[In the essay below, Atkins offers a deconstructionist reading of Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, focusing on the relation of the self to the other.]

An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot is normally read as Pope's defense of himself and justification of his satire, as—in other words—his apologia pro satura sua. In the prose "Advertisement" that precedes the poem, Pope describes his aim, in fact, in legal terms as an indictment, establishing an adversarial situation and pitting himself and his word against certain others, their changes, and their "truth": "This Paper is a Sort of Bill of Complaint, begun many years since, and drawn up by snatches, as the several Occasions offer'd. I had no thoughts of publishing it, till it pleas'd some Persons of Rank and Fortune …to attack in a very extraordinary manner, not only my Writings (of which being publick the Publick judge) but my Person, Morals, and Family, whereof to those who know me not, a truer Information may be requisite." After making clear his own desire to tell the truth, Pope proceeds to describe himself as "divided between the Necessity to say something of Myself, and my own Laziness to undertake so awkward a Task." This confession of self-division is perhaps more suggestive, and important, than has hitherto been recognized. These two kinds of difference, that external form consisting of difference between (say) Pope and those he indicts, and the internal form representing self-division and rendering certain conventions problematical, will be my focus here. I shall attend, that is, to the story told by the play of difference in Arbuthnot. My effort, hardly exhaustive, will be exploratory and speculative.

I begin with Pope's defense, which consists in large part of a series of strategies designed to establish him as a "good man." He differentiates, for example, his background, motives, and character from those of "the Race that write," maintaining that, unlike the "Clerk, foredoom'd his Father's soul to cross, / Who pens a Stanza when he should engross" he "left no Calling for this idle trade, / No Duty broke, no Father dis-obey'd. Depicting himself as a good man, Pope claims to rise above the level of "slashing Bentley" and "piddling Tibalds," proceeding to adduce a list of illustrious friends to prove the difference; from them, he asserts, "the world will judge of Men and Books, / Not from the Burnets, Oldmixons, and Cooks."

Pope focuses strategically on this matter of friendship as a means of establishing his virtue and his difference. Perhaps his most effective and economical rhetorical use of friendship appears in the choice of John Arbuthnot as "recipient" of his "epistle" and as interlocutor. As is well known, Pope draws on a tradition suggested in Ecclesiasticus 6:16 ("A faithful friend is the medicine of life") and developed by Plutarch, who, in a disquisition entitled "How to Know a Flatterer from a Friend," uses as a recurrent motif the comparison of a good friend to an able physician. Of course, Arbuthnot was by profession a physician (he had, in fact, been physician to Queen Anne), and if one accepts the view expressed by Sir William Temple, Pope is especially blessed in having a doctor as a friend: "In all Diseases of Body and Mind, 'tis happy to have an able Physician for a Friend, or a discreet friend for a Physician; which is so great a blessing that the Wise Man will have it to proceed only from God." That Arbuthnot was a satirist as well as a physician (he wrote the History of John Bull, coauthored with Pope and Gay Three Hours after Marriage, and was a member of the Scriblerus Club) allows Pope to suggest also the familiar notion that the satirist is, despite appearances to the contrary, a physician and a friend. Finally, because Arbuthnot was widely respected, Pope is able to draw on a tradition perhaps deriving from Aristotle's Ethics and to suggest that his friendship with such a man evidences his own virtue. When this good man speaks in the poem as interlocutor, therefore, his words carry considerable weight and authority. In his five short "speeches," Arbuthnot urges caution and restraint, warning against the naming of individuals, but he also assists in his friend's satire on Sporus.

The terms this particular friend enables Pope to exploit, "physician," "satirist," and "friend," serve indeed as focal structuring devices for the defense. The idea that links the first two here, "friend" is also the concept that differs from while connecting two other terms crucial to the poem's thematic development and Pope's strategies of defense. The terms appear together in lines 206-7: "A tim'rous foe, and a suspicious friend, / Dreading ev'n fools, by Flatterers besieg'd." Pope, of course, opposes "friend" to "foe," and the other term, "flatterers," is both distinguished from and linked to "foes"; indeed, the construction of line 104, which brings together the conclusion of Arbuthnot's warning concerning names and Pope's response thereto, illustrates the similarity and difference of the terms: "'But Foes like these!'—One Flatt'rer's worse than all." Pope's claims may, then, be described as follows: Because the satirist is a physician of sorts, he is ultimately a friend, even of those he lashes, intending to cure them of their follies and vices: "This dreaded Sat'rist Dennis will confess / Foe to his Pride, but Friend to his Distress." A satirist obviously differs from a flatterer, who, Pope insists, is ultimately a foe (Bufo well illustrates the point).

Though I have no doubt oversimplified in summarizing, the above represents, I think, Pope's basic line of argument in An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. Indeed, Pope's defense exhibits many of the qualities Margaret W. Ferguson [in The Literary Freud: Mechanisms of Defense and the Poetic Will] claims as characteristic of the tradition of defenses of poetry; being classifiable as neither disinterested art nor disinterested critical commentary, becoming in fact "active rather than passive advocates for what we might call the claims of the ego," these defenses, according to Ferguson, act as "protection against external threats to the ego's task of defending itself against internal threats." It is impossible to do justice here to Ferguson's subtle and complex argument, and I have no intention of trying to apply her arguments to Arbuthnot in any consistent way, though a certain parallel will emerge between my argument below and her claim that the usual poetic defense "involves a complex double movement of attack and courtship." But of course, Pope's "Bill of Complaint" is more than merely defensive. To use J. Paul Hunter's helpful terms, in this poem satiric apology turns into satiric instance—one of several turns we shall consider. From the very beginning, indeed, Pope is concerned to draw straight, distinct, and unmistakable lines between himself and those others.

The poem opens, of course, with Pope seeking shelter from the would-be poets who besiege him wherever he goes. In escaping into his own home, Pope signals the desire for physical distance that is itself a sign of his desire for literary and moral differentiation. Outside, he maintains, with the poetasters lunacy rages, from which he would sequester and protect himself. The immediate danger Pope fears is contamination or infection; thus he laments, "What Drop or Nostrum can this Plague remove?". This seemingly innocent metaphor, like all other figures, carries great weight, for the medical plague has become, as here, a metaphor for a social plague. Indeed, it functions as a "generic label for a variety of ills that …threaten or seem to threaten the very existence of social life." [René Girard, "To Double Business Bound," 1978.] In texts as divergent as Oedipus Rex, Troilus and Cressida, and Camus's 1948 novel, the plague acts as part of a thematic cluster that involves epidemic contamination and eventually the dissolving of differences. If Pope cannot cure the plague or be inoculated against it, he can at least reduce the possibility of infection by quaranteening himself and perhaps thus maintaining the difference that the plague threatens to collapse.

Pope preserves his difference not only by escaping from the "plague" but also by establishing his difference from others who, he argues, lack sufficient difference. The desire to differentiate himself takes several forms. Some of these we have already glimpsed, including the differences in background, motive, and character he draws between himself and "the Race that write." Naming is another basic means of differentiation, perhaps the simplest, and Pope indulges in naming the specific targets of his satire, despite Arbuthnot's warnings. Pope's most elaborate and effective means of differentiation, which happens to be his main offensive strategy, the famous linked portraits of Atticus, Bufo, and Sporus, is designed to advance the defensive strategy of establishing Pope as an alternative—indeed, as a true friend and a good man.

Before turning to these portraits, it is necessary to examine carefully Pope's desire for difference and the implications of his wish for clear and absolute distinctions. Such desire appears to be masculine, Pope wanting from the outset to establish what he later calls his "manly ways." To be a good man and a true friend is, according to Pope's strategy, to be distinct, to possess a clear identity—in short, to be different. Difference is the male quality, the presence of the penis. Pope's fear of the loss of difference may be seen, then, as fear of the loss of his maleness, or castration. It is the fear that he will become, in fact, what Sporus was turned into: an in-different male, a male who was castrated and then treated as a woman, "one vile Antithesis. / Amphibious Thing!" In Pope's case, however, it is not so much castration as intercourse with him, feminized, that threatens: "What Walls can guard me, or what Shades can hide? / They pierce my Thickets, thro' my Grot they glide." The judgment rendered by Pope, after being "Seiz'd and ty'd down to judge," certainly carries sexual overtones: "'Keep your Piece nine years,'" an imagined suitor's reaction to which extending the implication ("'The Piece you think is incorrect: why take it, / I'm all submission, what you'd have it, make it'"). Feminized, Pope withdraws from these suitors and their assaults, declaring in the poem's opening lines, "Shut, shut the door, good John! fatigu'd I said, / Tye up the knocker, say I'm sick, I'm dead," "knocker" perhaps being the penis.

The enigmatic ferminization, or attempted feminization, of Pope cannot be understood, I contend, apart from the metaphorical treatment of writing in Arbuthnot. Pope of course claims that, whereas for the "Witlings" writing is a compulsion and a drive akin to madness, for him it is both a burden and a moral obligation. He also treats writing in sexual terms, as when he notes that "ev'ry Coxcomb knows me by my Style" and when he counsels to "'Keep your Piece nine years,'" "Piece" being both the written text and the sexual instrument and "Style" suggesting the stylus or penis. The references to Gildon's "venal quill," to Bufo "puff'd by ev'ry quill," and to "each gray goose quill" that a patron may bless, as well as to "slashing Bentley, indicate the relation of pen to penis—writing, according to Freud, entailing "making a liquid flow out of a tube onto a piece of white paper" and so assuming "the significance of copulation." The mob of wouldbe poets courting favor and Pope are thus said "To spread about the Itch of Verse and Praise." Pope makes clear that the writer with his pen(is) seeks pen-etration and satisfaction. As a result of Pope's own (masculine) writing, moreover, "Poor Cornus sees his frantic Wife elope, / And curses Wit, and Poetry, and Pope."

Further, Pope depicts his own reception as a writer in terms that define writing as a masculine act and the response to a writer as feminine. Pope indeed describes his own writing in sexual terms ("The Muse but serv'd to ease some Friend, not Wife,") the suggestion of homosexuality being (anachronistically) supported by the statement that his friends "left me GAY." If writing and writers are masculine, and the response sought feminine, we can appreciate why Pope as would-be patron, courted for favor, is being treated as female. He becomes the sexual object pursued by the "Witlings."

Recalling the Freudian implications of eyes and sight, we can appreciate too the nature of Pope's withdrawal from the poet-suitors as he summarizes that withdrawal: "I sought no homage from the Race that write; / I kept, like Asian Monarchs, from their sight." Withdrawing, Pope refuses to mingle with the poetasters. He thus rejects the role of woman they seek to impose upon him: he will not be turned into their lover, their host, their patron.

Pope attempts, then, to preserve his difference (phallus) in the face of the dunces' aim to make him a patron-woman who can satisfy their desires as writer-males. He preserves his difference not only by withdrawing but also by establishing clear and distinct difference from others. Pope's most effective strategies of differentiation, and his most strenuous attacks, occur in the portraits of Atticus, Bufo, and Sporus, in which the language of sexuality and the sexuality of language are unmistakable.

The first portrait is of Atticus, whom Pope lashes for his failure to achieve distinct identity:

Different from the manliness Pope praises, Atticus appears weak, indistinct, unwilling to take a definite stand. He accedes to flattery, and if he attacks, it is barely. Unable to be really different, Atticus is not sufficiently masculine. Lacking in confidence, he fears competition for "the throne" and indeed hates the very "Arts" by which he has "risen" to that place.

With the second portrait the situation is more complicated. From more than one perspective Bufo is the central portrait—and arguably the most important difference Pope establishes in Arbuthnot. Bufo's importance derives in part from his similarity to Pope, particularly as the poet appears early on in the poem, courted by the flattering dunces. Pope's aim, of course, is to claim essential difference in this situation of similarity, thereby differentiating himself as true friend from the false friend (and foe) that Bufo the patron is. The theme of the portrait thus concerns the relationship of flatterer and flattered or, to use analogous terms, host and parasite. Clearly, the plagues of poetasters surrounding Bufo, like "the Race that write" courting Pope, are parasites. But just as clearly the patron-flattered-host Bufo functions also as a flatterer-parasite on what initially appear to be parasite-poetasters: for if as host Bufo feeds the "undistinguish'd race" of "Wits," he is fed in turn by the very parasites he feeds, feeding on the parasites, changing places with them in a "see-saw between that and this" and so finally becoming identifiable as neither simply parasite nor host, flatterer nor flattered, but as both.

The sexual language we have noted elsewhere in Arbuthnot appears here, too. For the portrait treats the relationship of male-female, as well as that of patron-poet and parasite-host. As the opening lines of the portrait indicate, what Pope feared does happen to a patron: "full blown" and "puff'd by ev'ry quill," Bufo becomes female in hosting the would-be poets. Yet he gets his revenge on the emasculating writers by becoming the castrated-castrating woman, for in his library (or womb) lie "dead" poets, including Pindar, who "stood without a head." Are these writers merely "spent"? Or is it that, feminized, Bufo feminizes, turning the masculine writer into a female if he is allowed to have his way? Perhaps it is both. With the male-female relationship, in any case, as with those others it treats, the Bufo portrait dramatizes the turning of one thing into another, destabilizing, indeed, differences usually arrested as distinct oppositions.

If Atticus is neither quite one thing nor fully another, neither adequately friend nor identifiably foe, Sporus is, more dramatically than Bufo, both one thing and another. According to one of the shrewdest commentators on the poem, Sporus is, therefore, "the very reverse of the divine reconciliation of opposites" [Thomas E. Maresca, Pope's Horatian Poems, 1966]. Assumed to represent John Lord Hervey, well known for effeminacy of both manner and appearance, Sporus is an "Antithesis" and an "Amphibious Thing," both male and female, oscillating "between that and this":

Yet let me flap this Bug with gilded wings,
This painted Child of Dirt that stinks and stings;
Whose Buzz the Witty and the Fair annoys,
Yet Wit ne'er tastes, and Beauty ne'er enjoys,
So well-bred Spaniels civilly delight
In mumbling of the Game they dare not bite.
Eternal Smiles his Emptiness betray,

As shallow streams run dimpling all the way.
Whether in florid Impotence he speaks,
And, as the Prompter breathes, the Puppet squeaks;
Or at the Ear of Eve, familiar Toad,
Half Froth, half Venom, spits himself abroad,
In Puns, or Politicks, or Tales, or Lyes,
Or Spite, or Smut, or Rymes, or Blasphemies.
His Wit all see-saw between that and this.
Now high, now low, now Master up, now Miss,
And he himself one vile Antithesis.
Amphibious Thing! that acting either Part,
The trifling Head, or the corrupted Heart!
Fop at the Toilet, Flatt'rer at the Board,
Now trips a Lady, and now struts a Lord.
Eve's Tempter thus the Rabbins have exprest,
A Cherub's face, a Reptile all the rest;
Beauty that shocks you, Parts that none will trust,
Wit that can creep, and Pride that licks the dust.

According to Aubrey Williams [in Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope, 1969], the name "Sporus" derives from the youth that the emperor Nero caused to be castrated and then, treating him as a woman, eventually married. Certainly, Pope's portrait presents Sporus as having lost his difference. He seems, in fact, to have succumbed, somewhat like Bufo, to pressures Pope has resisted, and that failure in Sporus no doubt accounts in part for the vigor of Pope's attack. Sporus both attacks and flatters, and so his efforts evidently cancel each other out. He is self-divided, opposing forces colliding within him. According to Pope, he is, then, impotent and empty.

Taking the portraits together, we notice a certain progression: whereas Atticus is not male enough, Bufo appears feminized, and Sporus is divided, being both male and female. The straight lines Pope has sought blur in Atticus, curve in Bufo, and become indeterminate, undecidable in Sporus. To them Pope aims to be an effective alternative, with his "manly ways." He has, of course, acted in an apparently "manly" way in setting up these differences in hopes of preserving his difference. Having established that difference, in part by showing his difference from those lacking difference, Pope now exhibits some interesting differences from himself, at least from himself as he has appeared in the poem.

Though they are by no means radical breaks, important differences appear immediately following the Sporus portrait. To begin with, there is the change to third-person narration, indicative of the indirectness that replaces the directness we have noted. The accompanying change in tone is also marked, Pope now appearing patient and long-suffering, receiving rather than giving blows and apparently no longer so intent on the kind of differentiation evident earlier. For "Virtue's better end," he claims, he withstood

The distant Threats of Vengeance on his head,
The Blow unfelt, the Tear he never shed;
The Tale reviv'd, the Lye so oft o'erthrown;
Th' imputed Trash, and Dulness not his own;
The Morals blacken'd when the Writings scape;
The libel'd Person, and the pictur'd Shape;
Abuse on all he lov'd, or lov'd him, spread,
A Friend in Exile, or a Father, dead.

Two verse paragraphs later Pope extends the argument, maintaining that he has actually befriended his attackers:

Full ten years slander'd, did he once reply?
Three thousand Suns went down on Welsted's Lye:
To please a Mistress, One aspers'd his life;
He lash'd him not, but let her be his Wife:
Let Budget charge low Grubstreet on his quill,
And write whate'er he pleas'd, except his Will;
Let the Two Curls of Town and Court, abuse
His Father, Mother, Body, Soul, and Muse.

The shift in these paragraphs in tone and from first- to third-person are but two of several significant internal differences that the remainder of the poem develops. To continue, the verse paragraph from which I have just quoted closes with Pope's praise of his father and mother for their tolerance and forbearance—qualities the son has not displayed, at least through the Sporus passage. Whereas the poet passed judgment, assigned blame, and launched often-scathing attacks, his "Father held it for a rule / It was a Sin to call our Neighbour Fool, / That harmless Mother thought no Wife a Whore." Obviously, such passages are designed to show the injustice of the attacks on Pope's family, but I think more is going on. For one thing, the following portrait of Pope's deceased father develops the differences between father and son, offering, indeed, a clear criticism of the poet as he appeared earlier in the poem. Presented as a kind of hero, the elder Pope is given the name the poet had sought for himself: "The good Man." Hero and vir bonus, the father is yet a naif: unlike his son, he was never involved in civil or religious controversy and never offered such a "Bill of Complaint" as is An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. In phrases that inevitably recall his earlier depiction of "this long Disease, my Life," Pope even contrasts his father's lifelong healthfulness with his own illness and physical deformities:

Born to no Pride, inheriting no Strife,
Nor marrying Discord in a Noble Wife,
Stranger to Civil and Religious Rage,
The good Man walk'd innoxious thro' his Age.
No Courts he saw, no Suits would ever try,
Nor dar'd an Oath, nor hazarded a Lye:
Un-learn'd, he knew no Schoolman's subtle Art,
No Language, but the Language of the Heart.
By Nature honest, by Experience wise,
Healthy by Temp'rance and by Exercise:
His Life, tho' long, to sickness past unknown,
His Death was instant, and without a groan.

Pope proceeds to pray that he be allowed to live and die like his father; if so, "Who sprung from Kings shall know less joy than I." His father thus represents for Pope simplicity, naturalness, and innocence of discord, strife, and rage—in short, the pastoralism that the poet supposedly forsook as "not in Fancy's Maze he wander'd long, / But stoop'd to Truth, and moraliz'd his song." Whether Pope now wishes to return to "Fancy's Maze," there appears a nostalgic longing for simplicity and escape that connects with the desire evidenced in the poem's opening to get away from the "plague" of poetasters. Though he sought to appear "the good man," Pope now appears different from "the good man." What does this say about his effort to establish and preserve his difference?

We approach an answer to that question by noting that Pope seems desirous of leaving behind the burden of writing, a masculine activity that is in the poem, as we have seen, aggressive, differentiating, and indeed divisive. In deemphasizing writing, Pope seems to put penis, as well as pen, away, for very little sexual language appears in later sections of Arbuthnot. Withdrawing from writingsex, Pope, "sick of Fops, and Poetry, and Prate, / To Bufo left the whole Castalian State." Having done so, he turns to his surviving but aged mother. Despite his earlier resistance to the attempted feminization of him, as well as his determined insistence on his "manly ways," Pope now depicts himself as nurse and mother to her. In effect, he changes places with his mother:

Me, let the tender Office long engage
To rock the Cradle of reposing Age,
With lenient Arts extend a Mother's breath,
Make Languor smile, and smooth the Bed of Death,
Explore the Thought, explain the asking Eye,
And keep a while one Parent from the Sky!

At poem's end, then, Pope evidently rejects the divisive life of writing for the immediacy, naturalness, and supposed peace of home and family. Pope thus withdraws, adopting his father as model and ideal and apparently hoping to repeat the innocence he represents. In so doing, Pope completes, it seems, the pattern established at the opening of the poem. But much more is happening, as we have begun to see. In several ways Pope comes to differ from "himself," appearing divided, just as his poem does. Pope implicitly admits that his desire of difference has produced precisely difference from at least one major ideal and goal. Moreover, shortly after adopting his father as ideal, Pope—in a quite different sense—adopts his mother, indeed mothering her; though his father is an ideal (even if nonassertive, nondifferentiating, and so only problematically masculine), Pope becomes a mother. If this is so, if difference thus plays with our desire, what difference does the desire of difference make in those oppositions around which Arbuthnot is constructed?

It begins to appear that binary oppositions are illusory. Consider, for instance, Pope's desire all along to project "manly ways" and to resist the feminization apparent in the poetasters' efforts to make him their patron. In spite of himself, Pope reveals throughout certain supposedly feminine traits. For as he defends his hard-hitting truthtelling, Pope resembles a coquette: he asks, coyly, "You think this cruel?" and "Whom have I hurt?" Further, when he admits, "If wrong, I smil'd; if right, I kiss'd the rod," the double entendre establishes his own position as female. Moreover, the act of withdrawing, apparent in the opening couplet and culminating in Pope's focus at poem's end, seems a feminine act. Pope not only withdraws, of course, but, as we have seen, he also becomes nurse and mother. Thus differentiating, a masculine act, and withdrawing, a feminine one, result in the same loss of difference and the turn into the femininity Pope sought to avoid.

But "turn" can be misleading if it suggests a change from one stable and absolute identity into another. "Oscillation" may be better, for even when female qualities seem most apparent in Pope, they exist alongside and in oscillation with masculine ones. There are no absolute differences—and so no radical breaks in Arbuthnot before and after the Sporus portrait. Thus, even as he adopts his father as (nonassertive and nondifferentiating) model and ideal, Pope continues the (masculine) desire of clear, straight lines, for he posits his father as an absolute: innocent, simple, and natural. Pope thus substitutes one kind of absolute, one kind of distinctiveness, for another.

It seems that male and female qualities are actually cotermjnous in Pope as appears at poem's end when he is both drawn to his father and acts as mother. This is, of course, precisely what Pope objected to (and perhaps feared) in Sporus especially. It is to the Sporus portrait that I want now, in concluding, to return.

The internal split within the antithetical Sporus is obvious, but what that self-division signifies—and implies for Pope's own situation—may not be. Does it spell emptiness and impotence, as Pope declares? To begin with, consider that the name "Sporus" also suggests "spore," which comes from the New Latin spora (seed, spore), which derives from the Greek sense of both seed and the act of sowing, itself traceable to the word speirein, meaning "to sow." A spore is "a primitive usually unicellular resistant or reproductive body produced by plants and some invertebrates and capable of development into a new individual in some cases unlike the parent either directly or after fusion with another spore" (Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary). Whereas Sporus as a historical reference suggests the doubleness Pope emphasizes in the portrait, the etymology of the word denotes fertility and productiveness. This second, positive meaning is always in the word as a shimmering or trace that prevents the meaning from lying still or being unequivocal.

Though we may insist, with Pope, on Sporus' impotence, we can also insist on his at least potential fertility. That potential may, in fact, be seen as realized in Pope's satire. For within the poem the fertility is no longer merely potential but manifest and productive of satire. In a sense, Pope places Sporus, though not unproblematically, in the role of male to Pope's own female ability to produce.

The negative side of the coin that is Sporus, which represents Pope's declaration of Sporus' lack of difference as impotence, is simply but half the story. The other side shows how an internal split, an oscillation "between that and this," can be positive and productive. The self-division satirized in Sporus is an analogue of, among other things, the internal split in Pope's poem between the (negative) declaration concerning Sporus and the (positive) description that has emerged through our reading. There are other internal splits, as we have seen, both Pope and his poem being fissured and self-divided, oscillating, just like Sporus, "between that and this." Produced in each of these cases is a "both/and" situation, a dividing that is also a joining. If identities are thereby nullified, so are absolute differences. Left are relations, made possible by the "trace" of the "one" in the "other." The structure thus revealed "allows an osmotic mixing, making the stranger friend, the distant near, the Unheimlich heimlich …without, for all its closeness and similarity, ceasing to be strange, distant, and dissimilar." Absolute difference such as Pope sought, we can now understand, must result in loss of difference; only relation preserves difference. Strangely, it seems, Sporus is the truth that Pope denies. The textual situation of undecidability between Sporus as potential and as impotent emerges, then, as an analogue, like the "trace-structure" of the word "Sporus," of the "both/and" nature Pope (satirically) ascribes to him. Is Sporus the "trace-structure"? In any case, instead of a vigorously masculine activity, writing emerges as another name for the "trace-structure" and for the modes of self-division Arbuthnot presents and enacts.

If an "uncanny antithetical relationship," resulting from inevitable internal fissure, thus "reforms itself in each polar opposite when that opposite is separated out," subverting or nullifying "the apparent unequivocal relation of polarity," then Pope's relationship to the mob of would-be poets, as well as to Atticus, Bufo, and Sporus, is rendered problematical. Unwilling patron, Pope is nonetheless host to the parasites (and therefore feminine) in at least the sense that they "live" inside his poem, taking life from it and being preserved in it, a point Pope himself suggests when he writes, "Ev'n such small Critics some regard may claim, / Preserv'd in Milton's or in Shakespeare's name." Thus "the Burnets, Oldmixons, and Cooks," as well as Atticus, Bufo, and Sporus, are given life by Pope even as he "destroys" them. There appears to be no undoing, or satirizing, that is not also a preserving. A similarly oscillating relationship obtaining between host and parasite, it is impossible to decide whether Sporus, for example, is the parasite within the host-text that is Pope's poem or the host on which that text feeds. Like Bufo, who is fed by his parasite-hosts, Pope himself can be seen as perhaps not much less parasite than host. He needs the dunces just as they need him. Without them, he could not, of course, turn satiric apology into satiric instance.

Despite, then, Pope's desire for, and efforts toward, absolute difference, he is finally and always already related to all those from whom he would distance and differentiate himself. The "trace" prevents both absolute difference and distinct identity, ensuring relation, for a "trace" of the "other" lies in the "same" and vice versa. The "trace," always "present" in writing, graphic or otherwise, is responsible for the play of difference that, in Arbuthnot, produces the relation, the mingling, and the intercourse that Pope would avoid.