Philip Purchase: Philip Purchase is a graduate student in the Classics Department at the University of Southern California, and is particularly interested in questions of gender and self-definition in Latin love poetry.
Any work attempting an overview of a literary tradition or school is haunted by questions of exclusion and inclusion, while recent trends in literary criticism have focused attention on the political import of canon-making. So feminist and post-colonialist scholars have drawn attention to the excluded voices in our history books: those working in gay studies are no exception, demanding a re-instatement of gay presences in the way we write about our literary heritage. The difficulties inherent in the idea of a gay identity spanning times and cultures render the drawing of a gay canon both controversial and of great import, in terms of writers included (does it make any sense to ask whether Catullus was a gay poet and thus worthy of inclusion?) and in terms of the implied gayness of the readership. These gay readers are the focus of Gregory Woods' monumental HISTORY OF GAY LITERATURE. By investigating the history of gay readings, he by-passes objections to importing a western, bourgeois twentieth century gay consciousness into alien cultures, and identifies the rich tapestry of motifs and strategies inherent in works susceptible to what we might term gay canonization.
Woods, then, is constantly aware of the danger of constructing a gay tradition which relies on the gayness of authors: the gayness he is after lies in the dialectic between text and reader in the context of creating a gay canon: speaking of the gay reader, he writes “we represent, as it were, a vested interest, and the readings we perform are shaped accordingly.” In this way he goes in search of, in Roland Barthes' phrase, “l'intelligible de notre temps”. Barthes in general gets rather short shrift in this history, given the fact that his ideas of “jouissance” or pleasure in reading seem closely linked to his gay sexuality; nevertheless, we find that Woods is on the side of the common reader who “does this (i.e. finds what is intelligible for her time) all the time”. We therefore avoid fruitless arguments of the “Was Shakespeare homosexual?” type, rather focusing on the text and strategies of reading gay presence within that text. Of the three levels of gayness we might identify (in author, text and reader)the gayness of the author is not a necessary criterion for inclusion, although Woods certainly discusses the social realities encountered by the authors in his history: texts are seen to acquire meaning in the mutually defined relationship of gay reader and text. As Woods states: “it does not take an author whose homosexuality can be proved with . . . documentary evidence to provide us with an authentic gay literature.”
Who, then, is going to write this “authentic” history, and what concrete criteria of inclusion are to be employed? Clearly any project of this type involves some appropriation of group identity to the figure doing the choosing: Woods' readership is envisaged as largely gay with a broad community of concerns (probably a safe bet on both counts). However, any work which covers multi-cultural manifestations of male homo-eroticism from Homer to Tony Kushner can scarcely avoid some capriciousness in terms of chosen texts, especially when the writer displays the trenchancy of Woods. One of the most outstanding aspects of his work is the presence of writers we might never expect to see in such a history: so Woods excavates “queerness”, in terms of social and sexual exclusion, in Thomas Hardy's THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE, in the process re-invigorating our critical approaches to an already canonical text.
Also exemplary is the demonstration of homophobia in previous critics' readings, especially in the sensitive area of Shakespeare studies, where any questioning of the bard's inherent “manliness” has been taking as a slur on the masculinity of English letters in toto. Take, for instance, Woods' treatment of John Sutherland writing about THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY in IS HEATHCLIFF A MURDERER? Sutherland states: “Dorian Gray is, to play with the word, two kinds of fairy- the Faustian hero who sells his soul for youth, and the middle-aged, mutton dressed as lamb gay, who would sell his soul to look young again.” Clearly, unhelpful stereotypes about gay men are being played out here; however, as Woods acknowledges: “I am not clear that Sutherland is clearly wrong about the book, but the manner of his approach is prejudicial and near-sighted.” Which is perhaps to say that his comments could have benefited from a realization that the cult of youth and the fear of aging are scarcely limited to your average “fairy”.
The headings under which Woods examines gay literature are multi-faceted. Over the course of thirty-two chapters, organized in a broadly chronological fashion, we find groupings around individuals (so Shakespeare, Proust), periods (Greece, Rome, the European Renaissance), and genre (Fantastic Realism, Boyhood). This mixed approach bears ample fruit, although less reliance on chronologically grouped headings might have been even more effective in the generic discussions. Having said this, however, Woods shows great sensitivity towards the ongoing tropes of the gay tradition: so for example, the pastoral mode is followed across chapters from Theocritus and Vergil to Marlowe and on to Melville (in an excellent chapter on the American Renaissance).
Woods' introductory chapter, “The making of the Gay Tradition”, opens with a full disclosure of the wariness such a project necessarily entails: “If we are to speak of a continuous . . . “gay tradition” in literature- and every gay theorist warns us to be careful if we wish to do so- it would be a tradition of novels but mainly of verse.” This insistence on the importance of verse in gay literary history immediately historicizes and defamiliarizes Woods' account: after all, we are accustomed to think of novels (Edmund White, Andre Gide, Thomas Mann) and plays (Jean Genet, Tony Kushner, Joe Orton) as defining gay literature. All this points to the twofold value of constructing a gay literary history parallel to standard accounts. Not only is the gay community enriched by exposure to paradigms distant in time and space, but the creative horizons of gay writers are extended by such contact (one need only consider the productive presence of the Other in the guise of the Arab and the Gipsy in the work of Federico Garcia Lorca, for instance).
Woods is excellent in pointing out the importance of tradition-making in the self-definition of gay men historically: so he traces the relationship of academics like Benjamin Jowett and Walter Pater and artists like Oscar Wilde to Victorian constructions of Platonism and “Greek Love”, memorably excised by the censorious don in E. M. Forster's MAURICE. (The subject of aestheticism, homosexuality and Ancient Greece is dealt with in Linda Dowling's HELLENISM AND HOMOSEXUALITY IN VICTORIAN OXFORD, reviewed separately in the IGLR.) And of course this process of constructing the relationship to imagined pasts is still going on, as instantiated in Woods' history. The West's relationship to classical antiquity is particularly fascinating: Woods teases out contemporary re-readings of the classics. Writing of Christopher Marlowe's poetics, he states: “The body of his Leander is no blank sheet: it is fully inscribed with the text of (Ovid's) METAMORPHOSES.” Likewise, the growth of English pastoral, translating the norms of rocky Arcadia into an alien climate and culture: the love song for the beautiful Alexis in Vergil's second ECLOGUE is located as a constantly repeated presence in the cultural memory.
The treatment of Pastoral and Elegy in England strikes me as one of the most impressive chapters in the book, identifying a strain of mourning in English poetry over three centuries with deeply ingrained homo-erotic (or at least homo-social) overtones. So we find readings of Milton's LYCIDAS, Gray's ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD, Shelley's ADONAIS, and Eliot's THE WASTE LAND, again demonstrating Woods' ability to read (and construct) cogent strands of tradition. He states, somewhat provocatively: “it is arguable that gay literature has taken as its most insistent, solemn theme the relationship between love and death.” Of course, this statement takes on resonance from the AIDS Epidemic, a subject treated by Woods in a separate chapter towards the end of the book- he is right to point out that the equation of love and death in gay literature is scarcely a new phenomenon. Yet in the strategies for controlling grief poetically, in the double immortalization of dead friend and soon-to-die poet, “friendship” elegy is seen as “exert(ing) a much stronger influence on people's responses to the quotidian experience of death and mourning than one might ordinarily expect of ‘mere' poetry”. Of course, some readers might object to the inclusion of these works in a history of specifically gay literature. Yet Woods teases out the implications of reference to ancient pastoral, and highlights the erotic ambiguities of the poet's relation to the friend/beloved: “The gender of the loved one in this tradition is neither immaterial- as one modern, liberal argument would have it- nor always proof of mere friendship”. (One small point: in Milton's EPITAPHIUM DAMONIS, the line “Lambs, go home unfed; your shepherd does not have time for you now”, is a modification of the last line of Vergil's tenth ECLOGUE, not his second.)
Woods' chapters on Greece and Rome are useful introductions to the range of homo-erotic desire written about in the ancient world. He is particularly cogent in discussing the bi-valency of Plato's writing for later readers, with one camp finding an encomium of celibacy, another finding justification of same-sex love. He is quite right to insist on the centrality of Theocritus to later European literature, finding in the first IDYLL, where the death of Daphnis, in some way linked to the refusal of (heterosexual?) love, is lamented, “the pattern for centuries of European mourning” identified in the tradition of pastoral elegy above. A particularly intriguing suggestion occurs in the context of pederasty and the expectation on the part of the lover of unresponsiveness in the beloved: ”(this) partially accounts for the fact that so many modern cultures think of loving as a matter of yearning for the absent beloved.” I am not sure that I see how pederasty accounts for this view of desire, but Woods makes a good case for seeing pederasty through the lens of unconsummated longing which I would be more inclined to explain in terms of the global geometry of desire. Indeed, this geometry of desire is identified in the work of the Roman Elegiac poet Tibullus, where the lover of boys is particularly hard hit as his beloved reaches the age at which it is no longer appropriate for him to play the passive role in a sexual relationship.
If the writer of such a work betrays personal predilections in what subjects he treats, then it will be true also of a reviewer: as mentioned above, I was particularly struck by the cogency of Woods' chapter on Shakespeare, seeing in his writing a playing out of “the heavily policed boundary between friendship and sexual love”. He is particularly strong in identifying the dynamics of erotic desire in the comedies, which spills over out of the rigidly demarcated distinction between male and female, and he writes cogently on the concealed presence of gay characters within the drama: writing of Shylock, we find “the homosexual self that Antonio has come to identify symbolically as the Jew. It is the earliest portrait of the homophobic homosexual.” Turning to his treatment of the sonnets, I felt that he could have examined more fully the question of sincerity in poetic discourse. After all, we often find the argument that the homosexual love poems are merely literary exercises, while gay readers might be inclined to read them as protestations of love, so incorporating them into the gay canon. His discussion would benefit, though, from asking to what extent any protestation of love is in essence a literary exercise: we return again to Barthes, specifically the remarkable A LOVER'S DISCOURSE. This is to say that demonstration of sincerity in Shakespeare's writing of love missives to another man is both unimportant and meaningless: it does not matter whether the gay poems are any more or less literary exercises because all love poems are literary exercises. Similarly, Woods seems dangerously prone to extrapolating biographical reality in his discussion of Catullus, when he writes: “Catullus loved one man, Iuventius, with greater ardour than the feeling was returned.” I am not sure how he knows that.
In later periods, we find a detailed reading of the shadowy world of Gautier's MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN, in which gender uncertainty and homo-erotic desire are combined vertiginously. I would also recommend specific readings of Patrick White's apocalyptic, dyspeptic and visionary novel RIDERS IN THE CHARIOT, in which four marginalized characters become involved in an Australian passion-play, and Carson McCullers' REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE, an examination of the destructive power of repressed homo-erotic feelings. From the point of view of readings of earlier criticism, I found Woods' treatment of Leslie Fiedler's classic LOVE AND DEATH IN THE AMERICAN NOVEL particularly rewarding, locating Fiedler's reading of the inherent homo-eroticism of American literature as “an indication of what gay literary criticism might become , but, importantly, (it was) not itself gay literary criticism.” Although Fiedler reduces this strain of homo-eroticism to “puerile narcissism”, seeing it as an inability to come to terms with woman, his discussion has proved fruitful for more positive appreciations in later critics.
Every reader is sure to be disappointed by several approaches taken. I felt that Lorca merits more attention than he was given as an important creator of gay identity, through his poetry, drama and art. Also, Woods' discussion of Christopher Isherwood's A SINGLE MAN struck me as somewhat reductive: he complains that the “central character is as single-dimensional as he is single”, specifically because he is not contextualized by any gay friends. Well, is not the theme of isolation a worthy one for gay writers to tackle, given the possibilities of compounded isolation in urban existence for gay men unwilling to join the gay subculture? These reservations arise out of treatments of works I already appreciated: the most remarkable impact of reading THE HISTORY OF GAY LITERATURE was the expansion of works that could be considered gay. For this, and for the rigorous clarity of Woods interpretative scheme, Woods deserves wide praise.
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