Special Issue of GLQ Feature On Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

The 1001 Seances
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 17, Number 4, 2011, pp.
457-481 (Article)
Published by Duke University Press
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/450784
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THE 1001 SEANCES
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
James Merrill’s long poem, The Book of Ephraim, is

The Book of a Thousand and One Evenings Spent
With David Jackson at the Ouija Board
In touch with Ephraim Our Familiar Spirit.1
The poem sounds autobiographical in Merrill’s characteristic way, and while

he may express some irresoluteness or, he says, “nonchalance,” about “who or
what we took Ephraim to be” (75), the reader is not invited to be skeptical about
the facts of those evenings “in touch.” For everything that sounds unpromising
about a long, credulous poem about a Ouija-board spirit, though, “The Book of
Ephraim” comes up with astonishing mitigations. The poem makes a focus for
just those kinds of play that one would have thought the afterworld would most
blankly repel.
After all, the reason one is obliged to find messages from the dead “unin-
teresting” is their too transparently responding to what one is interested in. What
seems tedious is what comes closest to important wishes: the indissoluble “I,” the
stream of disinterested and contextless revelation, the toneless authoritative voice,
the unintermitted presence of those one had thought absent. Indeed, the tedium is
a threatening presence in Merrill’s poem. On the sight of Ephraim’s first message
at the Ouija board,
The cup twitched in its sleep. “Is someone there?”

We whispered, fingers light on Willowware,
When the thing moved. Our breathing stopped. The cup,
Glazed zombie of itself, was on the prowl
Moving, but dully, incoherently,
Possessed, as we should soon enough be told,
By one or another of the myriads
GLQ 17:4
DOI 10.1215/10642684-1302316
© 2011 by Duke University Press
458 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES
Who hardly understand, through the compulsive

Reliving of their deaths, that they have died
— By fire in this case, when a warehouse burned.
HELLP O SAV ME scrawled the cup
As on the very wall flame rippled up,

Hypnotic wave on wave, a lullaby
Of awfulness. I slumped. (50)
The stupor that hovers over Merrill, Jackson, cup, spirit at some moments is
clearly the blind side of, or the recoil from, too insistent a fixation on the continu-
ity between this life and the next: panic, stuttering, withdrawal are the results.
But then
D: One more try.

Was anybody there? As when a pike
Strikes, and the line singing writes in lakeflesh
Highstrung runes, and reel spins and mind reels
YES a new and urgent power YES
Seized the cup. (50)
This is any writer’s wish, that the stultified fishing for souls should turn into a line
that writes.
That Ephraim’s language is specifically written, or even more specifically,
spelled out,
letter upon
Letter taken down blind by my free hand — (51)
lends the spirit an oblique presence. The cup
swerved, clung, hesitated,

Darted off. (50)
At the same time, attention necessarily fixes on the array of letters, what Ephraim
calls in a related poem
THIS TOPSYTURVY WILLOWWARE
IGLOO WALTZING WITH THE ALPHABET (42)

THE 1001 SEANCES 459
Ephraim is the voice a poet wants because he is not a voice. Most immediately he
hasn’t the presence even of an inscription. He is the purely ostentive, pure point-
ing in the absence of either a pointing subject (the cup stands in) or a pointed-at
object (the alphabet stands in). He leaves the surface unmarked. Merrill turns into
the wax tablet, the memory, for this mystic writing pad (to use Freud’s image). In
recording the itinerary of the cup, he provides spacing for Ephraim’s temporal-
izing not only by writing the letters in the pointed-at order but also by introducing
spaces between groups of letters, making words. This is an imperfect process, for
Too much went whizzing past. We were too nice

To pause, divide the alphabetical
Gibberish into words and sentences.
Yet even the most fragmentary message —
Twice as entertaining, twice as wise
As either of its mediums — enthralled them. (51)
The assignment of parts in this drama of writing is not fixed, either; later in the
poem, the traveling mediums themselves briefly become willowware, when
A mapmaker (attendant since Jaipur)

Says that from San Francisco our path traces
The Arabic for GREAT WONDER (83)
What Merrill produces for Ephraim is the small capitals that spangle the
printed poem and toward which the reader learns to speed an eye with some of the
mediums’ eager gratitude. (The poem makes the small caps seem so distinctive
that the mediumistic character of GREAT WONDER, above, seems to go without say-
ing.) The small caps are often funnier than the rest of the poem, and even when
they are not, the froth of apposition, explanation, finishing of sentences and rhymes
that eddies between the two intercalated type cases is funny and affecting.
TAKE our teacher told us

FROM SENSUAL PLEASURE ONLY WHAT WILL NOT
DURING IT BE EVEN PARTLY SPOILED
BY FEAR OF LOSING TOO MUCH This was the tone

We trusted most, a smiling Hellenistic
Lightness from beyond the grave. Each shaft
Feathered by head-turning flattery:
LONG B4 THE FORTUNATE CONJUNCTION
(David’s and mine) ALLOWED ME TO GET THRU

MAY I SAY WEVE HAD OUR EYES ON U
— On our kind hearts, good sense, imagination,

Talents! Some had BORNE FRUIT Others bore
Comparison with those the Emperor
Recruited, fine young fellows from five races
To serve as orgy-fodder in CAPRICES (59)
The pointing to the letter is accomplished in several ways: by the alphabet-

ical division of the parts of the poem; by Ephraim’s economies (B4 , U); and some-
times, as later, by his unexpected precisions ( BUT AT 6ES / & 7S WHAT DO WE POOR
SPIRITS KNOW [100]). Even more, though, it is accomplished by the intermittence of
the two type cases imposed on a (roughly) continuous piece of grammar and versi-
fication. The effect is not steadily reducible to that of either novelistic dialogue or
the mock-scholarly weaving-in of authoritative quotations, though it can sound at
times like either. “Ephraim” in the poem is the name of a typographic differential,
shared with the poem’s other ghosts, more indeterminate than inclusion between
quotation marks: both less conventional in import and more permeable to the con-
tagion of surrounding tones and grammars.
The way Merrill treats Ephraim’s language, making it formally distinct
but not entirely self-contained, spacing fragments of it here and there throughout
the poem, is like the device he hits on for “including” sustained narrative in the
poem. Ephraim is one absent presence. The other is a lost novel by Merrill — its
characters, like those of “The Book of Ephraim” and Merrill’s earlier novel The
Seraglio, based on the people around Merrill, its subject the influence on those
characters of a Ouija-board spirit. In this enterprise, Merrill
Saw my way
To a plot, or as much of one as still allowed
For surprise and pleasure in its working-out.
Knew my setting; and had, from the start, a theme
Whose steady light shone back, it seemed, from every
Least detail exposed to it. (47)
The novel is described as if it were an early version of the poem, covering the same
ground but in a less satisfying way. The relation between the two versions is not
exactly evolutionary, though, because the novel is also literally lost, in a taxi. The
novel has not been refined into a poem, or dissolved into a poem, or, like a canvas,
retouched bit by bit until it is quite transformed. Two other things have happened
instead. The novel has been removed entirely and the poem put in its place. And
within the poem, the lost novel has recurred, this time in reported fragments.
The lost novel, though Merrill describes it as an attempt to “do” the same
“subject matter” as the poem, really sounds very different from the poem (47).
There does not seem to be an exact one-to-one relation between the two sets of
characters. The characters’ names are different, so that one knows whether one
is reading about people in the poem or characters in the novel. One knows fur-
ther because Merrill usually accentuates his transitions (“Back to the novel for a
bit . . . ” [78]), and because there is no first person in the novel. Novelistic incident
and poetic incident intertwine in much the way Ephraim’s language and Merrill’s
language intertwine: they solicit, evoke, complement, and most of all interrupt
one another. Their formal distinctness is underlined by the same gesture as their
appositeness: that is to say, undermined as soon as underlined.
The most striking difference between the lost novel and the poem is that
the novel had a real plot, something beyond the periodic manifestations of Ephraim
(here alias Eros). The plot seems to have involved three generations of one family,
certain friendships and intertwining adulteries, and the fate of a river and water-
fall in the southwestern landscape whose flow is to be interrupted by the building
of a power dam. The plot of the novel even leads to a kind of climax, when Leo,
recently out of the army, penetrates to
— at last, the waterfall.

(It’s deep in Indian land. Some earlier chapter
Can have Sergei drawing a map for Leo.)
Stepping through it drenched, he finds himself
On the far side of reflection, a deep shelf
Hidden from the nakedest of eyes.
...........................
In fact (let this be where the orgies led)
Leo in tears is kneeling by the bones
He somehow knew would be there. Human ones.
A seance can have been devoted to
That young Pueblo, dead these hundred years
Whose spirit SEEKS REPOSE (One of the others
Has killed him in a previous life? Yes.)
Whose features Leo now hallucinates:
Smooth skin, mouth gentle, eyes expressionless —

The “spy” his outfit caught, one bamboo-slender
Child ringed round by twenty weary men —
Expressionless even when Leo — even when —
Sleep overtakes him clasping what he loathes

And loves, the dead self dressed in his own clothes. (93)
What the “novel” has that the rest of the poem lacks is not the direct con-
frontation with a reincarnated being (since there is such a confrontation, later in the
poem) but the sadomasochistic pointedness of the confrontation. I take the supposed
spy to have been in Leo’s immediate past, perhaps in Vietnam, but the poem blurs
him with the young Pueblo, Leo with the “one of the others” who had killed him.
So the prurient awe at the spy’s impassivity, the prurient gasp with which the line
preterites what happened to him, oddly become the point of the Pueblo’s story. What
permits such a slippage? One answer would be the doctrine of transmigration of
souls: the spy had been the Pueblo. That isn’t said, though, and the reader who tries
to infer it does so in order to rationalize an impetus that is already there in the lines,
and already describable as both masturbatory and novelistic.
That it has been masturbatory becomes especially clear in the sequel, the
instant surrender to sleep. The “dead self,” loathed and loved, must be the phal-
lus. One wants, this time, to identify Leo’s “dead self” with the bones of the young
Pueblo, even though there is no other suggestion that Leo is his reincarnation,
and even though there would still be no reason for his bones to be described as
dressed in Leo’s own clothes. To take transmigration as the subject of a narrative
is, we should be noticing, to invite a slow disintegration of conventions of iden-
tity. The masturbatory impulse speeds that disintegration by making the body at
once subject and object, clasping and clasped, at once the weary tormentors and
the bamboo-slender child, at once the expressive source and the expressionless
destination of loathing and love. It also seems to limit that disintegration, though,
allowing it to take place only within the charged polarity of subject and object.
The “one of the others” who really is a reincarnation thus proves irrelevant to the
thrust of these lines, just because his identity is, in that phrase, too readily plu-
ralized. Spy and Pueblo are identical only in being objects; Leo is divorced from
himself, or identified with the Pueblo, only as one or the other half of a sadomas-
ochistic totalization.
If I say that in Merrill’s writing the connection between sadomasochistic
totalization and “the novelistic” has been unusually thorough, I do not mean that
as a dismissal or even a good description of his two nonlost novels. Within novels,
as within poems, streams of plurality always animate landscapes of totalization.
But the geography of each novel is dominated by a moment that is all too much
like Leo’s moment under the waterfall, inflictive, phallic, and conspicuously unut-
terable: a horsewhipping in The (Diblos) Notebook and, in The Seraglio, a literal
castration. Let me anatomize these two moments briefly in order to clarify what I
take to be the structural issues of the verse.
The (Diblos) Notebook is a novel that purports to be the working journal
of a man who is writing a semiautobiographical novel, and its formal focus is, as
the title suggests, the device of including, while bracketing or crossing out, words
that the novelist has rejected. The action of both outer and inner novels converges
on the return of the novelist’s half-brother Orson (Orestes in the inner novel) to
Diblos, the Greek island where the novelist now is, and where the stinging end of
a volatile erotic situation awaits Orson. Orson’s relation to the novelist is totemic or
fetishistic, and obsessing. A few pages before the climax,
A terrible guilty excitement slowly filled me. I knew that the Enfant had
spoken the truth, & that I’d done nothing to prevent what was going to
happen. A brutal, horrible action . . . . How could I have prevented it? In
countless ways . . . . By writing O., even, and trying to warn him, since I
must have known in my heart that he would come to Diblos sooner or later.
By not keeping this notebook! Out of myself, my inertness, as well as a few
things Orson had given me (nail-parings, his secret name, a drop of his
blood) it came over me that I had constructed a magic doll called Orestes,
which had drawn him here. I had wanted Awake & asleep, I had dreamed
of his punishment.2
“A magic doll” describes Orestes’s relation to Orson, that is to say, the inner nov-
el’s relation to the outer novel. But it also renders both Orestes and Orson (as)
objects of the novelist, of his desire or (more permissibly) dream of punishment.
“Out of myself” suggests, like Leo’s “dead self dressed in his own clothes,” that
it is only oneself or one’s parts that one can fully stamp with alienness, make a
fetish of. (It is for this reason that an insistence on the subject-object relation can
be described as totalization.) This magic doll is thus the dumb center of the novel.
It is Orestes, Orson, “this notebook,” “my inertness,” all right here, all about to
be punished.
And everything points to the punishment as the center of the center. Para-
graphs leading up to it begin,
His expectancy was easier than my own to understand.

A deep breath, one might have said, had been indrawn by somebody
whose attention was at the same instant so caught & held by 1000 details
of the scene . . . that he, the breather, simply kept forgetting to exhale.
.........................................................
The scene kept brightening & darkening around me.3
Finally the expectancy is answered.
Orestes
Orson appeared at the far end of the waterfront . . . .
His approach was, or seemed, slow . . . .
He had been whipped He had evidently Byron had
We could now see the red weal on Orson’s face . . . .4
The effect of the horizontal stroke on the climactic writerly stutter of the next-to-
last line is like the effect of his stripe on Orson, or of castration on the phallus.
In extinguishing, it distinguishes. It marks, unifies, asserts. Inner and outer nov-
els converge on an excised sentence, as Orson’s vagrant life finds its center in a
wound. “Hadn’t he become his destination?”5 And later, “O. had found a currency
in which to pay the full price for what he believed. His view of things, his ‘tragic’
view, would never be wholly an illusion, once having interlocked so perfectly with
his suffering.”6
As with Leo’s epiphany, the specifically preorgasmic direction of these
convergences becomes fully visible only retrospectively, from the tired and decon-
centrated vantage of the achieved orgasm. The narrator here arrives at his moment
through a mental replay:
He raised
In my head he raised his beautiful clenched hand. The riding-crop
descended, once, twice, again, upon my
once, twice, again, inscribed its madder penstroke upon my brother’s
face, at the tempo of a slowly pounding tempo of a giant’s drugged pulse
..........................................................
..........................................................
Today I tend, in my better moments, toward chagrin & scruple. That
orgy must never be repeated! – as with a moistened cloth I dab primly at
my mind, where there are telltale stains.7
In The Seraglio, an earlier novel, the inflictive, phallic, unutterable moment

comes earlier, is more fully central, less conclusive. It occurs when the protagonist
castrates himself. Characteristically, it is an ostentatious reticence that tells us
what has happened, more than anything the characters manage to say. The mutila-
tion takes place in the bathtub, amid the set of details (razor, mirror) that usually
goes with a suicide attempt, and even the phrases that pass retrospectively for
denials of that interpretation seem, at first reading, only to complicate and thus
deepen it. “Before dipping a foot in the water he unlocked the door — it had never
been his wish to die — and looked about one last time.”8 Francis performs the
act (“something began easily to separate, then to resist, tougher than a thong of
leather”) and loses consciousness without the ambiguity being revealed, since to
reveal it would, as Roland Barthes points out about another story of castration, be
to resolve it.9 Then a space, and a new chapter: Francis’s mother speeding toward
the hospital on a train, under the impression that he has attempted suicide. In the
succeeding pages it is the prodigious energy that she seems to have to devote to
maintaining that impression that makes the reader inescapably conscious of some-
thing else at stake. The moment that tries her willed obtuseness most wrenchingly,
the moment when the reader’s range of speculations finally diverges from hers
altogether, plays interestingly, proleptically on that distinguishing slash on Orson’s
cheek. Orson’s wound, like his half-brother’s crossing out of words, had been a
sign of negation that nevertheless totalized. It is by something like this that Fran-
cis’s mother, whom “the idea of cutting had always appalled,” has a dreadful numb
expectation of finding her son disfigured: scars “at his wrists no doubt where cuffs
might easily slip back to reveal them, perhaps even at his throat.”10 The answer
of “castration” is, however, returned not by a scar but by just the intactness of
these surfaces.
Back at Francis’s bedside, Vinnie stared and stared at his bare throat, his
smooth wrists. Mercifully, the wound wouldn’t be visible, wherever it was.
Her gaze shifted. She froze. He had turned towards her a face whose open
eyes, though unseeing, expressed wonder and joy. It came over Vinnie that
he knew that nothing short of realizing what he had done could have pro-
duced the look on Francis’s face.11
The space following this sentence divides the novel’s first half from its second.
Such is the potency of the invisible tokens of the unutterable.
If I seem to be coming down hard on these phallic moments, it is only partly
because of a queasiness in writing about intelligent pornography. A polemical nar-
rowing of attention on my part is being met by a less simple-minded narrowing on

the author’s part. My account does these novels violence, not by “reading into” the
summarized moments more sexual polarization than is really there but by cutting
the moments off from the flow of energy within each novel that supports and spends
them. My account is a less serious violation of The (Diblos) Notebook because that
is the more pointed novel. It is almost adequately epitomized by the sadomasoch-
istic event that almost ends it. What resistance there is appears in a couple of hur-
ried sentences (“I saw at least how little any of it had been my doing”) and in some
undercutting knowingness in the tone, but the resistance weighs little against so
climactic a structure and so rapid a conclusion.12 The structural effect of the real
castration in The Seraglio is much more interesting. Far from enforcing, as one
might have expected, an erotically charged focus on the polarized space between
subject and object, possession and loss, concealment and display, the self and the
narcissized other, his accomplished castration seems instead to permit Francis
finally to dissolve into his book. This is true both tonally and structurally. The first
half of the novel is told preponderantly from Francis’s point of view, in a third per-
son that, I think, suffers from having a first person playing anxious hide-and-seek
behind it. What makes the writing sound gauche or facile or parodically Jamesian
is, I take it, a deflected self-contempt or at least a contemned self-consciousness.
And castration, oddly, cures the symptom decisively: all at once Francis is no
longer the novel’s central consciousness. In the second half he is one among many
characters on whom the narrative point of view briefly devolves, privileged perhaps
in having the last scene for his own, but on the whole liberated from what had been
oppressive in his author’s investment in him. He is stout, precious, avaricious, and
invulnerable, far from being dangerously engaging. One of the ways Merrill has
prepared us for the unexpectedly pluralizing effect of this castration on the novel
is thematic, in an early scene (taking off from The Golden Bowl) where Francis in
an Italian antique shop has shown to him “carelessly thrown together, . . . perhaps
a hundred phalluses, of clay, of marble, some primitive — the old man chose one
of these and held it high, croaking, ‘Etruscan! Votive’ — others (‘Roman! Artistic’)
monumental and detailed, evidently chipped from sculpture under whichever Pope
had been responsible for fig-leaves.”13 Another strategy for dissolving the castra-
tive fixation is, I think, the insistent parallel between Francis’s castration and his
previous, unsuccessful efforts to rid himself of his huge patrimony. To cut oneself
off from one’s trust funds would have been, after all, to succeed in making an
amputation that was at the same time a dispersal. Clearly, then, sadomasochistic,
phallic-castrative, or subject-object totalization is not the whole of what happens
in novels, not even in these two novels. But the unique prominence given to these
glamorously totalizing moments in the novels seems to permit at least a provisional

or dialectical identification of such totalizations with “the novelistic.”14 What hap-
pens to “the novelistic,” to the novel, when it is dismembered inside a poem?
And here was I, or what was left of me.

Feared and rejoiced in, chafed against, held cheap,
A strangeness that was us, and was not, had
All the same allowed for its description,
And so brought at least me these spells of odd,
Self-effacing balance . . . .
Young chameleon, I used to
Ask how on earth one got sufficiently
Imbued with otherness. And now I see. (133)
The next-to-last section of “The Book of Ephraim” ends with these words.
“Feared and rejoiced in, chafed against, held cheap” is a beautiful brief way to
describe oneself, especially in a writer who has spent so much energy on elaborat-
ing repeated, self-hating versions of his family and his position in it. The phrases
are able to be arrived at not as a description of the I, or even of what is left of it, but
of something almost else, “a strangeness that was us, and was not.” Is the strange-
ness like the otherness with which one needs, in those last lines, to become suffi-
ciently imbued? I think so, and yet if that is true, this otherness must be somehow
different from the phallic otherness that had dominated the novels, that “magic
doll” or dead self dressed in one’s own clothes on which one had vented one’s
inflictions. This otherness imbues — suffuses, saturates, dyes — rather than either
making or receiving the “madder penstroke” of punishment, deletion, amputation.
Thus it opens upon a different thematic range, one having to do not with separable
parts of the body but with the behaviors of liquids, with currents, obstruction,
diffusion, and circulation. This thematic range is here associated with — though
it is not the same as — the “strangeness that was us, and was not,” which I take,
in its context, as referring not to themes but to structures: to the poem, and also
to the emergence of a distinct language for Ephraim from the hands of Merrill
and Jackson.
The thematic array we are dealing with here is not the dialectical opposite
of the castratory themes any more than “The Book of Ephraim” is the dialecti-
cal opposite of the castratory and castrated lost novel, or of the language of the
absent precursor. The thematics of liquids does for the thematics of fixation what
the long poem does for the obsessive novel and for the intrusive ghostly verbiage.
It includes but does not synthesize it. It spaces, distributes, circulates it. The the-
matics of liquids is in itself differential, it is structured. This structure, which
echoes and refers to the structure of the poem, appears variously: not tied to any
single physical property of liquids but attachable to a variety of properties, it is
thus more discernibly a structure, a pointing toward the liminal.
To look at a few of the ways in which this thematic array differentiates
itself, I will center on the long poem but guardedly admit language from Merrill’s
other poems as well.15 A good place to start is with the shifting differentiation of
mirror and water. The mirror is the most obvious and, to most critics, the irresist-
ible emblem for Merrill’s poetry, for the verse’s high finish, its self-admiration, its
brilliance, its sometimes shallowness, its luxe. On the cover of Divine Comedies is
a wonderfully ornate oval, all “cross-hatched rondure,” framing, disconcertingly,
a silvered blank: a mirror, presumably the one Ephraim asks the mediums to prop
on a chair near the Ouija board.16
Erect and gleaming, silver-hearted guest,

We saw each other in it. He saw us.
(Any reflecting surface worked for him.
Noons, D and I might row to a sandbar
Far enough from town for swimming naked
Then pacing the glass treadmill hardly wet
That healed itself perpetually of us —
Unobserved, unheard we thought, until
The night he praised our bodies and our wit,
Our blushes in a twinkling overcome.) (50)
Here the mirror, though in a nicely oblique way, plays its usual part, and the
water does just the same. “Glass,” “hardly wet,” the water no more lets itself be
fragmented by the men inhabiting it than the mirror does. In perpetually healing,
recomposing itself, it preserves the schematic doubleness of reflection. We can
identify the reflective, doubling aspect of mirrors, and of water-as-mirror, with the
totemic doublings of what I have called novelistic moments, with their dummies
and dead selves. Certainly there are endearing mirrored moments:
Ephraim, who enjoys this flying trip

Round the world more than we do, sees us next
At the tailor’s in Kowloon:
MY DEARS I AM BEST SUITED WHEN U STRIP (80)
But notice how theatrically this mirror and what had been the innocent narcissism
of the naked men get taken up in the lost novel itself. In the passages leading up to
the climax of Leo behind the waterfall, his wife, Ellen, has been feeling that
she can neither reach nor exorcise

This Leo. Now he wants their baby born
As Eros’s new representative.
What is it when the person that you live
With, live for, no longer — ? She is torn
Between distaste and fright. Leo, or someone,
Has made a theatre of their bedroom — footlights,
Music, mirror, glistening jellies, nightly
Performances whose choreography
Eros dictates and, the next day, applauds.
Half of Ellen watches from the wings
Her spangled, spotlit twin before those packed
Houses of the dead, where love is act
Not sacrament; and struggles to dismiss
As figments of their common fancy this
Tyrannical ubiquitous voyeur
Only to feel within her the child stir. (92)
Anything as uncanny as possession can take place only in a field of erotically

charged doubles. The creation of magic dolls of the self is not, though, the only
thing mirrors can do in Merrill. Less predictably, but repeatedly, the mirrors
themselves dissolve, and dissolve the fixation on doubleness that the solid surface
had represented. At the end of a glum, stale passage, one such fixed-on double:
But that’s life too. A death’s-head to be faced.

No, no! Set in our ways
As in a garden’s, glittered
A whole small globe — our life, our life, our life:
Rinsed with mercury
Throughout to this bespattered
Fruit of reflection, rife
With Art Nouveau distortion

(Each other, clouds and trees).
What made a mirror flout its flat convention? (85 – 86)
So far this is still a reflecting mirror, though one that performs some fruitful dis-
placements and deflections. The dissolution that sounded close in “rinsed” comes
even closer, though.
And what was the sensation

When stars alone like bees
Crawled numbly over it?
And why did all the birds eye it with caution?
It did no harm, just brightly
Kept up appearances.
Not always. On occasion

Fatigue or disbelief
Mottled the silver lining.
Then, as it were, our life saw through that craze
Of its own creation
Into another life. (85 – 86)
What is seen through the dissolved mirror is something that hovers ambiguously
between doubleness and dissolution. Merrill sees Rufus Farmetton, a previous
incarnation of himself, but sees him at the moment when, dying, he gives him-
self up:
So, bit by bit, the puzzle’s put together,

Or else it’s disassembled, bit by bit. (87)
A more extended version of the dissolving mirror in an early poem, “Mirror,”

begins by identifying the mirror — which is the speaker in the poem — with dou-
bleness and totalization, as opposed to the window — the “you” — which is more
accommodating of plurality.
Across the parlor, you provide examples,

Wide open, sunny, of everything I am
Not. You embrace a whole world without once caring
To set it in order. That takes thought. (36)17
Slowly, through an influx of what may be negativity, the window seems to gain in
influence.
Late one sleepless

Midsummer night I strained to keep
Five tapers from your breathing. No, the widowed
Cousin said, Let them go out. I did.
The room brimmed with grey sound, all the instreaming
Muslin of your dream . . . (36 – 37)
The result, though, is not that the window’s attributes — streaming, dream — are
imposed on the mirror from outside, still less that the mirror is extinguished, but
that the mirror turns into them.
Since then, as if a fish

Had broken the perfect silver of my reflectiveness,
I have lapses. I suspect
Looks from behind, where nothing is, cool gazes
Through the blind flaws of my mind. As days,
As decades lengthen, the vision
Spreads and blackens. I do not know whose it is,
But I think it watches for my least silver
To blister, flake, float leaf by life, each milling-
Downward dumb conceit . . . . (37)
There is only one extended moment (111 – 15) in “The Book of Ephraim”
where confusions occur between the lost novel and the poem’s first-person surface,
and these happen in a complexly structured space between mirrors and waters.
Merrill is reflecting on the loss — attributed to Ephraim’s intervention — of the
novel, a version of his life with
Landscape and figures once removed, in glass

TWICE REMOVED THANKS TO MY COUP DE GRACE (110)
His thoughts settle on a character from the novel, Sergei; and he gives an unfol-
lowable account of his provenance: “scion and spit” of whomever the person was
who was portrayed as Japanese and in some other poem, presumably “The Sum-
mer People.”18 Does Sergei equal David Jackson? More deeply, or more shallowly,
Sergei seems to be “the figure in the mirror stealing looks” and carrying on with
“unrelenting fluency” a garbled, vagrant monologue of “current events no sooner
sped than din.” Although the person fixed in anxious interrogation of the mirror
had seemed to be Merrill —
Tell me, tell me, as I turn to you

What every moment does, has done, will do —
Questions one simply cannot ask in person (Divine Comedies, 112)
— it is Sergei who, after the mirror’s response, “steeled himself to move beyond its
range.” From the mirror’s vista where reflection and inversion go hand in hand and
“one wand hashes the other,” Sergei moves to
The waterfall that day. Chill tremblings floored

A space to catch one’s death in. (Divine Comedies, 114)
(Another poem in Divine Comedies is written in the voice of what seems to be this
same waterfall, and invites the same abandonment of mirrors and doublings:
Now you’ve seen through me, sang the cataract,

A fraying force, but unafraid,
Plunge through my bath of plus and minus both,
Acid and base,
The mind that mirrors and the hands that act.
Enter this innermost space
Its lean illuminations decompose.

...........................
Come live within me, said the waterfall. [14])
Difficult as it is, in these particular pages, to know what is happening

in the alluded-to novel, the salience of turning away from the mirror toward the
waterfall seems to me underlined by a gesture of Merrill’s that frames the mirror-
to-waterfall gesture. As he begins to address Sergei on page 112, Merrill seems to
be not only investing himself in the fictional character but investing both of them
in a particular insentient figure in his surroundings, a red geranium.
Pallid root-threads. A blue sky inverted

In waterglass. The Greek geranium
Snapped off last week unthinkingly lives on.
Forgets that, short of never to be born,
Best is an early, painless death. Its ruffled
Leaf is cool, and smells of rained-on tin.
................................
Freshening its water, I feel faint

Waves of recognition, my red flower
Not yet in the dread phrase cut-and-dried. (112)
In those last lines is audible the fear that goes with investing oneself in an object,
a double: the fear of castration. At the end of the poem’s next section, after the mir-
ror’s answer, after certain obscure occurrences at the waterfall and “upstream,”
after a perfunctory account of how the novel was to end (“Leo is healed. His little
boy is born.”), the fear of castration is also answered, if not reassured.
From my hatband
Taking the wraith of withered pink — Sergei —
I crumple it unthinking. When the urge
Comes to make water, a thin brass-hot stream
Sails out into the updraft, spattering
One impotent old tree that shakes its claws.
The droplets atomize, evaporate
To dazzlement a blankness overdusts
Pale blue, then paler blue. It stops at nothing. (Divine Comedies, 115)
Instead of the red flower gathering to itself, by its root-threads, the reflected,
inverted blue sky, here is that other flower (its brass-hot stream answering the
cool rained-on tin) atomizing back into the real, blue because surfaceless, sky.
The geranium itself similarly disintegrates: no longer simply a fetishistic double
for Sergei, or for the poet’s possession of Sergei, it is sent by the poet as a kind of
advance guard into dissolution.
As I suggested earlier, and as that flow of urine also suggests, the dissolu-
tion of a solid mirrory surface is not the only threshold moment that can structure
or differentiate the imagery of liquids. The liquid can also be channeled through
the solid, or the solid obstruct the liquid: differentials that do not so directly
engage the problems of reflected doubles or fictive selves, but find other ways of
articulating the poem’s play of fix and flow. Liquids moving through solids, the
flow of urine through the unamputated penis, the circulation of the blood, are
ways of describing the relation between parts and whole. Or rather, they both point
to and mitigate the inadequacy of describing a whole in terms of its parts. What
Merrill liked about the lost novel, and tries to preserve, is a scene with one of his
characters
lost among arroyos —

Each the abraded, vast, baked-rose detail
Of a primeval circulatory system —
So as to measure by triangulation
Heights up there beyond the height of self,
Or so that (when the fall rains fell) would go
Flashing through me a perfected flow . . . . (110)
Perhaps it is only the too-simple location of the “me” here, its readiness to see
itself mirrored in the dry conduit as opposed to the sudden current, that leaves this
passage so distinctly part of the novel, “once removed, in glass.”
The interface between the solid channel and the liquid that flows through
it (in one nice phrase, “The arteries of Ephraim’s influence” [110]) may describe
the poem or even, as in “McCane’s Falls,” speak it:
The creek, a crystal tendon strained,
Tossed on its couch, no longer freely associating

Hawk with trout, or cloud with pebble white as cloud.
Its mouth worked. The history began. (11)
At the end of the unwritten novel,
Now along crevices inch rivulets

At every turning balked. (115)
Rivers diverted from their beds, one in Giorgione’s La Tempesta, one in the lost
novel, are described as somehow seminal for the long poem, though the signifi-
cance of the first of these is murky to me, and the significance of the second is
murky even to Merrill — “What did I once think those two would feel?” (128).
Along with the resonance of liquids running through solids, though, and no less
explicitly a figure for the progress of the poem, is the obstruction of liquids by sol-
ids in their path. I am not sure how thoroughly the language of electrical current
and resistance is apposite here, but it seems close enough to be useful:
What did I once think those two would feel?

What I think I feel now, by its own nature
Remains beyond my power to say outright,
Short of grasping the naked current where it
Flows through field and book, dog howling, the firelit

Glances, the caresses, whatever draws us
To, and insulates us from, the absolute — (128)
This is a good example, not only because it shows the poet’s explicit effort to stop
the flow of the poem for an instant in order to give an account of it, but because it
is so often at just these instants that Merrill’s verse sounds best: the instants when
some resistance sends him back over the ground he has just covered, arresting
the fluency of which he is rightly a little suspicious. It is as Merrill feels on the
night when Jackson lets himself be hypnotized by him, and apparently possessed
by Ephraim:
Caught up in his strong

Flow of compulsion, mine was to resist.
The more thrilled through, the less I went along,
A river stone, blind, clenched against whatever
Was happening that once. (71)
One of the ways in which the resistance animates the current is in the
obstacles to communication between the immortals and the poem’s human char-
acters. Intervention in the world by immortals is forbidden, and when the group is
found to have MEDDLED, the POWERS ARE FURIOUS.
Ephraim they’ve brought

Before a kind of court
And thrown the book (the good book? YES) at him.
We now scare him with flippancies.

DO U WANT TO LOSE ME WELL U COULD
AGENTS CAN BREAK OUR CODE
TO SMITHEREENS! How Kafka! PLEASE O PLEASE
Whereupon the cup went dead,

And since then — no response, hard as we’ve tried . . . . (73)
Later in the poem the mediums’ cup gets “Shanghaied” by a stern, authoritative
spirit with the message, MYND YOUR WEORK SIX MOONES REMAIN after which, with
Ephraim, “things were not the same” (117 – 18). An even greater obstacle is, unex-
pectedly and beautifully, the feelings toward each other of the spirit and the medi-
ums, the strength of the spirit’s attraction toward the mediums, the fitfulness of
their interest in him. There are moments when the cup
moved awkwardly, as after

An illness or estrangement. (99)
or, in the middle of an argument,
goes inert.
Ephraim, are you still there? Angry? Hurt?
Long pause. YR SPIRIT HAS BEEN CAUGHT REDHANDED

IT IS HIS OCCUPATIONAL FAIBLESSE
TO ENTER & POSSESS REPEAT POSSESS
L OBJET AIME Who, me? WELL I HAD PLANNED IT . . . . (41)
It is against this continual threat and obstruction that Ephraim’s language

feels its urgency: its urgency being at the same time the main threat and obstruc-
tion. In his section of “Quotations” Merrill has Ephraim, in his one sustained
burst of language, explain,
THE PATRON IS OFTEN DUMB WITH APPREHENSION FOR IT IS EXTRAORDINARY WHAT
WE DO U COMMUNICATE THRU MY IMPARTIAL FIRE U MATERIALIZE WITHIN MY
SIGHT AS FIGURES IN THE FIRE & A PATRON CALLED UP KNOWING NO SUCH DIRECT
METHOD IS NERVOUS LEST HE EXPOSE TOO MUCH OUR TALK IS TO HIM BLINDING
FOR OFTEN HE COMES TO OUR FIRE & HIS REPRESENTATIVE SITS LOOMING UP THE
HOPE & DESPAIR THE MEMORY & THE PAIN O MY DEARS WE ARE OFTEN WEAKER
THAN OUR REPRESENTATIVES IT IS A SILENT LOVE WE ARE IN A SYSTEM OF SUCH
SILENT BUT URGENT MOTIVES U & I WITH OUR QUICK FIRELIT MESSAGES STEAL-
ING THE GAME ARE SMUGGLERS & SO IN A SENSE UNLAWFUL THE DEAD ARE MOST
CONSERVATIVE THEY COME HERE AS SLAVES TO A NEW HOUSE TERRIFIED OF BEING
SOLD BACK TO LIFE (103)
This language is remarkable for its weight and repetitiousness. If any of the other
poets floating around the rest of the poem is being invoked here, and especially
in the next extract, it must be Frost. Think of some of the lines of “West-Running
Brook,” of
The universal cataract of death

That spends to nothingness — and unresisted,
Save by some strange resistance in itself,

Not just a swerving, but a throwing back,
As if regret were in it and were sacred.
...............................
It is this backward motion toward the source,
Against the stream, that most we see ourselves in,
The tribute of the current to the source.19
Like Ephraim’s prose, this verse is more than ordinarily repetitious in texture: it is
repetitious as if resisting being carried away by its own current. In the Frost poem it
is clear that language — for example, the naming of the fleeting brook, the naming
of the fleeting day, the repetition of words — is the most signal tribute of the cur-
rent to the source. The endangered medium in which Ephraim speaks is similarly
a throwing back, a running counter to itself of the cataract of death. “Cataract of
death” is no longer exactly the phrase for it, though, since it would, at its most fear-
ful, sweep the dead once again into life. It is simply the cataract, the impetus, that
against which Ephraim’s smuggled sentences come into being. More: he loves it.
& NOW ABOUT DEVOTION IT IS I AM FORCED TO BELIEVE THE MAIN IMPETUS
DEVOTION TO EACH OTHER TO WORK TO REPRODUCTION TO AN IDEAL .... & AT

LAST DEVOTION WITH THE COMBINED FORCES OF FALLING & WEARING WATER PRE-
PARES A HIGHER MORE FINISHED WORLD OR HEAVEN THESE DEVOTIONAL POWERS
ARE AS A FALL OF WATERS PUSHED FROM BEHIND OVER THE CLIFF OF EVEN MY
EXPERIENCE A FLOOD IS BUILDING UP EARTH HAS ALREADY SEEN THE RETURN
OF PERFECTED SOULS FROM [LEVEL] 9 AMENHOTEP KAFKA DANTES BEATRICE 1 OR 2
PER CENTURY FOR NOTHING LIVE IS MOTIONLESS HERE OUR STATE IS EXCITING
AS WE MOVE WITH THE CURRENT & DEVOTION BECOMES AN ELEMENT OF ITS OWN
FORCE O MY I AM TOO EXCITED SO FEW UP HERE WISH TO THINK THEIR EYES
ARE TURNED HAPPILY UP AS THEY FLOAT TOWARD THE CLIFF I WANT TO DO MORE
THAN RIDE & WEAR & WAIT (103 – 4)
One asks about devotion, as about death, whether it is the name of the current or
of the resistance. The names are not, however, proper to the forces. They belong
only to the tripped-over threshold between one rhythm of repetition and another.
Late here could mean, moreover, In Good Time

Elsewhere . . . . (126)
(The distinction between “the novel” and “the poem” in the work is of the same
order as that between the mortals and the immortals, the living and the dead. It is
a highly charged interface between currents that differ not in their elements but
in their spacing. Writing and silence are, as we shall see, in a similarly energetic
proximity, and blockage or resistance to writing is the charged interface.) In a
current that is itself partly cyclical, and hence repetitious, even repetition is the
wrong name for the resistance.
In a book of short poems, say one of Merrill’s five, there are perhaps seventy-five
pages, perhaps twenty-five ends of poems, twenty-five fresh beginnings. In the
whole, wearing course of such a book, the repeated defiance of and repeated sur-
render to closure are the best-worn traces. These defiances and surrenders are a
more than accidental rhythmic echo of struggles toward the “odd, / Self-effacing
balance” that is threatened by the self-hatred — the investment in a never-quite-
narratable fiction about the self — implicit in family history. Near the end of “The
Book of Ephraim,” Merrill mentions with interest and, I think, a little surprise
a matter hitherto
Overpainted — the absence from these pages
Of my own mother. (127 – 28)
This is in Section X. Will its secret name prove to be deletion, the X-ing out of the
XX? No; this poem is written under the aspect of spacing, not of deletion.
Because of course she’s here

Throughout, the breath drawn after every line . . . . (127 – 28)
To be capable of this homeopathic sowing into the poem of the mother is

“to let the silence after each note sing” (on that “kind of pear-bellied early instru-
ment” suggested to Merrill by the words “The Absolute”) (128 – 29). The last
words of the poem, the final closure, are a surrender to silence and the mother:
And look, the stars have wound in filigree

The ancient, ageless woman of the world.
She’s seen us. She is not particular —
Everyone gets her injured, musical
“Why do you no longer come to me?”
To which there’s no reply. For here we are. (136)
The “no reply” at the end of Section Z has none of the concentration of that blank,
central silence between mother and son, in The Seraglio, that spelled castration.
If, as Barthes says, Z is the sign of castration, it doesn’t matter; the surrender
to silence in the face of the parent is not climactic; enough — the whole alpha-
bet — is already spent.
Similarly Ephraim’s withdrawal from the poem — he is last heard from in
V — is a nonclimax. It is hard to trust Merrill’s assertion of unbroken continuity
through growth:
We’ve modulated. Keys ever remoter

Lock our friends among the golden things that go
Without saying, the loves no longer called up
Or named. We’ve grown autumnal, mild. (129)
But that un-Proustian tone of elegiac wishfulness only obscures his acuteness
about the fate of any single current in his poetic roman fleuve.
We’ve reached a
Stage through him that he will never himself reach.
Back underground he sinks, a stream, the latest
Recurring figure . . . (129)
Recurrence is not importantly a magnet for optimism about personal survival, nor
for pessimism about uncontrolled repetition. It is so palpably the simple condition
of the poem’s being sustained that other issues are always at the service of the
verse’s waxing and waning concentration. Unless one has, as I do not, an appre-
ciative ear for his often long gemütlich or autumnal passages, Merrill must seem
of all interesting poets the one least capable of sustaining his moments of strong
focus. In one passage, both eloquent and symptomatic, about finding his foot has
fallen asleep, he describes
this net of loose talk tightening to verse

And verse once more revolving between poles —
Gassy expansion and succinct collapse —
Till Heaven is all peppered with black holes,
Vanishing points for the superfluous . . . . (129 – 30)
The flow of his writing is awesome and can be awful, and its real drama is about
those succinct collapses, those moments of arrest: how intently and beautifully, for
an instant, they are improved, and then how quickly squandered.
Merrill’s long poems are formally exciting because they are so knowing,
so inventive, and so trusting about that wastage. The mediums value Ephraim
because
We, all we knew, dreamed, felt, and had forgotten,

. . . became through him a set of
Quasi-grammatical constructions which
Could utter some things clearly, forcibly,
Others not. (75)
I like that “others not.” Each important differential in the poem — mortal/immor-
tal, novelistic/poetic, solid/liquid — is used impartially as a surface for the spac-
ing of quasi-grammatical constructions that have just this partiality. The poem
is a spacing machine. An earlier, superb long poem, “From the Cupola,” which
resembles “The Book of Ephraim” in having an intercalated novel, an intercalated
typographic differential, and intrusions from the gods, ends with Merrill’s atten-
tion narrowing to his room, his typewriter.
My hands move. An intense,

Slow-paced, erratic dance goes on below.
I have received from whom I do not know
These letters. Show me, light, if they make sense.20
This machine sounds like a Ouija board, and to be able to think of it as that is, for
a reader of the new poem, to imagine unexpectedly vast and animated landscapes
of “whom I do not know.”
Notes
1. James Merrill, Divine Comedies (New York: Atheneum, 1976), 48. Hereafter cited in
the text.
2. James Merrill, The (Diblos) Notebook (1965; rpt. New York: Atheneum, 1975), 137.
3. Merrill, (Diblos) Notebook, 139.
7. Merrill, (Diblos) Notebook, 144 – 45.

8. James Merrill, The Seraglio (New York: Knopf, 1957), 165.
9. Merrill, Seraglio, 165.
10. Merrill, Seraglio, 169 – 70.
14. The countervailing identification, in the thematic terms discussed in the next section,
would be of “the novelistic” (as narrative) with a flow that is channeled, obstructed, or
diffused by the formal fixities of the poem.
15. My interest in discriminating within the thematics of liquids has been sharpened by
discussions with Joshua Wilner. An additional, broad indebtedness in my thinking
about Merrill is to Joseph Gordon.
16. James Merrill, “An Urban Convalescence,” in Water Street (1962; rpt. New York: Ath-
eneum, 1973), 3.
17. James Merrill, The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace (1958; rpt. New York: Ath-
eneum, 1970), 36 – 37.
18. James Merrill, The Fire Screen (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 55 – 77.
19. Complete Poems of Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967), 329.
20. James Merrill, Nights and Days (1966; rpt. New York: Atheneum, 1976), 53.
The Black Swan: Poetry, Punishment, and the Sadomasochism of
Everyday Life; or, Tradition and the Individual Talent
Michael Moon
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 17, Number 4, 2011, pp.
487-496 (Article)
Published by Duke University Press
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/450786
Access provided by Tufts University (28 Oct 2017 13:32 GMT)

THE BLACK SWAN
Poetry, Punishment, and the Sadomasochism of
Everyday Life; or, Tradition and the Individual Talent
Michael Moon
Always the black swan moves on the lake, always

The blond child stands to gaze
As the tall emblem pivots and rides out
To the opposite side, always. The child upon
The bank, hands full of difficult marvels, stays
Forever to cry aloud
In anguish: I love the black swan.
— James Merrill, “The Black Swan”
During the time (ca. 1977) that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick produced her essay
“The 1001 Seances,” on James Merrill’s long poem “The Book of Ephraim,” she
was also at work on revising and expanding her dissertation for publication.1 The
project appeared in 1980 as her first book, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions.
Published by Arno Press, a commercial reprint house, in a series of “studies and
dissertations” aimed primarily at academic libraries, the book made little impact
for some years after its appearance, although it eventually came to be recognized
as having made an important intervention in employing as it did the then new con-
ceptual armory of Yale-style deconstruction, and deploying it to displace Freudian
depth psychology as the dominant mode of interpreting gothic fiction. Ironically,
by the time the book’s deft critique of depth psychology began to register, Sedg-
wick had reengaged with psychoanalytic theory of a rather different kind (working
with Sigmund Freud’s case study of Daniel Paul Schreber and its linking of homo-
sexuality and paranoia) and had produced her highly influential essay on male-
male desire and the “paranoid Gothic,” which appeared in Between Men.2
GLQ 17:4
DOI 10.1215/10642684-1302334
Sexuality is barely a topic of The Coherence of Gothic Conventions; it sur-

faces occasionally, and then only in conventional terms, as in the passing reference
to Lucy Snowe’s allegedly “buried” or “repressed” sexuality in Villette (127). The
conceptual grammar and syntax at Sedgwick’s command in the mid- to late 1970s
seem to provide her no ready way to shift the topography of the analysis of sexual-
ity out of the depths it was supposed to occupy onto the surface of the gothic where
she was working. Given this apparent limitation in Sedgwick’s ability to (in Gayle
Rubin’s phrase) “think sex” at the time she was finishing her first book, the quite
belated publication of the present essay, “The 1001 Seances,” may have some-
thing to tell us about where her thinking actually was early on apropos of a whole
range of issues that magnetized her work for the long middle of her career, includ-
ing the politics and poetics of male-male desire, sadomasochism, and other (at the
time) largely abjected sites for writing, reflection, public discussion, and academic
study such as masturbation and female anality. Indeed, “The 1001 Seances” essay
may be chiefly of interest to students of Sedgwick’s work and of the emergence
and development of queer theory insofar as it is her first extended experiment in
trying to focalize and analyze in relation to each other a particular sexuality and a
particular set of literary texts — chiefly, in this case, “The Book of Ephraim,” the
first installment of what became Merrill’s epic poetic trilogy The Changing Light
at Sandover (first published in its entirety in 1982), but also certain features of his
two novels, The Seraglio (1957) and The (Diblos) Notebook (1965).
If the Saussurean-Derridean-DeManian effects of Sedgwick’s graduate edu-
cation remain to the fore through her revision of her dissertation into The Coher-
ence of Gothic Conventions, there is a different, less coherent (apparently a highly
magnetic term for Sedgwick in the mid- to late 1970s) — and possibly all the more
formative and productive for that — constellation of “theory” and theorists presid-
ing in varying degrees over the production of the Merrill essay circa 1977. The
chief one, cited in the essay, is the Roland Barthes of S/Z, published in French
in 1970 and translated into English (by Richard Howard) in 1974. Sedgwick’s
concern with castration as a semiotic, narrative, and literary effect in Merrill’s
writing seems considerably empowered by Barthes’s then recent bravura essay
on similar effects in Balzac’s Sarrasine. The figure of castration as deployed by
Merrill, Barthes, and Sedgwick in the 1970s is definitively, deconstructively post-
Freudian. (Less immediately salient for Sedgwick’s reading of Merrill, perhaps,
but still detectable in some of the gestures that she begins making to theorize
various sexual practices, is Jacques Derrida’s extensive treatment of masturbation
as “dangerous supplement” in his analysis of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s writings
THE BLACK SWAN: POETRY, PUNISHMENT, AND THE SADOMASOCHISM OF EVERYDAY LIFE 489
in Of Grammatology, published in French in 1967 and in English translation by

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in 1976.)
But “The 1001 Seances” may be of even more interest to some students of
Sedgwick’s work and legacy for the (to the retrospective gaze) conspicuous absence
of any trace in it of the work of Michel Foucault — a theorist with whose work she
would have a longer and richer engagement than she would with that of either Der-
rida or Barthes. One way to place “The 1001 Seances” in the intellectual history
of the late twentieth century and, within that, the history of the development of
queer theory would be to say that Sedgwick’s Merrill essay is likely to have been
written largely between the time Foucault’s first volume of The History of Sexual-
ity was published in French in 1976 and the time it was translated into English
in 1977. With the dissemination of this work through the anglophone intellectual
and academic world starting in 1977, the further emergence of “gay and lesbian
studies” and, a little over a decade after that, the initial emergence of queer theory
(with Sedgwick playing a distinctive role in each) would take on a quite different
set of focuses and tools from the ones that had seemed readiest to hand during the
brief period between the publication of S/Z and that of A Lover’s Discourse (pub-
lished in French in 1977 and translated into English in 1978), when Barthes still
appeared to many anglophone readers to provide the most enabling model of how
to analyze writing and sexuality in relation to each other.
So one way to begin reading “The 1001 Seances” historically might be to
take it as a Mount Pisgah vision of early gay studies just on the verge of, but not
quite arrived at, the Foucauldian moment that would radically transform it. But I
want to trouble somewhat this too-pat tale of the supersession of Barthes’s influ-
ence by Foucault’s in queer theory by recalling the highly influential work of D. A.
Miller, who has produced major critical-theoretical works in both the Foucauldian
(e.g., The Novel and the Police, 1988) and Barthesian (e.g., Bringing Out Roland
Barthes, 1992) lines — and also by mentioning Sedgwick’s own intense reengage-
ment in what turned out to be the last year or two of her life with the Barthes of
The Neutral (published in French in 2002 and translated into English in 2005).
But rather than stop at the point of perceiving “The 1001 Seances” as
merely or only providing us a snapshot of Sedgwick without or before Foucault, I
want to go on to discuss an aspect of the essay — its central concern with poetry
and punishment — that involves her in a fair amount of rapid reconnaissance with
some strands of the psychoanalytic theory that she was so forcefully critiquing in
The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. The terms and concepts she borrows from
Freud to analyze the dynamics of punishment as these manifest themselves in
Merrill’s writing are not the Schreberian ones that she recuperated in her work on
the “paranoid Gothic” of a few years later. In this essay, they are still the highly
orthodox set that derive from Freud’s early theorization of the oedipal, which
Sedgwick characterizes as being, in the main, phallic, castrative, “inflictive,” and
occurring in a mental and emotional universe in which relationality has been vio-
lently reduced to an extreme form of “subject-object totalization” (see Sedgwick,
this issue).
In the last decade of her life, teaching at the CUNY Graduate Center, she
repeatedly offered seminars under the rubric “Non-Oedipal Psychologies,” which
ranged among the writings of Sandor Ferenczi, Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott,
Silvan Tomkins, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and others. But in “The 1001
Seances” Sedgwick is writing not as the seasoned and adept revisionary critic of
psychoanalytic theory that she became in later years but as a fascinated, absorp-
tive, admiring, and in some ways highly imitative reader of Merrill. Merrill’s own
lifelong relation to psychoanalysis remained in most ways thoroughly grounded
in the thematics of sons (and “son-poets”) striving to wrest power and authority
from “difficult” fathers and dauntingly “great” poetic mentors and predecessors.
Having had what he saw as a crucially enabling experience of psychoanalysis in
early adulthood (elaborately recounted in his 1993 memoir A Different Person),
Merrill appears to have understood his own psychic development as centrally
featuring such staples of the oedipal scenario as the powerful, potentially over-
whelming father, the anxious and threatened son, and the spectacle of retributive
castration — and subsequent variations thereon with other key male figures in
his life and poetic career. The young Sedgwick — herself an aspiring and already
accomplished poet-critic in her own right — may have regarded, as she appears
to at some points in “The 1001 Seances,” the Grand Guignol theatrics of oedipal
strife as a primary way to understand males and male-male sexuality and the
ambitious poet-critic’s relation to poetic/literary tradition.
Add to that her studies at the time with Harold Bloom, who had just begun
promulgating his oedipal system of poetic influence in The Anxiety of Influence
(1973). Reading Gayle Rubin’s 1975 essay “The Traffic in Women” as she began
to work out the theoretical program of Between Men — not to mention having by
then served for several years as a pioneering feminist faculty member at Hamilton
College — Sedgwick by the mid-1980s had a lot of feminist political and theo-
retical leverage with which to displace and radically revise the male-homosocial
realm of oedipalized personal and poetic competition and its polarized outcomes,
“triumph” for one “player” and “disastrous defeat” (“castration”) for the other. But
these transformative critiques of the oedipal from both feminist and post-Freudian
psychoanalytic theory only partly register in “The 1001 Seances.” Rather than
engage the highly oedipalized atmosphere of Merrill’s writing directly, Sedgwick
“dangerously” supplements the dense figuration of the phallic and castration in
“The Book of Ephraim” with what she reads as a strong, comparably dense coun-
termovement in the poem that recurrently “dissolves” the overly solidified, totaliz-
ingly objectified matter of the oedipal with figures of “flow,” of music, water, light,
breath, “glistening jellies,” mirror images, and the circulation of blood.
But rather than allow this counterpattern to liquefy the oedipal “fixation”
of much of Merrill’s writing — the phallic hardening, the turning to stone, the
infliction of spectacular punishment on one male by another that galvanizes so
much of his work — I want to stay, for the rest of these remarks, with Sedgwick’s
initial focus on the thematics and metaphorics of the spectacle of the infliction
of punishment between men. For that intense, overdetermined focus, and not the
countermovement she imagines “dissolving” it at least in some ways in the last
section of her essay, proved enormously generative for Sedgwick’s subsequent work
at least through the early 1990s. Or so I shall now argue.
Merrill himself, who had been telling the story in fragmented and “disguised”
fashion in various of his poems for fifty years at the time, began with the publica-
tion of the prose memoir A Different Person to tell the fuller story of his first love
affair and of his initiation into writing poetry for publication, both of which experi-
ences came to him from (or with) the same man, Kimon Friar. A translator, poet,
and cultural impresario himself (Friar was the director of the Poetry Center at the
YMHA in New York at the time he was involved with Merrill), Friar was about
fifteen years older than Merrill, who was twenty in 1946. Friar taught at Merrill’s
college, Amherst, for only one academic year, and not as a member of the English
department but as a temporary instructor in Amherst’s special division for soldiers
returning from World War II. The two men became lovers at the same time that
they engaged in a strenuous and remarkably productive tutorial in which Friar
assigned Merrill to write poems in a wide and complex range of verse forms and
meters. At the same time, Friar began taking the fledgling poet down to New York
City to meet and discuss poetry and art with the likes of W. H. Auden and Maya
Deren, both of whom Merrill formed lifelong friendships with (see The Changing
Light at Sandover).
The poet’s mother, Hellen Ingram Merrill, happened to read a letter that
her son had written to Friar and, in consultation with Merrill’s father, took steps
to end the relationship. Merrill and Friar were forced to agree not to see each
other when they returned to Amherst. They surreptitiously maintained their close
relationship a little longer, until Friar’s employment at the college ended and he
moved back to Greece (from whence he’d immigrated to the United States with
his parents as a toddler). Distance and a little time did what Hellen and Charles
Merrill had been unable to do: end the love affair. But not without Friar publish-
ing a beautiful little volume of some of the poems Merrill had written under his
tutelage, titled after the “lead poem” in the volume (still today the first poem in
Merrill’s Collected Poems), “The Black Swan.” According to his friend and fellow
translator Willis Barnstone, Friar, in the years after his intense involvement with
Merrill had ended (the two maintained a cordial but distant relationship for the
rest of their lives), enjoyed telling him, “I was the Black Swan.”3 But when Mer-
rill’s (Diblos) Notebook appeared nearly twenty years after their affair, and Friar
readily recognized himself in the character Orestes, whose violent humiliation by
horsewhipping provides the novel’s dramatic climax, Friar commented that he had
not realized until then how “obsessive” his former lover and pupil’s attachment to
him had remained to that point.
Friar had challenged Merrill, while still the younger man’s mentor at
Amherst, to get to work on a long poem, but this assignment Merrill refused even
to consider carrying out, responding by insisting (as Edgar Allan Poe influentially
had done just a century before) that modern poets can’t write really long poems,
that the very form is outmoded. Declining to attempt the long poem was one of
the chief ways that Merrill defined his own poetic project for decades after the
inception of his career: he thought of himself — and wrote and spoke of himself
as a poet — as someone who energetically rejected the “monumentality” of Anglo-
American high-modernist long poems such as T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land, Ezra
Pound’s Cantos, Hart Crane’s Bridge, or William Carlos Williams’s Paterson. One
of the psychic tasks that we can see Merrill struggling with when he writes about
one man severely punishing another and either (or both?) sadistically relishing
the pleasure of inflicting the punishment (or seeing it inflicted) or enjoying being
the object of the punishment is something that Bloom might have identified as the
oedipal triple threat of incurring the displeasure of his readers, his critics, and his
poetic predecessors by challenging and inviting comparison with the epic poets
of modernity and, in turn, with the earlier epic poets whose work these modern
epicists both imitated and sought to rival, such as Dante and Milton.
Dante’s and Milton’s respective epic poems are obviously impor-
tant precursor-texts for the epic poem that Merrill initiated with “The Book of
Ephraim” — a long poem that first appeared in a book titled The Divine Com-
edies. Given the conspicuous presence of both the Inferno and Paradise Lost in the
poetic DNA of Merrill’s poetic project overall, it is likely an overdetermined condi-

tion of Merrill’s poetry that it, as Sedgwick insists, should be centrally concerned
with the spectacle of punishment from the perspectives of both the punisher and
the punished. “Compare the element of punishment in the Inferno and Paradise
Lost” has been the assigned theme of countless undergraduate literature essays.
The critic Blake Leland has analyzed, in Dante’s encounter with one of his literary
models, Brunetto Latini, in canto 15 of the Inferno, a locus classicus of a scene of
punishment that evokes powerfully ambivalent feelings toward an important (and
highly esteemed) literary precursor. Leland writes:
In this canto Dante, accompanied by Virgil, meets Brunetto Latini, a Flo-

rentine politician, rhetorician and writer who was his teacher and literary
precursor . . . . Dante presents himself as surprised to discover Brunetto
here, among a band of sodomites running in eternal circles under a rain of
fire. The encounter is a subtle exploration of influence and the desire for
literary authority and the immortality such authority confers. On the one
hand, Dante acknowledges a debt to Brunetto for teaching him how a “man
makes himself immortal” . . . . On the other hand, Dante offers an implicit
qualification of the literary father-son relation; while Brunetto (sodomite
and literary progenitor) addresses Dante as his “son,” Dante is careful to
stress the merely figural nature of the relation — Brunetto is not his father,
but a “paternal image.”4
Leland explores the fascination of three great modernists, Eliot, Joyce, and
Pound, with the strange and dramatic terms in which this episode presents an
encounter between a “great” poet and one of his precursors. In “Tradition and
the Individual Talent,” Eliot famously insists on the necessity (if one aspires to
achieve poetic “greatness”) that the human being who suffers be kept separate and
at a distance from the being who creates — even though the two entities cohabit (to
some degree) in the same person’s/poet’s body. In Leland’s reading of Eliot’s essay,
Dante’s complex and thoroughly mixed response to encountering his sodomite pre-
cursor in hell emblematizes for Eliot the kinds and forms of distance necessary to
creating “great” poetry. Leland understands this Dantean fable as further figur-
ing the contrasting fates of two “great” poets, one suffering eternal punishment
for the “sin” of combining the pleasures and sufferings of the body with creative
poetic powers, the other rapidly learning a kind of object lesson in the necessity of
permanently partitioning passions of bodily origin off from culturally authoritative
creative achievement. Ultimately, Leland can’t resist tying the whole supposedly
complex set of relations up with a large Bloomian bow: asking himself and his
reader what it is for which (according to Eliot) the poet anxiously fears punish-
ment, he proposes that it is for the sheer “oedipal effrontery of declaring oneself
a poet” (972).
For me, a large share of the value of Sedgwick’s essay on Merrill lies in
the restless energy with which she goes about detaching pleasure and suffering
(and complex admixtures of the two), reward and punishment (ditto), and various
forms of social and sexual abjection as well as various marks of the achievement
of cultural authority from their routine routing through the thematics of the oedi-
pal and of its presumably endless capacity for galvanizing relations only between
men. Rachel Jacoff has definitively demonstrated that Merrill was a Paradiso and
not an Inferno poet.5 Surely part of the kinship the young Sedgwick felt with the
author of “The Book of Ephraim” proceeded from her perspicuous intuition that
although certain forms of sexuality and certain forms of poetic authority could be
gotten to line up along oedipal lines, nevertheless, Merrill’s proliferation of erotic
practices in his poetry — sadism, masochism, masturbation, and others — could
also function to short-circuit the oedipal orthodoxies of (one branch of) the Yale
School to relaunch quite other kinds of poetic and erotic imaginings.
Soon after Eve’s partner Hal Sedgwick rediscovered the unpublished man-
uscript of this essay in the months after her death in April 2009, he told me that
perhaps part of the reason she hadn’t seen it through to publication at the time
it was written was her disappointment in Merrill’s response when she sent him a
copy of it soon after completing it. As Hal remembers it, when Merrill’s written
response arrived in the mail, Eve found it crushingly conventional, distant, and
measured (I paraphrase Hal’s memory of the note as running along the lines of,
“Dear Ms. Sedgwick, Thank you for sending your essay, Sincerely yours,” etc.).
Hal also recalls his and Eve’s hearing Merrill read at his alma mater Amherst
College some years later at the time Eve was teaching there; again, apparently, no
sparks of connection flew.
Sedgwick was to take some of the energies of her early powerful cathexis
of Merrill and his writing to quite other places than the personal-but-also-poetic
relationship she may have hoped to initiate with “The 1001 Seances.” Her 1986
essay “A Poem Is Being Written” returns to the kinds of questions she first opened
in her writing in her Merrill essay, about poetry, punishment, the theater of spank-
ing, her own S/M-inflected poetry, and her own struggles to produce a long poem.
She would go on to produce her own rich, often disturbing, and sometimes cultur-
ally authoritative accounts of the pleasures and pains of erotic desire and of many
other forms of rich intimacy between friends, patient and psychotherapist, teacher
and student, boddhisattva and spiritual seeker, cat and person.
The first critical work of my own that Eve took a characteristically impas-
sioned interest in was my writing about what I called “the Scheherazade party”
in a 1989 article “Flaming Closets,” which I began by discussing the recurrence
of the “Scheherazade party” from Serge Diaghilev and Vaslav Nijinsky’s 1910
ballet to an impromptu striptease-and-dancing celebration (again, to the Nikolai
Rimsky-Korsakov score) that a friend of mine had told me about staging with his
brothers as adolescents in the 1960s).6 Now, having read her “1001 Seances,”
I feel I can better understand why and how she cathected that particular piece
of writing. In writing “The 1001 Seances,” she herself had thrown a “Schehe-
razade party” a decade or so earlier, specifically in honor of a glamorous gay-male
Scheherazade-poet (author of a poem titled “The Thousand and Second Night”),
and he had politely but firmly declined her invitation to the dance.7 A deeply
shy person throughout her life, Eve became a generous and creative hostess to
colleagues and students at Duke. For many of her friends there, her hospitality
culminated in her “drag” performance one night in the late 1990s as Mama Cass
Elliott, singing “Dream a Little Dream of Me.” Since our loss of her, Eve’s party
has moved back into her writing, where it promises to continue attracting new
guests for years to come.
Notes
1. I quote the final stanza of Merrill’s early poem “The Black Swan” in the version in
which it appeared in the 1946 volume titled The Black Swan (Athens: Icaros, 1946),
rather than in the revised version that appears in Merrill’s subsequent republications
of the poem. Thanks to Kathleen Shoemaker and her colleagues in Emory University’s
Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library for making Merrill materials from the
Danowski and Edelstein Collections available to me.
2. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Murder Incorporated: Confessions of a Justified Sinner,” in
Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1985), 97 – 117.
3. Willis Barnstone, Sunday Mornings in Fascist Spain: A European Memoir, 1948 – 53
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995), 118. My account of Merrill’s
relationship with Kimon Friar depends primarily on two sources: Langdon Hammer,
Masks of the Poet: James Merrill and Kimon Friar (Athens: American College of
Greece, 2003); and Mark Bauer, This Composite Voice: The Role of W. B. Yeats in
James Merrill’s Poetry (New York: Routledge, 2003), 16 – 31, 68 – 69.
4. Blake Leland, “ ‘Siete voi qui, Ser Bruneto?’: Dante’s Inferno 15 as a Modernist Topic
Place,” ELH 59 (1992): 965 – 66.
5. Rachel Jacoff, “Merrill and Dante,” in James Merrill: Essays in Criticism, ed. David
Lehman and Charles Berger (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 145 – 58.
6. Michael Moon, “Flaming Closets,” October 51 (Winter 1989): 19 – 54.
7. “The Thousand and Second Night” is the second poem in Merrill’s 1966 collection,
Nights and Days. It was also the name of yet another “Scheherazade party,” this one
thrown in Paris a century ago this year by the great couturier Paul Poiret.
THE BAR AND THE BOARD
for Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Henry Abelove
I first met Eve in the Yale University Library. I believe that the year was 1978. I
was there to read, but when Eve spoke to me, quite out of the blue, I was wander-
ing around the stacks, taking a break. Had I been working on my ever-so-slowly
developing Ph.D. dissertation? Probably. She evidently knew who I was, greeted
me by name, introduced herself, and told me that she and I were both interested
in Anthony Trollope. How did a stranger know this about me, I wondered. I rarely
spoke to anyone about Trollope. He was a secret and unaccountable pleasure for
me — nothing to do with my very Jewish upbringing, my New Left politics, or my
research. But Eve, as I later came to understand, had a marvelous communion
with secret pleasures, in herself and in others. At the time of this first meeting I
chiefly noticed that she seemed to be both bold and self-contained. We chatted
about Trollope, his high-church gentlemen, his low-church scoundrels, his confid-
ing narrator. I enjoyed the conversation thoroughly. When we next met, at Cornell,
a few years later in 1980 — I was there to coteach a summer session course for
the Telluride Association — it struck me as wholly natural, even predictable, that
we would speak about gayness. From one of my secret pleasures to another! What
could have been more appropriate, more necessary.
I had been coming out gradually, at about the same glacial pace as I was
doing my dissertation, and I had also been plunging into the then new scholarship
on gay history. Eve hadn’t yet read any of it. She asked me about it, and I told her
what I thought I’d learned. Her questions — particularly about my account of Jef-
frey Weeks’s concept of “homosexual identity” — were probing.1 As I tried to cope
with them, I realized that what I was saying by way of explanation was woolly.
I couldn’t really answer her. She left me to feel a bit disoriented but also grate-
ful — grateful, because the questions she’d asked touched on matters that were
important to me and because she’d shown me that I understood less about them
GLQ 17:4
DOI 10.1215/10642684-1302325
than I wanted to. Her books would perform a similar service for me over the years,
again and again.
Of these books, the first that gave full-throated expression to the antiho-
mophobic intellectual project to which she would devote much of her career was
Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. It appeared in
1985. Eve later wrote that when she was drafting it she knew only one out gay
man. 2 I have always understood, or maybe rather supposed, that I am the one
she then knew. I hope I am anyway. It would be a distinction to treasure. Even
if I am that one, I cannot have influenced the making of the book. Every bit of it
astounded me. Eager to attract gay and lesbian readers, Eve urged me to write a
notice of it for the newspaper Gay Community News, which at that time was an
important voice of US gay and lesbian activism. Reluctantly, I declined. I couldn’t
do the job, though I wanted to. I found the book too original, too long in reach, and
too big in consequence, to sum up at the moment of publication.
Eve and I met only intermittently. Months, years, might pass between our meet-
ings. She and I taught in different cities, we moved in mostly different circles, and
we surely led very different lives. I can’t say that she and I ever came to be close.
Yet I believe I remember every conversation we had. One started as a discus-
sion of Merrill’s poetry and then meandered. It took place probably a few years
after she wrote the essay now published here for the first time. It is an essay that
focuses on Merrill while offering a brilliant meditation on the ties between fiction
and poetry.
Eve adored Merrill’s work, especially the long poetic sequence that
recounts his “Thousand and One Evenings” in Stonington, Connecticut, with his
lover, David Jackson, and the Ouija board. She herself was a poet as well as a
critic, and she very much wanted to complete a successful long narrative poem.
Merrill’s was a model for her of excellence achieved. She praised him to me for his
metrical genius, his wit, his nonmisogynous representation of women, his inven-
tiveness, his profuseness, his dexterity. I think she may have been particularly
emphatic in her praise of Merrill when talking with me because she could tell
from my conversational response, or the sparseness of it, that he wasn’t a favor-
ite of mine. My heart was given to his contemporaries, Frank O’Hara and James
Schuyler. Still, I was thrilled by her praise for Merrill. It struck me as aestheti-
cally and politically generous in the highest degree. Eve, as I understood her, was
fundamentally a feminist. It may be hard now to recall just how exceptional it was
in the late 1970s and early 1980s for a feminist to devote herself to a gay male
THE BAR AND THE BOARD 485
writer. So many of Eve’s fellow feminists believed strongly then that they should
reserve their attention and praise for women.
Take, for example, the very influential New York – based magazine Her-
esies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics. Its inaugural issue appeared in
January 1977 and featured a manifesto titled “On Woman’s Refusal to Celebrate
Male Creativity.” As the manifesto understood feminism, that refusal was essen-
tial. “To celebrate male creativity,” the manifesto said, would be “to submit to
the historic sovereignty of men.” Would the refusal to celebrate male creativity
constitute an attack on creativity as such? No, the manifesto said. “By refusing to
celebrate male creativity, we are not judging creativity, nor are we contesting it.
Rather with our absence we are refusing to accept it as defined.” The manifesto
went on to explain, “We are challenging the concept of art as something which
men graciously hand down to us.”3 But Eve thought and proceeded differently. She
routed her feminism through what she saw as gay male representation, which she
often celebrated.
At a late point in the conversation I started to joke, setting Merrill’s poetry
aside or rather using it as a pretext for something I wanted to say. What I said
was approximately this: “A thousand and one evenings spent in small-town Con-
necticut with a conjugal partner! How dreary. No wonder Merrill and Jackson were
driven to a Ouija board. And Merrill seems to want us as readers to know what
motivated their fantastical adventure. After all, the homonyn of ‘board’ is readily
spotted.” Eve can’t have been surprised by my disposition to ironize about conju-
gal domesticity. She knew that I objected to it as an ideal. She knew, too, that I
liked to cruise. I often said so. I lived in Connecticut then, as Merrill and Jackson
did, in a house that I had chosen chiefly because it was sited within easy walking
distance of a gay bar called Nick’s. During some of the very same evenings that
Merrill and Jackson passed in taking dictation from their Familiar Spirit via the
Ouija board, I contentedly, and often happily too, cruised at Nick’s.
Eve did more than just listen to me attentively, and with comradely inter-
est, whenever I expressed my preference for Nick’s and talked of its major and
minor pleasures. She also found a way to acknowledge my preference. I make a
cameo appearance in her long narrative poem “The Warm Decembers.” She first
mentions a Henry who shares with me nothing but a name, and then she goes on
to write:
Another Henry I know

says that the thrill, for him, in watching
video porn in the bar’s back room’s
the irrepressed consciousness that somebody

somewhere (Upstate?) is busy wracking brains
to figure what on earth it is that men
can Do Together.4
I love to remember that Eve made room, in poetry and in her sympathies,
for the bar as well as the board.
Notes
1. Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain, from the Nineteenth
Century to the Present (London: Quartet Books, 1977), 237.
2. She said so in November 1992 in her preface to the second edition. See Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1992), viii.
3. Rivolta Femminile, “On Woman’s Refusal to Celebrate Male Creativity,” Heresies: A
Feminist Publication on Art and Politics 1, no. 1 (1977): 101. Rivolta Femminile was
an Italian feminist group. A note at the end of the manifesto says: “Text written by
Rivolta Femminile, March 1971; free translation by Arlene Ladden from Carla Lonzi,
Sputiamo su Hegel: La Donna clitoridea e la donna vaginale e altri scritti, Scritti di
Rivolta Femminile, 1, 2, 3, Milan, 1974.”
4. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “The Warm Decembers,” in Fat Art, Thin Art (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1994), 149. She never completed the poem.
“SURPRISING RECOGNITION”
Genre, Poetic Form, and Erotics from Sedgwick’s
“1001 Seances” to A Dialogue on Love
Kathryn R. Kent
I n Touching Feeling Eve offers her understanding of Buddhist pedagogy: “[It is]
mainly an exchange of recognition — at best of surprising recognition. As if the
template of truth is already there inside the listener, its own lineaments clarified
by the encounter with a teaching that it can then apprehend as ‘true.’ ”1 When she
wrote “The 1001 Seances” soon after the publication of James Merrill’s long poem
“The Book of Ephraim,” in 1976, perhaps Eve hoped the essay would inspire in
its author that feeling of “surprised recognition.”2 When he read her account of
its alternating “novelistic” and “poetic” forms (the effects of a retelling of a lost
novel inside a poem, the move from moments of traditional poetic forms to “bare
feet” (48) as Merrill puts it), its experimentation with the limits of lyric voice (the
idea of the poet as mechanical medium rather than authorizing center), and its
queer (although she does not use the term) theory of representation, perhaps Eve
hoped it would create between them a mutual recognition of the poem’s “truths.”
From Hal Sedgwick’s introduction to “Seances,” however, it is clear that Mer-
rill, regardless of his reaction to her essay, did not share any kind of recognition
with her.
Similarly, contemporary readers used to Eve’s distinctive, lavish, Jame-
sian style may find little in “Seances” they recognize, although it already demon-
strates the brilliant idiosyncrasy that will continue to characterize her criticism.
It displays an intimate familiarity with both poststructuralist analysis and Mer-
rill’s texts and assumes a similar intimacy on the reader’s part — it seems to take
for granted that anyone who reads it already has the same interpretive flexibility,
that any reader is already there, beside Eve, sharing these moments of surprising
recognition. As in her teaching and in her other critical writings, in doing so Eve
GLQ 17:4
DOI 10.1215/10642684-1302343
works to produce such an interlocutor, a move that may not always succeed but
nevertheless makes us long to be that person.
My own experience of Eve’s pedagogy and work — seldom, if ever, extri-
cable from her very existence — often matched this description. She inspired in
me that feeling, in her terms, of a deep realization that goes beyond knowing.3 I
remember the two of us reveling over the injunction to “tend her butt” that Ger-
trude Stein embedded within the title of her long prose poem Tender Buttons, an
interpretation I would never have felt the permission to make, let alone embrace,
without Eve’s work on (female) anal erotics.
At other moments — in her classroom, for example — my experiences were
different. In the fall of 1989 I came to Duke University intending to focus on les-
bian writing; I arrived with a critical sensibility primarily filtered through French
feminism. I remember looking at the syllabus of Eve’s course and feeling dismay at
the lack of female, let alone lesbian, authors. We were reading Epistemology of the
Closet in galleys. Gay, Anglo-American white men, the “chronic, now endemic cri-
sis of homo/heterosexual definition, indicatively male . . .”4 To be sure, “Seances”
already reflects some of these central preoccupations, and reading it I find myself
slightly irritated, but more bemused, even impressed, in a “there she goes again”
kind of way. Most of our scholarship, as Eve taught me, is driven by our obsessions,
though not always as productively as hers. I realized early on in our relationship
that Eve was never going to generate the kind of passionate intensity for the work
of Stein or Marianne Moore or the female-female erotics of nineteenth-century
American novels that she felt for Henry James — that was up to me.
Instead, when I think of Eve’s work and her pedagogy, I think of a process
of making room for interests other than her own, ones she emphatically refused
to predict. In Epistemology, there are two key moments I continue to treasure for
their generosity. Early in the introduction Eve writes, “A point of the book is not
to know how far its insights and projects are generalizable, not to be able to say
in advance where the semantic specificity of these issues gives over to (or: itself
structures?) the syntax of a ‘broader’ or more abstractable critical project.”5 In
“The Beast in Closet,” in relation to the main character, she forcefully qualifies
her claim to “know” the content of his secret: “I would argue to the extent that
Marcher’s secret has a content, that content is homosexual.”6
Unlike the critic who makes universalizing truth claims, in “Seances”
already Eve is careful to delineate the particular critical frame she is draw-
ing around her subject and acknowledge that doing so rules out other readings.
Perhaps this is designed, as she notes, to head off the charges, still made today
against her work, of “reading too much into” texts, charges often designed to
“SURPRISING RECOGNITION”: GENRE, POETIC FORM, AND EROTICS IN SEDGWICK 499
police the limits of what counts as valid interpretation — because of the injunction
our culture relentlessly enforces in regard to any assertion about homoerotics, that
we “don’t ask. Or, less laconically: . . . shouldn’t know.”7 Nonetheless, it reflects
the way Eve’s meticulous attention to specificity opens up so much more than it
shuts down. In general, her most studied works of queer theory, Between Men and
Epistemology, harness the insights of poststructuralist thought for a particularly
inflected project, one whose outlines, as I noted above, she is careful not to over-
determine even as she delineates clearly her own investments in it. In doing so, she
rejects the universalizing assumptions of various theories, as well as the emphasis
on plurality, high deconstruction’s drive toward proving the ultimate instability
of meaning (itself a totalizing claim), for the specificity of possibilities an applied
deconstruction can provide. The goal is not just to invoke even the queer polysemic
against the phallic but instead to show what work various kinds of structuring
binarisms do within a particular political context, as well as how deconstructing
them may or may not be automatically liberatory.
In the process, her sense of authority as a poet and critic emerges, as she
describes in her essay “A Poem Is Being Written”:
The main component of this “authority” seems to me to be the presentation

of a piece of writing as the now-under-control palimpsest of some earlier,
plurivocal drama or struggle: among tones, among dictions, among genres.
The visible marks of solicitous care and of self-repression, the scrupu-
lously almost not legible map of exorbitance half-erased by discipline, the
very “careful [one might add very pleasurable] orchestration of spontaneity
and pageantry” (the same with which one’s parents took one over their lap):
these stigmata of “decisiveness” in and authority over one’s language are
recognizable as such by their family resemblance to the power, rage, and
assault that parents present to the child with a demand for compulsory
misrecognition of them as discretion and love.8
She adds in a footnote: “I always find it hard to figure the polylogic, at least in my
writing, as liberatory as opposed to disciplinary” (187n7), where disciplinary here
stands for pleasure and pain. Thus, in “A Poem,” Eve’s meditation on the erotics of
poetic form, she also explores what one might term, following her own articulation
of it, disciplining (in all senses of the word) a body (of work).
To read “Seances” thirty-some years after its inception is to witness Eve’s
reckoning with the polylogic and the erotics of genre, in ways that, when con-
textualized alongside her self-reflexive investigations of her own poetics, produce
unexpected moments of surprising recognition. The essay reminds us of Eve’s last-

ing and deep investment in poetry, an investment easy to overlook given the enor-
mous importance of her writing on prose. In what follows, I place Eve’s writings
on poetry alongside “Seances” to illustrate how the latter theorizes the connection
between poetic form (and its relation to the novelistic) and male-male homoerotics.
For example, in “Seances,” when Eve assesses the whipping scenes in Merrill’s
early novel The (Diblos) Notebooks, she associates sadomasochism with a nega-
tively inflected, totalizing form of closure. In “A Poem,” however, she begins to
reject such grand proclamations for the taxonomic curiosity that will distinguish
much of the rest of her work: “People are different . . .”9
That she is different is something Eve claims in “A Poem” she has always
known: her long history of depression and her erotic attachment to poetic form are
two dominant strands within the essay. For Eve, inhabiting a self is much more
difficult than losing one, and the discipline of poetic form is a relief, a release, a
(painful) pleasure. As she wryly, proudly notes, “Fortunately, the visibly chastised
is by now my favorite style” (177). Traces of her erotic attachment to whipping
appear in “Seances,” at times in exactly the same language of “stripes” as in “A
Poem” (183); in the latter, she, riffing on Sigmund Freud’s essay “A Child Is Being
Beaten,” goes beyond condemning sadomasochism to exploring what it means for-
mally and literally to be spanked: “When I was a child the two most rhythmic
things that happened to me were spanking and poetry” (182). Her fantasies of the
“tableau” of a child’s bottom, carefully “sectioned,” being rhythmically spanked,
becomes a touch point for her understanding of the lyric form (when it occurs in
regular, metered rhyme), as well as a space for reclaiming exhibitionist pleasure,
even at the risk of being shamed. She writes: “A primary hunger to be seen was
certainly not undone in these punitive moments” (182 – 83).
Risking shame, not covering (211) but displaying her ass, claiming a dis-
course of sadomasochistic and penetrative anal erotics through both this discus-
sion of spanking and her connection of enjambment with butt fucking: in graduate
school, reading this essay in Eve’s class, at a moment at which the feminist sex
wars were still being waged, all I could think was “courage.”10 Immense courage.
Eve insisted we value our own erotic attachments — formal, thematic, perverse,
banal — for which we had been routinely shamed. She emphasized not generic dif-
férance but the recognition of our own peculiar differences, our own critical queer-
ness. And in her course Experimental Critical Writing, when she asked us to mix
genres, to make from a variety of discourses the kind of palimpsest she describes
above, I found the impetus for my first book. Eve pushed me to write about my own
experience of the subject-forming pressures and pleasures of the Girl Scouts. In
juxtaposing, literally, on one page, words from sappy camp songs, excerpts from
the Girl Scout handbook, and a narrative of my lesbian desires for my camp coun-
selors, three forms of expression the “academic” devalued, if not disallowed, I had
a moment of “surprised recognition.” One of my book’s central interests became
the way conventional, even antifeminist, pressures to become proper young women
can easily transform into desires to have them, that the relations of identification
and desire produced through sentimental culture’s intense pedagogical imperative
can result in “protolesbian” erotics. Nothing in the feminist theory I had been
studying would have allowed this reading.
Given Eve’s own critical predilections, to critics schooled in the ground-
breaking claims of Between Men and Epistemology, the fact that Eve in “Seances”
at no point considers in a sustained way its central subject — a gay relationship —
what would “obviously” be the queerest aspect of the poem in terms of content
and what we might predict would be the focal point of her critical attention —
might seem startling. “The Book of Ephraim” purports to be largely a series of
dictated messages from various spirits, the most dominant of which is the epony-
mous character and guide to the other side, messages passively received by James
Merrill and his “friend” (68), David Jackson: the making of poetry here is rep-
resented at least in large part by the literal joining of the lovers’ “fingers light
on Willowware” (50) as it slides across a homemade Ouija board, transmitting
the words of a slightly campy, flirtatious medium, Ephraim.11 With Merrill’s “free
hand” (51), one of many puns the poem alludes to in its running metatextual com-
mentary on the act of writing and on poetic forms, he records these messages (at
other times he and Jackson worked from memories of earlier séances), which are
set off in the poem by the use of small capital letters.
That Merrill and Jackson’s relationship, eroticized and encouraged by
Ephraim, grounds the poem, is something to my knowledge no critic at the time
explored in detail (in fact, it may have been for most critics “conspicuously unut-
terable” — to lift one of Eve’s phrases from “Seances” — a capacious category
within literary criticism we see Eve here already working to demolish).12 In fact,
her subsequent work shares much of the credit for making it politically and intel-
lectually possible to value such queer readings.
Within the poem, Ephraim addresses the homoerotics head-on: At one
point he remarks, “LONG B4 THE FORTUNATE CONJUNCTION / (DAVID’S AND MINE) ALLOWED
ME TO GET THRU / MAY I SAY WEVE HAD OUR EYES ON U” (59), more than hinting at the
cruisey, scopophilic pleasure he himself is experiencing in Merrill and Jackson’s

“fortunate conjunction.” Immediately before this in the poem, Ephraim instructs
the two in how to manage pleasure:
. . . USE USE USE

YR BODIES & YR MINDS — instead of being
Used by them? So imperceptibly

His bromides took, I only now detect
How that thirtieth summer of mine freed me —
Freed perhaps also D — to do the homework
Fiction had optimistically assigned
To adolescence. TAKE our teacher told us
FROM SENSUAL PLEASURE ONLY WHAT WILL NOT
DURING IT BE EVEN PARTLY SPOILED
BY FEAR OF LOSING TOO MUCH. (59)
Ephraim offers guidelines on how to live a queer erotic life, a life Merrill at thirty
and Jackson have not yet fully grasped, the reader assumes, because it is not
a “normalized” part of the dominant (always already heterosexual) “fiction” of
male adolescence. That this aspect of the poem, its major focus on the quotidian
struggles and pleasures of a gay relationship, would, in an era of “gay liberation,”
go largely unnoticed even as Merrill won the Pulitzer Prize for the book, Divine
Comedies, in which this poem appears, is either a historic irony or a spectacular
instance of what Eve would call “willed ignorance.”13 Is she participating in such
a move? While Eve also quotes many of the above lines from the poem, she is
ostensibly most interested in how they “point . . . to the letter,” revealing the insta-
bility of “tones and grammars.” Ephraim, she claims, is “one absent presence” in
the poem, and the other is Merrill’s lost novel. In “Seances” Eve at first appears
most compelled by the poem’s evacuation of the lyric “I,” and the epistemologi-
cal consequences of “totalization” versus “streams of plurality” that characterize
both Merrill’s novels and poems. These terms are invoked without explanation;
they reveal Eve’s immersion in the critical parlance of the time, which perhaps
meant that she assumed they needed no definition. Traces of Roland Barthes’s
recently translated S/Z (the one theoretical work alluded to in “Seances”), the
lessons of deconstruction, especially its critiques of the phallocentric move toward
difference-denying “truth,” recur in “Seances” — for example, in its underlying
deconstructive impulse to undo a series of shifting binarisms and in its attention to
what Eve terms the sadomasochistic phallic urge to shut down polysemy to achieve
“totalization” (for more on Eve’s relation to Barthes, see Moon, this issue).14
The meaning ascribed to that term seems to include a secured (i.e., other deny-
ing) vision of the self and voice, as well as an emphasis on formal closure. Such
moves, she implies, are attempts to close off the multiplicity of significatory pos-
sibilities, the “streams of plurality,” all literary texts provide. Eve contrasts what
she calls “novelistic” instances in Merrill’s works with moments of what she calls
“fluidity,” literal images of urine, waterfalls, rivers, as well as the slipperiness of
metonymy and the refusal of “The Book of Ephraim” to perpetuate the fantasy of
the coherent, lyric “I.” Early on in her piece she refers to Ephraim as “the voice a
poet wants because he is not a voice . . . the purely ostentive, pure pointing in the
absence of either a pointing subject (the cup stands in) or a pointed-at-object (the
alphabet stands in).” In turn, she writes that “Merrill turns into the wax tablet,
the memory, for this mystic writing pad . . . . [He] provides spacing for Ephraim’s
temporalizing not only by writing the letters in the pointed-at order, but also by
introducing space between groups of letters, making words” (Sedgwick, this issue).
Her interest in the emptying out of poetic subjectivity is not necessarily a harbin-
ger of her later fascination with Buddhist understandings of a (non)relation to the
self, however, but seems more to echo poststructuralism’s emphasis on the death
of the author. Her discussion of crucial shifts in the narrative perspective in Mer-
rill’s early novels also reflects these concerns. In a 2008 interview with Michael
Snediker, “Seances” briefly comes up:
MDS: I love seeing all of your James Merrill books. Do you have favorites
of his?
EKS: Favorites? Yeah. I love “The Book of Ephraim.” Some of the early
lyrics I really love. What’s it called? “Prose of Departure.” I love that one.
MDS: I really like The Seraglio, also.
EKS: [Laughs.]
MDS: The castration scene —
EKS: Yeah, that’s a pretty great scene. I haven’t reread that in a long time. I
think I had a theory that the castration scene involved Henry James’ style,
getting rid of Henry James’ style. If I’m remembering rightly, it was more
about getting rid of the Jamesian singular point of view. After that climac-
tic chapter break, the point of view is suddenly much more diffuse.15
“Singular” and “diffuse” are familiar deconstructive terms. However,

even when in “Seances” Eve discusses in detail the scene alluded to above, she
does not rigidly thematize these observations along the lines of “masculinity” and
“femininity” (phallic singularity versus écriture feminine) in ways that lock them
into an always already heterosexualized dialectic, as would become a norm in
(feminist) poststructuralist criticism. Thus, beyond reflecting the zeitgeist of her

critical moment, perhaps more obliquely (one of Eve’s oft-used words), “Seances”
develops a theory of a queer, male-male écriture.
In fact, in “Seances” I would argue that subjectivity, narrative and poetic
voice, and form are all linked to different versions of male-male erotics. Eve’s
readings of Merrill’s novels The Seraglio and The (Diblos) Notebook explore and
deconstruct the possibility of phallic mastery, what she claims at least partly
distinguishes “the novelistic,” through her discussions of both form and con-
tent. In regard to the latter text, she discusses the significance of the stripes pro-
duced by a whipping on Orson’s face and their connection to the act of writing
and of editing performed by the novelist (not Merrill but the character within
the novel), “the effect of the horizontal stroke” through a set of words. Eve links
both the visibility of Orson’s wound and this version of representation to castra-
tion. Following loosely a psychoanalytic model, she argues that castration, far
from obliterating the phallus, reconfirms it, just as the “crossing out of words
[. . . is] a sign of negation that nevertheless totalize[s].”
Similarly, Eve points to the metonymic chains of incorporation and what
she calls the masturbation Leo (the main character of the lost novel reproduced
as poetry within “The Book of Ephraim”) performs as ultimately representing not
the “slow disintegration of conventions of identity” available within the rest of
the poem but a “sadomasochistic totalization.” Subject and object are fixed duali-
ties; rather than see Leo’s relation to the “others” of his past as one of homoerotic
entanglement with difference, Leo’s “masturbatory impulse” becomes instead a
compulsion to subsume otherness into the self.
Eve contrasts these versions of phallocentric castration, which she argues
parallel the “novelistic” drive toward formal closure and its attempts to control
meaning, with the literal (self)-castration that occurs in the middle of The Sera-
glio. In this case, she asserts again that presence becomes analogous to absence,
in her description of the significance of Francis’s uncut wrists, but to different
ends. Here the castration has “pluralizing effect[s]” instead: Eve points to the
“ ‘hundred phalluses’ ” in the “Italian antique shop” Francis encounters earlier in
the novel, as well as what she identifies as “the insistent parallel between Fran-
cis’s castration and his previous, unsuccessful efforts to rid himself of his huge
patrimony. To cut oneself off from one’s trust funds would have been, after all, to
succeed in making an amputation that was at the same time a dispersal” ([Sedg-
wick, this issue]; emphasis mine). Castration here formally equals the scattering or
flowing of narrative energies: what Sedgwick remembers in her 2008 interview as
the undercutting of the Jamesian point of view.
Amputation, cutting, dispersals: such terms recall Eve’s description of her

own critical method a few pages earlier in “Seances,” also:
If I seem to be coming down hard on these phallic moments, it is only

partly because of a queasiness in writing about intelligent pornography. A
polemical narrowing of attention on my part is being met by a less simple-
minded narrowing on the author’s part. My account does these novels vio-
lence, not by “reading into” the summarized moments more sexual polar-
ization than is really there, but by cutting the moments off [sic in ms] from
the flow of energy within each novel that supports them.
Here Eve’s account of her own critical method uses the same language
of amputation. She can’t seem to resist the pun, “coming down hard,” but also
appears nervous to be writing about sex, as signaled in her use of the distancing
term “intelligent pornography.” But her most important point is metacritical: criti-
cism, she claims, can’t help but repeat the acts of phallic totalization the “novelis-
tic” at least partly inevitably performs.16
At this point “Seances” turns back to “The Book of Ephraim,” and in par-
ticular to the status of the “I.” Eve argues that the larger poem which forms a sort
of dialectic with the novel within it resists phallic totalization, not only because of
the allusions to a form of automatic writing discussed above but because of the way
the relationship between Merrill and Jackson produces another kind of otherness,
“somehow different from the phallic otherness that had dominated the novels”
(Sedgwick, this issue). Eve focuses on a line from the poem, “ ‘a strangeness that
was us, and was not,’ ” which she reads as a description of their joined subjectivity,
“the emergence of a distinct language for Ephraim from the hands of Merrill and . . .
Jackson,” an “us” that allows absence and presence, the self and the other, to exist
simultaneously, rather than produce violence, suppression, “punishment, dele-
tion, amputation” (Sedgwick, this issue). Strangeness, queerness, hands joined
on a teacup, hands writing, hands perhaps doing other things — two men together
resisting phallic totalization. Rather than see homosexuality, then, as the epitome
of phallic narcissism (loving in the other only an idealized vision of one’s self) or a
repeat of the masturbatory sadomasochism Leo represents, Eve’s vision of Merrill
and Jackson’s homoerotic bond becomes a way to preserve otherness, to bring it
into being. It involves doubling, she argues, but its narcissism is “innocent,” not
a version of what Luce Irigaray, translated a few years later, will term hommo-
sexualité.17 Eve considers this different form of doubling at the level of content as
well, showing how the mirrors within the poem dissolve images at least as often,
if not more frequently, than they reflect them. Underpinning her poststructuralist-
inflected formal analysis is a rewriting, a revaluing, then, of a particular structure
of homosexual desire. Her work reveals how this theory enables this kind of read-
ing, but also how poststructuralist critique is reframed and extended through pay-
ing explicit attention to gender and sexuality.
Throughout her piece Eve is careful not to make different binaries rigidly
static: the novel can be fluid, the poetic is strongest in Merrill, she argues, when
it mixes “fix and flow,” the absent mother is present in silence (as opposed to
repressed). Yet by the end of the piece we find her praising what one might call a
queer significatory economy:
The flow of [Merrill’s] writing is awesome and can be awful, and its real
drama is about those succinct collapses, those moments of arrest: how
intently and beautifully, for an instant, they are improved, and then
how quickly squandered. . . . Merrill’s long poems are formally exciting
because they are so knowing, so inventive, and so trusting about that
wastage.
“Squander[ing],” “wastage,” “flow” allude to a different, a queer spermatic, econ-

omy, one based on pleasure not (re)production, “waste” not frugality or control.18
In a related move, Eve finishes “Seances” by discussing Merrill’s repre-
sentation of the poet not as phallic master but as one who adds spaces to “ ‘quasi-
grammatical constructions’ ” to produce the poem as “spacing machine.” Spaces,
silences, gaps: according to Eve, Merrill’s poem allows for otherness to exist. And
who or what sets this all in motion? The term Ephraim uses for Merrill and Jack-
son’s relationship, their “fortunate conjunction,” echoes the emphasis on grammar
and on spacing: it is their joining, grammatical and sexual, that brings the poem
into being. Building on Eve’s reading, then, one might view the creation of the
poem as a queer form of (re)production, homoerotic eros the force that brings into
being the work.19 Eve’s analysis thus represents a nascent recognition of the power
of such a theory of poetic collaboration.
At a moment when poststructuralist (feminist) criticism was beginning to
gender particular forms of writing, for Eve to root the preservation of différance in
a relationship between two gay men foreshadows the separation of queer critique
from feminist analysis she would enact more fully within the coming decade. It
also points to her own attachments: for example, rather than laud the polysemous
“writing like a woman” of a James Joyce or Thomas Pynchon, whose works are
rather less (openly) queer, as some of her contemporaries were doing, she chooses
Merrill’s high camp complexities. We are still within a white male canon, but it is
a thoroughly gay one.
It is tempting to read Eve’s account of her own critical practice against the
grain of her analysis of it, to see it, like “The Book of Ephraim,” as “succeed[ing]
in making an amputation that was at the same time a dispersal,” a “spacing” (or
ordering) of knowledge, “not [. . . a] deletion.” If we consider later moments in her
criticism where she tries to preserve plurality, rather than close it off, perhaps we
have a way to contextualize this early attempt. For example, consider Eve’s formal
decisions and her relation to the pleasure of revelation in A Dialogue on Love.20
The book is written in a modified form of the haibun, a Japanese form that mixes
haiku and prose. We are already back within the mixing of poetry and, if not the
novelistic, the memoir and a third genre, the notes of Eve’s therapist, Shannon.
Perhaps not surprisingly, one model for the book was Merrill’s own haibun, “Prose
of Departure” (1988), which describes living with the presence of death — his
friends’ — of AIDS, and his fear of the possibility of his own diagnosis. 21 In both
works, we might see this mixing of genre as again “resisting totalization,” any
finality of viewpoint, including on death. That Eve would find inspiration in both
the form and content of a work centrally concerned with living and dying with HIV/
AIDS not only signals her continued investment in Merrill’s writing but also points
to her ongoing identification with gay male culture, and the way her understand-
ing of living with breast cancer (a “women’s disease”) is formed largely through
her understanding of what it means to live with HIV (at that point overwhelmingly
associated in the United States with gay men), something she elucidates further to
Shannon in A Dialogue on Love.
Looking, literally, at this text after reading “Seances,” I’m struck by Eve’s
choice of typeface. Instead of Ephraim’s messages, we have Shannon’s notes in the
same small capitals. Obviously his writings represent another “real” person’s voice
within the piece. But through her use of a different typeface, is Eve emphasizing
how Shannon becomes a sort of medium for Eve’s new relation to her subjectivity
postcancer? Therapists, certainly, are at least partly brought into being through
the transference of their patients, and vice versa. But at times we may also find
it painful to read the way Shannon’s notes reduce, discipline, misrecognize Eve’s
layered accounts of herself, even as this book reflects Eve and Shannon’s develop-
ing intersubjective intimacy.
And consider the way she describes her need to find pleasure in therapy.
As she explains:
“Then, there’s something about pleasure that might be important. I don’t

know how to say it properly: I’ve gotten hold of an intuition that if things
can change for me, it won’t be through a very grim process. It won’t hap-
pen as I always used to imagine in the old days, by delivering myself up
for good at the door of the Law. I used to take one deep masochistic breath,
and determine I was ready to surrender to the disciplinary machine — in
enough pain to have to do it — but then of course I didn’t know how to, and
couldn’t sustain my resolve anyway; and nothing about the therapy would
work. Now it seems that if anything can bring me through to real change, it
may be only some kind of pleasure.” (Dialogue, 8)
When Shannon replies that this process may be painful, Eve alludes to the history
she recounts in “A Poem”: “My slightly secret smile. ‘I tolerate pain okay’ ” (8).
Perhaps the way Eve inserts poetry into prose, producing a kind of enjamb-
ment at the level of genre, one that mirrors the enjambment occurring within the
haiku themselves, is meant to perform through form this erotics. Perhaps this
deliberate mixing of genres that forces language, if in a seemingly almost arbi-
trary way, to flow from prose into poetry and back again, instantiates the multiple
queer pleasures (sometimes through pain) of the text that “The Book of Ephraim”
and “A Poem” recount. That is to say, the pleasure (and pain) at the disciplining
of language, the creation of a (set of) tableaux that frame the exhibitionism of the
entire work, a space,
“a life
where work
and love
are impos-
sible
to tell
apart.” (23)22
Here I add my own spacing to Eve’s words, turning her prose to poetry. I
regard my mimetic disciplining, as I do my own interpretation of “Seances,” as
an act of “ TENDERNESS AND GRATITUDE,” the terms Shannon records Eve using to
describe how relationships that produce “surprising recognition” feel. My read-
ing of “The 1001 Seances” began with this concept, the idea that the best epis-
temological or spiritual moments are those where one immediately understands
something as true, as always already grounded in one’s own sense of a sort of iden-
tificatory fit with a claim or statement or way of experiencing the world. It may be
hard for us to find such an immediate identificatory relationship with “Seances”:
recognition may come more slowly, or not at all. To the degree that identification
or recognition (which are not always analogous) requires incorporation, we may do
well to recall Eve’s emphasis in “Seances” on Merrill’s “strangeness that was us,
and was not.” As a form of critical generosity, in its making room for other ways
of knowing, Eve’s oeuvre is unique. In that spirit, in contextualizing “Seances,” it
is as crucial to underline its strangeness as it is important to identify moments of
surprised, queer recognition.
Notes
1. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Dur-

ham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 165. Throughout this essay I use the familiar
form of address: this essay is a tribute to my former teacher and beloved friend.
2. James Merrill, Divine Comedies (New York: Antheneum, 1976), 45 – 136. For the rest
of the essay I use “Seances” to refer to Eve’s piece; references to Merrill’s “Book of
Ephraim” are cited by page number in the text.
3. It was Annamarie Jagose’s writing that pointed me to this moment in Eve’s work
(Annamarie Jagose, “Thinkiest,” PMLA 125, no. 2 [2010]: 378 – 81).
4. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1990), 1.
5. Sedgwick, Epistemology, 12.
8. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “A Poem Is Being Written,” in Tendencies (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1993), 186 – 87. Hereafter cited in the text.
10. Eve was often attacked for her revelation of the perverse ways her auto- and alloerotic
desires expressed themselves. Particularly vicious were some feminists’ rejection of
her as a traitor to the cause.
11. The poem never uses the term lovers to describe Merrill and Jackson’s relationship: it
instead performs the kind of “quasi-nominative, quasi-obliterative” signifying prac-
tices Eve identifies with Henry James’s “Beast in the Jungle” (Epistemology, 203), the
“I know that you know what ‘friend’ really means” that is echoed in much of the early
critical writing about the poem.
12. David Kalstone, not surprisingly, comes perhaps the closest in his review “Nights
and Days,” Times Literary Supplement, October 28, 1977, 1267, reprinted in Critical
Essays on James Merrill (New York: G. K. Hall, 1996), 44 – 49.
13. Sedgwick, Epistemology, 3–10.

14. Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang,
1974).
15. Eve Sedgwick, “Queer Little Gods: A Conversation with Michael Snediker,” Massa-
chusetts Review 49, nos. 1 – 2 (2008): 205.
16. Tracing the way this relation to the “novelistic” shifts in Eve’s work is beyond the
scope of this essay, but consider that she moves from exploring what she sees as
another male homophobic version of this totalization in Between Men to arguing for
a move away from the notion of inevitability, the always already, the “anticipatory,
mimetic mechanism,” in “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So
Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is about You” (in Novel Gazing:
Queer Readings in Fiction, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick [Durham, NC: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 1997], 11).
17. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1984).
18. Eve explores such alternative economies throughout her work; in relation to “waste,”
consider how she (and Michael Moon) revalue a demonized version of fat as addic-
tion and overconsumption in “Divinity: A Dossier, a Performance Piece, a little-
Understood Emotion,” Tendencies, 215 – 51.
19. That Ephraim was called “Eros” in Merrill’s lost novel makes this claim even more
plausible. See also “Book of Ephraim,” 78.
20. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love (Boston: Beacon, 1999).
21. James Merrill, The Inner Room (New York: Knopf, 1988).
22. Formatting mine.
Figure 1. North Plain St., Altered Polaroid self-portrait by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.
Ithaca, New York, 1980
A NOTE ON
“THE 1001 SEANCES”
H. A. Sedgwick
W hen Eve died, in April 2009, her papers were scattered, disorganized, and
incomplete. The process of sorting through, organizing, and preserving what
remains is still ongoing. In August 2009 we were looking through a box marked
“Eve’s personal papers” that had been stored in a rented storage locker. Among
the papers was a photocopy of a typescript of “The 1001 Seances,” Eve’s essay on
James Merrill. I remembered the paper, but it had been many years since Eve had
mentioned it to me, and I had not known that it still existed. As far as we knew
then, this was the only surviving copy.
The typescript was undated, but something about the date could be
inferred from the Cornell University address in its heading. Eve’s paper focuses
on “The Book of Ephraim” in Merrill’s The Divine Comedies, which was first pub-
lished in 1976. After five years as a graduate student and instructor at Yale, Eve
had moved to Cornell in the fall of 1976, supported by a two-year postdoctoral
Mellon fellowship. So this typescript was produced during her fellowship. It’s quite
possible, however, that she was already working on the essay during her last year
at Yale. We can further narrow down the date to the first year of Eve’s fellowship
because of a letter in her files dated June 7, 1977, from the editor of Salmagundi.
The letter declines to accept “The 1001 Seances” but encourages resubmission
with some changes to make it less “like an academic paper.” It appears that Eve
chose not to change her paper.
We prepared a clean, digitized copy of the paper. In doing so, we checked
Eve’s quotations from Merrill and made a few small corrections. Additionally, Eve
had made a few very minor handwritten changes in wording on the photocopy, and
we have incorporated those.
We have since learned (with the help of Google) of the existence of two
GLQ 17:4
DOI 10.1215/10642684-1302307
other photocopies of Eve’s paper. One is in the Merrill archive at Yale’s Beinecke
Library. It was given to the archives, as part of two boxes of Merrill’s papers, by
J. D. McClatchy, Merrill’s literary executor, in 1991. McClatchy had received the
paper from Joseph Gordon, a close friend of Eve’s and a fellow graduate student,
along with McClatchy, at Yale.1 The other photocopy is in the files of Mark Bauer,
Joseph Gordon’s partner. In 1996 Bauer had organized a panel on Merrill for that
year’s meeting of the Modern Language Association. Eve had agreed to give a talk
(about twenty-five minutes long) based on a much-shortened version of “The 1001
Seances” and had sent Bauer a photocopy of the full-length paper, which is what
he has now. These two photocopies both have a Hamilton College address on the
first page, so Eve presumably retyped that page after she moved to Hamilton (her
first faculty position) in the fall of 1978. The other pages of both these photocop-
ies, however, were clearly made from the same typescript that Eve used in making
the Cornell photocopy that we have.
There’s much that we don’t still know about the history of this paper, but
what we do know makes it clear that Eve maintained her interest in her writing
about Merrill over at least the twenty-year period from 1976 to 1996.
A dear friend of Eve’s remarked that readers of GLQ may not recognize in “The
1001 Seances” the Eve who was “the founding voice of Queer Theory” — that
the author of this essay may seem like an Eve before she was Eve. This remark
deserves careful thought.
There are, of course, many differences between the Eve of this essay and
the more familiar Eve of the 1990s. Looking back, though, for me the most salient
difference between the Eve of “The 1001 Seances” and the Eve of, say, “Queer
and Now” lies in her complex and changing relation to her own poetry. In 1976,
although Eve hoped to earn her living in academia and certainly had serious ambi-
tions as a literary critic, she thought of herself, in the first place, as a poet.
In October 2006, in a public conversation with Gavin Butt at the Frieze
Art Fair in London, Eve set out to briefly “tell the story of my development as a
critic.” She went on to say, “I didn’t start out to be a critic. I started out to be a
poet from very, very, very early on, but my muse was very fickle, and so there was
a lot of time when I just couldn’t write. And so my sense of identity as that kind
of a writer was kind of excruciatingly tenuous. So I found my way — I’m talking
about college and graduate school here — into seeing myself as a literary critic.”2
The transition, however, was a slow one, extending well into the 1980s. In
the most recent curriculum vitae of Eve’s that we have, all five of her publications
A NOTE ON THE “THE 1001 SEANCES” 453
from 1980 and earlier are poems or groups of poems. Eve’s first listed publication
as a critic, apart from her dissertation, was in PMLA in 1981. 3 It was also as a
poet that Eve sought and received early recognition. In the section of Eve’s cur-
riculum vitae listing her awards and honors, there are five listings from 1968 to
1975; all are prizes for poetry. The next listing is from 1984; it’s an award for a
piece of critical writing.
Both external and internal causes must have made Eve’s self-identification
as a poet increasingly difficult to maintain from the late 1970s through the 1980s.
First, during her two-year fellowship at Cornell, Eve assembled the manuscript for
a book of her poems. Its title was Traceable, Salient, Thirsty: Poems, 1973 – 1977.
She was, however, unable to find a publisher for this book. Among her papers, in
addition to several revisions of the manuscript, is some of her correspondence with
publishers, as well as a list of publishers to whom the manuscript had been sub-
mitted. These papers show a sustained effort over a number of years, continuing
well beyond her move to Hamilton College in the fall of 1978, before it was finally
abandoned. Many of the poems from the manuscript were included, years later,
when Eve finally did publish her first book of poems, Fat Art, Thin Art, in 1994.
Others remain unpublished.
Second, in 1978 Eve began work on a book-length poem, The Warm Decem-
bers, that she was (as she wrote in her note to the poem) “to regard as current
work” for the following decade. She made extensive preparatory notes and plans
for the poem, including a trip to the south and east coasts of England to study
the poem’s locales. She continued to work actively on the poem while she was at
Hamilton and after she moved to Boston University in 1981, although she was also
working then on the critical essays that would be published as Between Men in
1985, shortly after her move to Amherst College. The Warm Decembers remained
a central project for her during her years at Amherst as well. But, although she
continued planning and sketching fragments, it proved “unable to be written.” In
her note, in 1994, to the publication of the half-finished poem, she sees “quite
precisely the 1984 line . . . [that] . . . was the last one destined to have been
written out of a relatively seamless sense of the integrity and momentum of this
writing process. Yet it took me three or four more years of a punishing incredulity
to understand that this poem was not being written. In fact it was nine years . . .
before I seemed to be able to write poetry of any kind.”4
In saying, in 2006, that she came to see herself as a literary critic, Eve
does not say that she ceased to see herself as a poet. Indeed, she was again highly
productive as a poet in the 1990s while her critical writing became more personal
and more experimental (one of the graduate seminars she offered then was called
Experimental Critical Writing), extending even to writing about her own poetry (in
“A Poem Is Being Written”).
So, to the literary critic of “Queer and Now,” the boundary between criti-
cism and poetry was more permeable, more fractal, than to the newly credentialed
literary critic of “The 1001 Seances.” But it seems to me that there may be a fur-
ther way in which Eve’s very active engagement with her own poetry affected her
writing in “The 1001 Seances.”
I remember Eve being intensely engaged with “The Book of Ephraim” and
working on her essay for an extended period. I remember, too, that she sent a copy
of her paper to Merrill and that she received back from him a short, polite note,
thanking her for sending it, but saying nothing of substance. I remember that Mer-
rill’s evident lack of interest was a serious disappointment to Eve.
Thinking about it now, I doubt whether there was any indication that he
had read her paper. Although the reader may perhaps feel that Merrill would not
have been altogether pleased if he had read the paper, my guess is that this was
not what Eve felt when she imagined him reading it. Although the paper is plain-
spoken in places about what Eve perceived as limitations in his writing, she gen-
erally suggests that Merrill was aware of these limitations himself and that he
worked with them in productive ways. What are most salient in the paper are the
care, the intelligence, and the empathy with which Eve reads Merrill. I imagine
that he was the reader she had most in mind in writing this paper. I imagine that
she hoped her paper would create an impression and would perhaps be an opening
to further communication.
Eve evidently felt that Merrill’s poetry was close enough to her own for
her to be able to learn from him. For example, her formal use of capitals for the
voice of a queer little god in her long poem “Trace at 46,” which was written in
the late 1970s, is clearly adapted from Merrill’s use of small caps for the voice of
the spirit Ephraim. She uses this typographic differentiation of Merrill’s again, for
the voice of her therapist Shannon, throughout her second book of poetry, A Dia-
logue on Love, published in 1999.5 Also, Dialogue is written in the Japanese hai-
bun form, an interweaving of poetry (haiku) and prose that Eve first learned from
reading Merrill.
I want to say that it was primarily as a poet that Eve was drawn to read
Merrill and to write about him. The absence of any hint in this essay on Merrill’s
poetry that she herself is a poet might then seem puzzling. To me it suggests more
than simply a carefully maintained separation between her critical writing and her
poetry. Her absence as a poet suggests a reserve, perhaps a reluctance to make
A NOTE ON THE “THE 1001 SEANCES” 455
that particular claim on the reader’s interest, that constrained her voice as she
wrote this essay.
Notes
The writing of this note has been greatly helped by conversations and correspondence
with Mark Bauer, Jonathan Goldberg, Joseph Gordon, Neil Hertz, Sarah McCarry,
Tina Meyerhoff, Michael Moon, and Joshua Wilner. I am grateful to the Beinecke
Library at Yale University and the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library for
sharing their archives of Merrill’s books and papers. I am especially grateful for the
help of Sarah McCarry, who is working with me on Eve’s archives and who did most of
the work in researching and preparing the manuscript of “The 1001 Seances.”
1. At the top of the first page of my copy of this paper — the copy bearing Eve’s Cornell
address — is Eve’s handwritten inscription “For Joe Gordon,” which I take to be a
dedication.
2. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Gavin Butt, “Art, Writing, Performativity,” Frieze Foun-
dation, MP3 audio file, October 13, 2006, www.friezefoundation.org/talks/detail/art
_writing_performativity/.
3. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the
Gothic Novel,” PMLA 96.2 (1981): 255–70.
4. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Note on ‘The Warm Decembers,’ ” in Fat Art, Thin Art
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 159.
5. For a short description of Eve’s formal ambitions for A Dialogue on Love, see “Art,
Writing, Performativity.”

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The 1001 Seances

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

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James Merrill’s long poem, The Book of Ephraim, is

The poem sounds autobiographical in Merrill’s characteristic way, and while

The cup twitched in its sleep. “Is someone there?”

Who hardly understand, through the compulsive

As on the very wall flame rippled up,

D: One more try.

Seized the cup. (50)

lends the spirit an oblique presence. The cup

swerved, clung, hesitated,

THIS TOPSYTURVY WILLOWWARE

IGLOO WALTZING WITH THE ALPHABET (42)

Too much went whizzing past. We were too nice

A mapmaker (attendant since Jaipur)

TAKE our teacher told us

DURING IT BE EVEN PARTLY SPOILED

BY FEAR OF LOSING TOO MUCH This was the tone

LONG B4 THE FORTUNATE CONJUNCTION

(David’s and mine) ALLOWED ME TO GET THRU

— On our kind hearts, good sense, imagination,

The pointing to the letter is accomplished in several ways: by the alphabet-

— at last, the waterfall.

Smooth skin, mouth gentle, eyes expressionless —

Sleep overtakes him clasping what he loathes

His expectancy was easier than my own to understand.

Finally the expectancy is answered.

In The Seraglio, an earlier novel, the inflictive, phallic, unutterable moment

rowing of attention on my part is being met by a less simple-minded narrowing on

glamorously totalizing moments in the novels seems to permit at least a provisional

And here was I, or what was left of me.

Erect and gleaming, silver-hearted guest,

Ephraim, who enjoys this flying trip

she can neither reach nor exorcise

Anything as uncanny as possession can take place only in a field of erotically

But that’s life too. A death’s-head to be faced.

With Art Nouveau distortion

And what was the sensation

Not always. On occasion

So, bit by bit, the puzzle’s put together,

A more extended version of the dissolving mirror in an early poem, “Mirror,”

Across the parlor, you provide examples,

Late one sleepless

Since then, as if a fish

Landscape and figures once removed, in glass

Tell me, tell me, as I turn to you

The waterfall that day. Chill tremblings floored

Now you’ve seen through me, sang the cataract,

Its lean illuminations decompose.

Difficult as it is, in these particular pages, to know what is happening

Pallid root-threads. A blue sky inverted

Freshening its water, I feel faint

lost among arroyos —

The creek, a crystal tendon strained,

Tossed on its couch, no longer freely associating

At the end of the unwritten novel,

Now along crevices inch rivulets

What did I once think those two would feel?

Flows through field and book, dog howling, the firelit

Caught up in his strong