The Erotic Wounds of War

This loneliness for you is like the wound

That keeps the soldier patient in his bed . . .

—Dunstan Thompson, "This Loneliness for You Is Like the Wound"

Ifirst saw the Dying Gaul when I was eight. The statue, a plaster cast of the original, was tucked away under a back staircase in the Burke Gilman Museum. The Burke Gilman was my favorite place: my mother, who was studying at the University of Washington, took me there frequently, even leaving me (once I got older) on my own while she retrieved books from the library. She must have been trailing behind me the day I found the Dying Gaul, because I know I was too young to have seen, or understood, the statue on my own.

I stood for minutes, stunned, at chest height to this life-sized naked man slumped on his marble shield, a sword tossed by his thigh, a trumpet like a whip of sea kelp coiled beneath his propped leg. His head was bowed, his hair wild in tuft-like peaks that looked like waves breaking against shore. His large hand clasped his inner thigh. The day I saw him, sun glowed through the glass windows, turning his flesh a paste of creamy white, as if it had been mashed with milk and paper, not composed of plaster and stone. I moved closer. The broad moustachioed face, contorted in pain. The whorls of his pubic hair like the intricate lines etched on a clamshell. His heavy sex, and the slight slit at his right side that traced the crease of skin under his breast, blood chiseled down his ribs in droplets.

I stared. He was massive and yet, folded in upon himself with pain, surprisingly intimate in emotional scale. The white light made him seem alive. I could imagine him bleeding; I could practically feel him dying before me. I stared at the wound, wanting to touch it, knowing that touching art was forbidden. But wasn't looking at a man like this also forbidden? I put my finger to the wound, drawing it across the lips of his peeled-back flesh, the way I'd felt (and imagined) my own self peeled back when, once, I touched myself between the legs.

I didn't think the fact he was a soldier was what made this dying so electric, so powerful. I ignored the sword, the shield, focused on his wound. He was real because of this wound. I could look at him, could touch him because of it. And yet I must have understood, instinctively, the statue's connection with violence and sex. I was supposed to pity the Gaul for his beauty and his injury; I could picture the horror of the battle he'd fought by being moved by its mortal outcome.

Reading the poetry of war, I understand that the Dying Gaul is a common elegiac trope: I have come to recognize the complex roles that sex, physical beauty, and the erotic play in our literary imagination of soldiers and war. I understand that the sexualization of the dying soldier is in many ways a natural extension of the poetic elegy itself, in which the charge of death becomes an erotic charge, death and Eros twinned in our imaginations of men who died young. Here is Milton's "Lycidas," an elegy for Milton's drowned childhood friend, Edward King:

So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted highThrough the dear might of him that walk'd the waves;Where, other groves and other streams along,With nectar pure his oozy locks he laves,And hears the unexpressive nuptial song,In the blest kingdoms meek of joy and love.

And here is Shelley, writing of Keats, in "Adonaïs":

    But now, thy youngest, dearest one, has perish'd,    The nursling of thy widowhood, who grew,    Like a pale flower by some sad maiden cherish'd,    And fed with true-love tears, instead of dew;    Most musical of mourners, weep anew!    Thy extreme hope, the loveliest and the last,    The bloom, whose petals nipp'd before they blew    Died on the promise of...