In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

MALE = FEMALE (GENDER TROUBLE) 393
love an appropriate partner are related to severe psychic and so-called
nervous diseases, they would be shocked by their own lack of interest in
this enormously important field. The development of a sexuality that
accords, on the one hand, with the highest ethical standards and, on the
other, with the biological functions of humankind must be among the
highest goals of our education" (Fischer, 105-106).
In its confident certitude, this affirmation of "normality" relates biological
reproduction and sexual "normality" to individual well-being, to
moral and intellectual excellence, and, mediated through the love of
God, even to a religiously grounded cosmology. But portrayals of homosexual
love that seem to come from an inside perspective (portrayals that
are always indirect) are in general accompanied by a suspension of
cognitive assurance and by complicated episodes of introspection. In
Thomas Mann's story "Unordnung und friihes Leid" ("Disorder and
Early Sorrow"), Dr. Cornelius, a professor of history, feels an almost
Oedipal affection for his five-year-old daughter, Lorchen: "She is undeniably
his. She consciously basks in the profound tenderness with which
he embraces her little body (a tenderness that, like all deep feelings,
conceals a certain sadness) and in the love that shines from his eyes as
he kisses her fairylike hand or her dear forehead, with its intricate pattern
of fine blue veins" (Mann, 496). Somewhat vaguely, however, Cornelius
knows that this love for his child undermines his intellectual rigor as a
historian. For if history registers the constant changes that constitute
human life in all its complexity, the professor's unconditional love for
Lorchen is a feeling that remains unaffected by such ongoing transformations:
"In this love for his young daughter, his conservative nature,
his sense of the everlasting, has found a refuge from the hurtful modern
age. A father's love, a baby at its mother's breast-aren't these timeless,
and therefore supremely sacred and beautiful? Yet Cornelius, thinking
matters over in the darkness, glimpses something in his love which is not
quite right. From a theoretical point of view, for the sake of science, he
silently admits this. There is a motive underlying his love, inherent in its
very nature. The motive is animosity: toward the history of the present
moment, which is still taking shape, hence not history at all; and on
behalf of true history, which has already occurred-that is to say, death"
(498). [see Present = Past (Eternity)] Mann never lets Cornelius' reflections
exceed the limits of this highly academic interior monologue. But
is there more behind the professor's fatherly affection than a resistance