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Literature
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Tony Duvert - When
Jonathan Died
German language edition published by Verlag Rosa Winkel
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Duvert's Portrait
of the
'Boy Eternal'
Some
say Tony Duvert is the most important writer on man/boy-love today, if
rarely read in English. Is there room for hope or beauty in
Duvert's tragic vision?
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by Robert Rockwood
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THE THEME
of Tony Duvert's When Jonathan Died is expressed in the novel's
epigram, quoted from Act I, Scene II, of Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale
--
Two lads, that thought there was no more
behind,
But such a day tomorrow as today,
And to be boy eternal.
Although the lines from Shakespeare concern the
mutual love between the
speaker -- Polixenes, King of Bohemia; and Leontes, King of Sicilia --
when
both were boys, Duvert's "When Jonathan Died" shows that a "boy
eternal" can be any age.
 This
poignant man/boy love story portrays the psychology of a
boy-loving man and a man-loving boy sympathetically and
accurately. Arguing for a child's right to be taken seriously,
the novel reveals the tragedy that results when pressure from society
forces an artistically productive man/boy relationship into its
negative aspect. The friendship between Jonathan, a painter with
"English, Dutch, or German accent, you couldn't tell," and the French
boy Serge begins in Paris when Serge is six and Jonathan, 27.
Later, the two are together in a village outside of Paris for "three or
four months" when Serge is eight, and for two months when Serge is ten.
Initially, little Serge is too full of spirit to allow his mother,
Barbara, to devalue and depersonalize him without a fight, even though
he always loses. Jonathan, however, views the boy's antics in a
different light:
Jonathan worshipped this
turbulence. He saw beyond it.
Despite the disagreeable side to the situation, he could sense a truth
the child was pointing out; and he recognized beneath the manners he
disapproved of, a model he would have liked to follow. For with
Serge he was like a wandering disciple, who... has searched for a
master... and has found him at last. But this master does
not know he knows; only those who have searched for him, after
rejecting the great men and the charlatans, can understand.
(p. 68)
Barbara "would shake Serge and hit him, reasoning
with him in a
measured voice 'listen now, young man, it's time to stop the
play-acting, don't you think.'" Jonathan, on the other hand, is
irresistibly moved to open the door of the linen closet where a weeping
six-year-old Serge has taken refuge:
On a shelf fixed very high on the wall,
curled up behind a heap of
rumpled linen, there was a little animal gasping, rigid, savage,
inaccessible, of which no more was to be seen than some ear and a bit
of knee. Deeply moved, Jonathan desperately wanted to comfort
him, to take him in his arms. Tears in his eyes, he waited and
allowed himself to be watched. Then, suddenly, Serge overturned
the rampart of linen and fastened himself about his neck.
(p. 20)
If Serge has symbolically returned to the womb,
reversing the birth
process, the moment he falls into Jonathan's arms he is reborn into a
world closer to his spiritual origin. This is a sacramental
action, for both Serge and Jonathan are performing an unconscious
ritual as though the two were "play-acting" in a psychic drama as old
as mankind itself.
As an unmarried person not much interested in parenthood, Barbara is at
first pleased to park her son with Jonathan for days or weeks on
end. However, when she observes that Serge behaves himself with
Jonathan and that the two obviously love each other, she brings the
matter up for discussion in her Zen group. The intellectual level
of Barbara's friends is apparent as they conclude that Jonathan's "bad
influence" is the result of a deficiency of "orgone energy":
"I know, but, you see, I don't know, you
know, he doesn't accept it, he
refuses it, like he... well, I don't know... but hey, it's
obvious, isn't it?" (p. 21)
For Barbara, Jonathan's "clear qualification as an
unconditional enemy
was simply that Serge preferred him to her.” Convincing herself
that there is something "not right" about the relationship, Barbara
puts a halt to it:
That put Serge back in a bad mood; more
disorder, with things getting
broken, shouting, and retreats to the top of the... [linen
closet]. Barbara concluded from this, in accordance with her own
private way of linking cause and effect, that Jonathan upset the boy
and had a bad influence on him. (p. 21)
When Jonathan leaves Paris, Serge becomes "passive
and closed in on
himself.” Barbara is adept at telling lies with malicious intent,
even if only for the pleasure of kicking her already-defeated rival
when he is down. In a letter to Jonathan she celebrates her
recent success in breaking Serge's spirit:
I hope you think of my lovely boy every
now and again!!... He
seems to have forgotten you completely!!!!... I talk to him about
you- we were even going to see that exhibition of yours in
December!... But no, the young man wasn't interested... You
know at their age they forget very quickly, which is best don't you
think.... (p. 9)
After 18 months, however, Barbara is again willing
to overlook
Jonathan's alleged "bad influence" and leave her moping eight-year-old
son with the artist for the entire summer while she takes a carefree,
extended vacation abroad. This unexpected event makes possible
the first of two magical interludes in which Jonathan and Serge
celebrate their mutual rites of friendship and love unmolested by
disapproval from the outside world.
The little dishes of food that Jonathan sets out for the mice that
prowl his cottage at night, or his willingness to join the boy in a
round of plate-smashing, dismissing it with, "We can eat with our
hands, it's better," assure Serge that Jonathan is radically different
from any grown-up he has ever known. If Serge sees Jonathan as an
overgrown boy, Jonathan, who has "no notion of childhood', sees Serge
as a master whose realm is cosmic and outside of time:
In the presence of this boy...
Jonathan stood aside. He
chose to be a servant, not daring even to be a witness.... [He]
allowed himself to be hugged, offered up his nakedness, his sex, his
sleep, and observed in the house a diffident splendor in which there
basked, as if tomorrow had no existence, the aerial kingdom of the
little boy. (p. 29)
Proof of how each feels about the other is revealed
in their respective
portraits. Jonathan's drawing of Serge communicates the awe that
he feels in the boy's presence:
And beneath the top of the head with its
hair so delicately tangled,
Jonathan sketched out Serge's profile as he saw him sitting close, in a
pencil line so fluent and so tender that he felt abashed by the beauty
his hand produced despite himself. (p. 12)
Serge's drawing, on the other hand, renders the man
Jonathan as a boy:
Serge said: "Now, I'm going to draw
you.” He grabbed half a dozen
colored felt-tips and in red, blue, yellow and pink, he drew a boy
holding a green flower in his hand, eyelashes radiant like stars and
smiling from ear to ear, and with very long legs because he was a
grown-up. (p. 13)
A reincarnationalist would insist that Serge
behaves as though he were
an "older soul" than Jonathan. Although the star-like eyelashes
suggest the cosmic nature of what Serge is projecting onto Jonathan,
the boy sees Jonathan as actually the smaller and younger partner:
Serge was entirely accustomed to
Jonathan's docility and to everything
that made him different from an adult. Now, he rather thought of
the young man as some kind of very small boy, smaller than Serge was
himself- and he was very kind and gentle with little children.
The boy's habitual violence and provocations were often put aside; he
was even sometimes shy when he cornered Jonathan to make love.
Perhaps he felt that he was really the assailant. (p. 83)
Jonathan, for his part, regards Serge as the same
size as himself:
Serge's place [on Jonathan's bed]
was... a very small space; you
couldn't imagine that someone had slept there, a complete body, with
nothing missing at all.... Jonathan had never seen Serge as
small, and he could have sworn in good faith that they were the same
size. (p. 99)
These distortions of body image prove not only that
Jonathan and Serge
have established a psychological and spiritual peer-ship, but that
their relationship is a synthesis of opposites in which the man is
simultaneously a boy, and the boy a man.
This intergenerational erotic attachment, in dissolving traditional
boundaries between status and chronological age, has the unexpected
effect of applying sexual energy to the service of art. The eros
that underlies Jonathan's artistic response to Serge comes to the fore
when Jonathan sketches Serge's feet, an act so meaningful that for
eight-year- old Serge it fetishizes the feet (the reader finds out,
when Serge is ten, that "bare feet gave him ideas"). When
Jonathan's sketch is inadvertency trampled as Jonathan starts kissing
Serge's feet, it is dear that for Jonathan- and, indeed, for Serge, so
excited that he is "almost dancing"- art is a sublimated expression of
sexual longing or anticipation, subservient to physical sex:
[Jonathan] suddenly pulled Serge towards
him by his legs, and spent
some time kissing his feet.... The child laughed and shouted with
pleasure. He thrashed about. The sketch had fallen to the
ground, and got trampled and torn. Then they had a rest, and in
silence Jonathan and the boy looked at each ocher in a very particular
way. They got up and went back into the house. As Serge
disappeared barefoot in front of Jonathan, he seemed in a hurry, a
little insubstantial, almost dancing. (p. 19)
Even when man and boy are mutually occupied by
artistic activities,
their sexualized banter has priority over art:
They would often draw together....
Pictures, writing, stories
followed one after another, each taking his turn like a game of cards,
indecent and bantering conversations where the drawing was no more than
an accompaniment, riddling burlesques, composed in silence, waiting for
solutions.... (p. 65)
What most dearly defines this relationship,
however, is that for the
young painter the physical presence of the beloved boy imparts the same
satisfaction as artistic creation itself:
As soon as the child left him, Jonathan
would pick up his brush; as
soon as [the child] returned, Jonathan would put [his brush] down and
forget the canvas he was working on. (p. 83)
Jonathan copes with Serge's return to Paris by
making a holy shrine out
of the boy's "little civilization in a microcosm," his garden (depicted
abstractly in the cover art by Chris Brown), and tending it with "manic
attention" like one who "loved a departed child":
While he worked, he wasn't sad.
His imagination recreated for him
each gesture, each attitude, each look on Serge's face and each
intonation of his voice as he had played in the garden: and he was
astonished at how much he had remembered, for he thought he had
forbidden himself to watch the child. (p. 88)
Barbara's letters, filled with the usual cruelty
that seems to
accompany any reference to Serge, adds to Jonathan's torment, even
though he tosses them aside unanswered:
[Her] letters, more sharp than friendly,
always very brief when it came
to the child, told of some very strange doings. Serge, it seemed,
had complained of his holiday: Jonathan was a real nuisance, bossy, and
boring, he had no radio, no television... he lectured you about
anything, he only thought about work... you weren't even left
alone to sleep, there was only one bed, and Serge was very glad to get
back to Paris.... (p. 92)
As he continued to torment
himself, Jonathan thought too that the child could have had a deeper
reason to disown him, once he had got back to Paris. For his life
with Jonathan had made him very different from what normal people
expected a little boy to be. No child could bear to find himself
a stranger amongst the people he is obliged to live with. It was
an inferiority, a misfortune. In a world of dog eat dog, to
respect a child is to pervert him; to encourage in him his fugitive
humanity is to change him into a monster his parents, his friends and
his school will no longer recognize. Serge must have felt the
first painful consequences of this.... He was suffering.
And it was because of Jonathan. (p. 94)
Two years later, a letter arrives from Simon,
Serge's father,
announcing that he and Barbara are planning to marry. This ends
Jonathan's long period of grief. Simon writes to Jonathan that
"the boy thought about him a lot and that he would very much like to
visit him in the country again.” When Serge's father delivers his
son for a two-month visit with Jonathan, the young artist is awed by
the distinctly spiritual appearance that the now ten-year-old boy has
acquired since he last saw him:
A boy long in the legs, long-necked,
slim and supple as a
girl.... His neck, his shining forearms, had a different tone,
white and delicate. His hair fell down to the collar, in loose
curls. His back was long, his shoulders a bit narrow.... He
was relaxed, with the merest ghost of a smile, a smile of pride, the
merest ghost, nothing at all. Jonathan was stunned by his
beauty.... (p. 116)
To Jonathan, Serge seems "Bigger, taller, but less
solid.
Disembodied. Diaphanous.” Touching Serge on the neck,
Jonathan is struck by the eery feeling that the boy is both Serge and
not Serge. On the one level Jonathan is touching a boy he has
known intimately for four years, a fully historical being. At the
same time he is aware of a transpersonal aspect, an archetypal
dimension, god-like and awesome, comprising two entities in one, a
being simultaneously known and not known:
[Jonathan] had the impression that it
wasn't Serge he touched, but an
indefinite being, more general, almost abstract: a boy. Any
boy. Something in Serge's physical presence did not belong to him
himself. This feeling was new, troubling, almost repugnant.
At six, at eight, the child had been wholly his body, and his body had
been wholly him. Now, on the other hand, he had curiously, a body
to be looked at, attractive and expressive, which must be him, and
another body to be touched, this anonymous boy's body. A body in
excess.... Even later that evening, in bed... when Serge
teased the young man with such a particular look of mischief in his
eyes that Jonathan was certain that Serge now knew what all this was
about. (pp. 125-126)
The most significant event of the entire novel
occurs as soon as
Serge's father leaves. Serge "shyly" drags Jonathan upstairs to
the bedroom, climbing the stairs "with great strides that brought his
knees above the waist."
Serge's luggage had not been unpacked,
just as Jonathan had
imagined. But he'd taken out from his old bag an enormous roll of
drawings in watercolor, glued end to end like a papyrus, and he'd hung
it up across the room. A paint-box and a damp brush on Jonathan's
table showed that Serge had added a few final touches while his father
had been talking downstairs. This was the surprise which he had
mysteriously been preparing for Jonathan. The marvellous banner
started at the top of the cupboard; then the fat people, the enormous
flowers, the crazy houses, the oceans, rivers, forests and brilliant
skies ran over the bed, draped themselves over the chest of drawers,
lay across the drawing-table, spanned the gap between two chairs and
ended in large folds at their feet. There were twenty-five or
thirty feet, perhaps more. Serge looked at the drawings, then at
Jonathan, his face all smiling, his arms dangling at his sides.
(pp. 123-124)
The ten-year-old's prodigious art exhibit, hung --
significantly -- in the
bedroom, bears a direct relationship to the four months of man/boy
lovemaking that occurred there two years ago, thus defining the bedroom
as a sacred place.
Serge's end-on-end papyrus of drawings serves as a detailed map of the
boy's psyche, painstakingly constructed in the interim since Serge's
previous visit with Jonathan. The boy's running commentary on
contents of the papyrus provides the essential ambiance of the entire
second half of the novel, a colorful monologue straight from the
soul. The drawings are strikingly archetypal and admit to the
same type of analysis that dreams do.
The pictorial drama revolves around two main characters: a "captain"
(Jonathan) and a "boy" (Serge). There is a "submarine" with
"sails
like a boat," which signifies an ego equally at home in the conscious
or the unconscious realms of the psyche. The "sea" is the
unconscious, and there is sometimes an "island" and other times a
"mountain," an image of a phallicized consciousness, alternately
swelling and shrinking, as though the boy had learned to think with the
genitals rather than the brain- which is to say that feeling rather
than thinking is serving as the primary rational function. In one
drawing the "captain" is simultaneously "fishing" and "looking through
the binoculars," not satisfied with merely hooking content from the
collective unconscious, but wanting to examine it with a feeling-
toned, metaphoric intellect (the binoculars), as Serge is doing by
explicating his drawings for Jonathan.
The drawing showing the "hole in the sea" reaches to the crux of the
matter if the water disappears, then "the boat has got no water round
it.” This implies that the boat-like ego loses contact with the
unconscious, and thus his ability to create dries up. For the
captain and the boy the sea returns, however, as soon as the phallic
"rocket" big enough to "hold five elephants" reasserts itself.
The rocket signifies the elephantine libido of man/boy love, whose
periodic resurgence causes the sea of creativity to flow again.
Serge expresses this with the beautiful metaphor of a penile erection,
in which the "sea snake" goes "for a walk in the sky."
A formula for creativity is graphically defined in another
drawing. Serge depicts a machine "with pedals and steam pipes"
that provides deliverance from a sense of isolation captured in a
previous papyrus drawing where Serge has portrayed himself as a boy "on
the moon... looking at the ground.... There's nothing there
for him to eat.” Serge's art machine illustrates the erotic
interface between the individual and the creative imagination.
The ten-year-old's concept of the machine powered by "dirty words"
brilliancy articulates the hidden intimacy between eros and art,
thereby providing a ready escape vehicle from barren, moon-like places
which offer no nourishment for the soul:
"[The boy's] found a machine to escape,
it's a machine with pedals and
steam-pipes, but really, to make it work you have to talk into that
loudspeaker there. Then that wheel goes round, that makes the
chain go round, and so on. He's not sitting down properly.
What he's discovered is that if he says dirty words, the machine goes
very very fast. If he says ordinary words, it doesn't go
fast.... "He must have said something really dirty, it's flying
now.” (p. 150)
The epic dimensions of Serge's papyrus exhibit
indicate that the boy's
prodigious artistic efforts are the result of sexuality sublimated
during his absence from Jonathan. The one exception occurs when
Serge seduces a 15-year-old, as he boasts to Jonathan:
Serge told Jonathan that a little while
before the holidays, he sucked
a boy of 15 -- who had also fucked him, without reserve. The
suggestion... had come from the teenager; Serge had agreed
without fuss. Nothing came of it; the elder boy, having done his
bit, must have got the jitters, and had never set foot in the house
again. [The] child spoke of it disdainfully, with a laugh in his
voice... He was, however just a tiny bit proud of what had
happened; Jonathan could see it clearly. (p. 148)
The affair with the 15-year-old starkly contrasts
with the sexual
relations between Serge and Jonathan, where the sex is transacted
without the anxiety that Serge experienced with the older boy
[Every] three or four hours...
Serge would want to be sucked and
masturbated; he masturbated the young man at the same time, for the
pleasure of seeing the skin slide up and down on the big cock.
And Serge, as soon as he had his own orgasm, would say, without batting
an eyelid: "That's it. Stop now!" Jonathan would stop.
Flies were done up again. Jonathan, for his part, wasn't
concerned to have an orgasm or not. They turned back to other
physical activities which had the advantage of not coming to an abrupt
end because of an orgasm. (p. 152)
Jonathan never ceases to struggle with the moral
dilemma implied by his
relationship with Serge. He agonizes over the realization that no
adult can engage a child in sex without bearing responsibility for the
trauma to which a pathological society subjects the child, if the
relationship ever becomes known.
Serge imagined things according to his
own experience. How to
tell him that their amorous encounters, for example, were not what he
believed, not what he lived himself, not what he innocently and
frivolously insisted upon, in the perfection of his personally as yet
intact. How to tell him it was a crime, to be corroborated by
commissioning doctors to spread apart his buttocks; and that their
pleasures would bring Jonathan ten years in prison, and bring upon
Serge a flood of psychotherapy, torture without instruments.
Jonathan's silence on this subject meant their discussions about the
future could have no meaning. But never, never could he explain
to the freest of men, the purest of boys, that he was a criminal.
(pp. 155-156)
Knowing that there is no innate contradiction
between innocence and
sex, except as imposed by a sexophobic socially hell-bent on destroying
love itself, Jonathan is tormented by his inability to explain to Serge
that society condemns the very relationship that the boy needs in order
to survive spiritually, a relationship which the boy prizes above life
itself. Jonathan attempts to bring the matter up by showing the
boy Barbara's letters. Serge's reaction to the evidence of his
mother's deception is both noble and poignant:
When [Serge] saw what opinions his
mother had ascribed to him, and with
what lies she had deceived Jonathan, he blushed all over, tore up the
letter in his hand as if twisting someone's neck, burst out in tears,
knocked over the chairs and showered the cupboard with kicks. But
he said nothing, not even an insult. (p. 137)
The discussion goes no further than how to "keep
them away," before
Serge begins speculating about death. Since Jonathan and Serge
first fell in love, the man has himself experienced every separation
from the boy as a "fight against death.” Despite an attempt at
flippancy, Serge verbalizes a preoccupation with death that is shared
by both man and boy:
"When you die in the ordinary way, d'you
think it hurts? I
wouldn't like that, not really. So, you go to sleep? Is it
like going to sleep? "But if you kill someone, then it hurts them
just the same? Can they feel it? With a gun, say?...
And with the guillotine? In America they kill people with
gas. They say it takes ten minutes. Or what about the
electric chair then! That must be strange. It's funny,
electricity, it tickles. Have you ever tried, with a
battery? "It has to be a new one. Not the round ones for
torches. There are two things sticking out like that.
You've got to touch them both at the same time. With your
tongue!" (p. 141)
Overt talk about death seems to be Serge's way of
convincing Jonathan
that the boy prefers not to discuss the so-called moral aspects of
their relationship. One wonders who is protecting whom. The
boy -- if he is truly the older soul -- may be much more aware of the
situation than the man realizes.
Art and sex are too closely intertwined to be effectively separated, as
Duvert's story of Jonathan and Serge demonstrates. For a child to
experience an art-centered erotic relationship with a man comparable to
that depicted in this novel is to feed the child the human equivalent
of "royal jelly," that mysterious substance which genetically
transforms a normal bee larvum into the biological ruler of the
hive. Such a relationship programs the child's psyche for
artistic and intellectual expression as a normal response to eros,
effectively transforming what might otherwise have been an ordinary boy
into Man as Artist and Creator.
To demonize fundamental human instincts like sex and love is tantamount
to inducing a self-initiated auto-immune reaction into the body of
society. In stubbornly applying precepts that have failed
disastrously in the past and can be shown today to be false (see Alice
Miller's "For Your Own Good" and Philip Greven's "Spare the Child"),
the self-appointed defenders of society's collective misconceptions
behave like the cultural equivalent of a bull in the china shop.
Their misguided efforts result not only in innocent lives ruined or
destroyed, but effectively block the intellectual and artistic spin-off
which might normally enrich the cultural heritage of our civilization.
The words of the title come true at the moment of Barbara's final
remarks to Simon about the boy's request to make a third visit to
Jonathan, overheard through the thin wall of the bedroom by the
wide-awake ten-year- old:
"Oh no! As far as that's
concerned, no, no, and no! There's
no reason- Serge has no reason, no reason at all!- I don't want him to
carry on seeing Jonathan. I don't want any more of it....
I'm telling you I don't want to hear about it again. There's
something not right about it.... No. It's over, as far as
Jonathan is concerned, and that's it...” Serge, behind his wall,
heard the whole discussion. He carried on thinking about it, long
after the parental bed had ceased to creak. (p. 169)
The event referred to in the title is metaphorical
yet real: at the end
of the novel Jonathan is still alive, like Serge, but as in classical
Greek drama, where the violent conclusion occurs offstage, Duvert makes
clear that this man and boy can continue their relationship only in
another world. In this present world, society has failed them,
not the other way around, and the man's death is merely a phone call
away from that of the boy. In "killing" the man Jonathan by
killing the boy Serge's relationship with him, Barbara employs
psychological weapons to deny life-giving spiritual sustenance to her
own son. The societal impact of Barbara's blunder is where the
real tragedy lies, for the Barbaras of this world in their ignorant,
Philistine insensitivity also destroy the future contribution to
society which children like Serge seem destined to make, but only if
these intellectually and artistically royal ones are not inadvertently
condemned to spiritual "death."
Duvert focuses on one of the most misunderstood processes of the
transpersonal human psyche, the "boy eternal," or puer aeternus aspect
of the senex-puer (old man/young boy) archetype. This polar
archetype (exhaustively explored in Puer Papers, edited by James
Hillman), reflects society's acceptance (the positive senex) or
rejection (the negative senex) of the creative imagination (the
identifying attribute of the "boy eternal" or puer aeternus).
When society constellates the negative senex by creating an environment
in which the creative imagination is stifled, the puer also turns
negative, expending itself in unproductive anger and violence, or
collapsing into itself in spiritual apathy and even suicide, as in
Serge's case- resulting in the "puer problem" which Marie-Louis von
Franz analyzes in her brilliant study Puer aeternus. When the
senex is positive, the puer is also positive, enabling the imagination
to explode with creative vitality, as occurred so spectacularly toward
the end of the 15th century in the Florentine Renaissance or in England
toward the end of the 16th century during the Age of Elizabeth.
Unlike Barbara, to whom her son is a nuisance, Jonathan sees Serge as
the living embodiment of an internalized ideal which C. G. Jung, in
"The Psychology of the Child Archetype" refers to as the
archetype of the "eternal child":
The archetype of the child...
expresses man's wholeness.
The "child" is all that is abandoned and exposed and at the same time
divinely powerful; the insignificant, dubious beginning, and the
triumphal end. The "eternal child" in man is an indescribable
experience, an incongruity, a handicap, and a divine prerogative; an
imponderable that determines the ultimate worth or worthlessness of a
personality. (Collected Works, Volume 9, Part I: "The Archetypes
and the Collective Unconscious", 2nd ed., para. 300)
In worshipping the boy eternal in Serge, Jonathan
constellates this
archetype in himself. In fact, Jonathan constellates the positive
senex in his relationship to Serge primarily because he himself is also
a puer aeternus. To complicate matters, the boy Serge sometimes
serves as Jonathan's senex. This archetypal shape-shifting is an
enantiodromia, a Greek term first coined by Heraclitus to mean "running
contrariwise" or play of opposites in which, sooner or later,
everything turns into its opposite. The tendency of the opposites
within the senex-puer archetype to switch poles is a characteristic
that should be pointed out whenever a discussion of man/boy love
focuses on the issue of dominance and submission. In thrall to
Jung's "indescribable experience," which defines the young artist's
perception of Serge, Jonathan reflects that as long as Serge continues
to be a "boy eternal," he will always be whole:
Serge knew how to look after himself;
his open and cheerful manner, his
laugh, his attention to people, his impertinence and his vitality
charmed even the brutish and the crabbed.... The young painter
loved this character of Serge's. He could imagine the child six
foot high covered in hair, or even ruined by wrinkles and convictions,
without this new Serge making him sad, as long as he imagined him with
the child's humor and... soul. (p. 67)
The remainder of Shakespeare's "boy eternal" speech
from whose opening
lines "When Jonathan Died" draws its epigram (quoted at the beginning
of this essay) is also relevant to Duvert's novel:
We were as twinn'd lambs that did frisk
i' the sun,
And bleat the one
at the other what we changed
Was innocence for innocence; we knew not
The doctrine of ill-doing, nor dream'd
That any did. Had we
pursued that life,
And our weak spirits ne'er been higher rear'd
With
stronger blood, we should have answer'd heaven
Boldly "not guilty"....
Thus does King Polixenes, a positive figure in
Shakespeare's A Winter's
Tale, defend youthful homeroticism and the concept of the boy eternal,
audaciously raising boy-love to royal status. This confirms that
the positive aspect of the senex-puer archetype is fully operative in
Shakespeare's England, an era which saw an astonishing burst of
creative energy -- until the Puritans constellated the negative senex
by establishing a repressive, authoritarian regime and closing the
theaters. In the French society of the late 1960s that Duvert is
describing, collective disapproval of boy-love has likewise
constellated the negative archetype. If the positive puer
encourages spiritual and artistic flowering, the negative puer
transforms individual creativity into mental illness, and represents
for many of the potentially most artistically productive youth a
personal sentence of intellectual, spiritual, and even physical death.
Considering the foolish hysteria presently surrounding the topic of
man/boy love in most of the English-speaking countries, D.R.
Roberts' elegant translation of Duvert's novel into English should be
welcomed by all who regard literary art as our most trustworthy
reflection of the human condition. Tony Duvert's "Quand mourut
Jonathan", as the novel was titled in the 1978 French original, is one
of the finest literary descriptions of the boy eternal since Antoine de
Saint-Exupery's exquisite Le Petit Prince [The Little Prince],
published in 1943. Duvert's novel, however, undertakes a greater
challenge, for it witnesses, as Saint-Exupery's does not, to the
unacceptable cost to society in human and cultural terms when an
intellectually and artistically productive intergenerational
relationship is arbitrarily condemned and the child is treated like a
thing rather than a person. Yet, for a novel as freighted with
deep meaning and serious purpose as this one is, readers not interested
in complexities will discover that the work is at the same time simple,
eloquent, and profoundly moving -- compelling evidence that "When
Jonathan
Died" is not just good, but great.
---
Tony Duvert, "When Jonathan Died", translated from the French by
D.R. Roberts (London: Gay Men's Press, 1991), 174 pages,
paper.
For more on the works of Tony Duvert, see: Good Sex
Illustrated - (Review)
http://www.semiotexte.com/authors/tonyDuvert.html
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From
the NAMBLA Bulletin, Vol. 14,
No. 1, Pgs. 42 - 49, 1993.
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Copyright © NAMBLA, 2007
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