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THE OSCHOLARS: Special Teleny issue
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A Dictionary of
19th-Century Pornography: Teleny,
Language, and Melancholy at the Fin de
Siècle
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Deborah Lutz
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Of all the single-subject
dictionaries of disappearing words and languages that should be
compiled—lexicons that seek to maintain a collection of terms that mean more
when kept together, like old photo albums whose individual pictures lose much
of their worth when the whole is broken up—an inventory of terms from
19th-century British pornography (or of any era or nationality) would have an
interesting oddity about it: words meant to describe intense bodily moments
pulled out of context and placed in a scholarly list. Like John Stilgoe’s Shallow Water Dictionary, which documents vanishing terms used to
describe particular types of waterways (themselves endangered), such a volume
would be filled primarily by words that more commonly mean something else
(for example, ‘to spend’ which in this dictionary would mean to have an
orgasm). Therefore, it’s not the words
themselves that are disappearing, but rather the definition, or the terms
steeped in their atmosphere. It’s no
surprise that 19th-century pornographic language is parasitic: that it comes
recycled from other milieus. The
language of pornography, at its purest, functions merely as a transparent
screen through which the reader feels erotic sensation. Opaque words, whose density stops the
reader to puzzle over their meaning (the rich language of poetry for instance),
drag down the speed pornography generally requires for its readers: the
reading has a direct goal that has everything to do with the body and little
to do with literary form and style. To
pull the terms out of their highly determined function turns them into
strange artifacts, no longer transparent and use-oriented but now things to be analyzed for their own
sake.
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Teleny or The Reverse of the Medal works as a good stopover on such a
collecting itinerary. This is not so
much because of its homosexuality (depictions of male-male sex and sodomy are
common in many classics of Victorian pornography, such as The Romance of Lust, My Secret Life, and stories running in
the serials The Pearl and The Cremorne) but rather because of
its status as a mosaic of genres and literary styles (attributable, perhaps,
to its being written by numerous hands, although 19th-century pornography
often has a patch-work quality to it) and because language itself is one of
its explicit themes. Teleny exemplifies well the dual
nature of the language of pornography because it often has the transparency
of garden-variety porn but it, at times, seeks the complexity of a literary
work, causing those reading purely for its erotic value to stop and puzzle. It is both smut and a work of art (what we
would call, in the 20th-century with the dawn of Modernism, erotica). Thus it
sometimes adds its own terms to the usual compilation of 19th-century
pornographic language, words that seem to have more depth and richness, but
with a residue of their use value as a means to ‘get off’ still clinging to
them.
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Not only would a
lexicographer want to use Teleny in
compiling her glossary, she need not do any excerpting in order to find it
useful as another type of reference text.
Teleny immediately comes to
hand as a sampling of popular 19th-century fictional styles or themes, an
anthology of historical examples for the 20th- and 21st-century reader. A partial list of stereotypical elements
reworked in Teleny: the Byronically
tormented genius/artist (the character of René Teleny himself has these
qualities—the mysterious past, the magnetism that comes from his outsider
status, and the doomed fate from the beginning); a Gothic eroticism (Teleny
and Camille Des Grieux are uncanny doppelgängers whose love leads to
telepathic, galvanic communications); liebestod
(the love between the two is consistently intertwined with death and leads
inexorably to it); a Wildean Aestheticism imbued with postcolonial
materiality (a glorying in ephemeral beauty, the experience of the senses,
and refined, exotic interiors); and
sadomasochism (the sexual encounters between the main characters are
exquisitely painful). The genius of Teleny is in the way it foregrounds
the pornographic elements that already lurked in these conventional formulas,
making obvious the fact that a key to their popularity was always their
eroticism. As such, Teleny at times
strikes the reader conversant with the 19th-century canon as a kind of parody
of its serious themes, a burlesque of writing by the likes of Dickens, Eliot,
the Brontës, Swinburne, D.G. Rossetti, and Wilde (perhaps a self-parody,
since it’s speculated Wilde had a hand in producing sections of Teleny).
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But not only does Teleny play an important role as a
commentary on 19th-century literary history in its final days, but it also
looks forward clearly to Modernism, as do, of course, all Aesthetic
texts. And this point takes us back to
the language of Teleny, and its
status as a resource for the lexicographer.
Like much Modernist writing, Teleny
has a self-awareness of the frailty of language in expressing
experience. In a move Virginia Woolf
would soon perfect, Teleny takes up
the theme of words themselves as a medium: for art, sexuality, and
communication between lovers. What
results is an occasional unease with language, an unsettling quality at odds
with the project of pornography. This
difficulty in expressing meaning is to be found most clearly in the
descriptions of orgasms: those passages that are both the raison d’être of pornography and the
point when it often fails, gesturing to the near impossibility of conveying
in words the visceral moment when being becomes all sensation.
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In a discussion (or a
dictionary) of the language of pornography, words for the orgasm would
necessarily have a prominent place. As has been recognized by scholars in the
past (for example, see the analysis of ‘to spend’ in Freud and
Post-Freudians), cultural meaning pools around these terms. Teleny
has many of the common descriptions to be found in run-of-the-mill
pornography: a female prostitute has an ‘ejaculation’ (42); a man has ‘squirt
his sperm’ (46) into his wife; ‘The milky fluid that had for days accumulated
itself now rushed out in thick jets’ (51); when Des Grieux attempts
intercourse with a servant girl, he ‘squirted her all over with my creamy,
life-giving fluid’ (66). But most of
the passages depicting orgasms are far more compelling: unusual in their
poetic layering and in their attempt to convey not just the moment of
ejaculation but something more essential, philosophical even. These sections for the most part cluster
around Des Grieux and Teleny (not surprisingly) and their love for one another.
From the first chapter, when Camille first sees Teleny perform and before
they have even met, the ejaculatory sensations take on a dark tinge. As
Teleny produces an ‘entrancing’ music on the piano, his consciousness seems
to invade Camille’s from across the room, and Camille’s imagination and body
helplessly react.
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My blood
began to boil like a burning fluid, so that I felt my (what the Italians call
a ‘birdie,’ and what they have portrayed as a winged cherub) struggle within
its prison, lift up its head, open its tiny lips, and again spout one or two
drops of that creamy, life-giving fluid . . . But those few tears—far from
being a soothing balm—seemed to be drops of caustic, burning me, and
producing a strong, unbearable irritation. (19)
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Their eroticism has
occult, Gothic overtones. Sexuality
can harm in its intensity, in its otherworldly mysticism: sperm is a ‘burning
liquid’ (52) and can come as ‘a jet of caustic fire’ (109). The first time
Teleny sodomizes De Grieux, Teleny’s orgasm is ‘a most violent jet, like a
hot geyser,’ and he exclaims that it ‘coursed within me like some scorching,
corroding poison’ (97). But at the
same time it’s a magical, life-giving fluid, with mesmeric, galvanic, or alchemical
properties (reference is even made to the ‘doings of the Psychical Society’
[53]): Teleny’s sperm is ‘the fiery foaming sap of his body, the real elixir
of life’ (92), Des Grieux’s ‘the burning milk of life’ that mounted up ‘like
a sap of fire’ (91). Built carefully into the climactic scenes is the
attestation that sex and love disturb, trouble, are dangerous forces somehow
inexorably unavoidable.
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Added to the sense of
pressing doom that comes with many of the orgasms in the text, there is an
attentiveness to words and their definitions. In the long passage quoted
above, the author(s) displays a hesitancy in naming forthrightly the penis
and instead gives a brief, almost scholarly, disquisition on the Italian
slang. Having nothing to do with
prudishness (as the explicitness of the later narrative proves), this
reference to the penis is something of a hall of mirrors. It’s a ‘birdie’ and a ‘winged cherub,’ but
then it’s also imprisoned, has lips that drool, and is personified such that
it weeps sad tears. All of these terms
are a bit different, creating a kind of prism effect of meaning. None of them add up to a coherent sense of
what is being named—a trapped bird? An
instrument of love? A doomed soul? The
proliferation of meaning is a deliberate wordplay that implies, with levity
(perhaps even a purposeful silliness), not only that the body (here
represented by the penis) has multiple sensations and modes that require
numerous metaphors, but quite possibly that language—even more than one
(English, Italian, and in other passages, French)—is not adequate to convey
its true nature. This is a common
theme throughout the text: casting about for words becomes a way to express
sexual congress (other examples: ‘his merle—as the Italians call it—flying out
of his cage’ [52], ‘hooding their falcon with a ‘French letter’’ [46]). Almost a stutter of scare quotes, of
m-dashed phrases, chop up the flow of the sentence when the orgasm or
erection enters the story, often as a character itself.
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The sorrow, the unease
with the efficacy of words, the pre-confirmed liebestod, reach their pinnacle when Teleny and Des Grieux have
their first sexual encounter. For Des
Grieux, Teleny has ‘a supple, mesmeric, pleasure-giving fluid in his
fingers.’ Camille’s orgasm begins with
‘an intense pain, somewhere about the root of the penis . . .’
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—or,
rather, within the very core and centre of the reins—after which the sap of
life began to move slowly, slowly, from within the seminal glands . . . like
the scalding and scathing lava within the crater of a volcano. It finally reached the apex; then the slit
gaped, the tiny lips parted, and the pearly creamy viscous fluid oozed out .
. . in huge, burning tears. . . At every drop that escaped out of the body, a
creepy almost unbearable feeling started from the tips of the fingers, from
the ends of the toes, especially from the innermost cells of the brain; the
marrow in the spine and within all the bones seemed to melt; and when the
different currents—either coursing with the blood or running rapidly up the
nervous fibres—met within the phallus . . . a tremendous shock took place; a
convulsion which annihilated both mind and matter . . . (88)
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More than an orgasm, this
scene feels like a death (and not a petite
one)—’the sap of life’ oozing out like blood, the sense that the body is
being drained from the ‘tips of the fingers’ to the ‘marrow in the spine and
within all the bones.’ The ‘creepy, almost unbearable feeling’ speaks to
Camille of more than just sexual pleasure, or the love (obsession) between
two people. The annihilation of ‘both
mind and matter’ seems to reach his very soul, uncovering some mystery of
life in the ‘tremendous shock’ of the cataclysmic meeting.
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What is this mystery? Teleny succeeds in being that rare
thing: a piece of melancholy pornography.
The sophisticated sadness, the near despair that comes when one is
faced with joys such as love and lust, speak of the world-weariness of the fin de siècle, of Aestheticism’s
graceful acceptance of the fleetingness of all living things. Pater’s influence is seen here: ‘Every
moment some form grows perfect . . . some mood of passion or insight or
intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us—for that
moment only. Not the fruit of
experience, but experience itself, is the end’ (249). The orgasms in Teleny are recognitions that when joys come, they foreground the
mortality at the back of all experience.
Part of this mortality is the death-like shock that comes when Des
Grieux feels he has achieved unity with Teleny—that he has finally truly
known this loved one—only to discover that, to his despair, he can never know
Teleny (proven when Teleny sleeps with Des Grieux’s mother and then commits
suicide). The orgasms the two lovers
experience together seem to bring them true communion; their sexuality like a
language, they appear to be fully understanding each other, for once. But it is in the orgasm—that moment when
oneness and transparency appear most confirmed—that the despair of communion
ever being possible creeps in, bringing with it a whiff of death. This is the mystery that gathers around the
ejaculations in Teleny. Thus when one orgasms, what comes out is
usually called ‘tears.’ And to ready a penis for sex is to ‘let it out of its
dim dungeon, to drive it into the dark den’ (68). In the lover’s orifice, the
penis remains a ‘prisoner lodged in its narrow cage’ (72). And ‘such a kiss
follows you to the grave’ (87).
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Teleny prefigures the Modernist rendering of
language as a kind of muddy veil, covering truth rather than sharing it. The
orgasms in Teleny work perfectly as
a means to convey the loneliness of modernity. They are almost endlessly repeated because
they seem to succeed, but then they must be repeated because they never quite
do so. What appears to be the coming
together of two souls only proves the inevitable—that unity is impossible. Teleny gestures toward the idea, to be
taken up more completely by 20th-century writers like D.H. Lawrence and James
Joyce, that the language of sexuality approaches a state of
non-representability, constituting a kind of pure art that doesn’t point to
anything outside of itself. As such,
the orgasm is something like music, and thus, in Pater’s famous formulation,
becomes itself an art, silent or noisy.
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Anonymous. Teleny or The Reverse of the Medal.
Hertfordshire, UK: Wordsworth, 1995.
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Pater, Walter. The
Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. New York: Macmillan, 1899.
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