Given his many forays into the realms of art and literature, Freud shows a surprising lack of interest in the love lyric. Surprising, because such poetry would seem to offer an obvious point of connection between eros and art. Perhaps too obvious. Not only is the Freudian hermeneutic drawn more to covert or occulted expressions of sexuality, but Freud’s theory of art as sublimated desire ascribes a certain “coolness” or desexualized quality to the artwork. The love poem, a literary form which not only takes sexual desire as its explicit content but also frequently adopts a rhetoric of seduction, lacks both the representational and the libidinal distance that a Freudian theory of art seems, if not exactly to require, then at least to prefer. The love lyric conjoins sex and art in so blatant a way as to be, for Freud at least, apparently devoid of interest.
Yet in the Petrarchan tradition, which includes Shakespeare’s sonnets, love poetry often represents a form of sexual desire which is both idealized and sublimated.1 Likewise the courtly love lyric, in which the beloved is elevated to an object of almost religious veneration, offers Jacques Lacan a privileged point of entry for his own distinctive theory of sublimation. (Both Freud’s and Lacan’s theories of sublimation will be addressed in later chapters of this book.)
In the case of Shakespeare’s sonnets, a sublimating interpretation has been both encouraged and complicated by the fact that most of the sequence’s poems are addressed to a young man. The most famous—and, I will argue—the most profound instance of such an interpretation occurs in Oscar Wilde’s novella The Portrait of Mr. W.H. Wilde’s fictional critic Cyril Graham depicts Shakespeare as the victim of a largely desexualized but still somewhat intoxicating fascination with the beauty and personality of the man whom Graham “identifies” as a young actor named Willie Hughes.2 Graham goes on to argue that not only Shakespeare’s sonnets but “the essentially male culture of the English Renaissance” (194)3 derives much of its inspiration from Ficino’s translation of Plato’s Symposium, which extols a decorporealized love between men. “There was a kind of mystic transference of the expressions of the physical sphere to a sphere that was spiritual, that was removed from gross bodily appetite, and in which the soul was Lord” (185).
Wilde’s sublimating interpretation of the sonnets has found answering echoes among critics from G. Wilson Knight to W. H. Auden to Joel Fineman.4 More recently, however, and particularly at the hands of gay criticism and queer theory, sublimating interpretations of the Sonnets have come under severe critical scrutiny. The Freudian associations of the term “sublimation” have rendered it doubly suspect, as being both ahistorical and tainted by its association with a discourse that has sometimes classed homosexuality as pathological. Moreover, the postulate of a sublimated homosexuality in the Sonnets has (with some reason) been seen as a strategy for installing an aestheticized, desexualized, and therefore relatively sanitized and “acceptable” version of same-sex passion that would allow homophobic readers of the Sonnets to acknowledge the unavoidable fact of homosexual desire while ignoring its more earthy and direct expressions.5
This last objection strikes me as the most significant of the three. English Petrarchanism, starting with Thomas Wyatt, has always accommodated a strongly anti-idealizing strain. Shakespeare’s sonnets to the young man combine a rhetoric of sublimation with an exuberantly bawdy taste for sexual wordplay.6 Any theory of sublimation that either ignores or is embarrassed by the poems’ repeated references to same-sex practices as well as desires will thus be guilty of both homophobia and simple inaccuracy. Wilde, it should be said, balanced his sublimating interpretation of the Sonnets with intimations of things forbidden. Cyril Graham is careful to mention “critics, like Hallam, who had regretted that the Sonnets had even been written, who had seen in them something dangerous, something unlawful even” (186–87). And he admits to being “almost afraid to turn the key that unlocks the mystery of the poet’s heart” (160). Wilde will not and cannot name this secret, of course, but he takes pains to communicate its presence to the reader, as both the antithesis of and the counterpart to sublimated desire. Wilde’s invocation of sodomy only as the unnameable secret is, as we shall see in a later chapter, dictated by motives other than simple prudence. The rhetoric of the unspeakable is not merely a means of avoidance or self-protection but a positive strategy with both political and aesthetic dimensions. In any case, Wilde’s ability to find in the Sonnets both a legitimate, because sublimated, form of same-sex desire and the unspeakable crime of sodomy is not a simple contradiction. It results, rather, from careful reading of the Sonnets’ own rhetoric of sublimation.
In this chapter I shall argue that Shakespeare’s Sonnets contain not only a rhetoric but what one might go so far as to call a “theory” of sublimation, and that such a theory will enable us to pass from a merely thematic handling of male same-sex desire to the aesthetic principles that govern the form of the Sonnets. It will also, I believe, answer the charges of ahistoricism by positing sublimation not as a way of processing a non-historical essence called “homosexual desire” but as a discourse that helps to produce such desire in a culturally and historically specific way.
My initial focus will be that subsequence of poems, beginning with the first sonnet and usually but not always taken as ending with the seventeenth, known as the “procreation sonnets.” These poems might seem to offer a counterintuitive starting point. For one thing, in counseling the young man to reproduce, they promote a distinctly nonsublimated form of sexual activity. For another, in counseling him to take a wife, or at least a mistress, they offer a curiously mediated and indirect form of same-sex desire. It is nevertheless these sonnets that formulate, in an especially striking and visible way, a poetics of sublimation. And they do so in a manner that defines the nature of same-sex desire for the entire sequence of poems to the young man.
Typical of the procreation sonnets in many respects is number 5:
Those hours that with gentle work did frame
The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell
Will play the tyrants to the very same
And that unfair which fairly doth excel:
For never-resting time leads summer on
To hideous winter and confounds him there,
Sap checked with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,
Beauty o’ersnowed and bareness everywhere.
Then were not summer’s distillation left
A liquid pris’ner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty’s effect with beauty were bereft,
Nor it nor no remembrance what it was.
But flow’rs distilled, though they with winter meet,
Leese but their show, their substance still lives sweet.
Like many of the procreation sonnets, this one employs a turn on the familiar carpe diem argument: since time will soon ruin your beauty, it cautions, best to have sex now. Only in this case, have sex with someone other than me—with a woman who will bear your child. Somehow the sonneteer’s rhetoric of seduction has gotten twisted in the direction of family values. Indeed, the sense of imminent demise that pervades the poem works less to whip up a desperate sexual longing than to mortify desire into something merely prudent. It makes sex seem as exciting as putting up preserves.
The poem’s most interesting and (not incidentally) most elegiacally beautiful lines introduce the image of the perfume bottle. But while this metaphor bolsters the poem’s longing for a beauty that transcends death, it fits somewhat awkwardly with its supposed tenor. In the translation from a child, to semen in a womb, to perfume in a bottle, something has been lost, and that something is life. The glass bottle is, to begin with, a conspicuously sterile and inorganic image for the womb. It contains the vital fluid, but does not nourish or quicken it. Its beauty is therefore static—not so much the transcendence as the incorporation of death. It turns birth into stillbirth.
But if the image of perfume and glass is vastly ill-suited to its stated purpose of figuring sexual procreation, it is, as more than one critic has noticed,