Fourteen Sonnets for an Epidemic: Derek Jarman’s The Angelic Conversation
Prelude: Ethics
In the mid-1980s, in the first rush of the urban homosexual AIDS crises in North America and England, Derek Jarman made The Angelic Conversation, a film involving Shakespeare’s sonnets. The film opens with the first two lines of sonnet 151 in white letters on a black ground:
Love is too young to know what conscience is:
Yet who knows not conscience is born of love?
Now, as contemporary scholarly editions of the Sonnets will note,1 the whole of sonnet 151, one of the bawdiest of Shakespeare’s sonnets, is likely a play on a proverb: Penis erectus non habet conscientiam (“an erect penis has no conscience”). The first two lines open that play in two senses of “conscience” — conscience as ethical sensibility (Cupid is too young for this) and conscience as joint, shared knowledge (in this context, carnal knowledge, knowledge “born of love”). Sonnet 151’s subject, then, is variously the prick of conscience.2 And these lines set the problem for Jarman’s film.
“Conscience” traditionally names whatever it is that equips properly attentive people to do their part in the daily production and reproduction of excellent modes of social life. When “conscience” likewise names homosexually inflected carnal knowledge (as, Jarman’s film insists, it will for his audience), we have to alter our understanding of the reproduction of sound social life accordingly. The collectives that form at sites of erotically charged homosexual congress are not, in any ordinary sense, communities. The cast — the particular groupings of participants — changes, for one thing. For another, there is no reason to expect in advance that a group forming itself erotically on one occasion will share in feeding, clothing, and sheltering its members over time. Instead, various participants might wander in and out of domestic life with other members indifferently; stable duos might host temporary guests; solitary youth might move from place to place never intending to enter into durable domestic arrangements. Worse, there is no reason to expect in advance that the regular participants — those who can be found, reliably, at this or that place, from one week to the next — will have anything much in common beyond their interest in erotic exchange, either at the outset or afterward. In short, the kinds of institutional affiliations that are crucial to normal, North Atlantic heterosexual coupling (and its characteristic modes of intimacy) are not the substance of temporary, urban sexual collectives. The need to secure this form of social life, then, has to be theorized without the usual props of joint economic venture, shared domestic circumstances, or even shared “culture” (in many traditional senses of that term).
Some homosexual erotic scenes in Jarman’s day had almost no anchor in everydayness, actually. Although names may have been exchanged, there was no reason to assume that the names you were told were the names that appeared on leases, passports, or driver’s licenses — even if the exchanged names were “real,” they needn’t have been real in those senses. By a similar token, it was bad form to ask what someone did for a living, where he came from, or where he lived.
While this aspect of the “little ethics” (etiquette) of participation owed a lot to the danger of exposure, it also made possible modes of intercourse that were intensely intimate and utterly focused, uncluttered by the stuff of heterosexual private life. The notorious “anonymity” of the sex, that is, was neither faceless nor inattentive to the particular qualities of participants. The first problem for an ethics of these intimacies is precisely the problem of coping with depersonalized, vibrantly particular, erotically charged interaction.3 It is a hard problem. It is so hard that the question of whether sexual arousal contains the seeds of conscience has to be treated as ethical bedrock here.4 Sexual arousal — in fact or in prospect — brings together Jarman’s constituency and holds them in place here or there. It is the one known thing that participants have in common.
The queer ethical at stake in The Angelic Conversation hangs out at the sites of collective erotic intimacies, which may only seem like one sort of place because participants face heteronormative hostility at the defensive perimeters (both as hostilities take shape in law and custom and as such forces interpellate participants). The work of developing ethics under the circumstances is apt to go missing from view under conditions of political urgency. Ethical matters are those transpersonal and (in some sense) impersonal aspects of interaction, activity, and attachment that tend to the reliable production and reproduction of nonaccidentally sound modes of social life. By nonaccidental I mean that some part of what’s good about the mode of society in question can itself be explained with reference to the very forms of interaction, activity, and attachment that make such society possible.5 For example, it is no accident when friends enjoy each other’s company and risk things with each other that they will not risk with strangers. It is hard to see how friendship would be possible without this, and to whatever extent friendship is a good thing, it is good in part because of the pleasures and risks made possible by friendship. Moreover, friends know this about each other and about friendship, and, while it is possible to discover that some mode of attachment has become a friendship without having noticed the change, it isn’t possible to be friends without sharing the pleasures and risks of friendship. This point is impersonal — it holds for friends generally, not just for me and mine. It is also transpersonal — friends are, as such, in thought or in company, collectives.
Modern friendship turns on hyperpersonalized intimacy. Accordingly, work on the ethics of friendship turns on locating its impersonal, general aspects. By contrast, the challenge of working toward an ethics of homosexual erotic collectives turns on understanding the particularity of depersonalizing intimacy (intimacy that operates at some remove from autobiographical detail),6 the peculiar lineaments that articulate the collective body, and how these produce and reproduce sound society steadily, reliably, but en passant.
The lines of attachment that draw together erotically charged homosexual collectives were — and often still are — visual rather than narrative. Queers notice each other. The ways in which they notice each other are titillating. Visuality is, in this sense, central to modern urban homosexual congress. As Lee Edelman puts it, “homosexuality, as constructed in the modern West, occupies a distinctive relation to questions of the gaze and of visual perception.”7 Edelman is interested in tracking the centrality of visual semiotics (both inside homosexual urban exchanges and at the orientation-defining, anxious, unstable perimeter of heteronormative surveillance) in terms of the obscure and the obvious, of the tropes that turn on the representation of man-woman sexual difference as apparent, and of the male homosexual as a troubling, potentially undetectable difference within what reads as sameness at the masculine pole of that very man-woman axis. I am interested in taking his suggestion that homosexuality operates through distinctive and distinctively vexed modes of visual attachment in a different direction.
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Notes
I am grateful to Tom Vogler and Dan Morgan for comments on the first draft of this essay. Jaime Hovey and Patchen Markell stepped in to help me with a subsequent draft. Michael Sinnetiker gave me tremendously helpful critical comments in symposium at Johns Hopkins. I want to thank Jonathan Goldberg and Michael Moon for organizing that symposium and for their comments on that version of my project, which allowed me to redirect and refocus the work substantially. Audience questions and comments at Johns Hopkins and the University of Texas at Austin, together with a very helpful session at the University of Chicago’s Mass Culture Workshop, have allowed me to understand Jarman better and to make better use of the film. Jay Schleusener has been a tireless conversation partner about the erotic. Bradin Cormack has been a tireless interlocutor about Shakespeare and the untimely character of queer visuality. Claudio Lomnitz urged me to bring out the ethical more explicitly, and Dilip P. Gaonkar gave me excellent editorial advice about how to do it. Damon Young raised a final set of objections. Finally, throughout the four years that I have been picking up and putting down this essay, Neville Hoad has provided steady support, criticism, and encouragement.
- See, e.g., Stephen Booth’s masterful edition: Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977).
It is sonnet 151 in which “I do betray / My nobler part to my gross body’s treason; / My soul doth tell my body that he may / Triumph in love; flesh stays no further reason, / But rising at thy name doth point out thee,” and so on. The “rise and fall” of the erection plays out across the verse.
Bradin Cormack pointed out to me that there is a further play on “conscience” in the sonnet — con feminizes “conscience” by way of Latin (where conscientia, as joint knowledge, is feminine). Jarman, like Shakespeare, was fascinated by the specters of Latin in English literature. In The Angelic Conversation, Jarman plays with feminizing elements, which is why he had a woman read the poetry in voiceover and why one of our two lovers figures the dark lady in the final sequences. Jarman locates something of the woman in masculine alterity to itself.
- The second problem is coping with the ethical challenges peculiar to this form of social life. I will not discuss the second problem at any length here. I am grateful to Damon Young for discussing some of its aspects with me. What follows turns on Jarman’s film, which celebrates masculine beauty in the figures of race-marked white, Anglo men. The pursuit of beauty in the relevant social milieu had an undeniable ruthlessness. Moreover, as Young put it in personal correspondence, other modes of racial marking tended to read as “exotic” from the dominant modes of visual attachment. I think it reasonable to set these matters to one side here, partly because there has been almost no patient work on the first problem — namely, the problem of articulating the sense in which a temporary erotic collective counts as an ethical subject internally, rather than how such a collective becomes a target for violence and normative criticism, erasure, disapprobation, or demonization.
- Leo Bersani took up this problem in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” in AIDS: Cultural Analysis/ Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 197 – 222. For Bersani, homosexual congress could serve as an ethically hygienic counterpoint to some forms of sexualized violence by putting the phallic ego at risk and in play. Bersani works in a Freudian phenomenology of man-to-man sexual intercourse. I will be less concerned with individual subjects than with unstable collective subjects and will rely upon Lacan more than Freud, but I hope to be working in the same vein.
- Any aspect of sociality can be good in some respects, bad in others, of course. Sex/gender systems, for instance, might be good insofar as they manage procreative human activity and bad in the personal costs of managing the production of future generations in the ways required by the specific codes. Moreover, the varieties of practical goodness at issue here are several. The bulk of my work in Reasonably Vicious (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002) involves explaining practical good.
- I began work on depersonalizing intimacies in an essay on the strangeness of troubled marriages as these take shape in U.S. popular culture. See “Sex and Talk,” in Intimacy, ed. Lauren Berlant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 48 – 85.
- Lee Edelman, “Imagining the Homosexual,” in Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994), 199.