I do not wish to claim, however, that in praising Winkelmann Hegel either assumes or endorses the homoerotic strains in the latter’s work. On the contrary, Hegel’s analysis systematically dampens the sensuous elements in Winkelmann’s descriptions. Moreover, this neutralization is, I would argue, elevated to a kind of thematic status when Hegel discusses the eyes of Greek statues. Hegel begins this discussion by insisting that Greeks painted in the eyes of statues only as an exception, and that the blankness of the eye is therefore a deliberate norm. He gives several reasons, of which two are pertinent here. First, a man’s
glance is what is most full of his soul, the concentration of his inmost personality and being…. But in sculpture [as opposed to painting] the sphere of the artist is neither the inner feeling of the soul, the concentration of the whole man into the one simple self which appears in the glance as this ultimate point of illumination, nor with the personality diffused in the complications of the external world. Sculpture has as its aim the entirety of the external form over which it must disperse the soul, and it must present it in this variety, and therefore it is not allowed to bring back this variety to one simple soulful point and the momentary glance of the eye. (73)
In other words, Greek statues must lack a seeing eye because the expression of soul must be distributed over the entirety of their form. Second, “the eye looks out into the external world; … But the genuine sculptural figure is precisely withdrawn from this link with external things and is immersed in the substantial nature of its spiritual content, independent in itself, not dispersed in or complicated by anything else” (732–33). The statue is therefore blind because it looks inward rather than outward; it “sees” only its withdrawn spiritual content and not the external world.
This theme of blindness recurs indirectly when Hegel turns to the question of nude and draped forms in Greek sculpture. The Greeks, claims Hegel, valued personal individuality and therefore respected the bare human figure because it is “the freest and most beautiful one. In this sense of course they discarded that shame or modesty which forbids the purely human body to be seen, and they did this, not from indifference to the spiritual, but from indifference to purely sensual desire, for the sake of beauty alone” (744). Of course, as Hegel notes, the Greeks sculpted primarily male figures nude. The “indifference to purely sensual desire” (Gleichgültigheit gegen das nur Sinnliche der Begierde)7 that allows aesthetic appreciation of the male body thus recalls Burke’s negation of homoerotic desire in his definition of beauty. But while Burke denies the very existence of such desire, Hegel insists rather that the Greeks do not care for it—they abstain from desiring this desire. To put it differently, the desire is there, but Greek eyes do not see it, and this not-seeing defines the aesthetic quality of their vision. Moreover, while describing the Greeks themselves as spectators, Hegel’s remarks clarify in retrospect the blindness of Greek statues. For what these statues (like the Greeks who sculpted them) do not see is sensual desire, specifically male homoerotic desire. Following a classically Freudian formula, then, we may say that blindness takes the place in Hegel that castration occupied in Winkelmann. The not-seeing of Greek statues is their way of incorporating the neutralization of desire that characterizes not only the Greeks but the subject of aesthetic contemplation more generally. The blind eyes of Greek statues teach the spectator in turn a blindness with respect to merely sensual content. But this (partial) negation of the visual in Greek art also recalls the more thoroughgoing annihilation of images that characterized the Hebraic sublime in Hegel. Greek beauty ascends to the spiritual, and it does so by blotting out the merely sensual, thus retaining a faint echo of its sublime precursor even as it celebrates the image. Where St. Paul saw Greek statues as fomenting homosexuality by turning the Greeks away from the sublime God, then, Hegel wields the sublime as a way of cordoning Greek beauty off from Greek homosexuality.
These examples provide nothing more than an initial matrix for this study. Aesthetic theory will play no great role in the chapters that follow. Nevertheless, Wilde, Freud, and Lacan share both an awareness of, and a subversive intent toward, the tradition of philosophical aesthetics. And Shakespeare constructs in his Sonnets an art that formulates—and then shifts—its own aesthetic principles as it proceeds. All four writers reflect in original ways upon the role of sexual desire in art (and art in sexual desire), and all four do so by conjoining the unlikely categories of sodomy and the sublime.
Before proceeding, however, I want to make clear what I do and do not hope to accomplish. Despite my book’s subtitle, I have relatively little to say directly on the topic of sodomy, and not a great deal more to say on the topic of the sublime. Much of the interesting recent work on sodomy in the early modern period has involved opening the concept up to include its associations with nonsexual phenomena such as witchcraft, treason, heresy, and so on. But this larger penumbra of cultural meanings simply doesn’t come into play in the specific tradition I address here. This is a book not about sodomy as such but about the way it is constructed by a specific, post-Pauline tradition. My treatment of sodomy is determined in large part by the fact that I focus on literary and theoretical texts, not on the legal arguments and the medical and theological treatises on which historians of sexuality have tended to base their work. In all the writings I address, sodomy is invoked either fleetingly or implicitly. Indeed, it constitutes a kind of empty hole in discourse, about which nothing directly can be said. This is one of its points of contact with the sublime. In any case, both sodomy and the sublime, taken separately, are topics that have generated abundant commentary and scholarship in recent years. My contribution, as I see it, is to draw previously unnoticed connections between the two. It is only natural, then, that I should focus on mediating terms, of which sublimation is the most important for my purposes.
Perhaps it is only a restatement of the previous paragraph to say that, while I hope this work will be of interest to queer theorists and historians of sexuality, I consider it to be primarily concerned with literary criticism and aesthetics. It would be an exaggeration to say that this is a book about art, not life. But it is more about literary constructions of the sexual than it is about the history of sexuality. Moreover, the specific lineage of writers I construct will be a puzzling and even troubling one, since it conjoins a foundational homophobe (St. Paul), a foundational homosexual (Oscar Wilde), the writer of the world’s most renowned same-sex love sonnets, and two of the most influential figures in psychoanalysis, a discourse and practice that have had a history of enforcing heteronormativity. This strange constellation of writers argues for the continuing and even generative presence of phobic strains in the construction of a “canonical” homosexuality—that is, same-sex desire as represented by some central texts and writers of the literary canon. I think it is fair to say that Shakespeare, Wilde, Freud, and Lacan all struggle with St. Paul, or with the tradition to which he gives rise, and that they manage to wrest something unexpected and even delightfully perverse from his dour moralizing. But it is true at the same time that Paul exerts an irresistible pressure despite the twistings and turnings to which he is subjected. And he does so not merely through the dead weight of cultural tradition but because his disagreeable fulminations also display a brilliance that almost invites revision. As a result of the fascination he exerts, later writers end up saying things that they might not be expected (or even wanted) to say.
Although the four figures on whom I focus have been arranged in chronological order, and some later writers even refer to earlier ones, nothing so coherent as a history emerges from the series I present. If anything, what I uncover is a compulsion to repeat a culturally primal scene. This is not a book about the emergence of modern homosexual identity, in part because the instances of sodomy I examine are, almost as often as not, heterosexual. But also in part because this a book about the ways in which an older, sodomitical thematic persists even into the modern regime of sexual identities, when its cultural supports might seem to have fallen away.