The Modernist Art of Queer Survival
Benjamin Bateman
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bateman, Benjamin, author.
Title: The modernist art of queer survival / Benjamin Bateman. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017006765 (print) | LCCN 2017025591 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190676544 (pdf) | ISBN 9780190676551 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190676568 (online course) | ISBN 9780190676537 (cloth : acid-free paper)
Subjects: LCSH: English literature—20th century—History and criticism. | Modernism (Literature)—England. | Modernism (Literature)—United States. | Homosexuality and literature. | Survival in literature. | Collective memory and literature. | Literature and society—England—History—20th century.
Classification: LCC PR478.M6 (ebook) | LCC PR478.M6 B38 2018 (print) | DDC 820.9/112—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017006765
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
Contents
Foreword vii
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
1. James’s Animal Encounters 22
2. Wilde’s Messy Messianism 45
3. Forster’s Queer Invitation 64
4. The Invitation’s Success 85
5. Cather’s Survival by Suicide 114
Coda: Queerness’s Bloody Narration 140
Master List of Works Cited 145
Index 153
Foreword
At the heart of Benjamin Bateman’s The Modernist Art of Queer Survival stands a temporal paradox that is fundamental as well to modernism more broadly— that study (“-ism”) of the “just now” (“modo”) is doomed, always, to belatedness. Bateman, a canny reader of queer theory and a formidable theorist in his own right, puts some of this century’s most influential queer theory (as well as the psychoanalytic writing of Michael Eigen) into productive conversation with unmarked queer writing of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What results is what one always hopes for from such intellectual alchemy: both the theory and the objects of analysis are enriched.
The HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s made manifest in a blunt and brutally public way the precarity that has always haunted queer lives. Queerness “is always under threat,” Bateman writes, and “its survival cannot be taken for granted.” In the cold light of this stark truth, and under the tyranny of what he famously dubbed “reproductive futurism,” no less a thinker than Lee Edelman advised queers to “reject the future and to ‘accede’ to their ‘figuration’ as the death drive.” Bateman is not the first thinker to resist the inevitability of this conclusion, of course, but his rejoinder is utterly novel. For Bateman sends us back to the untimely and proleptic work of Oscar Wilde, Henry James, E. M. Forster, and Willa Cather, which, once our postmodernity has taught us how to read them, turn out to contain wisdom for these times, to provide a transatlantic archive of “alternatives to conventional protocols of survival”—to teach us, in short, what Bateman calls (in a formulation both precise and unforgettable) “the modernist art of queer survival.”
An important part of what Bateman takes from Eigen is an understanding of the sovereign self—a self, as Bateman memorably evokes it, that is “composed,
controlled, driven, productive, proprietary, ambitious, acquisitive, intentional, aware, responsible (for itself), competitive, upwardly mobile, future-oriented, and vertically inclined.” This is the very self performed by the android voice on Radiohead’s OK Computer (1997):
Fitter, happier, more productive, comfortable, not drinking too much, regular exercise at the gym (3 days a week), getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries a pig in a cage on antibiotics.
Bateman’s modernist quartet, in contrast, intuit and anticipate Lauren Berlant’s notion of “lateral agency” in the willfully nonteleological, nonproductive “dissipation” of their writing practice—something akin to Walt Whitman’s “loafing,” perhaps—tarrying with a de-instrumentalized relationship to self, to others, to time. In this version of lateral agency, Bateman writes, “the indefinite arrest of individual momentum permits sideways attention to adjacent entities and to similarly precarious agencies whose supportive energies and possibilities otherwise risk going unnoticed.”
This is the hard-won lesson of queer survival: that what lies next to one is as important as (or more important than) what lies ahead. Reading Bateman’s take on lateral agency, I was reminded of, and dug to find, an observation from queer postmodern American composer and artist John Cage: “Our intention is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of a chaos or to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.” Cage gets here via Zen Buddhism rather than modernist fiction, but his insight lines up perfectly with Bateman’s: “Survival is less a matter of opening a future chance than it is of sensing an overdetermined present, a multidimensional moment of mutual permeability—the stroke not merely of time but also of the other—irreducible to an immediate impression.” In the library scene of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus praises Shakespeare’s life and writing in terms that Joyce surely hoped would stick to his own novel: “His life was rich. His art, more than the art of feudalism as Walt Whitman called it, is the art of surfeit.” This is perhaps one version of the modernist art of queer (or “quare”) survival.
Among other provocative interventions, Bateman’s notion of queer survival— emphasizing the “sur” of survival such that it confers a richness to a concept of baseline getting-by—carries important implications for the recent resurgence in scholarship on the modernist Bildungsroman (as in Jed Esty’s book in this series, Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development). As Bateman tantalizingly suggests in his introduction, when looked at from the perspective of queer survival, the “constitutive failure” of the genre “demonstrates not the disappointingly stubborn inability of protagonists to achieve the ‘full’ biological, cognitive, and creative capacity of the sovereign individual . . . but, rather, the disappointingly limited and limiting versions of life foisted onto the protagonists.” Versions such as nationality, language, religion—“nets” that a younger Stephen Dedalus (in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), notorious lazy, idle little schemer that he was, vowed to “fly by.”
The Modernist Art of Queer Survival is as conceptually rich and original and challenging as anything we’ve published in the Modernist Literature & Culture series. It promises a salutary swift kick both to modernist fiction studies and queer theory, and we think it makes good on that double threat. We’re pleased to be able to bring Benjamin Bateman’s careful work to you.
Kevin J. H. Dettmar and Mark Wollaeger
Acknowledgments
This project could not have survived without the intellectual influence, generosity, and comradeship of some very special people. Will Schroeder helped me conceptualize the “queer invitation” many years ago, and I am indebted to him for countless conversations on the topic. John Havard has been a continuing source of support and critical feedback, and Elizabeth Adan has collaborated with me on other projects whose theoretical currents animate this one. Andrew Knighton has been my colleague in arms at Cal State Los Angeles and an embodiment of the teacher-scholar ideal. I am lucky to call these four my peers and dear friends.
The completion of this book was made possible by a sabbatical and by fellowships from the American Communities Program and the Barry Munitz Fund at Cal State Los Angeles. I had the good fortune of being able to write the early chapters at the Estación de Biología Tropical Los Tuxtlas (near Catemaco, Veracruz) and the final chapters in Paris, and I had the even better fortune of writing all the chapters in the company of my intellectually inspirational partner and co-survivor of thick and thin, J. P. Drury.
Boundless gratitude goes to Rita Felski, who introduced me to queer theory, encouraged my doctoral study, and then became my dissertation director and mentor at the University of Virginia. Other intellectual support and camaraderie at UVA, Cal State Los Angeles, and elsewhere came from Kristen Taylor (the most fabulous roommate and confidante anyone could ever have, anywhere), Walt Hunter, Maria Karafilis, Anna Carastathis, Marlon Ross, Eric Lott, Lawrie Balfour, Jim Garrett, Dionne Espinoza, Ruben Quintero, Michael Calabrese, Stewart Pillow, Helen Dunn, Matthew Morrison, Robert Mendoza, Jennifer Geraci, Efren Lopez, Cyndi Donelan, Jason Coats, Eric Lewitus, Brian Roberts, Justin Zelikovitz, Rob
Stilling, Marnella Stout, Warren Arbogast, Holly Evans, and Steph Brown. The hot yoga community in Charlottesville helped keep me sane during graduate school and yielded the invaluable friendships of Severine Bertret, Tricia Neumann, Lizzie Clark, and Michaela Curran Grubbs.
A special place is reserved for Jennifer Wicke, who influences every page of this book. Jennifer taught and keeps teaching me, quite simply, how to read. The roots of every chapter lead back to seminars and one-on-one conversations with Jennifer, and for over a decade she has been showing me, as the fiercest of friends, how to pair close textual analysis with global political, environmental, and ethical awareness. My sense of modernism is hers, and for a reason I cannot fully explain I will always consider Lucy Gayheart our most precious gift to one another.
An earlier and abbreviated version of chapter 1 appeared in Modern Fiction Studies as “Species Performance, Or, Henry James’s Beastly Sense,” and an earlier version of chapter 3 appeared in Twentieth Century Literature as “Beyond Interpellation: E. M. Forster, Connection, and the Queer Invitation.” Much appreciation goes to these journals for their generous permissions. For including the book in a series that has taught me so much about modernism, The Modernist Literature and Culture Series, additional appreciation goes to Kevin Dettmar and Mark Wollaeger, as well as to the reviewers who gave the manuscript serious and thoughtful attention.
Finishing this book about survival was made both difficult and urgent by the death of my brother Thomas from complications of aplastic anemia. He would have detested a sentimental tribute, and so I dedicate this book, no matter how bizarre they will find it, to my entire family. My parents, Bob and Gail Bateman, have offered unstinting support of so many kinds. Seeing my grandparents survive in them brings relief.
The Modernist Art of Queer Survival
Introduction
In a recent essay, Dana Luciano and Mel Y. Chen write that the “primary catalyst for queer thought” is a “desire to persist in the face of precarity” (193).1 Whether we speak of queer bodies targeted with harassment or forcible medical intervention, queer sensibilities derided as dangerous or immature, or queer intimacies denied respect and legitimacy, we admit of a close companionship between queerness and precariousness. We acknowledge, that is, that queerness is always under threat and that its survival cannot be taken for granted. Sometimes these threats to survival are vivid and immediate—for example, the AIDS crisis and its attendant crises of ignorance and neglect—and other times they are subtle and entrenched, as in the various micro-aggressions that wear queer people down and out. Eve Sedgwick’s foundational “Queer and Now” commences with the sobering thought that “everyone who does gay and lesbian studies is haunted by the suicides of adolescents” (1). Many queer lives, to be sure, end prematurely. But not all end in the physical expiration of life. Some terminate gradually and even unconsciously in the countless concessions to normativity demanded by dominant cultures that perceive, through a perverse set of projective identifications, their own survival as imperiled by queerness.
Survival as competition, violent assertion, self-preservation—this is the loose legacy of evolutionary thinking as it has been and continues to be hijacked by ideologies of capitalism, heteronormativity, and rugged individualism.2 Grouped
loosely under the heading of “survival of the fittest,” these ideologies distort the writings of Darwin and others to put a scientific, and therefore naturalizing, veneer on social inequalities of various stripes.3 As we know from Foucault, these discourses also, in their manic pursuit of a “normal” humanity, proliferate new inequalities by generating a staggering array of racial and sexual deviancies. In other words, “fittest” comes to mean the best fit with rapidly emerging norms of development (including somatic shape and size), desire, and deportment. And even as the regulation of these norms happens at a population level—giving rise to the biopolitical era—conforming to them becomes a matter of individual distinction and specialness, producing a competitive struggle over who does normativity best. The most important units of analysis for this biopolitical management are the individual and the species, where the former aspires to embody the norms of the latter and the latter’s future is guaranteed by the former’s strength, selfishness, and self-possession.
Cast as survival’s foe, queerness encounters an almost impossible dilemma: remain queer and risk extermination; or conform as best as possible and extinguish itself. Either approach leaves queerness in close proximity to death, but it is the latter that has won the day in mainstream gay and lesbian politics and representation. “Homonormativity,” Lisa Duggan explains, is a “politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption” (179). Duggan’s definition describes the contemporary, neoliberal moment—in which conservative values of marriage, childrearing, military service, and commercial acquisition have become the priorities of many LGBT people and organizations— but it also names an assimilative impulse that has a long life in gay and lesbian history and that has always promised protection and longevity in exchange for annihilation. Homonormativity is a privileged survival strategy; it helps privileged queers survive with their privilege intact. But what remains of their queerness is often quite threadbare.
The stubborn persistence of those high suicide rates among LGBT persons noted by Sedgwick, the continued failure of hetero- and homonormativity to supply the senses of fulfillment they promise, and the gathering evidence of possessive individualism’s inducement of both economic and environmental precarity form a forceful indictment, at once ethical and political, of normative survival’s appeal, accessibility, and sustainability. As many scientists and philosophers have argued, Darwin’s discoveries need not have contributed to this destructive situation. In
his journal of 1837, for example, Darwin writes, “if we choose to let conjecture run wild, then animals may partake of our origin in one common ancestor—we may be all melted together” (qtd. in Degler 7). While Darwin cannot be exonerated of imperial racism and human exceptionalism, as he prefers to keep his conjecture on a shorter leash than “melt” promises, his theory of natural selection does in fact rob the human of its specialness. Man is no longer the intelligent design of a creator who bestows upon him absolute dominion over all other life; instead, he is merely another life form created by the impersonal and random forces of natural selection. Destined for and to be nothing, man has no guarantee of his futurity or viability. And since he came from nowhere special, he is headed for nowhere special—no golden-avenued heaven to compensate for life’s constitutive suffering.4
But once the notion of the afterlife and its concomitant immortality vanishes, Adam Phillips argues, man must necessarily become oriented, lest he descend into nihilism, to getting more out of life on earth (xv). Thus the “more” previously reserved for eternal life becomes internal to life itself; it becomes the “sur” of survival. And this turn of events for Phillips is an invitation to invent and improvise a future, to supply new directions and purposes to a life given none by nature.5 Elizabeth Grosz—who writes trenchantly against the ideological conflation of Darwin and biological essentialism that has made Darwin a persona non grata for feminists and queer theorists alike—argues that Darwin’s radical contribution is “an anti-humanist … understanding of biological dynamics that refuses to assume that the temporal movement forward can be equated with development or progress” (28). Darwin’s work thus anticipates contemporary queer scholarship arguing that developmental narratives insisting bodies arrive at particular places at particular times—conventional life trajectories—are social constructions, not natural formations, that leave queers suspended in a state of “extended adolescence” (Halberstam, In a Queer 175). What has happened in evolution’s history speaks little of what ought to happen in the future. Indeed, there is little way to predict, at least by the terms of natural selection, which variations and adaptations extant today will persist generations from now. An oddball mutation of the present may turn out to be tomorrow’s lifesaver, or it may not.
Echoing Phillips’s emphasis on the creative opportunities afforded by the afterlife’s attenuation and by the incorporation of survival’s “sur” into terrestrial existence, Grosz queries, “What kind of new understanding of the humanities would it take to adequately map this [Darwinian] decentering that places man back within the animal, within nature, and within a space and time that man does not regulate, understand, or control? What new kinds of science does this entail? And
what new kinds of art?” (25). This book answers Grosz not with the “new” art she imagines does not yet exist but with a modernist literary archive underappreciated for its alternatives to conventional protocols of survival. The early twentieth century, after all, was the time when Darwin’s ideas, no longer totally doomed by their atheistic implications, were taking firmer root and translating more audibly into the social, tendentious, and teleological Darwinisms with which Grosz takes issue. Their distortion contributes to and coincides with the medical sciences’ production of normative sexuality via the specification, anatomization, and categorization of “abnormal” bodies, pleasures, and desires. Recall Foucault’s memorable observation from The History of Sexuality that whereas the sodomite of the pre-sexological era “had been a temporary aberration, the homosexual was now a species” (43). Although Foucault brings a pejorative tone to homosexuality’s speciation, his rhetoric invites consideration of how this novel species, unfit for the procreative imperatives of normative personhood, might survive and imagine its survival differently. The writers assembled here—Henry James, Oscar Wilde, E. M. Forster, and Willa Cather—are all now recognized, to varying degrees and always with an ounce or two of anachronism, as LGBT thinkers and artists who struggled with and against the gender and sexual binaries of their time. While the approach of this book is not primarily biographical, its premise is that the lived queerness of these authors animates their different but also provocatively resonant efforts to detach futurity from conventional scripts, to loosen the grip of biological determinism, and to widen the experiential and affective parameters of individual lives. Queer survival for these authors, I will show, means not the extension of an individual life into the future but the distension of life, and feelings of aliveness, across personal, species, imperial, and generational boundaries. The individual does not disappear entirely in this reconceptualization, but it loses its status as the privileged locus of drama, animation, intention, and uniqueness. The “more” of life is to be found not in more of (and more time for) one’s own self but in the lives of others. Getting closer to these lives—physically, intellectually, affectively— produces a different kind of aliveness that is at one and the same time swelling and shrinking, enlarging and miniaturizing, invigorating and enervating. It is a survival in which the self expands by losing and lives by dying. If what appears is a fragile vision of collective and interanimate survival, then what disappears is the certainty of individual distinctness and possession, and the desirability of placing national, racial, sexual, and creaturely limits on what counts as (my and our) life.6 Roy Scranton’s widely circulated essay “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene” observes, “if homo sapiens survives the next millenniums, it will be survival in a world unrecognizably different from the one we have inhabited.”
Concluding that we must learn to die as a civilization if we are to adapt to a rapidly destabilizing world, Scranton asks, “What does my life mean in the face of death? What does human existence mean against 10,000 years of climate change? What does one life mean in the face of species death or the collapse of global civilization?” Although the modernists assembled here predate the discovery of global warming, they anticipate Scranton’s call for a philosophical inquiry into how the relinquishment of individual importance and isolation may be, curiously enough, the individual’s only hope of surviving. Scranton finds his own arsenal of diminished survival strategies in his military service—strategies not unknown to modernist war poets such as Owen and Sassoon—which taught him how to live at death’s door, and his use of that precarious situation invites us to consider how other historical experiences of precariousness, such as queerness, have produced their own slantwise views of and alternatives to the strong, productive, and regenerative self of normative survival.
And so queer survival for this modernist ensemble is not only the survival of explicitly queer persons, ideas, and sensibilities. It is also a queer approach to survival in which weakness, frangibility, uncertainty, dispossession, senescence, indistinction, and even morbidity play a vital role. The sex sciences of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries associated same-sex desire and gender nonconformity with “dissipation,” a polysemic word conveying both an excessive preoccupation with pleasure and a “process of slowly disappearing or becoming less.”7 The infamously effeminate and extravagant protagonist of Cather’s “Paul’s Case”—where “case” insinuates Cather’s engagement and entanglement with a medical paradigm of sexuality—is urged by family and businessmen alike to follow the example of a previously “dissipated” bachelor who “in order to curb his appetites and save the loss of time and strength that a sowing of wild oats might have entailed … at twenty-one had married the first woman he could persuade to share his fortunes” (259). Cather’s description of this couple and the brood of four children they produce as “near-sighted” (259) evinces both her sympathy for the incorrigible Paul, who is content to spend the rest of his life working as an usher and soaking up the theater’s luscious fictions, and her critical distance from the social Darwinism and compulsory productivity of Progressive-era cultural life. Paul’s suicide stems not only from his stigmatized queerness, expressed corporeally in a skinny body with a mincing gait and behaviorally in a predilection for truthstretching flamboyance, but also from his unfitness for the tightly buckled masculinity touted by his teachers and banking employers. At story’s end, Paul throws himself in front of a train, destroying even the possibility of his body remaining intact for sentimental memorialization, not because he faces punishment for
stealing from the bank but because he cannot bear reconscription by capitalist austerity and neighborhood normativity. His split and splintered body literalizes the dissipation for which he dies and takes a stand; it also makes him available for a queer theory and politics that responds to marginalization not with proof of queer sovereignty but with an imaginative defense of dissipation’s spreading pleasures and encompassing ethical possibilities.8
Indeed dissipation, construed broadly as a capacity for bleeding into and becoming perforated by other lives—Paul, for example, perfects the queer art of make-believe so exquisitely that he mistakes himself for an operatic hero(ine)—is the name of the game for The Modernist Art of Queer Survival. Each of the texts over which this book lingers poses the survival of inchoate and untraditional ideas and intimacies as an imaginative charge and challenge. Chapter 1, “James’s Animal Encounters,” reads Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” as a commentary on the “Nature Fakers” controversy of the early twentieth century, in which Teddy Roosevelt attacked naturalists such as William Long for attributing a range of skills and sensibilities, including innovation and compassion, to wild animals. Unfazed, Long accused Roosevelt of having cultivated a violent and rapacious understanding of nature because of his own violent, gun-wielding approach to it. Long, that is, advances a performative understanding of “survival of the fittest” in which human competition, aggression, and brutality induce the violent world to which they claim merely to be responding. “The Beast in the Jungle” experiments with this claim, I argue, by having May Bartram chip away at John Marcher’s sense of being kept for a special beast that he, steeped in ideologies of human exceptionalism, believes will confer distinction upon him. As she trains him to eschew normative institutions—such as marriage with her—and to see as the beast sees, she engages him in a process of queer speciation that exposes him to his environment, makes him available to the beast (including the threatened tigers about which James’s brother William wrote in a philosophical inquiry that replicates Roosevelt’s prejudicial approach), and connects the oppression of animals with patriarchal logics of control and possession. Leaving Marcher alive but vulnerable at story’s end to the beast’s spring, James revivifies neglected strands of Darwinian thought, by Alfred Russel Wallace as well as Darwin himself, that undercut a strictly bloody conception of nature and that depict humans and other animals in scenes and situations of generous, if also precarious, entanglement.
Chapter 2, “Wilde’s Messy Messianism,” turns to Oscar Wilde’s letter-cumprison autobiography, De Profundis, to imagine how the permeable self of queer survival might narrate itself and devise a perforated form suited to its precarious presentation. Where the text’s abundant repetitions, contradictions, and
switchbacks are usually read as either proof of Wilde’s artistic decline or symptoms of the text’s carceral conditions of production, I read them as faithful footholds in a supportive otherness that prevents Wilde’s isolation and enclosure. De Profundis supplies space to this opaque otherness, and thereby staves off loneliness, by ritually becoming other to itself and to its stated intentions of mood equilibration, moral reform, aesthetic autonomy, and ethical transcendence. The autobiography’s admixture of angry rants against its addressee, Lord Alfred Douglas, and lofty self-comparisons to Jesus Christ expresses less a formal failure or ironic pose than a “messy messianism” in which Wilde’s sexual martyrdom occasions a motley merger of queer life and in which shame and despair become the emotional supports of an unconventional and extravagant hospitality.
Chapter 3, “Forster’s Queer Invitation,” scrutinizes more closely the subjective vagrancy and social complexity upon which queer survival depends. I argue that Louis Althusser’s influential account of ideological interpellation as the means by which society secures the individual’s identity and submission—and submission to an autonomous sense of selfhood—overestimates the self’s sufficiency and underappreciates the variety of intimate experiments and explorations afforded by the social realm. In Howards End, these unbecoming opportunities appear as queer invitations that get proffered and grow more detectable during times of distress, exhaustion, and in the case of both Ruth Wilcox and Margaret Schlegel, of affective austerity demanded by normative protocols of biological kinship. The beauty of the queer invitation, Forster discovers, lies in its unconventional temporality, which permits delays, demurrals, and even extended deferrals, but which nonetheless supplies a lifeline for interanimate collaborations that interrupt the self’s consolidation into an obedient disciple of heterosexuality. Queer invitations keep queer yearnings and alliances alive, but they also reveal a mode of survival in which running out of steam makes the attenuated self available for other and more sustainable energies.
Chapter 4, “The Invitation’s Success,” deepens the insights of the previous chapter but switches the frame to the colonial and imperial context of Forster’s A Passage to India. Riffing on Althusser’s discussions of ideological success and on the neo-Darwinian preoccupation with reproductive success, I show how the novel develops a global and collective view of survival by fusing the individual’s succession, its legacy, with the cultivation of its capacities for sensitively following, or succeeding, the creaturely life whose world it enters. Mrs. Moore, whose very name overflows with the surplus life of queer survival, is the unassuming vehicle of this ethical sensibility, and her culminating refusal to participate in the sham trial against Aziz is preceded by her gathering receptivity to other lives, including
the wasp in her bedroom she declines to disturb. Mrs. Moore’s counter-imperial apprehension that her life is intermingled with countless other agencies—and that their survival is her survival—is intensified and mediated by the echo of the Marabar Caves, which flattens all sounds and evacuates all utterances of their distinction, thereby creating a conducive context for the symmetrical thinking of the unconscious. By tarrying, to terrifying ends that compel her separation from family and nation, with the echo’s message of creaturely substitutability, Mrs. Moore is able to communicate—as both a ghost and a chant—her transgressive revelations to others. As she joins forces with the flora and fauna of India to interrupt reconciliation on colonial terms—that is, the unequal friendship Fielding seeks with Aziz, she illustrates how a loss of distinction (the relinquishment of the imperial lens symbolized by Adela Quested’s loss of her binoculars in the Marabar Caves) is a precondition for a truly planetary conception of modern survival.
Chapter 5, “Cather’s Survival by Suicide,” pushes the connection between queer survival and death to its conceptual limit. I argue that Willa Cather’s fiction, including her neglected novel Lucy Gayheart and even more neglected short story “Consequences,” departs from the sociological wisdom of both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by depicting thoughts and practices of selfabandonment not merely as precursors to suicide but also as ways to mete suicide out and thereby avoid its more conventionally unitary and dramatic presentation. Lucy’s light heart signifies both a carefree spirit and a tenuous attachment to the normative coordinates of a good life, including the small-town married existence she is supposed to share with the successful banker Harry Gordon. In Chicago, Lucy comes into contact with a queer secret, passed intergenerationally to her by the wounded and haunted opera singer Clement Sebastian, that life is not all that important, and this clandestine knowledge becomes her way of relating to others and connecting to a world whose reproductive imperatives she cannot bear. It also, I illustrate, connects the desire for self-abandonment to the disruption of capitalism’s twin logics of hoarding and austerity. Kier Cavenaugh of “Consequences” also seeks a community of persons loosely attached to life as he becomes haunted by what appears to be the aged ghost of his twin brother, who committed suicide. With this ghost tugging him closer to death, he seeks companionship in his neighbor, George Eastman, and engages him in extended conversations about motives for and examples of suicide. But Eastman’s photographic commitment to appearances above all else—Cavenaugh cuts a fine figure—ultimately leads him to push Cavenaugh away and deny a place for death in life. The consequences of this lifeaffirming response, which expresses Eastman’s growing anxiety about their mutual loss of masculine vigor and self-possession, prove fatal. In the coda to the book,
“Queerness’s Bloody Narration,” I visit a single scene from The Professor’s House the homoerotic dinner between Godfrey St. Peter and Tom Outland, in which the latter finally divulges his mysterious past—and argue that the jarring insertion of the French word saignant creates a vivid image of queer survival’s need for nourishment, negation and, eventually, narration.
Central to my thinking is the relatively neglected work of contemporary psychoanalyst Michael Eigen, whose immense oeuvre grapples with the question of where “the idea of peace, of caring, [and] treating others as ends come from in a world permeated by survival needs, practicality, antagonisms, [and] lust for power” (Feeling Matters, 16). Although he does not offer a strong theory of subjectivity to counter the possessive and aggressive self of social Darwinism, his case studies register the psychic damage inflicted by the manic pursuit of sovereignty in modern and contemporary life. I use “sovereignty” broadly to describe a self that is composed, controlled, driven, productive, proprietary, ambitious, acquisitive, intentional, aware, responsible (for itself), competitive, upwardly mobile, futureoriented, and vertically inclined. The sovereign self is the gold standard of individualism, the fittest form of subjectivity. A range of philosophers have identified sovereignty as a staple of modernity—with Agamben famously contrasting it with the minimally agential “bare life” upon whose abjection it depends—and recently Lauren Berlant has stressed its fictional and idealized character, explaining that its vaunted desirability and impossible attainment leave everyone, to varying degrees, striving after it in vain and feeling like failures as a result.9 Jasbir Puar couches this necessary failure in the language of disability, arguing that aspirational sovereignty generates a potentially endless, and endlessly gradated, series of disabilities and debilities on which capitalism can profit with various treatments and cures ( 154), including new age elixirs of mindfulness and positive thinking.
Eigen is equally critical of sovereignty, but instead of emphasizing its virtues, however impossible, he launches from the premise that it, not its unsuccessful aspirants, is sick and disabled. The sovereign self, he urges, is a broken engine of will and willpower run amok. Eigen breathes new life into theories of intersubjectivity by arguing that the self as we have come to know it is a meager and emaciated form shorn of its capacities for what he designates as “mutual permeability.” “I appeal,” Eigen writes, “to implicit worlds of permeability between people. Yes, ‘will’ and ‘choice’ are important, and personality forms around them. But often they take the place of emotional flow. Where the latter is lacking, self congeals and becomes obsessed with wills and choices” (Damaged Bonds 3). There are two, nonmutually exclusive ways to parse Eigen’s formulation. In the first, a self exists that loses its interpersonal dimensions over time and, eventually, finds itself
reduced and shackled to the very willpower from which it had sought happiness and fortitude. In the second, profoundly performative riff, the loss of an original mutual permeability, which Eigen and other psychoanalytic thinkers consider a birthright, produces the self in the first place; in other words, no self exists that isn’t already in an attenuated condition.10
The work of therapy, Eigen continues, is to restore a richer feeling of “aliveness,” which he warns is profoundly “weird” (I would say “queer”), by ungluing the patient from his obsessive will. Reporting on progress made with his patient “Nick”—whose preoccupation with control had spun so far out of control that suicide, a kind of sovereign act that attempts to preserve control in the form of an absolute cancellation, had begun to feel like the only solution—Eigen poetizes:
He begins to notice that he is internally alive for me and that the himin-me is more complex and unknowable than what he is used to calling himself. How can he be inside me without dominating me? How is it possible to be in each other in ways neither of us can control? What dies is self-encapsulation, the determination to live without being inside an other. What grows is the sense that one is more than one imagined, and so is everyone else. (Damaged Bonds 135)
Living and growing inside of another rather than determining to live and grow apart captures perfectly the notion of survival this book advances, one in which the more of life is its dynamic flows with other lives, human and nonhuman, whose interpenetration can feel like a kind of death, like a removal of oneself to an inscrutable site of preservation without possession, of expansion without aggression. This living together is not necessarily oriented to the future nor is it reducible to communities or couples that risk resurrecting sovereignty in the guise of a willbound collective impermeable to foreign voices. Communities, after all, can have their compulsions, too.
Equally incisive in Eigen’s analysis is his characterization of the “more” as a sense, an affective apprehension of mutual permeability that animates and precedes, no doubt flickeringly, more radical endeavors at nonhierarchical co-inhabitation. Indeed, Eigen writes of “a kind of mutual permeability working within, behind, and under us, outside the margins of awareness. Perhaps within the margins as well, for over time, we sense something happening, although we [can] not say what” (Contact 8). Mutual permeability requires reattunement and the recultivation of powers of detection rendered dormant by practices and protocols of selfencapsulation. A major aim of this book, then, is not simply to make the case that there is more to one life than meets the eye but additionally to show how specific
modernist experiments work to train the eye and other sense organs to perceive aliveness as a fundamentally joint and enjoyable enterprise. Another way of saying this is that mutual permeability both is and needs an imaginative and expressive apparatus—an art. Eigen’s magpie methodology blends case studies with literary interpretation, autobiographical introspection, and the theoretical contributions of Bion, Winnicott, Klein, and Lacan. His therapeutic accounts merge patients’ voices with his own, protecting privacy but also performing permeability and urging a profound intimacy—a tight squeeze of aesthetics and ethics—between formal experimentation and subjective transformation. Eigen’s therapeutic model is, I submit, an art of queer survival. And while it will provide inspiration and a rich lexicon for the interpretations developed in the following chapters, it will also find its ethical orbit widened by modernist imaginations in which the complex otherin-me and complex me-in-other challenge the very viability of those terms, as well as the political and ecological arrangements they subtend.
Nick’s queer sense that he is surviving himself—surviving a compulsive need to be sovereign—by disappearing into and becoming alive in Eigen recalls Paul’s dissipation and casts dissipation as an exercise in both self-preservation and annihilation. And the fact that it is, in the beginning, a mere sense means the work of queer survival does not necessarily refer itself instantly to cognition nor become apparent immediately as an object of intellectual recognition. Lauren Berlant’s recent work on affect and affectivity encourages this line of thinking; namely, that changing circumstances—the sort that eventually induce crises of both confidence and genre—are felt before they are known, apprehended before they are understood (“The Commons” 413–414). What is more, Berlant links this apprehension to situations of precarity, arguing that the wearing out and down of populations simultaneously attenuates their agency, in a traditional sense, and exposes them to a different sort of self-propulsion that she calls “lateral agency.”11 In her discussion of “slow death,” Berlant explains that for many dispossessed and disadvantaged people, life is experienced as an extended decline, a gradual attrition of will and efficacy wrought by relentless demands on time, body, energy, and attention. Because these demands come from without, forcing a breathless and improvisational performance of catch-up, they deny the precarious self a sovereign experience of agency—that is, the ability to plan, project, possess, and position (“Slow Death” 755–759).
But within these straitened and compromising circumstances, precarious selves avail themselves, or find themselves, relaxing or even fading into opportunities for respite and escape. “Lateral agency” names the experience of being so exhausted by capitalism’s and heteronormativity’s productive incitements that the self cannot
