SOURCE: "'Descend, and Touch, and Enter': Tennyson's Strange Manner of Address," in Another Kind of Love: Male Homosexual Desire in English Discourse, 1850-1920, University of California Press, 1994, pp. 44-70.

[In the following chapter from his book, Craft studies Tennyson's In Memoriam as a document of homosexual desire, looking at the poem in relation to its social context and contemporary notions of sexuality.]

In the final chapter of Sexual Inversion, Havelock Ellis turns with measured circumspection to the difficult problem of the correction and consolation of the sexual invert. In the especially vexed case of the "congenital invert"—in the case, that is, of a person who is the "victim of abnormal [homosexual] impulses" that spring incorrigibly from "the central core of organic personality"—consolation through sublimation provides the only available palliation; and this because the invert's "inborn constitutional abnormality" remains, by definition, nonductile and fundamentally resistant to "psychotherapeutical [and] surgical treatment."¹ Still, the impossibility of effective medical remediation did not legitimate an active homosexual genitality. Instead, and for reasons less medical than political, Ellis prescribed the difficult consolation of a more than Penelopean patience: "it is the ideal of chastity, rather than normal sexuality, which the congenital invert should hold before his eyes."² Yet if the rigors of so sustained a meditation upon "the ideal of chastity" were likely to produce intense ocular strain, then perhaps this difficulty could be mitigated by the implementation of a practical program of displacement and surrogate satisfaction: a regimen of sublimation, a course of psychosexual exercises, or, as Ellis cheerfully calls it, a "method of self-restraint and self-culture, without self-repression."³ A civilization, it would seem, without the burden of much discontent.

What does Ellis offer as his primary example of this "method of self-treatment?" By what "psychic methods" may the invert "refine and spiritualize the inverted impulse"? How else than by a course of corrective reading? And indeed Ellis proposes a list of books to read and imitate, a prophylactic mimesis. Such remedial homosexual reading, at once consolatory and disciplinary, would serve a double or ambivalent function: the verbal substitution would express the very desire it would also work to contain; the text would be at once the home of desire and the site of its exile. (The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, . . . narrates a personal history of this agonistic Victorian belief that "literary and imaginative palliatives" would double as both "the vehicle and the safety valve for [the] tormenting preoccupations" that beset the victims of "this inexorable and incurable disease.")⁴ First among the exemplary texts listed in Ellis's curriculum of literary palliation are, predictably enough, the dialogues of Plato, which "have frequently been found a source of great help and consolation by inverts." The reading of Plato, especially the Phaedrus and the Symposium, often had for nineteenth-century gay males the force of a revelation. Symond's case history in Sexual Inversion, transcribed by Ellis into the third person, is representative: "It was in his 18th year that an event which A [Symonds] regards as decisive in his development occurred. He read the Phaedrus and Symposium of Plato. A new world opened, and he felt that his own nature had been revealed."⁵ This topos of self-recognition via Platonic texts is of course a staple in the cultural construction of nineteenth-century male homosexual subjectivity. Second in order of emphasis in Ellis's itinerary of inverted reading is, again predictably, Whitman's Leaves of Grass, with "its wholesome and robust ideal" of "manly love," although Whitman's exuberant sensuality and aboriginal stance rendered his poetry "of more doubtful value for general use." Again, Symonds on Whitman has representative value: Leaves of Grass "became for me a kind of Bible. Inspired by 'Calamus' I adopted another method of palliative treatment, and tried to invigorate the emotion I could not shake off by absorbing Whitman's conception of comradeship. . . . The immediate result of this study of Walt Whitman was the determination to write the history of paiderastia in Greece [Symonds's A Problem in Greek Ethics] and to attempt a theoretical demonstration of the chivalrous enthusiasm which seemed to me implicit in comradeship."⁶ Here, in the transposition of desire into sexual discourse and of sexual discourse into more sexual discourse, we may see a paradigmatic example of Ellis's program of disciplinary reading and writing, itself a striking confirmation of Foucault's assertion that the nineteenth century worked assiduously to "put sex into discourse."

Yet if Ellis felt the rhetorical need to demur at Whitman's anatomical insistence, his barely veiled genital reference, he also had the advantage of an absolutely canonical counterexample, a Victorian text whose passionate discursivity and sexual obliquity everywhere marked its constitutive submission to the agonistic Victorian imperative "to refine and spiritualize" so problematic a desire. He turned with confidence to In Memoriam:

Various modern poets of high ability have given expression to emotions of exalted or passionate friendship towards individuals of the same sex, whether or not such friendship can properly be termed homosexual. It is scarcely necessary to refer to In Memoriam, in which Tennyson enshrined his affection for his early friend, Arthur Hallam, and developed a picture of the universe on the basis of that affection.⁷

Ellis's sentences here pivot on an ambivalence we may recognize as our own: it may be "scarcely necessary" to adduce In Memoriam in this homosexual context, so famous is it as a site of exalted friendship and erotic displacement, yet Ellis equivocates, as indeed he must, as to "whether or not such friendship can properly be termed homosexual." Ellis's verbal equipoise here—his dichotomous need to affirm the homosociahty of Tennyson's poem while refusing to specify the homosexuality of Tennysonian desire—responds faithfully both to Ellis's own delicate discursive situation as a writer of suspect texts and to a certain strategic equivocation within In Memoriam itself, one accurately identified by Edward Carpenter when he described In Memoriam as being "reserved" and "dignified" "in [its] sustained meditation and tender sentiment" but as also "half revealing here and there a more passionate feeling."⁸ Exactly this equivocation defines the critical and taxonomic problem of whether In Memoriam "can properly be termed homosexual." The issue here is not merely one of choosing specific terminologies, words like homosexual or heterosexual, but also of submitting (or refusing to submit) to the historically particular acts of conceptualization that make a taxonomic category like homosexuality intelligible at all. To make any definition is first to establish, and then to be governed by, a set of constitutive limits or boundaries. Obviously enough, this process of defining entails the inscription within specific vocabularies and discourses of the authorizing culture's signature, its particular impress of value and belief. Equally obviously, the category of homosexuality, with its inescapable residuary imputations of disease, dysfunction, and disorder, is manifestly incompetent to represent the complex, evasive, and beautiful manipulations that Tennyson's desire for Hallam receives in In Memoriam.

This is not to deny but rather to assume and affirm that In Memoriam revolves around Hallam as around "the centre of a world's desire."⁹ Or, rather more accurately, around Hallam's absconded presence, for he is, as Carol T. Christ writes, "the absent center around which the poem moves."¹⁰ But if Hallam is Tennyson's "central warmth diffusing bliss," the elegy negotiates its problematic desire less by a centering of its warmth than by the dispersion of its bliss, less by acts of specific definition than by strategies of deferral, truncation, and displacement, strategies that everywhere work to "refine and spiritualize" what otherwise would be "the wish too strong for words to name." But In Memoriam is more than a machine for the sublimation, management, or transformation of male homosexual desire; it is, rather, the site of a continuing problematization: the problem not merely of desire between men, but also of the desire (very urgent in the elegy) to speak it.

A certain anxiety attends the reading of In Memoriam and always has. The first reviews were, of course, largely laudatory, but a palpable dis-ease haunts particular early responses. An anonymous review in The Times (28 November 1851), now usually attributed to Manley Hopkins, father of Gerard Manley Hopkins, specifically complained of the elegy's erotic metaphorics, its "strange manner of address to a man, even though he be dead."¹¹ A "defect," this reviewer noted, "which has painfully come out as often as we take up the volume, is the tone of—may we say so!—amatory tenderness." "Very sweet and plaintive these verses are," Hopkins the elder continued, "but who would not give them a feminine application? Shakespeare may be considered the founder of this style in English." Here the reviewer's palpable gender anxiety, his fear of the unhinged gender within Tennyson's poetic voice, reflects the bewildering ease with which Tennyson employs heterosexual desire and marriage as a trope to represent his passion for lost Hallam, a tropological indiscretion, the reviewer assumes, derived from "floating remembrances of Shakespeare's sonnets," which "present the startling peculiarity of transferring every epithet of womanly endearment to a masculine friend—his master-mistress, as he calls him by a compound epithet, harsh, as it is disagreeable." This homoerotic linkage of In Memoriam to Shakespeare's sonnets is hardly anomalous. In another review published anonymously, Charles Kingsley found in In Memoriam a descendant of "the old tales of David and Jonathan, Damon and Pythias, Socrates and Alcibiades, Shakespeare and his nameless friend, of 'love passing the love of woman'," although recently Christopher Ricks has charged Kingsley with "recklessness" and has balked at the allusion to 2 Samuel, calling it "that perilous phrase."¹² By the 1890s, when Tennyson's son Hallam wrote his biography-cum-hagiography Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir (1897), the perils of what Ricks defensively calls the "homosexual misconstruction" incited Hallam to a prudential pruning of any material that might conduce to equivocal interpretation. For example, as Ricks's biography of Tennyson informs us, when Hallam quoted Benjamin Jowett regarding "the great sorrow of [Tennyson's] mind," he carefully elided anything suggesting what Jowett called, with discreet indirection, "a sort of sympathy with Hellenism." Jowett's comment on Tennyson's grief, that "it would not have been manly or natural to have lived in it always," succumbed to Hallam's editorial vigilance and was cut from the Memoir.¹³

Very much the same critical propensity to keep Tennyson "manly and natural" has governed more recent criticism of In Memoriam, although modern evasions of the poem's disturbing sexuality have generally demonstrated more cunning than Hallam Tennyson's. Perhaps the simplest of contemporary critical circumventions of In Memoriam's homoerotic discourse are those, like Jerome Buckley's Tennyson: The Growth of a Poet (1960), that don't find sexuality pertinent at all to the elegy's recuperative desiring; we have here the simple elision of the homosexual subject. A more intriguing strategy for negotiating the problematics of same-gender desire can be found in Harold Bloom's early essay "Tennyson, Hallam, and Romantic Tradition" (1966), in which Bloom declares, with a false assurance, that it "need disturb no one any longer" that "Tennyson's Muse was (and always remained) Hallam." Bloom's poetic/sexual centering of Hallam is of course substantially correct, but his cosmopolitan poise would be more convincing did he not directly exculpate himself from further musing on homoerotic muses by saying, first, that "the sexual longings of a poet qua poet appear to have little relation to mere experience anyway" and second, that "the analytical sophistication in aesthetic realms that would allow a responsible sexual history of English poetry is not available to us."¹⁴ There is therefore very little to say.

We may see in Bloom's passing acknowledgment of the homosexual subject an ambivalence characteristic of our tradition's reading of this poem. First, he specifies the inescapable homoerotics of In Memoriam's elegiac desire, then precludes a sustained and detailed analysis of that desire by foreclosing critical access either to "mere experience" (which in the case of Tennyson and Hallam is unrevealing anyway) or to the "analytical sophistication" that would render such criticism "responsible." (Since 1966, of course, Bloom has been writing a brilliant and responsible "sexual history of English poetry": a history, not incidentally, in which a belated poet's creative potency—his power of speech as self-production or self-fathering—is tested not in a heterosexual embrace with a female muse but rather in a distinctly Oedipal tussle between men, during which the muscular ephebe may wrest from his father/precursor the power of seminal speech. It is precisely this gladiatorial wrestling—during which the ephebe, now giving what he had been forced to take, reverses the temporal hydraulics of influence—that enables his subsequently productive intercourse with the text-to-be, whose essentially "feminine" receptivity has been, until that moment, effectively forfended by the father's presence, by the Oedipal force of his prior inscriptions. In Bloom's agonistic reading, a text functions as an already inscribed mediatrix, an intervening distance or difference, between two competing familial male potencies whose displaced intercourse is poetry itself. The applicability of all this to In Memoriam is, to say the least, enticing, but as yet we have had from Bloom no revised misprision of Tennyson's elegy.)

But Bloom's blithe assurance in 1966 that Hallam's erotic centrality in In Memoriam "need disturb no one any longer" seems not to have had its pacifying effects, seems indeed to have gone unheeded, for in 1972 Christopher Ricks in his astute critical biography Tennyson paused for some ten pages to worry over precisely this issue. "But do we too," Ricks asks, "need to speak bluntly? Is Tennyson's love for Hallam a homosexual one"?¹⁵ Ricks's answer—I doubt that I am betraying any suspense here—is no, although a number of equivocations beset this denial. His discussion of this anxiogenic question opens with a gesture that recalls Bloom's deferral of adequate discussion to that millennial day when analytic sophistication in aesthetic realms will enable intelligent discourse, but whereas Bloom's displacement is temporal, Ricks's is spatial. Disclaiming the authority of literary criticism altogether, Ricks invokes another professional discipline, and a predictable one: "the crucial acts of definition will have to be left to the psychologists and psychiatrists, though it should be said that literary historians usually vitiate their arguments by conveniently jumbling the old severely differentiating view with the newer 'something of it in everybody' one." Such recourse to psychiatry and psychology does double duty: in submitting poetry to pathology, the literary critic escapes ultimate responsibility for what must remain a literary-critical decision about the representational function of desire in the text, while simultaneously and inescapably situating that decision within an ideological economy of disease, dysfunction, and presumptively desirable remediation. Implicit in this gesture is the normalizing hope that Tennyson was not "bluntly" "homosexual" or, in Ricks's odd locution, "abnormally abnormal." More importantly still, the deferral of literary decision to medical authority quite simply misses the point. The question at issue is neither the history of Tennyson's genitalia (which Tennyson's most recent biographer suggests would yield a rather brief and tedious narrative) nor the potentially psychopathic trajectories of an obviously tortured psyche. Rather, as we shall see, the issue that matters here is the function of represented sexual desire within the verbal economy we call In Memoriam and within the larger tradition of representation from which the poem arises, the tradition to which it continues to direct its strange manner of address.

Ricks's extended "defense" (so to speak) "of Tennyson" against imputations of homosexuality remains sympathetic to certain Tennysonian notions of an orderly and conventional androgyny, an androgyny that perhaps mitigates but never subverts the disciplinary bifurcation of gender characteristics, as when Tennyson admonishes that "men should be androgynous and women gynandrous, but men should not be gynandrous nor women androgynous."¹⁶ A transparent ambivalence informs Tennyson's sentence: a desire to escape the containments of gender engages a desire to contain the escape. Tennyson's precise marshalling of prefixes and suffixes, of fronts and backs, of (to borrow one of Ricks's metaphors) "heads" and "tails," bespeaks an anxiety of gender inversion strong enough to require careful regulation at the level of the signifier. (If signifiers can be compelled into remaining "jubilantly straight" [Ricks again], perhaps signifieds will follow suit.) The disciplinary punctilio of gender enacted by Tennyson's sentence suggests one reason for the obliquity of sexual representation in In Memoriam, and it certainly anticipates the disease circulating throughout Ricks's defense of Tennyson's (hetero)sexuality. As a parting instance of this representative anxiety consider Ricks's response to the inclusion of selected stanzas of In Memoriam in an anthology of homosexual writing published by Brian Reade in 1970:

Was Tennyson, so to speak, abnormally abnormal? A new anthology entitled Sexual Heretics: Male Homosexuality in English Literature from 1850 to 1900 does not hesitate to quote extensively from ten sections of In Memoriam; its editor, anxious to enlist or if necessary pressgang Tennyson, quaintly says "the fact that Tennyson evolved an emphatically heterosexual image in later life does nothing to disqualify him as homosexual when he wrote In Memoriam."

To read Ricks reading Reade is to disclose a confusion that in turn generates an anxiety: Reade's confusion is to fail to transcend the cultural agon of a fixed, bipolar opposition between the homo and the hetero (despite the familiar compromise trope of temporal oscillation), while Ricks's anxiety registers itself as a barely suppressed metaphor of homosexual rape by an editor "anxious to enlist or if necessary pressgang Tennyson" into a very dubious literary brotherhood. The rigors of such an enlistment are presumably unbearable, but for a poet laureate to be ganged upon and then pressed— perhaps im-pressed as well as em-pressed—is to suffer at editorial hands the additional indignity of a sodomitical intrusion. Better, obviously, to house In Memoriam in canonical—that is to say, heterosexual—anthologies.

The foregoing reading of In Memoriam criticism, however fragmentary, suggests the conceptual and imagistic burden suffered by our culture's discourse on same-sex eroticism. In Memoriam remains a pivotal case in this regard precisely because the problematics of the poem's erotic representations are indistinguishable from readerly problems of interpretation and feeling. To mouth the Tennysonian "I," as the reader of this poem must repeatedly and obsessively do, is to bespeak (for the duration of the reading at least) an anxiogenic identification with the poet's fierce reparational longing, which regularly presses to a transgressive homosexual verge. But In Memoriam approaches this verge only when compelled by an incommensurate grief; homosexual desire, in other words, is here constituted only elegiacally, once its object has been surpassed. Why, we must now ask, does In Memoriam disclose homosexual desire as indissociable from death? As itself a mode of mourning? Why this constitutive linking of desire and death?

In In Memoriam death discovers desire, the latter arriving in and as the wake of the former. The linkage between desire and death is not a casual metaphorical articulation; it is a causal narrative one. For in the highly personal erotic myth that In Memoriam so extensively develops, the death of Hallam, when "God's finger touch'd him, and he slept," initiates in the poet both a recuperational homosexual desire—a desire to restore to its preschismatic unity the "divided hal[ves] of such / A friendship as had master'd Time"—and, what is worse, a desperate need to speak this potentially philosophic "desire and pursuit of the whole" under the aegis of a transgressive erotics.¹⁷ "Descend, and touch, and enter," Tennyson dangerously pleads, and "hear / The wish too strong for words to name." The extremity of such expression, its desperate mode of erotic address, proceeds from the poet's belated recognition that no other human love will ever be "as pure and whole / As when he loved me here in Time"; correlative to this recognition of loss is the fear that "love for him [may] have drain'd / My capabilities of love." Thus desire's duration, the temporal and spatial extensions of this very distended text's poetic wooing (compare "I woo your love"), commences not with Arthur's desirable presence—for when Arthur is present desire and language are supernumerary—but rather with its opposite, with destitution: the poet recognizes that his "dear friend" has become in death's difference "my lost Arthur's loved remains." In a figure whose murderous implications will concern us repeatedly in the present study, the language of active homosexual desiring discovers its origin in a death or terminus that disrupts an ontologically prior wholeness whose unitary gender remains emphatically, inescapably, male. In what we may now correctly call the "hom(m)osexual" economy of In Memoriam, death and not gender is the differential out of which longing is so painfully born; it is death that breaches the perfect male couple and opens it to the circulations of desire.¹⁸

This structure of desire entrains certain disciplinary relations that are coextensive with, indistinguishable from, the desire itself. Because it established homosexual desire as always already elegiac, as originally grounded in the destitution of its object, In Memoriam both incites and contains homosexual desire in a single cunning articulation. The elegiac mode constrains the desire it also enables: the sundering of death instigates an insistent reparational longing, yet it claustrates the object of this desire on the far side of a divide that interdicts touch even as it incites the desire for touching. An infinite desire is infinitely deferred, subject always to postponement, displacement, diffusion. Death works to inscribe a prophylactic distance, as Tennyson himself suggested in a related context. Commenting on the initial line of lyric 122 ("Oh, wast thou with me, dearest, then"), the poet said: "If anybody thinks I ever called him 'dearest' in his life they are much mistaken, for I never even called him 'dear.'" Ricks finds this statement "naïve perhaps, but not tonally suggestive of homosexuality."¹⁹ Better to say that such "naïveté" marks Tennyson's perfectly Victorian strategy of linguistic displacement, precisely because it embeds homosexual desire within an idealizing elegiac register. The elegy insists that desire and death conjugate out of tropological necessity: "Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drown'd." What is "saved" in this embrace is a poetic logic that instantiates homosexual desire as already its own distantiation. "My prime passion [is] in the grave," and "so hold I commerce with the dead."

Of course, as Victorian and modern readers have been quick to notice, the formal solution to this problem is Christ. In a way that is so straightforward as to be transparent, Tennyson would master his unconventional desire for Hallam by figuring it as a subspecies of a very conventional desire for "the Strong Son of God" (prologue). A perfectly conventional trope of typological interpretation enables Tennyson to represent Hallam as a "noble type / Appearing ere the times were ripe" (epilogue)—as, that is, a medial character whose death repeats the ontologically prior sacrifice of the other "He that died," and whose earthly presence had pointed to the superior consummation of a second coming. Yet simply to identify Hallam and Christ as interpenetrated figures of erotic and religious devotion is to repeat what the criticism has already noticed. "In Memoriam," Gerhard Joseph writes, "describes the transformation of Hallam into an analogue of Christ; to render this Hallam-Christ accessible Tennyson eroticizes him, giving him female attributes."²⁰ Joseph's sentence is of course summarily correct—correct, that is, as summary—but the pages to follow will argue that a more capacious understanding of Tennyson's fluent erotics demands that we pause at length to consider just how In Memoriam articulates its analogy between Hallam and Christ, and how that analogy operates to relieve the speaker's desperate erotic distress—a distress, as I have said, indistinguishable from his grief. To rush to the Christological or logocentric solution—to chant compliantly with Tennyson "Love is and was my lord and king"—risks another terminological reduction, one that, in its leap to the available comforts of a conventional faith, fails to register the anxious and fluctuant interfusion of sexual desire and religious faith in a poem justly more famous for the quality of its oscillations than for the force of its closural affirmation. In Memoriam, Eliot was right to say, "is not religious because of the quality of its faith, but because of the quality of its doubt."²¹ If, making explicit what Eliot in his essay leaves implicit, we recognize doubt as a figure of desire, as a mode of suspension poised between the loss of Hallam and the promise of his restoration in a Christological embrace, we will have begun to trace the homoerotic basis of the elegy's extensive yearning.

In its most orthodox articulation, Tennyson's typological strategy represents Hallam as a beautiful but fallen simulacrum of the ontologically prior archetype of Christ himself. The disciplinary and transferential trajectory of such a figurai strategy is clear: a desire that would seem to begin in Hallam is discovered to begin and end in Christ, whose forgiving body safely absorbs, relays, and completes a fierce homoerotic cathexis. The elegy's sustained appeal to the "conclusive bliss" of its Christological closure identifies apocalyptic death as the site of a deferred but certain erotic restoration. In the closural ecstasis of the "one far-off divine event / To which the whole creation moves," Christ will "take" the lovers' riven halves and restore them to a "single soul." In Memoriam thus solves the problem of desire's divisiveness by fantasizing a dissolving incorporation:

Dear friend, far off, my lost desire
So far, so near in woe and weal;
O loved the most, when most I feel
There is a lower and a higher;

Known and unknown; human, divine;
Sweet human hand and lips and eye;
Dear heavenly friend that canst not die,
Mine, mine, for ever, ever mine.

(129)

The intermediate qualities identified in these quatrains refer equally or indistinguishably to Hallam and to Christ; the blended might of erotic and religious devotion both facilitates and idealizes the poet's indefatigable longing for "that dear friend of mine who lives in God" (epilogue). In this transfiguration the conventional topoi of a reparational theology subsume and discipline the transgressive force of Tennyson's elegiac desire.

Faithful to its consolatory structure, In Memoriam begins and ends with an orthodox stress upon this Christological figuration; begins and ends, that is, with promises of transcendence for the unappeasable homosexual longing that drives the poem's extended middle. For as In Memoriam opens, the problematics of elegiac desire—of desire for the dead and desire for death as recuperated sameness—have already found their solution and resolution in Christ; or so at least the pietistic voice of the prologue suggests:

Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
Whom we, that have not seen thy face,
By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove;

Thine are those orbs of light and shade;
Thou madest Life in man and brute;
Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot
Is on the skull which thou hast made.

Thou wilt not leave us in the dust:
Thou madest man, he knows not why,
He thinks he was not made to die;
And thou hast made him: thou art just.

That the prologue, which was written last and postdates the composition of the earliest lyrics by some seventeen years, should offer the image of a Christocentric "embrace" as the elegy's apparently originary gesture very well figures the evasive dislocations, both temporal and spatial, required to manage the anxieties generated by Tennyson's "lost desire."²² Indeed, part of the disciplinary work of the prologue specifically, as of the Christological figuration generally, is thus belatedly to install a fantasized terminus (the promise of Christ's restorative embrace) in the place of the origin (the rift opened by Hallam's death) in order thereby to mask the apostacy intrinsic to a personal love that is, to borrow Bloom's apt phrase, "about as restrained and societal as Heathcliff's passion."²³

Within the figurai economy of In Memoriam, the Christocentric impulse works its consolatory changes largely through the extended trope by which Christ's hand comes to substitute for Hallam's own; the oft-repeated images of "clasp," "touch," and "embrace" are all local variations on this trope. Indeed, as the criticism has already noticed, In Memoriam is almost obsessive in its concern for the human hand and in its desire for a restored male touch. Noting correctly that "Tennyson's love for Hallam is the overriding subject of In Memoriam, " John D. Rosenberg continues: "Indeed, Tennyson's unending speculation on immortality is rooted in his inexhaustible impulse to visualize and to touch Hallam. Hence the ubiquitous image of the hand."²⁴

Ubiquitous indeed, Hallam's "sweet human hand" is at once this text's primary synecdoche for presence ("hands so often clasp'd in mine"); for absence ("A hand that can be clasp'd no more"); and for the medial condition between these two (that crepuscular state of "dreamy touch" during which the poet is left "waiting for a hand"). Nor is it surprising that "one of the great love poems in English," as Rosenberg correctly calls it, should identify the hand as a site of passional interchange, since the elegy's explicit recommendation that "Love clasp Grief lest both be drown'd" specifically cathects the hand with an erotic charge that oscillates obscurely between the homosocial and the homosexual. At times the poet's desire that Hallam "should strike a sudden hand in mine" takes on a startling sexual configuration:

Tears of a widower, when he sees
A late-lost form that sleep reveals,
And moves his doubtful arms, and feels
Her place is empty, fall like these;

Which weep a loss for ever new
A void where heart on heart reposed;
And, where warm hands have prest and closed,
Silence, till I be silent too.

Tennyson's specification of the squeeze of the hand as a multivalent site of male homosocial communion is anything but anomalous in Victorian literature, although the extraordinary repetitiousness in his use of this figure may well be so. The utility of the hand as at once an overdetermined and unstable signifier is, I take it, manifest and obvious: on the one hand, the "manly" handshake and the "fraternal" embrace are respectable, disciplined, and sexually innocent gestures of Victorian male homosociality (imagine, for instance, counting the handshakes in Dickens); on the other hand, such gestures, given a slightly altered social context, readily take on the heat and the pressure of the sexual. A mobile figure, the hand ranges dexterously across the entire male homosocial spectrum. Consider what happens when fingers wander:

I stripped him naked, and fed sight, touch and mouth on these things. Will my lips ever forget their place upon his breast, or of the tender satin of his flank, or on the snowy whiteness of his belly? Will they lose the nectar of his mouth—those opened lips like flower petals, expanding neath their touch and fluttering? Will my arms forget the strain of his small fragile waist, my thighs the pressure of his yielding thighs, my ears the murmur of his drowsy voice, my brain the scent of his sweet flesh and breathing mouth? Shall I ever cease to hear the metallic throb of his mysterious heart—calm and true—ringing little bells beneath my ear?

I do not know whether, after all, the mere touch of his fingers as they met and clasped and put aside my hand, was not of all the best. For there is a soul in the fingers. They speak. The body is but silent, a dumb eloquent animated work of art made by the divine artificer.²⁵

The ambivalent gesture that dominates this passage from The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds very well figures the cloven subjectivity of sexual inversion while it also tellingly exercises the ambivalence at hand here. "For [if] there is a soul in the fingers" and if "they speak," then what they bespeak is a rivenness so integral to soul that soul must celebrate its own alienation. The touch that repels touch touches fulfillment; to have one's hand "put aside" is indeed "all the best." As a self-nominated "invert" who understood himself to be "a compound of antagonistic impulses" and whose sexual praxis certainly included mutual masturbation, Symonds repeatedly inclined toward the hand as a figure, and a mode, of self-expression:

I knew that my right hand was useless—firmly clenched in the grip of an unconquerable love, the love of comrades. But they [i.e., those who criticized "the languor of my temperament"] stung me into using my left hand for work, in order to contradict their prognostications [of failure].²⁶

When one hand is busy at pleasure, the other may be stung by criticism into the compensation of good work. Clearly enough, the heterosexualizing semiotics of Victorian masculinity inscribe a developmental trajectory by which the boy's hand of pleasure must pass into the mature hand of work (a trajectory, obviously, that Symonds never quite mastered). What is understood to happen between boys in the dormitories of Harrow ("onanism, mutual masturbation, the sport of naked boys in bed together")²⁷ must not happen, as Wilde was to discover, between men in the private dining rooms of, say, the Savoy Hotel. Hence the maturing boy's growing hand must be lifted from the specific genitality of an institutionalized homosexual pedagogy and carefully steered forth into the business-like and sterilizing grip of a radically homophobic male homosociality. Handsome is as handsome does; fingers must not wander.²⁸

If, as I have suggested, these passages from Symonds's Memoirs present genitally specific analogues to In Memoriam's fetishizing of the hand, then it is also clear that large differences of tact and tactility distinguish the two discourses. Part of In Memoriam's rhetorical finesse lies in its articulation of a desire whose intensities are sexual but whose modalities have already superseded the genital placement that Symonds's autobiography works to justify and explain. Indeed, the elegy's typological figuration works against the "deviations" that Symonds so breathlessly charts, especially so since In Memoriam curbs the longing of its hands by transfiguring Hallam's hands into Christ's own "shining hand." By way of a "metamorphosis of Hallam's hands into those of divinity,"²⁹In Memoriam devises a trajectory by which a desire to touch Hallam is satisfied in Christ, as when late in the poem "out of darkness came the hands / That reach thro' nature moulding men." And in turn these consoling hands point to the closural embrace in which Christ's outstretched apocalyptic hand will redeem—or, more literally, re-member (restore the hand to)—the interrupted secular embrace between the poet and Hallam. In that good moment the poet and his beloved will

Arrive at last the blessed goal,
And He that died in Holy Land
Would reach us out the shining hand,
And take us as a single soul.

The singular virtue of Christ's apocalyptic hand is that its finishing touch finishes everything, and not the least what it finishes—completes and erases—is the constitutive ambivalence about intermasculine union that the metonymy of hands so ambidextrously conveys. In the rapture that comes at his second coming, the handy interchangeability of Hallam and Christ insures a taking so complete that it leaves nothing—no one—to be desired.³⁰

But now we must clarify what Tennyson's orthodox typology works to obscure: this Christocentric embrace—which should at once be originary, medial, and terminal—is in fact secondary and irreducibly belated; only by a strategic misspeaking may such fulfillment be termed Christocentric at all. For the consoling pieties of a conventional typological reading cannot diminish the elegy's strong impression that Christ arrives as a belated lover who functions as the devotional succedaneum of which Hallam is the great original. Christ's otherwise redundant presence is fathered by Hallam's absence, since it is the loss of Hallam's hand and Hallam's embrace that alone motivates the re/pair/ational touch of Christ, whose hand must "shine" in order to obscure its transparent second-handedness. T. S. Eliot, who understood the anamorphic optics of Christological displacement well enough not to be blinded by the light, caught Tennyson at his sleight of hand. In what remains the best essay ever written on In Memoriam, Eliot handles this subject with characteristic and knowing finesse:

[Tennyson] was desperately anxious to hold to the faith of the believer, without being very clear about what he wanted to believe: he was capable of illumination which he was incapable of understanding. "The Strong Son of God, immortal Love," with an invocation of whom the poem opens, has only a hazy connection with the Logos, or Incarnate God. Tennyson is distressed by the idea of a mechanical universe; he is naturally, in lamenting his friend, teased by the hope of immortality and reunion beyond death. Yet the renewal craved for seems at best but a continuance, or a substitute for the joys of friendship upon earth. His desire for immortality never is quite the desire for eternal life; his concern is for the loss of man rather than the gain of God.³¹

Eliot's circumspection here constitutes a brilliant tactical response to the failure of tact in Tennyson's account of Christological tactility. Gently reproving Tennyson for dubious or eccentric theology, Eliot clearly recognizes that the elegy's desire for Christ is "at best but a continuance, or a substitute for the joys of friendship upon earth." A stylistic chastisement is also implicit here. Consider, for instance, the revisionary subtlety with which Eliot redeploys Tennyson's language of desperate and anxious "holding," of "teasing," of "craving," and finally of "desiring." Performing a kind of postmortem refinement upon In Memoriam's language of desire, Eliot effectively chastens the precursor poet for the startling clarity of his longing to fill the "void where heart on heart [had once] reposed / And, where warm hands have prest and closed." Eliot's tact inherits and then reproves Tennyson's passionate failure of it.

In the opening pages of "Mourning and Melancholia," Freud explicates the libidinal work that mourning performs:

Reality-testing has shown that the loved object no longer exists, and it proceeds to demand that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to the object. This demand arouses understandable opposition—it is a matter of general observation that people never willingly abandon a libidinal position, not even, indeed, when a substitute is already beckoning to them. This opposition can be so intense that a turning away from reality takes place and a clinging to the object through the medium of hallucinatory wishful psychosis. Normally, respect for reality gains the day. Nevertheless its orders cannot be obeyed at once. They are carried out bit by bit, at great expense of time and cathectic energy, and in the meantime the existence of the lost object is psychically prolonged. Each single one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object is brought up and hypercathected, and detach-ment of the libido is accomplished in respect of it. Why this compromise by which the command of reality is carried out piecemeal should be so extraordinarily painful is not at all easy to explain in terms of eco-nomics. It is remarkable that this painful unpleasure is taken as a matter of course by us. The fact is, however, that when the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhibited again.³²

In this compact synopsis of a libidinal dilemma that recalls Tennyson's own, Freud delineates the process of "normal" mourning: an excruciating, fluctuant, and piecemeal process through which the mourner is compelled by the reality of loss to abandon one object cathexis for another. "A substitute," after all, "is already beckoning." But this cruel process of abandonment and substitution is sometimes impeded by an intractable resistance, as the mourner refuses to abandon his attachment to the beloved object. An ambivalent memorialization ensues. "Each single one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object is brought up and hypercathected." As Freud carefully stresses, this work of remembering performs a double or ambivalent function, a binding and an unbinding. The beloved object is revived and made present, even by "hallucinatory wish," to consciousness; in this way "the existence of the lost object is psychically prolonged." Conversely, and by way of an operation whose workings Freud leaves obscure, the same labor of remembering accomplishes "detachment of the libido" in respect to the lost beloved; somehow the "hypercathected" repetition unbinds or decathects desiring subject and desired object. Every act of vivifying memory, Freud seems to imply, entrains a corresponding death, a terminal forgetting, if only because the desiring subject cannot, short of psychosis, sustain the fantasmatic presence of the beloved. The lost object thus suffers a thousand posthumous deaths at the now-murderous hands of the mourner. Hence the duplicitous work of mourning: to "prolong" in order to "detach," to give birth in order to kill. Once this "work of mourning is completed"—once detachment overmasters prolongation—"the ego becomes free and uninhibited again." Free, that is, to become bound to a substitute object.

It is unnecessary, I think, to belabor the striking symmetries between Freud's account of mourning and Tennyson's elegy; each of Tennyson's lyrics operates like a hypercathected memory, working at once to prolong Hallam's presence and to facilitate his substitution in Christ. Freud's intuition regarding the ambivalence of memorialization may be employed to interrogate the divided work of In Memoriam's homosexual figuration, to suggest, that is, the ways in which In Memoriam resists its own ideology of recuperative substitution, Christological or otherwise, and the ways in which this resistance ensures the intractable circulation of male homosexual desire. For In Memoriam works to postpone the conclusive bliss it also wants to complete. Thus at odds with its own desire to end desiring, the elegy wards off, even as it employs, an (eroto)logic of efficient surrogation. Until that far-off and divine event enfolds the poet and his beloved in its closural embrace, the poet must endure the empty and passive space of grief, the same space in which "the existence of the lost object is psychically prolonged." It is, finally, this medial space of unclosed longing that In Memoriam memorializes. But there is compensation here too. Because disseminated Hallam inseminates everything, Tennyson as desiring subject partakes of an equivocal expansion that helps him endure his subjection to desire:

Thy voice is on the rolling air;
I hear thee where the waters run;
Thou standest in the rising sun,
And in the setting thou art fair.

What art thou then? I cannot guess;
But tho' I seem in star and flower
To feel thee some diffusive power,
I do not therefore love thee less:

My love involves the love before;
My love is vaster passion now;
Tho' mix'd with God and Nature thou,
I seem to love thee more and more.

Not the least beauty of In Memoriam, nor its least cultural utility, can be traced in these lines, which very well enact the equivocal process of substitution that Freud anatomizes in "Mourning and Melancholia." Hallam is prolonged even as he is dispersed into simulacra whose "more and more," Tennyson says, involves and extends "the love before." This ambivalent procedure subjects male homosexual desire to an almost sanitizing mediation. An intense desire for another male submits itself, or is taught by privation to submit, to a mediating force, or "diffusive power," that generates the difference of a "vaster passion" whose very differences will in turn recondense (if Tennyson's promise of the good moment holds) into the closural bliss of an absolutely androcentric embrace. From sameness to sameness, then, but only through difference. If this is a disciplinary trajectory (and of course it is), its particular strength resides in the quality of its ambivalence: on the one hand a startling and sometimes abrupt acknowledgment of intermasculine desire and its right to bliss; on the other, the submission of this desire to mediation by substitutes that bespeak a more conventional erotics of difference.

Of course the most obvious instance of such differentiating substitution is what Ricks aptly calls "the reiterated metaphor of man and wife,"³³ which both sexualizes and heterosexualizes the perduring grief whose extreme painfulness seems to have neutralized whatever disciplinary anxiety would otherwise have forestalled the use of an even heterosexually figured homosexual desire. Perhaps the sheer straightforwardness of the requisite gender inversion is this figure's most disarming quality:

Two partners of a married life—
I look'd on these and thought of thee
In vastness and in mystery
And of my spirit as of a wife.

As In Memoriam repeats this swerve toward heterosexual (only sometimes marital) figuration, the gender assignments within the figure vary. In lyric 13, "Tears of a widower," which specifically recalls Milton's sonnet on the seeming return of his dead wife, Tennyson identifies himself as a male, though a weeping one; but it is more characteristic, given both the passivity of his grief and the feminization of passivity within Victorian gender codes, that Tennyson should feminize his longing for Hallam as a "perpetual maidenhood" that expects "no second friend." Like Marianna, who fixedly grieves for the arrival of a male lover who "cometh not," Tennyson, as the speaker of In Memoriam, can only yearn in a perpetual—and here "heterosexual"—stasis.

Yet the metaphor of heterosexual embrace remains—at least for Tennyson and Hallam—a figure of separation, interdiction, distance. In In Memoriam woman indeed "exists only as an occasion for mediation, transaction, transition, transference, between man and his fellow man, indeed between man and himself."³⁴ The very presence of woman signifies the rift or gap in sameness that the hetero, by definition, cannot heal, or perhaps even help. Hence the elegy most characteristically represents the heterosexual embrace as always already interrupted, and therefore as a sign or structure whose primary service is painfully to repeat loss without ever recuperating loss into gain. Of course to say even this much is to refute the recuperative or reparational value of the thumpingly symbolic heterosexual marriage that so famously and unconvincingly closes—or almost closes—the elegy. Tennyson himself made the point didactically enough: "the poem," he said, "concludes with the marriage of my youngest sister [to Edward Lushington]. It was meant to be a kind of Divina Commedia, ending with happiness."³⁵ If Tennyson's argument for this particular variety of terminal bliss seems a little forced—more formal than felt—this is because the overweighted marriage quite obviously leaves the elegy's two central lovers still halved by desire, still unwed, the distantiated participants (Hallam's spirit, Tennyson conjectures, is present as a silent "stiller guest") at a wedding whose symbolic recompense quite openly ignores the poem's primary erotic schism. Even Tennyson himself seems unconvinced by this account of heterosexual closure; his "posture in the closing epithalamium is mannered and false."³⁶ When the poem quite correctly dismisses the newlyweds ("But they must go . . . and they are gone"; epilogue) and Tennyson "retire[s]" to his enduring loss, he must then dream (or dream up) the abundant recompense of this poem's other dream of closure: its prolepsis of the "one far-off divine event" whose Christocentric erotics we have already examined. In a very linear way, therefore, the epilogue repeats the elegy's double or contrary relations to longing: its desire to put an end to desire and its countervailing desire to exceed all such endings. Hence the epilogue goes on to supersede its own account of satisfactory heterosexual closure, requiring its speaker once again to fantasize the conclusive bliss that is offered only by—and only in the deferral of—that divine embrace with the compound "Christ that is to be." A promise, then, of homosexual closure rather than the thing itself. Or better: a promise indistinguishable from its own deferral.

In Memoriam may be Victorian poetry's preeminent example of this aesthetic regime of hygenic deferral, but it is hardly the only one. Consider, for instance, the febrile equivocations of Coventry Patmore's little-noted poem "The Unknown Eros" (1878), a text that obliquely narrates both the advent of pedophilic desire and its subsequent sublimation. Consisting largely of an extended series of interrogatives, Patmore's seventy-five-line poem nervously questions the meaning of the "blind and unrelated joy" that seizes the poet/speaker when he is unexpectedly subject to the descent of an "Unknown Eros"—that is, of an insufficiently celebrated homoerotic Cupid ("which not a poet sings") whose promise of "rumour'd heavens" provokes in Patmore an otherwise "unguess'd want" "to lie / Between those quivering plumes that thro' fine ether pant."³⁷ Teased into an anxious sentience by the flirtations of this fluttering boy-god, the speaker begins his speculation upon the problem of homosexual desire by presenting, coyly but recognizably, his genital response to the unknown deity's (semi)divine bottom:

O, Unknown Eros, sire of awful bliss,
What portent and what Delphic word,
Such as in the form of snake or bird, Is this?
In my life's even flood
What eddies thus?
What in its ruddy orbit lifts the blood

Like a perturbed moon of Uranus
Reaching to some great world in ungauged darkness hid;
And whence
This rapture of the sense
Which, by thy whisper bid,
Reveres with obscure rite and sacramental sign
A bond I know not of nor dimly can divine?

If the obliquity with which the lifted blood of the poet's genitalia (itself figured, by way of an astronomical pun, as "a perturbed moon of Uranus") stands and tracks the hovering boy's "ruddy orbit" seems more than a little comic, it is clear that Patmore intended no laughter. The gravity of tone and diction in these lines implicitly counterspeak the indignity of their latent anal implications. Indeed the nervously, or even unconsciously, embedded pun on "your anus" accurately figures the poet's anxious oscillation between the exalted pedophilia, or Aphrodite Uranos, as encomiastically described by Pausanias in Plato's Symposium, and the specifically anal desire to reach into "some great world in ungauged darkness hid."

If one hears a residually Satanic resonance in the temptation of a great world in darkness hid, it will come as no surprise that the speaker renounces the boy-god's body as a "compulsive focus" that must lead to "Nought." The poet's errant and culturally transgressive desire to gauge this darkness yields, not unexpectedly, to a conventional fear of the anus as a site of decreation; and this fear in turn moves the poet to refuse or renounce his "meaningless desire." But, by way of a familiar paradox whose ideological investments still require unpacking, this act of renunciation is said to entail a benefit, a recompense, in the form of an enabling sublimation. In the poem's closing lines, Patmore discloses the "enigma," or constitutive ambivalence, that structures this representative Victorian renunciation (the quotation marks are Patmore's):

"There lies the crown
"Which all thy longing cures.
"Refuse it, Mortal, that it may be yours!
"It is a spirit, though it seems red gold;
"And such may no man, but by shunning, hold.
"Refuse it, though refusing be despair;
"And thou shalt feel the phantom in thy hair."

As in the more subtle and beautiful example of In Memoriam, these programmatic lines deploy a compensatory logic of substitution that both excites and curtails homosexual desire by identifying renunciation as itself a deferred mode of possession: "Refuse it, Mortal, that it may be yours!" And in a substitution too funny to be intentional, the poet renounces "the Crown / Which all thy longing cures" in return for the endless tickle of a heady sublimation: "And thou shalt feel the phantom in thy hair."

But any desire that must be shunned in order to be held might indeed be occasion for despair. The extreme personal cost inherent in Patmore's phantom logic has already been registered for us by a self-declaredly "complete and undoubtedly congenital" homosexual who discovered in Patmore's verse a copytext for the conversion of his own "inverted nature" into "transcendental interpretations." The individual to whom I refer is "R.S., aged 31, American of French descent," also known as "History IX" in Ellis's Sexual Inversion.³⁸ As is typical of these case histories, which seem to have been patterned after a questionnaire developed by John Addington Symonds, R.S. begins his narrative with a personal genealogy ("Upon the question of heredity I may say that I belong to a reasonably healthy, prolific, and long-lived family . . . my father was a very masculine man."); moves next to a history of childhood and adolescence ("It was always the prince in fairy tales who held my interest or affection."); and then expatiates at some length upon the process that "stirred me to a full consciousness of my inverted nature." In this context and in a striking parallel to the erotic situation in In Memoriam, R.S. describes the self-revelatory effects of a passionate but nongenital friendship that is prematurely terminated by the death of the friend:

It was now that I felt for the first time the full shock of love. He returned my affection but both of us were shy of showing our feelings or speaking of them. Often when walking together after nightfall we would put our arms about each other. Sometimes, too, when sleeping together we would lie in close contact, and my friend once suggested that I put my legs against his. He frequently begged me to spend the night with him; but I began to fear my feelings, and slept with him but seldom. We neither of us had any definite ideas about homosexual relations, and, apart from what I have related above, we had no further contact with each other. A few months after our amorous feelings had developed my friend died. His death caused me great distress, and my naturally religious temperament began to manifest itself quite strongly. At this time, too, I first read some writings of Mr. Addington Symonds, and certain allusions in his work, coupled with my recent experience, soon stirred me to a full consciousness of my inverted nature.

After the passage of some years, during which he continued to "couple" his "recent experience" with his "allusive" reading, an anguished R.S. developed "what, for lack of a better name, I term my homosexual Patmorean ideal":

Three or four years ago a little book by Coventry Patmore fell into my hands, and from its perusal resulted a strange blending of my religious and erotic notions. The desire to love and be loved is hard to drown, and, when I realized that homosexually it was neither lawful nor possible for me to love in this world, I began to project my longings into the next. By birth I am a Roman Catholic, and in spite of a somewhat skeptical temper, manage to remain one by conviction.

From the doctrines of the Trinity, Incarnation, and Eucharist, I have drawn conclusions which would fill the minds of the average pietist with holy horror; nevertheless I believe that (granting the premises) these conclusions are both logically and theologically defensible. The Divinity of my fancied paradise resembles in no way the vapid conceptions of Fra Angelico, or the Quartier St. Sulpice. His physical aspect, at least, would be better represented by some Praxitilean demigod or Flandrin's naked, brooding boy.

While these imaginings have caused me considerable moral disquietude, they do not seem wholly reprehensible, because I feel that the chief happiness I would derive by their realization would be mainly from the contemplation of the loved one, rather than from closer joys.

If R.S. circumspectly omits the title of that "little book by Coventry Patmore," we may with reasonable certainty identify it, a little belatedly, as The Unknown Eros, the 1878 volume whose title Patmore derived from the coyly pedophilic poem we have already read. Like In Memoriam, it is a volume preeminent for its "strange blending of religious and erotic notions," a process in which the considerable work of homosexual deferral can be completed only by a diffusion of these otherwise inadmissible erotics into a Christocentric "Desire of Him whom all things love."³⁹ As we have seen, this implicitly disciplinary process is not without its agonistic benefits, as when in the volume's final poem, "The Child's Purchase," Patmore deploys an elaborate trope of feminine mediation in order himself to share, with Christ, "the spousal rapture of the sharp spear's head." But even as a way of forestalling "closer joys," these pleasures are not innocent of individual expense. "To project [one's] longing into the next [world]" may itself constitute a project of self-desiccation. These are the last sentences of History IX:

Since the birth and development within me of what, for lack of a better name, I term my homosexualized Patmorean ideal, life has become, in the main, a weary business. I am not despondent, however, because many things still hold for me a certain interest. When that interest dies down, as it is wont from time to time, I endeavor to be patient. God grant that after the end here, I may be drawn from the shadow, and seemingly vain imaginings into the possession of their never-ending reality hereafter.

Displacement may have its place, but it also has its costs.

But what is the place of displacement, short of that "never-ending reality hereafter"? Exactly this question intervenes between R.S.'s finally disheartened account of the bleak housing offered to desire by the "homosexualized Patmorean ideal" and Tennyson's altogether more bullish accounting of the compensatory economics that fund In Memoriam's strategy of erotic deferral. In Memoriam more deeply invests, and is more deeply invested in, the practices of postponement and sublimation. The sheer extensiveness of Tennyson's discourse of desire (no one ever wished the poem longer) writes against desire's own desire to end. And if it is true that In Memoriam concludes with one of Victorian poetry's most famous promises of satisfaction—that "one far-off divine event / To which the whole creation moves"—it is conversely true that it is this movement, rather than this event, that the whole creation of In Memoriam memorializes. For the very medium of Tennyson's spoken desire to embrace Hallam in Christ and Christ in Hallam depends upon the same enabling rupture or scission that this desire also wants rapturously to terminate; the very desire to speak the end leaves one stranded in the desiring middle, where "[a] use in measured language lies." This paradoxical condition can be readily measured into orthodox uses: a potentially transgressive desire is obsessively evoked in order that it may be just as obsessively repeated in words that "half reveal / And half conceal the soul within." The desiring subject is thus held back, by language as by death, from his proper place, but in some sense he loves that displacement:

O days and hours, your work is this
To hold me from my proper place,
A little while from his embrace,
For fuller gain of after bliss:

That out of distance might ensue
Desire of nearness doubly sweet;
And unto meeting when we meet,
Delight a hundredfold accrue,

For every grain of sand that runs,
And every span of shade that steals,
And every kiss of toothed wheels,
And all the courses of the suns.

Here, in a totalizing eroticism that would be difficult to exceed, Tennyson submits all things to desire in order thereby to achieve the submission of desire itself. As Hallam had once been "the centre of a world's desire," its "central warmth diffusing bliss," so in these lines he becomes diffusion itself, as Tennyson dutifully deploys the whole of creation—every grain, every span, all suns—to facilitate the good Victorian work of interdicting the homoerotic embrace that is nonetheless acknowledged to be "my proper place." It may have been death alone that set Tennyson to his specifically reparational wooing, but these lines suggest the poet's own complicity with the duty of differentiation; for just as it is the "work" of the world both to separate and remember lovers by incarnating difference, so it is the poet's work to distribute his desire as meaning—indeed, as the most overdetermined of meanings—through the differentiae of an otherwise blank scape. The diffusive power of imagination thus perfectly fetishizes the world: where Hallam emphatically is not, Hallam therefore everywhere is.

In a strategically double way, then, Tennyson retains the ontological primacy of his desire for Hallam while simultaneously dispersing the perils of gender sameness into the prophylactic difference of an absolute heterocosm; the inescapable residuum of this process is that "every kiss" of this therefore secondary hetero remains but the disfigured memorial of a banished originary homo. The erotics of such a substitutive structure are irreducibly ambivalent: since the homo is lost or banished only to be rediscovered in and as the hetero, all longing remains longing for the homo even as it submits to the differences intrinsic to mediation. Difference itself thus bespeaks a desire for sameness—speaks, like the poet, in memoriam. No surprise, then, that the work of mediation is double: time ("O days and hours") and "distance" "work" to "hold" the poet "a little while" from his proper "embrace", yet this deferral recenters and heightens the desire for that "meeting when we meet." Within this transparently compensatory structure, distance (here the aporia of death) is said to double the sweetness of desire, even as the postponement of desire's closural embrace yields, in due time, that "fuller gain of afterbliss."

It was, I think, to this strategic ambivalence that Ellis alluded when he recommended In Memoriam as a primary literary exemplar of how "by psychic methods to refine and spiritualize the inverted impulse." In the extremity of his grief, Tennyson had authored a virtual copytext for the recognition and articulation of a homosexual desire whose subjective effects were palpable in their intensity, but whose distantiated object had always already been exiled to a realm beyond touch if not beyond the desire for touching. In figuring Hallam's death as the terminus in which desire discovers its origin, Tennyson's discourse of homosexual longing instructs the desiring subject in the affined Victorian virtues of heroic patience and active surrogation, virtues that alone make it possible to endure a desire otherwise impossible of fulfillment. (They also serve who only stand and wait.) And in his figuration of the hetero as the diffused or encoded expression of the homo, as in his subsumption of erotic privation within an economy of symbolic reparation, Tennyson had in effect devised a translation machine for the conversion of the desire otherwise too strong for words to name; by 1850 he had provided a personal and exacting version of what Ellis, more than fifty years later, was still struggling to formulate: "a method of self-restraint and self-culture, without self-repression." Revaluing the easy optimism of Ellis's last phrase, we may say that Tennyson transvalued his passionate grief into a semiotics of homosexual desire in which the painful but presumably liberating work of recognition and accommodation blends indistinguishably into the work of discipline and containment; incitement and repression are complicit and coeval here.

But to have said even this much is already to have overvalued the disciplinary register at the expense of its revisionary or oppositional complement; and it would be wrong to leave In Memoriam with so compliant an acceptance of its normalizing significations, important as it is for criticism to acknowledge these. For Tennyson's elegy retains much of the transgressive force that so unsettled some of its first readers. Whatever bliss or agony the poem owns it owes to its insuperable desire for Hallam; nor can the manifold dispersions of that "vaster passion" displace Hallam as the affective center of In Memoriam's world of desire. In this sense, In Memoriam refuses to complete its work of mourning; refuses, that is, the work of normal, and normalizing, substitution. Thus, in the sheer ferocity of its personal loss, as in the extreme extensiveness of its reparational hungering, Tennyson's elegy manages to counterspeak its own submission to its culture's heterosexualizing conventions. In this view, our departing view, In Memoriam remains at its end what it had been at its beginning: a desiring machine whose first motive is the restitution of lost Hallam. As such In Memoriam continues to do what it has always done best: it keeps its desire by keeping its desire desiring.

¹ Havelock Ellis, Sexual Inversion, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia, 1931), 328. See note 38 below.

² Ibid., 341.

³ Ibid., 341.

⁴ Symonds, Memoirs, 194, 189, 190.

⁵ Ellis and Symonds, Sexual Inversion, 60-61.

⁶ Symonds, Memoirs, 189.

⁷ Ellis, Sexual Inversion, 339.

⁸ Edward Carpenter, Iölaus: An Anthology of Friendship (1917; reprint, New York, 1982), 181. My use of the notion of "homosociality" is derived from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, 1985). Following Sedgwick I understand "male homosociality" to denote an entire spectrum of male bonds, only some of which are sexual; and I understand this spectrum or continuum to be historically marked by a phobic disruption that would severely disjoin the homosocial from the directly homosexual. It might be said of the intensity of In Memoriam's elegiac desire that it problematically overrides or elides the disjunction that conventionally intervenes, so phobically, between what is social and what is sexual.

⁹ Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, lyric 64; I have used the Norton Critical Edition, ed. Robert H. Ross (New York, 1973). Subsequent citations of In Memoriam refer to this edition and appear in parentheses.

¹⁰Carol T. Christ, Victorian and Modern Poetics (Chicago, 1984), 117.

¹¹This contemporary review is most readily accessible in John Dixon Hunt, ed., In Memoriam: A Casebook (London, 1970), 100-12.

¹² Charles Kingsley's unsigned review of In Memoriam first appeared in Fraser's Magazine (September 1850), 245-55; it is most readily available in Tennyson: The Critical Heritage, John D. Jump, ed. (London, 1967), 172-85. Christopher Ricks's remarks may be found in his Tennyson (New York, 1972), 215.

¹³ Ricks, Tennyson, 215.

¹⁴ Harold Bloom, "Tennyson, Hallam, and Romantic Tradition" in Ringers in the Tower (Chicago, 1971), 149-50.

¹⁵ Ricks, Tennyson, 215.

¹⁶ Quoted in Ricks, Tennyson, 218.

¹⁷ I take the phrase "the desire and pursuit of the whole" from Benjamin Jowett's translation of Plato's Symposium, where it is employed by Aristophanes to explicate a problematically sexual desire whose recuperative energy seeks to restore a lost ontological wholeness. David M. Halperin, in "One Hundred Years of Homosexuality," Diacritics 16 no. 2 (1986): 34-45, explains:

According to Aristophanes, human beings were originally round, eight-limbed creatures, with two faces and two sets of genitals—both front and back—and three sexes (male, female, and androgyne). These ancestors of ours were powerful and ambitious; to put them in their place, Zeus had them cut in two, their skin stretched over the exposed flesh and tied at the navel and their heads rotated so as to keep that physical reminder of their daring and its consequences constantly before their eyes. The severed halves of each former individual, once reunited, clung to one another so desperately and concerned themselves so little with their survival as separate entities that they began to perish for lack of sustenance; those who outlived their mates sought out persons belonging to the same gender as their lost complements and repeated their embraces in a foredoomed attempt to recover their original unity. Zeus at length took pity on them, moved their genitals to the side their bodies now faced, and invented sex, so that the bereaved creatures might at least put a terminus to their longing and devote their attention to other, more important matters.

From this narrative Aristophanes extracts, as Halperin says, "a genetic explanation of the observable differences among human beings with respect to sexual object-choice," an explanation that clearly establishes a formal isomorphism between female-female, male-male, and male-female desire. As Aristophanes says, "the reason is that human nature was originally one and we were whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love." The Dialogues of Plato, ed. and trans. Benjamin Juwett, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1875), 2:43-44). For an excellent analysis of the relation between the Aristophanic myth and modern notions of homosexuality, see Halperin.

¹⁸ The cross-lingual pun "hom(m)osexual" comes from Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, where it is used to designate the androcentric assumptions grounding Western notions of same-sex desire. See especially "Commodities among Themselves," 192-98.

¹⁹ Ricks, Tennyson, 218.

²⁰ Gerhard Joseph, Tennysonian Love (Minneapolis, 1969), 68.

²¹ T. S. Eliot, "In Memoriam," from Essays Ancient and Modern (London, 1936), 186-203. This essay is also available in Hunt, ed., A Casebook, 129-37.

²² Although the first lyrics in memory of Hallam were composed as early as 1833, the prologue was not composed until 1849, as Tennyson arranged and assembled the individual elegies into the long poem we know as In Memoriam.

²³ Bloom, "Tennyson," 154.

²⁴ John D. Rosenberg, "The Two Kingdoms of In Memoriam," Journal of English and Germanic Philology 58 (1959), 228-40; reprinted in Ross, ed., In Memoriam, 206-19.

²⁵ Symonds, Memoirs, 209-10.

²⁶ Ibid., 119-20.

²⁷ Ibid., 94.

²⁸ Other Victorian texts, specifically two canonical American ones, offer comic and comically displaced versions of Tennyson's fellowship of hand; if the examples I am about to cite are already familiar, they nonetheless merit our brief recognition. The first of these examples, chapter 94 of Moby Dick, coyly entitled "A Squeeze of the Hand," literally expresses—that is, presses out or fluidly extrudes—its almost homosexual homosociality by way of the exuberant topos of "spermatic" immersion. As part of the Pequod's systematic capitalist transfiguration of natural object into commodity, of whale into product, of sperm oil into money, the members of the crew are compelled by "business" and "unctuous duty" into the blissful hiatus of a good squeeze. After "the baling of the Heidelburgh Tun, or Case," the sperm thus removed

had cooled and crystallized to such a degree that when, with several others, I sat down before a large Constantine's bath of it, I found it strangely concreted into lumps, here and there rolling in the liquid part. It was our business to squeeze the lumps back into fluid.

The immediate effect of the "carefully manipulated" sperm is a subjective sense of benign metamorphosis ("After having my hands in it for only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels and began, as it were, to serpentine and spiralize") which in turn mediates a fluid masculine intersubjectivity:

I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my colaborer's hands in it, mistaking the hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands and looking up into their eyes sentimentally. . . . Come; let us squeeze hands all around; nay, let us squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.

If the rhetorical densities and fluidities of this passage are so manifold and interfluent as to preclude comprehensive analysis here, we are nonetheless constrained to remark the figurai duplicity by which the self-evident homoerotics of such a vision of intermasculine community are rendered visible by an occulting that is at once ocular (Ishmael cannot see the squeeze he loves to feel) and auricular (the homosexual valence of this passage is, as it were, pun-buried in a comic homophone—in, that is, the handy wordplay on, in, of "sperm"). We should also note, if only again in passing, Ishmael's claim that the opulent tactility exercised here releases or "discharges"—his verb not mine—a specific renovatory effect, a direct counterfluence to the brutalizing and suicidal homosocial pact, or "indissoluble league," explicit in the crew's promise to man the harpoon of Ahab's vengeance. "In that inexpressible sperm," says Ishmael in recalling the moment on the quarterdeck, "I forgot all about our horrible oath" and "I washed my hands and heart of it."

When Melville has Ishmael dream that he might squeeze himself and his fellows "into the very milk and sperm of kindness," he is deploying a particular cultural fantasy about the body's dark hydraulics: a fantasy of what Thomas Laqueur calls "the fungibility of [bodily] fluids" in "Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology," Representations 14 (Spring 1986): 1-41, a belief that the body's base fluid, blood, may under particular conditions of heat and pressure be "concocted" or expressed into other bodily fluids—milk and semen most particularly. And when that cultural fantasy is conjoined with its masculist writerly analogue (most familiar in its Freudian version) that a telling half pun obtains between pen and penis, and between semen and semantics, then there are large implications for the hands of the writer and the reader, specific implications for the craft of writing and for the semiotics of reading. "I find it hard to write of these things," Symonds writes in the erotic diary entry I have already quoted, "yet I wish to dwell on them and to recall them, pen in hand."

If Symonds is comically unselfconscious here, if the trope works him rather than he the trope, then this was never the case with Symonds's "Master," Whitman, who very self-consciously exploited this analogy to considerable cultural effect. The assault that Whitman launched on literary culture derived in fair part from his refusal to subdue this trope, from a specific refusal to idealize the difference between textual production and bodily discharge: "bathing [his] songs in sex," he then presses the reader with the texts, that are for him indistinguishable from the "limitless jets" of his "slow rude muscle." ("Enfants D'Adam," poems 12, 3, 4). Obviously, this strategy was calculated to disrupt idealizations of reading by putting a problematic text directly into the hands of the reader, who must hereafter equivocate over just what it is that he or she is holding now. The (homo)erotics of this readerly dilemma are specifically thematized in the third poem of the "Calamus" sequence:

Whoever you are holding me now in hand,
Without one thing all will be useless,
I give you fair warning, before you attempt me further
I am not what you supposed, but far different.

If the quotidian dynamics of reading require a certain tactility—if, after all, we must hold the books we read and touch the texts we also see—then it is also implicitly the case that these dynamics open within the primarily ocular trope of reading another aperture for the writer's promiscuous address. The reader reading thus touches, retouches, the writer's touch, even touches back, and in doing so finds himself (the implied reader of "Calamus" is, I would argue, male) implicated in the comic Melvillian topos we have just explicated: finds himself squeezing hands squeezing sperm, and staring sentimentally into the eyes of the poet. Here, from stanza 5 of "Calamus" 3, is another, or rather the same, trope of reading:

Or, if you will, thrusting me beneath your clothing,
Where I may feel the throbs of your heart, or rest upon your hip,
Carry me when you go forth over land or sea;
For thus, merely touching you, is enough—-is best,
And thus, touching you, would I silently sleep and be carried eternally.

By way of a fatal trajectory characteristic of Whitman, the palpable "thrusting" of these lines touches or taps into a desire for death's cradling, as if the writer could die into the reader, thereafter to be "carried eternally." Whitman very capably exercised the ambivalence that the metonymy of hands conveys: if he liked to finger pulses, he also said "my tap is death" ("Sleep-Chasings"). In "Calamus" 3 this ambivalence, partly self-protective, is figured by the reversal of touch that closes the poem, closes it by leaving its grasp open:

But these leaves conning, you con at peril
For these leaves, and me, you will not understand—

Even while you should think you had
unquestionably caught me, behold!
Already you see I have escaped from you.

And then the poem's last line:

Therefore release me, and depart on your way.

Whitman's writing exuberantly exercises the same hands that shake and haunt Tennyson in In Memoriam, but pivotal differences in tact intervene to separate their discourses on tactility: Whitman specifies what Tennyson prefers to diffuse, just as he incarnates what Tennyson instead drives into the recesses of the incarnation. But these are differences that serve to texturize the therefore palpable sameness that otherwise we would not be able to feel. Herman Melville, Moby Dick (New York, 1972). Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, facsimile edition of the 1860 text (Ithaca, 1961).

²⁹ Rosenberg, "The Two Kingdoms," 214.

³⁰ In broad terms of Christocentric desire the strong parallel to Tennyson is Hopkins, who finds in Christ both "beauty's self and beauty's giver" and whose sermons on the body and the blood of Christ—"of our noble lover, our prince, our champion"—describe a theology of desire with unembarrassed sensuality:

I leave it to you, brethren, then to picture him, in whom fullness of the godhead dwelt bodily, in his bearing how majestic, how strong and yet how lovely and lissome in his limbs, in his look how earnest grave but kind. In his Passion all this strength was spent, this lissomeness crippled, this beauty wrecked, this majesty beaten down. But now it is more than all restored, and for myself I make no secret I look forward with eager desire to seeing the matchless beauty of Christ's body in the heavenly light.

(Sermons, 34-38.)

Hopkins's eager desire for "the matchless beauty of Christ's body" can be borne only because it is contrapuntally and agonistically matched with, or wedded to, Hopkins's own matchless passion for substitute satisfaction and submission to his "mastering me/God." In the complex and beautiful way that J. Hillis Miller has explicated in The Disappearance of God, the world for Hopkins is so radically inscribed with the grandeur of God that phenomenal things are literally—that is, as letters—the dispersed fragments of the originary integral word:

All things therefore are charged with love, are charged with God, and if we know how to touch them give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him. (Sermons, 175)

Right perception—luminous, fluid, harmonic—is sacramental reading.

And what the perceiver reads when reading is right are the literal traces of Christ's blood—his "lessons" "written upon lovely limbs / In bloody letters." The figurai mechanism that so charges Hopkins's world is, very explicitly, the saving "discharge" of Christ's "dense" and "driven Passion" ("The Wreck of the Deutschland," stanza 7). By way of a powerful temporal inversion, Hopkins deploys a historical event, the crucifixion, as the only trope adequate to represent the otherwise inaccessible, ahistorical moment of the "great sacrifice" of God's own selving—of, that is, the fracturing or "cleaving" of Christ out of God that Hopkins calls "the Incarnation proper." For Hopkins this originary fracture creates flesh, invents time, enables redemption, and sets desire to its reparational yearning. But because this moment is ontologically prior to the divisiveness it is in the process of creating, it can only be figured belatedly and retrospectively by a reversal of origin and terminus. Thus Hopkins interpolates Jesus' last moment where Christ's first one should be; the sensations of the crucifixion bespeak the incarnation:

The first intention then of God outside himself or, as they say, ab extra, outwards, the first outstress of God's power was Christ; and we must believe the next was the Blessed Virgin. . . . It is as if the blissful agony or stress of selving in God forced out drops of sweat and blood, which drops were the world. (Sermons, 197)

Here Christ's originary self-expression must take as its expressive figure the terminal moment of "the piercing of Christ's side," when "the sacred body and sacred heart seemed waiting for an opportunity of discharging themselves." (Sermons, 255). This tropological inversion is predictably double. It is epistemologically negative in the deconstructive sense that the presumptively originary origin must submit to the belatedness of historical figuration. Thus the Christocentric origin is already blocked or decentered by the writhing body of Christ himself. But it is phenomenologically positive in the sense that the world and the things in it are spectacularly reified as the sacramental distillations of Christ's saving effluence; thus "bathe[d] in his fall-gold mercies," "this world then is the word, expression, news of God" ("The Wreck of the Deutschland," stanza 23; Sermons, 129). Exactly this extreme incarnationism, with its celebratory corollary that "Christ plays in ten thousand places / lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his" (poem 57, "As kingfishers catch fire"), enables Hopkins to sustain himself on the supplemental satisfactions that intervene between the patient time of writing and the eager time when the poet will be restored "to the dearest him that lives alas! away)" (poem 67, "I wake and feel the fell of dark"). In the parallel cases of Hopkins and Tennyson, that distanced and dearest him—that "first, fast, last friend" (poem 40, "The Lantern Out of Doors")—is an ambivalent figure or compound ghost, a copula who conjoins both Christ and that other "He that died": in the case of Tennyson, Hallam obviously; in the less renowned case of Hopkins, the boy-poet Digby Mackworth Dolben. The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 4th ed., ed. W. H. Gardener and N. H. MacKenzie, (Oxford, 1970); and Sermons and Devotional Writings, ed. Christopher Devlin (London, 1959).

³¹ Eliot, "In Memoriam," 133.

³² Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," in The Standard Edition, 14:244-45.

³³ Ricks, Tennyson, 216.

³⁴ Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 193.

³⁵ Tennyson, quoted in Hallam, Lord Tennyson, Alfred, Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, 2 vols. (London, 1897), 1:300.

³⁶ Rosenberg, "The Two Kingdoms," 216.

³⁷ Coventry Patmore, The Unknown Eros (London, 1878), 8-12. In the streamlined analysis offered here, I have somewhat simplified Patmore's rather more elusive sexual representation in order to foreground the poem's homosexual/pedophilic valences. Not surprisingly, Patmore embeds such valences within a rhetoric that is idealizing, interrogative, sometimes downright obscure. There is, furthermore, some shifty gender identification that permits the "Unknown Eros" to be figured sometimes as male ("bashful love, in his own way and hour") and sometimes, though less emphatically, as female. Of course anything like a complete account of Patmore's poem and volume would have to negotiate these differences.

³⁸ R.S. is "History IX" in the third American edition (1931) of Ellis's Sexual Inversion, 111-15. Readers interested in this citation should note that different editions of Sexual Inversion have differently numbered case histories; revising his text for each edition, Ellis both added and deleted individual case histories. The Ellis-Symonds English edition of 1897 does not contain R.S.'s history.

³⁹ Patmore, "The Child's Purchase," Unknown Eros, 208-9.