After the Lovedeath: Sexual Violence and the Making of Culture - Hardcover

Kramer, Lawrence

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520210123 ISBN 13: 9780520210127

Publisher: University of California Press, 1997

Synopsis

This elegantly written book is a bold attempt to reinterpret the nature of sexual violence and to imagine the possibility of overcoming it. Lawrence Kramer traces today's sexual identities to their nineteenth-century sources, drawing on the music, literature, and thought of the period to show how normal identity both promotes and rationalizes violence against women.

To make his case, Kramer uses operatic lovedeaths, Beethoven's "Kreutzer Sonata" and the Tolstoy novella named after it; the writings of Walt Whitman and Alfred Lord Tennyson, psychoanalysis, and the logic of dreams. In formal and informal reflections, he explores the self-contradictions of masculinity, the shifting alignments of femininity, authority, and desire, and the interdependency of hetero- and homosexuality. At the same time, he imagines alternatives that could allow gender to be freed from the existing system of polarities that inevitably promote sexual violence.

Kramer's writing avoids the conventional dress of intellectual authority and moves between music and literature in a style that is both intimate and effective. He combines informed scholarship with candid personal utterance and makes clear what is at stake in this crucial debate. After the Lovedeath will have a profound impact on anyone interested in new ways to think about gender.

About this title

About the Author

Lawrence Kramer is Professor of English and Music at Fordham University. He has published three previous books with California: Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After (1984), Music as Cultural Practice, 1800-1900 (1990), and Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (1995). All are available in paperback.

From the Back Cover

"In this brilliant extended essay, Lawrence Kramer once again brings his formidable skills as a literary critic and musicologist to bear on nineteenth-century culture. . . . As always, Kramer surprises his readers with bold new insights; he compels us to return to poems, stories, and sonatas we thought we knew."―Susan McClary, author of Feminine Endings

"This book makes its readers understand the stakes of a crucial debate while itself raising that debate to a higher stage. Its powerful, original vision of gender informs remarkable readings of individual texts. The style, uniquely personal and invariably effective, often reaches a level of eloquence rare in academic prose. Kramer has a distinctive voice and uses it to dramatic effect."―Sandy Petrey, author of Speech Acts and Literary Theory

"Enormously important. . . . [This book] takes a crucial next step from previous cultural-critical work. Its determination to speak directly to the problem of sexual violence by way of certain cultural products―rather than the other way around, as countless previous authors have done―is a weird and wonderful gesture. I wouldn't have thought it could be done, but I find quite persuasive Kramer's demonstration that readings like these can authorize such a diagnosis."―Ruth A. Solie, editor of Musicology and Difference

From the Inside Flap

"In this brilliant extended essay, Lawrence Kramer once again brings his formidable skills as a literary critic and musicologist to bear on nineteenth-century culture. . . . As always, Kramer surprises his readers with bold new insights; he compels us to return to poems, stories, and sonatas we thought we knew."—Susan McClary, author of Feminine Endings

"This book makes its readers understand the stakes of a crucial debate while itself raising that debate to a higher stage. Its powerful, original vision of gender informs remarkable readings of individual texts. The style, uniquely personal and invariably effective, often reaches a level of eloquence rare in academic prose. Kramer has a distinctive voice and uses it to dramatic effect."—Sandy Petrey, author of Speech Acts and Literary Theory

"Enormously important. . . . [This book] takes a crucial next step from previous cultural-critical work. Its determination to speak directly to the problem of sexual violence by way of certain cultural products—rather than the other way around, as countless previous authors have done—is a weird and wonderful gesture. I wouldn't have thought it could be done, but I find quite persuasive Kramer's demonstration that readings like these can authorize such a diagnosis."—Ruth A. Solie, editor of Musicology and Difference

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

After the Lovedeath: Sexual Violence and the Making of Culture

By Lawrence Kramer

University of California Press

Copyright © 1997 Lawrence Kramer
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520210123


After the Lovedeath:
Sexual Violence and the Making of Culture

I knew a man once did a girl in
Any man might do a girl in
Any man has to, needs to, wants to
Once in a lifetime, do a girl in.
T. S. Eliot, Sweeney Agonistes

This book proposes that the forms of selfhood mandated as normal in modern Western culture both promote and rationalize violence against women. Even if unacted, the possibility of sexual violence ripples in the air like rising heat, visible and invisible at the same time. Far from being haunted or threatened by this possibility, normal selfhood is permeated by it. Both men and women alike are enjoined to construct heterosexual gender identities based on a mercurial love-hate relationship to whatever is understood as femininity. Violence simply transcribes this attitude as action. Virtually everyone regrets it, including those who

inflict it. Yet it persists, indifferent to social distinctions and impervious to sociologically inspired remedies—sensitivity training, better role models, more ideal media images—that try to promote less tolerance in women and less aggressiveness in men. The tendency to sexual violence seems lodged in the very core of ordinary subjectivity like a bone in the throat.

This predicament arises, not from any particular definition of what it means to be feminine or masculine, but from the way femininity and masculinity are distinguished. The two genders may be constructed, performed, and lived in any number of ways, as long as femininity constitutes the radically ambivalent polar opposite of a radically unambivalent masculinity. The conflicts and confusions that inevitably result when people prove unwilling or unable to fulfill this rigid mandate play themselves out roughly on women's bodies, both real and imaginary. Zealots of the system, men transfixed by some masculine ideal, feel called upon to punish the less zealous. Sometimes their rod falls on the "unmanly" men who embrace ambivalence, but the primary objects of punishment are the women whose paradigmatic role it is to embody ambivalence. A woman may be judged to deserve punishment whenever she steps beyond her paradigmatic position; her role as an embodiment is protected from injury by doing injury to her body. A woman may come to deserve such punishment either by affirming whatever features of femininity are stigmatized in her particular milieu or by unmasking the condition of stigma-free masculinity there as an illusion. Sometimes, however, she may seem to do one of these things merely by being alive.

Does each man kill the thing he loves, as Oscar Wilde maintains? If so, it is because the thing he loves can be embodied only

in the thing he hates. The woman he desires (so he is told) is the bearer of a femininity that he is required to devalue. Yet her femininity (so he is told) is precisely what enables him to desire her. He can love her only insofar as there is something in her he cannot love. It does not matter whether his feelings are crude or refined, earthy or idealized, passionate or companionable. What is loved and what is hated are necessarily interwoven into the texture of the same person's being. And the person—the woman—pays.

After the Lovedeath suggests why and how this is so and imagines alternatives. In form, alternative in itself, the book is a mosaic: a piecing together of reflections formal and informal, longer and shorter, on the interplay between sexual violence and the complex ways in which we imagine ourselves as gendered beings. The sources of reflection are passages drawn from a variety of imaginative media, including fiction, opera, poetry, instrumental music, visual imagery, even dreams. The aim of reflection is to reach a better understanding of the cultural situation by interpreting it in the light of these works of imagination. In a reversal of familiar procedures, culture takes on the role of a text to be read in the context of representation, expressivity, and fantasy. Such imaginative processes can neither be translated directly into "real" life, as a certain repressive moralism fears, nor be entirely disengaged from it, as a certain repressive aestheticism wishes. In one of their many dimensions, they form treasuries of suggestion, nurseries of attitude, that can help produce, sustain, and foster insight into complex cultural realities. When we listen to music or hear the music of language, we resonate with such realities; when we gaze with strained attention at imaginary scenes on the stage or screen, including the screen of the mind's eye when we

read or dream, we are engaged in the making of culture, our making by culture, which includes the mechanism both of sexual violence and, someday perhaps, of its undoing.

I begin with Franz Schubert because he once wrote music for a dream of mine. I was in a thick wood where wild animals, wolves or bears, might be lurking, but I took so much pleasure in observing the flowers—some of my favorite flowers were there, especially the pinkish-yellow roses—that I was careless of danger. The dream also had a soundtrack, a "melting" melody, endlessly repeated, that I later recognized (or believed) to be by Schubert, a theme he used in the ballet music to the drama Rosamunde and used again in one of his Impromptus for piano. The whole scene was suffused with a distinct sense of sexual pleasure.

I return to this dream later, but to begin with I want to note only its most obvious element. The dream finds pleasure in a dangerous place, a sexual pleasure and a place linked with Schubert. What was the place? And what was the danger?

One clue comes from another composer, Robert Schumann, who admired Schubert and was perhaps unsettled by Schubert's early nineteenth-century reputation as a kind of musical idiot savant: a childlike figure, clumsy, bashful, awkward in speech and writing, lacking in self-possession, and yet a genius from whom, somehow, exquisite music flowed. Perhaps too exquisite: for there was felt to be something wrong with this music. For all its beauty, it lacked virility, at least in comparison with the masculine ideal embodied, inevitably, by Beethoven. Schumann sets out to rescue Schubert from this invidious comparison, though only at the cost of assenting to it. In relation to Beethoven, Schumann wrote,

Schubert was indeed a feminine composer, but in relation to all other composers he was masculine enough. Beethoven, in this reading, is a violent figure, or a figure—a personification—of violence: one who feminizes others but who can never himself be feminized. "The man [Beethoven]," writes Schumann, "commands;" the woman [Schubert] "pleads" (117). In this hypervirile role, Beethoven stands as the embodiment of musical culture itself: stern, unyielding, commanding, his name the name of the musical Father. Before this Beethoven, Schubert is yielding, dependent, permeable. Yet this same Schubert can himself lay claim to the name of the father if only one can forget (but one can never forget) the figure of Beethoven behind him.

This tale of the gender of musical genius gives, in allegory, the gist of this book. Bluntly stated, my argument is that in our gender identities, all of us—men and women alike—are Schuberts, none of us a Beethoven. Between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, the position in which Schumann recognized Schubert became the normative position of the subject in Western culture, and so it remains today. For both men and women, to become a subject, to acquire an identity, is to assume a position of femininity in relation to a masculinity that always belongs to someone else. This other is the wielder and bearer of authority in all its forms, social, moral, and cultural; both pleasure and truth are in his charge; yet no man, and certainly no woman, can securely identify with this masculine subject-position. Instead, biological men are directed to occupy a position that is simultaneously masculine in relation to a visible, public, feminine position, and feminine in relation to an unstated, often unconscious position held by the figure (trope, image, or person) of another man. The same men are directed to repress their knowledge that

this doubling of polarity by the dim, ever-looming figure of the other man renders their own position masculine in content but feminine in structure. Every man who commands is secretly a woman who pleads—and blissfully obeys—but who struggles not to know it.

The reward for maintaining this repression is the fiction of unambivalent self-possession: the fiction of holding the absolutely masculine subject-position that in truth no one can hold. In the language of Jacques Lacan, it is the fiction of having the phallus (note that there is only one). To be sure, this fiction is unstable, sometimes even ridiculous. But in social terms it translates—for some men—into the privileges of a practical, manifest, functional masculinity.

For some men. Not everyone with a penis is entitled to even a fictitiously absolute masculinity; the masculinity of some must wear its contingency visibly. Racial, sexual, and social polarities cut across gender polarity in complex ways and further deplete the position of entitlement. Black men, for example, still do not have the unquestioned right to claim masculine privilege in relation to white women, and they may find that this racial limitation undercuts their ability to claim the socially inferior version of that privilege available through black women. In many cases, the darker the man, the greater the difficulty. Gay men, or men suspected of being gay, are likely to find themselves assigned to a feminine position regardless of whether their behavior is effeminate and regardless of whether they are met with open homophobia. They may also contend for privilege among themselves by stigmatizing effeminacy; fag or fairy functions as an insult among gay men the way nigger does among black men. These sorts of baroque convolution in social logic are easy to take as farcical in

the telling; in the living they are simply hard to take. To acknowledge such complexities is important at this point, because I am forced mostly to ignore them in pursuing the more than ample complexities of gender considered in isolation.

Like all defense mechanisms, the repression of the knowledge that all subjective positionality is structurally "feminine" works only sporadically. Masculine identity is always shadowed by disavowed reminders that it is borrowed, simulated, relative—more a costume than an essence. Meanwhile, and partly in consequence, biological women are made to bear the main burden of occupying the official, visible feminine position, and in so doing of maintaining the fiction that the position held by men is genuinely polarized, absolutely masculine in both content and structure.

This symbolic function operates in a multitude of contexts, social, erotic, aesthetic, narrative, and ideological. It underwrites both the empirical subordination of women and the ideological ruses by which men and women alike come to legitimate that subordination, often while vigorously denying that they do so. Also underwritten is the hair-trigger anxiety about gender boundaries that no man can fully escape, that so often symbolizes itself as the threat of castration or liquefaction, and that manifests itself reactively as misogyny and sexual violence. For the basis of the cultural authority associated with the impossible position of absolute masculinity is precisely the threat of violence.

This violence is paradoxical by nature and thrives, alas, on the paradox. As long as it remains only a threat, the violence at the disposal of absolute masculinity feels legitimate—feels, indeed, like the power implicit in legitimacy itself. As a threat, this vio-

lence polices the psyche, appearing as guilt, depression, compliance, or constraint within both women and men rather than as the abuse (or worse) of women by men. Only when it is acted out does this violence risk becoming outlaw. The risk, however, is incurred only after the deed of violence is done. In the moment of its enactment, violence against the feminine, violence against women, always feels legitimate to the man who enacts it. That is why it is so readily excused, even by its victims; that is why it is so easily repeated, even by those who feel deeply remorseful at having inflicted it. Built into the very structure of identity, sexual violence is always already sublimated into the inner or outer threat by which it (re)establishes itself as legitimate.

Feminist theories uniting psychoanalysis and semiotics suggest two ways of conceptualizing this state of affairs, one based on Lacan's concept of the phallus and one based on the classical Freudian account of masculine Oedipal subject-formation.1 Sketches of both schemes follow in due course, outlining the concepts I need in order to pursue my thesis. In the interim, let me suggest the spirit in which these concepts will be used, a suggestion made necessary by the recent resurgence of attacks on psychoanalysis as both unscientific and hostile to women.2

This is scarcely the place to mount a detailed apology for psychoanalysis or a critique of the misreadings and misunderstandings that inform much of the case against it.3 It is, rather, a place to indicate allegiances, which I can do sufficiently (and gratefully) by quoting from the philosopher Thomas Nagel:

For most of those who believe in the reality of repression and the unconscious . . . the belief is based not on blind trust in the authority of analysts and their clinical observations but

on the evident usefulness of a rudimentary Freudian outlook in understanding ourselves and other people, particularly erotic life, family dramas, and what Freud called the psychopathology of everyday life. Things that would otherwise surprise us do not; behavior or feelings that would otherwise seem simply irrational become nevertheless comprehensible. You feel miserable all day and then discover that it is the forgotten anniversary of the death of someone who was important to you. . . . Since controlled and reproducible experiments are impracticable here, the kind of internal understanding characteristic of psychoanalysis must rely on the dispersed but cumulative confirmation in life that supports more familiar psychological judgments.

The question is not whether Freud got it exactly right, or whether strong criticism cannot be made of some of his case histories, but whether the types of explanation he introduced substantially amplify the understanding of ourselves and others that common-sense psychology provides. I believe that the pervasive Freudian transformation of our modern working conception of the self is evidence of the validity of his attempt to extend the psychological far beyond its conscious base. Common sense has in fact expanded to include parts of Freudian theory. . . . To many of us it certainly feels as if, much of the time, consciousness reveals only the surface of our minds and, for many, this feeling is confirmed by their dreams. (35-36)

It is the intimate linkage between psychoanalysis and the texture of everyday life that allows me to say, following Teresa de Lauretis, that I seek to direct my reflections "not to but through psychoanalysis—to whom it may concern" ("Habit" 311).

The commonsense psychology on offer here situates gender

polarity in a cultural regime of Oedipal or phallic subject-formation that canonizes sexual violence against anything or anyone coded as feminine. Gender polarity occurs when the duality masculine-feminine is constructed around a rigid boundary, a phallic bar or barrier, in terms of mutual exclusion and masculine dominance. My point is not to identify this polarity, which is all too familiar to both its friends and foes, but to suggest its underlying dynamic.

Gender polarity is set in motion when a man's behavior meets (or a woman's accepts or encourages) most or all of three conditions. First, the man claims to occupy the masculine subject-position absolutely rather than relatively: to occupy it, so to speak, as the lender rather than the borrower of the phallus. Second, the "claimer" (Freud's term for a phallic woman, but here referring to men acting as such phallic women are imagined to act) embodies his status as a "borrower" in the person of someone else, someone who, as a woman (or effeminate man) is not even entitled to borrow. Third, the claimer consolidates, in the person of the false, feminine, "borrower," a positive form of his actual lack of entitlement, which he identifies with her femininity. The consolidation may be covert or overt, subtle or crude, verbal or physical. It may work through either idealization or contempt, desire or aggression. It does not, however, work evenhandedly. Even the slightest fault line in idealization or desire can provoke contempt or aggression in excess of any apparent reason. Both men and women are notoriously ready to justify or excuse this outcome. ("I shouldn't have, but she was asking for it." "If only I had. . . . If only I hadn't. . . .") In the order of gender polarity, the ambivalence built into femininity is always skewed toward the negative.

This dynamic is the half-acknowledged subject of Leo Tolstoy's infamous story "The Kreutzer Sonata," the tale of a self-loathing husband, one Pozdnyshev, who murders his wife for her infidelity. Whether the infidelity occurs in a literal sense is moot and really does not matter; the sexual performance is supposedly brought to light by a musical performance but actually consists in that musical performance itself. The music is Beethoven's "Kreutzer" Sonata; it is played, with a passion too great for its salonlike occasion, by the wife at the piano and the down-at-heels son of a bankrupt landowner at the violin. Pozdnyshev sees this violinist, Trukhachevski, as a monstrosity not because he, Trukhachevski, desires Pozdnyshev's wife, but because he resembles her. In Trukhachevski the cultural secret that must be kept at any cost, the incorporation of a feminine position within the structure of masculinity, ceases to be a secret; it becomes transparent, even blatant.

Pozdnyshev's murder of his wife is an impromptu ritual through which this revelation is reconcealed. To make it so, the details of the murder, which are particularly brutal, fall into a symbolic pattern. Pozdnyshev's dagger encounters a resistant substance—both his wife's corset "and something else"—before plunging into "something soft"; the murder is initially a kind of rape. But the result is the production of a striking bloodstain, marked both as the immediate gush of blood from under the corset and, later, as a black stain spread over the wife's discarded dress. The eroticized murder produces the traditional sign of the virtuous wife's deflowering. The resistant "something else" acts as a surrogate hymen; the murder reenacts the original sexual act by which the husband, with or without his wife's consent, ratifies his manhood by legitimately shedding her blood.

"The Kreutzer Sonata" shows gender polarity in its most self-conscious and also its most reprehensible form. The story both says explicitly just what I say here, that sexual violence is the pathology of modern subjectivity, and embodies that pathology in the very act of indicting it. For that reason, and also because of its insight that music is somehow at the heart of the dilemmas of gender polarity, I return to "The Kreutzer Sonata" often in this book.

Other sources furnish other insights. I am also concerned to suggest the dynamic for an alternative to gender polarity, which I call gender synergy. Gender synergy collapses the polarized structures that privilege an abusive virility. It by no means does away with assertive energies, but it does demote them; they cease to be necessary to the articulation of sexual difference, and they circulate freely around and through possible positions instead of belonging exclusively to a single position. At the same time, gender synergy uncouples sexual difference from the heterosexuality that, in the modern era, has come to ground it. The general importance of homosexual desire, even for those who don't act on it, surfaces repeatedly in this book.

Gender synergy occurs when a single subject occupies both masculine and feminine positions either simultaneously or in rhythmic succession, in representation or behavior, in solitude or company, in whole (by cross-identification, literal or figurative cross-dressing) or in part (by redistributing the traits characteristic of each position). The result is the ability to affirm that authority, truth, and pleasure inhere in the ad hoc ensemble of positions rather than in a fixed and prepotent masculine position.

The word affirm is important here, because all gender synergies can be interpreted in terms that reduce them to expressions of gender polarity. The reason for this reductive possibility is that gender polarity is basic to the order of the culture we have inherited. Synergy can only emerge from within the framework of polarity, and the practice of synergy is correspondingly fraught with dangers and anxiety even for those most drawn to it. In this book, for instance: most of the examples of synergy are male-authored and therefore open to challenge as appropriations of femininity. The conviction that they are something more and better can emerge only if they appear to release a centrifugal energy that no mere fixed position can control. For that to happen, the energy must be both potential in the gesture of synergy itself and kinetic in the response of an interpreter, who must, by improvising the necessary language and rhythm of thought, reperform the gesture so that its synergy is credible. The vitality of gender synergy consists precisely in its ability to prompt or embody an interpretation that can defer the reinstatement of the polarized norm.

For this reason gender synergy is not to be confused with either "gender-bending" by role-reversal (the technique of inversion) or androgynous "gender-blending," although elements of both may appear within a given act of synergy.4 Inversion and androgyny function less as alternatives to gender polarity than as unruly forms of it; they represent a relocating or reordering of polarized terms. Synergy must do more; it must disperse and deconstruct those terms. Nonetheless, synergy cannot be distinguished from inversion or androgyny by rule or by rote. There is no set of formal properties unique to any of these practices; the

differences between them are practical, context-sensitive, dependent on interpretation. We might even say, drawing on the principle that synergies can always be reduced to expressions of polarity, that synergy unravels from the moment we begin to "read it down" into inversion or androgyny.

An odd couple of nineteenth-century poets, Walt Whitman and Alfred Tennyson, respectable Bohemian and (im)proper Victorian, were galvanized by gender synergy and wrote at white heat under its promptings. Whitman was a prototypical "gay" poet who nonetheless wrote memorably—and notoriously—about genital love between men and women: "limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of love, white-blow and delirious juice" ("I Sing the Body Electric" 1.59). Tennyson was an officially "straight" poet whose most important work was an elegy celebrating his meltingly eroticized love for another man: "Descend, and touch, and enter; hear / The wish too strong for words to name" (In Memoriam 93 ). Whitman longs for both masculine and feminine intimacies and does not much care whose body conveys them; one of his most arresting images, from "I Sing the Body Electric," interweaves the presence of a tender nursing mother with that of a ruggedly virile patriarch:

He drank water only, the blood show'd like scarlet through the clear-brown skin of his face,

He was a frequent gunner and fisher, he sail'd his boat himself, he had a fine one presented to him by a ship-joiner, he had fowling-pieces presented to him by men that loved him,

When he went with his five sons and many grand-sons to hunt or fish, you would pick him out as the most beautiful and vigorous of the gang,

You would wish long and long m be with him, you would wish to sit by him in the boat that you and he might touch each other.
ll. 41-44

The beautiful old man is both a paradigm of manly action and a site of immobile caressing presence, a phallic master engorged with blood and a circulator of vital nourishing fluids, a figure of pure self-possession and one through whom gifts, be they objects or touches, are given and taken. Tennyson similarly imagines his friend Arthur Hallam as a male mother, a source of liquescent bliss yet a virile culture hero; and he imagines himself as a male wife, meekly worshipful and yet a virile poet.

It is no accident that these examples of synergy come, like my examples of polarity, from the nineteenth century. The period in which the Western bourgeoisie achieved its historical triumph is also the period in which our modern oppositions of masculinity and femininity, heterosexuality and homosexuality, were formed. The work of Michel Foucault has shown what should, perhaps, have been always before our eyes: that the "repression" of sexuality in the nineteenth century cannot be taken at face value, that it is part of a larger social process, a general sexualization of life, a "putting of sex into discourse," that continues unabated today. Even in an accelerating state of collapse, the nineteenth-century gender system still sets our agendas as subjects. The formative years of this system offer more revealing, more candid representations of both polarity and synergy than more recent times can generally offer—certainly more than is offered by the modernist era, which so often interpreted an enhanced misogyny and ho-

mophobia as the vehicle of cultural heroism.5 We no longer accept nineteenth-century preachments, but that does not stop us from practicing what the nineteenth century preached. More even than to the culture in which they came to life, the focal texts of this book belong to the culture of their afterlife, the culture that continuously revives them as classics. In which form, misrecognized, in fragments, displaced or condensed, they become part of a shared textual unconscious, part of the stuff that dreams are made on—not least my own. So the best way to envision a new gender system for the next century may well be to reenvision the system that was new in the last.

Best, that is, if I am right in thinking that our best hope for a humane gender system, an unsystematic system in which coercion has no place and improvisation is everyplace, lies in the critique of gender polarity and the practice of gender synergy. This book is meant to advance the critique and inspire the practice. These aims, however, will be somewhat assymetrical, correlative to the assymmetry in power and status between men and women. The critique of gender polarity is basic to feminist thought, and this book, any book, can do no more than put a new element into play in a very rich conceptual field. In this case, the new element is a model of the underlying dynamic of gender polarity. But gender synergy is different. When women practice it, they assume privileges historically denied to them; when men practice it, they surrender—or, better, repudiate—privileges historically reserved for them. It follows that gender synergy cannot establish itself culturally unless men come to embrace it, and that not grudgingly or resignedly but with enthusiasm.

This book, accordingly, is addressed differently to men and to women. Women, of course, have been articulating the problems

of gender difference and violence for a long time; they have said loud and clear that, as Dorothy Dinerstein put it, "what women want is to stop serving as scapegoats (their own scapegoats as well as men's and children's scapegoats) for human resentment of the human condition" (234). If Dinerstein's answer to Freud's famous "What do women want?" is right, then this book is meant to show that men can share women's desire, can need an end to the scapegoating, can demand the replacement of resentment by the shared recognition of human limits. To this end, the book presents a dialogue of masculinities and femininities by a male author, and mostly about male authors, in which phallic polarity seeks to overcome itself and metamorphose into a fluid, uncoercive duality that can also unexpectedly become a unity or a plurality. It tries to locate an actual, viable masculinity that does not merely seek to appropriate the feminine as a part of itself or as a means of representing masculine desires and ideals.

For men, the book sketches a practice of masculine identity that may include phallic, firmly bounded, and agonistic elements without being limited to them or by them, without demanding that they be unambivalent, and without requiring a feminine or feminized Other against which (violently) to privilege them. This mobile masculinity, moreover, seeks to be equally accessible to both straight and gay men, but its embrace—again, not reluctant, but free and wholehearted—requires that straight men cast out not only misogyny but also homophobia, whether directed against gay men or lesbian women. Homosexualities, arguably a product and certainly a vehicle of social resistance to gender polarity, offer models of gender synergy from which anyone, however disposed to feel or act on same-sex desire, can benefit.

True to its theme, this book is itself a kind of synergy, a net-

work or constellation of reflections based primarily on the material mentioned and implied so far: the novella by Tolstoy and the music by Beethoven it names; the poetry of a gay writer, Whitman, and his straight counterpart, Tennyson; and the primal scene of the lovedeath, both within opera and without. From these nuclei of concern a pattern of interpretation branches out on a variety of collateral materials. To the depth I hope to gain from intensive focus on Tolstoy and Beethoven, Tennyson and Whitman, love in death and death in love, a breadth should emerge as this focus impels itself to widen. There are readings of other exemplary nineteenth-century works, reflections on the character of polarity and synergy, and comments on notable recent events—the names Bobbitt and Simpson could hardly be left out of a study like this. There are even interpretations of three of my own dreams—a Freudian strategy based partly on my conviction that in some sense it was this series of dreams that taught me, before I was aware of it, the thesis of this book. The dreams, like the most famous dream of the twentieth century, the "primal scene" dream of the patient Freud called the Wolf Man, all concern themselves with wolves, woods, windows, and desire.

Taken together, my readings offer a prismatic anatomy of both the sexual violence sanctioned in the cultural order of gender and a nonviolent gendering of the human subject that may, just may, follow from disordering that order in all its senses. Admittedly, and obviously, these readings cannot "prove" my thesis about polarity and synergy as if it were an experimental hypothesis. My anatomies are interpretive rather than empirical, products of a thought experiment energized rather than inhibited by the friction of differences, the crossing of conceptual borders,

the leaps of faith between speculation and reality. It would be naive, however, to think that this procedure unfolds at a safe distance from the misogyny of everyday life and the brutalities of actual harassment, abuse, battery, and rape. On the contrary, it is precisely in the realm of representation, of images charged with value, pressure, feeling, images recognized and misrecognized, conscious and unconscious, that actual sexual violence is grounded and in which its antidote must likewise be grounded. When men abuse women they act from a sense of entitlement: they do what a man has a right to do. The sense, the right, may be abhorrent, but it is too pervasive to be explained away as abnormal. Rather it honors the norm of a cultural order in which gender polarity, precisely because it is never quite true, must compulsively reestablish itself as the truth. Corpus delicti.

One more note on method. In taking shape as a synergy based on a small body of material, this book becomes a palimpsest or tapestry of case histories: studies of particulars in which the typical reveals itself so fully that the particular itself becomes general, "exemplary" in every sense of the term, a contingent happening that in retrospect seems necessary. The case history reveals what Whitman called "facts showered over with light"; it finds the angles of vision, the levels of discourse, from which, as Goethe claimed, "Everything factual is, in a sense, theory. . . . There is no sense in looking for something behind phenomena: they are theory."6 There is, of course, no gainsaying that the choice of material for these case histories is to some degree arbitrary. But a text like this gains credibility by assembling possibilities rather than by demonstrating necessities. The process is like compos-

ing a theme and variations: the choice of theme is arbitrary but gains credibility insofar as it serves to show the possibilities of variation, transformation, and thereby insight. In my own "variations," I have sought both to gain intensivity by recurring continually to the exemplary figures of Beethoven, Tolstoy, Tennyson, and Whitman, and to gain breadth by branching out freely to reflect on a variety of "satellite" texts, topics, and events.

Continues...

Excerpted from After the Lovedeath: Sexual Violence and the Making of Cultureby Lawrence Kramer Copyright © 1997 by Lawrence Kramer. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520210123
• ISBN 13: 9780520210127
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 290