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Confessional: Sexuality and textuality

2024; Wiley; Volume: 97; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/gequ.12439

1756-1183

Robert Tobin,

Historical and Linguistic Studies

Bob Tobin originally wrote this essay in 2000 as the preface to his first book, Warm Brothers: Queer Theory and the Age of Goethe. At the time, however, only one of the reviewers of the manuscript approved of it, so he decided not to include it in the book. In the summer of 2022, when Bob was struggling with liver cancer, he remembered this essay and expressed his desire to have it published, but it was nowhere to be found in his home or office files. Fortunately, he still had the old floppy discs for the book and was able to save the document. We are honored to publish this piece posthumously in this German Quarterly forum that also includes ten other essays by scholars inspired by Bob's lasting legacy. A note on citations: we have done our best to fill in references where needed; where not otherwise indicated, translations are, we assume, Bob's own. —The Editors How did German literature become queer for me? And how did I become queer through German literature? The first time I heard the phrase "confessional criticism" I was entranced, since the personal, the subjective, and the sexual are all bound up with the confessional. Michel Foucault sees modern discourses of sexuality emerging from the early Christian practice of confession, which he claims began the imperative of turning desire into discourse. Augustine and Rousseau both wrote confessions in which an aberrant sexuality informs new models of subjectivity. But the text that best reflects my relationship to confession, sexuality, and subjectivity is Yukio Mishima's Confessions of a Mask. Mishima did not look to the explanations for his desire in the long tradition of Japanese same-sex relationships, but rather turned to Europe, to Joan of Arc, to the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, to Oscar Wilde, and to depictions of Cleopatra. Mishima made no claim for the authenticity of this constructed desire, but regarded it as a mask. His coming out was not the discovery of a solid identity, but an investigation of his own construction. I too find myself constructing a mask out of a culture, admittedly a culture much closer to mine than Europe's was to Mishima, but still not an immediately obvious choice. German might seem far from my early life and upbringing. Although there is some German blood in my veins, there are other nationalities—Polish, Scotch-Irish, English—that play at least as important a role in constituting my genetic background. We'd have to go back to my grandmother's grandfather to find German speakers in my family history. But in my own life and academic career, starting in college, German was the language that helped me express myself, organize my thoughts, name my desires, and develop my sexuality. Raised as an American speaking English, I pivoted to this foreign language, the literature written in that language (and for me, literature is often language about language), and critical language to discuss this literature—an intricate web of textuality—while coming of age and coming to terms with my own identity as a white gay male in the 1980s. One of the appealing aspects of conventional academic writing was that it prohibited the "I." Through high school, college, and graduate school, I wrote papers that presented objective interpretations, denying any subjectivity. My teachers urged me to avoid the "I" in the interest of concise prose, and I also recommend my students delete openings like "I think" and "I believe." I seemed only too eager to embrace an academic style that discouraged me from analyzing myself, from looking into those images that constructed me, from thinking too much about something—such as sexuality—that intrudes too painfully upon the "I." But while I was happy to lose myself in academic writing, I did have a lively interior life. I kept extensive journals through much of my childhood and youth. The journal is a self-portrait, like Dorian Gray's, taking on the weight of all the perceived iniquities the writer feels the need to hide. It is a useful closet into which one can shove the messier parts of one's personal life so that one's persona will look neat when the guests arrive. Is there a queer affinity to the journal? John Cheever, Ned Rorem, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Joe Orton, Noel Coward, Virginia Woolf, Julien Green, August von Platen, Klaus Mann, and Thomas Mann are just a few of the queer journal writers who come to mind. The journal sharpens one's ability to write as well as giving its writer a chance to develop multiple identities. My journals helped me develop a mask for my sexuality and associated that hidden sexuality closely with the text. These journals preserve my old masks for me, forcing me now to come to terms with who it was I had wanted to be. In "On Keeping a Notebook," Joan Didion writes, "So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking." Instead, she argues that "keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about." She means keeping in touch with younger versions of herself—even uncomfortable versions like the twenty-three-year-old, "skirts too long, shy to the point of aggravation, always the injured party, full of recriminations and little hurts and stories I do not want to hear again, at once saddening me and angering me with her vulnerability and ignorance, an apparition all the more insistent for being so long banished" (140). I find myself similarly confronted with younger versions of myself, with a teenager who was sometimes radically intolerant, right-wing, homophobic, and at times cruel to his family and friends. He frequently wrote about girls he hoped to go out with. He was socially active and busy with all the events of his school and family. He was also surprisingly articulate, writing entries that sound like the journals he liked to read by Charles Sulzberger, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Charles de Gaulle. None of this jives exactly with my own memories, however. I would like to think of myself as progressive, open-minded, sensitive, clearly homosexual, a loner, and full of emotions that I couldn't express. My journals provide a vital corrective to my vision of myself. Yet, as a reader, I too can provide a corrective to the bravado that marks these journals. I resist the temptation to grant absolute primacy to the text; these texts I also want to read queerly. During my high school years in Eugene, Oregon, my first extended exposure to real gay culture occurred at the Eugene Hotel. A downtown establishment that had seen better days (John F. Kennedy had stayed there when he was campaigning for the presidency!), the hotel still had a restaurant (where I worked), dance halls, and a couple of bars, one of which was Eugene's gay bar. The dance halls also hosted annual transvestite balls. Once in a blue moon I would be asked to deliver something to the upstairs bar, the gay one. It was terrifying, because I thought I would be accosted by promiscuous gay men. It was also mortifying, because no one even looked at me. Reading my journal entries from the summer of 1979, when I was 17, I can't believe the casual homophobia of my writing: "At work, things go steadily downhill. The place is becoming gay all over. If I were not leaving soon, I would quit immediately." A few weeks later, "I finally got a chance to tell a gay that the Hotel is going downhill because of the gays. The fellow responded well." I don't recall this exchange at all, yet there it stands, this attitude glaring out at me from pages I myself wrote. On this last we each had an opinion worth writing. Jonathan said that homosexuality was "still love," even if degenerate and perverted, however. I pointed out that male friendship in America runs down certain channels—sports, business, church. When men try to be friends through more dangerous paths—academics, for instance—the risk of perversion grows more strong. Disobeying societal rules can lead to homosexuality. I find this entry hilarious. On the one hand, Jonathan, who was probably further along in coming to terms with some version of his homosexuality, sounds positively open-minded in his argument that homosexuality was "still love." On the other hand, I was using words like "degenerate" and "perverted" to sum up our views on homosexuality. Applying a literary critic's paint thinner to the hardened varnish of this entry, I have to wonder why I was so interested in homosexuality and why I was pursuing an academic career despite the "danger" in that "path." I also seemed to be anticipating theories of homosexuality that I now study in formulating a distinction between societally disruptive homosexuality and societally condoned homosociality. Hans Blüher, for instance, speculated in the early twentieth century on male society, animated by male-male eros, in opposition to the heterosexual family. Thomas Mann read Blüher closely. My line about disobeying societal rules could come straight from Mann's Death in Venice. As the cholera epidemic spreads and Gustav von Aschenbach falls in love with Tadzio, the narrator notes that the German poet's illicit love merges with the criminal and crass official secrecy around the cover-up of the emerging epidemic: "For passion is, like crime, not suited for the secure order and welfare of the everyday, and every loosening of the civic fabric, every confusion and infestation of the world must be welcome to it; passion can hope to find its advantage in some way through this disorder" (2.1: 565). I first began to develop an interest in German literature as an undergraduate at Harvard College. At the same time I started to come out very slowly, both sexually and more generally. Coming out required going out—to another culture. There was no particular reason that I should look to German culture; I hadn't planned even to learn the language. French and Italian seemed much more glamorous, Greek and Latin classier, and Arabic more exotic. But the teacher of the intensive German language course was a real inspiration. She told us beginners that we needed to assume a German mask if we were to learn German: we needed to pretend we were German, even speak English with a German accent. I still pass this advice on to my first-year students, reminding them that one needs to act, as though on the stage, in order to speak another language. I think the prospect of putting on another mask, of acting out the role of another persona, was very appealing to me at the time. In French Lessons: A Memoir, Alice Kaplan addresses this issue: "Why do people want to adopt another culture? Because there's something in their own they don't like, that doesn't name them" (209). Kaplan writes that her teenage experiences in French taught her "a language for covering pain, not expressing it" (58). "Learning French and learning to think, learning to desire, is all mixed up in my head, until I can't tell the difference" (140). Considering the homophobia lurking in my early journals, perhaps my motivation for learning German had more to do with escaping, rather than constructing, my identity. Foucault famously argues that it is not the case that we are repressed, but that we insist upon our repression, and he scrutinizes the effort to found identity in discourse. Perhaps the act of expressing one's desire within a specifically foreign discourse avoids some of the pitfalls that Foucault locates in confessional urges. As Suzanne Cusick writes in "On a Lesbian Relationship with Music," "it would be easier to say my say in Italian. It would be easier in that language that isn't mine because there, in that language, there is no illusion of the natural, native 'mother tongue' (… it would be thus easier, for everyone, to know that what I say is a translation, subject to infinite infinitesimal errors)" (68). In Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Hans Castorp makes the declaration of his love of Clavdia Chauchat in French, rather than his native German, because, as he asserts, it is like speaking in a dream: "car pour moi, parler français, c'est parler sans parler, en quelque manière, —sans responsibilité, ou comme nous parlons en rêve" ("because for me, speaking French is speaking without speaking, in the manner—without responsibility—in which we speak in dreams"; 5.1: 511). Speaking about one's desire in a foreign language offers the chance to speak out at a remove about something intensely personal; it provides an inexact doubling, a buffer zone, in which to express oneself. But a foreign language also seems to offer the chance to speak more clearly and exactly. My grammar became much more precise as I learned to inflect German adjectives, nouns, and pronouns according to case and to organize my sentences in the precise manner dictated by German syntax. Here was a language in which I had consciously learned the meaning, at some point, of every word that I used. There were few words or phrases that I used without thinking. Thus I couldn't hide behind clichés, nor did I have the luxury of obfuscating through jargon or slang. Instead, my statements, at their best, developed a kind of modernist, crystalline spareness. Kaplan relates a similar experience in the French classroom: "the fact that we don't have as many words is forcing us to say more. The simplicity of our communication moves us, we're outside of cliché, free of easy eloquence, some deeper ideas and feelings make it through the mistakes and shine all the more through them" (210). In a word, the foreign language allows the speaker to express him- or herself ironically—both at a distance from the subject matter, and yet touching upon it more exactly, more sharply, more precisely than those who feel that they are one with the subject. In Strangers to Ourselves, the French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva stresses that foreigners are often the best ironists (10). Kristeva's study on the foreigner begins and ends with the call to recognize the foreigner in our own self. As she writes, life abroad allows one to develop a new personality: "The person who scarcely dared to talk in public and only spoke […] with confusion and embarrassment in the mother tongue now appears in the new language as a fearless conversationalist" (41). Being a linguistic and cultural foreigner abroad allowed me the chance to find those elements of myself that were foreign to my homeland, especially to investigate and indulge in sexual foreignness, in my queerness. My junior year abroad in Germany was loaded with sexual tension for me. When I arrived at my dormitory room, I didn't resist the urge to stand naked on the balcony, overlooking the U-Bahn station Studentenstadt and the outskirts of Munich. The late summer sun shining on the eighth-floor balcony was incredibly sensual. As Kristeva puts it, "separating from one's own family, language, and homeland in order to settle elsewhere is a risky undertaking that always goes hand in hand with sexual frenzy: No more prohibitions. Everything is possible." She adds, "exile always implies an explosion of the old body" (39). In Germany I began to notice personal ads of men looking for other men. I remember one dance party where I began to dance with other men. I knowingly asserted in a discussion with a high school friend that everyone had hetero- and homosexual sides, as if I had great experience in the vagaries of human sexuality. Once, on the train, a young German man told me he was gay. I claimed that my "circles" were "beyond" that kind of "labelling," acting as if I came from the most sophisticated background. We talked all night, and, for all my nonchalance, nothing came of what was probably a come-on, due to the fears hiding behind my bravado. Oddly, these experiences did not make it into my journals. I do remember them distinctly, but I didn't write about them. Conversely, things I find recorded in my journals I don't remember thinking or writing. (Does writing actually serve the purposes of memory as its inventors alleged? Or does it further the decay of memory?) But I find it highly significant that my first confession of homosexuality is written in German. It took the doubly distanced process of 1) writing in 2) a foreign language to come to this realization about myself. In December 1981, in a paragraph about a woman I found attractive, I note: Verbunden mit dieser Frage ist warum ich athletische Männer reizend finde ("Connected with this question is why I find athletic men attractive"). As Kaplan writes, "Learning French and learning to think, learning to desire, is all mixed up in my head, until I can't tell the difference" (140). In English, I still rejected the label "homosexual." On a trip to Italy with a female friend, I wrote in April 1982, "I find men attractive sometimes, but do not consider myself homosexual." Italy inspired in me questions about male-male desire that it had also prompted for Goethe, Winckelmann, August von Platen, Thomas Mann, Hans Christian Andersen, James Merrill, Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, and many others. After that year abroad I knew that I was gay, and my years of graduate studies coincided with the blossoming of my sexuality. It was liberating to finally learn vocabularies for both my physical and intellectual passions. I was not just learning the specialized jargon of a disciplinary field, but in fact an entire new language. As part of the gradual progress around gay and lesbian rights, work in gay and lesbian studies began to be published in the mid-1980s. One of the first books I read along these lines was Louis Crompton's Byron and Greek Love (1985), introducing me to the study of same-sex relations in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. I also got hold of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire when it appeared in 1985. These texts joined the French literary criticism that I was beginning to read, usually on my own, since that brand of scholarship wasn't really reçu in the German department, although it was also not necessarily verboten. I found that even the slightest openness to my gay experiences allowed for new interpretations of literary texts that sparked interest in my seminars. It took a bit of courage, but I finally summoned enough to go up the steps to the Hotel Gaiety. When I got to the top of the stairs, I saw a woman conversing in French to a wimpy looking guy with hair that was blow-dried back. She had metallic blue nails. I asked, "is this place open yet?" She answered in the affirmative, and I paid six dollars to get in. It was very dark inside. There was a film showing. I eventually grew accustomed enough to the dark to find my way to a seat. I did not sit near anyone. There was a frail white haired old man with a delicate face. He had a stoop. He wore a shawl around his neck and when he danced, he kicked his feet up in a sprightly way, keeping his legs straight and his toes pointed. He bounced about quite a bit. He reminded me of the horrible man with make-up who Aschenbach sees on the ferry. I was beginning to think the homosexual world was very sleazy. I said I had had a relationship with a man this summer and that I had enjoyed it. My voice began to waver and crack as I reached the end of my declaration. There was a pause—it seemed long to me. I felt the need to explain why I had just made the declaration, so I said I was confused. "Have you lost your faith?" Mom asked. "No," I prevaricated. She seemed very collected. She talked about how she had had problems in her youth, too, and that she knew it was hard for young people to stay celibate. She said the church was not against homosexuals, only practicing homosexuals. She wanted to know if I was unhappy about losing my friend. I said I was very sad. In my own narrative I think of myself as having come out in Germany on my junior year abroad, mulling it over my senior year in college, and arriving at Princeton in a rainbow suit, completely out and gay. Obviously, it was more protracted than that! I had frequent anxiety attacks about AIDS, as did most gay men in the 1980s. Media hype would exacerbate the tension, as when the movie star Rock Hudson flew to Paris on a privately chartered 747 to seek help from the physicians there. His death and the eerie pictures of his plane landing at night in the Paris airport made it hard to avoid thinking of AIDS. I wrote on July 31, 1985, "The publicity around the Rock Hudson case has reawakened a thousand anxieties. I lay in bed wondering what I would do if I were diagnosed as having the disease." In a list of otherwise bland and typical New Year's resolutions from January 1, 1986, the following stands out starkly: "Be open with my sexuality, so that people will accept me with my friends, and won't be shocked if I develop AIDS." The AIDS crisis also made clear to me the importance of medicine and the significance of medical discourse. I was often going to the university clinic for health check-ups. Once, while I was having my throat checked by a doctor, a nurse asked if she needed to shine a flashlight into my mouth. The doctor replied, "No, he's good at this," referring to my ability to keep my mouth open wide, and she added that it was always nice to have a patient with a controlled gag reflex! All this was well-intentioned, so I can laugh at it. The same doctor asked me how many partners I had had. I told him I wasn't promiscuous and that I knew many people who had more partners. The doctor wisely informed me that the word "promiscuous" was not a very useful one, and that it was more important to ascertain that the sex I had was safe. Indeed, my increasing awareness of the importance, but undecidability, of intention (for instance, the comment about my gag reflex), the significance of word choice, and the power of labels, came to a large extent within a medical context as I grappled with my concerns about my sexuality and my health. Marcel Proust writes, "It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body" (408). The AIDS crisis intensified scholarly and critical interest in the body in terms of sexuality, pathology, and research. I found myself involved with the body on less profound levels as well. In graduate school I started working out at the gym, which still takes up a lot of my time. How much more I could have written if I devoted the hours I like to spend at the gym to writing! But the gym won out. I like to think that it helps make me more aware of my body, reuniting mind and body. But in other ways, I suspect that bodybuilding, like anorexia, has to do with an attempt by the mind to control the body. I had discovered dancing by this time, too. If weight-lifting and exercising are the exertion of the mind's will on the body, dancing is quite different. It is perhaps the control of a different part of the mind over the body connected to joy, freedom, and grace. In high school in the 1970s, I had foolishly belonged to the school of thought that believed that disco "sucked." Dance music was either mindless pop music or terribly déclassé, associated with the kids singing "Le Freak" in the school cafeteria. But friends with a taste for the new "alternative" music of the early 1980s provided me a segue between "intellectual" pop music and dance music. Like Marlon Riggs in Tongues Untied (1989), who identifies several points of his gay Black development on the dance floor, I found the gay dance party to be a transformative ritual. I was mesmerized by all the shirtless muscular bodies, sparkling lights and mirrors, pounding bass beats, and the resounding refrain of "Everybody dance now!" With the loudness of the music, one couldn't make much conversation, so the dance floor became a place for me to move and meditate. Yet, leaning down over the dance floor of Le Palace throbbing with colored beams and dancing silhouettes, diving around me in the shadow of levels and of open loges an entire ebullition of young bodies busy in their unsuspecting circuits, I seemed to recognize, transposed to the modern, something I had read in Proust: that evening at the Opéra, where the house and the boxes form, under the young Narrator's impassioned eye, an aquatic milieu, gently illuminated by aigrettes, by glances, by jewels, by faces, by gestures suggestive of those made by undersea deities, amid which sat enthroned the duchess of Guermantes. Nothing but a metaphor after all, traveling from far back in my memory and arriving to embellish Le Palace with a final charm: the one that comes to us from the fictions of culture. (48) The dance floor has been greatly embellished by the fictions of culture; it has also influenced my understanding of those fictions of culture. It is not just Goethe who embellished the dance clubs I went to, but those dance clubs that added spice to Goethe for me. These were the days that the music video was first becoming popular. One of my favorite gay bars played videos constantly. I found them irresistible: intense segments filled with rapidly changing images of symbols dripping with meaning about sex, love, power, money, beauty, and politics. The similarity to poetry seemed quite evident. What held all the symbolic visual images together was the music and the lyrics. I found it fascinating that a viewer's sense of realism was not in the least disturbed by the sight of a singer singing one melody in different locations, in a variety of different outfits. How many years of visual training must have gone into producing a generation capable of following such complex chains of images! I certainly got a lot of practice deciphering these objects. Much of my creative interpretative energy was spent on music videos, but it was good training for new insights into the eighteenth-century literary texts I was studying. The other technology that appeared while I was a graduate student was word processing. I wrote my first papers on cumbersome programs designed for the mainframe. Every command had to be introduced by a period at the beginning of a line. To underline a word, for instance, one had to break the line and type something like this: .u word. The text on the screen looked nothing like the text that came out of the printer. It was a literary critic's dream—a text filled with hidden signals and secret codes. We spent a great deal of time speculating on the effect of word processing on writing. Would it make our writing more prone to odd, almost organic growths, as we expounded upon points in our rewrites? There was some concern about the decline of the ability to think out a whole argument and write it down, as people had done when it was hard to recopy and retype essays. At the same time, it seemed significant that the mechanically printed page, with right-hand margins justified, would no longer be automatically understood as a finished document, completely trustworthy. Since anything could be made to look nice by a formatting command, looking nice was not enough. The notion of closure had undergone change as well. One could always add a bit more to an essay, polish a few sentences, edit a section—so in a sense, it was never done. But one could always print it out and hand it in, so it was also always done. While I regret the losses to writing associated with computers, I also enjoy the new gains. E-mail seems to me to have reintroduced an eighteenth-century culture of correspondence, with short communications between friends, even those who see each other frequently. (I'm not the only one who frequently sends e-mail messages to friends seen quite regularly, and sometimes tells them in person to check their messages for the most recent communication.) Resisting the general trend of our culture toward an increasingly visual way of knowing, e-mail suggests that the text will be with us for a while. In terms of text, the computer, particularly the internet, has revealed possibilities of non-linear writing that have already brought about a radically new kind of thinking. Hypertext-type models are leading us into a new era of commentary, of a Talmudic sort, that will allow for highly associative thinking, individual insights that are developed as far and as long as they can sustain themselves. New combinations of thought and collages of ideas—queer ones too—emerge from these technological developments. It is hard to imagine that much-maligned binary thinking would produce such postmodern possibilities. When I returned to Germany in 1987 for my dissertation research into eighteenth-century medicine and Goethe, I had concerns about my language abilities since I had just started learning German in college. One of the difficulties I still had to overcome was the American r. William Moulton notes that "nothing can ruin an otherwise good pronunciation more than the use of the American [r] in German" (32). It's a difficulty many Americans encounter in speaking another language, since the American [r] is quite unusual. It is constricted by the retroflex position of the tongue, that is, the tip of the tongue curls back when Americans say their r's, producing a characteristic American accent. In "Robert," the r turns up twice, so I worked endlessly on the pronunciation of my r to the amusement of my housemates, who got to hear me repeating "Ich heiße Robert" in front of the bathroom mirror. This practice underscores an element of my work in German—that strange, circuitous, and consuming search for one's identity in another culture. Kaplan, too, finds the search for the non-American r intimately tied to her discovery of herself in another language: "French got me away from my family and taught me how to talk. Made me an adult. And the whole drama of it is in that 'r,' how deep in my throat, how different it feels" (141). Worki