Abstract
Drawing inspiration from Gilles Deleuze’s conceptualization of masochism as an obsession with a perfect form, this essay argues that masochism offers literary critics opportunities to reconsider questions of beauty and form in literature. I use John Keats’s “Lamia,” Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and James Joyce’s “The Dead” as case studies to examine how literary works incorporate masochism as a means of reflecting on their own creative processes—and how they would impact their readers. Masochism in literature first helps authors to conceive beautiful forms. The imperfections of these forms, in turn, allows the artists to re-create or revise those original forms to come up with better versions. In this process, texts about masochism open up complex affective dimensions of pleasure, pain, beauty, destruction, and slowness.
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Notes
Kostas Boyiopoulos and Mark Sandy state that “decadence is a pervasive presence in Keats’s poetic style characterized by its lassitude, passivity, and richness of sensuous detail” (2016, p. 6). After quoting one of Keats’s letters where Keats describes the highest form of happiness as that of “delight in sensation” (KL 185, qtd. ibid.), they ask: “what else could these declarations be if not antecedents to Pater’s and Symons’s creeds of art for art’s sake?” (ibid.).
Here are some examples of post-Freudian takes on masochism: Ordinary masochisms: Agency and desire in Victorian and modernist fiction (Michell, 2020); “‘Alive to distant, and dead to near’: Masochism, suicide, and masculinity in North and South” (Morrissey, 2019); “‘Hurt you into tenderness finally’: erotic masochism and black female subjectivity in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora” (Aiering, 2019); Sublime surrender: Male masochism at the fin-de-siècle (Stewart, 2018); Exquisite masochism: Marriage, sex, and the novel form (Jarvis, 2016); and Sensational flesh: Race, power, and masochism (Musser, 2014).
Taking cues from Deleuze’s view on masochism, Musser too observes that “[m]asochism, commonly understood as receiving pleasure from pain and subjugation, is an imprecise concept” (Musser, 2010, p. 131). Musser emphasizes that the proper mechanism of masochism in literature lies in its interplay between reading and writing and between “body and text” (131). She claims that masochism makes it possible for us to elucidate “the intimacies between body, text, and experience” (132). For Musser, masochism helps us pay more attention to the reader’s ability and experience in turning a metaphoric and literary description of masochism into a felt experience. Musser recognizes Deleuze’s attempt at diluting the sexual or erotic meaning attached to masochism: “Deleuze argues that formal elements of masochism, namely, this desexualization of love, had been obscured by the clinician’s […] interest in masochism as a sexological phenomenon.” (ibid., p. 133).
Other studies on Keats and fetishism include Diane Long Hoeveler’s “Decapitating romance: Class, fetish, and ideology in Keats’s Isabella” and Richard Marggraft Turley’s “‘Strange longings’: Keats and feet.”
I wish to point out a similar construction of psychic deferral as analyzed in Freud’s Beyond the pleasure principle. Through the children’s game of “fort-da,” Freud introduces peculiar pleasures attached to “a compulsion to repeat which overrides the pleasure principle” and to the act of deferring the final moment when the mother comes back and the pleasure of waiting for the mother disappears (Freud, 1955, p. 23). Freud further explains this mechanism as “the pure effects of the compulsion to repeat, unsupported by other motives” (ibid., p. 23, my emphasis). I interpret this as Freud’s discovery of a form (i.e., the game arguably as an aesthetic form) that is arguably a masochistic one. It articulates the child’s “pure” obsession with deferring the moment of reunion with the love object (mother) and waiting via playing a game that requires carefully coordinated actions and movements.
Numerous studies have shed light on Keats’s problematic relationship with the genre of romance. Just to name a few, they range from Jack Stillinger’s “Keats and romance” and Robert Kern’s “Keats and the problem of romance” to Andrew Franta’s “Keats and the review aesthetic” and Tamsin Theresa Badcoe’s “The romance of place in Lamia.”
I discuss this passage in my essay on Oscar Wilde through the lens of reading and readerly pleasure; see Jo (2021).
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This work was supported by the Inha University Research Grant.
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