Unmaking Love: The Contemporary Novel and the Impossibility of Union 9780231543156

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UnmakingLove

L I T E R AT U R E N O W

LI T E RAT UR E NOW MATTHEW HART, DAVID JAMES, AND REBECCA L. WALKOWITZ, SERIES EDITORS

Literature Now offers a distinct vision of late-twentieth- and early-twentyfirst-century literary culture. Addressing contemporary literature and the ways we understand its meaning, the series includes books that are comparative and transnational in scope as well as those that focus on national and regional literary cultures. Caren Irr, Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U.S. Fiction in the Twenty-First Century Heather Houser, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect Mrinalini Chakravorty, In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary Héctor Hoyos, Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature Carol Jacobs, Sebald’s Vision Sarah Phillips Casteel, Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination Jeremy Rosen, Minor Characters Have Their Day: Genre and the Contemporary Literary Marketplace Jesse Matz, Lasting Impressions: The Legacies of Impressionism in Contemporary Culture

Unmaking Love THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF UNION

ASHLEY T. SHELDEN Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2017 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Shelden, Ashley T., author. Title: Unmaking love: the contemporary novel and the impossibility of union / Ashley T. Shelden. Other titles: Contemporary novel and the impossibility of union Description: New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. | Series: Literature now | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016024430 | ISBN 9780231178228 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231543156 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH : English fiction—20th century—History and criticism. | English fiction—21st century—History and criticism. | Love in literature. | Intimacy (Psychology) in literature. | Modernism (Literature)—Great Britain. Classification: LCC PR888.L69 S457 2016 | DDC 823/.08509—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016024430

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cover design: Jordan Wannemacher

For my mother, Roxanna and my father, Thomas

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix

INTRODUCTION: Unmaking Love

1

1 LESBIAN FANTASY: Psychoanalysis, the Legacy of Modernist Love,

and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood

28

2 THE ENDS OF LOVE: Amorous Redemption, the Passion for Negativity,

James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy

57

3 AMOROUS TIME: Nostalgia, Temporality, and the Pursuit of Optimism

in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty

76

4 COSMOPOLITAN LOVE: Encountering Difference in Hari Kunzru’s

Transmission and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled CONCLUSION: Otherness, Cloud Atlas,

and Contemporary Literature 128 Notes

137

Bibliography 167 Index

179

101

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

IT SEEMS FITTING that a book so skeptical of love would never have made it into

print without a lot of it. This project began as my doctoral dissertation in the English Department at Tufts University, where I found the support of faculty and friends, who made graduate school fun. Joseph Litvak not only taught me about reading but also remains the paragon of style—writerly, culinary, and sartorial—to which I aspire. Lecia Rosenthal was always willing to talk with me about all things modernist. And Heather Love, the outside reader for my dissertation, offered careful and generous feedback. I relished the time spent working on very early versions of some of these chapters in a writing group with Amy Woodbury Tease and Lauren Byler. I am especially grateful to Jonathan Wilson and the Center for the Humanities at Tufts for giving me a fellowship in my final year to complete my dissertation. My time in graduate school was also enriched by the company of Kristina Aikens, Brianna Burke, Sari Edelstein, Anne Moore, David Palumbo, Meg Toth, and Cynthia Williams. And I had the excellent fortune to meet Holly Jackson, who traipsed all over Boston with me in many unspeakable adventures and who is the best friend anybody could have. Most of all, graduate school would not have been filled with nearly as much joy were it not for my adviser, Lee Edelman. Lee has always provided what seems like a bottomless reserve of support, encouragement, and love. As my

adviser, he challenged and inspired me, tolerated my social awkwardness, and always welcomed me into his office when I needed help or wanted his company. I don’t think I will ever be able to repay him for his astonishing generosity or convey my gratitude for his friendship. Even as this project began at Tufts University, it also, in some ways, began earlier when I was an undergraduate at Ithaca College. My time at Ithaca College was formative in many ways, and one of the most significant moments was when I walked into Jonathan Gil Harris’s literary theory course; my brain has never been the same since. I am grateful to Gil not only for this utterly transformative class but also for his friendship all these years later. Even though the friends I made there—Frank Baldaro, Adam Bricault, Kim Correll, Camille Lannan, and Regan Schoeler—live far away, they are always with me. But when I think of Ithaca College, the face I see most clearly belongs to Madhavi Menon, whose mind galvanized me as she taught me about Shakespeare, queer theory, and life. Madhavi has been with me every step of the way through the writing of this book. She has fed me, read many drafts, yelled at me (with love), lifted me up when I was down, and taken care of me in many cities and on two different continents. Madhavi’s brilliance and her immense capacity for love have been and continue to be some of the greatest gifts in my life. Here in Atlanta, I am grateful to have developed friendships both at Kennesaw State University and beyond. At Kennesaw State, the members of my writing group, Keith Botelho and M. Todd Harper, provided much help in the development of chapter 4. This project has also benefited from conversations with other colleagues in the English Department: Martha Bowden, Katarina Gephardt, Chris Palmer, and H. William Rice. The students in my twentiethcentury British literature courses provided the first testing ground for many of the ideas in this book. I am especially grateful to Dean Robin Dorff and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Kennesaw State University for providing subvention funds for the publication of this book. And, beyond the university, I have had the pleasure of great company over many coffees, meals, movies, karaoke, and Broadway sing-a-longs with Jonathan Goldberg, Lynne Huffer, Tamara Jones, Michael Moon, and Colin Talley. At Columbia University Press, Philip Leventhal has been an amazing advocate for this project; I am grateful for his excellent editorial eye and encouragement throughout this process. I have also been fortunate to work with the X

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

coeditors of the Literature Now series—Matthew Hart, David James, and Rebecca Walkowitz—who have been receptive and generous interlocutors. Their support, suggestions, and advice have strengthened and sharpened the arguments in this book. I also owe the anonymous readers and Jane Gallop an immense debt of gratitude. Their attentive readings of various versions of the manuscript improved in myriad ways the final product. An early version of chapter 2 was presented as an invited talk at Emory University; thanks to Jonathan Goldberg for inviting me. And early versions of other chapters were presented at Narrative, the Modern Language Association Conference, and the Modernist Studies Association Conference. Part of chapter 4 appeared elsewhere: “Cosmopolitan Love: The One and the World in Hari Kunzru’s Transmission,” Contemporary Literature 52, no. 2 (2012): 348–73. My thanks to the University of Wisconsin Press for permission to include this work here. There are also people who were part of this book, even if they aren’t aware of it: Jerry Albus, Elizabeth Barragato, Ian Croft, Alicia Edwards, Peter Edwards, Felix Lee, Michael Lee, Phoebe Lee, Sharon Mathis, Kay McDowall, Bruce Merritt, Valerie Merritt, Aaron Sanders, Kim Severson, Barbara Wilson, Christopher Wilson, James Wilson, and Marian Wilson. My family’s encouragement has been absolutely integral to this project from start to finish. My father, Thomas Shelden; my sister, Hilary Weston; my stepfather, Gerald Paulsen; my grandmother, Marian Lee; and my brother-in-law, Jeff Weston have provided me with much-needed sustenance and love. My mother, Roxanna Paulsen, in particular, has always believed in me, cheered me on, and supported me in too many ways to count. It is most certainly the case that this book would not have been possible without her unflagging, steadfast love. Finally, this book is also always for Elizabeth Wilson, whose dazzling intellect, love, and patience have forever changed me and my world. The final stages of this book have been fueled by her encouragement, enthusiasm, cooking, and notes written on Post-its. And our conversations have informed every page. Elizabeth’s strength, humor, and intelligence inspire me every day. I never knew what fun life could be until I met her.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

XI

Unmaking Love

INTRODUCTION Unmaking Love

IN ACADEMIC INSTINCTS Marjorie Garber makes a claim that, at first, might

seem straightforward: “The job of the critic is to account for love.”1 Garber, of course, means that the critic’s task includes describing how and why one enjoys literature. However, if I willfully misread this passage, then I can hear in it a different sort of charge. This claim—“The job of the critic is to account for love”—suggests the task that contemporary writers put before us and the task that this book undertakes. In Unmaking Love I account for love: how modernists represent it and how contemporary writers both build on and depart from the modernists’ model. In particular, I account for the transformation wrought on love by the contemporary novel, because, indeed, love has changed. In contemporary literature the meanings of love can no longer be taken for granted; novelists now reimagine love in the negative, dissonant with what we typically take love to be. Such a drastic alteration to the meanings of love informs the title of this book. What might it mean to “unmake” love? When contemporary novelists “unmake” the concept of love, they shatter the idea that is supposed to bind individuals through relations of affection or affinity. By “unmaking” love, the contemporary novel dismantles romantic idealism and exposes as impossible our collective fantasy that intimacy has the capacity to unite us. Dismantling this myth of amorous union does not destroy the concept of love so much as

reorient it. That is, where love is unmade, it is also redefined: the love that is supposed to unify and redeem becomes corrupted with negativity and division. The negativity that contemporary novelists use to unmake love has an intimate relation to queerness. In his essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?” Leo Bersani opposes queer negativity to love, reading the former as having radical, subjectshattering potential and the latter as striving for the illusion of redemptive promise. Famously, Bersani identifies “the inestimable value of sex as . . . anticommunal, antiegalitarian, antinurturing, antiloving.”2 Against this opposition of love and the negative, I argue that the contemporary novel exposes the ways in which love is not opposed to queer negativity. Rather, love itself becomes “antiloving,” that is, imbued with all the corrosive force of the negative. The contemporary novel rejects the idea of love as a coherence-producing force of redemption and, in so doing, suggests that a love inhabited by the negative is a queered love. Queerness, then, cannot be understood simply as shorthand for homosexual identity. Contemporary writers find queerness potentially anywhere: where expectations are thwarted, where organization becomes disarticulated, where multiplicity disturbs and makes impossible unity. Queer love does not name homosexual attachments; instead, it marks social forms that are de formed, affective bonds that do not bind, and social structures that threaten to come undone. In other words, queerness emerges when love fails: to unify, to make the couple cohere, to redeem and erase negativity. The contemporary novels that I discuss in this book refuse to conceive of love as unity producing. In these novels, love appears, of course, as romantic attachment, companionate marriage, and erotics, but contemporary writers also extend their critique of love to amorous bonds that define ethical, familial, communal, and global relationality. These texts distinguish between different types of love, even as no particular type of love is safe from their critique. Before these more recent works, modernist writers attempted to imagine love in ways that resisted conservative, redemptive fantasies about attachment. However, modernists remained ambivalent about love: they rejected fusion and continued to strive for it at the same time. Contemporary writers rely on this history of modernist ambivalence and build on it in their concept of love. But, there are crucial differences between these two accounts of love. If modernists had the goal of questioning the validity of fusional love, then contemporary novelists’ aims are rather more ambitious. They do not just revise love so much 2

INTRODUCTION

as explode it, making love at times unrecognizable as love. No longer can we (literary or queer critics) simply think of as separate love (union, wholeness) and that which threatens it (negativity, division); rather, contemporary novelists require that we consider these two forces as intimately and inextricably connected. If the critic’s job is to account for love, then the contemporary novel makes it clear that we must not only focus on enjoyment, delight, or appreciation—words that Marjorie Garber associates with the critic’s task—but also, and most important, we must attend to love as the expression of discontent, aggression, and contempt.3 NEGATIVE, QUEER, LOVE Despite the fact that I use combinations of these terms throughout as modifying each other—“queer negativity, for instance—I understand these three terms, negative, queer, and love, as, if not synonymous, at least crucially overlapping with each other. Before turning to the literary component of Unmaking Love—the place where this negative, queer love unfolds—I need to examine some crucial theoretical debates to parse the relation between these three central terms. Psychoanalytic and deconstructive approaches to negativity inform my own approach to love in contemporary novels. In particular, Barbara Johnson’s conception of the “the difference within,” or “otherness,” echoes throughout the readings in this book.4 And my arguments build on Jacques Lacan’s account of love as a fantasy structure that obscures a negative void, which separates individuals from each other. Also influential to my thinking are debates about negativity in queer theory.5 If negativity is central to a particular form of queer theorizing, love is less familiar to that same intellectual genealogy. As Lauren Berlant points out in “Love, a Queer Feeling,” negative, queer love has been undertheorized, but the reasons for this undertheorization make sense.6 Love doesn’t have the sexy ring of transgression; love doesn’t readily evoke erotic fantasy. Nor can love, as Roland Barthes points out in A Lover’s Discourse, make good on its revolutionary promise because the “pure New” that love gestures toward is “the most worn-down of stereotypes.”7 In Written on the Body Jeanette Winterson echoes Barthes’s concern when she compares love to “the saggy armchair of clichés.”8 She goes on: “It’s all right, millions of bottoms have sat here before me. The INTRODUCTION

3

springs are well worn, the fabric smelly and familiar.”9 Love: not too sexy, politically conservative, repetitive, domestic, and even a bit dowdy. Kaja Silverman puts the predicament of love in different though related terms: “It [love] has always seemed to lack respectability as an object of intellectual inquiry—to represent the very quintessence of kitsch.”10 Silverman here suggests that love lacks respectability as an object of intellectual inquiry because it registers as too ideologically respectable. After all, the rhetoric of love insistently underwrites the quest for gay respectability in the form of marriage equality through the mantra, “love is love.”11 Yet, when critics do discuss love in queer theory, it has a strange trajectory. In the case of Leo Bersani’s “Is the Rectum a Grave?” love stands out as a paradigmatic case of antiqueer conservatism. For Lee Edelman, in No Future, love aims to conserve the integrity of the subject in the face of the death drive’s disarticulating force.12 Other queer theorists are seduced by love’s utopian promise. José Esteban Muñoz’s embrace of love correlates with his rejection of what he repeatedly calls in Cruising Utopia “the romance of the negative.”13 Muñoz does not explicitly link his project to love as such, even though the description on the back cover tellingly characterizes the book as “part manifesto, part loveletter.”14 Beyond this apt characterization, what closely links Muñoz’s suspicion of the negative to love is his avowed investment in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s conception of reparative reading.15 Along with Muñoz, a number of critics have recognized the potential for reparative reading. Michael D. Snediker separates destruction and reparation, desire and love: “I mean to distinguish love’s reparative, resuscitative energies from the oppositely and variously destructive, undoing energies of desire.”16 In a slightly different though related vein, Cindy Patton defines Sedgwick’s use of love in A Dialogue on Love: “it has the ring of intersubjectivity, of authenticity, the stems for a fundamental sameness across consciousnesses.”17 Though this passage is not a description of reparative reading, Patton’s gloss on Sedgwickian love is critical. Patton brings together latter-day reparative readers and makes explicit the values that accrue to the understanding of love informed by reparative reading. Reparative love creates unities, dissolves differences, replenishes lack, and aims to make the world a better place. Such accounts of the positive gains of critical practice are in line with what Sedgwick says about reparative reading. It is modeled on the possibility of “‘repair[ing]’ the murderous part 4

INTRODUCTION

object into something like a whole,” which then becomes “available both to be identified with and to offer one nourishment and comfort in turn.”18 I understand what some queer critics find enabling about reparative reading, even as I don’t share this position. The desire for reparation, for love to have healing power necessarily represses the fact that love is not univocally good; love does not, as Patton suggests, connect and unite us all through a common humanity. Indeed, love can be and is a force of corrosion, despair, division, and inequity.19 After all, you wouldn’t need to repair the object if you hadn’t already tried to murder it. Reparation, then, looks a bit like the room in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. The room, when David first arrives, is replete with detritus, dirt, and chaos: a “single brown and wrinkled potato in which even the sprouting eyes were rotten” lies among yellow newspaper and empty bottles, piles of boxes, a discarded violin.20 As the novel progresses, Giovanni wants to make the room better for David because he loves him. So Giovanni attempts to refurbish it, adding a built-in bookcase: “he chipped through the wall until he came to the brick and began pounding away at the brick” (114). It becomes clear that this act of love is also an act of destruction; Giovanni is trying to make this small room a better place for David, but the more he “improves” it, the more successfully he destroys it. Unmaking Love is in conversation with those sentimentalizing definitions of love that view it as the basis of human experience, as the one thing we all can share. This position is perhaps best articulated in the film version of The Celluloid Closet when Tom Hanks speaks about what he thinks is the most important message of Philadelphia: “It is all the same. Love is spelled, you know, with the same four letters.”21 And my point in relation to Hanks’s statement is that the important thing, at least in contemporary novels, is not that love is spelled with the same four letters, but that all the letters in love are different letters every time. The contemporary novel shows us that love is neither unifying nor unified; it is the place of division, divorce, and fissure. We can be seduced by the promise of love’s power to make humanity cohere, but we will be disappointed by its failure to do so.22 The authors I discuss here ask that we rethink what we mean by the word love. It no longer simply means something beneficent, something that can repair and heal wounds. Unmaking Love stakes its claims about love in stark distinction from both the definition of love as too respectable and the so-called reparative turn in INTRODUCTION

5

queer theory. As an alternative, I propose a love that builds on Barbara Johnson’s conception of “using people” as a model for queer love. Johnson paves the way for thinking love queerly, refusing the terms of either conventionality or reparation. Barbara Johnson’s deconstructive reading—and her emphasis on the value of encountering the “surprise of otherness”—provides not just exciting and provocative models for reading but also, crucially, a different, queer way of understanding love. Her essay, “Using People: Kant with Winnicott,” argues for the ethical importance and value of using people in our loving relations to others, “creating a space of play and risk that does not depend on maintaining intactness and separation.”23 The essay turns on Johnson’s reading of D. W. Winnicott’s idea of the transitional object. Even as Johnson discusses the seven features of this object, in many ways the essay dwells specifically on two related features of the transitional object: “2. The object is affectionately cuddled as well as excitedly loved and mutilated” and “4. It must survive instinctual loving, and also hating and, if it be a feature, pure aggression” (99). To “use people,” in other words, is to love and hate, to caress and mutilate, to feel affection and aggression. In response to Johnson, one could attempt to alleviate the anxiety that this pairing might evoke by keeping the two terms radically separate.24 But Johnson’s reading of Winnicott shows us that nothing can provide the benign sense of love that one might desire. No matter how much one might want to eradicate destruction, mutilation, and hatred from love, these negativities define love. Johnson’s “Using People” offers an extended meditation on, as she puts it, “the whole scenario of destruction and excited love” (101). Taking her cue from Winnicott, Johnson is essentially working with a pair of terms that takes the form of a rhetorical figure, hendiadys, about which Johnson writes in A World of Difference: “This positing and erasing of difference, this fluctuation of two and one, could perhaps be called a hendiadys (a figure in which, for example, ‘Deconstruction and Criticism’ substitutes for ‘Deconstructive Criticism,’ as Geoffrey Hartman has suggested), the rhetorical figure that most aptly names such versions of the question of the chicken and the egg.”25 Johnson’s hendiadys in “Using People” works not unlike Hartman’s by oscillating between two and one. However, rather than fluctuating between a phrase that separates the two terms (destruction and love) and one that erases the difference between them (destructive love, for instance), in Johnson’s essay, one of the terms almost 6

INTRODUCTION

completely drops out of the discussion. After the passage I’ve quoted, where Johnson sets up “the whole scenario of destruction and excited love,” the rest of the essay focuses almost exclusively on destruction.26 Johnson’s hendiadys posits and erases difference, fluctuates between two and one by using one term, destruction, as the figural representative for the pair. When Johnson does finally use the pair again, the collapse of the two terms that the hendiadic structure has established becomes explicit. Johnson writes: “The structure of address animates the object as a ‘you,’ a destroyed ‘you,’ a loved because destroyed ‘you.’”27 Love emerges not despite destruction but because of it. Thus the hendiadic fluctuation between two terms and one—between “destruction and excited love” and simply “destruction”—that Johnson weaves throughout “Using People” rhetorically enacts the intimate relationship between love and destruction. Love does not exist without such destruction; indeed, destruction defines love. FANTASIZING UNION The importance of Johnson’s hendiadys lies not only in the specificity of the terms she employs but also in the way the “fluctuation of two and one” figurally enacts the question of love’s structure. Both modernist and contemporary writers fixate on these fundamental questions: Can love make two people into one? Is one ever simply one, or does it contain (and repress) multiples? And these questions are as much psychoanalytic as deconstructive; the problem of love and number corresponds to the relation between love and fantasy, a relation on which each chapter in Unmaking Love depends. By fantasy I mean the scenario that creates the effect of seamless coherence or unity both within the subject and between individuals.28 For Jacques Lacan, love is always fantasmatic insofar as fantasy provides the framework for love, which strives to replace difference and discontinuity with the illusion of amorous union. This coherence-producing love universalizes the fusion of two into one as the index of absolute amorous value. We can understand the fantasy of love with a sort of mathematical shorthand: 1 + 1 = 1. By making two into one, such a formula attempts to reduce intractable multiplicity into a single, manageable whole: “‘We are but one.’ Everyone knows, of course, that two have never become but one, but nevertheless ‘we are but one.’ The idea of love begins INTRODUCTION

7

with that. It is truly the crudest way of providing the sexual relationship, that term that manifestly slips away, with its signified.”29 Here Lacan theorizes love in its relation to his famous assertion about the failure at the heart of sexuality: there is no sexual relation. Love’s ability to create fantasmatically one out of two gives consistency and coherence to a reality in which “the sexual relationship” is impossible. Fantasy ensures that the lovers never have to encounter the insurmountable chasm that separates them from each other. The coherence that the fantasy of love provides, then, eliminates negativity, hiding it from view by presenting the illusion of union. One way love produces this illusory oneness is to erase the specificity of the other. To the extent that the love Lacan describes is narcissistic and conserves the integrity of the self, “the other” is effectively obliterated. Lacan writes that “Love . . . never makes anyone leave himself behind. If that . . . is what Freud said by introducing the function of narcissistic love, everyone senses and sensed that the problem is how there can be love for an other. The One everyone talks about all the time is, first of all, a kind of mirage of the One you believe yourself to be.”30 This love is not for the other but for oneself. Love satisfies only insofar as it produces a “mirage” of the ideal ego. Offering an idealized image of the loving subject, love dissolves anxiety and puts “the One” of identity and synthesis in its place. Here love does away with the aggression, anxiety, and difference that can arise in response to an encounter with the other. Through fantasmatic love, the other becomes a repetition of the ego and an escape from negativity. Even though fantasy aims for union, even though we can try to use love to make up for the impossibility of the sexual relationship, fantasy regularly fails to make good on its promise. Lauren Berlant’s nuanced account of fantasy is particularly instructive here: “But the scene of fantasy can also be said to reveal the fundamental non-coherence of the subject, to which violence is done by the demands of the identity form, and which may well play out a competition between the subject’s desire to be recognized by her object and her desire to destroy the object she desires.”31 As Berlant suggests, the fantasmatic construction of love can simply enact the impulse toward fusion, but, more interestingly, fantasy includes the negativity, violence, aggression, division, and divorce that render fusion impossible.32 Contemporary novelists imbue fantasy not with union but division, not with redemption but negativity, remaking amorous fantasy so that it includes 8

INTRODUCTION

and aggressively pursues those elements that make coherence and unity impossible. Love does not produce unity but troubles it. A strategy contemporary writers use to “unmake” love is to infuse the oneness for which amorous fantasy strives with multiplicity. Such multiplicity thwarts a redemptive notion of love. Thus, one plus one does not, in fact, equal one but, crucially, two. By recognizing the two, over and against the one, contemporary writers give up any pretense to totalization, give up on the possibility of union, completion, or coherence. The challenge that the contemporary novel takes up, then, is to resist the temptation to be seduced by the illusory promise that the two, or the three, or the six might slip back into the vaunted figure of amorous union, the one. In her brilliant analysis of Barbara Johnson’s Mother Tongues, Jane Gallop discusses this risk specifically in relation to the romantic couple. “The couple,” Gallop writes, “is supposed to be a place where two equals one.”33 Johnson’s project, Gallop suggests, is to make the one impossible, and part of the urgency of this project has do to with the tendency the two has “to slide into one” (78). For Gallop, Johnson sees this tendency toward slippage from the multiple to the singular in the figure of the heterosexual couple. Of this figure Gallop writes, “The perfect couple, perfect complementarity, perfect fit; the heterosexual ideal: the woman finds her male counterpart” (80). The two and the one, then, are radically different, but the two also risks merely repeating the ideological imperatives of the one. Therefore, the task that contemporary writers undertake might best be described by Gallop when she writes: “If we can make two more like two thousand, there will be less danger of it slipping into one” (78). A BRIEF CRITICAL HISTORY OF LITERARY LOVE Needless to say, even as this study focuses on a particularly literary version of love, literature is certainly not the only place where love has been theorized. Indeed, a quick survey of other discourses indicates the centrality of love to a number of different sites of inquiry. Speculators on love cross a variety of terrains: philosophy, theology, psychology, self-help, politics, and, with increasing explicitness, economics. In these disciplines love expresses a desire for unity, standing out as a positive force. By focusing in particular on the literary construction of love in the contemporary novel, I am able to explore an alternative INTRODUCTION

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tradition in which writers resist the notion of love as positive, redemptive, and unifying. The contemporary novel offers a sharp counterpoint to this traditional conception of love, disturbing the possibility of redemption with which love is typically associated. I focus on literature and literary criticism because in literary study we can see both the repetition of this belief in the goodness of love and, crucially, the departure from this cliché. I am certainly not alone in viewing literature—and particularly the novel— as uniquely situated in relation to love. Tony Tanner’s Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression argues that the novel provides a special opportunity for writers to challenge the norms of bourgeois society. As such, the novel does not so much reflect the society’s values as expose “a series of discontinuities and instabilities that effectively gave the lie to the bourgeois’s image of his own society.”34 Tanner’s sense that the novel offers an opportunity to challenge existing social standards resonates with my own understanding of contemporary novelists’ challenge to the concept of love and their attention to the negative.35 Likewise, Leslie Fiedler’s account of the centrality of love to the novel inflects my own argument that the contemporary novel distinctively rewrites love: “the subject par excellence of the novel is love or, more precisely . . . love in one form or another has remained the novel’s central theme, as necessary and as expected as battle in Homer or revenge in the Renaissance drama.”36 Fiedler’s collocation of love, battle, and revenge as the proper stuff of different kinds of fiction suggests a possible equivalence between these terms at the levels of both structure and content. By drawing these terms in relation to each other, Fiedler indicates that love may have more in common with the two other negative social relations—battle and revenge—than we at first might want to believe. But the revelation that love relates in some crucial way to the negative was not new in 1960 when Fiedler published his study; in 1939 Denis de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World altered the discussion of literary love and has guided it to this day.37 De Rougemont focuses specifically on courtly love as a model for understanding love more broadly. “The myth operates,” de Rougemont writes, “wherever passion is dreamed of as an ideal instead of being feared like a malignant fever; wherever its fatal character is welcomed, invoked, or imagined as a magnificent and desirable disaster instead of as simply a disaster” (24). As de Rougemont sees it, courtly lovers need “obstruction,” because absence rather than presence forms the object of courtly love (37, 42). But for de 10

INTRODUCTION

Rougemont the obstructions that courtly lovers put in the way of their being with each other is itself an obstruction insofar their love conceals a desire for death (46). However, de Rougemont’s analysis of courtly love has been influential less for its content than for its structure. By elaborating courtly love as a passion for obstruction that conceals the lovers’ fundamental desire for death, he produces a notion of love structured by fantasy. The concealing, obscuring function of fantasy clearly emerges in de Rougemont’s analyses of courtly love, in particular, through the language of concealment, deception, and disguise that he repeatedly invokes to describe the relationship between love and death. In a moment of dramatic disclosure, he notes: “The love of love itself has concealed a far more awful passion . . . the desire for death!” (46). After this moment de Rougemont returns over and over again to this fantasmatic logic of concealment. He characterizes the lovers as “unawares, and passionately deceiving themselves” (46; my emphasis). Using the self-deceiving lovers as a model for all love, he asserts, “The tremendous success of the Tristan Romance shows, whether we like it or not, that we have a secret preference for what is unhappy” (51; my emphasis). And elsewhere, the courtly lovers’ “secret quest of obstruction” turns out to be “only the disguise of a love for obstruction” (54; my emphasis). For de Rougemont, love disguises, conceals, and secrets away the negativity of death, which is the “true” object of desire for the courtly lovers. He persuasively suggests that “happy love has no history,” but, as compelling as this claim is, it isn’t quite accurate (15). There may be no history of happy love, but the history of love focuses throughout on the attempt to attain happiness: tenuous and obstructed though this happiness might be. And the fantasmatic elaboration of love—the idea that this structure disguises or conceals the negativity that threatens to break it—aids in the history of unhappy but crucially aspirational loves. Love might fail to produce happiness because of the negativity it cannot eliminate, but, inevitably, we find in literature thwarted attempts to achieve amorous happiness everywhere we look. After de Rougemont, critics who write about literary love tend to understand love (whether implicitly or explicitly) as the fantasmatic structure that allows for the erasure of the negative. Importantly, this fantasmatic structure keeps love and the negative, redemption and destruction, separate. Another way of putting this might be: by casting love as that which conceals negativity, INTRODUCTION

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love can retain a positive cultural value. Returning to Leslie Fielder’s important 1960 study on love and death, we find one excellent example of such a phenomenon.38 In a chapter on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Fiedler argues, “we are left with a disturbing paradox . . . that love may conceal a destructive impulse and work for ill, while hatred may be a disguised form of love and eventuate in good.”39 Fiedler returns love to its proper redemptive place after suggesting that it might not be all that redemptive. Love, disguising destruction, might actually “work for ill,” but fear not: if hatred manages to disguise love, then such love “might eventuate in good.” According to Fiedler, it seems that there are bad loves and good loves, and the two types can easily be distinguished from each other on the basis of their effects, “ill” or “good.” Understanding love as a fantasy structure that can successfully conceal negativity thus promises the possibility of redemption. Such a redemptive conception of love relies on what Fiedler characterizes as the “sentimental love” of the eighteenth century, which develops with the emergence of the novel: Certainly, there is no one in our world to whom the phrase “They lived happily ever after” is meaningless or unclear; for us the “happy ending” is defined once and for all: after many trials, the sacred marriage! Our secure sense of what happiness means in this context has nothing to do with what we know about divorce statistics or the possibilities of successful adjustment in marriage; it is something we believe or pretend to believe, or more precisely perhaps accept at a level below belief and disbelief; it is a mythological rather than a factual statement.40

Fiedler describes an eighteenth-century ideal of amorous redemption that he suggests lives on in the present. While there is, no doubt, historical specificity to the possibility of the happy ending in love, this eighteenth-century conception of love also informs other, later critical interventions into this discussion.41 In criticism on literature of the nineteenth century, the focus on amorous redemption shifts from the sentimental to the social, but the possibility of fantasmatic coherence remains intact. Tony Tanner suggests the ways in which the fantasmatic understanding of the relation between love and negativity shapes social relations. Marriage functions, Tanner suggests, not to unite lovers with each other but to produce social coherence: “Marriage . . . is a means by which 12

INTRODUCTION

society attempts to bring into harmonious alignment patterns of passion and patterns of property.”42 Marriage is not, he clarifies, “a paradigm for the resolution of problems of bringing unity out of difference, harmony out of opposition, identity out of separation, concord out of discord” (15). The latter version of love coincides with the sentimental ideal whereby love redeems the couple by eliminating difference, opposition, separation, and discord, in short, by ridding the world of the negative. Tanner’s social conception of marriage, harmoniously aligning passions and property, however, does not completely depart from the structural imperative of sentimental love. Nineteenth-century love still strives for fantasmatic union; this love unites not individuals but larger institutions, attempting to ensure that society maintains coherence. For Tanner, the version of negativity that such fantasmatic social union strives to erase is adultery, which “introduces bad multiplicity within the requisite unities of social roles” (13). The social order thus attempts to contain and disarm the negative threat that adultery poses by producing, through marriage, fantasmatic coherence.43 BEYOND THE ONE: MODERNIST AMBIVALENCE The love depicted in modernist literature seems neither redemptive and unifying nor negative and threatening; for modernists, love is both simultaneously. Whether modernists are for or against love, it seems apparent that they are (ambivalently) obsessed with it.44 Skeptical of the oneness that love is supposed to produce, modernists attempt to multiply love’s forms, laying the groundwork for the unmaking of love that the contemporary novel undertakes. However, as skeptical of amorous union as modernist writers are, they nonetheless evince desire for oneness. Perhaps the best example of this ambivalence is Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse (1927).45 Lily Briscoe asks the most important question in the novel: “Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs. Ramsay one?” (51). To the Lighthouse is, in part, an attempt to answer this question, and Woolf returns to the problem of oneness repeatedly throughout the novel. Romantic love provides occasions for Woolf to dilate on the obstacles to oneness. In response to the formation of a new couple, Mrs. Ramsay feels “as if two emotions were called up in her, one profound—for what could be more serious than the love of man for woman, what more commanding, more impressive, INTRODUCTION

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bearing in its bosom the seeds of death; at the same time these lovers, these people entering into illusion glittering eyed, must be danced round with mockery, decorated with garlands” (100). Mrs. Ramsay’s response to love cleaves in two equally powerful directions, and, by simultaneously celebrating and denigrating love, Woolf demonstrates her skepticism of unity. Mrs. Ramsay’s nonunified reaction directly relates to the possibility (and impossibility) of unity in love. Later in the novel, Lily Briscoe echoes Mrs. Ramsay’s dividedness: “from the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreaths heaped and roses; and if you asked nine out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this—love; while the women . . . would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than this; yet it is also beautiful and necessary” (103). Briscoe and Mrs. Ramsay’s accounts of love are particularly important in considering how Woolf ’s novel approaches the concept of amorous union. Both passages touch on the horror of love. For Mrs. Ramsay, love “bear[s] in its bosom the seeds of death,” and for Briscoe “there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than” love. But, crucially, both passages include a desire for it. Immediately after Briscoe questions whether love can “make her and Mrs. Ramsay one,” Woolf writes, “for it was not knowledge but unity she desired” (51). To the Lighthouse perfectly exemplifies the modernist ambivalence toward amorous union; Woolf may style love as deadly, puerile, tedious, inhumane, but she also articulates a desire for it, perhaps above all else. Mrs. Ramsay repeatedly strives for the union—in romance and in other interpersonal relations—that won’t come. At the dinner party she laments: “Nothing seemed to have merged. They all sat separate. And the whole effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her” (83). Mrs. Ramsay feels like the responsibility for merger depends on her insofar as elsewhere in the novel she expresses the desire for not just social but subjective unity: “It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself ” (64). Seeking understanding of herself through her connection to “inanimate things,” Mrs. Ramsay feels that she becomes “one” with them. Of course, in the passage where she becomes one, Woolf repeats the word one seven times. Woolf suggests through this repetition that oneness 14

INTRODUCTION

is impossible even as Mrs. Ramsay insistently desires unity, if only with herself. The tension between the impossibility of oneness and the desire for it must inform James’s observation toward the end of the novel that “nothing was simply one thing” (83). This passage reiterates the skepticism about amorous fantasy we encounter earlier in the novel, but it also laments the impossibility of the union for which To the Lighthouse asymptotically strives. The ambivalence evident in Woolf ’s novel translates into the critical tradition on modernism and love.46 Critics have been divided on the subject of love in modernism. Some read love as conservative and as antithetical to the modernist project. For instance, Joseph Allen Boone argues that modernist representations of love—insofar as they involve love—are fundamentally conservative: “traces of the love-plot format, along with its themes and ideological values, have continued to inhabit (and inhibit) the genre to the present day.”47 Though marriage is no longer the telos of modern narrative, its normative ideology persists: “the (hetero)sexual relation has come to occupy a symbolic role analogous to that formerly fulfilled by romantic wedlock.”48 Boone’s account of modernism maintains that love illusorily persuades us to believe in the complementarity of the sexes and the possibility of the (hetero)sexual relationship. Similarly, Catherine Belsey suggests, “Love dissolves the anxiety of division in the subject, and replaces it with a utopian wholeness.”49 In other words, love produces the illusion of unity and turns out to be antithetical to and capable of alleviating any anxiety created by a modernist aesthetic of fragmentation. However, just as reliably, other critics interpret love as a radical force that serves the political aims of modernist aesthetics. Maria DiBattista argues that love and modernism are far from opposed. Her book focuses on “radical narratives of First Love,” which she suggests “attest to a deep perturbation, a ‘shock’ administered to the self ” and record something “capable of revolutionizing the old.”50 Love in its “first” manifestation works not to alleviate anxiety, or to preserve what DiBattista calls “surface tranquilities,” but rather to create anxiety by shattering the uninterrupted continuity of the subject (4). Love describes “modern consciousness” for DiBattista, making “First Love” central to the anxiety of subjective disarticulation produced by, and represented in, modernist literary artifacts (15). Love is not contrary to what she posits as the “radical,” “revolutionary” force of modernism; they are part and parcel of each other. INTRODUCTION

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CONTEMPORARY LOVES Whereas quite a bit has been written (albeit contradictorily) about the status of love in modernism, much less has been written about love in contemporary literature.51 In “Romance, Trauma, and Repetition: Testing the Limits of Love,” Lynne Pearce reads in contemporary literature the assessment of “something bleakly irredeemable and deeply traumatic in the nature of romantic love.”52 Pearce’s take has quite a lot in common with modernist ambivalence. In Sarah Waters’s Night Watch, Pearce finds irredeemable loves alongside “the only relationship in the novel that holds out any hope for the future” (85). In other words, like a good modernist, Pearce has it both ways: contemporary love as irredeemable and hopeful for redemption. She perceptively comments that contemporary British fiction tends to read “successive, futile attempts to repeat, or resurrect, love as symptomatic of a faltering belief in what Emmanuel Levinas characterized as ‘responsibility for the other’” (86–87). Pearce’s account of contemporary love differs from my own where she tempers her assessment of love’s irredeemability with the “hope for the future” that she finds in Waters’s novel. Waters’s “hope” echoes in Pearce’s later attempt to redeem the seemingly irredeemable ethics she discusses by turning to what she calls de Rougemont’s “tragic-redemptive” love as the horizon, once again, of “hope” (87). Pearce asserts of de Rougemont’s love, “we must hope that it nevertheless survives as an intellectual, emotional and moral limit-point” (87). Must we hope for redemptive love as a moral touchstone? The temptation to read contemporary literature as seamlessly continuous with modernism, as Pearce does, is strong. However, contemporary novelists revisit modernist ambivalence in order to experiment with it, rewrite it, and, ultimately, reimagine love as different. In the first novel of the Patrick Melrose series, Never Mind (1992), Edward St. Aubyn rewrites Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse and depicts the corroded relationships of his characters.53 But he goes even further: by rewriting Woolf ’s novel, he asks us to use Never Mind as a lens through which we might reread To the Lighthouse. Doing so, St. Aubyn suggests that Woolf ’s seemingly more optimistic account of human relationships is much closer to St. Aubyn’s pessimistic vision than we might have thought. At the levels of both style and content, St. Aubyn’s acid take on elite society reads as a contemporary interpretation of Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse. Specif16

INTRODUCTION

ically, St. Aubyn’s story closely resembles the first section of To the Lighthouse, entitled “The Window.” Both texts detail the coming together of a family—in Woolf the Ramsays and in St. Aubyn the Melroses—at a holiday house with friends for the enactment of a variety of domestic tasks: oedipal aggression, an awkward dinner party, and masculinist, intellectual competition. Indeed, at times Never Mind seems to be a parody of Woolf ’s text.54 However, to read Never Mind as simply a parody of To the Lighthouse would be to miss what is most important about St. Aubyn’s revision. St. Aubyn’s novel takes the concerns—about oneness, love, and connection—Woolf expresses in To the Lighthouse and raises the volume exponentially. Whereas Woolf ’s text is bifurcated with regard to oneness—maintaining both desire for and skepticism about it—St. Aubyn’s novel destroys completely the possibility of inter- or intrapersonal fusion. Moreover, whatever relational difficulties Woolf ’s characters experience St. Aubyn depicts hyperbolically, shedding new light retroactively on the earlier novel. Playing on Mrs. Ramsay’s desire for “merging” over the dinner table, Eleanor, also over the dinner table, has completely abandoned any hope for oneness. Instead, she finds her guests, and, importantly, herself, hopelessly divided: “When David reminded someone of their weaknesses and failures she was torn between a desire to save the victim, whose feelings she adopted as her own, and an equally strong desire not to be accused of spoiling a game” (114). Eleanor’s response to David’s sadism is divided, and neither response helps to create the union around the dinner table that Mrs. Ramsay desires. Either Eleanor unites with her husband or her husband’s victim; in both cases she achieves union by being pitted against, and divided from, someone else. But perhaps the most explicit reinterpretation of Woolf ’s novel appears in the figure of Patrick Melrose, the five-year-old son of David and Eleanor, who functions as the author surrogate for Edward St. Aubyn and as the contemporary translation of James Ramsay. David’s attitude toward his son sounds strikingly similar to Mr. Ramsay’s toward James: “David’s methods of education rested on the claim that childhood was a romantic myth which he was too clear sighted to encourage” (62). Replace the word David with Mr. Ramsay in this sentence and you get a very succinct explanation of the reason why Mr. Ramsay would not concede his position on not going to the lighthouse because of bad weather. Of course, the brilliance of St. Aubyn’s account of the relation INTRODUCTION

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between father and son is that he raises the relatively benign antagonism between Mr. Ramsay and James to a fever pitch in Never Mind. Instead of simply foreclosing on a day trip to the lighthouse, David Melrose destroys the possibility of joy, security, and psychological health both in Patrick’s present and future through sexual, physical, and psychological abuse. While the relationship between David and Patrick is considerably more terrible than James and Mr. Ramsay’s, both James and Patrick have the same response: murderous rage. When Mr. Ramsay contradicts Mrs. Ramsay’s promise that the weather the next day will be good enough to allow them to venture to the lighthouse, Woolf writes: “Had there been an axe handy, or a poker, any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father’s breast there and then, James would have seized it” (4). In a very similar fantasy, Patrick imagines killing his father as well: “He looked at the painting hanging on the stairs and imagined its frame hurtling through the air and embedding its sharp corner in his father’s chest; and another painting whistling down the corridor and chopping Nicholas’s head off ” (93). James and Mr. Ramsay, though locked in an aggressive struggle at the outset of the novel, come, by the end, to have a more sympathetic relationship. Their bond grows, changes, and, importantly, is not beset by the abuses that define Patrick and David Melrose’s relationship. The Melrose father and son do not get a chance to grow or change or get better. Their relationship is never redeemed. But St. Aubyn makes clear that both types of relationship—the relationship that can improve and the one that never will—are informed by the same sort of desire for aggressive negation. In this way, St. Aubyn does not just parody To the Lighthouse, does not just exacerbate the relational difficulties we see in the modernist precursor to Never Mind but also retroactively reveals that the latter is implicit in the former. This contemporary rewriting of love allows us to return to modernist texts and read them anew as St. Aubyn does here by suggesting that, whether a text strives for redemption through union or forecloses it, both types of love rely on murderous rage. St. Aubyn’s novel exemplifies the way the contemporary novels that I discuss in Unmaking Love—including Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy (1998), Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2004), and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled (1995)—have much in common with Caren Irr’s sense that “twenty-first-century writers have returned to received genres and begun to overhaul them.”55 Instead of received genres, contemporary nov18

INTRODUCTION

elists return to received ideas about love and oneness as well as to the modernist critique of such ideas to produce a new account of love. But the category of the new in the contemporary novel gestures toward the ways in which the contemporary novel itself is not all that new. Indeed, this might remind us of Fredric Jameson’s analysis of Jean-François Lyotard’s “embarrassment” that the postmodern depends on “what remain essentially modernist categories of the new, which cannot be fully eradicated from the ‘new’ dispensation, whatever its rhetoric.”56 Indeed, the connection between modernism and what comes after it is important to understanding contemporary love. In her essay “Periodizing Modernism” Susan Stanford Friedman challenges critics to refuse the conception of modernism as monolithic by looking for “plural periods of modernism.”57 The possibility of many modernisms relies on the idea of continuity, which runs counter to the tradition of associating modernism with the new: “buried within the radical ruptures with the past are hidden continuities.”58 David James takes up this notion of continuity in The Legacies of Modernism where he “examines what it might mean to reread the politics and aesthetics of later twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction by deliberately foregrounding the reciprocities between writers today and their modernist predecessors.”59 And elsewhere James expands on this notion of reciprocity where he seeks to complicate the concept of rupture that designates how we think of modernist literary production.60 The idea that modernism might be continuous not just with what follows it but also with what precedes it reframes the status of modernism in literary history. But continuity is not synonymous with sameness. Just as important as the similarities between modernist and contemporary loves are the differences between them. If modernist love is characterized by ambivalence, then the contemporary novel distinguishes its representation of love by rejecting such ambivalence.61 The novels I discuss in this book build on modernist love by departing from its ambivalent legacy. Ambivalence suggests a bifurcated structure such as the one diagnosed by Lynn Pearce: bleak, irredeemable, while hopeful for redemption. Contemporary writers learn from modernism how to critique the possibility of oneness in amorous fantasy, questioning the relation between redemption and love. However, the contemporary novels I discuss produce distinctly different answers than their modernist predecessors. For these contemporary writers, gone is the hope for amorous redemption; gone is the INTRODUCTION

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possibility of any kind of wholeness or unity in love; gone is the notion that fantasy knits together individuals and collectivities. Modernist ambivalence becomes amorous negativity, stripping love of the potential to make the world a better place. In this way, my readings gather energy from David PalumboLiu’s analysis of ethics in contemporary global literature in The Deliverance of Others.62 Palumbo-Liu’s work can be understood as a response to the idea that literature teaches empathy, the logic to which some recent defenders of the humanities defer: “great works of literature deliver difference, otherness, that which is nonsimilar to us, all with the effect of making us better, richer, more moral, more tolerant, more sensitive to the world and the lives it contains” (12). Palumbo-Liu suggestively points out that while difference and otherness can inspire empathy, encountering such unknown quantities—whether in literature or in the world—also provoke “disdain, even contempt” (13). HISTORY, TIME, AND LOVE Of course, the interplay between continuity and rupture brings to the fore the question of history. Because the contemporary novel changes love, contemporary novelists are invested in historicity. But the concept of history in this context is by no means straightforward. In part, this is due to the fact that in the relation between modernist and contemporary loves we find not simply difference or similarity, rupture or continuity, but both at the same time. In this sense, contemporary literature participates in historical discourse while also troubling the idea of literary historical periodization. Thus there is a tension between the historical claims of this book and the challenge posed to history and time by the contemporary novels I discuss in it. Rather than let this tension derail one or the other of these aspects of Unmaking Love, I want to preserve this tension as a source of productive complexity. The novels I discuss here may challenge linear temporality and historical periodization, but it remains the case that the question of love seems always in contemporary literature to be a question of time. After all, love depends upon narrative, the most basic element of which is temporal movement. Without challenging temporality, contemporary writers would not be able to articulate their historically distinct conception of love, distorted, nonredemptive, and deidealized as it is. The imbrication

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INTRODUCTION

of love and time, therefore, is a central concern throughout Unmaking Love. In the first two chapters I implicitly inquire into the time of love, and in chapter 3 I explicitly treat the question of love’s temporality in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. Love and time cannot be disentangled from each other, which Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach (2007) illustrates by simultaneously distorting traditional conceptions of love and time. In this novel he explores a a romantic commonplace familiar to conventional love stories: lovers repeatedly return to the early scenes of their courtship.63 McEwan’s newlyweds lovingly mythologize the beginnings of their relationship, the first moment they saw each other, and, even before they met, all the times they were in the same place but did not encounter each other. This romantic ritual of reliving the beginnings of love makes apparent a cleavage in time that underlies passionate attachment. Love in the present takes recourse to love in the past, so that love depends upon the coincidence of both temporalities simultaneously. McEwan lays bare this structure in order to bring to the fore the amorous discontinuities that are figured by temporal discontinuities. Gesturing toward the progressive teleo-logic of the love plot, McEwan styles Florence and Edward’s perceptions of their relationship as participating in and effecting forward movement. Celebrating their marriage, “Almost strangers, they stood, strangely together, on a new pinnacle of existence, gleeful that their new status promised to promote them out of their endless youth—Edward and Florence free at last!” (7). Getting married propels Edward and Florence into the future; they graduate from youth into adulthood. The marriage they celebrate as inaugurating progress from one time of life to another stands out as part of a much longer timeline that Edward uses to track his progress toward sexual congress with Florence. McEwan stages Edward’s slow advance to his goal in a diaristic structure: “The day in October he first saw her naked breasts long preceded the day he could touch them—December 19. He kissed them in February, though not her nipples, which he grazed with his lips once, in May” (27). The meticulous calendrical reporting on any minor or major physical contact orients the enactment of desire along a traditional, linear chronological axis. This moment might remind one of Dowell’s abortive attempt in The Good Soldier to subdue his narrative by constraining it with a linear diaristic structure.64

INTRODUCTION

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He succeeds in this task for only one paragraph, which trails off with an ellipsis and returns the reader to the nonlinear narration that dominates the text. Just as Dowell fails to tell the story of his Florence and Edward in a linear, progressive sequence, so too does McEwan’s narrator abandon the fiction of linearity to dwell on the temporal splitting that determines the newlyweds’ relationship. McEwan writes: “The conversation had returned again to those moments, by now enriched by a private mythology, when they first set eyes on each other” (71). In this passage the lovers use their “private mythology” of first meeting to enhance their experience of enjoyment in the present. In a different affective register, later in the novel, now lamenting the disharmony that seeps into the new marriage, McEwan narrates Edward’s memory “of one of the exquisite moments of their early love, when they went slowly, arm in arm, back up the glorious avenue, walking in the center lane to take full possession” (157). This passage at first seems to be transparently nostalgic, desirous of an earlier, perfect time. But what becomes clear is that interpreting these trips into the past only in terms of nostalgia gives an incomplete picture of how love’s divided temporality works in this text. Still reminiscing about their first meeting, Florence recognizes, “In the stone-floored echoing hall with the heavy low beams, her problems with Edward were already present in those first few seconds, in their first exchange of looks” (76). The mythology Edward and Florence construct around their first encounter cannot hold back the realization Florence here experiences: that the past to which they constantly return reflects back to them the division at the heart of their relationship in the present. They divide time, bringing the past into the present in order to find not the unification of their bond but rather its fragmentation. Nevertheless, Edward attempts to capture wholeness through memory: “He conjured these memories from last year . . . not from a sentimental desire to compound or indulge his sorrow but to dispel it, and feel himself in love, and to hold back . . . the beginnings of a darkening mood, a darker reckoning, a trace of poison that was branching through his being” (161–62). That Edward fails in this task—to find the antidote to these feelings that “poison” his love—can be no surprise. Indeed, the “poison” and the “darkening mood” are there in the past as well as in the present: “Even in their happiest moments, there was always the accusing shadow, the barely hidden gloom of his unfulfillment” (178). The distorted time of love in On Chesil Beach functions to denatu22

INTRODUCTION

ralize heterosexual union and the fiction of complementarity that supports it. And temporal disturbance corresponds to myriad forms of sexual disturbance in the novel, which McEwan signals when Edward thematizes his anxiety about sex in a temporal metaphor: “His specific worry, based on one unfortunate experience, was of overexcitement, of what he had heard someone describe as ‘arriving too soon’” (8). McEwan plays with narrative structure and temporality in order to deform the concept of love. The classic love story is structured by progress through time and posits loving union as the telos of narrative movement. Clearly, as Virginia Woolf suggests with To the Lighthouse, modernists are invested in temporal distortion. And McEwan’s novel builds on this modernist investment in chronological deformation in order to expose the narrative machinery at work in the construction of love. McEwan does not just distort amorous temporality but also uses this distortion specifically to elaborate the negativity that makes fantasmatic union impossible. The return to and reworking of modernist temporal disruptions in order to investigate the concept of love is crucial for my argument about contemporary novels. Love and time are intractably tangled with each other such that as time breaks down, love does too. But the obverse is also true: the disarticulation of love creates temporal disruption. Just as temporal distortions call into question the teleological progress toward union in the love plot, love cannot be understood as progressively breaking down, beginning a narrative with, for instance, a successful marriage and ending with marital failure. This would simply reverse rather than significantly rework the conventional marriage plot. Instead, contemporary writers suggest that the logic of temporal progress cannot adequately represent love; they make an argument for understanding love synchronically rather than diachronically. Implicit in marriage is divorce; coextensive with the One is the many that it obscures; inextricably linked to fantasmatic union is its fragmentation and failure. DISARTICULATING FANTASY In order to produce a full picture of how contemporary novelists unmake love, in the chapters that follow I offer readings of both modernist and contemporary novels. This comparative study of modernist and contemporary loves elaborates the resonances and continuities among these distinctive aesthetic INTRODUCTION

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and historical categories as well as marking out the crucial points of divergence between the modernist and contemporary treatments of love. The structure of the book therefore progresses from considering resonances and continuities in chapters 1 and 2 to suggesting how the contemporary novel departs from modernism in chapters 3 and 4. The first chapter, “Lesbian Fantasy,” delves more deeply into psychoanalytic theories of love. The structure of amorous fantasy as that which obscures disunity and division by producing the illusion of fusion and merger is central to this chapter. I show that psychoanalysis overwhelmingly associates the figure of the lesbian with the conservative, unity-producing structure of fantasmatic love. The argument of this chapter introduces the concept of fantasy to which my subsequent readings of love return. The chapter also locates the basis for contemporary rewritings of amorous fantasy in modernism. My readings of the lesbian in psychoanalysis inform an analysis of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936), which complicates the simple equation of love and the lesbian. Djuna Barnes’s picture of lesbian love resonates with contemporary revisions of love in general and lesbian love more specifically. Contemporary revisions of love, I argue, exploit the contradictions of modernist love that Barnes brings to the fore so as to corrode the conception of love as redemptive and unifying. At the end of this chapter I briefly consider two contemporary rewritings of lesbian fantasy in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) and Eleanor Catton’s The Rehearsal (2008).65 Smith and Catton return to the notion of the lesbian-in-love, infusing fantasy with forms of negativity that relate, in Smith’s text, to histories of racism and colonial aggression and, in Catton’s text, to loss and pain. Such contemporary experiments with lesbian love—which is to say, love as such—gesture toward the other queered, negative loves that I discuss in later chapters. Explicitly taking up the relation between modernist love and contemporary revisions of it, chapter 2 dwells on the relation between modernist ambivalence in the “Penelope” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and the contemporary return to and revision of such ambivalence in Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy (1998). This chapter engages with the possibility of amorous redemption as articulated in the continuities and differences between modernist and contemporary representations of love. I begin the chapter by offering a reading of the affirmation of love in a modernist text: specifically, Molly Bloom’s “yes” in the final chapter of Ulysses. Drawing on the work of Barbara Johnson, I argue that Molly’s af24

INTRODUCTION

firmation is undercut by an implicit and simultaneous “no.” In order to read Molly’s “yes,” I suggest we must suspend the law of noncontradiction, hearing in it affirmation and negation simultaneously. The “yes” both confirms and denies the possibility of amorous redemption. Kureishi’s Intimacy takes seriously this modernist suspension of the law of noncontradiction. This contemporary revision of modernism magnifies the problem of love, “unmaking” love in perhaps the most corrosive way of all the contemporary texts I explore. Intimacy tells the story of the end of the narrator’s marriage, but the novel still clearly exemplifies what its title announces. Kureishi proposes not just that love is contradictory—affirmative and negative at the same time—but also, as important, that love ends even as it begins. Kureishi’s novel achieves this goal by challenging us to consider why and how one might continue to believe in the possibility of amorous redemption. Kureishi allows us to see that all love is fueled by a passion for negativity that enables and dissolves the redemption that love seems to offer. Building on Kureishi’s emphasis on the negative as well as the structure of amorous fantasy that chapter 1 lays bare, chapter 3, “Amorous Time,” investigates the temporality of love in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2004). I assert that love relies on a fundamentally nostalgic temporal structure. In order to make this argument, I include brief readings of additional contemporary and modernist texts that exemplify the way in which love typically relies on a nostalgic idea of perfection that exists only in a nonexistent past: D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), E. M. Forster’s Maurice (1971), and Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body (1994). Nostalgia’s conservative desire for the preservation of the old is evident in the novels I discuss. However, my reading of Hollinghurst’s novel turns on the fact that The Line of Beauty crucially reveals that the nostalgic desire for perfection in the past is always tainted by an awareness of negativity in the present. Even as nostalgia seeks pure love, Hollinghurst makes clear that it is impurity as much as purity that creates the nostalgic desire for the past. This chapter thus develops the concept of “amorous time,” which I differentiate from both “modernist time” and “queer time.” Amorous time is a resolutely contemporary creation; it shows that love partakes of nostalgia while also revealing the disjunctive machinery that subtends nostalgic love. In this way the temporality of contemporary love, as in McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, is divided against itself. INTRODUCTION

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Chapter 4, “Cosmopolitan Love,” the final chapter of Unmaking Love, extends its argument to the global context of contemporary literature. Whereas the preceding chapters focus on “local” types of love—between individuals— this one inquires into the “global” function of love. Indeed, this global, cosmopolitan love stands out as the most distinctively contemporary revision of love in this book. For this reason, I focus only on contemporary novels: Hari Kunzru’s Transmission (2005) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled (1995).66 This chapter addresses the question of whether love can bring together a global collectivity. Kunzru depicts the world of Transmission as being united and divided through the force of globalization, the most salient figure for which being a computer virus. I argue that Kunzru insistently presents this computer virus as a figure not just for globalization but also for love. And Ishiguro’s novel plays on the possibility of being connected and disconnected simultaneously in the cosmopolitan world of his novel. Both works attend to the problem of difference as an unbridgeable gap that keeps individuals and collectivities from uniting. In this chapter I ultimately argue that if love is universal, if it unites the world, then it does so only to the extent that it universalizes the experience of not-being-united. No matter how many groups use love as the battle cry of liberation; no matter how many claims are made for the “common ground” of love, for love as the most human of conditions; no matter how many political causes rest on the idea that love makes all people in all times the same, love is the site of negativity and difference. LOVE IS NOT LOVE The slogan for marriage equality, “love is love,” has widely circulated the mathematical equation whereby two ones add up to only one. Such a tautology, to be sure, demands equality, but in so doing disavows difference, ignores negativity, and obliterates the gaps that divide individuals from each other and, what is as important, from themselves. Unmaking Love can be understood as an extended argument against this naive tautology; it asserts that love is not love. By redefining love as negative, the contemporary novel rejects completely the idea that love can produce loving merger, that 1 + 1 = 1. One, in contemporary fiction, is never just one. And just as one is not one, so, too, love is not love. Or to put this idea another way, misquoting Virginia Woolf, “nothing, 26

INTRODUCTION

not even love, is simply one thing.” Such a transformation of the concept of love in the contemporary novel has literary and political consequences. Amorous negativity as presented in these contemporary novels allows us to imagine new ways to engage with literary texts and opens up other avenues for literary critics invested in examining sexual, affective, global, and historical relations of affiliation. But, if we follow these avenues opened up by amorous negativity, we may not be happy with what we find. Indeed, these contemporary writers suggest that love may be utterly unrecognizable as love: violent, jealous, divisive, destructive, and possibly untenable. But even the untenable alternative is better than the constraining ideology of oneness. The fundamental premise from which the following chapters proceed is that love—whether local or global, here or there, straight or gay, male or female—is no longer the same, however much we might want it to be.

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1

LESBIAN FANTASY Psychoanalysis, the Legacy of Modernist Love, and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood

IN 2014, THE New Yorker published a profile of Edith Windsor, plaintiff in Windsor v. United States, the Supreme Court case that made significant inroads into the legalization of gay marriage in the United States. This profile of Windsor, “The Perfect Wife,” draws out the most salient feature of the lesbian: she does not threaten the social order because she is associated with the fantasy of romantic love.1 Ariel Levy, the profile’s author, writes, “From the Bible onward, two men having intercourse has been viewed as more disturbing to the social order than two women doing whatever it is that lesbians do. For people to embrace same-sex marriage, they needed to focus on the universal desire for romantic love and committed intimacy.”2 In this chapter I focus on the way the figure of the lesbian exemplifies fantasmatic love, creating coherence and unity. As fantasy, the love of the lesbian poses no threat to society, to love itself, or, as evident, to marriage. “Lesbian fantasy” means that the lesbian loves fantasmatically, conservatively, and nonthreateningly. The association of love and the lesbian is common in psychoanalysis. In particular, the lesbian is linked not just to fantasy but also crucially to transference. Insofar as the love of the lesbian is fantasmatic, by looking into lesbian love, we also look into the structure of fantasy that aims to produce wholeness, closure, and unity by eliminating negativity. And, most important, the representation of the lesbian as the exemplar of amorous fantasy helps to conceptualize the

contemporary, queered love that is the subject of this book. In the first part of this chapter I parse the psychoanalytic theory of transference love (that is, love as such) in its relation to the figure of the lesbian. Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalytic theorists read the lesbian as an intractably conservative figure, sustaining the notion that love thrives on homogeny, coherence, and unity. In other words, lesbian love functions as the coherence-producing screen of fantasy that attempts to elide and erase negativity. Psychoanalysis repeatedly associates the lesbian with love and, I argue, establishes a transferential relationship with her in order to sustain its own sense of “self.” The seemingly inevitable linkage of the lesbian with transference becomes even more important to consider when one takes into account the intimate link between psychoanalysis and transference. To the extent that the lesbian is bound up with transference, the lesbian is also fundamentally bound up with psychoanalysis. At times, psychoanalytic theorists welcome an identification with the lesbian, at others resist it. In both cases the lesbian figures centrally in understanding the function of love in psychoanalysis. In the second part of this chapter I inquire into the consequences of my observations on lesbian love in Djuna Barnes’s canonical (for both queer studies and modernism) novel Nightwood.3 Barnes takes up the psychoanalytic link between the lesbian and transference to reformulate it, providing a more complex understanding of the structure of transference. In her depictions of lesbian relationships, Barnes exposes two seemingly conflicting structures at the heart of transferential love: metaphor and repetition. Barnes’s depiction of the lesbian does not extricate her from the psychoanalytic understanding of the lesbian as loving, imbuing her, for instance, with the more “radical” element of desire. Rather, Barnes rewrites love, revealing queer forces of disfigurement, heterogeneity, and negativity at the heart of what seems to be the capacity for love and fantasy to redeem and unite. Barnes’s disarticulation of lesbian fantasy becomes an important innovation that sets the stage for the contemporary rewriting of love. Finally, I turn from psychoanalysis and Barnes’s modernist account of love to contemporary rewritings of lesbian fantasy. I read elements from Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) and Eleanor Catton’s The Rehearsal (2008) in order to examine both the continuity and difference between Barnes’s modernist love and these contemporary accounts of lesbian relationships.4 In both of these texts I L E S B I A N FA N TA S Y

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suggest that the concept of fantasy (inherited both from psychoanalysis and from Barnes) remains central to Smith’s and Catton’s understandings of lesbian love. What makes these contemporary rewritings of love distinctly different, however, is the way in which amorous fantasy can no longer be understood as that which can conceal or erase negativity. Indeed, these contemporary accounts of lesbian fantasy include forms of negativity as central to love. OBSERVATIONS ON LESBIAN LOVE On the subject of lesbian sexuality, psychoanalysis is not unlike a broken record, repeating over and over again the same equation: female homosexuality = love. Lacan asserts that certain women love “their partner, who is nevertheless homo to the hilt . . . as the same in the Other.”5 And Bruce Fink clarifies the force of this claim by reminding us that Lacan “qualifies lesbianism not as a perversion but as ‘heterosexuality’: love for the Other sex—that is, women.”6 Continuing this reiterative pattern, Jacques-Alain Miller almost identically reasserts, “For women it [homosexuality] is constituted in the domain of love, while for men in the domain of desire.”7 Psychoanalysis in this regard gives new meaning to the phrase “lesbian fantasy,” insofar as the lesbian is intimately tied up with the fantasy screen that unifies and redeems the romantic couple. The moment in the psychoanalytic corpus that speaks most explicitly to this link between lesbian love and fantasy occurs in “The Signification of the Phallus” where Lacan asserts that “male homosexuality . . . is constituted along the axis of desire, while female homosexuality, as observation shows, is oriented by a disappointment that strengthens the axis of the demand for love.”8 This passage is interesting not simply because it reiterates the motive to choose Edith Windsor as the ideal plaintiff to challenge gay marriage laws in the United States; it also clarifies that lesbian love raises the question of clarity. In Gender Trouble Judith Butler reads this passage with an emphasis on Lacan’s phrase “as observation shows” to suggest that there is nothing particularly obvious about the genealogy of lesbian subject formation that Lacan seems able to observe without much difficulty.9 The passage from “The Signification of the Phallus” does not simply index, as Butler’s analysis suggests, the analyst’s pretense to epistemological mastery when faced with homosexuality in women. Rather, that Lacan can “observe” the relationship between female homosexual30

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ity and love points to the way that love for psychoanalysis always aims to produce the illusions of transparency, fantasmatic coherence, and unity; it aims to produce, in other words, something that can be unproblematically observed. While it may be the case, as Elizabeth Grosz argues in “The Labors of Love,” that “lesbianism has been left largely unexplained by psychoanalytic theory,” it is nonetheless not quite true that “the topic of lesbianism” stands out as “a point of constitutive incoherence and confusion.”10 Indeed, psychoanalytic theorists quite successfully imagine lesbians so that the image concretizes into immutability. The representation of the lesbian seems to cohere almost too completely, not only forcefully associating the lesbian with love, but also establishing this association on the basis of repetition without difference.11 Since female homosexuality is constituted as love insofar as it finds the same in the other, it seems telling that psychoanalysis cannot move beyond saying the same thing about homosexuality in women over and over again. Thus, if homosexuality in women is dangerous, as many critics claim, it is not because it is antipatriarchal, resistant, noncompliant, or subversive. Rather, lesbian love comforts and consoles; it offers a sort of closure. And psychoanalysis is most vulnerable to the threat posed by lesbian love insofar as the lesbian has a distinctive relationship to not just love but also psychoanalysis itself. This connection becomes particularly clear when one considers the fact that love in psychoanalysis goes by another name: transference.12 Lacan suggests that without transference there would be no psychoanalysis, which Collette Soller glosses as the recognition that “psychoanalytic practice and transference are identical.”13 Beyond simply clarifying the constitutive function of transference for psychoanalysis, this idea has an even more fascinating implication: that psychoanalytic practice and love are identical. After all, Lacan does tell us: “Transference—is love.”14 Lacan would not be alone in taking this position. In Tales of Love Julia Kristeva also suggests that “transference love is . . . the royal road to the state of love.”15 Even as psychoanalysis may be identified with love, it remains somewhat ambivalent about this identification. After all, the point of the transference is ideally to move beyond it; by withholding the love the analysand demands, the analyst teaches her, as Freud argues in “Observations on Transference-Love,” “to overcome the pleasure principle, to give up a satisfaction which lies to hand but is not socially acceptable, in favor of a more distant one.”16 To “give up” the L E S B I A N FA N TA S Y

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“satisfaction” of the transference is also, as Freud suggests here, to “overcome,” or to move beyond, the pleasure principle. By rejecting the pleasure of a consistent, reciprocal transference, the analysand eschews love for the sake of her desire. For psychoanalysis, the promise of love is that it ends, and its threat is that it might not. For this reason, Laplanche and Pontalis specify in The Language of Psychoanalysis that the transferences “do not constitute aides to cure except in so far as they are explicated and ‘destroyed’ one by one.”17 The analyst approaches these transferences “one by one” in order to demystify the “the One of universal fusion,” dissolving the dream of completion.18 In some instances, then, lesbians make good on the promise of transference love, particularly when the female homosexual is also hysterical, as JacquesAlain Miller describes in “On Perversion”: “You have to consider female homosexuality in hysteria, which can disappear like magic when a woman enters analysis. As long as she can love the analyst as inaccessible, the longing for love which is realized in female homosexuality may immediately shift into the transference and you may witness a magical cure. Others take a very long time.”19 In the space of two sentences, the lesbian stands in for the whole of the analytic process; the hysterical female homosexual becomes the ideal analysand. She partakes of the transference, overcomes it, and moves beyond the pleasure principle toward the “magical cure.” Miller thus idealizes the ability to divest the female homosexual of her idealizations. Or, in other words, alleviating the lesbian’s love instantiates Miller’s own. It is not simply fortuitous that Miller produces this figure of the hysterical female homosexual who confirms the success of transference in analysis in the same passage that mentions “others” who “take a very long time,” others who may never be cured. These female homosexuals, one presumes, cannot so easily give up on the transference; they remain enfolded in the satisfaction of the pleasure principle; they will not give up their love. The co-presence of analytic success and analytic failure in this passage indicates that these figures are far from separate. Both figures inspire love, as Miller’s idealization of the lesbian who can give up her idealizations suggests. Miller’s account of lesbians-in-love makes clear the fact that, for better or worse, the lesbian—through her love—is constitutively linked to psychoanalytic theory. That there are Miller’s “others” who “take a very long time” suggests that what psychoanalysis sees in the love of the female homosexual is the 32

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potential retardation of the analytic process, its being forever moored in fantasy, in the median stage of a benign, essentially conservative transference love. By doing so, psychoanalysis maintains a certain stubborn attachment to the lesbian not as the same but as other. In the very act of asserting the otherness of these women, psychoanalysis itself seems to fall in love. But how could psychoanalysis fall in love with the lesbian-as-other? The simple answer to this question is that it cannot. Lacan clarifies that “everyone senses and sensed that the problem is how there can be love for an other.”20 Indeed, for Lacan, there can be no love for an other, only love for the same. But if, by othering the figure of the lesbian, psychoanalysis can disidentify with her love, then it is free to become enamored of the image of itself as not-in-love. Illustrating this interplay of identification and amorous attachment, Lacan tells a story of a “parakeet that was in love with Picasso”: “How could one tell? From the way that the parakeet nibbled on the collar of his shirt and the flaps of his jacket. Indeed, the parakeet was in love with what is essential to man, namely, his attire. . . . The parakeet identified with Picasso.”21 The story of Picasso’s parakeet perfectly depicts the situation of the female homosexual as psychoanalysis sees it, emphasizing especially the absurdity of identifying with something radically different from oneself. Love requires a fantasy so persuasive that a parakeet could see the image of itself in a man, so deceptive that two “others” could see themselves as same. Not being able to recognize itself in another’s image, the lover can love only him or herself. When faced with the otherness of the lesbian, psychoanalytic anxiety rises to a fever pitch, turning run-of-the-mill resistance into a fully-fledged aggressive negation. Psychoanalysis must distance itself from the lesbian, asserting its position as not-in-love, in order to maintain a coherent image of itself. Even as it attempts to assert distance from the paralyzing force of love, psychoanalysis is seduced by the very state—being completely immersed in passionate attachment—in which it cannot, at any cost, bear to find itself for too long. The distance established between the lesbian and psychoanalysis shores up the boundaries of the latter in its difference from the former or cultivates a sort of narcissistic self-love. Psychoanalysis, in other words, is in love with itself as the demystification of the sort of love in which the lesbian finds herself enthralled. Such psychoanalytic narcissism represses the fundamental relationship between psychoanalysis and the lesbian, represses the implication that lesbian L E S B I A N FA N TA S Y

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love and psychoanalysis might well be identical. How can psychoanalysis escape from its paralyzed relation to homosexuality in women? Must psychoanalysis always relate to the lesbian narcissistically? One sort of response to the paralysis of lesbian love from some feminist and queer scholars is to offer a critique of the psychoanalytic understanding of female homosexuality at the level of desire. According to psychoanalysis, to the extent that lesbian sexuality is situated in the domain of love, it is not properly sexuality; it does not partake of desire. Many critics have pointed to this phenomenon either to change or to reject psychoanalysis. Elizabeth Grosz, for instance, points out that in psychoanalytic theory “the lesbian relation must be regarded in desexualized terms, as a regression to the mother-infant relation or a relation of narcissistic mirroring.”22 This failure to grant sexuality where sexuality is due, as Grosz sees it, demands a complete repudiation of the psychoanalytic apparatus to understand or to explain lesbian desire. Others, rather than simply rejecting psychoanalysis, respond more hopefully to its depiction of female homosexuality as “barely sexual at all.”23 They attempt to rethink lesbian desire in psychoanalytic terms, making incoherent and unwieldy the alltoo-coherent image psychoanalysis produces. Too often, adducing the female homosexual’s desire in response to her desexualization makes her more palatable not only to lesbian feminist critics but also to psychoanalysis itself. Following from the claim with which her book opens—that “within psychoanalytic discourse, lesbians have been most striking in their invisibility”—Adria E. Schwartz recuperates female homosexuality from the vantage point of psychoanalysis by arguing that “lesbians stand outside the laws of patriarchy and compulsory heterosexuality.”24 A position like this one seems to “resist,” as Schwartz puts it, the psychoanalytic circumscription of lesbianism, but, as a variation on a more general theme in feminist criticism, this position turns out hardly to resist psychoanalysis at all.25 Schwartz’s argument resonates with the discordant keynote of lesbian sexuality: its capacity to disorganize the supposed harmony between the sexes. renée c. hoogland gestures toward this disharmony where she claims that “lesbian sexuality, falling outside the terms of the ‘social contract’ inevitably provokes a specific (though usually undefined) anxiety with respect to .  .  . the stable operation of the system of gendered heterosexuality.”26 This critique ultimately might translate to an assertion not unlike Judith Roof ’s: “representing lesbian sexu34

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ality conspicuously unmasks the ways gender and sexuality normally coalesce to reassert the complementary duality of sexual difference.”27 Such interventions into psychoanalytic discourse claim, against psychoanalysis, that lesbian sexuality does not “make up for the sexual relationship” through love. Rather, homosexual relations between women expose the sexual as impossible by explicitly evincing the noncomplementarity of all desire, hetero and homo alike. Such an understanding of female homosexuality may well resist the fantasy of sexual fusion, but it does not resist psychoanalysis “as such.” In fact, if female homosexuality is disunified in the way these critics suggest, then it cannot help but offer psychoanalysis a seductive image of itself. This radical, desirous lesbian might suggest, as Lacan does, “the point is that love is impossible and the sexual relationship drops into the abyss of nonsense,” registering both the futility of love and the failure of sex to make the couple cohere.28 To the extent that the figure of the female homosexual and psychoanalysis butt heads in a narcissistic battle-to-the-death, the lesbian’s simply aligning herself with psychoanalysis cannot alleviate the pressure of this specular anxiety. By becoming the avatar not of love but of the impossibility of all sexual relationships, the “revolutionary” lesbian reflects for psychoanalysis the mirror image of itself, confirming the latter’s theory of desire, giving it substance by bearing the burden of proof. Psychoanalysis might well find itself falling head over heels once again, this time by identifying with the female homosexual. If it is the case, as I have suggested, that psychoanalysis must disidentify with the female homosexual’s threat of retarding the analytic process in an eternal exchange of transference, then understanding the lesbian as not-in-love would seem to remedy this dilemma. But if psychoanalysis has to disidentify with love so as to situate itself as not-in-love, then finding itself face-to-face with the specter of a sexual subject similarly rejecting such an attachment might well become the propulsive force for identification. Even worse than aggressive negation, identifying with the lesbian—at least since Freud’s failed encounter with the “homosexual girl”—is precisely the sort of relationship psychoanalysis cannot brook.29 That is, psychoanalysis suffers less from a lesbian-centered homophobia than from what one might call “philophobia” in which the lesbian is positioned as the indicative figure of love itself. In Lacan to the Letter: Reading Écrits Closely Bruce Fink briefly details Lacan’s critique of Freud’s “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in L E S B I A N FA N TA S Y

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a Woman,” which suggests that Freud fails to achieve his analytic aim because of his countertransference onto the girl.30 Instead of acting from the position of the analyst, he acts from the position of a subject immured in an imaginary relation of narcissistic attachment and aggression. In relation to the homosexual girl, in other words, Freud feels a little too much love. But what Fink does not address is the fact that Freud seems also to identify with her insofar as his position toward the girl is analogous to the girl’s relation to her beloved. Freud’s transference love thus is a sort of lesbian love or the girl’s lesbian love is a sort of transference love; either way, these loves turn out to be a little too similar for comfort.31 “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman” makes explicit that psychoanalysis finds in the lesbian the representation of its own analytic apparatus, a freeze-frame of the nightmare scenario that female homosexuality allows us to envision: the potential impossibility of breaking through the fantasmatic content of love. But is there any way to get out of this stalemate between the figure of the female homosexual and the discourse of psychoanalysis? Will psychoanalysis and the lesbian be forever locked in an imaginary impasse, each one condemned either to affirm or to destroy the other? In The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire Teresa de Lauretis rethinks the position of the lesbian by encouraging an encounter with otherness and “resignify[ing] the demand for love,” especially taking into account the specificity of lesbian desire.32 She wants to open her text—and, more important, lesbian love—to the intrusion of otherness, to the intrusion of desire. A project that first and foremost emphasizes the sexuality of homosexuality in women seems as though it would also value the unconscious currents that shape desiring subjects. But de Lauretis’s argument relies overwhelmingly not on the possibility of an unconscious otherness but rather on the conscious formation of fantasies, both specific and general, that make lesbian sexuality manifest. By engaging with fantasmatic scenarios that account for her own desire, and operationally defining her use of the term lesbian as centrally including “the conscious presence of desire in one woman for another,” de Lauretis’s project in effect resists itself.33 De Lauretis’s focus on conscious fantasy effectively reiterates the coherence-producing fantasy structure on which lesbian love relies. Elizabeth Grosz refers to de Lauretis’s book as a “labor of love,” but Grosz also censures The Practice of Love as an “insulating” project that keeps psycho36

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analysis “propped up.”34 Though these characterizations may seem at first to be different, they turn out to be two aspects of one critique. Lacan writes of love as a function of “propping”: “one sees in one’s partner what one props oneself up on, what one is propped up by narcissistically.”35 If love aims to construct and preserve the One, then it’s not for nothing that “one” multiplies in this relatively short formulation. Of course the irony is that, here, five “ones” can make one “one,” as if to demonstrate rhetorically the disunity upon which any pretense to unity is predicated. Even as Lacan ironizes the “one” of narcissistic propping, the more jarring irony is that the untenable fantasy of wholeness that always seems to determine the psychoanalytic relation to the lesbian nevertheless remains imbedded in de Lauretis’s project. Insofar as it brings conscious fantasy to the fore, de Lauretis’s argument provides a narcissistic prop for both psychoanalysis and itself, producing the lesbian as a fantasy screen, which obscures the negativity that might disturb this fantasy. Such recourse to lesbian fantasy becomes nowhere more apparent than in de Lauretis’s oft-repeated equation, “it takes two women, not one, to make a lesbian.”36 With this formulation, de Lauretis returns us to the mathematics of love that I discuss in the introduction. Arguably, she modifies the original formulation, making particular a “universal” formula by turning “1 + 1 = 1” into “one woman plus one woman equals one lesbian.” But even this assertion of specificity does not resist the impulse to universalize. Adding the variable of desire to this formula does not produce the remainder that asserts the divisibility of love; the lesbian now has the privilege of fantasizing fusion for herself, rather than having it fantasized for her. Even the circular displacement of one formula for love onto another suggests the seamless bond that characterizes homosexuality between women. DISFIGURING LOVE Djuna Barnes offers yet another sort of answer to the insistent depiction of lesbians as loving, which is, as I have argued, central to the psychoanalytic understanding of the lesbian. It is worth noting here, however, that the lesbianin-love cannot be restricted to simply the discourse of psychoanalysis. Indeed, this representation of the lesbian has great currency in contemporary culture, as evidenced by, at the very least, that U-Haul joke we’ve all heard, which The L Word glossed in the early years of the twenty-first century as “the lesbian L E S B I A N FA N TA S Y

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urge to merge.”37 Barnes’s engagement with the question of lesbian love does not have any pretense to novelty; Nightwood eschews the possibility of a “new” form of love in order to work with and work over the old. Lesbians in Nightwood are not somehow more desiring than in other psychoanalytic texts; they are not less “loving.” Indeed, Nightwood continues the psychoanalytic discourse about the lesbian by taking psychoanalysis at its word. Barnes depicts lesbian love through the lens of fantasy; Barnes’s lesbians strive for the merger, union, and coherence that fantasy aims to provide. Interpreting lesbians through fantasy, Barnes represents the love of the lesbian as not just fantasmatic but also transferential. But rather than simply reporting on a narcissistic relation of self-confirmation, sustained by forward displacement in time, Barnes parses lesbian love into the two mechanisms that operate within and as transference: metaphor and repetition. Here two mutually exclusive structures construct Nightwood ’s understanding of female homosexuality, two structures that also fundamentally construct love. By rearticulating love in this way, Barnes does not so much provide a new understanding of love and female homosexuality as expose the discontinuity and negativity at the heart of both concepts. In this way, Barnes’s representation of the paragon of love, the lesbian, sets the stage for contemporary writers’ recasting of love in terms of amorous negativity. Of course, this is not the first time a critic has inquired into Nightwood ’s relationship to psychoanalysis. Jane Marcus, for instance, reads Nightwood as “a brilliant and hilarious feminist critique of Freudian psychoanalysis and a parody of the discourse of diagnosis of female hysteria.”38 Carolyn Allen, who identifies narcissism as a “negative construction . . . of the gay and lesbian erotic,” argues that the lesbians in Nightwood “illuminate the gaps” in Freud’s theory of narcissism.39 At least part of the reason for interpreting Nightwood as a rejection of psychoanalytic theory has to do with the concomitant critical desire to read in Barnes’s novel its rejection of love. Elizabeth A. Meese clarifies what is at stake in Nightwood ’s purported repudiation of love when she states, “The novel presents a world in which people refuse identification and transference.”40 The imbrication of love and psychoanalysis in Nightwood thus comes explicitly to the fore: to refuse love is to refuse psychoanalysis, to refuse the language of psychoanalysis through which it is impossible to conceive of love without transference. All of these critics could be said to position Nightwood against psychoanalysis, but, contrary to what they suggest, psychoanalysis does 38

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not provide the position against which Barnes can articulate a sort of “oppositional politics.” Far from it: Nightwood is not so much against psychoanalysis as firmly grounded within its discourse. Moreover—and this is part and parcel of the novel’s debt to psychoanalytic theory—Nightwood does not repudiate love but yearns for it, dreams of a lesbian sexuality that grows out of complementarity and fusion. As I write in the introduction, love functions as fantasy by making possible the sexual relationship. It deludes us into believing that we can achieve sexual complementarity, that one person is made for another, that one signifier is made for one signified. Indeed, love provides the ego with the assurance that signifier and signified coincide; two egos, like two signifiers, become One complete unit in the difference-dissolving operation of fantasmatic love. What we should become aware of at this point is that love is not simply a psychic structure but also a figural structure. The fantasy of self-sameness that love provides constructs love as metaphor; like love, metaphor asserts the possibility of identity. If desire is metonymy, as Lacan suggests in “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,” then love is the metaphor toward which metonymy strives as its impossible telos.41 The other facet of Nightwood ’s understanding of love is that which troubles the identity that love would provide: the repetitive elaboration of transference. The other side of love’s metaphoricity, insofar as all love bespeaks transference, is its repetition. Indeed, it is possible to see metaphor and repetition working together insofar as every love object becomes a love object to the extent that, in its repetition “of earlier reactions,” transference attempts to metaphorize past love in the present.42 A “new” love becomes a metaphor for an older one. But repetition compulsion, as Freud and Lacan theorize it, threatens to undo the identity for which love, metaphor, and narrative strive. Peter Brooks suggests that narrative repetitions “may be in some sense painful” insofar as “repetition . . . retards the pleasure principle’s search for gratification of discharge, which is another forward-moving drive of the text.”43 In other words, repetition stifles narrative progress, coherence, and closure.44 Thus, if love seems at first glance to be conservative, simply in the service of complementarity and linguistic transparency, then love also, at the level of repetition, challenges the conservatism of such transparency and the complementary closure for which traditional love stories aim. Against this reading of repetition, I want to suggest L E S B I A N FA N TA S Y

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that Nightwood details the way in which repetition can itself aim to conserve. After all, what does repetition do if not preserve intact one particular instance by iterating it over and over again? By pitting one version of conservatism against another, Barnes shows us that not only love but also conservatism is not coincident with itself. Many critics have noted the nonlinear, unconventional narrative structure of Barnes’s novel.45 Some of the early reviews of Nightwood address this issue, as when Dylan Thomas writes that “it can’t be called a novel, because it only has a sort-of-a-plot.”46 Beyond being simply unconventional, Nightwood ’s narrative is also nothing if not repetitive. Erin G. Carlston gestures towards this when she writes: “While Nightwood ’s narrative structure . . . is quite coherent and even symmetrical, it is also fiendishly intricate, anticipating itself, circling back again and again to the same chronological moment, deferring and baffling temporal resolution and the realization of meaning. Both an aestheticized style and an antirealist narrative structure, then, can express the desire to evade finality.”47 On the one hand, what Carlston describes is Nightwood ’s insistent repetition through anticipation, circularity, and deferral. On the other hand, however, this insistence stands in stark contrast to the all-too-accurate description of the novel as “coherent and even symmetrical.” Given the structure of her sentence, it is clear that Carlston opposes coherence to repetition and, moreover, values repetition over coherence in order to make the claim that Nightwood is antifascist in its evasion of “finality.” However, what Carlston does not see in Nightwood is that coherence and circularity, symmetry and repetition are not opposites. Indeed, in Barnes’s novel, these apparent opposites enable each other. That is, the repetitions of Nightwood do not so much derail narrative closure as produce the sort of closure that repetition should trouble. This drive toward closure seems to be what Jane Marcus refers to when she writes that Nightwood “is such a tightly closed text.”48 Such self-enclosure bespeaks the attempt to shore up narcissistically the boundaries of identity, which characterizes lesbian love in psychoanalysis. But Nightwood also represents female homosexuality in this way. Nora says of Robin: “A man is another person—a woman is yourself . . . ; on her mouth you kiss your own” (143). This passage may prefigure Luce Irigaray’s famous lips, which insist upon the impossibility of a unitary feminine sexual satisfaction, but here Nora does not produce any awareness of difference or multiplicity.49 She understands love as 40

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complete fusion, as the identity between two people, and this becomes most apparent when Nora simply says of Robin, “She is myself ” (127). Many critics of Barnes’s novel have tried to rescue Nightwood from this lesbian narcissism and have attempted, in a variety of ways, to argue that Nora and Robin’s relationship valorizes difference over and against sameness.50 The reasons for this particular critical tendency make good sense. First of all, even if self-sameness is the goal of love, all relationships will fail to live up to this ideal. Another good, though dubious, reason for insisting on the difference within Nora and Robin’s love emerges from Carolyn Allen’s Following Djuna. She “stress[es] the layering of differences in Nightwood ’s erotics between women because lesbian relationships are conventionally described as self-enclosing, and in danger of fusion even in contemporary lesbian communities.”51 Allen’s motivation is understandable indeed, but just because we want something to be true about Nightwood ’s representation of lesbians does not mean that it actually is. Indeed, it may well be the case, that rather than producing an unconventional representation of lesbian sexuality, Djuna Barnes cannot help reproducing female homosexuality as narcissistic, identitarian, self-enclosed, and desexualized. Allen’s fear for the self-enclosed fate of lesbians everywhere should bring us back to Jane Marcus’s assessment of Nightwood as a “tightly closed text.” It’s not for nothing that these critics use virtually identical language to describe lesbian relationships and Barnes’s novel. Indeed, this convergence indicates that at stake in the structure of Nightwood ’s narrative is the question of the lesbian relationship. On one level, one could say that the narrative is repetitive insofar as the first four chapters tell the story of how Nora and Robin get together and then how their relationship dissolves. But the following three chapters return to this initial story; rather than moving the narrative forward, these sections of the book retard its progress. For instance, at the end of chapter 5, “Watchman, What of the Night?” Dr. Matthew O’Connor recounts the fight that takes Robin away from Nora by bringing Jenny and Robin together: “And then Robin was going forward, and the blood running red, where Jenny had scratched her, and I screamed and thought: ‘Nora will leave that girl some day; but though those two are buried at opposite ends of the earth, one dog will find them both’” (106). This is the exact moment we read about for the first time in chapter 4, “The Squatter”: “Then Jenny struck Robin, scratching and tearing in hysteria, striking, clutching and crying. Slowly the blood began to run down L E S B I A N FA N TA S Y

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Robin’s cheeks, and as Jenny struck repeatedly Robin began to go forward as if brought to the movement by the very blows themselves” (76). Some of the phrasing that recurs in these passages has to do with “going forward,” which seems important since this is exactly what repetition should not do. However, in these passages a repeated action—Jenny’s blow—seems actually to produce this forward movement. These moments not only evince the repetition of this event in the narrative but also enact the contradictory way that repetition functions within Nightwood as a whole. Certainly the later passage in chapter 5, to the extent that it is a repetition, moves us backward, but it also nevertheless propels the narrative forward to a point where the repetition finally seems to stop. This end point occurs in the book’s final chapter, “The Possessed,” which resumes the narrative where the first four chapters leave off ; here we find out how Robin and Nora reencounter each other after their initial separation. And it turns out that the last chapter is itself a repetition of something that happens earlier. In the passage quoted from “Watchman, What of the Night?” O’Connor embeds a sort of prediction in the text of the repetition. He claims that Nora and Robin will be reunited by a dog that will “find them both.” This turns out to be not so much a prediction as part of another repetitive structure. O’Connor’s assertion that “one dog will find them both” appears again in “The Possessed” when a dog actually does unite Nora and Robin. Robin wakes up “to the barking, far off, of Nora’s dog,” and follows the sound until the two women meet again (168). Robin then gets “down on all fours” and starts to bark like a dog (169–70). But, as Louis Kannenstine points out, the end of the novel closes a circle that begins much earlier in the narrative, well before O’Connor asserts that “one dog will find them both.”52 When Barnes provides the first extended description of Robin in chapter 2, “La Somnambule,” she describes Robin as “a woman who is beast turning human” (37). Thus, even before Robin seems to turn into a dog, she is already aligned with the nonhuman, making the final scene of the book a return to this earlier moment in the text. The repetition that poses as narrative progress constitutes the moment in which Nora and Robin return to each other; the circular structure of the novel brings the two women back together, concluding the novel with the closure of lesbian love. As if this structure were not enough to emphasize Nightwood ’s investment in fantasmatic, narcissistic attachment, the language that Barnes uses to reunite Nora 42

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and Robin reinforces this model of love. As Robin travels toward Nora, Barnes writes, “Robin now headed up into Nora’s part of the country. She circled closer and closer” (168; my emphasis). Just as the repetitions provide the road map for the circular self-enclosure of the novel, the route that brings Robin back to Nora is itself made of circles. If, as Brooks suggests, repetition should trouble narrative resolution and closure, particularly those forms of closure associated with the construction of the couple, then repetition in Nightwood produces the opposite effect. Rather than disturbing resolution, repetition produces it; rather than keeping the couple apart, repetition brings them together; rather than calling into question the self-sameness associated with lesbian love, repetition reinforces it. Metaphor, on the other hand, disarticulates the fantasmatic coherence, closure, and identity for which repetition strives in Nightwood. A number of critics have approached Nightwood ’s metaphoricity in sometimes contradictory ways. Shari Benstock writes, “It is significant that critical attention” to Barnes “has focused on style.”53 She expands upon this idea by hypothesizing that “this critical move suggests that readers did not understand the subject matter.”54 For Benstock, matters of style, figure, and signification are not of central importance to Barnes’s work.55 However, I want to argue that style, or figure, is central to the novel’s “subject matter.” Only by investigating the operation of metaphor in Nightwood can we get a suitably full idea of what the novel’s arguments about love and lesbian sexuality are. One possible metaphorical reading would be to follow Victoria Smith’s suggestion that Robin “stands in for the past.”56 In this reading, Robin is a metaphor that transparently points to “the past” as its referent. But, in contrast with this sort of reading, I want to suggest that metaphors do not work to produce identity between figure and referent, signifier and signified, lover and beloved. Counterintuitively, the impossibility of producing identity through metaphor has everything to do with Nightwood ’s insistence on self-sameness and closure. In Nightwood, structures of metaphor and repetition, though they seem to conflict, cannot be separated from each other.57 After all, if metaphor were able to make figure and referent, lover and beloved the same, then the structure of metaphor would be fundamentally repetitive; the logical structure of metaphor is tautology. Nightwood ’s metaphors thus directly engage with and respond to its narrative; metaphor forces us to rethink the unities produced by narrative and by fantasmatic lesbian love. Barnes L E S B I A N FA N TA S Y

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frequently describes Nora and Robin’s relationship with figures that can only be called figures of disfiguration. In one instance: “Love becomes the deposit of the heart, analogous in all degrees to the ‘findings’ in a tomb. As in one will be charted the taken place of the body, the raiment, the utensils necessary to its other life, so in the heart of the lover will be traced, as an indelible shadow, that which he loves. In Nora’s heart lay the fossil of Robin, intaglio of her identity, and about it for its maintenance ran Nora’s blood” (56). In one way, this is a simple figure: heart as charnel house, death as the miseen-scène of love. The melancholic construction of identity seems to become the primary focus of this figure. Here, “the fossil of Robin” is carved into Nora as “intaglio of her identity”; identity, in other words, depends upon the lack of identity. Nora’s melancholic incorporation of Robin thus traces an almost too familiar outline of modernist love. But Barnes abjures this apparent simplicity insofar as it is not just “personal identity” but the identity of love that this figure disarticulates. Love, on the one hand, is analogous to “the ‘findings’ in a tomb,” which Barnes likens to “raiment” and “utensils.” As a pharaoh is buried with the accoutrements that he will need in the next life, so too does Nora take love to the grave. At this point, love is an aesthetic object that is, moreover, not associated with any particular referent. On the other hand, as the passage proceeds, “love” becomes aligned with the particularity of “that which he [the lover] loves,” which in the next sentence turns out to be Nora. At the outset of this passage, then, “love” is an abstract, unmoored universal, but the trajectory of the metaphor forces this universality to pass through degrees of particularity: from “that which he loves” to Nora herself. Such a movement from general to specific produces a concept of love that is somewhat more complicated than a love that would be linked to either the abstract or the concrete. And though the passage begins by charactering love as an aesthetic object, it ends by suggesting that love is also organic, a “fossil.” Thus, if this is a figure of disfiguration, it is not primarily because it puts into play a conventional conception of love as melancholic. Rather what Barnes disfigures in this passage is the very idea of love itself; love is both abstract and concrete, both universal and particular, both aesthetic and organic. Elsewhere, Barnes writes again of Nora and Robin’s love: “As an amputated hand cannot be disowned because it is experiencing a futurity, of which the

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victim is its forebear, so Robin was an amputation that Nora could not renounce” (59). As another seemingly easily readable figure of melancholia, the amputation of Robin from Nora once again emphasizes the centrality of Robin’s absence to Nora’s “identity.” But what is more astonishing by far about this figure is the strange temporality Barnes employs to make an otherwise banal point about the necessity of loss in love. This figure is as much about something like transference as it is about melancholia. The amputated hand, a remnant of the past, persists into the future as though it is not absent, just as an old love through transference gets recreated anew. In other words, Nora is different from herself through the melancholic incorporation of Robin, and Robin—the amputated love object—by occupying at least two distinct temporal moments at once, is not the same. O’Connor produces a related metaphor when he recounts the story “of a dead horse that had been lying long against the ground. Time and birds and its own last concentration had removed the body a great way from the head. As I looked upon that head, my memory weighed for the lost body; and because of that missing quantity even heavier hung that head along the ground. So love, when it is gone, taking time with it, leaves a memory of its weight” (127). In this passage the amputated hand of the previous passage is replaced by the decapitated head, but, despite this difference, they both point toward a similar reading of love. Indeed, though the “content” of all three figures that I cite is different, they seem nonetheless to say, almost compulsively, the same thing: love is about loss, a loss that goes unrecuperated and unmourned. And what could be more clichéd? These clichés become even more marked when one considers Nightwood in relation to Sarah Waters’s The Night Watch (2006).58 Not only does Waters seem to take the title of her book from Nightwood ’s chapter 3, “Night Watch,” but she also plays on the relationship between lesbian love and melancholic metaphors that Barnes evokes. Waters writes, “I’d suffer more pain than this . . . to be sure of Julia! She thought of the things she’d readily give up—the tip of a finger, a toe, a day from the end of her life” (152). Or: “She had often longed, in fact, for her jealousy to take some physical form; she’d sometimes thought, in moments like this, I’ll burn myself, or I’ll cut myself” (159). Of course, these dreams of self-injury and the amputation of body parts aim to ensure that one will not have to amputate the loved one;

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Waters’s character, Helen, wants to literalize Barnes’s metaphors so that the disconnection they figure does not become the truth of love. The cliché of love as loss is not distinct from the ideal of One in love; rather the two ideas are fully imbricated. But Djuna Barnes does not simply uncritically repeat commonplaces about tragic lesbians. She also significantly reworks them. This becomes most apparent in a metaphor that is unlike the rest inasmuch as it seems to have nothing to do with loss: “Robin and she, in their extremity, were a pair of opera glasses turned to the wrong end, diminishing in their painful love” (62). If I refer to Barnes’s metaphors as figures of disfiguration, then this is the place where the force of disfiguration becomes strongest. On the one hand, this “pair of opera glasses” brings into focus the discontinuity that inheres in lesbian love. Nora and Robin, as a “pair,” produce a love that is at once both singular and multiple; they are metaphorized as one object that is constituted by more than one. On the other hand, the pair of opera glasses that focuses Barnes’s engagement with the self-contradictory construction of love also functions to unfocus love. The reversed opera glasses as which Robin and Nora figure distort the image of love. Looking through the wrong aperture mars love so that it becomes almost unrecognizable as love. This moment casts in a different light the other, seemingly more conventional metaphors that I have cited. These figures can no longer be understood as simple representations of melancholia. Ostensibly, Nora and Robin’s “love” is the referent of these three figures, which describe the fissures and disjunctions that exist within this love. If these metaphors refer to their love, then this relationship creates an identity between figure and referent. However, the images of the decapitated horse and the wrist without a hand, in particular, seem to suggest that the referent of these figures is nonself-identical or itself disfigured. The problem with Nora and Robin’s relationship is that they cannot achieve the self-sameness that metaphor struggles to establish. In this way, we can think of their relationship as the thematization of not simply the particular metaphors that Barnes produces but metaphor as the privileged trope of fantasy. Just as fantasy aims to produce coherence and identity, so too does metaphor figurally try to achieve the same goal. If metaphor seeks to produce an identity between itself and its referent, and especially if the supposed referent is itself nonself-identical, then metaphor here fails to

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achieve its identitarian aim. And as metaphor breaks down, so too does fantasy; the fracturing of fantasy disfigures love. Barnes’s metaphors thus disfigure love because they represent love as discontinuous, ruptured, failed, and fragmentary, even as repetition reinforces the coherence of the “conventional” love plot. But it is not simply the case that there is one structure—repetition—that enables love and another unrelated structure—metaphor—that makes love impossible. Rather, repetition and metaphor are implicit in each other; they are part and parcel of the same movement. Insofar as these two structures dominate transference in particular, and love in general, Barnes suggests that love constructs and destroys unities simultaneously. The moment in which love materializes—and the lesbian is the indicative figure of love for psychoanalysis—it also dematerializes; the moment in which a lover seems to unite with her beloved is also the moment in which the two are most rigorously and violently separated. Though we can only perceive the disfiguration of love by looking the “wrong” way though a pair of opera glasses, Nightwood suggests that this “wrong” way is also the only right way. A distorted picture of love is an accurate one. PREFIGURING AMOROUS NEGATIVITY With this distorted picture of lesbian love in mind, I would be remiss were I to suggest that such disfiguration is exclusively at issue in this text. Indeed, Barnes offers in Nora and Robin’s relationship a complex and contradictory account of love and the redemption it promises. But it would not be quite true to say that in their relationship Barnes explicitly depicts the impossibility of such redemption. Nora and Robin’s relationship is distinctively modernist in its contradictoriness; we find in this relationship the modernist ambivalence of which I write in the introduction. Nora and Robin’s love certainly is disfigured, but it can still be, and regularly is, redeemed by critics. Centrally important to the possible redemption of Nora and Robin’s love is Jenny Petherbridge, in every way the central figure of negativity in the text. Petherbridge functions in Nightwood as a desublimated scapegoat. We can blame on her the dissolution of Robin and Nora’s relationship. She becomes the “evil” intruder who interferes in the sanctity of their union. Were it not for

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her, Nora and Robin’s love might survive. Implicitly, this is what critics address when they heap value judgments upon her or uncritically repeat the attitudes toward her expressed by the other characters.59 Her status as a scapegoat, as the repository of all the text’s negativity, makes Jenny Petherbridge the most compelling (and queer) character in the text. Critics almost universally dismiss Petherbridge. She is “evil,” “foolish,” “horrible,” “odious,” “abject,” “parasitic,” and “mediocre.”60 Or, forgoing value judgments, other critics simply identify her as a minor character. In Djuna: The Formidable Miss Barnes Andrew Field characterizes Petherbridge as “another distraction from the main play of passion.”61 And, in the 2006 reissue of Nightwood, Jeanette Winterson writes in her preface of the “avid,” “ruthless,” and “predatory” Jenny.62 She also suggests that in Nightwood ’s lovers (Robin and Nora) we find “a truth . . . that moves us beyond the negative” (xii). Winterson expands upon this where she writes: “there is great dignity in Nora’s love for Robin. . . . We are left in no doubt that this love is worthy of greatness—that it is great” (xiii). But nowhere in her preface does Winterson manage to redeem Petherbridge’s predation as nurturing, her ruthlessness as mercy. In no way can Winterson make Petherbridge into the paradigm of dignity and greatness as she does for Robin and Nora. Jenny Petherbridge manages to escape having the responsibility of purveying the “truth” that is “beyond the negative” because she is not great, not dignified, not somehow “beyond” the force of negativity; she is “avid and ruthless,” a predator, debased and debasing. Nightwood certainly does not foreclose on these sorts of readings. Barnes, after all, seems less than sympathetic toward her; and it’s true that when one thinks of Nightwood Nora, Robin, Dr. O’Connor, and even Felix Volkbein come to mind more readily than Jenny Petherbridge. Because critics so reliably forget or reject Petherbridge, she deserves closer examination. When one dismisses her, or simply misses her, one also misses the fact that in her are condensed the structures of love that I have already detailed; one misses the fact, in other words, that she is not, as Field suggests, “the powerful petty demon of anti-love,” but she is rather the face of love itself.63 Barnes’s anatomy of love does not actually culminate with her depiction of Nora and Robin’s relationship; it is too easily sentimentalized, too easily redeemed. After all, if one were to valorize Nora and Robin’s love as the epitome of lesbian sexuality, that reading could quickly fall into the trap of attributing

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to it either success or failure, fusion or noncomplementarity. I want to suggest, instead, that Barnes’s portrait of Jenny Petherbridge, the woman who “steals” Robin from Nora, provides the most concentrated and most persuasive example of Barnes’s interpretation of the lesbian. With Petherbridge, Djuna Barnes queers love—here, specifically lesbian love—by depicting it as the embodiment of the negative. Barnes’s text is therefore unmistakably ambivalent about love. On the one hand, love becomes associated with the negative through Jenny Petherbridge. On the other, however, love can still be redeemed in Nora and Robin’s relationship (particularly, if one does not look too carefully at its disfiguration). But, in the midst of Barnes’s modernist ambivalence, we find in Petherbridge a precursor to contemporary amorous negativity. Whereas in Nightwood the negative love for which Petherbridge stands has to be vilified in order to sustain the possibility of amorous redemption, contemporary writers will do away with this ambivalence in order to focus exclusively on the negativity of love. We would do well, then, not to dismiss Petherbridge as the negative against which we can pose the possibility of redemption but rather to examine how Barnes represents her in relation to love. Condensed into Barnes’s representation of Petherbridge are the structures of love: metaphor and repetition. Petherbridge undoubtedly constitutes the most “transferential” figure in the text. Her physical appearance is not identical with itself: “She had a beaked head and the body, small, feeble, and ferocious, that somehow made one associate her with Judy; they did not go together. Only severed could any part of her have been called ‘right’” (65). Here Petherbridge embodies the disjunctive logic of Nora and Robin’s love; her figure might be more appropriately, if awkwardly, called a disfigure. She is bricolage become body; she is Frankenstein’s lesbian monster. But, beyond her appearance, it seems that her whole life is an aggregate of collected parts. “She has a longing for other people’s property,” Barnes writes, and we read about a number of objects that she takes, or wants to take, from others: a child (104), the portrait of Felix’s fake grandmother (114), Robin’s mind (124), plaster virgins (124), and photographs from the past (102). Most important, however, she steals love: “When she fell in love it was with a perfect fury of accumulated dishonesty. . . . She appropriated the most passionate love that she knew, Nora’s for Robin” (68). These are the keynotes of Jenny Petherbridge; she steals other

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people’s lives, other people’s loves. And what is this if not the hyperbolic culmination of the logic of transference? Petherbridge metaphorizes others as herself and repeats the past, though not her own, in order to construct the present. Though none of her parts fit, Petherbridge seems like she could become complete; O’Connor suggests that “one is always waiting for the rest of it, for the last impurity that will make the whole” (98). The tension between her discontinuity and the expectation of her accession to wholeness perfectly captures the dilemma of modernism’s ambivalent love. She is neither one thing nor the other, but moving toward both diametrically opposed poles simultaneously. And, in the movements toward wholeness and disarticulation, everything she touches turns to shit: “what she steals she keeps, through the incomparable fascination of maturation and rot” (98). The pursuit of oneness produces what exceeds enumeration, waste matter, “rot.” Moreover, she thrives on excrement: “Jenny the bird, snatching the oats out of love’s droppings” (101). This passage evokes what becomes most important about Jenny Petherbridge. It is not simply that what she touches she turns to shit, but rather that whatever she touches is already shit. It is almost as if only a body as monstrous as hers, as piecemeal, as hybrid, can metabolize waste in order to produce more waste. This is, of course, not to say something so absolute, so totalizing as “Jenny Petherbridge exposes the way that all love is shit.” Rather the fact that Barnes insistently associates her with decay, corrosion, and waste points to her function as the repository of negativity in the book, a function that Nightwood and its critics cannot do without. But just as Petherbridge cannot be sublimated, so too she cannot be fully desublimated. In addition to making her the most reprehensible character in Nightwood, Barnes also seems to condense into Petherbridge all the central characters in the novel.64 After all, it is not just Jenny Petherbridge who steals other people’s pasts to make them her own. Felix’s father, Guido, makes up his own and, by extension, Felix’s history: “he had said that he was an Austrian of an old, almost extinct line, producing, to uphold his story the most amazing and inaccurate proofs” (3). And the portraits of relatives that adorn Felix’s home are simply “reproductions of two intrepid and ancient actors,” which “Guido had found . . . in some forgotten and dusty corner and had purchased . . . when he had been sure that he would need and alibi for the blood” (7).65 But beyond this, Felix at times sounds strangely like Petherbridge, who “could not partici50

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pate in a great love, she could only report it” (68). Felix also seems able only to report: “He tried to explain to her what Vienna must have been before he was born; yet his memory was confused and hazy, and he found himself repeating what he had read, for it was what he knew best” (43). Moreover, Petherbridge is not the only character in the book in whose home is a collection of “wrong things,” as O’Connor puts it (104). The description of Nora and Robin’s home together sounds equally “wrong”: “There were circus chairs, wooden horses bought from a ring of an old merry-go-round, Venetian chandeliers from the Flea Fair, stage-drops from Munich, cherubim from Vienna, ecclesiastical hangings from Rome, a spinet from England, and a miscellaneous collection of music boxes from many countries” (55–56). When we are introduced to this scene, it is romanticized in a way that Petherbridge’s “wrong things” never could be. Barnes writes of Nora and Robin’s home, “In the passage of their lives together every object in the garden, every item in the house, every word they spoke, attested to their mutual love, the combining of their humors” (55). But in less than a page these “humors” turn to bile: “When the time came that Nora was alone most of the night and part of the day, she suffered from the personality of the house, the punishment of those who collect their lives together” (56). By recasting Nora’s and Robin’s humors as bile, Barnes prefigures the waste matter with which Jenny Petherbridge is insistently associated. This decadence also extends to Dr. O’Connor’s abode, which Barnes describes as another collection of wrongness, but here, “a swill-pail . . . brimming with abominations” is actually represented (79). Barnes also aligns O’Connor with Petherbridge where the former says, “I have always thought I, myself, the funniest-looking creature on the face of the earth; then I laid my eyes on Jenny—a little, hurried, decaying comedy jester, the face on the fool’s stick, and with a smell about her of mouse-nests” (98). Nightwood and its critics generally attempt to distinguish Jenny Petherbridge from the more laudable characters—Felix, Robin, Nora, and Dr. O’Connor—but ultimately we are forced to see that in Petherbridge the commonalities among them become most apparent. She is the scapegoat who can’t be fully scapegoated, the laudable character who cannot quite become laudable herself. Because Barnes collapses into the figure of Jenny Petherbridge the two foundational structures of transference, which we see operating separately elsewhere in the text, she leads us to see Petherbridge and love as synonyms for each other. L E S B I A N FA N TA S Y

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And, in so doing, we derive a very different notion of love from the conception with which this chapter begins. If the fantasy structure upon which love is built aims to produce merger and coherence, then Petherbridge encourages us to begin to modify these conceptions of fantasy and love, paving the way for contemporary rewritings. The love Petherbridge figures more closely resembles the negative queered love of the contemporary novel: a love that does not bind, that insists upon difference, that relies on a heterogeneous and unredeemable fantasy. FANTASIZING THE NEGATIVE Unlike the ambivalent modernists, contemporary writers foreground the negativity of love without giving us the opportunity to take recourse in amorous relations that seem safe and redemptive. However, fantasy is no less a feature of love in contemporary novels than it is in their literary precursors’ accounts of love; the crucial difference is that contemporary writers include negativity as part of fantasy rather than conceiving of the negative as that which must be erased by love. I want to offer two examples of how the terms that have been central to my discussion of lesbians, love, and fantasy in psychoanalysis and modernism undergo changes in contemporary novels. The following two examples are drawn from very different contemporary novels by Zadie Smith and Eleanor Catton: White Teeth and The Rehearsal, respectively. I focus in Smith’s novel on a passing reference to a minor lesbian relationship made by the character Joyce Chalfen. Chalfen couches this relationship in terms that draw explicitly on the association of lesbians with nondesirous loving relationships. Smith, however, recasts this seemingly safe bond in the negative context of histories of violence and racism. Eleanor Catton, on the other hand, approaches lesbian relationships within the context of psychoanalysis, depicting lesbian love as fundamentally transferential. Catton rewrites lesbian transference, experimenting with the ways that seemingly nonthreatening lesbian bonds can be corroded and corrosive. In White Teeth Zadie Smith plays on the association of lesbians with fantasmatic, safe love and shatters our expectation of a redemptive fantasy that erases negativity. Parodying the anodyne reading of lesbians as loving and without desire, Joyce Chalfen anxiously questions the lesbian couple, Neena and Maxine, 52

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with a complete non sequitur: “‘Do you use each other’s breasts as pillows?’” (290). This question seems to evoke all the nonsexual, domestic, loving associations with the lesbian “urge to merge,” calling forth as well the specter of lesbian “bed death.” In this way, Chalfen’s depiction of lesbian relations could not have more in common with the lesbian of psychoanalysis or the redemptive possibility for lesbian romance that we see in Nora and Robin’s relationship in Nightwood. However, Smith goes on to explain the reasons for Chalfen’s question; it does not express the safe, redemptive notion of lesbian fusion but rather evinces orientalist aggression and negativity. Smith explains of Chalfen, “She was cut of the same cloth as the frontier ladies who, armed with only a Bible, a shotgun, and a net curtain, coolly took out the brown men moving forward on the horizon toward the plains” (290). Chalfen’s question turns out to be a weapon of sorts, analogous in Smith’s estimation to a shotgun used to kill indigenous people. However, most interesting is not the homophobic and racist motivations for Chalfen’s question. Rather, the explanation that Chalfen produces to make sense of her bizarre question tellingly indicates the shift in the contemporary novel from the redemptive version of lesbian fantasy to a much more negative vision of love: “‘It’s just, in a lot of Indian poetry, they talk about using breasts for pillows, downy breasts, pillow breasts. I just—just—just wondered, if white sleeps on brown, or as one might expect, brown sleeps on white? Extending the—the—the—pillow metaphor, you see, I was just wondering which .  .  . way . . . ’” (290). The fantasy that at first seems to express the least dangerous, most comforting version of love—using breasts not as erotic objects but as pillows—turns out to be buttressed by another sort of fantasy. The latter fantasy scenario is imbued with myriad forms of negativity: difference where there should be merger (brown versus white), a struggle for dominance where there should be equality, and a history of colonial strife and aggression that marks the fantasmatic appearance of difference and dominance. Lesbian love here— “pillows, downy breasts, pillow breasts” and all—is rife with explicit negativity and cannot be redeemed by images of safety and merger. Indeed, those images are themselves informed by aggression, inequity, and difference. If Zadie Smith represents love as disarticulated by histories of colonialism, racism, and political strife, then Eleanor Catton depicts the redemptive potential of lesbian love as encumbered and ultimately halted by loss and pain that L E S B I A N FA N TA S Y

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inaugurates rather than ends a relationship. In The Rehearsal Catton experiments with the transferential structure of love. Catton’s novel tells the story of the scandal that follows in the wake of a relationship between a high school student and her older music teacher. But in the novel we never hear the story directly from the student, Victoria, or the teacher, Mr. Saladin. The only information we get is reported at a remove, and the person through whom we receive all this information is the private saxophone teacher who instructs many of the girls who go to school with Victoria. While the scandal of Victoria and Mr. Saladin’s relationship is the glue that makes the whole story cohere, more interesting are the relationships on the periphery of this scandal about which we learn during the course of the novel. One such relationship occurs between Victoria’s sister Isolde and another girl at the school, Julia, both of whom take private lessons with the saxophone teacher. The saxophone teacher encourages Julia to pursue Isolde romantically, and they eventually come together. It is unclear precisely what actually occurs between them, whether the erotic encounters we read about them are purely imagined, and we do not know who might be imagining such encounters. The reason for this lack of clarity is that throughout the narration of their relationship it is apparent that theirs is not the only relationship at issue. That is to say, when the saxophone teacher encourages the bond between Julia and Isolde, she seems to understand their sexual relationship (imagined or not) as a version of her own relationship with her saxophone teacher, Patsy, in the past. In a sort of flashback, Catton explains the saxophone teacher’s feelings for Patsy: “‘Patsy,’ the saxophone teacher says finally, ‘Do you know something? Whenever I am alone and intimate with anybody else, whenever I am at ease, or making someone laugh, or kissing somebody, or making someone feel truly good—whenever I feel like I am being really successful as a lover, doing it right—at all those times, part of me is wishing that you were watching me’” (271). Transference love: perhaps not all that surprising, given that Catton here depicts a teacher/student relationship, which is certainly possible to see as structurally similar to the analyst/analysand relationship. However, the transferential structure that Catton here illustrates is important less because of the teacher/student relationship than because of the lesbian love transference here encodes.66 Transference love is indicatively linked to lesbian relationships in The Rehearsal, echoing the psychoanalytically inflected representation of les54

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bian relationships in Barnes’s Nightwood. How frumpy and chaste lesbian love here seems; the saxophone teacher can only imagine transferentially the presence of Patsy during intimate encounters that do not involve her. The chasteness of this love becomes particularly apparent when immediately after the saxophone teacher expresses her exhibitionist fantasy it must be disavowed: “‘I don’t mean that I wish you were there’” (271). Given the insistence upon the chaste—almost courtly—love that frames lesbian attachment in Catton’s novel, it can hardly be surprising that the saxophone teacher is regarded as much safer than Mr. Saladin. A student reports to the saxophone teacher what her mother says: “‘She said thank God you’re a woman’” (94). But Catton, like Smith, does not let us simply take comfort in the safety of women and lesbian love; she also modifies our understanding of what precisely this love consists. Speaking of her relationship with Isolde, Julia’s account of her love might remind us both of the clichés about love and loss and of Barnes’s reinterpretation of them: “And it’s a weird idea, the idea that loss—the massive snatching tearing hunger of loss—is something that doesn’t start when a relationship ends, when she melts away and disappears and I know that I can never get her back. It’s a feeling that starts at the very beginning, from the moment we collide in the dark and we touch for the very first time. The innocence of it—the sweetness and purity of it, the shy and halting tenderness of it—that is something that I am only ever going to lose” (274–75). Again, we find a lesbian love divested of desire: all “sweetness,” “purity,” and “tenderness.” But what is most important about this love is that there is nothing pure about such “purity.” From the very beginning, as Julia suggests, the “purity” is marred by the stain of loss, “sweetness” dominated by pungent bitterness. Moreover, Julia does not eventually encounter this bitterness, this loss, but it is there at the start of the relationship. Catton depicts love as defined by negativity from beginning to end. Thus Smith and Catton rewrite the lesbian love we see in both psychoanalysis and modernism. These contemporary novelists depict lesbian love in a way such that it provides a template for the contemporary, queered loves that are the focus of this book. Even as this chapter has focused specifically on the figure of the lesbian in psychoanalysis, in modernism, and modernism’s legacy in contemporary literature, the consequences of this argument extend well beyond this figure. Insofar as the lesbian is the paradigmatic figure of love, L E S B I A N FA N TA S Y

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Unmaking Love is most concerned not with the lesbian as such but with the love that she figures. The lesbian of these contemporary novels lays bare a nonredemptive love, providing an important counterpoint to the anodyne fiction in which Edith Windsor stands for “romantic love and committed intimacy” in the fight for marriage equality.67 In the following pages I will explore the ways that contemporary literature contests almost all the central terms of this phrase: romantic love, commitment, and intimacy.

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2

THE ENDS OF LOVE Amorous Redemption, the Passion for Negativity, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy

THIS CHAPTER EXTENDS my discussion of the relation between modernism and

contemporary literature by exploring in more detail the continuities and differences between modernist ambivalence and the contemporary unmaking of love. I read James Joyce’s Ulysses alongside Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy, pursuing a question that both texts differently engage: given the negativity that inhabits love, why might one maintain a belief in amorous redemption?1 If love has failed, then how can we preserve the hope that love can unite us, save us, or make us better people? One place to look for, if not an answer to these questions, then an excellent example of the continued belief in the possibility of amorous redemption, would be in the critical tradition centering on James Joyce’s Ulysses. Responding to Molly’s “yes” in the final chapter of Joyce’s novel, some critics read this oft-repeated word as an affirmation of love. For instance, Peter Gay characterizes Molly’s “yes” as the “most positive word in the English language” and reads it as a “declaration of love to life.”2 And, in a similar vein, Robert Scholes reads in Molly’s “yes” “affirmation, acceptance, [and] joy,” going on to argue that this “is what Joyce gives us, and this is what we love in his work.”3 Gay and Scholes, and other critics like them whose readings I address in the following chapter, participate in what I call fetishistic intimacy. The critics who attempt to rescue Ulysses from negativity, making it into the paragon

of a purely redemptive love, must ignore fetishistically the features that disturb the seamless vision of affirmation that they desire. Specifically, what disrupts this vision of affirmation is the contradictory structure of Molly’s “yes,” into which Joyce condenses both negativity and affirmation by raising the specter of a “no” within her “yes.” I use as the framework for my analysis Barbara Johnson’s suspension of the law of noncontradiction in The Wake of Deconstruction.4 By pairing Johnson with Joyce, I argue that in order to understand modernist love we must participate in the suspension of this law. I then turn to Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy, which responds to Joyce’s ambivalent construction of love. Kureishi depicts a scenario in which the main character, Jay, experiences a failed love and, in spite of this failed love, remains hopeful about the redemption that a new love can offer. In representing Jay’s utopian desire for a new, better love, Kureishi demonstrates the fetishistic fantasy that is required for a continued belief in amorous redemption. Equally important, he clarifies that the desire for redemption through love is motivated by a passion for the negativity that both enables and dissolves the redemption that love might seem to offer. JOYCE’S AMBIVALENCE In The Wake of Deconstruction Johnson writes of a letter she received from a critic whose project focused on the topic of death and deconstruction. This critic wanted to know whether the title of her book, which was at the time not yet a book but a set of lectures, could be interpreted as a reference to this topic. Contrary to the critic’s stated desire for a simple “yes” or “no,” Johnson sent her response: “Yes and no (what else?).”5 Johnson’s “yes and no” forms the framework for this chapter, insofar as it allows us to conceive of a yes that is also a no, locating in the possibility of affirmation the contradictions central to modernist love. And in Ulysses James Joyce bears out this condensation of no into yes—and of yes and no into love—in the “Penelope” chapter in particular. He invites us to read “yes” simultaneously as “no,” understanding the embrace of redemptive love as the rejection of it. Where love is concerned in Ulysses, we always have it both ways. A yes that brings to light a no, an affirmation that calls forth negativity and loss, characterizes perfectly Molly’s final “Yes” in “Penelope.” Condensed into this single word is Joyce’s interpretation of modernist 58

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ambivalence; he depicts a love that ends even as it seems to begin, a love under erasure in the moment of being made present. In order to arrive at the specific vision of love that Molly’s “Yes” affords, we must take a detour through Ulysses and the critical tradition centering on it to grasp how love in Joyce’s novel can be understood more generally. Many critics characterize, with surprising frequency, Ulysses as Joyce’s authoritative statement on the redemptive power of love. In the preface to the Gabler edition of the novel, Richard Ellmann effectively frames all future readings of Joyce’s text with the assertion that “Joyce’s theme in Ulysses was simple.”6 And this “simple” theme, Ellmann goes on to suggest, is nothing other than love: “If we consider the book as a whole, the theme of love will be seen to pervade it” (xiii). In Ulysses “the word known to all men has been defined and affirmed” (xiv).7 Even as Ellmann is careful to clarify that the love with which Ulysses is concerned has to be understood as multiple, he nevertheless contradictorily associates the love that Joyce “defines” and “affirms” with union or the unitary. Thus, on the one hand, in order to save Ulysses from “didacticism or sentimentality,” he reminds us that love cannot be synthesized insofar as “we perceive that the word known to the whole book is love in its various forms, sexual, parental, filial, brotherly, and by extension social” (xiv). On the other hand, he intimates that synthesis, or union, provides the paradigm for love in Ulysses, which has “the keenest sense of how love . . . can claim to be all soul or all body, when only in the union of both can it truly exist” (xiv; my emphasis). Despite the fact that he gestures toward the idea that love in Ulysses is complex and potentially contradictory, Ellmann ultimately makes an argument for the simplicity of love in Joyce’s novel, a love that resolves contradictions and reconciles opposites as well as people: “Like other comedies, Ulysses ends in a vision of reconciliation rather than sundering. Affection between human beings, however transitory, however qualified, is the closest we can come to paradise” (xiv). And Ellmann is not alone in this desire to redeem Ulysses through love. Richard K. Cross’s reading of the novel takes as its starting point the assertion that Ulysses “hinge[s] on the issue of love,” which “can scarcely be doubted.”8 Tellingly, Cross suggests that Joyce “bound the leaves of [his] book together with love.”9 Though Cross does not follow Ellmann’s explicitly linking love to unity, he nevertheless implies its unifying, redemptive power by figuring it as a binding agent. This metaphor suggests that were it not for love, we could not conceive of Ulysses as T H E E N D S O F L OV E

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coherent. Only love brings together the separate leaves of paper, making them into a whole. It is hardly surprising that these critics would read love as central to Joyce’s text. In addition to the passage in which the “word known to all men” turns out to be “love,” which Hans Walter Gabler famously “recovered” for his edition of Ulysses, references to love are scattered generously throughout the text (161). In “Sirens” Bloom contemplates: “Hate. Love. Those are names. Rudy. Soon I am old” (234). And in “Cyclops” the word pops up again: “Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred” (273). Famously, Stephen asserts, “Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life” (170). Indeed, Ulysses clearly has something to say about love. However, where Joyce does not just mention love but rather actively engages with it, a slightly less redemptive picture of love begins to emerge.10 Seeming nothing if not critical, Joyce’s text parodies the possibility of unifying love, particularly in relation to the question of the romantic couple. The “Nausicaa” episode enacts perfectly the fantasy of fusion through love while simultaneously marring this fantasy. As critics have noted, this episode parodies the rhetoric of a nineteenth-century romance in which the union of a man and woman in marriage is the traditional telos.11 The perfect Victorian heroine, Gerty MacDowell blushes and fears the “warm flush” of desire, understanding it as a “danger signal” that helps to protect her unblemished purity (292). And this romantic rhetoric reaches a fever pitch as the mere “warmth” starts “flaming,” pointing us toward the moment in which Bloom and Gerty make eye contact when “his eyes burned into her as though they would search her through and through, read her very soul” (292, 293). Joyce here emphasizes the literariness, the constructedness, of Gerty’s idea of love through the rhetoric of fire.12 Departing from this particular literary trope, as Gerty watches Bloom masturbate across the beach, the amorous rhetoric becomes increasingly absurd: “At last they were left alone without the others to pry and pass remarks and she knew he could be trusted to the death, steadfast, a sterling man, a man of inflexible honour to his fingertips. His hands and face were working and a tremour went over her. . . . she seemed to hear the panting of his heart, his hoarse breathing” (299). Here the fantasy of love turns the rapid breathing of his arousal into “the panting of his heart,” when we can be pretty sure that the heart is not the

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primary organ at issue. And, after Bloom has his orgasm, Joyce writes, “Their souls met in a last lingering glance,” depicting the sort of union that love is supposed to produce, even as he also disarticulates this sentimental fantasy (301). Joyce calls into question the possibility of an amorous merger elsewhere in this episode as Gerty experiences the pangs of a longing to be married: “With all her heart she longs to be his only, his affianced bride for riches for poor, in sickness in health, till death us two part” (289). The desire for union in love is undercut by the insistence upon twoness and division that ends this passage. Gerty’s reappearance in the “Circe” episode returns us to the moment in “Nausicaa” when she yearns to recite the wedding vows. But she recites these vows incorrectly in “Circe”: “With all my worldly goods I thee and thou” (361). This mis-citation of the wedding ceremony raises again the specter of dissolution that the figure of the two introduces into her earlier fantasy of achieving marital oneness. And Joyce goes on in “Nausicaa” to disfigure still further the unifying love that Gerty seems to desire. Gerty longs to play the part of the perfect wife, taking up her domestic duties with enthusiasm and skill: “She would care for him with creature comforts too for Gerty was womanly wise and knew that a mere man liked that feeling of hominess” (289). And she fantasizes, in particular, about making for her handsome husband expert “griddlecakes” (289). These imaginings seem idyllic for Gerty, but what makes her domestic idyll possible might strike one as less than romantic. This encomium to heterosexual union begins oddly, to say the least: “And while Edy Boardman was with little Tommy behind the pushcar she [Gerty] was thinking would the day ever come when she could call herself his little wife to be” (289). And the idyll ends when Tommy is done and Edy “buttoned up his little knickerbockers” (289). In other words, what allows Gerty’s reverie of desire is a little boy’s need to urinate. In a certain way, since these two passages bookend Gerty’s daydream, her fantasy seems actually to coincide with a stream of urine. The waste of which Tommy relieves himself in this scene de-idealizes and destabilizes the fantasy in which Gerty participates, suggesting that amorous bliss cannot be separated from the waste matter with which it here coincides. Joyce’s critique of a unifying, redemptive love remains largely implicit in “Nausicaa,” but it becomes more explicit in “Ithaca” as Bloom joins Molly in bed:

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If he had smiled why would he have smiled? To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first, last, only and alone whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity. (601)

In this passage Joyce both explains how the fantasy of union works and exposes the way it fails. Love should allow Bloom—or any lover—to imagine that he is Molly’s one and only; there are only two in this amorous equation, and these two make one. However, Bloom evinces his anxiety about being part of a “series” of lovers rather than the One. Love attempts—and fails—to obscure the fact that there are others that impinge upon this couple, others that precede and may well succeed the lover who imagines him or herself to be the only one. However, the other people that intrude upon Bloom’s and Molly’s relationship are not the primary focus of my reading of Ulysses, even as Molly’s affair with Boylan gestures toward it. I want to focus instead on Molly’s final “Yes,” which both affirms her love for Bloom and recognizes the other members of the “series”—including Boylan—that work to negate it. Molly’s final “Yes” registers less as a moment of pure affirmation than as Barbara Johnson’s evocative, ambivalent “yes and no.”13 Critics of modernism in general and of Joyce in particular have not had a dearth of things to say about Molly’s famous yes. Often, these critics read the repetitive yes as affirmative, following Joyce himself, who famously asserted of Molly in a letter to Frank Budgen: “Ich bin der Fleisch der stets bejaht” (I am the flesh that always affirms).14 This critical tradition begins as early as 1930 with Stuart Gilbert’s famous study of Ulysses, in which he argues, “it is significant for those who see in Mr. Joyce’s philosophy nothing beyond blank pessimism, an evangel of denial, that Ulysses ends on a triple paean of affirmation.”15 Over fifty years later, Frances L. Restuccia still styles Molly’s yes as the very picture of optimism: “And, in breathing new life, through her final memory, into Bloom’s marriage proposal, Molly creates a feeling of rebirth at the novel’s (‘yes I said yes I will Yes’) affirmative close.”16 However, not all critics have read the yes in this way. Indeed, the critical tradition around Molly’s yes is nothing if not a clear instantiation of modernist 62

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ambivalence. Alongside those critics that read yes affirmatively, there are those for whom the yes does not affirm. Robert O. Richardson, revolting against the tradition of affirmation, argues that the yes is not really a yes but a verbal tic: “But the word is not an affirmation; it is a speech mannerism roughly equivalent to ‘Aha’ or ‘Uh.’”17 And Hugh Kenner acknowledges, “And, yes, another expositor’s cliché, that Molly rises to a fervent Affirmation of Life, is equally suspect.”18 Kenner goes on to argue, “No, Molly does not lift up her voice in affirmation whatever the unvoiced rhetoric may be doing.”19 Making modernist ambivalence even more explicit, other critics read Molly’s yes as feminist resistance to the misogynistic treatment of “Penelope” in the early days of Ulysses criticism.20 Joseph Allen Boone, for instance, understands Molly’s yes as both “her self-affirmation” and “a resistant ‘no,’ the refusal of an acting subject to submit her thoughts to others’ desires and demands.”21 In another feminist reconsideration of the “Penelope” episode, Christine Froula argues that “without registering the sadness, the pain, the No that reverberates within Molly’s Yes, we risk unwittingly embracing the violence ‘Penelope”s sadomasochistic scenario exposes.”22 For Froula, the “No” within Molly’s “Yes” constitutes her saying no to the violence of patriarchy.23 The ambivalence in the critical tradition centering on Molly’s yes corresponds to the ambivalent character of Joyce’s text. The attempt to read the yes as simply and uniformly affirmative misses the other equally important feature of Joyce’s depiction of Molly’s desire in her soliloquy: that the yes also articulates a no. Rather than focusing, as Boone or Froula do, on the way Molly’s ambivalence articulates her feminist resistance—creating identity, coherence, or an oppositional political stance—I argue that the simultaneous assertion of yes and no indicates the dissolution, corrosion, and diffusion of the concept of love. Molly’s yes is explicitly linked to love in the final passages of her soliloquy in “Penelope”: the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw T H E E N D S O F L OV E

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he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know . . . and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. (643 –44)

Molly recalls Bloom’s proposal sixteen years before on Howth Head. As she does throughout “Penelope,” Molly punctuates her lyrical memory with yeses that have no clear relation to the content of her monologue. These yeses seem to mark her autoerotic pleasure as she masturbates in bed at the end of the day, thinking about Boylan and other sexual encounters. That these yeses should appear to be in excess of the text corresponds to the excessive pleasure she enjoys. But in the final line of the chapter, as the text and Molly come to climax, the yes no longer seems simply excessive, belonging instead to the content of her narrative: she says “I will Yes” to Bloom’s marriage proposal. Some critics have understood this passage as Molly’s expression of nostalgia for better days with Bloom. Darcy O’Brien writes of these final lines, “That these two pages sum up in a sustained lyrical burst the emptiness of the present and the fullness of the past is the truer, the profounder source of their effectiveness.”24 By attributing “emptiness” to the present and “fullness” to the past, O’Brien writes Molly into a nostalgic fantasy in which her relationship with Bloom was at least at one time coherent and unified. And Richard Pearce suggests something similar: “For their moment of union has a tragic dimension. Bloom is a good man, he was even handsome, but he would provide insufficient physical and emotional satisfaction.”25 Molly registers the loss of a love that exists only in the past, and this loss constitutes, for Pearce, a tragedy. This “tragic dimension” hinges on the fact that Molly and Bloom once believed that love could save them. In the final pages of Ulysses, according to this critical perspective, Molly’s yes expresses her mourning for the failure of love. But what if the failure of this love is not tragic? Can we really attribute to Bloom’s and Molly’s past a “full” love of which their present is now emptied? 64

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The negativity that clearly emerges in the final lines of Molly’s monologue only takes on a “tragic dimension,” only registers as nostalgic, if the negativity is not there at the outset. However, their union never has the potential to be complete; their fantasy of amorous investiture cannot be viewed without also seeing the blemishes that mar and disfigure this fantasy. In this way, the negativity that begins Molly and Bloom’s relationship prefigures Eleanor Catton’s account of “the massive tearing hunger of loss” that “starts at the very beginning” of a relationship.26 For instance, if we consider the end of Molly’s soliloquy on its own, we can see that Molly does not remember the scene of Bloom’s proposal as complete and full. It is nothing if not characterized by an immense gap. As I have cited it, which is the way most critics cite the passage, a large portion of the text gets omitted where Molly’s mind—in the moment of the proposal— drifts away from Bloom and Howth. Molly indicates this gap—a gap that effectively separates Bloom from Molly in the moment of their union—when she says, “I wouldn’t answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know” (643). What follows this passage is a lengthy catalog of all the “things he didnt know,” which include her love affairs before Bloom, sexual encounters, and memories from her youth in Gibraltar. The section in which she elaborates the chasm between Bloom and herself—the section that critics usually leave out—actually turns out to be longer than the section that details Bloom’s proposal.27 Despite the fact that critics often emphasize the union of Bloom and Molly in the final pages of Ulysses, Joyce actually seems to put the emphasis not on their union but on their disunion, on the knowledge that separates Molly from Bloom. And when Molly stops cataloging the vast array of things that Bloom does not know, she returns to Bloom’s proposal by way of a less than romantic characterization of a lover: “and I thought well as well him as another” (643). Although critics regularly avoid this line when looking to Molly’s monologue for hope, we should not ignore what this single line evokes: the utter lack of Bloom’s uniqueness and the infinite potential for his substitutability.28 At the very outset of their love, it is neither “full” nor ideal. At its center there is a gap, which Molly suggests she could attempt—and fail—to fill with any number of love objects. Since her apparently affirmative response comes at the end of a chapter in which she has detailed her adulterous sexual exploits, her desires that exceed her love for Bloom; since Molly’s “Yes” concludes a T H E E N D S O F L OV E

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novel in which it could be argued that the central problem is her infidelity to Bloom with Boylan; since Molly’s “Yes” constitutes a yes in memory alone, this yes also crucially brings to light Molly’s no. During the course of the novel, she says no to Bloom and yes to Boylan; she says no to marriage; she says no to the love that should make two into one. She abjures oneness for the sake of plurality, saying no to a fusional, unifying love. The love that brings Bloom and Molly together in this memory of an afternoon among the rhododendrons on Howth ends where it begins; it is lost even as they seem to find it; Molly and Bloom are separated irrevocably when they come together. Ignoring the indications that Molly’s relationship with Bloom implicitly includes its own failure, some critics attempt to bolster their sentimental claims about the harmony that love makes possible by pointing out that Bloom, like Molly, wistfully recalls his proposal on Howth. Cross suggests that “the decisive memory of passion for both Leopold and Molly is the radiant day in that same year when, among the rhododendrons on Howth, they became engaged.”29 Of this “radiant day” Cross also argues: “for Leopold and Molly alike what has transpired on Howth Head remains crucial, both as a benchmark against which the measure of present discontents can be taken and as a source of solace in difficult times.”30 For Cross, the memory of the proposal on Howth strengthens their relationship in the present by reminding them that they have had better days together in the past, promising hope for the future of their love. Similarly, in the service of elaborating the “simple” theme of Ulysses, Richard Ellmann suggests that “Bloom does understand it [the mystery of love], and so does Molly Bloom, and both cherish moments of affection from their lives together as crucial points from which to judge later events.”31 Suzette A. Henke notices as well that Bloom and Molly return in memory to the same event: “Molly’s ultimate return, like Bloom’s, is to Ithaca and to the mythic moment of consummated love among the rhododendrons of Howth.”32 Henke writes that the monologue in “Penelope” “celebrates [Bloom’s] timeless act of potency.”33 She goes on: “The theme of lovemaking on Howth recurs like a musical motif throughout Ulysses. The final paragraph of the novel achieves, both literally and figuratively, the effect of symphonic climax.”34 Here the shared memory of Howth bears the burden of proving that the sexual relationship is possible after all.

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Against these sorts of readings, I want to suggest that the memory of Howth that Bloom and Molly share does not help to make a case for the unifying, redemptive power of their love. On the contrary, if one looks carefully at Bloom’s memories of that afternoon with Molly, one can trace the disfiguration of this amorous fantasy in Bloom’s memory of it as well as in Molly’s. Bloom’s recounting of the afternoon constitutes the other extended reference to the proposal on Howth in Joyce’s text: Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweetsour of her spittle. Joy: I ate it: joy. Young life, her lips that gave me pouting. Soft warm sticky gumjelly lips. Flowers her eyes were, take me, willing eyes. Pebbles fell. She lay still. A goat. No-one. High on Ben Howth rhododendrons a nannygoat walking surefooted, dropping currants. Screened under ferns she laughed warmfolded. Wildly I lay on her, kissed her: eyes, her lips, her stretched neck beating, woman’s breasts full in her blouse of nun’s veiling, fat nipples upright. Hot I tongued her. She kissed me. I was kissed. All yielding she tossed my hair. Kissed, she kissed me. (144)

Many of the details of Bloom’s memory are the same as Molly’s: the seedcake she feeds him, the rhododendrons, the kisses, and Molly’s breasts. But the one detail that does not appear in Molly’s memory, the one detail that marks this memory as different turns out also to be the detail that critics of Ulysses reliably ignore. And it is this ignored detail that could not be more crucial. In this passage Bloom remembers not only the magic of his union with Molly but also “a nannygoat walking surefooted, dropping currants.” That is to say, central to this memory that supposedly unites him with his beloved, through the ups and downs of their relationship, is nothing other than shit.35 Certainly, we would be remiss if we did not register that shit has a number of connotations for Joyce. It can signal nature, the erotic, or, even, if we consider the trope of “currants,” something edible. However, the presence of waste in the midst of this amorous scene also gestures toward the negativity at the heart of love. And, when Bloom returns briefly to Howth in the “Circe” episode,

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Joyce foregrounds not the seedcake, not Molly’s breasts, but the goat shit. The stage directions read, “High on Ben Howth through rhododendrons a nannygoat passes, plumpuddered, buttytailed, dropping currants” (448). It is as though, in “Circe,” the waste matter metonymically comes to stand in for the whole of Bloom’s memory, which calls to mind both the urine that sets the scene for Gerty McDowell’s domestic idyll and the waste with which Djuna Barnes associates Jenny Petherbridge in Nightwood. As I suggest in the preceding chapter, Barnes similarly depicts Petherbridge’s love as being intimately linked to fecal matter. And if, as I say, this detail marks Bloom’s memory as different, then this difference is not primarily the difference between Bloom’s and Molly’s memories of Howth but rather the difference within love. Indeed, the waste at the heart of Bloom’s memory finds its analogue in “Penelope” in the form of the enormous gap in knowledge that separates her from Bloom. The negativity that Bloom’s shit and Molly’s gap figure returns us to the no within Molly’s yes, suggesting that the only thing her yes affirms is the impossibility of a wholly redemptive, unifying love. FETISHISTIC INTIMACY In Intimacy Hanif Kureishi builds on Joyce’s suggestion in Ulysses that the beginning of love harbors the seeds of its destruction by exploring the consequences of this recognition. Kureishi thus takes his depiction of negative love one step further than Eleanor Catton does in The Rehearsal, which I discuss in the preceding chapter. Catton seems to simply represent the negative beginnings of love, whereas Kureishi does so in order to extrapolate from love’s negativity how we might respond to it. Kureishi’s character, Jay, inhabits the bifurcated love that Ulysses depicts. Kureishi’s novel is not unlike the “Penelope” episode of Ulysses in that it details one person’s thoughts throughout a single night. In this case, Kureishi focuses on the night before Jay, the narrator of Intimacy, leaves his long-time partner, Susan, and their two kids. Just as Molly remembers old loves, thinks of her youth, reflects on recent adulterous exploits, considers the status of the relations between men and women, and masturbates to erotic fantasies, so Jay spends his last night under the same roof as Susan. But beyond these superficial similarities, Kureishi’s and Joyce’s texts are linked in

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their shared investment in exploring the contradictory, ambivalent structure of romantic love. Intimacy focuses, contrary to what the title might initially suggest, on the end of a relationship. Kureishi’s narrator, Jay, begins the novel by telling us that he is leaving his partner: “It is the saddest night, for I am leaving and not coming back. Tomorrow morning, when the woman I have lived with for six years has gone to work on her bicycle. . . . I will pack some things into a suitcase, [and] slip out of my house hoping that no one will see me” (9). By juxtaposing his departure with the novel’s title, Kureishi suggests that “intimacy” does not depend upon sharing love but rather registers the end of love: “This, then could be our last evening as an innocent, complete, ideal family; my last night with a woman I have known for ten years, a woman I know almost everything about, and want no more of. Soon we will be like strangers. No, we can never be that. Hurting someone is an act of reluctant intimacy” (10). Here the ideality of a complete, whole relational unit bound by affection does not constitute intimacy. Jay’s “almost” complete knowledge of Susan—the closeness they share, which is very unlike Molly’s and Bloom’s separation from each other—is not the stuff of intimacy either. Rather, echoing Barbara Johnson’s idea of “using people,” Jay’s “hurting” Susan by leaving her, rending the fabric of their family, making incomplete what seems complete stands out in this passage as the marker of the intimate. Intimacy does not signal the consummation of a traditional form of love; intimacy here registers the unmaking of love. Love still exists, but, in its dependence on pain, severing, and estranging, love looks very different than we expect. Thus Kureishi’s focus in Intimacy is the simultaneous affirmation and negation of the redemptive power of love; Jay, like Molly, says yes and no to love at the same time. However, there remains a crucial difference between Joyce’s and Kureishi’s treatments of love. Whereas Joyce, as I have argued, produces Molly’s yes and no as simultaneous, offering us an affirmation that raises the specter of negativity, Kureishi depicts Jay’s yes and no as a gesture of fetishistic disavowal, as the experience of loss that produces in turn the denial of loss. In this way, Jay follows in the footsteps of some expositors of Ulysses rather than Ulysses itself. Jay tries to rescue love from negativity by continuing to believe in its redemptive potential through what I am calling fetishistic intimacy.

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Freud theorizes fetishism as allowing the fetishist at once to deny the castration he nonetheless recognizes. Of the formation of the fetish, Freud writes: “It is not true that the child emerges from his experience of seeing the female parts with an unchanged belief in the woman having a phallus. He retains this belief but he also gives it up.”36 The fetishist thus becomes the subject who says “yes and no,” who can believe that the mother has a penis even as she clearly does not. And the fetish, for Freud, has a fundamentally protective function: “One can now see what the fetish achieves and how it is enabled to persist. It remains a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a safeguard against it.”37 In other words, the fetish both registers the fact of castration and quite crucially functions psychically to prevent it.38 Though the features of Jay’s fetishism seem similar to Johnson’s “yes and no,” they differ in important ways. Johnson invites us to read her “Yes and no (what else?)” as not simply the hallmark of fetishistic disavowal. In the formation of a fetish the child experiences a loss, a negation, and only then produces an affirmation in order to guard against the negative void. The affirmation of the phallus obscures the void from view. However, Johnson’s bifurcated response works slightly differently. Affirmation does not, in this case, obscure negation. Rather, negation turns out to be already within the affirmation. In other words, the yes does not occlude the no, but rather includes it, producing as part of the affirmation the insistence upon negativity. In contradistinction to Johnson, Jay seems to recognize that love—not just with Susan but with anyone—can only ever foster an incomplete intimacy and failure: “But what is the point of leaving if this failure reproduces itself with every woman? . . . Wouldn’t I have to keep a bag permanently packed by any door I had taken refuge behind? I don’t want to think of that” (53). Faced with the image of the failure of not just one relationship but all relationships, Jay immediately denies having ever glimpsed it: he does not want to think of “that.” Faced, in other words, with its impossibility, he fetishizes the fantasy of a “complete intimacy” in the future in order to guard against the void at the heart of love. That the end of love constitutes its beginning, that losing love produces the hope for it, becomes nowhere more apparent than in Jay’s seemingly nonsensical desire for love. Waxing sentimental in a conversation with his friend, Asif, in which Jay tells him that he is planning to leave Susan, Jay confesses, “‘But I tell you, when it comes to this matter, it is an excess of belief that I suf70

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fer from.’” And Asif responds, “‘Belief in what?’” To which Jay replies, “‘In the possibilities of intimacy. In love’” (106). What does this conversation record if not the staggering power of fantasy to blind us to failure and dissatisfaction? It did not work out with Susan, but somehow, as if by magic, it will work out with someone else in the future: not for nothing is the last word of Kureishi’s novel “love” (123). Beyond refusing to see past failure as the premonition of future failure, Jay also partakes of fantasy in his continuing attachment to the past. And his denial of the failure of former attachments cannot be separated from his hope for love in the future: “How rarely are we really disillusioned! I am not leaving this unhappy Eden only because I dislike it, but because I want to become someone else. The dream, or nightmare, of the happy family, haunts us all; it is one of the few Utopian ideas we have, these days. And so I believe, despite everything—as I told Asif—in love” (82). In this passage Jay believes in love not because the image of the happy family has collapsed in on itself, proving that it is just a facade, empty and false, but rather because this image still survives intact. The memories that Jay takes with him when he leaves propel him into a future in which he fantasizes that they are not just fantasies but real objects. Against all odds, the end of his relationship with Susan does not so much disillusion him as make him hold on even more desperately to the ideal of love. Fetishistic intimacy thus becomes inseparable from the mechanism of nostalgia. Kureishi offers this utopian nostalgia—hoping for a better love despite past failures—as one possible response to the ambivalent depiction of love in modernism. In other words, this would be one possible path that contemporary novelists could take in revising love. Kureishi alludes to the discourse of modernism at a number of moments in which Jay articulates his desire to leave his wife and find love anew: “I may be afraid but I am not cynical . . . I should, too, consider what it is I love about life and other people. Otherwise I will turn the future into a wasteland eliminating the possibility before anything can develop” (17). Seeming to refer here to Eliot’s poem, Jay contemplates a life without love. He leaves behind a failed relationship with Susan in order to pursue a future in which love is possible, a future that would not be a wasteland. Jay and Susan are like Eliot’s typist and clerk, and Jay might as well observe, along with the typist, “‘Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.’”39 Jay wants to turn the “wasteland” of his future into a place in which love can T H E E N D S O F L OV E

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become new: “If you never left anything or anyone there would be no room for the new. Naturally, to move on is an infidelity—to others, to the past, to old notions of oneself. Perhaps every day should contain at least one essential infidelity or necessary betrayal. It would be an optimistic, hopeful act, guaranteeing belief in the future—a declaration that things can be not only different but better” (11). Kureishi links Jay’s nostalgia to modernist aesthetics. It would not be much of a stretch to read this passage as a sort of modernist manifesto along the lines of Ezra Pound’s injunction to “make it new.” Jay wants to “move on,” to betray the past in order to make “room for the new,” for the “different,” for the “better.” Kureishi returns to this notion later when Jay, characterizing his desire to leave his old life, says simply, “We have to make the new” (38).40 Even as Kureishi depicts Jay’s belief in the possibility of a new, better love, he remains deeply skeptical of this belief. In this way, Kureishi echoes Roland Barthes’s assessment of the phrase I love you. Barthes recognizes in it “a revolution, in short—not so far, perhaps from the political kind: for, in both cases, what I hallucinate is the absolute New.”41 Of course, having acknowledged this “hallucination” of novelty, Barthes then goes on to remind us that “this pure New is ultimately the most worn-down of stereotypes.”42 There is no absolute new, and what characterizes the “hallucination” of the new is the fetishistic disavowal of failure in the past. Fittingly, then, Kureishi’s novel ends with a vision of the “complete intimacy” that Jay so desires: “We walked together, lost in our own thoughts. I forget where we were, or even when it was. . . . Suddenly I had the feeling that everything was as it should be and nothing could add to this happiness or contentment. This was all there was, and all that could be. The best of everything had accumulated in this moment. It could only have been love” (123). This passage seems to describe a memory since it is written in the past tense, and Jay “forget[s]” the details of where and when it took place. But it also appears in the narrative after Jay has left Susan the next morning; it is the final passage of the novel so it could also be read as a projection into the future. There is nothing in it to suggest the identity of the other member of this couple; it could be Susan, Nina, or some other woman entirely. That Jay’s lover is not unique, or even identifiable, that the future here collapses into the past exemplifies Kureishi’s critique of love in this novel. We get a glimpse of how, as in Ulysses, one’s partner can function as merely a placeholder. Similarly, temporal 72

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particularity does not register either; past, present, and future palimpsestically coincide, becoming indistinguishable. Because of this lack of particularity, Kureishi illustrates the nostalgia of fetishistic intimacy through which the end of love can become its beginning: the fantasy that substitutes failure in the past for the promise of success in the future. THE PASSION FOR NEGATIVITY Fetishistic intimacy is one possible response that contemporary novelists might produce to the modernist ambivalence about love. The other response, and this is the point of Kureishi’s critique, is to give up once and for all on the redemptive promise of love. Instead, Kureishi suggests that we cultivate a passion for negativity. Kureishi’s passion for negativity, for the unmaking of love, becomes most explicit where he draws our attention to literary precursors for amorous negativity. Intimacy is nothing if not aware of literature’s experiments with love. Kureishi quotes two authors who have far from uncomplicated relations to passionate attachment. Jay contemplates the fact that Susan will no doubt get married to someone else after he leaves: “As Joe Orton says, ‘Marriage excludes no one on the freaks roll-call’” (95). Kureishi’s citation of Orton is interesting less for its skepticism of heteronormativity than for the fact that it is incorrect. In What the Butler Saw Orton writes, “Marriage excuses no one the freaks’ roll-call.”43 Kureishi seems to be suggesting with his misquotation of Orton that marriage—normative though it may be—can include “freaks.” As he writes, “Nevertheless, the most grotesque people get laid, and even married” (95). But Orton’s actual quotation is more to the point, since his line suggests something even more devastating: that marriage, or committed intimacy, cannot be used as an alibi to defend against that which might threaten it.44 The story of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell, of course, gets at this problem in a similar way, and speaks, like the actual Orton quotation, directly to the problem of love that Kureishi addresses in this novel. Orton, after all, died at the hand of his long-time partner, Kenneth Halliwell, who bludgeoned Orton to death and then committed suicide. If there were any paradigmatic image of amorous negativity, certainly Joe Orton’s name brings it to mind. And, elsewhere, Kureishi cites another author, whose appearance gives us greater insight into the novel as a whole. As Jay is packing, he wonders, “What is it I require? T H E E N D S O F L OV E

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A kind of indifference, and some interesting underwear. As Scott Fitzgerald wrote, ‘So we beat on .  .  .’” (88). Fitzgerald too figures a sort of failed love. Though not perhaps as troubled as Orton’s with Halliwell, Fitzgerald’s relationship with his wife Zelda was famously fraught as well. But it also seems telling that Kureishi alludes to the final passage of The Great Gatsby: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. . . . So we beat on, boats against the current borne back ceaselessly into the past.”45 Kureishi’s allusion to Gatsby’s famous last lines allows us to reinterpret them from the perspective of contemporary literature. Instead of reading “the past” into which we are “borne back ceaselessly” as idealized, whole, or perfect, the past to which Kureishi wants us to return is the failed past that Jay can only fetishistically acknowledge and that he avoids. Kureishi wants us to wallow in Molly’s no. By citing Fitzgerald, Kureishi thus reminds us of the impossibility of what he calls a “complete intimacy” and rejects the fetishistic belief that such an intimacy can be maintained. In this way, the apparent choice Kureishi suggests we have in the face of love’s fragmentation turns out to be a false one. Intervening in the discussion about modernism’s ambivalent love, Kureishi implies that we cannot choose between believing in redemption or engaging with love’s negativity, between fetishistically rescuing intimacy and passionately pursuing the negative. Intimacy challenges us to acknowledge that both options are infused with the negative. The desire for union turns out to be motivated by the passion for negativity that a belief in redemption attempts and fails to disavow. It is to this passion for negativity that Freud speaks in Civilization and Its Discontents where he suggests the futility of fetishistic intimacy. Freud writes, “one can try to re-create the world, to build up in its stead another world in which its most unbearable features are eliminated and replaced by others that are in conformity with one’s own wishes. But whoever, in desperate defiance, sets out upon the path to happiness will as a rule attain nothing.”46 If we recast these ideas with the central terms of this book in mind, then we end up with something like Kureishi’s sense of the inescapable negativity of love: if we try to recreate love, to build another intimacy that looks better, more complete, than the one that precedes it, then we will find not change but a repetition of the negativity we tried to eliminate. Freud’s ideas are important for this discussion of love, therefore, not simply because they evince the seduc74

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tiveness of the attempt by some critics of Ulysses to make whole the love of the Blooms or the ubiquity of Jay’s continued belief in love despite all signs to the contrary. Freud also demonstrates what Kureishi knows even if his character doesn’t: that if you choose to embrace fetishistic intimacy, believing blindly in a love that redeems, what creates the union that one imagines to exist is “nothing.” This gap, this void, renders love split from within by a negativity that both founds and disturbs the union that love should create. In this way, amorous redemption cannot be separated from the negative void that makes such redemption impossible. And the passion for negativity that Kureishi recommends constitutes the substance of passion for “happiness” and for the “nothing” that one finds in its place. The happiness that always slips out of our grasp, the love that disturbs rather than consoles, the divisions that are magnified through the lens of love all suggest that love cannot save us; it will not make us whole. So, rather than lamenting, or conveniently forgetting, love’s failures, these problems become the very stuff of love itself. In the two chapters that follow I explore the ways in which contemporary authors pursue negativity in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (in chapter 3), Hari Kunzru’s Transmission, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled (in chapter 4). Building on the passion for negativity Kureishi cultivates, chapters 3 and 4 extend my arguments beyond interpersonal relationships. Amorous negativity for Hollinghurst, Kunzru, and Ishiguro also informs larger structures of temporality and global relatedness that organize social relationships between both individuals and collectivities.

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3

AMOROUS TIME Nostalgia, Temporality, and the Pursuit of Optimism in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty

SINCE UNMAKING LOVE focuses on the construction of love in novels, specifi-

cally,  it is necessary to turn to the question of time. In Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster clarifies the intimate relationship between the novel and time: “in the novel, the allegiance to time is imperative: no novel could be written without it.”1 The novel is an inherently time-bound form. Not only does the novel detail the progression of time—whether the unit of time is large or small—but also it takes time to read a novel. Forster’s account of novelistic temporality importantly also includes some of the ways that the time of the novel can be distorted: Brontë obscures it, Sterne reverses it, Proust condenses it, and mystery suspends it, if only briefly.2 In all of these cases, however, Forster reminds us, time may be distorted but never destroyed. It is this tension between the inevitability of the linear logic of time and the distortion of it that is the subject of this chapter. Specifically, I focus on the ways that love itself distorts temporality, and nostalgia offers the perfect example of this distortion. In Plato’s Symposium Aristophanes characterizes the nostalgia of love as the “desire and pursuit of wholeness” that is only possible in the future because it once existed in the past.3 Through nostalgia, love occurs as temporal division, as a distortion in time. This chapter builds on ideas that have emerged implicitly in the first two chapters of this book. Both chapter 1 and chapter 2 suggest the distorted temporality of love without explicitly addressing it. In chapter 1 I elaborate the

transferential structure of amorous fantasy in psychoanalysis and in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood.4 Barnes’s ambivalent representation of lesbian fantasy articulates a notion of love in the present that builds on the transferential repetition of love from the past. And in chapter 2 the relation between love and temporality appears in the form of nostalgia, which I suggest some critics of Ulysses rely on in their readings of the final chapter of the novel.5 Hanif Kureishi, in his novel Intimacy, draws on such nostalgia in order to attend to the passion for negativity that informs contemporary love.6 Here in this chapter I gather up these loose threads of temporality by explicitly addressing the relation between time and love. In order to examine the temporal dimension of love, I focus on both modernist and contemporary engagements with nostalgia. While this chapter begins and ends with Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2004), my argument takes a detour through E. M. Forster’s Maurice (1971), D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), and Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body (1992) in order to examine the modern fixation on nostalgia.7 I argue that Hollinghurst’s novel critically mobilizes the idea of nostalgic love that Forster, Lawrence, and Winterson uncritically represent. Forster’s, Lawrence’s, and Winterson’s texts seem to suggest that, by having recourse to an untainted idealized past, love can achieve wholeness and provide redemption. Hollinghurst directly engages with this notion of love, but he does not restrict his novel to mere repetition. The Line of Beauty also lays bare the machinery of idealization and occlusion that structures nostalgic love. Thus I connect Hollinghurst’s treatment of nostalgia to the concept of amorous fantasy that I discuss in the introduction and in chapter 1. The Line of Beauty exposes the way in which the idealization of love in the past requires the fantasmatic erasure of negativity, hiding those aspects of amorous relations that do not fit the redemptive promise of fusion. But Hollinghurst goes one step further: he also suggests that the negativity that nostalgic fantasy erases is fundamentally bound up with nostalgia itself. Through a concept I am calling “amorous time,” The Line of Beauty explores the construction of love through the temporal splitting of nostalgia and suggests that nostalgia longs not for wholeness or unity in the past; instead, nostalgia articulates a desire for optimism, for unending potential in the future. And this nostalgic ideal of pure optimism is accompanied by an alloy of negativity, disappointment, or failure. In order to make this argument, I turn to the titular concept of AMOROUS TIME

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beauty, particularly aesthetic sophistication. I suggest that Hollinghurst’s novel asks us to take sophistication literally, understanding it as the process that makes impure an unadulterated substance. Amorous time in Hollinghurst’s novel suggests that negativity contaminates the optimism for which nostalgia aims. HOLLINGHURST’S NOSTALGIA The Line of Beauty partakes of nostalgia in so many ways that one could easily argue that not homosexuality, not class, not AIDS, but nostalgia itself is the primary subject of Hollinghurst’s work. And I would not be the first critic to call Hollinghurst’s work nostalgic. Robert MacFarlane quite rightly notes that “the characteristic tense of all of Hollinghurst’s novels is the future perfect, the will-have been.”8 And, Sarah Brophy suggests, “The Line of Beauty questions the political costs for queers of investing in a nostalgic England defined by heritage, family, wealth and power.”9 Of course, the first clue to the text’s nostalgia is its title. Hollinghurst reminds us that the “line of beauty” refers to a concept that William Hogarth coined in his Analysis of Beauty and, as Nick Guest says, “‘originates in . . . the Middle East, in fact, and then you see it in English architecture from about the fourteenth century onwards.’”10 In this account, the line of beauty nostalgically suggests Nick’s aspirational cosmopolitanism while indicating the central place of nostalgia more generally in Hollinghurst’s construction of the world of the novel.11 According to Nick, in fact, the line of beauty explains the very condition of possibility for the novel itself: He [Nick] couldn’t unwind the line of beauty for Catherine, because it explained almost everything, and to her it would seem a trivial delusion, it would seem mad, as she said. He wouldn’t be here in this room, in this country, if he hadn’t seen Toby that morning in the college lodge, if Toby hadn’t burnt in five seconds onto the eager blank of his mind. How he chased Toby, the covert pursuit, the unguessed courage, the laughable timidity (it seemed to him now), the inch or two gained by pressure on Toby’s unsuspecting good nature, the sudden furlongs of dreamlike advance when Toby asked him up to town—he could never tell her that. (305)

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Hollinghurst connects Hogarth’s figure to Nick’s nostalgic look back at meeting and falling in love with Toby, the aftermath of which, as Nick here acknowledges, forms the substance of Hollinghurst’s text. Without the winding of the line of beauty, without Nick’s falling in love with Toby and following him to London, Hollinghurst’s novel would not exist. The line of beauty thus figures in multiple ways what Allan Johnson refers to as Hollinghurst’s “fascination with rebuilding or renewing a particular vision of history.”12 In this way, the line of beauty forms both Nick’s aesthetic nostalgia and, through his amorous nostalgia for Toby, the narrative structure of the novel. Hollinghurst tellingly positions this account of the narrative significance of the line of beauty right after a moment when nostalgia is foremost in Nick’s consciousness. While looking out at the French countryside, Nick envisions, “beyond that in the mind’s distance northern France, the Channel, England, London, lying in the same sunlight, the gate opening from the garden to the gravel walk, and the plane trees, and the groundsmen’s compound with the barrow and the compost heap” (305). Of this associative geographical chain, Hollinghurst writes, “It came to Nick in a flash of acute nostalgia, as though he could never visit that scene of happiness again” (305). Nick’s nostalgic reverie, which takes him from the present of this moment to the recent past, traces the trajectory of his and the Feddens’s trip to France: from their house in London with the private garden to this mansion in the French countryside. Metaphorizing everything that comes before it, the line of beauty becomes the next logical thought in this sequence of nostalgic structures. Hollinghurst uses the line of beauty as not only the narrative structure for the novel’s nostalgic look backward but also the figural representation of nostalgia itself. It “explains everything” even as Nick cannot explain it or “unwind” it for Catherine: the line of beauty as impossible ideal. LOVE, NATURALLY The line of beauty—as narrative structure, figure for nostalgia, and the novel itself—is by no means the first time that Alan Hollinghurst has dealt with the issue of nostalgia. Arguably, the subject has come up in his work both before and after The Line of Beauty.13 For the purposes of this discussion, perhaps the most important instance of Hollinghurst’s encounter with nostalgia occurs in AMOROUS TIME

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his 1987 Times Literary Supplement review of the Merchant Ivory production of E. M. Forster’s Maurice.14 Unlike some other readers of Forster’s novel, Hollinghurst seems to see more strengths than weaknesses in Forster’s belatedly published creation.15 Conceding that the novel’s “success is by no means total,” Hollinghurst’s review, however, celebrates the revolutionary import of Maurice: “one could say that, if it falls short of subsequent Modernist experiments, it is none the less a new kind of book, appropriate to a new kind of experience.”16 The newness that Hollinghurst so values in Forster’s Maurice all but evaporates, in Hollinghurst’s view, from the Merchant Ivory production of the same name: “it [the film] sacrifices all the novel’s nervous veracity, its point and its animus, to a numbingly slow display of authentic detail. The central struggle is muffled by the nostalgia with which the period is viewed, and the society which Forster is criticizing becomes almost involuntarily an object of veneration.”17 The title of his review, “Suppressive Nostalgia,” suggests what Hollinghurst here makes explicit: the film version of Maurice infuses the story with a nostalgia not present in Forster’s original. In particular, the film directs its nostalgia toward the time in which the narrative of Maurice takes place. Such nostalgia for Edwardian England suppresses or even erases the newness and the revolutionary stance that Hollinghurst celebrates in Forster’s novel. However, Hollinghurst’s reading itself suppresses the nostalgia that Forster embeds everywhere in Maurice: nostalgia for an earlier, pure time, for an England that Forster himself concedes no longer exists.18 In his review Hollinghurst gestures toward this nostalgia even as he resists reading it as such: “Its romantic-pastoral ending is indeed visionary, a defiant curtain that challenges us to believe in a new possibility of happiness between solidly middle-class Maurice and his gamekeeper lover.”19 Finding a “new possibility” for love, Hollinghurst applauds the “romantic-pastoral ending” that allows Maurice and Alec to escape from the England that disallows their love, even as he does not acknowledge that this ending relies nostalgically on an old ideal. I want to focus in Maurice on what Hollinghurst calls the “romantic-pastoral,” because it is precisely this nostalgic construction with which Hollinghurst is in conversation in The Line of Beauty. Despite the idyllic “romantic-pastoral ending” of Maurice—despite, that is, an ending that redeems Maurice and Alec’s love—some more recent readers of Maurice have sought to “redeem” the novel from many of its early critics.20 80

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The most important example of such a project is Jesse Matz’s reconsideration of Maurice for both modernist studies and queer theory. Matz’s provocative account of time in Forster’s novel encourages us to see the text as not simply nostalgic but rather as Forster’s foray into experimental, modernist time. Arguing that “we read Maurice’s faults as ‘games with time,’” Matz also suggests that this argument “may help to redeem the novel and also to locate Forster in the history of gay writing.”21 His project, and other critical enterprises that seek to “redeem” or “recuperate” Maurice raise important questions: What is it about Maurice that invites the language of redemption? Does Maurice, in fact, need to be redeemed? Rather than needing to be redeemed, Maurice tells us something crucial about the nature of redemption itself and its dependence upon nostalgia. Indeed, the central focus of Maurice is the idea of redemption. Or, to rephrase an oft-quoted line from Forster’s “Terminal Note” to Maurice, “Redemption is its keynote.”22 When Forster wrote it, Maurice was almost unique with regard to its treatment of a happy homosexual relationship. But, for my purposes, Maurice’s interest lay not in the unique but in the commonplace. Maurice, one might say, is utterly unremarkable in the modern British novelistic tradition, insofar as, like so many other texts, it finds seductive and enabling the idea of a love that redeems by reaching back into a quickly receding past. Certainly, at the time of its publication in 1971, the world of Maurice was in the past, for the pragmatic reason that the text was published nearly sixty years after Forster wrote it. Even in the 1960 “Terminal Note,” Forster positions his novel in “an England where it was still possible to get lost,” lamenting that “the wildness of our island, never extensive, was stamped upon and built over and patrolled in no time” (254). As other critics have pointed out, Forster gives a name to this England of the past, the greenwood.23 Forster mourns, “Our greenwood ended catastrophically and inevitably” (254). The greenwood, of course, is the place to which Maurice and Alec escape at the end of the novel, which enables them, as Forster says, “to fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows” (250). Thus the greenwood of England that Forster laments losing becomes associated with an eternally successful love. We might well attribute to this nostalgic ending the disdain to which the end of Maurice often gives rise. In a letter to Forster, Lytton Strachey expresses his disbelief in the “for ever and ever” to which Maurice and Alec accede: “I should AMOROUS TIME

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have prophecied a rupture after 6 months . . . and so your Sherwood Forest ending appears to me slightly mythical.”24 And many reviews follow Strachey’s lead. C. P. Snow regards “the ecstatic ending . . . artistically quite wrong, as a wish-fulfillment.”25 Julian Mitchell, with the slightest whiff of homophobia, suggests, “Maurice ends like a fairy tale in the worst possible sense.”26 Disbelief and disdain echo throughout the early reviews as well, where one critic refers to the novel’s “saccharine intensity” and another asserts that “we are left with little belief that Maurice’s euphoria is a solution to anything.”27 That so many critics focus on the implausible ending of Forster’s text suggests that were the novel to close differently, critical reception might not be so derogatory. However, it is not simply the “Terminal Note” or the spurious disappearance of Maurice and Alec into the greenwood that gives Maurice its fanciful, nostalgic notes. Throughout the novel, Forster announces the text’s nostalgic orientation repeatedly. To put this another way, in Maurice, love, or the early stirring of it, is always associated with a fixation on the purity of the natural world. George, young Maurice’s first love, is employed, not for nothing, as a “garden boy” (18). And Maurice tellingly inquires about him in the context of a discussion with Mrs. Hall about the fruits, presumably, of George’s labor: “There is nothing like home, as everyone finds. Yes, tomatoes—” she liked reciting the names of vegetables. “Tomatoes, radishes, broccoli, onions—” “Tomatoes, broccoli, onions, purple potatoes, white potatoes,” droned the little boy. “Turnip tops—” “Mother, where’s George?” (17)

It is reasonable enough that Maurice would be reminded of George, the garden boy, while enumerating the plants grown in this garden. But the way that young Maurice inserts George into this conversation makes it seem as though George might be just another vegetable among the turnips and broccoli grown there. This scene is certainly not one that depicts Forster’s idealized greenwood, but as evidenced by George’s metonymic connection to the garden, the association of love with an untainted, fecund natural world exists very early on in Forster’s text. This association is only strengthened when Forster describes 82

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Maurice’s dream in which “George headed down the field towards him, naked and jumping over woodstacks” (22). When one reads this passage, it is difficult to imagine the novel ending differently than it does. George clearly provides an early model for Alec, the gamekeeper. And the woodstacks over which George leaps in the nude seem to prefigure the woodcutters that Maurice and Alec become when they escape into the greenwood of Forster’s lost England (254). Everywhere one looks, Forster connects love, or the possibility of it, to this British Eden. Exhilarated by meeting Risley and being introduced to the new homoerotic world of Cambridge that he represents, Maurice “slipped into Trinity and waited in the Great Court until the gates were shut behind him. Looking up, he noticed the night. He was indifferent to beauty as a rule, but ‘what a show of stars!’ he thought” (35). Forster here couches Maurice’s transformation in the language of aestheticism—for the first time, Maurice notices beauty—signaling his homosexual desire. But beauty is not really the point here. After all, he could have looked up at the architecture of Trinity in order to register his new aesthetic appreciation. Instead, “he noticed the night” and with it the stars, suggesting less Wildean aestheticism than an appreciation of the Wordsworthian natural sublime. Elsewhere, an intimate encounter with Clive inspires organic fantasies: “‘I say, will you kiss me?’ asked Maurice, when the sparrows woke in the eaves above them, and far out in the woods the ringing doves began to coo” (93). And of Dickie, Forster writes, “There was a freshness about him—he might have arrived with the flowers” (148). Such intimations of the relation between romance and nature throughout Maurice come to fruition in the figure of Alec who “liked the woods and the fresh air and water, he liked them better than anything” (219). Thus it is not the case that reading Maurice from the perspective of almost sixty years after it was written can only create the sense of nostalgia for “an England where it was still possible to get lost.” Indeed, nostalgia is built into the structure of Maurice from the outset. In order to understand Alec as the telos of Maurice’s desire, we must look at this pattern, which explicitly and repeatedly imbricates love with a fantasmatic natural world. Alec thus becomes a nostalgic figure himself, one that, if we are to understand him, we must see as a figure constructed in the image of Maurice’s past. And this nostalgic structure does not simply unfold progressively throughout Forster’s text. Forster also crucially depicts this structure on the very first page of the book. Of Maurice’s AMOROUS TIME

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early school experience, Forster writes, “Amid mutual compliments the boys passed out into a public school, healthy but backward, to receive upon undefended flesh the first blows of the world” (9). The “backward” orientation of the boys replicates the founding gesture of nostalgia: the look backward that propels one nevertheless forward.28 The future into which Maurice’s nostalgia moves the reader is indicated, of course, by Forster’s dedication: “to a Happier Year.” This statement announces even before the first page of the novel that Forster’s is fundamentally a redemptive project. The situation for gay men in Britain at the time of Forster’s writing is dire, and this novel seeks to be a part of the process whereby the place of homosexuality in society will be redeemed. Maurice’s uniting with Alec in the greenwood at the end of the novel reinforces this desire for redemption specifically through love. Love, Forster seems to be saying, can change the world for the better, and such love can only be constructed by reference to the past. Forster is not alone in espousing amorous redemption through nostalgia. In Married Love, written in 1918—not long after Forster penned Maurice—Marie Stopes aims to redeem love in the face of difficulties that resonate with Forster’s text. She writes, “the opportunities for peaceful, romantic dalliance are less today in a city with its tubes and cinema-shows than in woods and gardens where the pulling of rosemary or lavender may be the sweet excuse for the slow and profound rousing of passion.”29 Stopes, like Forster, hankers for a time when the city had not overtaken “woods and gardens,” which in her estimation is the ideal scene for love. Part of Stopes’s project, therefore, is to return people to a state of nature (in the midst of “tubes and cinema-shows”) in order that they may have, once again, successful, loving relationships. SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW At this point, one might be tempted to accede to the premise that Maurice and Married Love are of a piece and, moreover, that their approaches to love—nostalgic, redemptive, and dated—are relentlessly conservative. Indeed, many critics of Maurice have just this to say about it.30 However, looking forward in the twentieth century, we find that his “dated” conception of love is not that dated at all. Jeanette Winterson’s contemporary novel, Written on the Body (1992), partakes of a notion of love that depends on a structure that looks suspiciously 84

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like the modernist nostalgia Forster employs in his 1913 text. Rather than identifying middle-class, English respectability as the thing from which lovers must escape, Winterson scapegoats something we might refer to as virtual reality.31 At first glance, Winterson’s text seems deeply invested in virtuality. Critics often characterize this novel as “postmodern,” in particular because of Winterson’s unwillingness to impose a gender or sexual identity upon the narrator. But, drawing on the novel’s title, critics most often focus on the way in which Winterson attempts to create reality out of language. In her essay on Written on the Body, Molly Hoff explicitly links the “writing” in the title to the virtual by suggesting that the narrator speaks “from the timeless dimension of a rhetorically realized virtual world.”32 Similarly, Brian Finney extends Baudrillard’s theory of the simulacrum to the question of love when he argues, “In writing a love poem about Louise, the narrator is substituting a textual for a sexual and physical evocation of her.”33 Here language, or virtual reality, takes the place of and subsumes “true” reality, which Finney designates as the category of “the physical.” Even more radically, Susann Cokal claims that in Winterson’s novel language “reinvent[s] . . . the world itself ” in addition to “creat[ing] love.”34 Such accounts of the status of the virtual in Written on the Body can be described as what Marjorie Worthington calls the “traditional” understanding of the consequences of “cyberspace technology”: namely, “the postmodern dissolution of the subject and the technologically enabled flight from the physical.”35 However, for an author that at least seems “postmodern,” Winterson might strike one as strangely suspicious of virtuality, following in the footsteps of D. H. Lawrence, who shares these suspicions of virtuality and whose characters seek a natural world to which they can escape. Constance Chatterley exists in a world distant from the true: “But it was all a dream: or rather, it was like the simulacrum of reality. The oak-leaves to her were like oak-leaves seen ruffling in a mirror, she herself was figure somebody had read about, picking primroses that were only shadows, or memories, or words.”36 In this passage, we find an idea that Lawrence will return to over and over again throughout his novel: that all experience in the modern world, including sexual experience, amounts to a mere approximation of truth, to a virtual reality. Virtuality is embodied, for Mellors, “in the world of the mechanical greedy, greedy mechanism and mechanized greed” that would “destroy the wood, and the bluebells would spring no more.”37 But one need not look even as far as Lawrence’s heavy-handed AMOROUS TIME

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description of industrialization in order to understand Lawrence’s fear. One need only look at Clifford, sitting in his motorized wheelchair, discussing flowers with Lady Chatterley: She put the tea-cosy over the tea-pot, and rose to get a little glass for her violets. The poor flowers hung over, limp on their stalks. “They’ll revive again!” she said, putting them before him in their glass, for him to smell. “Sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes,” he quoted. “I don’t see a bit of a connection, with the actual violets,” she said. “The Elizabethans are rather upholstered.”38

Clifford’s metaphorization of the violets recalls the earlier passage in which Lady Chatterley laments the status of the primroses she is picking as “shadows or memories or words.” Clifford plunges the natural world into the realm of the virtual, and Lady Chatterley’s quest throughout the novel is to wrest both the violets and herself from his grasp. Like Alec Scudder and Maurice Hall before them, Lady Chatterley and Mellors must escape by returning to the past in the form of an untainted natural England.39 Whereas Clifford in Lady Chatterley’s Lover most explicitly embodies the world from which Lady Chatterley and Mellors want to escape, in Written on the Body the figure associated with poisonous virtuality is Louise’s cuckolded husband Elgin. By far the most abject character in the novel, Elgin has been called by critics “blackhearted and selfish,” “unpleasant,” and “patriarchal.”40 Such assessments of Elgin uncritically repeat the novel’s understanding of him as awkward, out of place, and, perhaps most important, unredeemable. Winterson explains that Elgin was “small” and “narrow-chested” as an adolescent (33). These traits seem to remain with him in adulthood; indeed, as the narrator visits Louise at their home, Elgin enters the kitchen, and the narrator tells us derisively, “in his navy blue corduroys (size M) and his off-duty Viyella shirt (size S)” (35). Because of his small stature and, we learn, his Orthodox Jewish upbringing, as a schoolboy, he is “excluded from Saturday games” (33). But the narrator reassures us of his attitude toward the boys with whom he might have played on Saturdays: “He knew he was better than those square-shouldered upright beauty queens whose good looks and easy manners commanded affection 86

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and respect. Besides, they were all queer, and Elgin had seen them grappling with one another, mouths open, cocks hard. No-one tried to touch him” (33). Far from evoking our pity, the narrator’s description of Elgin here seems designed to make us hate him insofar as he pretends not to want to be, or to be with, one of these “beauty queens” even as he secretly wants to be touched by them. In other words, we are supposed to share with the narrator the enjoyment of Elgin’s debasement. Elgin plays the role of outcast among both his peers and eventually in his family too, because he marries Louise, a gentile, despite the fact that, prior to the wedding, his parents, “locked in prayer through the twenty-four hours of the Sabbath, wondered what would happen to their boy who had fallen into the clutches of a flame-haired temptress” (34). Adding insult to injury, the woman for whom he became a pariah to his family, Louise, eventually cheats on him with the narrator, casting Elgin into the margins of his own marriage. It seems that no matter where he goes, or what he does, as Winterson writes, “Elgin was awkward and he didn’t fit” (35). But most important about the abject, debased, and awkward Elgin is that he figures all the evils of virtual reality. The first time we meet him, the narrator rings his and Louise’s doorbell, but Elgin does not answer it because, despite the fact that he is a “real” doctor, he is “in his study playing a computer game called HOSPITAL” in which “you get to operate on a patient who shouts at you if you do it wrong” (29). And much later in the novel, when the narrator comes to consult with Elgin about Louise’s cancer, the narrator finds Elgin playing a computer game called “LABORATORY,” the premise of which is “a good scientist . . . and a mad scientist . . . fight it out to create the world’s first transgenic tomato” (104). The defining feature of the narrator’s conversation with Elgin that follows is how Elgin discusses the very serious and, arguably, “real” issue of his wife’s cancer without really losing interest in the virtual reality game. Elgin becomes a force that collapses the distinction between the real world and virtual reality when both Winterson and the narrator seem more interested in the real-world concern of cancer and potential death. Repeatedly, Winterson depicts Elgin as a doctor who cares not for real people but presides over impersonal lab experiments and computer simulations, which becomes most explicit when Louise derisively asserts that Elgin “‘can no longer wrap a Band-Aid [a]round a cut finger but he can tell you everything there is to know about cancer. Everything except what causes it and how to cure it” (66, 67). AMOROUS TIME

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The virtual reality that Elgin prefers becomes most threatening in Winterson’s novel when it might impinge upon “true” love. Winterson envisions this threat in the form of not just virtual reality but virtual sex. Imagining a world in the not too distant future that sounds strikingly similar to Ray Bradbury’s dystopia in Fahrenheit 451,41 Winterson writes of having a room in one’s house that is “a wall-to-wall virtual world of your choosing. . . . You will be able to try out a Virtual life with a Virtual lover. You can go into your Virtual house and do Virtual housework. . . . And sex? Certainly. Teledildonics is the word. . . . The Virtual epidermis will be as sensitive as your own outer layer of skin” (97). In a certain sense, the tone of this passage says all one needs to know. Here we have access to certainly the narrator’s, and possibly Winterson’s, mistrust of virtual reality and virtual sex. Having virtual sex may be the ideal prophylactic and defense against sexually transmitted infections, but it cannot satisfyingly substitute for human interaction. And not all types of interaction are equal. Early in the novel, we find out that when Louise first met Elgin she “suspect[ed] of him being a masochist,” which “was confirmed when he lay on his single bed, legs apart, and begged her to scaffold his penis with bulldog clips” (34). And later we also learn, as Winterson writes in an idiom that is not simply fortuitous, that “Elgin and Louise no longer made love. . . . She refused to have him inside her. Elgin accepted that this was part of the deal and Louise knew he used prostitutes. His proclivities would have made that inevitable even in a more traditional marriage. His present hobby was to fly up to Scotland and be sunk in a bath of porridge while a couple of Celtic geishas rubber-gloved his prick” (68). While it is not the case that Elgin partakes of “teledildonics,” as Winterson describes it in the aforementioned passage, his sexual proclivities nevertheless register as “virtual” insofar as they are highly mediated. Whether it be bulldog clips or rubber gloves, these erotic intermediaries are posed in opposition to the idea of “making love” that begins this passage. Making love, we are led to believe, is much closer to what the narrator and Louise do in their attempt to “cross one another’s boundaries and make [them] selves one” (20). Indeed, Winterson associates love with the attainment of unity between two people. In this way, it seems inaccurate to accuse Maurice, as so many critics have, of being dated. Maurice nostalgically longs for a time and place where pure love is possible. Forster’s novel details the transition whereby 88

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“two men” (135) “in a way [become] one person” (233).42 Rather than being “dated,” Maurice’s emphasis on union in the idyllic world of the past makes clear the tenacity of this nostalgic fantasy, a fantasy that extends well into the future—indeed, into Winterson’s novel. Written on the Body similarly fantasizes the possibility of union achieved by a return to an earlier, better state. As in both Maurice and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, such unifying love seems premised on a nostalgic return to the natural world. For example, early in the novel the narrator luxuriates in the vibrant, saturated reality of his or her beloved’s naked body. Winterson writes: “You turned your back and your nipples grazed the surface of the river and the river decorated your hair with beads. You are creamy but for your hair your red hair that flanks you on either side” (11). Immediately after this, we find an odd interjection that seems at first only to be a non sequitur. An unnamed interlocutor says: “‘I’ll get my husband to see to you. George come here. George come here’” (11). And, “without turning [a]round,” George responds, as though misquoting the child in Freud’s famous account of the burning dream: “Can’t you see I’m watching television?” (11). Although this moment in the text may not narratively make sense, it is nonetheless instructive. George is called upon to confirm the existence of and to become involved with the reality that Winterson previously describes, but he remains too engrossed in the virtual reality of the television set.43 Refusing to turn away, he also refuses the true, which Winterson clearly codes as more valuable and more seductive than the synthetic. Perhaps most tellingly of all, immediately following the description of “teledildonics,” the narrator opines, in language that could just as readily come from the mouths of Alec Scudder and Oliver Mellors, “For myself, unreconstructed as I am, I’d rather hold you in my arms and walk through the damp of a real English meadow in real English rain” (97). NOSTALGIA, FANTASY, AND AMOROUS TIME Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty also constructs love through a nostalgic structure that the novel inherits from Forster’s Maurice and that Lawrence and Winterson repeat in their divergent yet ideologically similar texts. In Hollinghurst’s novel, then, it is not that we don’t see nostalgia; indeed, we see it everywhere. When nostalgia and sentimentality erupt into the world of The AMOROUS TIME

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Line of Beauty, we are asked not simply to accept these as desirable, as we are in Forster’s, Lawrence’s, and Winterson’s novels. Rather, in Hollinghurst’s text, where we find nostalgia, we are asked to examine the machinery of nostalgia. Far from simply repeating the turn toward a scene in the past in which amorous wholeness or unity was possible, Hollinghurst parses nostalgia into its constitutive elements, displaying how it both functions and fails. In the passages from Hollinghurst’s review of the Merchant Ivory Maurice that I discuss earlier, Hollinghurst articulates what, for him, is the problem with the production’s nostalgia. He writes, “The central struggle is muffled by the nostalgia with which the period is viewed, and the society which Forster is criticizing becomes almost involuntarily an object of veneration.”44 Nostalgia is a problem because it muffles struggle, and, even more important, criticism gets obscured while veneration takes its place. Hollinghurst’s critique of nostalgia thus centers on its fantasmatic structure, occluding and eliding elements that might disturb the smooth surface of idealization. As Slavoj Žižek puts it, fantasy is “a screen masking a void.”45 The screen of fantasy obscures that which would mar a seamless and continuous reality. Nostalgia, for Hollinghurst, thus cannot be separated from fantasy, and we can find the negativity-erasing function of fantasy everywhere in The Line of Beauty. Hollinghurst literalizes the screenlike function of fantasy when Nick reflects on not attending Nat Hanmer’s wedding: “Nick was glad he wasn’t going to Nat’s wedding, and yet his absence, to anyone who noticed, might seem like an admission of guilt, or unworthiness. He saw a clear sequence, like a loop of a film, of his friends not noticing his absence, jumping from gilt chairs to join in the swirl of a ball. On analysis he thought it was probably a scene from a Merchant Ivory film” (426).46 Nick fantasizes about the wedding that he is not attending by imaginarily citing a sequence from a Merchant Ivory production. While this fantasy is meant, ostensibly, to illustrate Nick’s discomfort with not being present—the “guilt or unworthiness” it may imply—this scenario has the counterintuitive effect of inserting himself into the scene from which he is supposedly absent. He gets to be there without really being there; the Big Screen thus allows Nick to screen from view the actual absence that he will experience. The negativity that fantasy typically obscures is not just any negativity but that which stands in the way of uniting two people as one. Žižek explains, “‘There is no sexual relationship,’ and this impossibility is filled out by the fas90

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cinating fantasy-scenario—that is why fantasy is, in the last resort, always a fantasy of the sexual relationship, a staging of it.”47 In other words, fantasy enables the subject to forget or deny what Lacan calls the impossibility of the sexual relationship. As I indicate in the introduction, what rectifies this impossibility is first and foremost the fantasy of love. Thus fantasy becomes a sort of synonym for love or the possibility that unity, continuity, and redemption are possible. The final passage of Hollinghurst’s novel makes explicit the links between nostalgia, fantasy, and love. In a reverie that sounds suspiciously similar to the one in which Nick imagines being at the wedding where he is not, Nick prepares for a positive diagnosis from his HIV test: None of his friends could save him. The time came, and they learned the news in the room they were in, at a certain moment in their planned and continuing day. They woke the next morning, and after a while it came back to them. Nick searched their faces as they explored their feelings. He seemed to fade pretty quickly. He found himself yearning to know of their affairs, their successes, the novels and the new ideas that the few who remembered him might say he never knew, he never lived to find out. It was the morning’s vision of the empty street, but projected far forward, into afternoons like this one decades hence, in the absent hum of their own business. (438 )

Despite the fact that what Hollinghurst describes is clearly a scenario from which Nick is absent, because he has died of AIDS, Nick abounds here. Nick fantasizes a future without him in which he is still able to appear, even “decades hence.” The fantasmatic future of Nick’s continued (non)existence gives way to an even more evocative construction of fantasy. Hollinghurst continues: “The emotion was startling. It was a sort of terror, made up of emotions from every stage of his short life, weaning, homesickness, envy, self-pity; but he felt that the self-pity belonged to a larger pity. It was a love of the world that was shockingly unconditional” (438). Whereas in the previous passage—the one in which Nick is supposed to be dead—Nick and his pronominal representatives abound, in this passage Nick is all but absent. The subject here seems to be “the emotion” or, even more vaguely, “It.” This “It” subsumes the preceding AMOROUS TIME

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passage and contains it, along with Nick himself. And Hollinghurst then tries to specify precisely what this “it” is: “terror,” “weaning,” “homesickness,” “envy,” “self-pity,” and an even “larger pity.” But the state that comes to define them all—comes to include and ultimately obscure terror, envy, and pity—is love. Love stands in for and explains Nick, his death, and the “emotions from every stage of his short life.” The “emotions” throughout Nick’s life share no common denominator except that they are emotions. And yet, here, love can decode them all. Can there be any more complete fantasmatic unification than this? Love takes into itself and pacifies negativity, failure, remorse, disappointment, and even death. Emphasizing the continuity that fantasy provides throughout the novel, Hollinghurst highlights the insistence of the desire for pure positivity. In Leo’s calling Nick a “twit,” Nick hears “some complex of minor reproaches, class envy, or pity” (133). Hollinghurst adds, “As always Nick searched for something else in it too, which was Leo’s tutting indulgence of his pupil; he still longed for flawless tenderness” (133). Nick here seeks to redeem reproach, envy, or pity with a pure tenderness, which would subsume and erase these forms of negativity. Elsewhere, Hollinghurst describes Nick’s attitude, as if anticipating the criticisms his producers offer, toward his adaptation of Henry James’s Spoils of Poynton: “He’d spent months writing a script, and it was almost as if he’d written the book it was based on: all he wanted was praise” (378). Unalloyed “praise,” “flawless tenderness”: these objects of desire repeat, with only a slight difference, Nick’s wish for unqualified love. Indeed, Nick “hated to see Wani’s beautiful mouth curl like that, and to feel his disdain, so amusing and exciting when applied to others, fall on him. He only wanted love” (167). In these passages, we see clearly and repeatedly the structure by which love (or tenderness, or praise) is imagined to make up for and cancel out negative feelings. Moreover, the forms of negativity that Hollinghurst represents in these passages prefigure the negativity that love will engulf in the final passage of the novel. “Envy” and “pity” explicitly appear here and at the end. And criticism and “disdain,” though they do not figure explicitly in the final passage, seem more than plausibly to belong in the “emotions from every stage of [Nick’s] short life” that love supersedes at the end of the novel. Love thus becomes inseparable from nostalgia, which allows one to reach fantasmatically back in time, perfecting the imperfect, suturing that which is riven from within, purifying pleasures 92

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alloyed with pain, and shoring up fragments against ruin. But Hollinghurst understands that love, like nostalgia, cannot fully eliminate negativity, disappointment, failure, and absence. In The Future of Nostalgia Svetlana Boym articulates some of the features of nostalgia that are most important to Hollinguhurst’s critical engagement with it. Boym points out that even as nostalgia seeks coherence, continuity, and wholeness, it cannot achieve these goals because of its fundamentally divided structure: “A cinematic image of nostalgia is a double exposure, or a superimposition of two images—of home and abroad, past and present, dream and everyday life. The moment we try to force it into a single image, it breaks the frame or burns the surface.”48 Nostalgia may well aim to make these two images into one (1 + 1 = 1), but Boym and Hollinghurst make clear the fact that this union is impossible. By unpacking this divided structure of nostalgia, Hollinghurst draws from nostalgia his anatomy of what I am calling amorous time. Amorous time rewrites nostalgia and makes explicit the impossibility of uniting the past and present, foregrounds negativity, and emphasizes division over and against union and coherence. Amorous time has a relation to both modernist time and queer time even as it is distinct from both concepts. Though quite different, both modernist time and queer time share an investment in the problems and potential of temporal splitting. The splitting that distinguishes modernist time has to do with the noncoincidence of different types of temporalities. In The Cosmic Time of Empire Adam Barrows explains that “the dominant critical tendency has been to treat modernist time as a purely philosophical exploration of private consciousness, disjointed from the forms of material and public temporality that standard time attempted to organize.”49 Modernist time cleaves between private and public temporalities.50 In Barrows’s project, however, he produces yet another temporal cleavage by arguing that the fissure at the heart of modernist time is not so much between private and public as “between national and global time.”51 The temporal splitting theorized as queer time, on the other hand, most often takes the form of a present that is inhabited and informed by other past (or even future) times.52 One smart and persuasive example of this sort of queer time would be Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon’s idea of “homohistory.” Attempting to counter the stark temporal distinctions produced under AMOROUS TIME

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the auspices of historicism, Goldberg and Menon theorize homohistory as not a “history of homos” but rather a history that “would be invested in suspending determinate sexual and chronological differences while expanding the possibilities of the nonhetero, with all its connotations of sameness, similarity, proximity, and anachronism.”53 Homohistory thus becomes a way of doing history that allows the past to inform the present and the present to influence our understanding of sexual significations in the past.54 The question of queer time is certainly not uncontroversial. A generative discussion emerged in PMLA around Goldberg and Menon’s concept of homohistory. In her essay “The New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies,” Valerie Traub raised objections to Goldberg and Menon’s arguments because “the theoretical rationales, specific methodologies, and political payoff of this bending of time are far from clear.”55 Ultimately, I disagree with Traub’s rejoinder to Goldberg and Menon, and the reasons for this disagreement can be found in the pages of Hollinghurst’s novel. While arguments certainly can be made to support ideas of historical specificity and difference—indeed, I make such an argument in the introduction—it is also important to note the emergence of alternate temporalities that trouble clear historical distinction and temporal progression. Love is one node around which temporality breaks down and historicity becomes subject to doubt, precisely because of the nostalgic imperative to bring the past into the present and future. Rather than finding such nostalgia simply problematic, Alan Hollinghurst asks us to look carefully at the “bending of time” in order to examine the ideological stakes of the fantasy that love can create wholeness by bringing into the present what is imagined as a successful love in the past. What I am calling amorous time shares with both modernist time and queer time a sense of temporal splitting, constructing love through a temporality that is divided between the past, present, and future. This amorous temporality depends, then, on nostalgia: from the position of the present, one desires a better future based on an ideality that is supposed to have existed in the past. But Hollinghurst’s amorous time is not simply nostalgic; it also involves untangling the relation between negativity and love. Another way of putting this is to say that for Hollinghurst nostalgia is not simply a desire for past wholeness, unity, or purity in the future. Amorous time rewrites nostalgia as a desire for the absence or lack of concrete fantasmatic content rather than treating nostalgia as the pursuit of past fullness. Through amorous time one might nostalgically 94

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look back on the past, but in this past it is less the content of the memory than the potential it promises that forms the object of nostalgic desire. As an illustration of the desire for potential, we can turn briefly to a different contemporary novel, Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (2000). In this passage, Clarissa Vaughn is remembering a moment from her youth with Richard Brown: They’d kissed, and walked around the pond together. In another hour, they’d have dinner, and considerable quantities of wine. . . . It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers; and even the sex, once she and Richard reached that point, was ardent but awkward, unsatisfying, more kindly than passionate. What lives undimmed in Clarissa’s mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it’s perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more.56

On the one hand, Clarissa’s memory features distinct details: the kiss, the dead grass, the pond, the dinner, the wine, a novel by Doris Lessing, sex. On the other, her assessments of many of these details reveals them to be, to use her word, “unsatisfactory.” Thus, it is not that the fantasy does not have content. Rather, the content matters less than what is absent from this memory: everything that happens after it. At this moment Clarissa feels that her life is purely full of “promise” and “anticipation.” She has not yet made the decisions that would determine the course of the rest of her life. What she cherishes most in this nostalgic fantasy is that it is unfixed; the absence of concrete decisions and their consequences makes it seem that anything is still possible in the future. In this example, we can see how amorous time directs its energies toward the lack of fixity; it is a version of nostalgia that seeks a time in the past when nothing was certain and as such, everything seemed possible. The nostalgic structure of amorous time thus articulates a desire for unalloyed optimism. Importantly, the corollary of this idea is: since love seeks the promise of possibility in the past, amorous time also demands we acknowledge the negativity in the AMOROUS TIME

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present that this search for optimism implies. Love’s dreams have been dashed, and so the only recourse we have is to seek what turns out to have been impossible, the endless potential that we imagine to have existed. Hollinghurst’s amorous time, therefore, directly engages with the fantasmatic construction of love through nostalgia, which aims to eliminate the taints of imperfection, disappointment, and failure through fantasy. But the crucial difference between unexamined nostalgia and amorous time is that simple nostalgia constructs a fantasy to eliminate negativity; amorous time constructs a fantasy that foregrounds and thrives on the negative. THE POLITICS OF LOVE AND BEAUTY Amorous time allows Hollinghurst’s novel both to participate in the nostalgic longing for unalloyed optimism and to expose the disappointments that ultimately inspire this nostalgic desire. For Hollinghurst, the impossibility of redemption through love, the inability to purify either the past or the future registers as desirable, even laudable. The Line of Beauty values disappointment, failure, and absence over and above the erasure negativity. Hollinghurst poses the unalloyed love that Nick desires against the alloy itself. In purity we find the fascistic threat of totalization, thematized in the novel by the depiction of Margaret Thatcher’s conservative government, and, as an alternative, Hollinghurst presents the concept of aesthetic sophistication, which he thematizes through Nick’s figuration as an aesthete. The Line of Beauty asks us to take literally the concept of sophistication as that which results when purity becomes adulterated, when an alloy contaminates and disturbs a flawless substance.57 Alongside Nick’s relentless desire for “flawless tenderness” and unalloyed love; alongside his nostalgic desire for a time in the past when potential was all; Hollinghurst depicts a world marked by beauty, by aesthetic sophistication, by the alloys that taint and render love imperfect.58 Signaling this world of beauty is Hollinghurst’s insistent use of the metaphorics of light. On the very first page of the novel, a book about Margaret Thatcher features her “pale-gilt image” in the window of a book store where the book display “rushe[s] towards the customer in gleaming slippage” (3; my emphasis). And throughout the rest of the novel Hollinghurst repeatedly turns to figurations of glossiness

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to describe the world of The Line of Beauty. It is as though the whole world is covered with a layer of gold leaf or highly reflective gloss. Hollinghurst generously peppers his novel throughout with figures that evoke this luminosity. The world “sparkle[s]” (118), “gleam[s]” (150), “dazzle[s]” (161), “shines” (185), “glow[s]” (293), and “glint[s]” (309). Or it is “luminous” (100), “glittering” (264), “glossy” (221), and bathed in “glamorized light” (222). David James focuses on the trope of the “flicker” in Hollinghurst’s work as “another guise for the impression,” suggesting that Hollinghurst is indebted to modernism and, specifically, literary impressionism.59 James suggests that Hollinghurst’s impressionist flicker “highlight[s] the dissonance between private fulfillment . . . and the public discrimination that exists to impede or forestall” such private fulfillment.60 James’s sense that the flicker reflects dissonance is absolutely crucial; the flicker, as an aspect of Hollinghurst’s metaphorics of light, points to the dissonant or divided account of nostalgia Hollinghurst offers in The Line of Beauty. With the flickering of light throughout this novel, Hollinghurst counters nostalgia with amorous time: a temporal relation to love that is not at one with itself. At times, particularly toward the end of the novel, radiance suggests the pangs of nostalgia. Nick, for example, has a “flash of acute nostalgia” (305; my emphasis). Or, when the first and only volume of Ogee finally arrives, Nick “find[s] that its splendour had a glint to it, a glassy malignity. . . . It was lustrous. The lustre was perfected and intense—it was the shine of marble and varnish. It was the gleam of something that was over” (428; my emphasis). And when the depleted, AIDS-ravaged Wani is sick in the bathroom of a restaurant where he meets with two American film producers, Nick, in the process of assisting him, considers his surroundings: “He .  .  . found himself thinking of nights here the year before, both cubicles sometimes carelessly busy with crackle of paper and patter of credit card. There was a useful shiny ledge above the cistern, and they would go in turn. The nights sped by in unrememberable brilliance” (381; my emphasis). Though Hollinghurst writes that these nights in the past are “unrememberable,” they seem, instead, to be “unforgettable.” Indeed, Nick remembers enough to long nostalgically for a time when his lover was not infected with AIDS, when they were both untouched by the tragedies that the future would bring.

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However, at other points, the shine has to do less with the uncanny return of the past than with the promise of the future. When Nick takes Wani swimming for the first time at a private, “Men Only” pond, Hollinghurst describes the scene: “It was hard to tell from their sleeked heads in the water, but through the smear of the goggles each figure waiting on the jetty or clambering onto the raft had the gleam of a new possibility” (162; my emphasis). Here the sense of “gleam” contradicts the nostalgia in the passages I quoted before. Rather than returning Nick to the past, the gleam insists on the possibility of escaping the past altogether through the creation of the new. The multiple significations of the metaphorics of light collapse nostalgia for the past into the promise of “new possibility” in the future, suggesting the temporal splitting that structures amorous time. With this collapse, Hollinghurst confirms the coincidence of optimism and negativity that amorous time exposes as fundamental to the construction of the ideality of love. Thus, with startling consistency, Hollinghurst depicts nostalgia as the longing for optimism, for a time when everything still seemed possible. This recognition of the object of nostalgia reveals the negativity and disappointment that fundamentally structure the desire for endless potential in the past. Hollinghurst’s account of the fading glamour of cars makes explicit the collapse of optimism and negativity that amorous time effects: “How cars themselves changed as they aged; at first they were possibilities made solid and fast, agents of dreams that kept a glint of dreams about them, a keen narcotic smell; then slowly they disclosed their unguessed quaintness and clumsiness, they seemed to fade into the dim disgrace between one fashion and another” (381). Nostalgic fantasy permits one to forget, at least momentarily, the “unguessed quaintness and clumsiness” in order to remember only the “glint of dreams,” possibilities, and promises that the earlier time holds tantalizingly in abeyance. Hollinghurst’s most important contribution to the understanding of nostalgic love emerges where he points out the longing for the optimism of the past and the failure of the past to make good on its promise. One place where this becomes most explicit is Hollinghurst’s description of the effect that cocaine produces in its users: “They had kissed the first time they did coke together, their first kiss, Wani’s mouth sour with wine, his tongue darting, his eyes timidly closed. Each time after that was a re-enactment of a thrilling beginning. Anything seemed possible—the world was not only doable, conquerable, but 98

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loveable: it showed its weaknesses and you knew it would submit to you” (225). “A thrilling beginning,” “anything seemed possible”: the first hit of cocaine promises an exciting, limitless future that Nick and Wani reenact each time they take the drug anew. Of course, the feeling of the limitless potential of the future to which the cocaine gives way is quickly replaced by an acknowledgment of limitation.61 Wani and Nick must repeat this moment, giving rise at once to the feeling that “anything seemed possible” and to the sensation that last time such limitless possibility did not come to fruition. But cocaine is not the only guaranty of the nostalgic return to the past in which anything seems possible in the future. Later Nick contemplates “the time of year when the atmosphere streamed with unexpected hints and memories, and a paradoxical sense of renewal. He thought of meeting Leo after work, always early, the chill of promise in the air” (387). Nick’s nostalgic desire focuses, as in the preceding passage, on possibility or, as Hollinghurst puts it, “the chill of promise in the air.” Similarly, it is not being with Leo but rather anticipating being with Leo that Nick cathects in this moment. It is not for nothing that Nick arrives to meet Leo “always early,” as if to prolong the anticipation. And the key to understanding the way nostalgia functions lies in Nick’s feeling “a paradoxical sense of renewal.” Hollinghurst’s understanding of the paradoxically renewing function of nostalgia most incisively articulates his anatomy of the machinery of nostalgia. Nostalgia provides a paradoxical feeling of renewal insofar as it has to fetishistically ignore—while at the same time acknowledging—the failure of the promise in the past in order to recreate the feeling of that promise in the future.62 Like beauty in this novel, nostalgia, love, and optimism turn out to be sophisticated: impure, split from within, and corroded by negativity. These impurities align Hollinghurst’s amorous time with the obverse of the uncritical nostalgic love on which Forster’s, Lawrence’s, and Winterson’s texts rely. Hollinghurst’s contemporary rewriting of the temporality of love differs considerably from these modernist evocations of nostalgic love. But the contemporary vision of love that The Line of Beauty offers does not completely depart from its modernist precursors; amorous time needs the legacy of modernist nostalgia. Hollinghurst therefore does not simply oppose sophistication to Nick’s nostalgia for optimism; he crucially links this sophistication to the nostalgic desire for purity by exposing the former as being an alloy for the latter. Hollinghurst AMOROUS TIME

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illustrates the mutual imbrication of purity and impurity, unalloyed optimism and negativity when he describes Catherine Fedden’s manic episodes: “Well, it’s poisonous, you see. It’s glittering but it’s deadly at the same time. It doesn’t want you to survive it . . . It’s the whole world just as it is . . . everything exactly the same. And it’s totally negative. You can’t survive in it” (15). Mania is beautiful and deadly; the world is the same and different; “you can’t survive in it” but you do. Catherine’s glitteringly “negative” condition is a study in self-contradiction and indexes the chaos of a world that is not at one with itself. Here Hollinghurst offers a description of a state of “sophistication”—a state of contradiction, disunity, and impurity—that seems wholly opposed to the optimism and flawlessness that love would seem to provide. And yet the “glittering” condition of Catherine’s mania is also described, elsewhere in the novel, in terms that seem to have much more in common with Nick’s nostalgia for optimism: “When she’s manic she lives in a world of total possibility” (419). The glitteringly negative mania turns out to be the world for which Nick nostalgically longs: the flaw that fantasy elides and includes, the alloy that corrodes and creates the pure substance of love. Hollinghurst thus gives us a way to understand Nick’s assertion that “there is a sort of aesthetic poverty about conservatism” (93). Like fantasmatic love, conservatism seeks unalloyed purity; like nostalgia, it seeks “total possibility” without the glitteringly negative mania such possibility must also entail. In place of what Sara Brophy aptly characterizes as “Thatcherism’s will to annihilate . . . difference,” Hollinghurst constructs a vision of the world, a relation to time, and a notion of love that all depend on the ineradicability of potentially corrosive differences.63 Hollinghurst’s response to conservatism’s “aesthetic poverty,” however, does not offer us a “progressive” political solution. He does not even offer us the opportunity to choose finally between purity and sophistication, redemption and negativity, possibility and failure. The Line of Beauty renders this choice impossible. Instead, Hollinghurst offers a series of surfaces that blindingly gleam, shot through with negativity and conflict. He offers a contemporary world full of both possibility and failure, a world of beauty: a world of love.

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4

COSMOPOLITAN LOVE Encountering Difference in Hari Kunzru’s Transmission and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled

I SUGGESTED AT the end of the preceding chapter that Alan Hollinghurst in-

vites us to reconsider nostalgia through the lens of amorous time. In so doing, The Line of Beauty gestures toward a contemporary world full of love: divided, contradictory, and disunified.1 This chapter extends my argument by examining Hari Kunzru’s Transmission (2005), which gives us a picture of what a contemporary “world of love” might look like.2 In this way, Transmission inquires into the politics of love as well as the ethics of something we might call global love. I extend my analysis of global love to include a consideration of Kazuo Ishiguro’s imbrication of cosmopolitanism, intimacy, and communal relations in The Unconsoled (1995).3 Unlike the other chapters in Unmaking Love, this chapter focuses solely on contemporary texts; indeed, the issues that Kunzru and Ishiguro deal with in these novels are distinctively contemporary. The consequences of the negative, queered love imagined by contemporary writers become most apparent in these texts insofar as the globalized world (and globalized love) of which they write stands out as a problem that modernist writers did not have to contend with on the same scale. Kunzru and Ishiguro ask us to consider where contemporary revisions of love leave us not just as individuals but as a collectivity. Given the changes contemporary writers make to the concept of love, of what sort of bonds can the world consist? Does a global

sense of connectedness emerge in light of contemporary writers’ experiments with amorous negativity? By asking such questions about the nature of relatedness, Kunzru and Ishiguro also question the political and ethical force of the contemporary novel’s new, negative love. Focusing on not just the interpersonal but also the transnational ramifications of love, Kunzru and Ishiguro crucially engage with the concept of cosmopolitanism. Most critics will agree that the adjective cosmopolitan describes not just a way of organizing the world, or a type of subject position, but also a stance that pertains to the ethical relation to the other. Few critics, however, in their explorations of the ethics of cosmopolitanism, inquire into what one might call the fundamental analytical category of ethics: love.4 This stands out as a curious omission insofar as the discourse of loving one’s neighbor stages, first and foremost, a debate about the status of ethics itself, suggesting that love and ethics are terms that cannot be thought without reference to each other. In this chapter I examine the concepts of cosmopolitanism and love, the latter of which seems inseparable from the former. Hari Kunzru’s Transmission explores the idea of a specifically “cosmopolitan love,” which does not necessarily partake of a conventional ethical relation to the other. I argue that Kunzru takes up a truism about love—that it is a “universal” emotion—in order to offer a critique of not only this conception of love, not only the homogenizing force of this idea, but also the idea of cosmopolitanism itself. The work of the philosopher Alain Badiou, particularly his theories of love and universality, helps to expand my interpretation of Transmission by complicating the notion of global ethics. Kunzru suggests that the ethics of cosmopolitanism—indeed, cosmopolitan love—can manifest as a corrosive and divisive stance toward the otherness of the other. In this way, Kunzru offers a critique of love as a universal emotion that would appear to unite all people across the globe, making of the world a single culture, a single place. He also critiques the idea of cosmopolitanism as simply a beneficent model for an ethical relation to the other. In other words, Transmission’s cosmopolitan love corrodes connections even as it creates them, destroys bonds in the process of forging them, and instantiates fissures and gaps between discrete entities at the moment in which it may also seem to suture them. And the idea of bonds that dissolve the moment they are created guides 102

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my reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled at the conclusion of this chapter. Ishiguro creates a cosmopolitan world that superficially seems to be distinguished by its lack of distinguishing features. However, I argue that this lack of specificity allows Ishiguro to explore more fully Barbara Johnson’s conception of “the difference within.”5 Ishiguro elaborates a world in The Unconsoled that is marked not by specific or distinct identities, ethnicities, or geographies but rather by internal differences that corrode communal, intimate, and amorous relationships. Such internal differences thus inform both Ishiguro’s and Kunzru’s depictions of cosmopolitanism, suggesting that the corrosion of relationships that these differences occasion are unavoidable and insurmountable. THE LOVE OF COSMOPOLITANISM In Transmission Kunzru signals his critique of cosmopolitanism and love—and the link between the two—most explicitly when he draws an analogy between intimate love and economic globalization. He takes up in a single moment the question of the whole world—and the world as whole—that the concept of the universal raises. Early in the novel, Guy Swift and his girlfriend, Gabriella, meet at the restaurant Sake-Souk, where they eat “Japanese-Lebanese fusion food as if oblivious to its trendsetting collisions of taste and presentation. . . . [Guy] glanced back at Gabriella, who was pushing an eggplant and chick-pea dragon roll around her plate and staring inscrutably at a point behind his shoulder. She looked beautiful. Her hair and eyes and nose and teeth. . . . He wanted to touch her but it felt unwise. . . . [Gabriella] watched Guy take a bite of his hamachi kebab making that irritating clicking sound with his teeth” (67–68). Peter Kemp, in his review of Transmission, suggests that in this scene Kunzru “impale[s] . . . [the] fashionable fatuity” represented by the meal of an “eggplant and chickpea dragon roll” and a “hamachi kebab.”6 Funny though this scene is, it does not simply “impale” fashion, but also crucially foregrounds the relation between globalization and cosmopolitanism. What is a hamachi kebab if not the culinary equivalent of the cosmopolitan desire to unite and preserve particular differences within the context of the universal? Perhaps even more important, this scene condenses cosmopolitanism into the problem of love. After all, this “Japanese-Lebanese fusion food” aims to bring together harmoniously two different cuisines; not for nothing do we call this sort of food fusion. Indeed, the C O S M O P O L I TA N L OV E

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combination of disjunctive culinary elements mirrors the sort of collision that romantic love is supposed to produce when it seems to unite two radically different people. “Japanese-Lebanese fusion food” thus exposes as untenable the fantasy of “fusion,” destroying the dream of complementarity, demonstrating how this fantasy fails. The relation between the food and love becomes explicit when one considers the fact that in the moment Kunzru introduces this cuisine he also foregrounds the impossibility of Swift’s and Gabriella’s relationship: a bored Gabriella finds Swift’s clicking jaw annoying, even as Swift fears touching Gabriella, noticing her undisguised detachment from him. The concept of combining two cuisines—not to say two people—that are radically disparate in order to produce a new whole becomes, for Kunzru, not simply absurd but patently impossible. Kunzru allows us to see how his text both takes issue with a particular idealized version of romantic love and confronts head-on the founding premises of contemporary cosmopolitanism. The ethics of cosmopolitanism tend, in general, to derive from either Kantian or Levinasian theories of the ethical. Were one working within a Kantian frame, making good on the responsibility to the other requires that one put oneself in the other’s place. This act depends, as Rebecca Walkowitz puts it, “on the cosmopolitan’s ability to imagine other people, those far away whose injury one must conceive as one’s own.”7 In this model the experiences of the other must be construed imaginatively as one’s own experiences. It would seem to follow, then, that one would not harm the other, if one can experience this as harm to oneself as well. In the Levinasian frame, one encounters the absolute otherness of the other, or what Levinas calls, in “Ethics as First Philosophy,” “the uniqueness of the noninterchangeable.”8 Levinas here contradicts Kantian cosmopolitanism: the idea of “noninterchangeablity” maintains that the self cannot occupy the space of the other precisely because of the other’s radical otherness. In “Cosmopolitan Reading” K. Anthony Appiah describes this form of cosmopolitanism as “universalism plus difference,” which, as he puts it, “thinks nothing human alien, but not because it imagines all humanity in its own image.”9 However different these approaches to cosmopolitanism, their prescriptions for an ethical relation to the other ultimately share progressive political aims. Vinay Dharwadker concisely sums up the goals of a cosmopolitan politico-ethical program in his description of cosmopolitanism “in antiq104

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uity.”10 He identifies cosmopolitan aims as political investments that are recognizably contemporary: “a validation of inclusive, egalitarian heterogeneity, of the tolerance of difference and otherness . . . of the recognition of others’ freedoms, of (comm)unity in diversity, or very simply, of the unqualified practice of fairness, kindness, and generosity” (7). In Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism Alain Badiou identifies cosmopolitanism in similar terms. He writes: “there are intertwined histories, different cultures, and, more generally, differences already abundant in one and the ‘same’ individual . . . the world is multicolored . . . one must let people live, eat, dress, imagine, love in whichever way they please.”11 The optimism implied by these characterizations of cosmopolitanism strikingly contrast the difficulty, if not impossibility, of a halcyon relation to the other that Kunzru depicts in Gabriella and Guy’s meal of “Japanese-Lebanese fusion food.” Not unlike Kunzru, Badiou remains at best skeptical of the openness that the cosmopolitan’s responsibility to the other might at first suggest. Rather than sharing the optimism associated with cosmopolitan politics and ethics, Badiou lambastes the progressive assumptions we often bring to bear on cosmopolitanism. This critique becomes explicit if we contextualize more fully and at greater length his description of cosmopolitanism. Badiou gives an account of the hypocrisy of contemporary, Western invocations of cosmopolitan ethics: That there are intertwined histories, different cultures and, more generally, differences already abundant in one and the “same” individual, that the world is multicolored, that one must let people live, eat, dress, imagine, love in whichever way they please, is not the issue, whatever certain disingenuous simpletons may want us to think. Such liberal truisms are cheap, and one would only like to see those who proclaim them not react so violently whenever confronted with the slightest serious attempt to dissent from their own puny liberal difference. Contemporary cosmopolitanism is a beneficent reality. We simply ask that its partisans not get themselves worked up at the sight of a young veiled woman, lest we begin to fear that what they really desire, far from a real web of shifting differences, is the uniform dictatorship of what they take to be “modernity.” (11)

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Reading Badiou at length complicates and helps to elaborate on Kunzru’s own skepticism about the relation to the other. The very fact that competing versions of cosmopolitanism exist—that we differ on what an ethical responsibility to the other might be—suggests that the acceptance, tolerance, or even celebration of difference that defines cosmopolitanism turns out to be undermined by the very terrain that “cosmopolitanism” seeks to name. Cosmopolitanism cannot be understood solely as a harmonious collectivity in which difference exists peacefully without the pressure to assimilate it to sameness; in which all antagonism is relieved by tolerating otherness. Rather, cosmopolitanism also turns out to be based on the competition between, and collapse of, sameness and difference; a community at war with itself and others around it; a collectivity created through the ideas, as I argue in the preceding chapter, that The Line of Beauty holds near and dear: division, disappointment, and negativity. In order to understand better how Badiou’s assessment of the contradictory force of cosmopolitanism might enrich a reading of Transmission, it is important to note that, for Badiou, cosmopolitanism derives, in the true ethical style, from nothing other than love. Kenneth Reinhard gives an account of Badiou’s theory of “the neighborhood,” which makes explicit the link between cosmopolitanism and love.12 The concepts of the neighbor and the neighborhood stand out as recognizably ethical and political concepts; with these terms, Badiou intervenes in the contemporary debate centering on “the love of the neighbor.” Reinhard explains, “For Badiou, the question of the neighbor is fundamentally the question of the neighborhood: just as there is no possible formulation of a sexual relationship, so two elements in a set, or two people in a world, cannot be directly linked as ‘neighbors,’ but only asserted as being in the same neighborhood” (66). This allusion to Jacques Lacan’s theorization of the “impossibility of the sexual relationship” gestures toward fantasy, particularly the fantasy that love can bridge the gap both between and within subjects. Reinhard reads Badiou as suggesting that to love one’s neighbor means neither that you fantasmatically make the other into the same nor that you aggressively destroy the other. Rather, to relate ethically to the neighbor means keeping faith with the impossibility of sexual rapport and the truth of multiplicity. In Reinhard’s discussion, it becomes clear that because the idea of “the neighborhood” suggests a disjunctive, nonunited unity, it might also represent the aggregate of nonidentical parts that we have come to understand as the “cosmopolis.” 106

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In “What Is Love?” Badiou traces more systematically the contours of the love upon which the cosmopolis depends. Rather than constructing unity or coherence, love insists upon the radical unassimilability of discrete elements. Badiou proposes “an axiomatics of love” that includes four central propositions: 1. “there are two positions of experience”; 2. “the two positions are absolutely disjunct”; 3. “there is no third position.”; and 4. “there is only one humanity.”13 The first two axioms, taken together, refute the primacy of what Badiou calls the “fusional model of love,” which depends on the simple mathematical formula that I discuss in the introduction: 1 + 1 = 1.14 Unlike a love that aims for fusion, Badiou suggests that the “two” (1 + 1) cannot become one because of their disjunction. Complementing Badiou’s antifusional model, axiom three maintains that no third position exists, because from this third position we would be able to imagine that the two constitutes a one. A third position would be situated outside the fundamental disjunction that structures human relations, producing the possibility of there being some subject or loving relationship that does not suffer from this disjunction and may be able to achieve oneness. With this critique of, and alternative to, fusional love in mind, axiom four might seem to stick out as the feature that does not fit Badiou’s picture of love. However, this final axiom—that “there is only one humanity”— rather than being the point at which Badiou’s account of love falls apart, actually turns out to be central to it. Because love collocates “one humanity” with the “absolute” disjunction of the two, it provides the structure for not only, as I am arguing, cosmopolitanism but also what Badiou defines as “universality.”15 On the one hand, love articulates a rule applicable to all, to humanity as one: there are two radically different positions. On the other hand, the universal rule of love asserts not sameness but difference, not unity but multiplicity. Badiou helps to expand on the paradoxical structure that I am calling cosmopolitan love as it emerges in Kunzru’s Transmission. This love asserts the oneness of humanity while, at the same time, splintering the one into many. Or, returning to Kunzru’s figure, cosmopolitan love creates “fusion food,” even as it also insists upon the impossibility of this fusion. Just as love cannot, for Lacan, make up for the impossibility of the sexual relationship, so too cosmopolitan love cannot make up for the fundamental discontinuity that structures communal, or global, human relationships. In “What Is Love?” Badiou elaborates on love’s refusal to resolve this paradox: “Love fractures the One according to C O S M O P O L I TA N L OV E

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the Two. And it is in virtue of this that it can be thought that, although worked by this disjunction, the situation is exactly as if there had been a One, and it is through this One-multiple that all truth is assumed” (273). Love does not make up for discontinuity, because it institutes it. Love “fractures the One” rather than “sutures the Two.”16 Here we find an added level of disjunction; not only are the two separate positions disjunctive but the One and the Two are radically different as well: they cannot be synthesized or assimilated to one another. It is significant, then, that Kunzru allows us to glimpse his critiques of amorous and economic globalization through the “fusion food” encounter. The problem of the two, doubly figured by the romantic couple and by the “Japanese-Lebanese fusion food,” emerges in relation to the desire for oneness. The attempt to create a single unit out of two discrete entities—whether it be a romantic or culinary union—encounters the impossibility of seamlessly integrating the two into one. Thus the concept of the “One-multiple” becomes the defining feature of Kunzru’s depictions of cosmopolitan love. To put this another way, Transmission seems to suggest that love can be universal without attempting to resolve difference into unity. Love is universal, but we are not universally the same. ONE/MULTIPLE In Transmission Kunzru sets up the idea of cosmopolitan love by way of his critique of the relation between globalization and love. Transmission can be interpreted as presenting a globalized world that appears to be fusing into one whole. This vision of the world erases plurality and occludes difference in order to produce a single, global, transnational culture.17 This “progress” toward the telos of universal community promises that the irreconcilability of national, ethnic, or political specificity will no longer hamper humanity. Borders that may have seemed impenetrable, geographies that may have been radically distinct no longer stand in the way of producing a globe united by commonality rather than divided by difference, presenting a hyperbolic version of a global culture. Arjun Appadurai has suggested of this global culture that “the central feature . . . is the politics of the mutual effort of sameness and difference to cannibalize one another and thereby proclaim their successful hijacking of the twin Enlightenment ideals of the triumphantly universal and the resil108

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iently particular.”18 However, in Kunzru’s text it seems, on the face of it, that the struggle Appadurai describes is over. Sameness rules the world, claiming victory for the “triumphantly universal.” In Transmission Kunzru most closely links this new world to two figures: the business partners, Guy Swift and Yves Ballard. Ballard, for instance, who wears “clothes as internationally acceptable and context-free as his forty-something face,” bears all the signs of global culture, which translates into his bearing no distinguishing signs at all (116). Swift also floats effortlessly through the world, footloose and context-free: “Thailand or Mauritius or Zanzibar or Cancun or Sharm el Sheikh or Tunisia or Bali or the Gold Coast or Papeete or Grand Cayman or Malibu. So many places for Guy. All the same” (126). These two businessmen bear the burden of metaphorizing a version of globalization, which depends upon eradicating difference and multiplicity in order to unify through universal sameness. As businessmen, they represent the economic aspect of globalization, which creates, as Fredric Jameson suggests, “a picture of standardization on an unparalleled new scale; of forced integration as well, into a world-system from which ‘delinking’ . . . is henceforth impossible and even unthinkable and inconceivable.”19 Ballard’s “internationally acceptable and context-free” clothes and Swift’s capacity to register radically different geographical locations as “all the same” illustrate what Jameson calls “standardization” and “integration.” Ballard and Swift figure both the standardizing swath of globalization and the inescapability of being enfolded into the global capitalist system. There can be no doubt, however, that Kunzru’s depiction of Ballard and Swift as representatives of a global economy is intended not to celebrate or naturalize the capitalist pretension to globalism but to critique it. In an interview with Frederick Luis Adalma, Kunzru suggests that his interests in writing this novel were at least twofold. Transmission addresses, on the one hand, “the ways that people try to make sense of place in a world that appears very homogenized,” and, on the other, “a sense of the immense inequality of the global system.”20 However, above and beyond illuminating Kunzru’s avowed suspicion of economic globalization, Transmission also develops a critique of something that might be called amorous globalization, the force of which Ballard and Swift also figure. Their figural function has everything to do with the fact that Ballard funds Swift’s company; as Kunzru tells us, “For Guy, love was C O S M O P O L I TA N L OV E

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the message” his company provides (20). Swift describes the nebulous service of “deep branding” that his company, Tomorrow*, offers: “We need relationships. A brand is the perfect way to come together. Human input creates awareness and mines the brand for emotion. In a real way, the more we love it, the more powerful it gets” (20). Upon Swift’s and Ballard’s partnership, two ideas thus converge: a universal culture premised on sameness and a conception of love that seems to unite everyone in the world, laying the groundwork for this universal collectivity. Swift’s belief that love not only motivates his business but also ensures its global success implicitly relies on an idea that we know all too well: that love is a universal experience. Julian Barnes echoes this belief in the universality of love in A History of the World in 10½ Chapters.21 He departs from his novel’s “historical” narrative to theorize love in a chapter called “Parenthesis” where he enumerates the translation of I love you in several different languages: “Ich liebe dich . . . Je t’aime . . . Ya tebya lyublyu . . . Ti amo” (227–28). Of this list Barnes writes, “I imagine a phonic conspiracy between the world’s languages. They make a conference decision that the phrase must always sound like something to be earned, to be striven for, to be worthy of ” (227). We have to hear in this sentence Barnes’s trademark glib style; in this joke, however, Barnes also makes a claim about the worldwide consensus on love that we would do well to take seriously. His list of translations and his uniform interpretation of them as connoting the same sort of desirability intimates that, for Barnes, love transcends linguistic, cultural, and national differences. Love is always already the same.22 Because all people, no matter who they are or where they are from, share this understanding of love, it follows that, in this way, all of us—across the globe—are fundamentally linked. Barnes perfectly traces the contours of fantasy: love unites us and proves that we are one.23 By illustrating the coherence and connectivity that love provides, Barnes also makes explicit the stakes in the debate about love’s universality. Repeating an idea we know too well by now, Barnes asserts that the universal love he imagines forms the basis of an ethics: “it’s a starting point for civic virtue. You can’t love someone without imaginative sympathy, without beginning to see the world from another point of view” (241). By seeing the world through someone else’s eyes—by loving your neighbor as yourself—love closes the distance between self and other, making the other into the same. Love, in effect, erases 110

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the difference between you and me. This vision of love demands that we register only selves, not others or otherness. Barnes brings to light the redemption that universal love seems to promise: the eradication of all antagonism, all difference, whether it be linguistic, cultural, or psychic. In Transmission Kunzru challenges these ideological commonplaces about the ethical force of love and love’s ability to erase differences between radically different individuals and cultures, laying bare the question at the heart of his novel: what is the relationship between love and the universal? Does love translate to all people, just as Swift and Ballard can translate themselves into any context? Can love unite the world, making it one, by being “internationally acceptable and context-free”?24 Kunzru seems to affirm the notion that Swift’s version of corporate, branddriven love translates universally and that the world constitutes a united whole. The boundaries that create and preserve differences across the globe break down during the course of Kunzru’s novel. For instance, Arjun Mehta’s sister, Priti, gets a job with DilliTel, a telecom company in India that provides service not to India but to Australia (16).25 National, linguistic, cultural, and geographical differences pose no challenge to the possibility of connecting one country to another.26 When Kunzru describes a golf course in Dubai, the universalizing imperative of global culture becomes even more explicit: “Like all golf courses the landscape was a ghost of Scotland, an environmental memory abstracted into universal signs. Bunker, fairway, rough” (164–65). Even as these “universal signs” might seem to retain the trace of particularity, Kunzru exposes the process through which the universal colonizes just such traces. In other words, if “all golf courses” preserve the specificity of the Scottish landscape, then this specificity begins to belong not simply to Scotland but to “all,” until the universal value of this “ghost of Scotland” supersedes any national specificity it might initially suggest. Were the world united or in the process of uniting, the condensation of love and universality into the figure of Ballard’s and Swift’s partnership would make good sense. However, as soon as Kunzru has traced the contours of a united world, a world made into a single place through standardization and homogenization, he also simultaneously insists upon disunity by relentlessly scattering numbers, the most literal signifiers of multiplicity, throughout the text. For instance, Arjun Mehta counts obsessively, Kunzru tells us, in order to establish certainty in an uncertain world: “He needed a place to stand. . . . Numbers were the truth C O S M O P O L I TA N L OV E

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of the world. . . . Find certainty by counting the things” (98). But rather than providing a firm ground to stand on, the uncountable multiplicity of numbers in Kunzru’s text suggests the way in which multiples work to “fracture,” to use Badiou’s word, not just solid ground but the world as such. Outside Virugenix, Mehta spots a crow and begins to count its feathers: “He found himself counting them: one, two, five, ten, until he was distracted by the light streaming between the needles of the tall conifers lining the campus perimeter” (93). Far from helping him concentrate, far from unifying his consciousness, numbers drive him to distraction, as “streaming” light—diffuse and unquantifiable— draws his attention away from the task. Elsewhere, multiples do not make the world concrete but rather dissolve it into a scrim of impenetrable code: What is more certain than number? Fifteen sails visible on the water. Twelve cars parked in the lot by the marina. Eight windows along the first floor. Eight more above them. . . . . How many sixteens of trees in his field of vision? How many around the lake? Streams of numbers came to him, too fast to handle. (98)

If the world of Kunzru’s novel is a world united, then Kunzru asks us to reconceptualize what we understand by unity. Unity, here, does not mean wholeness, singularity, or concreteness. Nor does unity confer identity upon the world. Rather, Kunzru’s unity institutes a world of uncountable plurality, excess, nonidentity. Indeed, Kunzru signals this excessive multiplicity early in the novel, when Gabbar Singh, one of Mehta’s friends in India, tries to sell him a pornographic CD-ROM called “Too Too Sexy 2.” We hear in this title a multiplication of twos, echoes of which we also find in the abbreviation of Mehta’s favorite Bollywood film, N2L2, which stands for Naughty, Naughty, Lovely, Lovely (33). In “Too Too Sexy 2,” we not only hear three twos, we also see in this title the repetition of “too.” This redoubling of too, the signifier of excess, confirms the multiple twos that we hear and suggests, at least two times over, the plurality that inhabits and structures the world Kunzru describes. There are too, too many twos to count, too many numerical possibilities to create a singular world 112

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of which its inhabitants can be certain. Punctuating the profound instability of two, suggested in these passages in which two quickly becomes more than two, Kunzru writes: “At the boundaries of any complex event, unity starts to break down. . . . How many people must be involved for certainty to dissipate? The answer, according to information theorists, is two” (146). Given the problematic status of the two in this novel, it is hardly surprising that Kunzru makes most explicit the corrosive convergence of the one and the multiple within the framework of love, and specifically the moment in any love story that aspires to establish narrative closure: the moment when two people should become one. His novel ends where many do: the union of the couple— Arjun Mehta and the namesake of his virus, Leela Zahir—at the culmination of an arduous love story, replete with difficulty and obstacles to happiness: There are sightings of Arjun Mehta and Leela Zahir around the world, sometimes alone, sometimes in company. She is seen begging in the streets of Jakarta and talking on the phone in the back of New York cabs. He is spotted one day at an antiglobalization demo in Paris and the next coming onto the pitch in a hockey match in rural Gujarat. . . . One persistent report, mostly from Pacific-rim countries, has a young man fitting Mehta’s description accompanied by a South Asian woman of a similar age. . . . They are sometimes seen kissing or holding hands. According to conspiracy theorists, there is only one possible explanation, only one pattern that makes sense. (276)

This constitutes the final passage of Transmission and would seem to provide narrative resolution. Surely, Mehta and Zahir appear to end up together happily ever after. Rather than narrating the appearance of the couple at the end of this novel, this passage seems instead to narrate its disappearance or, to use one of Kunzru’s descriptions of the “Leela” virus, its “deletion.” The couple gets deleted from the text, leaving a zero where a One should be.27 This disappearance of the romantic couple necessitates the multiplication of fantasies to make up for the gap that love would suture. Kunzru offers a multitude of possible explanations of what may have happened to Mehta and Zahir, without confirming any one of them. Nevertheless, the final sentence of the paragraph seems to provide some concrete knowledge C O S M O P O L I TA N L OV E

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when Kunzru asserts that “there is only one possible explanation.” Faced with the assertion that “there is only one possible explanation” for what happens to Mehta and Zahir, we might be driven to ask: what is this “one”? There is nothing to suggest that any of the possibilities he lists here is the right one. Certainly, the love story is most familiar, but not necessarily the most plausible.28 By producing many possible explanations, without confirming the truth of any one of them, Kunzru undercuts his final assertion that “there is only one possible explanation.” The “deletion” of the couple supplants the fullness we expect of a One, even as the “only one” seems to contain multiples. That is, Kunzru asserts there is “only one” not once but twice: “there is only one possible explanation, only one pattern that makes sense” (276; my emphasis). It turns out to be the case—quite literally—that there is not “only one”; rather there are actually two “only ones.” “One” itself becomes the insistence upon multiplicity. The many possible explanations do not so much contradict as inform and constitute the “only one” with which Kunzru ends his novel.29 CORROSIVE COSMOPOLITANISM It might be tempting to see Kunzru’s critique of oneness as part of a larger critique of the sameness that globalization demands. In this analysis Kunzru would be arguing for a cosmopolitan tolerance of difference: a revivification, and potentially even a celebration, of local, national, and cultural differences over and against the standardizing swath of global capitalism. Kunzru himself suggests that Transmission explores “the loss of a particular sense of place in a globalised world” and the “tension between the global and the local.”30 Part of this critique might include Kunzru’s drawing our attention to the profound class disparity that globalization creates and maintains. For instance, air travel, Guy Swift’s and Yves Ballard’s primary form of transportation across the globe, may well be an exemplary form of global connectivity, even though, as John Tomlinson points out, “it is still restricted to relatively small numbers of people and, within this group, to an even smaller, more exclusive, cadre of frequent users.”31 Moreover, the Internet, or the World Wide Web, which serves as the paradigmatic figure of globalization in Kunzru’s text, creates a notion of the world united, even as it also necessarily excludes from this world those people who are not “online.” 114

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This argument against globalization as the erasure of differences comes to fruition in the figure of Arjun Mehta. He demonstrates that the apprehension of a universally connected world is not a universal experience, that globalization does not apply to all. As Mehta waits to be interviewed for the job that will eventually take him to America, Kunzru offers a glimpse of this critique: “Behind the desk sat a receptionist. Above her a row of clocks, relics of the optimistic 1960s, displayed time in key world cities. New Delhi seemed to be only two hours ahead of New York, and one behind Tokyo. Automatically, Arjun found himself calculating the shrinkage in the world implied by this error. . . . For a moment or two the image hung ominously in his brain, the globe contracting like a deflating beach ball” (6). On the one hand, this image introduces the potentially optimistic idea that the world is shrinking. New Delhi, New York, and Tokyo become near neighbors, suggesting the possibility that this is “a small world, after all.” This world belongs not just to Disney but to men like Guy Swift and Yves Ballard, whose message of love unites the world through the fantasy of universal brand recognition. On the other hand, in this passage, Kunzru brings Mehta into focus as Swift’s and Ballard’s foil. For every person like Swift or Ballard, there also exists a Mehta, who recognizes the apparent shrinkage of the world as an “error.” It would be easy to see Transmission as offering an uncomplicated critique of globalization by privileging the local over the global, bringing into the light of day the exclusions that subtend any claim to universality. While Kunzru does allow us to see Transmission in this way, the novel also exceeds this reading. Kunzru does, through Mehta, offer a critique of globalization, but it does not aim simply to privilege local difference over universal sameness, valorizing in turn a version of cosmopolitanism that understands the other as other, that tolerates difference rather than attempting to assimilate it to sameness. As I will show, Kunzru’s critique also crucially points to cosmopolitanism as a potentially antagonistic force by foregrounding the difference on which love insists. Mehta figures the disruption of Swift’s and Ballard’s universal community because he exposes the unification of the world as a misrecognition of the power of what I have been calling cosmopolitan love. Through Mehta, Kunzru depicts cosmopolitan love not as a uniting but as a corrosive force. Mehta authors the aggressive computer virus that functions in Transmission as the central figure for love. An unsuspecting owner of an infected computer sees an C O S M O P O L I TA N L OV E

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innocent clip from one of Leela Zahir’s films, and, as the clip plays and replays, the infection spreads throughout the machine. The Leela virus is not restricted to an individual computer; it travels, as Kunzru describes, rapidly across the globe, becoming, in effect, the perfect figure for the “One-multiple”: “The truth is that Leela was not one thing. She was not even a set or a group or a family. She was a swarm, a horde. . . . So many Leelas. So many girls with the same face” (107). Leela multiplies into an uncountable number of variations of the original virus, though all these multiples bear a single name and “the same face.” The multiplication of Leela suggests its relation to the romantic couple with which Kunzru ends his novel. In both cases, we find a “one” that is more than one, a “one” that multiplies endlessly. Were Kunzru simply to describe the way a particular pattern of zeros and ones takes possession of a hard drive, it might be difficult to defend a reading of the Leela virus as a figure for love. However, Kunzru repeatedly emphasizes the resonance between the virus and passionate attachment. The novel opens with a description of Leela in explicitly amorous and erotic terms: “Leela Zahir, dancing in jerky QuickTime in a pop-up window on your screen. . . . It was not as if you asked for Leela to come and break your heart. . . . For a moment, even in the midst of your panic, you probably felt special. Which was Leela’s talent. Making you believe it was all just for you. But there were others. How many did she infect?” (3). Kunzru introduces the virus in this passage through the logic of love. Leela is not just a virus but a placeholder for any love object. Her attention makes one feel “special,” as though Leela and her lover are the only two people in the world. As in love, this feeling of self-enclosure also produces the threat of “others,” who might interrupt the union of the couple. In this way, Kunzru’s introduction of the Leela virus mirrors another representation of love in Transmission: the relation between Chris, Mehta’s brief and abortive love interest, and her boyfriend, Nicolai. We learn that they have an open relationship, but it becomes clear that the openness that makes it exciting also constitutes a danger: “No compromises, anything possible, anything permitted. It sometimes made for a strain, especially when other people got involved, but it had always felt like a brave choice” (96). The “others” that Leela infects suggest the “other people” that trouble Chris’s relationship with Nicolai, condensing into Leela both the queerness with which multiplicity infects love and the impulse to conserve the unity of a couple in which two can become one. 116

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Expanding upon the threat that “others” pose to passionate attachment, Leela has the structure of fantasy, the coherence-producing mechanism that love both requires and enables. But the virus also instructs us in how fantasy fails to maintain such coherence. Kunzru writes: “she was a surface effect. The real action was taking place in the guts of the code: a cascade of operations, of iterations and deletions, an invisible contagion of ones and zeroes. Leela played holi, and her clinging sari diverted attention from the machinery at work under her skin” (4). What is this if not a perfect illustration of how fantasy operates? The illusion of seamless coherence seduces us and, in doing so, diverts attention from the antagonism that fantasy attempts to allay. Such antagonism—which Kunzru figures here as “deletions”—insists that fantasy must fail. This description of the virus suggests the failure of love and finds its parallel in Swift’s relation with Gabriella. Kunzru extends his critique of fantasy introduced through the figure of Leela: “Gaby smoked a cigarette on the balcony and Guy took a shower, during which he surreptitiously masturbated, thinking about a fantasy partner who was like Gaby but kinder, less abrasive” (125).32 The fantasy that two can fuse into one may aim to produce unity in a relationship, but, unable to provide coherence, fantasy instead demands the continual multiplication of fantasies in the face of amorous failure. The Leela virus also figures love when it constitutes Mehta’s attempt, as Lacan might say, to “make up for the sexual relationship” in his own life; it becomes one instantiation of these fantasies that must multiply to compensate for the failure of love to unify. One way of reading his motivation for creating the virus is to see it as a way to get back his job at Virugenix and as revenge for having lost it. Ruth Scurr calls the virus “Arjun’s muddled gesture of protest and revenge.”33 And Peter Kemp suggests that “[Mehta] creates and unleashes a computer virus . . . so that he can display his indispensability to Virugenix by coming up with an ingenious way of stopping it.”34 Though this sort of reading seems plausible, it isn’t wholly persuasive. Before he decides to write the virus, Mehta appeals to Chris, his one-time sexual partner, for help. He tells her, since they have an intimate relationship: “You’re my last hope. It’s you and me against the world now” (96). Chris rejects Mehta’s clichéd interpretation of their bond and declines to help regain his job, an act whose meaning he sees as clear: “That means you don’t love me. . . . You’re supposed to love me” (97). Perfectly exemplifying the impossibility of sexual rapport, their relationship inevitably runs C O S M O P O L I TA N L OV E

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into the obstacle of excruciating misunderstanding. The difference between Mehta’s and Chris’s attitudes toward their sexual encounter makes this impossibility most apparent. Chris cannot seem to remember why she slept with him: “She could not find anything . . . to remind her why it had been so important to come by at 2:00 am and have sex with this man” (84). Whereas Mehta wakes up with jubilant sentimentality after their night together: “Now Chris had showed him, solved the uncomputable problem of finding another person to touch and be touched in return. He felt humble, grateful” (85). The unbridgeable gap between Mehta and Chris that these passages illustrate demands the construction of the virus. Mehta responds to the radical disjunction between them by creating the virus, a substitutive form of love. Rather than serving to connect Mehta and Chris, the virus dissolves their relationship; it exposes the inability of love to bring together disparate elements, making them into a new whole. The Leela virus does not just fail to fill the gap between Mehta and Chris; it also actively corrodes connections between people across the globe. Kunzru describes repeatedly the chaos that is attributed to Leela in Honduras, Ottawa, Bihar, and the United States (146). Leela blocks transmission and creates “an accretion of frustration, a furring of the global arteries. Simple tasks took on a new level of difficulty. . . . Breakdowns, closures, suspensions and delays” (164). The virus erupts into “an informational disaster. A number of major networks dealing with such things as mobile telephony, airline reservations, transatlantic e-mail traffic and automated teller machines went down simultaneously” (254). Intervening in the means through which the globe might be united, Leela divides the globe against itself. No one can breach the new, arbitrary thresholds Leela generates in a world where it seemed as though information and individuals could effortlessly cross borders. Rather than making up for the radical disjunctions between people, filling in the distance between them, “Leela,” as a force aligned with love, shatters connections. After the virus appears, Kunzru writes, “all that can be said with honesty is that . . . there were absences, gaps that have never been filled” (254). Indeed, intransmissability is the only thing Leela can be said to transmit. Where “Leela” figures love, love becomes not a uniting but a corrosive force. Even as Leela does not unite the world, the virus nonetheless universalizes the condition of not being united. Kunzru thus exposes the exclusionary 118

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structure of a global relatedness and shows that all people—whether they are “online” or not—are disconnected from each other. Leela connects the world through disconnection and makes it one through division. That the virus both destroys and creates unity points to the way in which Kunzru simultaneously embraces and rejects the concept of the universal. As a figuration of cosmopolitan love, Leela makes the world one by showing that it is not one. Not unlike the romantic couple with which Kunzru ends his novel, the insistence on multiplicity overwhelms and disarticulates the concept of the singular, even as the one does not simply disappear. Rather than obscuring or overwriting the one, multiplicity operates on the one from within by both troubling and enabling the idea of unity; the world is united by the universally shared experience of not being united. The world is one and more than one at the same time. Kunzru’s “only one”—that itself contains multiples—not only becomes aligned with the “one” of the romantic couple, but it also crucially describes the cosmopolitan world in which this novel takes place and in which Kunzru wrote it. COSMOPOLITAN CONNECTIONS IN KAZUO ISHIGURO’S THE UNCONSOLED Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled also explores the imbrication of intimacy and cosmopolitan relatedness through an exaggerated version of a cosmopolitanism that, like Guy Swift and Yves Ballard in Transmission, is “internationally acceptable and context-free” (116). The unnamed European city through which Ryder travels in The Unconsoled for some critics seems to consist of a universal swath of sameness. However, I want to suggest that Ishiguro’s hyperbolic representation of the universal actually occasions his extended meditation on unavoidable and insurmountable difference. That is, Ishiguro focuses on, to use Johnson’s words, “a difference within.”35 The Unconsoled thus narrates a story about a labyrinthine and seemingly featureless cosmopolis in order to elaborate the failure of intimate and communal bonds when faced with such a difference. This self-difference is key to understanding not only Ishiguro’s depiction of intimacy and communal belonging but also Hari Kunzru’s cosmopolitan world that is one and more than one at the same time. Critics reliably identify The Unconsoled as a cosmopolitan novel and Ishiguro as a cosmopolitan author. Natalie Reitano argues that, by setting The C O S M O P O L I TA N L OV E

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Unconsoled in an unspecific and indistinct city, “Ishiguro takes to task both his own vision of the universal and those proposed by certain cosmopolitical stances.”36 Bruce Robbins, gesturing toward the question of cosmopolitan ethics that I address early in this chapter, also reads this novel as an inquiry into the temporal and, importantly, “geographical limits on caring.”37 For Robbins and Reitano, The Unconsoled registers as cosmopolitan because of its radical translatability: it could take place anywhere and involve anyone. There is nothing “different” (local or specific) about the world of Ishiguro’s novel; the world in The Unconsoled is “universal” to the extent that it has no specific features that would make it register in its particularity.38 Ishiguro’s universality erases local, specific, and particular differences, producing instead what Robbins calls a “sanitized foreignness” (435). Through such sanitizing, as Reitano suggests, “otherness recedes to where it need not be touched” (369).39 However persuaded I am by aspects of these arguments, by focusing on the decontextualized, sanitized, unspecific, and universalized world of The Unconsoled, we risk missing the moments of distortion and disruption that resist integration into a world that is seamlessly whole and relentlessly the same. In The Critical Difference Johnson discusses Barthes’s notion of the “text’s difference” in order to elaborate what she refers to as “the difference within.” For Johnson, difference does not signal a text’s “uniqueness, its special identity” but rather “the text’s way of differing from itself ” (4). However, this concept of difference is not, for Johnson, restricted to texts in any simple sense. Difference has everything to do with identity, both its establishment and dissolution: “Difference, in other words, is not what distinguishes one identity from another. It is not a difference between (or at least not between individual units), but a difference within” (4). For Johnson, identities exist only to the extent that we translate a difference within into a difference between. The difference of which Johnson writes thus has everything to do with the question of “otherness”: how we register and treat not just the otherness, or difference, of the other but also and quite crucially the otherness of ourselves.40 Johnson’s conception of “a difference within” is particularly instructive in relation to a text like The Unconsoled, which seems fixated on the lack of ethnic, identitarian, or geographical differences. By producing a world that seems to be a representation of a “sanitized” universal, Ishiguro draws our attention internal otherness. It may be true, then, as Robbins suggests, that Ishiguro’s novel “specifies no na120

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tionalities and thus can offend no one.”41 But the lack of national and ethnic identity also has a different set of consequences, as Walkowitz notes where she writes that Ishiguro “suggests that national identities are generated not only to maintain a boundary from the outside but also to erect a boundary in the face of new, perhaps internal estrangement.”42 The idea that establishing specific identities based on particularity protects against “internal estrangement” is what interests me most here. Ishiguro abandons identity and specificity in The Unconsoled, experimenting with the possibility of a world dominated by such estrangement, by difference, by otherness. The style of Ishiguro’s novel lends itself, perhaps more than any other aspect of the text, to the persistent interruptions of self-difference. The dreamlike atmosphere of Ryder’s travels through the unnamed city produces the awareness of an otherness that exists not outside of the city and the self but within.43 There are any number of moments in the text that register the dreamlike status of the narrative, but I want to focus specifically on moments in which Ryder experiences a recognition that creates at once an improbable continuity and, because of this continuity, the sense of a profound disjunction. We see this structure in The Unconsoled when Ryder narrates following Sophie on one of his earliest journeys through the city: “at that moment I became conscious of footsteps coming down behind us. . . . The person entered the pool of light cast by the lower lamp and I saw that it was someone I knew. . . . His name was Geoffrey Saunders and he had been in my year at school in England” (44). Ryder just happens to bump into an old school friend from England in an alley in a mysterious European city, establishing a connection between here and there, home and away. Meeting someone from home while abroad seems plausible enough, but the likelihood of this happening repeatedly seems improbable. Of course, in The Unconsoled, it does happen again. Not only does Ryder reencounter Geoffrey Saunders later in the text as the man who amputates Brodsky’s leg by the side of the road, but Ryder also meets another old school friend elsewhere in the text: “The ticket inspector looked at me. . . . I recognized Fiona Roberts, a girl from my village primary school in Worcestershire with whom I had developed a special friendship around the time I was nine years old” (170). The repeated—and sometimes bizarre—encounters with old childhood friends produce continuity between two places, even as the strangeness of these moments creates a disruption in the smooth functioning of the text. Not unlike the Leela C O S M O P O L I TA N L OV E

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virus in Kunzru’s Transmission, these moments create connection, but the instance of connection is also one of disconnection. By fusing together disparate geographies and temporalities, a sense of disjunction emerges; such moments create the fleeting impression that reality is not as coherent as it might seem. The conflict of connection and disconnection is not restricted to such interpersonal encounters; they are part of a larger pattern that extends beyond the intimate sphere of childhood relationships into the world more widely, linking the intimate to the global. The experience of recognizing simultaneously improbable continuity and the disjunction such continuity effects is also, in The Unconsoled, a distinctively geographical phenomenon. In the cases of Ryder’s meeting George Saunders and Fiona Roberts, we already see indications of this global component. By finding Saunders in the present, Ryder is transported to the England of his childhood, and in Roberts Ryder returns, if only in memory, to Worcestershire. Often, though, the continuity between Ryder’s present location and elsewhere seems not virtual but actual. When Gustav first takes Ryder to his hotel room, Ryder realizes: “The room I was now in . . . was the very room that had served as my bedroom during the two years my parents and I had lived at my aunt’s house on the border of England and Wales” (16). Later in the novel, when Ryder and Boris return to an apartment where they apparently at one time lived with Sophie, Ryder has a similar experience: “I realised . . . it resembled exactly the back part of the parlour in the house my parents and I had lived in for several months in Manchester” (214). We might read such moments as Robbins does, as evincing a foreigness that “may not be foreign at all,” which “sanitizes,” domesticates, and de-fangs the threat of the other.44 However, The Unconsoled suggests that the simultaneous experience of continuity and discontinuity in these passages actually has the opposite effect. Rather than domesticating foreignness, Ishiguro makes foreign the domestic, creating a sense of a place that is always inhabited by others: other places, other people, other times. The world of The Unconsoled is certainly cosmopolitan, but this is a cosmopolitanism, defined by disjunction, that attends to the difference within. As these moments of connection mount up throughout the novel, one starts to get the sense that there might be no outside to the world of The Unconsoled, collapsing inside and outside. Ryder seems to be in a European city, but this city also includes Worcestershire, Manchester, and the border between England and Wales. As Jeanette Baxter suggests, this city also seems to be “an amalgam 122

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of Hungary, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Scandinavia, Italy, and Poland, while at the same time it is reducible to none of these places.”45 One gets the sense that, at the end of the novel, as Ryder prepares to leave for his next appearance in Helsinki, he won’t be going anywhere at all. Rather than going outside the city, it seems quite likely that he will find that Helsinki is inside this city. After all, throughout the novel Ryder is often surprised by realizing he is in a location that he is not aware of having entered: “it suddenly dawned on me that we were in the atrium of the hotel” (148). The collapse of inside and outside and the geographical confusion that this collapse occasions bears a striking resemblance to Jameson’s account of the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles. As in Jameson’s description of the hotel lobby, in the unnamed city of The Unconsoled “it is quite impossible to get your bearings,” as Ryder learns repeatedly.46 Moreover, and more important, the collapse of inside and outside, of local and global has the effect of troubling “the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world.”47 Clearly, no map will help Ryder navigate inside this city. But, perhaps even more crucial, whereas the world external to the Bonaventure remains for Jameson “mappable,” the external world beyond the city in which The Unconsoled takes place seems as unmappable as the city itself. If the city contains, at the very least, English cities as well as other European countries, then what would this map look like? The external world of The Unconsoled seems as convoluted and labyrinthine as the world inside the city, giving us the impression of a shrinking world that might remind one of Arjun Mehta’s image of “the globe contracting like a deflating beach ball” in Kunzru’s Transmission.48 However, the sense of a shrinking world in The Unconsoled does not necessarily create communal connections. Jameson approaches this idea where he writes that the disjunction between the body and the environment around it analogizes “the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the real global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught.”49 Here Jameson might well be describing the world of Kunzru’s Transmission, but he also elaborates some of the consequences of the confusing collapse of inside and outside that The Unconsoled achieves. Just as Ryder cannot locate himself inside the city or in relation to the world external to it, so too do his connections to the community—both local and C O S M O P O L I TA N L OV E

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global—become obfuscated and confused. And this idea is at the heart of Ishiguro’s depiction of the cosmopolis in The Unconsoled: communal and intimate connections are necessarily rearranged by the confusions, collisions, and disjunctions that structure the cosmopolitan world. Indeed, these connections and disconnections mirror the intimate relationships throughout Ishiguro’s novel. There are few, if any, examples of “successful” amorous relationships in The Unconsoled; not just Ryder but all the characters seem to be facing broken relationships they are striving to repair. Ryder, Sophie, and Boris have endured a rupture in their familial structure, which they all at different points in the novel try and fail to mend. The relationship between Gustav and Sophie is so strained that they no longer communicate directly anymore, using Boris and Ryder as intermediaries. Stephan seeks to make up with his parents by playing at the concert at the end of the novel, an attempt that ends disastrously as his parents walk out during his performance. Even Stephan’s parents, who seem to produce a united front when walking out on his performance, have relational difficulties. Hoffman realizes a chasm exists between himself and his wife: “she had always hidden certain parts of herself from me. Preserving them, as though contact with my coarseness would damage them” (351). And Brodsky wants to use the concert and his recovery from alcoholism to persuade Miss Collins to love him again; his pleas for her love are ultimately met with her heartbreaking assertion, “Wherever you’re going now, you’ll have to go by yourself ” (498). Even Christoff nurses the fantasy that having better musical talent would improve his relationship with his wife, Rosa (191). But the broken, troubled bonds are not restricted to familial or romantic relationships; in The Unconsoled brokenness extends to the wider community. These corroded communal relationships are signaled early in the novel when Ryder is scheduled during his tour to meet with “the Citizens’ Mutual Support Group,” which is “made up of ordinary people from every walk of life brought together by their sense of having suffered from the present crisis” (12). It seems that Brodsky’s wound that “never healed properly” and sometimes even “start[s] to grow again” does not belong simply to Brodsky (308, 309). This wound belongs to everyone, infecting intimacy and community alike, creating a sense of permanent injury that resists reparation. Ishiguro does not give us the satisfaction of repairing the broken relationships in the novel or healing Brodsky’s, the community’s, or other individuals’ 1 24

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wounds.50 The novel is not, after all, called “The Consoled.” However, Ishiguro does help us to understand the wounded relationships throughout the novel in a way that refuses reparation. Early in the novel, when Ryder recognizes his hotel room as his childhood room in his aunt’s house, he remembers a game he played with toy soldiers as a child: I could remember how once that same area of floor had been covered by a worn green mat, where several times a week I would set out in careful formations my plastic soldiers. . . . I reached down a hand and let my fingers brush against that hotel rug, and as I did so a memory came back to me of one afternoon when I had been lost within my world of plastic soldiers and a furious row had broken out downstairs. . . . Near the centre of that green mat had been a torn patch that had always been the source of much irritation to me. But that afternoon, as the voices raged on downstairs, it had occurred to me for the first time that this tear could be used as a sort of bush terrain for my soldiers to cross. (16)

Young Ryder realizes in this moment that a wound, or in this case a “tear,” need not be repaired or erased in order to proceed with his game. He finds that, as Ishiguro writes, “the blemish that had always threatened to undermine [his] imaginary world could in fact be incorporated into it” (16). In this moment a fantasy world is threatened by a flaw that might undo it, but, rather than disarticulating the fantasy, the flaw becomes a part of it. Ishiguro offers this moment not simply to illustrate the imaginative ingenuity of youth but rather as a guide for all the broken, wounded, and flawed fantasies of relatedness we see throughout the novel. It seems telling that Ryder incorporates the tear into his game at the same time he hears his parents having a fight downstairs. The coincidence of the fight and the flaw in the green mat suggests a connection between these two seemingly disparate events. The tear in the mat becomes analogous to the tear in relations both between Ryder’s parents and between all the characters in Ishiguro’s novel. Stephan, Ryder, Brodsky, Christoff, Hoffman, Gustav, Boris, and the Citizens’ Mutual Support Group all share one central blindness: that the wounds in their relationship cannot and do not need to be repaired. Instead, the gaps that separate C O S M O P O L I TA N L OV E

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them from their families, their communities, their spouses do not block the relationships between individuals but actually constitute them. In other words, the relationships in this novel are only relationships to the extent that a tear exists in their fabric; without this tear, there would be no relationship at all. These connections that include disconnection, breakage, and rupture, of course, return us to the cosmopolitan love of Hari Kunzru’s Transmission. But this structure also resembles the bonds of intimacy that are founded on the end of love in Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy as well as the concept of amorous time that I discuss in relation to Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. Cosmopolitan love is the corollary of Hollinghurst’s amorous time: both include, and, indeed, require, the flaw or rupture that threatens to dissolve bonds in order to establish connection at all. In order to have a clear sense of cosmopolitan love, we would do well to turn briefly to Walkowitz’s concept of “critical cosmopolitanism.” Not unlike the authors of whom Walkowitz writes in Cosmopolitan Style, Kunzru and Ishiguro could also be said to be attempting “to develop a critical cosmopolitanism,” which Walkowitz describes as “thinking beyond the nation . . . comparing, distinguishing, and judging among different versions of transnational thought; testing moral and political norms . . . and valuing informal as well as transient models of community.”51 I would also add that Kunzru’s and Ishiguro’s critical cosmopolitanism takes literally the modifier critical. In her “Opening Remarks” to The Critical Difference, Johnson offers a definition of “critical” that would be helpful to consider here. In addition to signifying “evaluative,” as Walkowitz implies, “critical” can also suggest that something is “crucial” or “fraught with danger, or risk; perilous.”52 This last aspect of “critical” is, for these contemporary authors, critical because this definition designates the potential for antagonism, aggression, and corrosion included in the term cosmopolitan. Looked at in this way, cosmopolitan love does not have a purely redemptive function. Rather than establishing community in a world radically different from itself, rather than simply tolerating or accepting difference, contemporary cosmopolitan love reasserts and verifies the inescapable truth of self-difference and the antagonism that any idea of difference inevitably occasions. Such love is “critical,” therefore, because it risks partaking of potentially perilous encounters with difference; it accepts and pursues the unavoidable danger of encountering the other, both internal and external. One might say, then, that 126

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cosmopolitan love has the structure of Kunzru’s “Japanese-Lebanese fusion food”: more collision than commingling, more division than fusion. None of the elements of cosmopolitanism exists in harmony with the others. Love is not just the subject of cosmopolitanism but its fundamental structure: riven from within, haunted by inadequacy, multiple, divided, and divisive.

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CONCLUSION Otherness, Cloud Atlas, and Contemporary Literature

LOVE—WHETHER MODERNIST OR contemporary, redemptive, or negative—bears

a relation to otherness. But otherness and love are strange bedfellows. Leo Bersani points out in Intimacies the difficulties that subtend “the assumption that in love the human subject is exceptionally open to otherness.”1 He goes on to elaborate the tension between love and otherness in terms that resonate with both negativity and the question of ethics: “simply willing ourselves to cherish the differences of others will, in all likelihood, leave our murderous antagonism towards difference intact.”2 Throughout the preceding chapters I have demonstrated the ways in which contemporary writers take up the challenge that Bersani outlines: to imagine a relation between love and otherness that does not simply repeat empty truisms about being open to the other.3 Queered love combines love and otherness without fusing them together, which requires that we let go of the utopian promise that love seems to hold out before us. Contemporary writers suggest that love is entwined with and inseparable from negativity, its apparent other, resonating with J. Hillis Miller’s description of otherness: “a darkness of unknowability that is not out there somewhere, beyond a circle of light cast by the desk’s reading lamp . . . but this darkness has woven itself into the light of reason itself.”4 Even as chapter 4 is the only one in this book to examine explicitly the ethical relation to the other, implicitly the question of otherness has been at issue

all along. Indeed, the otherness with which Unmaking Love is concerned has less to do with specific identity groups than with the otherness that makes a concept noncoincident with itself, a gap or a fissure that disturbs structures from within. As another foray into this darkness, I want to turn now to David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas as a test case for a different way of thinking otherness.5 If the film adaptation of Mitchell’s novel (not to mention much of the critical conversation around it) is any indication, then the temptation to read in the novel the same old message of hope and goodness is compelling. Lana Wachowski, Tom Twyker, and Andy Wachowski’s 2012 film, Cloud Atlas, could not be clearer about its interpretation of otherness: it does not exist.6 Visually, the film offers this interpretation through the repetition of many actors in a variety of both major and minor roles, as if to suggest that the disparate characters are all versions of the same. The film foregrounds the suggestion of reincarnation by asserting that the characters are inextricably linked by the “cometshaped birthmark” that, in the novel, Robert Frobisher, Luisa Rey, Sonmi-451, Meronym, and Timothy Cavendish all share.7 Loud and clear, we hear the filmmakers telling us: they (and all humans) are the same. In fact, Robert Frobisher expresses this idea in the film in voice-over, ostensibly addressing Rufus Sixsmith in a letter: “All boundaries are conventions, waiting to be transcended. One may transcend any convention if only one can first conceive of doing so. Moments like this, I can feel your heart beating as clearly as I feel my own, and I know that separation is an illusion. My life extends far beyond the limitations of me.”8 The film achieves the obliteration of otherness as well through the filmmakers’ emphasis on love’s redemptive power; it exists beyond death, saves the world through repopulation, and remedies loneliness. For example, it turns out at the end that Zachry and Meronym become a couple and go on to produce children and grandchildren. And Timothy Cavendish also gets an amorous rewrite in the film. The end of his story begins the way Mitchell writes it in in the novel, “Like Solzhenitsyn laboring in Vermont, I shall beaver away in exile” (387). However, the film quickly veers away from Mitchell’s text as Cavendish intones, “Unlike Solzhenitsyn, I shan’t be alone,” as a loving and mute Susan Sarandon strolls into the room and sits on Cavendish’s lap.9 Perhaps the most telling revision to Mitchell’s novel, however, is the film’s wistful reimagining of Frobisher and Sixsmith’s relationship, which is signaled when Sixsmith’s niece CONCLUSION

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says of him: “He believed that love was real, a kind of natural phenomenon. He believed that love could outlive death.”10 Expressing this idea in a different way, Frobisher signs his final letter to Sixsmith in the film, “Yours Eternally, R.F.”11 The obliteration of otherness that this redemptive and reparative close effects becomes clear when one compares it to Frobisher’s letter in the novel, which he signs, quoting Virgil, “Sunt lacrimæ rerum. R.F.”12 The difference between these two phrases perfectly encapsulates the difference between the redemptive promise held out by the film and the negativity and otherness that Mitchell makes available in the novel. “Sunt lacrimæ rerum” evokes mourning, loss, pain: there are tears for things.13 “Yours eternally” stands out as the diametrical opposite of Mitchell’s phrase; there need not be any tears at all, since Frobisher and Sixsmith are forever linked despite separation and death. None of this, alas, is particularly surprising. The Wachowskis and Twyker are, after all, in the business of making a Hollywood film, which demands, as Mitchell himself points out, “exactitude” rather than “suggestiveness” and, perhaps most important, closure.14 However, what is more surprising is the tendency on the part of many critics of the novel to interpret it in ways that are similar to the Hollywood understanding of the text. Critics echo the sentiments of the film version of Robert Frobisher when he calls for the transcending of boundaries. Being open to others, fighting evil in the world, establishing a transhistorical and transnational sense of community: these are some of the redemptive promises that Cloud Atlas can inspire in its critics.15 Though they tend to stay away from the literal understanding of reincarnation to which the Wachowskis and Twyker appeal, the critical tendency toward redeeming Cloud Atlas is of a piece with the literal translation of reincarnation in the film. What is openness to otherness, transcending boundaries, and building transhistorical community if not reincarnation by another route?16 Such conclusions achieve the impression of sameness and connectedness that the film effects through its visual and narrative strategies. It is not, of course, the case that Mitchell does not introduce the possibility of redemption through transhistorical connection or even actual reincarnation in his novel. But these possibilities for interpretation are not woven evenly throughout the text.17 Patrick O’Donnell rightly notices this discrepancy when he writes that “the narratives of Cloud Atlas are asymmetrical, unevenly joined, enjambed by virtue of contingency rather than folded together in an encap130

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sulating architectural design.”18 One significant example of such asymmetry is that Mitchell foregrounds the issue of reincarnation, and the transhistorical connection it implies, in only one of the six stories that make up his novel, “Half Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery.” Here, Mitchell offers the explicit interpretation of the comet birthmark as a signifier of reincarnation. As Luisa Rey reads Frobisher’s letters to Sixsmith, she finds: “the dizzying vividness of the images of places and people that the letters have unlocked. Images so vivid she can only call them memories . . . a detail in one letter will not be dismissed. Robert Frobisher mentions a comet-shaped birthmark between his shoulder blade and collarbone. I just don’t believe in this crap. I just don’t believe it. I don’t” (120). Affirming by negating, and suggesting by not suggesting, the idea of reincarnated souls appears for the first time. The images seem to Rey like her own memories, and even though she says she doesn’t believe in reincarnation, it seems that she does. Later in this section she has what Mitchell refers to as “déjà vu,” a flash of “Robert Frobisher doing a dine and dash from another hotel” (139). Reinforcing the idea that Luisa Rey is Robert Frobisher reincarnated, marked as the same by the comet birthmark despite temporal difference, Rey seeks out Frobisher’s “Cloud Atlas Sextet” and finds it uncannily familiar. She “knows” the music without knowing it (408–9). It’s not simply fortuitous that Louisa Rey’s namesake comes from Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey.19 As A. S. Byatt points out in her review of Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, both novels share a certain indeterminacy: is life chaos or order, fate or chance, divinely inspired or contingent?20 And neither novel, as Byatt indicates, settles on one interpretation or the other. However, both novels offer the seductions of redemption and the promise of connection— between individuals and through time—that, if we choose, we can decide is the hope that Wilder and Mitchell hold out for their readers. The final lines of The Bridge of San Luis Rey are telling in this respect. The comfort they provide seems to resolve the question whether the bridge collapsed due to divine intervention or random chance that Brother Juniper pursues throughout the novel: “But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”21 Of course, these lines do nothing to answer Brother Juniper’s question; instead, they provide a kind of amorous salve for the wound of CONCLUSION

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undecidability, connecting individuals with each other, beyond memory, time, and death.22 As Byatt suggests, the undecidability of Wilder’s novel belongs to Mitchell’s as well. After all, Luisa Rey’s idea of the transmigration of souls is not the only notion of reincarnation that we get in the novel; Frobisher’s final letter to Sixsmith offers an alternate way to understand reincarnation. But the film neatly fits Frobisher’s idea of reincarnation into Luisa Rey’s: “I believe there is another world waiting for us, Sixsmith, a better world, and I’ll be waiting for you there. I believe we do not stay dead long. Find me beneath the Corsican stars, where we first kissed.”23 “Reparative reincarnation” might best describe the beliefs that Frobisher outlines here. The dead “do not stay dead long,” and what welcomes those who return is a “better world” where one can revisit the scene of romantic congress. But Frobisher’s final letter to Sixsmith in the novel is interestingly quite different. Mitchell’s Frobisher also imagines a world after death in which the dead are reincarnated. But, rather than the idea of the transmigration of souls across centuries, Frobisher suggests that we are condemned to repeat our lives, exactly as they happened, into eternity: Rome’ll decline and fall again, Cortés’ll lay Tenochtitlán to waste again, and later, Ewing will sail again, Adrian’ll be blown to pieces again, you and I’ll sleep under Corsican stars again, I’ll come to Bruges again, fall in and out of love with Eva again, you’ll read this letter again, the sun’ll grow cold again. . . . Thirteen years from now we’ll meet again at Gresham, ten years later I’ll be back in this same room, holding this same gun, composing this same letter, my resolution as perfect as my many-headed sextet. (47 1)

Far from promising a “better world,” the life after death that Frobisher imagines is exactly the same as the one he leaves. He, and all of human history, will play itself out again exactly as it once happened: a meeting “under Corsican stars” inevitably and always followed eventually by betrayal and suicide. The “better world” promised in the film turns out in the novel to be a world marked by love, to be sure, but a love always informed by failure, conflict, and death, a world unredeemed by the magical power of Frobisher’s attachment to Sixsmith.

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The point, then, is not that there is no place for redemption, connection through time, reincarnation, or even love in Cloud Atlas. “Half Lives” has it all. However, it seems important, before we accept redemption and connection as the hallmarks of Mitchell’s novel, that we consider the source of such interpretations. It is not irrelevant to note that “Half Lives” is written, according to Mitchell himself, on the model of “any generic airport thriller.”24 Thus, before one gets too excited about the fact that connectedness, love, and the sameness of humanity are built into Mitchell’s text, we should consider the generic source of this material. Might the generic nature of this section suggest that Mitchell builds into the novel the earnest belief in reincarnation—and the connectedness it implies—in order to produce skepticism about such ideas? Indeed, Mitchell’s skepticism might remind one of George Bernard Shaw’s “Sequel” to Pygmalion, which takes issue with similarly generic material: “The rest of the story need not be shown in action, and indeed, would hardly need telling if our imaginations were not so enfeebled by their lazy dependence on the readymades and reach-me-downs of the ragshop in which Romance keeps its stock of ‘happy endings’ to misfit all stories.”25 “Airport thrillers” bear, for Mitchell, a sort of familial resemblance to Shaw’s “ready-mades and reach-me-downs.” Just as these romances offer, for Shaw, the “happy endings” that readers come to expect, so too do “airport thrillers,” Mitchell seems to suggest, establish generic conventions and expectations that make the genre untrustworthy. If “Half Lives” is Mitchell’s idea of this genre, then it is suspect because its ideological stances are too concrete, its seductions of closure too intense. The appeal of the airport thriller, for Mitchell, is also its threat. You know what is going to happen before it happens; the answers it offers are glib and predictable; and, most often, everything works out in the end: the mystery is solved, the day is saved, and peace reigns once more.26 If we read Cloud Atlas through the frame of “Half Lives” and offer interpretations that are provided by Luisa Rey herself, we risk turning the novel as a whole into just another airport thriller, ignoring the complexity and richness of Mitchell’s text. Even further: the more we promulgate interpretations of the sameness of humanity, asserting the connectedness of all people, avowing the truth of a love that redeems, the more we ignore an otherness that exists not simply in the difference between identities, but one that also inhabits identity.

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We risk, in other words, providing answers that are too easy, too comforting, too readily packaged and sold. Contemporary literature—Cloud Atlas included—instead makes abundantly clear that the glibness with which we affirm the humanness of the human corresponds directly with mounting evidence that the human is different from itself, that an otherness inhabits us, our ideas, and our loves. Why is it necessary, for instance, that the “comet-shaped birthmark” in Cloud Atlas be read as a signifier of sameness? After all, Luisa Rey is the only character who understands it in terms of reincarnation. Moreover, it does not appear in all six stories that make up the novel. Almost every central character has the birthmark except for Adam Ewing, whose story both begins and ends the text. Might we then read the birthmark as the one thing it certainly is: a signifier in need of interpretation? Signifiers, of course, signify through differential relations with other signifiers. With this in mind, might we read the birthmark as a mark of difference—or otherness—rather than sameness? What sorts of readings would this other reading of the birthmark enable? There are many moments in Mitchell’s text when characters become “other” to themselves and, even more important, bring up the “other” of the readings that maintain the goodness of these characters. Adam Ewing, who critics point to most often as the ethical center of the text, provides a good example of how to approach this novel as being something other than redemptive.27 After Autua, the stowaway slave, saves Ewing from Goose’s efforts to poison him, Ewing recognizes Autua as a human being. Because of this revelation, Ewing decides to take up the abolitionist cause. The filmmakers envision a moving encounter between Ewing and his father-in-law, when Ewing informs his father-in-law of these plans, the latter responding with racist vitriol. However, in the novel, the conversation between Ewing and his father-in-law is a bit more nebulous, insofar as it is unclear whether they have an actual conversation or Ewing merely imagines his father-in-law’s response, holding him up in his mind as a sort of fantasy figure of racist ideology (508). If it is the former, then Ewing wins, and goodness prevails. If it is the latter, however, then we must accept that Ewing has within him an otherness over which he has no control. Even as he espouses a belief in the potential for goodness in the world and the necessity of righting history’s wrongs by taking up the cause of abolition, at the same time, he still has within him the racist ideology to which he only recently adhered.28 We need not even decide that the one or the other of these interpretations is true; 134

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it is important that both these interpretations be available, because their coexistence suggests that otherness cannot be wished away. Elsewhere in Cloud Atlas Mitchell addresses the problem of otherness in terms of identity. Meronym explains to Zachry, “List ’n, savages an’ Civ’lizeds ain’t divvied by tribes or b ’liefs or mountain ranges, nay, ev ’ry human is both, yay” (303). The other cannot be restricted to a discrete identity; instead Meronym here suggests that the other inhabits us all regardless of our identities.29 Zachry himself experiences his own otherness when he finds a Kona asleep and unaware and he contemplates his desire to kill the man: “I knowed why I shudn’t kill this Kona. It’d not give the Valleys back to the Valleysmen. It’d stony my cussed soul. If I’d been rebirthed a Kona in this life, he could be me an’ I’d be killin’ myself. If Adam’d been, say, adopted an’ made Kona, this’d be my brother I was killin’ . . . Weren’t these reasons ‘nuff jus’ to leave him be an’ hushly creep away” (301). Here Zachry attempts to follow a Kantian version of cosmopolitan ethics and tries to imagine the Kona’s murder as his own in order to deter himself from killing the man sleeping before him: the other is not the other but myself. Of course, Mitchell turns this ethics on its head when, in the next line, Zachry responds to his own question, which turns out not to be rhetorical, “Nay, I says to my en’my, an’ I stroked my blade thru his throat” (301). Not persuaded by the other-as-self logic, Zachry kills the sleeping Kona and moves on. Mitchell thus importantly illustrates that what Zachry must understand here is not the fact that the other is like myself but that I am like the other. The Kona, after all, in Cloud Atlas are represented as uncivilized, murderous, and savage. At this moment Zachry becomes like the Kona, like the other; the act of murder reveals Zachry’s difference from himself.30 In the Deliverance of Others David Palumbo-Liu suggests that contemporary literature “says that it’s not that easy, these days” for literature, or, indeed, the world, to “‘deliver’ others to us in a less problematic fashion.”31 Cloud Atlas builds on Palumbo-Liu’s idea in order to go one step further. The novel puts into question a liberal truism that is best expressed by Sonmi-451: “ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence” (344). But Mitchell’s novel suggests that one can only ever be ignorant of otherness; simply eradicating ignorance cannot eliminate the problem posed by the other. Indeed, if there is any lesson to learn from Mitchell’s novel, then it is that otherness can neither be defanged by amorous union nor erased by CONCLUSION

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understanding. Johnson gets at this idea when she suggests that ignorance of the other cannot be remedied by knowledge because otherness is ignorance itself: “What the surprise encounter with otherness should do is lay bare some hint of an ignorance one never knew one had.”32 One is not only ignorant of the thing that one does not know but also ignorant of the ignorance itself. The negativity with which contemporary writers imbue the concept of love invites us to identify with blind spots, with contradictions, with all that we don’t know, and especially with what we don’t know we don’t know. The otherness that emerges in Catton, Smith, Kureishi, Hollinghurst, Kunzru, Ishiguro, and Mitchell pertains to the otherness of other people, inscrutable and mysterious as they are. But the vision of the world they give us does not restrict otherness to different people, groups, or times. For these contemporary writers, the otherness with which they are most concerned is everywhere; it is inside us; it defines and shapes those ideas (like love) that seem the most universal, that we hold most near and dear. Otherness, negativity, and ignorance will not save us; the contemporary novels in this book make that absolutely clear. But by recognizing the otherness not just in the other but in ourselves, by engaging with the negativity that structures love, contemporary writers suggest that there is value and even pleasure in finding in literature and in the world not a reflective surface that offers a seamless image of who we want to be, but rather blinding refractions of light that distract and disturb our vision, throwing doubt on who we think we are and what—and how—we think we love.

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NOTES

IN T RO DUCT I O N 1. Marjorie Garber, Academic Instincts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 51. 2. Leo Bersani, Is The Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 22. Bersani makes clear the opposition of love and negativity where he suggests that sex can only be redeemed when it is combined with love: “The argument against pornography violates the natural conjunction of sex with tenderness and love” (21). 3. Garber, Academic Instincts, 51. 4. Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 4. Melissa Feuerstein, Bill Johnson González, Lili Proten, and Keja Valens, “Editors’ Preface,” in The Barbara Johnson Reader: The Surprise of Otherness, ed. Melissa Feuerstein, Bill Johnson González, Lili Porten, and Keja Valens (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), xi. 5. Of particular significance are ideas that encapsulate the negative: D. A. Miller’s “nonnarratable,” Lee Edelman’s “death drive,” Judith [ Jack] Halberstam’s “failure,” and Heather Love’s “feeling backward.” D. A. Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). 6. Lauren Berlant, “Love, A Queer Feeling,” in Psychoanalysis and Homosexuality, ed. Tim Dean and Christopher Lane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 445. 7. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979), 151. 8. Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body (New York: Vintage, 1992), 10.

9. Ibid. 10. Kaja Silverman, Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996), 1. 11. The respectability that the idea of love suggests no doubt accounts, at least in part, for Bersani’s assessment of sex as “antiloving” in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” 12. Edelman, No Future, 73. 13. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 1, 10, 11, 12. 14. Ibid., back cover. 15. As Sedgwick points out, “Among Klein’s names for the reparative process is love.” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is About You,” in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 8. 16. Michael D. Snediker, Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 168. 17. Cindy Patton, “Love Without the Obligation to Love,” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and Arts 52, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 219. 18. Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 8. 19. Lee Edelman addresses the negativity of love in a slightly different way. He draws attention to the ways in which reparation is invested in the divisiveness and murderousness that Sedgwick repudiates as paranoid: “the repair that undoes what we now can call reparativity’s murderous division—and undoes it by way of its own implication in the negativity it seems to negate.” Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 44. 20. James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (New York: Delta, 2000), 87. 21. Tom Hanks, perf., The Celluloid Closet, dir. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (Tristar Pictures, 1995). 22. This idea resonates with Heather Love’s consideration of queer historiography, which touches on the failure of love. Arguing that “some loves are more failed than others,” Love writes, “Same-sex desire is marked by a long history of association with failure, impossibility, and loss.” Feeling Backward, 21. My point is not to argue with the latter of these claims, since I am convinced by and in sympathy with Love’s project. However, I do disagree with Love’s assertion that “queers” have “more failed” loves. The contemporary novels that I discuss in this book make arguments for a conception of love in which it is inevitably a failure. Queerness resides in this failure of amorous fantasy to make the couple and the collectivity cohere. The emphasis on failure as intrinsic to love might also call to mind Judith [ Jack] Halberstam’s interest in failure. Even as we share the terrain of failure as the object of analysis and criticism, my own interests in failure are ultimately rather different. In particular, Halberstam sees queer failure as a possible source of productive political change: “Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world.” Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 5. The contemporary texts I read in Unmaking Love do not hold out the promise that Halberstam’s sense of failure does. My argument in this book is that love’s failures trouble the binding together of individuals in romantic couples and in

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23. 24.

25. 26.

27. 28.

29.

30. 31. 32.

collectivities, making the possibility of “cooperation” in the wake of failure a redemptive dream that the contemporary novel renders illusory at best and impossible at worst. In Unmaking Love failure is queer not because it can create new, different, or “surprising” queer communities but rather because it unmakes the very concept of community altogether. Barbara Johnson, “Using People: Kant with Winnicott,” in Persons and Things (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 105. Indeed, this strategy seems to guide Michael D. Snediker’s reading of Winnicott in which he foregrounds love at the expense of hatred: “The destructiveness that an object can withstand, for Winnicott, demonstrates not just the object’s own integrity . . . but its own capacity for loving in spite of feeling damaged.” Snediker, Queer Optimism, 10. In this sentence, destructiveness does not create damage but just the “feeling” of damage. Pairing this feeling with the “integrity” of the object that remains in the face of destructiveness, Snediker effectively eliminates any actual aggression from this Winnicottian loving scenario. Of course, then, love can exist “in spite” of damage, because in Snediker’s sentence there is apparently no damage to begin with. By erasing damage with the “feeling” of damage, replacing mutilation with “integrity,” Snediker makes the pairing of which Johnson writes, love and hate, into anodyne tautology: love and love. Barbara Johnson, A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 20. For instance, Johnson writes: “The properly used object is one that survives destruction. The survival of the object demonstrates that the baby is not omnipotent, that the object is not destroyed by destruction.” “Using People,” 101. And in another instance, destruction predominates again: “The realness of the object requires that the possibility exists for it to really be destroyed” (102). Ibid., 103. Lauren Berlant gets at this idea in a slightly different register when she writes, “Fantasy donates a sense of affective coherence to what is incoherent and contradictory in the subject.” Desire/Love (Brooklyn: Punctum, 2012), 75. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge: Book XX: Encore 1972–1973, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998), 47. Ibid., 47. Berlant, Desire/Love, 80. Berlant notes that the intimate relation between aggression and love is often overlooked: “the history, the aggression, the unevenness, the ambivalence—whatever is obscured by longing’s form, gets very little attention, deemed a threat to the very thing that suffuses love’s figura.” “Love, A Queer Feeling,” 442. And elsewhere Berlant expands on these ideas, sketching out one of the ways that aggression is overlooked or avoided, which requires one “to disidentify with what’s aggressive in his pursuit of desire and interest in all spaces, and to see himself as fundamentally ethical because he means to have solidarity with some humans he knows.” Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 181. Here Berlant describes one way to understand the negativity of love; through disidentification, love relies on the aggression that obliterates self or other.

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33. Jane Gallop, “Making the ‘One’ Impossible,” Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 34, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 79. 34. Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 52. 35. The centrality to love in the novel can also cleave in a different direction, of course. Robert M. Polhemous also argues that love and the novel are constitutively intertwined: “Fiction has had to share with electronic media, the press, the recording industry, advertising, and the whole world of popular entertainment the labor of telling what it means to be in love. It was the novelists, however, who created the job.” Erotic Faith: Being in Love from Jane Austen to D. H. Lawrence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 27. Unlike Tanner, however, Polhemous finds continuity between broader social values and the novel; the novel, like society, he suggests, both find value in “erotic faith.” The best example of this, for Polhemous, is the event of Edward VIII’s affair with Wallis Simpson and the ways in which their relationship expresses a version of the “erotic faith” that Polhemous finds in literature. Polhemous implicitly suggests the continuity between the social and the novel— and indeed, the redemption that love promises through “erotic faith” in both arenas—in his claim that “the union of love and the novel has continued to generate diverse and important meanings, forms of art, and patterns of desire” (307). His reading of “the union of love and the novel” bespeaks the continuity between social and novelistic forms as well as, perhaps most important, the union that he argues love strives for and provides. 36. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Criterion, 1960), xx. 37. Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). 38. Another example of this fantasmatic understanding of love emerges in René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965). Girard’s theory of the mediation of desire sets up a sort of fantasmatic structure insofar as the subject borrows desire from another in the triangle (2, 4). The fantasmatic structure of this desire is most apparent where fantasy becomes like a sort of scene into which one is placed (the other’s desire). 39. Fiedler, Love and Death, 505. 40. Ibid., 11. 41. For two examples of the repetition of this critical model, see Polhemous, Erotic Faith; Lynne Pearce, Romance Writing (Cambridge: Polity, 2007). 42. Tanner, Adultery in the Novel, 15. 43. In The Culture of Love Richard Kern gets at the social function of fantasmatic love where he points to what he takes to be the “inauthentic” aspects of Victorian love. Such love is represented as patient, polite, and self-sacrificing, qualities that have some value in the social sphere (9). But Victorian love, as Kern writes it, is also crucially “inauthentic” because, among a number of reasons he provides, it represses desire for the sake of propriety (90) and stays silent on the subject of sex (349). 44. Richard Terdiman points the modernist obsession with love where he claims, quite rightly, I think, that James, Proust and Joyce “concentrated on how to put love into text.” “Can We Read the Book of Love?” PMLA 126, no. 2 (March 2011): 474.

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45. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, 1927). 46. To the Lighthouse is the best but certainly not the only example of the divided, ambivalent attitude toward love that distinguishes modernism. Rebecca West’s “Indissoluble Matrimony” (1914) deidealizes George and Evadne’s marriage to such an extent that George attempts to kill his wife, and yet he continues to believe in and hope for a sort of spiritual union. “Indissoluble Matrimony,” in Modernism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence Rainey (Malden: Blackwell, 2005), 293–704. Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando (1927) both questions and participates in traditional romantic discourses and conventions. Orlando: A Biography (New York: Mariner, 1973). In The Secret Agent (1907) Joseph Conrad experiments with the disunity that inhabits the union of marriage, particularly in the form of the information that Verloc keeps from his wife, Winnie, which eventually leads her to kill her husband. The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). And Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915) illustrates beautifully the seductions of the romantic couple and its capacity to destroy other, alternative forms of relatedness. The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion (New York: Vintage, 1989). Further examples of such modernist ambivalence about love appear in chapters 1 through 3. In these chapters I explore how Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), E. M. Forster’s Maurice (1971), and D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) also exemplify the various and multiple ways that modernists regarded love with suspicion and hope simultaneously. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (New York: New Directions, 1961). James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior (New York: Vintage, 1986). E. M. Forster, Maurice: A Novel (New York: Norton, 2005). D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, (New York: Penguin, 2006). 47. Joseph Allen Boone, Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 134. 48. Ibid., 135. 49. Catherine Belsey, Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 1994), 23. 50. Maria DiBattista, First Love: The Affections of Modern Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 4, xi. 51. Two volumes that are adjacent to, but not synonymous with, the topic of love come to mind. Joel Gwynne and Angelia Poon, ed., Sexuality and Contemporary Literature (Amherst: Cambria, 2012). Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega, ed., Trauma and Romance in Contemporary British Literature (New York: Routledge, 2013). 52. Lynne Pearce, “Romance, Trauma, and Repetition: Testing the Limits of Love,” in Trauma and Romance in Contemporary British Literature, ed. Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega (New York: Routledge, 2013), 79. 53. Edward St. Aubyn, Never Mind, in The Patrick Melrose Novels (New York: Picador, 2012). 54. Nodding towards his parodic stance, St. Aubyn imbeds in the text a conversation that gestures toward both the location and context of Woolf ’s novel. Two of the Melroses’ dinner guests greet each other upon arrival, and “When the greetings were over, Nicholas could not help remarking on Victor’s appearance. ‘My dear chap, you look as if you’re about to go mackerel fishing in the Hebrides.’ ‘In fact, the last time I wore this sweater,’ said Victor

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55.

56. 57.

58. 59.

60.

61.

. . . ‘was when I had to see a student who was floundering badly with his D. Phil. It was called “Abelard, Nietzsche, Sade, and Beckett,” which gives you some idea of the difficulties he was running into’” (105). St. Aubyn teasingly acknowledges Woolf ’s text as the precursor to his own. At the level of style, St. Aubyn also announces his debt to Virginia Woolf. He constructs a Woolfian stream-of-consciousness monologue for Eleanor Melrose: “Must you leave so soon? thought Eleanor. That was the phrase. She had remembered it. Better late than never was another phrase, not really true in this case. Sometimes things were too late, too late the moment they happened. Other people knew what they were meant to say, knew what they were meant to mean, and other people still—otherer people—knew what the other people meant when they said it. God, she was drunk” (123–24). We can see clear traces of Woolf ’s creation in To the Lighthouse. The feelings of alienation and insufficiency in relation to “other people” that Eleanor expresses are reminiscent of Mrs. Ramsay’s experience of the dinner party she gives and her relation to her husband and his friends. What casts this passage in a distinctly St. Aubyn light, however, is the fact that these thoughts that might—in another context—seem perceptive or even true are the product of not just Eleanor’s excessive drunkenness at this moment but also a variety of drugs that she takes during the course of the day St. Aubyn narrates in his novel. Woolf ’s poetic style and existential depth become, in the hands of St. Aubyn, products of a drug- and drink-addled mind. Zadie Smith, White Teeth (New York: Vintage, 2000); Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy: A Novel and Midnight All Day: Stories (New York: Scribner, 1998); Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty (London: Bloomsbury, 2004); Kazuo Ishiguro, The Unconsoled (New York: Vintage, 1996); Caren Irr, Towards the Geopolitical Novel: U.S. Fiction in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 4. Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002), 5. Susan Stanford Friedman, “Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/Time Borders of Modernist Studies,” Modernism/Modernity 13, no. 3 (September 2006): 432. Ibid., 434. David James, “Introduction: Mapping Modernist Continuities,” in The Legacies of Modernism: Historicizing Postwar and Contemporary Fiction, ed. David James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 5–6. David James explores these issues in even greater depth in Modernist Futures: Innovation and Inheritance in the Contemporary Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Yet to some extent, modernism remains a part of contemporary literature even as the latter also departs from the former. This complexity relates to Rebecca Walkowitz’s account of possible ways of reading this relation: “It will therefore be useful, as a preliminary gesture, to understand works of contemporary fiction as being modernist in some ways and nonmodernist in others. . . . Identifying modernist and non-modernist strains within contemporary literature is only a preliminary gesture because we may find that modernist works and modernist writers themselves managed contradictory impulses.” “For Translation: Virginia Woolf, J. M. Coetzee, and Transnational Comparison,” in The Legacies of Modernism:

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62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

Historicizing Postwar and Contemporary Fiction, ed. David James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 244. Indeed, on the question of love, modernists managed contradictory thinking. Even as their ambivalence does not translate exactly into contemporary literature, it is precisely this modernist contradiction that makes possible the contemporary continuity with and departure from modernism. David Palumbo-Liu, The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach (New York: Doubleday, 2007). Ford, The Good Soldier, 241–42. Eleanor Catton, The Rehearsal (New York: Little, Brown, 2011). Hari Kunzru, Transmission (New York: Plume, 2005).

1. LES B I A N FA N TASY 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

Ariel Levy, “The Perfect Wife,” New Yorker 89, no. 30 (September 30, 2013). Ibid. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (New York: New Directions, 1961). Eleanor Catton, The Rehearsal (New York: Little, Brown, 2011) and Zadie Smith, White Teeth (New York: Vintage, 2000). Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge: Book XX: Encore 1972–1973, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998), 85. Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 173. Jacques-Alain Miller, “Love’s Labyrinths,” Lacanian Ink 8 (Spring 1994): 11. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 280. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 2006), 62–63. Elizabeth Grosz, “The Labors of Love. Analyzing Perverse Desire: An Interrogation of Teresa de Lauretis’s The Practice of Love,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6, nos. 2–3 (Summer 1994): 285. Judith Roof gets closest to the mark when she argues that “lesbian sexuality instigates the overly compensatory and highly visible return of the terms of the ruptured system that mend and mask its gaps.” A Lure of Knowledge: Lesbian Sexuality and Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 5. In other words, if the lesbian does disrupt the system, she only does so to the extent that she immediately obscures this disruption, providing coherence where Grosz’s “incoherence” emerges. One version of this relationship becomes apparent when Catharine R. Stimpson writes: “Of course lesbianism is far more than a matter of mother/daughter affairs, but the new texts suggest that one of its satisfactions is a return to primal origins, to primal loves, when female/female, not male/female, relationships structured the world. A lesbian’s jealousy,

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13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

then, spurts like blood from the cut of terror at the possibility of losing again the intimacy that has at last been regained.” “Zero Degree Deviancy: The Lesbian Novel in English,” Critical Inquiry 8 (Winter 1981): 377. The idea that lesbian love distinctively regains the “primal” intimacy lost when the child is separated from the mother seems to suggest that the lesbian is the transferential sexual subject. Collette Soller, “Transference,” in Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Return to Freud, ed. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and Maire Janus (Albany: State University of New York, 1996), 56. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester (New York: Norton, 1991), 90. Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 9. Sigmund Freud also addresses this issue in “Observations on Transference-Love,” answering the objection that because the transference is “entirely composed of repetitions and copies of earlier reactions, especially infantile ones,” it is not “real” love. “Observations on Transference-Love,” in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: Norton, 1989), 384. Freud asserts, against his opponents, that the transference, precisely because of its repetitive structure, “is the essential character of every state of being in love” (385). And he continues: “there is no such state which does not reproduce infantile prototypes” (385). Ibid., 386. Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1974), 457. Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, 10. Jacques-Alain Miller, “On Perversion,” in Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Return to Freud, ed. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and Maire Janus (Albany: State University of New York, 1996), 320. Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, 47. Ibid., 6. Elizabeth Grosz, “The Labors of Love,” 295. Stephen Frosh, For and Against Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1997), 214. Adria E. Schwartz, Sexual Subjects: Lesbians, Gender, and Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1998), 3. Ibid., 16. renée c. hoogland, Lesbian Configurations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 106. Roof, A Lure of Knowledge, 2. Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, 87. Sigmund Freud, “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Freud, vol. 18, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953), 142–72. For a brilliant and sophisticated discussion of the operations of identification in “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman,” see Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (New York: Routledge, 1995). Bruce Fink, Lacan to the Letter: Reading Écrits Closely (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 15–19.

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31. I write at greater length on the subject of the interchangeability of Freud’s and the girl’s positions in “Freudian Foreplay: Lesbian Failure and Freud’s Desire in ‘The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman,’” in Straight Writ Queer: Non-Normative Expressions of Heterosexuality in Literature, ed. Richard Fantina ( Jefferson: McFarland, 2006), 158–69. 32. Teresa de Lauretis, The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 286. 33. Ibid., 284. 34. Grosz, “The Labors of Love,” 288. 35. Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, 87. 36. de Lauretis, The Practice of Love, 235, 283. 37. Ilene Chaiken, “The Pilot: Part 1,” The L Word, directed by Rose Troche (2004; New York: Showtime Entertainment, 2011). 38. Jane Marcus, “Laughing at Leviticus: Nightwood as Woman’s Circus Epic,” in Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, ed. Mary Lynn Broe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 221. 39. Carolyn Allen, Following Djuna: Women Lovers and the Erotics of Loss (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 34. Victoria L. Smith also reads Nightwood in conversation with psychoanalysis. “A Story Beside(s) Itself: The Language of Loss in Djuna Barnes Nightwood,” PMLA 114, no. 2 (March 1999): 194–206. She argues that Nightwood “depends on” what she refers to as “melancholia with a difference” (196). 40. Elizabeth A. Meese, (Sem)erotics: Theorizing Lesbian: Writing (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 55. 41. Lacan, Écrits, 166. 42. Freud, “Observations on Transference-Love,” 384. 43. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 101. 44. In The Freudian Body, Leo Bersani writes of the relationship between the death drive, the repetition compulsion, and narrative structure. Repetition makes nonsense out of sense, creates unpleasure where unalloyed pleasure should abide, and dissolves linear narrative. The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 45. Cheryl Plumb recounts Barnes’s assessment of the difficulty she had getting the novel published: “she wrote Coleman, ‘I can’t get the book accepted anywhere . . . they all say it is not a novel; that there is no continuity of life in it, only high spots and poetry.’” “Introduction,” in Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts (New York: Dalkey Archive, 1995), x. And Joseph Frank writes, “Since Nightwood lacks a narrative structure in the ordinary sense, it cannot be reduced to any sequence of action for purposes of explanation.” The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1963), 31. 46. Dylan Thomas quoted in Jane Marcus, “Mousemeat: Contemporary Reviews of Nightwood,” in Silence and Power, 199. Elsewhere in Marcus’s compliation of early reviews, we can find similar readings. Peter Burra wrote in November of 1936 that “one cannot recommend Nightwood indiscriminately to the novel-reading public any more than one can describe it plainly as a novel” (quoted ibid., 201). And Fadiman suggests that Nightwood is

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47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57.

like “the non-representative condition of pure music . . . just as ‘Ulysses’ is, and ‘The Waste Land,’ and the best of Hart Crane” (quoted ibid., 203). Erin G. Carlston, Thinking Fascism: Sapphic Modernism and Fascist Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 51. Marcus, “Laughing at Leviticus,” 231. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). In 1977 Louis Kannenstine published The Art of Djuna Barnes: Duality and Damnation, which was important for resuscitating serious critical interest in Barnes’s oeuvre. In his chapter on Nightwood, Kannenstine asserts that “lesbianism is the absorption in the mirror image, which amounts to the forswearing of generation.” The Art of Djuna Barnes: Duality and Damnation (New York: New York University Press, 1977), 121. It seems like there is a particular moment in the critical tradition that is devoted solely to disavowing Kannenstine’s equation of lesbian sexuality and narcissism. Shari Benstock suggests of Nightwood that “the discovery that another ‘woman is yourself ’ . . . leads, ironically, to yet another form of self-alienation.” Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 259. Jean Gallagher and Karen Kaivola also belong to this tradition insofar as they reject, in virtually identical ways, the ascription of narcissism to lesbian relationships. Jean Gallagher, “Vision and Inversion in Nightwood,” Modern Fiction Studies 47, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 279–305; Karen Kaivola, All Contraries Confounded: The Lyrical Fiction of Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, and Marguerite Duras (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991). Carolyn Allen insists that Robin’s narcissism is her own and does not exist between the two women. Allen, Following Djuna, 31. And for Judith Lee, “fairy-tale romance” does not lead to wholeness. Judith Lee, “Nightwood: ‘The Sweetest Lie’” in Silence and Power, 209. Allen, Following Djuna, 32. Kannenstine, The Art of Djuna Barnes, 88. Benstock, Women of the Left Bank, 244. Ibid. This attitude becomes even more pronounced where Benstock attributes what one might call her own “style-phobia” to Barnes herself: “Immensely vain, Barnes affected a pose that drew attention to her beauty, yet resented the notice taken of that beauty and resisted the effects of vanity, in particular the sexual trap. She was always aware that her style might be confused with her substance . . . that her intellect might be successfully hidden by her own beauty” (ibid., 254). Here, once again, it is as if “style” has nothing at all to do with “substance,” as if style cannot tell us something about “subject matter.” Smith, “A Story Beside(s) Itself,” 200. Alan Singer argues this point when he suggests that “Barnes’ strategy seems explicitly to deny the substitution theorem of metaphor.” “The Horse Who Knew Too Much: Metaphor and the Narrative of Discontinuity in Nightwood,” Contemporary Literature 25 no. 1 (Spring 1984): 71. For Singer, metaphor does not produce “closure” but “shatter[s]” the possibility of such closure (69, 71–72). The consequences of this argument bear on the re-

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58. 59.

60.

61. 62. 63. 64.

65.

66.

lationship between Nightwood’s narrative and its figural structures. Singer writes: “And insofar as Nightwood does chronicle the self-destruction of Nora, Jenny, and Felix, it likewise constitutes a familiar ‘story’ of the limits of human love. But the sentimental banalities to which such a ‘story’ always threatens to reduce have the concomitant effect of trivializing the rhetorical complications that drew attention to it in the first place” (85). Singer wants to dissociate the “familiar ‘story’ of the limits of human love” from “rhetorical complication,” but this is precisely the point from which I want to distinguish my reading from Singer’s. The narrative and figural structures of the novel are interrelated; it is not the case, as Singer suggests, that focusing on one draws attention away from the other. Sarah Waters, The Night Watch (New York: Riverhead, 2006). Andrew Field characterizes Petherbridge as a “spiritual capitalist.” Djuna: The Formidable Miss Barnes (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), 146. Diane Chisholm denigrates Petherbridge’s “simulacrum of passion.” “Obscene Modernism: Eros Noir and the Profane Illumination of Djuna Barnes,” American Literature 69, no. 1 (March 1997): 188. And Shari Benstock calls Petherbridge a “vulture.” Women of the Left Bank, 265. Lee, “‘The Sweetest Lie,’” 211; Marcus, “Mousemeat,” 198, 199, 203; Marcus, “Laughing at Leviticus,” 231. Michaela M. Grobbel, Enacting Past and Present: The Memory Theatres of Djuna Barnes, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Marguerite Duras (Lanham: Lexington, 2004), 25. Frank, The Widening Gyre, 41. Field, Djuna,161. Similarly, Joseph Frank writes, “Jenny’s main function in the novel seems that of underlining the hopelessness of Robin’s plight.” The Widening Gyre, 42. Jeanette Winterson, “Preface,” Nightwood (New York: New Direction, 2006), xi, xii. Field, Djuna, 161. Relatedly, Kenneth Burke suggests that “‘Jenny,’ though she bears the brunt of the author’s resentment, has obvious tonal affinity with ‘Djuna.’” Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 246. I don’t want to stress too much Barnes’s possible identification with Petherbridge, but Burke’s suggestion remains nonetheless interesting in light of the other sites of overlap between Jenny and the characters with whom we are more likely to feel an affinity. Louis Kannenstine notices that Jenny Petherbridge and Felix are quite similar: “Jenny’s grasp upon the past is that of a ‘looter.’ Felix’s is no less tenacious and tenuous, but infinitely more respectful” (122). Though he says the two characters relate to the past in the same way, Kannenstine also contradictorily deems Felix’s relation to the past “more respectful” than Petherbridge’s. Consider, for instance, the fact that the relation between the saxophone teacher and Patsy is not the only teacher/student relationship in the text. Indeed, the sexual transgression represented by Victoria and Mr. Saladin figures prominently in Catton’s novel, but nowhere is this relationship framed by transference love. In one account of Victoria and Mr. Saladin’s relationship, physical desire might be to blame: particularly Victoria’s “round cherry pout and round wide eyes, and the flash of red satin whenever she leans over and exposes the artful low waistband of her school kilt” (89). Or in another account, far sexier than transference, the exhilaration of risk explains the appeal of their trysts: “‘It was exciting because

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he stood to lose so much more if anyone found out. . . . He wouldn’t just lose her. He would lose everything’” (89). 67. Levy, “The Perfect Wife.”

2 . T H E E N DS O F LOV E 1. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior (New York: Vintage, 1986). Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy: A Novel and Midnight All Day: Stories (New York: Scribner, 1998). 2. Peter Gay, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy from Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond (New York: Norton, 2008), 201. 3. Robert Scholes, Paradoxy of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 317. 4. Barbara Johnson, The Wake of Deconstruction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). 5. Ibid., 16–17. 6. Richard Ellmann, “Preface” in Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior (New York: Vintage, 1986), ix. 7. Ellmann here refers to Hans Walter Gabler’s famous “recovery” of the word “love” in his edition of Ulysses. In previous editions, several lines were left out of Ulysses that Gabler returns to the body of the text, which now reads: “Do you know what you are talking about? Love, yes. Word known to all men.” “Preface,” xii. Joyce, Ulysses, 161. 8. Richard K. Cross, “Ulysses and Under the Volcano: The Difficulty of Loving,” in Joyce/ Lowry: Critical Perspectives, ed. Patrick A. McCarthy and Paul Tiessen (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 64. 9. Ibid., 79. 10. For an interesting discussion of reading Ulysses redemptively, see Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). 11. See, for instance, Karen Lawrence, “Joyce and Feminism,” in The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 237–58. 12. This might remind one of Nancy’s education in love in The Good Soldier. Ford dramatizes the construction of romantic love whereby Nancy first reads about love and, having read about it, starts to see the symptoms of love in herself and others. In the first stage of this process, Ford writes, “she remembered chance passages in books . . . that love was a flame, a thirst, a withering up of the vitals.” Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (New York: Vintage, 1989), 201. Then Nancy understands that Edward Ashburnham is in love with someone other than his wife, noticing that, as if making good on his name, “he appeared as a man who was burning with inward flame” (202; my emphasis). Finally, Nancy herself feels “like a person who is burning with an inward flame,” after which she imagines being in Ashburnham’s arms, “that he was kissing her on the face that burned, on her shoulders that burned, and on her neck that was on fire” (202, 203). 13. Jacques Derrida importantly addresses the signification of “yes” in Ulysses. “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce,” in Derrida and Joyce: Texts and Contexts, ed. Andrew J.

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14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

Mitchell and Sam Slote, trans. Françoise Raffoul (Albany: State University Press of New York, 2013). Of particular importance for this discussion is Derrida’s account of the splitting of “yes.” He writes: “The yes of affirmation, of assent or consent, of alliance, engagement, signature, or gift, must carry this repetition within itself if it is to be of any value. It must immediately and a priori confirm its promise and promise its confirmation. This essential repetition is haunted by an intrinsic threat, by the interior telephone that parasites it as its mimetic-mechanical double, as its unceasing parody” (56). Derrida’s point here is different than my own, but it is nonetheless instructive insofar as Derrida here suggests that the “yes” is not unitary. It contains not just a repetition but also potentially multiple repetitions, which he signals with the idea of an “interior telephone.” Repetition, rather than simply confirming the affirmation, also threatens it, as the next iteration of yes may well derail the message. The nonunitary yes also points to the reason for Derrida’s making light of the fact that critics “ingenuously” refer to “Molly’s monologue” (49). For Derrida, a monologue it is not because of the multiplicity of telephonic voices that he reads in Joyce’s text. For Derrida, Molly is, like Bloom, “at-the-telephone,” which means that he is “connected to a multiplicity of voices or answering machines” (53, 54). James Joyce, Letters of James Joyce, vol. 1, ed. Stuart Gilbert (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), 170. I am borrowing the translation from Suzette A. Henke, James Joyce and the Politics of Desire (New York: Routledge, 1994), 126. Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Study (New York: Knopf, 1930), 377. Frances Restuccia, “Molly in Furs: Deluzean/Masochian Masochism in the Writing of James Joyce,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 18, no. 2 (Winter 1985): 111. And in Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, she also reads yes as simply affirmative. Upon her father’s suicide, she wonders how her father could have so admired Ulysses and Molly’s “yes” “and end up saying ‘no’ to his own life.” Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 228. Robert O. Richardson, “Molly’s Last Words: ‘O Rocks! Tell Us in Plain Words,’” Twentieth Century Literature 12 ( January 1967): 184. Hugh Kenner, Ulysses (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1980), 146. Ibid., 147. It is also worth noting that even as Kenner rejects the idea that Molly affirms, he still reads the “yes” as purely affirmative. Instead of reading it as Molly’s affirmation, he suggests the affirmation actually belongs to Joyce. For good examples of critical misogyny, see Richardson, “Molly’s Last Words”: 177–85. Lewis M. Schwartz, “Eccles Street and Canterbury: An Approach to Molly Bloom,” Twentieth Century Literature 15, no. 3 (October 1969): 155–65. In order to make up for this early critical tendency, of which these essays are just two examples, critics undertook various efforts at “recovering” Molly Bloom, both historically and ideologically. See Phillip F. Herring, “Toward an Historical Molly Bloom,” ELH 45, no. 3 (Autumn 1978): 501–21; Heather Cook Callow, “‘Marion of the Bountiful Bosoms’: Molly Bloom and the Nightmare of History,” Twentieth Century Literature 36, no. 4 (Winter 1990): 464–76; Kimberly J. Devlin, “Pretending in ‘Penelope’: Masquerade, Mimicry, and Molly Bloom,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 25, no. 1 (Autumn 1991): 71–89; Cheryl Herr, “‘Penelope’ as Period Piece,” Novel:

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21.

22. 23.

24.

25. 26. 27.

A Forum on Fiction 22, no. 2 (Winter 1989): 130–42; Richard Pearce, ed., Molly Blooms: A Polylogue on ‘Penelope’ and Cultural Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994). Joseph Allen Boone, “Staging Sexuality: Repression, Representation, and ‘Interior’ States in Ulysses,” in Joyce: The Return of the Repressed, ed. Susan Stanford Friedman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 218. Christine Froula, Modernism’s Body: Sex, Culture, and Joyce (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 172. Finally, in a mysterious footnote in Cheryl Herr’s essay, she attributes to her colleague, Herman Rapaport, a reading of the “‘failed ending’ of Ulysses in which Molly’s ‘yes’ becomes a ‘no.’” Herr, “‘Penelope’ as Period Piece,”131n2. It remains unclear in this footnote how Rapaport thinks the “no” signifies and what this “failed ending” is. Darcy O’Brien, “Some Determinants of Molly Bloom,” in Approaches to Ulysses: Ten Essays, ed. Thomas F. Staley and Bernard Benstock (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970), 151. Pearce, Molly Blooms, 57. Eleanor Catton, The Rehearsal (New York: Little, Brown, 2011), 274. So that the significance of the passage is clear, I cite the omitted passage in full here: I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and jews and the Arabs and the devils knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas 2 glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson something like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another. ( 64 3 )

28. Some critics have noticed this line and nevertheless not interpreted it as an immense stumbling block to imagining their love as initially whole. Richard K. Cross, for instance, recognizes that this line indicates “indifference to Bloom’s singularity” and then redeems Bloom

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29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

41. 42. 43.

insofar as he is apparently able to acknowledge that Molly is a “flower of the mountain.” “Ulysses and Under the Volcano,” 71. And Darcy O’Brien also notices this line, but doesn’t really make much of it. “Some Determinants of Molly Bloom,” 151. In a different though related vein, some critics ignore this line and make an argument for the value of particularity. Suzette A. Henke suggests, against evidence to the contrary, that “Molly respects her husband and appreciates his uniqueness.” Joyce’s Moraculous Sindbook: A Study of Ulysses (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978), 246. And Janine Utell also addresses the question of particularity through her argument that Ulysses articulates an ethical love through the recognition of the other. James Joyce and the Revolt of Love: Marriage, Adultery, Desire (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Cross, “Ulysses and Under the Volcano,” 70. Ibid., 71. Elmann, “Preface,” xiii. Henke, Joyce’s Moraculous Sindbook, 246. Ibid., 247. Ibid. It seems important, for instance, that when critics discuss this passage in the text they omit references to the defecating goat. Richard K. Cross conveniently omits this part, even as he seems to cite the passage in full. “Ulysses and Under the Volcano,” 70. Christopher Devault also discusses Howth without mentioning or including this part of the passage. Joyce’s Love Stories (Surrey: Ashgate, 2013), 142. Janine Utell also fails to mention it in her discussion of Joyce’s ethical love. James Joyce and the Revolt of Love, 85. Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism” in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 206. Ibid. It would be possible to read Joyce’s simultaneous affirmation and negation of love as a structure not unlike fetishistic disavowal. Love does not “really” exist or, to put it somewhat less hyperbolically, love is not what we imagine it to be, but we believe in it nevertheless. A number of critics have read Ulysses in relation to fetishism. Frances L. Restuccia, for instance, links masochistic desire—in Joyce’s personal life and in the novel—with the function of the fetish. “Molly in Furs,” 101–16. Christine Froula suggests that the vision of “Molly-as-whore” functions as a fetish for Stephen and Bloom. Modernism’s Body, 190. And for another discussion of fetishism in Joyce, see Mark Shechner’s, Joyce in Nighttown: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry Into Ulysses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land” in The Waste Land and Other Poems, line 252. Newness is a common trope where love is concerned. In Written on the Body, for instance, Jeanette Winterson plays on this idea when Louise says to the narrator, “‘I want you to come to me without a past.’” Written on the Body (New York: Vintage, 1992), 54. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans., Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979), 151. Ibid., 151. Joe Orton, What the Butler Saw in Joe Orton: The Complete Plays (New York: Grove, 1976), 409.

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44. In Orton’s play, Prentice offers marriage as a defense against sexual impropriety. It turns out that Geraldine accuses Prentice of trying to take advantage of her: “On some pretext the doctor got me to remove my clothes” (408). On top of this accusation, it turns out that Geraldine is a “boy” (408). Defending against the accusation, Prentice volunteers the evidence that he is married: “It’s ridiculous. I’m a married man” (409). To this, Sergeant Match replies that marriage is not a sufficient alibi for Prentice: “Marriage excuses no one the freaks’ roll-call” (409). 45. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribner’s, 1953), 159. 46. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 31.

3. A MO RO US T IME 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

10. 11.

E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt, 1955), 29. Ibid., 30, 87. Plato, The Symposium, trans. Christopher Gil (New York: Penguin, 1999), 26. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (New York: New Directions, 1961). James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Vintage, 1986). Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy: A Novel and Midnight All Day: Stories (New York: Scribner, 1998). Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty (London: Bloomsbury, 2005); E. M. Forster, Maurice: A Novel (New York: Norton, 2005); D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (New York: Penguin, 2006); Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body (New York: Vintage, 1992). Robert MacFarlane, “The Line of Beauty,” in The Good of the Novel, ed. Liam McIlvanney and Ray Ryan (New York: Continuum, 2011), 174. Sarah Brophy, “Queer Histories and Postcolonial Intimacies in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty,” in End of Empire and the English Novel Since 1945, ed. Rachael Gilmour and Bill Schwarz (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), 185. In an analysis of the BBC version of The Line of Beauty, Dion Kagan also identifies the centrality of a “fondness for what has been lost” that accurately describes both the televisual and novelistic versions of Hollinghurst’s text. “Homeless Love: Heritage and AIDS in BBC2’s The Line of Beauty,” Literature Film Quarterly 39, no. 4 (2011): 227. William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty, 196–97. Nostalgia is everywhere in this novel, but here are just a few salient examples. Nick, at his parents’ home: “On his back, in the curtained light, the inveterate habits of home took hold of him without a word . . . Wani, of course . . . yes, Wani . . . in the car . . . and that time with Ricky, the outrage of it . . . though home, historically, was a shrine of Toby-longing, almost extinct now, worked up only in moods of vicious nostalgia” (231). In Toby’s speech at his birthday party, “Nick sensed a touching nostalgia for the Oxford years, on which a door, an oak perhaps, seemed gently but firmly to have closed” (64). Nick also feels nostalgia for

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12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

the early days of his relationship with Leo: “And for a second or two, in the meridional heat, the thrill of that first London autumn touched him and shivered him” (284). Allan Johnson, Alan Hollinghurst and the Vitality of Influence (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 3. In The Swimming-Pool Library, Hollinghurst addresses in sophisticated and nuanced ways the nostalgic relation of British colonizers toward the colonized in Charles Nantwich’s account of Africa. Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library (New York: Vintage, 1989). For an account of this colonial nostalgia, see Robert L. Caserio, “Queer Fiction: The Ambiguous Emergence of a Genre,” in A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction, ed. James F. English (Malden: Blackwell, 2006), 209–28. And The Stranger’s Child treats both literary and gay nostalgia in the search for information about the minor English poet Cecil Vance. Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger’s Child (New York: Vintage, 2012). Alan Hollinghurst, “Suppressive Nostalgia,” Times Literary Supplement (November 6, 1987). Upon the publication of E. M. Forster’s Maurice, reviewers seemingly could not say enough bad things about it. Many early assessments of Forster’s novel focus less on the political or ideological content of the text than on its artistic failures. Julian Mitchell, for instance, judges it “sadly tame and sloppy, a painful demonstration of his [Forster’s] limitations as a novelist.” “Fairy Tale,” in E. M. Forster: The Critical Heritage, ed. Philip Gardner (New York: Routledge, 1997), 439. “The book suffers from an inconsistency in the principal character,” Alan Hunter concludes. “Novel That Haunted Forster,” in E. M. Forster: The Critical Heritage, 452. Other critics call Maurice “unsatisfactory,” “ill-written, humorless, and deeply embarrassing,” and suggest that “the defects of the book are obvious.” Colin Wilson, “A Man’s Man,” in E. M. Forster: The Critical Heritage, 455. Philip Toynbee, “Forster’s Love Story,” in E. M. Forster: The Critical Heritage, 463. George Steiner, “Under the Greenwood Tree,” in E. M. Forster: The Critical Heritage, 476. Echoing these criticisms, Stephen Spender refers to what he takes to be the “thinness” of Forster’s creation. “Forster’s Queer Novel,” Partisan Review 39 (1972): 113. And David Lodge succinctly asserts, “Maurice is not a very good novel.” “Before the Deluge,” in E. M. Forster: The Critical Heritage, 473. Hollinghurst, “Suppressive Nostalgia,” 1225. Ibid., 1225. In the “Terminal Note,” to which I return later in this chapter, Forster writes that the book “belongs to an England where it was still possible to get lost. It belongs to the last moment of the greenwood.” Forster, Maurice, 254. Hollinghurst, “Suppressive Nostalgia,” 1225. For instance, in an article tellingly entitled “Recuperating E. M. Forster’s Maurice,” Matthew Curr seeks to challenge the critics who “consistently rejected [the novel] as weak” by reevaluating its political effects. “Recuperating Maurice,” Modern Language Quarterly 62, no. 1 (March 2001): 53. Curr argues that “Maurice . . . is the detonator of Forster’s explosive social revision” and maintains that the text “throws down a challenge from this prototype of what we could be as human beings and what we, alas, allow ourselves to dwindle into” (60). “Recuperating” Forster’s novel translates into being able to understand the text as a vehicle for “positive” social change, propelling us into a better, more egalitarian world.

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21. Jesse Matz, “Maurice in Time,” Style 34, no. 2 (2000): 191. 22. The actual passage from Forster’s “Terminal Note” is worth quoting at length. It makes clear what Forster sees as his redemptive project in the novel: “A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn’t have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood. I dedicated it ‘To a Happier Year’ and not altogether vainly. Happiness is its keynote.” Forster, Maurice, 250. 23. Elizabeth Wood Ellerm, “E. M. Forster’s Greenwood,” Journal of Modern Literature 5, no. 1 (February 1976): 89–98; Henry Alley, “To the Greenwood: Forster’s Literary Life to Come After A Passage to India,” Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature 46, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 291–314. 24. Lytton Strachey, “Letter to E. M. Forster,” in E. M. Forster: The Critical Heritage, 430. 25. C. P. Snow, “Open Windows,” in E.M. Forster: The Critical Heritage, 435. 26. Mitchell, “Fairy Tale,” 440. 27. Steiner, “Under the Greenwood Tree,” 478. Hunter, “Novel That Haunted Forster,” 452. 28. One might also add here that the “backwardness” of Maurice and the other boys can be read not only in terms of the nostalgic orientation of modernism but also in relation to the “backward” orientation of queers and modernism that Heather Love theorizes. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). 29. Marie Stopes, Married Love: A New Contribution to the Solution of Sex Difficulties (New York: Putnam’s, 1931), 17. 30. The early reviews of Maurice make this assessment explicit. Walter Allen asserts, “Yet I am bound to say that of all his novels it seems to me the least in literary value. He himself realized it was dated.” “The Least of Forster,” in E. M. Forster: The Critical Heritage, 437–38. Julian Mitchell suggestively characterizes Maurice as a “fairy tale” and attributes to it “childishness” that implies a different sort of datedness. “Fairy Tale,” 440. For Cyril Connolly, “Two things date: the language, especially the language of love, and the platonic ragging and romping of those two splendid fellows—Maurice Hall . . . and Clive Durham.” “Corydon in Croydon,” in E. M. Forster: The Critical Heritage, 459. George Steiner suggests that Forster’s “conception and handling of the theme [of homosexuality] are almost risibly hedged and dated.” “Under the Greenwood Tree,” 476. And Forster himself says: “The book certainly dates and a friend has recently remarked that for readers today it can only have a period interest. I wouldn’t go as far as that but it certainly dates.” Maurice, 254. 31. Here, we might be reminded of one of the distinctions that Fredric Jameson makes between the modern and postmodern: “In modernism . . . some residual zones of ‘nature’ or ‘being,’ of the old, the older, the archaic, still subsist. . . . Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good.” Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), ix. Jameson’s identification of the residual “natural” zones in modernism is important in particular for considering the relationship between Forster and Winterson. Though Winterson’s work seems staunchly postmodern, we will see that her insistence on the “natural,” similar to Forster’s, links her work much more closely to modernism.

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32. Molly Hoff, “Winterson’s Written on the Body,” Explicator 60, no. 3 (Spring 2002): 179. 33. Brian Finney, “Bonded by Language: Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body,” Women and Language 25, no. 2: 29. 34. Susann Cokal, “Expression in a Diffuse Landscape: Contexts for Jeanette Winterson’s Lyricism,” Style 38, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 17, 22. 35. Marjorie Worthington, “Bodies that Natter: Virtual Translations and Transmissions of the Physical,” Critique 43, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 192. 36. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 18. 37. Ibid., 119. 38. Ibid., 91. 39. Other critics have noted the relation between Maurice and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Dixie King, “The Influence of Forster’s Maurice on Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” Contemporary Literature 23, no. 1 (1982): 65–82. Spender, “Forster’s Queer Novel.” In Forster’s “Terminal Note,” he acknowledges the similarities between the two texts only in order to disavow them: “He [Alec Scudder] is senior in date to the prickly gamekeepers of D. H. Lawrence, and had not the advantage of their disquisitions, nor . . . would they have had more in common than a mug of beer.” Forster, Maurice, 254. 40. Jim Shephard, “Loss Is the Measure of Love,” New York Times Book Review, February 14, 1993, 10; Cokal, “Expression in a Diffuse Landscape,” 17; Gregory J. Rubinson, “Body Languages: Scientific and Aesthetic Discourses in Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body,” Critique 42, no. 2 (Winter 2001): 220. 41. Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (New York: Ballantine, 1953). 42. One might want to note that the similarities between Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Maurice do not simply end with the figure of the gamekeeper. Indeed, the amorous unity the characters in each book eventually achieve is premised on the return to the untainted natural world. In the case of Maurice, the two lovers escape to the greenwood. In the case of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lady Chatterley and Mellors have their first successful sexual encounter in an aggressively natural setting. And what passes as “success” in sex in Lawrence’s novel turns out to be just another figure for amorous fusion, in this case, simultaneous orgasm. Without such a unifying sexual act, Lady Chatterley and Mellors’s love is incomplete. 43. The problem that Winterson implicitly diagnoses here in George’s behavior would, of course, apply to Roland Barthes’s “I love you.” This love that is supposed to be revolutionary, supposed to be the “pure New,” not only is based on an old, oft-repeated idea but also derives from the virtual. Barthes writes, “every other night, on TV, someone says: I love you.” A Lover’s Discourse (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979), 151. The love of which Barthes writes is artificial and repetitive, deriving from televisual discourse. Thus, if love can be understood as Barthes’s “pure New,” then it is purely artificial, purely virtual, purely impure. 44. Hollinghurst, “Suppressive Nostalgia,” 88. 45. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 126. 46. Perhaps it is the Merchant Ivory production of Maurice. After all, Maurice came out the same year during which the final section of Hollinghurst’s novel takes place. 47. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 126.

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48. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xiii–xiv. 49. Adam Barrows, The Cosmic Time of Empire: Modern Britain and World Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 7. 50. The tension between private time and public time can be found, for instance, in Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Mariner, 1990). And in Aspects of the Novel Forster’s discussion of the tension between “the life by value” and “the life in time” resonates with Barrows’s account of modernist time. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 41. 51. Barrows, The Cosmic Time of Empire, 7. 52. One exception to this model is Judith [ Jack] Halberstam’s account of queer time that sounds more like modernist time in that she gives the example of a queer time that stands in contradistinction to the standardized, public time of “proper” sexual maturation: “Queer subcultures produce alternative temporalities by allowing their participants to believe that their futures can be imagined according to logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience—namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death.” In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 2. In fact, Halberstam’s queer time is so aligned with modernist time that she marks this similarity thus: “Queer time, as it flashes into view in the heart of a crisis, exploits the potential of what Charles-Pierre Baudelaire called in relation to modernism ‘The transient, the fleeting, the contingent’” (2). 53. Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon, “Queering History,” PMLA 120, no. 5 (October 2005): 1609. 54. Other important examples of theories of queer time can be found in Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Carla Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. 55. Valerie Traub, “The New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies,” PMLA 128, no. 1 (2013): 22. 56. Michael Cunningham, The Hours (New York: Picador, 2002), 98. 57. In addition to the “literal” reading of sophistication that I’m calling for, I am also thinking here of Joseph Litvak’s brilliant reading of sophistication in his book Strange Gourmets: Sophistication, Theory, and the Novel. Litvak’s nuanced reading of sophistication in relation to queerness certainly informs the work sophistication is doing in Hollinghurst’s novel. Joseph Litvak, Strange Gourmets: Sophistication, Theory, and the Novel (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). 58. A number of critics have discussed Hollinghurst’s aesthetic debt to Henry James, but I am less interested in James as aesthetic precursor than in the legacy of modernist nostalgia Hollinghurst returns to and reworks in his novel. For discussions of James-inflected criticism, see Julie Rivkin, “Writing the Gay 80s with Henry James: David Leavitt’s A Place I’ve Never Been and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty,” Henry James Review 26 (2005): 282–92; Denis Flannery, “The Powers of Apostrophe and the Boundaries of Mourning: Henry James, Alan Hollinghurst, and Toby Litt,” Henry James Review 26 (2005): 293–305;

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59. 60. 61.

62.

63.

Andrew Eastham, Aesthetic Afterlives: Irony, Literary Modernity, and the Ends of Beauty (London: Continuum, 2011). David James, “Integrity After Metafiction,” Twentieth-Century Literature 57, no. 3 and no. 4 (Fall/Winter 2011): 503. Ibid. It seems important to note that drug use does not simply point to the disappointments implied by the nostalgia for possibility. Hollinghurst also uses the metaphorics of light— what I’m calling the text’s investment in aesthetic sophistication—to describe the experience of being high: “Just then he felt a kind of sadness—well, the shine went off things, as he’d known it would, his mood was petering into greyness, a grey restlessness. He felt condemned to this with Bertrand. It was just what had happened at Lowndes Square” (219). Nick attributes losing this “shine” to Bertrand Ouradi, and it reminds him of a time before when he was at Ouradi’s house when this happened. But when he refers to this previous encounter in the text, the greyness seems to have much more to do with the drugs wearing off than it does with anything Bertrand does or does not do: “and just then Nick felt the steady power of the coke begin to fade, it was something else taken away, the elation grew patchy and dubious” (195). Once amorous time collapses optimism and negativity, it is almost impossible not to see it everywhere in Hollinghurst’s text. Indeed, even the times in the past for which Nick nostalgically longs seem to have been always already infused with disappointment and failure. In the early days of his relationship with Leo, Nick experiences just such a collapse while listening to Mozart: “To Nick himself the faltering notes were like raindrops on a sandy path, and he was filled with a sense of what his evening could have been. The simple Andante became a vivid dialogue in his mind between optimism and recurrent pain” (16). Or, when the Feddens return from vacation early in the novel, “his real pleasure in seeing them again was stained with a kind of sadness he associated with adolescence, sadness of time flying and missed opportunities” (20). While listening to Leo play the piano, Nick thinks, “To apologize for what you most wanted to do, to concede that it was obnoxious, boring, ‘vulgar and unsafe’—that was the worst thing. And the music seemed to know this, to know the irresistible curve of hope, and its hollow inversion” (152). Importantly, all these passages are early in the novel, well before Nick’s and the Feddens’s world starts to break down. It seems that optimism in this text is always inhabited by the “hollow inversion” of the negative. Brophy, “Queer Histories and Postcolonial Intimacies,” 191.

4. COS MO P O LITA N LOV E 1. 2. 3. 4.

Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty (London: Bloomsbury, 2005). Hari Kunzru, Transmission (New York: Plume, 2005). Kazuo Ishiguro, The Unconsoled (New York: Vintage, 1996). Interestingly, in some cases cosmopolitanism can even be understood as opposed to love, or as precluding love. In an essay on Kazuo Ishiguro, Bruce Robbins suggests that in Ishiguro’s

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5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

Remains of the Day, cosmopolitanism “is presented as an unnatural detachment from ordinary emotions: erotic love, love of country.” “Very Busy Just Now: Globalization and Harriedness in Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled,” Comparative Literature 53, no. 4 (Fall 2001), 426. Martha Nussbaum responds to this particular understanding of cosmopolitanism by asserting: “the life of the cosmopolitan, who puts right before country and universal reason before the symbols of national belonging, need not be boring, flat, or lacking in love.” “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism” in For Love of Country, ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon, 1996), 17. Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 4. Peter Kemp, “Review: Fiction: Transmission by Hari Kunzru,” Times Online. May 30, 2004. Rebecca Walkowitz, “Cosmopolitan Ethics: The Home and the World,” in The Turn to Ethics, ed. Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (New York: Routledge, 2000), 223. Emmanuel Levinas, “Ethics as First Philosophy,” in The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 84. K. Anthony Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Reading,” in Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture, ed. Vinay Dharwadker (New York: Routledge, 2001), 202. Vinay Dharwadker, “Cosmopolitanism in Its Time and Place,” in Cosmopolitan Geographies, 7. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 11. Kenneth Reinhard, “Toward a Political Theology of the Neighbor” in The Neighbor: Three Inquiries Into Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Badiou, “What Is Love?” in Sexuation, ed. Renata Salecl (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 266–67. Ibid., 265. Badiou condenses love into the paradox of universality, asserting that universality “in no way implies that differences should be ignored or dismissed.” Saint Paul, 98. The universal “traverses” differences, but does not eradicate them. Just as sameness does not underwrite the universal, so too union, the creation of the One cannot be achieved through and as universality. Kenneth Reinhard helpfully clarifies this idea: “If the situation, the state of affairs, the status quo of a particular world, presents itself as if it were unified, love is what ‘fractures’ that imaginary unity, brings out the universal truth of disjunction in a particular situation.” “Toward a Political Theology,” 68. Richard Brock reads Kunzru’s text as an allegory of the threat posed by HIV/AIDS to the world. Brock sees Kunzru’s novel as a “profound meditation on the problems of transcultural and transnational movements of people, capital and ideas, all viewed through the lens of some of contemporary global society’s defining fears: the HIV/AIDS pandemic.” “An ‘onerous citizenship’: Globalization, cultural flows, and the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Hari Kunzru’s Transmission,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 44, no. 4 (December 2008): 379.

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18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25.

For Brock, the HIV/AIDS pandemic is a force that brings together the world, breaking down the national, geographic, and linguistic boundaries that seem to have separated people from each other. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 43. Fredric Jameson, “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue,” in The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 57. Hari Kunzru and Frederick Adalma, “Hari Kunzru in Conversation,” Wasafiri: The Transnational Journal of International Writing 45 (2005):14. Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (New York: Vintage, 1990). This understanding of love’s universality is not restricted to Barnes’s novel. In the domain of social science, for instance, researchers attempt to prove the existence of love across cultures. William Jankowiak cites his coauthored study with Edward Fischer, in which they find that in “146 out of 166 sampled cultures” romantic love exists. Statistically, Jankowiak argues, since romantic love appears in 89 percent of these cultures, the study “suggest[s] that romantic love constitutes a human universal or, at the least, a near-universal.” “Introduction,” Romantic Passion: A Universal Experience? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 4–5. And elsewhere, ignoring the former qualification of love as a “near-universal,” he refers to it, alongside lust, as one of “the most powerful panhuman emotions” (6). Jonathan Gottschall and Marcus Norlund expand on Jankowiak’s study in order to ascertain if love constitutes, as the title of their study would have it, a “literary universal,” by conducting “a systematic content analysis of dozens of collections of folk tales drawn from diverse world populations.” “Romantic Love: A Literary Universal?” Philosophy and Literature 30 (2006): 453. After mining what they refer to as a “global repository of cultural wealth,” Gottschall and Norlund conclude that “this study . . . offers staunch support to the existing evidence that romantic love is a statistical cultural universal” (453, 457). Critics have conflicting views on the force of Barnes’s claims about love. Jackie Buxton, for instance, uniformly interprets Barnes’s view of love as being oppositional and universal, without any interest in critiquing this perspective. “Julian Barnes’s Theses on History (in 10½ Chapters).” Contemporary Literature 41, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 83–85. Gregory J. Rubinson, on the other hand, attempts to save Barnes from being “a bit smarmy” by exposing Barnes’s “self-doubt” and “clear belief in the ultimate futility of love as an answer.” “History’s Genres: Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10½ Chapters.” Modern Language Studies 30, no. 2 (Autumn 2000): 172. Kunzru, Transmission, 116. The connection between love and the creation of a united world is also expressed in the name of the company, DilliTel, that employs Priti. Dilli is the Hindi name for Delhi. But “Dilli” also registers as a pun insofar as it contains the Hindi word for heart, dil. DilliTel thus marks the crossing of geographical and national boundaries not only through globalization but also through the condensation of Dilli and dil, Delhi and heart, as though the heart itself, as metaphorical representative of love, breaks down these boundaries.

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26. Another example of such transnational connectivity in Transmission is the anxiety centering on immigration that emerges throughout the novel. The irony of this particular example is that Guy Swift’s company is in the running to “brand” EU border patrol, the success of which would presumably trouble the globalization Swift otherwise represents. Kunzru writes of Swift’s possible business: “The contract was potentially huge. It offered the opportunity to brand the entire combined European customs and immigration regime. Logos, uniforms, the presentation of a whole continent’s border police” (214). 27. Of this ending, Kunzru says, “I open the space for a classically romantic resolution here. But then I withhold it slightly: I don’t want to condemn outright, nor do I want to give them a traditionally happy romantic ending. In spite of this, it’s interesting that most of my readers do imagine Arjun happy and succeeding at the end. They want him to be with Leela at the end.” Kunzru and Adalma, “Hari Kunzru in Conversation,” 14. 28. Alan Robinson would seem to disagree with my claim that the conventional love story is implausible as he argues, “The generic hybridity is handled with self-conscious playfulness, but—despite Kunzru’s ideological critique of the culture industry—the Bollywood-style scenario and happy ending are not undermined ironically.” “Faking It: Simulation and SelfFashioning in Hari Kunzru’s Transmission,” in British Asian Fiction, ed. Neil Murphy and Wai-Chew Sim (Amherst: Cambria, 2008), 91. Robinson goes on to admonish sharply any reader who might find this ending problematic, “It seems implausible that Leela and Arjun could have succeeded in contacting each other, but the conventions of comedy dismiss such pedantic objections” (95). 29. In this way, the final passage of Transmission is not unlike the final passages of Kunzru’s next novel, My Revolutions (2007). At the end of the novel, the protagonist, Chris, has left Miranda, his wife, and, while driving desperately through France, he has a revelation: Because legality is just the name for everything that’s not dangerous to the ruling order, because the poor starve while the rich play, because the flickering system of signs is enticing us to give up our precious interiority and join the dance and because just round the corner an insect world is waiting, so saying we must love one another or die isn’t enough, not by a long way, because there’ll come a time when any amount of love will be too late. But it’s something, love, not nothing, and that’s why I pull over and find a phone booth. . . . Miranda picks up on the third ring.

My Revolutions (New York: Dutton 2007), 278–77. It would be easy to read this final meditation of Kunzru’s novel as producing closure for the narrative by means of the restoration of the heterosexual romantic couple. Chris decides, despite his intellectual objections, to put his money on love rather than on his pessimism. Because he has not quite given up on the salutary, redemptive potential of love, he feels compelled to get in touch with his estranged wife and tell her the truth that he has hidden from her. However, in order for this reading to succeed, we must forget the fact that most of this appeal to the power of love takes the form of negation. This passage suggests that love does not so much redeem or repair corroded connections between people as force them to acknowledge the inevitability of such corrosion. 30. Kunzru and Adalma, “Hari Kunzru in Conversation,” 14.

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31. John Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 8. 32. Interestingly, Kunzru says: “I am not interested in romance as a form or topic in the traditional sense, but rather in writing about sexual relationships between people; I especially seem to write unpleasant or failed sex scenes.” Kunzru and Adalma, “Hari Kunzru in Conversation,” 14. 33. Ruth Scurr, “Vagrant in the Global Village,” Times (London), May 29, 2004. 34. Peter Kemp, “Review: Fiction: Transmission.” Similarly, another review states that Mehta “creates a virulent computer virus with the intention of being a cyber-saviour and claiming the respect of his peers.” Phil Baker and Steve Boyd, Ian Critchley, Sam Gilpin, Mat Loup, Brian Scofield, Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, and John Smith, “Paperbacks: Fiction and Nonfiction.” Times Literary Supplement Online, July 17, 2005. 35. Johnson, The Critical Difference, 4. 36. Natalie Reitano, “The Good Wound: Memory and Community in The Unconsoled,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 49, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 362. 37. Robbins, “Very Busy Just Now,” 431. 38. In this way, The Unconsoled is very different from most—if not all—Ishiguro’s other novels. Even The Buried Giant, which is both literally and figuratively nebulous, has in many ways a more distinct sense of place than The Unconsoled. Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant (New York: Knopf, 2015). 39. For these critics, the novel’s cosmopolitanism is not wholly salutary or celebrated, but this cosmopolitanism could certainly cleave in the opposite direction, as it does for Sebastian Groes and Sean Matthews, who suggest that Ishiguro’s work “celebrates openness and tolerance, addressing readers of all places and times.” “‘Your Words Open Windows for Me’: The Art of Kazuo Ishiguro,” in Kazuo Ishiguro: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, ed. Sean Matthews and Sebastian Groes (London: Continuum, 2009), 2. 40. In The Barbara Johnson Reader: The Surprise of Otherness, the editors point out the relationship between difference and otherness in Johnson’s work: “Johnson played a crucial role in articulating the continuity between and mutual importance of what initially seemed incongruous approaches to otherness: the rhetorical analysis of linguistic otherness, or repressed ‘difference within,’ and the political analysis of oppressed otherness in the world, or social ‘differences between.’” “Editors’ Preface,” in The Barbara Johnson Reader: The Surprise of Otherness, ed. Melissa Feuerstein, Bill Johnson González, Lili Porten, and Keja Valens (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), xii. 41. Robbins, “Very Busy Just Now,” 435. 42. Rebecca Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 114. 43. Some critics have written more substantially on The Unconsoled as a dream: Gary Adelman, “Doubles on the Rocks: Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled,” Critique 42, no. 2 (Winter 2001): 166–79; Jeanette Baxter, “Into the Labyrinth: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Surrealist Poetics in The Unconsoled,” in Kazuo Ishiguro: New Critical Visions of the Novels, ed. Sebastian Groes and Barry Lewis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 133–43; Clare Brandabur, “The Unconsoled: Piano Virtuoso Lost in Vienna,” in Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context, ed. Cynthia F.

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44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52.

Wong and Hulya Yildiz (Surrey: Ashgate, 2015), 69–78; Tim Jarvis, “‘Into Ever Stranger Territories’: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled and Minor Literature,” in Kazuo Ishiguro: New Critical Visions of the Novels, 157–70; Richard Robinson, “‘To Give a Name, Is That Still to Give?’: Footballers and Film Actors in The Unconsoled,” in Kazuo Ishiguro: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, 67–78. Robbins, “Very Busy Just Now,” 435. Baxter, “Into the Labyrinth, 135. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in Modernism/Postmodernism, ed. Peter Brooker (New York: Longman, 1992), 175. Ibid. Kunzru, Transmission, 6. Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” 176. However, in response to the seemingly universal wounding of all the characters and relationships in the novel, some critics turn to the final scene of the book for the redemption that Ryder and seemingly all of the characters seek. At the end of the novel, after being rebuffed for the last time by Sophie, Ryder takes a ride on a tram around the city. At the back of the tram, Ryder finds an ideal hot breakfast buffet laid out for him to eat as much as he desires, and he begins a conversation with a fellow passenger with whom he feels a friendship growing. This situation occasions Ryder’s fantasy of a day spent on the tram, talking with his new friend, building a sort of intimacy with him, as they refill their plates every so often and then continue talking. Then, when their conversation comes to a natural conclusion, the two passengers would say good-bye and disembark “to join the crowd of cheerful passengers gathering around the exit” (534–35). Richard Robinson reads in the tram ride “a kind of contentment . . . a temporary shelter from an outside world that has defeated him.” “Footballers and Film Actors in The Unconsoled,” 72. And Gerry Smyth suggests that “the food and conversation he shares with his new acquaintance offer an equally positive image of the universal human faculty of empathy, as well as people’s capacity to find comfort and pleasure in ordinary things and everyday situations.” “‘Waiting for the Performance to Begin’: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Musical Imagination in The Unconsoled and Nocturnes,” in Kazuo Ishiguro: New Critical Visions of the Novels, 149. In a similar vein, Yugin Teo suggests that the breakfast tram appears in the novel as a sort of utopia. Kazuo Ishiguro and Memory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 123–24. Bruce Robbins also agrees that the tram strikes a “utopian note,” evincing “more inclusive civility.” “Very Busy Just Now,” 439–40. It seems to me that the bizarre and incongruous happiness that infuses this scene, immediately after Ryder has been effectively ousted from the family by Sophie and Boris, bespeaks not the social promise that the experience on the tram holds out but rather, if anything, the jubilation of cutting intimate and romantic ties altogether. However, the scene makes clear as well the ways in which the cutting of those ties is never complete or final; other forms of sociality will emerge and will no doubt be beset by the same sorts of wounds that structure the other relationships in the text. Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style, 2. Johnson, The Critical Difference, ix.

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CO N C LUS I O N 1. Leo Bersani and Adam Philips, Intimacies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 75. 2. Ibid., 76. 3. Indeed, I am in full agreement with Bersani on this point, even as I cannot completely follow him to the resolution of this problem in the form of what he develops in Intimacies as “impersonal narcissism,” or more recently, as a different answer to a similar question, the idea of the “oneness of being” in the “undivided” (but not unified) subject. Leo Bersani, Thoughts and Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 64, 63. Both concepts seem a bit too utopian (indeed, Bersani says as much in Thoughts and Things) and risk repeating the illusory openness to difference and otherness that Bersani wants to avoid. 4. J. Hillis Miller, Others (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 249. 5. David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (New York: Random House, 2004). 6. Lana Wachowski, Tom Twyker, and Andy Wachowski, Cloud Atlas, dir. Lana Wachowski, Tom Twyker, and Andy Wachowski (2012; Burbank: Warner Home Video, 2013). 7. Mitchell, Cloud Atlas, 120. 8. Wachowski, Twyker, and Wachowski, Cloud Atlas. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Mitchell, Cloud Atlas, 471. 13. Jason Howard Mezey demonstrates the difficulty of translating Frobisher’s closing. “‘A Multitude of Drops’: Recursion and Globalization in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas,” Modern Language Studies 40, no. 2 (Winter 2011): 10–37. Mezey details some of the other possible translations of Virgil’s phrase, and, though they differ, what connects them is an awareness of the pain that inevitably accompanies life (29). 14. David Mitchell, “Translating Cloud Atlas into the Language of Film,” Wall Street Journal Online (October19, 2012). 15. Celia Wallhead and Marie-Luise Kohlke, “The Neo-Victorian Frame of Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas: Temporal and Traumatic Reverberations,” in Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma: The Politics of Bearing After-Witness to Nineteenth-Century Suffering, ed. Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutelben (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 217–52; Theo D’Haen, “European Postmodernism: The Cosmodern Turn,” Narrative 21, no. 3 (October 2013); Casey Shoop and Dermot Ryan, “‘Gravid with the ancient future’”: Cloud Atlas and the Politics of Big History,” SubStance 44, no. 1 (2015): 92–106; Mezey, “‘A Multitude of Drops.’” 16. Even as critics do not tend to read the birthmark as literally signifying reincarnation, they nevertheless do see it as a marker of sameness and connection. See Ian Baucom, “‘Moving Centers’: Climate Change, Critical Method, and the Historical Novel,” Modern Language Quarterly 76, no. 2 ( June 2015): 137–57; Jay Clayton, “Genome Time: Post-Darwinism Then and Now,” Critical Quarterly 55, no. 1 (April 2013): 57–74; Fiona McCulloch, Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary British Fiction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

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17. A number of critics of the film point out that the Wachowskis’s and Twyker’s adaptation concretizes issues and ideas whereas Mitchell’s novel is more suggestive and undecidable. See A. O. Scott, “Souls Tangled Up in Time,” New York Times, October 26, 2012; David Mitchell, “Translating Cloud Atlas.” Patrick O’Donnell, A Temporary Future: The Fiction of David Mitchell (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015); Jo Alyson Parker, “From Time’s Boomerang to Pointillist Mosaic: Translating Cloud Atlas Into Film,” SubStance 44, no. 1 (2015): 123–35. 18. O’Donnell, A Temporary Future, 76–77. 19. Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (New York: Harper and Row, 1986). 20. A. S. Byatt, “Review: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell,” Guardian, March 6, 2004. 21. Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, 148. 22. Casey Shoop and Dermot Ryan use the quotation from Wilder’s novel that I discuss here as the epigraph to their essay on Cloud Atlas. But, oddly, they never comment on its significance, which seems telling. It is as though the assertion of love’s ability to connect the past and the present, the living and the dead needs no explanation, no matter how ambiguous this assertion is in Wilder’s novel itself. Shoop and Ryan, “‘Gravid with the ancient future,’” 92. 23. Wachowski, Twyker, and Wachowski, Cloud Atlas. 24. “Q&A: Book World Talks with David Mitchell,” Washington Post, August 22, 2004. 25. George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009), 135. 26. Elsewhere in the novel, Mitchell expresses this skepticism in a slightly different way, which is particularly important given the way the film version of Cloud Atlas interprets the text as a whole through the lens of Luisa Rey’s idea that the birthmark signals the transmigration of souls. When Timothy Cavendish is reading the “Half Lives” manuscript, he notes: “It would be a better book if Hilary V. Hush weren’t so artsily-fartsily Clever. She had written it in neat little chapteroids, doubtless with one eye on the Hollywood screenplay” (162). Indeed, there is something distinctly Hollywood about the generic conventions of “Half Lives” from the structure of the story to the values it promulgates. 27. For examples of critics who read Ewing as the ethical center of the text, see: Mezey, “‘A Multitude of Drops’”; Parker, “From Time’s Boomerang to Pointillist Mosaic”; Wallhead and Kohlke, “The Neo-Victorian Frame of Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.” 28. We see this otherness early in Ewing’s tale when he decides to help Autua the first time by secretly getting him food: “Back in the confines of my cabin, the savage thanked me for the kindness & ate that humble fare as if it were a Presidential Banquet. I did not confess my true motives, viz., the fuller his stomach, the less likely he was to consume me” (28–29). 29. Here, Meronym also provides an alternative to Sonmi-451’s interpretation of the relation between humans and fabricants in Cloud Atlas. Sonmi-451 states, “Every consumer, xec, and Juche Boardman in Nea Se Copros must understand that fabricants are purebloods, be they grown in a wombtank or womb” (346). In response, Meronym might point out not only that fabricants are purebloods but also, and perhaps even more important, that purebloods are fabricants. 30. It is worth noting that in the Wachowskis’ and Twyker’s version of this moment in the film is very similar with one important difference. In the film, Zachry comes upon the sleep-

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ing Kona, clearly wants to kill him, but then reconsiders. However, as Zachry is having his change of heart, the Kona wakes up and sees Zachry standing over him. At this point, Zachry must kill the Kona to save himself. The film changes this moment of pure murderous aggression into a necessary act of self-defense, thereby pacifying the force of the murder and saving Zachry from his own otherness. 31. David Palumbo-Liu, The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 21. 32. Barbara Johnson, A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 16.

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INDEX

Academic Instincts (Garber), 1, 137n1 Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Tanner), 10 Aggressive negation, 18 Allen, Carolyn, 41, 145n39 Amorous globalization, 109–10 Amorous negativity, 26–27, 136, 137n5; for Catton, 29–30; contemporary novels and, 101–2; modernist ambivalence and, 20, 49; optimism and, 98; Orton and, 73; writers on, 75. See also Negativity Amorous redemption, 24, 140n35; in contemporary novels, 9–10; fetishistic fantasy of, 58; Fiedler on, 12; in Intimacy, 57–58; in Maurice (book), 80–81, 84; negative void and, 75; nostalgia and, 84; in Ulysses, 25. See also Redemption Amorous time: On Chesil Beach and, 20–23; fixity lacking in, 95–96; for Hollinghurst, 93; The Line of Beauty and, 77, 96, 100, 101, 126, 157n62; love as distorting, 76; modernist and queer time and, 93, 156n52; nostalgic structure of, 94, 95, 96; novels distorting, 76; optimism and negativity in, 98

Amorous union, 2; fantasy and, 7–8; ideology of oneness as, 27; in To the Lighthouse, 14; mathematical formulation of, 7, 37, 93; in Maurice (book), 89; modernists on, 13; multiplicity opposed to, 9; St. Aubyn contrasted with Woolf on, 16–17; Woolf on, 13–14; in Written on the Body, 88, 89 Analysis of Beauty (Hogarth), 78 Appadurai, Arjun, 108–9 Aspects of the Novel (Forster), 76 “Axiomatics of love,” 107 Badiou, Alain: on antifusional model of love, 107; on cosmopolitanism, 105; on onemultiple, 108; the other for, 105–6; Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism by, 105; universality for, 102, 107, 158n15; “What Is Love?” by, 107, 108 Baldwin, James, 5 Barnes, Djuna, 146n55; disarticulation of lesbian fantasy by, 29. See also Nightwood Barnes, Julian, 110 Barrows, Adam, 93 Barthes, Roland, 3, 72 Belsey, Catherine, 15

Berlant, Lauren: on aggression and love, 139n32; on fantasy, 7, 139n28; “Love, a Queer Feeling” by, 3 Bersani, Leo, 163n3; The Freudian Body by, 145n44; “Is the Rectum a Grave?” by, 2, 4, 137n2, 138n11; on love and otherness, 128; queer negativity and, 2, 24 Boone, Joseph Allen: on conservatism, 15; on Molly Bloom’s “yes,” 63 Boym, Svetlana, 93 Bridge of San Luis Rey, The (Wilder), 131–32 Brock, Richard, 158n17 Brophy, Sara, 100, 152n9 Butler, Judith, 30–31 Byatt, A. S., 131–32 Carlston, Erin G., 40 Catton, Eleanor: negativity and love for, 29–30; see also Rehearsal, The Celluloid Closet, The, 5, 138n21 Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud), 74 Cloud Atlas (film), 164n17; otherness in, 129, 134–35; reincarnation in, 130 Cloud Atlas (Mitchell), 163n13, 164n22, 164n26, 164n30; Adam Ewing in, 134, 164n27, 164n28; cosmopolitan ethics in, 135; fabricants in, 164n29; negativity and otherness in, 130; otherness in, 129, 134–35; redemption in, 130, 131, 133; reincarnation in, 131, 163n16; undecidability in, 132 Contemporary novels, 1, 101; amorous negativity and, 101–2; amorous redemption in, 9–10; fantasmatic union in, 8–9; fetishistic intimacy in, 73; The Great Gatsby reinterpreted through, 74; love redefined as negativity in, 26–27; modernism and, 19, 55, 142n61; multiplicity in, 8; new account of love in, 18–19; nonredemptive love in, 56; otherness in, 128, 136; redemption in, 2, 10, 19 Cosmic Time of Empire, The (Barrows), 93 Cosmopolitanism: as antagonistic, 115; defining, 126; Dharwadker on, 104–5; ethics of, 104–5, 120, 135; in Unconsoled, 102–3, 119 180

Cosmopolitan love, 126–27, 157n4; defining, 126–27; globalization and, 103, 108; Onemultiple in, 113–14, 119; self-difference in, 126; in Transmission, 102, 107, 108, 115, 119, 126 Courtly love, 11 Critical Difference, The ( Johnson): critical defined in, 126; difference in, 120 Cross, Richard K.: on hope, 66; on love, 59–60 Cruising Utopia (Muñoz), 4 Cunningham, Michael, 95 Curr, Matthew, 153n20 De Lauretis, Teresa: on conscious fantasy, 36; mathematical formulation of, 37 De Rougemont, Denis: Love in the Western World by, 10; Pearce, Lynne, on, 16; on self-deceiving lovers, 11 Derrida, Jacques, 148n13 Destruction: as defining love, 6–7; in seeds of love, 68; using people and, 139n26 Dharwadker, Vinay, 104–5 DiBattista, Maria, 15 Economic globalization, 103, 109 Edelman, Lee, 4, 138n19 Eliot, T. S., 71 Ellmann, Richard, 59, 66, 148n7 Ethics: of cosmopolitanism, 104–5, 120, 135; love and, 102 Fantasizing negativity: in The Rehearsal, 52, 55, 68; in White Teeth, 52–53 Fantasmatic love, 140n38; conservatism and, 100; Kern on, 140n43; Lacan and, 7; lesbians and, 24, 28, 36; in Maurice (book), 83; as metaphor, 39; Nightwood and, 43; otherness and, 8; structure of, 11; White Teeth and, 52 Fantasmatic union, 90; in On Chesil Beach (McEwan), 23; in contemporary literature, 8–9; fragmentation linked to, 23; lesbian and, 37; mathematics of, 7; social, 12–13 INDEX

Fantasy: and amorous redemption, 58; amorous union and, 7–8; Berlant on, 7, 139n28; de Lauretis on conscious, 36; erasing negativity in The Line of Beauty, 90; in A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, 110; Hollinghurst on nostalgia and, 90; lesbian, 28, 29, 30, 77; metaphor in Nightwood as, 46; modernism and amorous, 24; nostalgia and, 77; nostalgic, 64; one-multiple and, 117; redemption and, 91; in Transmission, 117; in Ulysses, 62; in The Unconsoled, 125. See also Fantasizing negativity Fetishistic intimacy: Freud theorizing, 70; in Intimacy, 69, 70–71; modernist ambivalence and, 73; nostalgia of, 71, 73; in Ulysses, 57–58 Fiedler, Leslie: on amorous redemption, 12; on love in the novel, 10 Fink, Bruce, 35–36 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 74 Ford, Ford Madox, 148n12 Forster, E. M., 153n18, 154n22; Aspects of the Novel by, 76; on novelistic temporality, 75. See also Maurice (Forster) Freud, Sigmund, 144n29, 145n31; Civilization and Its Discontents by, 74; fetishism theorized by, 70; on lesbian love, 29; negative void for, 74–75; “Observations on Transference-Love” by, 31, 144n15; “The Psychogensis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman” by, 35–36, 144n29; on repetition compulsion, 39; on transference, 31–32 Freudian Body, The (Bersani), 145n44 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 19 Froula, Christine, 63 Fusional model, of love, 107 Future of Nostalgia, The (Boym), 93 Gallop, Jane, 9 Garber, Marjorie: Academic Instincts by, 1, 137n1; on critic’s task, 3 Gay, Peter, 57 INDEX

Giovanni’s Room (Baldwin), 5 Global culture, 108 Globalization, 26; air travel and, 114; amorous, 109; cosmopolitan love and, 103, 108; critique of, 115; disconnected people in, 118–19; economic, 103, 109; in Transmission, 26, 108, 109, 114–15; World Wide Web and, 114 Goldberg, Jonathan, 93–94 Good Soldier, The (Ford), 148n12 Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald), 74 Grosz, Elizabeth: on de Lauretis, 36–37; on lesbian sexuality and psychoanalysis, 34 Henke, Suzette A., 66 Historical periodization, 20 History, of literary love, 9; de Rougemont in, 10–11; eighteenth century in, 12; happiness in, 11; nineteenth century in, 12–13 History of the World in 10½ Chapters, A (Barnes, Julian): fantasy in, 110; universality of love in, 110–11 Hogarth, William, 78 Hollinghurst, Alan: amorous time for, 93; fantasy and nostalgia for, 90; James, Henry, and, 156n58; Maurice (film) review by, 79–80, 90; nostalgia in work of, 79–80, 94, 153n13; see also Line of Beauty, The Homohistory, 93–94 hoogland, renée c., 34 Hours, The (Cunningham), 95 Howth, 67 Intimacy (Kureishi), 24, 68, 126; amorous redemption in, 57–58; “complete intimacy” in, 72, 74; contradictions in, 25, 69; on end of love as beginning, 69, 73; Orton misquoted in, 73; partner as placeholder in, 72; passion for negativity in, 68, 69, 73–75, 77 Irr, Caren, 18 Ishiguro, Kazuo: amorous negativity for, 75. See also Unconsoled, The “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (Bersani), 2, 137n2, 138n11; antiqueer conservatism in, 4 181

James, David, 142n60; on “flicker” in The Line of Beauty, 97; on reciprocity, 19 James, Henry, 156n58 Johnson, Barbara: The Critical Difference by, 120, 126; on “the difference within,” 103, 120; on hendiadys, 6–7; on otherness, 3, 136, 161n40; on suspension of the law of noncontradiction, 58; on using people, 6, 69, 139n26; “Using People: Kant with Winnicott” by, 6–7; The Wake of Deconstruction by, 58; A World of Difference by, 3, 6, 165n32; “yes and no” of, 58, 70 Joyce, James: on Molly Bloom’s “yes,” 62. See also Ulysses Kant, Immanuel, 104, 135 Kenner, Hugh, 63 Kern, Richard, 140n43 Kunzru, Hari: on ending of Transmission, 160n27; My Revolutions by, 160n29; on sexual relationships, 161n32. See also Transmission Kureishi, Hanif: passion for negativity of, 73. See also Intimacy Lacan, Jacques, 3; on fantasmatic love, 7; on “heterosexuality” of lesbians, 30; on impossibility of the sexual relationship, 91, 106, 117; metonymy for, 39; on narcissism, 8; on psychoanalysis and lesbians, 28, 30; “The Signification of the Phallus” by, 30–31; on transference, 31 Lacan to the Letter: Reading Écrits Closely (Fink), 35–36 Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence), 85–86, 155n39; Maurice (book) compared to, 155n42; redemption in, 77 Lawrence, D. H., 85–86, 155n39, 155n42 Lesbian fantasy: Barnes, Djuna, disarticulation of, 29; defining, 27; negativity in, 30; transferential past and present love in, 76 Lesbians, and psychoanalysis: “bed death,” 52–53; fantasmatic love and, 24; Freud on, 28, 35–36; gendered homosexuality 182

and, 34–35; Grosz on, 34; “heterosexuality” for, 30; Lacan on, 28, 30; Miller on, 31–32; narcissistic self-love of, 33–34; in Nightwood, 38–39; otherness and, 32, 33; “philophobia” in, 35; psychoanalysis and love identical for, 31; psychoanalysis identifying with, 35; rethinking desire for, 34; sexuality as love for, 30; social contract and, 34; transference and, 27, 28; union for, 37; Windsor as, 27 Levinas, Emmanuel, 104 Levy, Ariel, 27 Line of Beauty, The (Hollinghurst): amorous time in, 77, 96, 100, 101, 126, 157n62; cocaine in, 98–99; conservatism in, 100; fantasy erasing negativity in, 90; James, David, on “flicker” in, 97; the line of beauty in, 78–79; luminosity in, 96–98, 100; Merchant Ivory in, 90; negativity in, 78, 90, 96, 106; nostalgia in, 25, 78–79, 89–90, 92, 97, 98–99, 100, 101, 152n11; the “romantic-pastoral” in, 80; sophistication in, 96, 99–100, 157n61 Love. See specific topics Love, Heather, 138n22 “Love, a Queer Feeling” (Berlant), 3 Love in the Western World (de Rougemont), 10 L Word, The, 37–38 Marcus, Jane, 41 Marriage equality, 4; “love is love” as slogan for, 26; Windsor v. United States and, 27 Married Love (Stopes), 84 Mathematical formulation, of amorous union, 7, 37, 93 Matz, Jesse, 81 Maurice (film), 155n46; Hollinghurst critique of, 79–80, 90 Maurice (Forster), 76, 79, 89; amorous redemption in, 77, 80–81, 84; criticisms of, 81–82, 153n15, 154n30; Curr on, 153n20; fantasmatic love in, 83; greenwood in, 81, 82–83; Lady Chatterley’s Lover compared INDEX

to, 155n42; nostalgia in, 80, 82–83, 154n28; the “romantic-pastoral” in, 80; union in, 89 McEwan, Ian. See On Chesil Beach Menon, Madhavi, 93–94 Merchant Ivory, 155n46; The Line of Beauty referencing, 90; Maurice (film) produced by, 79–80 Metaphor, in Nightwood: disfiguration in, 43, 44, 46–47, 146n57; fantasmatic love and, 39; as fantasy, 46; repetition and, 39; tautology as structure of, 43; transference in, 38 Miller, Jacques Alain: “On Perversion” by, 32; on psychoanalysis and lesbians, 31–32; on transference, 32–33 Mitchell, David: airport thrillers and, 133. See also Cloud Atlas (Mitchell) Modernism, 140n44; amorous fantasy in, 24; amorous union and, 13; Barnes, Djuna in, 28; Boone on conservatism in, 15; contemporary novel distinguished from, 19, 55, 142n61; on fusion of love, 2; illusion of unity in, 15; Kureishi and, 71, 72; postmodernism and, 18, 154n31; radical force of love in, 15; redemption and, 16; temporal distortion in, 23 Modernist ambivalence, 2; amorous negativity and, 20, 49; bifurcated structure of, 19; fetishistic intimacy as response to, 73; in To the Lighthouse, 13–15, 141n46; Molly Bloom’s “yes” as, 62–63; in Never Mind, 16–18; in Nightwood, 47; in Ulysses, 58–59 Modernist time: queer time and, 93, 156n52; temporal splitting in, 93 Molly Bloom’s “yes”: as affirmative, 149n16, 149n19; Derrida on, 148n13; feminist resistance in, 63; Gay on, 57; Joyce, James, on, 62; as modernist ambivalence, 62–63; no in, 63, 150n23; optimistic view of, 62; Scholes on, 57 Multiplicity: amorous union opposed to, 9; in contemporary novels, 8; in Transmission (Kunzru), 112–13 INDEX

Muñoz, José Esteban, 4 My Revolutions (Kunzru), 160n29 Negative queer love, 3 Negativity: Catton on love and, 29–30; in Cloud Atlas (book), 130; contemporary novel redefining love as, 26–27; fantasizing, 52–56; in Intimacy, 68, 69, 73–75, 77; in The Line of Beauty, 78, 90, 96, 106; nostalgia eliminating, 96; and optimism, 77; queer, 2, 3, 24, 49; Smith on, 29–30; in Ulysses, 64–65. See also Amorous negativity Never Mind (St. Aubyn): To the Lighthouse compared to, 16–18, 141n54; modernist ambivalence in, 16–18; oneness in, 17 “New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies, The” (Traub), 94 Night Watch, The (Waters), 45–46 Nightwood (Barnes, Djuna), 24, 145n45, 145n46; as antifascist, 40; clichés in, 45; disarticulation in, 29, 44; fantasmatic love and, 43; fantasmatic structure of, 42; love in, 159n23; melancholia in, 45, 46; metaphor in, 43, 44, 46–47, 146n57; modernist ambivalence in, 47; narcissism in, 40–41, 42, 146n50; Night Watch drawing on, 45–46; nonlinear structures of, 40; opera glasses in, 46, 47; psychoanalysis in, 38–39; queer negativity in, 49; redemption in, 47; The Rehearsal echoing, 54–55; repetition in, 39–40, 42; scapegoat in, 47–48; transference structures in, 38, 45; waste matter in, 50–51 Nostalgia: amorous fantasy and, 77; amorous redemption through, 84; amorous time and, 94, 95, 96; of fetishistic intimacy, 71, 73; formulation union and, 93; for Hollinghurst, 79–80, 90, 94, 153n13; impurity and purity in, 25; in The Line of Beauty, 25, 78–79, 89–90, 92, 97, 98–99, 100, 101, 152n11; in Maurice (book), 80, 82–83, 154n28; negativity eliminated by, 96; temporality and love as, 76; time distortion 183

Nostalgia (continued) from, 76; in Ulysses, 64; in Written on the Body, 84–85, 89

Queer time: homohistory as, 93–94; modernist time and, 93, 156n52; temporal splitting in, 93; theories of, 156n54

O’Brien, Darcy, 64 “Observations on Transference-Love” (Freud), 31, 144n15 On Chesil Beach (McEwan): amorous time in, 20–23; fantasmatic union in, 23 One-multiple: Badiou on, 108; in cosmopolitan love, 113–14, 119; fantasy and, 117; Leela virus and, 116; in Transmission, 108, 114, 116–17, 119 “On Perversion” (Miller), 32 Optimism: amorous negativity and, 98; in amorous time, 98; of Molly Bloom’s “yes,” 62; and negativity, 77 Orton, Joe, 152n44; What the Butler Saw by, 73 Otherness: Bersani on love and, 128; in Cloud Atlas (book), 129, 130, 134–35; in Cloud Atlas (film), 129, 134–35; contemporary writers on, 128, 136; fantasmatic love and, 8; identity and, 135; as ignorance, 136; Johnson on, 3, 136, 161n40; in psychoanalysis for lesbians, 32, 33; in The Unconsoled, 120–21

Redemption: in The Bridge of San Luis Rey, 131; in Cloud Atlas (book), 130, 131, 133; in contemporary novels, 2, 10, 19; fantasmatic structure and, 11; fantasy and, 91; in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 77; modernism and, 16; in Nightwood, 47; in The Unconsoled, 162n50. See also Amorous redemption Rehearsal, The (Catton), 24; negativity defining love in, 52, 55, 68; Nightwood echoed by, 54–55; psychoanalysis in, 52; purity and loss in, 55; transference in, 52, 54 Reincarnation: in Cloud Atlas (book), 131, 163n16; in Cloud Atlas (film), 130; reparative, 132 Reinhard, Kenneth, 106, 158n16 Repetition: Freud on compulsion in, 39; in Nightwood, 39–40, 42; in transference, 38 Richardson, Robert O., 63 Robbins, Bruce, 120, 121 Robinson, Alan, 160n28 Roof, Judith, 34–35, 143n11

Passion for negativity, 73–75, 77 Patton, Cindy, 4–5 Pearce, Lynne: on ambivalence, 19; on de Rougemont, 16 Pearce, Richard, 64 “Periodizing Modernism” (Friedman), 19 “Philophobia,” 35 Polhemous, Robert M., 140n35 “Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman, The” (Freud), 35–36, 144n29 Queer historiography, 138n22 Queer negativity: Bersani opposing, 2, 24; in Nightwood, 49; in queer theory, 3 Queer theory, 3, 5–6

184

Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Badiou), 105 Scholes, Robert, 57 Schwartz, Adria E., 34 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 4, 138n15 Self-deceiving lovers, 11 Self-difference: in cosmopolitan love, 126; in The Unconsoled, 121 Sentimental love, 12 Shaw, George Bernard, 133 “Signification of the Phallus, The” (Lacan), 30–31 Silverman, Kaja, 4 Singer, Alan, 146n57 Smith, Zadie: negativity and love for, 29–30; White Teeth by, 24, 52–53 Snediker, Michael D., 4, 139n24

INDEX

Sophistication: in The Line of Beauty, 96, 99–100, 157n61; readings of, 156n57 St. Aubyn, Edward: on amorous union, 16–17; murderous rage and love for, 18; Never Mind by, 16–18, 141n54 Stimpson, Catharine R., 143n12 Stopes, Marie, 84 Tanner, Tony: Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression by, 10; on marriage as social coherence, 12–13 Teledildonics, 88, 89 Temporality: amorous negativity and, 75; linear, 20; nostalgia as love and, 76; novelistic, 75 Temporal splitting, 93 To the Lighthouse (Woolf ): amorous union in, 14; modernist ambivalence in, 13–15, 141n46; Never Mind compared to, 16–18, 141n54; oneness in, 13, 14, 17 Transference: Freud on, 31–32; Lacan on, 31; lesbian and, 27, 28; metaphor and repetition and, 38; Miller on, 32–33; in Nightwood, 38, 45; psychoanalysis as, 31, 76–77; in The Rehearsal, 52, 54 Transitional object, 6 Transmission (Kunzru), 101, 161n34; amorous globalization in, 109–10; amorous negativity in, 75; Brock on, 158n17; cosmopolitan love in, 102, 107, 108, 115, 119, 126; economic globalization in, 103, 109; fantasy in, 117; fusion food and love in, 103–4, 107, 108, 127; globalization in, 26, 108, 109, 114–15; homogenization in, 111; immigration in, 160n26; Kunzru on ending of, 160n27; Leela virus in, 116, 117–18, 161n34; love as corrosive in, 118; multiplicity in, 112–13; numbers in, 111–12; One-multiple in, 108, 114, 116–17, 119; shrinking world in, 116, 123; unity in, 112, 113–14, 159n25; universality of love in, 109–11 Traub, Valerie, 94 Tristan Romance, 11

INDEX

Ulysses ( Joyce), 24, 148n7, 150n27; amorous redemption in, 25; Cross on love in, 59–60; disarticulation in, 60–61; Ellmann on love and unity in, 59; fantasy and failure of union in, 62; fetishistic disavowal, 151n38; fetishistic intimacy and, 57–58; love in text of, 60; modernist ambivalence in, 58–59; negativity in, 64–65; nostalgic fantasy in, 64; partner as placeholder in, 72; sexual relationship as possible in, 66; waste connotations in, 67. See also Molly Bloom’s “yes” Unconsoled, The (Ishiguro), 26, 101, 161n38, 162n50; broken relationships in, 124–25; connection and disconnection in, 124; continuity and discontinuity in, 122; cosmopolitanism in, 102–3, 119; “the difference within” in, 119; as a dream, 161n43; fantasy in, 125; otherness in, 120–21; redemption in, 162n50; Ryder in, 121–22, 124–25, 162n50; shrinking world in, 123; universality in, 120 Unity: illusion of, 15; in Transmission, 112, 113–15, 159n25 Universal emotion, 102 Universality, of love, 159n22; Barnes, Julian, on, 110–11; in Transmission, 109–11; in The Unconsoled, 120 “Unmake” love, 1 “Using People: Kant with Winnicott” ( Johnson), 6–7 Virtual reality: Elgin and, 86–87; virtual sex in, 88; in Written on the Body, 85–88 Virtual sex, 88 Wake of Deconstruction, The ( Johnson), 58 Walkowitz, Rebecca, 104 Waters, Sarah, 45 “What Is Love?” (Badiou): “axiomatics of love” in, 107; One-multiple in, 108 What the Butler Saw (Orton), 73

185

White Teeth (Smith), 24; disarticulation in, 53; fantasizing negativity in, 52–53; fantasmatic love and, 52; racism in, 52, 53 Wilder, Thornton, 131–32 Windsor, Edith, 28, 30, 56 Windsor v. United States, 28, 30 Winnicott, D. W.: Snediker on, 139n24; on the transitional object, 6 Winterson, Jeanette, 48, 155n43; Written on the Body by, 3–4, 77, 84–88, 151n40 Woolf, Virginia, 26–27; on amorous union, 13–14, 16–17; on private and public time,

186

156n50; temporal distortion and, 23. See also To the Lighthouse World of Difference, A ( Johnson), 3, 6, 165n32 Written on the Body (Winterson), 3–4; amorous union, 88, 89; Elgin in, 86–88; modernist nostalgia in, 84–85; newness in, 151n40; nostalgia for natural world in, 89; redemption in, 77; virtuality in, 85–88; virtual sex in, 88 Žižek, Slavoj, 90

INDEX