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50 THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP all leading, ironically, to the same point. This second pattern of meaning is the more interesting because it mimetically enacts the psycho-biological problem of synesthesia itself. That is, synesthesia is typically conceived of as an improper cathexis, a bonding of one mode of sensory impression to an object proper to another mode. Synesthesia is, in its broadest sense, a problem of object-choice, an inability to link an internal, subjective process to a normative external manifestation or causality. And this, of course, writes both synesthesia and Wilde’s textual dissemination into the general problematics of sexual inversion: all are typified by a “bad” object choice. Sensory perception, sexual desire, and textual influence are all generally thought of in terms of one straight line. Synesthesia, sexual inversion, and the poetics of “The Disciple” are all, from this perspective, a bit queer. A BRIEF HISTORY OF NARCISSISM: THE ANACLITIC SELF It is only the gods who taste of death. Apollo has passed away, but Hyacinth, whom men say he slew, lives on. Nero and Narcissus are always with us. Oscar Wilde, “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young” I would like to suggest that “The Disciple” enacts a critique of sexology not so much through its direct adoption of inversion and Narcissus, but more through its display of polymorphous textual cathexes. Narcissus and inversion signal an engagement with sexology, but the “queer” poetics of the text signal a resistance. In order to understand this point, it is necessary to take a brief stroll through the “narrativization” of Narcissus that is displayed in the history of sexology—for it is precisely this display that Wilde’s poem dis-plays. Initially, Narcissism entered sexology as a discrete topic near the middle of the nineteenth century. Ellis cites three examples of early work with the concept, one from Italy, one from Germany, and one from France. In 1897, Nicefero’s Le psicopatie sessualle used the term to describe a fifteen-year-old boy who would “derive pleasure from the spectacle of his penis becoming erected, and even the idea of this would give him voluptuous emotions” (1900:3:354) It further presents the case of another boy who could successfully masturbate only if he could see his own legs while stimulating himself (3:354). Moll’s 1898 publication, Untersuchungen über die Libido Sexualis, analyzed the case of a 43-year-old man who was attracted to both men and women, but achieved his primary stimulation through gazing in the mirror and comparing his own image to that of other men he had seen (3:354). Féré’s contemporaneous studies in France, published under the title L’Instinct sexual, presented the case of a girl who stimulated herself by kissing her own hand, and termed the practice “auto-fetichism” (3:354).
NARCISSUS IN THE WILDE 51 What is striking about all three examples is the extent to which they write selfattraction in terms of a self/other or subject/object split. In Nicefero’s example, the penis becomes tacitly dismembered from the subject and exists as an external object, a phenomenon outside the subject which then stimulates him. The question that is repressed here is the obvious one: what stimulates the penis to erection in the first place if stimulation is only derived from the erect penis itself? In Moll’s example, the issue of self-attraction is preceded by a declaration of the object-attraction of the subject. The self-attraction is further categorized as an engagement of a self/other dynamic—“his own image” is simply an intercourse with the images of “other men.” For the French girl, the hand is not herself, but a “fetich,” an object which, as Ellis tells us in his essay “Erotic Symbolism,” only functions in “the absence of the beloved person” and as the surrogate for the beloved. (1900:3:18). Desire, it seems, can only manifest itself across the great divide—“/”—and the self cannot exist in any sense that is entirely self-sufficient. Narcissism in these instances seems to hint at a mode of desire that precedes or escapes the divisive binaries of sexual and gender ontology but, at the same time, this possibility also is clearly subordinated to an articulation that privileges this binaristic logic. Narcissism maps a complicated interplay between the autonomy of the self and the need to tether this autonomy to the dependence of object-choice. These two tensions are best displayed in Freud’s summation and refinement of the earlier Victorians’ explorations in sexology. In his essay “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” Freud provides a vocabulary for expressing the two elements of this tension. The first auto-erotic sexual gratifications are experienced in connection with vital functions in the service of self-preservation. The sexual instincts are at the outset supported upon the ego-instincts; only later do they become independent of these, and even then we have an indication of that original dependence in the fact that those persons who have to do with the feeding, care, and protection of the child become his earliest sexual objects; that is to say, in the first instance the mother or her substitute. Side by side with this type and source of object-choice, which may be called the anaclitic type, a second type, the existence of which we had not suspected, has been revealed by psychoanalytic investigation. We have found, especially in persons whose libidinal development has suffered some disturbance, as in perverts and homosexuals, that in the choice of their love-object, they have taken as their model not the mother but their own selves. They are plainly seeking themselves as a love-object and their type of object choice may be termed narcissistic. (1914:68–69) The difference marked here is also the difference marked between self-attraction and self/other attraction. The anaclitic relation is a manifestation of cathexis to an
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THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP
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First published 1994 by Routledge 1
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CONTENTS List of plates vi List of
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11 Richard Halverson as Lady Enid a
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to tha
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2 THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP
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110 REVAMPING THE GAY SENSIBILITY J
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112 FE/MALE IMPERSONATION pieces th
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114 FE/MALE IMPERSONATION practitio
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116 FE/MALE IMPERSONATION This meta
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118 FE/MALE IMPERSONATION specifica
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120 FE/MALE IMPERSONATION great tra
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122 FE/MALE IMPERSONATION In her pr
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124 FE/MALE IMPERSONATION Dynes emp
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126 FE/MALE IMPERSONATION Case, Sue
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Plate 9 Claire Moed as Sir Oliver S
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Plate 11 Richard Halverson as Lady
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Plate 14 Liberace in long cape with
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Plate 16 Liberace was Count Dracula
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THE CAMP TRACE IN CORPORATE AMERICA
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The key value, however, among these
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eternal youthfulness; and the way h
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7 TAKING OUT THE TRASH Camp and the
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THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP 15
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homosocialism 35-6, 43-4 Hutcheon,
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