2

Hobert Langenfeld, ed , Reconsidering AubreyBeardsley (Ann Arbor and London: UMIResearch Press, 1989), 19-53.

Beardsley's Oscillating Spaces:Play, Paradox, and the Grotesque

Chris Snodgrass

If I am not grotesque I am nothing.Aubrey Beardsley

Aubrey Beardsley's art was first published in the spring of 1893. By mid-March 1898, he was dead at the age of twenty-five. Despite the extremebrevity of his career, probably no other artist or writer prior to the elec-tronic age achieved more notoriety or exercised a more pervasive influenceon his era in such a short time. Less than two years after Beardsley's workfirst appeared, Max Bcerbohm felt able to proclaim that he belonged "tothe Beardsley Period," a designation Osbert Burdett would adopt as the titlefor his famous study of the late Victorian Decadence. I As Holbrook Jacksonexpressed it in his classic book The Eighteen Nineties (1913): "The appear-ann: of Aubrey Beardsley in 1893 was the most extraordinary event inEnglish art since the appearance of William B1ake."2 If the artist's ownCOil temporaries considered him, in Bernard Muddiman's words. the nine-ties' "real king," "the mentality most representative of the period,"> it maywell have been because his art captured (as did his life) all the centralcontradictions, and the fundamentally paradoxical vision, of the VictorianDecadence itself-a period that affirmed Art as the unifying order andspiritual principle of life, only to experience that life as a disordered, per-verse, self-contradictory paradox.

Nearly all of Beardsley's biographers have commented on how hispersonal life was curiously marked by contradictory tendencies--a taste fixthe bizarre and scandalous and yet a simultaneous attraction to ami rever-ence for the church, a constant need to violate convention and yet an

almost equal need for literary and artistic "fathers." He would expressdisgust at the "inexcusable" appearance and indecorous social behavior ofIcllow artists, yet his own "ruling passion ... to astonish" was so "undisci-plined" that publisher John Lane claimed (only a little facetiously) that hehad to place Beardsley's drawings "under a microscope, and look at themupside down" in order to catch details that might be too outrageous forpublication' These polarities continued to the end of Beardsley's life, whenhe cultivated as friends and benefactors both Andre Raffalovich, the fastidi-ous Russian expatriate who responded to Beardsley's numerous requestsfor religious texts and ultimately succeeded in bringing him into the Catho-lic Church, and Leonard Smithers, the rakish publisher whose iconoclasmand risque self-indulgence delighted Beardsley and more than one of whosevices Beardsley reputedly investigated.t Beardsley once claimed that"strange as it may seem, I really draw folk as I see them .... My pictures arelife itself."6 If that was true, even metaphorically, then his vision of life wasnot merely "strange," but "grotesque" in a fundamental way. In fact, Beards-ley's art presents a world-and also a view of that world-that is inescap-ably "de-formed" even in its elegance, a world whose meaning is not univo-cal but slides or oscillates precariously among unstable alternatives, evenopposing poles, so that clear and stable categories of meaning arc madeimpossible. In his works, as in the works of so many of his fin-de-steelecompatriots, the transubstantiation of the "Religion of Art" renders a worldthat is not holistic, logocentric, comforting, and nurturing, but split, para-doxical, vexed, and monstrous.

This dislocation of meaning is apparent even in Beardsley's earliestmajor project, the borders and illustrations to the Dent edition of Le MorteDartbur. As Brian Reade has noted, most of the drawings follow the horroruacui principles of Morris, but with some varying and particularly strikingeffects? In the full-page border to book 3, chapter i (fig. 2.1), to take atypical example, the dense, highly convoluted, serpentine foliage that en-twines the two knights at the right and the stylized Whistlcrian peacock atthe bottom and lower left creates an especially suffocating sense of impris-onment. 111e knights and the peacock themselves seem ensnared by thefoliage; the peacock's feathers (some of which mimic tulips) arc forced totwist around the side of the text. 111eroots of the two trees that verticallyspan the drawing arc cut off completely by the bottom of the border; thetree trunks arc obscured by the text and initial; and the leaves and branchesat the top seem artificially pressed down against that text. The initial I is inthe shape of a tree, but it is strangled by foliage and by what appears to bethe body of a snake. 111earmor of the two facing knights in the right borderis elaborated in ornate detail, yet the lines so approximate the shape andveins of the foliage that the knights seem not only entrapped, but about to

HOW DNG AIlmUi. TOO~ A WlFE, ANDWEDDED GUENlVER, DAUGHTER TO LEODE.GRANC!., DNG OF THB LAND OF CAMELIARD,wrra WHOM HE HAD THE ROUND TABLE.

Figure 2.1. Aubrey Beardsley. Title Page for I.e Morle Uartbur

Published in Beardsicvs t llustrntionsfor I.e .1101'1"

Dartbur: New York: 1lo\'er. 1972.

22 Chris Snodgrass Beardsley's Oscillating Spaces 23

be absorbed by their surroundings. Their shields, which wrap around theirbodies in a fashion mirroring the oversized body-length leaves aroundthem, resemble insect-chewed leaves or stems. This implicit violence andthreatened extinction stand in metaphoric relation to the text that thedrawing decorates, which speaks of the need for Arthur to establish lineagein order to halt the corroding civil strife in his kingdom. Moreover, theframe of the text has the appearance of having been superimposed over adrawing, cutting off parts of it and obscuring all but what appears in theborder and pushes through around the initial. The effect is to intensify thegeneral feeling of discomfort, violation, and imprisonment, an effect that isitself intensified by the fact that everywhere our comfortable perceptualcategories are blurred-the "outside" constantly threatens to become the"inside," border and text encroach upon each other's space, the naturalworld produces mutant animal-plants or appears artificial, and artificial ob-jects mirror nature, such that we can never be entirely certain whetherwe are viewing ironwork or briars, shields or leaves, feathers or flowers.

As in the Art Nouveau movement he so influenced, Beardsley's art"defamiltarizes'" both man-made and natural forms, mixing them or placingthe one in the traditional "place" of the other, jarring our normal codes ofperception and creating a disturbing hybrid image that seems simultane-ously cultural and natural. As Hector Guirnard did with his famous "orchidlamps" and plantlike lampposts, Beardsley places "flowers" where we ex-pect "shields" or "feathers," and vice-versa, creating an alien and conceptu-aUy threatening environment. The resultant hybrid figure, the flower-feather or shield-leaf, is a paradox, expressing a new meaning even while itretains the traces of its old one.

In a sense, Beardsley's drawings exhibit vivid variations of what Jac-ques Derrida has described as the "double mark," the effect produced bythe fact that every signifier (whether word or image) is inevitably andunavoidably supplemental, every element being a "trace" or "supplement"to other elements, no "message" existing that is not its concomitant "trace"or "supplement." These "supplements" (from the French slljJjJlhlle1lt) arcboth "an addition" and "a substitute": as expressed in Barbara johnson'sintroduction to Derrida, they "may add to something that is already pre-sent, in which case they are superfluous AND/OR they may replace some-thing that is not present, in which case they are necessary." Moreover, theydo both simultaneously. Since each meaning of the supplement is a"shadow presence" of the other meaning, undermining in constant decon-struction the independence of the other meaning, it is never possible todistinguish definitively between "addition" and "substitute," excess andlack, or even primary and secondary meanings?

Derrida's model wrenches apart or "dcconstructs" the "traditional,

hierarchical opposition" of dialectical terms. It demonstrates that no termcan in actual fact replace, negate, or sublate the other without simultauc-ously affirming as its supplement the sublated other term, leaving us witha "double reading" (sublation is itself the traditional English translation ofthe German Aufbebung, Hegel's term for the simultaneous negation andretention of what is being surpassed by dialectical thought). 10 PerhapsDerrida's most famous example of what he calls this basic "undecidability"is that of the pbarmakon, which in classical Greek means both poison andthe antidote for poison (medicine), both sickness and cure. Depending onhow the many variables-dosage, disease, body chemistry, other physicaland emotional circumstances-intersect and align, this same drug can ap-parently have "opposite" effects, "hurting" or "benefiting," even hurting asit benefits. For Derrida, the notion of the pbarmakon upsets even the abilityto decide the effect, the very system of decidabiliry, the opposition ofpoison and medicine itself."! That is, for Derrida, no word, image, name,concept, or other sign can be "pure," any more than can the pbarmakon.All of its meanings are caught in the AND/OR (and the NEITHER/NOR)..

The effect of Beardsley's conflating images appears to conform particu-larly well to Derrida's model. The defamiliarization Beardsley achieves isespecially intense, not only because he transports objects (and their conno-tative associations) across traditional recognized boundaries, but also be-cause the dislocation is often not simply dyadic, but triadic (at least): theshapes of many of Beardsley's exotic hybrids convey, in addition to thenormal connotations and "traces," a distinct sexual symbolism throughtheir erotic union of the ornamental and the genital. Plants and animals,even ornamental ones, are naturally sexual, of course, but Beardsley intensi-fies that sexuality--deliberatcly "perverting" it, in effect-not only bytransforming the superfluously ornamental into the functionally sexual butalso by conflating and confusing "lower" and "higher" (plant and animal)forms. His "flower-feathers" and "shield-leaves" become "flower-feather-vaginas" and "shield-leaf-phalluses." Moreover, of course, the "doublemark" paradox is not isolated in a specific plant, animal, or man-madeobject; it "disseminates," as Dcrrida would say, the compositional structureof the entire picture, in the new relationships generated by the juxtaposi-tions of these hybrid figures.

In How Sir Tristram Drank of the Love Drink (fig. 2.2), another illus-tration from LeMorte Dartbur, we have a good example of this hermeneuti-cal and metaphysical dislocation. The subject itself is fundamentally ironic,the drawing being based, as Simon Wilson has indicated (n. 5), on Wagner'sversion of the Tristan and Isolde story: Tristan has killed not merely theIrish champion but Isolde's fiance; Isolde, much to her anguish. has beenunable to avenge her lover's death, because when she was about to slay the

Beardsley's Oscillating Spaces 25

Figure 2.2. Aubrey Beardsley, Hour Sir Tristram Drank of the Love Drink

Illustration for Le Marte Dartbur.(Reade, 1(5)

sleeping Tristan, he awoke, and his loving gaze stayed her and plunged herinexplicably into the impossible dilemma of both loving and hating him.Her tortured despair is compounded by the fact that, having conqueredher, the dutiful and selfless Tristan is now coldly delivering her to he thebride of his uncle, King Mark, thereby humiliating her and making a lie ofhis love for her. To extricate herself from this intolerable situation, Isoldeinstructs her servant to prepare a poisoned drink, which she gives to Tristanbefore drinking it herself. Tristan, equally in despair, agrees to drink thepoison in symbolic atonement, neither of them realizing that Isolde's faith-ful servant has substituted for the poison a love potion so powerful thatthose who drink it are forever bound to each other with a desire so over-whelming that it can never be wholly fulfilled in earthly life. That is, expect-ing an escape into death, they are about to be plummeted into the livingtorture of an inescapable passion.

The drawing goes to some lengths to suggest a union, or at least acomplementarity, between the two lovers. Two parallel Japanese curtains,treated as screens and each displaying a clematis flower and a floweredblack base, serve as the backdrop for the lovers. The lovers' faces, althoughtheir expressions may vary slightly, seem to be but two versions of thesame face. 111e body shapes, though very different, are both exotic andbroadly complementary, Tristram's being broad at the shoulders and nar-row at the feet and Isoud's being narrow at the shoulders and wideningtoward the ground. And both figures convey a sense of being imprisonedby their fate: Tristram's wrist is wrapped, and the black border of his cloakis drawn so as to appear almost as a separate strip of cloth knotted andhound to him; Isoud is drawn without arms, as ifwrapped and bound tightlyin her garment.

Yet this suggestion of univocality, even if in tragedy, is simultaneouslyundercut by many of the same elements that foster it. 111ematching clema-tis flowers, ominously poised over each lover's head, are attached to lurch-ing grotesque and arabesque stalks that contrast sharply to the stylizedelegance of the lovers' dress. Furthermore, while Tristram's gesture andhearing may be thematically ironic-he makes a willing "toast" to theirdeath (the goblet itself seems adorned wi th painted snakes }--the elementsarc consistent. Indeed, his arm is parallel to the phallically surgcnt clematisstalks, which only reinforces the association of consummated love withdeath. On the other hand, Isoud's bearing is neither consonant (overtly)with Tristram's nor even self-consistent. She seems to be recoiling fromhim, in contrast not only to his gesture toward her but also to other compo-nents of her manner: the stylized pointed passion-flower-tulips that adornthe skirt connote sexual enticement, not aversion. Her entire shape, afterall, is pronouncedly phallic, accentuated by her lack of arms and the scro-

Beardsley's Oscillating Spaces 27

turulik« wukninj; (II hIT lower skirt. l h-r snakelike Medusan hair reinforceslu-r IIH'l1adl1~connot.uions hut again contradicts her averting posture.While, if Ikadl' and \\.'i1sonarc ("orrcct (n. HH; n. ';), her bearing may wellhe psychologically a("("urat("-hau~Il\i1y triumphant in revenge while simul-taneously shrinking from the horror of death-it raises the question of whyTristram is not also vexed and generally undercuts what at first appears tobe the logical theme. Isoud's ambiguous expression further compounds theproblem: whether we are inclined to believe it is "primarily" an expressionof "bitter triumph" (Wilson, n. 5), or apprehension, or scorn, or a numberof other possibilities, none of these interpretations can in fact be ruled out;the meaning of her expression defies hermeneutic closure, sliding amongseveral subtle alternatives.

The compositional "framing" of the drawing only reinforces what Der-rida would call this "undecidability." Even though we know that this sceneis supposed to be taking place on board a ship (the floorboards, as well asthe sea and gull-dotted sky in the center, confirm that it is), the Japanesecurtains nevertheless trick us at first glance into assuming that the scene istaking place indoors. Certainly logic suggests that the curtains would notbe on the deck of the ship, not to mention how they might be suspended.Furthermore, the fact that the opening to the prospect is made very narrow,and that the poison goblet is set in that "prospect" (against the sky andabove birds in flight ), seems to highlight symbolically the scene's centralambiguity: in light of the fact that the cup actually contains a love potionand not poison, is the aperture symbolically widening or narrowing? Arewe to understand that the love drink will "liberate" the lovers from death(the curtains, in effect, opening to spiritual freedom)? Or are we to under-stand that the love drink will in fact only imprison them anew (the curtains,in effect, closing out the freedom death would have provided)? Or is it,rather, as in the case of the depicted seagulls--we can't tell whether theyare flying toward, or away from, the lovers--that meaning equivocateswithout closure among the alternatives? It connotes freedom, imprison-ment, both, neither. Indeed, this underlying sense of dislocation and the-matic ambivalence is very subtly but surely intensified by the fact thatBeardsley does not provide the drawing with the traditional vanishingpoint. If we examine the floorboards that presumably ground the scene,we discover that rather than being designed to converge (theoretically) ata central unifying locus, they are drawn so that, if extended, they wouldintersect absurdly at a variety of different angles.

The border outside the central scene simply "frames" the paradoxonce more. Like Beardsley's other borders, it is a "decoration" that turnsout to be yet another thematic illustration. Undulating around the right andtop of the scene is a large restless snakelike stem (or is it a whip?), to which

is attached what Reade has called "Beardsley's symbolic flower, whichseems to have been derived from the passion-flower, or Clematis riticellaor Bush Bower, and the tulip" (n.I 04), and around which are also scatteredthe combination rose-gems, which are mirrored in the Japanese curtains.The passion-flowers and the stem are huge, appearing to create perceptu-ally an almost gravitational pull on the lovers, particularly Isoud, Readenotes that the "delicate tensed-up petals" of the blossoms "counteract" therestlessness of the border (n. 104). But this is not the only paradox in theborder; the overall design inverts itself. The huge tensed-up blossoms in thewide right-hand border are offset in the much narrower left-hand borderby their dwarfed, limp, moribund version, in which the erotic tension andhope of fulfillment have drained completely away, leaving the shrunken anddrooping petals to their inevitable death and leaving the "final" meaning ofthe scene even more unresolved.

D. J. Gordon defines the case well when he suggests that the centraldifficulty in Beardsley's art is that his pictures demand to be "read," yet hydeliberate ambiguity they often defy a definitive reading: their meaningstands "between the puzzle and the clue ... objects are neither one thingnor another, or they are two things at once," the terrain he tween the puzzleand the clue being "the terrain of the indeterminate and of alternatives." I2

An excellent metaphor for this hermeneutic ambiguity is given hy GregoryI.. Ulmer in his study of Derrida entitled Applied Grammatology. Ulmerlikens the effect of Derrida's deconstructive model to the visual "shaking"or "trembling" "shuttle motion" of the "moire effect" seen in much of OpArt, the "flicker" achieved by what was then the revolutionary manipulationof geometric forms, color dissonance, and kinetic effects: "the proximityof two meanings ... that are the same and different, offset, like the twooverlapping but not quite matching grids ... generate] s] the flicker ojthe moire effect."? In a similar sense, hermeneutically if not visually, theimages in many of Beardsley's drawings oscillate among dissonant, if notcontrary, meanings. As occurs with the overlapping of not quite matchinggrids in Op Art, the conflation of the different sets of coded associations andmeanings carried by Beardsley's images and relationships creates a logical"flicker" or "trembling" oscillation when the viewer tries to "read" themunivocally-signalling the fundamental and unresolved paradoxes underly-ing the drawing.

One of Beardsley's most persistent tools of dcfamiliarization, and afigure he comes to use as virtually a symbol for this metaphysical disloca-tion, is the grotesque. So central was the grotesque in his sensibiliry thathe once asserted in an interview with the Idler, "I have one aim-thegrotesque. If I am not grotesque I am nothing."!" Beardsley's obsession withthe grotesque is logical, because in a sense the grotesque is a visual incarna-

28 Chris Snodgrass Beardsley's Oscillating Spaces 2f}

tion of paradox. Recognizing this fact, John Ruskin was one of the firstcommentators to describe the grotesque as a fundamentally ambiguousphenomenon, which evokes in the viewer a violent clash of opposite feel-ings: on the one hand, it evokes in us fear, horror, dread, disgust, awe (theawe of "awful"), as embodying a distortion or ugliness almost beyond hu-man limits; but, on the other hand, that same preposterous quality movesus to laughter.P It is profoundly alienating, being without firm ground orreference, combining two presumably opposite realities--the fearful andthe humorous--its "meaning" free to slide back and forth between them.Beardsley utilizes the grotesque in virtually every conceivable fashion, butthree figures in particular appear to focus his paradoxical vision: the her-maphrodite, the foetus, and Pierrot.

Scholars have noted how mythic figures of doubtful sex, specificallythe androgyne and the hermaphrodite, have been used from the time of theGreeks at least through the nineteenth century as ambiguous and ambiva-lent representations of fundamental human desires and conflicts. On theone hand, primarily in their androgyne emphasis, where male and femaleaspects blend in almost indistinguishable unity, the figures have often repre-sented the ideal sexual union, the joining of man and woman in one bodysymbolizing the recovery of man's former androgyny and immortality. Yet,paradoxically, in their hermaphrodite emphasis, where both sexes exist inclearly defined and unresolved contradiction, these figures also come tosymbolize, particularly in the late nineteenth century, the converse of unity,communion, perfection, and virtue-frustrated isolation, hyper-self-reflex-iveness, corruption, and sin.16

One factor in this latter, negative view, bearing on Beardsley's use ofthe hermaphrodite, is the Decadence's well-known amhivalence towardwomen. Traditionally, the sanctification of women owed much not only tothe Madonna myth, but to the erotic value given to the feminine form,which Georges Bataille argues is due in significant degree to the relativeabsence of natural heaviness in its structure; that is being lighter "moreethereal," it was perceived to be less depe~dent on 'animal reality: conse-quently "purer" and more deslrable.l? But, paradoxically, the erotic qualityof the female body is equally defined by the desire to touch, transgress,despoil that purity. Indeed, Bataille explains, the pure beauty of the femi-nine form is provocative precisely because it is also bound up with thepromise or revelation of "a mysterious animal aspect": "The beauty of thedesirable woman suggests her private parts, the hairy ones, to be precise,the animal ones .... Beauty that denies the animal and awakes desire finishesup by exasperating desire and exalting the animal parts."!" The hermaphro-dite becomes, in effect, an emblem for this inextricably fused combinationof beauty and beast, of aesthetic refinement and bestial Nature-ultimately,

a confusion of good and evil. And in so many of Beardsley's hermaphrodites.we find the joining of the female with, not the male, or merely the mule.but the animal-satyr, snake, monster, or simply raw sexuality (c.g., ace.en-tuated sexual organs). In the most striking of Beardsley's figures of dual ordoubtful sex, we do not find that the genders blur into Burnc-joncsianasexuality so much as each gender is grotesquely accentuated, set oil insharp paradoxical conflict within one body. We are made to confront in asingle space the joining of what we thought were polarities--male/female,nature/culture, sacred/profane, ethereal/animal. The inherent contradic-tions, far from blending or being dissipated, rupture in an intense, if highlystylized, violence-a dislocation of meaning, a skewing of traditional logo-centric alignments.

In Beardsley's famous The Peacock Skirt from Salome (fig. 2.3), thebeauty of line and balance in composition belie several contradictory spa-tial and thematic tensions. In the first place, even before we entertain thequestion of what the scene signifies generally. we have the more specificproblem of identifying the two central figures, that is, which figure rcpre-sents which character from Wilde's play. Even though we may readily ac-knowledge the obvious fact that Beardsley did not feel constrained to "illus-trate" Wilde's text, we are also naturally inclined to establish at least atenuous connection between drawing and play. In this case, it seems morethan reasonable to assume, as almost all critics have, that the figures sym-bolize Salome and jokanaan. Certainly, such an identification seems logicalin light of the drawing's focus on the transfixed stares of the two figures andthe play's emphasis on the dangers of "looking" at objects of desire, particu-larly Salome and Jokanaan. Salome says of jokanaan, "Ce sont les )TUX

surtout qui sont terribles" (Salome, 2,j) ["It is his eyes above all that arcterrible" (Salome, 40 I ) I, and Jokanaan understands immediately that hedare not entertain Salome's "look": "Qui est cette femme qui me rcgarde?je ne veux pas qu'elle me regarde .... Arriere! Arriere! j'entends dans Iepalais le battement des ailes de l'ange de la mort .... je ne te regarderai pas.Tu es maudite, Salome, tu es maudite" (Salome, 25, 27, 33) ["Who is thiswoman who is looking at me? I will not have her look at me .... (;et theebehind me! I hear in the palace the heating of the wings of the angel ofdeath .... I will not look at thee, thou art accursed, Salome, thou art ac-cursed" (Salome, 402, 403, 406 )].19

But reasonable assumptions are not always safe in Beardsley's pictures.and Ian Fletcher makes a strong GL<;e,taking the same thematic emphasison the fatal "look," that this scene may well be intended to depict Salome'sencounter with Narraboth, The Young Syrian, Captain of the Guard, inwhich Salome cajoles and seduces the Syrian Captain into granting her wishto see Jokanaan face to face.i" Fletcher's reading is strengthened by the fact

Figure 2.3. Aubrey Beardsley, The Peacock SkirtIllustration for Salome by Oscar Wilde.(Reade, 277)

Beardsley's Oscillating Spaces JJ

that the Salorne-Narraboth episode occurs early in the play, and Beardsleyplaced his drawing facing page two of the text (Reade, n. 277). Moreover,there is little clear evidence in Wilde's text that jokanaan gazes directly atSalome, or that they confront each other closely in the fashion Beardsley'sdrawing depicts; indeed, the stage directions specify that at their meeting"Salome le regarde et recule" (Salome, 22) ["Salome looks at him andsteps slowly back" (Salome, 401 )J, and the play generally turns on joka-naan's (problematical) refusal to look at Salome, On the other hand, sucha close eye-to-eye confrontation clearly does occur between Salome andNarraboth. The stage directions indicate that Salome is "s'approcbant dujeune Syrien" (Salome, 20) ["Going up to the young Syrian" (Salome,399)J and "souriant" ["smiling") (Salome, 21; Salome, 400), as depictedin Beardsley's drawing, whereupon she declares, "Regardez-rnoi, Narraboth.Regardez-moi. Ah! vous savez bien que vous allez faire ce que je vousdemande" (Salome, 21-22) ["Look at me, Narraboth, look at me. Ah! thouknowest that thou wilt do what I ask of thee" (Salome, 4(0)J. And, ofcourse, he does look at Salome and does do immediately what she asks,only to witness her obvious desire for jokanaan: furthermore, after futilelybegging her to leave yet seeing her lust for jokanaan increase, "II se tile ettombe entre Salome et Iokanaan" (Salome, 31) ["He kills himself andfalls between Salome and [oteanaan" (Salome, 405) I.

111at is, even at the most elemental level Beardsley heightens from theoutset the ambiguity, "undecidability," and latent tension of his drawing,making deliberately unclear-he provides no clarifying tags or inscriptions,as he does in most of the other Salome drawings--just who is the subject,who it is we are viewing. In one sense, this blurring of distinctions isscandalously appropriate and consistent with Beardsley's well-known pen-chant for outrageous hidden jokes. In effect, hy deviously posing Narraboth.the pagan suicide, as an emblematic character in every way sufficient tosubstitute for jokanaan, the martyred Christian prophet, Beardsley onlyaccentuates the profound subversiveness of one of the play's themes, thatthe catastrophic potential of desire and egoistic arrogance recognizes 110

boundaries, entrapping and destroying both the small and the great, thehedonist and the ascetic, the pagan ami the Christian, the "guilty" and the"innocent," as if there were no real difference between them. Even moresubversive, perhaps, just as Beardsley's "illustrations" were said to supplantWilde's text, so in finding--contrary to our reasonable assumptions--thata minor character is the thematic locus of perhaps the most prominent andstriking Salome illustration, we are provided the additional "grotesque"metaphysical proposition that the "ancillary" can in all Significant respectsbe substituted for what is presumably "central," impugning the very hierarchyof center and circumference, primary and marginal, original and derivative.

( .hrts Snodgrass Beardsley's Oscillating Spaces 33

But that Is only the heginning of the hermeneutic and metaphysicaldislocation we find implicit in Beardsley's drawing. Even if we are willingto accept that the figures in the drawing represent Salome and Narraboth,not Salome and jokanaan, we are still left with the seemingly perfunctoryquestion, which is which? Logically, of course, we assume the more aggres-sive "attacking" figure on the left is Salome, and the more passive, "threat-ened" figure on the right is the Syrian Captain. But once again such a logicalassumption is almost immediately thrown into question. Ostensibly, theleft-hand "Salome" figure appears "coded" as the classic femme fatale, itsfemininity seemingly confirmed by the long ornate hair, the delicate fea-tures of its leering face, the elegance of its lines, and the billowing skirt,on which are depicted dozens of egg-shaped fertility forms, which may alsoserve as icons of the moon, associated in the play with Salome and death.We also have the teeming, poisonous headdress of the female Medusa (thecustomary snakes being replaced in this instance by decadent hothouseflower-hearts), Medusa being in Freud's conception the archetypal "castrat-ing" female. Yet, paradoxically, the figure's threatening character is mostforcefully conveyed by the fact that its armless, elongated, serpentine bodyand its scrotum-shaped lower skirt are blatantly phallic. It is, after all, themale peacock that has the beautiful plumage, and the skirt is thematicallymirrored in the elaborate peacock emblem perched at the back of (andmetaphorically reinforcing) the Salome figure's phallic shape. like Whis-tler's Peacock Room that inspired it, the skirt is in fact a miniature self-sufficient cosmos. But its self-sufficiency is the self-fertilizing solipsism ofthe hermaphrodite: the shapes that intimate the "feathers" of the peacockskirt also intimate not only ovaries and eggs, but tailed spermatozoa, thislatter connotation being reinforced synecdochically by the meticulouslyspaced fila added around the border of the skirt. According to the tradi-tional cultural codes that define for us "woman" and "femme fatale," mostof the elements comprising the left-hand "Salome" figure are female, but itsmost defining characteristics code it as male. We are left with a figure thatslides across our neat ontological categories.

The right-hand "Narraboth" figure dislodges our coded expectationseven more. Our focus is drawn naturally to the area around the stare-lockedfaces. From that perspective particularly, the right-hand figure appears tobe female, which is illogical, in the sense that it ought to be representingNarraboth, a male, and yet simultaneously logical, in the sense that it isbeing threatened by a distinctly phallic, "castrating" figure. Also, of course,Narraboth is in Wilde's text the love-object of the homosexual male Pageof Herodias (a fact Beardsley illustrates in "A Platonic Lament"), which actsto destabilize further traditional gender identity. Beardsley, in fact, goes outof his way to accentuate the feminine characteristics of the right-hand

"Narraboth" figure: the stylized hair (or headdress=-another hlurt ing ofdistinctions); the delicate and sensual facial features; the especially elegantlayered gown; and the ultra-feminine stance, one hand on her lower hip. theother poised delicately in the air, and her hips cocked slightly in sexualsuggestiveness. But once again we find our univocal perception overturned.As we lower our eyes toward the point where the hermaphroditic peacockskirt intersects the Narraboth figure, we find first, that the elegant, perfectlysymmetrical gown shreds into a frayed and ragged hem, highlighted hy theconcentric circles of dots Beardsley regularly used to suggest decadentphosphorescence, and second, that our delicate feminine figure has themuscular legs and knobby knees of a man (prefigured, perhaps, by the factthat it has no discernible breasts).

What we have to this point is a confrontation between two self-contra-dictory figures. While one may seem aggressive and intense, and the otherrestrained and passive, both at first glance appear to be female and elegant;yet, upon second glance we see those feminine and elegant qualities under-cut by their opposites--the male and, just as significant, the vulgar. Thisparadoxical dislocation, or "despoiling" of logical meaning, is reinforcedby the fact that in both figures Beardsley deliberately mars the cleannessof their lines with tiny blots of black ink. We are made to confront theprobability that nothing is "pure," clear, unalloyed, unequivocal. '111efig-ures are hermaphroditic, which in itself makes them paradoxes, ami thepolarities these hermaphroditic figures embody are not harmonized butstarkly demarcated, so that they deliberately jar our sensibilities, rupturingthe smooth logic of traditional categories and associations. In this regard,these hermaphroditic figures become themselves oscillating texts: they donot blend opposing meanings, but pose those contradictions "simultane-ously," or (if we cannot hold both poles in a "single" glance) in rapidalternation, so that their meaning(s) "flicker," each pole implying (indeed,including) the other without supplanting it, and also without supersedingit. The "essence" of these figures becomes in effect a suspension, a void-uncertain, undecidable-through which each alternative meaning passesin turn, oscillating, with no one meaning establishing supremacy.

The rationale that the left-hand Salome figure is becoming more "vir-ile" and "castrating" while, conversely, the right-hand Narraboth figure ismade more "effeminate" and "castrated" may indeed provide us with asubterranean psycho-logic to help unravel the paradoxes in these figuresand reach some interpretive closure. But such an interpretation does notcome close to suhlating the visceral aesthetic and ontological shock we aremade to experience in viewing these figures. And, in fact, the drawingproceeds to undercut even this interpretation, continuing in its hermeneu-tic oscillation to resist a definitive reading.

Chris Snodgrass Beardsley's Oscillating Spaces 35From the psychoanalytic perspective, the coiling, serpentine curve of

the body, the leering face, and the Medusan headdress of the Salome figureon the left clearly identify it as ominous and aggressive, curling tightly intothe Narraboth figure on the right, invading its space, even thrust forwardspatially by the "cocky" peacock emblem at its back; the hair of the Salomefigure even partially overlays and obscures a portion of the headdress of itsright-hand "victim." Moreover, the Medusan headdress is comprised of ashell-like casing with sharp jagged edges, highlighting its dangerous aspect,and a swarm of hothouse flowers (formed out of inverted hearts, Beards-ley's suggestion of perverted love), whose poisonous, perfumed decadenceis accentuated by swirling stems and filaments and an arabesque of concen-tric dots. Emanating along varying paths from this poisonous source arefour long filaments or lashes, whose tips are the same poisonous flower-hearts. These lashes symbolically heighten the erotic tension provided bythe Salome figure, as they recall the flagellation fantasies popular in theDecadence. Flagellation is presumed, in the logic of sado-masochism, toprovoke orgasm, thus the "whips" reinforce still further the phallic incur-sion of the Salome figure. There is also the oblique connection betweenflagellation and androgyny, in that Sacher-Masoch described the algolagniacas the "new man without sexuallty.">' Visually, our attention is first drawnto the androgyny of the right-hand Narraboth figure because one of thelashes from the Salome figure cuts across its masculine knees. And just asthe left-hand figure seems clearly the dangerous "attacker," so the right-hand figure seems the endangered "victim." Its stationary posture, its posedeffeminate stance, its slightly recessive tilt, and the fact that the kineticleft-hand figure seems spatially to overpower it, all contribute to this initialimpression.

But almost immediately these alignments begin to encounter disso-nance. First, the face of the Narraboth figure shows no fear; in fact, it seemsto express fearlessness, even scornful self.assurance, its eyes fixed on itsadversary in an unflinching glare. Its masculine, knock-kneed legs evenseem to reinforce this sense of firmness and resolve. 111eleft hand, poiseddelicately in the air, which under another perspective might be interpretedas a sign of tentativeness or imminent flight, actually rests under Beardsley's"japonesque mark" Signature, which he suggested was an equivocal em-blem representing (presumably depending on one's mood) his talismaniccandlesticks, sexual penetration and ejaculation, or the familiar obscenehand gesture. In this instance, the Narraboth figure's poised hand seems tobe holding (or about to grasp) this "candlestick," either to shed light on itsattacker or as a weapon; but, needless to say, either of the other symbolicmeanings Beardsley encouraged for his "signature" undercuts equally theperception of the right-hand figure as passive and defenseless. Indeed, in

this context the figure's posture, particularly the cocked hips, seems muchless restrained, more openly sexual, seductive, even arrogant. As the cle-ments of the drawing realign, we may begin to wonder, in fact, whetherwhat we have here is victimization or entrapment. The real C()Up de gr(icecomes when we suddenly recognize that the black waistband ami the con-necting black line extending down the front of the gown of the right-handfigure form the shape of an axe, pointing directly at the phallic-shapedaggressor. Suddenly, the valences of the figures are reversed: the "castrat-ing" Salome is in imminent danger of heing castrated; the "castrated" Narra-both is potent after all.

In the play, too, of course, the destructive power of desire is reciprocaland symbiotic; while Salome has the power to seduce the normally dutifulSyrian Captain, it is Narraboth's command alone that can bring forth joka-naan, intensifying the cycle of desire and violence that results in all theirdeaths. Salome can unleash destructive violence, but she cannot escapehaving it ultimately rebound upon herself. And, of course, the same is trueof "defensive-aggressive" Narraboth, In this respect, the axe encoded intothe right-hand Narraboth figure symbolizes not a specific, but a thoroughlydisseminated violence, undercutting the drawing's ironic reversal even asit affirms it: thematically, the "axe-waistband" is a graphic prefiguring of theliteral axe that beheads )okanaan, but even prior to the prophet's execution,the violence attendant to it will claim both Narraboth, who in calling forthJokanaan precipitates the events that lead to the execution, and Salome,who will be inextricably entrapped in the ensuing maelstrom of desire andretribution.

Indeed, compositionally, Beardsley suggests that the two figures mayeven be only mirror images of one another. In addition to the clementsalready noted, the headdresses of the figures, while different. are both inthe shape of a shell. Furthermore, the conch shape of Narraboths headdressin the upper right is mirrored in the skirt at the lower left of the drawing;and the fila bordering the skirt are duplicated on the border of Narraboth'sheaddress, Similarly, the concentric dots of "phosphorescence" around Sa-lome's headdress on the upper left appear also around Narraboth's hem inthe lower right Compositionally and thematically, our coded polarities donot stay in their culturally assigned places but shift and slide among chame-leon signifiers. 111e "outside" aggressor who seeks to invade the "innerpurity" of his/her victim discovers that there is no purity, that outside isinside, and that, in fact, the aggressor is but a double of the victim.

There is ultimately in the world of the drawings no way to recuperatestable categories, to put the encroaching "intruder" hack "outside," to putthe world back in its "proper" place, in part because to put the "intruder"back "outside" would necessitate expelling an integral part of what is also

Chris Snodgrass Beardsley's Oscillating Spaces F

"inside," the dynamic of desire that drew the intruder in the first place.Hermeneutically, that world also resists any recuperative "reading" of it.Although we may read the drawing incrementally, "progressively," our sec-ond or "deeper" reading does not in fact sublate or "correct" the first. It isnot the case, for instance, that what we first thought to be the passive"castrated" Narraboth figure (or is it Jokanaan?) turns out "in truth" to bethe "castrator"; he/she is both, Derrida's AND/OR, and more. We may wishto dispel the anxiety or discomfort the drawing creates by crafting a univo-cal reading, which would rid us of the dissonant elements of the sup-plement and impose logocentric closure. But our second "deeper" readingdues not finally "put it all together" any more than the first, nor is it evennecessarily an improvement on it, only "another" reading. Neither readingsupersedes the other, because the second reading itself is also partial, con-tingent in the midst of inescapable oscillation.

The "flicker" effect we see in each hermaphroditic figure is in factdisseminated throughout Beardsley's world and our reading of it. It is aworld that at first appears to split into polarities, then each element seemsto incarnate both halves of the polarity, until the polarities themselves arethrown into question, and the distinctions between them blur to the pointwhere each pole seems to take on the characteristics of its opposite. Ourtraditional dialectical formulations no longer seem applicable. There is nofixed and stable frame of reference. Polar opposites are no longer opposites;they may be also complements, or even variations of the same element.

Beardsley goes to great lengths to convey a sense of uncontrollableviolence being released, or about to be released, within a space from whichthere is no escape. Here in The Peacock Skirt, for example, we find thatthrough an artificial framing of the scene Beardsley intensifies the sense ofcompacted space the scene itself has created. He sets a frame around hisdrawing, actually makes the frame a part of the drawing, leaving an expanseof white "negative space" all around the frame to make the central actionseem compressed, the figures "trapped" (Beardsley instructed that hisdrawings be reproduced surrounded by this negative space). In fact, hedraws not one but three concentric frames, which creates the optical illu-sion of increasing constriction. To accentuate this feeling still further,Beardsley has the frames appear to cut off artificially parts uf the drawingitself-part of the peacock skirt at the bottom, part of the peacock emblemat the left, part of the Salome figure's headdress at the top. The overall effectis to highlight and intensify the sense of existential suffocation the drawingconveys, particularly the hothouse erotic tension attending the two centralfigures. We are imprisoned in a world whose surface is rupturing, boilingwith erotic heat that cannot escape but can only be turned back upon itself.It is not a tension playing back and forth between opposite poles, because

it is not a world stable enough to produce fixed poles. It is a world whoselocus is ultimately a void, desire ever deferred, signifiers whose siguifiedsare but other signifiers receding (or mirroring) endlessly. It is the imprison-ment of overfilled space, the decadent hothouse, in which every meaningis overdetermined, every element crossed by many floating signifiers.whose pattern coheres only to be ruptured by the next shifting realign-ment, a world where meaning itself is constantly dislodged, dislocated,thrown into question.

like the hermaphrodite, the foetus is another recurring grotesque inBeardsley's work, and another overdetermined hybrid figure. Brigid Brophyis probably correct when she proposes that the figure is Beardsley's onto-logical "self-portrait," an implicit recognition that his own life would he"aborted" before its full term; in his work the foetus-grotesque seems tosymbolize human life "telescoped," embodying in a single figure both life'syoungest form and, with the wizened looks Beardsley gives it, life's endnHaving come into the world abnormally early (like Beardsley's career), itis a prodigy, as signified by its often precocious actions, its huge head, andits jutting frontal lobe. But it is also "out of place"; in fact, it can have noproper place. It is held up as a curiosity, as in the first (uncensored) versionof a design for St. Paul's (flg, 2.4) and in Lucian's Strange Creatures (Readc,256), or it is presented to the haggard quester in Dreams (Reade, 2'j,j) asa demonstration that his dreams are really nightmares. In short, Beardsley'sfoetus figure is a "monster," which according to the 0. E D. means bothsomething "unnatural," a person or thing "of inhuman and horrible crueltyor wickedness," and "a prodigy, a marvel."

As in the fin-de-steele revival of the gothic monster, so in Beardsley'sfoetus-monster we have the incarnation of an intense consciousness of timeand fear of change, particularly those dreaded changes that mark decay,death, and the disintegration of values. For this figure in whom heginningsand endings meet in the identical physical form, life is hut a self-reflexiveprison, slowly poisoned by its own stagnating air, all attempts at assertingvalue collapsing self-destructively upon themselves. In a vignette in BOH-

Mots of Smith and Sheridan (fig. 2. ';), for example, the foetus figure takesthe shape of a prawn, whose tail curls into its mouth, and out of whosetruncated, flat-top head arise a WhistJcrian butterfly and a skeleton wavingan Aesthetic peacock feather (Reade, n. 187).

Beardsley often utilizes the figure of the hermaphrodite or the foetusin combination with another figure he commonly made grotesque-Pierrot..Arthur Symons called Beardsley the paramount "Pierrot gamtnr=: andBeardsley strongly identified with the figure;21 he once wrote to RobertRoss, referring toa pictures-and-poems project for the journal Pick-me-up,saying that what he was particularly eager to have was "a prologue to be

Figure 2.4. Aubrey Beardsley, Design for Sf. Paul's

(Reade, 2<)·1)

Figure 2'<;' Aubrev Beardsley. Vignt'lle in nOIl·,lInts of Smith ami

Sheridan(Relille. J <)1))

-lt! Chris SII( /(I.~r({ss

spoken hy Picrrot (lIIysdf)."l~ The Picrrots in Beardsley's drawings have allthe typical [in-de-siecle characteristics, but under Beardsley's hand theybecome more grotesque, mixing in dements of the harlequin, who wastraditionally a trickster and possessed a "complete absence of moralsense.',2(, As he did with so many other sources, Beardsley ended up con-flating various elements of the harlequin-clown-pierrot tradition into over-determined figures who incarnate all of life's paradoxes--naturalJartificial,fool/sage, dreamer/cynic, good/evil-and are made grotesque in the pro-cess.

Most of Beardsley's drawings seem to intimate that ultimately the gro-tesqueness of his figures (and configurations) is hut the incarnation of afundamental erosion of categorical distinctions. In another vignette in Bon-Mots of Smith and Sheridan (fig. 2.6), the clown-pierrot figure on the left,disheveled and perhaps aged before its time, has its gaze fixed upon anexotic bird, which it is introducing (or offering) to a grotesque puppet-headof a clown, which is itself protruding from an even larger, more grotesqueand just as disheveled clown-puppet, whose ripped clothing exposes theblack void that seems to define its being. 10e limits of the drawing's jokeare almost impossible to define. Is it that the left-hand Pierrot is too en-grossed (or too self-deceived) to see that it is introducing the bird to amere puppet-head? Or that the puppet-head is held by only another puppet?Can we in fact be sure that the bird itself is alive and not stuffed? Or is thejoke that the exotic, overly refined bird, even if "alive," is really little morethan another puppet? But then, cannot the same be said for the left-handclown, that it is little more than life's puppet (it does in fact facially resem-ble the right-hand clown), that the joke is really on the jokester, that we areseeing the meeting of multiple mirror images, pet to pet, pet to puppet,puppet to puppet, etc.? Or is the joke that they recognize this truth, butthey are nevertheless compelled to play out the game? Or that even thoughthey recognize it, we do not, and thus do not understand that we arepuppet~ looking at puppets looking at puppets? And on and on. The bound-ary lines between fake and real, artificial and natural, frivolous and seriousare so confused that there is no way to stop the "meaning" from slidingalmost endlessly.

Beardsley once proclaimed to Lewis Hind that life was a "great game,"when the latter caught him "pirouetting" throughout the studio in a longyellow dressing gown and red slippers with turned-up toes.i? Certainly,Beardsley's well-known love of the theater and his fascination with role-playing and "masking" of all kinds found obvious expression in his work,as well as in his life. He often uses masks and "masking" as a metaphor forthe conflicts, both conscious and unconscious, between our "private" de-

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42 Chris Snodgrass Beardsley's Oscillating Spaces 43

sires and obsessions, and what we publicly avow.:" What seems particularlyintriguing, however, is just how double-edged, how self-subverting, the"game" is. We usually feel that the exposure, both literal and thematic, thattakes place in a Beardsley drawing actually ends up complicating insteadof simplifying the problem of interpretation; the "unmasking" feels likeanother "masking," even an obscuring of the drawing's meaning.

As Georges Bataille has explained in Death and Sensuality, the viola-tion of a taboo--in this case, the exposure of forbidden (or hidden) featuresor desires-e-only intensifies the "sacred" or privileged character of thattabooed object or desire.i? Even the most frivolous joke must, after all,establish a connection, a Signification, in order to be understood; or, moreaccurately, perhaps, it must call upon a prior connection or signification,the one that valorizes the butt of the joke and permits the point to be made.111atvalue attached to the "unmasked" authority cannot be annulled by thejoke, because it must exist for the joke to be understood. So every "unmask-ing" or reciting of desire is unavoidably a re-citing of it, which becomesalso a re-sigbting and a re-siting of it. The desire's psychological force orauthority is not sublated, but at most only shifted, displaced-not replacedbut re-placed. As in Jacques Derrida's invagination metaphor, in which hecompares the hymenal effect of his homonyms to turning a glove insideout-transforming a right-hand glove into a left-hand glove but not annul-ling the utility of the glove-so in Beardsley's drawings we often find thatthe revealing has become a re-ueiting.r' "Masks" seem both to conceal andreveal, and even reveal more than they conceal; and "unmasking" seems toreveal only another mask, and even conceals more than it reveals. Beards-ley's drawings as a whole are narratives whose meaning seems always de-ferred to a point "behind" or "beyond" what we can see; each elementslides or oscillates, suspending or displacing any "final" meaning, and pre-venting the resolving of the paradoxes posed, or even the separating of theirelements into distinct and "certain" dialectical opposites.

We should not be surprised at this phenomenon, because, of course,Beardsley's art disseminates the "game" beyond the "interior" dynamics ofthe drawing, beyond metaphysics to epistemology. His art does not merelydepict society's masking or unmasking, and raise questions about it, but alsoparticipates in the game. That is, the drawings do themselves deceive, playtricks on, the "reader." In calling attention to the lust of the figures in adrawing, Beardsley almost invariably "hides" various scandalizing sexualshapes or other "dislocation" elements among the decorative or structuraldetails, and thus he "masks" desire while "unmasking" desire, exposingdeception while deceiving, sometimes scandalizing the reader twice over.Part of what we sense to be the oscillation or "flickering" of the drawing'smeaning is truly a "double exposure," creating an image and blurring it at

the same time, Oil two levels, throwing into question not only what is heingdepicted in the drawing but also the validity of our perception of it. We arcmade intensely aware of the "artificiality" of the meaning we are beingoffered. We can never be entirely certain that the joke isn't on us, thatwhat is being exposed isn't our own "blindness," or our own voyeuristicdesire, or both. In fact, our own latent desires, our predispositions-c-herme-neutic as well as sexual-inevitably implicate us as accomplices in thedrawing's narrative. We become an unavoidable part of the ongoing dis-course "in" the drawing. And even if the joke isn't on us directly, we cannever be sure that the meaning "in" the drawing is "real" and not itself a"joke," a mere construction, implying that perhaps all of life's meanings areonly jokes, masks, hidden desires, including our own desire for meaning.Through these multiple ironies Beardsley's drawings create fundamentaldislocation: they seem to insist on establishing themes, or inviting "read-ings," and yet throw those themes and readings into question even as theyposit them.

The complexity and "undecidability" of this process is demonstratedin the unbowdlerized version of Enter Herodias (fig. 2.7), which KennethClark calls "the most evil of all Beardsley's drawings.">' Here, the "un-masked" explicit sexual details (e.g., Herodias's huge erect breasts and theright- hand attendant's genitals) at least momentarily divert our attentionfrom (that is, mask perceptually) what are a number of fundamental para-doxes in the world of the drawing. The first set of paradoxes involves thateffeminate page boy on the right. He holds a powder-puff and case, whichsuggests that he has just applied a powder "mask" to Herodias, although itseems amusingly clear that hardly anything is masked. He holds in his otherhand a black facial mask, which is ironic, as Ian Fletcher has noted, not onlybecause his uncovered/ace is not the issue, but also because he now "masksnothing." Furthermore, although the youth is anatomically male and standsalmost touching the godlike femme fatale, he is not aroused by her. It couldbe that he is homosexual (he is made to appear androgynous), or that,following the logic Beardsley employed elsewhere, the "castrating" femmefatale has already rendered him impotent (although this effect is not sharedby the figure on the left), or that he is merely one of those eunuchs tradi-tionally kept at court. Whatever the case, there is a paradox posed: the factthat this "unmasked" worshipful male (however problematic the categori-zation) is not aroused by the ostentatiously sexual Herodias, especially inllght of the highly demonstrable erection of the figure opposite, implicitlycasts at least some doubt on Hcrodias's pervasive erotic power.

The attendant on the left is also caught in paradox. His state of sexualexcitement is "masked" by his clothing, hut in fact his erection can hardlybe ignored. This heated sexual emphasis is underscored by his satyr's hoof

Figure 2.7. Aubrey Beardsley, Enter Ilerodias ( UN,})Illustration for Salome hy Oscar Wilde.(Reade, 285)

Beardsley's Oscillating Spaces 45

and by the flaming candles in the foreground: not only are the grotesque(phallic) candles held erect by animalistic and demonic icons, but, as BrianReade has noted, there exists the visual pun on these "fantastic prickers"(n. 285). Yet it is odd that this figure is so moved in the first place. He is,after all, another variation of Beardsley's telescoped foetus/old man, and assuch his sexuality (in either his first or his second infancy) should presum-ably be less genital than oral. In fact, this connection seems reinforcedtangentially by Herodias's giant mammary glands and egg-dotted sash, andby the fact that the growths on the creature's throat resemble the clusteredbreast motif Beardsley used in other drawings (Reade, 179, 227, 246, 50 I).Furthermore, even though this figure is obviously sexually aroused andholds Herodias's train, his stare of concentration is clearly aimed past Hero-dias, which seems to contradict the assumption that she is the source of hisexcitement and again implicitly impugns her sexual omnipotence. AmI,finally, the drawing is so composed that the creature's "heat of passion" isin the same pen stroke highlighted and humorously undermined: we seethat his erection is about to be intersected by the center-candle's flame-ineffect, he "burns" and is burned in turn.

Herodias herself extends the dislocating paradoxes. She is clearly anoversexed female, but Beardsley also supplies her with considerable male"coding." She towers over the scene, and except for her bulging, overripebreasts, she has little shape; she is made to seem a stiff and erect pillar, akind of omnipotent phallus between two less effectual ones. And this para-dox is joined to another: here, she appears all-powerful and dominant, yeteven dismissing the previous questions about her erotic omnipotence, weknow from the text (and the legend) that she will be superseded veryshortly by her own daughter.

These various intimations of a basic meraphysical instability are under-scored by yet another set of paradoxes involving the \X'ilde caricature atthe lower right of the drawing. One might argue that he should be themost stable symbol of authority, both theoretically, as author-holding thetext of his play, he is the original "masker" and "unmasker'i=-and composi-tionally, as our master of ceremonies for the scene. Ostensibly, his claim isfirm. He wears the owl-cap of a sage magician or sorcerer, who wouldpresumably know everything about "masking"; he also carries the caduceusof the ancient herald, and later the physician. So it is little wonder he canconfidently give us the showman's gesture of entry into the drawing's se-crets. But even the author, the scene's original interpreter, cannot escapethe subversive paradoxes of this world. The owl-cap is clouded by theconcentrically circular dots Beardsley customarily used to connote deca-dent phosphorescence; and as Brian Reade notes, the healing physician'scaduceus is also drawn as a crutch, implicitly impugning the author who

'/6 Chris Snodgrass

"leans on a gospel of 'curing the senses by means of the soul, and the soulby means of the senses'" (n. 285). Most graphically, perhaps, we have thefact that the author's gesturing hand is intersecting (or about to intersect)the flame of the right-hand candle; we realize that imminently he will jerkback the hand in pain, not healing but in need of healing.

Visually, this striking drawing creates a sense of order and balance,aided by the way the black of Herodias's hair and horizontal sash at the topbalance the black stage at the bottom and by the way the vertical lines ofthe curtain, the human figures, the candles, and the Signature are set per-pendicular to the horizontal band that is the stage, all of which are enclosedin the familiar three-lined frame. Yet despite this visual order and coher-ence, we have metaphysical disorder and dislocation; the drawing entices,even implores, hermeneutic reading, yet it resists, indeed undercuts, anyunivocal explanation. Indeed, it seems constantly to taunt our hermeneuticconfusion, our myopia, our "blindness," even as it twists every "reading"in paradox. Ultimately, the drawing manifests a world whose very definingcharacteristic, whose "essence," is grotesque self-contradiction, As such, itis a world without rest, without "place," where no value can be safely setlest it be inverted, "perverted," where the very existence of any such valueis thrown into question. And, of course, it is a world where even perversionis not a viable category, because one cannot pervert in a world where onecannot establish a univocal value.

If anything, this confusion intensifies in Beardsley's later work. Theproliferation of extreme detail in his later pictures through the use ofclose-laid lines, graded stipples, and gray wash half-tones can be interpretedas Beardsley's compulsive attempt stylistically to create finer distinctions,where before there was only black and white, and to "fill" the metaphysical"emptiness" of his previous negative spaces. But such techniques actuallyonly call attention to the dislocating Signification. For instance, in The Toiletfrom Under the Hill (fig. 2.8) the calm expression ofVenuslHeIen is beliedby an explosion of visual and metaphysical confusion and contradiction. Inspite of her restrained and sophisticated bearing, and the fact that she isclad in the refined undergarments of the culture, the serene Venus/Helenis known to be a sexual animal, a fact confirmed not only by her barebreasts, but by having her pointed left foot juxtaposed with the cloven-hoofed leg of her dressing table, with its multiple-breast and animal-headornamentation. The inclination of her foot (along with the curvature of thetable leg) gives a sense of kinetic energy, suggesting that she is standingupright and stepping forward. But this appearance seems to be an illusion:she is apparently seated, as is indicated by the fact that part of her rightleg, though barely visible, is clearly extended under the table. Moreover,although the features of the non-grotesque figures are drawn in proportion,

Figure 2.H. AlIhrey Beardsley. 71>" I oitctIllustration for I 'II II,,/, 'he I Ii II by Auhrcv Beardsley.(Retlde. 42·/)

48 Chris Snodgrass

Helen's left hand, holding her mirror, is considerably larger than is war-ranted by the rest of her body and is positioned at an angle and in a placethat is anatomically improbable, unless her upper arm is extraordinarilylong. In this way she is made to seem more closely akin to the grotesque"monsters" in the drawing than to her ladies-In-waiting.

For the most part, in the entire drawing it is not easy to determineimmediately what detail belongs to which furnishing, or even where thefurnishings stop and some piece of clothing begins. In fact, often the detailsof the one seem to be embellishments of the other, the distinctions be-tween them blurring. For example, it is difficult to determine whether theelement appearing in front of Helen's face is a candelabra attached to thedressing table, or a chandelier, or something else, for that matter. Thecandelabra effect is reinforced by the long vertical white forms extendingupward, but these "candles" are superimposed on, so as to blur into, thesimilar vertical lines on the dressing screen. The dressing screen itself ispositioned in such a way that it is difficult to tell whether it is "folded"forwards or backwards; in fact, at first glance, it is not apparent that it is ascreen, rather than part of the wall. The floral (or bulb) trtm=-anotherconfusion of beginnings and endings-on the "candelabra" hangs down andcurls around another object until the trim also adorns the dressing table.But then it is not clear whether part of that trim is not actually the hem ofthe gown that appears to be hanging across the dressing-table mirror. More-over, the same floral-bulb trim does comprise part of the hem of Helen'spetticoat, which as it extends under the table seems but an extension of theother long strand of trim. In yet other examples of misdirection, the gro-tesque under the table has his head turned away. but seems neverthelessto be holding a hook to Helen's petticoat; and the jaded mustachioed dandyin the upper right, though presumably attending on Helen (holding whatmay be Helen's crown), peers down with an ambiguously sinister stare atthe brawling dwarfs at the bottom of the picture. The attendant groomingHelen's hair embodies another paradox. It (the gender is indeterminate)seems to be covered-face as well as body (except for its hand, its severeeat's eyes, and the trim around its hip )--by the same dark textured material;yet it wears a black mask, to hide what is apparently already hidden.

The most striking dislocations are provided, of course, by the gro-tesques. They are associated with Helen formalistically by (in addition tothe elements already mentioned) the fact that the "flowers" on her hemalso appear on the hat of the obese woman seated at the far right, whichReade identifies as Mrs. Marsuple, the manicure and fardeuse of Beardsley'sstory (n. 424), and on the mammoth, incongruously meticulous and elabo-rated headdress-wig of the fighting dwarf in the lower right. The irony ofthe goddess of beauty and erotic love being surrounded by such deformed

Beardsley's Oscillating Spaces

creatures is obvious. But the fact that the beauty and elegance of Ilclcn andher doll-like female companions in the upper part of the drawing are com-positionally framed and "grounded" by hideous grotesques at the left. right.and lower parts of the drawing seriously undercuts that beauty and clc-gance and threatens any univocal reading of it. After all, Beardsley has themusic that presumably accompanies the action provided by a hunchback;and the illusions and masks surrounding the sophisticated goddess and theattendant coiffing her hair are counterpointed in jarring fashion by themisshapen dwarfs in the lower right, who demonstrate more brutal coiflingand brawl with unvarnished violence. Once again, compositionally andmetaphysically, the drawing's meaning oscillates between poles, slidingchromatically, undecidably, through many possible alignments, both hu-morous and horrifying.

German scholar 'I110masCramer explains that the grotesque not onlyis "das durch ubersteigerte Komik ausgel6ste Gefiihl der Angst" !the feelingof anxiety aroused by the comic being pushed to an extreme], but alsorepresents "die durch Komik bekampfte Angst vor dern Unerklarbarcn" !thedefeat of anxiety, by the comic, in the face of the inexplicable lY Beards-ley's use of the grotesque is certainly humorous, and it gives every evidenceof being an attempt to shape the "inexplicable"-what Wolfgang Kayserdescribes as that manipulative "game," in which the artist plays, half laugh-ingly, half horrified, with the deep absurdities of existence in "AN AT-TEMPT TO INVOKEAND SUBDUE !ZU HANNEN UND ZE BESc/HnJRENITHE DEMONIC ELEMENTSOF THE WORLD."33It is an aggressive, combat-ive form of humor, conforming to what PhilipThomson speculates is thatunconscious "sadistic impulse," by which, out of self-defense, we "react tosuch things with unholy glee and barbaric delight."34

Ultimately, however, Beardsley's grotesques are not a "defeat of anxi-ety," and certainly not "comic" in any classical sense, because the drawingsin which his grotesques appear provide no resolution; in fact, they onlyincrease the metaphysical confusion. They are not, strictly speaking, evensatiric (or ironic), because we cannot clearly separate what amuses us fromwhat disgusts or angers us, or the "right" from the "wrong," the true fromthe untrue, appearance from reality. We cannot really "be instructed" re-garding things in Beardsley's pictures, at least as satire usually "instructs"us, because the frame of reference by which we can determine such moraldistinctions is always shifting, cut out from under us. What is demonstratedis the unresolvabiliry of incompatible clcmcnts-s-not their separation, buttheir basic inseparability.V'

We may recall that near the very end of his life, in one of the last workshe produced, Beardsley wrote enthusiastically of Volpone's mastery of "dis-guise," his ability "to be imposing, to playa part magnificently ... the blood

50 Chris Snodgrass HCilrds/I','s Oscillatillg .\j}(lc('s ')/

of the mime is in his veins," such that the "pitiless unmasking of the fox"at the end of Jonson's play made the play more a "tragedy" than a comedy,"more terrible than satisfactory.P? lf Beardsley's own drawings demon-strate an obsession with "masks," with deferring any final meaning, it mayhave been out of the sheer joy of the game, or it may have been out of anunconscious fear that to stop the game might mean "unmasking" the ulti-mate horror, that there was no meaning or joy in the world beyond thegame.

Beardsley's art was scandalous by Victorian standards not only becauseof its "pornographic" elements, but also because it implicitly undercut theauthority of a world of logocentric meaning. When Beardsley himself la-beled as "indecent" his "strange hermaphroditic creatures wandering aboutin Pierrot costurnes.r '? he was being more metaphysically accurate thanhe probably realized, because in fact his grotesques incarnate what is afundamentally paradoxical view of meaning. They are metaphors for aworld=-cspccially the overfilled, overdetermined spaces of the Decadenthothouse-where meaning oscillates ceaselessly among indeterminate al-ternatives, even polarities; where no value can ultimately be authenticated,no truth made finally secure; where the very foundations of meaning arethe shifting sands of paradox. In a sense, perhaps one of the keenest insightsinto Beardsley's art was made by Oscar Wilde, who shared with Beardsleymany of the same psychological, if not literal, prisons: "His muse had moodsof terrible laughter. Behind his grotesques there seemed to lurk some curi-ous phtlosophy.t'-"

Brophy. Beardsley and His World (New York I \;lrmoll), \looks. Il)~(, l. ~-IK. K~-I 12:and Ian Fletcher. "A Studv in Black arul ,,'hitl': The Lq~clld and Lctters of 11c.•r dxlrv ."

Times Literary SII/J/Jlemel/t. 14 January 1971..1.~2K.

<i. Jackson, 99.

/. Reade.Allbrev Beardsley (New York: Viking Press. 1')(,7). n.('')' When I cite in mv essaveditions of Beardsley's drawings--Brian Reade's Auhrev Beardslev (New York: VikingPress,1967). Simon \X'ilson's Beardsley ( 1'),7(,: repr. Oxford: Phaidon Press l.imrtcd.

19R3). and Edmund V. Gillon, Jr.'s Beardsley's Illustrations for Le Marte Dartbur, Repro-duced in Facsimile from the Dent Edition of IH')3-')4 (New York: Dover. 1')'72}-ntlm-bers following the author's name refer to plate numbers. An "n." preceding a numbersignifies the author's note regarding that plate.

8. Victor Shklovsky, in "Art as Technique." Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essavs. l.ceT. Lemon and Marian J. Rcis, ed. and trans. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. \ <)(,'i l.12. describes art as a defamiliarization. or a "making strange" of objects, as an essentialmeans of renewing our perception and understanding of the world. It is. according toShklovsky, by wrenching our already "received." culturally preconditioned. perceptionsof things that we are made to confront and rcexpcrtence our world in its existentialfreshness and terror.

9. Jacques Derrtda, Disseminations. Barbara Johnson. trans .• intro .. notes ( 1972; Chicago:University of Chicago Press. 19RI). xiii.

10. Derrida, 4.

I I. Dcrrida, 99.

12. D. J. Gordon. "Aubrey Beardsley at the V. & A....Encounter 27:4 ( 1966). 14. \ 'i.

13. Gregory L. Ulmer. Applied Grammatologv (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.I ,)H5). 39-47.

NotesH. Arthur H. Lawrence, "Mr. Aubrey Beardsley and lIis Work." the tater. II March IH9~.

I ')R

I. Max Beerbohrn, The Works of Max Beerbobm (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1896),160.

2. Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties: A Reuieto of Art and Ideas at the Close of theNineteenth Century (1913; London: Grant Richards, 1922).91.

3. Bernard Muddiman, The Men of the Nineties (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1921).6.13.

\ 'i. John Ruskin. 'HJI' Works of John Rustetn. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderhurn. ('(Is

(London: George Allen. 1')03-12). 1.: \ 'i 1--63.

1(,. A. J. L. Busst, "The Androgyne." in Romantic Mythologies. Ian Fletcher. ed, (New York'Barnes and Noble, 19(7). R-II. 3R-39. See also Richard Wayne Collins. "A Tov of DoubleShape: The Hermaphrodite as Art and Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain." Ph.D.diss., University of California. Irvine. \ ')84 (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms. I <)H(».

4. John Lane. "Publisher's Note." in Aubrey Beardsley. Under the Hill and Other Essays InProse and Verse by Auhrey Beardsley, Edward Lucie-Smith, cd. and intro. ( 1904; London:Paddington Press. 1977), 22.

5. For discussion of Beardsley's polarized life. see particularly Malcolm Easton, AlibrEy andthe Dying Lady (Boston: David R. Godine, 1972). 57-7(,. 16H-61; Stanley Weintraub,Beardsley (New York: George Brazlller, 1967). 1-\ 'i. 133-240; Miriam J. Benkovitz,Aubrey Beardsley (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1')81). 17-30, 127-34, 136; Brigid

17. Georges Baraille, Death and Sensuality- A Study of Eroticism and the Taboo ( 1')(,2; NewYork: Ballantine Books. 19(9). 13R-39.

1R Bataille, 139-40.

19. Citations from Wilde's original text (in French) are from The First Coltected Edit ion ortbe Works of Oscar Wilde. 1'J08-1')22. in l S vols .. Robert Ross. ed. (London: l);twS(lnsof Pall Mall. 19(9). first issued by Methuen and Co. in I,)OR For convenience. citati()nsof the English text (translated by Alfred Lord \)""g\;rs. with massive corrections hy Wilde

52 Chris Snodgrass

himself) are from The Portable Oscar Wilde, Richard Aldington, ed (1946; New York:The Viking Press, 1987). For clarity, in this and subsequent quotations entirely in aforeign language, I have italicized only those words in the stage directions and the titles.

20. Ian Fletcher, Aubrry Beardsley (Boston: G. K lIall, 19H/), 7B-79.

21. Jerry Palmer, "Fierce Midnights: AJgolagniac Fantasy and the literature of the Deca-dence," in Decadence and the 1890s, Ian Fletcher, ed. (London: Edward Arnold, 1979), 94.

22. Brigid Brophy, Beardsley and His World (New York: Harmony Books, 1976), 55.

23. Arthur Symons, "Auhrcy Beardsley," 17JeMemoirs of Artbttr Symons: Life and Art in the1890s, Karl Beckson, ed. (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, (977), 176.The original version of Symons's essay appeared as "Aubrey Beardsley," FortnigbtlyReuieui, n.s. 63 (1898), 752-{)1. For a volume of Beardsley prints published later thesame year Symons expanded the essay hy adding four paragraphs to the beginning. Theexpanded essay is the one which Beckson reprints in his book.

24. Benkovitz, 78.

25. Tbe Letters of Allhrel' Beardsley, Henry Maas.]: L Duncan, and W. G. Good, eds, (Ruther-ford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970), ';1.

26. Enid Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History ( 1935; Gloucester, Mass.: PeterSmith, 1966),295-303.

27. [Lewis Hind), "Bookman's Memories," The Christian SCience Monitor, 17 May 1921, 3.

28. Benkovitz, 78.

29. Bataille, 33, 42, 61-{)3

30.. Jacques Derrida, Glas (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1974), 160; Ulmer, 103.

31. Kenneth Clark, The Best of Aubrey Beardsley (New York: Doubleday, 1978),90.

32. Thomas Cramer, Des Groteske bei E T.A Hoffman (Munich: W. Fink, 1966), 26. Thetranslations arc mine.

33. Wolfgan~ Kayser, Tbe Grotesque in Art ami Literature, lllrich Wcisstein, trans. (1957;New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), IH6-HH.The emphasis is Kayser's.

34. Philip Thomson, The Grotesque (London: Methuen, 1972),9,56.

35. a. Thomson, 42, 59, 35.

36. "Beardsley's Notes for Volpone Prospectus and Introduction," ms. dated 4 January 1898,Aubrey Beardsley Collection, Princeton University, 1-8. Extractions from this manu-script, as published in R. A. Walker's A Beardsley Miscellany (London: The Bodley Head,1949),87-88, arc quoted in Stanley Weintrauh, Beardsley (New York: George Braziller,1967),236-37.

37. Letters, 43.

38. Oscar Wilde, The Letters of Oscar Wilde, Rupert Hart-Davis, ed. (New York: Harcourt,Brace & World, 19(2),410.