Unforbidden Pleasures Read online

  With less earnestness, and far less portentousness, Wilde was – in Zarathustra’s words from Nietzsche’s great book – not sitting and waiting like the prophetic Zarathustra, but talking and writing, ‘with old shattered tablets around [him] as well as new half-inscribed tablets’. But Wilde, like Nietzsche (like everyone else) could speak the language of the future only by using in new ways the language of the past. Neither of them wanted any more tablets of law, any more exact and overexacting commandments of good and evil. And both of them realized that all tablets are only ever half inscribed, always to be completed, and never to be completable, in what are always unknowable futures. That morality – and morality is only ever the language in which it finds its form – could no longer be used to stop time. Or talk. Or development. If God is dead, the phrase ‘become who you are’, as used by Nietzsche and endorsed in a different way by Wilde (as ‘the full realization of his own personality’), necessarily involves, in another of Nietzsche’s phrases, ‘a transvaluation of all values’. ‘Who you are’ no longer means who you have been essentially defined as by an omniscient authority. The forbidden begins to lose its grip; or one set of forbidden things simply replaces another. For both Nietzsche and Wilde, man, as he was then called, is the evaluating animal, not merely the obedient animal. So the questions were no longer which of man’s evaluations are true, but rather, what is he doing when he is evaluating? Or, not what is forbidden, and why, but rather, why is this forbidden now, and to what purpose? Who is doing the forbidding, and who is consenting, and what kind of pleasure does it give them? What is the making forbidden a way of doing? What are we making when we make something forbidden, when we lay down the law in no uncertain terms?

  To forbid can be both protective and intimidating, superstitious and realistic, sadistic and masochistic, vengeful and comforting, imaginative and narrow-minded, optimistic and pessimistic, terrified, arrogant, kind, omniscient and humble. Without the forbidden as traditionally conceived, in other words – the forbidden as that which, because it must not be contested, apparently can’t be contested – we lose all our preferred dramas. We lose a hallowed vocabulary (unforbidden pleasures pale in comparison). When Wilde and Nietzsche in their different ways ask us to talk differently about the forbidden and the forbidders, they ask us to consider our pleasures anew. If religion and its structures of moral authority were to be no longer objects of desire – and towards the end of the nineteenth century, unlike today, this seemed like a distinct possibility – where could those desires be satisfied, or how could the desires themselves change, or be modified? Could we want new things, and in different ways? What would wanting be like if other things were forbidden – if, say, ‘vulgarity’, or ‘dullness’, or ‘earnestness’ were forbidden, as both Wilde and Nietzsche would have preferred – or even if there were no things we were forbidden to want? We do not have laws because we have desires: we have desires because we have laws, they want us to believe. The law arranges our wanting for us. These were the kinds of intimations of mortality that the new writing of the later nineteenth century was beginning to encourage. Wilde and Nietzsche, and later Freud (among others), allowed us to wonder, in an interestingly secular way, what it was that the forbidders wanted, and why we had needed to deify them in order to take them seriously.

  V

  ‘Man feels himself to be a more various and richly-endowed animal than the old religious theory of human life allowed,’ Matthew Arnold wrote in a letter to Ernest Fontanès in March 1881, ‘and he is endeavouring to give satisfaction to the long suppressed and still imperfectly-understood instincts of this varied nature.’ Arnold is clear that something is dawning which has been, in his view, ‘long suppressed’, (and suppressed primarily by Christianity), and which modern Darwinian biology is allowing people to recognize in new ways. What has been suppressed, in Arnold’s view, is something of the sensual spontaneity, the life-affirming intellectual curiosity of the ancient Greeks (the Greeks, that is, as Arnold and some of his contemporaries conceived them to be). Instincts and their satisfaction are now the issue, not faith and doubt, or duty and compassion, or morality and grace. And the instincts are not so much new as long buried. A ‘more various and richly-endowed animal’ is at once expansive, unfrightened and full of excited apprehension; there is no mention of selves or souls. Arnold is announcing a renaissance of something both ancient and unprecedented.

  There is, in one of the old religious theories of human life, a self made by God, which is living for this God who lays down the laws of life. But once people begin to feel and believe that they may be what Arnold calls, ‘more various and richly-endowed’ animals – animals, that is to say, as described by Darwin, among others, and therefore no longer selves in the traditional sense – they have to imagine what a self not made by God, not providentially informed, might be like; and how, if at all, the word ‘self’ still applies. And, by the same token, they have to ask what a law is like, and its laying down, when it is imposed not by a god but by a human animal. And with this, of course, comes the possibility that our so-called selves might be quite different from the divinely created selves that we have inherited (that is, that we have been persuaded to believe in); and, indeed, that being or having a self may be just one among many ways of describing what we are.

  We are all too familiar by now with a wide-ranging scepticism about what, if anything, the word ‘self’ (or ‘individual’) can refer to, or include and preclude; and about what hidden agendas the idea of the self can be used to sponsor or maintain (what old, religious theory of human life the self, and all the assumptions about the self, might bring in its wake). And we are also becoming familiar with descriptive vocabularies – in some versions of psychoanalysis, in structuralism, in neurobiology – that can, and want to, dispense with the term ‘self’ altogether (though not to dispense, it seems, with the laying down of laws). As though, for example, the anachronism of the self may be keeping us in some sense religious, connected to those selves that were created, and as part of a sacred order; at once too servile and too arrogant, too knowing and too serious, too reverential and too defiant, too self-important and too self-deceiving. As though the Judeo-Christian God and the selves He supposedly made were really a radically misleading picture of – the wrong, or out-dated, vocabulary for – the kind of creatures we are, the kind of creatures we were turning out to be, or wanted to be; creatures that evolved, creatures that could be more or less self-fashioning (Nietzsche’s injunction, ‘become who you are’ depends entirely on the language you have for what you might be, or take yourself to be). This, at least, is what the names Wilde, Nietzsche and Freud, among many others, stand for in the great nineteenth-century awakening, in which directions for a possible and unprecedented secularism are beginning to be worked out. And what is at stake is how, if at all, the competing accounts of what a person is, and what a life, and indeed a good life, entails, can be linked up. And whether a compelling account can be given of who people are in terms of what they want, or feel the lack of, an account which capitalism exploited in a particular way.

  In psychoanalysis – a discipline contemporary, in its beginnings, with other traditions of aestheticism, and significantly and strangely influenced by Nietzsche; a discipline trying to put together pleasure and morality in new ways – the use of the word ‘self’ can feel like a throwback, a nostalgic, almost regressive, attempt to unify the ineluctably conflicted individual that Freud described (as, indeed, in their different ways, had Wilde and Nietzsche). Freud frightened even psychoanalysts with his unconventional (that is, secular) description of a person as having everything except a self – instincts, conscience, an ego, but nothing that could put it all together, nothing that could use the word ‘I’ with conviction or any kind of real authority. Psychoanalysis could help us forget the self, and help us talk about conflicting desires and punitive internal authorities instead; or competing pleasures; or competing evaluations of pleasure, a Death Instinct that wants to destroy the possi
bility of pleasure, and a Life Instinct that will go to great lengths to sustain pleasure (once again there being no single sovereign authority). It could encourage us, at its most unsettling, to allow for a great deal of disarray and drive, of incoherence and unintelligibility, of pleasure found at all costs. Like Wilde and Nietzsche, Freud was to urge on us a newish vocabulary that would make us wonder what we are doing in moralizing ourselves and others; what kind of pleasure moralizing was; how the forbidden forbids us the language to talk and think about what we are doing when we forbid; and why we might be wanting one God rather than many; and why we would be wanting any gods at all.

  Freud would redescribe ‘good’ and ‘evil’ – or Wilde’s language of the ‘beautiful’ and the ‘vulgar’, or ‘ugly’ – as, initially, the more blandly secular (and bodily) ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’, what we can take in and what we can’t swallow and want to spit out. And then, later in our development, he would describe us as internalizing our parents’ versions of good and evil, the ‘superego’ being Freud’s new word for the part of ourselves that forbids us what we most want and mustn’t have (the superego guarding us against and punishing us for the incestuous desires of the Oedipus complex). He would see us as riddled with severe, unduly punitive and forbidding internal authorities that we use to obscure ourselves, to hide and even attack the versions of ourselves that may matter most to us. For Freud, any moral clarity we have is a temporary suppression of the complexity of our desires. Morality, as Wilde and Nietzsche would also say, was a servile oversimplification of ourselves in the service of self-protection. Freud’s psychoanalysis would be an attempt to work out an alternative to this protection racket. And for Freud, as for Wilde and Nietzsche, amusement was somehow the key. Certain kinds of pleasure, usually previously forbidden, had to be recycled. And certain things needed to be forgotten so that certain other things could be remembered instead.

  So we should note that of Freud’s two references to Wilde in his work one of them links Nietzsche and Wilde together. In, appropriately enough, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), Freud referred to a patient that his colleague Sándor Ferenczi had told him about: ‘A lady,’ he wrote, ‘who had heard something about psychoanalysis, could not recall the name of the psychiatrist Jung. The following names came to her mind instead’, among them Wilde and Nietzsche. Freud continued:

  As a common characterization of Wilde and Nietzsche she named ‘insanity’. Then she said chaffingly: ‘You Freudians will go on looking for the causes of insanity until you are insane yourselves.’ Then: ‘I can’t bear Wilde and Nietzsche. I don’t understand them. I hear they were both homosexuals. Wilde had dealings with young people.’

  Freud reports this – and it is, of course, of interest that he wants Nietzsche and Wilde named in his text, and linked in this way – in a section of his book about what he calls ‘the forgetting of names’ and the ‘motives’ for such forgettings. I want to suggest that Wilde, Nietzsche and Freud himself were all, in their different ways, encouraging the forgetting of certain names and the wish to replace these forgotten names with other names (‘goodness’ replaced by ‘beauty’, ‘duty’ replaced by ‘delight’, ‘punishment’ by ‘sexual pleasure’, and so on). And, unsurprisingly, as Freud unconsciously suggests, this was considered, even by them, as somehow disreputable and disturbing (insane, homosexual, paedophiliac). As the patient says, looking for the causes of insanity could make you insane. This was what Wilde called the ‘strange influence’ of words. You forget one word and you come up with another. One word leads to another. You forget a name (Jung) and the next thing you know you are talking about paedophilia. The patient got from Jung to the young via Wilde and Nietzsche. The forgetting of names and what they might be replaced by – what the forgetting might lead you into – was clearly dangerous. When you lose one intention you always find some more. Forgetting, Freud would suggest, was a way forward. Only by forgetting a name can you come up with another one.

  VI

  When Nietzsche wanted to describe the day the world changed in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he invented the day of an ultimate forgetting, the day when God forgot Himself. In the history of the forgetting of names this was one day, Nietzsche believed, that should stand out. Indeed, on the day that God, the one Judeo-Christian God, forgot Himself, all the other gods died – of laughter. This, at least, is Nietzsche’s fable of the end of the old religions, and perhaps, Nietzsche hopes, the death of religions altogether and their vocabulary of what he calls ‘life-hatred’, ‘world-hatred’, ‘world-slander’. In this book that is, in the words of philosopher Robert Pippin in his Introductions to Nietzsche, ‘both a prophetic book and a kind of send-up of a prophetic book’ that both presents Zarathustra as ‘a teacher and [parodies] his attempt to play that role’ – that is to say, not unlike many of Wilde’s fictions – we have to be as attentive to tone as to content. The sounds of words and voices make their own kind of sense; and tone can be at odds with intended meanings (another meaning of Wilde’s ‘strange influence’ of language, and one that Freud endorses). ‘For with the old Gods things came to an end long ago,’ Nietzsche wrote in the section entitled ‘On Apostates’:

  – and verily, they had a good and joyful Gods’ end!

  Theirs was no mere ‘twilight’ death – that is a lie! Rather: one day they – laughed themselves to death!

  This happened when the most godless words issued from a God himself – the words: ‘There is one God! Thou shalt have no other God before me!’ –

  – an old wrath-beard of a God, most jealous, forgot himself thus: –

  And thereupon all the Gods laughed and rocked on their chairs and shouted: ‘Is just this not Godliness, that there are Gods, but no God?’

  He that hath ears let him hear.

  In Exodus 20:3–5, God introduces the Ten Commandments by saying, ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me … For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God.’ This is what makes them the commandments that they are supposed to be; not guidelines, or suggestions, or talking points, but a list of unarguably forbidden things. This is the canonical formulation of the idea of living for others prescribed by what we might call our most significant other. In the Ten Commandments it is made explicit both what and who we are living for. It is the idea of there being one law that is clearly anathema, so to speak, to Nietzsche and his pagan gods. But the idea of the only God as a jealous god is itself something of a giveaway; as though the joke was on God without His realizing it. If God was really omniscient and omnipotent He would have nothing to be jealous about, so the qualification seems unnecessary. Jealousy, one could say, is the real acknowledgement that there are other gods; and that if there are other gods one may not be the God that one thought one was.

  The ‘Gods’ end’ was not a ‘mere “twilight” death’, as in Wagner’s Ring Cycle – Wagner having been one of the young Nietzsche’s gods, but now dead to him as an idol – it was nothing so serious, so portentous. Indeed, it was a laughing matter. God forgot Himself by laying down the law – the law of His own unique sovereignty that invalidates all other authority. By misnaming Himself He had misnamed everyone else as well. It was, at least in Wilde’s terms, the ultimate selfishness of needing everyone to agree with you.

  For the pagan gods, godliness was by definition polytheism; a conflict and collaboration between essentially hedonistic deities (like Wilde, and in a sense Freud, Nietzsche took his moral and aesthetic compass from the ancient Greeks – though each of them, of course, had a different ancient Greece). So when the Judeo-Christian God declares His unique sovereignty, the other gods, the earlier gods, can only burst out laughing at the absurdity of His claim, its self-importance, its arrogance, its tyrannical cruelty, its patent and ridiculous untruth. As Blake was to write in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in words that Nietzsche and Wilde would clearly have endorsed, ‘one law for the lion and ox is oppression’. Nietzsche’s fable includes, of course, a nice homey picture of the gods rocking on t
heir chairs, as if to say: those pagan gods were much more like us; whereas this God of the old and new tablets is a monster! He’d never burst out laughing and rock on His chair! Why, though, would this pronouncement finish off all the gods, albeit with amusement? And why does Nietzsche suggest that God ‘forgot’ Himself in making this pronouncement? What would He have said if He had remembered Himself?