Double Cain

III. Narcissus Odoriferous

But that isn't all. If the "homo" in the "homosexual"-the threat of his likeness, the danger of the double-leads ineluctably to the indistinction of a vaginal mime, the "sexual" in that same figure takes us somewhere close, but also some lace different. It takes us, in short, to the anus; we shouldn't be surprised to find ourselves there, since anal eroticism is almost always "in the air" where dominant representations of homosexuality are concerned. When Winston takes up the ear from Juana and sinks down to his hands and knees, his explicit coding as a gay man tends to evoke that particular form of eroticism, and to refigure the smell of the ear as the smell of his own uplifted rear. Given, moreover, that the scene imagines the gay man as animalized and animalizing, this figuration gestures in turn toward a fabulous Freudian myth concerning human prehistory, in which men were only bound together in asocial "bonds" of an essentially olfactory and finally anal kind. Long long ago-this fable says-in the animal womb of human time, individual "humans" came together only briefly, frenziedly, to experience the most intense sexual pleasure "man" has ever known. Sex at that time was a smelly business; both anally and genitally pungent, it "convulse[d] our physical being" in a way it has never done since (Civilization 28). But sex at that time was not yet human sex; it was animal sex, archi-narcissistic, in that it did not seek as good sex should to bring about ever larger social units, but tended rather to foster an uncivilized and violent separation. It was not a sex guided by the civilizing hand of love, but a sex in the grip of the death drive.

Civilization proper, as Freud continues, is Erotic through and through; it "is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind" (77). The sex of our beastly ancestors couldn't perform this combinatory function because it was a sex prompted by the periodic smell of the menstrual process, and it consequently brought humans together only occasionally, momentarily, impermanently. It was only when that sex became harnessed to the Erotic function that it could properly be called "civilized" or sociable at all, and this of course happened, according to this obscene but provocative myth, when the human animal stood up.

For at that point the role of the smelling apparatus "was taken over by visual excitations, which, in contrast to the intermittent olfactory stimuli, were able to maintain a permanent effect" (51n). Love ceased to be blind, dropped the scales from its eyes, and became thereby a constant factor in the life of the human being. Since, moreover, "the founding of families" (and thus, of society itself: civilization is always in Freud familial-social) results from the fact that "the need for genital satisfaction [now] took up its quarters as a permanent lodger" (51), we can begin to decipher one of those series of equivalence so common in Freud's work, and so telling: human society is a regime of permanence, a regime of vision, a regime of love. What it takes to bind people together in a community is an unending love, whose work is facilitated by the permanence of visual stimuli insofar as what gets "seen" is first and foremost the others' genitals.l4 There are thus, on this reading, either (permanent) social bonds of an essentially Eroticovisual nature, or there are no bonds, no relations, whatsoever. Either I smell the other and remain completely self-enclosed, a mere roaming and sniffling Narcissus whose very sexual union with the other is curiously non-Erotic and non-bonding; or I see the other and join with him lovingly, in a sociable manner that bonds us without annihilating our subjective autonomy and difference.