Modern masturbation can be dated with a precision rare in cultural history. It was born in, or very close to, the same year as that wild and woolly and profoundly self-conscious exemplar of “our” kind of human, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It arrived in the same decade as Daniel Defoe’s first novels and the first stock-market crashes. (Readers will remember the repeated jokes – new at the time – in the first chapter of Gulliver’s Travels that Swift began in 1719: “Mr. Bates, my master”; “my good master Bates.”) It—by which I mean masturbation as a moral and medical problem that attracted the serious attention of the likes of Kant, Rousseau, Samuel Johnson, Voltaire and S.A.D. Tissot, the most read medial authority of the century– is a creature of the Enlightenment. And more specifically it is intimately bound up with the question of solitude in eighteenth century thought. 

To be precise, sometime between 1708 and 1716 – “in or around 1712” – the then-anonymous author of a short tract with a long title not only named (Onan had not before been associated with masturbation) but actually invented a new disease and a new highly specific, thoroughly modern, and nearly universal engine for generating guilt, shame, and anxiety.  Its title: Onania; or, The Heinous Sin of Self Pollution, and all its Frightful Consequences, in both SEXES Considered, with Spiritual and Physical Advice to those who have already injured themselves by this abominable practice. And seasonable Admonition to the Youth of the nation of Both SEXES…. 

Onanism was loosed upon the world. 

The problem that had been so long ignored but that would come to play such a large role in the modern Western understanding of self and sexuality was this:  That unnatural Practice by which persons of either sex may defile their own bodies, without the Assistance of others. Whilst yielding to filthy imagination, they endeavor to imitate and procure for themselves that Sensation, which God has ordered to attend the Carnal Commerce of the two sexes for the Continuance of our Species.  

Modern masturbation is profane. It is not just something that putatively makes those who do it tired, crippled, mad, or blind but an act with serious ethical implications. It is that part of human sexual life where potentially unlimited solitary pleasure meets social restraint; where habit and the promise of just-one-more-time struggle with the dictates of conscience and good sense; where fantasy silences, if only for a moment, the reality principle; and where the autonomous self escapes from the erotically barren here- and-now into a luxuriant world of its own creation. It hovers between abjection and fulfillment.  

“The solitary vice” as the most common synonym for masturbation is an early nineteenth century neologism but the perceived moral and medical dangers of solitary sexual pleasure— solitary both in the sociological sense of being alone and unwatched and, more importantly in the psychological sense of the self being alone with itself—were there at the start. Notice in the description I just quoted “for themselves,” “without the assistance of others,” “yielding to filthy imagination.” Onanism as a paradigmatic pathology of solitude, of the mind un-moored.  

Barbara Taylor in her review of my Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (LRB, 6 May 2004) argued that the book was essentially a history, writ on the body, of a new sort of self in society: “the sexuality of the modern self” I called it. Laqueur, she notes,  “presumes a caesura between the modern and the pre-modern. The modern masturbator stands on the near side of a cultural divide whose far side is a world where the moral hazards of sex were not those of rampant individualism but violations of a hierarchical, providential order.” In other words a new pathology of solitude, a new and powerful engine of shame, was born and flourished as a bulwark against rampant individualism, against the hazards of un-moored moral autonomy.  The roots of Onanism in Laqueur’s account lie in “the predicaments of secularized subjectivity.”  

Taylor accepts these claims but argues, rightly, that it does not fully account for the novel shamefulness of Onanism, the new pathology of solitude. The shame, she continues, is rooted in the Christian notion of concupiscence, the idea most profoundly articulated by Augustine, that the estrangement of the soul from God is marked in the flesh by the autonomy of sexual desire—and speaking as he does from a male perspective— signaled by the un-unruliness of the sexual organs. Adam’s shame at his nakedness came from an unwilled erection. (For Augustine the key is un-willed and un-willable.  In a letter to Paulinos of Nola that he wrote in his old age he said that his present impotence was just as much a sign of concupiscence as the erections of his youth.)  

If we think of the new shame of Onanism as grounded in the old shame of concupiscence then the stakes of a history of the solitary vice has to account not just for “a new relationship between self and society but [the] self’s relationship to the self.” “We are none of us, female or male, masters in our own house,” Taylor writes:  Augustine redux without original sin.  She concludes with a Freudian twist: “Shame’ Jacqueline Rose wrote recently, ‘is one of the ways we try to forget part of ourselves’ and it is this amnesia that ultimately lay behind the masturbation panic. 

We do not have to choose between these perspectives. On the one hand there is the novelty of a new pathology of solitude that cannot be explained by adducing an abiding engine of shame.  Something changes on or around 1712 that demands an explanation. On other hand we need to account for the wild success of Grub Street pamphlet that makes its way into the inner sanctums of the high Enlightenment and generates torrents of guilt at a practice that before had received almost not attention. It somehow mobilized a deep disquietude about the self’s relationship to its desires that did not suddenly appear with the early philosophes. 

I propose briefly to make the case for my history of self and society. That is I want to offer an explanation for what it was about solitary sex—as opposed to sex that was not practiced in solitude–that was purportedly so dangerous—medically and morally– in the particular circumstances of the eighteenth century and beyond. I then want to return, by offering the sketchiest of sketches of a social and cultural history of shame, to Taylor’s argument about the persistent shamefulness this one particular form of sexual activity–sex with ones self– that had for so long gone un-noticed. Shame is an emotion that precisely bridges the space between society and self, outer and inner. As Protagoras tells Socrates, after Prometheus had distinguished humans from other animals by giving them fire Zeus gave them all equally both shame (Aidos) and justice so that they could live together in harmony. I will end with a modern redemptive twist on the solitary vice as a form of healthy self-discovery in solitude. 

Readers will have to accept, for the purposes of this discussion, that there is something specifically modern about the medical and moral anxiety surrounding sex in solitude. It really did emerge more or less from nowhere around 1712.  The editors of the most exhaustive of the nineteenth-century medical encyclopedias allotted more than twenty- six pages and a long bibliography to the article “Onanisme.” No problem more deserves the attention of philosophers and doctors, the author announces, which is presumably why it deserves so much space. entitled Onania had enormous repercussions.  The rabbis had had all sorts of views of how exactly Onan had spilled his seed upon the ground—anal sex, intracrural sex, coitus interruptus, and, yes, perhaps also masturbation—but what became his eponymous sin in the eighteenth century was of no concern. God struck him dead because he refused to have a child from whom would grow “the tree of Jesse” with his widowed sister in law Tamar.  The backstory as But the ancients—Galen, Hippocrates and the nearly two thousand year tradition built on their work viewed it “with the most serene indifference.” Only in the eighteenth century, the article continues, did onanism become important:  “book to why this was so bad fills volumes but is irrelevant to this conference.  

A long line of Church fathers and the theologians who followed them developed an exquisitely refined hermeneutics of sexuality– concupiscence was a central but by no means the only issue—but they had almost nothing to say about solitary sex. St. Thomas includes what we might interpret as the act—mollities, from the L. mollius-e, condition of softenss—but they are included in a long list of non-reproductive sexual acts and are not singled out as worth especial note. One unpublished fourteenth century tract by Jean Gerson about which Foucault makes a great deal does seem to address the subject but it is a rare exception that proves the rule. Solitary sex is a problem connected somehow with modern questions of the condition of the self with her or himself and outside the nexus of society. 

What then is the problem that captivated the world of doctors and moral philosophers and through them and through them made men and women, boys and girls guilty and ashamed of a practice that in earlier ages would have passed notice. It was not sexual excess per se. S.D. Tissot, the best read doctor of the century whose 1759 book on Onanism was translated into twenty languages over hundreds of editions that it is “far more pernicious than excesses with women” because these were mitigated by some measure of reciprocity and engagement. (Although much was made of the dangers of solitary sex for women– and  for children of both sexes– no-one made the comparative argument about excesses with men.) 

When Tissot and the Encyclopédie – the obscure pamphlet of 1712 had made its way to the inner sanctum of the Enlightenment in half a century–pronounced on the subject, they located the evil genius of masturbation not in the lusts of the flesh but in a generally benign faculty of the mind. Both distanced themselves from theological condemnations based on violation of the telos of sex—reproduction– or the triumph of concupiscence. Menuret de Chambaud, writing for the Encyclopédie, was more straightforward. Leaving theology aside, as he clearly wanted to do, masturbation would not be so bad if – and here comes the big “if” – it were not in the thrall of an unmoored psyche: “Masturbation which is not so frequent, which is not excited by a fiery and voluptuous imagination, which is, in a word, spurred only by one’s need,” is not harmful at all.  

In other words, if masturbation were natural – that is, the result of real sexual need – it would be fine. de Chambaud’s point in the Encyclopédie article is that it is not so easy to maintain moderate masturbation simply as an alternative way of satisfying ordinary, sociable sexual desire. Solitary sex was almost by its nature immoderate, because the imagination was not easily restrained. It had “the greatest part of the crime,” and thus the seat of the imagination – the mind and all that is connected to it – was most severely punished for doing it. A central problem with solitary sex as understood by the canonical text of the high Enlightenment was that it was generally driven from within, driven by a “voluptuous, a fiery imagination” that had only the most tenuous connections with all those charms, tricks, arrangements – and physiological natural processes – that drive a more social passion.  

Rousseau, always ready with the psychologically astute reflection, always poised to transform a personal anxiety into a general truth, got it right when he considered masturbation in his Confessions. It was, he famously said, “the dangerous supplement”: there was always something more, something unbounded, something that could not be satisfied and laid to rest. When he masturbated, the greatest and most original of the philosophes tells us, he would conjure up a sexually exciting image or story, become excited, and satisfy his desire, all without recourse to anyone. There was nothing to stop him from doing it again and again, “with” whomever he wanted, whenever he wanted, and without any natural satiety. Masturbation was outside not just this or that form of restraint but all bounds whatsoever. There was no stopping it because it was so terribly easy, because it was so alluringly free, because it seemed to escape from any and all consequences, because it was so perfectly outside civilization. 

The moral foreboding about masturbation that haunts the sexual awakening of Emile, Rousseau’s eponymous protagonist, and, by extension, that of all adolescents has to do with the threat poised by the solitariness of a practice born out of the self, out of the imagination.  And the secrecy of the act makes it all the more difficult to teach the practitioner that it is shameful. “If he [an educator’s pupil] were to know one time the dangerous supplement” as a way of satisfying his sexual instincts, “he is lost,” declares Rousseau unequivocally. Not only would “he carry the doleful [triste] effects of this habit, the most disastrous to which a young man can subjugate himself, to the grave,” but by the very act he would be lost to his teacher. But even more troubling is the fact that through masturbation Emile would become hopelessly enslaved to himself. Better to fall in love with an inappropriate woman; from such a fate, Rousseau is sure, he might be saved. But to be rescued from himself as the engine of sexual desire and satisfaction would be altogether another matter.  

Ambivalent as Rousseau’s feelings were about the role of society in making us who we are, society still offered grounds for redemption; pure interiority was harder, perhaps impossible, to reach. And pure interiority, driven by the possibility of endless, self-generated sexual pleasure was the most extreme case. “Deceitful” and “counterfeit” were the adjectives that came to Rousseau’s mind when he wrote about the teacher’s worry in Emile about the collapse of his whole educational project should his pupil succumb to the secret vice.  

Taylor is right: for the old fashioned “concupiscence”—desires of the flesh as a sign of the estrangement of the soul from God, of the lack of singleness of heart– we could substitute “the fiery imagination,” something unbounded that could not be laid to rest– even if the doctors and moralists of the eighteenth century wanted to distance themselves from so theologically loaded a term. And she is right that “Protestantism, by drawing God—and the devil—into the individual psyche upped the ante. The inner world of the believer became a cosmic battleground, with sex as its front line.” But it is not the only line of battle.  A fiery imagination stimulated by the passions  “led believers to confuse inner states with outer objects, to mistake their own desires and fantasies for the living God.” Enthusiasm. I might add that other forms of secular concupiscence were also creatures of the Enlightenment; “alcoholism” was another eighteenth century neologism.  

The question remains why this one particular sign that we are “none of us, male or female, masters of our own house,”—solitary sex– became a new and lasting and paradigmatic engine of shame.  If the gods gave humans shame to allow us to live together the pedagogues, doctors, and philosophers of the Enlightenment worked so hard to make sex with ourselves shameful in an effort to allow us to live alone. It was a hard road to make something private—solitary—shameful because shame is an emotion evoked in public through the the real or imagined gaze of others.  It was their project to make it shameful in the eyes of the self. And, in the long Augustinian tradition, they located it in the desiring flesh: a secular appropriation of concupiscence. 

I find it puzzling how difficult it has been to shake off what they wrought: a new engine of shame, a new purported pathology of solitude.  In an age when the desiring flesh and the fervid imagination seem triumphant masturbation remains if not contemptuous then embarrassing: in need of defense. There is a redemptive feminist tradition beginning in the 1970s: Betty Dodson’s Liberating Masturbation: A Meditation on Self Love for example, straightforwardly makes the case that autoeroticism is not only a politically but also a personally liberating act. A lively market in sex toys and a trove of articles in women’s magazines makes the case. An avalanche of porn is in its service.  

But solitude still bears something of the sense that it is had behind closed doors. There is a passage early in Swann’s Way in which the narrator, certainly no enemy of he imagination writes of a room at Combray: it was the only room whose door I was allowed to lock. Whenever my occupation was such as required inviolable solitude: reading or day-dreaming, tears or sensual pleasure. 

Thomas W. Laqueur is Helen Fawcett Professor of History Emeritus at UC Berkely.

The post The Advent of the Solitary Vice appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

The 2003 publication of Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation stimulated academic and popular discussions about masturbation which have increased our understanding of this under-discussed human behaviour. This paper revisits the arguments of the book in the light of these discussions and considers the implications of solitary sex – its practice, its reputation, its friends and enemies – for the history of human solitariness in general.

This seminar was co-sponsored by ‘Pathologies of Solitude Project’, Centre for 18th Century Studies, Sexual Cultures Research Group (SED).

Professor Thomas Laqueur, based at Berkeley, University of California, is the author of Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990), Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (2003), and The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (2015), among many others.

The post Professor Thomas W. Laqueur: Revisiting Solitary Sex appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

‘With their parallel lives,’ writes John Berger, animals ‘offer man a companionship which is different from any offered by human exchange. Different because it is a companionship offered to the loneliness of man as a species.’ This lecture argues that the gaze of the dog, grounded in evolution and appropriated by visual artists in the western tradition, offers a way of representing being seen – being regarded as worth regard – as a defence against loneliness both as a species and as social beings. Dogs are cultural doppelgängers of the human, creatures whose ways of seeing and very presence stand in a metonymic relationship to how we – artists and those who look at art – see in the world and want to be seen.

Professor Thomas Laqueur, based at Berkeley, University of California, is the author of Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990), Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (2003), and The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (2015), among many others.

The post Professor Thomas W. Laqueur Public Lecture: Canines in Solitude appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

A single term to cover both is manifestly inadequate in these times of pandemic because of the painfully evident differences between the solitude of the privileged — those with caring kin, friends, jobs that can be done from home and adequate financial resources for whom social isolation comes as a welcome, or at least bearable, break from a overly hectic life and offers the opportunity for self-improvement — and the solitude, the loneliness, the bereft condition of those who lack a hospitable world beyond the boundaries of the self and for whom social isolation offers nothing but added adversity. The distinction is an existential one.

‘Liveable solitude is underpinned by care,’ Taylor says. And conversely, ‘for a person who has had no reliable carer, solitude is unendurable.’ Solitude without ‘reliable care’ is loneliness.

To some extent the divide between being cared for and not being cared for follows the social and economic fissures of our society. If ‘caring’ means ‘looked after’ or ‘provided for’, the poor, the homeless and the elderly are less likely have their needs looked after than the more prosperous, the sheltered, and the young. And if ‘to be cared for’ means to be regarded by someone, to matter to someone, to be watched over by someone, or, in the now obsolete sense of the verb, to be mourned by someone, that too is, as objective matter, a question of sociology. Is there really someone beyond oneself who cares?

But it is also a subjective question: the deeply rooted feeling that someone or the world cares — or as Taylor puts it, in the past has cared — so profoundly that the carer lives in our psyche.  Marcel, the narrator of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way was there before psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott.

He is speaking about the ‘one thing necessary to send me to sleep contented.’  He lies ‘in the zone of melancholy,’ wishing ‘he were lying dead’  as the world threatens to slip away.  He remembers the ‘untroubled peace’

…no mistress in later years has ever been able to give me, since one has doubts of them even in the moment when one believes in them, and never can possess their hearts as I used to receive, in a kiss, my mother’s heart, whole and entire, without qualm or reservation, without the smallest residue of an intention that was not me alone… [1]

There is, here, the cosmic sense of a ‘reliable carer,’ who cares not just for the individual but for human kind and all who care to be cared for: God (although that is not who Taylor had in mind).

This is the carer of whom the poet of the Psalms sings ‘It is better to take refuge in the LORD, than to trust in humans (Psalm 118); ‘Be strong, be brave, you are never alone’ (Joshua 1:19) The carer of whom the prophet Isaiah speaks: ‘Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying ‘This is the way; walk in it”; or ‘fear not for I am with you.’

Tennyson’s In Memorium offers a famous modern and more fragile cosmic version:

Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law –
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed –

And finally in John Berger’s account of the human bond with animals we have more secular, that is, a historically and anthropologically grounded, story of this kind of cosmic caring:

With their parallel lives, animals offer man a companionship which different from any offered by human exchange. Different because it is a companionship offered to the loneliness of man as a species.

This ‘unspeaking companionship’, he continues, ‘was felt to be so equal that often one finds the conviction that it was man who lacked the capacity to speak with animals — hence the stories and legends of exceptional beings, like Orpheus, who could talk with animals in their own language.’ And then it wasn’t. ‘To suppose that animals first entered the human imagination as meat or leather or horn is to project a 19th century attitude backwards across the millennia.’ The old equality died with the disenchantment of the modern world.

Dogs, the shaggy subject of this blog, are a part of Berger’s story of a fall from grace: they played their part along with their fellow beasts in the cosmic drama of humans and animals. Perhaps a bigger part than others.

No single species is so deeply imbricated in the mythic structures of the human imagination around the world and through time.

God, when he created the world, had a dog in the California Kato Indian story; dogs guard the dead from Zorastrian Persia to Aztec Mexico. And though they are only occasionally used for meat — the species is not an efficient source of protein — or for leather, they too have lost their cosmic status in the dog shows and bourgeois homes of recent centuries. But in one respect they have maintained a singular sort of consistent companionship for a very long time quite apart of their utility for humans.

They continue to offer companionship — or more specifically a locus for imaging that an animal cares sufficiently to assuage ‘the loneliness of man as a species’ and as singular creatures.

Evolution produced in the dog an animal that lives intimately with humans, a sort of presence that is a minimal condition of companionship. We know for certain that dogs have hung out with us for a very long time and not just as work mates although that too. There were dogs among humans thousands of years before there were sheep to guard or cattle to herd although they did probably help us hunt from the very beginning of the relationship. The oldest visual image we have of an animal doing something with a human rather than being hunted is from rock paintings in the Arabian desert of dogs helping humans hunt that date from c. 9000-8000 BCE.

A friend recently sent me a picture of a Sumerian fired clay brick, 30 cm x 30 cm, from Third Dynasty of Ur (22nd to 21st century BCE) that had been sent to him by the British Museum through Instagram. The cuneiform text, according to my Berkeley colleague Niek Veldhuis’ translation, says ‘Urnamma. king of Ur the man who built a temple for Nanna [the moon god].’

At the bottom left are two small dog footprints, evidence that some mutt, four thousand years ago was walking among the brick makers of Sumer and stepped into one of their brick moulds. Anyone who has ever poured a concrete pad or step will recognise the danger: evidence in clay of the affinity between people and their dogs.

It is perhaps not quite as uncanny as the footprints, stretching over 50 meters, made in clay and preserved in dissolved limestone, of a boy who visited the Chauvet caves 25,000 years ago, five thousand years after they were painted, next to the footprints of a canid. It would be delicious to image the boy carrying a torch — scientists date his visit from the soot left behind — and his dog out for an afternoon’s exploration. But the canid might have been a wolf or proto-dog, a wolf-dog far enough along its evolutionary path to want to be with humans; it also might have left its prints earlier or later.

But in the case of the Sumerian brick we know there was a dog around a human brick maker. Maybe it came bounding onto the drying bricks after the workers left for home. Or maybe it was wandering around during the work day; or maybe it sat all day with the brick maker. We do not know of course but we do know that there are many dogged bricks like it.

There is one at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology with four paw prints from the same period on which the nails of the dog’s claw left its imprint; we have one with three dog footprints from a few centuries later in the Hearst Museum at Berkeley; another at Penn from the period of Nebuchadnezzar, 626-529 BCE, rough speaking when the Jews were in exile there. And there are more such tiles in the world’s museum and no doubt also in the ground.

But tiles with paw prints are not evidence for how we might imagine dogs as caring for us. For this I leap forward almost four millennia to a story from classical antiquity in which a dog came to play a new part around 1500. Michelangelo has a role to play in this history of the emotions.

A shaggy dog story of how I came to this. The philosopher Hagi Kenaan’s Photography and its Shadows (Stanford University Press, 2020) is a meditation on Nietzsche’s death of god — the collapse of a cosmically given ground of meaning — and specifically on his image of ‘Buddha’s shadow in the cave’ as ‘an allegory of the dramatic transmutation of the condition of the visual that allows the shadow to endure as an independent entity.’ As part of her study she is interested in welcoming and bidding farewell, to ‘negotiating the dimensions of transience and finitude.’

My interest in her work lies in the aloneness of the one left behind but also in the comfort that one might feel at the prospect of being missed. It is about imagining that someone cares, if not the cosmos.

Kenaan reports that she asked the Renaissance art historian Giancarla Periti whether she could think of any interesting farewell gestures. After a while Periti came up with Correggio’s ‘Abduction of Ganymede’ (c. 1530s). This was, Kanann responded, an unlikely suggestion: ‘Ganymede was abducted by Zeus… does this involve a farewell?’ ‘Listen to the barking in the painting’ she replies. ‘The dog is the one saying goodbye.’

I have my doubts this is what the dog is doing; a dog is more likely to bark when its master returns than when she leaves. More likely it is barking because an eagle has disturbed his peace and abducted the boy he works with. An upset bark; an angry bark. But I do not want to push the point but rather ask ‘why is the dog there in the first place?

No ancient image of the beautiful young shepherd — or in other versions hunter — with whom Zeus fell in love and sent an eagle to abduct has a dog. Nor is one mentioned in any of the many versions of the story we have from antiquity. Correggio’s painting does not tell us anything substantive about the relationship of the dog and the human being swept off by an eagle. The putative shepherd or hunter of legend in this painting is barely pubescent not up to such adult pursuits; he is too young to have a dog.

Michelangelo’s ‘Rape of Ganymede’ is more revealing of the relationship between boy and dog.

In 1532 the fifty seven year old artist fell in love with a beautiful young nobleman Tommaso dei Cavalieri and gave him as a gift a series of drawing on classical themes, among them one about Zeus’s passion for the young shepherd whom he abducted from his fields to be with him on Olympus. The image he produced was widely copied. In the left foreground, seen only very faintly, is a dog; centre and right is a shepherd’s crook; further up and right are sheep.

The dog cares that the young man with whom he has shared a life is gone. It is not an allegorical dog; it means nothing.

We can be pretty sure of this because when a version of Michelangelo’s drawings appears in Andreas Alicato’s Emblemata, the most popular and widely translated book of its kind in Europe, a collection of over 200 images with an explanation of what each one means, nothing is said about the iconography of the dog. He is just looking up at his abducted master being borne away by an eagle and barking as any dog might do.

Ganymede, on the other hand, is an allegorical figure, there under the rubric ‘Joy is to be found in God.’ There isn’t even a dog in the first, 1531 edition, but after it appears in 1551 it is there to stay. I am not sure but given how often the Michelangelo drawing was copied that he was the ‘skillful illustrator’ whose dog now makes its way into the image. I quote from the fullest, the 1621 edition of Alciato:

See how the skillful illustrator has shown the Trojan boy being carried through the highest heavens by the eagle of Jove. Can anyone believe that Jove felt passion for a boy? Explain how the aged poet of Maeonia [Homer] came to imagine such a thing. It is the man who finds satisfaction in the counsel, wisdom and joys of God who is thought to be caught up into the presence of mighty Jove.

One moment the dog and the solitary shepherd are guarding sheep together. The next moment the shepherd is gone, his cloak and crook left on the ground with his dog and his sheep. Any dog would bark farewell and look forlorn. This dog — the dog whom we imagine, through the visual arts, to care about humans — has a past and the future. A moment in the history of the emotions. Somewhere between 1300 and 1305.

To art historians the date will come as no surprise; Giotto’s ‘Life of the Virgin’ in the Arena Chapel in Padua. He was the master, as Tim Clark recently wrote — the Shakespeare — of western art in telling us what visualization is for, what ‘job of exemplification it was called upon to perform.’

Giotto was there at the birth of the western tradition of representing emotion visually, of representing to ourselves — to take the case in point, what it would look like to have a dog care. This fresco, completed in 1305, is probably the first work most of us will have seen in a class in the history of modern western art. Vesari claimed in his sixteenth century Lives of the Painters that had Giotto had initiated ‘the great art of painting as we know it today.’

The second image on the upper tier of the south wall is a scene of grief, humiliation and loneliness. The pious Joachim, husband of Anne — mother-to-be of the Virgin — has fled into the dessert after the priests of the temple rejected his sacrifice because in their eyes Anne’s barrenness reflected God’s displeasure with him.

He is dejected. He meets the shepherds who are looking after flocks that he owns (‘Joachim among the Shepherds’). They avert their eyes, uncertain what to make of their boss, surprised at the presence of so august a figure from the far off city; un-willing to engage.

The scene had been frequently represented in Byzantine art and in western illuminations. But Giotto’s version is the first with a dog. Not an allegorical dog; not a dog that is doing its work herding sheep. Not a dog in the painting for its reality effect or to represent faithfulness or courage.  It is there for its emotions; it exemplifies attention to this human; it notices Joachim and looks him in the eye. The dog has left his sheep and rushes up to the downcast stranger — maybe he knows him but probably not; the rich owner from the city who owns the flock probably does not come out to the fields. The dog gets up on its hind legs; looks up at Joachim; wags his tail in greeting.

It recognizes him as a man.  He makes a connection; and we can imagine him caring.

The painting brings to mind an essay of Emmanuel Levinas in which the philosopher speaks about a dog named Bobby who recognizes him and his fellow prisoners in a Nazi camp as human by greeting them when they return from forced labor. The dog recognizes them as humans even if their German guards do not [2].

Joachim falls into a deep sleep and an angel appears to tell him that Anne has conceived and asks him again offer God a sacrifice. Watching him — on the rock between the stony world of the dessert and the brilliant blue of the world of the imagined world to come — is the dog.

Much more to be said about this painting of course but let me just say minimally that here, at the origin of a new kind of painting is a new way of representing the emotional bond of human and animal.

The afterlife of the dog who notices a lonely human and cares runs from Giotto through the Ganymede images I have talked about, through hagiography — the dog who fed St. Roch, patron saint of plague victims, after humans had cast him out of the city (Strozzi’s 1640 image is one of hundreds) — on to the dog as the witness to a lonely death. Landseer’s ‘The Old Shepherd’s Chief Mourner’ is probably the most famous nineteenth century image in that genre.

My claim is of course not that a dog can replace the deeply seated carer that lies at the foundation of the psyche of which both Proust and Winnicott speak. Nor am I arguing that a dog can provide the kind of services that make life in solitude livable. But the dog who offers a ‘reliable carer’—another creature who is watching when one is alone with oneself and keeps unbearable loneliness at bay – has a long history. It is perhaps the last survivor of the world that Berger conjures up; the world in which animals more generally guarded against cosmic loneliness.

[1] Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way (New York: Modern Library, 2003), pp. 258, 261.

[2] ‘A Name of a Dog’, in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).

Thomas Laqueur is Professor of History at University of California Berkeley. He is the author of Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (2003) and The Work of the Dead: a Cultural History of Mortal Remains (2015).

The post Watching When One is Alone With Oneself: Solitude and the Dog appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.