To keep the masses from revolt, we must
have a forward policy'. Tirpitz himself claimed the navy was the 'answer both
to educated and uneducated social democracy'.6 Promoting a sense of
solidarity with the imperial mission abroad, in other words, would distract
people from the real inequalities at home.
From about 1893 onwards the British had regarded war as 'fairly imminent,
inevitable and not undesirable'. The British 'neo-Darwinians'
wrote that war was not simply a passing affliction, but a glorious and
inevitable mode of progress, sanctioned by a law of nature. The nation
had become great through war and the nation which did not and could
not make war would deteriorate and cease to exist as a nation. ... The
progress of humanity required the maintenance of the race struggle,
physical, industrial, political, in which the weaker powers would go
under, while the strongest and fittest would survive and flourish, because
it was desirable that the world should be peopled, governed and
developed, as far as possible, by the races which could do the work best.7
The outbreak of the Boer War in 1899 was welcomed by many in England as
an opportunity to demonstrate this belief. W. E. Henley, self-styled leader of
an anti-decadent 'regatta' and one of Oscar Wilde's fiercest attackers, whose
New Review had serialized The Nigger, joined the chorus of jingoism with his
poem 'Remonstrance' asking 'Where is our ancient pride of heart?', and
cheering 'Rise, England, rise!' and 'Strike, England, and strike home!'8 In the
midst of all the excitement about the demonstration of national and racial
superiority on the evolutionary ladder the more perfectly developed specimens
of humanity, the British, put women and children in concentration camps.
The Boer War also led to the discovery that a shocking number — 60 per
cent — of the young British recruits were themselves not anything like perfectly
developed specimens of humanity but were scrawny, undernourished
individuals, rather like Conrad's Donkin, who showed clear signs of coming
from generations of poverty, poor working and living conditions and who
were physically unfit for military duties. The solution to this sad state of
affairs, according to Robert Baden-Powell, was Scouting for Boys (1908).9
To return however to Conrad: what I want to suggest is that The Nigger of
the Narcissus is a contribution to a European discourse concerning decadence
and degeneration and to the rise (across Europe) of an ideology of 'national
 The Nigger of the Narcissus and Dracula 125

solidarity', which Conrad happens to urge upon his adopted Britain, an

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

The vampire: invader and immigrant

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

however, to haunt England. Dracula explains to Jonathan how he has studied

English life in books and magazines and how he now longs 'to go through the
crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst and rush of
humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is'
(p. 31). In Dracula's library Jonathan finds a map of England with rings marked
on it: one east of London 'manifestly where his new estate was situated' (p. 36);
and two others in Exeter and at Whitby on the Yorkshire coast. It turns out
that Dracula has acquired several 'ghastly refuges' in various parts of London,
including Piccadilly, where he has boxes of Transylvanian soil 'enriched by the
blood of men, patriots or invaders' (p. 33) deposited. These last boxes of
'imported earth' must later be sanitized by such modern household
disinfectants as garlic and communion hosts in order to deprive Dracula of
his literal pieds-a-terre in England.
Thus Stoker's Dracula could be said to constitute an early example of what
has been termed 'invasion literature', common in England during the years
preceding the First World War. The term includes such works of popular
fiction as Erskine Childers's The Riddle of the Sands (1903), William Le Queux's
The Invasion of 1910, serialized in the Daily Mail in 1906, and Guy du Maurier's
play An Englishman's Home (1909).15
Simple immigration is, of course, often unreasonably put on a par with
military invasion, and fears of invasion are to this day all too often mobilized
to oppose immigration. The link between invasion and immigration is inspired
by an obsession with the maintenance of a clear boundary between 'us' and
'them' along the same lines as those clearly drawn lines on maps which do not
necessarily correspond with any natural feature of the landscape but which
none the less separate one nation-state from another. Thus the nationalist
opposition of 'inside' and 'outside', of 'us' and 'them', transformed arbitrary
political divisions into quasi-natural distinctions, and this all the more intensely
as distinctions between classes and communities within these boundaries were
eroded.
Jules Zanger seeks to link Dracula with 'a number of popular apprehensions
which clustered around the appearance in England of great numbers of Eastern
European Jews at the end of the century'.16 Between 1881 and 1900 the
number of Jews living in England increased by 600 per cent due to pogroms
and anti-Semitic legislation in Russia. The Bishop of Stepney spoke of 'the Jews
coming in like an army, eating up Christian gentiles ...' (p. 34). Zanger
proceeds to relate how Jews have been associated with vampirism and the
'blood libel' since their earliest appearances in the West (p. 37). He documents
how over the course of the latter half of the nineteenth century Jewish
communities all over Europe were constantly accused of murdering Christians,
supposedly in order to obtain their blood. In England a popular theory held
 The Nigger of the Narcissus and Dracula 127

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

Madmen, degenerates, animals, criminals and slimy strangers

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

continues to increase as at present', The Times editorialized in April 1877, 'the

insane will be in the majority and, freeing themselves, will put the sane in
asylums.'21
A strange parallel is drawn between the mental patient's madness and
Dracula's masterful cleverness: while Renfield feeds flies to spiders, spiders to
sparrows, sparrows to himself and himself eventually to his 'master', Dracula,
as well as treating other humans as a predator treats its prey, lands at Whitby
in the form of a dog and can transform himself at will into the shape of a bat, or
even into the shapelessness of a mist. From this one might draw a number of
conclusions: firstly that Renfield, the mentally degenerate, fulfils much the
same function as Donkin, the physically degenerate and 'the enemy within' in
The Nigger of the Narcissus; secondly that Renfield's methodical placing of
himself in the food chain as well as Dracula's transformations threaten to erase
the boundary between human and animal nature, a boundary apparently not as
distinctly drawn in the mad and the foreign as in the native intellect; thirdly
that as the notion of 'degeneration' was conceived as the opposite of the
progressive march of evolution away from 'the origin of species' through ever
more complicated differentiations between species and between the human
species and other species, Dracula and Renfield are here demonstrating their
degeneracy in Darwinist terms by slipping over these boundaries as easily as
they slip over other boundaries.
One might further draw a parallel between this threat to the maintenance of
the boundaries between species (as to other boundaries, as we shall see) and
James Wait's threat in The Nigger of the Narcissus to the clarity of the boundary
between truth and falsehood, and so to all certainty. Zygmunt Bauman argues
that in a modern world obsessed with order and the ability to classify and to
draw clear boundaries, the 'stranger' becomes the bearer par excellence of all
the ambivalence and lack of clarity thus marginalized. Bauman writes:
The friends/enemies opposition sets apart truth from falsity, good from
evil, beauty from ugliness. It also differentiates between proper and
improper, right and wrong, tasteful and unbecoming. It makes the world
readable and thereby instructive. It dispels doubt.22
The 'stranger', however, is an unknown quantity who disturbs this neat
opposition of 'inside' and 'outside' and a member of 'the family of undecidables
— those baffling yet ubiquitous unities that, in Derrida's words ... , "can no
longer be included within philosophical (binary) opposition, resisting and
disorganizing it ..."' (p. 55). The 'stranger' 'undermines the spatial ordering of
the world ... , the staying-together of friends and the remoteness of enemies'
(p. 60) and is a person afflicted with the 'incurable sickness of multiple
incongruity'. The 'bane of modernity',
 The Nigger of the Narcissus and Dracula 129

He may well serve as the archetypal example of Sartre's le visquex [sic] or

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

Sex and disease

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

can only be hinted at; and secondly that this sexual 'crime' is being linked to
the spread of an infectious disease, for the vampire's victims automatically
become vampires themselves with those give-away 'little white dots with red
centres' on their throats.
Long after Lucy's death, Mina is discovered in a 'terrible and horrid
position':
Kneeling on the near end of the bed facing outwards was the white-clad
figure of his [Marker's] wife. By her stood a tall thin man, clad in black.
His face was turned from us, but the instant we saw it we all recognized
the Count in every way, even to the scar on his forehead. With his left
hand he held both Mrs Marker's hands, keeping them away with her arms
at full tension; his right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing
her face down on his bosom. Her white nightdress was smeared with
blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man's bare breast, which was
shown by his torn-open dress. The attitude of the two had a terrible
resemblance to a child forcing a kitten's nose into a saucer of milk to
compel it to drink, (p. 363)
It appears from the horror expressed at this 'terrible and horrid position' that
Mina is indeed being instructed not just in vampirism but in 'horrid' acts of
'sexual degeneracy'.23 After the innocent Mina has been caught in this
compromising position, and rescued, though a little late, she considers herself
'Unclean, unclean!' and declares: 'I must touch him [her husband, Jonathan] or
kiss him no more. Oh, that it should be that it is I who am now his worst
enemy, and whom he may have most cause to fear' (p. 366). To which all one
can say is that this is a bit of an overreaction if all they were doing was having
a drink together.
So in addition to the charges of illegal immigration and of having a
degenerate congenital kinship with madness, criminality and wild animals,
Dracula is also charged with sexual transgressions, to wit, unashamed
promiscuous behaviour with several women, indulgence in and promulgation
of horrid deviant sexual practices and the transmission of sexual disease.
James Twitchell argues that the vampire only really entered Western
popular culture in the seventeenth century 'as a logical way to account for the
geometric progression of deaths caused by the plague bacteria'.24 The plague-
like sexual disease of the fin de sie.de was syphilis, which was apparently the
cause of Bram Stoker's own death in 1912. The disease was described by one
commentator as an 'invisible demon' and by another in 1919 as 'the enemy of
man, the enemy of woman, the enemy of the child, the enemy of the home, the
enemy of the nation, and the enemy of the Empire'.25 Already in this
externalization of syphilis as 'the enemy' lies implicit a projection of the
 The Nigger of the Narcissus and Dracula 131

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

Sexual ambivalence

Dracula's 'devil's illness' attacks not just the young women of England, as we
have seen, but also the young men. Lucy's bloodless condition after her
interview with the vampire requires 'transfusion' of blood from the three men
who had proposed to her. First is her fiance, Arthur, of 'stalwart proportions',
an example of 'strong young manhood':
As the transfusion went on something like life seemed to come back to
poor Lucy's cheeks, and through Arthur's growing pallor the joy of his
face seemed absolutely to shine. After a bit I began to grow anxious, for
the loss of blood was telling on Arthur, strong man as he was. (p. 161)
Just as Dracula sucks the blood or vitality out of the women, the women, his
female agents, drain the men. Dr Seward, after his own contribution, comments:
'No man knows until he experiences it, what it is to feel his own life-blood
drawn away into the veins of the woman he loves' (p. 167). Showalter suggests
that the female vampire represented the oversexed wife or the New Woman
whose insatiable sexual demands were feared by men. In that case, the political
and sexual liberation sought by feminism is being seen as a dangerous foreign
disease, disseminated (!) among the nation's women by a wicked agent
provocateur. A gynaecologist of the time declared that 'just as the vampire
sucks the blood of its victims in their sleep, so does the woman vampire suck
the life and exhaust the life of her male partner'.31 One should, it appears, be
almost as wary of women (whether feminists or not) as of foreigners.
Foreign women are of course particularly dangerous — and tempting — for
the young English man. During his stay in Dracula's castle Jonathan Marker
himself has a close encounter with three foreign temptresses, one of whom
approaches him:
I could feel the movement of her breath upon me. Sweet it was, in one
sense, honey sweet, and sent the same tingling through the nerves as her
voice, but with a bitter underlying the sweet, a bitter offensiveness, as
one smells in blood. ... The girl went on her knees and bent over me,
fairly gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both
thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her
lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining
on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp
teeth. Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of
my mouth and chin and seemed about to fasten on my throat. Then she
paused, and I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her
teeth and lips, and could feel the hot breath on my neck. ... (p. 54)
 The Nigger of the Narcissus and Dracula 133

Jonathan and the reader are spared an indulgence in masochistic pleasure32 -

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

the ideal man is entirely or almost entirely masculine and the ideal
woman is entirely or almost entirely feminine. Each individual must have
a preponderance, be it ever so little, of the cells of its own sex, and the
attraction of each individual to the other sex depends upon its place on
the scale between the highest and the lowest grade of sex. The most
masculine man draws the most feminine woman, and vice versa; and so
down the scale till close to the borderline in the great mass of persons,
who, having only developed a few of the qualities of sex, are easily
satisfied to mate with anyone.37

This from a man who had at the age of 24 written, and at the age of 28 (in
1876) sent a rather gushing letter to Walt Whitman in which he wrote: 'How
sweet it is for a strong healthy man with a woman's eyes and a child's wishes
to feel that he can speak so to a man who can be if he wishes father, and
brother and wife to his soul'.38 How does this square with his notions of 'the
ideal man' cited above?
After the Wilde trials the denial and deportation of any hint of 'homosexual
desire' became particularly urgent and homosexual behaviour was not
infrequently attributed wholesale to foreigners; it certainly - at least to the
'healthy' English man — was not an English habit. Arnold White, writing in
1916, claimed Germany wanted 'to abolish civilization as we know it, to
substitute Sodom or Gomorrah for the New Jerusalem, and to infect clean
nations with Hunnish erotomania'.39 The infectious disease White was referring
to was homosexuality, the 'doctrine of the German Urnings'.
The practice of drawing amazingly precise geographical boundaries around
'homosexual desire and practices' and thus between a native territory free of
any taint of such 'perversity' and a foreign realm where 'perversity' was
possibly or probably given free rein (at least in the imaginations of the
boundary-drawers) was, of course, neither entirely new, nor unique to England.
Stoker's Dracula hails from a region just about within what Sir Richard Burton,
in his Terminal Essay' to his translation of Thousand Nights and a Night (1885-
88), labelled the 'Sotadic Zone':

1. There exists what I shall call a 'Sotadic Zone', bounded westwards

by the northern shores of the Mediterranean (N. Lat. 43) and by the
southern (N. Lat. 30) ... including meridional France, the Iberian
Peninsula, Italy and Greece, with the coast-regions of Africa from
Marocco to Egypt.
2. Running eastwards the Sotadic Zone narrows, embracing Asia
Minor, Mesopotamia and Chaldaea, Afghanistan, Sind, the Punjab
and Kashmir.
 The Nigger of the Narcissus and Dracula 135

3. In Indo-China the belt begins to broaden, enfolding China, Japan and

Turkistan.
4. It then embraces the South Sea Islands and the New World where, at
the time of its discovery, Sotadic love was, with some exceptions, an
established racial institution.
5. Within the Sotadic Zone the Vice (pederasty) is popular and
endemic, held at the worst to be a mere peccadillo, whilst the races
to the North and South of the limits here defined practise it only
sporadically amid the opprobrium of their fellows who, as a rule, are
physically incapable of performing the operation and look upon it
with the liveliest disgust.40
As Joseph Boone argues, Burton was merely restating popular Western notions
about the East and 'articulating a widespread perception that had hitherto been
filtered through codes of vague allusion'.41 The delimitation of a geographical
'Zone' where all the moral and conceptual boundaries of the West were
supposedly dissolved served not only the exclusion of practices threatening
these boundaries, but also the titillation of the West in Orientalist literature
and the promotion of the East as a destination of 'sexual tourism', where
Westerners might allow themselves indulgence in fantasy or in reality in
'exotic' pleasures they would not allow themselves or others 'at home'. Once
defined as 'exotic', as 'the Other', 'the foreign' par excellence, the East could
embody all the sexual ambivalence, as well as every other kind of ambivalence,
the West had marginalized in the course of the project of modernity as
described by Bauman. All the absolute categories and distinctions of Western
modernity, including the recent homo/heterosexual opposition, could be
imagined as 'still' (in terms of the evolutionary narrative) in a state of flux, as
merging deliriously and dangerously in this 'slimy' 'Other', a geographically
delimited 'unconscious' for the accommodation of anything the Western 'ego'
cared to repress.
An 'erotomania' which is neither exclusively homosexual nor heterosexual,
and thus again threatens conceptual boundaries, does perhaps indeed describe
what Dracula is attempting to 'infect' 'clean' England with — something
terribly, vaguely sexual and tempting which is linked to madness, criminality
and the spread of disease.

The ambivalence of the cure

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

required was one scapegoat foreigner, who must be shown to be the bearer of
all these ills and to have come 'inside' from the 'outside' prior to being
deported back to where he belongs.
However, while the novel is about the fear and seductive attraction of
'Hunnish erotomania' and the threat of venereal diseases deriving from such
promiscuity and while these are seen as foreign imports - from which the
Aliens Act and the Contagious Diseases Act, or, in the case of Dracula, garlic
and communion hosts, might protect the natives of England - in the text of the
novel this 'Hunnish erotomania', promiscuity and 'borderline' bisexual
behaviour, is replicated on the English side and is indeed part of the 'cure'
itself. But this English 'erotomania' is dressed up in religious and patriotic — and
misogynist — mumbo-jumbo.
After Lucy's death, Arthur feels that since the 'operation' (the blood
transfusion) he and Lucy had been really married and that she 'was his wife in
the sight of God'. Nobody dares say anything of the other 'operations', though
Van Helsing later laughs at the implication that 'this so sweet maid is a
polyandrist'. As well as this playful suggestion that Lucy's morals were
perhaps rather loose and that three men enjoyed intimate relations with her in
a short space of time, these 'operations' could actually be seen as an exercise in
male-bonding, the homosocial/sexual object of which is doubly disguised by
the apparently non-sexual nature of the 'operations' as well as by the fact that
the ostensible object of their attentions is an unconscious woman.42 After the
transfusions the men are 'blood brothers', though one is not absolutely sure
that it was really their blood which mingled in Lucy's body.
A similar scene occurs later, when despite all their efforts Lucy has become a
fully fledged vampire and has to be done away with - by driving a 'round
wooden stake, some two and a half or three inches thick and about three feet
long' (p. 275) through her heart. The men stand watching as her fiance does the
job:
The Thing in the coffin writhed; and a hideous, blood-curdling screech
came from the opened red lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted
in wild contortions; the sharp white teeth champed together till the lips
were cut and the mouth was smeared with a crimson foam. But Arthur
never faltered. He looked like a figure of Thor as his untrembling arm
rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake, whilst
the blood from the pierced heart welled up and spurted up around it. His
face was set, and high duty seemed to shine through it; the sight of it
gave us courage, so that our voices seemed to ring through the little
vault, (p. 277)
As Showalter says, 'the sexual implications of this scene are embarrassingly
 The Nigger of the Narcissus and Dracula 137

clear'. It is difficult not to see this as a 'gang-rape' with an 'impressive phallic

instrument'.43 The purpose of this 'gang-rape', one might add, is really the
constitution and bonding of the homosocial 'gang', or what Jonathan Marker
himself describes as 'our little band of men' (p. 485).
This 'gang' of 'blood brothers', this 'little band of men' is understood by
extension to be the nation itself, a national community of men who are
threatened by degenerate, 'pervy' foreigners as well as by the weakness and
slipperiness of women. In Dracula the attempt to defend the native male
against his own insecurities requires the constitution of a national, misogynist
Mannerbund, and the projection of men's sexual fears and desires onto alien
territory. The threat of invasion appears to be equated with a threat of
'polymorphous perversity', a confusion of the 'sexual identity' and even the
rape of the native male - dangers which can be flirted with in the
sadomasochistic encounter with the male 'outsider' before ultimately being
reprojected onto him when his defeat will show him to be the passive (read
'feminine') victim and the 'insider' victor to have rescued and enhanced his
threatened virility.
If Dracula threatens the native male with a demonstration of his superior
and the native's inferior power through rape one would imagine that his defeat
will involve a similar humiliation. The final showdown with Dracula on his
home territory is however conspicuously toned down by comparison with the
'gang-rape' of Lucy mentioned above. For some unexplained reason no 'round
wooden stake, some two and a half or three inches thick and about three feet
long', such as that used on Lucy and on the three female vampires, is used on
Dracula, nor is there any long description of the plunging arm and the spurting
gore. The obvious ambiguity might be too offensive when it came to the male
vampire, who was after all supposed to be their chief quarry.44 All we see is
'the sweep and flash of Jonathan's great knife' as it sheared through Dracula's
throat while 'Mr Morris' bowie knife plunged into the heart' (p. 484). Rather an
anticlimax after almost 500 steamy pages.

Conclusion

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

boundary between 'inside' and 'outside' which had been threatened with
extinction - apparently by this very 'outsider', though in actual fact by the
arrival of modernity itself and its accompanying political, social and sexual
revolutions and transformations.

Acknowledgement

This chapter is a slightly altered version of an article published in the Modern

Language Review, January 1997, vol. 92, no. 1, pp. 1—21.

Notes

1. Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the Narcissus, a Norton Critical Edition, ed.
Robert Kimbrough (New York: Norton, 1979), p. 10. Following page
references refer to this edition.
2. Norris W. Yates, 'Social comment in The Nigger of the Narcissus', Joseph
Conrad, The Nigger of the Narcissus, Norton Critical Edition, ed. Robert
Kimbrough, pp. 258-62 (reprinted from PMLA, 79 (March 1964), pp. 183-5).
3. On Conrad's use of racist cliche in The Nigger see Eugene B. Redmond,
'Racism, or realism? Literary apartheid, or poetic licence? Conrad's burden
in The Nigger of the Narcissus', in J. Conrad, The Nigger of the Narcissus,
Norton Critical Edition, pp. 358—68.
4. Daily Mail, 7 Dec. 1897, quoted by John Batchelor, The Life of Joseph
Conrad: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 65.
5. See Brian Bond, War and Society in Europe 1870—1970 (London: Fontana,
1984), pp. 64ff.
6. See Norman Stone, Europe Transformed (London: Fontana, 1983), Chapter
2, '(ii) National Efficiency and "Sammlungspolitik"'.
7. A. J. Marder, quoted by Tom Gibbons, Rooms in the Darwin Hotel
(Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1973), p. 29.
8. Quoted by Karl Beckson, London in the 1890s: A Cultural History (New
York, London: Norton, 1992), p. 372.
9. See Beckson, London in the 1890s, pp. 377-8.
10. Benita Parry, Conrad and Imperialism (London: Macmillan, 1983), p. 61.
11. See Brian W. Shaffer, '"Rebarbarizing civilization": Conrad's African
fiction and Spencerian sociology', PMLA, 108 (1, January 1993): 45-58.
12. As Jules Zanger phrases it in 'A sympathetic vibration: Dracula and the
Jews', English Literature in Transition, 34 (1, 1991): 33—44 (p. 33).
13. Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. Maurice Hindle (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 7.
Following page references are to this edition.
 The Nigger of the Narcissus and Dracula 139

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

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

North, South, East, West:

Musil, Mann, Hofmannsthal

The geographical confusions of young Torlefi

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

familiar, charted world of his parents and the imperial capital to unfamiliar,
uncharted provincial surroundings Torlefi is literally deprived of his bearings at
an age when 'orientation' in an uncharted adult world becomes problematic
anyway. What TorleS comes to realize is that the geography he had learned as
a child — the map of the world showing clear unambiguous borders — is not a
faithful representation of the landscape, but an ideological one which may have
its practical uses as an aid to orientation in a world where things are not always
as they appear.
Hence TorleS's obsession with 'Grenzen' (borders) and Musil's emphasis on
the crossing of certain boundaries between physical spaces in the novel. In a
passage reminiscent of Joseph Conrad's Marlow's 'penetration' to the 'heart of
darkness' and indeed of Jonathan Harker's penetration to the heart of
Transylvania, TorleS and his friend Beineberg find a passage through the dark
woods, which brings them face to face with what they like to style and
fetishize as the utterly and exotically Other — divided from themselves by a
physical boundary, the crossing or 'penetration' of which is loaded with sexual
significance:
The far bank was covered with dense trees which ... seemed threatening
like a black, impenetrable wall. Only after careful searching did they find
a narrow, hidden path that led straight in. From the dense, luxuriously
thriving undergrowth a shower of drops fell every time they brushed it
with their clothes.2
They eventually find their way to the prostitute with the Slavic name of
Bozena, who resides in the obscure and ill-reputed margins of an obscure,
provincial village, itself on the farthest-flung margins of the empire. Bozena
likes to tease the young gentlemen by telling them of 'goings-on' in the high
society of the imperial capital she used to work for, hinting specifically at
liaisons between Beineberg's mother and uncle. TorleS suddenly sees the
sexless image of his own mother threatened and equally suddenly the
boundary between his parents' upper-middle-class, metropolitan world of
apparent clarity and moral propriety and a marginal, dark underworld of
supposed impropriety populated by subaltern classes and peoples, a boundary
which was so ceremoniously underlined as it was transgressed, threatens to
dissolve and leave no recognizable bearings by which TorleS might navigate
his course through the world.
This episode is followed by another longer episode which constitutes the
'action' of the novel and whose significance for TorleS's inherited geography is
similar. Reiting reveals that he has discovered who has been behind a series of
petty thefts from the schoolboys' lockers. The culprit, he claims, is a certain
Basini, whose name sounds uncannily like an Italian equivalent of Bozena. Both
 Musil, Mann, Hofmannsthal 143

are fortunately non-Germanic names and indicate an origin in nations

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

burning, passionate, naked and devastating world. That between those

people whose lives move as in a transparent and stable construction of
glass and iron in a well-ordered fashion between office and family and
others, the fallen, bloody, wild and dirty, those who err through confused
alleys full of shouting voices there is not only a bridge but their
boundaries collide secretly and closely and can be traversed at any
moment.3
The problem, once again, is not Basini, but the threat he poses to the
maintenance of a boundary between two 'worlds', the one of transparent
clarity, moral probity, normality Torlefi thought he belonged to and a dark
exotic world of 'the fallen, bloody, wild and dirty' — quite the respective
spheres of Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Basini's
misdemeanour, like Bozena's gossip, undermines a whole ideological
geography which is in the process of disintegrating in Torlefi's mind.
Aloud, however, he utters the simple and utterly condemnatory 'Basini is a
thief ... he doesn't belong to us any more' (p. 47). Basini must be punished and
expelled from the community, in classic scapegoat fashion, not for his own sins
but to appease the confusions of his judge, and to enable him to redraw a
conceptual and geographical boundary which is crucial for his way of thinking.
What surprises Torlefi is that his friends display no such moral indignation,
but rather revel in the power they have acquired over Basini through their
discovery. They make of him a slave on whom they perform sadistic
experiments in the 'rote Kammer'. This morally questionable behaviour of
those he had assumed would be his allies further confuses TorleS's geography
and black and white notions of who belongs where. For their behaviour
involves quite the opposite of the distance between the 'two worlds' Torlefi's
suggested expulsion would effect and implicates them in the same realm of
dubious morals to which TorleS wished to consign Basini definitively.
TorleS stands by and watches with detached curiosity as the other boys
sadistically beat Basini in the 'rote Kammer', until he suddenly realizes to his
consternation that his position as neutral spectator has been compromised by
the fact that he has become sexually excited by their sadism. TorleS is at first
appalled by the revelation that Reiting is using Basini for his own sexual
purposes — appalled less, one imagines somehow, by the fact that Reiting is
raping Basini on a regular basis, than by the fact that Reiting is involved in a
taboo homosexual activity, again something supposedly belonging to the
other world of the 'wild and dirty'. It is perhaps interesting, though not very
edifying, to see how Reiting himself seeks to free himself of the stigma
normally attached to the participants in such activity. Basini explains to TorleS
that Reiting has to beat him before having sex with him — not because Basini
 Musil, Mann, Hofmannsthal 145

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

world with which he identified are discovered to have been based on a false
notion of themselves as sovereign rational subjects ruling over a distinct
subordinate and irrational object world. Of the ego and the world, as after
Ernst Mach's analysis, 'il ne reste plus que des "elements", sensations et
complexes de sensations (couleurs, sons, pressions, espaces, durees)' (there is
nothing left but 'elements', sensations and complexes of sensations (colours,
sounds, pressures, spaces, durations)).4
What happens in the red room of an Austrian boarding school at the end of
the nineteenth century comes dangerously close to dissolving the opposition
between the subject and object, the relationship of power upon which the
empire rests. The 'object', presumed to be 'outside', beyond the pale,
geographically, socially and sexually - ideally Slav, belonging to the
underclass and a woman — is discovered 'inside' the establishment 'subject' —
an Austrian, upper-middle-class male, fortunately with an Italian name, who
must be toyed with and then expelled, as indeed happens to Basini, in order
that the establishment's rule and territory be re-established. The real crime here
is apparently allowing oneself to become a victim, and thus revealing one's
'natural' affinity with other subordinates. Reiting's sadism appears to meet with
much less disapproval than Basini's masochism, perhaps because a certain
amount of sadism was considered the natural attribute of the rulers of the
earth, as Krafft-Ebing had considered it the natural attribute of men in general
(as opposed to the 'natural' masochism of women).
At the same time of course what happens here is an illustration of the normal
working of empire and hierarchy, where even the natives of the nation holding
sway over other nations, and even the metropolitan bourgeois 'subjects' are
more or less on the margins of an 'inside' ultimately situated in the body of the
emperor himself, to whom they are 'subject', and where each rank of the
hierarchy may consider all subordinate ranks as 'objects' - 'subject to them' -
while they themselves are objects, 'subject' to the whim of their superiors. The
distinction between inside and outside, subject and object, does not simply
coincide with the borders or even the peripheral, marginal(ized) regions of the
empire, but is replicated along an infinite series of concentric circles, the centre
of which is the emperor, or the brain, or the dominant part of the brain of the
emperor. Thus each 'individual', including the emperor, is both subject and
object, straddles a boundary between 'inside' and 'outside', and replicates the
sadomasochistic relationship of power within as well as around her/himself. It
was not just a question of a sadistic master/centre and a masochistic slave/
margin, for, as Freud argued in his Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (1905),
the two 'perversions' were linked, the roles interchangeable.5
At the beginning of the novel the school was described as a training ground
for the ruling classes of the empire. Musil draws attention to the analogy
 Musil, Mann, Hofmannsthal 147

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

There is a remarkable parallel between the progress and the resolution of

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

Tonio Kroger and Death in Venice

Geography and 'orientation' are more obviously of central importance in

Thomas Mann's Tonio Kroger (1903) and Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice)
(1912), where mere points of the compass are loaded with such significance
that it seems that all one would need to answer the major dilemmas in life is a
good compass and a Thomas Mann novella.
Both these novellas ascribe the geographical direction of the journeys
undertaken by their artist anti-heroes to the prevailing influence of one or the
other of their parents. Like their author himself, both these artists attribute the
artistic streak to their maternal heritage. Their mothers are also both,
significantly, foreign. Tonio's father had picked up his beautiful, 'dunkle und
feurige' (dark and fiery) wife, 'die so wunderbar den Fliigel und die Mandoline
spielte' (who played the piano and the mandolin so wonderfully), from 'ganz
unten auf der Landkarte' (right down at the bottom of the map) (p. 121), and it
is from her that Tonio derives not just what he regards as his deviant, quasi-
criminal artistic tendencies, but also his very name, which his classmates
consider 'befremdend' (disconcerting/alienating)7. Aschenbach's ancestors had
been officers, judges, civil servants, men who had led their strict, decently
meagre lives in the service of the king and of the state (p. 462), and he regards
'Zucht' (discipline) as something he has inherited from his father's side (p. 464).
Of his mother we are told that she, the daughter of a Bohemian bandmaster,
had introduced 'rascheres, sinnlicheres Blut' (racier, more sensual blood) into
 Musil, Mann, Hofmannsthal 149

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

'femininity'. Heinrich Dietering has suggested that the adventures of the flesh
Tonio embarks upon in the South were specifically modelled on Oscar Wilde's
character Dorian Gray's rumoured adventures in the London underworld, the
implication in both cases, though never quite spelled out, being that both were
sexual tourists in a forbidden homosexual underworld. Dietering also suggests
that Tonio's link between the artist and the criminal may have had much to do
with the reception of Dorian Gray in German translation in 1901 in which
Wilde was referred to principally as a 'homosexual writer' and in which the
story of the trials and imprisonment was revived.10 Wilde's trials were of
course the crucial event, enabling the popularization of a link between literary
and artistic 'decadence' and aestheticism, the Darwinist scientific, medical and
ultimately political discourse concerning 'Entartung', 'degeneration' and that
other neologism of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, 'homosexuality'.
The narrator of Tonio Kroger tentatively suggests that it was perhaps the
blood of his mother which drew him to the South, and that 'vielleicht war es
das Erbteil seines Vaters in ihm ... , das ihn dort unten so leiden machte'
(perhaps it was the inheritance of his father in him ... which made him suffer so
much down there) (p. 140). 'Down there' could be interpreted as referring to
the lower parts of Tonio's own body, as well as to the 'nether regions' of the
map. Is his father, or the memory of his father, really threatening him with the
fate of the Pope's singers, with castration? In a letter to Otto Grautoff in 1895
the young Thomas Mann wrote: 'Ich habe mich letzter Zeit nahezu zum
Asketen entwickelt ... Ich sage, trennen wir den Unterleib von der Liebe!' (I
have almost become an ascetic recently ... I say, let us separate the lower parts
of the body from love). At the end of 1896 'down there' in Naples he was still
wondering how to cut himself free of his own nether regions: 'Woran leide ich?
An der Geschlechtlichkeit ... wird sie mich denn zugrunde richten? ... Wie
komme ich von der Geschlechtlichkeit los?' (What am I suffering from? From
sexuality ... will it be the death of me? ... How do I get away from
sexuality?).11 For Tonio, the South is the body, as it is art, his mother,
femininity, sensuality, 'base instincts' and a sexuality he never comes to terms
with (no doubt because the direction of his desires would have been termed
deviant by others and particularly by his father). The North, on the other hand,
is purity, the soul and of course his father, and a 'life' he can declare his love for
once he has left his troublesome lower body 'down there'. Mann's aesthetic of
distance from 'life', from the body and its desires, his body and his desires, an
aesthetic apparently rejected by Tonio in his long discussion with Lisaweta, is
converted in Tonio Kroger into a distance measurable in terms of kilometres
travelled northwards, towards a 'life' that is pure, or southwards towards a 'life'
that is the polar opposite of this imagined purity.
Predictably Tonio rejects Lisaweta's suggestion that he return to Italy,
 Musil, Mann, Hofmannsthal 151

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

'burgerlich' and conventional side of his personal list of oppositions. In his

essays and speeches Mann was not silent on the issue; indeed he constantly
brought up the subject of 'homoeroticism', sometimes urging, quite bravely, its
acceptance as a 'normal' part of human experience. But he did waver between
different conventional evaluations of 'homosexuality' or 'homoeroticism'. In
his 1925 essay 'Uber die Ehe' (Concerning marriage) for example, Mann,
having begun to celebrate the liberation of homosexual desire he claimed to
see evident among the younger generation, and to find encouraged by the
discoveries of psychoanalysis, proceeds to deny this path of desire any access
to the realm of the ethical, as, he writes, 'mit Fug und Recht ist die Homoerotik
erotischer Asthetizismus zu nennen' (homoeroticism is with complete
justification to be named erotic aestheticism);13 assuming what he imagines
to be is the position of his audience vis-a-vis both homoeroticism and
aestheticism, a Protestant Work Ethic for which both are sins of extravagance
not in conformity with the capitalist duties of thrift and marriage. He thus
manages to 'normalize' 'homoeroticism' on the one hand and reject it on the
other, because 'we' must not allow ourselves too much of a good thing. This
when a couple of years previously, in 'Von deutscher Republik' (Of the
German republic) (1922), he had suggested that a healthy, Whitmanian,
Republican homoeroticism of the love of brothers and comrades would serve
as the basis of the new Weimar Republic, and before that again, in his war
writings 'Friedrich und die GroSe Koalition' (Frederick and the great coalition)
(1915) and Betmchtungen eines Unpolitischen (Reflections of an unpolitical man),
had favourably contrasted the healthy, Germanic tradition of the homoerotic
Ma'nnerbund of warriors with the effeminacy of the French.14
With Tonio Kroger, however, we are back with the idea of 'homoeroticism' as
'erotic aestheticism' — tempting, but something that one must resist or
overcome. Yes, Mann does try to integrate his homosexual desires into the
decent, bourgeois 'normality' of the North in the first episode with Hans
Hanssen, an innocent little childish 'crush', out of which he will soon grow. He
can celebrate this homoeroticism so touchingly only because it is going to be
left behind. At the end he can again declare his continued love for the Hans
Hanssens of the world, as long as they are accompanied by Ingeborg Holms, as
he has arrived at a position by which he can integrate his 'homosexuality' into
a 'more normal' 'bisexuality' and which permits him to love men as well as
women, since he has left his lower body and 'all that' behind 'down there' in
the South anyway and this is hence a 'pure' love which is not sexual at all.
Indeed, Tonio's love for this couple who resemble his first loves seems to
stem less from his bisexual libido than from his love for the conventional and
'biirgerlich' institution of marriage, which requires that he overcome his
wayward sexual desires.15 Thus Tonio Kroger's journey north is a journey
 Musil, Mann, Hofmannsthal 153

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

brought back to the Dionysian birth of tragedy and of all art. But Dionysus
appears to be an Eastern 'male mother' that Aschenbach, Apollo and indeed
Western civilization must deny and keep east of a certain line if they are not to
lose all control over themselves and sink into the sea.
Mann appears to have been a little upset by the reaction of some of his
contemporaries to Der Tod in Venedig, who saw it, not surprisingly, as a diatribe
against art, beauty and homosexuality. Stefan George claimed Mann had 'das
Hochste in die Sphare des Verfalls hinabgezogen' (pulled down the highest to
the sphere of decadence).18 In his letter to Carl Maria Weber of 4 July 1920,
Mann explained, with what sounds like a certain amount of regret, how what
started as a 'trunkenes Lied' (drunken song), as a lyrical description of his
feelings for the boy he observed on the Lido in Venice while on holiday in
1911, turned into a 'sittliche Fabel' (moral fable). It is, however, a strange
version of morality that requires the support of racism, misogyny and
homophobia.
My point here is merely that in the course of these undeniably beautiful and
subtle novellas, Thomas Mann, out of a desire to overcome his own tendency
to decadence and aestheticism, and indeed his own sexual desires, makes some
disturbingly unsubtle equations linking art and artists, decadence, degenera-
tion, homosexuality, femininity, the 'decline of the West', disease, decay and
the peoples of the lands east and south of his 'Vaterstadt'. Thus Aschenbach's
and Tonio Kroger's respective journeys served to promote a rather misogynist,
racist and homophobic expatriation of all the confusions, social, sexual, ethical
and philosophical, which reigned at home and were really the offspring of
Western modernity itself, not of 'der fremde Gott' (the foreign god) (p. 540),
nor indeed of musically-gifted foreign women.
The same desire to overcome decadence would lead Thomas Mann, even
ten years after the outbreak of the First World War, to send his literary
offspring, Hans Castorp, almost with a kick, away from the 'Zweideutigkeiten'
(ambiguities/double entendres) of the Magic Mountain and of peacetime, into
the thick of the 'Weltfest des Todes' (world feast of death) with the vague and
naive hope expressed in the question 'Wird auch aus diesem Weltfest des
Todes, auch aus der schlimmen Fieberbrunst, die rings den Himmel entzundet,
einmal die Liebe steigen?' (Will one day love also rise from this world feast of
death, from the bad feverish heat that ignites the sky all around?).19 Of course
this was a faithful picture of the atmosphere of euphoria surrounding the
outbreak of the First World War and of the naive hopes with which many
young men would rush to their deaths in the belief that the war would
somehow restore their threatened masculinity to health.
 Musil, Mann, Hofmannsthal 155

Hofmannsthal's nation

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

The essence of our epoch is polysemy and uncertainty. It can only rest on
what is slippery and is aware that it is slippery, whereas other
generations believed in the fixed and stable. A gentle, chronic dizziness
pulsates in it.21
In the midst of this 'dizziness' he claims to detect 'eine versteckte Sehnsucht
nach dem Dichter' (a hidden desire for the writer) (p. 278) on the part of the
contemporary reading public. Readers are looking for the same thing in books
as they once sought before at smoke-shrouded altars, he claims. He compares
the relationship of the writer and the reader to that between a priest and the
believer, the magician and the one who is enchanted and even to the
relationship between the Platonic beloved and his lover. The 'Dichter' can
apparently offer both his blood and his body to satisfy the physical, religious
and erotic needs of his public. 'Lesen', he says, is 'ein religioses Erlebnis'
(reading is a religious experience) (p. 296).
Thus Hofmannsthal is beginning to delineate what is at once a leading
religious and political role for the writer. The writer will spirit away all the
disturbing aspects of modernity. Hofmannsthal criticizes other poets for not
providing the food they are supposed to give to a hungry populace: 'Den
zersplitterten Zustand der Welt wollten sie fliehen und fanden wieder
Zersplittertes ' (they (the readers) wanted to flee the fragmented state of the
world and only found more fragments) (p. 287). The contemporary reader finds
only 'ein Verzichten auf Synthese, ein Sich-Entziehen, eine unwiirdige und
unbegreifliche Resignation' (a renunciation of synthesis, a withdrawal, an
unworthy and incomprehensible resignation) (p. 290). The writer as religious
and political leader will however apparently provide the harmony that is
lacking in modern life.
Hofmannsthal furthered his claim to religious and political leadership with
his revival and adaptation of a fifteenth-century English morality play —
Everyman. The simple play about the death of a rich man lent itself to
Hofmannsthal's disgust at a society where money seemed the highest common
value, which was evident in Die Briefe des Zuruckgekehrten, and to his nostalgia
for the stability of medieval communities, a version of which he hoped to bring
about by the staging of Jedermann. Hofmannsthal's play was actually
performed before the High Altar of the Kollegienkirche in Salzburg in 1922,
and has been performed on the Domplatz in Salzburg annually as part of the
Salzburg Festival, which Hofmannsthal hoped would establish itself as a kind of
cultural community. It is of course a little ironic that the patrons of the
Salzburger Festival should have to pay through the nose in order to see this
morality play on the vanity of human riches. In 1938, the new rulers of Austria
put an end to Hofmannsthal's ritual; they had their own rituals to replace it.
 Musil, Mann, Hofmannsthal 157

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

the war, viewing this activity in political terms, as a means of fortifying the
nation against the forces of disintegration. Again and again he emphasized the
connection between language, literature and the nation. In a lecture he gave in
Zurich in 1917, entitled 'Osterreich im Spiegel seiner Dichtung' (Austria in the
mirror of its literature), he insisted on the central importance of poetry and
literature in the construction of a national myth and national consciousness.
Hofmannsthal's idea of the 'nation' was an eminently conservative one, so
conservative as to set itself against the ethos and the achievements of the
French Revolution. Like many others, Hofmannsthal hoped the war would
clear the way for a new kind of society, but what he meant was a return to pre-
1789, antediluvian innocence — and ignorance: he wrote of the need for a new
authority which would be in accordance with a reawakening of the religious
sense as well as of the need for the conversion of the masses into a Volk.25
Thus Hofmannsthal could welcome the outbreak of the First World War as
an event which would help melt down the anarchic masses of individuals with
individual interests and forge a unified community, a Volk. On 28 July 1914,
the same day he went to join his regiment in Istria, he scribbled a note
expressing his enthusiasm and joy to a friend.26 To another he wrote: 'Kam
dieser Krieg nicht, so waren wir verloren - und wohl Deutschland mit uns' (if
this war had not come we would have been lost, and Germany with us).27 He
saw the army as a model of political and moral unity for the rest of society, a
healthy alternative to a decadent political system of routine parliamentary
business.
Disappointed with the outcome of the war and with the kind of society that
emerged from it, Hofmannsthal made what in retrospect seems an extremely
ominous prophecy in the speech he gave at the University of Munich on 10
January 1927, 'Das Schrifttum als geistiger Raum der Nation' (Writing as the
spiritual space of the nation). Here he claims to detect a growing movement
against the revolutionary transformations which had occurred in the sixteenth
century, against the Renaissance and the Reformation; he welcomes the advent
of a 'konservative Revolution' (conservative revolution) 'on a scale hitherto
unknown in European history'. The aim of this conservative revolution,
according to Hofmannsthal, is 'Form', 'a new German reality in which the
whole nation could participate'.28 The search for form requires, it seems, a
counter-revolution countering not merely the revolutionary developments of
recent modernity or even the French Revolution but the Renaissance and the
Reformation as well. Hofmannsthal died before he could fulfil such an
ambitious task, and before he could see what happened when others carried out
this 'konservative Revolution' on a scale with which European history is
unfortunately now acquainted.
 Musil, Mann, Hofmannsthal 159

War and the writer: Musil and Mann

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

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

Notes

1. Robert Musil, Die Verwirrungen des Zoglings Torlefi, in Musil, Gesammelte

Werke, ed. Adolf Frise (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978), Vol. 6, pp.
7-140, p. 7.
2. Musil, Die Verwirrungen des Zoglings Torlefi, p. 27: 'Das jenseitige Ufer war
mit dichten Ba'umen bestanden, welche, . . . wie eine schwarze,
undurchdringliche Mauer drohten. Erst nach vorsichtigem Suchen fand
sich ein schmaler, versteckter Weg, der geradeaus hineinfuhrte. Von dem
dichten, uppig wuchernden Unterholze, an das die Kleider streiften, ging
jedesmal ein Schauer von Tropfen nieder.'
3. Musil, Die Verwirrungen, pp. 46—7: 'Dann war es auch moglich, dafi von der
hellen, taglichen Welt, die er bisher allein gekannt hatte, ein Tor zu einer
anderen, dumpfen, brandenden, leidenschaftlichen, nackten, vernichtenden
fuhre. DaS zwischen jenen Menschen, deren Leben sich wie in einem
durchsichtigen und festen Bau von Glas und Eisen geregelt zwischen Bureau
und Familie bewegt, und anderen, Herabgestossenen, Blutigen, ausschwei-
fend Schmutzigen, in verwirrten Gangen voll briillender Stimmen Irrenden,
nicht nur ein Ubergang besteht, sondern ihre Grenzen heimlich nahe und
jeden Augenblick iiberschreitbar aneinanderstossen.'
4. Jacques Le Rider, Modemite viennoise et crises de I'identite (Paris: PUF, 1990), p. 59.
5. Like Krafft-Ebing, Freud, in his Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (1905),
views 'Sadismus' as implicit in normal male sexuality and for the attributes
'male' and 'female' is ready to substitute 'active' and 'passive'. For Freud,
however, the 'most conspicuous characteristic of this perversion is the fact
 Musil, Mann, Hofmannsthal 161

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

18. Quoted by T. J. Reed in his introduction to Thomas Mann, Der Tod in

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

Kampf or Male Bondage

This page intentionally left blank
 War, men and 'meaning'

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

fraternity. Strangers spoke to each other in the streets, people who had
avoided each other for years shook hands ... Each individual experienced
an exaltation of his ego; he was no longer the isolated person of former
times, he had been incorporated into the mass, he was a part of the
people, and his person, his hitherto unnoticed person had been given
meaning.3
Walter Scheller wrote: 'My first impression was that war changed men, and it
also changed the relationship between men.'4 Another witness wrote: 'On the
streets and avenues men looked each other in the eye and rejoiced in their
togetherness'.5 It is specifically the 'relationship between men, one notes, that
the outbreak of the war transformed: the war enabled men to 'rejoice in their
togetherness'.
With what now seem incredibly naive, great expectations many
volunteered; many 'fell'; many became disillusioned but many did not, and
some even remained uncritically nostalgic for the war in later peacetime. Leed
suggests that 'a large portion of the enthusiasm for war was fuelled by a search
for some avenue of escape from privacy' and that 'the motive that thrust many
out onto the streets, into the recruiting offices, and onto the parade grounds
and barrack yards was precisely a longing to throw off a too narrow and
confining identity.' He relates how for Carl Zuckmayer 'the declaration of war
meant that the trend "toward liberation" from the "pettiness and littleness" of
the bourgeois family, which had formerly been expressed in the youth
movement, would "no longer be confined to Sunday outings and sports".'6
War would be the complete opposite of a bourgeois world increasingly subject
to rationalization, regulation and routine, of a bourgeois world of convention
and normality in which many men felt trapped. For some, and perhaps really
for a great many, the war held out a promise of an escape from simple
boredom. Months of sitting in muddy trenches would, of course, not do much
to satisfy this hope. Initially, however, the military life appeared instantly to
provide 'a life replete with palpable meanings, clear precise goals and
nonconflicting demands', an antidote to 'the diseases that were felt to be
inherent in civil society: indecision, aimlessness and loneliness'.7 One can
perhaps generalize and suggest that what the war seemed to offer in August
1914 to almost everyone, whatever their political standpoint, was the promise
of something completely different, a complete break with the status quo and
the possibility of clearing the ground either for something completely new or
for the restoration of something very old indeed.
For conservatives the war seemed to offer an escape from modernity, from
the onward march of what Thomas Mann disparagingly called 'Zivilisation',
from a society in which the democratic ideas of the Enlightenment and the
 War, men and 'meaning 167

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

which ends with an atmospheric and joyful evocation of fire spilling through
the dark night on Gomorrah.11 Gomorrah no less! This is strong stuff indeed.
Albert Ehrenstein similarly honoured the god of war and appears to have
enjoyed putting the following words into his mouth:
I pour out the arid time of war,
Stick Europe in the sack of war.

Bullets hack down your women,

Spread on the ground,
Are the testicles
Of your sons,
Like the pips of gherkins.12
In his poem 'Weltende' (The end of the world) Jakob von Hoddis described the
end of the world with cruelly sarcastic Schadenfreude. And so on. It is hard to
deny that what many Expressionist poems actually expressed was a
combination of a certain sadistic pleasure in the imaginary infliction of pain
on the bourgeois with apocalyptic hopes of the renewal of mankind through
some extremely violent process of purification.
In this respect the standpoint of many Expressionist poems is really not that
different from that of the work of supposedly much more conservative figures,
such as Thomas Mann and Hofmannsthal or indeed Yeats and Eliot. In
Jedermann Hofmannsthal castigated the world of the capitalist pretty much as a
modern version of Gomorrah whose only salvation lay in death. In his
Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) Thomas Mann appeared to endorse the
'Weltfest des Todes' (world feast of death) as the only way out of stagnation.
William Butler Yeats bewailed the loss of any values 'higher' than those of
petit-bourgeois capitalism in his poems 'No Second Troy' and 'September
1913' and celebrated the return of such values as well as of traditional male
warrior-heroism during the Irish 'Easter Rising' of 1916 in his poem 'Easter
1916'. T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland (1922), another 'Easter poem', beginning, as
we remember, in April, 'the cruellest month', is both a very long prayer and an
attempt to enact a ritual purification of the modern world via death by
drowning. Only death, understood in terms of religious sacrifice, appears
capable of reinvesting a meaningless modern world with 'meaning'. But this is
to jump ahead a little: Mann's Zauberberg and Eliot's The Wasteland were
published after the war — and evidence that certain illusions concerning
'sacrifice' and 'salvation' which were floating around before the outbreak of the
First World War were still lingering around — and not just in Germany — in the
1920s.
To return to the outbreak of the war: E. J. Leed endorses Hannah
 War, men and 'meaning' 169

Hafkesbrink's suggestion that the war was 'conceived as a distinctively

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

who went into combat just as it was present in the enormous appetite of
the age for any relic of authentic (preindustrial) life or for anything that
imitated organic forms or materials.15
'Direct experience', 'authenticity/ apparently demands a 'direct confrontation
of human wills'. A good fight between men would perhaps restore 'direct
experience', and thus restore a sense of meaning to life.
As men increasingly worked in situations where the physical strength of
their bodies was no longer required, while the dominant model of masculinity
continued to be based on an image of physical strength and force, it was
perhaps inevitable that men would view the war as an opportunity to
demonstrate their virility in traditional terms, indeed in the terms that had been
promoted during their formative years through school sports, the boy scout
and the youth movement. Opportunities for demonstrating traditional virility
were becoming increasingly scarce. Maurice Barres, according to Elisabeth
Badinter, made fun of the new race of bureaucrats, describing them as ' "demi-
males" qui n'aspirent qu'a la securite, comme des femmes' (demi-males who
aspire to nothing but security, just like women), and contrasting them with
men of old 'qui vivaient "le fusil a la main", dans "le corps-a-corps viril avec la
nature"' (who lived with guns in their hands in a virile body-to-body contact
with nature).16 Direct experience in physical combat, in 'le corps-a-corps viril
avec la nature' would, it was hoped by many men, make of 'demi-males' real
men again.
If men looked upon the war as a means of recovering and demonstrating
their virility, they also sometimes looked upon it as an ersatz father figure. At
the end of Thomas Mann's Zauberberg, a novel partly about Hans Castorp's
search for a father on whom he might model himself, the war itself appears as
his only worthy father-substitute. Ernst Jimger later wrote of his generation:
'Der Krieg ist unser Vater, er hat uns gezeugt im gliihenden Schofie der
Kampfgraben als ein neues Geschlecht, und wir erkennen mit Stolz unsere
Herkunft an' (The war is our father, he begat us in the glowing lap of the
trenches as a new race, and we proudly recognize our origin).17 Perhaps the
war would do the job fathers traditionally held in the patriarchy, but bourgeois
fathers no longer seemed up to, the job of giving boys access to masculine
identity and 'meaning', and separating them from their mothers?
If this masculine 'meaning' was, as I am suggesting, linked especially around
the time of the First World War to a sadomasochistic derivation of pleasure
from pain (whether experienced or inflicted) that was perhaps because this lost
and now to be restored 'meaning' had always had to do with sadomasochistic
relationships, relationships of power between men as well as between men and
women in a patriarchy. Indeed one might claim that in a patriarchal society the
 War, men and 'meaning' 171

relationships of power between men are more charged with sadomasochism

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

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

Notes

1. E. J. Leed, No Man's Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 39-40.
2. Quoted by Leed, No Man's Land, pp. 44-5.
3. Quoted by Leed, pp. 42—3.
 War, men and 'meaning 173

4. Quoted by Leed, No Man's Land, p. 42.

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

corps, la structure du projet originel que je suis, 1'histoire que j'historialise

peuvent determiner 1'attitude sexuelle a demeurer ordinairement implicite,
a 1'interieur de conduites plus complexes: en particulier il n'est pas frequent
que Ton desire explicitement les Autres "du meme sexe". Mais, derriere les
interdits de la morale et les tabous de la societe, la structure originelle du
desir demeure, au moins sous cette forme particuliere de trouble, que 1'on
nomme le degout sexuel.' Jean-Paul Sartre, L'Eire et le Neant (Paris:
Gallimard, 1943), pp. 475-8.
 9

Fighting men: Lawrence and

London

Lawrence's The Prussian Officer

D. H. Lawrence's story The Prussian Officer' first appeared in August 1914,

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

The orderly felt he was connected with that figure moving so suddenly
on horseback: he followed it like a shadow, mute and inevitable and
damned by it. And the officer was always aware of the tramp of the
company behind, the march of his orderly among the men. (p. 8)
The vague mystery surrounding this 'connection', which is never made quite
explicit, draws the reader into the story.
The eroticism of the relationship between the two men is intensified by the
fact that it is never given explicit physical or linguistic expression either by the
Captain or by the narrator of the story. The reader is however made aware that
this is an intensely physical relationship by the constant reference to the men's
bodies which the narrator describes almost lovingly: the Captain 'had a
handsome, finely-knit figure, and was one of the best horsemen in the West',
his orderly 'having to rub him down, admired the amazing riding-muscles of
his loins' (p. 8); the orderly, 'a youth of about twenty-two, of medium height,
and well built', had 'strong, heavy limbs, was swarthy, with a soft black, young
moustache'. There was 'something altogether warm and young about him' (p.
9).
As if to highlight the ambivalence of his attitude to the 'relationship', the
narrator's standpoint alternates between the perspective of the officer and that
of the orderly. The reader is given access to the consciousness (and
subconscious) of both. The officer's 'passion' is described with some sympathy:
Gradually the officer had become aware of his servant's young, vigorous,
unconscious presence about him. He could not get away from the sense
of the youth's person, while he was in attendance. It was like a warm
flame upon the older man's tense, rigid body, that had become almost
unliving, fixed. ... as the young soldier moved unthinking about the
apartment, the elder watched him, and would notice the movement of his
strong young shoulders under the blue cloth, the bend of his neck. And it
irritated him. To see the soldier's young, brown, shapely peasant's hand
grasp the loaf or the wine-bottle sent a flash of hate or of anger through
the elder man's blood, (p. 9)
The narrator also shows sympathy for the terror of the orderly — while at the
same time apparently attributing some 'deep7 significance to the young man's
terror and to the development of a relationship between the two men based on
this terror: once, when a bottle of wine is knocked over and 'the red gushed
out onto the tablecloth' the officer cursed and his eyes 'held those of the
confused youth for a moment':
It was a shock for the young soldier. He felt something sink deeper,
deeper into his soul, where nothing had ever gone before. ... And from
 Lawrence and London 177

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

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

Men in love

'Now,' said Birkin, 'I will show you what I learned, and what I remember.
You let me take you so -' And his hands closed on the naked body of the
other man. ... So the two men entwined and wrestled with each other,
working nearer and nearer. ... He [Birkin] seemed to penetrate into
 Lawrence and London 179

Gerald's more solid, more diffuse bulk, to interfuse his body through the
body of the other, as if to bring it subtly into subjection ... .4

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

desires. During the First World War at least, and hence during the period when
he was working on Women in Love, Lawrence retained an intensely
individualist attitude, and refused to identify with the nationalism of the
masses around him.9 The friendship - even the suggested 'Brtiderschaft' - of
Birkin and Gerald as well as whatever they get up to in the privacy of Gerald's
library is a personal matter to do with their individual needs and desires in
relationships.
The danger of Fascism only comes when the scene is developed into a
political dogma requiring all men to go so far — and no further — in a collective
and precisely limited expression of repressed desires in 'womanless regions of
fight'. It is an important part of the argument of this book that the nationalism
of the war and the Fascism of the years thereafter did indeed appeal to men
with much the same desires as Birkin and Gerald, holding out the tantalizing
promise of an institutionally sanctioned 'Briiderschaft' and close physical
contact with other men, an escape from the restrictions of bourgeois society,
bourgeois clothes and bourgeois sexuality.
Lawrence himself saw there was a connection between the desires of his
wrestlers and the seductive power of Fascism. Richard Somers, the central
character of his Kangaroo (1923), plays with the idea that one of the great
ideologies of the 1920s, Fascism or communism, might satisfy his desire for
emotional and physical closeness with other men. While he and his wife are in
Australia, members of two opposing groups of men, the Fascist 'Diggers' and
the Communist 'General Confederation of Labour', make not merely political
but also erotic overtures to Somers, which he finally rejects, having been sorely
tempted. Somers thus seems only to escape the temptations of these great
political 'Mannerbiinde' of the time by dismissing with a cynical (and not
terribly convincing) quip both homoerotic and heteroerotic bonds of any kind:
as men and women are not having much success in their relationships there is
not much hope for relationships between men either. This is a sensible point
warning against idealizing same-sex relationships over others, and an abrupt, if
not terribly convincing return to common sense. At least Somers, the writer-
hero, for whatever reasons, has not frivolously abandoned his independence
for the vague homoerotic promises of Fascism. What is interesting about the
novel is that Lawrence depicts the attraction of Fascism as resting primarily on
its appeal to repressed male homosocial/homosexual desire: it is solely Somers'
interest in Whitman's 'love of comrades', in 'mate love', which attracts him to
the 'Diggers'.
To return however to The Prussian Officer' and Women in Love: Lawrence
portrays outright violence in the one case and the playful violence of sport in
the other as means through which men can enjoy some kind of desired close
physical contact with one another. One might wonder why fighting - and not
 Lawrence and London 181

simple sex - should be chosen as a means of enjoying physical closeness.

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

Shaggy men and muscle-bound dogs, cowboys and the American dream

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

Wild West — is of course a classic Romantic and American theme stretching

from the dreams of escaping European civilization which inspired some of the
first colonists (one thinks for example of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe] to nineteenth
and twentieth-century dreams of escaping American civilization and civiliza-
tion altogether (from Twain's Huckleberry Finn to the appearance of the
'Western' in popular literature and cinema to Kerouac's On the Road and even
Burroughs's The Wild Boys}. Writing about the 'topography of masculinity in
America at the turn of the century' Mark Seltzer notes that 'the closing of the
frontier ... in 1893, apparently foreclosed the regeneration of men through
"the transforming influence of the American wilderness"'. In 1899 Theodore
Roosevelt addressed members of a men's club on the subject of The Strenuous
Life' and argued that confronting the wilderness regenerated 'that vigorous
manliness for the lack of which in a nation, as in an individual, the possession
of no other qualities can atone'.10 The regeneration of masculinity became a
national affair and 'confronting the wilderness' was promoted as a means of
overcoming the decadent and feminizing influence of civilization. This very
often also involved or implied the escape of men and boys from women and
the civilizing influence of women to an all-male world of adventure, danger
and violence, where intense relationships between men would be of primary
importance (while the appearance of the odd token woman and token
heterosexual relationship would serve to deflect any charge of deviance from
the sexual mores of the civilization these men had escaped from).11
It is interesting that it was precisely in the years leading up to the First
World War that the literary figures of the cowboy and of E. R. Burroughs's
Tarzan were invented and enjoyed huge popularity.12 The America of the
imagination, the mythological America, and indeed consequently the real
America, has in the twentieth century constantly been conceived by men
everywhere as an adventure playground for boys and men, a playground
where men could play at being boys and men, love (and endlessly write about
loving) being and playing at being and playfully fighting boys and men - and
really love boys and men. Of course there is nothing 'wrong' with that as long
as it is honestly acknowledged, as long as women have the space and power to
play too and as long as it is not accompanied by an intense and politically
effective misogyny, the self-contradictory knots of homophobia, or the
glorification of real violence as 'fun'.
Jack London's stories of the adventures of men and dogs in the hostile
environment of an icy wilderness were written around the same time as the
literary figures of the cowboy and of Tarzan were born and could be said to
belong in the same context of an American attempt to regenerate and
reconstruct a hardened masculinity threatened by the spread of effeminate
civilization.
 Lawrence and London 183

The first thing we learn about Buck, the hero of Jack London's The Call of the
Wild, is that he did not read the newspapers - which may have had something
to do with the fact that his father, Elmo, was a 'huge St Bernard' and his
mother, Shep, 'had been a Scotch shepherd dog'.13 The novel traces the
progressive 'decivilization' (London's word) of a domestic pet who is stolen
and sold to become a working dog in the 'Arctic darkness', who comes to
terms with the brutal working conditions obtaining there and finally abandons
'civilization' altogether when he has 'touched noses' with his new friend, his
'wild brother' (p. 138), a wolf.
London describes the dog's 'ecstasy' as he is unleashed from the self-
consciousness attendant upon decadent civilized existence:

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life
cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes as a
complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of
living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of
flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing
quarter; and it came to Buck ... He was mastered by the sheer surging of
life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint
and sinew in that it was everything that was not death . . . . (pp. 76-7)

The comparison of this big dog returning to the wild with a 'war-mad' soldier
and indeed with an artist 'caught ... in a sheet of flame' is, to say the least,
interesting. One is reminded of the 'ecstasy' which gripped Europe at the
outbreak of the First World War.
London again intimates that he is not just writing about dogs but about
men, and reminds us that men are animals when Buck dreams of an almost
naked 'primitive' man whose body hair is 'matted into almost a thick fur' (p.
86). Shortly before the end of the story this Vision of the short-legged hairy'
man comes to Buck more frequently (p. 124) and this vision was 'closely akin'
(p. 125) to the sounding of the call of the wild which Buck eventually obeys.
Buck's naked man is also closely akin to Tarzan: 'the hairy man could spring up
into the trees and travel ahead as fast as on the ground, swinging by the arms
from limb to limb, ... never falling, never missing his grip' (p. 125). London's
Call of the Wild is thus in a sense a call to men to tear off their clothes and
swing from tree to tree.
The natural world that Buck returns to is no pastoral scene of harmony but
is consistently described as a violent, bloody place where no law holds but
the Darwinian 'survival of the fittest', or as London puts it, the 'Law of Club
and Fang'. Buck fights his way to 'mastership' over the other working dogs;
he enjoys the 'thrill of battle' (p. 78); and the bloody dogfights are described
with some relish by London. With what seems very much like admiration
184 Kampf or Male Bondage

London relates how Buck's new world of pain and deprivation affects him
physically:
His muscles became hard as iron, and he grew callous to all ordinary pain.
He achieved an internal as well as external economy. ... the juices of his
stomach extracted the last least particle of nutriment; and his blood
carried it to the farthest reaches of his body, building it into the toughest
and stoutest of tissues, (p. 63)
Buck thus develops what sounds very much like the 'Korper als Panzer' (body
as tank), the body as a steeled fighting machine, that Klaus Theweleit discovers
as the obsession of certain German soldiers fighting the First World War.14 A
very masculine, body-builder's masochism, a Nietzschean sadomasochism with
regard to one's own body, is what London is admiring here, one might
suggest, and one that is coupled with pretty gory violence. An extract from
one of the many descriptions of dogfights is exemplary:
Dave and Sol-leks, dripping blood from a score of wounds, were fighting
bravely side by side. Joe was snapping like a demon. Once, his teeth
closed on the foreleg of a husky, and he crunched down through the
bone. Pike, the malingerer, leaped upon the crippled animal, breaking its
neck with a quick flash of teeth and a jerk. Buck got a frothing adversary
by the throat, and was sprayed with blood when his teeth sank through
the jugular. The warm taste of it in his mouth goaded him to greater
fierceness, (p. 67)
Substitute men for dogs here?
London does precisely that in the strange short story 'Batard', in which the
fiercely passionate hostility between one man and his dog is played out unto
the death of both parties, rather as in Lawrence's 'Prussian Officer' - except
that it is rather more difficult to suggest repressed homosexual desire is the
cause of such irrational hate when one of the parties is a dog. In a fierce
dogfight between man and dog, Leclere (the man), preferring to use his fists
and teeth rather than reach for his knife or rifle, 'buried his teeth to the bone in
the dog's shoulder'. London writes:
It was a primordial setting and a primordial scene, such as might have
been in the savage youth of the world. An open space in a dark forest, a
ring of grinning wolf-dogs, and in the centre two beasts, locked in
combat, snapping and snarling, raging madly about, panting, sobbing,
cursing, straining, wild with passion, in a fury of murder, ripping and
tearing and clawing in elemental brutishness. (p. 27)
Given such scenes as this it is hard not to feel that Jack London is celebrating
 Lawrence and London 185

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

'Liking it rough' in politics too

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

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

Notes

1. D. H. Lawrence, 'The Prussian Officer', in D. H. Lawrence, The Prussian

Officer and Other Stories (London/New York: Penguin, 1945), pp. 7-29. A
contemporary reviewer drew a comparison between the brutality of the
officer of the story and that of the contemporary German officer in his
'bombardment of unfortified places' and 'massacring of helpless civilians'.
See the unsigned review in Outlook, 19 December 1914, in D. H. Lawrence:
The Critical Heritage, ed. R. P. Draper (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1970), pp. 81-3.
2. Emile Delavenay, D. H. Lawrence: L'Homme et la Genese de son Oeuvre, Les
annees de formation: 1885-1919 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1969): original English
text given in Vol. 2, p. 763, of translated text quoted in Vol. 1, p. 248.
3. It also echoes a similar significant episode in Herman Melville's similar
story of repressed homosexual desire between the ranks of an all-male
hierarchy — Billy Budd — in which the 'Handsome Sailor' spills a bowl of
soup and 'the greasy liquid streamed just across his [Claggart's] path'.
Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor, The New and Definitive Text, ed.
Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 72.
4. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (London/New York: Penguin, 1960), pp.
304-5.
5. Lawrence's original but abandoned prologue to the novel was much more
 Lawrence and London 187

explicit about Birkin's physical desires for men's bodies. See the 'Prologue
to Women in Love', in Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished and Other Prose
Works by D. H. Lawrence, collected and edited with an introduction and
notes by Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore (London: Heinemann,
1968), pp. 92-108.
6. Alfred Andris also sees the sexual as very close to the surface in the
description of the struggle and points out that the 'Ringkampf can be
divided into similar phases as the sexual act — '1. Vorspiel (foreplay); 3.
Phase der willkiirlichen Bewegungen (phase of voluntary movements); 4.
Phase der unwillkiirlichen Bewegungen und Muskelkontraktionen (phase
of involuntary movements and muscular contractions); 5. Entspannungs-
phase (phase of relaxation of tension).' All that is missing is actual
penetration (2). There is, however, as we noticed above, enough 'seeming'
penetration. Alfred Andris, 'Homosexualitat im Werk von D. H.
Lawrence', in Forum: Homosexualitat und Literatur, 15 (1992): 5-40, pp.
24-5.
7. D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the people', in Phoenix: The Posthumous
Papers of D. H. Lawrence, edited and with an introduction by Edward P.
McDonald (London: Heinemann, 1936), p. 665.
8. Delavenay, D. H. Lawrence, p. 611.
9. See Delavenay, D. H. Lawrence, pp. 285-95.
10. Mark Seltzer, The love-master', Engendering Men, ed. Boone and Cadden
(London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 140-58, p. 140. Seltzer
entitles his section dealing with Jack London 'Men in Furs', appropriately
enough, and writes of 'S/M in the Klondike' (p. 155).
11. This is pretty much the argument of Leslie Fiedler writing about Moby
Dick and Huckleberry Finn in his Love and Death in the American Novel (New
York: Criterion Books, 1960).
12. Elisabeth Badinter, XY de I'identite masculine (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1992), pp.
40-1. See also pp. 196-204.
13. Jack London, The Call of the Wild, White Fang and Other Stones, ed. Andrew
Sinclair (New York/London: Penguin, 1993), p. 44.
14. See Klaus Theweleit, Mannerphantasien (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt,
1980), Vol. 2.
15. Quoted by James Dickey in his introduction to Jack London, The Call of
the Wild, White Fang and Other Stories, ed. Sinclair, p. 11.
16. Jack London, The Iron Heel London/New York: Amereon, 1976), p. 205.
 10

Kampf: Walser, Kafka, Brecht

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

Jakob von Gunten

Jakob von Gunten is a very modern novel, reflecting in its fragmentariness, in its
lack of a continuous narrative, the modern condition itself. In several of his
anecdotal fragments Jakob gives some fragmentary impressions of city life.
Jakob's descriptions illustrate Baudelaire's comment that 'La modernite, c'est le
transitoire',2 and this is apparently what Jakob loves about the city. There are
so many things happening simultaneously here they cannot be arranged in a
linear narrative at all. Everything, all sense of identity, is relative and in a
 Walser, Kafka, Brecht 189

constant state of flux in Jakob's city. A similar impression is given by the

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

Through Jakob's declaration in his cv of his masochist inclinations he has

finally managed to make an impression on the head of the school, Herr
Benjamenta, and that has been his intention all along.3 With Benjamenta Jakob
henceforth enjoys a relationship based on little games of mutual humiliation
and provocation, games in which Herr Benj amenta is only too willing to play
along. In his conversations with Jakob, Herr Benj amenta alternately adopts the
roles of all powerful master - the role to which he, as principal of the school, is
conventionally entitled - and humble slave to master Jakob. At one point he
bares his soul, 'confesses' his affection for Jakob and at the same time almost
begs Jakob to abuse his confidences. Jakob remains silent but feels that 'Von
diesem Augenblick an war etwas Bindendes zwischen uns getreten' (From this
moment on there was something binding us to each other); 'Jedenfalls besteht
zwischen uns beiden ein Verhaltnis, aber was fur eins?' (In any case a
relationship exists between us two, but what kind of relationship?) he wonders
(pp. 94-5). When Jakob threatens to leave the school to look for work
Benj amenta finally explains what kind of 'Verhaltnis' he has in mind: he tells
Jakob 'ich liebe zum ersten Mai einen Menschen' (for the first time in my life I
love somebody). In the same breath Benjamenta asks Jakob to laugh at him and
then warns him that he can still punish him (p. 129).
Just as Benjamenta alternates between playing the roles of master and slave
in this relationship, so also does Jakob. Despite his declared intention of
remaining 'etwas sehr Kleines und Untergeordnetes im spateren Leben'
(something very small and subordinate in later life), Jakob has some fantasies of
being really 'grofi'. In one dream he has become an immensely fat glutton, who
is also a sadist. The tears of his defeated opponents and the sighs of the poor
are sources of pleasure for him. He calls for various allegorical figures to serve
him and abuses them, one by one: Wisdom, an old man, crawls up to kiss his
boots; a young girl, Childlike Innocence, begins to kiss him, nervously aware
of the presence of his whip beside him; he takes great pleasure in whipping
Eagerness, a 'superbly built working man', in the face. Finally God himself
appears and the fat man asks 'what, you too?'. At this point Jakob wakes up,
bathed in sweat (pp. 87-9). One cannot really imagine anyone more 'grofi'
than this God-defying glutton.
The overweening ambition and the sadism, for surely that is what it is, of
this dream is matched by another fantasy where Jakob again imagines himself
enjoying a position of absolute power, this time as a fifteenth-century army
colonel who has the power to decide whether a captured deserter be hanged or
released. The colonel gives the sign for the deserter to be hanged, then has him
released and Jakob describes again how this man fell at his feet and kissed his
shoes. As army colonel, Jakob is the 'Herr des Tages' (lord of the day) and half
of Europe depends on his whim (pp. 108-9).
 Walser, Kafka, Brecht 191

Interestingly, Jakob's masochistic tendencies are evident in another military

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

Hellerau interprets Jakob's dream of Benjamenta on a horse with a long sword

hanging by his side (p. 162) as a fantasy about the length of Benjamenta's
penis. She also notes with a significant exclamation mark that when
Benjamenta throws himself with all his might on the terrified Jakob (p. 142),
Jakob responds by biting Benjamenta's finger, which to Schmidt-Hellerau
clearly stands (!) for something else. One could add that Benjamenta repeatedly
uses the metaphor of having 'entkleidet' (undressed) himself or having exposed
his 'BloSe' (bareness), in the sense of having exposed his vulnerability, before
Jakob.
Schmidt-Hellerau explains this relationship between Benjamenta and Jakob
as the fantasy of an individual caught in a particular kind of Oedipal
relationship in which the 'feminine' attitude of a young boy towards his father
is strengthened by the fact that a 'weak' father has left him in a symbiotic
relationship with his mother, who, through her contradictory messages
signalling alternately smothering love and rejection, places the son in a 'double
bind'. The father does not pose a threat (of castration) to the cosy symbiotic
relationship of mother and son; the son triumphs (is 'grofi') in his Oedipal
victory over his supposed rival, the father. The more the son triumphs, the
more he must fear his come-uppance, i.e. castration (being made 'klein'); at the
same time he eventually feels smothered (also 'klein') by this relationship with
the mother and wishes for the intervention of a strong ('grofi') father, who by
his threat of castration would break up the quasi-incestuous relationship
between mother and son and offer an alternative model for identification than
that supplied by the mother, a means, in other words of becoming 'groS'
himself and no longer being 'smothered' and kept 'klein' by the mother. In
short, smothered by the relationship with one parent, the son desires the one
he cannot have, i.e. the one with the father. Thus Schmidt-Hellerau manages to
deal with both Jakob's need for a loving relationship with a father figure and
his obsession with being either 'klein' or 'grofi'
Such an Oedipal constellation, one might suggest, will be common in an age
when the patriarchy is in decline. Freud himself, the discoverer of the Oedipus
complex, wondered whether the so-called normal Oedipus complex was
perhaps not 'the most common one at all':
A more detailed examination reveals in most cases the more complete
Oedipus complex, which is a double one, a positive and a negative one,
resulting from the original bisexuality of the child, i.e. the boy does not
only have an ambivalent attitude to his father and a tender object choice
for his mother, but he behaves at the same time like a girl, he displays the
tender, feminine attitude towards his father and the corresponding
jealous-hostile attitude towards his mother.6
 Walser, Kafka, Brecht 193

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

A strange romance: Kafka's Beschreibung eines Kampfes

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

I looked at my acquaintance with loving eyes. In my thoughts I protected

him against rivals and jealous men. His life became dearer to me than my
own. I found his face beautiful, I was proud of his good fortune with
women and I took part in the kisses which he had received this evening
from the two girls.9
The speed with which this relationship has developed is absurd, and intended
to be appreciated as such. Nevertheless the relationship thus described appears
to be charged with more than just casual friendship: the narrator admires the
face of his acquaintance, looks with loving eyes upon him and is ready to
protect him from 'jealous men'. When he says 'I took part in the kisses' it seems
possible that he is imagining himself in the position of the women kissing his
acquaintance. In the later version the narrator is willing to let the girls kiss his
acquaintance as long as they do not 'steal' him from him: 'er soil immer bei mir
bleiben, immer, wer soil ihn beschutzen wenn nicht ich' (he should stay with
me always, always, who will protect him if I don't) (p. 104). At one point the
narrator so desires to please his acquaintance that he contorts his tall body so
that his new friend will not feel small beside him. His contortions do not
escape the notice of the acquaintance who (in 'Version B') turns around to find
with some surprise the narrator's 'head at the seam of his trousers' (p. 107).
Suddenly and inexplicably the narrator fears his acquaintance might attack
him; he tries to run away and slips on the ice. The acquaintance catches up with
him, bends down and 'mich mit weicher Hand streichelte. Er fuhr an meinen
Wangenknochen auf und nieder und legte dann zwei dicke Finger an meine
niedrige Stirn' (caressed me with his soft hand. His hand moved up and down
my cheekbones and then he laid two thick fingers on my low forehead) (p. 57).
The first part of Kafka's Kampf reaches a climax - and ends - with the
acquaintance making passionate love to the narrator under the statue of saint
Ludmila on the Charles Bridge in Prague:
'I have always loved', said my acquaintance pointing to the statue of saint
Ludmila, 'the hands of this angel on the left. Her tenderness is without
bounds . . . . But from this evening on I am indifferent to these hands, for I
have kissed hands.' - At this point he embraced me, kissed my clothes
and pushed with his head against my body.10
Quite as unexpected and absurd as is this sudden expression of affection is
the beginning of the next part of the story, headed 'II: Belustigungen oder
Beweis dessen, daS es unmoglich ist zu leben. 1. Ritt' (Amusements or proof of
the fact that it is impossible to live. 1. Riding). The narrator relates how he
jumped on the shoulders of his acquaintance and began to ride him as if he
were a horse, punching him in the back with his fists and kicking him in the
 Walser, Kafka, Brecht 195

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

between the male narrators/characters of the story, all of whom are either
lovers or the beloved in the series of relationships between pairs of men. The
blossoming relationship between the fat man and the young man in the church
is again not only interrupted but is also described as a relationship of power:
the young man in the church has submitted himself to the fat man by telling him
how much he admires his attire and his skin.
What is most interesting about this part is that here this love' is clearly put
in the context of a desperate desire on the part of one man for recognition on
the part of another man as a real human being. The young man begins his story
by announcing: 'Es hat niemals eine Zeit gegeben, in der ich durch mich selbst
von meinem Leben iiberzeugt war' (There has never been a time when I could
convince myself of my own existence) (p. 75). Later this young man again
expresses his fear about not being 'real', suggesting 'dafi es vielleicht gut ware,
in die Kirche zu gehn und schreiend zu beten, um angeschaut zu werden und
Korper zu bekommen' (that it would perhaps be good to go to the church and
to pray at the top of one's voice, in order to be looked at and to get a body) (p.
89). In order to get a body the young man needs to be perceived by others, to
be recognized, and ultimately to be loved. This section ends with the young
man in the church kissing the fat man and the fat man finally remarking that,
despite his dislike of touching human bodies, he had to embrace the young
man (p. 90).
At this point of his narrative, however, the fat man, who has been floating
down the river all this time, suddenly disappeared over the edge of a waterfall.
Having thus lost his second friend and source of his recognition in as absurd a
fashion as he had lost the first, the original narrator suddenly feels that his head
is 'so klein, wie ein Ameisenei' (as small as an ant's egg) and he begs passers by
to measure his arms and legs and to tell him how big he is (p. 91), reminding us
of how vulnerable he felt and of how he lost all sense of his own size after he
abandoned his first 'acquaintance'. Thus ends the long subdivided middle part
of Kafka's Beschreibung eines Kampfes, the part entitled 'amusements or proof
that it is impossible to live'.
Now the narrator returns to his first 'acquaintance', the same who had
embraced him, kissed his clothes and pushed his head against his body at the
end of Part I and whom the narrator subsequently 'rode' until he was half-dead
in his first 'amusement'. The acquaintance tells the narrator of his problems in
love, to which the narrator abruptly replies that he will have to kill himself.
Equally abruptly the acquaintance bares his chest for the narrator's admiration.
The narrator is suitably impressed: 'Seine Brust war wirklich breit und schon'
(his chest was really broad and beautiful) (p. 95). Part of the narrator's reaction
to being made acquainted with this broad and beautiful chest is his
exaggeratedly confidential announcement: 'Ich bin verlobt, ich gestehe es' (I
 Walser, Kafka, Brecht 197

am engaged, I admit it) (p. 95). It seems the narrator is simultaneously

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

(The Trial) where K hears 'sighs' behind a door and opens it to find his two
guards, Franz and Willem, being whipped and ordered to strip naked by a third
man, 'in einer Art dunkler Lederkleidung, die den Hals bis tief zur Brust und die
ganzen Arme nackt liefi' (in a sort of dark leather garment which left a large
part of his chest and the entirety of his arms naked).12 One may also recall the
execution of K, stripped half-naked in a quarry by two men who stand cheek to
cheek right in front of his face as one of them plunges a knife deep into his
heart.13 In Das Urteil (The Judgement) (written September 1912, published
1913) an absurd Kampf develops between Georg Bendemann and his father
while he is undressing the old man and trying to put him to bed. Absurdly the
old man gains the upper hand and equally absurdly sentences Georg to death
by drowning, a sentence which Georg carries out himself by promptly jumping
into the river and drowning. Kafka wrote to Max Brod that while writing the
final sentence - 'In diesem Augenblick ging iiber die Brucke ein geradezu
unendlicher Verkehr' (at this moment unending traffic passed over the bridge)
— he was thinking of 'eine starke Ejakulation' (a strong ejaculation).14 Sexual
pleasure derived from a fantasized final defeat in a Kampf with his father? And
this masochistic pleasure exhibited for the benefit of his future fiancee, to
whom the story was dedicated?
The conclusion to be drawn from such passages is, one might suggest, not
that 'Kafka was a homosexual' or indeed that 'he was a sadomasochist' but that,
like Sartre and Nietzsche, he saw all relationships as relationships of power and
essentially and apparently unavoidably sadomasochist affairs. This sadomaso-
chism of human relationships is treated with the ironic distance of tragicomedy
by Kafka, but at the same time such relationships are seen as not only
unavoidable but also desirable - as the only 'relationships', the only kind of
contact possible with the Other. The young man in Beschreibung eines Kampfes
needs the attention of others to persuade himself of his own reality, 'in order to
get a body'. Once alone the narrator arrives at the verge of terror and madness
and cries out for someone to measure his arms and legs as he has lost all sense
of proportion. Without anchorage in particular social relationships — where he
would be defined in a relatively stable position in relation to the other as 'gro6'
or 'klein' - the narrator vacillates 'schizophrenically' between both extremes,
rather like Walser's Jakob or indeed like Dostoevsky's Mr Golyadkin. In order
to escape from one's existential loneliness - a loneliness which derives from an
'existentialist' abandonment of, or simple sense of alienation or exclusion from,
collective identities and the collective sadomasochism of 'us vs. them thinking' -
and establish 'real' contact with the Other, whether this Other be male or female,
one must apparently engage in some sadomasochism.
Mark Anderson sees the closing scene of Beschreibung eines Kampfes, in
which the 'acquaintance' bares his chest and sticks a knife in his arm, as 'an
 Walser, Kafka, Brecht 199

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

'Diese pure Lust am Kampf (This sheer pleasure of combat): Brecht and
Irigaray

It was the wildness that interested me in this Kampf. During those years
(after 1920) I derived much pleasure from sport, and particularly from the
sport of boxing . . . . Thus in my new play a pure, unadulterated Kampf
was to be fought out, a Kampf without any cause other than the pleasure
of combat, with no other aim than to determine who was the 'better
man'. ... In my play this sheer pleasure of combat was to be looked at.21
This is how Bertolt Brecht attempted in 1954 to explain his interest in writing
Im Dickicht der Stadte (In the jungle of the cities) (1924).
Brecht's play is subtitled 'Der Kampf zweier Manner in der Riesenstadt
Chicago' (the Kampf of two men in the giant city of Chicago) and the title itself
echoes a phrase at the end of London's novel about Chicago, The Iron Heel:
There was warfare in that modern jungle, a great city. ... We had not changed
much from primitive man.' 22 In his piece Brecht displays a boyish delight,
similar to that of Jack London, at the opportunity afforded by the 'modern
jungle' of the city for 'primitive man' to indulge one of his deepest desires — to
fight another 'primitive man'.
The Kampf in Im Dickicht der Stadte is a peculiarly abstract affair. There are
however constant references to physical combat: the wood trader Shlink
announces that he is opening a Kampf against the librarian Garga; Garga uses
the language of the boxing ring and speaks of Shlink's 'Knockout' (Sc. 9);
Garga speaks of 'die letzten DegenstojSe' (the last thrusts of the rapier) at the
climax of the fight in the tenth scene. But what actually takes place is what the
antagonists describe as a 'metaphysischer Kampf (metaphysical combat), a duel
in which the weapons are insults, money, goods and women, the object of
which appears to be the forceful subjugation of the 'soul' and not just the body
of the other man, or rather the sheer pleasure to be derived from a Kampf.
What the meaning of the Kampf is for Shlink remains unclear until the tenth
scene.
At the beginning of the play Shlink, a prosperous wood trader, opens the
Kampf by offering Garga, a poor librarian, money for his opinion as to the
quality of a certain book. Garga proudly declares 'Ich bin keine Prostituierte' (I
am not a prostitute) and refuses to sell, apparently fearing that he would thus
be selling his soul to the other man. Shlink and his men get Garga into trouble
with his boss and by the end of the first scene Garga has lost his job. Shlink
informs Garga that he has also 'bought' Garga's girlfriend, Jane.
This is the absurd beginning of a three-year-long Kampf between the two
men. Having humiliated this utter stranger, Shlink then hands over his entire
 Walser, Kafka, Brecht 201

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

Reigning everywhere, but forbidden in practice, 'hom(m)osexualite' is

played out across the bodies of women, as matter or sign, and
heterosexuality is up to the present nothing but an alibi for the good
functioning of the relations of man with himself, of the relations between
men.27
According to Irigaray the exchange between men of women and goods
symbolizes a relationship between men, a sexual relationship which is at the
same time taboo and may not actually take place — for that would reveal and
undermine the real structure of the whole symbolic order of patriarchal power
and economics (p. 189), and indeed deprive the symbolic and economic
exchange of much of its 'value' and 'meaning'. Once the penis, she writes,
becomes simply a means to pleasure, and even to pleasure between men, the
Phallus loses its power, for 'mere pleasure' is what the patriarchy only allows
women, while the men get on with more serious business (p. 190). This is what
Irigaray means by 'hom(m)osexualite' - the centrality of the symbolic
expression (in patriarchal economics and politics) of male homosexuality
combined with the repression of the actual (sexual) expression of male
homosexuality.
This is what Brecht's piece reveals - unintentionally, one suspects. Brecht
himself is not suggesting one distance oneself from the perverse course of
society's 'hom(m)osexualite'. He is too involved in it himself; he is 'innocently'
(and also cynically) enjoying it — even in 1954 he writes of the 'pure Lust am
Kampf (sheer pleasure of the Kampf) — and he suggests at the outset that the
audience enjoy it.
However, in the abrupt tenderness of the tenth scene Shlink himself reveals
the real motive behind the strange Kampf when he openly declares his love for
Garga. 'Nimm dich zusammen,' he says, 'ich liebe dich' (pull yourself together, I
love you) (p. 200). Garga has understood Shlink's strategy Tuhlung zu
bekommen' 'Durch die Feindschaft' (of getting contact by means of hostility)
and that 'wir Kameraden sind, Kameraden einer metaphysischen Aktion' (we
are comrades, comrades of a metaphysical operation) (p. 200). Through his
initial absurd aggression Shlink has managed to draw Garga back into a 'jungle'
where some kind of animal warmth, even the warmth generated by fighting, is
possible between men. Shlink's speech rather reminds one of Jack London:
I have observed the animals. Love, the warmth of the closeness of bodies
is our only mercy in the darkness! But the union of organs is all there is, it
doesn't bridge the rupture of language. ... Yes, the isolation is so great
that there isn't even a Kampf. The forest! Humanity comes from here.
Hairy, with the teeth of apes, good animals that knew how to live.
Everything was so easy. They simply tore each other to pieces. I can see
 Walser, Kafka, Brecht 203

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

Concluding remarks to Part IV

I could go on - to write about Doblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929)30 or

Beckett's En attendant Godot (1952) for instance. The point of this section has,
204 Kampf or Male Bondage

however, already been made and sufficiently illustrated and can now perhaps
be summed up. In the writings of such different writers as Walser, Kafka,
Lawrence, London and Brecht from such a range of countries as Switzerland,
the Czech part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, England, the United States and
the German Weimar Republic, the works of writers taken to be somehow
representative of modernity, modern literature and the modern condition, and
not generally seen as representing the mere marginal interests of a (gay)
minority of men, are to be found scenes of what one must surely call
'sadomasochism' between men (and dogs), scenes where the violence of a
Kampf is being used in order to establish and give expression to some kind of
'connection' or 'relationship' between the male combatants. The relationships
between Lawrence's Prussian officer and his orderly, Gerald and Birkin,
London's dogs and men, Walser's Jakob and Benjamenta, the characters of
Kafka's Beschreibung eines Kampfes, Brecht's Shlink, Garga, Baal and Ekart are
relationships of a love which, even if it does speak its name, can only or tends
only to express itself in violent terms.
That violence may certainly be attributed to the influence of a homophobia
prohibiting any other kind of physical contact between men other than the
physical contact involved in violence. Lawrence's 'The Prussian Officer' is most
clearly such a case of the repression of (homo)sexual desire leading to real
violence. In other cases the violence appears to be also related to the influence
of Darwinism and a view of the world as a place where even 'love' (whether
between persons of the same or of different sexes) is contaminated by the
'struggle for survival' and the 'survival of the fittest'. This is what lies behind
not only London's but also Brecht's and Kafka's depictions of sadomasochist
scenarios. In London's writing about 'the Wild' the cruelty and violence
involved in the law of the 'survival of the fittest' is a source of something very
close to sexual excitement; the same might be said of Brecht's Ira Dickicht der
Stadte. Here the Kampf of the Darwinian state of nature itself is fetishized to
such an extent that it is no longer just a pale imitation or representation of
what one might be inclined to interpret as its real meaning, i.e. sex; here sex
becomes subordinate to the fetish, 'a good fight'. In Kafka's work the sadism of
men is treated with an irony that produces a great deal of ambivalence: it is
treated as both sexually titillating and tragic at the same time. This ambivalence
is evident for example in the title of the section of Beschreibung eines Kampfes
where the narrator 'rides' his acquaintance almost to death - 'Belustigungen
oder Beweis dessen, dafi es unmoglich ist zu leben' (amusements or proof of the
fact that it is impossible to live).
In this section it has also been suggested that there is a link to be made
between these scenes of sadomasochism between men in modern literature and
the widespread enthusiasm at the outbreak of the First World War. Once again
 Walser, Kafka, Brecht 205

I emphasize that my purpose in writing about Kafka, London, etc. is not to say
something about the individual psychology of these writers, to say that they
were 'perverts', 'sadomasochists', '(closet) homosexuals' or 'homophobic
homosexuals'; my purpose is rather to attempt to say something about
modern men in general by looking at a fairly representative group of modern
male writers, those that have been taken to be canonical representatives of
literary modernism and the 'modern condition' and indeed have been (and still
are) put forward in schools and universities as role models for future
generations of men. The point is that one has constantly found a desire on the
part of modern men for some kind of physical and 'metaphysical' 'contact' with
other men and that this 'contact' frequently occurred in the context of
sometimes playful, sometimes serious violence. This must be seen in the
context of that desire for 'direct' or 'authentic' experience, for a 'direct
confrontation of human wills' that Leed suggests 'dominated the enthusiasm
for war',31 a desire which resulted from the increased alienation of men from
each other resulting at least in part from the development of the modern
'technology of transportation and communication', as Leed suggests, but also
of course from the decline of the patriarchy which had symbolically as well as
in political reality represented such a direct contact (and contract (of marriage))
between men. The fact that any attempt to re-establish that contact and re-sign
that contract will involve intimations of 'homosexuality' and instances of
(sometimes homophobic) sadomasochism should not surprise — as these
constituted the foundations of the old 'lost' patriarchy, at the heart of which
lay (and lies) Irigaray's 'hom(m)osexualite'.
Further: both the 'decline of the patriarchy' and the related 'Entzauberung'
(demystification), to use Max Weber's expression, of the world by the progress
through the nineteenth century of materialist thought, science and technology,
left a vacuum where 'meaning' had been, the 'meaning' of the grand
legitimating narrative of patriarchy and male authority and identity, told and
retold in mythical, religious, literary and cultural forms. If there had never been
such a thing as war, writes Stefan Breuer, the generation of men that was
'coming of age' around 1914 would have had to invent it. Breuer cites Ernst
Junger:

The war was to give it to us, greatness, strength, solemn ceremony. To

us it seemed to signify manly action, a gay shooting match on flowery,
blood-bedewed meadows. There is no more beautiful death in the world
32

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

Krieg', wrote Junger, '1st unser Vater, er hat uns gezeugt im gluhenden SchoSe der
Kampfgraben als ein neues Geschlecht, und wir erkennen mit Stolz unsere
Herkunft an' (The war is our father, he begat us in the glowing lap of the trenches
as a new race and we recognize with pride our origin).33
Breuer writes of the 'mobilization of apocalyptic models of thought' and of
the respect for violence as persistent effects of the First World War in
Germany and considers that the 'konservative Revolution' which hastened the
end of the Weimar Republic consisted to a large degree of an attempt 'to hold
onto this apocalypse of 1914 and to make it continue' (p. 38). He also observes
that the apocalyptic interpretation of experience is part of the Judeo-Christian
tradition and notes the 'intensification of religious consciousness' evident in
writings about the war. This was an intensification and a revival, one may add,
of enthusiasm for the Judeo-Christian patriarchal tradition which set great store
by the notion of sacrifice, of the beneficial effects of ritual violence, the
patriarchal tradition of 'hom(m)osexualite' ... of the sadomasochist relations
between father and son, between men.
Norbert Bolz finds striking similarities between, of all people, Ernst Jiinger
and Walter Benjamin, as well as between other philosophical figures of the
right and the left in the inter-war period in Germany, such as Lukacs, Bloch,
Heidegger and Schmitt. The similarities are to be found precisely in the
apocalyptic notions of the salutary effect of violence and death.34 Bolz writes
of Carl Schmitt's 'political existentialism' (p. 76) in which the central issue of
politics is simply Teindbestimmung', the clear definition of enemies (p. 59). For
Schmitt the enemy is 'der anerkannte Andere: der Bruder' (the recognized
Other: the brother): 'Der Feind steht auf meiner eigenen Ebene. Aus diesem
Grunde mufi ich mit ihm, kampfend, auseinandersetzen, um das eigene MaS, die
eigene Grenze, die eigene Gestalt zu gewinnen' (The enemy stands on my
level. For this reason I must clash with him, fighting, to establish my own
measure, my own boundary, my own form) (p. 64). This sounds a little like
London's 'Law of Club and Fang', or the absurd arbitrariness of Shlink's
Teindbestimmung'; it also reminds one of Kafka's narrator's confusion
regarding his own size when he did not have anybody to clash with. During
the 1920s, talk of Teindbestimmung' kept the experience of the front of the
war alive and fetishized it as a desirable experience well after the war was over
and indeed ensured that it would not be long before another war.
Breuer suggests one good reason why many of the structures of the
'konservative Revolution' were a specifically German affair: while the Allied
Forces returned to victory and stability, the German soldiers returned after the
war to both defeat and revolution (pp. 46—7). Of course that is true. But what
about the apocalyptic interpretation of experience and the apparent desire for a
'Gewaltkur' (cure in and through violence) evident for example in Eliot's The
 Walser, Kafka, Brecht 207

Waste Land (1922) or indeed the fascination exerted by Fascism in Lawrence's

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

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

Notes

1. Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten (Zurich: Suhrkamp, 1978, 1985).

2. Quoted by Jacques Le Rider, Modernite viennoise et crises de I'identite (Paris:
PUF, 1990), p. 35.
3. I am not alone in applying the term 'masochism' to Jakob. Cordelia
Schmidt-Hellerau also reads Jakob's determination to remain 'klein' as an
expression of masochism: Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau, Der Grenzganger: Zur
Psycho-Eogik im Werk Robert Walsers (Zurich: Ammann, 1986), p. 75.
4. Klaus Theweleit, Mannerphantasien, Vol. 2 (Reinbek bei Hamburg:
Rowohlt, 1980), pp. 161-2.
5. Steven Zeeland, The Masculine Marine: Homoeroticism in the U.S. Marine
Corps (New York: The Haworth Press, 1996), p. 145.
6. 'Man gewinnt namlich den Eindruck, daS der einfache Odipuskomplex
iiberhaupt nicht das haufigste ist . . . . Eingehendere Untersuchung deckt
zumeist den vollstandigeren Odipuskomplex auf, der ein zweifacher ist, ein
positiver und ein negativer, abhangig von der urspriinglichen Bisexualitat
des Kindes, d.h. der Knabe hat nicht nur eine ambivalente Einstellung zum
Vater und eine zartliche Objektwahl fur die Mutter, sondern er benimmt
sich gleichzeitig wie ein Madchen, er zeigt die zartliche feminine
Einstellung zum Vater und die ihr entsprechende eifersuchtig-feindselige
gegen die Mutter.' Cited by Schmidt-Hellerau, Der Grenzganger, p. 50,
from Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke, ed. by Anna Freud, Vols. I-XVIII
(London: Imago 1940-68), Vol. XIII, p. 261.
7. 'willst du mit mir gehen, wollen wir zusammenbleiben, zusammen irgend
etwas anfangen, etwas unternehmen, wagen, schaffen, wollen wir beide, du
der Kleine, ich der GroSe, zusammen versuchen, wie wir das Leben
bestehen?' Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten, pp. 148f.
 Walser, Kafka, Brecht 209

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

19. Quoted by Wagenbach, Kafka, p. 50.

20. Quoted by Fritz J. Raddatz, Mannerangste in der Literatur: Frau oder Kunst
(Hamburg: Carlsen, 1993), p. 114.
21. 'Es war die Wildheit, die mich an diesem Kampf interessierte, und da in
diesen Jahren (nach 1920) der Sport, besonders der Boxsport mir SpaS
bereitete, ... sollte in meinem neuen Stuck ein "Kampf an sich", ein Kampf
ohne andere Ursache als den Spafi am Kampf, mit keinem anderen Ziel als
der Festlegung des "besseren Mannes" ausgefochten werden. ... In
meinem Stuck sollte diese pure Lust am Kampf gesichtet werden.' Bertolt
Brecht, 'Bei Durchsicht meiner ersten Stiicke' (1954), Bertolt Brecht, Fruhe
Stiicke (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1967), pp. 10-11.
22. Jack London, The Iron Heel (London/West Nyack, NY: Amereon, 1976), p.
204. Brecht makes no mention of Jack London here, the man who, with The
Game (1905) and The Abysmal Brute (1913), invented 'the boxing novel'.
Of course Brecht makes no mention here either of his 'zeitweise intime
Freundschaft' (at times intimate friendship) with Arnolt Bronnen which
Fritz Raddatz claims was the basis of Im Dickicht der Stadte. See Raddatz,
Mannerangste in der Literatur, p. 184, and also John Fuegi, The Life and Lies
of Bertolt Brecht (London: HarperCollins, 1994), pp. 92-9.
23. Bertolt Brecht, Im Dickicht der Stadte, in Fruhe Stiicke, Sc. 2, p. 152.
24. 'GARGA Ich habe mehr im Leben zu suchen, als an Ihnen meine Stiefel
krumm zu treten./SHLINK Auf meine geringe Person sowie auf meine
Absichten bitte ich Sie keine Riicksicht zu nehmen.' Brecht, Im Dickicht der
Stadte, Sc. 5, p. 173.
25. 'Ich nenne ihn meinen hollischen Gemahl in meinen Traumen.... Ich werde
einmal seine Witwe sein.' Brecht, Im Dickicht der Stadte, Sc. 5, p. 170.
26. See Luce Irigaray, 'Des marchandises entre elles' and 'Le marche des
femmes', Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1977), p. 189.
27. Tartout regnante, mais interdite dans son usage, rhom(m)osexualite se
joue a travers les corps des femmes, matiere ou signe, et 1'heterosexualite
n'est jusqu'a present qu'un alibi a la bonne marche des rapports de
1'homme a lui-meme, des rapports entre hommes.' Irigaray, Ce sexe, p. 168.
28. 'Ich habe die Tiere beobachtet. Die Liebe, Wa'rme aus Korpernahe, ist
unsere einzige Gnade in der Finsternis! Aber die Vereinigung der Organe
ist die einzige, sie uberbriickt nicht die Entzweiung der Sprache. ... Ja, so
grofi ist die Vereinzelung, daS es nicht einmal einen Kampf gibt. Der Wald!
Von hier kommt die Menschheit. Haarig, mit Affengebissen, gute Tiere,
die zu leben wu6ten. Alles war so leicht. Sie zerfleischten sich einfach. Ich
sehe sie deutlich, wie sie mit zitternden Flanken einander das Weifie ins
Auge anstierten, sich in ihre Halse verbissen, hinunterrollten, und der
Verblutete zwischen den Wurzeln, das war der Besiegte, und der am
 Walser, Kafka, Brecht 211

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

Patriarchy - the issue from the French Revolution to postmodern times

The one thing we know about the mysterious Godot Beckett's characters are
waiting for is that he is male. Whatever the colour of his beard — Vladimir
interrogates the 'Garcon' on this point for a moment — he is a patriarchal figure
whose presence or absence is all important for the lives of Vladimir and
Estragon. They have nothing else to structure their lives around apart from
their 'waiting for Godot'.
This suggests that the concern with the issue of patriarchy and the crucial
question (for men) of how to live after the end of patriarchy, which has been, I
suggest, the concern of all the texts dealt with here, continued to be of vital
interest to men even into the 1950s. That it is still an issue is evident in our
daily 'postmodern' lives, in the political and literary debates of the last years of
the twentieth century, as well as in the attention paid in recent literature to the
'crisis of masculine identity' and the masculine response to feminism at the last
turn of the century, of which this study is itself a part. That 'masculine identity'
and men's (so often 'repressed' and perversely 'sublimated') fears and desires
are still a minefield, still usually scrupulously avoided as an embarrassment, is
indicated for example by the body of evidence assembled and the questions
posed by Elisabeth Badinter in her XY de I'identite masculine and by Mark
Simpson in his Male Impersonators.1
Questions such as how it ever happened that men have come to regard the
reins of public life as their more or less exclusive birthright, that they regard
themselves (whatever their actual position of power or powerlessness) as
somehow more closely related to a political, financial, scientific, religious or
metaphysical centre of power than women, how and whether this is to be
justified or contested, what would happen if men no longer held this partly
imagined, partly real position of power — all these questions might be said to
 After patriarchy 213

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

Bachofen, Nietzsche, Engels, Freud

Questions concerning sex, gender, sexuality, patriarchy and matriarchy became

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

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

Revolutionary psychology: Otto Gross, Raoul Hausmann, Mathilde

Vaerting, Alfred Doblin

Along with Wilhelm Reich, Otto Gross was one of those who suffered Freud's
disapproval for this reason. The son of an extremely conservative Austrian
criminologist, a radical thinker and associate of bohemian circles of writers and
artists, Otto Gross lived a stormy life of drugs and 'free love', sweeping up
Frieda von Richthofen, D. H. Lawrence's future wife, and her sister in 1907 for
example. He also wrote radical psychoanalytical articles.5 In 1913 a series of
articles of his appeared in the Expressionist weekly Die Aktion. Here he gave
his radical interpretation of the meaning of psychoanalysis: the psychology of
the unconscious was, he claimed, the philosophy of revolution; its vocation
was to make people internally capable of freedom. He compared the effect of
Freud's discovery of psychoanalysis with that of Nietzsche's transvaluation of
all values.6 In particular he argued that the coming revolution would be a
revolution against patriarchy and for matriarchy.7 In another article he cited
Freud's idea that everybody is fundamentally bisexual in the first stage of life,
disagreed with Freud that in later life one side of bisexuality simply had to be
repressed and suggested that with progress it would no longer occur to
anyone to repress a part of their nature.8
All this proved to be too much for his father, who had his son arrested in
November 1913 and committed to a mental asylum in Austria. This led to
uproar among Otto's Expressionist friends. An edition of Die Aktion as well as
 After patriarchy 215

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

heute ... in der Phase des Ubergangs von der Mannerherrschaft zur
Gleichberechtigung der Geschlechter' (we are today in the phase of transition
from male rule to the equality of the sexes).12 For Vaerting this indeed entailed
a dissolution of all masculine and feminine as, according to her Trinzip der
Umkehrung in der eingeschlechtlichen Vorherrschaft' (principle of reversal in
one sex rule), all those qualities automatically attributed to women in a
patriarchy, or 'Mannerstaat' as she calls it, would be attributed to men in a
matriarchy or Trauenstaat'. What is termed masculine and feminine is simply a
function of the position of power of one sex over the other. As the relative
positions of power of the sexes change, so the qualities automatically
attributed to one sex will simply be transferred to the other. Armed with this
extremely clear principle she writes, for example, that 'die Anschauung uber
die GroSe der Intelligenz einer Klasse, Kaste oder eines Geschlechts ist ein
reines Machtprodukt' (opinions regarding the size of the intelligence of a class,
caste or of a sex are pure products of power) (p. 77). She also wrote that 'das
herrschende Geschlecht hat die Tendenz, der Gottheit des eigenen Geschlechts
den ersten Platz zu sichern' (the ruling sex tends to reserve the highest position
for the divinity of its own sex) (p. 104). In Vaerting's eyes 'matriarchy' would
simply be the mirror image of 'patriarchy': men and male children would be
disadvantaged and suffer in exactly the same ways as women and female
children are disadvantaged and suffer in the patriarchal system (pp. 3f.). Thus
viewing matriarchy as in all likelihood no better and no worse than patriarchy,
Vaerting places all her hope not in a return to matriarchy but in the absolute
equality of the sexes.
According to Vaerting's principle, equality would mean that members of
both sexes would possess all the qualities traditionally divided into 'masculine'
and 'feminine' traits. Alfred Doblin was another who saw and welcomed the
approach of equality and the dissolution of gender differences. In his essay
'Der Geist des naturalistischen Zeitalters' (The spirit of the naturalistic age)
(1924) he saw the decline of the patriarchy and the elision of differences
between the sexes as one of the results of the new technological age:
The old patriarchal notions are going; they belong to a more rural,
geographically restricted period. The masculine sense of superiority is
being shaken. ... What contributes to this most is the fact that both sexes
are doing similar work; with the new kind of work the sexes hardly exist
any more. ... The sexes are resembling each other more and more.13
The 'Bubikopf, the boyish hairstyle fashionable among women of the
Twenties, no doubt helped Doblin form this opinion.
 After patriarchy 217

"Manly women' and "womanly men': Shaw, Joyce, Woolf

Lest anyone think that such matters were only of interest in Germany one
should recall, for instance, that George Bernard Shaw had, in The Quintessence
of Ibsenism (1891), supported Nora in slamming the door on the Doll's House
and suggested that 'unless Woman repudiates her womanliness ... she cannot
emancipate herself'.14 In his preface to a later edition (1922) Shaw claimed that
the carnage of the First World War might have been avoided 'had the Gospel
of Ibsen been understood and heeded' (p. 97). 'All good women are manly and
all good men are womanly' he also wrote.15 Shaw's Saint Joan (1923/4) was one
dramatic manifestation of this ideal of 'manly woman'.
This was an ideal to which his fellow Irishman, James Joyce, also adhered.
Leopold Bloom, the hero of Joyce's Ulysses (1922), is the quintessence of just
such a 'womanly man': a modest, multifaceted, peace-loving, wandering Jew of
Hungarian extraction living in Dublin who brings his wife her breakfast in bed
and indulges in masochistic fantasies. It is clear that his wife, Molly, apart from
embodying a very distinctly Joycean version of 'the eternal feminine', 'wears
the trousers' in the marriage. In the course of the novel both Leopold and
Molly, who are held up in the novel as the ideal modern man and woman
respectively, have transsexual fantasies.
That other great exponent of experimental modernism in the English
language, Virginia Woolf, similarly held that 'it is fatal to be a man or a woman
pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly'.16 The
eponymous hero/ine of Orlando (1928) manages, over the course of a few
centuries, to be both.

Patriarchy or matriarchy and relations between men:

Lawrence, Joyce, Eliot

D. H. Lawrence wrote an essay on 'Matriarchy', in which he welcomed what

seemed to him to be inevitable in the near future with the ascent of the 'New
Woman', for the peculiar reason that he expected matriarchy would liberate
men from their responsibilities as 'heads of families' and property owners, and
'give the men a new foregathering ground, where they can meet and satisfy
their deep social needs, profound social cravings which can only be satisfied
apart from women'.17 Here he cited the example of 'the Pueblo Indians of the
Arizona desert' who 'still have a sort of matriarchy' (p. 551). While the man
marries into the woman's clan and all his property becomes hers,
the real life of the man is not spent in his own little home, daddy in the
bosom of the family, wheeling the perambulator on Sundays. His life is
218 Conclusion

passed mainly in the khiva, the great underground religious meeting-

house where only the males assemble, where the sacred practices of the
tribe are carried on ... (p. 551)
'Matriarchy' understood thus sounds rather like 'having your cake and eating
it'.
In Kangaroo (1923) Lawrence's writer hero, Richard Somers, newly arrived in
Australia, flirts with the two great political 'Mannerbiinde' of the 1920s - the
extreme right and the extreme left - and representatives of these groups flirt
unashamedly with him, offering their undying love if he will only pledge
himself to them. What attracts Somers to both groups — and indeed what
ultimately repels him from them — has nothing to do with their ostensible
politics but rather with his desire - and his fear and suspicion of his desire - for
the company of men, for 'a new bond between men'.18 While the left offers the
homoerotic brotherhood of equal comrades, the leader of the proto-Fascist
'Diggers', the eponymous Kangaroo, offers a homoerotic patriarchal constella-
tion: 'Man again needs a father', says Kangaroo, 'not a friend or a brother
sufferer, a suffering Saviour. Man needs a quiet, gentle father who uses his
authority in the name of living life, and who is absolutely stern against anti-
life' (pp. 110—11). One wonders to what extent the appeal of actual Fascism in
the Twenties and Thirties was derived from this constellation of desire for a
'new bond between men', for brotherhood and for a father figure.
Strange to say, perhaps, but a vaguely homoerotic paternal—filial bond
between two men who are not blood-related is also the subject of Joyce's
Ulysses, mentioned above in connection with the 'manly woman, womanly
man' theme. The plot of the novel concerns the wanderings around Dublin and
eventual meeting and 'bonding' of two men, Leopold Bloom, who is in search
of a son, and Stephen Dedalus, who is in search of a worthy father. One could
argue that it is their 'marriage' (the consummation of which is symbolized by
the question and answer 'intercourse' of the penultimate episode during which
the two men urinate under the stars in the dark of Bloom's garden, 'their sides
contiguous, their organs of micturition reciprocally rendered invisible by
manual circumposition')19 which is celebrated by Molly in the final episode of
Ulysses, that great ode to limitless love and joy.
Using Walter Ong's distinction between a 'materna lingua' (mother tongue)
and a 'patrius sermo' (father speech), Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar claim
that Joyce's 'revolution of the word', his style of 'densest concentration, hard',
'with its proliferation of puns and parodies':
transforms what Helene Cixous calls 'the old single-grooved mother-
tongue' into what we are calling a patrius sermo only comprehensible by
those who, like Merlin and like Joyce himself, can translate what has been
 After patriarchy 219

'scribbled, crost and crammed' on the margins of literature into a spell of

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

From a 'fatherless society' to the 'Mannerbund': Federn, Bliiher

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

patriarchal social order) is however: 'die Kongruenz der Familie mit dem
gestiirzten, patriarchalisch gebauten Staate und ihre Inkongruenz mit einer
Bruderschaftsorganisation' (the congruity between the family and the over-
thrown, patriarchally structured state and the incongruity between it and an
organization of brotherhood) (p. 17). After referring to Freud's myth of the
primal horde in Totem und Tabu Federn expresses rather prophetically the fear
that the revolution will ultimately lead to reaction as those who have usurped
one father figure will be inclined to wait around for the appearance of another
father figure (p. 28). This was exactly the tendency Siegfried Kracauer
recognized in many of the films of the Weimar Republic.24
It is perhaps remarkable how Federn - and of course he is not alone in this —
sees the whole dilemma as a choice facing men between a 'patriarchalische
Gesellschaftsordnung' and a 'Bruderschaftsorganisation'. Women are left out of
the equation altogether: the aim of the revolution is to replace patriarchy with
'fraternite', the rule of brothers.
In his speech on the subject of 'Familie und Mannerbund' (April 1918), Hans
Bliiher attempted to summarize the message of his Die Rolle der Erotik in der
mannlichen Gesellschaft (The role of eroticism in male society) (1915), a message
which programmatically excluded women from the political realm. Bliiher's
argument was that while the family depended on 'mann-weiblicher Eros'
(male—female Eros), male society depended on the effects of 'mann-mannlicher
Eros' (male-male Eros) which was expressed in Mannerbunde.25 Bliiher refers
back here to Heinrich Schurtz, whose Altersklassen und Mannerbunde (1902)
broached the subject and supplied the term of the Mannerbund (male bond/
alliance/association), which some national socialist ideologues later enthusias-
tically took up.26 Bliiher's emphasis on and affirmation of the 'Rolle der Erotik',
and specifically of 'mann-mannliche Erotik' in male society did not go
uncontested — but it was also not so far from Freud's less programmatic ideas
of the role of homosexual libido in society (in Zur Einfiihrung des Narziflmus
(1914) and Massenpsychologie und Ichanalyse (1921), for example).
The family, according to Bliiher, is the area of responsibility of woman who
is, by nature, not a political animal but is rather associated with the non-
committal social interaction of the herd (p. 12). Man's nature, on the other
hand, inclines him to the enduring bonds of the Mannerbund, which is closely
allied to the basic principles of the political state, 'Herrschaft und Macht' (rule
(mastery) and power):
He who wishes to replace mastery and power by administration is
ignorant of the essence of human politics and is using, without being
aware of the fact, a herd theory. ... The times will be all the flatter and
drier the more alliances for a particular purpose rule: joint-stock
 After patriarchy 221

companies, syndicates and bureaucracy; all the more thoughtless the

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

A nation of men, once again: Mann, Hofmannsthal, Benn

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

'Wird auch aus diesem Weltfest des Todes, auch aus der schlimmen
Fieberbrunst, die rings den Abendhimmel entzundet, einmal die Liebe steigen?'
(Will love one day rise also from this world festival of death, also from the
awful fever heat that lights up the evening sky all around?)33 Molly Bloom's
'Yes' to life and love at the end of Joyce's Ulysses is rather more appealing.
If Mann suggested that Eros, and specifically that form of Eros which binds
men to each other as brothers and comrades, might form the basis of a
Republic, Hofmannsthal invoked literature or 'Schrifttum' as the force that
binds a rather more conservative notion of the nation (of men) together. The
argument of his speech given in the University of Munich in January 1927
entitled 'Das Schrifttum als geistiger Raum der Nation' (Writing as the spiritual
space of the nation) might be compared to T. S. Eliot's attempt to forge an
identity, to save his masculine sense of power and control and to 'inaugurate a
new patrilinguistic epoch' by 'shoring up' 'fragments' of literature against his
ruin. Here Hofmannsthal spoke of turning back the clock to pre-Enlightenment,
pre-Revolutionary and even to pre-sixteenth-century times and ominously
referred to a conservative revolution on a scale hitherto unknown in European
history.34
In 1934 Gottfried Benn looked back in nostalgia to an even earlier age in his
essay 'Dorische Welt: eine Untersuchung tiber die Beziehung von Kunst und
Macht' (Doric world: an examination of the relation between art and power).
Here he wrote in praise of a civilization which had arisen out of matriarchal,
feminine times to enthrone men as lords of creation, enshrine masculine values
and worship the male body. With lyrical enthusiasm Benn wrote:
Doric is every kind of anti-feminism. Doric is the man who locks up the
supplies in the house and forbids women from watching the games: she
who crosses the Alpheios will be thrown from the cliff. Doric is the love
of boys, so that the hero stays with the man, the love of the war
campaigns, such couples stood and fell [together] as a [solid] rampart.
This was erotic mysticism ... ,35
Of course the love of boys was never officially introduced as one of the
institutions of Hitler's state.
Fascism was however the supreme attempt to turn back the clock after the
end of patriarchy and to bond men to each other in some sort of extremely
homosocial but equally extremely homophobic Mannerbund by means of mass
ritual, vague appeals to vague homoerotic desires and some vague
mythological past, and the drawing of a clear boundary between this select
male community and the rest, who had simply to be exterminated. If this was
really all to some extent the result of well and truly perversely sublimated
'homosexual libido', together with an intense misogyny and anti-feminism
 After patriarchy 223

intensified by the decline of the patriarchy and dissolution in reality of its

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

A more complex Oedipus; a less Fascist man?

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

Towards an acceptance of ambivalence and a revival of an ars erotica

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

Notes

1. Elisabeth Badinter, XY de I'identite masculine (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1992);

Mark Simpson, Male Impersonators (London, New York: Cassell, 1994).
2. Quoted by Jane Moore, 'Promises, promises: the fictional philosophy in
 After patriarchy 225

Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in The Feminist

Reader, ed. Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1989), p. 158.
3. See Johann Jakob Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht: eine Untersuchung uber die
Gynokratie der alien Well nach ihrer religiosen und rechtlichen Natur, 2 vols
(Basel: Benno Schwabe & Co., 1948), Vol. 1, pp. 44-8 and Vol. 2, pp. 591-
606. See also Jacques Le Rider, Modernise viennoise et crises de I'identite
(Paris: PUF, 1990), pp. 126-9.
4. See the extract from Friedrich Engels' Der Ursprung der Familie, des
Privateigentums und der Staat in Das Mutterrecht von Johann Jakob Bachofen
in der Diskussion, ed. Hans-Jurgen Heinrichs, (Frankfurt/M.: Qumran,
1987), pp. 331-42.
5. See Jennifer E. Michaels, Anarchy and Eros: Otto Gross (Bern, Frankfurt/M.,
New York: Peter Lang, 1983); Le Rider, Modernite viennoise, pp. 126-9. On
Gross and the 'Nietzscheism' of the avant-garde see Steven E. Aschheim,
The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany: 1890—1990 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1992), pp. 57-9.
6. Otto Gross, 'Zur Uberwindung der kulturellen Krise', Die Aktion, 2 April
1913, p. 384.
7. Otto Gross, 'Zur Uberwindung der kulturellen Krise', p. 387.
8. Otto Gross, 'Anmerkungen zu einer neuen Ethik', Die Aktion, 1913, p.
1142.
9. Michaels, Anarchy and Eros, p. 164.
10. Cited by Michaels, p. 52, from Otto Gross, Drei Aufsatze uber den inneren
Konflikt.
11. 'Wir erleben heute die ungeheuerste Revolution auf alien Gebieten des
menschlichen Organisierens. Nicht nur die kapitalistische Wirtschaft,
sondern auch alle Wahrheit, Ordnung, Recht, Moral, auch alles Mannliche
und Weibliche ist in Auflosung.' Raoul Hausmann, 'Zur Weltrevolution', in
Hausmann, Texte bis 1933, Vol. 1, Bilanz der Feierlichkeit, ed. Michael Erlhoff
(Munich: Edition Text und Kritik, 1982), p. 50.
12. Mathilde Vaerting, Neubegriindung der Psychologie von Mann und Weib, Vol.
1: Die weibliche Eigenart im Ma'nnerstaat und die mannliche Eigenart im
Frauenstaat (Berlin: Frauenselbstverlag, 1975), p. 134.
13. 'Die alten patriarchalischen Vorstellungen gehen verloren; sie gehoren einer
mehr landlich gebundenen, ortlich beschrankten Periode an. Das mannliche
Uberlegenheitsgefuhl wird erschiittert. ... Aber vornehmlich tragt zu dieser
Erschutterung bei das gleichmaSige Arbeiten beider Geschlechter; es gibt bei
der Arbeit der neuen Art kaum noch Geschlechter. ... Die Geschlechter
ahneln sich an.' Alfred Doblin, 'Der Geist des naturalistischen Zeitalters', Die
Neue Rundschau, December 1924, p. 1288.
226 Cone/:usion

14. George Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, in Wisenthal, Shaw and
Ibsen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), p. 130.
15. Quoted by Declan Kiberd, Men and Feminism in Modern Literature
(London: Macmillan, 1985), p. 61.
16. Quoted by Kiberd, Men and Feminism, p. 32.
17. D. H. Lawrence, 'Matriarchy', Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished and Other
Prose Works lay D. H. Lawrence, ed. Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore
(London: Heinemann, 1968), pp. 549-52, p. 552.
18. D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo (London: Heinemann, 1955), p. 199.
19. James Joyce, Ulysses (London: Bodley Head, 1967), p. 825.
20. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, 'Sexual linguistics: gender, language,
sexuality', The Feminist Reader, ed. Belsey and Moore, pp. 81-99, p. 94.
21. Gilbert and Gubar, 'Sexual linguistics', p. 94.
22. See Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), pp.
380—94, for a discussion of the theme of 'Fathers and Sons' in Irish
modernist literature.
23. Paul Federn, 'Zur Psychologic der Revolution: die vaterlose Gesellschaft',
Der Aufstieg, 12/13 (1919): 7.
24. See Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler (Princeton University Press,
1947), Ch. 10, 'From rebellion to submission'.
25. Hans Bliiher, Familie und Mannerbund (Leipzig: Der neue Geist, 1918), p.
11.
26. See Jiirgen Reulecke, 'Das Jahr 1902 und die Urspriinge der Mannerbund-
Ideologie in Deutschland', Mdnnerbande, Mdnnerbunde, ed. G. Volger and
K. von Welck, (Cologne: Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum, 1990), Vol. 1, pp.
3-10.
27. 'Wer Herrschaft und Macht durch Verwaltung ersetzen will, verkennt das
Wesen des menschlichen Staatstumes und benutzt, ohne es zu wissen, eine
Herdentheorie. ... Eine Zeit ist um so flacher und trockener, je mehr die
Zweckverbande herrschen: die Aktiengesellschaft, die Syndikate und die
Biirokratie; umso leichtfertiger, je mehr sie die Herrschaft der Frau duldet,
umso tiefgriindiger und starker, je mehr die Herrschaft in den Handen des
Mannerbundes und des Konigtums liegt. ... Die Frage bleibe offen, ob die
vorgetragenen Gedanken konservativ sind oder revolutionar, wahrschein-
lich sind sie beides.' Bliiher, Familie und Mannerbund, p. 36.
28. See Thomas Mann's letter to Carl Maria Weber of 4 July 1920, Thomas
Mann, Briefe: 1889-1936, (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1961), pp. 176-80.
29. Thomas Mann, 'Von deutscher Republik', Gesammelte Werke, Vol. XI;
Reden und Aufsdtze 3 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1960), p. 847.
30. See Hans WiSkirchen, 'Republikanischer Eros', ed. Gerhart Harle,
'Heimsuchung und sufies Gift': Erotik und Poetik bei Thomas Mann
 After patriarchy 227

(Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1992), pp. 17-40. See also Widdig, Mannerbiinde

und Massen (Opladen: West deutscher Verlag, 1992) pp. 55-72.
31. 'in der das allgiiltig geglaubte Gesetz der Geschlechtspolaritat sich als
ausgeschaltet, als hinfallig erweist und in der wir Gleiches mit Gleichem,
reifere Mannlichkeit mit aufschauender Jugend ... oder junge Mannlichkeit
mit ihrem Ebenbilde zu leidenschaftlicher Gemeinschaft verbunden sehen.'
Thomas Mann, 'Von deutscher Republik', p. 847.
32. Quoted by Stefan Breuer, Anatomie der konservativen Revolution (Darm-
stadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993), p. 32.
33. Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg (Stockholm: Fischer, 1943), Vol. 2, p. 572.
34. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 'Das Schrifttum als geistiger Raum der Nation',
Prosa IV, Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben, ed. Herbert Steiner
(Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1955), pp. 390-413, pp. 412-13.
35. 'Dorisch ist jede Art von Antifeminismus. Dorisch ist der Mann, der die
Vorrate im Haus verschliefit und den Frauen verbietet, den Wettspielen
zuzuschauen: welche den Alpheios iiberschreitet, wird vom Felsen
gestiirzt. Dorisch ist die Knabenliebe, damit der Held beim Mann bleibt,
die Liebe der Kriegsziige, solche Paare standen wie ein Wall und fielen. Es
war erotische Mystik ...' Gottfried Benn, 'Dorische Welt: eine
Untersuchung uber die Beziehung von Kunst und Macht', Samtliche
Werke, Vol. IV, Prosa 2, ed. Gerhard Schuster (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta,
1989), pp. 124-53, p. 137.
36. Robert Musil, 'Der bedrohte Odipus', Gesammelte Werke, ed. Adolf Frise,
Vol. 2, pp. 528-30, p. 530.
37. This was mentioned in connection with Robert Walser in Chapter 10
above.
 Index
Allen, Christine Garside 29, 31
Anderson, Mark 198
Andreas-Salome, Lou 32, 33, 37
anti-Semitism 65, 73, 126-7, 131
Aschheim, Steven 30, 37, 167
Bachofen, J. J. 13, 29, 87, 213
Baden-Powell, Robert 124
Badinter, Elisabeth 6, 89, 91, 92, 95,
112, 170, 212, 224
Barres, Maurice 92, 170
Baudelaire, Charles 188
Bauman, Zygmunt 43, 76, 111, 127,
128-9
Beardsley, Aubrey 66
Bebenburg, Karg von 72
Beckett, Samuel 172, 203, 208, 212
Benjamin, Walter 157, 206
Benkert, Karoly 13
Benn, Gottfried 222, 223
bisexuality 13, 32, 38, 86, 89-90, 152,
214
Bloch, Ernst 206
Bliiher, Hans 113-14, 220-1
Boer War 124
Bohm, Karl Werner 153
Bolz, Norbert 206
Bonheur, Rosa 92
Boone, Joseph 134
Bosanquet, Bernard 111
Bourdieu, Pierre 171
Brecht, Bertolt 188, 200-3, 204
Breuer, Stefan 205-7
Broch, Hermann 72—3
Brod, Max 198
Burroughs, Edgar Rice 112, 182
Burroughs, William 6, 182
Burton, Sir Richard 134
camp 38, 48
Carpenter, Edward 22
Childers, Erskine 126
Cixous, Héléne 218
Conrad, Joseph 120-5, 137-8, 142,
143, 148
conservative revolution see konservative
Revolution
Coolidge, Calvin 111
cowboys 112, 182
Craft, Christopher 133
D'Agoult, Marie 92
D'Aurevilly, Barbey 92
Dadaists 167, 215
Darwin, Charles 10, 11, 51
social Darwinism 10, 11, 111, 204
Davenport-Hines, Richard 14, 67, 68,
131
deconstruction 8, 213
Defoe, Daniel 182
degeneration 10-12, 14, 17-18, 59,
61-8, 71, 73, 123, 127-8, 149
degenerate art 61—3, 65—8
sexuality 13-14, 130
see also Nordau, Max
Delavenay, Emile 175, 179
 Index 229

Derrick, Jacques 30, 31, 33, 59, 128 Fritz, Horst 92

Dietering, Heinrich 150 Fuchs, Eduard 94
Doblin, Alfred 203, 216 Futurist manifesto 167
Dostoevsky, Fyodor 3, 58, 198
Douglas, Lord Alfred 61 Galton, Sir Francis 14, 61, 112
Douglas, Mary 129 Gast, Peter 95
Dreyfus affair 68 George, Stefan 78, 154
Du Maurier, Guy 126 Gibbons, Tom 10, 12, 14, 59, 62, 66
dualism 3-8, 6-11, 17-19, 27-31, 43, Gide, André 50
48, 51-2, 57, 86-102, 128, 135, Gilbert, Sandra M. 218-19
144, 147 Gillespie, Michael Patrick 48
narcissism and 7, 49-50, 51-2 Girard, Réné 58-9
Girouard, Mark 112
Ehrenberg, Paul 151 Gissing, George 66, 92—3
Ehrenstein, Albert 168 Gloeden, Wilhelm von 35
Eliot, T. S. 168, 169, 206, 219, 222 Goethe, J. W. 5, 169
Ellis, Havelock 61, 123 Goltz, General Colmar von der 111
Ellman, Richard 42, 44, 50, 57 Gough, James 93
Engels, Friedrich 12, 213 Grautoff, Otto 150
eugenic reform 14 Gross, Otto 214-15
see also Galton, Sir Francis Gubar, Susan 218-19
Eulenburg, Prinz Philipp zu 115-16,
124 Häckel, Ernst 111
Expressionists 167-8, 214 Haggard, Sir (Henry) Rider 67
Hardy, Thomas 67
Fascism 65, 114-15, 157, 179-80, 181, Hauptmann, Gerhart 94
207, 218, 222, 223 Hausmann, Raoul 215
Federn, Paul 219-20 Hawkins, Sir Anthony Hope 67
female symbols of the nation 93—4 Hegel, G. W. F. 171
femininity 7, 11, 18, 20, 25-32, 38, 42, Heidegger, Martin 206
48, 51, 73, 75, 77, 86-102, 112, Henley, W. E. 115, 122, 124
149, 151, 154, 160, 171, 182, 192, Hennigan, Alison 46
207, 215 Hentschl, Willibald 111
First World War 37, 72, 157-60, 199 heredity 13-14, 17
enthusiasm for 165-72, 204, 205-6 Herzl, Theodor 65
as ersatz father figure 170, 205—6 Heym, Georg 167
Fischer, J. M. 62, 65 Himmler, Heinrich 114, 116
Ford, Ford Madox 90 Hitler, Adolf 65, 90
Foucault, Michel 13, 24, 68, 115, 224 Hitler Youth 114
Frazer, J. G. 59, 169 Hobsbawm, Eric 11
Freud, Sigmund 7, 20, 51, 57, 146, Hoddis, Jakob von 168
213-14, 219-20 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 3
Narcissism and the nation 109—10 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 71-85,
Oedipus complex, complete 86-7, 91, 116, 155-8, 159, 168,
version 192—3, 223 222
Uncanny, the 75-6, 153 anti-Semitism 73-4
Freyer, Hans 207 army volunteer 72-4
Friedrich Wilhelm III, King of Prussia 94 art as cure for modernity 155—6
230
death as cure for decadent
narcissism 71-4, 82
homosexual panic 78
language crisis 79—82
orientalism 78-9
Strauss, Strindberg and women 91
war writings and conservatism 116,
157-9
Wilde trials 74, 77
hom(m)osexualité see Irigaray, Luce
homophobia 116, 154, 204
homosexual panic 24, 44, 78, 197
homosexuality
geography of 134-5, 148
invention of 13—14
Huelsenbeck, Richard 167
Huysmans, J. K. 47, 62, 74, 98, 125
Huyssen, Andreas 88
Ibsen, Henrik 62, 97
invasion literature 126
Irigaray, Luce: hom(m)osexualité 6, 116,
188, 201-2, 205, 206, 224
Jameson, Frederic 8
Johnson, Barbara 8
Joyce, James 217, 218-19, 221, 222
Jünger, Ernst 170, 191, 205-6, 221
Kafka, Franz 188, 193-9, 204, 206, 215
Kerouac, Jack 182
Kiberd, Declan 43, 91, 98
Kinsey, Alfred 119 n.30
Köhler, Joachim 35-6, 95
konservative Revolution 206—7, 221, 222 Moebius, Paul Julius 90
Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve see Sedgwick,
Eve Kosofsky
Kracauer, Siegfried 157, 220
Krafft-Ebing, Richard von 13, 33, 38
Kraus, Karl 71
Kurzke, Hermann 151
Labouchère Amendment 24
Lawrence, D. H, 36, 175-81, 184, 185,
204, 207, 214, 217-18
Le Bon, Gustave 87-8
Le Conte, Joseph 88
Le Queux, William 126
Index
Le Rider, Jacques 75, 77, 81
Leed, E. J. 166, 167, 168, 169, 178, 181,
186, 199, 205
Lombroso, Cesare 9—10, 14, 61, 66,
123, 129, 149
London, Jack 181-6, 200, 202, 204
Lugosi, Bela 133
Luise, Queen of Prussia 94
Lukàcs, Georg 206
Lyotard, J.-F. 123
Mach, Ernst 81, 146
male
bonding 14, 113-16, 136-7 (see also
Irigaray; Männerbund)
fantasies of giving birth 3—5
nudity 34-6, 94, 113, 178-9
rites of initiation 5-6, 118-19 n.30
Mann, Thomas 114, 148-54, 159, 166,
168, 169, 170, 221-2
First World War 159-60
homosexuality 151-4
Tonio Kröger and Death in
Venice 148-54
Wilde trials 150
Männerbund 113-16, 137, 152, 180,
181, 218, 220-3
Martins, Armin 151
matriarchy 13, 51, 213-18
see also Bachofen, J. J.
Maudsley, Henry 12
Michelangelo 113
misogyny 7, 29, 86-102, 154, 160, 182,
207
Moreau, Gustave 98—9
Mosse, George L. 90, 93-4, 113-14,
116
Musil, Robert
Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings
Törleß 141-8
First World War 159
Oedipus complex 223
narcissism, national 52, 57, 109—16
see also dualism; male bonding;
patriarchy
Navy Leagues, British and German 124
 Index 231

New Woman, the 51, 91-2, 97-8, 132 Rank, Otto 7, 49-50, 51
Nietzsche, Friedrich 3, 20, 27-38, 47, Rée, Paul 32
51, 52, 58, 62, 64, 65, 80, 87, 91, Reich, Wilhelm 214
95-7, 112, 123, 143, 167, 169, Reinhardt, Max 99
172, 184, 198, 199, 213, 214 Reulecke, Jürgen 114
beauty of men 34-6 Rhodes, Cecil 124
Dionysus and Apollo 28—9, 33, Richthofen, Frieda von 214
153-4, 213 Roosevelt, Theodore 112, 182
Doppelgänger 27—8 Rosebery, Lord A. P. P. 67
First World War as Euro-Nietschean Ross, Robert 44
War 37 Rudolph, Hermann 80—1
legacy 37-8
male mother 31-2 SA (Sturmabteilung) 114
sadomasochism 32, 36 sadomasochism 20—2, 32—4, 36—8, 52,
truth as woman 29—31 146, 168, 170-2, 175-208
Wagner and femininity 95—7 Sartre, J.-P. 129, 171, 188, 195, 198
Nisbet, J. F. 61 scapegoats 5 7-60
Nordau, Max 59, 61-8, 71, 123, 129, Scheller, Walter 166
149 Schmidt-Hellerau, Cordelia 191—3
Schmitt, Carl 206
Olympic Games 112 Schnitzler, Arthur 86
see also sport Schopenhauer, Arthur 123
Ong, Walter 218 Schurtz, Heinrich 220
orientalism 78-9, 135 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 44, 78
Orwell, George 185 see also homosexual panic
Oxford Union 91 Seltzer, Mark 182
Shakespeare, William 151
Parry, Benita 125 Shaw, G. B. 31, 57, 97-8, 217, 223,
Pater, Walter 113 Shelley, Mary 3, 5, 6, 49
patriarchy 212—4 Showalter, Elaine 4, 9, 22, 23, 59, 66,
love of men for men 5—6, 14, 132, 136
24-5 Simpson, Mark 212, 224
see also Irigaray; male bonding; socialism 11, 123
Manmrbund Socrates 4, 31
male narcissism and 4—5 Sontag, Susan 48, 131
Pick, Daniel 9-10, 87 Spencer, Herbert 10
Platen, August von 113 see also survival of the fittest
Plenge, Johann 114 sport 112, 119 n.30, 181, 200
Plimsoll, Samuel 121 SS (Schutzstaffet) 114
Podmore, Frank 121 Stark, Karl 62
political existentialism 206 Stead, W. T. 63, 66
postmodernism 8 Stevenson, R. L. 3-6, 17-26, 47, 51, 52,
Princip, Gavrilo 37 144
Pringsheim, Katia 151 Stoker, Bram (Dracula] 120, 125-38, 142
Prometheus 5 Strauss, Richard 91, 99
Strindberg, August 91, 96, 98
Queensberry, Marquess of 61, 65, 77 survival of the fittest 10, 12, 181, 183,
Quilter, Harry 66, 67 204, 224
232 Index

syphilis 129-31 Wharton, Edith 165

White, Arnold 134
Tarzan 112, 182 Whitman, Walt 30, 62, 134, 152
Theweleit, Klaus 114, 184, 191 Wilde, Oscar 3, 4, 5, 6, 30, 42-9, 57,
Tiefenbrunn, Ruth 197 61-8, 71, 74, 116, 150
Tirpitz, Alfred von 123-4 Salome 99-101
Tuchman, Barbara 99 trials 61-8, 115, 123, 133
Twain, Mark 182 Hofmannsthal 77-8
Twitchell, James 130 Mann 150
Nordau 61-8
Uncanny, the 75-7, 153 Wilhelm II 115-16
Winckelmann, J. J. 113
Vaerting, Mathilde 215-16 Winterson, Jeanette 4
Veber, Jean 94 Wister, Owen 112
Volke, Werner 75, 80 Wollstonecraft, Mary 213
Woolf, Virginia 217
Wagner, Richard 62, 149 Wynter, Andrew 9
Nietzsche and femininity 95—7
Walser, Robert 188-93,198,204 Yeats, W. B. 115, 168, 208
Webb, Beatrice 111 Young Bosnia Movement 37
Weber, Carl Maria 154
Weber, Eugene 74, 77-8 Zanger, Jules 126
Weber, Max 205 Zeeland, Steven 191
Wedekind, Frank 88 Zola, Emile 62, 88, 112
Weininger, Otto 73-4, 89-90, 91, 96 Zuckmayer, Carl 166
Wells, H. G. 111 Zweig, Stefan 165-6