How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (36 page)

The statement suggests what's wrong with so much of the criticism of the film, however well meaning it is. It seems clear by now that
Brokeback
has received the attention it's been getting, from critics and audiences alike, at least partly because it seems on its surface to make normal what many people think of as gay experience—bringing it into the familiar “heart of America.” (Had this been the story of, say, the love between two closeted interior decorators living in New York City in the 1970s, you suspect that there wouldn't be full-page ads in the major papers trumpeting its “universal” themes.) But the fact that this film's main characters look like cowboys doesn't make them, or their story, any less gay. Criticisms like LaSalle's, and those of the many other critics trying to persuade you that
Brokeback
isn't “really” gay, that Jack and Ennis's love “makes no sense” because they're Wyoming ranch hands who are likely to vote Republican, only work if you believe that
being gay means being some specific, essential thing—having a certain look, or lifestyle (urban, say), or politics; that it's anything other than the bare fact of being erotically attached primarily to members of your own sex.

Indeed, the point that gay people have been trying to make for years—a point that
Brokeback
could be making now, if so many of its vocal admirers would listen to what it's saying—is that there's no such thing as a typical gay person, a strangely different-seeming person with whom Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar have nothing in common—thankfully, you can't help feeling, in the eyes of many commentators. (It is surely significant that the film's only major departure from Proulx's story are two scenes clearly meant to underscore Jack's and Ennis's bona fides as macho American men: one in which Jack successfully challenges his boorish father-in-law at a Thanksgiving celebration, and another in which Ennis punches a couple of biker goons at a July Fourth picnic—a scene that culminates with the over-the-top image, familiar from the trailer, of Ennis standing tall against a skyscape of exploding fireworks.) The real achievement of
Brokeback Mountain
is not that it tells a universal love story that happens to have gay characters in it, but that it tells a distinctively gay story that happens to be so well told that any feeling person can be moved by it. If you insist, as so many have, that the story of Jack and Ennis is OK to watch and sympathize with because they're not really homosexual—that they're more like the heart of America than like “gay people”—you're pushing them back into the closet whose narrow and suffocating confines Ang Lee and his collaborators have so beautifully and harrowingly exposed.

—The New York Review of Books,
February 23, 2006

W
ho knows how classical scholarship might have evolved if Oscar Wilde had gone to grad school? Already at boarding school, and later at college, the young Oscar's mastery of both Greek and Latin was legendary. “The flowing beauty of his oral translations in class,” a schoolmate later recalled to Wilde's biographer Frank Harris, “whether of Thucydides, Plato, or Virgil, was a thing not easily to be forgotten.” Among the many classics prizes he carried off was his school's gold medal for Greek. (The essay subject was, perhaps prophetically, “The Fragments of the Greek Comic Poets, as edited by Meineke.”) When Wilde went up to Oxford, it was on a classics scholarship; he left it with a prestigious double First in Greats. Yet when he was asked what he proposed to do after leaving, the otherwise aporetic undergraduate (“God knows,” was his immediate response) was emphatic about at least one thing. “I won't be a dried-up Oxford don, anyhow,” the twenty-four-year-old replied. “I'll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I'll be famous, and if not famous, I'll be notorious.”

Times have changed. As the current
siècle
lurches to its own
fin
, ambitious young classics graduates need hardly choose between philology and fame. According to a recent
New York Times Magazine
report on
the Modern Language Association convention—the annual gathering of literature professors where scholarly papers are given, job interviews are conducted, and professional contacts maintained or made—many of today's dons aspire to an A-list world of six-figure salaries and fast-lane accessories. Some, like NYU's Weather-Channel
Wunderkind
Andrew Ross, have publicly traded in their Harris tweed blazers for the considerably more
récherché
creations available at Comme des Garçons; others, like archaeologist Iris Love, have come to be associated less with Doric or Ionic than with columns of a more gossipy order. As you sit in your dentist's waiting room, you can read about Professor Ross in
New York
magazine, or Cornel West in the newly hot
New Yorker.

These, however, are merely the external symptoms of more substantive, and indeed more desirable, developments in the relations between the academy and the real world since 1878. If academics have been power-lunching along with everyone else lately, it's because they've got more…well, power. For the first time in over a generation, professional scholars are actively participating in public life.

It is no accident that many of the scholars who do so are, like Wilde, “marginal” in some sense: women, gays, African-Americans, professors whose intellectual energies have been focused on recuperating lost or long-repressed voices from those margins. On the face of it, this agenda is more closely entwined with their personal experience than are the professional activities of those who study, say, Greek grammar or patristic church history. Over the past few years, the writings and public appearances of such scholar-stars as Catharine MacKinnon and Cornel West and Martha Nussbaum have done much to change the way we think about the potential for symbiosis between scholarship and public life. (Because she has written a lot about Plato's
Symposium
, for instance, the last of those three testified as an expert witness in hearings on the constitutionality of Colorado's anti-gay Proposition 2 in 1993.)

The reappearance of professional intellectuals in the public arena would appear to be a healthy corrective to the cultural ailment plaintively diagnosed by Russell Jacoby in his 1987 study
The Last Intellectuals
. In this book, Jacoby catalogs a number of factors that have contributed to the decline of vigorous and intelligent discourse in America. Among these he counts the rise of suburbia and the accompanying diffusion of urban centers of intellectual life, and of course television, which Jacoby
rightly blames for having eroded the public's critical acumen, to say nothing of overall intelligence. But for him none of these factors is more critical than the increasingly narrow restriction of serious intellectual activity over the past two generations to a highly professionalized and hence ultimately solipsistic academic elite.

Despite its sometimes frivolous accoutrements, therefore, scholarly engagement with “real” life appears to be a good thing—from whichever end of the political spectrum such engagement may come. This is true both for the scholars themselves and for the public they address. In the case of the former, the opportunity to apply sophisticated techniques and erudite insights to (as it were) a living subject helps to inoculate against what George Steiner, in an essay on the case of Sir Anthony Blunt, once referred to as
odium philologicum
, that all-too-familiar perversion of perspective that results when the objects of intellectual inquiry occlude our vision of the everyday world. (By airing his thoughts in the pages of
The New Yorker
, Steiner was practicing what he preached.) And the participation of professional intellectuals in public discussion of urgent everyday issues presumably raises the level of that discourse itself, bringing to it the expertise, erudition, and argumentative finesse expected of those who have undergone rigorous intellectual and scholarly training.

All of these developments take on a certain poignancy when you think back on the fate of poor Oscar Wilde, whose postgraduate career, viewed from the comfortable vantage point afforded by hindsight, assumes a depressingly familiar Sophoclean shape. At first, Wilde's choice of fame over philology seemed a good one: he became very famous indeed. The astonishing verbal facility that had won him all the glittering prizes at university became the weapon with which he skewered Victorian convention, thereby earning him considerable literary
kleos
. But the dazzling intellectual self-assurance gradually fermented into the deluded hubris of his libel suit, followed by the nemesis of a humiliating public defeat. (Even his wit betrayed him: his glittering, flippant responses during the trial were what destroyed his case.) Wilde was the Ajax of early literary celebrity, impaled on his own desire for fame. After the brief stint of penal servitude, he fled to Paris, where he expired in the last year of the last century, outlived by Victoria herself.

And so, despite the recent erosion of the once-rigid distinctions that
forced Wilde to choose between philology and fame—and by “fame” I mean conspicuousness within, and impact upon, the outside, public, “real” world—every now and then you're still tempted to see in his unhappy trajectory from Magdalen to maudlin a sort of morality tale. Sometimes, it's safer to stick to stichomythia.

 

I couldn't help thinking of Wilde as I read and reread a recent book by another precociously gifted philologue who, like Wilde, came to chafe at the dried-up donnish bit, and who as a result sought an audience outside of the academy's walls. His book is, in fact, expressly aimed at a broadly public rather than a narrowly academic audience, and toward that end was published by a trade rather than university press. Indeed, like much of Wilde's oeuvre, this work seeks to present a devastating indictment of social and especially religious hypocrisy on the subject of human sexuality. It is a nice further coincidence that its late author was, like Wilde, charming, personable, erudite, and above all an extraordinarily gifted linguist. (His defenders invariably point to his expertise in such arcane tongues as Old Church Slavonic.) And like Wilde, he was a homosexual who suffered both personally and, according to some, professionally for it.

The book I am talking about is John Boswell's
Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe
. In it, the author claims to have unearthed a medieval ecclesiastical ceremony known as the
adelphopoiêsis
which, he argues, was in fact a liturgy to be performed at (primarily male) homosexual marriages. As much today as a hundred years ago, that is the kind of claim that makes you very notorious indeed.

The tortured relationship between homosexuality and Roman Catholicism is familiar territory for Boswell's readers—as it was, indeed, for Boswell himself. In his extremely well received 1980 study
Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality
, published by the University of Chicago Press, Boswell shed welcome light on the early Church's by no means straightforward attitude toward male homosexuality. Hence though he was to eventually become generally (and laudably) more cautious about the anachronistic use of words like “gay” to describe the affective states experienced by members of cultures radically different from our own, Boswell's latest project may be seen as the next charge in
a polemic whose opening salvo was fired nearly fifteen years ago. There is little doubt, moreover, that this scholarly interest was fueled by deep personal feeling. Boswell, a homosexual, was also a devout Catholic.

In view of the undeniably powerful political uses to which the Church's institutionalized opposition to homosexuality has been put over the centuries, it was inevitable that what began as the author's personal and scholarly interest in destabilizing the theological and historical premises for the Church's position should end up serving a political purpose as well. This last consideration explains why, upon its publication in the summer of 1994,
Same-Sex Unions
won the kind of fame—and notoriety—that would have warmed even Oscar Wilde's heart. The apogee of this publicity was the triumphant citation of Boswell's book in the popular comic strip
Doonesbury
. “For 1,000 years the Church sanctioned rituals for
homosexual
marriages,” declares Mark Slackmeyer, a gay character who has recently come out; he then goes on to mention the source for his information: the “new book by this Yale professor.”

Given the political climate at the time of the book's publication, you can hardly blame Slackmeyer for his enthusiasm. If they were indeed what Boswell says they were, the ecclesiastical ceremonies discussed in
Same-Sex Unions
would be considered by many to be powerful ammunition in the increasingly ugly battles about social tolerance now being fought in America. Among the liberal press and especially gay activists, it was hoped that what Boswell's publisher, Villard, calls his “sensational discovery” would, in the words of an approving
Nation
reviewer, “have a chance of intervening effectively in this debate [i.e., over gay marriage].” This fantasy of “effective intervention” is a potent one: how nice it would be for us gay men and women to go clumping down to the Senate floor, Byzantine manuscripts firmly in hand, and hurl the appropriate bits of papyrus and vellum into Senator Helms's empurpled visage. In more ways than one, it would all be Greek to him.

This makes it all the more unfortunate, both for that political project and for Boswell's posthumous reputation (he died a few months after the book's publication in 1994), that the only people who have reason to be intimidated by Boswell's ceremonies of
adelphopoiêsis
—and, perhaps more important, the only people likely to use them as weapons in a political battle—are, in fact, those who have no Greek: that is, readers who lack the training and expertise necessary to evalu
ate what are, in the end, this work's very dubious claims. For seen as a work of philology,
Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe
is a bad book. Its arguments are weak, its methods unsound, its conclusions highly questionable. Most disturbing of all is its rhetorical stance: the complexities and ambiguities of the historical, literary, and linguistic material Boswell discusses are of a very high order indeed, and hence give the lie to his rather disingenuous assertion that no specialized scholarly training is necessary to the proper evaluation of this book. (Professional scholars have been arguing heatedly over his conclusions since the day the book appeared.) Given the author's inevitable awareness of his thesis's potential impact on a wider public discourse, his decision to target precisely those readers who have no particular expertise is alarming.

Seen, however, as a work of that other category—“fame”—
Same-Sex Unions
has been considerably more successful; even Professor Nussbaum didn't make it to
Doonesbury
. In Boswell's case, what's striking is that so obvious a philological failure should be accompanied by so great a public impact. This correlation, I think, should provoke serious discussion about the means by which intellectual celebrity is achieved and the aims to which it can be put. In the end,
Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe
provokes questions that are far more disturbing than the “controversial” answers it claims to provide. It exemplifies the dangers inherent in careless cross-pollination of scholarship and politics, of philology and fame.

 

Why all the fuss? That's an easy one. Pretty much any evidence that marriages between male homosexuals were performed under the auspices of the early Church would certainly put a crimp in the Vatican's current rhetorical style. Referring to increasing debate about the legalization of same-sex marriages in (post)modern Europe and America—at the time of the present article's publication, it is on the constitutional agenda in Hawaii—Pope John Paul II denounced such unions as “a serious threat to the future of the family and society.”

I should say at the outset that I characterize Boswell's book as being about “gay marriages,” despite the fact that some have defended his
book from scholarly skepticism precisely on the grounds that Boswell himself carefully eschews that tendentious term in favor of the ostensibly more judicious “same-sex unions.” To do so, these defenders argue, bespeaks a praiseworthy scholarly prudence. Although it is true that Boswell himself hedges his rhetorical bets in this fashion, the overarching thrust of his arguments, his own description of the unions as celebrating “permanent romantic commitment,” the enormous quantity of material he marshals concerning both the language and diction of erotic (versus, say, agricultural) activity in the ancient world and about the history of homosexual relationships from archaic Greece to the early years of the Christian Church—all this makes it clear that what Boswell is talking about in this book is what his intended audience of nonscholars will surely understand as “gay marriages celebrated by the church.”