[lit-ideas] Re: The Sect of the Phoenix
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2007 21:43:23 EDT
What is interesting about the sect of the Phoenix is that by relying on De
Quincey's "Phoenix Club" -- he's referring to that demi-monde of English
Culture that may well be the ambience where H. S. Ashbee felt most at ease.
Balderston qualifies Borges's reference to Whitman:
"the divine husband knows, from the work of fatherhood"
Balderston writes: "The exchange replays some of the misunderstandings
between Whitman and Symonds and can hardly be regarded as the last word on the
story."
--- Interesting. I am fascinated by all the fuss Symonds and notable
heterosexual HAVELOCK ELLIS had to go through to publishe "Sexual Inversion".
More from D. Balderston's interpretation, at
_http://borges.uiowa.edu/bsol/bgay.php_
(http://borges.uiowa.edu/bsol/bgay.php)
"In 'The Sect of the Phoenix', Borges writes:
"Without a sacred book that brings them together like the Bible for the
people of Israel, without a common memory, without that other memory that is a
common language, scattered over the face of the earth, differing in race and
aspect, only one thing--the Secret--unites them and will go on uniting them to
the end of time. . . . I can testify that the performance of the rite is the
only religious practice observed by the members of the sect. The rite
constitutes the Secret. This Secret, as I have already indicated, is
transmitted
from generation to generation, but custom requires that mothers not teach it
to
their children, nor the priests either; the initiation in the mystery is left
to the lowest individuals. A slave, a leper or a beggar serve as initiators.
Also a child can teach another child. The act in itself is trivial, brief
and requires no description. . . . There are no decent words to name it, but
everyone understands that all words name it or rather that inevitably they all
allude to it; in conversation I have sometimes said something that made the
initiated smile or grow uncomfortable, because they felt that I had referred
to the Secret.]
Balderston writes:
"The content of this passage is undeniably homoerotic. The secret taught by
one boy to another, the secret revealed in empty spaces such as basements."
"The revelation of the Aleph takes place in Carlos Argentino's basement, and
I have already noted elsewhere (El precursor velado 40) that the basement
scene is charged with erotic energy, perhaps with suggestions of mutual
masturbation.
:Also vacant lots (charged with frightening energy for Borges, as revealed
by Estela Canto). Canto writes of Borges's fear of beaches (50) and vacant
lots (52), repeatedly insinuating that as a boy Borges must have suffered some
sort of rape: " One is tempted to imagine that some strange and terrifying
experience that happened to young Georgie in one of these vacant lots. . . .
All
of this, of course, is pure "conjecture."]
"This is the secret which serves to unite a diverse group of people and is
jealously guarded from others, the secret whose name one dare not speak: that
secret, for Borges, was male homosexuality.
"Earlier accounts have tended to see the "Secret" in "La secta del f énix" as
sexual intercourse in general, and perhaps male-female genital intercourse
in particular: in particular, see Christ 155-59. In a note on this passage
Christ clarifies that in a conversation with Borges in New York in 1968,
Borges
claims that the "Secret" is procreative heterosexuality, citing Whitman on
what "the divine husband knows, from the work of fatherhood" (190). The
exchange replays some of the misunderstandings between Whitman and Symonds and
can
hardly be regarded as the last word on the story."
"The phoenix is the symbol of this secret because in it male creates male
without the intervention of the female."
"The eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica notes:
"According to Pliny (Nat. hist. x. 2), there
is only one phoenix at a time, and he,
at the close of his long life, builds
himself a nest with twigs of cassia and
frankincense, on which he dies; from
his corpse is generated a worm which
grows into the young phoenix"
(21: 457).
Woscoboinik, commenting on the appearance of the phoenix in this story and
in a couple of other Borges texts, comments:
,the Phoenix is simultaneously father and son, "heir to itself," immortal,
reborn from the ashes and testifying to the passage of time. A fantasy of
narcissistic and deathly self-engendering, which denies paternity and sexual
relations.]
The "phoenix sect" of the Borges story must be constituted through that
ultimate act of "male bonding," anal penetration, but that act is shrouded in
secrecy. But of course if he returned so often to this secret, once even
calling
it a "fecal dialectic," it must be because he was in some way implicated in
that dialectic.
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