The Book of Minor Perverts

The School of Pater: Register, Reception, and the Gay Phase

“…On the other hand, its neglect speaks to a philosophical issue: our "failure to naturalize the periodicity of desire." 56 As Valerie Traub has commented, discussing queerness and time together often relies on specious analogies between sex, time, and history-especially when scholars dismiss periodization. Studying Pater's art history through its popular (mis)applications might reveal how this Victorian writer provides a way to discuss inconsistent sexual histories as well as the collaborative semiotics of the gay phase.…”

“…Boys not only historicized themselves but art-historicized themselves, a process to which their memoirs also contribute. As Agha notes, although register users may not always be able to give correct glosses on their own register, such a description's social importance "may well lie not in its degree of correctness, but in its efficacy, its capacity to bring more and more of the group's future discursive history into conformity with itself" (56). The way in which memoirists quote each other, even each other's diaries-Connolly calls Walter Le Strange's diary a "valuable contemporary document"-give their social scene a palpable coherence, at least in its remembered significance (213).…”

“…9 One way to make this type of person more discussable, I argue, would be the idea of the school of art as a model for "nonsubjective" and "situational" group identity, in this case "a homosexuality not of persons, but of place." 10 It is often assumed that Pater's later, more conservative work is in part a reaction to his personal difficulty with Studies in the History of the Renaissance's scandalous reception, and concurrent events at Oxford, in the 1870s. And indeed, these texts explicitly or implicitly deprecate the school in comparison to other elite collectives, such as the cult.…”

Des Grieuxand the Origins ofTeleny

“…for periodizing and narrativizing what is variously referred to as the invention of sexuality, the birth of homosexuality, the formation of sexual subjectivity, [and] the emergence of the homo/hetero binary." 54 This approach enables Kahan to contend with historically specific sexualities and practices that the binaristic model of homo/hetero occludes, such as "the cast of minor perverts that stick around after the initial tentative articulations of the homo/hetero divide." 55 Among such perversions, Kahan cites "bestiality, kleptomania, nymphomania, necrophilia, dendrophilia," and even "sex with statues."…”

“…16 Des Grieux reads as if it could be an extended sexological case study: it recounts the sexual lineage of Camille Des Grieux through several generations. Emerging from a historical moment that witnessed, in Benjamin Kahan's words, "a revolving door between literature and sexology," 17 Des Grieux shares sexology's etiological narrative burden in that it is preoccupied with cataloging and assessing the causes of the Des Grieux family's (congenital) sexual irregularities. A far less accomplished production than its counterpart, Des Grieux (the Prelude to "Teleny") nevertheless makes good on Teleny's numerous hints about storylines set in an earlier time, even though it fails specifically to fulfill the promise Des Grieux makes to his interlocutor in Teleny that "some day I shall tell you the reason why I am an only son" (Teleny 1: [41]).…”