Shakespeare's Perfume. Richard Halpern

      Introduction

      Sodomy and the sublime: once the pleasures of alliteration have faded, it is not at all clear what might connect the two. Sodomy is primarily a legal and theological category whose heyday was the medieval and early modern periods. The sublime is an aesthetic category that originated with Longinus but flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. So the two terms inhabit not only different and apparently unrelated discourses but also distant historical and cultural moments. The temporal problem is perhaps the less serious of the two, since the category of the sublime often seems to be applied after the fact. Longinus detects it in Homer, who surely lacked any inkling of the concept; Edmund Burke finds it in Milton, who at least had read Longinus, as well as in Shakespeare and Spenser, who had not. So if the conjoining of sodomy and sublimity seems anachronistic, at least anachronism is built into one of the two terms. Still, other problems remain. Sodomy has generally denoted a class of nonprocreative sexual activities (usually but not always same-sex activities) for which one might be denounced, prosecuted, or executed. Sublimity is a class of aesthetic phenomena associated variously with grandeur, exaltation, the experience of fear or pain, and the limits of representation. Both categories have been so diversely construed that they are fuzzy around the edges, but it isn’t intuitively obvious how they might overlap, either logically or culturally. Sodomy doesn’t engross much space in treatises on aesthetics, and aesthetic issues, conversely, don’t much preoccupy the jurists and theologians who define sodomitical acts.

      Things seem less dire if we shift categories a bit and speak of sexuality and aesthetics, for here we find a rich tradition, from Plato to Freud, connecting erotic (often homoerotic) desire and artistic creation or transcendent experience. Freud’s concept of sublimation, in which sexual drives are diverted to nonsexual (often artistic) aims, will provide a kind of guiding thread for much of this study, although I take it as a culminating point of the tradition I wish to explore rather than a theoretical postulate, and I will also examine certain themes that run distinctly against the Freudian grain. The very word sublimation suggests a connection with the sublime which I will develop in every chapter of this book, not only those on Freud and Lacan. Sublimation as a psychoanalytic concept draws on older alchemical traditions of purification, separation, and (surprisingly) defeminization, which will also come into play.

      I turn to Oscar Wilde, however, to provide a first set of connections as well as tensions between the sexual and aesthetic spheres. Wilde’s novella The Portrait of Mr. W.H. depicts the catastrophic results of a theory about Shakespeare’s sonnets that circulates in hothouse fashion among a coterie of young men. There is much swooning over the beauty of the sonnets and of the young man they depict, all of which serves to displace the desire that Wilde’s characters feel for one another. Lawrence Danson wryly notes that “for many of Wilde’s readers, both before and after the trials, this ‘rationalization of homosexual desire as aesthetic experience’ (in Elaine Showalter’s phrase) was a verbal fig-leaf bulging with phallic reality.”¹ Such a response was not wrongheaded; indeed, it was probably just what Wilde demanded of his readers. One might even argue that part of Wilde’s project in the Portrait is to push the “fig-leaf” model to the point of breakdown. At the same time, however, this strategy reveals certain difficulties with the model itself insofar as it reduces the aesthetic to a mere surface phenomenon covering the truth of forbidden sexual desire. For one thing, aesthetic experience could not substitute for sexuality at all if it did not already offer a sensual intensity that rivals (or at least evokes) that of its counterpart. Second, it is not at all clear that (homo)sexuality is the hidden “truth” of aesthetic experience for Wilde; it seems more accurate to say that for him aesthetic experience is both the “truth” and the origin of sexual desire. This, I will argue, is an idea that Wilde borrows from Shakespeare, and it turns Freudian sublimation on its head. It is to be found as well in a passage from St. Paul to which I shall soon turn. The aesthetic origins of sexuality is a recurrent motif in the tradition I trace in this book.

      But even if we accept the idea that aesthetic experience provided Wilde with a kind of fig-leaf for the love that dare not speak its name, his discursive situation has now been precisely reversed. On the one hand, openly addressing homoerotic themes when discussing Shakespeare’s Sonnets is now perfectly acceptable, indeed unavoidable—unless, that is, one happens to be Helen Vendler. I myself frequently enjoy the pleasurable frisson of springing sonnet 20 and its “master mistress” on unsuspecting groups of undergraduates. On the other hand, I would be rendered squirmingly uncomfortable were I told to teach a class on the beauty of Shakespeare’s sonnets. And I believe that I’m not alone in this. Thus if what was unspeakable for Wilde (let’s call it sodomy) is now perfectly speakable for us, yet what was once speakable for Wilde (let’s call it beauty) has now become somehow unspeakable—or at least less speakable—for us. This reversal of positions is the product of a complex history, but its possibility