Spurning teleology in Venus and Adonis

GLQ

Volumn 11, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 491-519

  Menon, Madhavi ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34247664135     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-11-4-491     Document Type: Article

References (59)

1. R. D. Heldenfels, "Finally, 'Sex and the City' Beginning Its Final Season," Beacon Journal, January 4, 2004, www.ohio.com/mld/ohio/ entertainment/7624947.htm;
2. Frazier Moore, "Carrie Ends Up with Big in 'Sex' Finale," Advocate, February 23, 2004, www.stamfordadvocate.com/entertainment/tv/ sns-ap-tv-sex-and-the-city-finale,0,5039826.story?coll = sns-ap-tv-headlines.
3. Moore, "Carrie Ends Up with Big."
4. This developmental curve has persisted despite the early assertion by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), about the "overlap" between regimes of sexual desire such that one model cannot "replace" an earlier one without being irretrievably marked by it (44), and the more recent nuancing of the notion of sexual and historical difference by David M. Halperin in his breathtaking book How to Do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
5. Lee Edelman posits and argues against the fixity of this definition of sexuality in Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994), 8.
6. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1 (Harmonds-worth: Penguin, 1981), 43; emphasis mine.
7. David M. Halperin, "Forgetting Foucault," in How to Do the History of Homosexuality, 22-23.
8. Inasmuch as it revolves around questions of historical and chronological difference, archaeology always runs the risk of being teleological. In Foucault's case, however, these kinds of difference are never posited as mutually exclusive or definitionally fixed. Foucault would probably not have any difficulty with the coexistence of the sodomite and the homosexual; in any case, for him the latter does not represent the distillation of pervious discourses of desire even as one discourse might, at any given point, overwhelm another. Halperin suggests that Foucault's "approach to the history of the present was also too searching, too experimental, and too open-ended to tolerate converting a heuristic analytic distinction into an ill-founded historical [or teleological] dogma, as his more forgetful epigones have not hesitated to do" ("Forgetting Foucault," 44).
9. Ibid., esp. 27.
10. "As almost always in The History of Sexuality," Halperin asserts, "Foucault is speaking about discursive and institutional practices, not about what people really did in bed or what they thought about it" ("Forgetting Foucault," 29).
11. Paul Morrison returns to this nexus between signification and homosexuality at the end of his essay "End Pleasure," GLQ 1 (1993): 53-78.
12. Speaking of the protagonist of Paul Monette's Halfway Home, Morrison analyzes the safe ending of that novel in these terms: "Our culture allows Tom and his kind to want only in accordance with a rigid binarism: choose between a sexuality that works toward its own effacement, the erotic pessimism that calls itself love, and a sexuality that issues in death, the erotic excess that is called perversion. Refuse the terms of the opposition and you are committed, willingly or not, to forcing what all the deaths have not yet occasioned: a crisis in signification" (74). The refusal of a historicist teleology in studies of Renaissance sexuality might well occasion just such a crisis where its acceptance currently allows for contained reinscription.
13. Halperin, "Forgetting Foucault," 93-94, 109.
14. Studies of Renaissance sexuality that tend toward the teleological include Mario DiGangi, The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997);
15. and Harriette Andreadis, Sappho in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). However, teleology for these studies is not a celebratory formula; the way in which the present has allegedly distilled and fixed the past is a matter of some sadness, and these works thus are political attempts to change the current status quo. As I argue below in relation to Catherine Belsey's essay "Love as Trompe-l'oeil: Taxonomies of Desire in Venus and Adonis," in Venus and Adonis: Critical Essays, ed. Philip C. Kolin (New York: Garland, 1997), 261-85, such attempts at change repeat, ironically, the terms by which the sexual status quo is maintained.
16. Halperin, "Forgetting Foucault," 32, 42.
17. Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 32, 354.
18. Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero, eds., Premodern Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1996), viii. In their introduction Fradenburg and Freccero make explicit the difficulties inherent in reading Foucault literally: "Alterity is too often used now to stabilize periods or epistemes. . . . the academic reception of Foucault has tended to emphasize the radical difference of one episteme from another, and to de-emphasize those aspects of Foucauldian thought engaged with multiple time-lines" (xx).
19. Annamarie Jagose, Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), xii.
20. Valerie Traub reads the Shakespearean sonnet sequence "for what it can tell us about the interarticulation of sequence and sexuality," noting that "the problem of narrative sequence and the problem of 'same-sex love' are often closely related" ("Sequence, Sexuality, and Shakespeare's Two Loves," in A Companion to Shakespeare's Works, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard, 4 vols. [Oxford: Blackwell, 2003], 4:280, 278).
21. Judith Roof poses "the question of how to break narrative and sexuality apart, entwined as they are (and we with them) like tragically doomed lovers whirling around Dante's third circle" (Come as You Are: Sexuality and Narrative [New York: Columbia University Press, 1996], xiv).
22. Jonathan Goldberg, "The History That Will Be," in Fradenburg and Freccero, Premodern Sexualities, 3-21.
23. The sense of a futurity that is, and should be recognized as, alien to the province of queerness is explored in Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
24. Jagose, Inconsequence, x.
25. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1989), s.v. "teleology."
26. Glenn Burgess, "The 'Historical Turn' and the Political Culture of Early Modern England: Towards a Postmodern History?" in Neo-historicisrn: Studies in Renaissance Literature, History, and Politics, ed. Robin Headlam Wells, Glenn Burgess, and Rowland Wymer (Woodbridge, UK: Brewer, 2000), 36.
27. See Jonathan Goldberg, ed., Queering the Renaissance (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994).
28. Sixteen editions of this poem were printed before 1640, and several of them allegedly found their way into bawdy houses.
29. The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 1798. All quotations from Shakespeare are taken from this edition.
30. The Riverside Shakespeare, 1799 and n.
31. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "success."
32. In several early sonnets, the young man is urged to reproduce his kind to stave off the end signified by death: "From fairest creatures we desire increase, / That thereby beauty's rose might never die" (1.1-2); "And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defense / Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence" (12.13-14); "Who will believe my verse in time to come / If it were fill'd with your most high deserts? / . . . But were some child of yours alive that time, / You should live twice, in it and in my rhyme" (17.1-2, 13-14).
33. Michael Warner, "Homo-narcissism; or, Heterosexuality," in Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism, ed. Joseph A. Boone and Michael Cadden (New York: Routledge, 1990), 194.
34. In certain early sonnets, the poet similarly chides the "fair youth" for not reproducing: "No love toward others in that bosom sits / That on himself such murd'rous shame commits" (9.13-14); "of thy beauty do I question make / That thou among the wastes of time must go, / Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake, / And die as fast as they see others grow, / And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defense / Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence" (12.9-14).
35. Lee Edelman, "The Mirror and the Tank," in Homographesis, 109.
36. Fradenburg and Freccero make a similar argument in the introduction to Premodern Sexualities: "In struggling against cultural demonizations of certain kinds of sameness, queer perspectives can usefully call into question the historiographical status of concepts of alterity and sameness" (xviii).
37. Several critics, regardless of their theoretical inclination, blame Adonis for spurning Venus's sexual advances. For Coppélia Kahn, this spurning is cause enough for his violent death (Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981], 44).
38. Maurice Evans blames Adonis for choosing "the sterile chase of the boar in preference to the kiss of Venus" (introduction to William Shakespeare, The Narrative Poems [London: Penguin, 1989], 14).
39. Heather Dubrow suggests that we see signs of Adonis's immaturity when "we begin to suspect subterranean motives that he cannot or will not face, such as the narcissism of which Venus accuses him" ("'Upon Misprision Growing': Venus and Adonis," in Kolin, Venus and Adonis, 240).
40. See also Richard Rambuss's magisterial reading of the poem, "What It Feels Like for a Boy: Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis," in Dutton and Howard, A Companion to Shakespeare's Works, 4:240-58.
41. Not that Adonis is uninvested in teleology. In fact, as Belsey makes clear ("Love as Trompe-l'oeil"), Adonis clearly outlines his belief in teleological growth: "'Fair queen,' quoth he, 'if any love you owe me, / Measure my strangeness with my unripe years; / Before I know myself, seek not to know me, / No fisher but the ungrown fry forbears; / The mellow plum doth fall, the green sticks fast, / Or being early pluck'd, is sour to taste'" (523-28). Even as he becomes a vehicle for teleology, however, his teleological yearnings are not articulated in response to Venus's desire; in the lines quoted here, he holds out firmly against the desire for consummation and sketches the poem's resistance to final endings in relation to desire.
42. Morrison suggests that "where the well-made narrative is, the pervert is not" ("End Pleasure," 63). Venus and Adonis complicates this assertion, since it is a complete and polished narrative about incompletion; its perversion lies equally in the narrative and sexual realms.
43. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. A. D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 10.697-98. All quotations from Ovid are taken from this edition.
44. In Love's Labor's Lost, for instance, Berowne slates: "The King he is hunting the deer: 1 am coursing myself. They have pitch'd a toil: I am toiling in a pitch - pitch that defiles - defile! a foul word" (4.3.1-3). In 1 Henry IV Falstaff, playing the king, rebukes Hal by saying, "There is a thing, Harry, which thou hast often heard of, and it is known to many in our land by the name of pitch. This pitch (as ancient writers do report) doth defile, so doth the company thou keepest" (2.4.410-14).
45. Jagose, Inconsequence, 2.
46. Celia R. Daileader, "Renaissance Gynosodomy, Aretino, and the Erotic," ELH 69 (2002): 323.
47. "Many things are obscene," Jean Baudrillard postulates, "because they have too much meaning, because they occupy too much space. They thus attain an exorbitant representation of the truth, that is to say the apogee of simulation" (Revenge of the Crystal: Selected Writings on the Modern Object and Its Destiny, 1968-1983 [London: Pluto, 1999], 187). Baudrillard's notion of obscenity, then, provides the very framework within which a scene can be made sense of. The obscene contains the excess that threatens to overwhelm the scene's ability to produce meaning but that simultaneously provides the conditions in which the scene can mean.
48. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Christopher Ricks (New York: Signet, 1968), 1.63.
49. Linda Williams, introduction to Porn Studies, ed. Linda Williams (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 3-4.
50. While I see a fixing of ideas as the defining attribute of "history," Halperin considers it the basis of "theory." Thus he suggests that Foucault in fact does not offer a theory of sexuality: "The History of Sexuality, volume I, . . . does not contain an original theory of sexuality. If anything, its theoretical originality lies in its refusal of existing theory and its consistent elaboration of a critical anti-theory. It offers a model demonstration of how to dismantle theories of sexuality, how to deprive them of their claims to legitimate authority. . . . As a theory of sexuality, however, The History of Sexuality, volume I, is unreadable. That may in fact be its greatest virtue" ("Forgetting Foucault," 45).
51. Morrison, "End Pleasure," 68.
52. After quoting Venus's acknowledgment of the sexual nature of Adonis's encounter with the boar - "And, nousling in his flank, the loving swine / Sheath'd unaware the tusk in his soft groin" (1115-16) - Rambuss suggests in "What It Feels Like for a Boy" that, "as rendered by Venus in such palpable, voluptuous detail, the coupling of the boar and the boy stands as one of the most graphically sexual figurations in Renaissance poetry of male/male penetration, of tusk in groin, of male body 'rooting' male body" (249). However, Rambuss never suggests that Venus and Adonis is a homoerotic poem in any easy sense. Rather, he argues that "Adonis's eschewal of Venus - the pivotal feature of Shakespeare's rendering of the story - points in the direction of another kind of love. . . . Adonis's desire - to the extent that it finds expression in the poem . . . - flows in only one direction: towards the boar" (251-52). The essay ends, then, not with an embrace of teleology but with an understanding of the rhetorical complications of desire: "What a boy like Adonis wants remains gestural, allegorical in Shakespeare's poem" (255). While making a compelling case for a nonheterosexual reading of the poem, Rambuss manages not to cast it in a teleological light, despite his hope of evoking a sexual climax for Adonis.
53. Ibid., 249-50.
54. Rambuss quotes Kahn, Mans Estate, 44, 21;
55. and Don Cameron Allen, "On Venus and Adonis" in Elizabethan and Jacobean Studies: Presented to Frank Percy Wilson in Honour of His Seventieth Birthday (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), 111.
56. Ellis Hanson, introduction to Out Takes: Essays on Queer Theory and Film, ed. Ellis Hanson (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 5.
57. Belsey, "Love as Trompe-l'oeil," 262-63.
58. Ibid., 265, 280.
59. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family; or, Critique of Critical Criticism: Against Bruno Bauer and Company (Moscow: Progress, 1956), 110.