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LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL
THEORY
OUTSTANDING DISSERTATIONS
edited by
William E.Cain
Wellesley College
A ROUTLEDGE SERIES
ii
OTHER BOOKS IN THIS SERIES:

WORD OF MOUTH FIGURES OF FINANCE
Food and Fiction after Freud CAPITALISM
Susanne Skubal Writing, Class, and Capital in the
THE WASTE FIX Age of Dickens
Seizures of the Sacred from Upton Borislav Knezevic
Sinclair to The Sopranos BALANCING THE BOOKS
William G.Little Faulkner, Morrison, and the
WILL THE CIRCLE BE Economies of Slavery
UNBROKEN? Erik Dussere
Family and Sectionalism in the BEYOND THE SOUND BARRIER
Virginia Novels of Kennedy, The Jazz Controversy in Twentieth-
Caruthers, and Tucker, 1830–1845 Century American Fiction
John L.Hare Kristen K.Henson
POETIC GESTURE SEGREGATED
Myth, Wallace Stevens, and the MISCEGENATION
Motions of Poetic Language On the Treatment of Racial
Kristine S.Santilli Hybridity in the U.S. and Latin
BORDER MODERNISM American Literary Traditions
Intercultural Readings in American Carlos Hiraldo
Literary Modernism DEATH, MEN, AND
Christopher Schedler MODERNISM
THE MERCHANT OF Trauma and Narrative in British
MODERNISM Fiction from Hardy to Woolf
The Economic Jew in Anglo- Ariela Freedman
American Literature, 1864–1939 THE SELF IN THE CELL
Gary Martin Levine Gender and Genre in Woolf,
THE MAKING OF THE Forster, Sinclair, and Lawrence
VICTORIAN NOVELIST James J.Miracky
Anxieties and Authorship in the SATIRE AND THE
Mass Market POSTCOLONIAL NOVEL
Bradley Deane V.S.Naipaul, Chinua Achebe,
OUT OF TOUCH Salman Rushdie
Skin Tropes and Identities in John Clement Ball
Woolf, Ellison, Pynchon, and Acker THROUGH THE NEGATIVE
Maureen F.Curtin The Photographic Image and the
WRITING THE CITY Written Word in Nineteenth-
Urban Visions and Literary Century American Literature
Modernism Megan Williams
Desmond Harding
iii
LOVE AMERICAN STYLE

Divorce and the American Novel,
1881–1976
Kimberly Freeman
FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS
OF THE 1970s
Joanna Russ and Dorothy Bryant
Tatiana Teslenko
DEAD LETTERS TO THE NEW
WORLD
Melville, Emerson, and American
Transcendentalism
Michael McLoughlin
THE OTHER ORPHEUS
A Poetics of Modern
Homosexuality
Merrill Cole
ROUTLEDGE
NEW YORK & LONDON
Published in 2003 by
Routledge
29 West 35th Street
New York, NY 10001
www.routledge-ny.com
Published in Great Britain by
Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane
London EC4P 4EE
www.routledge.co.uk
Copyright © 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group.
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cole, Merrill, 1966
The other Orpheus: a poetics of modern homosexuality/by Merrill
Cole.
p. cm.—(Literary criticism and cultural theory)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-203-50927-7 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-57873-2 (Adobe eReader Format)

ISBN 0-415-96705-8 (Hardcover : alk. paper)
1. American poetry—20th century—History and criticism.
2. Homosexuality and literature—United States—History—20th century.
3. Homosexuality and literature—France—History—19th century.
4. Eliot, T.S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888–1965. Waste land.
5. Crane, Hart, 1899–1932—Criticism and interpretation.
6. Rimbaud, Arthur, 1854–1891. Illuminations.
7. Modernism (Literature)—United States.
8. Orpheus (Greek mythology) in literature.
9. Erotic poetry—History and criticism.
10. Sex in literature. I. Title. II. Series.
PS310.H66C65 2003
811’.509353–dc21
2003007030
La musique savante manque à notre désir.
—Arthur Rimbaud
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS viii
INTRODUCTION: The Intellectual Life of the Feelings 1

CHAPTER ONE: The Anatomy of Decision: Modernist Bodies 17
and the Meaning of “No”
CHAPTER Two: The Rack of Enchantments: “New Love” in 39
Rimbaud’s Illuminations
CHAPTER THREE: Jouissance of the Commodities: Rimbaud 69
against Erotic Reification
CHAPTER FOUR: Empire of the Closet: Erotic Colonization in 91
The Waste Land
CHAPTER FIVE: Perversion’s Permanent Target: Hart Crane 116
and the Uses of Memory
AFTERWORD: A Lovely End 141

EPILOGUE: Wine 144
NOTES 146
BIBLIOGRAPHY 166
INDEX 174
Acknowledgments
Writing The Other Orpheus has been a long-term project. I have many
people to thank.
In 1991, Phyllis Janowitz, my MFA thesis advisor at Cornell University,
told me that my suspicions about homoeroticism in the poetry of T.S.Eliot
were right on target. That was the beginning. Four years later, at the
University of Washington, Tim Dean and Jeanne Heuving assisted me in
developing an extended analysis of Eliot, which would become the starting-
point and fourth chapter of the dissertation. Christopher Lane’s criticism
of this essay helped to make it appropriate for publication in Discourse.
Leroy Searle guided the entire dissertation, and also provided a great deal of
moral support. Nancy Rubino helped me with the Arthur Rimbaud
chapters. Ranjana Khanna’s comments on the completed dissertation were
highly useful in figuring out what to do next. Tim Dean helped me sharpen
my argument about Hart Crane; Tim’s assistance and support have been
invaluable through my graduate career and beyond. The third chapter
owes a debt to Ann Kibbey, who published it in Genders, after providing
excellent editorial advice. Brian Reed offered highly useful commentary on
the complete manuscript, as I prepared to resubmit it to Routledge.
The Graduate School at the University of Washington gave me a
scholarship to France, which helped to make the Rimbaud chapters
possible. The one-year position I held at the University of Minnesota,
Morris allowed me a good deal of time to develop this book. I thank Gulf
Coast Community College for hiring me as an adjunct at the last possible
moment, thus giving me time to complete final revisions.
I thank Paul Foster Johnson, my editor at Routledge, for encouraging me
to find a better title for the book.
All four of my parents, Carole and Lee Lapensohn, and Paula and Grant
Cole, provided material support at various points in the process. I
thank my Mother, Carole, for proofreading the manuscript and offering
substantive criticism.
An enormous debt of gratitude goes to my former partner, Tony Potts,
who gave me a life outside of academia during graduate school; and to
ix
Frank Mersand, whose friendship since college has been a blessing. Finally,
I thank my current partner, Jeff Stuckey, for all the reasons he knows.
CREDITS:
“Asphodel, That Greeny Flower (excerpt)” by William Carlos Williams,
from COLLECTED POEMS: 1939–1962, VOLUME II, copyright © 1944
by William Carlos Williams. Used by permission of New Directions
Publishing Corporation.
“Bad Blood,” “Alchemy of the Verb,” and “Farewell (excerpts)” by
Arthur Rimbaud, translated by Louise Varèse, from A SEASON IN HELL
& THE DRUNKEN BOAT, copyright © 1961 by New Directions
Publishing Corp. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing
Corporation.
“By Way Of A Preface,” “After the Deluge (excerpt),” “Childhood
(excerpt)," “Tale (excerpt),” “Side Show (excerpt),” “Antique,” “Beau-
teous Being (excerpt),” “Departure (excerpt),” “To a Reason,” “Morning
of Drunkenness,” “Working People (excerpt),” “City (excerpt),”
“Vagabonds (excerpt),” “Common Nocturne,” “Historic Evening
(excerpt),” “Democracy,” “War,” “Genie (excerpt),” “Youth (excerpt),”
and “Sale,” by Arthur Rimbaud, translated by Louise Varèse, from
ILLUMINATIONS, copyright © 1957 by New Directions Publishing Corp.
Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
“Canto I, LXXXI (excerpts)” by Ezra Pound, from THE CANTOS OF
EZRA POUND, copyright © 1934, 1937, 1940, 1948, 1956, 1959, 1962,
1963, 1966, and 1968 by Ezra Pound. Used by permission of New
Directions Publishing Corporation.
“The Death of Saint Narcissus” from POEMS WRITTEN IN EARLY
YOUTH by T.S.Eliot. Copyright © 1965, renewed 1995 by Valerie Eliot.
Reprinted with permission of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, LLC.
“Empire of the Closet” by Merrill Cole, from Discourse 19.3, copyright
© 1997 Discourse. Used by Permission of Discourse.
“Eurydice” and “Tribute to the Angels (excerpts)” by H.D.(Hilda
Doolittle), from COLLECTED POEMS, 1912–1944, copyright © 1982 by
The Estate of Hilda Doolittle. Used by permission of New Directions
Publishing Corporation.
Excerpt from “Legend” by Marc Simon, editor, excerpt from “Emblems
of Conduct,” “Paraphrase,” excerpt from “Possessions,” excerpt from
“Lachrymae Christi,” “Passage,” excerpt from “The Wine Menagerie” by
Marc Simon, editor, excerpt from “Recitative,” excerpt from “For the
Marriage of Faustus and Helen” by Marc Simon, editor, excerpt from
“Voyages I” by Marc Simon, editor, excerpt from “Voyages III,” excerpt
from “Voyages VI,” excerpt from “C 33“by Marc Simon, editor, excerpt
from “The Broken Tower,” excerpt from “Forgetfulness” by Marc Simon,
editor, and excerpt from “Episode of Hands” by Marc Simon, editor, from
THE COMPLETE POEMS OF HART CRANE by Hart Crane, edited by
x
Marc Simon. Copyright 1933, 1958, 1966 by Liveright Publishing

Corporation. Copyright © 1986 by Marc Simon. Used by permission of
Liveright Publishing Corporation.
“Hugh Selwyn Mauberley II: The Age Demanded (excerpts)” by Ezra
Pound, from PERSONAE, copyright © 1926 by Ezra Pound. Used by
permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
“Personism: A Manifesto” from COLLECTED POEMS by Frank
O’Hara, copyright © 1971 by Maureen Granville-Smith, Administratrix of
the Estate of Frank O’Hara. Used by Permission of Alfred A.Knopf, a
division of Random House, Inc.
Purgatorio. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Volume II (excerpt),
translated by Allen Mandelbaum, University of California Press, 1982.
Used by permission of Bantam Books.
INTRODUCTION
The Intellectual Life of the Feelings
In the opening salvo of “A Boy’s Life: For Matthew Shepard’s Killers,

What Does It Take to Pass as a Man?,” a September 1999 Harper’s
Magazine article published eleven months after the murder, JoAnn
Wypijewski sets out to distance her critical investigation from the more
aesthetic and sentimental accounts preceding it. “From the beginning,” she
writes, “there was something too awfully iconic about the case” (61). After
a preliminary outline of the “real and fanciful detail” surrounding the
sequence of events in Laramie, Wyoming, Wypijewski provides a
cautionary tale about the professional journalist, Melanie Thernstrom, who
became too emotionally involved:
At the site where Shepard was murdered, in a field of prairie grass

and sagebrush within eyeshot of suburban houses, a cross has been
laid out in pink limestone rocks. In crotches of the killing fence, two
stones have been placed; one bears the word ‘love’; the other, ‘forgive/
The poignancy of those messages has been transmitted out and
beyond via television; it is somewhat diminished if one knows that
the stones were put there by a journalist, whose article about the
murder for Vanity Fair was called The Crucifixion of Matthew
Shepard.’
Torture is more easily imagined when masked in iconography but
no better understood. (61)
It is doubtless that attention to the social conditions enabling homophobic

aggression, or the spelling-out of how American culture engenders an
always potentially violent masculinity, serves better political purpose than
merely enshrining Shepard as a sacrificial hero. As Wypijewski argues, it is
“the culture of compulsory heterosexuality,” rather than Shepard’s
personality, that deserves interrogation (73). Whatever catharsis the
tragedy of the individual sufferer renders available to its audience, or
however much pathos the untimely death of an attractive young man
elicits, would appear a poor substitute for cultural critique. Wypijewski’s
trenchant analysis, along with such endeavors as Beth Loffreda’s 2000
2 THE OTHER ORPHEUS
academic study, Losing Matt Shepard: Life and Politics in the Aftermath of
Anti-Gay Murder, and Moisés Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project’s
2001 The Laramie Project, points us toward critical self-reflection as a
society.
What Wypijewski’s antisentimentality elides, nonetheless, is its enabling
condition: it was the murder’s sacrificial scripting, its suitability to a
representational economy she dismisses as “myth” (61), that made
Shepard’s story eminently reproducible, a national and international news
sensation, and thus a narrative available for sophisticated interventions
such as her own. An explanation of the media’s interest simply referencing
the victim’s youth, beauty, social class, and light skin-color would mistake
enabling conditions for causes. Like his gender, these attributes rendered
Shepard susceptible to aesthetic universalization; they are precisely the
markers that our culture tends to receive as unmarked. No one lacking
such characteristics could become a “child-saint” (71), Christ figure, and
sacrificial victim. Jim Osborn, then chair of the University of Wyoming’s
Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Association, tells Loffreda that Shepard
was “someone we can identify with. Matt was the boy next door. He
looked like everybody’s brother and everybody’s neighbor. He looked like
he could have been anyone’s son” (Loffreda 27). In the context of his
demise, Shepard’s homosexuality is anything but a disqualifying factor, for
death had once been the prerequisite for the male homosexual’s full entry
into social representation. The homosexual’s death, in the decades between
Oscar Wilde’s disgrace and the Stonewall Riots, had wielded a particular
aesthetic force, the power of which remained apparently undiminished in
the era of celebrity outings and lesbian sitcom kisses. The incident’s brutal
and evocative unfolding, Shepard “hijacked to a lonely spot outside of
town, bludgeoned beyond recognition, and left to die without his shoes”
(Wypijewski 61), together with the man’s empathetic small loveliness, set
the stage for a fully embodied representation of sacrifice, the most
enduring, and perhaps the most potent, mythology in the Western
imaginary.1
Although Wypijewski would have our sentimental experience of the crime
scene “somewhat diminished” by the journalist’s participation, we could
just as easily read Melanie Thernstrom’s physical intervention, her
positioning of the inscribed stones, as a sign of how emotionally
compelling that site was. This is especially so, if we subscribe to the
stereotype of the “hardboiled” reporter. What Wypijewski implies to be
the betrayal of professional protocol, we can, to follow the sacrificial logic,
interpret as a sacrifice itself in fidelity to something “deeper” or “higher”
than professional ethics. Antisentimentality, as a rhetorical technique that
must take recourse to its opposite, courts the risk of reproducing it. More
problematic is Wypijewski’s ideological assumption that the
commemoration of a friend or fellow townsperson should seem more
INTRODUCTION: THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE OF THE FEELINGS 3
authentic to us than Thernstrom’s, as though the journalist’s responsibility

to represent “what really happened” renders her a less innocent witness.
Wypijewski explicitly engages in ideology critique. She cleverly uncovers
the contradictions of cowboy mythology: “For the men of Laramie who
didn’t grow up on a ranch riding horses and roping cattle—that is, most of
them—the cowboy cult appears to be as natural as the antlers affixed to a
female elk’s head hanging on a wall at the Buckhorn [Bar]” (68).
Wypijewski shows how a cowboy image that in one context seems a
straightforward, traditional depiction of masculinity, in another becomes
pure gay camp (69). Given this, her assumption that a proper ordering of
representation should be maintained in the control of maudlin excess
deserves scrutiny. “A Boy’s Life” argues that our culture teaches men not
to express emotion, and that the man who attempts to suppress his
emotions may end up releasing them in violence. To dramatize one’s
feelings means to display weakness, or, in the particular vocabulary of
American boyhood, to expose oneself as a “wuss” (63). Like Wypijewski’s
readers, boys, it would seem, are enjoined against indulgence in
sentimentality.
The awful iconicism of Matthew Shepard’s murder is not at all easy to
circumvent. If Thernstrom becomes a compromised participant in its
production, Wypijewski’s more rigorous argument deconstructs in the
effort to evade its affective pull. In his introduction to The Laramie
Project, Moises Kaufman references the modernist playwright, Bertold
Brecht. The play, concerned with how “a particular event brings the various
ideologies and beliefs prevailing in a culture into sharp focus” (v), has to do
with the community of Laramie after Shepard’s death, rather than with a
dramatization of the murder. Unlike other artistic representations of the
event and its aftermath, The Laramie Project abjures the representational
strategies of conventional tragedy, instead relying on Brecht’s concept of
alienation, whereby the spectator’s emotional disengagement from the
staged action should open space for a more critical response. Nor is the
spectator encouraged to identify with a tragic hero. Dialogue consists, for
the most part, of the unaltered words of local residents and their interviews
with Tectonic Project members, a technique avoiding the playwright’s
rhetorical amplifications. The arrangement of speakers into scenes that the
script terms “moments” breaks up the Aristotelian unity of action,
sometimes abating dramatic tension. Even though the three acts center
upon the crime, the discovery, and the funeral, respectively, multiple
digressions in time and place work against tragic sequencing. The stage
directions stipulate that the performance space should “suggest, not
recreate” the original scenes (vi); and the same actors perform multiple
roles, with minimal costume changes. Where the conventions of dramatic
realism encourage an audience to receive a self-contained stage
representation passively, the staging of The Laramie Project works to
4 THE OTHER ORPHEUS
engage spectators as critical participants. The performance, therefore, does

not deliver an encapsulated message or moral, even as it problematizes
aspects of American day-to-day ideology: it is the task of audience
members to draw their own conclusions from the multiple perspectives
voiced therein.
While structured to make its audience think, The Laramie Project also
engages the emotions. Intent on representing the full range of Laramie’s
response to the murder, the play has Shepard’s lesbian friend, Romaine
Patterson, recount how she helped to orchestrate an “Angel Action”
against the Reverend Fred Phelps and his anti-gay protest entourage (80).
Its dramatic reenactment is a metatheatrical interlude, for the “Angel
Action” was itself a performance:
So our idea is to dress up like angels. And so we have designed an

angel outfit—our wings are huge—they’re like big-ass wings—and
there’ll be ten or twenty of us that are angels—and what we’re gonna
do is we’re gonna encircle Phelps…and because of our big wings—we
are gonna com-plete-ly block him.
So this big-ass band of angels comes in, and we don’t say a fuckin’
word, we just turn our backs to him and we stand there…. And we
are a group of people bringing forth a message of peace and love and
compassion. And we’re calling it ‘Angel Action.’ (79–80)
Again, the exhortation is to “love” and “forgive.” Here the sacrificial

script, elsewhere somewhat withheld by the play’s Brechtian structure,
releases its affective charge.2 Patterson mentions briefly that her protest
was held during the trial of one of the perpetrators, which took place more
than six months after the murder; however, in placing her monologue in
unbroken proximity to the funeral liturgy, wherein salvation is promised,
the play intensifies the action’s symbolic appeal. This is evidence for what
Loffreda terms The Laramie Projecfs “redemptive heart” (127).
The Laramie Project acknowledges that the boundary between theater
and “real life,” like the one between performer and audience, is
provisional. However, another “Moment,” a few short scenes after
Patterson’s monologue, might appear to reestablish demarcations blurred
by the “Angel Action.” University of Wyoming theater major Jedadiah
Schultz expresses perplexity concerning his parents’ hostility toward his
intention to audition for Angels in America, a gay-themed play, when
previously they had not objected to seeing him perform as a murderer in
Macbeth (85). There is a problem, the play would imply, when parents
would prefer to cast their boys as killers, rather than as queers. While we
might conclude that the parents should have known how to separate their
son’s role in any given play from his ordinary self, this is hardly the sole
instance in The Laramie Project when homosexuality confuses the ordinary
drawing of distinctions. Schultz’s ordinary self, of course, becomes part of

the content of what is arguably another gay-themed play. When Doug
Laws states the Mormon faith’s objection to homosexuality, that “God has
set his boundaries” (25), his unintentional irony evokes the image of the
fence on which Shepard died.
A play dramatizing the courtroom discourse of both perpetrators subtly
raises the question of whether we can ultimately separate action from
dra matic representation. And we cannot say with certainty that Aaron
McKinney and Russell Henderson were not themselves, in the night that
they left Shepard to die on the fence, performing roles in a script that had
been written long before they were born, the same script to which
Thernstrom and Patterson, among innumerable others, responded. In Act
III of The Laramie Project, McKinney confesses, “it was like somebody else
was doing it” (90). “‘The story’ passed into myth,” Wypijewski writes,
“even before the trail had been set, and at this point fact, rumor, politics,
protective cover, and jailhouse braggadocio are so entangled that the truth
may be elusive even to the protagonists” (61). That “truth” may have been
a myth all along.
Wypijewski suggests as much when she hypothesizes that Henderson and
McKinney’s adherence to an impossible-to-fulfill masculine ideal played a
causal role in their crime. Yet her disdain for the affective dynamics of the
murder scene precludes investigation of a darker possibility. As Donna
Minkowitz asserts in “Love and Hate in Laramie,” an article published in
the June 12, 1999 issue of The Nation, ”[m]edia reports to the contrary,
gay bashing is an erotic crime, not just a violent one” (22). Minkowitz
considers Shepard’s killing a sacrifice, imagining that at the “holy place” of
the crime, the perpetrators found “all their worthlessness …redeemed”
(23). What Loffreda in her preface calls the “American transubstantiation”
(x) of Matthew Shepard deserves critical scrutiny. This is not to argue
against how important it is for critics to counter the easy stereotype of
Wyoming as “the hate state,” whereby we might lose the sense that an anti-
gay murder could indeed happen anywhere (Loffreda 12). It is also crucial
to oppose the simplistic portrayal of the perpetrators as “monsters,” for
the unexceptional character of the two young men suggests they could have
grown up, with minor variations, in any American locale (Wypijewski 62).
However, pointing out that Shepard “was not crucified” in “the most
literal definition of the word” does not suffice as demystification
(Wypijewski 62).
All accounts of Shepard’s death have had to deal with an economy that
this study will term “sacrificial.” The sacrificial economy, not necessarily a
narrative, drama, or poetics, is a significatory system that, while first
articulated in poetry, proves adaptable to television, newsprint, or any
other means of representation. It forms an “economy” because it entails
the regulation and mobilization of affect. The ideology of feeling as the
6 THE OTHER ORPHEUS
natural or spontaneous expression of the self, beyond and behind the

mediations of language, from which, among other concomitants, follows
the disconnection of critical thought from emotional response, is part of
this economy. To critique it means to consider affect in terms of
signification. That affect belongs to the order of representation, though,
does not render it always amenable to conscious mediation. As part of the
libidinal economy theorized in the writings of Sigmund Freud, affect is also
unconscious.3 If, as Jacques Lacan famously states, the unconscious is the
discourse of the Other—that is to say, of the symbolic order—then it may
be affect that articulates and disarticulates the volitional self, as opposed to
the commonsense notion that the self expresses emotion. The self
repressing emotion would also be an over-simple formulation. Instead of
advancing the basic Freudian thesis that McKinney and Henderson reacted
violently to repressed homoerotic desire, as Minkowitz suggests, it would be
better to consider how they responded to the discourse of the Other. To do
so would not be to abjure them of the crime, for Lacanian ethics consists in
keeping a certain distance from the violent injunctions of the unconscious.
McKinney’s abdication of responsibility, his statement that the crime felt
“like somebody else was doing it,” makes horrifying sense from this
perspective.
Christian symbolism is everywhere evident in the response to the
murder, even where the religion would appear to have little more status
than metaphor. To figure interpersonal relations in the language of
Christian devotion, and thereby to make sacrifice the proof and substance
of human love, is the inaugural strategy of Western love poetry. As Lacan
explains in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, the courtly love poetry of the
troubadours helped to bring about in the West a reorganization of
“sentimental attachments” that remains very much in effect today (148).
The Other Orpheus concerns the specific challenges posed to the sacrificial
economy by male homoeroticism in modernist poetry. While not an
analysis of current events, except insofar as it intervenes in contemporary
queer and cultural theory, this study is premised on the conviction that
attention to poetry can reward serious cultural critique. “Queer”
modernism, I will argue, can help us better to understand the
contemporary situation, as well as the past, the history of which has been
written in such a way as to obscure all it has to offer us. My analysis of the
discourses surrounding Matthew Shepard’s murder serves not only to
introduce the continuing entanglement of male homosexuality in the
sacrificial economy, but also to suggest that the aesthetic deserves much
more critical attention than it currently receives. Analyzing the work of the
sacrificial economy in representations of Shepard’s death does not point us
towards alternatives to that economy. The close readings in the chapters
that follow will serve to demonstrate, among other things, that we can locate
less violent constructions of masculinity, as well as better ways to mobilize

affect, in homoerotic poetry.
Although the irrelevance of poetry is tacit in much of recent cultural
critique, Terry Eagleton’s The Ideology of the Aesthetic states it rather
bluntly. Opposing nonetheless the “automatic condemnation” (8) of his
titular subject in leftist political discourses, Eagleton argues for a more
nuanced and dialectical understanding of the various meanings attached to
“the aesthetic” since its bourgeois conception, taking his reader from
Enlightenment rationality to postmodern indeterminacy. It is worth
considering how he dismisses poetry. After “the work of Blake and
Shelley,” he writes, “‘political poetry’” becomes “an effective oxymoron”:
“There can be little truck between an analytical language of political dissent
and those subtly sensuous intensities which are now coming to monopolize
the meaning of poetry.” (61) This statement would remove all modern—not
to mention, all postmodern—poetry from leftist consideration.4 Eagleton
does not back up his summary claim with textual evidence. The rejection
of poetry as a subject of discussion reinforces the bipolar dichotomy of
thought and affect, for in upholding a distinction between “the analytical
language of political dissent” and “subtly sensuous intensities,” Eagleton
rehearses the Kantian aesthetic he elsewhere subjects to critique: “Kant
associates the sublime with the masculine and military, useful antidotes
against a peace which breeds cowardice and effeminacy.” (90) The
ideological effect of the sublime is to wrench the implicitly male subject
“from the maternal pleasures of Nature and experience,” in order to lift
him to a “higher” location, “the phallic law of abstract reason” (91).
Feminine “peace” is the beautiful; in other words, it is nothing other than
the realm of “subtly sensuous intensities.”
Sexism relies upon the symmetrical opposition of two genders. We
should note that the language of homophobia, structured in borrowed
sexist bifurcations, contrasts the “real” man, who takes interest in serious
matters, such as politics, with the homosexual, whose pursuits are frivo-
lous and empty of meaning. In much of traditional Marxism, the
“nonproductive” male homosexual was an important sign of bourgeois
decadence, just as he symbolized aristocratic decadence for the Victorian
bourgeoisie. Eagleton lapses into a masculinist ideology of dissent, which,
if taken to its extreme, would not only preclude the playfully effective
innovations of queer activism, but also the queer idea that affective
displays are political, as illustrated by the Queer Nation “kiss-in” and
Romaine Patterson’s “Angel Action.” Eagleton’s lapse occurs at the very
moment he kisses off poetry, and this may be no coincidence: the dismissal
of poetry, usually also a defense against affect, dovetails with the
belittlement of men who engage in untoward emotional display and verbal
extravagance. The traces of homophobia in Eagleton’s discourse do not
render the critic an active homophobe; rather, they suggest the unconscious
8 THE OTHER ORPHEUS
work of ideology. Nor do I wish to imply that all queer males adhere to
Wildean stereotype: it is enough that the homophobic imaginary conceives
them thus. “Wussitude,” Wypijewski quips, “haunts a boy’s every move”
(63). One sure sign of it is an interest in poetry. In Nicki Elder’s Laramie
High School creative writing class, “students who wrote love poetry were
deemed ‘faggots’” (Loffreda 116).
In her discussion of Elton John’s charity performance in Laramie,
Loffreda writes, “it seemed to me, as I listened to straight professors tell me
how moved they had been by the concert, how it important it was, that a
purchased ticket and a few shed tears didn’t count much as political action;
and that it was a dearly bought mistake to let oneself think otherwise”
(101). Emotional extravagance that assuages liberal guilt, or that serves to
take the edge off the distressing sense that one should do something,
ulti mately confirms the status quo. Loffreda then criticizes “a national
political style that proceeds, all too often, through the mechanisms of
iconhood and adoring identification, through the expression of emotion
itself as a political good” (102). If America’s therapeutical culture can so
easily substitute sentiment for action, as though the two were mutually
exclusive, and as if feeling self-redeeming sorrow about an event were
incompatible with thinking hard about how to prevent its recurrence, then
perhaps we should see the sacrificial economy not only a shaper of affect,
but also as an impediment to activism. This is not at all to say that we
should “get over” our feelings, that we should “act like men,” in order to
behave as responsible citizens. We need to revoke affect’s sacrosanct status
and submit it to critical analysis. One aim of this study is to advance the
notion that feeling thinks. The sacrificial economy is a long chapter in the
intellectual history of affect. In his introduction to Beyond Sexuality,
“Beyond the Couch,” Tim Dean emphasizes the importance of “thinking
about sexuality and desire in different, less psychological terms” (3). This
study follows Dean in using psychoanalysis to theorize beyond
psychology’s fixation on the individual: it is worthwhile to consider the
impersonality of affect.
Loffreda observes a change in Laramie commercial practice after the
media spread knowledge of Shepard’s murder:
local businesses announced, on signs usually reserved for information

about nightly rates, indoor pools, and bargain lunches, their dismay
with the crime. The Comfort Inn: ‘Hate and Violence Are Not Our
Way of Life.’ The University Inn: ‘Hate Is Not a Laramie Value.’
Arby’s: ‘Hate and Violence Are Not Wyoming Values 5 Regulars $5.
95.’ Obviously, these signs suggested a typically American arithmetic,
promiscuously mixing moral and economic registers. Underneath the
sentiment lingered the question: what will his death cost us? (17)
If, as Loffreda claims, the contamination of sentiment by commerce is not

the most salient aspect of the response to the crime, it is absolutely crucial
to understanding of poetry in the era of commodity culture. Another
reason that I employ the term, “economy,” in speaking of sacrifice is to
contrast sacrifice with commodification. The Ideology of the Aesthetic
brilliantly links the supposedly autonomous Kantian subject to the form of
the commodity. Eagleton proceeds by structural analogy, locating the
commodity precisely where the philosopher would most want to exclude it.
In modernism, however, commercial relations intrude as a thematic, as
well as a formal, concern. Subjected to the conditions of commodity
exchange, which include the dissemination of “popular” culture, modernist
poetry responds politically to a world far different from the medieval one of
the troubadours, wherein a religion centered on sacrifice regulated even the
marketplace, and also markedly different than Kant’s. Eagleton seems to
imply that intellectual dissent, at least since Shelleyan Romanticism,
necessarily follows the formal structure of the philosophical or political
essay.5 Yet radical modernist practice subjects such formal preconceptions
to critique. To read the departure of modernist poetry from poetic
convention merely as empty innovation or elitist obfuscation is to mistake
its import. Even modernist poetry that seems “a preserve of the political
right” (Eagleton 61) can prove rewarding to political study.
The Other Orpheus aims to reestablish an interest in poetry by
integrating questions of prosody and aesthetics with political literary
inquiry. The broader theoretical goal is nothing less than a rehabilitation of
the concepts of affect and imagination, though the study also argues
against antiformalist approaches to literature. It does not, however,
advocate a simple return to the New Criticism, nor even to Russian
Formalism. Rather, it utilizes the methodological insights of contemporary
theory, most intensively psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and Marxism, to
elaborate the social significance of poetic experiment. The study focuses on
the works of Arthur Rimbaud, T.S.Eliot, and Hart Crane. At issue is the
extent to which homoerotic affect influences formal innovation, what
unconventional sexualities have to do with new poetic practices. The
neglected genealogy that I delineate evidences how the coincident, but
hardly accidental, historical emergence of modernism and homosexuality
has pro-found repercussions on our society as a whole. Much as the
concept of homosexuality challenges the normative regime of Western
sexuality and human relations, so the poetry here under consideration
rewrites the dominant representational economy of Western poetry. That
economy, which centers upon sacrificial love, depends upon the nostalgia
effects of traditional mimesis for poetic efficacy, enlisting discourses of
impossibility, inaccessibility, inexpressibility, fatality, and forfeiture to
articulate the profundities of interpersonal feeling. Rimbaud, Eliot, and
Crane, while retaining to varying degrees the romantic ideal of redemptive
10 THE OTHER ORPHEUS
self-sacrifice, alter its direction. Yet the responses of these three poets to the
inadequacies of traditional mimesis, as well as to the dilemma of the
homosexual closet, drastically diverge. I attempt to elucidate and evaluate
the political consequences of their distinct poetic decisions.
The advent of commodity capitalism concurs with that of modernism
and homosexuality. While sacrifice entails an economics of privation,
commodity culture encourages excess and expenditure: as Reginia Gagnier
writes in The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in
Market Society, “Knowledge and freedom in market society may be
reducible to a single dominant narrative about the total actualization of
individual pleasure” (1). This “narrative” first came into effect at about the
same time that Rimbaud definitively broke with previous poetic tradition:
“Around 1871,” in response to new economic conditions, “economic
theory began to shift its focus from the social relations of population
growth, landlords, entrepreneurs, workers, and international trade to the
individual’s subjective demand for goods” (Gagnier 3–4). This shift from
the public to the private is also roughly contemporaneous with the coining
of the word, “homosexuality.” Capitalism made possible the formation of
non-normative sexual identity in the West, as John D’Emilio, Michel
Foucault, and other historians have demonstrated; yet from its beginnings,
male homosexuality has denied, challenged, and even outdared its enabling
condition. Homosexuality is an underexplored register of capitalism’s
constitutive contradictions; and it is in this context that modernist poetry’s
reappropriations and disarticulations of consumer culture prove
particularly significant. As Theodor Adorno writes in Aesthetic Theory, “[t]
he unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent
problems of form” (6). To elaborate the shared history of male
homosexuality, modernist aesthetics, and commodification is to argue for a
realignment in contemporary queer political thought, one which pays
attention to the aesthetic and the economic at the same time.
It would also be a realignment of queer theory, which, to speak generally,
has come more and more to define itself as a branch of cultural studies.
Even though, as this introduction should indicate, I share an interest in
mass-mediated culture, my work simultaneously asserts the importance of
adversarial art. Queer studies has often followed Foucault’s latter dismissal
of the political promise of such art; I am more interested in an earlier
Foucault. I would emphasize too that much of what passes now as
“popular culture,” such as, most notoriously, the music of Madonna,
would better be defined as the work of the culture industry. The cultural-
studies leveling of art forms has here, as elsewhere, disabled the capacity to
make critical distinctions. Dean contests “the historicist principle that
converts every text into a historically determined cultural document,
placing it on equal footing with other contemporaneous documents” (28),
for such reductionism “eliminates the possibility of any discursive
specificity whatsoever” (29). I would add that it also assumes the text’s
availability to historicist mastery, an especially questionable notion when
the text at hand directly challenges historicism’s narrative presuppositions.6
And there is some irony to the fact that intensely difficult academic
discourses, which tend to limit readership on the basis of vocabulary alone,
would censure demanding aesthetic production as “elitist”—especially
when both involve the work of cultural critique.
The male homoerotic nexus that concerns this study cannot claim
exclusive literary or social privilege, and indeed intersects with other
important histories, including, of course, that of lesbianism. It is
nevertheless a crucial component of any comprehensive understanding of
modernism and of the crisis of modern masculine identity, a crisis
abundantly evident in Matthew Shepard’s murder. My exploration of the
issue of homoerotic affect also contributes to queer theory, which has not
recognized the full purchase of modernist technique. For if I use theory to
interrogate poetry, I also show that poetry has a lot to teach critical inquiry
—especially concerning imagination, the human capacity to envision and
construct change. When theory forgets its status as language and assumes a
metadiscursive position, it ren ders itself incapable of entering into dialogue
with the texts it presumes to explain.
By including Rimbaud in this study, I intend not only to dispute certain
spurious literary boundaries, but also to register this most decisive figure in
the history that interests me. A pivotal influence on Crane, Rimbaud
practices a revolutionary modernism virtually antithetical to Eliotic
reaction. It is not my intention, however, to divide poetic production of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into a progressive “avant
garde” and a regressive “modernism.” Even some of Eliot’s poetry
possesses qualities that can be considered avant-garde, as Marjorie Perloff
shows in TwentyFirst-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics. And it is
Rimbaud, arguably the most avant-garde of the three poets, who boldly
asserts the imperative to be modern. Both “modernist” and “avant-garde”
necessarily appear in my discussions of literary criticism; I nonetheless
prefer to build my argument around specific poems, rather than
terminological abstractions.7 It is a messier process to move from close
reading outward; but the poetry under consideration relates adversarily to
historical metanarration and the master terms through which it operates.
This challenge can only be apprehended through careful attention to poetic
form.
Since the troubadours, Western poetry has rarely spoken of love, desire,
and pleasure without concurrently invoking the specter of death.
Remembering Sodom and Sappho, Western discourse also marries
representations of homoeroticism to catastrophe; an entire modern
narrative subgenre, for instance, plots the untimely demise of a wayward
homosexual protagonist. Media discourse on AIDS, especially during the
first decade of the crisis, has sometimes resuscitated this metanarrative. As

Paul Morrison argues in “End Pleasure,” ”[t]he cultural function of AIDS
has been to stabilize, through a specifically narrative or novelistic logic, the
truth of gay identity as death or death wish” (54). If the dominant culture
understands “homosexuality as a simple failure of teleology” (55), it
becomes clear why death, whether through complications resulting from a
compromised immune system, or as the result of gaybashing, provides
narrative satisfaction. As I will demonstrate, this metanarrative not only
informs the critical reception of Rimbaud and Crane, but also the structure
of Eliot’s antinarrative poem, The Waste Land. Death so overdetermines
the semantic framing of homoerotic love that to inscribe it, whatever the
intent of the author, risks reaffirming the sacrificial economy. For Eliot,
such homophobic acquiescence evinces fidelity to tradition, regardless of
his poetry’s rearrangement of the literary past. There is, however, a
constitutive ambivalence about homosexuality in his earlier work, of
consequence to the meaning of modernism and to Crane. More overt than
Eliot about his ambition to transfigure poetry—not to mention, more open
about his sexuality—Crane, like Rimbaud, does not fully extricate himself
from the pitfalls of tradition. The Other Orpheus subjects poetry to
intensive political scrutiny, critiquing instances of misogyny, orientalism,
classism, and ho mophobia, as well as shortcomings of formal design. Each
chapter represents a specific intervention in criticism. My overall purpose is
nonetheless to explore the possibilities of imaginative language.
Avoiding the ideological implications of chronological order, my study
begins with the poem that has come to epitomize modernism, at least for
the Anglo-American audience. “The Anatomy of Decision,” the
introductory chapter, compares Eliot’s “The Love Song of J.Alfred
Prufrock” with Sigmund Freud’s “Negation.” The hesitancy and
disaffirmation that these works share forefronts the presumed antagonism
of love and death, Eros and Thanatos, sexuality and the death drive.
Following Leo Bersani, I furnish a reading of Freud that undermines the
founder of psychoanalysis’s official view and propose a less violent
potentiality for the operations of desire. In The Freudian Body, Bersani
argues that coming undone, or selfshattering, constitutes the positivity of
the erotic. Prufrock’s supposed sexual inadequacies read differently when
the very possibility of sexual affect depends upon a fundamental structural
failure of the self. Bersani’s psychoanalytic theory, which I trace across a
number of his writings, valorizes literary works which would enact, rather
than constrict or repress, the disordering impetus of desire. Sacrifice,
thereby, need not entail literal death. However, neither Eliot’s poem nor
Freud’s essay sanctions this sanguine perspective. “The Love Song of
J.Alfred Prufrock,” albeit charged with sexual indecision, reads its
persona’s disappearing act in resolutely negative terms. Although Eliot’s
curious, even comic, metonymic displacements complain against the
manipulations of romantic rhetoric, those “tedious” (l.8) arguments of

“insidious intent” (1.9), Prufrock signifies not a workable departure from
heroic masculinity, but a defeat dependent upon contrast to the desired
ideal. Instead of imagining how human relations might be structured
differently, Prufrock bemoans his inadequacy to social expectation. The
social order’s immutability seems guaranteed by Eliot’s methodical allusion
to its canonical texts. Prufrock’s failure to appreciate failure signals the
inherent difficulty of resignifying sacrifice nonlethally. Undoing the work
of negation may require more than self-shattering. Self-shattering, or
jouissance, if it precludes decisive action, is insufficient for queer politics.
Nor does jouissance account for the full emotional range of Eliot’s poem,
involved as it is in the pathos of the individual. Bersani’s theory, however,
provides an invaluable alternative to Hugh Kenner’s heroic modernism and
other masculinist critical frameworks.
With the second chapter, my intervention is to produce the first sustained
queer theoretical reading of Rimbaud’s prose poetry. “The Rack of
Enchantments” considers male homoerotic love and sacrifice in the Illumi-
nations. Rimbaud would write a poetry actuating love, rather than
representing it belatedly or mourning for it. He eroticizes the reading
process: “Ta tête se détourne: le nouvel amour! Ta tête se retourne: le
nouvel amour!” (“Your head turns away: the new love! Your head
turns back: the new love!”).8 My interpretations of individual prose poems
demonstrate that, because Rimbaud’s poetic involves the active constitution
of meaning, efforts to fasten his lyrics to biographical narrative, to treat
them as retrospectives, or as psychiatric puzzles, necessarily betray them.
Because Rimbaud joins his stylistics to male same-sex love, criticism of any
kind that misses, avoids, or discounts this connection misinterprets him.
The biographical tradition, homophobically conceiving Rimbaud’s
sexuality as hapless adolescent rebellion, reads its master-narrative of
sacrificial failure into the poet’s most triumphant work. It tends to ignore
the antinarrative, often impersonal character of the Illuminations. Recent
philological approaches, while prosodically sophisticated, rule out
consideration of the relationship of formal innovation to iconoclastic
sexuality. Presenting the masculine body as an erotic spectacle, Rimbaud
disrupts the homosocial circuit of conventional love poetry, in which a man
speaks to other men about a woman. Rejecting the division of mind from
body, and with it, the separation of content from form, Rimbaud also
dismisses the Christian moral order. His new love includes the promise of a
new society, wherein the pursuit of jouissance becomes a cultural rite. With
jouissance, however, he also cultivates the negative ritual upholding the
older orders of Christianity and traditional love poetry: violent, deadly
sacrifice. Using the work of Jacques Lacan, Allen Grossman, and Catherine
Clément, I critique Rimbaud’s incomplete departure from the sacrificial
economy that would circumscribe his work as failure.
The third chapter addresses failure from a different perspective.

“Jouissance of the Commodities” examines the Marxist thesis on
modernism’s commodification in the context of Rimbaud’s prose poem,
“Solde.” The failure of artistic modernism is a claim variously elaborated
by Jiirgen Habermas, Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Andreas
Huyssen, and Fredric Jameson. If Rimbaud plays a nominal role in much
of contemporary Marxism, one reason is surely his place in the work of the
influential modernist Marxist, Theodor Adorno. Rimbaud’s early letters,
which echo the French utopian socialist thought critiqued as naive by Karl
Marx, play a pivotal role in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. Yet Adorno
appears to disregard the Illuminations. Reading “Solde” in terms of its
deconstruction of poetic and commercial discourse, I argue that the poem
not only well exemplifies Adorno’s adversarial modernism, but also
anticipates the postmodernist commodification argument. Rimbaud
sacrifices his earlier poetic idealism in order to initiate a more rigorous
cultural politics. The open-ended poetic structure of “Solde” abjures the
sense of closure that failure provides. I argue that Rimbaud’s failure should
be reconceptualized in Benjaminian terms, as participation in an unfinished
struggle. With “Solde,” Rimbaud also shows a critical awareness of the
limitations of the libidinal, sacrificial practices elsewhere exalted in his
poetry. The poem provides contemporary activists with valuable
techniques for countering the commodification of the queer.
The fourth chapter, “Empire of the Closet,” employs Foucauldian and
postcolonial theory, as well as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s seminal work in
queer theory, to inquire into the political ramifications of T.S.Eliot’s textual
erotics, circumlocutionary eloquence, and critical insistence upon
impersonality. I explore the complicity of The Waste Land in major
structures of power: the closet, the canon, and the empire. Reading The
Waste Land in the context of its borrowings from Eliot’s earlier,
suppressed lyric, “The Death of Saint Narcissus,” I contend that his
submission to traditional order entails homosexual sacrifice, among other
unfavorable offerings. My analysis not only argues against critical
procedures overly indebted to the poet, but also connects the homosexual
closet to Eliot’s persuasive force. The Waste Land operates by
ambivalence. Eliot’s language simultaneously causes its reader to overlook
connections and requests the effort to restore continuity. The poem leaves
elaborate traces of what it disavows, urging the digging-up of what has
been incompletely buried. The Waste Land adumbrates homoeroticism, yet
cues the reader to look for it. It gives approval to the violations it purveys
from a distance. Nonetheless, even as it urges the reconvening of
traditional hierarchies, the poem’s explosive fragmentation may serve to
inaugurate something unanticipated by its nostalgia. While John Guiliory’s
Cultural Capital shows how Eliot successfully marketed himself
throughout his career, this chapter considers the poem’s revulsion to
commodity relations: we can also read Eliot’s endorsement of the

sacrificial economy, as well has his stylistic difficulty, as the desperate
attempt to evade commodification.
In the narrative of homosexual demise, suicide has a special significance,
for here the guilty party appears to administer society’s judgment upon
himself. Thus Hart Crane’s leap from a Caribbean passenger ship, which, as
his biographer, John Unterecker, suggests, may very well have been an
unfortunate impulse following a night of drinking and soliciting violent
sailors, is loaded with symbolic freight. Queer studies approaches to
Crane, most prominently Thomas E.Yingling’s Hart Crane and the
Homosexual Text: New Thresholds, New Anatomies, have already
subjected New Criticism’s homophobic narrative to critique. Yet such
recuperations of Crane have missed the political challenge that his poetry
poses to historical narrative, homophobically or otherwise inclined.
“Perversion’s Permanent Target,” the concluding chapter, examines the
paradoxical relationship between defilement and remembrance in Crane’s
White Buildings, showing how the poems attempt to become unforgettable
through a direct assault on the remembering process. Although he uses
conventional verse forms, Crane violates the rules of poetic decorum in
such a way as to rewrite homosocial tradition in homoerotic terms.
Following Grossman, I argue that Crane’s radical revisions of the scenes of
poetic inspiration and sacrifice challenge an Eliotic understanding of the
purposes of modern poetry, replacing irony with affirmation. I depart from
Grossman in emphasizing Crane’s homoerotic impetus, insisting that the
poet’s crossing of the conventional boundary between the male poetic
speaker and the female source of his inspiration represents sexual
subversion. Although I agree with Tim Dean that jouissance has a central
place in his work—“where death, if shed/Presumes no carnage” (“Voyages
III” 11. 15–16)—I also show that jouissance serves as a perverse mnemonic
strategy. Such perversity depends on impersonality. Crane’s strategies also
owe a debt to Rimbaud, a debt that goes beyond poetic optimism or
interest in homoerotic expression, even though it does not include the
French poet’s sophisticated engagement with commodification.
“Perversion’s Permanent Target” explores how Crane develops Rimbaud’s
countermimesis, an inversion of the traditional order of representation that
places priority on the signifier, moving from words to what words can
evoke, rather than employing words to represent what already exists
elsewhere. Countermimesis may promise a different and potentially less
violent way of articulating desire.
In “‘True Love’: the Instituting Force of Loss in the Domain of
Representation,” Allen Grossman asserts that the poetic representation of
love inevitably depends upon belatedness. While he is undoubtedly right
that most of Western poetry depends on figuring something that does not
exist within the scope of the poem, that no longer exists, or that never
existed, countermimesis may counter the nostalgic imperative. Grossman

claims that “there are no poems…of having, just so” (25), but what if male
homoerotic poetry offers a poetics of such having? “A Lovely End,” my
afterword, considers some of the erotic questions that ensue from my
readings of modernist poetry, while also taking a very brief glance at
postmodern poetry. Given that one of the most positive aspects of
homoerotic poetry is its open-endedness, any conclusion about it must be
wary of closure. In another sense, of course, “the end” is very much a
focus of male homoeroticism; and there is more here to concern us than a
pun.
Of the epilogue, all I wish to say is that it represents a properly aesthetic
response to material that has concerned me for so many years. It, also, is
not really an ending.
Poetic promise focuses my entire inquiry. The thrust of the argument is
to suggest that the promises of poetic modernism are not so much
outmoded as unfulfilled. Certainly many aspects of modernism deserve
censure; and just as certainly, poetry cannot alone redeem whatever we
understand as the failures of contemporary society. Yet perhaps it is time to
rethink the place of the aesthetic, the emotive, and the literary in our
efforts to reimagine the possibilities of whom we might become. The
critique of social relations and of social texts, no matter how sophisticated,
whether in literary studies, cultural studies, queer studies, or any other
contestatory milieu, does not succeed when it can only elaborate its
analyses in a disbalance of pessimism and disparagement. What
representational strategies might modernism offer? What can poetry do for
us? William Carlos Williams writes,
Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there. (Book II 318)
In any straightforward sense, it would be outrageous to claim that Matthew

Shepard died for lack of poetry. And it is difficult to see how the
traditional poetics that have served to memorialize his death could do
much else than mourn. To me, however, Williams’s lines are not
hyperbole. More than offering alternative perspectives on human reality,
poetry provides a range of linguistic strategies for representing, feeling,
thinking, changing, and indeed creating it.
CHAPTER ONE
The Anatomy of Decision
Modernist Bodies and the Meaning of “No”
THE SUFFERING THING

In his definitive framing of the modernist period around the heroic figure
of Ezra Pound, Hugh Kenner moves carefully to disqualify the other
contender to canonical centrality, the one already consecrated by “great
man” historiography, T.S.Eliot. Heeding Pound’s call for hard-edged
precision, as well as, implicitly, masculine vigor, Kenner contrasts the
barbed-wire aesthetic to Eliot’s effete “poetic of eschewals and refrainings”
(16). Eliot would circumvent the true challenge. Because The Pound Era
demands that poetry speak publicly and firmly about the modern condition,
Eliot’s “response to impalpabilities,” with its “tones and airs, surfaces and
absences,” can register as no more, in all its eloquence, than “a poetic of the
mute” (16). Briefly reconsidering “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock,”
and virtually collapsing Eliot into his titular persona, Kenner disparages the
poet’s “suspensions and resolutions of things only half-named” as a
grandiloquent abdication of responsibility, a sort of magisterial impotence
(17). Yet more than a threat to Poundian prowess, Eliot’s deferral of settled
boundaries subtly casts doubt on the imperative to order that Kenner
inherits from his embattled Odysseus.1 Against the consolidation of the
self, its hierarchical social relations, and the self-present clarity of its
expression, Eliot registers a protest, if only by default. By negative
exemplification and oblique questioning, “The Love Song of J.Alfred
Prufrock” suggests modes of relation wholly foreign not only to the
authorized grand projects of High Modernism, but also to many of the
critical dictates and later poetic statements of Eliot himself. With the
borders of personality, the boundaries of modernism begin to vacillate in
Prufrockian indecision.
Kenner reads Pound’s own “drive toward fragmentation” not as an
assault on the fictions of the masculine self, but as a purgative to the “static
constructs” glutting the active mind (32). Aligning Pound’s novel
approaches to language with “[t]he Romantic quest for purity” (109),
he echoes the poet’s critical dicta. Pound’s literary guidebook, The A B C
of Reading, in spite of its emphatic rejection of Romanticism, asserts in

proper Wordsworthian fashion that “[g]ood writing is coterminous with the
writer’s thought, it has the form of the thought, the form of the way the
man feels his thought” (113).2 Furthermore, “[IJiterature is language
charged with meaning” (28). “Good writers are those who keep the
language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear” (32). The
manifest failure to sustain phallic order in the Cantos, in which Kenner
discerns a certain pathos, hardly brings Pound’s practice closer to the one
articulated in Prufrock and Other Observations.3 The coherence-haunted
poetics in the end finding error “all in the diffidence that faltered” (Cantos
LXXXI l. 174) necessarily disdains the imprecise phantasms of Eliot’s
“Preludes” speaker:
I am moved by fancies that are curled

Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing. (IV. 11. 10–13)
An elegant syntax skirts its undesignated object, in the delicate caress of

infolding abstractions. Perhaps rhyme is the only masculine feature of the
quatrain. Poignancy depends upon the absence of an objective correlative.4
Here, diffidence matters.
Perhaps psychoanalytic theory offers an aesthetics that can appreciate
and begin to explain, rather than simply dismiss, such ephemeral erotic
grief. In The Freudian Body (FB), Leo Bersani advances the startling thesis
that “sexuality…could be thought of as a tautology for masochism” (39).
It would be “that which is intolerable to the structured self,” for “the
pleasurable unpleasurable tension of sexual excitement occurs when the
body’s ‘normal’ range of sensation is exceeded, and when the organization
of the self is momentarily disturbed by sensations or affective processes
somehow ‘beyond’ those compatible with psychic organization” (38). For
Bersani, “[t]he mystery of sexuality is that we seek not only to get rid of
this shattering tension but also to repeat, even to increase it” (38).5
Reading Prufrock’s sexual foibles as instances of the self-unmaking
prerequisite to erotic feeling opens interpretive possibilities unrecognizable
in Kenner’s terms. Bersani valorizes literary works which would enact,
rather than rigidify or repress, the disordering impetus of desire. The
Freudian Body asks, “how might the esthetic be conceived as a
perpetuation and replicative elaboration of masochistic sexual tensions?”
(43). How then could we understand the aesthetic erotically, and what
would such an understanding offer? Bersani, more or less reversing
Kenner’s evaluative priorities in The Culture of Redemption (CR), opposes
a repressive art asserting “the authority to master the presumed raw
material of experience in a manner that uniquely gives value to, perhaps
THE ANATOMY OF DECISION 19
even redeems, that material” (1), to another art that in reconciliating

“culture and bodily intensities” (34), relinquishes command.6 As Prufrock
facetiously suggests, the time for “works” (l. 29) and “visions” (l. 33), to
“murder and create” (l. 28), may not be too far from “the taking of a toast
and tea” (l. 34).
The forms of art that Bersani contrasts share a constitutive element of
sacrifice. The redemptive model “is inherently sacrificial,” because its
action incorporates violence and, concomitantly, death. In redemptive
tragedy, a “catastrophic error or defect is somehow made up for by the
hero’s (the victim’s, the sinner’s) consciousness of his defect.” That “[l]ife
is redeemed by the act of cognition” depends upon a purifying death (CR
97). Whatever its generic specificities, redemptive literature seeks to
correct, and to compensate for, the inadequacies of ordinary human
existence. Instead of critiquing the coercive structural operations of
dominant society, its masterful aesthetic renarrates and legitimizes the
“processes of repression, symptomatic violence, and ascetic sublimation”
that “unleash sexuality in human history as murderous aggression” (FB
115). To recognize, rather than repudiate, the masochism of desire, Bersani
claims, can avert this threat, by reconfiguring the act of sacrifice. Eroticized
art rewrites the fatal imperative as the seductive call to self-undoing, and
thereby “erases the sacrosanct value of selfhood, a value that may account
for human beings’ extraordinary willingness to kill in order to protect the
seriousness of their statements. The self is a practical convenience;
promoted to the status of an ethical ideal, it is a sanction for violence” (CR
4). In Horaos, Bersani endorses “a nonsuicidal disappearance of the
subject” (99).
Bersani is recognized as a critic primarily of French literature and
Sigmund Freud, as well as a major figure in contemporary queer theory,
even though “queer” would seem not to be his preferred term.7 His
theoretical assault on the self aims primarily at the masculine ego,
alternatives to the stiffness of which he finds in male homoerotic novels
and French modernist poetry. For the reader familiar with Bersani’s superb
analyses of such writers as Marcel Proust and Stéphane Mallarmé, it may
seem unfair to apply his theory to the Anglo-American poet commonly
conceived as the last word in literary and social conservatism. The unlikely
Eliot, however, serves to test the limits of Bersani’s reworking of sacrifice.
It is also important to separate the young poet of concern in this study from
the forbidding figure who came to keep literary study in the United
Kingdom and the United States under his firm control.8 In “Avant-Garde
Eliot,” the first chapter of Twenty-First-Century Modernism: The “New”
Poetics, Marjorie Perloff considers “the still-vexed case of T.S.Eliot, the
American avant-gardist of 1910–11, who had, by the late 1920s,
transformed himself into the self-proclaimed ‘classical,’ Anglo-Catholic,
Royalist poet and conservative critic and editor” (10–11). If he still
troubles experimental poetic practice, as Perloff demonstrates, and if, as I

will argue in chapter five, he perturbs Hart Crane, Eliot himself, even in his
earliest published works, was already “vexed.” This vexedness, as
chapter four will explore, very much extends to the issue of male
homosexuality in The Waste Land. It is a topic for queer theoretical
investigation.
Whiie Eliot’s work indeed revolutionized poetic discourse in English and
elsewhere, he never cut, nor intended to cut, a revolutionary figure like that
of Rimbaud, whose blanket condemnation of the entire literary past will be
a subject of chapter three.9 Eliot announces, in “Tradition and the
Individual Talent,” an essay published in 1919, between Prufrock and
Other Observations and The Waste Land, the necessity that the new poet
“conform” to the entirety of Western literary tradition, a conformity that
would be more than slavish imitiation (38). In Cultural Capital: The
Problem of Literary Canon Formation, John Guillory argues that Eliot’s
critical rhetoric operates as a vehicle of self-promotion, for the model of
literary value advanced in his essays implicitly favors his own poetic
production and that of his associates. At the same time, Eliot articulates a
decidedly conciliatory view of the role of the poet in the modern world: the
new poet who “ever so slightly” modifies “the existing order” (38) of
European literature cannot pose as an agent of radical social change.
However significant the overall alteration that the new poet effects, Eliot’s
emphasis falls on cultural continuity: the canon never fragments. This is an
implicit endorsement of the stable social circumstances that the canon
sanctions.
Confrontation with recalcitrant literary and psychoanalytic texts renders
the full import of Bersani’s theory of self-undoing, as well as the difficult
complications and political problems it introduces, more readily
apparent.10 “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock,” albeit charged with
sexual indecision, reads its persona’s disappearing act in resolutely negative
terms. Prufrock signifies not a workable alternative to normative or heroic
masculinity, but a defeat dependent upon contrast to the desired ideal.11 If
that ideal does not sail off unscathed or unmoved by “the mermaid’s
singing” (l. 124), its escape from the feminine is still meant to seem more
attractive than Prufrock’s attentive anxiety. The defense mechanism
Prufrock deploys throughout his song receives careful consideration in
Sigmund Freud’s short essay, “Negation.” I read Freud against Prufrock not
to psychoanalyze the troubled literary figure in a reductive manner, but to
examine the strange interaction of eroticism and negativity that both works
manifest. Indeed, the authoritative analyst bears an obscure resemblance to
Eliot’s careworn persona; to compare the two, more than raising
interesting questions, submits the very activity of interrogation to
uncertainty.
THE MERMAN
The “overwhelming question” (1.10) that Prufrock defers resonates
throughout Western literary history, predicates psychoanalysis, and
appears as the chorus line of season after season of popular songs, always
with a new urgency, always with a slightly different inflection: What
is love? Prufrock protests his inadequacy to poetry’s ultimate concern, the
question of how to articulate love. “The Lovesong of J.Alfred Prufrock”
begins in the realm of the damned, where Dante’s Guido mistakenly
assumes he can give a self-compromising response to the Italian poet’s
question, because it will never reach the light of day. Although this
epigraph from the Inferno frames the purported song of love as a dialogue
with the dead, the poem turns quickly elsewhere, to frustrate epic and
elegiac expectations, as well as the romantic expectations elicited by its
title:
Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table (11. 1–3).
The astonishment provoked by the vivid juxtaposition of these opening

lines, which has become a benchmark of modernist criticism, evidences
what Richard Poirier, in “Modernism and Its Difficulties,” terms “an
unprecedented break in cultural continuity,” confronting the reader with
demanding “stylistic and structural evidences of dislocation” (97).
Unsavory and anything but anesthetizing, Prufrock’s invitation projects his
interior condition onto the surrounding environment, a gesture Bersani
associates with the realist novel’s claustrophobic structures of
containment.12 Perloff notes that the sound structure emphasizes the
speaker’s “frozen state”: the first line consists of monosyllables, “each one
demanding some stress,” with a caesura after “then”; the second line has
eleven syllables and six stresses; and third line, even longer, ends with “the
awkward shift from falling to rising and back to falling rhythm in
‘etherised upon a table’” (20). Such metric immobility would be mirrored
in the reader’s moment of shock. In urging forward motion—“[l]et us go”—
at the same time that he induces stasis, Prufrock sets the pattern for the
poem, in which he will repeatedly imagine taking action, only to refrain.
In contradistinction to solipsistic realism, Prufrock’s projection, his more-
than-rhyming tie of “I” and “sky,” enables him to engage in subtle self-
critique. The verse paragraph continues,
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent,
To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’
Let us go and make our visit. (11. 4–12, ellipsis Eliot’s)
The “half-deserted streets” mimetically suggest what appear to be the

poem’s half-completed lines, and the “muttering retreats” characterize
Prufrock’s hesitant discourse. The following phrases, however, obliquely
censure conventional male sexual propositioning, the pick-up lines
soliciting “one-night” stands in “cheap hotels.”13 Eliot’s curious
metonymic displacements complain against the manipulations of romantic
rhetoric, at the same time disrupting persuasion’s presumptive itinerary, its
“tedious argument/Of insidious intent.” A drill of hard “d,” “s,” and “t”
consonants, as well as an assonal insistence of the long “e,” accentuates the
unpleasantness. “By initiating a designifying mobility” within his poetry,
Eliot accords with Bersani’s claim that literature can undo “that security of
statement by which we can so easily be seduced, and possessed” (FB 67).
The context of paragraph’s posed but postponed final question works to
trivialize it, even as its negated offering provides the first hint of an
overwhelming significance. The poem obsessively returns to this question;
and, in each instance, a heterosexual encounter, anticipated in terror, leads
Prufrock to imagine delivering it in terms radically unsuited to the trite
circumstances he describes. Can “some talk of you and me” (l. 89) “[d]
isturb the universe” (l. 46)?
Would it have been worth while,

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: ‘I am Lazarus, come back from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all’—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: ‘That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.’ (11. 90–98)
We could read the juxtaposition of “Lazarus, come back from the dead”
and “one, setting a pillow by her head,” which is emphasized by
endrhyme, as a contrast of the serious and the trivial, or the sublime and the
beautiful. Since the second and subordinate term of each pair would
represent the feminine, we could understand the passage as exemplifying
Eliot’s sexism. There is nonetheless a distinctly different possibility. For all

the misogyny in Eliot’s poetry—in Prufrock and Other Observations,
contempt for women shows more prominently in “Portrait of a Lady” and
“Hysteria” than in the title poem—Prufrock seems prevented not from
speaking to a woman, but from speaking as a woman. It is her meaning he
imagines botching, and to interpret this ambiguous fumble exclusively as
her response to his unwelcome question of love would be to arrest
the identificatory slippage effected by negation elsewhere in the poem. The
allusion to Lazarus deflates the pressure of the carpe diem rhetoric Eliot
borrows from Andrew Marvell (If the dead truly can return, then the fate
threatened “To His Coy Mistress” loses some of its bite.).14 More
importantly, the appearance of Lazarus suggests that answering the
question of love depends upon contact with the dead. Just as Dante must
first descend into the underworld to earn his ultimate heavenly revelation,
so Prufrock fears he would have to face death in order to recognize love.
Prufrock declines, forlornly opting for the polite world of pillows, a
world in which he will “grow old” (l. 120) wearing “white flannel
trousers” (l. 123). He chooses not to follow that lineage of heroes, an
illustrious list including Odysseus, Aeneas, Jesus, Dante, and Pound, who
make the sacrifice and reap its cryptic rewards. At the opening of Pound’s
Cantos, the “rites” (I. l. 19) begin with “libations unto each of the dead”
(l. 22), “many a prayer to the sickly death’s-heads” (l. 24), and animal
“sacrifice, heaping the pyre with goods” (l. 26).15 Defining himself
negatively against macabre courage, Prufrock asks,
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,

Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a
platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid. (11. 79–86)
The comically maladroit feminine rhyme opening this passage, as well as

the exaggerated stretch of its fourth line, heighten the comparison’s
absurdity. And here the feminine gender role, positioned as frivolous
among “tea and cakes and ices,” implicitly suits Prufrock. The “eternal
Footman,” while symbolizing death, also seems a stand-in for the working-
class man who might “snicker” at his effeminacy.
In spite of the thrice-repeated construction, “I have seen,” Prufrock
denies visionary resonance to his discourse. His reluctance to assume the
sort of vatic poetic voice that would clarify life’s great confusions also
means backing away from tragic posturing. He does so in a long sentence

built of qualifications. Prufrock will no more play Hamlet than John the
Baptist:
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise a prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Poliric, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool. (11. 111–19)
Polonius, of course, also dies in the play. Ecclesiastes, one the poem’s most
extensive intertexts, asserts, “how dieth the wise man? as the fool” (2:16).
However provisional Prufrock’s identification with Polonius, it hardly
represents a repudiation of tragic social arrangements. Hamlet remains the
hero. Rather than imagining “relations of power structured differently”
(Homos 86), a task fundamental to epic poetry like Pound’s, “The Love
Song of J.Alfred Prufrock” laments the pinned-down proprieties of a
sociosexual order rendered seemingly immutable by Eliot’s pervasive
allusion to Ecclesiastes, Inferno, and Michelangelo. Where the trappings of
modernity appear in the poem, they serve as a negative contrast to august
tradition, feminine finery, or effete “white trousers.” Even the elaboration
of the “yellow fog” (l. 15) in the charming terms of a cat that “rubs its
back” (l. 15) and “rubs its muzzle on the window-panes” (l. 16) references
a scene of domesticity.
According to The Mew Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics,
metonymy is “[a] figure in which one word is substituted for another on
the basis of some material, causal, or conceptual relation” (783). A part
stands in for the whole, serving to indicate something larger, beyond its
particularity. In “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock,” however,
metonymy begins to operate in reverse, dismembering the body it would
ordinarily evoke, and scattering that body’s parts. Fragmentation
commences with a few lines about women’s arms:
And I have known the arms already, known them all—

Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!) (11. 62–64)
“[B]raceleted and white and bare” will soon find syntactic echo in “tea and
cakes and ices.” Although allusion to John Donne’s chilling “bracelet of
bright haire about the bone” (“The Relique” l. 6) undercuts Prufrock’s
wistful fancy, it leaves metonymy temporarily undisturbed: the easy

inference is that these arms belong to attractive women. The closely
following appearance of “lonely men in shirt-sleeves” (l. 72),
metonymically, if not logically, connected to this passage, soon brings
Prufrock back to the self he would like to abandon:
I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. (11. 73–74)
This couplet’s iambic pentameter places most of its stresses on words with
“s“sounds, which serve to recall the sound of the ocean; and the chiasmus
of the second line suggests the aimless motion of “[s]cuttling” in deep sea
currents. Favoring the appendages of an unthinking crustacean to
twentieth-century loneliness, Prufrock would appear to consider self-
extinction favorably, and thus to approach, in self-deprecating terms, a
major concern of the Danish prince. Even as the evening is “[s]moothed by
long fingers” (l. 76), he fantasizes his decapitation, in the John the Baptist
passage discussed above.
Prufrock would ride the wave of metonymic slippage out to sea, to
escape from his personality, as well as from the society impeding his
movements. This wish would seem compatible with Bersani’s argument in
Homos that “[o]ur complex views of intersubjectivity, nourished by an
intricate consciousness of desire, have the effect of channeling our
imagination of human relations into the narrow domain of the private”
(123). Prufrock’s dream of departure, however, entails no renewed
engagement in public affairs and no effort to go beyond the “unfixable
antagonism between external reality and the structures of desire” (Homos
124). Bersani, drawing on the implications of Monique Wittig’s analysis of
heterosexuality in The Straight Mind and Other Essays, deduces that
normative “[m]ale heterosexuality would be a traumatic privileging of
difference” (39). The lyric epiphany of “The Lovesong of J.Alfred
Prufrock” concludes its persona’s meditation in an appeal to uncapturable
otherness:
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown. (11. 124–31)
lambic pentameter, the standard verse form offered and withdrawn

throughout the poem, here accompanies the return to traditional poetic
vocabulary, as well as to decorous assonal and alliterative patterning.
Al though Prufrock initially asserts his utter distance from this scene, the
image of the waves combed “white and black” delicately suggests the
writing of black lines on white paper, as well as their reading. The poem
would enact what it describes, as Prufrock’s now noticeably seductive voice
becomes something like that of the mermaids. Again, negation
accompanies an ambiguous identificatory gesture: the half-withheld
fantasy, in its closing gesture, reaffirms seduction’s deathly consequence.
TWINS
Although the poem ends in a drowning, it is a metaphorical one; Prufrock
does not end his own life. The nonsuicidal disappearance of the subject,
which he arguably exemplifies, depends theoretically upon the dissociation
of “masochism from the death drive” (Homos 99). The strategy of undoing
psychoanalytic categories serves to elaborate the implications of the
multiple contradictions in Freud’s writings. In Baudelaire and Freud,
Bersani writes,
Perhaps the principal strategy for stabilizing the self, both for
individuals and for entire cultures, is to plot the immobilization of
desire. On the cultural level, what we have usually called psychology
is precisely an effort to arrest the movement of desire by creating a
mythology of an inert human nature, governed by mental “faculties.”
The latter are abstractions, such as love and anger, which “correct”
the continuous moving away of desire by providing totalities…always
just “behind” our behavior as illuminating or unifying causes (61–
62).
Freud’s hypothetical allegory of Eros and Thanatos, or sexuality and the

death drive, as the antagonistic forces governing human life, would
stabilize not only human nature, but psychoanalytic theory.16 Yet the
deconstruction of this opposition may jeopardize Bersani’s optimistic
critique, along with Freud’s hard-fought coherence. It is a problem of
limiting negativity.
If the conclusive trajectory of Freud’s work begins with the introduction
of the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (BP), as critical
consensus more or less agrees, perhaps it is appropriate to characterize this
final phase of Freud’s career as a double endeavor: both to account for, and
to set the limits of, the work of negativity. The negative shows itself in such
oft-repeated substantives as “aggression,” “primary masochism,”
“destructive drives,” “death drive,” “strife,” “uncanny,” and “repetition-
compulsion.” It appears, perhaps most concisely, in the essay entitled

“Negation” (NE). Here, Freud insists that in spite of its genealogy from the
unthinkable, negation is utterly essential to the possibility of thought: “the
performance of the function of judgment is not made possible until the
creation of the symbol of negation has endowed thinking with a first
measure of freedom from the consequences of repression and, with it, from
the compulsion of the pleasure principle.” (238) Negation can only
operate through language, through language’s unique capacity, in Jean
Hyppolite’s words, to present “what one is in the mode of not being it”
(Seminar I 291). It is the precondition for critical distinctions, as well as for
imaginative transformations, such as Prufrock’s.
In “A Spoken Commentary on Freud’s Verneinung” appended to The
Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I (Seminar I), Hyppolite is careful to
“make a clearcut distinction between the instinct of destruction and the
form of destruction” (297); that is to say, between the death drive and
negation, what is unconscious and what is conscious. Otherwise, Hyppolite
suggests, Freud would be unintelligible. But why should this be the case?
Perhaps Hyppolite finds justification in the passage of “Negation” where
Freud stipulates that the secondary function of judgment is “a question of
external and internal.” (237) The ego employs linguistic negativity in order
to distinguish outside and inside, reality and fantasy. The ability to
discriminate self from other cannot operate without the judgment, “that is
not me,” which enables more complex assertions, like “I am not Prince
Hamlet.”
Nonetheless, Freud also insists that the intellectual negations of the
analysand afford entry into her or his unconscious: “we take the liberty of
disregarding the negation and of picking out the subject-matter alone of the
association.” (235)17 Thus “I am not Prince Hamlet” would ultimately
mean in some sense that I am Prince Hamlet. The division of outside and
inside is finally superficial and secondary. Neither the uncompromised
avatar of enlightenment and higher understanding, nor the guarantor of a
unified self, negation is a locus of psychic resistance, the foil of self-
presence. Every negative would be, in effect, a double negative. The
repressed lurks in the unconscious as a sort of unwanted but insistent double
of the conscious negation, a double which must reassert itself, and must
repeat its message, which is itself repetition. Part of the ego’s purpose is to
misunderstand this process, and thereby to protect itself from redoubling
damage. When Lacan designates the fundamental synthetic function of the
ego as méconnaissance (Seminar I 53), he gives another name to the mistake
Freud intends to rectify in analysis by passing over the patient’s “No.”
According to Freud, an emotionless intellectual negation is “the hallmark
of repression” (236). Its destructive affectivity remains unconscious. And
what remains unconscious, by definition, cannot find its place in the
symbolic register of conscious linguistic practice. It cannot be
metaphorized, cannot be translated, cannot become figurative language or

poetry. Yet its repression somehow fosters the negativity that escapes it,
and thereby allows the ego and the reality principle to take their precarious
hold. Because unconscious destructiveness, or the death drive, maintains
partial contact with language, it perhaps should be theorized as a linguistic
phenomenon—or, at least, as the corpse behind a sutured symbolic skin.
Like Prufrock’s Lazarus, it always threatens to return from the dead. This
Lazarus, it should be added, also symbolizes the urgency of Prufrock’s
desire.
Perhaps the iterability of language, its power to posit signifiers without
sense, before and beyond figuration, is itself repetition-compulsion, and yet
another name for the death drive.18 This equation makes sense of the
impasse Freud sets up in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where he poses a
contradictory definition of the drive. He states that since all instinct is
restorative, any disturbance or detouring of the self must be “external”
(45) to it. He also claims that the death drive is “destructive or
dissimilatory” (BP 59). How can it be that the drive that leads the organism
to restore its earliest state of inertia, the drive that Freud claims to be the
most fundamental and essential, also operates as that which he has already
defined as necessarily external? How can the inside be the outside? In
“Negation,” Freud hints at, but does not apply, an answer to this seeming
paradox: when he insists that the arrival of the “symbol” allows thought to
operate, he suggests that language, in its capacity to present something in
the mode of not being it, operates as what is exterior in the interior.
Language, which belongs to no particular individual, constitutes every
person. In the terms of Lacan’s The Ethics of Psyckoanalysis, language is
“extimate” to the self.
A detour into the theoretical writings of Paul de Man helps to elucidate
what is at stake here. In “Shelley Disfigured,” de Man writes,
We can therefore not ask why it is that we, as subjects, choose to

impose meaning, since we are ourselves defined by this very question.
From the moment the subject thus asks, it has already foreclosed any
alternative and has become the figural token of meaning, “Ein
Zeichen sind wir/Deutungslos…” [“A sign we are/uninterpretable…”
(my translation)] (Hölderlin) To question is to forget. Considered
performatively, figuration (as question) performs the erasure of the
positing power of language. (118)
All figuration is prosopopoeia, “making the dead speak” (78). Figuration

can only gloss the positing power of language, the blind repetition
underwriting human consciousness, without becoming part of it. The death
drive would persist not at the level of figuration—which is the forgetting of
the drive, the forgetting of repetition—but at the level of linguistic
automatism. De Man does not entertain the possibility that this

unstoppable action involves love as much as death, that the fateful
blindness he diagnoses might belong, as tradition would have it, to Eros. If
question-making necessarily entails negation, and if it effaces the
operations of love and death, then critical inquiry itself has a crucial
constitutive limitation.19
“Metaphor,” as Jacques Derrida writes in “White Mythology: Metaphor
in the Text of Philosophy,” “always carries its death within itself” (271). At
the end of “Autobiography as Defacement,” de Man asserts that “[d]eath
is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament, and the restora tion of
mortality by autobiography (the prosopopoeia of the voice and the name)
deprives and disfigures to the precise extent that it restores.” (81). What de
Man names “autobiography” comes to include all language through which
human beings make sense of their world and themselves. As such,
figurative language would be an anthropomorphic veiling over unseeable
death, giving a false face to that which has no face.20 This may help to
explain why Freud finds the death drive so elusive: any linguistic attempt at
elucidating it is already a turning away.21 Like the face of Eurydice, to turn
to look at it is to watch it recede from view. And as with the myth of
Eurydice, the turning away is erotic: Freud’s quest is Orphic, regardless of
his denials.
To call death a displaced name, however, is not at all to say that it, or
the drive that heralds it, are merely figurative. They are precisely the
opposite. The death drive and love, as what structure the possibility of
consciousness, stand outside of consciousness and, of course, beyond the
pleasure principle. Even the separation of love and death, I would argue,
turns away from the profound indecisiveness of the drive. The drive is
indecisive because it comes before all decisions. It belongs to that
unconscious realm where, as Freud says in The Interpretation of Dreams,
there are “no means of expressing a relation of contradiction, a contrary or
a ‘no’” (361). At a turning point of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, after
Freud has pursued some of the most radical implications of the death
drive, he brings his argument to an abrupt halt: “But let us pause for a
moment and reflect. It cannot be so. The sexual instincts, to which the
theory of the neuroses gives a quite special place, appear under a very
different aspect” (47, my italics). Freud employs the operations of negative
judgment in his attempt to limit the scope of negativity. Reading Freud
here in the manner that he recommends surmising the analysand in
“Negation,” the implication would be that it must be so.
My argument thus returns to The Freudian Body, where Bersani asserts
that “destructiveness is constitutive of sexuality.” (20) If only we could
rechannel destructiveness through eroticism, he suggests, we could begin to
sublimate the murderous violence of history. In a manner similar to
Hyppolite’s, when the French philosopher separates the instinct of
destruction from the form of destruction, Bersani would make a clearcut

distinction between murderous repressive destructiveness, on the one side;
and ecstatic, masochistic self-shattering, on the other. Such a distinction is
prone to slippage, due to the linguistic iterability that provides the
possibility for both alternatives. And, as Freud asserts in “Analysis
Terminable and Interminable,” “portions of the earlier organization
always persist alongside of the more recent one” (229). Self-shattering
would never fully obliterate its repressed or sublimated double, death and
destruction. Eurydice cannot return. The mermaids will not join us for tea.
DIFFERENT BODIES
Where Prufrock remarks “Though I have seen my head (grown slightly
bald) brought in upon a platter,/I am no prophet,” he alludes
simultaneously to John the Baptist and to Orpheus, though the earlier
figure more easily follows from the immediate context. According to the
Orpheus myth, the original poet turns to exclusive homosexual
involvements after his failure to retrieve Eurydice from the underworld,
returning to the living empty-handed; and his final, sacrificial demise at the
hands of Bacchanites is motivated by unresponsiveness to their feminine
charms.22 Male homosexuality, thus, takes the form of an afterthought. In
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” all homoerotic implication
appears, as it were, in the wings, while heterosexual melodrama maintains
center stage.23 The “you” of “[l]et us go then, you and I” is presumably
male, as it is difficult to imagine Prufrock addressing his relationship
anxieties and expressing his remoteness from women to a confidante. The
probability that the love song’s only addressee is male could imply that
heterosexuality serves as a pretext and a detour. But no representation of
masculine beauty, no image of homoerotic desire, save the gallery of
brawny figures metonymically evoked by the name, “Michelangelo” (ll. 14
and 36), counterpoints the mermaids.
Read metonymically, however, one of the stanzas in which Pmfrock
excuses himself from encountering a woman proves especially interesting:
And I have known the eyes already, known them all—

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit our the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume? (ll. 55–61)
The objection to making his subjectivity available to others, to formulating

himself in language, accords obviously with Prufrock’s protest against
social demand. Less conspicuously, the propinquity of “pinned and
wriggling” to “butt-ends” may suggest something else entirely—perhaps

something of which the speaker, if not the poet, would be unaware.
However, male homoerotic innuendo seems unlikely, given the eyes that
penetrate him can only be interpreted as feminine. It needs to be added that
a poem about women, addressed by a man to another man, or to other
men, is a standard of the Western literary tradition, to follow Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick’s argument in Between Men: English Literature and Male
Homosocial Desire. Turning a woman into an absolute other, whether
mermaid, siren, virgin, or whore, gives the poet access to an entire
homosocial history of figuration.
The problem here is not only the male mythologization of the feminine,
with its tendency to hypostatize, but the singular place of that mythology in
the conceptualization of desire. My argument about figuration rules out the
prospect of nonallegorical conceptuality, of a name for desire that would
be desire itself. There is no access to an outside of mythology, even if we
can glimpse its margins.24 Nonetheless, the presumptive centering of male
myths of the feminine automatically subordinates other configurations,
including women’s erotic myths about the masculine, women’s erotic
myths about the feminine, and male homoerotic myths. In its reading of
desire as lack, as the loss of unreachable alterity, the Eurydice model casts
difference as trauma. Bersani argues that traumatic heterosexuality’s
“system of thinking” entails “a persistent habit of hierarchical placement.
If it is difficult…to think of differences nonantagonistically, it is because…
antagonism is bound up in the very origins of differential perception”
(Homos 40). Just such a hierarchy places Orpheus in sunlight and Eurydice
in shade. Bacchanites, mermaids, or sirens, women come to threaten the
masculine poet with castration—or its synonym, death.25 This system of
thinking thus secures men and women as hostile opposites, and almost
inevitably favors the male perspective. It depends upon the stability and
discreteness of masculine identity. Against this arrangement, and the
violence it legitimates, Bersani proposes self-shattering, his translation of
the French term, jouissance, as a political strategy: “I call jouissance ‘self-
shattering’ in that it disrupts the ego’s coherence and dissolves its
boundaries” (Homos 101).
Is this a viable political strategy; and is it sufficient, in itself? In Homos,
Bersani makes a case against the cultural priority of difference, locating in
homosexuality “a privileged model of sameness” (6). In gay sex, and
particularly, male anal sex, he finds acts that expose “the permeability of
bodily boundaries” to “the factitious nature of sexual differences as they
are postulated within the heterosexual matrix” (46–47). They are,
furthermore, acts that “block the theoretical confirmation of murderous
relations among men” (111). One happy result of queer sex is the discovery
that “[l]ack, then, may not be inherent in desire; desire in homo-ness is
desire to repeat, to expand, to intensify the same” (149). Sameness would
replace the tragic role-play of differences; and it is not hard, though

Bersani refrains, to imagine a reorganized heterosexuality taking its cues
from male (and female?) homoeroticism.
In “‘Material Girl’: The Effacements of Postmodern Culture,” an essay
that challenges the politics of difference from a cultural studies perspective,
and does not address Bersani, Susan Bordo writes that the “spectacle of
difference defeats the ability to sustain coherent political critique” (343).
“Those,” like Bordo herself, “who insist on an orienting context (and who
therefore do not permit particularities to rein in all their absolute
‘difference’) are seen as ‘totalizing,’ that is, constructing a falsely coherent
and morally coercive universe that marginalizes and effaces the experiences
and values of others” (344–45). Like Bersani, Bordo insists upon
grounding her argument, which includes a rebuttal of cultural studies
celebrations of the love songs of Madonna, in distinctions of value.
However, she follows with a pointed critique of the politics of jouissance:
All the elements of what I have here called postmodern conversation—

intoxication with individual choice and creative jouissance, delight
with the piquancy of particularity and mistrust of pattern and seeing
coherence, celebration of ‘difference’ along with an absence of critical
perspective differentiating and weighing ‘differences,’ suspicions of
the totalitarian nature of generalization along with a rush to protect
difference from its homogenizing abuses—have become recognizable
familiars in much of contemporary intellectual discourse. (346)
Bordo contends that jouissance is not the same as political resistance when
it effects or attempts no change in hegemonic power, beyond subjective
release. It would seem that the release from subjectivity, too, would not in
itself constitute effective resistance. As Bordo argues, affective mobilization
can fall flat against the hard constraints of race, class, and gender; and
celebration has the tendency—quite often, the privilege—to ignore these
limitations.
Bersani considers the lesson “that identity is not serious” to be
“invaluable” (Homos 18). For those who have fought hard, in the face of
social oppression, to establish a sense of identity, or a viable public self,
such a lesson might be offensive. In Homos, Bersani illustrates this moral in
a discussion of gays in the American military and its “Don’t Ask, Don’t
Tell” policy: “perhaps the most serious danger in gay Marines being open
about their gayness is that they might begin, like some of their gay civilian
brothers, to play at being Marines. Not that they would make fun of the
Marines. On the contrary: they may find ways of being so Marine-like that
they will no longer be ‘real’ Marines” (17–18). Bersani concludes that gay
men, finding such “theatricalities” “incompatible with the monolithic
theatricality of military masculinity” might “then begin to abandon the
armed forces by the thousands,” demoralize “straight comrades,” and

“furnish recruits for a new type of antimilitarism” (18–19). What this
happy prediction avoids is the likelihood that many young men, both gay
and straight, join the United States military for economic reasons—often to
pay for college.26 Economic restraint would undoubtedly temper a soldier’s
exuberance about parodic masculinity: where Marine drag is not felt as a
gender compulsion, it might be no more than dull necessity, “a drag.”
Without wholesale change in the economic system, wherein income would
no longer pose a barrier or major hurdle to higher education, it is difficult
to see Bersani’s scenario as anything but wishful.
Not everyone can afford, like the leisure-class Prufrock, to avoid danger.
There are other reasons to kill than sacrosanct selfhood. We might note,
however, that the muscular physical ideal summoned in “The Lovesong
of J.Alfred Prufrock” with the name of the Renaissance artist,
“Michaelangelo,” could not be more emphatically homoerotic. Ironically,
when heterosexual masculinity patterns itself after a statue such as David,
it imitates, and perhaps unwittingly travesties, an icon of male same-sex
desire. In contemporary mass culture, where some gay men emulate the
cowboy ideal, and some straight men dress according to the next-to-latest
in gay fashion, parody reveals itself as a reversible movement with no
necessary political direction.27
Although Bersani theorizes jouissance in political terms, he does not fully
explain to his reader how to move from his scrupulous readings of such
writers as André Gide and Jean Genet toward open political engagement,
except perhaps implicitly through teaching literature or writing theory. I
have to wonder, would the queer student-soldier benefit? Carefully noting
the limitations of the writers he extols, Bersani claims that, all the same,
they “point us in the direction of a community in which relations” would
be figured in unforeseen and affirmative ways (Homos 151). But how do we
get there? Perhaps Bersani’s “mistrust of pattern and seeing coherence”
precludes practical advice, and perhaps his dismissal of engaged literature
removes valuable options from the field of possibility. Does a return to
engagement necessitate redeploying the repressive boundaries affirmed by
Pound, Kenner, and Freud? Can a politically committed critique of
modernist poetry do without some measure of structural coherence?28 My
experimental answers to these questions appear in the chapters that follow.
To frame an argument, nonetheless, is always to forget.
Considering the negative potential of his objects of study in The Freudian
Body, Bersani asserts,
The mythologizing of the human as a readable organization is a

fundamental political strategy, and the eagerness with which both
literature and psychoanalysis have contributed to that mythology may
be the surest sign of their willingness to serve various types of orders
interested in the shaping of the human as a precondition for

predicting and controlling it. (83)
Following Bersani, I would hope that my argument counters such

mythologization, even as I have admitted the unavoidability of myth. This
politics of control depends upon the elision of mythology with “truth.”
“With its ineluctability as knowledge, as an obvious principle, as a given
prior to any science,” Wittig writes, “the straight mind develops a
totalizing interpretation of history, social reality, culture, language, and all
the subjective phenomena at the same time” (27). I would agree with
Bersani that what Wittig calls “the straight mind” would be more fairly
termed the heterosexist one (Homos 38). Such a mind operates through
what Derrida names “white mythology.” In his essay of that name, Derrida
shows how the demythologizing gesture is itself a part of this mythology.
Demythologization is not enough, as Bersani recognizes in his advocacy of
the literary as a means “to avoid the traps of meaning in language” (FB 27)
and as a “self-reflective activity by which desire multiplies and diversifies
its representations” (FB 49). Also insufficient is simply saying “No!” to the
ideal of masculine heterosexuality; Prufrock’s renunciation serves
ultimately to confirm its myth.
There is good reason to supplement Bersani’s eminently useful aesthetic
theory with other critical methods. We can thereby not only begin to
account more rigorously for the factors of gender, class, and race, but also
begin to consider “the political productivity of the sexual” (Homos 6) to
gether with economic production and circumstance.29 That Prufrock
imagines a lonely old age spent strolling on the beach is one of several
indications of the material well-being subtending his fretfulness: at least
some measure of economic freedom predicates whatever self-undoing he
performs. Prufrock, perhaps in conformity to the etiquette of his class, only
indicates indirectly that he belongs to it; but this does not mean that a
critical analysis should display similar tact. Discussion of the economics
and aesthetics of modernist poetry offers perhaps little to the hypothetical
queer student-soldier, or to those deprived of the experience of higher
education altogether. It may nonetheless be helpful to take poetry out of
the genteel milieu to which Eliot and his critical followers restricted it. For
although contemporary critical study has, for the most part, refuted,
rejected, or reversed Eliot’s critical directives, it all too often perpetuates
his idea of difficult poetry as an elite practice. It then abandons poetry as a
subject of serious concern. Part of the task at hand is to demonstrate what
else poetry has to offer.
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Christmas at
Cedar Hill
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Title: Christmas at Cedar Hill

A holiday story-book
Author: Lucy Ellen Guernsey
Release date: September 21, 2023 [eBook #71698]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Thomas Whittaker, 1869
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHRISTMAS

AT CEDAR HILL ***
Transcriber's note: Unusual and inconsistent spelling is as printed.
Christmas at Cedar Hill. Frontispiece.

"The very first thing I recollect is a dead tiger."
CHRISTMAS
AT
CEDAR HILL.
A HOLIDAY STORY-BOOK.
BY
LUCY ELLEN GUERNSEY:
AUTHOR OF "IRISH AMY," "STRAIGHT FORWARD,"
"THE SIGN OF THE CROSS," "WINIFRED," ETC.
NEW YORK:
THOMAS WHITTAKER.
NO. 2 BIBLE HOUSE.
ENTERED, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1869, by
REV. R. DYER, D.D.,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United
States for the Southern District of New York.
ST. JOHNLAND STEREOTYPE FOUNDRY,
SUFFOLK COUNTY, N
TO
LITTLE ANNIE,
FROM
HER GODMOTHER.
THIS VOLUME
IS PUBLISHED BY SPECIAL CONTRIBUTION
OF
THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
OF
CHRIST CHURCH, BAY-RIDGE, L.I.

CONTENTS.
CHAP.
I. SETTING OUT.
II. A RESCUE.
III. THE OLD LADY'S STORY.
IV. THE CLERGYMAN'S STORY.
V. THE SCHOLAR'S STORY.
VI. AGATHA'S STORY.
VII. CONCLUSION.
CHRISTMAS AT CEDAR HILL.
CHAPTER I.
SETTING OUT.
"ARE you quite sure this is the right train, Frank?"
"Of course it is! Now, Agatha, pray don't be conjuring up dangers so

early in the journey, or you will never get to the end. Come, let us get
on board! The train will start in a minute!"
The speakers were two of a little party of children who stood on the
platform of the little station of Greenbrier, waiting to take the train.
Agatha Bower, who had asked the question, was a pretty, pale little
girl, about thirteen years old, dressed in deep mourning. She was a
peculiar-looking child, with large dark eyes and long eyelashes, while
her hair was of a pale yellow, almost too light to be called golden,
and curled in close, short curls under her little black hat and crape
veil. She was very small and slender, but did not look young for her
years. She seemed rather nervous and excited, and kept close to
her companions in a way that looked as if she were easily frightened.
She was the only girl of the party. The other three were boys; the
eldest, whom Agatha had called Frank, being perhaps fifteen. He
was a tall, stout lad of his age, with brown curling hair, blue eyes,
and a ruddy complexion. Frank was a very handsome boy, and
attractive at first sight; but, when one looked at him again, there was
an expression of self-confidence, and a little contemptuous look not
altogether pleasing. Herbert, the next younger, had nothing
remarkable in his appearance, except a certain thoughtful and
earnest expression, which was lighted up with a very pleasant smile
when he was spoken to, or addressed anybody. Edward, the
youngest, was a pretty rosy boy of nine, with such a remarkable
resemblance to Frank as showed a very close relationship between
them.
Frank and Edward were brothers. They had been pupils in Doctor
Bower's private school—Frank for three years, Edward since the
beginning of last term—and were now going home to spend their
Christmas holidays, taking with them Herbert and Agatha, the
doctor's two children. They were to have been accompanied by
Doctor Bower himself, but the day before he had received
intelligence which made it necessary for him immediately to travel in
an opposite direction.
As the journey was only sixty miles long, he thought the children
might be safely trusted to go by themselves, especially as Frank had
been over the road so many times in his journey to and from school.
The railroad had lately been undergoing some changes and repairs,
but they were now all completed. Greenbrier had the advantage of
being situated upon two different railroads, which met at the same
station, about a mile from the centre of the village.
"Be sure to ask some one if you find yourself in any uncertainty what
to do," were the doctor's last words as he left them in the morning:
"and write to me directly, that I may know of your safe arrival."
"I do not believe I can write the same evening, father," said Herbert,
after a little consideration. "Frank says we shall not arrive till six, and
then there will be the party and the Christmas tree."
"I am not so absolutely unreasonable as to expect that, my son,"

said the doctor, smiling. "I only mean that you should write as soon
as possible."
"I will write the first thing next morning," said Herbert, after a little
more consideration, and the doctor was satisfied, knowing that
nothing short of an impossibility would prevent his son from keeping
his word.
"And mind, boys, that you take the best care of Agatha," he added,
as he bade them good-bye. "Remember, Frank, I shall hold you
responsible if she is not returned safely and in good order."
"Never fear, doctor," replied Frank, confidently, "I will take care of
her. It is a pity if I cannot look after one little girl. Only, I hope," he
added to himself, "that she will not be afraid of everything and
everybody she sees."
Three o'clock on the afternoon of the day before Christmas saw the
young travellers on the platform of the station-house, waiting for the
train which was to convey them to Riverton, the residence of Mr.
Landon. The cars stopped for only three minutes, and some haste
was really necessary in securing their places, so that Frank's
impatience at Agatha's hanging back was not altogether
unreasonable; but still she hesitated, and glanced around as if for
some one to ask.
"You silly child!" said Frank. "Haven't I been over the road dozens of
times? The Riverton train always comes in on this side of the
platform and the New York train on the other. We shall be left
altogether if you don't hurry! See, they are just going to start!"
"All aboard!" shouted the conductor, cutting short the debate by

swinging first Agatha and then Ned on the platform of the only
passenger car. They were not settled in their places when the bell
rang, the train started and whirled away at great speed, the sparks
flying from the engine and mixing curiously with the snow which had
been threatening all day and now began to fall heavily.
There was no difficulty about seats. The one passenger car was not
half full. There were three ladies, an elderly and two younger ones,
and some half a dozen men in all. Of these one of the women and
several men got out at the first two or three country stations, leaving
only the young and the old lady and two gentlemen. One of these
was an elderly man, with gray hair and spectacles, who looked like a
clergyman.
The other sat on the opposite side from our party, with his face
turned towards them. He was rather small and slight, with nothing
very peculiar about him except his large dark eyes, and a certain
abstracted expression. He held a book in his hand, but either he did
not find it very interesting or he had exhausted its contents; for he
was not reading, but looking now at his fellow-passengers, now out
of the window, though the fast-falling snow allowed but little of the
landscape to be seen. He looked round as the children entered, and
glanced at them once or twice afterwards with an appearance of
considerable interest.
Christmas at Cedar Hill.
The train started and whirled away at great speed.

Agatha's eyes were irresistibly attracted to this gentleman's face,
and though she felt as if it were rude to stare thus at a stranger, she
could not help looking at him again and again. At last, as he rose
and walked to the farther end of the car, Agatha whispered to her
brother:
"Herbert, did you ever see that gentleman before?"
"No," returned Herbert, after turning round to look at him. "Why do

you ask?"
"There is something about him that seems so familiar to me," replied

Agatha, after taking another long look. "I cannot say that I remember
him, and yet it seems as if I must have known him before."
"You may have seen some one like him," said Herbert. "He is a fine-
looking man, but I don't see anything remarkable about him, except
that he has a college medal, like my father's."
He looked round again, and his eyes encountered those of the

gentleman they were discussing, who was returning to his seat.
"Did you speak to me, my boy?" asked the stranger.
"No, sir," replied Herbert, blushing at being caught in his scrutiny. "I
only remarked that you wore a college medal like my father's, which
made me think that you might have been at the same college."
"Was your father at Dartmouth?" asked the stranger, whom we shall

for the present call the scholar.
"Yes, sir," replied Herbert; "and I am going there when I am old

enough."
He colored a little when he finished the sentence, as if he feared he

had been too forward. The scholar, however, did not seem to think
so. He turned over a seat, so as to place himself opposite to Herbert
and Agatha, and began questioning Herbert about his studies, not as
people sometimes speak to boys about such things, in a
condescending or patronizing tone, but as if he felt a real interest in
the matter. His face, which was rather sad when at rest, brightened
up with a beautiful smile; and the more Agatha looked at him and
listened to him, the more she felt as if she must have known him
before.
"Tickets!" called out the conductor, who had been invisible for some
time. It was with no small importance that Frank produced the tickets
for the whole party from his pocket, saying, as he did so, "How soon
shall we arrive at Riverton?"
"At Riverton!" repeated the conductor, as if surprised at the question.

He looked at the tickets, and added, "You are on the wrong road, my
boy! This is the New York train, and you have already come thirty
miles out of your way!"
The boys looked at each other for a moment as if perfectly

confounded; and then Edward exclaimed:
"There, Frank! So much for not asking any one!"
"Did not the station-master tell you which train to take?" asked the
conductor.
Frank colored up to the roots of his hair. "I did not ask him," he
replied, with a little effort. "I was sure I knew which side the trains
came in."
"But they have been changing the tracks," said the conductor. "Didn't
you know that?"
"I forgot it at first, and then I was quite sure—"
"Yes, you are always quite sure you know everything!" interrupted
Ned, in an angry tone. "Why didn't you ask? But you are so
wonderfully wise nobody can ever tell you anything!"
"There is no good in talking so, Ned," said Herbert, who had not
before spoken. "I ought to have asked myself, I suppose, but I
thought Frank knew the road. But there is no use in crying for spilled
milk, or fretting about it, either. What had we better do, sir?" he
asked, turning to the conductor.
"The best way will be to go on to E— and stay there all night,"

replied the conductor. "Then in the morning you can take the cross
road, which will bring you to Riverton about five in the afternoon."
"And so miss the party, and the Christmas tree, and all the rest of the
fun," exclaimed Ned, who was the youngest of the party, and never
much disposed to repress his feelings, of whatever sort they might
be. "I don't care, it is a real shame! And it is all your fault, Frank! The
next time I travel I will look out for myself!"
Frank's eyes flashed, and an angry retort seemed trembling on his

lips, but with a great effort, he repressed it and remained silent.
Edward was proceeding with some further remarks in the same

strain, when Herbert again interfered, and this time so decidedly that
Edward was silenced, and contented himself with muttering between
his teeth that he did hope some time Frank would find out that he did
not know everything in the world.
"Never mind, Frank," said Herbert, consolingly. "It was unlucky, but it
cannot be helped now, and we shall know better how to manage
another time. I dare say we shall do very well, after all. You know we
were wishing for some adventures on the way."
"I was not," said Agatha. "I don't like adventures."
"I don't wonder at that," replied Herbert. "You have had more than
your share of them already. But don't be troubled, Aggy. I don't see
how anything worse can happen to us than losing the party. How
shall we manage when we get to E—?" he asked, turning to the
conductor.
"I shall stop in E—," replied the conductor, "and I will go with you to
the hotel and ask the landlord to make you comfortable. It is an
excellent house, and I think you will have no sort of trouble."
"Now, I have another plan to propose," said the clergyman, who, with
the rest of the passengers, had been interested in the discussion.
"Let these young folks go home with me and spend the night. My
good lady will make them very welcome, and we will see what we
can do to make up for the loss of the party. That will be pleasanter
than spending the night at a strange hotel, won't it, my little girl?"
"Yes indeed, sir!" replied Agatha, recovering a little from her

consternation.
Herbert hesitated. "I am afraid we shall give you a great deal of

trouble," said he.
"Not at all, not at all!" replied the clergyman, heartily. "We are used to
the sudden arrival of any number of grandchildren, and our house is
a large one."
"I think you had better accept of the doctor's offer, since he is so kind
as to make it," said the conductor, addressing himself to Herbert,
"although I will make you as comfortable as I can at the hotel."
"What do you say?" asked Herbert of the other boys.
"Just as you think best," replied Frank, who had recovered his voice,
after a severe struggle with his temper. "I am sure the gentleman is
very kind."
"I don't care what we do if we can't get home," said Ned,

ungraciously. "I suppose it will be just as stupid in one place as
another!"
"Do behave yourself, Ned!" said Herbert, in an undertone. "You

make me perfectly ashamed of you!" Then turning to the clergyman,
he accepted the invitation with many thanks, feeling that it would
indeed be pleasanter for Agatha than spending the night at a hotel.
But as it turned out, they were to spend it neither at the hotel nor at
the doctor's.
The afternoon wore away, and still the snow fell thicker and faster
every moment. The wind rose and whirled it in clouds over the fields
or piled it up in fantastic drifts along the fences, and the track
became sensibly obstructed. The conductor's usually imperturbable
face wore a look of anxiety, and he seemed to spend much of his
time in conference with the engineer. As he came in towards dark,
the doctor remarked to him:
"We do not seem to make very rapid progress?"
"No, sir; the snow is growing very deep and drifts badly. I am almost
afraid we shall not get through to E— to-night."
Agatha was absorbed in her story-book and did not hear, but the
boys did, and exchanged glances. Frank rose from his seat and
followed the conductor to the other end of the car.
"Do you really think we shall not get through to-night?" he asked, in a
tone of anxiety.
"I can't say," replied the conductor, rather shortly; but, looking up and
seeing Frank's disturbed face, he kindly made room for him on the
seat, saying, as he did so, "You need not be frightened, my boy. The
worst that can happen to us is to be snowed up at some country
station all night."
"I am not frightened," said Frank, in a much more humble tone than
he would have used in replying to such an imputation twelve hours
before. "I don't mind for myself, I was thinking about Agatha."
"Is Agatha your sister?" asked the conductor.
"No, she is Herbert's; that is, he calls her his sister, but she is an
adopted child. Mrs. Bower took her from a poor woman who does
washing for the school, and the doctor thinks all the world of her,
especially since his wife died. He put her under my care particularly,
and if anything should happen to her—" Frank's eyes filled with
tears. He turned away to hide them, but the sobs would come in
spite of him.
"I do not think that any harm will come to Agatha," said the
conductor, kindly; "but I do not think the less of you for being anxious
about her. We will do the best we can for her."
He rose as he spoke, and going into the saloon, he brought out a

beautiful fur robe. Then, asking Agatha to rise for a moment, he
spread the robe over the seat, and wrapped it carefully around her.
Agatha was very grateful for the kindness, as her feet had begun to
grow very cold. The conductor then returned to Frank's side.
"How did you come to make such a blunder about the cars?" he
asked.
"I am sure I do not know," replied Frank. "I have been backward and
forward several times, and supposed I knew all about it. I never
thought of their changing the tracks."
"You should have asked, if there was any doubt about the matter,"
observed the conductor. "Never be too proud to ask a question, or to
follow the directions of people older than yourself. I expect your
friends are feeling rather uneasy about you by this time."
"I am afraid so," said Frank. "If they only knew about us, and Agatha
were safe, I should not care what became of me."
"I hope we may reach the Cedar Hill station, and then you can
telegraph—that is, if the wires are not all down. I do not suppose we
shall go any further than that to-night, even if we are lucky enough to
get as far. But I must go outside and see how matters are now."
"Suppose we cannot reach Cedar Hill, what shall we do then?"

asked Frank, as the conductor rose to leave the car.
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