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THE OSCHOLARS: Special Teleny
issue |
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––– |
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EROS |
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excess of love and social constraints in Inferno, Othello, and Teleny |
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John McRae |
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[…] come concedette
Amore |
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che conosceste i
dubbiosi disiri? |
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When Dante talks in
Canto V of Inferno of those who ‘la
ragion sommettono al talento’ (line 39), the reference is to Paolo and
Francesca da Rimini, lovers condemned to run forever among the carnal
sinners, those whose passion has gone out of control. Paolo and Francesca are
punished, in earthly terms, by death, and eternally by being condemned to run
among the sinners in Hell. Foscolo insisted that in the case of Paolo and
Francesca ‘la colpa è purificata dall’ardore della passione, e la verecondia
abbellisce la confessione della libidine.’1 Sin, punishment, and great passion are mixed
inextricably here. Dante takes care to compare their love with great literary
precedents, the most notable being the story of Lancelot and Guinevere, in
order to stress the importance of the real love in this story, and of the
intensity of the passion, the impossibility of repentance, and the consequent
damnation of the lovers. |
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Paolo and
Francesca’s ‘dubbiosi disiri’, interpreted by Boccaccio as the doubts and
uncertainties of the two lovers, are recalled in Teleny. The episode from Dante is referred to in the novel as an
example of social constraints condemning true love to perdition. I want to
examine how Wilde uses reference to Dante to give credence to the triumphant
nature of the homosexual relationship Teleny
describes, and to relate the story of love’s excess to perhaps the most
famous case of ‘one who loved not wisely but too well’, Othello, in the
Shakespearean tragedy which bears his name. |
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Paolo and Francesca
broke the rules of their society in that she was already married, for political
reasons, to Gianciotto, Paolo’s brother, when she fell in love with Paolo.
Gianciotto’s vengeance came upon them so suddenly that it denied them, any
possibility of repentance – the punishment for this excess, this
contravention of social and political laws, was death. |
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Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality affirms that
‘the exercise of power has always been formulated in terms of law’.2
In the Rimini of 1283-1285 this punishment might have been seen as a fairly
traditional reaction to adultery, were it not for the kind of assertion of
the positive power of passion that Foscolo and other commentators at various
times have given to the episode, such that Paolo and Francesca have assumed a
kind of mythical status, not unlike Romeo and Juliet, those other lovers
whose passion went against the constraints of their society.3 |
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If it were now to
die |
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‘Twere now to be
most happy |
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In Othello, the hero is an outsider from
the very beginning. ‘Il Moro’ of Cinthio’s original story has been
transformed into a negro, ‘the Moor of Venice’, who has, through his own
efforts, won recognition from the state as a warrior. Part of his reward for
his efforts is the virgin Desdemona, who falls in love with him as he
recounts his heroic exploits. Othello, however, has to plead his case for
their love in front of the Duke of Venice, and his plea is granted only when
Desdemona herself confirms her love. (In the play, as in the Francesca da
Rimini episode, it is noticeable that the female falls in love with the
attractive male figure first – this too might be seen as in some way an
overturning of the normal order.) The union of Othello and Desdemona can be
seen as the impossible union of Beauty and the Beast, of Diana and Mars, a
harmonic uniting of opposites, whose love goes against all the conventions of
the society in which they live. |
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It is, however,
finally sanctioned by that society, against the will of Desdemona’s father,
Brabantio, and of the devil-figure of the play, Iago, who, in describing the
couple’s love-making to Brabantio (using a disguised voice), reduces it to
the level of bestiality, ‘the beast with two backs’ (I i 116-117). It is Brabantio
who is the first victim of this union which goes against the traditional and
protective social order – he dies of a broken heart at his daughter’s
marriage to an outsider. As soon as he heard of the relationship between his
daughter and the Moor he considered her already dead, and the relationship
unnatural: ‘For nature so preposterously to err’ (I iii 62) leads inevitably
to death. That it does so in Brabantio’s own mind foreshadows the later
tragic death of the lovers themselves. Gianciotto’s active condemning to
death of Paolo and Francesca is every bit as rapid as Brabantio’s
consideration of his daughter as dead when the ‘natural’ order of things has
been overturned by the irrational expression of irresistible passion. Society
allows Othello to keep Desdemona, not in approving recognition of his or her
passion, but, as I have already suggested, as a kind of reward for services
rendered: he both conquers her, and justifies his right to her, through what
he has done for the state of Venice. He remains, however, the servant of the
state, recognised as ‘valiant’, the perfect warrior’ – but he carries no
honorific, nor is he welcomed into the ranks of the nobility of the state. He
remains an outsider, an employee: ‘We must straight employ you, Against the
general enemy Ottoman’ (I iii 48-49), says the Duke, in the same scene where
Othello later justifies his ‘claim’ to Desdemona. |
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This would not,
however, be the stuff of tragedy were it not for Othello’s inability to
understand the mechanism of the society to which he has struggled to belong.
He trusts Iago (‘honest Iago’) implicitly, and cannot see, as the audience can, that he is being ‘led by
the nose…. As asses are’ (I iii 399-400) towards the fatal outburst of
jealousy. When the tragedy has reached its conclusion, Othello asks his
listeners to speak of him as ‘one who loved not wisely, but too well, Of one
not easily jealous, but when wrought, Perplexed in the extreme’ (V i
345-347). In this, and in other crucial
moments when self-knowledge is called for, Othello speaks not in the first
but in the third person, as if distancing himself from the character he is
speaking about. Not only does he not succeed in combining the necessary
elements of the Renaissance man, (symbolised in Hamlet in the flower, the
book, and the sword – passion, reason, and physical strength) but neither can
he succeed in that most primary of requisites, ‘Know thyself.’ |
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What limits
Othello, in the society he has chosen to succeed in, is his inability to come
to terms with the rules of that society – at the end he is still ‘the Moor’,
not a true Venetian; no matter how well he has served the state (‘I have done
the state some service’) he remains their servant rather than a true part of
it. And Desdemona becomes the victim of her own excess of love, punished by
death, through no actual fault of her own, because she married beyond the
bounds prescribed by family, custom, and social order. |
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As with Paolo and
Francesca, the love between Othello and Desdemona, the depth and truth of
their passion, is not to be doubted. ‘Perdition catch my soul, But I do love
thee, and when I love thee not, Chaos is come again’ ( |
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The fact is that
nowadays we have got to be so mealy-mouthed, so ever-nice, |
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that Madam Eglantine, who ‘raught full
seemly after her meat’ would be looked upon, |
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in spite of her
stately manners, as something worse than a scullery-maid. |
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Foucault, in
analysing the deployment of sexuality in nineteenth century society, asserts
that ‘the task of truth was now linked to the challenging of taboos.’4
Oscar Wilde, in his life as much as in his works, challenged the assumptions,
pretensions, and manners of the society of late Victorian England. ‘How I
used to toy with that tiger Life’5 he was to write, after he became the most
conspicuous victim of that society. It was a society, which he, not unlike
Othello, aspired to belong to, but a society from which, as an Irishman, and
as a homosexual, he was bound eventually to be excluded. |
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Teleny
recounts the story of two lovers, Des Grieux, the narrator, and Teleny, a
musician. That their passion is homosexual forbids them from fully
recognising and accepting it until fairly late in the novel. Several themes
found in other works by Wilde recur: the absence of the beloved adversely
affecting the artist’s capabilities, the ‘shallow mask of manners’ which
keeps up appearances in polite society, the sensuality of furnishings,
comestibles and perfumes, the doppelganger theme, and above all, the tragic
inevitability of the dénouement. As in The Picture of Dorian Gray, the golden
young hero will be destroyed by those very same elements which have dominated
his life. Here, as so often, sex and money are inextricably linked. Teleny
forgoes his creative career for love, and is punished by lack of money – the
society which wanted him as an artist also oppresses him with debts. He takes
another lover who will pay his debts. This lover is Des Grieux’s mother, and
Des Grieux discovers them together just after he has secretly paid off the
debts Teleny betrayed him to pay. The resulting suicide of the eponymous hero
is treated as a victory for common decency, and as a proper punishment for
unnatural vice, no value being accorded to the passion the lovers shared.
This, it seems to me, is the artistic representation of the phenomenon
described by Foucault as ‘the socialisation of procreative behaviour’ whereby ‘sex’ was
described as being caught between a law of reality (economic necessity being
its most abrupt and immediate form) and an economy of pleasure which was
always attempting to circumvent that law.’ 6
(Italics mine). |
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Foucault observes
that ‘the nineteenth century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case
history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form,
and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious
physiology. Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by
his sexuality.’ 7 Teleny
is the first novel by a major writer which accurately reflects each of these
aspects listed by Foucault. The novel is a celebration of passion between
men, entirely in keeping with the aesthetic trends of the 1890s, and the
generation of writers influenced by Joris-Karl Huysmans (of whom Pierre Loűys was to write an important erotic novel, Aphrodite [1896], which is in many ways complementary to Teleny). The final punishment of the
lovers is brought about by an obscure commingling of ‘destiny’ and social
constraint – remarkable, indeed, is how often destiny is invoked in the
context of inexplicable ‘dubbiosi disiri’. |
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After the death of
Teleny, society rejoices, and Job’s comforters are invoked – ‘the Zophars,
Eliphazes, and the Bildads’ – friends who forsake Teleny at the moment when
the punishment of death is meted out to the carnal sinner, who has dared to
go beyond the norm to find his pleasure and his fulfilment. But, we might
observe, Job’s comforters rejoiced in his sufferings, yet were wrong to do
so. We recall that ‘the Lord blessed the latter days of Job’ (Job, 42, 12).
Instead of being ‘a byword’ to his critics, who abhorred him and kept aloof
from him (30, 9-10), he was restored to grace. This might be seen as
containing the smallest seed of hope that lovers like Teleny and Des Grieux
will overcome the constraints of the late Victorian society which condemns
them. And we might find a confirmation of this trace of optimism in the
homosexual writer’s references to Inferno
and Othello in Teleny. |
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In recounting the
joys of passion and lust (Teleny is
cast in the form of a dialogue, as, perhaps as a homage, perhaps only
coincidentally, is André Gide’s homosexual apologia, Corydon), Des Grieux
quotes Iago’s famous words: ‘I never said with Iago, ‘Virtue, a fig! No,
virtue is the sweet flavour of the peach: vice, the tiny droplet of prussic
acid – its delicious savour. Life,
without either, would be sapidless.’ (Chapter 6) |
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The use made in Teleny of reference to Dante is
perhaps even more interesting. Amid a welter of fairly predictable classical
references, ‘Dante’s Francesca and her lover Paolo’ are evoked as lovers for
all eternity, just at the moment when Teleny and Des Grieux are about to give
themselves up to their passion, to ‘a criminal kiss long withstood and fought
against, and therefore long yearned after.’ And that most famous of presumed
sodomites, Brunetto Latini, is invoked by Des Grieux as a model: ‘ I would
rather be like Brunetto Latini – a man who loved his fellow-men, than like
Dante, who sent them all to Hell’. Brunetto Latini is the last of ‘them all’
in Canto XV, and is treated affectionately by Dante, as his old master. It was he who wrote ‘Ki se laisse vaincre, la raison
remaint sous le desirier.’8 The final words of the Canto could lend themselves
to a Wildean interpretation, particularly in the context of Teleny, where the future homosexual
martyr looks forward to a more tolerant world. Brunetto Latini, who ‘parve de
costoro / quelli che vince, non colui che perde’, thus becomes an eternal
hero, as Francesca and Paolo became eternal lovers. |
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One of Foucault’s
principal and repeated assertions is that sex has been transformed into
discourse, its power to threaten the established order thus transmuted.9
The lovers in Dante and Shakespeare see their excess of Eros suddenly turn to
Thanatos – the lovers in Teleny
self-consciously refer to earlier models of punishment for love in a way
which almost foreshadows Wilde’s own self-conscious martyrdom, in his trials
and convictions for homosexual offences some eighteen months after the first
(anonymous) publication of that novel, By then, to quote Foucault again, the
Faustian pact has undergone a metamorphosis. It ‘is now as follows: to
exchange life in its entirety for sex itself, for the truth and the
sovereignty of sex. Sex is worth dying for. [ …] When a long while ago the
West discovered love, it bestowed on it a value high enough to make death
acceptable; nowadays it is sex that claims this equivalence, the highest of
all.’10 |
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This is the
challenge that excess of love has always posed to society. Those who put too
high a value on the passions will become victims of passion, or better, of
society’s unwillingness to countenance indulgence in such passions. The word
‘jealousy’ is usually brought into play at some stage in the story –
Gianciotto reacts in jealous rage, Othello becomes jealous when he thinks
Desdemona has betrayed him with Cassio, Des Grieux is faced with jealousy of
his own mother’s relationship with his beloved. But the greater jealousy is
surely the jealousy of society, which is disturbed and threatened by excess
of any kind. Hegemonic needs will prevail over individual desires. Western
society has tended to suppress eroticism and erotic art in a way that
Oriental societies have not – an overly erotic work, like Teleny, is therefore subversive in
more ways than one. It is explicitly erotic, and it celebrates an illicit
love, or, as Foucault so delicately puts it, ‘a peripheral sexuality’. But,
perhaps, even more significant, it extenuates the level of punishment meted
out to the carnal sinners – Des Grieux survives, literally, to tell the tale,
to assert the existence, and the value of the story, of the erotic experience
the characters have lived. |
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‘If Society’, says
Des Grieux, in the final pages of the novel ‘does not ask you to be
intrinsically good, it asks you to a make a goodly show of morality and,
above all, to avoid scandals.’ The dangerous area between hypocrisy and
disgust is the breeding ground of scandal. And it is the scandal that brings
about the punishment, rather than the fact of the illicit, abnormal, or
unnatural love relationship. Social constraint makes Eros illicit, and liable
to concealment. Eros revealed brings Thanatos in its wake. |
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NOTES |
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·
An early
version of this paper was published in Annali
della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia dell’Università degli Studi della
Basilicata, Potenza. |
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1.
Ugo Foscolo, La Divina Commedia illustrata da Ugo
Foscolo e curata da un italiano, London 1842-43, quoted in Natalino
Sapegno (a cura di), Dante Alighieri, La
Divina Commedia, Inferno, III
edn., 1985 (I edn., 1955), Firenze, La Nuova Italia Editrice, p. 66n. |
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2.
Translated by
Robert Hurley from the French La
Volonté de savoir (1976), 1979, Harmondsworth, Peregrine, 1984, p.87. |
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3.
There are some thirty operas based on Dante’s story (and on
Boccaccio’s and the Anonymous elaborations of it). The best known is by
Zandonai (1914), based in its turn on D’Annunzio’s play (1902), but composers
as different as Mercadante and Rakhmaninov have also made operatic use of the
subject. Tchaikovsky, perhaps unsurprisingly, also found inspiration in the
story for his ‘tone poem’ Francesca da Rimini (1876). Romeo and
Juliet has inspired an almost equal number of operas, Othello only
four, those by Rossini and Verdi being the best known. |
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5.
In a letter
from France to Reggie Turner, dated 3 February 1899. In Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde, edited by Rupert Hart-Davis,
Oxford, OUP, 1979 (1962), p.348 |
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9.
Foucault, op.
cit., passim, in particular Part Two, Chapter One, ‘The Incitement to
Discourse’, pp. 17-35: ‘an imperative was established: Not only will you
confess to acts contravening the law, but you will seek to transform your
desire, your every desire, into discourse […] The Christian pastoral
prescribed as a fundamental duty the task of passing everything having to do
with sex through the endless mill of speech.’ (p.21.). Foucault quotes
Alfonso de’ Liguori (Préceptes sur le sixième commandement) in support of his
argument, with the famous dictum ‘Tell everything […], all consenting
thoughts’, which recalls Dante’s ‘quanti dolci pensier, quanto disio / menò
costoro al doloroso passo’ (Inferno,
V, 113-114). Foucault concludes, ‘since the classical age there has been a
constant optimisation and an increasing valorisation of the discourse on
sex; and [ …] this carefully
analytical discourse was meant to yield multiple effects of displacement,
intensification, reorientation, and modification of desire itself.’ (p.23.) (Italics
mine.)
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