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THE OSCHOLARS: Special Teleny issue
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Why Read Teleny?
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Aaron Ho
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There are, according to John Sutherland, 60,000
works by 7,000 writers published from 1837 to 1901. Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
emerges victorious in the canon war, making regular appearances on college
courses. Professors justify the novel’s reason d’être with its intricate
prose and its epitomical representation of the movement, Decadence. Why then
should we read Teleny when there
are 59,999 other contenders, among which there are Charles Dickens’, George
Eliot’s, and the Brontë sisters’ books? Has it any value? Will it change the
way we read or think of the Victorian period? Has it any desirable function
in our society today?
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These questions, Mary Poovey has also asked in an
attempt to recover women writers into the canon. She concludes that not all
obscure female authors are worth bringing into critical limelight since their
novels do not contribute to what we do not already know and serve only ‘to
test our critical tools’ and enable ‘us to be more confident about the
conclusions we reach about Jane Eyre
and Mary Barton’ (449-50). Both
Jill Campbell and Margaret Homans repudiate Poovey’s position; they stress on
the historical significance of even a third-rate writer and argue that there
is a difference between a pedagogical text in a classroom and a furthering of
research.
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Following Campbell and Homans, I want to examine Teleny for its historicity and its
stance in the pedagogical and research divide. Many articles on Teleny give an introduction of its
genesis and its authorship. Legend has it that Oscar Wilde left a sealed
manuscript at a bookshop to be picked up by a young man who, in turn, left it
for another man. This was done three more times. Charles Hirsch, the bookshop
keeper, could hardly resist opening the Pandora’s box and telling it in his
introduction to the French translation of 1934 edition of Teleny. The authenticity of this
apocryphal story is perhaps not as important as its literary history and
multivocality. Even though the manuscript is lost, the inconsistent quality
and style of writing indicate that there are several authors. The collective
effort in writing a male homosexual pornography is one of the earliest ‘moves
[to] athwart those ideologies that sought to ‘naturalize’ male
heterosexuality’ (Cohen 803). Furthermore, the multivocality of the novel—the
myriad authors and its narrative on hetero- and homo-sex—underscores its aim
for diversity.
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Without a doubt, Teleny
holds a pivotal position in literary history. But to claim everyone should read the novel because
of its historical significance is simplistic and naïve. Teleny’s literary history belongs merely to a specific group of
people, white Anglo-Saxon gay male. Compared to Poovey et al’s project of
recovering little known women writers, a history that involves at least half
of the Caucasian race, Teleny’s bid
for the canon seems relatively feeble. Since the criteria for canonical
books, or books even busy people should read, are literary excellence,
relevance to majority of the people in today’s society, and exemplarity of
its age, Teleny is hardly a major
competitor. The quality of its prose is uneven, sometimes lucid, sometimes
lurid. Although its narrative has a central love development between Teleny
and Des Grieux, many parts of the book digress into unoriginal descriptions
of heterosex, reminiscent of the anonymously written, My Secret Life (1888). Teleny’s
limited circulation—it was published thrice from 1893 to 1934 with a total of
only 700 copies—means that the novel did not reach into the consciousness of
the public, gay or straight, unlike, say for example, Dracula (1897). Its small circulation also signifies that later
gay tragedies evolve independently of Teleny;
it did not influence gay writings.
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The best reason for everyone to read Teleny is perhaps that it is an
exemplar of its times. The furtive passing of the manuscript and its limited
print reflect the repression that Victorian homosexuals had to suffer and the
secret lives they led. Des Grieux internalizes homophobia, making forays into
heterosexuality and delaying his love-making to Teleny. Des Grieux’s
internalization is also the writers’: the lovers have to separate and die
eventually. But surely we do not need to read Teleny to learn that Victorians abhorred differences; anyone with
a sense of history will know that. Besides, since there are many novels that
portrayed ‘Urnings’ (homosexuals) in the same period as Teleny (McRae 16), why should Teleny
be the novel that represents the Victorian homosexual?
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A second cause that Campbell and Homans bring up
against Poovey’s unwillingness to recover unknown women writers is the
difference between classroom and research material. Teleny isn’t a book to teach undergraduates because there is no
suitable course to place it in: competition is much too stiff among Victorian
novels and an introductory course on sexuality would hardly accommodate Teleny.
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Neither is Teleny
significant in research so far; a critique of two articles on Teleny will prove the point. Ed Cohen,
in ‘Writing Gone Wilde,’ argues that Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, ‘even in the absence of explicit
homosexual terminology or activity…can subvert the normative standards of
male same-sex behavior,’ continuing the work that Teleny does (803). In Cohen’s
13-page article, his main argument (‘by juxtaposing male same-sex passion
with a cultural concept of ‘manliness’ that seeks to exclude it, the novel
deconstructs those definitions of human nature that deny the homoerotic as
unnatural’ [804]) repeats in every paragraph in the two pages devoted to Teleny as he gives a summary and
history of the novel. Similarly, in Robert Gray and Christopher Keep’s
15-page ‘An Uninterrupted Current,’ two entire pages are given to the
conception of the novel. Analysis too is superficial. Both articles apply a
Foucauldian theory but neither questions the framework it uses. If they have
substituted another novel for their articles, it would not have made a
difference: the argument Cohen makes could have easily used another
anti-feminine novel with a gay theme; Gray and Keep make could easily be
applicable to any gay novels with multiple authors.
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Clearly, Teleny
does not tell us things we do not already know. What is most interesting
is its multiple authors. It has no place in a classroom. It is, however, a
good read for scholars who are interested in the period or genre.
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Works Cited
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Campbell, Jill. ‘A Response to Mary Poovey’s
‘Recovering Ellen Pickering.’’ The Yale
Journal of Criticism 13.2 (2000): 461–5.
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Cohen, Ed. ‘Writing Gone Wilde: Homoerotic Desire in
the Closet of Representation.’ PMLA
102.5 (1987): 801-13.
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Gray, Robert and Christopher Keep. ‘‘An
Uninterrupted Current’: Homoeroticism and Collaborative Authorship in Teleny.’ Literary Couplings. Ed. Marjorie Stone and Judith Thompson. USA:
U of Wisconsim P, 2006. 193-208.
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Homans, Margaret. ‘A Response to Mary Poovey’s
‘Recovering Ellen Pickering.’’ The Yale
Journal of Criticism 13.2 (2000): 453–60.
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McRae, John. ‘Introduction.’ Teleny. London: GMP, 1986.
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Poovey, Mary. ‘Recovering Ellen Pickering.’ The Yale Journal of Criticism 13.2
(2000): 437–52.
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Sutherland, John. The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction. USA: Stanford UP,
1989.
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