TA N YA A G A T H O C L E O U S
Harry’s parents, Harry’s child and her own child, that child never represents futurity. Iggy too becomes a voyager on the Argo, which, over the course of the book, becomes increasingly over-determined as symbol: it stands for improvised family, the arbitrary nature of language, the constant refabrication of the self in relation to the other, and the boat that we’re all in together as “human animals” (in Nelson’s words). The Argo is thus a heterotopia rather than a vehicle oriented toward a destination. A term coined by Michel Foucault, “heterotopia” describes a space that functions as a “counter-site, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites […] that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.” For Foucault, “the ship is the heterotopia par excellence,” for it is “a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea […] the boat has […] been for our civilization […] the greatest reserve of the imagination.” As well as the nonlinear structure of her narrative, it’s this space that serves as a symbol of escape from the logic of futurity, for it also serves as a symbol of a time removed from the relentless destructive pace of modernity: of epic time, what Lukács calls “the blissful time-removed quality of the world of gods.” The Argo, then, is at once time as forward momentum: iteration and change — the constant forward movement of “I love you” remaking the relationship it describes each time it is repeated — and time as space: a temporary symbol of the utopian moment
where we are held together, or given form, by utterance before we break apart again. Though very different in spirit and style, The Argonauts and A Little Life might be seen as two sides of the same coin. In juxtaposition, their experiments unravel the dialectic of the novel by testing the limits of its ability to make form and life commensurate: the little life of Jude with its preponderance of ghastly details and the epic journey of The Argonauts; fixed form and fragmentary form; gathering darkness and open-ended journey. Operating at opposite ends of the spectrum of life-writing, these texts, taken together, are responses not only to Lukács’s world abandoned by God, but also the prospect of no world at all. On the question of “no future,” Edelman’s critique of reproductive futurity and the anticapitalist politics of Anthropocene environmentalists are not identical. Those in the Anthropocene camp, by and large, hope to salvage some form of future by shifting our perspective on it. Edelman refuses futurism altogether, calling on us to embrace the death drive rather than the family. But there is considerable overlap between these stances: both ask us to confront mortality head-on, and to use that confrontation as the occasion for a radical reconsideration of our social structures and their reproductive logic. The Argonauts inhabits this overlap comfortably, emphasizing the precarity of life while celebrating the mutuality that makes it bearable. A Little Life rips the two positions apart by denuding them of their emancipatory politics. Leveraging the homophobia that Edelman opposes but taking up his 45
