"Words that tell and hide": Revisiting C. P. Cavafy's Closets

Abstract

Critics have traditionally viewed C. P. Cavafy's work as moving from erotic secrecy to homosexual self-revelation. However, following Foucault, we should think of sexuality not as something repressed by control, but as a discourse inextricably linked with repression, power and knowledge. Seen in this way, Cavafy's strategies of "telling and hiding" form a constant dialectic running through the whole of his work, producing (not unveiling) the sexuality, identity, and eroticism at its centre. Reviewing the theorized figure of the closet as a central trope of Cavafy's writing, we witness how hiding can create a position from which to speak and a subversive set of discourses for the homosexual self. Cavafy puts desire, "semi-hidden," in the phrases of his poetry, fully exploiting the dissonance of silences and things unsaid. In key poems we can see how he translates the closeting of queer desire into a textual practice that produces identification and eroticism. Furthermore, we can trace the closet leaking across textual and sexual boundaries, defying social control and threatening the reader's certainties.

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