Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction 9780192650153, 9780192896339

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Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction

Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction BENJAMIN BATEMAN

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Benjamin Bateman 2023 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2023 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2022947321 ISBN 978–0–19–289633–9 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192896339.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Acknowledgments Portions of Chapters 1 and 4 previously appeared in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment and Contemporary Women’s Writing, respectively, and I appreciate these journals’ generous permissions. I want to thank Jennifer Wicke, John Havard, Maria Karafilis, Andrew Knighton, Michael Calabrese, Eric Lewitus, and Alix Beeston for offering feedback on portions of this book. Their insights, as well as their friendship, mean the world to me. I also want to thank audiences at the University of Cambridge, the University of Edinburgh, the Johns Hopkins University, Durham University, and Cal State Los Angeles. Particular thanks go to the American Communities Program at Cal State Los Angeles and the Feminist Autonomous Centre for Research in Athens, Greece (so much gratitude to Anna Carastathis, Myrto Tsilimpounidi, and the whole crew). I started this book at the very same time I took up a new position at the University of Edinburgh, and I’ve appreciated and benefited from the warm and supportive environment provided by the School of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures. Enlightening and fortifying conversations have been had with Rebecca Tierney-Hynes, Simon Cooke, Paul Crosthwaite, Glyn Davis, David Farrier, Chase Ledin, (David) Joshua Pugh, Penny Fielding, Celeste-Marie Bernier, Michelle Keown, Greg Walker, Anouk Lang, Allyson Stack, Patrick Errington, Natalie Ferris, Chisomo Kalinga, David Shipko, and Dan Kenealy. I’ve been so fortunate to have Andy Taylor, Alex Thomson, and Jeremy Robbins as my heads of department and school, and I’ve been equally lucky to enjoy the research, learning, professional, and student support guidance of Jackie Barnhart, Jacqui Brook, Chris Perkins, Katherine Inglis, Iona Macintyre, Janet Black, and Laura Tomlinson. Last but not least, I want to acknowledge the incredible doctoral and postdoctoral researchers who animate me more than I probably let on: Chloe Leung, Aiswarya Jayamohan, Heather Milligan,

vi  Eftihia Saxoni, Umar Shehzad, Alberto Tondello, Kai Lim, Ritobina Chakraborty, Alice Kelly, Avani Udgaonkar, and Rupeng Chen. I’m dedicating this book to two very different things: the memory of James Garrett, a former colleague and chair from Cal State Los Angeles who died far too young, and the city of Newcastle, where I sometimes feel like I’ve disappeared in ways that would have given Jim a characteristic chuckle. I’m a long way from Los Angeles, but I feel welcomed. Nods to Javier, Koldo, Adrian, Matthias, and Ross, as well as the whole crew at The Canny Goat (including Iain, Kate, and Cat), where I wrote large chunks of this book in between and after the lockdowns. This book was not originally intended to be about the pandemic, but as Chapter 3 demonstrates, I ultimately couldn’t keep the two apart because I kept wondering how, after disappearing to each other for so long, we could manage to reappear and reassemble. But we have—and the strategies we devised for disappearing together are a testament to our fortitude and no doubt also a resource in trials to come. A large part of what keeps me feeling at home here are my parents and Aunt Peggy, who visit me regularly and generously despite the long distance, and of course J.P./Jonathan, without whom none of this would be imaginable.

Contents Introduction: On Desire, Diminution, and the Perish-Performative

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1. Avian, Anal, Outlaw: Queer Ecology in E.M. Forster’s Maurice

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2. Cather’s Cancel Culture

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3. Disappearing and Resurfacing: Visions of Queer Community in Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance

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4. A Flattened Protagonist: Sleep and Environmental Mitigation in Lydia Millet’s How the Dead Dream

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5. Disappearing Flesh in Shola von Reinhold’s Lote

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Conclusion: On Birds and Black Life Works Cited Index

183 189 195

Introduction On Desire, Diminution, and the Perish-Performative

When the tragic protagonists of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde finally get to consummate their long-simmering love, their union is both the material of poetic articulation and a reason for its momentary reticence. As they discover pleasure “between (the) dread and security” provided by a semi-protective and therefore “kind” night, the narrator of their precarious entanglement steps away from the amorous scene to express his insecurity in conveying it properly (188–189). He decides to “. . . invite correction / by you that have experience of love’s art / and allow it all to your discretion / to increase or make a diminution / of my language” (191). Performing the practice of discretion by conceding it to his reader, who is then left to decide if inflating the language conforms to the caution with which he has been entrusted, the speaker also associates it, by means of a weak rhyme, with a word not previously used in print— “diminution.” This affiliative rhyme implies an important intimacy between sexual activity, in this case but also in many others the occasion of discretion’s deployment, and the process of decreasing or diminishing. Disappearance is not the same as detumescence, of course, as registered by the non-dichotomous pairing of “increase” and “make a diminution,” in which the latter follows the former in requiring activity irreducible to erasure or absolute negation. Nevertheless, the rhyme suggests that divergence from sexual protocols—these are, after all, lovers not intended to come together—necessitates an ethos of discretion whose extension and collaborative participation is at one and the same time a matter of retreat, retraction, and what Anne-Lise Francois, pursuing subjective potentials immune or indifferent to their actualization, calls “recessive action” (1). Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. Benjamin Bateman, Oxford University Press. © Benjamin Bateman 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192896339.003.0001

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Francois catalogs a variety of synonyms for her concept of minimal self-bearing, including “affirmative passivity” and “reticent assertion” (2670), all of which form the weak arsenal, I submit, of queer sexual practice, where “queer” designates sexual or para-sexual conduct that is not supposed to be happening and whose condition of possibility is vanishing terrain, stolen glances, abbreviated encounters, and covered tracks. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner write of “border intimacies” (201) occurring on the periphery of a normative life whose centers include long-term pair bonding and biological family, and thinking with Francois it is tempting to occupy critically the internal dividing lines of these border intimacies, the thresholds at which the intimate slides almost effortlessly into the non-intimate or the less-intimate, like one-night stands or fuck-buddies between whom buddiedom is little more than friendly cover. Queerness is that which never comes to fruition, endowing it with a messianic temporality and utopian appeal, but it is also that which, less promisingly and dramatically, falls short of fruition, vanishes from view, and diminishes as part of its fragile becoming. This book gathers and galvanizes a fictional archive stretching from 1889 to 2020—the period, fittingly enough, when sexual identity appeared as a coherent and isolatable formation—in which the activity of being and becoming queer is inseparable from disappearing, diminishing, and receding from social frameworks aiming to make the queer visible as virtuous, villainous, or varieties of in-between. My intention in spanning 131 years is to argue both that queer disappearance has a long history and that it cannot be explained away as merely a symptom of internalized homophobia or of the discretion demanded by a hostile world. Disappearance conceived as both artistic provocation and process constitutes a wayward aesthetic tradition with continued and even intensified relevance, this book will argue, for a contemporary moment in which many would allege it is safer than ever for queers to appear. Safety is an admirable and sometimes urgent goal, but that does not necessarily make it desirable or ethical on a planet rendered increasingly precarious by human activity, assertion, and affective amplification. Maybe, I want to suggest, queers were never intended to appear, at least not fully or in expected ways, because they have different lessons to

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teach about how subjectivity can be inhabited, enjoyed, valued, and even abandoned. These are not easy or straightforward lessons, and so a large portion of this Introduction is devoted to gleaning disappearing impulses and inclinations from several important touchstones in queer theory and literature. What I want to show is that disappearance, operating under other names, has long been integral to queerness’s affirmative and negative imagination; it is laminated so closely to queerness’s fragile emergence/endurance that the two are really sides of the same coin—a coin that must be spent to mean anything. After discussing queer disappearance’s disquieting desirability and fragile endurance, I theorize it in conversation with José Muñoz’s concept of “disidentification” and borrow Eve Sedgwick’s idea of soft “peri-performatives” to show how disappearance demands a revision of dominant models of individual and collective queer performativity. Arguing further that queer disappearance counters the visibility of privileged queers in an increasingly homonormative LGBT politics and instead promotes the sort of inter-class “contact” described by Samuel Delany in his critique of the gentrification of Times Square, I figure it as a pedagogical alternative to the self-centered theatrics of neoliberalism and contemporary social media. And after tracing disappearance backward to what is arguably the first gay novel published in English, I frame queer disappearance in literature as an example of an Anthropocene aesthetic that without environmentalist intent or even awareness comments critically on the ecological damage of overestimating self- and human-distinction. As the chapter summaries that conclude this Introduction indicate, queer literature and theory imagine the contraction and recession of the queer self as concomitant reaches outward to worlds where productive and prolific selves are not paramount; that is to say, to worlds that can maybe actually survive, long term, human presence. For many queers, the initial cultivation and acquisition of stigmatized, unutterable, or merely unconventional desire entails the simultaneous development of a repertoire of evasive activities. Waged from inside the proverbial closet, these practices include cruising, lying, denying, downplaying, stretching the truth, cleaning up, making excuses, clearing histories, hiding out, getting lost, taking cover, and, perhaps above all else, making do with less. But they might also include, more troublingly from a public health perspective, ostensibly injurious practices such as

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self-medicating, numbing, starving, anonymous fucking, cutting, detaching, oversleeping, risk-taking, and retreating from the embodied fullness of the sovereign person whose aspirations, in our age of neoliberal biopolitics, include wellness, mindfulness, and living their best life.¹ In my previous monograph, The Modernist Art of Queer Survival, I argued that these acts and impulses of self-abeyance and attenuation are not only threats to queer endurance, as modern medicine and psychology repeatedly emphasize when they decide to care about queer health at all, but they are also, paradoxically, the stuff out of which the queer is made, the messy material of its limited and liminal longevity. To live queerly, then, is to live the flow and ebb of appearance and disappearance, of increase and decrease, as a stubborn component of aliveness, and to identify historically with both those queers who, loud and proud, made a name for themselves and entered the public record, and those who turned away, went missing, and hid their lights under bushels. To think queerly is to apprehend disappearance, Patrick Anderson explains in his study subtitled “The Morbidity of Resistance,” as a sometimes “productive rather than destructive force in staging the venue of subjectivity” (23). In a similar vein, Heather Love makes a compelling case for the continued rhythms and resonances of backward feelings in queer life (8). Because shame, stigma, and self-loathing have been integral affects of queer life for such a long time, they feature prominently in the archives of queer history and constitute a stubborn stumbling block for those wishing to project onward-and-upward optimism onto the past or to recuperate deviant predecessors as prideful protagonists in progressive narration’s forward march to freedom and self-actualization. As Love demonstrates, “over the last century, queers have embraced backwardness in many forms: in celebrations of perversion, in defiant refusals to grow up, in explorations of haunting and memory, and in stubborn attachments to lost objects” (9). The importance of Love’s work—and of her refusal to go along with the all-too-common idea that all of queer ¹ Kane Race argues that the neoliberal state’s investment in controlling the use of illicit substances by gay men—and its whipping up of moral panics around gay profligacy—allow it to appear as if it can responsibly regulate excesses of consumption that it otherwise promotes and depends upon.

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history can and must be reclaimed in the name of community spirit and consolidation—extends beyond literary historiography to register the continued appeal and relevance of negativity to contemporary queer populations that, for a panoply of reasons, cannot or will not catch up to the emancipated happiness they are told, in light of marriage equality and increased media representation, is theirs for the taking. The precarity of queerness is of course distributed differentially, with queers of color and transgender people bearing the brunt of it, but even relatively privileged queers—for example, middle-class gay white men working and ostensibly thriving in the affluent and tolerant terrain of urban centers and suburban enclaves—report high rates of depression, suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, loneliness, and affective if not necessarily material insecurity.² Marital rights, military service, and the larger apparatus of heteronormative nationalism they subtend were meant to remedy these ailments, at least for those with cis, class, and racial privilege, but they may, I speculate, have had the unintended effect of piling on, of leaving queers in the lurch if they fail to marry, fail to want to marry, disidentify with the virile masculinity considered most desirable and patriotic, or, more fundamentally for the purposes of this book, experience minimal or inconsistent stirring to become visible within dominant frames of social legibility. An obvious retort to this way of thinking, which finds superb articulation in the queer theory of the past thirty years, is that we need to change the frames—and try to change them or make them more capacious we must—but we must simultaneously consider whether the queer might name an impulse to disappear that is fundamentally, one might even say over and against the preferred lexicon of queer theory, essentially, incompatible with the inclusive, assimilative, and diversifying logics of progressive politics.

² Popular media have been preoccupied of late with the “epidemic of gay loneliness” and drug use (https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/gay-loneliness). But they seem unable to disarticulate practices of self-harm from histories and contexts of homophobia, generating the illusion that if only homophobia could be extirpated (and what would that look like?), gay subjectivity would become whole and healthy. Unimaginable among so many pop psychologists is the desirability of this dangerous “lifestyle” or the protest that it wages against ideological formations adjacent but not reducible to heteronormativity. It should also be added that queers can be forgiven if they have less than full faith, in light of the rightward lurch of the Supreme Court and other institutions, in the “rights” they have been “granted.”

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Such acts of attrition and attenuation contravene common slogans of “out and proud” or “here and queer”—offering instead a less vigorous disposition of out and ashamed, queer but unavailable, or queer but over there—and they also demand a different articulation of the concept of performativity that has been so central to poststructurally informed queer theory. Writing in defense of transgender experience and survival, Jay Prosser has argued that the theoretical focus on performativity, particularly on how practices of drag subvert the putative naturalness of gender by exposing it instead as a set of culturally assigned and rewarded cues, denies trans folks the constative rights, protections, and pleasures to, quite simply, be (264). Although Prosser is responding in part to what he considers the undue burden of resistance and rebellion imposed upon gender-nonconforming bodies that already bear the burden of heightened exposure to stigma and violence, his thesis raises adjacent concerns about the degree to which performativity prioritizes visibility and privileges queer bodies that can do the difficult work of undermining the conditions of their own abnormalization. Eve Sedgwick has also demonstrated the limitingly individualistic context of performativity, showing how Esther Newton’s work on drag performance, a crucial influence on Judith Butler’s early thinking on performativity, emphasized elements beyond the individual, including the audience, proscenium, and stage design, whose inclusion might compel a socially richer and perhaps even collaborative concept of what it means to do and become a gender (8). Indeed, one could argue that Butler’s focus on the performative self, and their later work on the complex psychic constitution of this self, risk a disturbing affinity with liberal and neoliberal paradigms of subjectivity in which the individual is the primary locus of value and animation and gathers additional value, even ostensibly subversive value, through managed appearances akin to the avatar experiments of contemporary social media. In their more recent work, Butler acknowledges the shortcomings of performativity conceived individually, probing instead the illocutionary and perlocutionary effects of bodies gathered in public spaces for purposes of protest, resistance, and occupation. Circling back from the linguistic turn of which their oeuvre has been both an example and energizer, they consider the social impact of bodies appearing, volubly

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or not, in defiance of contemporary forms of dispossession that include neoliberal privatizations of previously common spaces, austerity measures, brutal crackdowns on and curtailments of freedoms of assembly, and harassment and violence targeted at nonwhite and nonbinary populations (Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 8–11). Central to their reassessment is the argument that appearance matters every bit as much as, if not sometimes more than, verbal articulation, and that bodies say something, collectively, even when they speak nothing. They do not abandon their focus on performativity but rather make the case that people bring new realities and worlds into being, even if only provisionally and temporarily, when they appear together in places they are not supposed to and when they assert, whether out of revolutionary spirit or sheer necessity, their right to be where they are and their demand for a different configuration of social and economic conditions (Notes, 11). Performativity happens, then, not only at the level of the individual body doing its discrete identity in compliance with or defiance of compulsory norms of corporeal comportment, but also at the level of bodies politic whose messages and meanings are inseparable from their coming together and making collective appearances. Although this shift in thinking corrects the earlier overemphasis on the individual and attends to the materiality of bodies even more concretely than did Bodies That Matter, its articulation of a right to appear, albeit one that acknowledges the differential ability to appear of disabled and debilitated populations, leaves unexamined a companion or corollary right to diminish, as well as the implications of such a right to diminish for rethinking the workings and possibilities of performativity. What sort of identity do we do, I wonder, when we decline, demur, and deflate, whether in isolation or as part of a loosely organized collectivity whose collection point might very well be dispersed or far from view? Obviously the generative insight that identity is done rather than expressed does not necessarily exclude recessive action, but coupled with a focus on appearance, particularly public appearance, it fails to count the ethical, political, and simply experiential value of disappearance lived as both part and predator of subjective continuity and social availability. Sedgwick seems to appreciate this problem when she posits “peri-performatives” (Touching Feeling, 67) that collocate around more

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impactful performatives but that also make an impact, however quietly or impermanently, in and of themselves. Returning to Berlant and Warner, we might call these border performatives, both because they are typically considered marginal and because they provide the frame for and give contours to more centralized instances of performativity. Sedgwick’s point is that periperformatives make performatives possible—they do the ambient and contextual work of supplying the performative a supportive and defining environment and ecology of signification—and have performative force in their own right; to wit, they inaugurate new realities and possibilities in minor keys and as tiny tendrils reaching to dimly imaginable worlds. Bit players on the dramatic stage of performance studies and theory, they declare something that can easily sound like nothing. At the risk of stretching Sedgwick’s concept beyond its already capacious bounds, this book elucidates a variant of periperformatives we might call perish-performatives, utterances that not only do what they say but also become undone or go missing in their saying. Iterative and obliterative, they name disappearing identities and subjectivities whose diminishing tendencies make them seem, at least to mainstream audiences, unbecoming. Perish-performatives are not single or singular events, just as conventional performatives, if they are to make any sense, require the diachronic extension and intervention of subsequent statements and significations. Disappearance is not an absolute act extinguished at its outset but rather a process that asserts itself positively in a negative register that cannot help but sometimes grow ambivalent in the face of its contradictory disarticulation. Another reason for my use of the admittedly unwieldy word “diminution” in the opening paragraphs is the weird effect of its third syllable, whose tertiary long vowel delays and dilates the destructive and hurried thrust of its first short two, sounding the possibility of a whole lot happening in the interstices of immolating activity. Now seems an early and opportune moment to explain, having unfurled diminution as a simultaneous doing and undoing, why acts of explicit immolation do not appear, at least for long, in the following pages. Although obviously violent acts such as suicide qualify as disappearing and diminishing, and although I am clearly interested in

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the array of peri- and para-suicidal practices that both fuel and forestall that final feat, I am also trying to dial down, in the company of thinkers like Berlant and Francois, the dramatic registers in which we imagine appearance and disappearance. A worrisome feature of suicide—and suicide rates are increasing not only among LGBT people but also across many others demographics in the United States and elsewhere—is that its independent asseveration sometimes mimics the logics of sovereign personhood such that the decision to end one’s life comes to be the intimate opposite of the neoliberal imperative, ideologically masked as a decision, to make one’s life the ultimate end of value, ethics, and sociopolitical calculation. Whether carefully plotted along a linear trajectory or undertaken hastily as a manic outburst, suicide and its victims remain vulnerable to cooptation by capitalist norms (and shock doctrines) of individualism, entrepreneurialism, branding, affective intensification, and headline-grabbing advertisement. The point is not to blame victims but to recognize that nothing escapes, even the gesture that would most seem to escape, capitalism’s tentacular reach; and the point is also to recognize that the most obvious escape might also be a trap into which meaningful resistance falls when it knows no other way, because it has been taught no other way, to direct its sincere energies. Having argued elsewhere that the totally understandable reflex to discourage people from committing suicide might be usefully accompanied by an effort to validate suicidal feelings and explore how they can be meted out in the form of a slow suicide—whereby one, counterintuitively, survives (by) suicide—I want to emphasize that prolonged self-destruction undertaken as a way of life enjoys a long history in queer subcultures and finds its source material in the precarious survival practices of people who have been forced to live their desire in intimate proximity to psychic, physical, and social death (Bateman 114–116). And I also want to stress that this cultural compulsion has been complexly negotiated and internalized, generating vital and nourishing activity irreducible to its obliterative origins and uncontainable to the homophobic historical moments in which it unexpectedly, and against all odds, flourished. It is controversial but also urgent to wonder if a primary problem for queer kids and young adults today is that too few adults are teaching them how to be unhappy, how to hate themselves, how to enact

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that hate, how to diminish without disappearing, and perhaps most important of all, how to socialize the urge to disappear such that it becomes the material of mutual pleasure and co-creative endeavor. I am not joining the war on coddled snowflakes or echoing conservative rants against parenting practices that shield children from disappointment and failure, because all of these things, rants included, take shape within a neoliberal paradigm of individual expression and success in which failure is viewed as either unacceptable or as a necessary toughening experience for individuals who will later, mettle tested, make a name for themselves. Far less clear is when, where, and how young people will learn what Jack Halberstam calls “the queer art of failure,” an evocative concept animating this book’s insistence upon a valuable and even generative aesthetics of queer diminution and incomplete endeavor. I aim to pursue Halberstam’s argument that “under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” (Halberstam 2–3). Whether classified as young entrepreneurs, activists, or visionaries, kids and adolescents find themselves under considerable strain to transform their worlds, make an impact, and leave a mark that is increasingly indistinguishable from a personal brand cultivated via proliferating technologies of the self. Just as neoliberalism depends upon the dispossession of wide swaths of the global population—austerity writ large—in order to enrich the wealthy, via tax cuts or predatory loan and investment schemes enabled by privatization, it also depends upon the amplification of individual ambition and affect as both a justification for its winner-take-all economics and as a diversion from its mass debilitation. If this seems vague, consider the commonplace contention that claims of wage and wealth stagnation among the middle and working classes are overstated because these groups now enjoy a different sort of life-enhancing capital in their access to various electronic devices and social media. By this logic, what one loses in direct monetary compensation one gains in the ability to hyper-connect and dispatch oneself across a variety of platforms conveniently designed for a simultaneous benefit to advertisers and corporations seeking consumer data. In other words, the heightened capacity to self-aggrandize online,

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and to grow one’s brand and value via the limitless addition and expenditure of attention, is the necessary compensation, or maybe even cover, for the reduced capacity to find a fair buyer for one’s work in labor markets that are either shrinking or relying more than ever on temporary, precarious, and exploitive contracts with unpredictable hours, stacked shifts, and few protections against swift or immediate dismissal. Young queer people know well the varying value of online existence. Even as they increasingly depend on social media platforms for the provision of community—and this phenomenon emanates in part from the shuttering of public venues of queer culture, from gay bars, theaters, and cruising grounds to less obvious institutions such as local businesses owned and operated by queer folks (Delany 14–15)—they also become exposed on these platforms to new varieties of bullying, harassment, and conformist compulsion, including some of the very same ones populated by other young queer people. Leo Bersani’s sobering reminder that gay culture has never offered the utopian and indiscriminate access to erotic encounters imagined by some students of its sexual golden age (206) does not render unimportant the distinction that the digital age offers unique and uniquely effective ways to mute the voices and bodies of those deemed undesirable by contemporary norms of comportment and corporeality. Users of applications such as Grindr proudly proclaim their refusal of fat, femme, old, poz, and nonwhite individuals—some hatefully but most in consumer culture’s preferred language of personal preference—and should one of these individuals deign to contact them in contravention of their stated “intos,” they enjoy the convenience of either ignoring that person, berating him with little fear of reprisal or accountability given the relative secrecy and anonymity of the mediated exchange, or blocking him with what can be a thoughtless press of the thumb that nonetheless confirms and performs the disposability of socially marginal groups. The double exclusion of these groups, first from mainstream and then from gay culture, is the interpersonal dimension of homonormativity, where a gay agenda animated by conservative values of marriage, monogamy, and capital acquisition—the white picket fence or gated community inhospitable to the poor, the homeless, and all too often the nonwhite—asserts itself with equal violence in the banishment of

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     

atypical bodies, gender expressions, and ethnic identities that cannot gain entry on the basis of a racialized fetish. No piece of contemporary prose attends to this struggle with more finesse and insight than does Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, science fiction writer Samuel Delany’s autobiographical reflections on the gentrification of Times Square and the zoning of queer culture out of urban centers and into dangerous and less accessible peripheries. What I want to suggest here is that even though Delany is diagnosing the disappearance of venues for queer expression and encounter, he is simultaneously theorizing queer subjectivity as a disappearing activity, sometimes even an anonymous dive, into these very same venues— meaning that it is precisely the disappearance of places to disappear that most threatens the wellbeing of contemporary queers, their ties to other marginalized communities, and their inheritance of richly experimental queer pasts. Delany demonstrates how New York City, in the name of making itself safe for children, families, and corporate chain takeovers, targeted institutions such as sex shops, porn theaters, bathhouses, and other arenas in which queers had traditionally enjoyed public provision of the opportunity for relatively safe and semi-public intimacy (Delany 14–15). These nourishing and protective spaces have been replaced by upscale cafes, bars, restaurants, and box stores in which the financially privileged are guaranteed the company of people who possess similar resources, because even if the price-point of these establishments does not act as a deterrent to the underprivileged, the presence of police and other security forces surely will (Delany 172–173). Where the earlier bars and theaters had assembled cross-class and cross-racial slices of city life—without, it must be realistically added, achieving anything like equality or absolute nondiscrimination—the new corporate landscape makes such congregations, and the erotic or political alliances to which they might give rise, nearly impossible. The unpredictable social “contact” (Delany 129) afforded by the earlier sites gives way, Delany laments, to intra-class “networking” (128) in which the privileged find and seek only the companionship of those who can facilitate their financial ascent and assimilation to the conservative values of a capitalist culture that is increasingly synonymous with, precisely because of these sanitized spaces, gay culture.

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“Contact” is a simple but also capacious term for the unpredictable proximities afforded by extinct or endangered queer spaces. On the one hand, it marks the possibility of unforeseen intimacies crossing traditional lines of relational demarcation and at least temporarily suspending certain hierarchies of race, class, and gender presentation. This scenario need not entail a utopian dimension at all, for it might simply involve an exchange between unlike persons at a bar or club brought on by an unintended collision, insufficient lighting, inhibition-blocking inebriation rendered more potent by the absence of a mediating device, idle curiosity while awaiting a drink or the arrival of someone more conventionally pleasing, restlessness born of boredom or the nonappearance of an anticipated companion, or a relatively spontaneous desire to socialize with someone new, unfamiliar, or embedded in different ways within a subculture one is only beginning to explore or understand. In each of these cases, an unplanned encounter could endure past its point of origin, perhaps yielding lasting friendships, sexual pairings, political alliances, or lifelines of support during difficult times. On the other hand, contact need not conduce to this degree of content or temporal duration. To stay in contact with other queers is not necessarily to get to know them in any traditional way but, less dramatically, to be minimally in their presence so as to feel a tacit togetherness that in a given instant might be enough, or maybe even too much for some people in the beginning, but that at a later instant might translate into concrete activity or erotic entanglement. To slip into a bit of utopian conjecture, we might say that this latter form of contact keeps open the horizons of alternative worlds less defined by racial, economic, and corporeal segregation without in any manner plotting or guaranteeing their actualization. The ultimate importance of “contact” is that it keeps lines of communication open, however staticky, and preserves the democratic convictions that people need not be identical to engage in common cause—even where such cause is merely the maintenance of a common space or semi-public sphere—and that it is beneficial for people to encounter differently situated people both to address the possible inequalities built into these multiple situations and to detect other modes of accessing pleasure, intimacy, and connection to an identity whose value lies not in its

14

     

exclusive precision but in its wide orbit of availability and accessibility. As the late Douglas Crimp points out, to identify as or with something, such as gay or queer, is not to affirm who one already is in an act of rote recognition but rather to move in the direction of something one wishes to become, get to know better, or grow closer with (186–187). A matter of affinity and affiliation, identification exceeds mere mimesis and recasts the identity toward which it reaches as a performative striving whose form and content cannot be known fully in advance. Although Delany is describing a particular type of togetherness, he is also insisting upon spatiality and infrastructure as critical supports for non-normative togetherness and intimacy; which is to say, the collective effort of identity and identification needs an arena and atmosphere of diverse and unpredictable gathering. But if these spaces are to remain queer—that is, to remain supportive of what makes queer “queer”—they cannot be entirely safe. This proposition sounds counterintuitive, but as Christina Hanhardt documents in her history of gay neighborhoods and their management of violence, the construction and maintenance of “safe space” is often of a piece with, or becomes too easily conscripted by, broader policing strategies whereby a privileged LGBT minority is “protected” from dangerous others that include the poor, the nonwhite, the homeless, and queers whose life trajectories do not conform to the straight and narrow politics of a family-friendly neighborhood watch (9). To summarize Hanhardt’s point as well as the situation of too many urban and suburban locations at the present moment, the consolidation of safe spaces for some too often means the denial of safety and dignity to others, who in a traumatic turn are cast not as vulnerable populations to which threats of survival attach but instead as perpetual and endlessly policeable threats to the social order. Less socially scientific in its execution, Delany’s account of the removal of spaces of inter-class queer contact in Times Square resonates with Hanhardt’s study of safe space’s oppressive agenda (Delany 122). Indeed, it is easy to imagine city planners making the ostensibly uncontroversial case that closing down Manhattan’s sex clubs, erotic bookstores, and porn theaters will make its streets safe not only for heterosexual families but also for LGBT couples and their children as

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well, even if in reality what they care most about is the recapitalization of those spaces via real estate development and the conversion of public and semi-public spaces into exorbitantly expensive condos, studios, and neoliberal live/work lofts. Developers are then able to conceal their oppressive and possessive investments in wealthy whiteness behind a screen of lavender love—a screen more aptly described, given the broader regimes of securitization of which this practice, bolstered by the militarization of local police forces, is a potent part, as a gate or checkpoint akin to those currently proliferating at multiple international borders in Europe, the United States, Israel, and elsewhere. This strategy of using LGBT rights as a cover for curtailing the rights of others or further regulating their conduct and mobility has become known as pinkwashing, and it can take several and sometimes overlapping forms, from using LGBT safety as a justification for hounding and jailing the poor, people of color, and religious minorities to pointing to the mistreatment of LGBT people within those marginalized communities as proof of their backwardness, unruliness, and inability to govern themselves (Puar xii). To wash a neighborhood in pink might also suggest, in line with Delany’s lugubrious analysis, a campaign of sanitation that activates biopolitical preoccupations with hygiene and cleanliness in order to remove variously stigmatized sources of moral contamination. And this campaign, waged over many years, further serves to whitewash queer history and conceal the diverse assemblage of nonwhite, working-class, trans, and nonconforming people who led the charge in pushing back against criminalization and police harassment. Indeed, pinkwashing describes a very contemporary form of settler colonialism, inclusive of the continued removal of indigenous people from native lands as well as “marketdriven” techniques of gentrification and the state-executed practices of racialized incarceration upon which gentrification depends, in which some abnormal bodies previously targeted by disciplinary and eugenicist control receive an exception of sorts—not a full reprieve, of course, since they must conform to the norms of pair-bonded romance and neoliberal acquisitiveness, but a bribe whose payout in social and economic privilege requires averting their gaze from persecution elsewhere or, worse, engaging actively in the precaritization of populations

16

     

with which they might at one time, in conditions of heightened contact, have found common cause. One could argue against the premise of this book that what these exceptional queers crave most is to disappear inside their liberal enclaves, shield themselves from perceiving the plight of others, and eschew their political and economic commitments to disadvantaged populations. But this desire is really not about disappearance at all, since what safe space ideology promises to those fortunate enough to move within its orbit is absolute and unqualified appearance without the risk of harassment and violence—obviously a good thing, but also without the risk of sacrifice, ethical summons, and immediate responsiveness and responsibility (not just writing a check) to those less privileged. An ethos of diminution would actually entail—and the literary and subcultural examples unpacked in this book will disclose—limiting and more conscientiously calculating the impact of one’s appearance so as to benefit vulnerable populations in greater need of attention and social provision. I am proposing here a possible collaboration between the queer impulse to diminish and the contemporary need for activist strategies whereby privileged parties to coalitional politics restrain their input and visibility in order to center the voices, experiences, and desires of those historically relegated to the margins. Consider the perish-performative value of a privileged white gay man withdrawing his self-interested demands from an intersectional platform of widely distributable social justice or taking a backseat within a movement in which he has long enjoyed a prominent role. Or consider, quite differently, the perish-performative value of a tentative and traumatized trans person feeling comfortable enough to appear silently at a public gathering because they possess the assurance that more privileged folks have shown up to demand an end to the horrifically underreported homicides of trans women in the United States. Or, on a similar note, imagine the performative significance of cis folks joining trans folks in a collective die-in meant to protest and elucidate the lethality of transphobia and the continued underinvestment in HIV care and prevention for poor, homeless, and nonwhite queers. I invoke die-ins to reiterate my point that disappearances can appear and appearances can disappear in one and the same movement, even if

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most such movements are not staged with as much intention, energy, and publicity as a coordinated event of political activism. This tension within queer diminution echoes José Muñoz’s concept of disidentification whereby queer spectators locate identificatory sites and make space for themselves within cultural formations from which they have historically been excluded or even in which they have historically been maligned. Changing “the way in which the object is inhabited by the subject,” disidentification is a “survival strategy that is employed by a minority spectator . . . to resist and confound socially prescriptive patterns of identification” (28). Just as Crimp argues that identification never amounts to mere recognition and rote repetition (186–187), Muñoz contends, summoning a long cultural studies tradition that emphasizes the agency and creative capacities of audiences over and against previous paradigms of purely exploitive and herd-like reception, that identification can also name an impulse to remake, differ with, and ultimately reconfigure not simply the object but also the field of power relations through which the object comes to count as a representation of the world. Disidentification does not take an axe to identity but instead “expand[s] and problematize[s]” it by generating new patterns of crossidentification that reveal identity as inexorably a matter of crossing and crisscrossing subjectivities and of negotiating intermixed hostility and hospitality at every identificatory site. Making these sites more welcoming necessitates a “disidentificatory optic” oriented to “shadows and fissures within the text, where racialized presences can be liberated from the protective custody of the white literary imagination” (Muñoz 29) and whereby dissident sexualities can be freed from the strangleholds of hetero- and homonormativity. Disidentification is such a valuable concept because it acknowledges that the activity of minority identification, or of making an affinity appear, goes hand in hand with a recessive impulse to make some things disappear, be they the elements of an object with which the minority spectator takes issue or the spectator themself as they seek escape and absorption within dark crevices undetectable by the majority eye. Although in his more utopian moments Muñoz leans on queers’ improvisational talent of “recycling” material from the dominant culture in the service of articulating their creative opposition and alternatives to

18

     

an oppressive status quo (31), at other moments he less triumphantly stresses disidentification as a mode of being both in the world and at a critically nourishing remove from it. Discussing a performance piece by Marga Gomez in which the artist meditates on pre-Stonewall queer “life” being replaced by a more prideful but also anodyne queer “community” averse to such self-destructive practices as cigarette smoking, Muñoz notes her “outlaw sensibility” and “disidentificatory desire for a queer life-world that is smoky, mysterious, and ultimately contestatory” of both the straight world and the straitening pressure for queers to conform to respectable models of personhood. Muñoz elaborates with ecstatic elegance, “Gomez’s disidentification with [the life] helps us imagine an expansive queer life-world, one in which the ‘pain and hardship’ of queer existence within a homophobic public sphere are not elided, one in which the ‘mysteries’ of our sexuality are not reined in by sanitized understandings of lesbian and gay identity, and finally, one in which we are allowed to be drama queens and smoke as much as our hearts desire” (34). Gomez’s is an act of disidentification because even as she embraces moving beyond the persecutory environment in which “the life” first flourished, she simultaneously laments the loss of the repertoire of defiant tactics that allowed queers to survive that environment and to mount a countercultural challenge to it. She performs disidentification’s affinity with “that lost object of identification,” be it the queer-affirming material missing from the object’s semiotic center, which the creative spectator labors lovingly and reparatively to supply, or the underground worlds rendered less accessible, imaginable, and desirable by queerness’s damaging dalliance with normativity. Where Muñoz mines the excesses of Gomez’s performance, I want to briefly mine Muñoz’s. Note how the repetition of “one” to name this queer-embracing world is itself a gesture toward an “expansive queer life-world,” because with each repetition the coherence and cohesion of this past and future world—where the mix of temporalities is crucial for Muñoz’s point that utopianism is more than a continualist reach toward a progressive and teleological tomorrow—is stretched beyond conventional parameters of community consensus. Muñoz’s is a promiscuous planet wherein multiple versions of queerness, from emergent forms to classic configurations no longer regarded derisively as wrong or

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retrograde, mingle and meander, and wherein identity never contracts entirely into sameness in part because the shadowy and enigmatic spaces of this planet—regions akin to Delany’s zones of contact about which Muñoz writes elsewhere—remain available for exploration, subjective erasure, and erotic invitation. On this planet exist myriad opportunities for appearing but also for disappearing, for getting lost and going missing or for engaging in practices, such as cigarette smoking, that risk the subject’s continuity in defiance of neoliberalism’s biopolitical maxims of health and wellness. Muñoz enacts this disappearing tendency with his nonparallel exclusion of a second “to” in the final clause of that sentence, so that we are allowed not only to “smoke as much as our hearts desire” but also “to be drama queens and smoke.” In other words, we are permitted both to appear with all the histrionic and inflationary effulgence of a drag queen and to disappear with all the deflationary haziness (but also erotic implication) of smoke, both of which, depending upon our mood and circumstances, might be what our hearts desire. Indeed, we might argue that one cannot be a queen without taking a drag, meaning that the yearning to vaporize is counterintuitively constitutive of a queer subjectivity that often drags with it, as Elizabeth Freeman has argued, queer histories from which it receives both pain and pleasure (Time Binds, 62). While it is easy enough to see the many ways in which queerness flames in Muñoz’s work as outrageous and flamboyant performance that contests the racialized respectability paradigms of mainstream politics and cultural production, it is no less important to breathe in the smoke of this slow burn and appreciate the radical longing to decompress and to diminish in the absence of which queerness would be nothing more than a perilous situation of limitless exposure and accountability. But this entropic urge is not necessarily an inward turn—though it is interesting to think of its destructive edge as a less sanitized and commercially complicit form of self-care—because it happens in the company of other queers who share, learn, and enable its enduring appeal. Gomez’s cigarette, after all, is described as being part of “the life” before it becomes a threat to the rehabilitated “community,” and as such it marks not an individual addiction or source of actuarially calculable morbidity but instead a common currency of a subculture whose acquired ability to flame out enabled it, sometimes, to burn bright.

20

     

If Gomez’s and Muñoz’s retention of this cigarette signifies a melancholic attachment to bygone or endangered queerness—Muñoz engages Melanie Klein’s work elsewhere to argue for melancholia as a key component of racialized queerness during a time when losses keep piling up (“Feeling Brown,” 676)—it also signifies a commitment to dragging queer history into the now and to preserving the conditions of its complicated survival. Smokiness in all its forms can then remain the atmosphere in which queerness is never forced to settle into a stable and individuated identity, in which recent arrivals can catch queerness in a hazy air behind which they can also seek cover, and in which the resolutely public can become, through first- or second-hand contact, the pleasurably private, the both energizing and enervating inhalation of an exquisite collective whose source-fire might be depleted but never fully extinguished. It is precisely this vague and vagrant intimacy Delany intends with “contact,” where with few or no aspirations to be good citizens, activists, or community members, queer people can exceed the limits of their discrete individuation and dissolve, discreetly or not, into a murky universe where identities, positions, and endgames have not yet been decided. In a certain sense, this alternative universe is safe, insofar as it offers something of a protective cloak for proscribed activity, but in another sense it is radically unsafe, both because it contains behaviors worrisome to institutions of public health and because it hazards the integrity of a subject who might very well catch fire. But a vital insight of queer culture is that volatile atmospheres of interpenetration can become the foundations of a life lived and a world constructed differently, one in which traditional values of longevity, familiarity, comfort, and biological kinship give way to strange, fleeting, threatening, nonreproductive, and at least initially uncomfortable encounters whose continued availability in the plural, rather than the specific singular, is its own kind of endurance and reassurance. Indeed, what so many queers find nutritive and necessary in the nimbi of queer culture, particularly those more seedy and smoky joints in which networking is most certainly not the objective, is the reliable experience of going missing from the everyday, be that a persecutory quotidian in which they must hide their queerness or an ostensibly accepting quotidian whose very supportiveness, often

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ignorant of all the extravagant and deviant impulses that queer can entail, threatens to smother the smoke of irresistible dissipation. By all means, public spaces of sex and sociability, threatened everywhere but acutely endangered in the United States, have afforded queers the opportunity for appearing otherwise, for removing the garb of domestic and occupational normativity and breathing the fetid but intoxicating air of promiscuous contact, naked or fully clothed. But the experience of this appearance is, for numerous queers, more like disappearance—like absorption into a realm where affective and somatic excitation is accompanied and amplified by a profound evacuation, often aided by the agencies of narcotic and stimulant substances, akin to smoke rings spiraling upwards and outwards and into the bodies of those who do not apologize, and who do not make others apologize, for toxic excrescence, including the shame trailing along behind them that might propel them into ecstatic activity or, alternatively, arrest their full participation in it. Queer culture has its idlers, sidlers, and onlookers—those who hew close to the bar but relish the fact that the darkroom doesn’t go unvisited—and they are crucial periperformatives in the collective performance of renegade sexuality. Sometimes it’s nice to know the cruise bar is there and open even if you are tucked into bed or having a bottle of wine in front of the television. I suggested earlier that the simultaneously brutal and banal removal of the institutions described so deliciously by Muñoz and Delany has not eliminated the desire to dissolve and disappear but has rather forced it into less supported directions and environments. As Muñoz’s work attests, the urgent project is both to rebuild the physical architecture of queer life, even of “the life,” and to revisit and thereby revive the cultural architecture that first narrated the complex affective currents of queer embodiment. Because this is the Introduction, it seems fitting to launch our autopsy of “the life” with a text that arguably preceded it—the first known Anglophone gay novel, A Marriage Below Zero, published pseudonymously (under Alan Dale) in the United States in 1889 by Alfred J. Cohen, a twenty-seven-year-old British theater critic. The novel was recently rediscovered by Richard A. Kaye, who in his informative Broadview introduction locates it within a constellation of medical, scientific, legal, and media developments that brought increasing focus upon

22

     

homosexuality in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the wake of the passage of the Labouchere Amendment in 1885, which imposed a two-year penalty of hard labor for sodomitical conduct, and the Cleveland Street scandal of 1889, homosexuals in England and elsewhere found themselves under new and heightened surveillance by the police, the courts, and everyday people who, awash in fresh information and attuned to the emergent discursive construction of the homosexual as a discrete and recognizable type, as described infamously by Foucault, were more than ever on the lookout for signs of a culture about which they had previously known little or nothing (Kaye 11). A touchstone for both an epochal and epistemic shift, A Marriage Below Zero also intertwines multiple popular genres of its moment, from the novel of manners and the “New Women” novels (Kaye 15–16) to detective fiction, dime novels, and the serialized penny dreadfuls. Told from the perspective of Elsie, a woman who marries a physically sparing but beautiful gentleman and who eventually discovers that he is kept, so to speak, by an older and more brutish man with whom he has all along spent an inordinate amount of time, the novel contains many scenes of melodramatic display and titillating revelation. That the story is routed through the jealous and jilted wife rather than through the husband Arthur, or through the senior Captain Dillington, might be understood as the novel’s cautious way of performing its relative ignorance of what might exactly go on between two men behind closed doors. Indeed, Arthur and Dillington are never discovered in a sexually compromising position or even awkward embrace; it isn’t until Elsie reads in The Daily Telegraph (Dale 184–185) of Dillington’s involvement in a Parisian “scandal,” which she also calls “a cesspool of vice,” that she puts two and two together, travels to Paris after having been left by Arthur in New York two years before, and discovers her recently auto-poisoned husband dead in the very same hotel in which Dillington was reported by the newspapers to have been staying. Perhaps most tellingly and troublingly, she spies above Arthur’s head separate portraits of him, “happy and smiling,” and Dillington “placed together in a single frame,” visual evidence of a connection she had too long mistaken for at worst a codependent and possibly manipulative friendship. Her grief giving way to “a violent, overpowering sense of anger,”

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Elsie shatters the frame on the floor, stomps the glass “into atoms,” tears the photographs “into smallest pieces,” and with blood dripping from her hands, gathers the “bits of glass” and shredded paper and tosses them from the window, watching them “scatter in all directions.” Without taking another glance “at the dead form in the chair,” she promptly exits the room and the continental hotel of ill repute (191). While fully acknowledging the novel’s animating, overarching homophobia and inaugural presence in a long lineage of literary and visual media in which the only acceptable ending for a homosexual is tragic and early death, I want to avoid generic dismissal or rigid historicization and argue for its flickering sensitivity to the queer desire for recession and disappearance. To do so requires temporarily redirecting attention from the mismatched cross-sex couple’s periodic arguments, interrogations, and overwrought histrionics to the muted sensibility that first brought them together. Writing retrospectively from the position of already having been abandoned and widowed, Elsie remembers preferring Arthur to the many young suitors who “made silly speeches, and showered compliments upon me in a manner that simply caused me consternation and hurt my self respect” (61). She responds with “disgust” to men treating her like a “doll” and although she has “since learned that a man who never says a pretty thing . . . is an abnormal being who will ultimately sink into obscurity,” she “wonder[s] that it should be so” (63). Because Arthur does not heap praise upon her beauty or whisper sweet nothings in her ear, as if she were a commodity being sized up on purely superficial grounds, she delights in his company even when it lacks the heat that might serve proof of sexual attraction. Indeed, much of their early dialogue is devoted to a mutual interest in desentimentalizing and ratcheting down the intensity of the courtship process. Labeling herself “a peculiar girl” (68)—a more than faint echo of the queer boy to whom she is undramatically drawn—Elsie professes her distaste for the “demonstrative” and tells Arthur that she would “despise” a man “if he deared and darlinged” her (76). On a later occasion the pair sit adjacent to clearly “enamored” newlyweds, and Elsie describes herself as “sickened” and “disgust[ed]” by their treacly behavior, to which a “satisfied” Arthur responds with a marriage proposal upon securing Elsie’s reassurance that she will be reciprocally “satisfied to marry a man who

24

     

absolutely declined to be the conventional lover, writing ballads to your eyebrows, and extolling your virtues, real and imaginary, while the love fever lasted” (83). Although such sentiments, or lack thereof, render Arthur “different to any other man [Elsie] had met . . . the difference seemed to [Elsie], then, to be in his favor” (83). As if to confirm this difference visually, Arthur’s face takes on “a startling pallor,” the first of many instances in which he appears to vacate his body in a manner that makes mortification more than etymologically akin to death. Elsie’s attraction to this recessive romance marks her as “peculiar” (her very name invoking the else or otherwise of identity), to be sure, but it also rebuffs a marriage market that dissimulates its crudely economic functions and that reduces women to receptacles of a chivalrous submissiveness that prevaricatingly precedes what will likely be an ongoing arrangement of male power and privilege. Arthur’s subdued seduction may lack passionate persuasion, but its soft yet serious presentation enables Elsie to feel empowered in encouraging it and respected as a rational contributor to the relationship it yields. She acknowledges that her “ideas were morbid” (82) in regard to romantic display, but this qualification happens within a context of disingenuous wooing that she and many other women worry will turn out to be deadly in its own right. For these reasons, Elsie cannot help but experience Arthur’s unavailability and half-hearted investment as a relief, even when this means that at their wedding, the one site where an amorous flourish would be expected, he appears to be in a “dream” as he answers the reverend with a “hoarse” voice and with “icily cold” fingers places the ring on Elsie’s hand (90–91). Afterward, as they drive away to a “honeymoon” that occurs underwhelmingly not in a far-flung locale but rather mere miles outside of London, Arthur’s “eyes [are] fixed dreamily upon two little fleecy clouds which [are] floating about artlessly above us,” in which reverie “he could not have looked more hopelessly subdued if he had been sitting in a funeral coach” (91). These oneiric tendencies—which might be said to name a sexual orientation in their own right—make the newlywed husband an absent presence, a cipher both in the sense that he amounts to naught for Elsie and that this nothingness codes queerness without revealing or substantializing it. Elsie cites this emptiness and the desire for it by describing

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the movement of the “two little fleecy” clouds—a tense juxtaposition of diminutiveness and indecipherable bulk—as “artless,” as a projective site that both includes Art(hur) and images his self-abandonment. To the extent these clouds provide cushion for the yearning to drop out of being, they fleece marriage of its proprietary and permanent claims, to be sure, but they also mark Elsie’s intensifying capacity to get some distance from her compromised situation, cultivate a perspective all her own, and make of her queer experience an artful if also arduous narration. She learns from her husband, that is, the powers and pleasures of dissipation, of living at a skeptical and inscrutable remove, and thereby manages to draw a minimal sustenance from the conjugal scraps he ungenerously provides. As her attention to the cloud attests, her husband’s flickering presence and uneven availability create the circumstances in which she can sometimes direct her powers of observation elsewhere—to the weather, the atmosphere, the inhuman conditions of her existence. Later on she admits to “eating [her] heart out for love of this iceberg,” in which formulation Arthur becomes an element of this inhuman terrain, a chilly reminder of the earth’s indifference to domestic dramas and conjugal chaos. After Arthur’s usual chill turns to a sick fever following Elsie’s stealth pursuit of him into London and her discovery of the previously undisclosed house in which he and Dillington have been spending nights while she honeymoons alone in the countryside, the precarious pair follow a doctor’s orders to cross the Atlantic for an American retreat. For a short time this escape proves therapeutic to their marriage and to Arthur’s health, and Elsie comes to delight in the sights and sensations of New York, praising the city’s “life, its motion, its excitement” (142) and reveling in the pleasures of walking its streets “absolutely unnoticed” (174)—yet another example of her desire converging with Arthur’s operative impulse to live as far below the radar as possible, a fragile communion or common sexuality organized around the erotics not of mutual penetration but of mutual pulling away. This getting lost together from each other and from the world carries an expiration date, however, because on one of these aimless jaunts Arthur spies what we will later find out is Captain Dillington situated among an “ogling . . . congregation of men” (175) in a hotel lobby, at which point the former either falls or

26

     

feigns to be ill, returns to his own hotel, insists that Elsie keep their opera date with new friends, and in her absence sneaks away to rejoin Dillington and set sail back across the Atlantic. I stress the possibility of Arthur’s genuinely becoming sick because when Elsie tracks down Dillington’s hotel in New York City the next day, just barely failing to cross paths with the man himself, she learns from the hotel detective—whom we might think of, given the earlier description of that unruly cohort of lewd and leering men, as an early loss (of husband) prevention specialist—of her spouse’s “ghastly hue [that] could not have been normal with any living being” the evening before and of his “appear[ing] to be in a dream” as he struggled to provide even meager answers to Dillington’s “glib remarks” (183). A minimal and diminishing presence, Arthur presents queerness not as a robust choice or passionate selection but rather as a borderline nonvolitional impulse akin to growing indisposed or, more appropriate to those fleecy clouds with which he insubstantially identifies, falling under the weather. Like E.M. Forster’s Maurice, to whom we will turn in Chapter 1, Arthur’s disappearance from proper society, aided and abetted by a man whose intimate influence comes without the personal details that would make of his and Arthur’s a traditional companionship, is a mixed matter of self-assertion and abandonment, of identity and non-identity, and of testing how far one can retreat from the colors and coordinates of normative personhood without lapsing into nonviability and absenting oneself from life entirely. That Arthur labors to answer even the most “glib” commentary places him at a simultaneously decisive and indecisive remove from the discursive activity that would suture his desire and behavior to an internally organized and explanatory homosexual identity, resulting not only in discretion and closetedness—though these characteristics are, as Eve Sedgwick has argued, central to modern configurations of sexuality—but also in noncompliance with the imperative that desire disclose its origins and make itself utterable. Although Elsie sets out to “save” Arthur after she learns of the Parisian scandal in which Dillington is embroiled, having at first given up on her husband in the wake of his madcap dash out of New York, upon discovering him dead her heroic rescue turns into more of a cover-up. As earlier detailed, she is overcome by a “violent, overpowering sense of

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anger” as she proceeds, no doubt heartbroken, to find ocular confirmation of the special bond her husband shared with Dillington, to break the frame in which their photos are suggestively conjoined, to crush the glass into tiny grains, to shred the photos into indecipherable confetti, and to entrust the demolished lot to a careless and scattering wind. Of course, this destructive reaction can easily be construed as a swipe at Dillington and his relationship with Arthur—as in, I will obliterate every trace of what you once had together and of the proof that what I had with my husband was a less than convincing charade—but it can also be viewed, beyond its immediately malicious intention, as a complicit continuation of Arthur’s lifelong inclination to move below the scrutinizing attention of others and to “sink into obscurity.” To the extent she has been covering for Arthur since their brief courtship, she persists in covering for him by removing the evidence tying him to Dillington even as, it must be acknowledged, she leaves his lifeless body to be discovered in a hotel already exposed for its deviant clientele. Her impulse to erase her husband repeats the various postures and gestures by which he has long absented himself from scenes of intimacy and sociality, and the bits of him that get separated and dispersed by the wind become the fleeting figures of the fugitive tendency he has long harbored and previewed with his blanched appearance and dreamlike expressions. To separate him from Dillington is not only to deny their connection but also to honor the disappearing disposition that, curiously enough, enabled it. This tension is captured by the arrangement of the photographs in the frame—paired but also clearly separate—which bespeaks not only the sad impossibility at that moment of a gay couple becoming visible as such (though we have no reason to believe such a normative presentation would appeal to either Arthur or Dillington) but also an intimate configuration in which the individual is not swallowed up by a phantasmatic union and is instead allowed to keep back something of himself; that is, he can be alone together, together and alone, available for other possibilities even when in the regular company of another. It is the freedom and pleasure, turning on fear and risk, of such a dis-union that Elsie senses at various points in her short-lived marriage, and although she no doubt feels betrayed by her husband’s indiscretions, her lively and critical voice,

28

     

delivered in a narrative few women would have been allowed to emcee, is inaugurated and amplified by them. In a tell-all account that in fact does not tell all, indeed whose very permission to circulate depends absolutely upon its not telling all, her return to the scene of the crime, ostensibly intended as an admonitory lesson for a female audience as naïve as she once was, oddly ends up memorializing its transgressive content and honoring the miscreant material as something of a foundation, or enabling condition, of its narrator’s engaging appearance. The re-performance of her turning her back on the whole sordid affair concomitantly reanimates, only barely, that limp body, laced with laudanum, left to symbolize queerness’s liquid ambitions and, just maybe, lingering appeal. The cultural meanings attached to queerness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were varied, overlapping, and uneven, but for the purposes of this project I want to focus, with Arthur Ravener as our cryptic touchstone, on the specific anxieties of urban modernity that collocated with particular force around the figure of the queer. Without rehearsing the well-known verities of modern life—with its constitutive sensations of shock, alienation, anomie, estrangement, and isolation from traditional and agrarian networks of filiation—we can nonetheless remind ourselves that the economic, cultural, and sensorial transformations of modernity threw into crisis, to varying degrees of course based on race and class, the previously secure coordinates of the individual’s social recognition and legitimation. As countless critics and philosophers have argued, the liberated self of modernity, unburdened from at least some of its familial and theological determinants, was re-burdened with the task of making a name for itself through the exertion of distinguishing talent, activity, or brilliance. Even men who could not claim to be self-made experienced embryonic pressure to leave a mark apart from the conventional one of patronymic prestige and reputation. Although urban life with its proliferation of creative and associative possibilities gave them the opportunity to do just that, it simultaneously imaged their erasure and invisibility within the teeming and rapidly growing crowds of city centers (Wicke 19). Indeed, for every bit the city promised people a platform of self-advancement, it also threatened to swallow them whole or spit them out.

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That these concerns were not exclusively the domain of men is dramatized to tremendous effect in Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway, in which Clarissa Dalloway, something of a fictional proxy for Woolf ’s own urban inclinations, delights in the bustling activity of London—as Jennifer Wicke has described elegantly, the “lark” and “plunge” of the opening pages have everything to do with the new freedoms afforded women by market economies in need of female attention, affection, and interpretive application (13)—even while noting that it is exceedingly difficult to get to know people (and for other people to get to know you) amidst the metropolitan hubbub. At the same time that Clarissa expresses her preference to take a stroll in London rather than in the country, she also laments a heightening, or perhaps lowering, sense of feeling “invisible.” Although this feeling speaks in part to Woolf ’s exquisite critique of the disposability of older women, who beyond their procreative years grow increasingly unnoticeable to a narrative perspective barely distinguishable from a lascivious male gaze, it cannot be set apart entirely from the novel’s urban milieu, which affords Clarissa abundant opportunities to breeze and browse through streets and shops, escaping the scrutiny of most prying eyes, but which also no doubt reminds her, precisely because of how infrequently she is noticed, of her minimal impact upon the lives of others. Indeed, the relative absence of such apprehensible and immediate impressions might explain her imaginative theorization of a different sort of legacy in which unseen aspects of herself survive her urban encounters and imprint themselves upon the psyches of passersby, generating a collective consciousness or, slightly less personally, a mind of the city. This theorization resonates powerfully with some of the most salient and even optimistic claims of this book, because if the self ’s disappearance can enable future forms of collectivity and collective belonging, then disappearance need not always, no matter its intentions, terminate in pure and lonely inwardness. If modernism names, in part, an artistic effort to glimpse and grasp this decline and transformation in self-registration—a crisis aggravated by the concomitant rise of bureaucratic institutions in which the individual is reduced to a nameless number—then a text like A Marriage Below Zero points up how differently this predicament is experienced by a queer man seeking erotic encounter and, simultaneously, the elimination of any traces it might leave behind.

30

     

Far from a simple reminder that urban spaces constituted the conditions in which queer subcultures could flourish—with the numbers and anonymity to sustain them—stories like Arthur Ravener’s delineate a psychological and experiential alternative to the crisis of self provoked by a metastasizing modernity. Seeking protective cover for the pursuit of his desire, Arthur merges with the city’s mounting masses and expresses little interest in becoming better known, socially prominent, or intimately recognized. The rapacious connotations of his name have less to do with any predatory damage he does to his surroundings than they do with his desire’s cannibalizing effect upon himself, for it is Arthur who is swallowed up and made minimal by a predilection for imposing captains. Indeed, the suggestion of Arthur’s sexual passivity—his absolute availability to Dillington, even when traveling, figures him a sub if not slave boi avant le lettre—makes A Marriage Below Zero not only the first Anglophone gay novel but also the first Anglophone bottom tale, a narrative prefiguration of Leo Bersani’s claim that a grown man with his legs in the air represents a grave in which the ego, hyper-charged by masculine pride and entitled swagger, goes to die (222). Bersani frames his argument as an intervention in feminist theory, alleging that it is precisely when sex becomes a dyadic relationship, rather than an impersonal evacuation of the self, that it devolves into competitive power struggles between men and women in which gender binaries and hierarchies are further consolidated (218). Evidence of such internecine squabbles appear in the novel, but of greater prominence are the nontranslation of Arthur and Dillington’s encounters into a romanticized couple form and the strategies devised by Elsie to remain in the company of a man who refuses to play the part of priapic paramour. Below zero marks an extreme and underexplored territory of affective deprivation and tests the limits of both the human and the human’s need for sustained intimate recognition. Absent the promise of such recognition, the human can of course turn to friends and other sources of non-normative intimacy, but they might also be forced to inhabit the world under a cloak of relative invisibility. The psychoanalyst Michael Eigen writes of patients who complain of their appearances not being registered, their voices not being heard, their touches not being felt, and their visages not being seen

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(Feeling Matters, 43). Such patients are often, understandably, depressed and desperate to remedy their perceptions of precarious presence. A predictable and eagerly sought-after therapeutic response is to reassure the analysand of their social impact and to heighten their appreciation of the impressions they make upon the world, which treatment might further include a critical analysis of the damaged and damaging bonds in and through which the analysand counterproductively seeks affirmation. But in addition to these ego-fortifying answers, Eigen also urges the importance of encouraging patients to sit with their feelings of minimal presence and to consider the viability of an inconspicuous existence (Toxic Nourishment, 160–162). While taking seriously the patient’s anxiety and disappointment, Eigen is also interested in recalibrating the sort of unrealistic expectations of transformative presence encouraged by pop psychology and other institutions of neoliberal individualism. This recalibration, it can be concluded, is directed not only at the patient’s experience of others but also at their experience of themself; that is, at both their burning desire and their inability to experience themself as being fully present, motivated, meaningful, and influential across multiple domains. Intimate bonds that are not mutually affirming and nourishing can be damaging, to be sure, but so too can be the conviction that one will make marks and connections wherever one goes and with whomever one comes into contact. When Michael Warner writes that a key lesson, sometimes learned the hard way, of queer culture is to “get over yourself” (35), he is converging with Eigen in taking seriously the value of not taking oneself too seriously. Many queer people have learned to survive at or below zero—finding affection here and there or poaching it from places and persons supposedly off-limits— and while we should of course continue to seek amplitude for their erotic ambitions, we should also, as I will soon explain, acknowledge and accommodate their hard-won insight that the world can be weathered, and new worlds can be imagined, when the self is viewed not as a substance to be actualized but as an obstacle to be cleared. Although this book is intended more as a meditation on queer subjectivity than as a direct intervention in science studies or the environmental humanities, it nonetheless takes many cues from and finds footing in the emerging field of queer ecology and in particular the

32

     

observation by Nicole Seymour, Sarah Ensor, and others that queer practices and imaginaries can be environmentally attuned, and even sometimes therapeutic, without bearing an explicitly environmentalist intent or agenda. What queer subcultural practice offers our exhausted planet is not a do-gooder regime of sustainability and stewardship— however much these practices might appeal to some queer people—but rather an extensive inquiry into the value and viability of attenuated appearance and of life lived with minimal impact. I refer here to some obvious examples, such as the absence of reproduction among many queer people and the attendant savings in resource expenditure, but I am less interested in flagging up concrete behaviors— and thereby hectoring people, contra the pedagogy of queer theory, for their irresponsible sexuality—than in probing a psychology and a subjectivity that can tolerate, and even appreciate, making a minimal imprint on the world around it. To return to the earlier discussion of contemporary childrearing, what we in the West lack today, perhaps more than anything else, is a curriculum in self-effacement that teaches kids it is okay to be idle and indolent, and that it is also perfectly okay not to dream big, aim high, and distinguish oneself through exceptional activity. We need fewer superstars, change agents, rock stars, innovators, entrepreneurs, and influencers and far more idlers, idle imaginers, introverts, and unambitious intellects. We need to learn forms of selfassertion that look like abeyance and modes of growth that go sideways, not very far, or nowhere at all. On a more morbid note, given the myriad extinctions already underway and the newly appreciated possibility, thanks to rapidly accelerating climate change, of eventual human extinction, we need to learn how to become less, to go away, to jettison the lure of salvation, and—whether we survive or vanish—to imagine environments in which humans enjoy (and we need to learn the enjoyment to be had in) only marginal presences. Preparation for climate futures, that is, requires material investment (and divestment) and reallocation but also a thoroughgoing subjective reorientation and attitudinal adjustment; otherwise, we will be left with people who know no other way through the impasse than an obsessive-compulsive fixation on innovation, entrepreneurialism, individual distinction, and techno-optimism that risks reverting back to, if ever it left behind, pro-growth models of

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land-devouring, ocean-polluting, and carbon-pumping economic development. Far from advancing a brand new argument about neoliberalism, I am merely emphasizing the fact that undoing a petro-culture involves more than weaning off of fossil fuels, ameliorating extinction events presently underway, and contriving collective approaches to environmental preservation—though these are all, clearly, critical endeavors; it also involves people, particularly the most privileged, acclimating themselves to a decentered position in the world and learning to feel their way through a situation of aliveness without striving, of endurance without exceptional exertion, and of existing without necessarily becoming bigger, better, richer, and prouder. What is required, in short, is an affective corollary to the material restraint of ecological conservation—a scaling back and dialing down that can probably never be ridded of the threat of growing numb, going missing, or dying out. Robert Emmett writes about a diverse “Anthropocene aesthetics” (159) that somehow capture or suggest humanity’s impact upon the planet, its gradual transmutation into a geological agent, and/or its necessary imbrication in pasts from which it draws (carbon-rich deposits) or futures to which it contributes (carbon-rich nightmares). To take nineteenth-century aesthetics as but one example, Benjamin Morgan argues that Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles succeeds at registering human activity at inhuman and transtemporal scales (45), while Daniel Finch-Race, in a recent seminar, points to chimneys and smokestacks in French paintings by Monet, Morisot, Cezanne, and others as subtle indicators of the increasingly inescapable presence of fossil-fuel consumption. There is also of late a wealth of climate-change fiction showcasing near- and long-term climate disasters replete with refugees, survivalist camps, dwindling resources, corrupt politicians and entrepreneurs seeking to capitalize on chaos, reconfigured nation-states and global alliances, contagions and epidemics of disease, and, in the more optimistic cases, semi-restorative solidarities between humans and between humans and other agents of the natural world.³

³ For a brilliant discussion of the achievements and limitations of recent climate-change fiction, see Song.

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     

Assembled here is an archive that possesses some of these characteristics, but its focus on human contraction and disappearance means it is concerned less with revealing the costs of the Anthropocene than with previewing pathways to its remediation that are not, at least not in every case, transparently connected to an environmentalist program or ideology. These loose connections and disconnections are part of what makes this collection of modern and contemporary texts queer; however, the meat of their queerness lies in their articulation of gender/sexual nonnormativity with tendencies to fade into the landscape, find pleasure in obliteration, identify quietly with other threatened members of an endangered territory, slumber at odd times and in unexpected places, and go missing for extended periods. Although these propensities apply to particular characters in the texts under examination, they do not remain entirely with or inside of them, because as the etymology of “tendencies” suggests, they tendril outward to the world around them, making contact even if only in the form of silent absorption or intimate evanescence. Disappearance can be an important way into an ecology, I will be arguing, and its minimal impact is both what makes it vitally ecological and difficult if not impossible to register in standard political metrics and rhetorics of agency, assembly, intent, protest, or revolution. I realize that a focus on individual characters, however much they may bleed into their environments, risks neoliberal individualism, but as Franco Bifo Berardi reminds us, neoliberalism has recently moved to hijack collectivity by synonymizing it with connectivity, converting assemblies into attentionseeking-and-expending networks of only superficially bonded monads. Buzzing, clicking, swiping, and thumbing their way through “followers” and “friends” in order to amass likes and emojis, members of so many contemporary collectives remain very much alone, glued to screens and devices in order to remain ready, at every instant, to react in ways that simultaneously affirm their membership and distance them in the name of self-promotion masquerading as difference of opinion. If the attention economy has indeed infected and inoculated traditional modalities of political organization and rebellion—not to mention its enabling of misinformation campaigns and neofascist messaging— then what we need direly right now is to ratchet the individual down and

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to ponder new, or old, ways for them to engage with others such that their involvement is not a matter of gathering distinction, accumulating approval, showcasing normalcy, or directing their attention at every stimulus so manically, wastefully, and ultimately unsustainably that they cannot distinguish a firestorm from a hot-take. Individuality, queer literature and theory teaches, can be a matter of inflation and aggrandizement, to be sure—consider the fabulousness of so many queens—but it can also be a matter of deflation, disappearance, and the desire not to mean and matter so damn much. I earlier mentioned Michael Eigen’s work on helping patients cope with feelings of invisibility and muteness, but another psychological vocabulary resonant with the attenuated subjectivity I am describing is that of depersonalization and derealization—affective states, or non-states, marked by detachment, disconnect, deadness, and uncanny absence that can constitute “a full-blown psychiatric disorder” but that can also symptomize other conditions, including trauma (Simeon 10–11). To the extent that we already associate such feelings and nonfeeling with modernism and modernity—consider the self-protective numbing and “dragging . . . downward” described by Georg Simmel in his study of the metropole’s impact on mental life (14–15), and consider also the painful senses of unreality explored by Kafka and others—and to the extent that we also appreciate how traumatic both the threat and experience of homophobia can be, it stands to reason that queer modernism and its literary afterlives have much to teach about the value of pulling away and dialing down. And as I argued earlier, we have to move past the idea that survival techniques cultivated in response to intolerant and even persecutory environments cannot prove pliable and even pleasurable past the point of their initial and embryonic use. We can learn as much from Arthur Ravener, this book submits, as we can from Harvey Milk. This book moves from modernism to the present, not to track a straightforward inheritance or determinative line of influence but rather to demonstrate that queer literature has been thinking ecologically and theorizing the ethics and appeal of diminution for quite some time—and not merely as a matter of discretion or calculated nondisclosure. Chapter 1, “Avian, Anal, Outlaw,” argues that Forster’s Maurice imagines queerness taking hold not through the canonical formula of

36

     

“coming out”—as too many interpretations of the novel conclude—but rather through a complex and deindividuating entanglement between the titular character and various nonhuman agencies that include bacteria, pollen, and birds. Where many critics read the novel’s conclusion, in which Maurice and the gamekeeper Alec Scudder abandon domestic life in favor of disappearing into the surrounding greenwood, as a naïve and even utopian escape, I read it as the culmination of a gathering receptivity to and recession into a threatened natural world. What is more, I press on the novel’s reference to Guatemalan stamps and the resplendent quetzal they picture to argue that Maurice’s fugitivity is not a provincial hiding out that stakes claim to British exceptionalism or protectionism, but rather an expression of the novel’s global imagination and solidarity with other endangered greenspaces and the diverse lives gathered in them. The chapter then extends Maurice’s queer ecological thinking to A Passage to India, where the reappearance of diarrheainducing and personality-reconstituting bacteria along with a mysterious green bird deepen the transnational connections between outdoor experience, outlaw sexuality, and the appeal of absence. Where Forster posits queer disappearance as something of an antidote to the excesses of the Anthropocene, Willa Cather explores the pains, pleasures, and subjective potentials of obliterative feelings that engulf her characters and diminish their senses of impact and importance. In a reading of My Ántonia, I argue that Cather’s fiction provides scenes of mixed relief and terror in which characters experience their meaninglessness in geological time and come to associate it, whether intimately or obliquely, with a sexuality that is not theirs in any possessive sense of the term but that rather surrounds them as an alien, ambient, and yet also affectionate force. Chapter 2, “Cather’s Cancel Culture,” revives an earlier line of inquiry by Judith Butler into Cather’s lesbianism only ever appearing through the very prohibitions meant to render it impossible in order to argue further that obliterative negativity occurs as both theme and form in her work—it is something that happens to her protagonists, often in natural settings, but it is also carried out through an oppositional style that operates to undermine proprietary claims and human hierarchies. Activating Ántonia’s antagonistic appellation and articulating it with negative intimations in the names of others—while at the same time

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examining scenes in which her marked bohemian dialect exposes the power relations within standardized terms—I highlight a pulsing and persistent negativity in the novel that allies the self-diminishing registration of geological time to a subtle critique of settler colonialism and antiblack racism. The negativity of Cather’s language infects the narrator’s (Jim Burden’s) master-discourse from within, burdening him with a counter-discourse he can never fully contain and giving the lie to his romanticized and paternalistic depictions of racial and ethnic others. Focused primarily on Cather’s novel, the chapter also bridges Judith Butler’s early interest in Cather’s names with their more recent reflections on the necessity of their learning to live “to the side” of their own name—a reminder that the self forged in and through citational performativity might not necessarily be a self to which one is particularly or exclusively attached. Forster and Cather provide modernist foundations to the literary exploration of queer disappearance—and to some degree they are supported by homosexuality’s not yet having consolidated into a discrete and hypervisible identity—and their imaginative investments, including acts of ecological embedding and erasure, enjoy experimental echoes in contemporary queer and LGBT literature. Chapter 3, “Disappearing and Resurfacing,” yokes the modern and the contemporary by revisiting a classic of gay literature that takes its name from a line in William Butler Yeats’s “Among School Children”—Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran. Where the novel’s popular reception so often treats it as the epitome of and an encomium to 1970s sexual excess, I argue that the novel’s form tells a different and more cautious tale about libidinal indulgence that almost eerily anticipates the HIV/AIDS epidemic that followed soon on the heels of the novel’s publication. Placing the novel in conversation with multiple pandemics, including the current Covid-19 pandemic, I show how its epistolary configuration and its characters’ differential access to their erotic ideal, Malone, model an intermittent practice of quarantine and social distancing that parallels and makes possible other practices of social and sexual immersion. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s meditations on acedia and melancholia and connecting the novel’s geographical investment in Fire Island with Gloria Anzaldúa’s thinking on sandbar subjectivity, I highlight recessive

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     

tendencies missing from most critical accounts of the novel and claim that those tendencies are as central to the imagination and preservation of gay subcultures as are the more thrilling scenes of disco inferno. Chapter 4, “A Flattened Protagonist,” moves into the twenty-first century and argues that Lydia Millet’s How the Dead Dream echoes and extends Holleran’s thinking about queer quiescence and environmental immersion, making its central character, nominally abbreviated “T.,” bend to the destructive outcomes of his rapacious development by falling asleep at unusual times and in scenes and locations of profound vulnerability and inter-animate contact. A capitalist of the first order— his primary hobby as a child is hoarding money and worshiping commercial titans—T.’s disintegration occurs via a series of losses and eventuates in an irrepressible desire to break into zoos and sleep in the presence of animals whose species are either critically endangered or extinct-in-the-wild. Having previously cultivated faith in the mitigative potential of set-aside schemes in which creatures threatened by his construction projects in California and Belize could be relocated to nearby land and thereby saved, T. deflates at the realization of the schemes’ nefarious naïveté, and his increasing inclination to trespass into the company of threatened animals melancholically repeats and performs the impossibility of—the failed fantasy of—inflationary human presence being able to offset its deleterious impact. Millet’s novel instantiates this sobering and deflationary realization in both content and form, beginning with an arrangement in which chapters move back and forth between T.’s personal life and descriptions of ecological peril (Millet is also a conservationist) but then gradually abandoning this arrangement by embedding T., his losses mounting, in the middle of the peril. And by abandoning him to sleep, I claim further—drawing on work by Jonathan Crary and Jean Luc-Nancy— the novel argues for the human’s somnolent form as being one of the few occasions for the planet to enjoy a temporary respite and the tenuous possibility of renewal. Breaking with forms of environmental activism rooted in loud and unruly activism as well as neoliberal solutions rooted in capital-friendly, technical innovation, How the Dead Dream works instead to rediscover a rhythm for collective abeyance—a profligate sleeping-with that defies modern norms of sleeping apart, sleeping only

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at night, and sleeping in the privileged safety of walled quarters—that might best be called a lullaby. As he loses the coordinates of his human identity—mother, girlfriend, domestic frame, full name—T. becomes a figure of the trans-animal in whom the performative effect is less a strong presence than a marked and immeasurable recess. Chapter 5, “Disappearing Flesh in Shola von Reinhold’s Lote,” turns to Shola von Reinhold’s 2020 trans novel Lote, winner of both the James Tait Black Prize in Fiction and the Republic of Consciousness Prize, to explore alternative archival approaches that circumvent the rules of traditional historiography, in order to make contact with disappeared black and trans forebears, but that also respect and value the desire to disappear as an integral component of a past that can never be fully recovered. Drawing on recent trans studies and black feminist philosophies of the flesh, I argue that Lote makes the evisceration of black flesh—which, according to Hortense Spillers, is ungendered—the material of transtemporal identifications, hauntings, and seizures through which the queer black past becomes known not only in its suffering but also in its yearning, ecstasy, and constitutive fugitivity. As it charts Mathilda’s obsession with neglected black artists of the 1920s and her historical and paranormal efforts to revive the rebellious spirit of a particular one, Hermia Druitt, it also, at the level of its own formal composition, redacts personal details about Mathilda’s and her trans companion and co-detective Erskine Lily’s murky pasts, as well as the means by which it comes to know particular details about Hermia Druitt’s travels through Europe. Placing the novel’s experimental form in dialogue with Christina Sharpe’s methodology of “black redaction,” I argue that the novel strikes a critical balance between historicizing black queerness and appreciating the fugitive impulses that exceed any historical grasp and that address themselves, fitfully but also unfailingly, to futures they work to make possible. In a brief Conclusion on a creative essay by black birdwatcher and wildlife ecologist J. Drew Lanham, I connect the opening and final chapters by showing how Lanham attributes his precarious ability to escape an oppressive present to the availability of equally precarious woodland and marshland habitats replete with birdsong. As Forster’s Maurice uses the foreign figure of a resplendent quetzal to relate the

40

     

threatened greenwood of England to other fragile ecologies, Lanham makes the 1918 extinction of the Carolina parakeet the occasion of a thoughtful meditation on the mutual entanglement of enslaved/escaped black folks and the avian creatures with whom they communed on agricultural fields and in cypress swamps. Commemorating this codependency on paper and in a figurine that he cobbles together, gives eyes, and hangs in his writing shack, Lanham activates the artistry of disappearance and serves the urgent reminder that part of what makes the drive to disappear so constitutive of the human is the human’s, and human history’s, inexorable imbrication with nonhumans of diverse appearances and, more recently, rapid and subjectively impoverishing disappearances.

1 Avian, Anal, Outlaw Queer Ecology in E.M. Forster’s Maurice

One undramatic and potentially extended way to disappear is to decay or decompose. This first chapter revisits E.M. Forster’s gay novel Maurice— one of his more critically uncelebrated works—to explore an alternative etiology for queerness. Posing queerness neither as sovereign decision nor as entirely unsovereign expression of a durable and destined “nature,” and refusing the gesture whereby queerness’s realization takes the form of a self-assured coming out, the novel instead imagines it as a process of unbecoming motored by an array of other agents, many of them nonhuman, that strip sexuality of its supposed possessiveness. In doing so, the novel thinks ecologically about queerness and sexuality and probes the ethics and pleasures of humans finding themselves by losing what they previously thought was most special—their distinctiveness, self-control, and separateness from a world increasingly threatened by their ambition and acquisitive aggrandizement. Maurice, I argue, is not only one of the first gay novels written by a major author; it is also a critical touchstone for apprehending queerness as a profound, and profoundly intersubjective, activity of disappearance. In the introduction to Queer Ecology, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson invoke the art of Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau in acknowledging that “natural settings have been important sites for the exploration of male homosexuality” and “rural spaces in particular have served, in a wide range of literatures, as places of freedom for male homoerotic encounters” (23). To this acknowledgment they append a parenthetical whose opening reads, “famously, in Forster’s Maurice.” E.M. Forster’s novel, written in 1913 but not published until after his death in 1971, appears one more time in their introduction in connection with the influence of the nineteenth-century “utopian Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. Benjamin Bateman, Oxford University Press. © Benjamin Bateman 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192896339.003.0002

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     

socialist” Edward Carpenter, who is claimed to have transmitted to Forster and others his belief in the harmonious fit between “rural natures” and “the Uranian temperament” (27–28). Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson’s inclusion of Maurice in a literary corpus devoted to “male homoeroticism as a central facet of the pastoral depiction of nature as a site for innocent, corporeal plenitude” (23) extends a rather conventional reading of the novel for which its ending—Maurice and the gamekeeper Alec Scudder flee forever into the English greenwood—renders the novel a romantic celebration of nature and gay self-acceptance to the end of making same-sex desire appear a thoroughly natural and individual expression. Forster encouraged this interpretation with his 1960 “Terminal Note” to the novel, which nods to the immediate influence of Edward Carpenter and his partner George Merrill (whose touch “just above the buttocks” struck an apparently erotic and aesthetic nerve in Forster’s “backside”), declares a “happy ending” to be “imperative,” and laments the “wildness of our island” giving way to commercial and industrial development (235–240).¹ But in this chapter, I argue that multiple aspects of the novel track less successfully with a pastoral tradition of self-actualizing nature-belonging than they do with the unruly sense of “queer ecology” explored by Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson, the contributors to their volume, and other scholars working at the intersection of queer studies, the environmental humanities, and the new materialisms. As MortimerSandilands and Erickson explain, “the extension of queer into ecology is not, then, simply a matter of making nature more welcome to gay inhabitation; it is also an invitation to open queer theory to ecological possibilities, and to thus producing a queering of ecological relations” (22). This queering of “ecological relations” further radicalizes the ¹ For example, Jesse Matz writes that Carpenter “seems to have convinced Forster that homosexuality would gain greatest acceptance if refracted through cultural nostalgia—if aligned with longing for such things as the English greenwood” (189). By this logic, the greenwood functions as a safe and naturalizing backdrop for the free expression of homosexual love. However, Matz notes, drawing on Gregory Bredbeck’s work, that Carpenter’s use of Eastern religion to conceptualize Uranian love placed the latter within an “indivisibility of being” that might in fact have more in common with ecological thought than with the transcendent “I” of Whitman (189).

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philosophical project of decentering the human as a privileged and self-containable site of analysis and regarding it instead, to quote Elizabeth Povinelli, as an “assemblage (a condensation and congregation) of living and nonliving substances” that render the human internally plural, contingent, and irreducible to a steady and settled self in possession of itself. As Nicole Seymour queries in Strange Natures, “if even mainstream environmentalist groups ask us to put the ecosystem ahead of individual human desires, might environmentalism as an impulse then be queer at its very core?” (6). Encouraging ecological thought as an indispensable companion to queer theory’s posthuman and anti-social project, Seymour is also gesturing to the fact that “human desires,” heteronormative or otherwise, are always preceded and predicated by an “ecosystem” that exists “ahead” of their immediate experience, exploration, and “fulfillment”—a word I place in quotation marks to draw attention to a certain congruence in modern thought between the satisfaction of a desire and the filling up of an ego toward the end of self-consolidation. I use “queer” in this chapter, and indeed throughout much of the book, in the broad sense employed by Noreen Giffney and Myra Hird in Queering the Non/Human, where they invoke the “unremitting emphasis in queer theoretical work on fluidity, uber-inclusivity, indeterminacy, indefinability, unknowability, the preposterous, impossibility, unthinkability, unintelligibility, meaninglessness and that which is unrepresentable [as] an attempt to undo normative entanglements and fashion alternative imaginaries” (4). But I find it curious that on the very next page of their introduction they cite Eve Sedgwick’s famous “pronouncement that ‘there are important senses in which “queer” can signify only when attached to the first person . . . all it takes—to make the description “queer” a true one is the impulsion to use it in the first person,’” without specifically querying what nonhuman forces might instigate this “impulsion” and what “entanglements” might be obscured or simplified when queer subjectivity is constricted or collapsed into an “I” whose declarations are construed as evidence of its unproblematic unitariness. Claire Colebrook’s contribution to Giffney and Hird’s collection poses just such questions, arguing that Judith Butler’s notion of gender performativity, of which Sedgwick’s first-person use of queer constitutes a signal example, is “too reliant on an image of life as coming into being and

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     

recognition through effected, critical and destabilizing subjects” (Colebrook 24). In other words, what queer theory continues to need, and what Maurice proleptically provides, are interrogations of that integrated and intentional “I” whose conjuration by a queer theory in need of a defiant agent risks taking it for granted and neglecting its status as a performative site for an array of other agencies—periperformatives and perish-performatives, as theorized in the Introduction—that usher it into being, enable its continual becoming, and eclipse its claims to sovereignty. By directing attention to what Mel Y. Chen calls the “animacy” of these other agencies, the novel thinks ecologically and thereby connects the precariousness of queerness—a precariousness summoned throughout the novel by scenes of eroticized decay—to the viability and vulnerability of a “natural” world no longer viewed as separate, not even at the level of the skin, from its human and cultural components. Its idealistic ending aside (for now), Maurice highlights time and again the nonhuman and semi-human spurs to and sources of queerness, making homosexual desire appear not as the unencumbered expression of an integrated sexual subject shorn of social prohibitions and cultural constraints (left free to run wild in the woods) but as the outcome of promiscuous entanglements between permeable, impressionable humans and influential environments that cannot be reduced to passive backdrops for narcissistic narratives of heroic self-flourishing and actualization, including the grand “coming-out” stories with which the novel is too often, if understandably, confused. Maurice anticipates, I argue, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s complaint about queer theory that “a critical movement predicated upon the smashing of boundaries should limit itself to the small contours of human form, as if the whole of the body could be contained in the porous embrace of the skin” (40). Focusing instead, or at the same time, on bacteria, pollen, rain, dirt, and other interpenetrating agencies, the novel depicts queering not as a matter of pent-up desires emerging from a repressed but distinct self but rather as the dynamic activity of that “self ” interacting, often against its will or in spite of its craving for intimate insulation, with external agencies that easily become internal, and in so doing smash the boundaries of which Cohen writes and the attendant certainties about from whence erotic non-normativity emanates and gathers energy.

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These muddled boundaries take on a global dimension as the novel connects the threatened greenwood of England, whose disappearance Forster more explicitly laments in that same “Terminal Note,” with the country of Guatemala, which at the time of the novel’s composition was itself undergoing environmental plunder at the hands of the United Fruit Company. Converting Guatemala into a banana republic, the United Fruit Company commandeered the country’s natural and human resources and fundamentally altered its communications infrastructure with a company-run postal system and, in 1913, the launch of the Tropical Radio and Telegraph Company. Maurice registers this farflung geopolitical transformation with the seemingly inconsequential detail of a set of Guatemalan stamps that Maurice receives from his classmates at the beginning of the novel, on which appears a resplendent quetzal, a symbol of indigenous resistance after which the nation’s currency is named, set atop a triumphant pillar. Connecting the lore about this avian creature with a later scene in which Clive, on a very different sort of pillar, loses control of his bowels and falls out of love with Maurice, and with the novel’s conclusion, in which Maurice merges with the natural world surrounding Clive’s estate, I disclose a transnational and transhistorical imaginary through which expansive ecologies are both adumbrated and connected to matters of sexual awareness and awakening. In doing so, I take up Jessica Berman’s call to “reframe the question about transnational, world, or planetary literature to better understand the centrality of sexuality, embodiment, and gender to national and transnational categories of belonging” (218), where “belonging” is understood, for my purposes, in Timothy Morton’s resolutely posthuman and transspecies sense of becoming “humiliated,” frighteningly and pleasurably, by one’s embeddedness in ecological networks no longer perceived as masterable or secondary to human endeavor.

Avian What most strongly marks Guatemala as an important location for Maurice’s transnational imaginary is the critical location of the stamps in the novel’s opening pages. They appear at the very moment Maurice

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     

begins to receive a birds-and-bees lesson from his schoolmaster Mr. Ducie. Described as “soaked in evolution” (4)—wedded to a pedagogy, first and foremost, of imperial masculinity and reproductive heterosexuality—Ducie appears concerned that Maurice, whose father died when he was young, has missed some important lessons. He seizes the occasion of Maurice’s graduation from his first school and a nature walk intended to celebrate it to wax grandiloquent over a man’s duty “to love a noble woman, to protect and serve her—this, he told the little boy, was the crown of life” (8), where “crown” condenses gender, sexual, national, and imperial normativity. But when Ducie launches into this speech, his charge struggles to focus, exclaiming, “the fellows have given me a set of Guatemalas up to two dollars. Look, sir! The ones with the parrot on the pillar on” (5). Restless to rejoin these “fellows” and to revel further in his gift, Maurice must instead patiently endure Ducie’s peroration, which includes a visual component of male and female diagrams, presumably interlocked in some fashion, drawn in the sand. The stamps and the avian images they bear both insert friction between Maurice and his imperial education and function as currency between him and the “fellows” whose company he would prefer to keep. “Currency” might be a misleading word here, though, because Maurice’s thrill lies in the image of the gorgeous bird having been delivered to him as a gift (from his friends, from afar, and as a stamp that can extend longevity by certifying future transmission), whereas Ducie’s depiction of normative sexuality, rendered in stick figures, conveys an economy of scarcity that prefigures a purely transactional marriage that will come later and that will confirm for Maurice the unappeal of disembodied eroticism. Maurice’s excitement is conveyed both by the exclamation mark and by the jumbled articulation of “parrot on the pillar on,” where the pileup of prepositions suggests Maurice’s prepossession with the image and, contrary to what we expect prepositions to secure, a loss of location. It is as if Maurice, like the resplendent quetzal, has been transported elsewhere, across an ocean and across history, spirited away by a linguistic and semiotic excess that is animal, an excess imaged in the male trogon’s (crucially, the stamp’s image is of specifically male beauty) most distinguishing trait—the unusually long tail it grows as part of its breeding plumage, an

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enticement to its would-be mates. It’s worth noting here that if Maurice mistakes the bird’s identity, at this point in the novel he mistakes his own as well. But a more likely explanation for the mistake is the advertising that accompanied these stamps. Philately, considered an appropriate hobby for young boys, was very popular in the early twentieth century, and countless publications aimed at them, such as Popular Mechanics, featured ads for Guatemalan stamps in which the bird was referred to as a parrot.² Mekeel’s Stamp Collector, from 1901, offers a more precise description of the captivating creature: “The republic of Guatemala decorates its stamps and its official documents with the image of a beautiful parrot. The bird is of a rich green color, with tufted head and a long tail, which frequently grows to a length of four or five feet” (213). In addition to its noble carriage and plumage, the parrot—which Mekeel’s correctly identifies as a quetzal (213)—is celebrated as a “national emblem” comparable to the “bald eagle.” Captivating in its display, the quetzal is metonymic with freedom, as it assiduously evades, according to Guatemalan traditions that in fact borrow from the indigenous beliefs of ancient Aztecs and Maya, human capture. Legend has it that “the parrots are too wary to be caught in a trap” and that “no parrot has ever been brought from its forest home alive” (213). Rounding out the bird’s dramatic reputation for refusing domestication, Mekeel’s concludes, “the natives say that the birds always commit suicide [when captured] in the same way, by pecking at their breasts until the jugular vein is exposed. A final peck severs the artery and the bird quickly bleeds to death. The quetzal dies, but never surrenders” (213). The refusal to surrender in the face of individual and group death might also apply to the “native Indians” (213) of Guatemala, the only people fabled capable of catching the resplendent quetzal and admirers of the bird’s independent spirit. Indigenous Mesoamericans mainly prohibited slaughter of the bird and trapped it only to remove feathers for headdresses that gave the human an avian cast and the quetzal a human incarnation.³

² See https://www.apfelbauminc.com/world-of-stamps-3. ³ See http://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/the-colorful-quetzal-is-facing-extinction.

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     

I will return to matters of interspecific identification and environmental sensitivity shortly, but I first want to emphasize the radicalism of Forster’s selection of the resplendent quetzal as a creature that gets Maurice’s attention. By the end of the novel, Maurice, like the bird, would sooner perish than remain in Clive’s company and continue with the stultifying profession he inherited from his father, who like and unlike his son briefly indulged queerness (197) but quickly reformed to become a respectable father and community member. As he approaches the pseudoscientific therapy he cautiously hopes will turn him straight, Maurice reflects, “with the world as it is, one must marry or decay” (156). Of course, decomposition restores one to the soil, and so when Maurice elects to flee with Scudder into the enveloping but endangered greenwood rather than persist in the sham that his troubles have all been about a woman who won’t accept his marriage offers, he performs his embrace of decay, his dematerialization into a constituent but in no way special component of a queer ecology. The dichotomy of “marry or decay” would normatively suggest that whereas marriage enables procreation and subjective expansion, decay entails diminution heading toward nothingness. But in the queer ecological framework of Maurice, as my close reading will continue to show, decay is actually the means by which one cultivates intimacy with human and nonhuman others and comes to experience the fortified self as a depressingly meager apparatus. Maurice asks himself after his first sexual encounter with Scudder, “The life of the earth, Maurice? Don’t you belong to that?” This query follows a description of “park trees,” the very sort in which men might have cruised, as “melt[ing] into one huge creature that had fingers and fists of green” (200), the very color for which the resplendent quetzal is admired. Introspective though Maurice’s thought sequence here may be, it catches him imagining the pleasure to be felt not only in merging with his environment but also in being held and perhaps penetrated by its half-personified “fingers and fists of green.” His appreciation of decay is evinced even in that early walk with Mr. Ducie, who breaks into a panic, “sweating with fear,” when he realizes that a “lady” is approaching and that he forgot to erase “those infernal diagrams” (9) of sexual activity. Maurice reassures his now dethroned elder, “the tide’ll have covered them by now” (9), a precocious recognition of nature’s decaying

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powers (its agency) and, by comparison, of heterosexuality’s feeble efforts to forestall them. Seeing Ducie sweat bullets briefly illuminates for Maurice that his schoolmaster is a “liar” and a “coward,” the obverse of the brave image he espies in the quetzal that he cannot wait to continue sharing with his male friends whose communion, at least in Ducie’s hands, cannot be diagrammed.

Anal The irony of the quetzal’s courageous depiction, though, is that it would never voluntarily perch upon a pedestal where it would be vulnerable to prey and apart from the camouflaging forests it prefers (Maurice thinks to himself at one point, “the forests and the night were on his side” (199)). To place it there is to suggest that there can be dignity in precariousness and desirability in exposure, a contradiction embodied by resplendent quetzals, which in spite of their showy tail feathers can actually remain, within native habitats, quite concealed and resistant to ornithological spectatorship. A similar predicament occurs for Clive, who normally hides his defecation from public consumption but, in a scene of gut-wrenching vulnerability, loses control of his bowels while paying Maurice a visit at the latter’s family house. Although he is unwell soon after arrival, his condition appears to worsen when, upon fainting, he receives a distressed kiss from Maurice, who proceeds to want to succor him, absolutely, in his time of need. Their critically neglected exchange unfolds like this: Before long Clive stirred and said feebly, “oh damnation, oh damnation.” “Want anything?” Maurice called. “My inside’s all wrong.” Maurice lifted him out of bed and put him on the night stool. When relief had come he lifted him back. “I can walk: you musn’t do this sort of thing.” “You’d do it for me.” He carried the stool down the passage and cleaned it. Now that Clive was undignified and weak, he loved him as never before.

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      “You musn’t,” repeated Clive, when he came back. “It’s too filthy.” “Doesn’t worry me,” said Maurice, lying down. “Get off to sleep again.” “The doctor told me he’d send a nurse.” “What do you want with a nurse? It’s only a touch of diarrhea. You can keep on all night as far as I’m concerned. Honestly it doesn’t worry me—I don’t say this to please. It just doesn’t.” “I can’t possibly—your office.” (97–98)

Clive’s “night stool,” both his toilet and excrement, associates him with the resplendent quetzal mounted atop its pedestal, although it also conjures the cover of darkness Maurice craves and associates with forests. Here again Maurice, even before he breaks with Clive’s meager offerings, embraces decay as a quotidian aspect of committed queerness. The “touch of diarrhea” conjures the penetrative “fists and fingers” of the trees—anal contact Clive simply cannot bear—at the same time that it reinforces the unbearable lightness of human being in a deep and deeply entangled natural world. Maurice quite literally touches this diarrhea, carrying and cleaning it and making it the material of an affectionate attachment in which Clive, despite being laid bare, is “put” lovingly upon a platform while Maurice opts not to have a “bed taken in” and to sleep “on the floor with his head on a foot-stool”; that is, with his head perhaps propped upon the very contraption that will receive Clive’s febrile feces (97). What is “wrong” with Clive’s “inside” is that, in part, it insists upon appearing outside and revealing itself despite Clive’s strong intention to keep it down. We could fall prey to a bit of essentialism here and suggest that the real Clive momentarily wins out—the Clive who, critics rarely note, would have been running in fright not simply from the stigma of being gay but also, given his enjoyment at being wrestled with and tossed about by Maurice, of being, like Arthur Ravener, a total bottom. Bottom shame is on full display in this scene, and its unnameability is conveyed through the vagueness and instability of “it,” which morphs from the loving handling of excrement into the excrement itself, as if Clive can’t quite believe that his anality could bring pleasure, that his decay could become the shared substance of an amorous bond. That Clive cannot

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experience this “relief ” as a relief, an opportunity for letting another carry the load of his corporeality, attests not only to his shame-averse renunciation of physicality but also to his unwillingness to acknowledge the diverse ecology he occupies and by which he is occupied. This double refusal undercuts our hypothetical essentialism because what this scene exposes is that Clive’s insides are anything but innermost; they are, in fact, the products of what he ingests and the filth with which he comes into contact, including the homophilic Hellenic tradition he imparts to Maurice, who is described as “descended from the Clive of two years ago,” a queer reconfiguration of the normative evolutionary framework touted by Mr. Ducie (230). Filth passed back and forth, be it illicit and obscene reading or actual excrement, describes an environment of unconditional exposure in which identities perpetually become and unbecome, and the insertion of “come” in this scene, particularly in relation to relief, connects it with Maurice’s first sexual encounter with Scudder, who climbs through the window at Clive’s estate after Maurice, in a sort of somnambulant state that itself performs a limit of sovereign sexual intention, gets out of bed and exclaims to an unknown nature outside (he has no clue Scudder is out there), “Come!” (178). Clive’s estate, Penge, is in fact the scene of multiple impingements that preclude static identity and domestic insularity. If Clive’s problem at Maurice’s home is that his inside manifests outside, the problem at Penge is that the external keeps manifesting internally. Its under-gamekeeper, tasked with managing the outdoors, dashes up ladders and through windows, and its drawing room is perpetually harassed by the “tap, tap” of rain leaking through the ceiling and onto the “lid of the piano” (157). Like a clock ticking down to Penge’s demise—the estate is in disrepair, Clive’s wife Anne brings no money to the marriage, and no future heir is in sight—this tapping rain, the rhythm of a natural world refusing to be kept at bay, enters through what Anne calls “the sweetest hole in the ceiling” and interrupts a decidedly conservative conversation bashing “radicals” and “socialists” (157–158) as if to radically retort that some things can never be fully owned. Anne’s fondness for this “dear little hole,” as well as her efforts “to probe the piano’s entrails with blotting paper,” associate her with Maurice, who adored Clive’s leaking hole and cleaned his entrails with utter devotion. That Ann recognizes

52

     

value in this widened sphere of permeability positions her at least momentarily on the side of queerness and serves the important reminder that heteronormative constraints—sometimes reacted to with misogyny by the novel’s male characters—hem women in as well, even as they sometimes provide an alibi for those who wish, with frustration or not, to pass. So much, we are told, “could never be mentioned” between Clive and Anne (this includes Clive’s past but perhaps Anne’s as well): “He never saw her naked, nor she him. They ignored the reproductive and digestive functions” (151). Maurice, of course, did not neglect these “functions,” and so this description of heterosexual union cannot help but be read as bereft—not of romance or any such treacle as that, but of “belonging,” where desire is understood to emanate from an intimate commingling that includes dirt, grime, urine, sweat, and the various secretions metaphorized by the intrusive and irrepressible rain falling upon the piano’s fading ivory. Things have a tendency to leak in and out of Penge—including Clive’s queer predilections, of which Scudder, to Maurice’s perverse delight, has caught wind—and this porousness verging on infectiousness continues with Maurice’s digestion of sex with Scudder and connects the novel with Forster’s more celebrated and more unequivocally modernist A Passage to India. After the window episode and the subsequent game of cricket in which Maurice plays alongside Scudder, Maurice’s complexion turns “green-white” and he becomes “violently sick” at the thought of his late-night rendezvous (188). Recovering a bit, he insists he must leave Penge, but during the drive with Clive, upon learning that Scudder’s father is a “butcher,” he becomes nauseated again and declares his head “putrid” (190). Reminiscent of the gastrointestinal upset experienced by Clive after Maurice’s kiss (queerness going viral), Maurice’s illness documents an intimate relationship between illicit desire and unwell feeling, as if the enactment of the former necessitates at least a partial evacuation of what has been internalized previously. It is impossible to determine in these scenes—recall that Clive is already a bit under the weather when Maurice kisses him—if queer actions precede stomach problems or are portended by them. A critically neglected episode of just this type occurs in A Passage to India. Shortly before the ill-fated expedition to the Marabar Caves, Adela Quested and Mrs. Moore join Dr. Aziz,

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Professor Godbole, and others for a long-awaited picnic whose contents, it is intimated, lead Aziz and Godbole to fall ill—the former with fever and the latter with, among other things, diarrhea (99). Adela and Mrs. Moore, the two westerners (the former preoccupied with seeing “the real India”), do not succumb at the same time as their fellow picnickers, but each seems less than robust on the trip to the Marabar Caves that soon follows. Mrs. Moore must sit out most of the cave expedition after becoming overheated, claustrophobic, and nauseated (138), and Adela, as is well known, suffers what might best be called a hallucination that Aziz assaults her, for days after which she lies with fever dreams as imperial sympathizers remove the cactus spines (184) with which she collided while dashing away from her imagined assailant. After she recants her accusation, Adela recalls in a conversation with Fielding that she was not feeling well during the cave exploration, although she can never quite explain what it was, man or animal or echo or cave-dweller—here again the question of ecology is of prime importance—that she felt seized her or that a seizure of her perhaps febrile mind auto-generated or projected (227–228). These nosological considerations might be trivial were it not for a much earlier episode in the novel when the narrator stages a conversation between Mr. Graysford and Mr. Sorley, two British missionaries working in India, about the range of life and nonlife capable of ascending to heaven. Nodding to local values, they agree “monkeys” and even “jackals” should be able to pass through the pearly gates, but they grow uneasy at the thought of a variety of other living and semi-living forms, including cactuses, mud, and “the bacteria inside Mr. Sorley,” gaining entry (32). As I have argued elsewhere, by locating these bacteria inside Mr. Sorley, rather than apart from him, the novel makes an implicit case for the ecological eclipse of sovereign humanity and for the futility of trying to separate creatures and to render some exceptional at the others’ expense (Bateman 92–93). There is no Mr. Sorley absent the bacteria that populate his gastrointestinal tract and that constitute the “mud” inside him, just as after the cave episode Adela discovers how easy it is to find oneself commingled with cacti and feverish contagions. Microbiotic science is increasingly establishing that bacteria do not simply reside in humans, quietly leading their own lives and only reminding us of their

54

     

existence during times of acute illness, but actively influence multiple dimensions of human personality, specifically anxiety, depression, and other mood disorders—or, to be a little less clinical and pathologizing about it, moods. If we admit bacterial involvement in mood, how far away may we be from identifying its implication in desire—in which case gut feelings might be apprehended not as a metaphor for instinct but as an accurate description of gastro-affective ecologies that render human conduct a multispecies affair? This question, I have been suggesting, is an unacknowledged preoccupation, sometimes mistaken as mysticism, of Forster’s prose, and its fundamentally ecological orientation means that queerness for him is never simply a choice or a biological given; it is, instead, a developing situation motored by multiple agencies, many of which lie outside individual volition. The force of these agencies, to return to Timothy Morton’s vocabulary, should spawn “ecological humility” as well as “tentativeness” in thinking we can understand queerness, make it a stable site of truth and knowledge production, or narrow its domain to an encased and environmentally exceptionalized human form. F.R. Leavis famously complained that “The very poise of Mr. Forster’s art has something equivocal about it—it seems to be conditioned by its not knowing what kind of poise it is” (273–274). Less noted is that one of the examples Leavis chooses to support this claim comes just after Mrs. Moore’s death in A Passage to India, when the narrator wonders, “How indeed is it possible for one human being to be sorry for all the sadness that meets him on the face of the earth, for the pain that is endured not only by men, but by animals and plants, and perhaps by the stones”? (274). Leavis takes issue with that final bit about plants and stones, labeling it a “run-out” of the sentence that undercuts the scene’s “dramatic mood” (274). But in the critical framework this chapter is trying to establish, it is no coincidence that the drama deflates into and over plants and stones, because Forster’s point is to decenter the human, to surmise the limits of the powers of human comprehension (including, quite possibly, the narrator’s own), and to run the human out (and to give the human the runs) into environments from which it is inseparable. In a similar vein, Myra Hird asks provocatively how trans subjectivity might be understood from “a bacterial perspective” (243), highlighting

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that “the bacteria that move freely into and within our bodies are already infinitely sex diverse” and “will avidly exchange genes with just about any living organism anywhere in the world” (239). But if bacteria are “beyond the female/male dichotomy of human discourse” (239), they are also the stuff of which men and women—gay, straight, bi, and trans—are both composed and exposed in unpredictable situations of ecological contact capable of decomposing and recomposing all the parties involved. Margaret McFall-Ngai notes that “the fundamental microbial-ness” of humans—the fact that we “are more microbe than human”—means that every “I” is also a “we” (52), and so by extension my sexuality is also a collective sexuality contingent upon the inputs of organisms whose influence might not always be foreseeable, predictable, digestible, or amenable to essentialist and constructivist accounts of identity that presuppose relatively stable formations of self and world. Perhaps like Adela, whose seizure came on as she pondered whether she was really doing the right thing in marrying Ronny Heaslop (whom she ends up not marrying), Maurice and Clive experience queerness—fall under its influence or spell, as it were—in compromised and attenuated states brought on, at least in part, by proximity to microbial “bugs” that put a whole new queer spin on buggery by suggesting that a bug in the works of sexuality might transition from extraneous element into constitutive contributor to desire. This experience of ecological entanglement guarantees nothing politically transgressive, of course—Clive reacts negatively, fleeing to Greece to shore up his platonic and disembodied ideals of same-sex intimacy, rejecting both queerness and the vulnerability his diarrhea made manifest—but in certain instances, like Maurice’s digestion of both Clive’s nausea and his own, it elicits a tender responsiveness to all that lies outside a person’s control, which is not to say, as Sorley’s bacteria remind us, outside the person. In the case of Misters Sorley and Graysford, as well as Adela and Mrs. Moore, the bacteria out of which they are constituted, and keep getting reconstituted, are the bacteria with which they come into contact in India, meaning the queer ecology to which they belong is fundamentally transnational as well. Mrs. Moore exhibits some of Maurice’s compassion for Clive in the hospitality she exercises toward the wasp that occupies her “coat-peg”—on which she bestows the generous

56

     

designation “pretty dear” (29) in unintended defiance of Sorley’s and Graysford’s reluctance to accept wasps into heaven—where “peg” conjures something of the pedestal on which perches, every bit as precariously as the wasp Mrs. Moore is supposed to want to kill, the resplendent quetzal and the vulnerable Clive. Maurice’s bird is of course an image rather than a living organism, but as a commodity and currency it makes its way to him nonetheless; it becomes a part of an ecology, in this case a global media ecology, to which Maurice, quite simply, belongs. In both cases there appears to be a subtle identification—Mrs. Moore’s with the wasp’s out-of-placeness (she no more belongs in India than it belongs in her room) and Maurice’s with the quetzal’s rebellious spirit. Or perhaps we can now say that Maurice not only identifies with the bird but sympathizes with its exposed location upon the pedestal, as if what he wants for it, and at one point for Clive, is not simply exaltation but also, more humbly, the safety and surety of the camouflage it prefers. To the extent that Maurice’s and Mrs. Moore’s posture of humility makes a case for letting be, for preserving ecologies and ecosystems in their fragility and specific locality, it signals Forster’s recognition of a link between sexual freedom, environmental conservation, and anti-imperial politics. Maurice’s unrest at Penge, that is, conjures, without corresponding to, imperial unrest abroad, both in the colonies of Southeast Asia and the banana republics of Central America.

Outlaw But as I have been arguing, Penge is a liminal zone in which Maurice feels both bottled up and summoned by a natural outside that he cannot help but experience as reciprocating his stormy inside. Shortly before Scudder comes to his window, Maurice feels that Penge is starting to prove less “numbing”—his hypnotherapist, Lasker Jones, recommended an environment in which his patient would not worry and “lie fallow” to the suggestions introduced during his “trance”—than “stimulating.” Its “impressions” are described as “vivid” and “complex,” and its “tangle of flowers and fruit” are depicted as “wreath[ing] his brain!”, in which

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case Maurice is both intoxicated by his surroundings and converted into them: man, in this case, made plant. And these transspecies transformations continue. After returning from a walk outside Penge, Maurice delights Clive’s mother with his altered appearance, on which she comments in an irreverent interruption of the reverend Mr. Borenius, who had been lecturing her on the dangers of employing “unconfirmed” servants like Alec Scudder (175). She remarks upon Maurice’s “exquisite coiffure,” which due to its saturation with “evening primrose pollen” appears “yellow” and “bacchanalian” (175). This suggestive plant reappears at novel’s end when Maurice releases petals of it from his hand that provide the only evidentiary “trace” of his having been outside with Clive professing his repudiation of normality and carnal desire for the estate owner’s gamekeeper (230). Fittingly, the flowers of evening primroses open only at night—Clive comes to feel that “his friend . . . was essential night” (227)—making them botanical companions in Maurice’s search for a fertile life lived fully under the cloak of darkness and camouflage. They are also, like the resplendent quetzal, native to the Americas, having made their way to England in the 1600s, additional reminders that no local site is untouched by global influences.⁴ Also relevant is the wildflower’s predilection for disturbed topographies such as waste areas, which echoes Maurice’s occupation of Clive’s digestive remains, suggesting an affinity in Forster’s work, as Jonah Corne has suggested, between queerness and degraded or abandoned environmental sites—or, relatedly, a queer hope that these locations can be reclaimed, eroticized, and made the scenes of different sorts of flourishing (28). Covered in the primrose’s pollen, Maurice becomes the vehicle of the plant’s reproduction but also a radiant image of interspecific pollination, of personhood momentarily transfigured by a sexuality that eclipses the merely human to include a broader ecology of aliveness both planted and free-floating. By making Maurice their own, these pollen grains also camouflage him for his eventual flight into the forest. I write “sexuality” rather than “male sexuality” because evening primrose has long been thought by alternative medicine to relieve symptoms of menopause in women by stimulating ⁴ See http://www.wildlifetrusts.org/species/evening-primrose.

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     

the production of hormones, meaning that in addition to concealing Maurice, the pollen might also be intensifying his queer transition and melding him with the women with whom his queerness up to that point has put him in tension. When the petals Maurice later drops are described as “mourn[ing] from the ground like an expiring fire,” they serve both as reminders of the vulnerability of queer ecologies and as floral proxies for Clive, who in dropping Maurice from his erotic life, and being dropped in due turn, is left to expire along with his declining estate, melancholically attached to a hallucination that “out of some external Cambridge his friend began beckoning to him, clothed in the sun, and shaking out the scents and sounds of the May term” (231). While this haunted fantasy does some justice to the natural environments with which Maurice stakes his claim, it refuses to acknowledge the post-Cambridge Maurice who demanded more than platonic intimacy and who chose darkness and evening primroses over the sunlit comforts of late spring. To the very end, that is, Clive “hate[s] queerness,” even as he provides Maurice the disordered ecology in which the latter eventually finds refuge (161). Upon leaving Penge to visit his hypnotist for the first time, Maurice conflates Penge’s deterioration with the unruly nature that surrounds it: “Scarcely anything was perfect. On one spray every flower was lopsided, the next swarmed with caterpillars, or bulged with galls. The indifference of Nature! And her incompetence!” (165). As he stares out of the car window to see if he can find something to his liking—if nature “couldn’t bring it off once”—he inadvertently “stare[s] straight into the eyes of a young man,” the “keeper chap” Scudder who at this point in the novel has not yet touched Maurice but has made an impression on him by not acting servilely grateful upon receiving a tip for having organized a hunting expedition (166). Maurice’s traveling companion finds it improbable that Scudder could have caught up to their car except by running—perhaps another hallucination brought on by libidinal attenuation—but even as a phantasm Scudder’s arresting appearance in a “swarmed” and “bulged” nature undercuts Maurice’s sense, a temporary relapse into Clive’s anal-retentive cleanliness, that nature’s decay must necessarily disappoint. Those later dropped petals, I am suggesting, betoken Maurice’s discovery of a profound relationship between desire

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and decay that he leaves Clive to, fruitlessly, decipher and that he later embodies and images in his evening primrose drag. Maurice’s traversal of bird, plant, and soil renders him a figure of queer ecology, but it also puts a twist on Foucault’s observation that what most terrifies mainstream society is not the idea of two men having sex but rather the prospect that these men will invent a new way of life (136). Foucault’s uncomplicated invocation of “life” in this formulation is striking given the pressure he puts on “life” elsewhere in his work, specifically in his interrogation in The History of Sexuality of modern biopolitical regimes that harness life in the service of disciplinary power (137). Life as an absolute good—getting more of it, doing more with it, getting more out of it, conforming to its various imperatives of health and well-being—is the means by which normativity gains its hold upon the self, converting bodies and pleasures into quantifiable and optimizable entities and identities. Maurice and Scudder certainly improvise a new way of life—swapping normality and respectability for sylvan anonymity—but they also install a different way of relating to life that decenters the human and fuzzes distinctions between life and its others. Maurice anticipates, I am arguing, Elizabeth Povinelli’s contention that equally as important to modernity’s machinations as the distinction between life and death (175)—in Foucault’s work, the biopolitical poles of making live and letting die—is the distinction between life and nonlife. Povinelli has in mind, among other things, the primary lesson of the Anthropocene: humans and other life-forms are geological and geologically shaped actors whose survival is absolutely implicated in, and dependent upon, a nonliving world of rocks, winds, and weather patterns, as well as various assemblages of life and nonlife that include forests, lakes, rivers, swamps, oceans, and deserts. Modernity has operated on the assumption that life can be set in relief against these background forces, but what climate change is demonstrating fast and furious is that the background is changing, abandoning its previous rhythms, and refusing to play second fiddle to life’s center-stage performance. Leo Bersani famously asked, also thinking about the threat that queers and queer sex pose to the mainstream psyche, if the rectum is a grave, and while Clive would no doubt agree that his leaky backside feels like death, in the larger queer ecology of the novel the more

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     

important question seems to be: Is the rectum nonlife—decay, rot, mud, or, to use one of Forster’s favorite words, muddle? To the extent that Forster celebrates muddle, he frames queer ecology not as a beautiful pastoral landscape in which homosexual desire can blossom but instead as a compromised and impure scene of degradation—an Anthropocene aesthetic, some might call it—where the unrealizability of nature’s hopes for unviolated wildness and wilderness is reciprocated by the limited horizons of dispossessed and dispirited queers who nevertheless come to experience themselves, and the environments with which they are enmeshed, as never entirely and unerotically beyond diminished inhabitation and tentative reclamation. For Maurice, queer intimacy, if not also queer sex, becomes the site of heightened human sensation and radical human diminution. As Maurice joyfully realizes, while standing with Mr. Borenius and Scudder’s family in Southampton, that Scudder is going to remain in England and not board the steamer to a more profitable life in Argentina, he starts to feel “how negligible they had all become, beside the beautiful weather and fresh air” (223). Further realizing that Alec has hidden out in the boathouse at Penge, he departs Southampton—“instinctively,” the novel emphasizes with its own dashes—and enters Penge through “a gap in the hedge” that echoes both Clive’s rectum and the hole in Penge’s decaying roof (224). Having Maurice make this move by instinct works to naturalize homosexuality, not in the sense of essentializing it but of making it the effect of an attuned immersion in nature. At the time he penetrates the estate, “night was approaching, a bird called, animals scuttled,” and “he hurried on until he saw the pond glimmering, and black against it the trysting place, and heard the water sipping” (224). Maurice and Scudder are entangled with multiple agencies in this happy reunion scene—living ones such as birds and animals but also nonliving ones such as the night and the pond and the water, which nearly come to life, or rather eclipse life’s distinctiveness, with their “approaching” and “glimmering” and “sipping” activity. That the trysting spot is black against the pond confirms the shadow life Maurice and Scudder seek to live and marks the zone of indistinction queerness comes to inhabit when it takes shape within an environment from which it seeks protection rather than submission.

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By staying behind in England and refusing the business opportunities afforded by his brother’s connections in Argentina, Scudder might seem perfect proof of the novel’s insular attachments to a native and uncorrupted England. But the critical lens this chapter has been trying to cultivate sees the situation very differently. Although he refuses to become an agent of maritime modernism, Scudder does not, by fleeing into the greenwood, abjure transnational connection and identification altogether. He certainly avoids the transactional connections touted by his brother and by Clive, in which other humans would be involved in a system of capital networking, but he maintains a firm link to the resplendent quetzal and to the forests it too calls home. What Maurice and Scudder want more than anything else is, to borrow Forster’s words from his “Terminal Note,” an “England where it [is] still possible to get lost” (240). Forster goes on to lament, nearly a half-century after the events of the novel, that “there is no forest or fell to escape to today, no cave in which to curl up, no deserted valley for those who wish neither to reform nor corrupt society but to be left alone” (240). When Forster longs for a time when queer “outlaws” could live outside civilization—rather than inside it as its rebellious “gangsters” (240)—it is not so much political quietism that he urges as the quiet that comes with remembering the human’s insignificance, something civilization disavows, in and to the geological time known to forests, caves, and valleys. Keeping Scudder at home rather than sending him abroad has two critical functions in the novel: it refuses the common practice of sending working-class and sexually problematic men away to do the work of empire in an effort to purge England of dangerous contaminants (Scudder’s penchant for scaling ladders and climbing through open windows makes him the ultimate threat to bourgeois domesticity); and it anticipates what we now know is the ecological necessity of keeping a light carbon footprint—so light, indeed, that Scudder and Maurice seem almost to disappear, to become as inconspicuous as the microbes inhabiting their bodies, making possible their furtive movements, and perhaps even drawing them together. Their queer escape is not only their defiant rejection of a respectable heteronormativity they cannot bear; it is also their gift of and to a future in which forests and resplendent quetzals and gay outlaws can continue to desire and decay together.

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     

Avian End Forster wrote A Passage to India in the decade after he completed Maurice, but just as he did not lose interest in gastrointestinal drama, he also did not lose interest in resplendent quetzals. After Adela and Ronny break off their engagement for the first time, Adela asks, “Do you know what the name of that green bird up above us is?” Ronny hasn’t the slightest clue, guessing that it may be a “bee-eater” (recall Mrs. Moore’s dear wasp) or a “parrot,” to which Adela responds, “Good gracious, no” (77). As they speculate in vain, the bird disappears “into the dome of the tree,” leaving Ronny to “dejectedly” lament, “I’m no good at all at birds, in fact I’m useless at any information outside my own job” (78). In a rare moment of candor and introspection, that is, Ronny admits the narrow focus and environmental insensitivity of the British colonial presence in India. Were one to pay more attention to birds or microbes, the novel suggests, one might reconsider the importance of the imperial “job” that so many of the characters, Ronny most of all, stammer to defend. As in Maurice, the “green bird” stands in for a different set of priorities, investments, and commitments that are specifically local and, at the same time, ethically and politically global. By refusing to identify the green bird, the novel leaves its imaginative range open to all green birds—including the resplendent quetzal—and permits this particular avian individual the privacy, anonymity, and right to simply be in defiance of imperialism’s logics of control, containment, and careful identification.⁵ This avian remainder is a reminder of the wide swath of creaturely life dying to be outlaw.

⁵ Stephen Ross argues that not knowing the identity of the bird is part of the novel’s modernist project of amplifying epistemological uncertainty so as to question the Enlightenment norms underpinning the colonial project (310–312).

2 Cather’s Cancel Culture Forster was not the only modernist author theorizing queer disappearance in an ecological vein. Across the Atlantic, Willa Cather was experimenting with non-normative subjects living in close physical and emotional proximity to the land, from Alexandra Bergson on the Great Plains in O Pioneers! to Thea Kronberg and Tom Outland on southwest mesas in The Song of the Lark and The Professor’s House, respectively. Like Forster’s, Cather’s fiction eschewed some of the metronormative biases of queer culture, acknowledging at times the constrictive surveillance of small towns and the acute loneliness of remote locales while simultaneously questioning the consumerism and conformism, pressures often twinned in her novels, of large cities with little time or space for big dreams and careful contemplation. Although Cather spent most of her adult life in Pittsburgh and New York City, where, as biographers have noted, she was able to keep the domestic and most likely romantic company of other women, her imaginative investments remained largely with the nonurban environments of her childhood and the European influences brought and ingrained there by immigrants summoned with promises, many apocryphal, of a more prosperous existence. The wideopenness of Nebraska, before it was paved over and studded with towns, is synonymous in Cather’s thinking with nonconformity, as it allowed for getting lost and, prioritizing survival over respectability, permitted a range of eccentric personalities to flourish or at least escape serious scrutiny. To say that Cather romanticized the Great Plains would be incorrect, though, because the feelings she associates with its natural sites are more canceling than confirming, more engulfing than entrancing, less aligned with the consolidation of identity—lesbian, American, or otherwise—than with the eclipse of identity by surroundings that overwhelm it.

Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. Benjamin Bateman, Oxford University Press. © Benjamin Bateman 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192896339.003.0003

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Nowhere is this anti-aggrandizing vision more evident than in My Ántonia (1918), a celebrated but critically controversial novel in which the experiences of a Bohemian woman transplanted to Nebraska at a young age are conveyed almost entirely from the perspective of a male narrator, Jim Burden, whose parallel childhood transplantation to Nebraska from Virginia echoes Cather’s own. Indeed, some of the novel’s controversy hinges on the degree to which Jim, who admires Ántonia but also seems worrisomely preoccupied with her gender and sexual propriety, functions as a phallic proxy for Cather and as evidence of Cather’s concession to the frustrating fact that a woman could only admire another woman—that is, limn her bronze skin and muscular body (itself a queering of the feminine daintiness preferred by town-women)—by displacing her desire onto, or hiding tactically behind, a socially licensed male gaze. For example, in a recent Paris Review tribute to the novel in its centenary year, Jane Smiley writes with utter confidence that “Jim is a stand-in for Cather’s own voice.” Where Eve Sedgwick, analyzing some of Cather’s earlier and later work, laments “the brutal suppressions by which a lesbian love did not in Willa Cather’s time and culture freely become visible as itself” (Bodies That Matter, 144), Judith Butler argues in a resolutely anti-essentialist manner that lesbian love can never speak its own stable and affirmative truth because it depends, fundamentally, on the prohibitions laid down against it, meaning it can only ever become legible through an “array of indirections, substitutions, and textual vacillations” (144) that expand the prohibition’s signifying capacity beyond its normative bounds or turn it against its ostensible aims. In the first edition of the novel, the woman who narrates the “Introduction” is a pronounced presence, and the language around her reception of Jim’s narrative about Ántonia leaves ambiguous the extent to which she might have added to it, in which case the “My” might be better understood as a collaborative and cross-gender “our.” But the now definitive 1926 edition, which received Cather’s stamp of approval, offers less evidence of the woman’s contribution, suggesting that she has to disappear in order to make the story possible; or better, the queer energy she embodies has to recede into Jim’s narrative to actualize its erotic potential. Piggybacking but also building on Butler’s invaluable interpretation, I will be arguing that Cather criticism has never adequately registered

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the importance of this woman’s cancellation, and by “cancellation” I do not mean simply her erasure by phallocentric imperatives but also the afterlife of her cancellation—and, by extension, Cather’s—in the form of a subtle but productive negativity that works to undermine Jim’s romanticizing and disciplinary depictions of women, as well as other discriminatory forces on the prairie that include racism and settler colonialism. To use Jim’s own vocabulary, these afterlives of cancellation might be regarded as “curious survivals” (127). This negativity is thematic, as multiple scenes visited in this chapter will illustrate, but it is also formal, surfacing in the names of characters and in the dialects of ethnic minorities, like Ántonia, whose “mispronunciation” of standardized words exposes the power relations of the society in which they circulate. Indeed, what I might be seen as doing in this chapter is taking Butler’s important and influential reading of Cather’s novel and exfoliating it across and in conversation with a series of scenes with which Butler, because the novel counts as only one of several objects of their analysis in Bodies That Matter, does not reckon. Butler notes, for example, that “as Jim appears to eclipse the ‘I’ of the narrator, the ‘I’ becomes the illegible condition of Jim’s narration.” They also note that “it is unclear whether Jim has taken the place of the narrator or whether the narrator now more fully possesses Jim, a possession which is enacted through the very logic of sacrifice” (147–148). Focused intently on practices of crossidentification and in pursuit of the hypothesis that “the displacement of identification is the very condition for the possibility of [Cather’s] fiction” (149), Butler unseats sexuality from a positive, present, and revelatory identity and instead associates it with a creative series of evasions, diversions, projections, and imaginative insertions that this book, perhaps sometimes gratuitously, wants to name as disappearances. By naming these practices as disappearances, we can then appreciate that if Cather and/or the unnamed woman narrator must disappear into the story—must, that is, engage in a kind of narratorial self-immolation— their diminution is not merely their own but is rather collectively inhabited by the array of subjectivities unleashed in the wake of that diminution. Their disappearance is also not entirely their own, and never entirely complete, because of the impact it makes from the outset on the novel’s form, introducing a subtractive element, or creative withdrawal,

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that anticipates the multiple qualifications that ensue and that becomes, in a sense, the novel’s (non)signature style. This chapter’s title might suggest that I am keen to intervene in recent “debates” about so-called cancel culture, and while I am certainly carrying some weight from that loaded expression, I operate with the firm conviction that it, like all conservative catchphrases, masks its opposite, an insidious effort to unleash the most censorious assaults on any form of progressive politics that challenges the perverse privileges—foremost among which is the right to think uncritically, or, not think—of heteropatriarchal white supremacy. But if the real targets of cancel culture are women, queers, and racial and ethnic minorities, then one of the things progressive politics needs urgently to do, in order to outwit and outlast a conservative culture that continues to threaten its very survival, is to approach cancellation creatively and make it the ongoing occasion of a critical and reciprocal revocation. Something of this rich responsiveness is implied in cancellation’s etymological indebtedness to the Late Latin cancellare, which, according to Merriam-Webster, means “to make like a lattice.” A lot is left to the imagination here, but when we consider that doors and windows and pies can have lattice patterns, we can see that if lattices act as covers and closures, they never do so completely and function concomitantly as entries, openings, and sites of crisscrossed confusion. The image of a lattice gives cancellation a materiality as well as a design; its assists in visualizing annulment as an aesthetic act that never eventuates in a simple absence. It provokes a series of inquiries into what the lattice lets in, what it leaks out, and what connections are implied by its multiple and often complex convergences. If we conceive of language as latticework, as we surely must, then we can appreciate every linguistic act as a fragile cover whose cracks permit, even while appearing to bar, alternative designs of and on the world. Lest this formulation seem overly opaque or merely derivative of poststructuralist accounts of language, allow me to ground it in a claim Butler recently made in what ended up becoming a controversial interview in The Guardian—controversial, in no small part, because a portion of it ended up being removed, or canceled, by a publication arguably fretful of offending those transphobic readers who have the breathtaking audacity to refer to themselves as gender-critical feminists. Asked about the

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challenges of their intellectual celebrity, including the hounding they have endured from right-wing, “pro-family” conservatives in Brazil and elsewhere, Butler proffered a somewhat cryptic and, I would imagine, unexpected response: “I have found a way to live to the side of my name. That has proven to be very helpful. I know that many queer and trans folks feel strongly about their names and I respect that. But my survival probably depends on my ability to live at a distance from my name.” Where many people view nomination as a life-or-death affair, as the certain sign of a legible and credible existence, Butler strikes a more ambivalent note, registering nomination’s demands, expectations, and privations. Although the name brings attention, authority, and reputation, it does not necessarily hold and nourish the person, and a key part of what Butler seems to be saying here, in very slight disagreement with their queer and trans allies and admirers, is that an overattachment to the name (whether a proper name or the name of some identity category more generally) risks underestimating the name’s capacity to function not merely as ballast and recognition but also as regulation and surveillance. Of course, Butler is not arguing that one can dispense with the name; to the contrary, they are saying that the name can be the occasion of a critical and life-giving evasion—a sort of cover, lattice-like, that in imposing a particular grid of legibility, canceling certain possibilities while enabling others, simultaneously functions as a shill or decoy that can absorb a lot of attention, both positive and negative, while the person it purports to describe goes about making a life elsewhere, whether behind it, to its side, or miles away from its scene of public exposure. To read a bit more into Butler’s observation than its brevity might authorize, we might say that Butler is touting and defending, guardedly but also generously, the arsenal of practices by which queers have learned to live and even thrive aslant and astride the names from which they also receive injury and misrecognition. But the central and difficult point is that these queers have accomplished these feats of survival not simply despite and in spite of those names, though they certainly have, but in certain cases because of them, because of the distractions they created, the generative deviations they necessitated, the alibis and access points they opened up, and the communal forms, both affirmative and ambivalent, that collocated around them. If they know and feel that these names

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cancel aspects of who and what they are, they also know and feel that they can occupy that cancellation critically, creatively, collaboratively, and in a manner that contests and destabilizes the givenness, transparency, and authority of their own names as well as the names of those who arrogate to themselves the right to name. Indeed, Butler highlights the importance of names in Cather’s fiction, asserting in a reading of her short story “On the Gull’s Road” that “the narrator is not a fixed or fixable site but a translative movement, one that cannot be captured by the fixity of the name” (“Withholding the Name,” 57). But Butler’s emphasis on the name as an unstable crossing, dynamic throughway, uneasy identification, and melancholic zone (58) in which possibilities seemingly foreclosed by nominal resolution linger and resurface in the name’s necessary rearticulation does not satisfactorily account for the name’s manifest negativity in My Ántonia, where the woman narrator’s sudden disappearance—she never reappears after the introduction and, as established, withdraws even further in the official 1926 version—is reciprocated by Cather’s obliterative style, the way in which the novel’s diction takes back what it says, qualifies its assertions, and shadows Jim’s confident storytelling with the threat of its undoing and irresolution. To preview but one example, consider the intrinsic antagonism of Ántonia’s name itself, in which critics have noted the accent as Cather’s endorsement of ethnic and linguistic difference and her disgust with the assimilative demand, popular at the time, to change “foreign” names and make them accessible and palatable to the American ear. What critics have not noted, however, is the negativity of its cultural and linguistic specificity, the repetitive force with which it opposes, or lodges an accent-asterisk inside, so many of Jim’s privileged declaratives. Every take he offers on Ántonia is haunted from within by its antithesis—a formal arrangement of synchronic dialecticism—or at least by the insistent reminder that it might not be true. Another way to put this is that Ántonia’s name is constructed such that every description of her is accompanied by the suggestion that she might not identify with it or claim it, unambivalently, as her own. That the accent falls on “ant,” amplifying its oppositionality, rather than “on,” means quite literally that she won’t be owned, at least not fully, by Jim’s master narrative, which in being dependent upon her for its source material must also

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remain subject to the sometimes violent friction of her foreignness. Also worth noting here is the name’s inclusion of Tony, by which Ántonia is sometimes called, which implies simultaneous ownership of the masculine name and cancellation of it, as if to say: I am not Tony, but I am also not not Tony; and, I am not tony, as I have no high-class pretensions and therefore no interest in being compared to the towngirls. And to the extent that the initial “a” in her name makes this queer confusion possible, it invokes and inverts the concluding “a” in Cather’s own name—she was both Willa and Will, a will inseparable from its creative abbreviation. In urging the agency of this oppositionality, I take issue with Marilee Lindemann’s assessment that “in the process of analyzing a man’s power to ‘figure’ a woman, Cather figures Jim as the god of his narrative— creator and sovereign of the world he calls into being from the opening” (496). While Jim might occasionally mistake himself for sovereign, Cather’s obliterative style serves the persistent reminder that he is not, disfiguring his accounts with a contrariness he can never quite control. He is therefore “burden”-ed not only by the immense responsibility of storytelling but also by a recessive and unchosen collaborator that builds negation into his enunciation. I am thus arguing that the novel’s form, or at least some of its form, derives from this determined disfigurement, this disappearing drive. In Cather’s preferred 1926 edition, the unnamed woman of the introduction quotes Jim, after he hand-delivers his narrative to her apartment in New York City, as saying that “he didn’t take time to arrange it; I simply wrote down pretty much all that her name recalls to me. I suppose it hasn’t any form” (Cather 8). Of course, the narrative does have an arrangement and form—meaning the woman’s diminished activity might not have amounted to a total elimination— and the form that it has takes its shape from Ántonia’s name; that is, from the oppositionality from which she cannot be dissociated. Every call he sounds, every name he assigns, she recalls, so when Jim says he “simply wrote down [his manuscript],” he of course dissimulates his pastoralizing and objectifying influence, but he concomitantly announces the extent to which he surrendered himself to another hand and found himself writing both more and less than his immediate intention. And the fact that the narrative ended up with the unnamed

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woman, who may or may not be Cather’s surrogate, means that at some level the tale is intended for her and her disappearing tendencies rather than for Jim and his self-amplifying ambition. What I am urging, then, both building on and slightly revising Butler’s understanding of the name, is the power of nomination not only to positively assert or describe someone or something but also to generate a zone of possibility in which that someone or something knows itself and comes to live as the very antagonism, opposition, and excess of that appellation. Cather’s novel explores the narrative force of a name that cancels, undoes, and qualifies both the person to whom it most immediately attaches and the people who come into contact with it and claim it, whether proprietarily or reminiscently, as their own; it investigates, without any certain conclusion, whether a name invariably secures and affirms an object or whether, sometimes, it purchases that object a protective cloak of indeterminacy and unbelonging capable of enshrouding, like a menacing fog, a patriarchal culture far too certain of its taxonomies and of the environmental control those taxonomies are meant to consolidate. Richard Millington argues that My Ántonia breaks with and critiques the conventional novel form by offering a series of vignettes rather than a continuously developing narrative and by replicating an older genre of oral storytelling in which the presumed audience is communal and patient rather than solitary and selfishly hungry, like a rabid consumer, for plot, climax, and resolution. Although I do not understand his need to place his interpretation at odds with “psychoanalytic and feminist criticism” (Millington 413), I deepen his emphasis on nondevelopment by pointing out that Jim’s tale is bookended by two descriptions of subjective obliteration. Remembering the night he met Ántonia on their long journey to Black Hawk, Nebraska as children, Jim writes, “I couldn’t see any town, or even distant lights; we were surrounded by utter darkness” (Cather 10). Robbed of vision (of an exoticizing male gaze) and reliant on the sound and touch of the wagon to confirm his presence on land, Jim “had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man’s jurisdiction,” and feeling further that his dead parents are no longer able to watch over him from above, he concludes that “between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what

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would be would be” (12). And at novel’s end, after reuniting with Ántonia and meeting the large Cuzak family of which she is matron, Jim returns to that simultaneously formative and deforming memory, feeling he “had only to close my eyes to hear the rumbling of the wagons in the dark, and to be again overcome by that obliterating strangeness” that serves an important reminder of “what a little circle man’s experience is” (179). Jonathan Goldberg, writing on “Willa Cather and Sexuality,” latches on to the same passages in arguing for her work’s interest in “a life beyond consciousness, certainly beyond its manifestations in individuals, that houses enormous energies” (90). I want to develop Goldberg’s insight about the individual’s disappearance working to make detectable the energy, presence, and even pleasure of a broader ecology, by examining multiple instances in which an irrepressible antagonism erupts and echoes in his environment to pause his possessive storytelling, and by locating this antagonism not only in the novel’s themes but also in its aesthetic configuration. If Jim ends up where he started, which was itself only a distant memory of erasure, then surely he cannot be taken too seriously or regarded as the certain center and controlling voice of the novel. To the contrary, the absence of a grand novelistic narrative means also the absence of a master narrator and the consequent possibility of the vignettes, and the minor characters and situations they adumbrate, being able to say and show something in excess of Jim’s tendentious plans. These bookends undo something of Jim’s grip on the narrative, and they also associate writing with the effect of the vast and overawing Nebraska terrain. Jim is “blotted” out and “erased” by earth and sky, undone by an environment inclusive of and absorbed into a compositional aesthetic indifferent to his personality, distinction, and specious claims to ownership. The strange space “obliterates” him; that is, it functions like a mode of writing that works against its own letter, and it is worth remembering, as Butler avers, the intimate connection between the name and the law of the father as well as the fact that Jim is a lawyer who delivers his narrative to the unnamed woman in a “legal portfolio” (Cather 8). We might construe obliteration, given Millington’s and Butler’s commentaries, as My Ántonia countering official forms of

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writing such as the novel or legalese that would convert Ántonia’s life into Jim’s copyright, but we might also consider it an aesthetic in its own right that undoes what it says in the act of saying it—a perishperformative, to return to the Introduction, for which appearance is barely distinguishable, if at all, from disappearance. This is a mode of writing answerable to and in league with a landscape demanding a diminished presence and minimal impact, and its internal death drive and antagonism toward human proliferation manifests in Jim’s now faithless (prayers no longer seem worth his time) conviction that heteronormativity, already damaged in the form of his dead parents, no longer has his back. Critics have long argued, in somewhat the same vein as Sedgwick’s displacement thesis, that Cather projects her lesbian longing onto feminized and lushly described landscapes. But the queerness of Cather’s prose, I submit, lies less in anthropomorphized representations of nature than it does in scenes like My Ántonia’s opening, where the human is denuded of its distinctiveness and reduced to a minor player in a larger ecology. From the vantage point of Anthropocene studies, Cather’s fiction might be said to offer a glimpse not only of humans’ damaging insertion into various environments but also their eclipse by biological and geological forces they cannot wrangle fully under their control. I intend to demonstrate that Cather’s obliterative aesthetic and its insistent negativity make her an ecologically oriented theorist of queer disappearance simultaneously, if not always consistently, attuned to the racial and settler-colonial logics through which the human constitutes itself as (heir) apparent and exceptional. That earlier quoted passage in which Jim recalls feeling “outside man’s jurisdiction”—he also feels “there was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made” (12)—has led Mike Fischer to indict Cather’s erasure of the “Plains Indians” (Fischer 451) and her contribution to a pervasive “amnesia concerning the people who once lived [in Nebraska]” (465), and along similar lines Janice Stout alleges that Cather’s inattention to the “Sioux or Lakota people recently displaced from the Nebraska prairies” makes her “the lyrical voice of Manifest Destiny” (473–474). While I sing no panegyrics to Cather’s openmindedness and wish in no way to suggest that she represents particular

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tribes and tribal histories with the specificity and sensitivity they deserve, I do submit that by ignoring the novel’s obliterative tendencies, accounts like Fischer’s and Stout’s can only apprehend absences in her novels as ignorant slights rather than important qualifications of the scenes and subjects permitted to appear on the prairie. The subversiveness of Cather’s style lies not in positive representations of particular people or groups of people—all of which struggle, alongside Ántonia, for a fair hearing within the “jurisdiction” of Jim’s authorship—but rather in an often sexualized antagonism that braids queerness with other targets of domination and that menaces the master narrative with intimations of its exclusions and even its unraveling. These other people, other voices, and other possibilities are never aired for long, but if we consider Millington’s point about the novel’s debt to and structural echo of a vibrant tapestry of oral culture, then we can regard their intermittent appearances and disappearances not only as minimal or muted presences but also as resistances to and interferences in the grand narrative that tries but ultimately fails to replace them. In other words, one of the key aims of this chapter is to nudge criticism of this novel in the direction of narrative form—and deformation—so that we can glean a politics of style irreducible to, and often in conflict with, seeming absences and caricatures at the level of story and plot. The native and the queer come together in an early and famous episode in the novel in which Jim and Ántonia, out adventuring as children, come across a deadly and grotesquely large rattlesnake. As the two “examine a big hole,” Jim begins “walking backward, in a crouching position,” when he hears his companion “scream” and turns around to find “the biggest snake I had ever seen. He was sunning himself, after the cold night, and he must have been asleep when Ántonia screamed. When I turned he was lying in long loose waves, like a letter ‘W.’ He twitched and began to coil slowly. He was not merely a big snake, I thought—he was a circus monstrosity. His abominable muscularity, his loathsome, fluid motion, somehow made me sick. He was as thick as my leg, and looked as if millstones couldn’t crush the disgusting vitality out of him” (30). No evidence is offered of how Jim knows the snake is male—no cloacal examination is performed, for example—but in labeling it as such Jim sets it up as a site of

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semi-identification made all the more psychically proximate by comparing its girth to that of Jim’s leg. His disgust with this masculine girth, having just “whirled round” to see it, seems connected to the fact that he was previously bending over, backing up to it, and rendering his “hole” susceptible to the creature’s penetrative examination. The sudden perceived threat—“if my back had been against a stone wall I couldn’t have felt more cornered” (30)—followed by a violent response—“I ran up and drove at his head with my spade . . . I struck now from hate” (30)—is undeniably an allegorical scene of homosexual panic. But as Judith Butler points out, the scene is also inseparable from the act of its composition. It is Ántonia’s voice, after all, that first catalyzes and dramatizes the encounter, and the rattlesnake’s labile lasciviousness—the alliteration and assonance of “lying in long loose waves” stretching the believability of Jim’s aversion and, phantasmatically, his haunted hole—assumes the shape of a letter, “W,” around which collocate writing, Willa Cather, and the unnamed woman writer from the introduction, all disappearing and appearing, coiled and conjoined almost beyond recognition, in a hole opened up by prairie dogs and burrowing owls (151). I have been suggesting that the “hole” here nods to a terrifying anal erotics—in much the same way it did for Clive Durham in Chapter 1—but it also stands more broadly for an absent presence and for suppressed agencies not yet fully buried. As Jim remarks of the snake, “even after I pounded his ugly head flat, his body kept on coiling and winding, doubling and falling back on itself. I felt seasick” (30). A raw and unruly physicality remains even after the brain is smashed, and it is fused with the excessiveness of the letter that produces it, the “W” that winds it up and redoubles its signifying power by causing Jim’s story, whose coherence here becomes as precarious as he felt his longevity to be at the time of the snake’s presentation, to fall back on itself and to become momentarily inhabited by the forces it tries assiduously to stamp out. Disoriented and off-balance, Jim is rattled by the snake despite escaping its bite and encircling aggression. Part of why Jim continues to feel off-kilter is that he cannot stop associating the venomous snake with the scream of Ántonia that startled and awakened it, as if Ántonia’s surviving the episode means the snake may not be dead. Moreover, the tongue with which she summoned the

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snake from its listless slumber was one that Jim did not recognize. It was not the English he had taught her—an English whose nominal fit with the natural world, as Butler mentions, she sometimes queries—but the Bohemian, to which he refers condescendingly as “Bohunk” (30), he has not had the humility or curiosity to learn. Which is to say, Ántonia’s warning call is a mixed signal alerting Jim to an immediate danger but also exposing him to that danger in the form of his own lack of understanding. She tries to assuage his fear and anxiety, swapping Bohemian for her nonstandard English while lauding him, ostensibly, for his bravery: “You is just like big mans; you wait for him lift his head and then you go for him. Ain’t you feel scared a bit? Now we take that snake home and show everybody. Nobody ain’t seen in this kawn-tree so big snake like you kill” (30). Jim is somewhat comforted by these words, and indeed the stated reason he shares this vignette is because it serves as an obituary for the “superior tone” the elder Ántonia previously took with him and as a dawn for a new era in which “she began to treat me more like an equal and to defer to me in other things than reading lessons” (29). But the frame for this vignette is surely faultier than Jim lets on, because Ántonia does not follow her language lessons in announcing the snake’s propinquity and, as Blanche Gelfant observes of this mock dragon-slaying sequence, “in pronouncing him a man, she keeps him a boy” (375) by arrogating to herself the right to distinguish between the two. Within the mythic genre through which this tale is conveyed, his initiation should not require a woman’s seal of approval, nor should it entail the two of them proceeding forward to exhibit his courageous kill under the banner of a collaborative “we.” Gelfant does not go far enough, though, in registering the “invidious” (Gelfant 375) implications of Ántonia’s speech. Her compliments teem with criticism and subtle mockery. “You is just like big mans” smacks of a taunt while simultaneously withholding a solid confirmation that Jim is, indeed, a man, and her subsequent question draws attention to the fact that Jim is most certainly afraid—“I suppose I looked as sick as I felt”—of the rattlesnake and possibly even of Ántonia, as he “petulantly” exclaims, “You might have told me there was a snake behind me!,” in which formulation she becomes as much of a culprit as the snake itself. What is more, Ántonia’s

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double negatives, like her name and the snake and Cather’s nonteleological prose, cause her declarations to loop and fall back in on themselves, conditioning and even canceling what they purport to communicate. “Nobody ain’t see in this kawn-tree so big snake like you kill” is far from definitive in its assertion—Ántonia’s “ain’ts” reconjuring the underappreciated negativity of her appellation—and its syntactical placement of “like” immediately between “snake” and “you” echoes her earlier “just like big mans,” suggesting that Jim is no more similar to a man than he is to a snake or that man and snake converge in “abominable” and monstrous ways Jim would prefer not to imagine. Here as elsewhere in the early moments of the novel, Ántonia’s pronunciation of country as “kawn-tree” allies her foreign dialect with a subtle interrogation of American values and principles of which Jim is reflexively defensive. When Ántonia says that her homesick father, to whom I will turn later, does not like this “kawn-tree,” Jim replies with all the thoughtless bluster of Donald Trump avant le lettre, “People who don’t like this country ought to stay at home” (51). On Ántonia’s lips, the United States, and the countryside being gobbled up as the United States expands westward, is something of a “con” running contrary to its professed ideals and promises—a betrayal of which the Shimerda family, cold and hungry after being lured away from Europe only to find recalcitrant soil and opportunists seeking every chance to bilk them of their meager savings, is powerful proof. Notice also how the sound of “naught or “ought not” in “kawn-tree”—as well as the very same intimations of ownership that the defiant accent in Ántonia works to silence— raises the specter of national illegitimacy, of the United States exercising a counterfeit claim to the space “between that earth and that sky” (12). The American con foisted upon immigrant families bears a close relationship to native dispossession. As Janice Stout documents, railways like the Burlington that extended the country’s frontiers westward were made possible by aggressive advertising luring immigrants with the prospect of “a far more comfortable home than they actually found” (Stout 477). Built on “false promises” to desperate foreigners, the railways were also constructed “through a vast transfer of public lands (in other words, land that sustained the Native populations) to private hands” (476). As the railways sold off public land to subsidize the laying

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of new track and the acquisition of new equipment, the people lured there then lined the railways’ pockets further by purchasing goods that had to be transported from the east. “It was a system,” Stout continues, “that worked quite efficiently to develop the rail system across the country, enrich a small number of investors, and deprive Indians of their way of life and means of survival.” As Stout concludes, “not only did settlers come to possess land that had provided game for the Indians’ sustenance, but their clearing of land as they plowed and planted destroyed necessary habitats and disrupted migration patterns of game even as trains brought in professional hunters who took buffalo hides and left the carcasses to rot or passengers who shot the great animals for pleasure” (476). Although Jim is no professional hunter, his murder of the snake and consequent display of it for admiring neighborly eyes positions him awfully close to the trophy hunter, particularly in light of the way he makes sense of the snake’s presence and susceptibility. Figuring the rattlesnake once had twenty-four rattles (“he had twelve rattles, but they were broken off before they began to taper”) and was therefore twenty-four years old at the time of its slaughter, Jim explains to Ántonia “that he must have been there when white men first came, left on from buffalo and Indian times” (31). But this would then mean, Jim further reflects without thinking aloud, that the rattler was too old and had lived too “lazy” an existence up there on the prairie, with unlimited access to prairie dogs, to put up the sort of fight that would permit Jim a legitimate claim of heroic action. On the one hand, this self-admission of a “mock adventure” (32) demonstrates Jim’s capacities for ironizing himself and taking on board critical counterpoints; on the other hand, it also implies a caricature of the indigenous as simultaneously violent and weak, aggressive and feminine, hypersexual and sterile, warmongering and yet backward and easily vanquished. As Chris Finley points out, native men and women have been “sexualized, gendered, and racialized as penetrable within colonial and imperial discourses” (35), meaning that by the terms of settler colonialism the native is always already queer—an ideology My Ántonia both activates and complicates with its insistence upon Jim’s, the settler’s, projective penetrability. That is to say, the text’s and Ántonia’s alignment of Jim with the rattlesnake interrupts and disrupts the various and conflicting narrative

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frames with which he tries to contain it. Whether it is a ferocious dragon that must be bravely slayed or a decadent native in need of removal, the snake will not stray far from Jim in large part because Ántonia, who first quickened it with her foreign exclamation, will not let it. Jim tries to consolidate with her an official account of what transpired, “insisting,” for example, about the snake’s age, despite the fact that rattles were missing and that a rattle tally is an imprecise measure in any case (31). But when he returns home with the snake and meets with obvious questions, first from his family’s handyman Otto Fuchs, about its size and vigor, Ántonia “[breaks] in” to offer her own version of events: “He fight something awful! He is all over Jimmy’s boots. I scream for him to run, but he just hit and hit that snake like he was crazy” (31). At first, “he” refers to the snake and its “awful activity,” but by the end of the sentence “he” has morphed into Jim and his “crazy” conduct, conflating the combatants rather than distinguishing between them while emphasizing Jim’s capacity for violence and contribution to the fatal episode. Her use of “Jimmy” once again pulls Jim back from proper adulthood, inserts a clever “my” at the end of his name in a reversal of his proprietary aims toward her, and shimmies with the gummy, slimy texture of the anguine native (her avoidance of past tense also makes the struggle seem ongoing rather than finished). As Jim hangs the defanged creature on the windmill, Ántonia rushes into the house and tells Jim’s family the story “with a great deal of color,” making it her own, most likely repeating the grammar and syntax by which Jim’s distance from the snake is dramatically curtailed, and figuring more powerfully than most critics acknowledge the counter-perspective of the supposedly missing woman narrator. Jim concludes at the end of the vignette, “I had killed a big snake—I was now a big fellow” (32), but the ostensible symmetry of his statement also means that he occupies the same place as the snake, and that if he has vanquished and supplanted it on the prairie, he has also incorporated it as the predicate and referent of his adult masculinity—an identity written into existence and firmed up, but also destabilized from within, by an immigrant woman whose noncompliance with discursive and gender normativity makes her something of a substitute for the queered and vanished native, by which I mean, to return to Butler, that the text foregrounds the impossibility of the native, not just the lesbian,

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becoming “freely visible as itself” on a prairie constituted, amnesically, on its absence. I have been arguing that what we might think of as Ántonia’s antonymity entangles an array of subaltern agencies—immigrant, native, queer, woman, woman artist—in the form of a nonhuman agent whose exquisite strangeness (consider the awed attention Jim gives to the snake’s singular form) works to obliterate Jim, to turn the letter of his possessive narration around in the name of an antagonism it can neither shed nor stare straight in the face. This antagonism yields those “curious survivals” I mentioned earlier, somethings born of nothings and negative impulses, and if the early anguine encounter is rendered relatively innocuous by Jim’s inward acknowledgment of the snake’s disadvantage, subsequent and thematically related vignettes grow increasingly violent and sexual, threatening to usurp not only Jim’s already shaky authority but also, because they are so disturbing, the balance and coherence of his story as a whole. Nowhere is this more the case than in the deathbed confession of Pavel, the Russian immigrant who along with his comrade and roommate Peter befriends the Shimerda family (their languages are partially mutually intelligible) and provides a refuge of sorts for Ántonia’s depressed and beleaguered father. Writhing in pain that performs the violence of his tale—perhaps the most crystalline example of Richard Millington’s point about embodied storytelling in the novel—Pavel recounts to Mr. Shimerda, with Jim and Ántonia within earshot, the events of a night many years ago in Ukraine in which he and Peter drove a friend and his bride home in a sledge at the conclusion of a long and boozy marriage ceremony and reception. Behind them follow many more sledges containing the friends and family of the bride and groom, and in a grisly turn of events each is overtaken by a pack of wolves whose strategy is to spook the horses into tangling the reins and causing the sledges to overturn. Assaulted by the blood-curdling cries of the wedding party and their equine conveyances, and cognizant of the two-dozen wolves still in pursuit of their lead sledge, Pavel, the more cunning of the two, tells the groom to throw his bride overboard to lighten the load and speed their escape. When the groom balks and puts up a “struggle,” Pavel throws him and the bride overboard, leaving Peter none the wiser.

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The only non-lupine survivors of the nightmare, Pavel and Peter are subsequently “run out of their village,” disowned by their families, and forever tarnished as “the two men who had fed the bride to the wolves” (36). Before turning to the formal circumstances of this gruesome narration, I first want to register its profound queerness. That reputation they earn—“the two men who had fed the bride to the wolves”—vernacularizes homosexuality and captures its rapacious connotations in the heterosexual mind. Peter and Pavel are lifelong bachelors, always the groomsmen but never the groom, who relocate to the United States to try to outrun, once again, the rumors that nip at their heels every bit as persistently as the wolves nipping at the horses. George Chauncey reminds us that some men who had sex with other men in the early twentieth century were known as wolves (67), and there is in this story a provocative association of Peter and Pavel with their lupine pursuers. Peter’s ignorance of exactly what happened that murderous night only deepens his homoerotic attachment to Pavel, because he sticks with him despite the gossip that sticks to both of them. “Always unfortunate” (36) in the economic schemes they undertake after arriving in the United States, Peter and Pavel move from place to place—“Chicago, Des Moines, Fort Wayne” (36)—becoming the working-class figures of an itinerancy and vagrancy that at the turn of the century was becoming increasingly associated, as Michael Trask so powerfully argues, with the various perversities being probed by modern sexology (1). There is in this vignette a gratuitousness of rapacity and death that makes it difficult for this queer reader not to sense Cather’s unbridled protest and revenge against a system of compulsory heterosexuality and connubiality that had robbed her of several female friends, perhaps most notably Isabelle McClung, who in 1916, around the same time Cather was conceiving My Ántonia, married at age thirty-eight, disappointing Cather considerably. Although Cather spent most of her adult life with Edith Lewis, biographers as disparate as James Woodress and Hermione Lee have suggested McClung as the “real love” that got away. It is as if Cather just could not help herself in composing this episode, as if her reservations about marriage already logged in O Pioneers! had intensified into an angry frenzy in desperate need of an aesthetic outlet. “Nothing,” according to Pavel’s telling, “seemed to check the wolves” (35), in which

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can also be heard Ántonia’s Czech background, the absence of aesthetic restraint, and the pleasing anonymity of an unverified and unverifiable shadow authorship intimated by the “black ground-shadows” (36) of the chasing wolves. Of course, the use of two male characters and the setting of a faraway land provide considerable cover for Cather, but in keeping with the previous anguine episode—on whose heels this scene of nature again attacking immediately follows—Cather and her writing (and, as I have been arguing, that unnamed woman narrator) surface in the “w” of the wolves and, even more so, in the wolves’ “whirling” (36) motion that echoes the coiling and winding of the rattlesnake. I am arguing that the wolves are a “curious survival” of the rattler that was exterminated physically but not literally; to wit, “he” survives in the letter, the obliterative letter with which this vignette, and the heteronormative rituals it puts into motion, are composed and decomposed. To the extent Cather disappears into her novels, she also haunts them as a sort of internal death drive, allying herself with snakes and wolves that bite back at multiple forms (including the scared horses that also unite the anguine and lupine episodes) of domestication. Cather lurks less naggingly behind Jim’s masculine gaze, then, than she does behind Ántonia’s insistent negativity. Not to be missed in this vignette is the fact that Jim, once again, cannot understand it and depends upon the supposedly less literate Ántonia for its translation. And because Pavel’s language is not identical with hers, Ántonia’s rendering is at best a rough translation communicated to Jim not in full but in bits and pieces spread across an unspecified “later” (34). These gaps in translation, narration, and transcription mean that Ántonia, like the unnamed woman of the introduction, enjoys a significant opportunity for editorial intervention, emendation, and emphasis. Blanche Gelfant contends that “the great narrative distance at which this episode is kept from Jim seems . . . to signify its explosiveness, the need to handle it with care” (379). True as that observation may be, it downplays the degree to which Jim’s authority is undermined by this mediated exchange as well as the degree to which he becomes, at least in this vignette, scribe rather than author. Ántonia’s handling and texturing of this episode is emphasized by her decision to wait until the ride home from Peter and Pavel’s house to

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begin sharing with Jim the details of the story. In the wagon, “lying in the straw” (34) to stay warm, she and Jim refigure the Russian bride “tucked . . . under the blankets” (35) of her groom’s ill-fated sledge. In her place if not quite at her imperiled pace, they are able to feel the thrill of the chase and the terror of a death drive that, as Lee Edelman would insist, is intrinsically, unapologetically queer. Pavel’s tale and its implicit homosexuality—suggested but not named, as Cather insists in “The Novel Démeublé” the aim of modern art should be—are whispered again as and translated into a “secret” that Jim and Ántonia “jealously” protect, “as if the wolves of the Ukraine had gathered that night long ago, and the wedding party had been sacrificed, to give us a painful and peculiar pleasure” (37). The difference between Cather’s and Edelman’s death drive is that whereas the latter’s spells “no future,” the former’s charts an alternative inheritance and line of flight from a shameful secret of the past to an intense jouissance in the present, a conversion that is at one and the same time a committed conservation and source of ongoing and imaginative conversation—the stuff of queer world-making repurposed from the ruins of a waylaid wedding. When Jim subsequently finds himself in bedtime reveries “in a sledge drawn by three horses, dashing through a country that looked something like Nebraska and something like Virginia” (37), he rekindles this queer imagination and confirms the futility of trying to sequester the wolves’ obliterative energies to a yester and yonder location, just as the “whining howl” of coyotes not far from Peter’s house (again, that suggestive “w”) catalyzed his confession to Mr. Shimerda. The animals pulling Jim in his fantasy are the three horses of an alluring apocalypse whose human counterparts are, on my reading, Ántonia, Cather, and the not entirely foreclosed woman narrator of the introduction. Jim often assumes the role of Ántonia’s instructor and, as has been discussed, is viewed as having a narrative grip on her sexuality, but in this thinly veiled allusion to masturbation he shows himself instead to be a gratified student. Neither the snake nor wolf vignette injures Jim physically (the intimation of “self-harm” notwithstanding), but the same cannot be said of a later episode in which Ántonia and Jim’s grandmother, worried about the sexual intentions of Ántonia’s employer, convince Jim to spend a series of evenings in her bed while she stays safely at Jim’s. Lulled into a

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sense of security by several uneventful evenings, Jim awakens one night to “something hairy and cologne-scented brushing my face” and realizes quickly who it is “bending over me” (124)—Wick Cutter, a figure of castration who also shares initials, as Jonathan Goldberg has pointed out, with Willa Cather (99). This is Jim’s story, of course, but once again it is set in motion by Ántonia, who forces Jim to feel, if only briefly, the male sexual violence more customarily endured by women. To the extent he subs for her in this scene, Jim becomes the dynamic switchpoint of gender and sexuality described by Butler, a crossing of narrative wires whose liminality is imaged in Jim, having fended Cutter off after being choked and punched, finding himself, as if governed by impulses and instincts that outstrip his intention, “running across the north end of Black Hawk in my nightshirt, just as one sometimes finds one’s self behaving in bad dreams” (124). In other words, what hounds Jim is not only Wick but a loss of control and abbreviation of agency in which he awakens to find himself in someone else’s story, emplotted erroneously and extravagantly exposed to the eyes of others. The “bad dreams” of which Jim speaks are left suspiciously vague, but their content might have something to do with his later insistence that the episode with Wick not be reported to the authorities or mentioned to anyone, because “if the story once got abroad, I would never hear the last of it. I could well imagine what the old men down at the drug-store would do with such a theme” (125). It isn’t entirely clear if Jim is more embarrassed by having been accosted sexually by another man, mistaken briefly for a woman, or associated erotically with a “hired girl” (the term used for Ántonia and other farm women hired to do domestic work in the town) in whose bed he was found. But what is entirely clear is that he holds what happened against Ántonia, feeling that “he never wanted to see her again,” that he “hated her almost as much as [he] hated Cutter,” and that she had “let [him] in for all this disgustingness” (125). When his grandmother says they should feel “thankful” Ántonia was spared Wick’s assault, Jim reports he “felt no particular gratitude” (125). Although the novel is too episodic to be treated chronologically, it is worth noting that this vignette concludes Book II and that Jim, who leaves soon after for university, does not visit Ántonia again until after she gets engaged, impregnated, and subsequently abandoned by Larry Donovan in Denver,

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forced to return to Nebraska with the very mark of sexual shame with which Jim had fretted his own reputation would be tarnished. Given the discretion and silence Jim demanded around the incident with Cutter, we might speculate that its inclusion in the novel denotes the hand of some other author, or assemblage of authors, seeking to spread the shame around and to rebuff Jim’s efforts at novel’s end to establish Ántonia as his hero worshipper, happy matron, and proud protector of idealized old ways—a resistance further waged in her using Bohemian when conversing with her husband, which Jim witnesses but yet again does not understand. We might see it as one of several key moments, that is, when Jim is nearly blotted out. Indeed, it would seem that it is precisely in those moments when Jim is decentered—either the pen pulled from his hand or his hand usurped by a ghostwriter—that those “curious survivals” become most evident. And the shape and sound of these survivals continue to breathe new life into that vanquished snake. Shortly before he commits suicide—strained beyond measure by the privations of an immigrant existence he never really wanted—Mr. Shimerda, Ántonia’s father, visits Jim and his grandparents at Christmas and, in a somewhat heretical manner that causes Jim’s grandmother to “look apprehensively” at her husband, “rose, crossed himself, and quietly knelt down before the tree, his head sunk forward.” In this pious if also pagan posture, “his long body formed a letter ‘S’” (49). His long body conjuring the outlandish size of the snake, Mr. Shimerda’s “S” shape bodies forth the serpent under the initial of his own name, and if its kneel before a Christmas tree scandalizes Jim’s Protestant family, its curved form anticipates the larger scandal of the suicide that ends in Mr. Shimerda “lying on his side, with his knees drawn up,” his body “draped in a black shawl” that fails to cover “one of his long, shapely hands” that lies upon it (63). That extrusive hand denotes a scandal that cannot be fully contained, an excessiveness akin to the snake’s posthumous wriggling, and the fetal form to which it is attached—with a head “bandaged in white muslin, like a mummy’s”— might be read as a prayer to or for a different world. In a decidedly supplicative and feminine form, Mr. Shimerda becomes a perishperformative, his death a protest against the country that conned him into immigrating and that denigrated, both xenophobically and

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misogynistically, his fondness for fine dress and artistic pursuits. Words make vows, but so too do bodies, and in this lugubrious scene Cather’s composition becomes corporeal and accuses, with those long fingers, a nation whose ideas and ideals of progress feel, to the foreigner on whom they depend, more like torture. Contracting from Mr. Shimerda into the letter “S” is of course a disappearing act and a tragic one at that, but I am also reminded of D.A. Miller’s meditation on Roland Barthes’s curious preference for the Letter over the Name. Where Barthes recoils from the name’s power “to immobilize the signifying subject” and therefore to act as “an instrument of domination and death,” he hypostatizes the Letter “as the purity of a signifier that is “not yet compromised in any association and thus untouched by and Fall” (Miller 18). Miller elaborates, though, that in Barthes’s “many encomia to the signifier, what he praises often looks less like purity than promiscuity—a proven ability to ‘fall’ into an infinity of not always untraceable contacts” (19). What interests but also vexes Miller is the fact that Barthes’s eschewal of nomination generally is indissociable from his avoidance of a very particular appellation pertaining to his sexuality. Miller cites the example of “a preparatory note for Roland Barthes” mentioning “a goddess he calls “Homosexuality” or “Homo” that, in the finished text, is shortened to “the goddess H.,” leading Miller to conclude that Barthes’s “relation to the act of gay selfnomination proves nothing short of phobic” (22–23). If the Letter enjoys and enables a freedom that the Name morbidly arrests, it is nonetheless true, as Miller points out, that the Letter carries the “semantic impressments” of the Name from which it has been excised (17–18). In other words, the Letter continues to bear the trace of the thing Barthes strives assiduously to avoid, and in trying to avoid that ineluctable association Barthes becomes complicit with the regimes of discretion and deferral under which gay men have suffered—even though, and Miller remains sympathetic to this point, the Letter’s distance from the Name no doubt affords it the ability to form or “fall” into other associations, some of which might function as productive and enabling abbreviations of that Name whose shadow hangs over it. These reflections on sexuality and nomination might seem far removed from poor Mr. Shimerda, but they help in assessing and

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perhaps raising the stakes of his truncation into that serpentine “S.” When Miller laments the phobic cast of Barthes’s predilection for what is ultimately the impossible purity of the Letter, he means homophobia, to be sure, but implied in that psychological diagnosis is a certain sort of disgust with the body and a decided flight from the concrete sexual needs and desires conveyed by the Name. But in Mr. Shimerda’s case, it is only when he curls into that “S” (snake, suicide, sex) and becomes a Letter that he transforms into a body that can disgust, disgrace, protest, and accuse. The Letter, in this instance, bestows upon him an impressive and indicting materiality that his Name never could, and in the larger ecology of the novel this is a transspecies and transpersonal materiality that enfolds the rattlesnake, the author, the unnamed narrator, and the array of agencies whose bodies, to riff on Butler’s title, have either been made not to matter or have been materialized in such a way so as to maximize extraction and minimize dissent. Detaching from the name meant to hold and govern that body, Mr. Shimerda is finally, as the Letter—Cather’s letter, Ántonia’s Letter—able to Speak, to Say, and to Sound a Subjectivity ungrounded from the disciplinary discourses, like the grateful and hearty immigrant, through which Jim’s family expect him to be unthreateningly legible. I began this chapter with the question of names, and what I have tried to demonstrate is that names and letters slide around in this novel, detaching from particular persons and reattaching to others. What we have, in a novel that is really a set of oral tales that would never be told the same way and would thus only ever appear so as inevitably to disappear, is a rich experiment in all that names and letters can do when we don’t take them for granted and we don’t reduce them to the individuals who would dare to claim them as their own. If we struggle, as Lindemann argues, to hear from Ántonia herself, it is partially because the novel is more interested in the multiple ways we can hear Ántonia without her becoming synonymous with “a self ” whose terms and traditions she never assented to.

3 Disappearing and Resurfacing Visions of Queer Community in Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance

Dancing and Social Distancing Under coronavirus quarantine and under the spell of contemporary LGBT novels whose renewed interest in the HIV/AIDS epidemic has morphed in a matter of months from melancholic remembrance to clairvoyant projection, I returned—in the way we all think now of returning to life as it was before—to Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance (1978), a novel famous for its decidedly pre-HIV sexual abandon and disco extravagance. As Alan Hollinghurst notes in his introduction to the text’s fortieth anniversary edition, “Holleran evokes a crowded world, of clubs, parties, bath-houses” (vi) that stands in stark contrast to both the social distancing of 2020 and the panic-induced shuttering of sites of sexual subcultures in the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, Dancer can seem to sing like a hymn to the sexual revolution of New York City in the wake of the Stonewall Riots—with one of its leading mouthpieces, the diva Andrew Sutherland (who can sustain a “piercing, high E flat” (109) while gyrating to Barrabás), esteeming the urban nightlife’s pulsations, poppers, and penises so highly that the world outside this concentrated energy, both the workaday world and the world outside of the five boroughs, diminishes in significance and recedes from view. In a New York Times review of Holleran’s penultimate novel, Grief (2005), Caryn James comments that “Holleran’s early novels can seem so determined to speak for their disenfranchised gay characters that the works become inaccessible to anyone else,” meaning in turn that James feels comfortable labeling Dancer “a period piece” narrowed down to “young gay men flocking to New York for carefree sex in the baths.” Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. Benjamin Bateman, Oxford University Press. © Benjamin Bateman 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192896339.003.0004

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The mild homophobia of James’s assessment notwithstanding—and not withstanding obvious questions about the ubiquity of critically celebrated novels that seem so determined to speak for their straight characters—it echoes the general consensus that the novel documents a historically specific moment of profligate sex, unrestrained sociality, and unambivalent experimentation. From this vantage point, the novel would have little relevance to the AIDS era that followed soon on its heels or to our contemporary moment of quarantine except as an object of nostalgia, a possibly exquisitely painful reminder of pleasure lost. Perhaps the power and persistence of such nostalgia, and of the pleasurable fantasies it indexes, explain the novel’s relatively uncomplicated reputation as an accomplished artifact of countercultural headiness. But in this chapter I will argue that Dancer from the Dance is anything but an unqualified endorsement of superfluous sensuality and constitutes instead a highly complex meditation on the appeal and endurability of social and sexual life lived at a rolling boil. The main characters, Sutherland and Anthony Malone, are actually the primary protagonists of Wild Swans, a novel-within-a-novel premised at least in part on the shared subcultural experiences of two men, now geographically separated, who exchange letters about their past and present lives. Indeed, their epistolary exchange frames Wild Swans, authored by the one of them who remains in and on the scene in New York, providing a preview of some of its key characters at the beginning of Dancer and, afterward, a critical commentary on the fates of those characters and, by extension, on the futures of the duo whose biographies it reflects and whose subjectivity it might be said to merge in a first-person narrator who participates in the events of Wild Swans but who primarily stands back from them, unnamed, as an informed spectator. By highlighting this formal arrangement and introducing these dramatis personae, I hope to have already tempered the sense of intoxicating immersion attending this text. Built around a narrator who is in and out of the action of the novel that is itself intercalated between a framing correspondence that positions the novel’s author and its first reader, who now resides in the American South, at a temporal and/or physical remove from the packed and promiscuous places described, Dancer is far from a direct plunge into the gay subcultural excesses with which it has become, simplistically, synonymous.

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In a recent assessment of Holleran’s oeuvre, Garth Greenwell notes some of the novel’s affinities with his later and more somber work, but even he fails to mention the novel’s complex framing. The issue at hand is not merely one of literary accuracy—though I do hope here to subject the novel to the kind of critical scrutiny it struggles to receive if regarded as a straightforward period piece—but also of gay subjectivity and even of American gay history. Dancer registers a profound ambivalence about unstinting subcultural participation more often associated with the HIV/AIDS era that succeeded it, the closeted era of police raids and internalized homophobia that preceded it, and the era of homonormativity that is our own—the era that asks, for example, why gay bars and clubs and sports leagues continue to exist, to the extent they still do, when gay people can now marry and be like everyone else. In other words, at the very peak of a historical moment in which gay men, to quote Patrick Moore, “used sex as the raw material for a social experiment so extreme” that it transformed into an “art” (xxiv), Dancer struck a cautionary note about the degree to which this artistic experiment could endure and the degree to which any individual or group of friends could sustain their participation in it uninterrupted and uncontaminated by deep doubts and reservations. Although I will suggest at various intervals that the novel is proleptic in its thematic engagement with matters of infection and disease, I want to stress that it is also very much of its moment, because by laying the emphasis there I can avoid the traditional dividing lines of gay historiography and delineate striking continuities between the sociosexual experiment of the 1970s, the deadly epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s, and the confining coronavirus pandemic of the present time. In doing so, I join, admittedly with my own ambivalence, a recent conversation in queer studies that asks after the viability of the antidiscipline’s ongoing preoccupation with oppositionality, anti-normativity, and other stances of social defiance. For example, a special issue of differences edited by Robyn Wiegman and Elizabeth A. Wilson was devoted to exploring the possibility of “Queer Theory Without Antinormativity,” while at the same time a range of voices have objected to the outsized influence on the field of Lee Edelman’s No Future (2003), which in the mode of a rousing manifesto exhorted a generation of

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scholars to align the queer with a kamikaze death drive hellbent against the sort of political alliances and compromises that might allow queer folks to achieve at least a tentative rapprochement with the dominant culture. If queer theory is all about rebelling against and antagonizing social norms, can there be queer quiescence, queer ordinariness, queer indecisiveness, or would these recessive modes, these seemingly powerless perish-performatives, always be viewed as obstacles to be overcome or as retreats beaten in regrettable moments of complicity or cowardice? I mention my vacillation in entering this conversation, because in my own work I have used Edelman’s brilliant polemic, along with other touchstones for “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory,” to theorize precarious forms of survival that flirt perilously with self-destruction, even as I have simultaneously stressed that these dangerous dalliances can enact and envision multiple and more ecologically oriented versions of a futurity that need not be the exclusive property of reproductive heteronormativity. Central to my thinking and to that of many others is the concern that a wholehearted embrace of radical oppositionality requires an extreme privilege unavailable to the myriad populations— nonwhite, indigenous, working class, homeless, trans, disabled—already relegated to social death and to a depth of deprivation that deprives them of anything like a decision to accede, or not, to their figuration as a specter of civilizational unraveling. Dancer from the Dance enters this conversation from a different and underappreciated angle, endorsing neither radical oppositionality nor tired conformity but rather a flickering involvement in subcultural life that includes going in head over heels but also coming up for air in order to write, reflect, rejuvenate, recover, retreat into isolation, and even reconnect, however uncertainly or half-heartedly, with the very institutions of normative existence against which gay counterculture forges its identity. Framing this back-and-forth movement neither as contradictory nor as hypocritical but rather as essential to the maintenance and longevity of gay subjectivity and, perhaps counterintuitively, of a queer community capable of meaningful opposition, the novel thinks in advance, I will be arguing, about the resilience, resourcefulness, and varied routines necessary for trying to survive the AIDS epidemic and for staying as sane as possible while in coronavirus quarantine. At my

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time of writing, we are threatened by both a deadly virus, with new and scary symptoms and related syndromes emerging every day, and by the prospect of going in and out repeatedly of quarantine because we begin to exhibit nonspecific signs of the illness, because tracking and tracing apps on our phones alert us to possible exposures that require our immediate disappearance from scenes of social gathering for at least two weeks, or because a rising reproduction value warning of exponential growth means that lifted restrictions need to be reimposed and social distancing protocols restored to their most extreme levels for all members of the community. My point is not to equate HIV and Covid-19 but rather to explore how strategies for surviving both the viruses and the dramatic and even draconian social and subjective transformations they necessitate were already embedded in the imagination of the queer communities and intense sociosexual experiments that preceded them and that, at least in the case of HIV, allowed them, tragically, to circulate. By alternating periods of subcultural immersion with multiple forms of both catatonic and creative abeyance, the substance and style of Dancer from the Dance model a behavioral practice that activists, health officials, and many people in their everyday lives have been working to adopt and to understand—that is, physical distancing, whether it materializes as a thin layer of latex, a mask, or a strict two-meter rule in places prone to crowding, as an act of social solidarity and an aid to community wellbeing. Which is to say, the desire or directive to turn away from a social environment and to pull back from the friends and lovers with whom one has co-constructed a counterhegemonic world and on whom one has depended, for perhaps long stretches of time, for affective and material sustenance, can be a vital way of protecting that environment and those people who move through it. And to think with the insights of intersectional feminism, it must be added that “those people” might very well be a diverse assembly with uneven access to resources such as space, money, and health insurance, meaning that it will be particularly incumbent upon individuals with the means and privilege to do so to reduce crowding and contamination to the extent that they can while concomitantly, of course, continuing to invest in the threatened environments from which they are, with a mix no doubt of selfishness and selflessness, temporarily retreating. Physical distance combined with emotional

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allegiance and mnemonic propinquity generates some cognitive dissonance, to be sure, but it also forestalls extreme alienation and isolation by preserving a sense of communication and responsibility and by remaining oriented, however tentatively, to an eventual reunion. In the first sections of this lengthy chapter, I will examine how and with what effects the novel adumbrates an ethos of on-and-off subcultural participation both in its erotic depiction of Malone—a stunning beauty whose arresting appearance on the scene is eclipsed in intensity only by his equally unexpected disappearance—and in its critically underexamined formal arrangement whereby Malone’s recessive tendencies in the narrative of Wild Swans are redoubled in the framing epistolary exchange of the two letter writers whose correspondence, delivered in a melodramatic mode redolent of a camp aesthetic, both attaches them to and detaches them from the communities they worry over and gossip about. If William Butler Yeats’s question—“O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?”—from which Holleran’s novel borrows its title might be taken to suggest, in a performative vein, that there is no dancer apart from the dance that constitutes and sustains them, then a companion question asked by this chapter is how the actions and inactions of that same dancer, undertaken at some distance from the frenetic floor, might nevertheless count as a critical part of the counterculture’s choreography. Showing throughout that Malone’s ambivalence tethers him to, rather than severs him from, the community whose sexual center he sometimes becomes, I turn later in the chapter to Giorgio Agamben’s argument in Stanzas that the figure of the melancholic derives from an older concept of sloth or acedia for which practices of withdrawal constitute not lazy acquiescence (Agamben 5) but rather frenzied fascination with preserving or imagining the distanced world in a more ideal form. If, as Agamben explains, the melancholic does not really lose an object but rather uses the fantasy of the object’s loss in order to pretend/believe that he once possessed it, that it indeed might be possessable, and that the primary problem lies in the established routes for reaching it, then melancholia transforms from a source of depressing isolation into a source of utopian thought and creative conjuration. Malone’s serial withdrawals, I conclude, his rich perish-performatives, allow him and

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his community of interpreters not to settle for the world they inhabit or to mistake it for the acme of queer possibility, and their example serves an important warning to queers at the present time not to mistake our world for an apex or to treat queer cultures of previous eras as prelapsarian ideals on which no improvements can be made and with which no areas of epistemic overlap can be identified. By refusing to square Malone with his time or to laminate him, permanently, to the scenes of dissipation into which he sometimes dives with gusto, the novel adopts Malone’s melancholic disposition and makes him the figure of a wistful reminiscence (he’s always trying to recapture the erotic edge of his first embrace with Frankie) exercised in the service of rendering queer futures possible. And a key part of this retrospection, I illustrate throughout, is the act of writing his experiences down and making authorship a key component of his periodic recession, a practice he bequeaths to his observers and to the men who reflect on him in the epistolary exchanges that open and close Dancer from the Dance. If the melancholic mode is intimately related to artistic production in the traditions of thought described by Agamben, then the act of using Malone as the occasion of a critical commemoration means that loss, or disappearance, can continue to make queer community happen and can keep queerness and its creative spirit alive even in lean times of abatement and arrest. Where Willa Cather’s formal negation—her anonymous retreat into an aesthetic that consistently antagonizes her narrator’s claims of confidence and accomplishment—works to expose Jim Burden’s remembrances as self-serving delusions, Holleran’s style indulges memory so as to keep alive configurations of intimacy and community whose full livability might only ever be intermittent. Writing becomes a tool, in other words, for disappearing queerly and for ensuring, critically and concupiscently, that queer disappearance— and queerness itself—are never complete.

A Cloud Over the Dance Floor At the end of his commemorative introduction, which to its credit detects a “melancholy . . . note” and a sense that the novel is “already

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elegizing the crazy and enchanted world it has conjured up” (Hollinghurst v–vi), Hollinghurst argues that there are some “strange fore-echoes” in Dancer of what he calls the “second wave” of “gay writing” churned up by HIV/AIDS, but he adds that “it would be absurd to say that the elegiac tone of this wonderful novel showed foreknowledge of the cataclysm that was soon to come” (xiii). While I would certainly never contend that Holleran was clairvoyant or that the novel foresaw HIV in its lethal specificity, I do maintain that there is more than merely elegiac lyricism in the novel pointing to approaching contagion and catastrophe. Indeed, on my first rereading of Dancer from the Dance in preparation for a class I taught on LGBT fiction over a decade ago, I had to thumb back to the opening pages to confirm that the year of publication was 1978 rather than, say, 1983, because I had been stopped in my tracks by the multiple allusions to illness, disease, and cancer in the opening epistolary exchange. The first letter, sent from the man who now resides in a place he names “The Deep South,” refusing to provide an exact location in order to “make a clean break with my former life,” begins with the announcement, “It’s finally spring down here on the Chattahoochee—the azaleas are in bloom, and everyone is dying of cancer” (1). Putting a small portion of his discretion aside, in the same letter he discloses that “We live on a farm near a small town filled with retired postmasters, most of whom are dying of cancer” (5). In response, the letter-writer in New York City, who provides as his location “The Lower East Side,” includes as the postscript to his letter, “I’m sorry everyone is dying of cancer, but be careful; I’m beginning to think cancer is contagious. I wouldn’t want to lose you just yet” (6). While cancer in this exchange is not restricted to gay men, the worry that it might become contagious associates it with a viral epidemic and anticipates the early thinking, before HIV was isolated and identified as the cause of AIDS, that it was a “gay cancer” terminating the lives of clusters of young and previously healthy men in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco (Altman). And in the letters that the men exchange at the end of Dancer, after the one in the south has had the opportunity to provide suggestions for, to read, and to eventually comment upon Wild Swans, they consider how Malone (a real acquaintance of theirs on whom the centerpiece of the novel-within-the-novel is

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based) was so rapaciously “in love with all men, with the city itself,” that “you could tell from his face how deep the disease had eaten into his system” (252). Suggestive of wasting, this description of Malone’s concupiscence as a force devouring him from the inside walks a fine line between the relatively neutral language of a mysteriously spreading cancer and the homophobically charged discourse that rolls off the tongues of some of the characters in Wild Swans. An example of the latter, John Schaeffer—a wealthy new arrival to New York to whom Sutherland, in hopes of a pecuniary commission, is trying to engage the gorgeous Malone— complains to his would-be matchmaker, “You know, I hate being gay . . . I just feel it’s ruined my life. It drains me, you know, it’s like having a tumor, or a parasite! . . . I’ll never be any of the things [my family] expect of me . . . because it’s like having cancer but you can’t tell them, that’s what a secret vice is like” (45–46). When Wild Swans then leaves Sutherland and Schaeffer and flashes back to Malone’s upbringing, young adulthood, and eventual realization that he desires men and must abandon his privileged, straitlaced life in the suburbs to pursue them, the narrator explains—without confirming Malone told him this directly, meaning the description could apply to every member of their abject cohort—that “it was as if he had finally admitted to himself that he had cancer” (67–68). Even as the novel activates these musings of internalized homophobia, of desire for men equated with vice, illness, and scandalous secrecy in a manner that many readers might find problematic or, at a minimum, somewhat dated, it does so unapologetically and with a consistent sense that if Malone is “doomed” (68), then he might as well make the most out of his fate and take the sort of brazen plunge into life that only a fatal diagnosis and bad prognosis can authorize. And if this tale of sickness acknowledged and accepted, however resignedly, was indeed offered by Malone to the unnamed narrator on one of the cruisy nights they spent talking in the park (the narrator observes Malone but only occasionally earns his attention, we are led to believe), its legacy of community candor and care is reflected in the New York correspondent’s disclosure, contained in the letter that accompanies the manuscript of Wild Swans, that he “discovered venereal warts on my ass last week” and “had them burned off by Dr. Jones in that

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VD Mill he runs on Lexington Avenue” (14). Leavened by the campy banter but not concealed by it is a frank attentiveness to matters of health born genuinely of a lifetime’s experience of not knowing whether or not, and with what mix of pleasurable and deleterious effects, homosexuality can be lived and tolerated. And what follows from that psychic ambivalence in these exchanges is not shameful furtiveness, or at least not only shameful furtiveness, but rather unabashed and unjudgmental acknowledgment of the material facts on the ground. In arguing that the novel is seriously if not always explicitly engaged with the question of how subcultures and subcultural participants can survive precarious times, then, I am aligning it with later texts such as How to Have Sex in an Epidemic (1983), which is credited with helping to mainstream the use of condoms in the gay community and to push back against the erotophobia unleashed by AIDS’s sudden and confusing assault. As religious groups, conservative politicians, and far too many sectors of the public were arguing that AIDS was a punishment from God and a somatic realization of a diseased soul, the authors of that manual framed it as a fundamentally medical problem demanding pragmatic behavioral fixes—the adoption of condoms, to be sure, but also other forms of harm reduction that included, for example, awareness of the heightened risk posed by bottoming rather than topping when engaging in anal sex. Although in hindsight some of the recommendations offered by David Berkowitz and Michael Callen, who wrote the manual under the direction of medical and scientific professional Joseph Sonnabend, proved less accurate than others—their most fundamental error, understandable given the lack of scientific data in the epidemic’s early years, being the premise that AIDS was caused not by a single pathogen but rather by a multifactorial stew of lifestyle factors—they provided a compelling model of subcultural knowledge and empowered their audience to feel, at a time of government ignorance and disinvestment, that remedies for at least some of their problems resided within their own communities and therefore needed not come at the expense, or require the cancellation, of amorous assemblies that had saved them in earlier periods of mental and physical health distress. Indeed, one affective strength of their now discredited etiology was that if something about the gay lifestyle (repeated exposure to semen was one example) was

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thought to be driving the spread of the virus, then perhaps the means of halting the virus’s spread rested in the hands of the very same men who had invented and refined that lifestyle, including those who had already made lifesaving modifications intended as lifestyle extensions.

M(alone) Dancer from the Dance’s libidinal center, the eternally youthful but ultimately unpossessable Malone, is a primary source of what I have been previewing as the novel’s adumbration of an organic epidemiology. Although his large sexual presence in the novel, ranging from one-night stands and discreet infidelities to multiple varieties of sex work, has rendered him legible as something like a scene queen, in reality his appearance is more modulated than many readers’ memories of the text might accurately conjure. To linger momentarily and etymologically on the surname that serves as his only name for most of the novel, we must note the “alone” which it contains and with which it rhymes—a reminder that if Malone functions as community property at times, he is also a poignant figure of solitariness whose peregrinations render him unassimilable to any single version of gay life. This in-betweenness is further reinforced by the tension between Eoin, the latter half of his name which translates from Old Gaelic to English as John, and Maol, which translates to bald and thereby denotes a monk or, more specifically, a monk serving St. John. In other words, Malone is both a kind of everyman, a generic member of the disco world who at times will go to bed with anyone and sell sexual services of all kinds to any and all johns, and a religious exception capable of sequestering himself and practicing chaste asceticism. It might be said that these life modalities can operate as two sides of the same coin, and Michel Foucault certainly seemed to think so when he included both Greco-Roman practices of appetitive discipline and participation in contemporary S&M cultures in his various formulations of creative ascesis and “care of the self.” To practice sexual withdrawal, including withdrawal from the social groups from which sexuality has been learned and constituted, is not necessarily to succumb to an anti-sexual and shame-ridden social

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discipline; to the contrary, its extremity can mirror the extremity of social immersion and prepare the self, both physically and psychologically, for an immersive return. Indeed, Malone remains haunted throughout Wild Swans by memories of his religious upbringing in Ceylon, particularly those associated with his mass-attending mother, and in the epistolary exchanges that conclude Dancer the friends surmise that what animated Malone, whether he was celibate or for sale, was a “religious” search for “the ecstatic food” (255), and they even tender the possibility that he fled New York City, like another friend they knew, to become a monk (254–255)—that is, to become Malone, to become his name, to become a figure suggestive of radical isolation without distinction, of separation shrouded in anonymity, of order and belonging secured by a dual ethical and imaginative commitment to unimpeded aloneness. If, as I am contending, Malone’s waxing and waning is part of a complex conservation of the subcultural world he circulates through, it is understandable that the retractive aspect of that movement makes him frustrating to wouldbe interpreters, in which case the tantalizing “M” affixed to his name— that something that makes him never entirely alone, that surplus of magnetic manliness, unthreatening muscle, and approachable modesty that makes him, at least for a while, the talk of the town—is sometimes regarded, particularly by abandoned lovers, as a tad malicious, even if in retrospect it might come to appear as a healthy reminder of the dangers involved in believing that divine objects, including those that inspire the most fanatical zeal, are meant to be fully possessed. Indeed, when Malone pulls away from his admirers and from the community from which he receives vital alimentation, he is concomitantly demonstrating the withdrawal from him, and his undeniable allure, that is a necessary precondition of the community’s continuation. Malone’s most prominent disappearance occurs near the end of Wild Swans, when “with a single splash” he “vanishe[s] in the darkness” (240) of the Great South Bay off Fire Island after attending a massive and internationally star-studded party thrown by Sutherland. Diving in upon telling the narrator, who in typical fashion watches and listens passively, to convey his thanks to Sutherland along with the message “I’m going out west, tell him I’ll write,” Malone consolidates his mythical status by becoming the stuff of legend, generating countless rumors as to whether

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he drowned on a lengthy swim across the bay to Long Island after a long evening of inebriation (and if so, whether it was suicide or accidental drowning), followed through on his intention of heading out west, perished later that morning in the fire at the Everard Baths that claimed the lives of many other gay men both in the novel and in the real-life conflagration on which it is based, or fled the United States to become “a steward on a passenger ship,” a teacher at a girls’ school in Singapore (250), or, as already mentioned, a Franciscan monk. The rumors swirling around Malone’s eventual destination extend his reputation for unpossessable possibility and potentiality, but the vanishing act to which they respond is not without forewarning or precedent. After he swears off his closeted life as a respectable lawyer, Malone goes fast and furious into a relationship with Frankie, who wants nothing more than the homonormative life that Malone’s Waspy look, innocent charm, and class background seem to promise. And for a while, Malone enjoys disappearing into Frankie’s fertile fantasy, allowing him to be their working-class provider as Malone stays home, relishes the reprieve from his former responsibilities, and sequesters himself from the world below “the whole floor” they share “above the empty West Side Highway,” where “like arboreal creatures high up in the ruins of this city of steel and engineers, naked in the heat, pale forms in a shaft of sunlight swimming with motes of dust between two girders across the dusty floor . . . they lay on a mattress devouring one another until they stopped, merely to wait for the long bout of love-making that night” (79). Mere dust mites swimming furiously and waywardly in the illuminated air foreshadow Malone’s later voyage across the Great South Bay, and it also imbues what at first glance might appear a deeply intimate, or even codependent, relationship with a decidedly impersonal flavor. Malone and Frankie are reduced to minimal forms, and when allowed to express itself uninhibited, their passion eats away at them and permits little distinction between satisfaction and exhaustion, self and other, and, noting the pathological intimation of “bout,” fortifying affection and enervating illness. Noteworthy in this hermetic arrangement is the stark and daily dichotomy between Malone’s amorous absorption and his acute aloneness. Wrapped at night in Frankie’s arms—whose metaphorization as

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“plants . . . with pale green tendrils, curling and locking” so as to produce in Malone an enveloping but also “chok[ing] happiness” conveys the unsustainable tension of their union—Malone spends his days unoccupied and recovering from the trauma of having tried for so long to succeed at the bourgeois life mapped out for him. Apart from trips to a “small gymnasium” to sculpt and chisel his body in the image of and as a gift to his beautiful lover (80), Malone mostly lies low and milks from domesticity a sense of restoration and security never available when it was tethered to the expectation of acquisition and heterosexual alliance. Although his idle hands eventually find their way on to the bodies of other gorgeous men encountered on neighborhood strolls, confirming Frankie’s worst suspicions about what unfathomed outlets his seemingly insatiable lust might discover, for a while he seems content to shelter in place and to document his new life and new feelings in a journal. In fact, it is this journal, left unhidden or unlocked, that eventually reveals to Frankie his indiscretions—a journal described as “a habit,” with all its religious implications, “of recording his thoughts”—including the exact names of his paramours (88). So even as Malone plunges into a gay community, or at least a gay sex life, from which he had previously kept his distance—having now decided to “renounce the world of work, duty, caution, and practicality . . . to live the life of a bohemian” (84)—he continues the practice of distancing, of withdrawal and reflection, in the form of a daily diarizing that positions him as a possible shadow author or ghostwriter of Wild Swans. Whether the narrator of that interpolated novel somehow gained access, like Frankie, to Malone’s private writing or rather made an educated guess as to its contents by piecing together biographical details gleaned here and there, his need to write things down and to stand apart from the very scenes of dissipation that inflame his imagination and demand his participation repeats Malone’s own need, meaning that their shared creative culture is both one of heated sexual experimentation and cool, quiet, and collected retrospection. I will have more to say about the writerly bonds and formal symmetries of these characters and their subcultural observations, but for now I want to dwell a bit longer with Malone’s tendency to enter and then exit gay life. After Frankie discovers his nonmonogamy, beats him up, and

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leaves him in shambles, Malone stumbles along West Tenth Street into the company of the trendsetting Sutherland, who takes him for a drink and then back to his apartment on Madison Avenue, promising a late night of “dancing at the Twelfth Floor,” a fictionalized site of bacchanalian excess of which Malone will eventually become a staple. But Malone does not take him up on that introductory promise, electing instead to remain at Sutherland’s apartment licking his wounds, sleeping away many weeks, and lying “as immobile on [the] sofa as a man recovering from some radical operation” (97). Although he eventually leaves the apartment to gather some belongings from Frankie’s, he remains holed up and “shut away from the city” (97–98) throughout the autumn months, venturing out only occasionally, including one regrettable trip home to Ohio for Thanksgiving, against which Sutherland warns him and the result of which, following intolerable queries about property and connubial prospects, is something like a final separation from a family that he no longer finds familiar (100). Even during the first couple months of winter, Malone “declined the many invitations to parties and dinners that Sutherland gave him; till one crisp February night he met Sutherland in the Oak Room” (103), after which he again becomes responsive to lusty stares and launches into a series of intense but impermanent affairs with men who appear as “replicas” (105) of Frankie, summoning Malone with their yearning beauty but also reminding him, again and again, that what he found most desirable in Frankie was that initial impulse of appetitive attraction rather than the possessive grip into which it calcified. Indeed, Malone’s bohemian transformation means both that he no longer cares about the material possessions, like a car, on which his family and mainstream America fixate, and that he no longer, despite investing considerable time and energy into honing his taut physique, considers his body or the bodies of others to be lucrative commodities available to and ownable by a limited number of well-heeled or well-endowed suitors. This ethical reorientation is also an affective one, for he “hated refusing anyone . . . and he was one of the few homosexuals in New York who went home with people because he did not wish to hurt their feelings” (90). But as I have been illustrating, if Malone has an anticapitalist tendency to give himself away freely, it is both counterbalanced and made possible by another tendency

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to disappear and to enter states, like the somnolent and sedentary one previously mentioned, akin to hibernation. While Sutherland can seem Malone’s antithesis, despite thinking he sees in his protégé a vision of himself “fifteen years before” (92), and while he does at times challenge Malone’s convalescent lethargy, on the whole he gives it a wide berth and enjoys the modest recompense of having a recumbent someone around at the end of the day to listen, if only passively, to his tales of erotic victory and defeat. In admonishing Malone not to travel back to Ohio for the holiday and then, upon his return, giving rueful acknowledgment to the disappointed feelings of alienation it was bound to spawn, Sutherland assumes something like a parental role. I mean “parental” in the very precise sense conveyed by D.W. Winnicott’s postulation of a “holding environment” in which the mother provides safe harbor not only for the child’s physical support and wellbeing but also for their fitful, furious, and frustrated attempts to escape it—their tempestuous tendency, to put it otherwise, to make or at least to want to make their entire world of support disappear. The “holding environment” is a resilient place or atmosphere for objectrelations psychoanalysis because it withstands and accommodates the antisocial desire not to be withstood and accommodated; it holds what detests being held and cushions the irascible impulse to crash out of life. I have been arguing throughout this book that queerness is nagged and nurtured by just such an inclination to go missing, and instead of regarding what may very well be the intractability of this tendency as a curse on queerness and the communities or cultures to which it might give rise, I have been trying to consider how queer people and queer cultures have made room for it, supported it, and even found ways to harness its power and appeal to the project of queer world-building. When Malone’s sexual appetite recrudesces and his domestic torpor of many months comes to an end, robbing his host of a reliable audience and companion, Sutherland responds not with accusations of ingratitude but rather with a knowing “sigh” and the simple assessment, “the heart is a lonely hunter,” which captures “perfectly” his awareness “that either of them could disappear at any moment, alone in the end, to pursue the superior call of love . . .” (105). The ellipses concluding that paragraph might be said to express the open-endedness both of the search for

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“love,” with an emphasis laid very much on the journey rather than on an ineluctable destination, and of Sutherland’s unconventional affection for Malone, which is never seriously tested or undermined by the latter’s extended absences and unannounced returns. Even though Malone is never exactly eager to go back to Sutherland after one of his affairs turns sour—Sutherland’s outrageous campiness being far from a perfect fit with Malone’s understated melancholy—he knows Sutherland will take him back in, perform a modicum of sympathy for his loss, and nudge him toward the future with new prospects of dancing and socializing. Thinking that if “Sutherland was happy without love . . . so could he be” (106), Malone learns from his mentor, despite their manifest dissimilarities, the nutritive compensations of friendship and the vital lesson that aloneness can be not only tolerated but also supported—and that, viewed somewhat differently, disappearance can be a tie that binds and a practice handed down from one generation to another, a legacy whose constitutive impermanence is inseparable from its endurance. The fact that Malone’s many stabs at love are not lingered with or spaced apart, with the exception of the Frankie episode, and that the narrator does not supply the amount of time that elapses between each of his disappearances and reappearances at Sutherland’s apartment, creates what might be regarded variously as a compressed, circular, or nearly absent temporality in the novel. There is definitely a sense of seasons changing and of a biotic mass migrating between its habitats—of debauched summers on Fire Island giving way to winters of dinner parties and indoor dancing—but at the scale of months and years events blur together to generate the impression of a looping life uninterrupted by signal events or transformative milestones. If the effect of this nebulous timekeeping is sometimes a numbing and exhausting repetition, which it most certainly can be for folks who remain with the herd yearround, it is also a spacious affordance, by the subculture described and by the form of the novel, for members like Malone to come and go, to separate and to be reabsorbed, if not exactly as they please then certainly as they need; and by not following Malone into each and every attempt at monogamous pairing, the novel cultivates a nonhomophobic variety of discretion and grants a considerable degree of privacy to its central character. Although the novel does not devote much space to Malone’s

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love affairs after Frankie, it also does not judge them or weigh them against his competing interests in playing the field and chasing down the next beautiful face, meaning that no particular credit or blame is assigned for the tiring repetition to either the domestic sphere or the disco counterculture. In other words, even as the novel uses Sutherland’s cynical but also sizzling voice, which finds multiple echoes in the epistolary exchange framing Wild Swans, to query the desirability of an enduring and all-embracing Frankie figure (the real Frankie, by the way, turns into a scene queen almost as sought after as Malone), it does not indict Malone in any serious manner for his serial and seasonal swerves between subcultural profligacy and what today we might call homonormative seclusion. My point is not that the novel endorses homonormativity—though every one of Holleran’s novels registers, often melancholically, its obdurate appeal—but rather that it explores and validates, in and through the figure of Malone, impulses alternating between protective seclusion and sociosexual immersion. And if the former impulse sometimes manifests as committed coupledom, it also manifests at other times as individual isolation or as a retreat into a platonic friendship that provides some relief from an otherwise languorous lockdown.

Not M(alone) In offering support to Malone’s disappearing tendencies, in part because he shares them, Sutherland teaches a lesson that I sketched in The Modernist Art of Queer Survival; namely, that whereas mainstream public health campaigns, like The Trevor Project, tackle suicidal impulses among queer people by discouraging them and reorienting their energy to aspirational pursuits and positive thoughts, alternative imaginings of gay public health dwell with them, encourage them, and find ways to make them the connective tissue of different kinds of communities and to incorporate them into ongoing, if also sometimes halting, attempts at queer world-building. Instead of conceiving suicide as a pointed and punctuated moment, queer culture has devised ways to stagger it, mete it out, and make it a constitutive aspect of remaining alive

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and associating with other diminished and diminishing presences. I am not suggesting that queer culture has perfected this practice or can lay exclusive claim to it, although I am acknowledging the critical and creative work required to sustain queer communities as HIV/AIDS both ravaged them and, later, left them to figure out how to negotiate its lethal history as part of their (still) homophobic presents and uncertain (given the resurgence of rightwing politics and other viral epidemics) futures. No doubt the recent turn to affect, and particularly to negative affect, in queer studies has to do with a gathering need to figure out what to do with all the lingering emotions of the worst years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in gay communities. And this need is intensified by the realization that these feelings cannot simply be wished or willed away, by political and amorous bonds that have formed between survivors and younger generations of queer people, by the persistence of HIV/AIDS among some of the most disadvantaged and stigmatized members of the queer and nonqueer global community, and by the pernicious afterlives of a genocidal homophobia/heteronormativity that today, at both a generalized and institutional level, diverts its gaze from the murders of trans women, the bullying of effeminate and tomboy kids, the desperate care needs of LGBT elders and persons with disabilities, and the forced mobilization of working-class bodies into service-sector scenes of coronavirus exposure. A key point that I did not make clear enough in my earlier work on this topic is that the queer project of making room for bad and backward feelings is not only about accommodating the acute social and psychological needs of queer people in the present or about figuring out how these needs can articulate with the needs of others so as to make disappearance the occasion of a supportive convergence in contemporary times. It is also about inhabiting profound senses of loss, mourning, frustration, and anger so as to keep the past near and, relatedly, to cultivate the ability to allow the past, in all its terribleness, to come close and to engage, both critically and compassionately, with present sorrow. In other words, to indulge suicidal inclinations so as to learn how they can be lived, tolerated, and shared—as opposed to ignoring, downplaying, or rerouting them such that they end up unanswered and accessible only in their most extreme forms—is to allow oneself to

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understand, or at least to try to understand, the extreme emotional states and straits of those who have come before, including people whose experiences of homophobia might very well have driven them to cliffs from which it would seem a miracle, by today’s standards, they did not leap. And while these connections might not always be salutary or salvific, in certain cases they might assuage the loneliness that contributes to suicidal impulses; which is to say, if people in the present are regarded by the would-be self-harmer as incapable of sounding the depths of their agony, perhaps people from the past, including some who are still alive, might be regarded less hopelessly. Along with this anterior inclination comes the possibility that there is a potent desire to feel the pain of the past, not only to connect with previous generations and to locate oneself within a specific history, but also to ground an identity that may very well be inseparable from the experience of injury. Again, I cannot help but think that the preoccupation with negative affect in queer theory, particularly among a new generation of scholars who lived through the worst years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic as children and teenagers, is the product of both the fact that injury and despair remain so historically proximate—so near the bone we are encouraged to call pride—and the fact that even today, counting all the gains in medicine and in law, queerness is experienced as a departure from expectations that can be, at best, accommodated and included within a dominant culture that never asks for it, never intends it, never imagines it, and never builds infrastructure to promote and greet its arrival in future generations. As Eve Sedgwick argues, we don’t try to grow kids up to be gay, effeminate, tomboyish, or, as Grace Lavery has recently offered as something of a corrective to Sedgwick, trans. And so to be queer today is still to feel, at least initially—and initial feelings amount to an affective anlage not easily altered or alleviated— wrong, off, bad, hurt, harmed, excluded, broken, deficient, lost, lonely, peculiar, funny, misunderstood, unseen, othered, unheard, unrepresented, uncounted, unexpected, unincluded, invisible, hypervisible, risky, undervalued, marginal, peripheral, targeted, ignored, selfish, unproductive, unsexy, hypersexual, unattractive, dangerous, destructive, immoral, amoral, gross, dirty, cursed, diseased, deadly, wasteful, wasted,

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wanton, wacky, mad, unhinged, delusional, immature, confused, abandoned, illicit, doomed, mistrusted, misunderstood, mistreated, tokenized, traitorous, uncivil, unpatriotic, uncelebrated, scrutinized, stigmatized, medicalized, totalized, brutalized, sensationalized, stereotyped, marooned, alien, unimpressive, vulnerable, alienated, unforeseen, unplanned, irremediable, irredeemable, hateful, hated, shameful, shamed, sinful, unfit, misfit, dubious, doubted, queried, interpellated, uninterpellated, insulted, abject, monstrous, indulgent, afraid, hesitant, reticent, malicious, unfamiliar, betrayed, overdetermined, indeterminate, uninvited, unsolicited, disallowed, objectified, unsympathetic, two-faced, two-sided, dishonest, fickle, flighty, unfuckable, lousy, lazy, limited, lethal, insane, stupid, stubborn, possessed, demonized, denigrated, denied, unheard, unfelt, untouched, disturbed, undisturbed, unloved, unlovable, swollen, shrunken, shrinking, secretive, disjointed, derelict, delinquent, panicky, accused, overstimulated, unstimulated, impatient, impassive, indecorous, disappointed, disappointing, egregious, disagreeable, unmanageable, backward, pathetic, bathetic, indescribable, undescribed, overprescribed, infantile, exiled, angry, anguished, angsty, maladjusted, unjustified, awkward, annihilated, nihilistic, nothing, and the list goes on and on. Of course, in the short, medium, and even long terms, some of these isolating and atomizing sensations can start to feel, particularly if supported by other forms of social privilege, edgy, exciting, engaging, energizing, and edifying. But for many queers, this conversion will never be complete and will never feel complete even after the process of coming out is long concluded. And part of what halts or compromises that conversion is the apprehension that even after the social shock, ambivalence, or rejection has worn off, what surfaces in their wake is a tepid tolerance or, sometimes worse, an overexcited affirmation that seems either phony or truthful only in its intensity—where the vigor of discomfort, disappointment, disapproval, and disgust lives on but is made to look like enthusiasm. As I argued in the Introduction, if a primary problem besetting queerness is that in most instances where it is not targeted for prevention or eradication it is instead unimagined and therefore not expected to appear, then it cannot be much of a surprise how constitutive disappearing tendencies are to queer subjectivity, particularly considering the failure of the United States, its government but

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also far too many of its people, to acknowledge the multiple ways in which their ignorance and negligence were accomplices to AIDS’s holocaust of gay men, trans women, immigrants, and people of color. To return to Malone, he is singularly distraught by the news, disclosed at Sutherland’s glamorous and gratuitous party in gossipy chatter that segues to the topic of repairing to the Everard Baths later in the evening, that an acquaintance named Bob “had jumped to his death that afternoon from a rooftop in the city” (225). Approached specifically about Bob’s suicide, Malone wonders . . . What had that twenty-three-year-old young man, whose blond beauty had caused even Malone to believe in the springs of his wasted youth again the day he saw him at the gym, done by dying? His face took on a sad cast as he spoke of the news that had put the whole island into shock, as shocked as it could be, and which, as he spoke of it now, made Malone’s limbs begin to tremble under his cotton shirt. That twentythree-year-old beauty who had his whole life before him; that boy from Idaho—who had slashed his wrists, and then his throat, and then hurled himself nine floors from the top of his apartment building to the steaming pavement below on the hottest of all hot afternoons just four hours ago in the city? What had he accomplished by that? . . . Of all the people Malone had listened to, had tried to help, he now felt responsible somehow for this one’s suicide; for he had spent many afternoons at the YMCA with him doing gymnastics. “Why didn’t I sleep with him?” he said. “When we’re all so terribly alone. The least we can do in this life is love one another . . . just a hug and a kiss . . .” (227–228)

Malone’s fixation on what Bob’s suicide has done or accomplished echoes the narrator’s observation, only a page before, that “in a country where one is no more than what one does (a country of workers) or the money one possessed, Malone had ceased, like us, to have any identity at all” (226). On these terms, the bohemian queerness embodied by Malone is itself already a breed of suicide insofar as it is a decided withdrawal from the characteristics that make a life count by conventional metrics. Having had one foot in that conventional world before metamorphosing

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into a circuit attraction, Malone cannot help sometimes subjecting the latter to the former’s values even while realizing that at a fundamental level the two worlds are irreconcilable and, compelled to choose, he would select the latter every time. But if Malone persists in weighing his life, and Bob’s, in traditional scales of longevity and productivity, he does so also in the form of a sad lament that no alternative mensuration exists, at least not prominently, for legitimizing the subcultural lives they lead and the goals they achieve on dance floors, under barbells, and in public and private sides of erotic exchange. As if to summon such a measurement and world into existence, Malone imagines the support he might have offered the struggling man not as financial or practical—like constructive advice or chin-up encouragements—but rather as the free gift of his own body ameliorating temporarily an acutely unbearable awareness of unspeakable aloneness. Far from one-sided or unearned, this gift would be the appropriate remuneration for the equally temporary present of unspoiled and promising youth that Bob’s beauty imaged for and inspired in Malone. In other words, Malone considers a different and thoroughly unprofitable sort of intergenerational inheritance in which the conviction of amounting to nothing—Bob’s life is worth nothing and Malone’s body, sold or given to so many without respect to qualification, counts for little—can be shared and made into something, not least a community held together, to the extent that it is, by men who continue to reappear to another and to provide the components of a familiar atmosphere, even when they exchange few words, learn little about each other’s backgrounds, and go missing for sometimes significant periods of time. Malone might exhibit some grandiose characteristics of a savior complex in this scene, but his poignant feeling of responsibility also means that, despite his coming and going and remaining ambivalent about his gay world, he cares about the health of its members and connects the behaviors of some, both what they do and what they do not do, to the wellbeing of others. Of particular concern to him is the extremeness of Bob’s suicide; rather than slash his wrists, slash his throat, or leap from a tall building, he does all three, harming himself so dramatically that his demise seems less calculated or premeditated than it does manic, frenzied, and possibly panicked. The added detail that he took his life “on the

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hottest of all hot afternoons” suggests a heat-of-the-moment decision, meaning that a timely intervention might have saved him and that, unlike Malone, Bob had not yet learned how to mete disappearance out in survivable doses. That Malone’s “limbs begin to tremble” when pondering Bob’s action demonstrates how viscerally he registers the story and how fused sex and death are in his mind, perhaps explaining why the only substitute he can conjure for suicide is erotic interaction; in other words, if Bob was hot under the collar and needing to get away, even needing at some level to be alone, he might have let off that steam, and come undone, in bed with Malone, whose minimal presence, reduced even to “just a hug and a kiss,” might have offered support to annihilative impulses that had seemed insupportable. What eats most at Malone, I am arguing, is the fact that Bob couldn’t apprehend his desire to disappear as not only something that could be fathomed by another but also shared and made the stuff of solidarity and sexuality. That this concern is as much communal as it is personal is conveyed both by Bob’s generic appellation—he could be anyone—and by the fact that so many of the men who speak of Bob’s suicide speak also of rushing off later to the Everard Baths, where quite possibly some of them will be extinguished by a fire even hotter than the boiling temperatures that supplied a spark to Bob’s self-immolation. Desire can be dangerous, Malone realizes, and the added detail that he has served as a fount of wisdom and advice for other gay men, a community center of another sort, reformulates his multiple disappearances as episodes of self-care; if Malone sometimes goes missing, that is, it is so that he can later show up, refreshed and even rejuvenated, for a community he never forgets.

Malone and Melancholia Worth emphasizing also in the passage cited above is the context of Malone’s ruminations. He is at a bacchanalian celebration intended, at least in part, as his engagement party to John Schaeffer, and yet in this scene he pulls away decisively to ask questions that are anything but frivolous. And the narrative pulls back with him, deploying free indirect discourse to render Malone’s thoughts as also belonging to the narrator,

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who on other late nights has received wisdom from Malone and whose commitment to writing them down imitates Malone’s own journalistic tendencies (Holleran 52). To put this otherwise, the prose style in this section performs my point that Malone’s recessive tendencies can, counterintuitively, tether him to his community, create something of a compact with other members whose presences he might sense only faintly, and work to safeguard the very scenes and social arrangements from which he pulls away. No doubt this vanishing inclination makes Malone a figure of melancholia, but his is an engaged, creative, and critical melancholia akin to the variety theorized by Giorgio Agamben in Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. Agamben departs from Freudian psychoanalysis’s understanding of melancholia as “the regressive reaction to the loss of the love object” and thinks of it instead as “the imaginative capacity to make an unobtainable object appear as if lost” (20). Where Freud regards the withdrawal of libido to be a primary symptom of melancholia, Agamben—rereading early work on the subject by Freud and Karl Abraham—posits it as “the original datum,” explaining that “if the libido behaves as if a loss had occurred although nothing has in fact been lost, this is because the libido stages a simulation where what cannot be lost because it has never been possessed appears as lost, and what could never be possessed because it had never perhaps existed may be appropriated insofar as it is lost” (Agamben 20). Only by cultivating the conviction that it has lost something can the libido, and the subject motored by his libido, orient itself to that something and apprehend it even in its obdurate unavailability. So yes, melancholia is a fixation of sorts on an object forever out of reach, but Agamben’s point is that by installing the object in the past, and in a previous grasp, melancholia pretends that it has once been had and might, by logical extension, be had again. But critical nuance is important here, since when I say “had again,” I do not mean “had again as it was,” because as Agamben insists, the object was never, empirically, possessed, and so the aspirational reclaiming of it, however soaked in a sense of impossibility, is actually an attempt to have it for the first time. And since the object was never possessed to begin with, meaning it was never known with any sort of visual or haptic immediacy or specificity, the act of trying to apprehend

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it, or of trying to describe exactly what it is that cannot be apprehended, is in fact a dissimulated effort to create and conjure it—not out of whole cloth, necessarily, but perhaps out of the residues and fragments of other experiences, acquaintances, and acquired knowledges. According to Agamben, “the lost object is but the appearance that desire creates for its own courting of the phantasm” (25), in which formulation desire lets something disappear in order to make it reappear (or simply appear) in a different register. Insofar as melancholy “confers upon [the object] the phantasmagorical reality of what is lost,” in part by “covering” the object “with the funereal trappings of mourning,” melancholy is an imaginative invention that “opens a space for the existence of the unreal and marks out a scene in which the ego may enter into relation with it and attempt an appropriation such as no other possession could rival and no loss possibly threaten” (20). By this logic, melancholy names not a hopeless retreat from the object but rather a particular “strategy” (20) for approaching it, imagining it, and keeping alive the sense of wonder and possibility that it evokes. All of which means, we must add, that the “it” is anything but a monolithic entity or quantity; it is rather an unspecifiable potentiality capable of morphing, transforming, and developing in proportion to the negative intensity of a melancholic investment made possible by an initial divestment, or “withdrawal,” from the world of objects—a disappearance into contemplative activity that masks an ongoing preoccupation with, and need to preserve and repair, what lies outside the self. Agamben’s reflections are particularly apposite in this chapter, because he traces modern melancholia back to the spiritual ailment of acedia, or sloth, that was said to run rampant among monks and other religious figures during the Middle Ages (3). Interestingly, Agamben contextualizes the outbreak of this sickness of the soul within the more famous pandemic of the bubonic plague, arguing that “during the whole of the Middle Ages, a scourge worse than the plague that infested the castles, villas, and palaces of the cities fell on the dwellings of spiritual life, penetrated the cells and cloisters of monasteries, the Thebald of the hermits, the convents of recluses” (3). Also going by the name of “tristitia (sorrow), taedum vitae (weariness, loathing of life), and desidia (idleness),” acedia troubled “the church fathers” so deeply that it came to be

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considered “the most lethal of vices, the only one for which no pardon was possible.” This “noonday demon” selected “its victims among the homines religiosi (religious men), assailing them when the sun reached its highest point over the horizon” (3). It is worth tarrying with Agamben’s rich description in order to appreciate both how the symptomology anticipates his more positive spin on the melancholic condition that he views as acedia’s heir and how it resonates with Malone’s condition of unorthodox monasticism in Dancer from the Dance. Agamben cites the following account of sloth from the writings of Evagrius Ponticus, a Christian monk, ascetic, and noted theologian: The gaze of the slothful man rests obsessively on the window, and with his fantasy, he imagines the image of someone who comes to visit him. At the squeak of the door, he leaps to his feet. He hears a voice, runs to face the window and look out, and yet he does not descend to the street, but turns back to sit down where he was, torpid and as if dismayed. If he reads, he interrupts himself restlessly and, a minute later, slips into sleep. If he wipes his face with his hand, he extends the fingers and, having removed his eyes from the book, fixes them on the wall. Again he gazes at the book, proceeds for a few lines, mumbling the end of each word he reads; and meanwhile he fills his head with idle calculations, he counts the number of the pages and the sheets of the bindings, and he begins to hate the letters and the beautiful miniatures he has before his eyes, until, at the last, he closes the book and uses it as a cushion for his head, falling into a brief and shallow sleep, from which a sense of privation and hunger that he must satisfy wakes him. (4)

Perhaps most striking in this portrait of acedia is the tension between the implication of idleness, on the one hand, and the abundant evidence of its opposite—a restless energy and irrepressible sociality whose lack of material productivity is made to sound like an absolute waste—on the other. Both alone and in the compelling company of his “fantasy,” the slothful believer cannot focus on his studies because he is attuned to the imminent arrival of a visitor. But rather than attribute the heightened sense of expectancy in this scene to foreknowledge of the visitor’s itinerary, the passage implies that it is instead the fantasy, or the frenetic

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activity of the sloth’s imagination, that produces the possibility of the visitor in the first place. This metaleptic maneuver foregrounds the power of the mind to bring close what it cannot, at least in that moment, enjoy direct access to—to such a creative extent that it can actually trick the ear into hearing the “squeak of the door” and the sound of a “voice.” Or maybe these noises do actually manifest in the auditory range of the sloth but are modified by the operative fantasy into signifiers of the visitor’s proximity. That said, the emphasis here lies on “dismay,” meaning that even though the sloth appears poised to spring into action at the first sign of an anticipated guest, in reality he is prepared to be disappointed, so much so that he does not make the extra effort to travel downstairs to certify that his “image” has not in fact materialized as “someone” at the door. Failure to show seems to be the point, for if the guest were to actually appear, he would inevitably fall short of a “fantasy” whose very reason for being is the absence of satisfying options at hand and the need to conjure a special someone or something not already inscribed in and by the books and pages that have come to feel increasingly lifeless and sterile. Fastening on this same material by Agamben and Evagrius Ponticus as part of an examination of “how memories of loss sited in the past may become occasions for the invention of idealistic futures” (175) among queer people, Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed emphasize that while the monk’s torpor “makes him inert before every activity that unfolds within the walls of his cell” (Agamben 4)—perhaps even cleaving him from his pious brethren—it simultaneously redirects him, imaginatively, to other “pleasant communities of brothers,” including “distant and absent monasteries” (Agamben 4) in relation to which he senses both a sharper affinity and an enhanced ability to supply assistance and camaraderie (Castiglia and Reed 183). What looks like regressive and antisocial behavior, then, is really a different sort of relational orientation—to past, future, and as yet unreal fraternal configurations. For Castiglia and Reed, “Agamben not only shows how melancholic ideality explains the transition from deprivation to vision so characteristic of queer creativity, he suggests as well the role in progressive imagination of eros and memory, which, by draping a desired object in the funereal garb of loss, manage to aspire toward and envision new

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desires, new socialities, new ideals” (182). In other words, it is precisely because these conjured communities are so distant, so seemingly beyond reach, that they can come to feel possible and inhabitable to the indolent but also imaginative individual who envisions for them no safe location within a hostile and conventional present. The antisocial queer, by this account, might actually be the queer who has hopes so high for their community that they refuse to settle for what is currently on offer; consequently, if they go missing from time to time, it is not because they abandon their community but because their community has abandoned its responsibilities to and lines of communication with posterior and anterior communities whose condition of possibility and survival is the creative investment of currently querulous queers. When the slothful monk “proclaims himself inept at facing any task” and “afflicts himself with being always empty and immobile” (Agamben 4), he is really turning away to face the unreal (or the ideal, as Castiglia and Reed would have it) and emptying himself of the dogma and doctrine that would come between him and the world at which he aims. Disappearance is here the prerequisite for accessing another world and allowing it to appear, however remotely and evanescently, and although acedia’s attendant restlessness makes a prolonged snooze impossible, its tendency toward dozing, daydreaming, and repurposing the book as a makeshift pillow means that sleep—as we will explore in Chapter 4—is an opportunity to dream that other world while temporarily exiting the present one. What surfaces in the melancholic’s reveries is so often an unreachable but urgent vision, and as Castiglia and Reed point out, “Agamben’s description of the phantasm as a visual image, at once recollected loss and projected fantasy, suggests why so many versions of idealist memory . . . take the form of art, video, and film” (180). In Dancer from the Dance, Malone appears time and again as an apparition to behold. The narrator of Wild Swans begins by averring that “[Malone] was just a face I saw in a discotheque one winter, but it was I who ended up going back to Fire Island to pick up his things” (Holleran 15). This chiastic commencement literally sandwiches the narrator between Malone and his possessions, rendering him responsible in spite of the fact that “Malone was hardly a friend—something much more, and much less,

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perhaps” (15). Precisely because Malone was not a friend in the conventional sense—they moved in different circles despite overlapping on multiple dance floors—the narrator struggles to understand exactly what it is he inherits, answers for, and feels he must put in order, and it seems crucial that the opening scene of this negotiation is the island from which Malone disappeared and on which gays of many stripes gathered annually in one of their more extreme manifestations of separatism, marginality, and utopian experimentation. This assembly’s precarious peripherality is reinforced by and echoed in Fire Island’s description as “the last island of the three” and as “nothing but a sandbar, as slim as a parenthesis, enclosing the Atlantic, the very last fringe of soil on which a man might put up his house, and leave behind him all— absolutely all—of that huge continent to the west” (Holleran 15–16). Both a place to hunker down and a zone of abandonment, this “Dangerous Island” (dangerous because you could lose your heart, your reputation, your contact lenses) allows queers to “put an even more disdainful distance between themselves and America” (16). Of course, Fire Island is technically part of the United States and Manhattan is also an island, but as Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens note in their work on the devaluation of archipelagoes in both American imperialist discourse and in the discipline of American studies, ideologies of exceptionalism work to continentalize some islands—to integrate them into the nation, where mainstreaming requires mainlanding—and to decontinentalize others (Roberts and Stephens 14). Where Roberts and Stephens interrogate, with illuminating effects, the equation of decontinentalized islands with insularity, the men who flock to Fire Island seem to cherish its sense of isolation and inwardness—its restorative remoteness from a mainland whose continental cohesion presupposes heterosexuality and whose geographic variety and sprawling size belie a disappointingly narrow provision of acceptable masculinities. If migrating to the island every summer is primarily a matter of sun and sex, it is also the occasion of a vital disidentification with nationalist normativity and of a performative enactment of a different sort of nation, a queer nation, that attaches to and detaches from the menacing mainland as a “parenthesis”—an afterthought for so many but, for the queers who arrive there every summer

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depleted by winter and by the withering repercussions of inhabiting a land hostile to difference, a replenishing interlude and digression made all the more precious and special by its “slim” nature. And the narrator returns to Fire Island to collect Malone’s things during the leanest of times, the off-season. For Malone, the depopulated off-season was the ideal time to visit, and although he regularly appeared at the height of summer, he insisted “people are fools to go back after Labor Day” as he preferred “the shore in autumn when the crowds had vanished” just as “in the winter” he preferred “dancing at five in the morning” after the revelers had thinned (Holleran 17). Inhabiting the scenes of gay culture at low tide—such that he conforms neither to the temporal norms of mainstream culture nor to the queer temporalities departing from and contesting those norms—Malone is an out-of-synch character whose disjointedness enables him, the novel, and the narrator to live both in and astride the gay world, to engage and enjoy it but also to enlarge its horizon of possibility (recall that Malone could become “something much more” by dint of not being the narrator’s close friend) by never coinciding with its current configuration or confusing its moments of crowded cacophony for a constitutive condition. To think in pandemic terms, Malone learns and models how to participate in gay culture without being fully in it, where “in it” denotes less a merely physical presence than it does an amplified presence staged at peak times. To the extent that pandemics depend upon corporeal proximity, their tactical moderation depends upon staggering arrival times, spreading bodies out, and appreciating cultural staples at periods of minimal congestion. The benefit to be had is the curtailment, if not elimination, of the pathogen, as well as the opportunity to see and to experience the common subcultural or countercultural world in a different context, from an unexplored angle, and at a lower decibel level that might permit the participant to continue to move through the world without growing insensible to other worlds and other permutations of a queer sexuality unquenched by the near and now. Malone’s identification with an island that is “nothing but a sandbar” distills the novel’s alignment of nihilistic tendencies with creative potentialities—where a melancholic feeling of “nothing” is understood, in Castiglia and Reed’s terms, as the precondition for tuning in to a

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radical if also remote something—and it also echoes Gloria Anzaldúa’s reflections on what she calls “the four basic roles” of “being, of acting, and of interacting in the world” as a person and in particular as a queer person of color: “bridge, drawbridge, sandbar, and island” (147). For Anzaldúa, queer subjectivity is about alternating between these roles, sometimes serving as a bridge or “mediator” to forge coalitions with others, sometimes drawing up that bridge when conciliatory contact becomes unbearable, occasionally shrinking to an island to fortify and to preserve a self in particularly “reactionary times,” and at many other moments assuming the function of a sandbar, “a submerged or partly exposed ridge of sand built by waves offshore from a beach,” that reaches toward other bodies while still supplying the fragile integrity of aloneness and the reprieve that comes, depending on conditions, with being able to disappear beneath the waves of social tumult (Anzaldúa 148). What Anzaldúa finds most evocative about that fourth metaphor is that “being a sandbar means getting a breather from being a perpetual bridge without having to withdraw completely,” in which scenario “the high and low tides of your life are factors which help you to decide whether or where you’re a sandbar today, tomorrow” (148). These descriptions resonate with Malone’s alternatingly social and antisocial tendencies, his capacities for sometimes extending generously and gloriously into the gay world, as when he offers a sympathetic shoulder to friends damaged by love’s labor and homophobia’s trauma, and for sometimes receding from it, like a tide going out. What Anzaldúa’s analogy captures so exquisitely is the fact that even when the sandbar goes below the water and thereby becomes invisible and unavailable for immediate contact, as it often does during a stormy season, it is still there and still composing itself for future use. But the moment and stability of its reappearance are not guaranteed, and so a sense of ongoing hazard necessarily attends its existence. I have been arguing that practices of self-abatement, retreat, and even cancellation are both deadly and vital components of queer culture, queer history, and queer subjectivity, so much so that a disappearing impulse can function for some as the strongest tether to queers who have gone before. Anzaldúa registers and admits of this tension when she follows her description of herself “slowly turning into a sandbar” with the startling

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confession—set off syntactically by a dash that works to visualize the slim terrain to which she precariously, but also gratefully, clings—“the thing is that I have a fear of drowning” (149). As previously mentioned, there is considerable fear that Malone drowns on the late night he plunges into the bay, and the novel’s refusal to confirm or deny that outcome suggests, at some level, that being uncertain is essential both for permitting Malone the disappearing disposition he embodies and, relatedly, for not relinquishing the sense of queer possibility for which he melancholically stands and takes a stand—or rather, a dive. As Sanja Bahun argues in her own riff on Agamben’s riff on melancholia, “the simultaneous denial and affirmation of the object in melancholia has a powerful, if indirect, social role . . . it is a symptomatic sign of an existing ‘rupture’ in society as well as a critical corrective to the ‘wholeness’ of society” (38). If Malone’s monastic and melancholic inclinations serve as something like a prayer for both a mainstream world inimical to queerness and a queer culture that has not yet realized all its possibilities due in part to multiple social and biological threats from within and without, then Wild Swans’s inability or unwillingness to pinpoint the result of Malone’s perilous plunge serves to maintain that gap between the real and the unreal, the world as it is and the world as it might be—that prayerful posture that for Malone is synonymous with ritual absence. Fusing the melancholic with the messianic, the author of Wild Swans permits Malone the unclear departure, destination, and (re)arrival that were always his calling card, and in doing so he is able to avoid a stale morality tale and to instead make Malone’s end, which is not to say his death, the beginning of a hazy and promising vision that had all along been Malone’s and been Malone.

Malone’s Legacy I earlier said, in introducing Castiglia and Reed’s point about the importance of visual representation to the queer melancholic imagination, that Malone is often depicted as a sight to be seen. Examples include the interruption of his initial biography by the narrator’s confession that, even before Malone had fled his closeted and bourgeois life commuting between Connecticut and his office in New York

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City (this is before his even more cloistered time in Washington D.C.), the narrator once “saw” him while working as a cocktail waiter at a party “crowded with corporate lawyers like himself” (62). The narrator also recalls, of a later moment in their informal acquaintance during the early disco years, that he “used to see [Malone] standing on the floor with a detached look of composure on his face while Sutherland danced brilliantly around him” (108–109). Of an even later moment, once John Schaeffer has come on the scene and Sutherland’s plot to profit from pairing him with Malone has been hatched, the narrator remembers “for a second, in glancing around, I found myself looking straight at Malone,” the consequence of which is his noting “later that morning in my journal” that he had been made to feel like a “protagonist” in a “historical novel” who “suddenly meets the eyes of Christ” and is “forever changed” (52). Indeed “the magic of the room” had “consisted, I realized then, not of the music, the lights, the dancers, the faces, but of those eyes, still, and grave and candid, looking at you with the promise of love” (52). And so Malone is not only the object of a seeking vision, he is also the source of it; he is at one and the same time what catches the narrator’s eye and what transforms his vision so that he is able to put queer beauty into words and to make his erotic optics the occasion of a “melodramatic” (52) artistic moment. That his visual encounters with Malone are narratively muddled—the rapturous gaze on the dance floor preceding the encounter at the cocktail party despite coming after it in historical time—contributes to the messianic and melancholic temporality I have been charting and suggests that the narrator’s ostensible search for Malone, launched by the admission that “he was just a face I saw in a discotheque one winter,” is really more of a pilgrimage in search of that transfixing and transformational vision with which Malone is gratuitously associated. If Malone’s stare “forever changed” him, then what he pursues, à la the melancholic investments of Agamben’s monk, is not a known quantity or stable identity but rather a dalliance with the unreal, or a “promise” of it, and the return of a (sense of) possibility that would go missing if Malone’s conclusion, or his literal reappearance, were the paramount point. In this regard, he is very much Malone’s erotic heir and echo, for remember that in chasing

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after so many “replicas” of Frankie, at the expense of the actual and electrically angry Frankie, Malone was attempting to reoccupy what seemed most elemental, experimental, and unexplored in their initial union. To become Malone’s inheritor involves learning to accept and even to appreciate a state of affairs in which, to quote the rumor that Malone met his demise in the conflagration at the Everard Baths, things can go “up in smoke” (241). In this book’s Introduction, I explained how Jose Muñoz imagines a right to smokiness as part of a disidentificatory maneuver by which the queer subject inhabits the world while concomitantly obtaining some distance from it and contesting its present configuration (Muñoz 34). Muñoz’s formulation rhymes with Agamben’s insofar as it posits a “lost object of identification” that necessitates not a straightforward mimesis of the past, which would amount to the kind of conservative nostalgia that currently animates any number of populist regimes, but rather a creative conjuring in the name of, and with a nod to, a past that can never be fully reclaimed both because it never actually was, in any straightforward fashion, and because it was surrounded and layered by plumes of possibility—revolutionary or maybe merely minor and nonconforming energies—that render it noncoincidental with itself and thus anything but apparent or unproblematically there for the taking by an heir apparent. The narrator experiences this ambivalent inheritance as he wanders, collecting some of Malone’s former possessions as he goes, through the house where Sutherland’s now infamous party took place: I felt a guilty pleasure I have always known in places the crowd has departed—a dormitory room on graduation day, a church after mass, bungalows by the sea when the season is past. There was something mute yet eloquent about such places, as if they were speaking a very old tale of loss, futility, and peace. Post offices in small towns, late at night . . . (22)

With those ellipses designating what remains ineffable in this experience—what cannot be said in part because its “eloquence” resides in its silence—the narrator conveys the searching creativity of the

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melancholic imagination. By visiting these spaces after their normal inhabitants have left, he is able to imagine them otherwise and to transform them into the occasion of a lack whose reparative gesture he could try to supply, if he were so inclined, but that in this moment he opts to prolong so as to enjoy both a reprieve from the usual bustle that defines these spaces and an opportunity to listen, at the lower volume, to a story that might otherwise never be heard. In this case, the ellipses describe a trailing off that is also a tuning in, a relinquishing of voice that allows other narratives to continue, even those whose primary message is that the desired end, like Malone, is ultimately unreachable. But as with so many other expressions of futility in the novel, the intimation of bereftness is offset by the productivity of the consciousness that registers them and, in doing so, lends amplitude to emptiness—a compensatory, and even sometimes restorative, effect achieved, in no small part, by first persuading us of how evocative emptiness can be. And as you will recall, this penchant for relaxing and ruminating during downtimes and in depopulated spaces also characterized Malone, who never understood why his gay companions fled so speedily from Fire Island after Labor Day. I have been treating the narrator of Wild Swans as Malone’s heir, and I will continue to do so as I bring this chapter to its conclusion, but given the retrospective orientation of the novel’s opening as well as Agamben’s, Castiglia’s, and Reed’s insights into the creative process of the melancholic imagination, it is worth considering the extent to which the narrator invents and sustains Malone through his own withdrawal from a world he finds lacking. And given the narrator’s social placement among the working-class, Puerto Rican, and Dominican waiters and bar staff at the various recreational establishments haunted by Malone, it is worth pondering the degree to which his cautious approach to Malone and delectation of the scenes and spots Malone has abandoned instantiate a racial melancholia whereby whiteness, with all its tyrannical privilege, is unavoidably allowed at times to function as an aesthetic ideal, but whereby that same idealization can give way to the sorts of rage and aggression necessary for criticizing and dislodging whiteness in the erotic imagination. If this interpretation is plausible—if, that is, the narrator autogenerates his own ambivalent ancestry—then Dancer from the Dance

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might be understood as a metacommentary or metaperformance of this very same artistic contrivance, the consequences of which are a version and a vision of gay lineage, community, and subjectivity as matryoshka dolls or as a seductive string of erotic reveries and oneiric investitures whose forward and backward thrusts are as much about displacement as they are about desire. As D.A. Miller explains in a recent meditation on watching Visconti’s cinematic adaptation of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice during coronavirus lockdown, gay desire has a long history of keeping its obsessions at a distance for a litany of reasons that include shame, scandal, incrimination, and pestilential pandemics. For Miller, and for so many others who have found their libidos waxing during lockdown in response to visions of beauty and then waning upon the realization of the damage that close contact with that beauty could wreak, Aschenbach’s fearful fixation on Tadzio—needing to be near but dreading, as in the elevator scene, getting too near—feels more like a survival strategy, particularly given the text’s subplot of a cholera epidemic, than it does a scopophilic fetish. Aschenbach has a way, Miller argues, of “lingering” in Venice and “lingering” on Tadzio, where that “frequentative” verb—“lingering”— denotes an action “intensified by repetition” and, etymologically speaking, a “lengthening at length” whereby Aschenbach’s longing is extended by and coextensive with the space or “lag” he maintains between himself and his blond beauty. Miller goes on to characterize Aschenbach’s cautious orchestration of proximity and distance, aided by Visconti’s brilliant cinematography, as a “saraband” and as a “dance of distance” whose aim and effect is an “eroticization of avoidance” that involves waving when the gesture cannot be seen and mouthing “I love you” when the words cannot be heard. If the success of this erotic choreography is at one and the same time its certain failure—if, that is, the choreography’s coming together has everything to do with its performers remaining, tantalizingly, apart—then in fact the ability to know the dancer from the dance is not only possible but crucial. Which is to say that Miller’s analysis, published at a time when the length of the coronavirus pandemic is not yet known, when new variants necessitate potentially endless booster vaccinations, and therefore when distanced lingering is one of the only safe ways of licensing and lengthening desire, serves the

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important reminder that queers have been thinking in terms of public health for a long time and that their epidemiological inclination, displayed in Holleran’s novel and Mann’s novella, has become inseparable from their erotic imagination. In addition to the cruisy array of avoidance measures practiced in scenes and situations of close physical proximity, one of the main methods queers have devised for managing the libidinous lag described so lusciously by Miller is, to return to Agamben’s alignment of artistry and melancholy, the craft of composition and correspondence. It is worth unpacking the fact that in the opening pages of Stanzas, before he arrives at “the noonday demon” and makes specific claims for the creative potentials of acedia and melancholy, Agamben thinks more generally about the relationship between writing and knowledge. First explaining that “European poets of the thirteenth century called the essential nucleus of their poetry the stanza, that is, a ‘capacious dwelling, receptacle,’ because it safeguarded, along with all the formal elements of the canzone, that joi d’amor that these poets entrusted to poetry as its unique object,” Agamben then questions what exactly that special object is and alleges that “poetry possesses its object without knowing it while philosophy knows its object without possessing it” (xvi–xvii). What he means, in a Platonic vein, is that while the poets are able to “enjoy” their object through their beautiful representation of it—a representation that is not, however, the actual object—the philosophers know something, in all “seriousness,” about the object but cannot enjoy it because they do not know “how to represent it” (xvii). The result is a poetry without a “method” of knowing and a philosophy without a “proper language” for enjoying, meaning that “the west” suffers from a “scission of the word” and stands urgently in need of “rediscovering the unity of our fragmented word” (xvii). Rather than suture this wounded word by proposing a poetry that would know a positive something or a philosophical language that would be able to enjoy a positive something, Agamben introduces a third writing practice, “criticism,” which “to appropriation without consciousness and to consciousness without enjoyment . . . opposes the enjoyment of what cannot be possessed and the possession of what cannot be enjoyed” (xvii). In other words, criticism “points . . . toward a unitary

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status for the utterance,” but it achieves this unification in a negative register—a dialectical reconciliation at the level of method, where criticism “neither represents nor knows, but knows the representation,” that is also a decisive nullification, or at least displacement, of the original object. But for all his efforts to delineate a third way, as it were, out of and through the poetry/philosophy impasse, Agamben absorbs and retains (even as the title of his critical innovation) the “stanza” associated with poetry, arguing that “what is secluded in the stanza of criticism is nothing, but this nothing safeguards unappropriability as its most precious possession” and, further, that each of the essays in his book “traces, within its hermeneutic circle, a topology of joy (gaudium), of the stanza through which the human spirit responds to the impossible task of appropriating what must in every case remain unappropriable” (xvii–xviii). Criticism, then, sublates poetry and philosophy, preserving valuable qualities in each while simultaneously splicing them into an artistic approach whose impossible end, representing what is known to be impossible, is the means by which the impossible remains apprehensible as impossible—that is, as not squarable with or conformable to the here and now. If the stanza is the most spacious affordance grantable to the impossible, and if the stanza is also synonymous in some way with joy, then Agamben seems to be suggesting, and then later confirming with his subtle meditations on the critical and connective tissue between melancholy and eros, that there is pleasure to be had in mapping the lineaments of, and making multiple rooms for, objects not meant for the taking. Agamben’s insistence that his critical stanzas safeguard a precious “nothing” echoes the many nothings sounded in Wild Swans and in Dancer from the Dance. Recall the island to which Malone clings that is “nothing but a sandbar”—also precious in its nothingness—and recall too that Malone, having renounced his bourgeois commitments and embraced a “bohemian” lifestyle, “ceased . . . to have any identity at all” and became, in his own person, a kind of nothing who accorded no commodifiable value to his (incalculable) beauty. And because he regards himself as amounting to precious little, Malone is able to make room for the feelings of nothingness and the annihilative impulses that beset and overtake others, in no small part because he has also learned to inhabit

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and draw inspiration from rooms that have been vacated and whose emptiness is mistaken for meaninglessness by the unappreciative crowds. Although it isn’t clear that Malone has time to create a journal entry documenting his regret over Bob’s rash suicide, his thoughts are recorded by the narrator, who follows after Malone in so many ways, including in the practices of basking in abandoned spaces and of furnishing stanzas, or little rooms, for disappointments, lost objects, fleeting impressions, and missed opportunities. This preoccupation with what did not transpire, what slipped away, and what could not, to cite Agamben, ultimately be possessed is Malone’s most “secluded” possession, and an homage of sorts is paid to it by the author of Wild Swans, who writes in one of his letters that he is “completely, hopelessly gay” and that he is committed to fictionalizing the “failures, that tiny subspecies of homosexual, the doomed queen, who puts the car in gear and drives right off the cliff! . . . The fags who consider themselves worthless because they are queer, and who fall into degradation and sordidness!” (Holleran 10). But far from the melodramatic car crash this description might seem to advertise, the failure that his narrative subsequently delivers is a rich and rewarding one, and its ethical impulse is revealed in his narrator’s admissions that Malone “lived perhaps in my memory” (26) and that, when Malone was nearby, “we wished to keep him at a distance, as a kind of untried resource, a reward we should have in our secret hearts. We wanted to be loved by Malone, with this egotistic detail: that it would be an exclusive love” (116). The point of encountering and becoming exposed to Malone is to fail, and it is only by keeping him at a certain and seductive distance, while simultaneously believing that the distancing is all his doing, that he is able to be enjoyed for precisely what he cannot, ultimately, provide. To the extent that Malone realizes no beauty will ever replace Frankie because nothing can replace an exquisite memory, the narrator realizes that to have Malone would be to lose him. In having him, the narrator would be forced to relinquish an exclusive hold on the impossible ideal he embodies—an ideal rendered sensuous when he is present but also sensuously memorable when he is, for no matter how long, agonizingly absent. But as I have been arguing throughout this chapter, Malone not only teaches us how to enjoy what we cannot have, he also teaches us how to

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write about it—and writing, as the most vital of compensations, is the means by which we stay in touch with the unreal and appropriate, as Agamben says, what must in the final instance remain unappropriable. A slight weakness of Stanzas, I think, is its neglect of the novel form in its discussion of the relationship between poetry, philosophy, and criticism. If an essay can practice criticism, as Agamben argues, why can’t a novel? By placing Malone at so many formal removes—a character in a novelwithin-a-novel, framed by an epistolary exchange, cut from the reflections of a narrator whose primary encounters with him were passing glances—and by also thematizing Malone’s absences as a constitutive part of his elusive appeal, Dancer from the Dance enjoys what cannot be confidently possessed and possesses what cannot be confidently enjoyed and, what is more, it allies this melancholy method to a specifically queer eroticism for which the creative avoidance and deferral of the object are intimately, ethically, and epidemiologically related to the construction and conservation of queer countercultures. The object’s disappearance, whether temporary or prolonged, is the necessary precondition of the community’s continuation, and what the form of Holleran’s novel accomplishes so delicately is the management of Malone’s distance— keeping him at bay, even sending him out into the bay, in order to keep him and so much else alive. You will recall that the epistolary correspondence that begins and ends the novel devotes considerable attention to Malone’s uncertain whereabouts. One way to formulate this focus is to say that the letter writers had to send Malone away in order to have something to talk about, just as the narrator of Wild Swans needed Malone to go and stay missing in order to install and appropriate him at the level of memory and to begin the rummaging through his possessions and former haunts. One of these haunts is a bar, now mostly vacant because of the off-season, where the narrator, upon seeing a “friend who had come into the room and its ghostly light,” asks, “where did you first see Anthony Malone?” (29). If Malone was once a shared vision, he is now a shared reflection, and he continues to forge community even in—or better, precisely because of— his absence, which had all along been a key component of his riveting presence. The occasion of letters, a journal, and even a full-length novel that then generates more letters, Malone is in many ways the name given

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to writing’s embrace of solitariness and its necessary violation of that solitariness in the form of its outward address. In an interview from 2007, Andrew Holleran comments that when he used to leave New York City for Florida—the same southward migration made by one of Dancer’s correspondents—he would write letters to his friends: “It was the time before computers and people would write seven, eight page letters and going to the mailboxes was really an exciting thing.” One cannot help but think of the narrator’s enjoyment of “post offices in small towns, late at night” (22), where the pleasure of appearing where things have disappeared and a quiet and lonely stillness has now settled is counterbalanced by the reason for being there—to see if anyone has written you or to post a recent batch of letters. When Malone wades out into the bay off Fire Island, he says to the speechless narrator, “tell [Sutherland] I’m going out west, tell him I’ll write” (240). Sutherland dies that same evening of a drug overdose, and so we cannot be certain that Malone did not post him that promised letter. What we can be certain of is that the narrator took that promise seriously and made it his own. He wrote alone, of Malone, and recomposed the community that once gathered around Malone. He wrote what might be regarded as a very long love letter—many, many pages that linger over Malone, bringing him near while simultaneously lengthening the length, to quote D.A. Miller, between them. To those of us trapped in coronavirus lockdowns, quarantines, and less extreme schemes of social distancing, he serves the vital reminder that physical separation can be the occasion of new forms of connection and erotic imagination. What might appear on the other side of our collective disappearance? For all we know, it could be Malone!

4 A Flattened Protagonist Sleep and Environmental Mitigation in Lydia Millet’s How the Dead Dream

In conservation biology, “the set-aside” (Sotherton 259) designates a compromise between environmental preservation and economic development. In exchange for setting aside a piece of land for the protection of a vulnerable or endangered species, the developer or farmer is allowed to proceed with a project, be it the extraction of resources from proximate land or the construction of residential or commercial property upon it. Often referred to as “mitigation” (“Strengthening Implementation of the Mitigation Hierarchy”), this practice requires consultation with scientists who perform studies in order to anticipate and prevent potential negative impacts. The practice is controversial both from the developer’s perspective because it can be quite costly and cause delays and from the conservationist’s because, even with the best environmental intentions, it entails habitat destruction, fragmentation, species relocation, and inevitably incomplete information about the threatened species’ ability to adapt. Mitigation aims to contain a vulnerable species in order to protect it, but containment comes with its own risks, including the possibility of the species refusing to remain or being unable to thrive within its newly defined parameters.¹ The logic of the set-aside is fundamentally technocratic insofar as it makes the primary cause of ecological destruction, human intervention, the simultaneous source of its remediation. To set aside is to compartmentalize or to believe that humanity’s expansionist desires and economic ambitions can be

¹ For a rundown of mitigation’s limitations with regard to the conservation of kangaroo rats, the species Millet chooses to showcase in the novel, see Tennant et al., who emphasize, five years after the novel’s publication, how precarious relocation schemes can be. Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. Benjamin Bateman, Oxford University Press. © Benjamin Bateman 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192896339.003.0005

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accommodated and cordoned off from a natural world with which they have historically been in tension. Pragmatic and certainly preferable to the type of unchecked development touted by the Trump administration as it slashed environmental regulations, the set-aside nevertheless maintains a fantasy of human separateness and exceptionalism that fails to reckon with the human’s and the nonhuman’s fundamental entanglement with the world around them. To write a novel sensitive to environmental issues is to risk perpetuating the logic of the set-aside by alternating didactic commentary on specific threats to nature with a conventional plot of a character’s development and realization; granted that a nuanced work can also render the cultivation of ecological awareness through which a character grows into a fuller consciousness of herself. Take, for example, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012), in which Dellarobia Turnbow’s education in climate change and monarch butterfly disappearance helps her to recognize the sexist shackles placed on her creativity. But to the extent that the form of such a work maintains a boundary between its protagonist and the degraded environment she only sometimes visits, it merely mitigates human expansion rather than thoroughly questioning its viability in the age of the Anthropocene. In other words, a text like Kingsolver’s furthers a faith in the capacity of the bildungsroman to accommodate ecological sensitivity, whereas a strand of thought such as Timothy Morton’s “queer ecology” would deem such faith little more than “cruel optimism,” to borrow Lauren Berlant’s term, destined to disappoint the natural world and, eventually, the humans and other creatures whose futures are intertwined with and dependent upon it.² In this chapter, I turn to another environmentally attuned contemporary novel, Lydia Millet’s How the Dead Dream (2007), whose plot ² Although recent work in the environmental humanities is rich and varied, it converges on the proposition that humans can no longer be viewed as external to their environments but must instead be regarded as embedded in them. See, for example, Stacy Alaimo’s thinking on exposure as a fundamental and humbling condition of humanity that puts it in constant exchange with other environmental agents such that the environment can no longer be conceptualized as a stable backdrop for heroic human agency. Alaimo’s insights are exciting because they emphasize not only the sacrifices—of sovereignty and exceptionalism—that must be made to arrest and abate the violence of the Anthropocene but also the pleasures to be found in growing closer to a host of previously ignored or subordinated nonhuman and nonliving agencies.

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contains a protagonist engaged in a set-aside conservation scheme but whose form gradually works to undermine the possibility of human and animal compartmentalization. I argue that the novel performs an unraveling of species separateness by beginning with ecological set-asides that over time become unsustainable and bleed into the subjectivity of T., an abbreviated central protagonist who by novel’s end moves from being peripheral to his natural environment to becoming deeply embedded within and promiscuously penetrated by it, compromised in his masculinity and curtailed in his development. In doing so, I demonstrate the capacity of literary form, not merely storyline, to engage in environmental critique and to envision alternatives to the rapidly deteriorating present. T. becomes a crossroads between human and nonhuman worlds as he increasingly takes an interest in vulnerable creatures, including an aged coyote with which his car collides, the dead body of a girlfriend killed prematurely by a previously undiagnosed heart condition, a mother retreating into dementia, a friend confined to a wheelchair, and an array of critically endangered and extinct-in-the-wild animals he visits in zoos and other protected locations. In close proximity to these vulnerable creatures, T. recognizes the destructiveness of his selfish individualism and hypercapitalist ambition—obsessed with money as a child, he had grown into a rapacious developer of fragile lands—but rather than use his newfound insight as fodder for his personal development, the novel abandons him to it, rendering him coincidental with a profound precariousness he can no longer set aside. T.’s coincidence with, abandonment to, and embeddedness in a precarious planet represents a situation of danger, to be sure, but the novel also frames it as a prolonged rest and as a reprieve from the productive imperatives of capitalist activity and neoliberal self-development. In keeping with its title’s inclusion of “dream,” the novel links its environmentalist critique with a subtle revaluation of soporific (in)activity.³ T. begins his bizarre flight from normative conduct by breaking into ³ In his recent history of sleep in the novel, Michael Greaney points out that even though E.M. Forster, in Aspects of the Novel, counts sleep among the five “main facts in human life” and even asks, ‘why should the [novelist] not understand or reconstruct sleep?,” he ultimately “does not dwell on this issue and it’s not long before Forster has lost interest in his own question” (9). My work builds upon Greaney’s insistence that sleep matters critically in the novel form.

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zoos, but eventually he wants little more from his illegal intrusions than to sleep in close contact with critically endangered animals, partly as a sympathetic response to their boredom but also as an attenuated expression of a planet exhausted by nonstop human activity. Pursuing Jean-Luc Nancy’s observation that the sleeper “coincide[s] with the world” (7), I argue that the planet enjoys restorative reprieve only when its creatures rest, meaning that these creatures achieve reciprocity with their world and with one another only through the ritualized disappearance sleep requires. As Jonathan Crary has argued, “sleep is an irrational and intolerable affirmation that there might be limits to the compatibility of living beings with the allegedly irresistible forces of modernization” (13), implying that sleep—and the world that desperately needs its creatures to sleep—is, in the final and most important instance, “irresistible.” Environmental degradation has gone hand in hand with the erosion of sleep, and this twofold crisis is no coincidence. With less time for repose, contemporary populations engage in more unsustainable activity. As Crary documents, neoliberalism produces an increasingly “24/7” experience of wakefulness, including longer and irregular work hours, heightened attentiveness to media stimuli, repetitive management of virtual avatars and identities (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.), and the elimination of darkness from urban zones. With insomnia and its pharmaceutical palliatives on the rise, people are struggling to wind down and go under. This struggle further coincides with difficulty both in making do and in reproducing life under late capitalism. Lauren Berlant writes of the “slow death” endured by the working and nonworking classes in neoliberal economies—for whom life is a protracted period not of thriving but of wearing out to the tune of stagnant shiftwork, endless and unsubsidized caretaking, and the toxic nourishment of cheap fast food (“Slow Death . . .”). An important dimension of this extended demise is the increasing unavailability of good rest. Out of joint, these somnambulists symptomize and aggravate planetary precarity, using unprecedented levels of resources even as they find their own resourcefulness constantly tested, retested, and unrewarded. As David Rosnick and others have demonstrated, those longer work hours, particularly long in the case of the United States (3), make a major contribution to climate

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change because they entail increased resource consumption and carbon production both on the job and on the way to the job. As sleepless humanity loses its rhythms, circadian and otherwise, it comes to reflect what Dipesh Chakrabarty flags as a hallmark of climate change: the interruption and arrest of the Earth’s natural cycles. Reflecting on the historical and epistemological challenges posed by the concept of the Anthropocene, Chakrabarty notes that the geological impact of anthropogenic carbon production goes beyond extreme weather events (204–205) to include the cessation of weather cycles that, though capable of extreme manifestations, nevertheless provided some temporal predictability to phenomena such as droughts, floods, blizzards, tornadoes, and hurricanes. Warm Christmases, soggy summers, spring cyclones, stationary heat domes, unyielding fogs—all of these displace the notion of weather as something that can be weathered through faith in seasonality. What if summer never sleeps, rain never rests, and winds never slumber? Crary contends that “the scandal of sleep is the embeddedness in our lives of the rhythmic oscillations of solar light and darkness, activity and rest, of work and recuperation, that have been eradicated or neutralized elsewhere” (11), and Nancy wonders “how to sleep in a world without a lullaby, without a lulling refrain” (39)—a question that How the Dead Dream takes up at extended length. Although Nancy’s bereft reverie does not consider climate change specifically, it invites more than a rhetorical connection between the disappearance of sleep and the waning of the seasons, which are both dependent upon and now dangerously abandoned by a rhythm no longer discernible. The restoration of repose is at odds with the activity bias also of progressive politics and revolutionary praxis, exposing their complicity with an Enlightenment rationality built upon the denigration of stuporous states (Crary 12). Sleep has a long history of associations with quietism, ignorance, and complicity. Individuals deemed insufficiently alert to social problems are told to wake up; dreamers (particularly of the diurnal sort) are mocked for having their heads in the clouds rather than the streets; and somnolence is conflated with the thoughtless stupor induced by advertising, television, and other monsters of mass culture. Today people boast about how little sleep they take or need, often while

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touting exercise and nutrition regimens that enable them to work longer and harder, such that extended or intermittent absences from worldly engagement come to appear not as an essential requirement but as an occasional indulgence or, more frighteningly, as a sign of disability needing physical and psychological intervention. This chapter does not aim to encourage passivity of the political sort, but it does work with Millet’s novel to probe the underappreciated solidarities to be found in prostration rather than productivity. These associations emerge between creatures in mutual need of repose and between the individual and a set of social experiences, encounters, and impressions whose digestion and crystallization depend upon the memory-work made possible by sleeping and dreaming. Ostensibly inert and unproductive, sleep is actually the site, research shows, where memory “consolidation” occurs and where long-term memories are made (Stickgold). In sleep and perhaps also in dreams, the individual incorporates the interactions of the day into enduring consciousness, forging temporal and intimate connections and thereby counteracting, I would add, the amnesia and individualism threatened by consumer culture’s steady diet of novelty and excitation. Because sleep provides the occasion to process and imprint, it is also the means by which meaning is gleaned and forged; it is a critical scene for interpretive activity too often considered the exclusive property of the waking mind. The point is not to instrumentalize sleep along utilitarian lines—to convert it into one more biometric for neoliberalism to optimize and administer—but to recognize it as a practice every bit as active as those for which it is made to serve, disingenuously, as a foil; and it must be added that the activity sleep performs might often look and feel more like passive resistance or like a disidentificatory declination, to think again with José Muñoz, whose power alarms in no small part because of others’ inability to determine precisely which worlds the sleeper visits and imagines when he snoozes. Treating sleeping and dreaming as yet two more modes of the “perish-performative” theorized throughout this book, in this chapter I come closest to approximating Eve Sedgwick’s provisional claim that “while explicit performatives can often be seen to do the work of Althusserian interpellation, the peri-performative is the more characteristic mode of attempted disinterpellation” (55). Although

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disinterpellation might sound liberating—as in, let’s wrench the subject from the ideological systems in which they are enmeshed—it has to be remembered that it is in fact the illusion of a self-propelling subject that grounds interpellation in the first place. And so the periperformative resistance, if we can name it that, resides not in the rehabilitation of a powerful individual but in a re-enmeshment of them in a world they have been fooled into thinking they can rise above; it resides in overturning the fictions of species separatism and human exceptionalism. By re-embedding T. in ecologies he thought he could subdue, and by undoing his efforts to cordon off and compartmentalize not only at the level of plot but also at the level of the novel’s structure, Millet establishes that literary form can, in subtle yet powerful ways, carry periperformative and perish-performative force. Millet’s novel, an outgrowth of her work as a conservationist and an extension of her fictional oeuvre’s pursuit of a “macrosocial” subjectivity encompassing “larger mysteries of the world” (Warner), leverages sleep in the service of a sympathetic bond between T. and an array of vulnerable creatures. It reimagines sleep, moreover, not as a concentrated activity to be set aside for a single chunk of the day—a now standard formulation that Benjamin Reiss’s recent history of sleep, Wild Nights, traces to capitalism’s “organization of labor” in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (8)—but as a mode of subjectivity better suited to ameliorating or, at least, slowing the rate of planetary exhaustion. Sleep becomes one of the means by which Millet pauses and slows the growth of her protagonist, flattening his body and his affect in order to gradually minimize his impact on a world that cannot handle him in full. By the end of the novel, I will demonstrate, T. is brought into radical coincidence with vulnerability, including a threatened tapir, which his own foreshortened name could represent, such that the preservation of his distinctive identity dissolves much as, in states of slumber, we often become other people, inhabit other worlds, and become strange to ourselves even while lying physically in states of relative inertia. In other words, How the Dead Dream questions multiple permutations of set-aside logic in its de-development, its progression from bildungsroman to a form that suggests a condition of what we might call “living and sleeping among.” Millet’s rejoinder to mitigation measures is

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ultimately not to reject them absolutely—after all, mitigating activity rhymes with aspects of this book’s logic of disappearance—but rather to supplement external mitigation with the radical mitigation of character, individuality, masculinity, and species specialness, and to delineate a commons for this other kind of mitigation within the already existing, and fundamentally transspecies, rhythms and requirements of somnolence. The young T. found in the opening pages of the novel possesses all the aspiration of a bildungsroman’s central character.⁴ Taking inspiration from the founding fathers of the United States and successful businessmen, he “[clings] to a vision of forward motion” and “[tells] himself every day of this latent capacity for eminence among humans” (2). Even in college he continues to think of himself as inhabiting a “lucky moment of forwardness” propelled by “the promise of a realized self” (21). Comfortably middle class and lacking for little, T. initially meets with few obstacles on his path to prosperity. He is the consummate capitalist, hoarding his allowance to the absurd degree of carrying coins in his mouth, engaging in shady money-making schemes, and precociously monitoring the stock market. By the time he finishes college, he is already well-off, a figure of self-assured privilege fit for a novel by Ayn Rand. Indeed, Millet could be justly accused of generating a stock character, with a one-dimensionality captured by his initialized name, whose downfall is made wholly predictable by his easy ascent to affluence. The narrator offsets this impression only slightly by describing T. as “guilty” of “having private gluts of feeling,” of “holding his secrets close,” all while “seeming the whitest of the white bread,” and of “being perfectly opaque and seeming transparent” (14). The possibility of interiority is granted but never explored in the opening pages, suggesting not simply that T. is a private person who keeps his feelings close to prevent others guessing and to gain the upper hand, but also a tremendous difference between external and internal development. Those “private gluts of ⁴ I am referring here to a traditional understanding of the bildungsroman as a “novel of formation . . . that focuses on the spiritual and intellectual maturation of its protagonist” (Boes 1). As Tobias Boes argues in his critique of the genre’s coherence and complicity with nationalist agendas, “harmony and teleology are among the most-often enumerated qualities of traditional Bildungsromane” (3).

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feeling” echo the hoarding of capital, establishing an affinity between the possession of wealth and the possession of a unique and individualized self. By denying T. internal complexity or, rather, merely hinting at it, the novel both questions the value of and disrupts the neoliberal ideologies that subtend a self acquired, stored up, and made personable and marketable by its vast reserves of emotional currency. After a mere thirtyfour pages chronicling T.’s “development” from child to adult, in mostly deadpan narration that does not stray far from the superficiality of his attachment to money and success, the novel sets his development aside, a move that anticipates and mocks his later set-aside scheme; the novel becomes a tale not of gains but of enervating losses. Having implanted T. in Los Angeles at the promising beginning of his career as a real estate developer, the novel abruptly shifts, in the opening of its second chapter, to his running over a coyote on a trip to Las Vegas. The experience rattles T. He drags the injured animal, its legs ruined, out of the road and sits with it as it exhales its final breaths (38). He tries to face this scene of destruction by reaching back for adolescent memories of similarly gruesome highway scenes as well as by rethinking the coyote’s “red insides . . . all exposed” as nonetheless “firmly contained” (37). This thought sequence registers again the fantasy of sovereignty, of a self less “shored” than hoarded against its ruins (Eliot 39), as if T.’s acquisitiveness has been a panicked and preemptive response all along to the prospect of death. If the dead coyote is T.’s and the novel’s first glimpse of ecological precariousness, it is one they can set aside, with relative ease, certain of the species’ robustness; they can also rationalize this unfortunate creature’s death by re-imagining it as that of an aged beast close to death. The novel immediately returns to T.’s life, but this time to the returning memory of his traumatized mother, which threatens further to arrest the momentum of T.’s forward ambition. Walked out on by T.’s father, she appears unexpectedly and in distress, subsequently moving in with her son and taking over many of his domestic affairs. Another strike against T.’s autonomy, his mother’s arrival subverts his plan to appear to others as if he had “sprung fully formed from the background of commerce” and loads him with “personal freight,” which risks making him seem “childlike” and “beholden” to something “frail” (45). Here the

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novel’s feminist sensibilities emerge, but it also names vulnerability— specifically the primary vulnerability of the infant’s attachment to his mother—as one of the first things humans are taught to set aside, to sequester from public life, and perhaps even to remove from consciousness altogether. T.’s fantasy of emerging from commerce’s womb erases the dependency he conflates with weakness and renders personal development synonymous with capital development, such that growing up can become entirely a matter of growing one’s stock portfolio. What further intrudes on T.’s delusion of self-sufficiency is the revelation that his father walked out because he realized he was gay and felt as if he had been living a lie. He describes his pre-departure life to T. as a “dream so real it felt like [I was] awake,” yet also phantasmatic: “I was a ghost. I wasn’t really there. It was all, I don’t know, some other guy’s life I stepped into by mistake” (50–51). Although it is only later, when T. tracks his father down in Key West, that he confirms this obscure confession as a matter of repressed homosexuality, in this early scene he is forced to confront the workings of normativity. Compulsory heterosexuality means his father’s life was scripted in advance, prohibiting him from dreaming his own future and instead conscripting him to appear in someone else’s dream—or an ideology’s dream. To find oneself in someone else’s script without understanding how one got there evokes Louis Althusser’s thinking on the mechanics of dominant ideologies. Ideology “tricks you into thinking you’re wide awake,” to borrow the father’s language, an important reminder that wakefulness or the fact of being awake should not automatically be considered the domain of the real “you” or the only state in which progressive or emancipatory activity can take place. T. must consider the implications of this revelation for his life—is he also a ghost going through motions made to appear as the fodder of fulfillment?—but most immediately he undergoes a return to his childhood and to a memory, from which he draws psychic sustenance, of his father reading him a bedtime story in a soft and soothing voice. Inside this picture book is “a family of beavers, and they lived in a dam. Inside the dam it was warm and golden, and the beavers ate their dinner at a round wooden table” (51). Comfortably soporific, the picture book stages a scene of nourishment, of actual eating but also of profound care—of an

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environment sealed off and set aside from danger. His father’s voice supplies the rhythm of a lullaby, except that now T. realizes that “sitting there on the side of his bed, reading the book about the beavers who were warm in their dam, had been no one” (51). The dam broken, the relaxation and subsequent sleep T. once relished now seem falsely conjured by a pretend father who admits, “I wasn’t awake when [your mother] had you” (51). If T. cannot trust the conditions of his own sleep or the sincerity of the lullaby by which he was laid to rest, how can he be certain he is alive or, less dramatically, anchored to the world? Benjamin Reiss points out that concentrated sleep is not the only sleep practice specific to Western modernity; so too is the imperative of isolated sleep, the mandate that each person sleep alone all through the night, a practice born of anxieties about illness and contagion but also of concerns about class status and normative sexuality. Although nineteenth-century Westerners fretted about the acts of self-abuse children might perpetrate in their own beds, they worried more about the temptations and sexual educations risked by children sleeping in close proximity with adults and with each other. The “masturbating child” nonetheless constitutes one of Michel Foucault’s four figures of modern sexuality, a problematic social element requiring regulation, investigation, and disciplinary procedures (May 89). Amid particular worries that co-sleepers from outside the family, including caretakers, would seduce the child into masturbatory activity, the insulated or set-aside nuclear family became “the necessary condition for healthy childhood sexuality” (May 89). Inside the home of the nuclear family, particularly among the bourgeois and wealthy classes, it became increasingly important that members sleep individually. Reiss speculates that the demand to sleep alone, reversing centuries of historical practice as well as evolutionary development, may explain the struggles parents have in putting children down for the night as well as some forms of adolescent and adult insomnia. In the memory T. conjures, he would no doubt have had to sleep alone after the conclusion of the beaver tale, but that loneliness is now redoubled, retroactively, by the discovery of his father’s apocryphal, apparitional presence. Soon after this distressing discovery, he begins allowing his dog to sleep with him at night, and “in the deepest part of

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the night he woke up and listened to the dog breathe, the regular pace of the breathing” (54). Now in touch with a lullaby he can trust, for his dog tells him no lies about love and safety, “he lay with his arms and legs frozen, imagining paralysis: he tried to feel the gradual freezing, the numbness that crept up into him” (54). If this imaginative activity, first practiced when he was a child, is a way of learning to feel and trust sleep, it is also an interspecific identification with the coyote whose legs he paralyzed on the drive to Las Vegas. Becoming a child again, he also becomes the coyote, thanks in part to a co-sleeping dog who provides the background lullaby in which this experimentation is made safe and part of an animal ecology. In scenes such as this one, the novel undermines the logic of the set-aside even as it continues to maintain some separation between T. and the nonhuman world. Accommodating himself to “numbness” (54) comes to seem proleptic after the devastating losses T. soon incurs. His mother attempts suicide; his girlfriend Beth dies while trying to assist his ailing mother; and then his mother develops early-onset dementia, eventually forgetting her son altogether. After Beth dies, T. goes into hibernation, barely eating or stirring from bed, and when he eventually rouses and returns to work, he considers himself “flattened” (101) by his loss, though faintly appreciative of his mother’s rising to the occasion to take care of him. Resting and sleeping symbolize T.’s flatness, but they also function as a melancholic identification with the dead, such that going under provides the occasion for exhuming all that has been lost, however temporarily. Scholars across many fields, including AIDS activism and postcolonial studies, have recently rescued melancholia from its clinical subordination to mourning, the latter traditionally viewed as healthier for its rehabilitative spirit of working through grief, arguing that melancholia’s stubborn refusal to part with the lost object can serve as a potent protest against the ongoing oppressive conditions that produced the loss in the first place.⁵ T. can hardly be described as oppressed, but in his earlier reenactment of the ⁵ Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, for example, argues that the innovative practices inaugurated by certain queer and queer-associated folks to contest and circumvent the cultural prohibitions against grieving queer life during the AIDS era should inform the equally urgent project of mourning without fetishizing lost and disappearing species, habitats, ecosystems, and microbial worlds (331).

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coyote’s paralysis, he begins to evince an environmental melancholia in which the introjection or, in this case, re(dis)embodiment of the slaughtered animal marks a growing inability to set it aside. Because this reenactment happens at the edges of slumber, it draws sustenance from dreaming and from a situation of human prostration in which animals cannot be killed and the planet can enjoy, in the human form, a period of nonviolent repose. But the dead also dream through T. here: he becomes the conduit of their ghostly reminder of a history of damage that continues unabated. At this point of mounting losses, T. visits, for the first time, the mitigation project required for his real estate development in the desert. The novel gives this set-aside scheme its own narrative section—set off from prior and subsequent events—for T. to meet the biologists who hope that on a “parcel of land” (123) spared by the subdivision, some critically endangered and precariously relocated kangaroo rats will build nests in the “abandoned burrows of pocket gophers” (124). T. begins to feel “receptive” and to have an “inner buoyancy” when he meets the youngest denizens of this well-intended project—“baby rats called pinkies” (though technically kangaroo rats are not rats)—but immediately after this promise of interior development is broached, it is followed by T.’s learning of the scheme’s failure. All the pinkies perish, and although some adult individuals remain, the biologist worries that “with so few individuals in a population there would be genetic drift” and “the gene pool [would be] too small for long-term survival” (125). T.’s “sense of well-being flees,” and despite his best efforts to convince himself that his perturbation stems primarily from the loss of Beth, he is overcome by a “tentative” and “suspicious” sensation as if “someone had slyly robbed him and only now was he suspecting it” (125). This sensation runs deeper than Beth and manifests as a brief vision of the “momentum of empire” (recall his preoccupation with forward movement) leading to and in turn being disrupted by the “crust of the earth . . . shifting and loosening, falling away and curving under itself ” (125). Having learned from a biologist that “the weight of ants . . . was equal to fifteen percent of the weight of all land animals,” he dreams that night of “the ants abandoning ship” and opening up “yawning sinkholes into which oceans and mountains poured” (124–125). Dreaming the

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Anthropocene, in sleep T. can think geologically and recognize the internal links between humans, kangaroo rats, ants, oceans, and mountains, their complex imbrication and inability to be compartmentalized. T. has not been “slyly robbed” of any of his material possessions; to the contrary, he is starting to sense that the acquisitiveness and accumulation that have defined his life-course, cleaving him from other lives and consolidating him into a sovereign self, have cost him in ways far more profound than his capital gains. But T. does not actually think about or recognize these phenomena with any sort of potent agency or intention—the hallmarks of sovereignty. As Jean-Luc Nancy remarks, “I fall asleep, that is to say, ‘I’ fall, ‘I’ no longer exist, or else ‘I’ ‘exist’ only in that effacement of my own distinction” (7). Arguing that the “I that sleeps can no more say it sleeps than it could say it is dead,” Nancy concludes that “it is another who sleeps in my place” (5). This “who” sounds all too human; the other who sleeps or at least rests is everything else I am not disturbing or only minimally disturbing when I cease the wakeful activity of commercial capitalism and lighten the touch of my carbon footprint. Anthropocentric insight materializes, that is, not in a state of productive ambition or self-possession but rather from within an experience of profound arrest and diminution. By having T. envision the planet’s precariousness in sleep and in thought sequences described as “tentative,” the novel declines to make human genius, innovation, entrepreneurship, or lofty ambition the antidotes to environmental degradation. The problem is not simply that technocratic solutions posit human activity as the solution to harms caused by human activity, but that they also obscure less flashy, exciting, and profitable remedies contained in the idea of doing less, sleeping more, and imagining, without grandiosity, human growth as something other than acquisition and hyperactivity. Human agency does not disappear in this alternative vision, but it does contract to take less potent and self-promoting forms. Before undergoing his many losses, T. at one point contrasts the “hard vectors of self”—the statesmen, builders, and barons with whom he identifies— with those who give themselves over to “coasting,” who “imagined and felt and enjoyed everything and ended up going nowhere because they needed nothing more than to be” (57). In that wording, the repetition of

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“and” also builds to nothing and thus annihilates the idea that all agency must be powerful and purposive. Anne-Lise François calls such diminished agency “recessive action” (1) and Lauren Berlant writes of “lateral agency” (“Slow Death . . . ,” 759) as characterized less by propulsion than by drifting, coasting, and spacing out. As Crary explains, however, capitalism demands the “incapacitation of daydream or of any mode of absent-minded introspection that would . . . occur in intervals of slow or vacant time” (88). What these thinkers have in common with How the Dead Dream is an interest in how the pressure to self-actualize risks complicity with capitalist systems of domination and displaces, through sheer might, humbler and more hesitant modes of self-bearing that would serve an imperiled planet better. Although the set-aside proves inhospitable to the kangaroo rats, it becomes a resting place for T. Almost exactly midway through the novel, the narrative, physical, and psychological dividing line between T. and his environment finally gives way, with the simple sentence, “he kept going back to the set-aside” (129). To keep going back to the set-aside is to contravene the purpose of the set-aside, be it failed or successful. T. returns because he “was permeable there, oddly inseparate from the dirt and the dry golden grass” (129). His return, now a complete reversal of the onward and upward logic that had governed his younger life, includes scaling a hill so that he cannot see the road, then imagining a world without roads, a world where people go nowhere or at least not far. From this position, he recedes into his surroundings, including “whirlpools and washes of soil and the mass of the clouds, dispersing into each other and leveling distinctions” (130). The very place he had intended to sequester in order to distinguish himself as both a valuable developer and a conscientious conservationist becomes instead the site of his undoing and absorption into an ecology whose multiple nonhuman agencies refuse to separate or be set aside. The narrator remarks on the “danger” of this situation to human exceptionalism, commenting that “for the purposes of ambition . . . the rest of being . . . should not be allowed to penetrate and divert you from . . . yourself ” (130). In this formulation, the self is understood as an entity set apart from its natural environment, one whose development requires, in fact, a determination not to be penetrated by the conditions of its existence (and T.’s lack of determination

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eventuating in multiple penetrations is why I include him in a study of “queer” disappearance). While the narrator’s perspective, perhaps meant to conjure T.’s earlier thinking, suggests the continued possibility of sovereign self-assertion, the image of T. prostrated on the ground visually contradicts it. He was “laid out to receive it”—where “it” renames the “rest of life” but also gathers all life into a bundle of non-distinction— “laid out by the force of gravity itself,” and as “sediment accumulated on him” and “buried him gradually . . . more and more he was silted in” (130). Buried alive. T. again becomes a figure of environmental melancholia, a living memorial to the many creatures killed by human encroachment, including the kangaroo rats. These miniature animals were meant to fill the abandoned gopher holes, but now T. attempts to occupy the space abandoned by the kangaroo rats—a melancholic identification that enables his abandonment to geological forces from which he can no longer set himself aside. T. is not dead; he has only gone under. This going under operates as a figure of sleep through which the planet dreams the possibility of its threatened continuation. One could argue that a kind of development of character does occur here or at least a change in character, but what I hope to have demonstrated is that T., becoming ever truer to his truncated appellation, does not so much gain a self as lose one through undergoing a series of losses that leave him exposed to the environment. He is “laid out” rather than built up, and while a profound sadness inheres in his bereft state, this development is not narrated as a sinking into a deep affective reserve through which he could be diagnosed as depressed, delusional, or distinguished in his anguish. More flattened than fulfilled, he becomes ecological not through a specific set of commitments or sentimental attachments to environmental causes but rather through the suspension of the agential mode of subjectivity that produces such commitments and attachments. Marta Figlerowicz has recently plumbed an alternative archive of “flat realism whose aim is to reduce our expectations about how much any particular person’s self-expression interests or affects anybody else” (4). How the Dead Dream contributes to this literary project of “decenter[ing] our forms of self-regard,” but it ties the “necessary finitude” of character to the oneiric imagining of sustainable cohabitation (4–5).

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Writing about “ecological lessness,” including an “environmentalism without environmentalists,” Sarah Ensor explores the limitations of identitarian environmental movements that demand their followers be more present, conscientious, driven, responsible, and ethically committed (156–157). These personal appeals galvanize some people, to be sure, but they also sustain the idea of the human as something sovereign, special, and set apart (not to mention upright and on red alert)—a steward capable of saving the planet through heroic action—and neglect the many ecologically sensitive practices people may engage in without strong intention and ethical focus. Ensor draws on the work of Leo Bersani and Samuel Delaney to “develop a disanthropocentric ecological imagination” (158) inclusive of such practices as gay cruising, in which a depersonalized “ecological entanglement” (151) occurs which is, in Bersani’s words, “less invasive” (149) than more socially approved forms of intimacy. Cruising permits and cultivates an attentiveness to one’s surroundings with an aim not to make a lasting imprint or to leave a legacy but instead to lightly notice minor movements, gentle fluctuations, and unexpected encounters; it offers minimal self-presence and lightness of being through which ecological embeddedness can be ambiently sensed if not directly understood. Ensor’s insightful description of cruising is of a piece with the depersonalized intimacy explored in How the Dead Dream, but I am not convinced that every cruiser is as traceless and receptive as Ensor would hope. Cruising requires mobility and can, in certain instances, carry on and on, demanding extended periods of wakefulness and alertness; it can also involve a fixation on particular things—a glance, a crotch, a stolen moment—that impede a broader ecological view or a sense of an entangled whole. I wonder about the extent to which some cruisers struggle to sleep and find the temporality of their desires influenced by the same 24/7 commercial economies in which workers find themselves increasingly exhausted and overburdened. If the point of a “disanthropocentric ecological imagination” is to glimpse depersonalized intimacy, then a more reliable jumping-off point (or falling-off point, to invoke Nancy) might be sleep, where one loses oneself, finds common ground with others who sleep (i.e., most creatures), and, through memory processing, gives one’s imagination the time and

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opportunity to assemble itself and, perhaps later, to reassemble or disassemble the human. In melancholic response to the kangaroo rats going extinct, T. begins visiting and, later, breaking into zoos. He is particularly drawn to zoobound individuals of species that are either critically endangered or extinct-in-the-wild. On his first visit to a desert museum, he “watched a bear sleep, and in the lull of the sun and the heat and the stillness felt like dozing off himself ” (132). The polysyndeton in that sentence conveys T.’s new tendencies to coast and cast about, to sleep in the day as well as in the evening. Later that night he breaks into the zoo to catch a glimpse of “its rarest animal,” a Mexican gray wolf, which had been “asleep” earlier in the day, but in doing so he becomes “tangled” in a wire fence and lacerated by barbs, catching only a “flicker of eyes” from the elusive wolf as it scampers away (137). There is something undeniably cruisy about this scene—the “wolf” enjoys a long history in gay lingo— but the emphasis is both on T.’s failure to objectify the body of the wolf and on his finding himself, in lieu of the critically endangered animal, to be embodied and vulnerable, caught by barbed wire. He admits to himself, after swallowing aspirin for the pain, that the “joke” was on him (137) and that the desire for “animals to turn to you in welcome” is as ridiculous as it is anthropocentric (138). “Instead of looking at the wolf as an animal he never knew and never could,” he thinks, “he had fallen into the trap. He had wanted it to lick his hand and lope along beside him” (138). Yet when T. discovers the wolf ’s “aloofness,” its desire to be left alone, and its inclination toward “self-containment,” he strongly identifies with it. While this language might suggest a return to set-aside thinking— even as it subtly criticizes the overarching containment of the zoo structure—it relates T. to the wolf through a common condition of being in “possession” not of a particular personality or special purpose but rather of an “obscurity” to themselves and to others (138). In other words, what T. comes to respect about these critically endangered animals, whose location in the zoo sharply distances and differentiates them from members of their species found or once found in the wild, is not just their difference from him but also their reciprocation of his opacity to himself. This condition of non-sovereignty amplifies the humility with

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which he approaches other creatures since to possess a sovereign self is to know what that self is—not to find it, as he does here, obscure. Another way to say this, and to connect the larger point to the Introduction’s discussion of the limits of performativity for delineating gendered and sexualized subjectivity, is that so much of who and what we are does not appear to us for cogitation or contemplation, and so an unappreciated source of commonality with other creatures might very well be that which we cannot declare and cannot disclose—that which, in disappearing or retreating, constituted us as being outer reaching in the first instance. After breaking into enclosures at other zoos, including that of a Sumatran rhinoceros whose complex “song” (like Nancy’s lullaby, discussed earlier) has been replaced by little more than a “sigh,” T. loses the thrill of observing rare animals and instead makes “sleep . . . part of the routine,” deciding to “let himself go” (166). Although he understands this urge to sleep as part of the “boredom” he assumes caged animals must feel, sometimes excruciatingly, he also experiences it as a form of “surrender” in which “it was up to the animals what happened” (167). He always sneaks out before the feeders come in the morning—another somewhat queer and cruisy element accentuated by T.’s zeroing interest in heterosexual dating—but despite being “awkward” and “uncomfortable” (167), he finds unique repose in sleeping in the presence of these other creatures. Sometimes they move closer to him in the night, but in most instances it is a situation of sleeping alone together that reinforces his earlier sense of obscurity to himself and others, which he shares with the zoo animals. In sleep, he is able to find refuge in and even intensify this profound obscurity, whose partial source is an ecological entanglement that can never be fully grasped or appreciated. His surrender to sleep in these scenes is simultaneously a surrender to the animals. If sleep is something we surrender to from the earliest age, then perhaps it is the condition of our ability to surrender to other forces and agencies as well. If we lose the ability to sleep or find it an unbearable scene of vulnerability that we try to resist or control, then perhaps we lose the ability to act with surrendering humility toward a planet whose survival depends not least on our willingness to go under and to be obscure. Nancy asserts that “sleep itself knows only equality” and that

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“everyone sleeps in the equality of the same sleep—all the living—and that is why it might seem strange to assert that sleeping together is such a high-risk undertaking” (18). As Reiss documents in his history of sleep, sleeping together has not always been thought risky, and so when T. slumbers with the animals, enjoying their propinquity if not their intimacy, he resists the modern idea that each sleeper should have their own private quarters—a notion, it must be added, that has led to the construction of larger houses and the destruction and displacement of still more wildlife. In sleep, he becomes the animals’ equal, reserved for nothing better and meant for nothing grander. He acknowledges that he cannot “pretend to the animals’ isolation,” but he does sense a connection between their aloneness and his loneliness following Beth’s death (166), where having fallen in love and then lost it reenacts the surrendering and fall necessitated by sleep. “Loss is common” to all creatures, T. reflects, and therefore does not distinguish him or make him uniquely receptive to the grief of others (166). But as Judith Butler remarks in Precarious Life, loss’s commonality might be exactly what gives it ethical ground (22–23). I do not want to dwell on this point except to note the difference between the losses of others about which Butler writes— friends, lovers, family—and the loss of the self to sleep that perhaps prepares us for these losses, permits us to process them, or at least provides a pause from their acute and abiding anguish. T. feels a sad communion with these animals, but he also learns from them the value of the less personal and more minimal variety of intimacy with which Bersani and Ensor associate cruising. In the case of his disabled friend Casey, he learns the lesson too late. Unable to allow their friendship simply to have an erotic charge, he has sex with her and only later recognizes that he had “believed he was doing her a favor” and “was giving more to [her] by [his] association than [she was] giving to [him]” (187). Like the rhinoceroses and the elephants, Casey does not need T. to be a savior or rescuer; to the contrary, she enjoys the minimal intimacy his acquaintance initially provides, never questioning where he goes at night or why his apartment is littered with locksmith tools and news about endangered animals. Casey is content for their relationship to go only so deep. Where he fails with Casey, he succeeds with his mother. He accepts her dementia for what it is and recognizes that she

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remains his mother even when she cannot provide the intensity of intimacy and support she once did. No longer recognizing him, her eyes become as unrevealing as the eyes of the Mexican gray wolf, yet even in their obscurity they confirm something of T. that ties him, however precariously, to his past and to a community of similarly obscure creatures (214). More fully aware of his non-sovereignty, he thinks of his mother, “you did not have to know yourself to be fully human” (214). What has changed here is not just his conception of the human, no longer radically distinguishable from other creatures, but also his valuation of the “full”: to be fully human, given the environmental damage already done, may be far too much. Having recovered his dog after his loathsome former friend and business partner Fulton kidnapped and abused her, leading to one of her legs having to be amputated, T. goes to bed (yet another scene of sleep) “satisfied . . . to know that in the dark around [him] other warm bodies slept” (185). The emphasis here falls on togetherness and mutuality, not intense intimacy or recognition, and as he drifts off, he wonders if the creaturely togetherness of his house, now recomposed by the return of his dog, “could even be the whole world” (185). If this is a utopian wish, it is also, perhaps like all utopias, atopic: a vision of creatures sleeping together but also, insofar as they have collectively fallen into sleep, existing elsewhere, perhaps on a planet that can survive and sustain them. Eventually, T. gets the chance to widen his world of co-sleeping. At novel’s end, after his resort in Belize is destroyed by a hurricane, T. embarks on a boat ride into the jungle in hopes of catching a rare sight of an elusive jaguar. But after his local guide dies of a heart attack and he succumbs to exhaustion and dehydration while attempting to steer himself, unsuccessfully, back to the mainland, he winds up semidelirious and without resources on the jungle floor. This concluding scene suggests a nod to Joseph Conrad even as it poses darkness as the one reprieve we are offered from planet-eroding productivity. T. begins to wonder what might have happened to him but also, by extension, to humanity if he had spent his life imagining “not the lights but the spaces between them” (234). As he proceeds to “forget the buildings and the monuments” and to relax into the “softness of dark,” he contemplates the “earth before and after those cities” as “the dream of a sleeping

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leviathan,” concluding that in those dark zones “it was god sleeping” (234). The absence of capitalization means “leviathan” and “god” name not a distinct creature but rather a collective presence or a collective absence instantiated by the universal need for sleep. From within this collective abeyance, the world’s future—the “after” to which this otherwise bleak scene hopefully gestures—is rendered dreamable, and it is aided by the sound of “lapping water,” constituting a different kind of wealth, “not the kind that was superfluous but the kind that kept you alive, down through the generations” (238). This rhythmic flow of water is compared to a “lullaby,” and although it displaces T. as the narrative’s cynosure, it is also highlighted as the only possible means to T.’s survival. Less T. is the only way to get more T., where T. designates both an attenuated humanity and a revaluation of “low T,” the testosterone shortage whose supposed prevalence, profitably for pharmaceutical companies, stands in stark contrast to the wider ubiquity of toxic masculinity. In his intensifying stupor, T. is joined by another t, “likely a young tapir . . . of a kind that was soon to die off” (242). Whereas previously T. sought out individuals of threatened species, here he is sought out by one of them, as if it somehow recognizes that he has become endangered too. T. imagines that this young creature seeks his company and bodily contact because it has become separated from its mother and brother, in which fantasy T., again melancholically, becomes both the mother he has lost and the sibling he never had. Despite its “tough skin” and “coarse hair,” T. enjoys its physical proximity and joins it in drowsily falling in and out of sleep: “In out, in out, they breathed and breathed. They both had lungs, they loved to sleep, they liked to be alongside each other in the comfort of their rhythm” (243). As the prose achieves its own rhythm through the repetition of “they,” it gives melodic form to the interspecific lullaby of respiration through which T., the tapir, and the environmental tapestry to which they belong collectively catch their imperiled breath. In one of the few academic treatments of the novel, Rachel Smith complains that this ending “recalls an older tradition of wilderness worship” by portraying “direct physical communion as the only way to engage with the alterity of the natural world” (104). But Smith fails to recognize that alterity is not the point in this poignant encounter; the emphasis lies instead on the sameness of their slumber. The tapir cozies up to T. less

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for “physical communion,” which by itself would suggest an almost naïve romanticism, than for the feeling of “safety” his corporeality provides—a feeling that is essential for sleep and that T. earlier feels with his dog when he is otherwise alone in his house. For the purposes of sleep and security, T. can substitute for the tapir’s mother, and the tapir can substitute for T.’s dog and for Beth—on the condition, that is, of the presence of a lullaby sung not by a human parent but by a geological agent. The water’s gentle lapping is the real lap in which T. and the tapir find repose, and by doing so they become the minimal agents of their own and its endurance. T.’s hollow pursuit of financial gain, which makes him unavailable for hero worship, has the one benefit of thinning him out and preparing him, in part through absenting him from conventional forms of reproduction, to coincide with an environment from which there is no longer any refuge precisely because it offers the only possible refuge if there is to be any hope of survival. He is neither a round nor flat character but, instead, a flattened character whose diminution and recalibration to the rhythms of breath and water both deny human exceptionalism and devalue the importance of the preceding events that left him ready to sense and receive them. Dozing during the day alongside a creature with whom he has no past and no means of communication, he becomes the figure of an environmental commons built not upon a shared history or project but upon a mutual need for a secure repose that, in turn, secures not a particular future but rather the very possibility of the planet’s future. With this final scene of interspecific tenderness and torpor, the novel rests.

5 Disappearing Flesh in Shola von Reinhold’s Lote In Chapters 3 and 4, I examined sleep and sloth as two modes of queer disappearance. And although I have taken considerable pains throughout the book to resist and to argue against the instrumentalization of disappearing impulses, I have nonetheless maintained—in my analysis of sleep’s environmental reprieve and sloth’s ethical imagination—that the benefits of disappearance exceed the relief they provide to exhausted and enervated individuals. Even as disappearance designates a practice, or set of practices, integral to a queer subjectivity for which endurance and dissolution are intimately twinned, it can also prove salutary to the wider world left behind, a world that might never have been the intended target, or condign recipient, of its generosity. In thinking through how T.’s soporific tendencies place him, both literally and figuratively, in close proximity to endangered animals and ecosystems that desperately need a rest, and how Malone’s melancholic tendencies, his inward turns, contribute to the wellbeing and longevity of the very subculture that discovers him missing, I have established that queer disappearance possesses a community spirit and cannot be reduced to a purely individual inclination, despite its exercise often originating in an idiosyncratic impulse that might feel urgently antisocial. Queer disappearance has a personal and even selfish dimension, to be sure, but because it is never practiced by only a single individual, there is a commonality to its enactment—a commonality previewed by the fact that so many queers disappear into queer communities precisely because they find their biological and hometown ones, the ones for which they try to appear straight and normal, unbearable and unlivable. If Malone vanishes from his friends, lovers, and distant admirers on Fire Island or in the conflagration at the Everard Baths, he disappears first from the Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. Benjamin Bateman, Oxford University Press. © Benjamin Bateman 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192896339.003.0006

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family he can no longer stand to visit on the holidays and second from the closeted suburban life he earlier retreated into as a workaholic solicitor. Sometimes in spirit with but in no way synonymous with self-care, queer disappearance protects something of the self but that something might be very minimal, and indeed the act or process of disappearing might issue from the terrific or terrifying feeling that the self cannot adequately nominate, describe, or contain the free-floating subjectivity—the “open mesh of possibilities,” to quote Sedgwick—that is queerness. Another way to formulate this ambivalence is to imagine a care of a self that is not there or of a self overburdened or undernourished by itself, where the emphasis would reside in not taking for granted the object of the succoring ministration or in regarding that ministration’s aim as necessarily fortifying, consolidating, or steroidal. If a key reason for not deciding in advance the forms queer self-care will take is to shield the queer self from a normative and normalizing conception of both care and of the self, another is to admit and value the queer self ’s enigmatic presentation to itself; that is, the queer self ’s ignorance of and ultimate unanswerability to the subjectivity within which it pleasurably and painfully unravels. We might think here of Édouard Glissant’s nuanced assertion that “as far as my identity is concerned, I will take care of it myself. That is, I shall not allow it to become cornered in my essence . . . it does not disturb me to accept that there are places where my identity is obscure to me, and the fact that it amazes me does not mean I relinquish it” (192). In his defense of the self ’s opacity to others and to itself, Glissant discovers a relief inequivalent to absolute abandonment; he retains a hold even on that which prevents him from holding himself together. When I write that Glissant discovers his opacity to himself and that the subculture limned by Dancer from the Dance’s nameless narrator discovers Malone missing, I am trying to disentangle self-discovery from a logic of mastery and transparent revelation and to imagine the possibility of a self that is approached, appreciated, and maybe even adored in its evanescence—an evanescence that might alternatingly look and feel like entropy and extravagance. As the narrator of Holleran’s novel revisits those old haunts on Fire Island, from the empty bars and vacated homes to the depopulated dunes and undisturbed ocean waters, he

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curiously gets closer to Malone, approximating Malone’s erotic enjoyment of off-seasons (and of the off-time, out-of-joint people who, like him, stick around) and thereby rendering himself proximate with his vanished and vanishing comrade. To discover someone missing is not only to find them gone but also to find them newly near in their goneness, remaindered by the materials left behind and reanimated by the melancholic activity of lingering in and on their increasingly evocative absence. To be discovered missing is perhaps even to be discovered for the first time, not only because vanishing has a way of focusing people’s otherwise scattered attention but also because it demands that attention be paid to recessive and retractive tendencies that were otherwise unnoticed, ignored, or downplayed. And it is worth adding that learning how to keep those tendencies at bay, at least some of the time, is an equally valuable exercise that might help to explain why the narrator’s fascination with Malone is accompanied by a habit of never getting too close to him. What we discover when someone else goes missing might be the inscrutability of that person to itself and to us—and it might also be our own disappearing inclinations materialized, both prospectively and retroactively, in the dematerialization of the other, in the appeal of an absence whose intermittent silencing testifies to the importance of sometimes dwelling on our opacity and, other times, avoiding it like the plague. My reference to Glissant, the Martiniquais philosopher and literary critic whose poetic postulation of an abyssal self (a nonsovereign and oceanic self redolent of Malone) made communal and communicable in and as its obdurate opacity informs this project’s apprehension of an unreliably productive and world-making disposition of disappearance, brings into view the particular subjective, ethical, and political stakes of opacity and disappearance for racialized and colonized (and decolonized) subjects. No novel thematizes and investigates these stakes or puts them more into intersectional contact with considerations of gender and sexuality than Scottish writer Shola von Reinhold’s Lote (2020), a genrebending work of fiction in which a queer Black protagonist of the twentyfirst century, Mathilda, struggles to remain unknown to various persons and institutions, some of which she has swindled, at the same time as she labors to get to know an early twentieth-century Black woman, Hermia

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Druitt, whose life exists only spottily and suggestively in the historical record. First coming across an image of Druitt in the “National Portrait Gallery Archive” (Von Reinhold 13) in a box of photographs taken at Garsington, home of English aristocrat and society hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell, Mathilda marvels at Druitt’s costume of “emblazoned pieces of armor over a fine mesh of chainmail” and “a coronet, around which her hair was brushed into a commanding nimbus” (26). Riveted by the photograph—one of many through which she eagerly thumbs documenting the Bright Young Things of 1920s London and the flamboyant experimentations in queerness they sometimes pursued—Mathilda reflects that “beyond photographs taken for colonial documentation, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever seen a photograph of a Black woman, or man, from this era, with hair this texture, that hadn’t been ironed or lyestraightened. Certainly never in such a setting. An excruciation of coil and kink, for it made me ache with jealousy and bliss” (26). Part of what Mathilda meditates on in this early scene are the multiple ways in which Black bodies can be and have been robbed of their agency, opacity, and beauty. Where the imperial gaze in the colonies might permit unstraightened hair in order to exoticize the Black body and to make it known in and as its exoticized and subordinated otherness, the imperial gaze at home assails the Black body with cosmetic interventions meant to make it less threatening and more normatively gendered, where gender is understood as a technology of race and racialization. To find this photograph in the archive—albeit a disordered archive accorded little value by the mainstream institutions of memory Mathilda visits and ransacks (she pilfers this image for personal use)—is to find both an historical precedent for a Blackness that exceeds the disciplinary parameters in which it is and was usually permitted to appear and an invitation, given the image’s rapturous appeal, to attach to the past, to suspend the objective pretensions of traditional historiography, and to make the photograph the occasion of and companion to a creative and critically invested disappearance. In turning to and thinking with the literary-historical experiment that is Lote, I want to place queer disappearance as I have been conceiving it thus far into conversation with the recent efflorescence of critical discourse that regards black and trans as distinct but mutually informing

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modes of instability and fugitivity. What I will be arguing in this chapter is that the narrative arc and capacious form of Lote, inspired and outraged by the inventions and omissions of literary modernism, compose a historiography for this fugitivity that allows Black queerness and Black trans-ness to mobilize across time while preserving disappearance and opacity as constitutive features of their survival, design, and desirability. I draw in particular here on the work of Marquis Bey who, inspired by theoretical efforts to intertwine queer and feminist theory, asks if the same effort might be undertaken with black and trans. Bey’s goal is not to equate black and trans or to deny the frictions that have and will continue to occur within and between the identities of people onto whom, sometimes simultaneously, those labels are grafted (volitionally or not), but rather to amplify the obliterative force each can apply to fixed and foundational understandings of gender and racial identity. Of course, there are specific people named black and trans, and the immediate needs of those people in their lived and visceral experience must be affirmed and attended to (and their politics not taken for granted), but as Bey explains, “manifesting in the modern world differently as race and gender fugitivity, black and trans*, though pointed at by bodies that identify as black and/or trans*, precede and provide the foundational condition for those fugitive identificatory demarcations” (278). Very much in keeping with Glissant’s oceanic conception of shared and sharable subjectivity, Bey views blackness and trans*-ness as “anoriginal” and “ante-foundational,” meaning they designate a sort of relational and irreducible priority that confounds their translation into a fixed, legible, and identifiable ontology. Building on Fred Moten’s definition of blackness as “that desire to be free, manifest as flight, as escape, as a fugitivity that may well prove to veer away even from freedom as its telos” (207) and aligning it loosely with Claire Colebrook’s postulation of a “transitivity . . . that underlies the (gendered) conditions of possibility that allow for distinction” (Bey 285), Bey taps into restless and fleeting energies that sometimes coalesce into fleeting persons only to then “dehisce” (Bey 283) and release a breath that is concomitantly a continuing search for life and a yawn born of exhausting struggle. Something of that suppurating dehiscence—where Bey has in mind both the literal cuts and wounds inflicted upon black flesh and, following Moten, the

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historical cut or “break” in which black people live aslant to, inside of, and apart from the annihilative ambitions of white history and supremacy—is pictorialized for Bey in the hyphens and asterisks that trans studies scholars such as Susan Stryker, Mel Y. Chen, Eva Hayward, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore supply to trans* (or trans-), which as a prefixal form remains open and incomplete, riven, striving, volatile, and irremediably oriented to an otherness it never fully arrives at or assimilates. To the extent that Bey’s analytic illuminates the lubricious and disappearing (un)nature of black and trans, figuring fugitivity as a constitutive condition of each, it raises a number of provocative questions, not least of which is how to document, historicize, inherit, and come into relation with that determined and indeterminate vanishing. These are questions that Saidiya Hartman raises in “Venus in Two Acts,” where she argues that writing the history of Black subjects lost in and to the transatlantic slave trade requires a method of “critical fabulation” (11) that aims to “imagine what cannot be verified, a realm of experience which is situated between two zones of death—social and corporeal death—and to reckon with the precarious lives which are visible only in their moment of disappearance” (12). Arguing further that “to write the history of an unrecoverable past” is to write “with and against the archive” (12), going beyond its meager details while simultaneously exercising the sort of “narrative restraint” (12) that that very meagerness would seem to discourage, Hartman delineates a historiographical mode that is at once critical and imaginative, reparative and respectful of that which cannot be repaired. Indeed, the state of disrepair becomes the entry point for the present-day scholar or artist attempting to reckon not only with that unrecoverable history but also with the brokenness of a present that is that past’s afterlife—its ongoing trauma, neglect, and cruelty, but also its unrealized reaches, fantasies, and aspirations. Where the past disappears into the present and the present disappears into the past marks the very zone of convergence occupied by Lote as it imagines the what-would- have-been of Black aesthetics. What rivets Mathilda’s attention to the photograph of Hermia Druitt is the surprise of the latter’s having appeared then and there as she did but also the knowledge that this appearance was likely rare—a snapshot

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of a regal and “commanding” presence that was no doubt exceptional, even within the more permissive environment of Druitt’s social milieu, and limited in its duration. Indeed, we might compare the ephemeral dignity and prominence achieved by Druitt with the aleatory delight taken by Mathilda in uncovering the photograph, and we might further understand Mathilda’s theft as an attempt to recover and reinstall that which white culture has almost relegated to history’s dustbin—to make the photo disappear in order to forestall Druitt’s possible disappearance. What is more, we might see these moments of pictorial resurgence and irruption in the novel, about which I will say more later in the chapter, as so many narrative interruptions that highlight the political necessity of arresting the progressive flow of normative time in order to become inhabited and even intoxicated by insurrectionary energies and imaginaries that can derange our expectations of what is thinkable and possible way back when but also here and right now. And this temporal derangement might derive from and remind us of the all-too-often unacknowledged threads (I accidentally typed “threats”) connecting that past to this present—the “afterlife of slavery” and colonialism, to borrow Saidiya Hartman’s phrase describing the persistence of institutional racism in everything from modern schooling and medicine to the prison industrial complex, and the afterlife, we must add, of the furtive, fugitive, fabulous, and fantastical tenacity with which Black life eluded the varied and violent strategies for extinguishing it. In harmony with Bey’s formulation of black and trans as transitive, as transitioning in the absence of a certain or predetermined destination, Mathilda moves between different residences and identities (her “Escapes” (14)), taking care never to overstay her welcome or divulge the often illegal means by which she stays, barely, financially afloat. Mathilda isn’t even the only name by which she is known—so much of her past, including her parentage, is undisclosed—though it remains the primary appellation attached to her during the main action of the novel. Most important for my present purpose, however, is not her physical restlessness but rather the embodied and rapturous reveries she experiences when beholding images and narratives of queer, Black, and/or artistically inclined individuals from earlier historical periods— transtemporal encounters, Stephen Tennant being perhaps one of the

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more recognizable ones to readers and scholars of modernism, that Mathilda calls “Transfixions.” When experiencing a Transfixion, Mathilda feels a kernel of the past reignite in the present and receives “flashes from Arcadia.” In the exemplary case of her quickening attachment to Hermia Druitt, she feels that “moonlight . . . sighed up and down the tube of her spine,” and she detects an “indescribable note . . . humming beneath the high fine rush—probably not dissimilar to holy rapture—[that] was an almost violent familiarity. The feeling of not only recognizing, but of having been recognized” (28–29). In other words, Mathilda seeks from her Transfixions not only antecedence but also anticipation, as if in finding them she herself also feels found and awaited. Admitting later on that the “kind of excess” she “craved” from her Transfixions first drew her to decadent and aristocratic figures of considerable privilege, like Tennant (207), she eventually learns—and the confession of this lesson occurs immediately after one of the only times in the novel she identifies as Black—that “history had buried many other potential Transfixions” and rendered an incalculable lot unavailable for literal and embodied recognition, the appreciation of which fact gradually refines her somatic and sensorial sensitivity such that she can “pass a building, and a particular curve in the stone would send me reeling with sensations and it could only be because the anonymous mason was a Transfixion, their life otherwise entirely unrecorded” (206). What comes back to life in this architectural approach is less the mason, or the specific details of the mason’s effaced biography, than the delight the mason took in leaving, rounding, or sharpening the excessive detail that is “the particular curve in the stone,” which pleasure may never have been verbalized or noted by surveyors of their own time. This experience is what Elizabeth Freeman calls “erotohistoriography: a politics of unpredictable, deeply embodied pleasures that counters the logic of development” (59). For Freeman, such transhistorical connections refute the “chrononormative” expectation that later moments invariably surpass, supersede, or depart from earlier ones—meaning that queer subjects can exist “beside” each other in time rather than in relative positions of anteriority, posteriority, or melancholic belatedness. In the examples Freeman describes, the past disappears into the present and the present disappears into the past such

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that queer disappearance names the abolition of a time that would divide, distinguish, and conquer (the past). As I have explained on various occasions in this book, disappearance is a vital tactic and technique used by queer subjects, whether creatively or out of necessity or both, to refuse the amnesiac and individuating terms of the present and to come undone in the service of a subjectivity that is not One but rather multiple and multiply implicated in histories it cannot and will not jettison. At the heart of Mathilda’s erotic thrill seems to lie the sensation that her nonbelonging to the present was foreseen and fore-suffered by an antecedent’s sense of nonbelonging to the past, in which case the temporally separated individuals are made coincident, and even conspiratorial, in the historical cut where they both do and do not exist and where the consequent ambivalence can register as alienation but also as hypnotic joy. I have been referring to these maneuvers throughout the book as perish-performatives, and although perish-performatives need not operate exclusively in a negative mode, the point is that pulling away from the present, and from its putative obviousness, does disinterpellative work and yields new proximities and possibilities that need not have been the target of a particular or particularly programmatic intention. But the language of subjectivity to which I am resorting, and which I refuse to dispense with entirely, is not exactly appropriate to the narrative situation I have been describing or to the theoretical frameworks I have been deploying. In a recent monograph showing how African American novels of the twentieth century adapted the bildungsroman while simultaneously coming up against the limits of that form’s attachments to liberal norms of autonomous freedom, Alvin Henry argues that the authors of these texts ultimately eschew subjectivity in favor of a plural and oscillating conception of being and becoming that Henry names as “black queer flesh.” Putting the queerness of this flesh momentarily to the side, it is necessary to locate Henry’s project, as well as Bey’s, in a line of black feminist thought inaugurated by Hortense Spillers. According to Samantha Pinto, “flesh, for Spillers and those who follow her, becomes a way of marking both violence and the conception of a black feminist methodology from the specific embodied, emotional, social, and cultural relations that this violence creates—an opening, a break, an interstice that doesn’t so much resist as remake what we think

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we know about the range and pitch of ‘Black women’ and Black feminist political possibility” (27–28). The turn to “flesh,” therefore, is about simultaneously foregrounding the multifarious ways in which the black body has been rent by colonialism, transatlantic slavery, and their afterlives within multinational capitalism, and about exploring how that pierced and punctured condition yields and necessitates modalities of being and nonbeing untethered to and unexplained by dominant taxonomies of self, subjectivity, individuality, and personhood. In Spillers’s view, “before the ‘body’ there is the ‘flesh,’ that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse,” and “if we think of the ‘flesh’ as a primary narrative, then we mean its seared, divided, ripped-apartness, riveted to the ship’s hole, fallen, or ‘escaped’ overboard” (67). Launching from the condition of “flesh” means displacing conventional focuses on ethnicity and skin color, which for Spillers work to re-contain the black body and to conceal its eviscerated status. Offering instead “a kind of hieroglyphics of the flesh,” Spillers enumerates multiple instances in the history of slavery where the Black body is turned inside out—its teeth pulled, its blood drawn, its flesh lacerated and worn by the master’s whip, its “eyes beaten out,” its “skulls branded,” and its parts made the raw material of endless “scientific” experiments, to name only a small handful of the barbaric practices constitutive of Western enlightenment and modernity (67–68)—the result of which is, to say the least, a slantwise and slaughtered relation to the integumentary enclosure and insulation implied by sovereign personhood. Also destabilized through this visceral optic—and here is where the queerness of queer flesh becomes more obvious—is the binary gender purported to reside on and within that epidermally sealed body. Noting that women slaves, over and above the rape that was a ritualized part of their daily lives, were subjected to many of the same “externalized acts of torture” as their male counterparts, Spillers argues that “female flesh,” exposed and extracted, was “ungendered” and, moreover, that this ungendered flesh “offers” to black feminist critical thought “a praxis and a theory, a text for living and for dying, and a method for reading both through their diverse mediations” (67–68). Spillers’s intent here is to disrupt, in a poststructuralist and intersectional vein, the feminist

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fantasy of a universalist “herstory” by pointing out that the eviscerated flesh of the “African female subject” cannot be included in, and also has not been included in, feminist accounts of a composite “female body” (67–68). To tell a different story about that flesh that was dissected and ejected from the body politic, and to make that flesh the grammar of a historical counternarrative emphasizing how Black subjects both suffered in the flesh and made that flesh a vehicle for knowing the world and knowing themselves otherwise, is to think fugitively. Which is to say, the hermeneutics implied by Spillers’s analysis entails finding in and for that flayed and flung flesh a language suited to both its torture and its transience—its dislocation from the possessive self to which it was never allowed to belong and to which it learned, out of painful and poetic experience, not to want or need to belong. Bringing Spillers’s insights into deeper conversation with Jamaican philosopher Sylvia Wynter’s contention that Enlightenment modernity, working in the service of colonialism and early capitalism, gnarled and narrowed humanity into a totalizing and hegemonic genre of “Man” governed by a legal apparatus that in turn codified the inhumanity of nonwhite others, Alexander Weheliye writes that we have to be careful not to let that unitary genre and its legal apparatus have the final say on those whose banishment and dehumanization were the requisite condition of its authoritative articulation. Weheliye complains, for example, that Giorgio Agamben’s account of “bare life”—or life reduced to a sheer biological fact—which has massively influenced how contemporary theories of biopolitics understand those populations consigned to the state of exception “denies the possibility of life in extreme circumstances” and “leaves no room for alternate forms of life that elude the law’s violent embrace” (130–131). Threading Wynter and Spillers’s vocabularies, Weheliye argues that “the world of Man denies the flesh its opulent and hieroglyphic freedom by relegating it to a terrain of utter abjection outside the iron grip of humanity, thereby disavowing how the ether of the flesh represents both a perpetual potentiality and actuality in Man’s kingdom, only enveloping some subjects more than others” (130). Filtered through the alembic of Weheliye’s provocative prose, Spillers’s flesh emerges as ether, in which formulation it becomes essential to read for flesh not only as substance but also as semaphore or as a series of

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smoke signals indicating those aspirations and respirations of a flesh irreducible to its visible materiality. Repeating what we might view as ecological language that renders the flesh transcorporeal (and recall that what distinguishes flesh for Spillers is that it is matter out of place—the body but also the body out and over there), Weheliye explicates further that according “existence” only to that which the law recognizes “can blind us to the sorrow songs, smooth glitches, minuscule movements, shards of hope, scraps of food, and interrupted dreams of freedom that already swarm the ether of man’s legal apparatus,” and in doing so can discourage the insurrectionary conviction that “Man’s juridical machine can never exhaust the plenitude of our world” (131). Wynter worries in particular about how the “incorporation of all forms of human being into a single homogenized descriptive statement that is based on the figure of the West’s liberal monohumanist Man” (23) obscures, and obscures the privilege of, the particular historical men whose profiteering productivity has led to climate chaos and disaster, and although this environmental implication is less pertinent to my analysis here than it will be to the book’s Conclusion on race and conservation, it is worth noting that if the flesh can figure forth heterogenous versions of humanness and humanity, then these humans and humanities will have to be interpreted in the “ether,” which is to say in those exterior places and atmospheres where the worldly “plenitude” of which Weheliye speaks outstrips particular varieties of humanity and abolishes any variety of humanity that claims independence from or impermeability to the more-than-human planet. I have taken this brief detour from Mathilda to provide deeper historical, cultural, and political texture to her Transfixions. Although she is initially drawn to past scenes of extravagant luxury in part as a refusal of the idea that fabulous and gender-bending hedonism cannot be a preoccupation of black bodies, she ultimately figures out that it is not just the likes of Stephen Tennant who can “allow me to embody a queer fantasy not immediately accessible” (207). So too can that “anonymous” and “unrecorded” mason whose “curve in the stone would send me reeling with sensations” (208), in which formulation the mason’s unappreciated if not also undercompensated labor finally receives the recognition it deserves as both industry and aesthetic ingenuity. It is worth lingering on Mathilda’s rapturous description, because while it

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could be interpreted as one person’s response to another’s design, its eddying energy undoes the sense of two distinct and discrete personages. The “curve” already designates the excess Mathilda craves—a potentiality in which the mason’s reaching toward a different world coincides with Mathilda’s time-traveling tendencies—and its animation as a force that can dispatch and transport (“send”) means further that something of the mason’s extramural enthusiasm escapes temporal and physical logics that would circumscribe the site and scope of their production. The “sensations” with which Mathilda spins, unleashed by the curve, cannot be said to belong exclusively to her, and by “reeling” with them, she reels the mason in from the past and gathers his excessiveness with the centripetal force of her sanguine spinning. This somatic excitation, a transhistorical situation of intimacy experienced as Lacanian “extimacy” (Lacan 171), registers an affectivity in the sense that the stone’s curve expresses an affective surplus on the part of the mason and in the secondary sense that it remains affected by the mason, charged over and above its immediate presentation and therefore available for unpredictable identifications and apprehensions. Recall Weheliye’s enumeration of the “smooth glitches, minuscule movements, shards of hope, scraps of food, and interrupted dreams of freedom that already swarm the ether of man’s legal apparatus” (131). As I have been adumbrating it, the curve in the stone is a smooth glitch, minuscule movement, shard of hope, scrap of food (for a malnourished imagination), and interrupted dream of freedom that becomes Mathilda’s own drunken daydream as it introduces a giddy glitch into her navigation of an urban environment intended to conceal, rather than convey, the emancipatory aspirations of the underclasses that no doubt constructed it. If Mathilda finds herself able to detect and render delectable these aspirations, it is because they “swarm the ether” of the cityscape; they are the dehiscence of the lapidary’s exhausted application, the residue of their blistered and calloused hands, and the faint vibrations of their constant sanding, smoothing, chiseling, and polishing. They are, in short, the atmospheric manifestation of the mason’s “flesh”—their body transported out there, over and beyond its epidermal enclosure, a fugitive remnant entangled with the fruits of the mason’s exploited labor. I am using the word “aspiration” not to suggest some unrealistic hope of

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upward mobility—where Mathilda and the mason would converge in a “cruel optimism” complicit with capitalism’s configuration of the good life—but rather to emphasize a transcorporeal respiration whereby the mason’s sigh (of sadness, of relief, of creative joy) becomes Mathilda’s restorative breath. Flesh as breath, air as heir, disappearance as gift. By bringing Spillers’s and Weheliye’s black feminist philosophy to bear on Mathilda’s escapes and fantasies, we are able to place a particular spin on her use of the word “Transfixion.” Of course, one important implication of the term is that Mathilda becomes imaginatively transfixed or riveted by historical scenes and situations of black joy and black indulgence. But this metaphorical register risks missing the word’s literal indication of a violent piercing, of an incision as physical as it is psychological. To the extent that Mathilda’s “Transfixions” tear her away from the present and invade her with the fitful strivings and stirrings of queer and Black and queer Black history, they both allow and compel her to live in that “cut” and that “break” theorized by Moten and Bey—where queer Black flesh is cut out of normative time, wrenched from historical moments whose rapacious removal of black flesh simultaneously mobilizes it for alternative experiments in humanity and community, and refigured as contraband smuggled into and out of contexts in which it is thought to be, for those insensitive to the extralegal ether, incommunicable. Fugitive flesh finds a future here, but as Bey reminds us, that future does not necessarily have “freedom as its telos,” in no small part because the rights satisfied and secured by juridical freedom make no provision for the rhapsodic sense of ecstasy that discombobulates Mathilda, whirling her round and disorienting her so thoroughly in time and space that she feels inhabited and inebriated. How could normative freedom anchor this variety of vertigo, this delicious disappearance, and what precedent does it offer for validating in Black bodies the wholly unrespectable desire to come undone? Another law exceeded or contravened by this episode is the law of stable and binary gender. Although odds are the transfixing stonemason was a man, Mathilda keeps “their” (206) gender unspecified, leaving open the possibility of a historical woman who was ahead of her time in arrogating to herself the right to perform a man’s occupation or who, by performing that occupation, meant to register her discomfiture with

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the gender to which she was assigned. Alternatively, the stonemason might have been a man who, in creating that evocative “curve,” performed melancholically the voluptuous femininity he was prohibited from embodying—in which case Mathilda becomes witness to an unconscious act of artistic reparation. But the most compelling explanation for this gender nonspecificity—an explanation not at all mutually exclusive with the previous ones—is that what the stonemason (and Mathilda) was expressing, and being transported by, was a fugitive impulse and indulgence irreducible if not also inimical to their socially prescribed identity. Recall Spillers’s point about the “ungendering” of female flesh, which in being severed from the body becomes unrecognizable as the rightful property of a gendered body (a body that, in any case, was regarded as the property of another). Flesh emanates from a body undone by racist violence, but it also becomes a site of gender’s undoing and suspension. The piercing sensations delivered to Mathilda have nothing to do with her being a woman or with the stonemason’s having been a man, and indeed the reeling effects they induce sever eroticism from gendered and genitalized embodiment. Flesh is then an experience of corporeal excitation that gender cannot explain or denominate, which is to reaffirm Bey’s concept of a flesh whose fundamental transitivity aligns blackness and trans-ness in their mutual refusal to toe the line of consistent, accountable, and locatable personhood. Lote’s Transfixions, then, might be seen as the material out of which it contrives a resolutely anti-essentialist trans-fiction, where “trans” both substantiates transidentified people—like Erskine-Lily, who is associated with Hermia Druitt and about whom more will be said shortly—and catalyzes the transitivity enabling Mathilda’s erotohistoriographical method. I have been focusing on this anonymous mason at some length because Mathilda’s fascination with them differs so markedly from her fascination with Hermia Druitt, whom she insists upon de-anonymizing, recovering, and restoring to a proper place in literary and cultural history. With this point in mind, I should now pause my analysis to fill out, at somewhat greater length, the plot of Lote. Seeking another escape and desperately needing a fresh source of income, Mathilda, while conducting endless and mostly fruitless web searches for Hermia Druitt, comes across what appears to be a “conceptual artists’ residency”

      ’  

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that is called the “Dun Residency” and is located in a resort town of the same name (61). Keyed up on drugs after a night out with her escapist mentor Malachi, Mathilda dashes off some meaningless answers to the residency’s opaque application and then is stunned when she is later flown out, expenses paid and stipend provided, to undertake a project that she vaguely hopes will bring her closer to Hermia. Upon arrival, and after playing hooky for several days disappearing into the intoxicating reveries supplied by her Transfixions, she commences the residency only to find out from a classmate astonished by her ignorance that it is narrowly centered on “a branch of performance art known informally as ‘Thought Art,’ which was founded on the principles of the theorist John Garreaux” (156). Garreaux’s school “viewed the production of art that negated the Self as efficiently negating Capitalism,” and so he created an institute where young artists, after devoting themselves rigorously and absolutely to their inspired “White Book Projects,” submit them to “Conveyors” who constitute the art’s only audience and who ensure that the final projects are safely stored away, never to be viewed again. This archival obliteration is of a piece with Thought Art’s “anti-aesthetic dimension,” which includes “a dislike of the decorative, of overt form, and which trickled into things like dress” (157–158). An impostor of many sorts, Mathilda meets in “Thought Art” the direct antithesis of her decadent inclinations. Where her Transfixions celebrate lavish expressions, particularly unapologetic outpourings of Black fabulousness, Garreaux’s movement demands asceticism, austerity, impersonality, and negativity. This antithesis becomes all the more pronounced, and revealing, when Mathilda later discovers that Garreaux’s father was enamored with Hermia Druitt and housed her in the building that later became the Residency Centre; and that following Garreaux Senior’s death, his son, who detested Hermia for her aesthetic extravagance and interest in the black arts of various kinds, paid her to leave for an apartment elsewhere in Dun (426) and preserved her quarters and their furnishings on the center’s top floor, including her notes on the occult, her perfume, the jacket cover of her missing poetry collection, and books ranging from Virginia Woolf ’s The Waves to Wallace Thurman’s Infants of the Spring. As Mathilda suspects and eventually confirms, Garreaux Junior treated Hermia Druitt as his first “Thought

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Art” submission, disappearing her by placing her at the very heart of his avant-garde enterprise, archiving her not to honor her but rather to remove her from an art world in which, in his view, she had no place. When confronted, Garreaux justifies his actions by the logic of his artistic philosophy, claiming that he engaged not in a “suppression” of Druitt but rather in a “synthesis” by which she “lives gloriously—by pure antithesis!” and that a primary pedagogical point of the residency is to learn that artistic purity is achieved, counterintuitively, by “hold[ing] two entirely two opposing modes of being inside you” and thereby incorporating the “foreign body” that “alienates you” (427). This “foreign body” includes not only Druitt but “more generally LOTE and everything it stood for” (427), and here I should explain too that LOTE was the unofficial occultist society of sorts in which Druitt, in league with other queer contemporaries, read and studied and performed complex rituals designed to summon “luxuries” of old—narcotizing spirits that of course invoke the Lotus-eaters of Greek mythology. Aware that his self-serving defense is making little headway with his skeptical audience, Garreaux concludes with a rhetorical question: “do you think [Druitt’s] personal effects would have survived had they not been, as you say, preserved”? (428). As disingenuous and bloviating as his response no doubt is, Garreaux speaks an uncomfortable truth: Hermia’s erasure was likely to happen whether Garreaux immured her or not, and by storing her belongings away intact, he at least allowed the possibility of their rediscovery, whereas the museums that Mathilda and her older coworker Agnes visit and discuss elsewhere in the novel leave Black art to deteriorate in inferior storage facilities. Which is to say that Mathilda’s ability to find something of Druitt owes to the very effort to extinguish her, serving the important reminders that not every disappearance succeeds and that, in some cases, disappearance guarantees future availability. Garreaux’s claim that he incorporated Hermia as “a foreign body” is patently offensive, but its immunological inclination describes a form of anti-black racism in which blackness is not kept entirely at bay, as would be mandated by a system of strict segregation, but is sometimes made intimate and even internalized in order to produce protective antibodies against it. These imagined antibodies would confer immunity to blackness, but in

      ’  

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saying that it is worth adding that immunity is rarely absolute and the implication would be not that blackness is perfectly distanced but rather that it is meted out, and dialed down, in order to pose the least possible menace to whiteness’s integrity and longevity. This protection might also come, less psychoanalytically and more practically speaking, in the familiar form of an ability to disclaim accusations of racism by pointing to the minimal ways in which blackness has been allowed and entertained: “some of my best friends are black” comes immediately to mind. If whiteness thrives on its capacity to neutralize and to become inoculated by a blackness that it simultaneously pathologizes and appropriates—implicit in Garreaux’s oration is the claim that he improved upon Druitt’s accomplishments—then we are compelled to imagine how blackness might circumvent that antibody response, escape appropriation, and refuse a synthesis whereby whiteness consolidates its hold while purporting to make countless concessions. What Garreaux inflicted on Druitt—forcing her from her home, retaining many of her possessions, and further exiling her in a town where she was already living in exile—repeats and extends the colonial dispossession of black life, and the literal removal of Druitt from the future residency echoes Spillers’s description of the ejection and extraction of black flesh, which in being cast off and out finds itself fugitive even when holed up, and left to perish, in a tiny apartment. At the end of the novel, Mathilda discovers that Druitt’s long poem, “The Fainting Youth,” was also stored away in the residency (another submission in which blackness is made to submit), and she suspects that the other copies of its limited printing remain there as well, meaning that in addition to wanting to extinguish Druitt’s decadent art Garreaux also wanted to conceal the poetic voice by which blackness makes itself communicable and remakes itself in future generations. What Garreaux fails to appreciate, perhaps because he treats Black artistic production so dismissively, is that Druitt no doubt foresaw her inevitable erasure, and in titling her would-be-lost poem as she did she previewed its and her own recession and demise, announcing and forecasting disappearance as a constitutive feature of blackness waged in and against an anti-black world; she staged, that is, her own perish-performative. I say “forecast” because Mathilda is a “fainting youth” (or at least young person) in her own right, fading periodically from present reality

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in order to make contact with her Transfixions and to dwell in an artistic past that she feels anticipated her. If we recall Weheliye’s accusation that whiteness produces and reproduces its hegemony in part by “disavowing how the ether of the flesh represents both a perpetual potentiality and actuality in Man’s Kingdom,” then we can appreciate the youth’s faint, however faint, as both avowal and retreat, and we can further detect in Mathilda’s recessive swoons a sensitivity and susceptibility to an ongoing potentiality and an unsubstantiated actuality that “swarm the ether” of an existence in excess of the residency’s restrictive rules. Indeed, Mathilda’s particular preoccupation with decadence should be understood not only as a refusal of dead-end respectability politics but also as an insistence upon a surplus—not necessarily a particular surplus but rather an ambient surplus that to dominant eyes appears as waste but to her eyes appears as treasure. That Druitt foretold Mathilda (she “drew it”) is of course supported by Mathilda’s arrival upon the recondite site of the former’s physical demise, and this premonition, positioning Mathilda and her Transfixions as occupying an almost alternative realm that survives in the interstices of mainstream society—or rather, in the interstices of artistic subcultures that repeat the racist logics of mainstream society while signaling radicalism—is one of several in a novel centered on, and decentered by, the fluid boundaries between people and times. Thus far I have made it sound as if Mathilda’s Transfixions are all her own, but after arriving in Dun she finds a time-traveling companion in Erskine-Lily, who it turns out has undertaken their own search for residues of Hermia Druitt and who has also, like Mathilda, become imaginatively fused with Druitt’s interest in occult practices generally and The Book of the Luxuries specifically. With Erskine-Lily, Hector, and Griselda—the latter two being brother-sister fellow residents who alternate between mocking and indulging Mathilda’s research-based reveries—Mathilda reconstitutes the magical organizations of her modernist predecessors, imbibing various tonics and potions and even stealing lotus-bark from a museum archive in order to initiate a particular ritual that she hopes will bring her closer than ever to her tantalizing Transfixions. Like Mathilda, Erskine-Lily regards their luxuriant swoons as decisive escapes from a racist quotidian, and their heterodox

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engagements with history are of a piece with their unorthodox lifestyle, which depends on intermittent thieving, squatting, boozing, and usually existing off the grid of social and economic legibility. It is worth noting that when Mathilda, having perfected her own shoplifting practices under the tutelage of Erskine-Lily, reinvents herself as an official historian, hilariously named “Rosemary White,” in order to poach the lotus-bark from the stuffy museum that does not appreciate its subcultural significance (411), she confirms the vital role Erskine-Lily’s nonconformity has to play in surfacing Black history and surviving its manifold privations. But Erskine-Lily’s presence in the novel also puts particular pressure on the term Mathilda selects for her creative indulgences— Transfixions—because although Erskine-Lily never explicitly identifies as transgender, over the course of the novel it grows increasingly clear that their escape to Dun was not just about finding Druitt but was also about escaping from the name and gendered identity by which they had previously been known and that Hector, a former classmate and lover from Erskine-Lily’s boys’ school days, threatens to reimpose. Hector selfishly and transphobically wants Erskine-Lily to be a gay man, but Erskine-Lily has thoroughgoing reservations about all the identity categories available to them. Sharing Mathilda’s Arcadian sensibilities, Erskine-Lily looks for queer inspiration not in current terminology or in future prospects but rather in previous configurations of gender difference and deviance. After lingering in the freezing cold for too long and then, while in the hospital recovering from that parasuicidal exposure, resorting to depilatory techniques that cause a serious burn, Erskine-Lily finds themself answering to two successive queries from Mathilda: “Why not ‘she?’ . . . ‘They’?” For Erskine-Lily, though, “these terms flagged up too much,” meaning that they signify too expansively and come too freighted with known associations. What Erskine-Lily had found tolerable in “he,” the pronoun attached to them up until even this point in the novel, is that it “had been mentally ironed down to a film and meant nothing as long as it was said without meaning” (436). Which is to say, Erskine-Lily can stand a dead pronoun on the critical condition it remains totally lifeless. And their predilection for deadness has another register as well, for it is actually in dead pasts that they seek precedence for their flamboyant

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     

aberrance. Mathilda exfoliates Erskine-Lily’s laconic hesitancy about “she” and “they” by insisting that “in all the terms, in all the identities, there was nothing ‘to correspond.’ Nothing that fulfilled a sense of it like the Alchemical Angel poster [that hangs in Erskine-Lily’s flat] did. There wasn’t a name for it. Not now anyway. There had been a name for it in the past. Maybe there would be one in the future” (436). Erskine-Lily subsequently confirms, “And I can hardly go around calling myself an Alchemical Angel”—the poster is previously labeled “the Hermetic Androgyne” (435)—but it is interesting that their perspective is initially articulated by Mathilda, or at least Mathilda commingling with a narrator whose voice is nearly hers. In an interview with Frankie Dytor, Von Reinhold notes that some trans readers, following textual evidence affirmed by the author themself, interpret Mathilda as trans-femme but that very few readers, somewhat to the author’s surprise, consider Hermia to have been trans despite evidence in Black Modernisms—the fictional history from which Mathilda draws evidence of Hermia’s peregrinations through Europe—of a traveling male artist whose movements correspond so closely to Hermia’s own as to suggest that the two Scottish expatriates might very well have been just one. The suggestion of a trans community, and of trans mentorship, is supported by the lamination of Mathilda’s and Erskine-Lily’s perspectives in the exchange previously mentioned, and as Von Reinhold notes in the same interview, the various potions and “tinctures” (437) with which the contemporary pair experiment might be viewed as an earlier incarnation of hormone replacement theory. Dytor claims that they “read LOTE as quite clearly a trans novel,” but Mathilda’s doubled insistence that “nothing” can denominate the trans sensibilities she and Erskine-Lily share paints a less clear picture of the novel’s investment in contemporary trans politics and representation. By looking to the past for “correspondence”—where that word signifies both likeness and a textual exchange materialized by Mathilda’s combing through photographs and other records—the decadent duo refute the idea, popularized in media organized around both promoting and oppressing trans people, that trans is a largely contemporary phenomenon marking a new horizon in gender’s undoing. As Jules Gill-Peterson documents in her study of transgender children spanning the entirety of

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the twentieth century, transgender people, and children specifically, have been around a very long time and for the entirety of that time have been seeking and sharing knowledge about how to transition. “Today’s trans children are not the first generation to identify and live openly as trans during childhood,” Gill-Peterson avers, and neither are they “even close to the first generation to transition or to be medicalized during childhood and grow up as publicly trans” (8). Far from a historical absence, trans narratives populate a number of medical, scientific, sociological, and subcultural archives, and while they indicate varying degrees of access to critical resources and supportive reception, they substantiate a rich history incommensurate with the reading of trans as some sort of trend, new wave, or next step in an LGBT progression. Gill-Peterson also tracks, as a critical component of her study, how race was a contributing and sometimes determining factor in how seriously trans children were taken and treated, such that many trans children of color met with considerable or absolute resistance from medical authorities. This problem was not merely one of access and resources but also of an ideological bias through which trans children of color struggled to become legible as trans and found their race regarded as an obstacle to their bodies being understood as alterable. Gill-Peterson speaks of this barrier in terms of plasticity, explaining that only certain bodies—generally young and white ones—were deemed plastic and impressionable enough to be able to execute a successful transition, even as that very same embryonic plasticity, figured as “raw material” (4), was temporally siloed so as to not threaten and indeed to stabilize a strict gender binary among adults. By this logic, trans adults were often seen as too far gone, too embedded in the sexes assigned them at birth, and insofar as children of color were excluded from a childhood culturally coded as white and innocent, they too were turned away and steered instead, if they were assisted at all, to other treatments and other authorities viewed as capable of getting at their underlying pathologies, meaning that in their cases gender dysphoria was primarily addressed as a symptom (of racialized deficiencies) rather than as the fundamental affliction (4). I wrote “were excluded,” but part of the significant value of Gill-Peterson’s study resides in the prehistory it provides not only of trans life generally but more specifically of the challenges people of color,

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especially Black people, experience in locating themselves within mainstream trans discourse and medical care. And so Erskine-Lily’s and Lote’s recourse to deep histories of genderaffirming practice and experimentation is less about refusing the medical model of the present—although that aim, waged in response to a real fear that trans people will find their lives invaded and scrutinized by those who feel that they have a right to know and to intervene, is certainly evident—than it is about contesting the pernicious presentism that plagues mainstream coverage of trans people, making them feel as if they are historically unprecedented and have thus appeared, as if magically, out of thin air. The real magic, Mathilda and Erskine-Lily insist, resides in the many unofficial, countercultural, and homeopathic applications trans people have devised to support themselves and each other both physically and psychologically across a timespan that might very well amount to centuries. And because some of these applications are shared, including the “choreography” (442) through which the crew in Dun propel themselves into “Transfixionland” and become “Transfixions” (444–445) in their own right, they model a trans-being and trans-becoming together that is diametrically opposed to an individuating and often pathologizing, by way of pitying, medical model. Crucial to this narrative imaginary is the reading backward of queerness and trans-ness into the past. Mathilda and Erskine-Lily do not attempt to stabilize a monolithic trans identity across time; their claim is most certainly not that particular historical figures must have been transgender in the exact manner that people inhabit trans identity today. Instead, their historical investigations and contrivances—which are redoubled at the level of the novel’s form, which fabricates a book on Black modernism parts of which it inserts, with the effect of a pregnant pause, between scenes of narrative action—lead them to previous people and communities who took a profound interest in manipulating their gender, questioning the putative givenness of their bodies, and transporting themselves out of rigid status quos and social norms. Whether these anterior subcultures and secret societies were holding seances, taking drugs, modifying their physiques, playing with sartorial conventions, or simply relating to themselves and to each other in new, creative, and playful manners, they can broadly be regarded as having

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taken an interest in transitioning, where trans-, to return to Bey’s formulation, is intimately connected to movement and to fugitivity or, to use Mathilda’s preferred language, to “escape.” Escape in this novel is not a singular event; it is rather a lifelong process, of trial and error, that abjures rootedness even as it depends, crucially, on particular places, such as ornate interiors and dusty archives, for temporary and sometimes extended protection and inspiration. This emphasis on moving and escaping—aestheticized by the language of choreography—means that if Mathilda and Erskine-Lily experience themselves as the kept promises of earlier lotus-eaters, the substance of those promises is less a particular version of transitioning than it is a resolute commitment to keeping transitioning possible and multiplying the forms it might take and the opportunities of which it might avail itself. That one or more of those forms might very well be medical or mainstream is a possibility to which Erskine-Lily seems to be warming, ever so slightly, by novel’s end. But to the extent that this change—its own sort of transition—is supported by Mathilda’s experienced tutelage, it presumes the continued intrigue and importance of Erskine-Lily’s historical obsessions, potions, throwback styles, and present resistances, meaning that what the duo devise is ultimately a syncretic trans that works with the past and with the present without allowing either to predominate. It might seem odd, if not outrageous, to pivot at this point to a conservative figure like T.S. Eliot, but Lote is after all something of an ambivalent love letter to modernism, and the way it theorizes escape is not entirely incompatible with Eliot’s thinking on the topic in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” You will recall Eliot’s argument that a successful poet must have a profound “historical sense” (38) and that what marks a talented poet is an ability to transcend their present moment, to efface themselves in their poetry, and to become impersonal. To rehearse one of the essay’s more famous sections, “what happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual selfsacrifice, a continual extinction of personality” (40). Now, this practiced discipline and self-abnegation might at first blush seem diametrically opposed to Lote’s indulgent decadence, but recall that immediately after the lines just quoted Eliot analogizes the depersonalization he is

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describing to a chemical reaction: “I therefore invite you to consider . . . the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulfur dioxide” (40). Not exactly an alchemical angel, Eliot’s preferred poet is nonetheless involved in experimentation oriented to one of alchemy’s key aims, the indefinite prolongation of life—not the life of the poet but the timelessness of poetry itself. It is easy enough to surmise the limits of Eliot’s decidedly European and nationalist configuration of the tradition he is enjoining poets to mingle their imaginations with (Homer, Shakespeare, etc.), but a generous and reparative approach to his essay might consider how his conception of tradition could prove useful for artists who want to experience a wider sense of historical belonging and who have been told that there is no tradition on which they can draw. Valuable in Eliot’s formulation is the constitutive idea that “no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead” (38). To be set among the dead is, in a certain sense, to die, and it is worth tarrying with the implication that poetic and artistic greatness depends on an ability and a willingness to disappear from the present and to recede into a past that risks eclipsing and engulfing the artist. Eliot concludes his essay by saying that the poet should be reaching for an “emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet,” that the poet cannot “reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done,” and finally that “he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living” (44). I think this construction resonates forcefully with the way in which Lote imagines the artistic community Mathilda tries to conjure. One could of course object that Mathilda’s experience is intensely personal and intensely invested in the personality that was Hermia Druitt, but because the novel introduces just enough doubt as to whether Hermia actually exists, or is rather a phantasm generated by Mathilda’s and Erskine-Lily’s overactive imaginations, it highlights less the specificity of these artists than it does the

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collaborative and transhistorical spirit they collectively embody—and embody with the very precise effect of interrogating norms of embodiment, including the preconception that the body we are born in can travel in only one canalized direction. At the end of the novel and after returning to Dun, Mathilda encounters two people on the street and introduces herself as Hermia, to which one of them, who might very well be Erskine-Lily in a new guise, responds, “so similar to my name” (458), suggesting that Hermia has multiplied, shaded into other people, and become the occasion of a cross-generational alliance whose central premise is that the temporal and spatial limitations of a marginalized figure do not have the final say on where they might ultimately go and how they might continue to transition. True to her namesake, Hermia is a messenger sent from the past, and in passing on the message of poetic transubstantiation—where the body is every bit the poem that the written word is—she finds herself passing into the lives, physiques, and experiences of Mathilda and Erskine-Lily. She is carried away, in part from a past that could not bear her, on and as the ether of a flesh that was always restless, always fugitive, and always in transition from the impossible to the possible. Hermia’s disappearance, that is, is the occasion of multiple appearances and reappearances, all of which “swarm the ether” of a present pregnant with a still-living past. Another way in which Mathilda’s Transfixions resonate with Eliot’s concept of tradition is that even though they suffuse her with joy—or perhaps better, with shattering jouissance that simultaneously energizes and enervates her—they do not confer distinction upon her or work to express her personality in any particular way; if anything, their primary effect is to depersonalize her so that she can merge and mingle with creative communities that themselves were primarily concerned with conjuring creative communities of yore. Eliot writes that “poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality” (43). Of course, “escape” is the precise word Mathilda uses to name the various transitions between identities she has made throughout her life (with friends like Malachi serving as her aleatory allies), and so at the core of her sensibility lies the conviction, consonant with Eliot’s counterintuitive proposition, that in order to be and become herself she must be and

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become someone else, and that in order to understand something about herself in the present she must understand both herself in the past and the past in her. That this temporal lubricity can be experienced as relief rather than as terrifying alienation or disorientation is supported by Eliot’s claim that “only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things” (43). For Eliot, escaping from emotion does not suggest actual impersonality, coldness, or psychosis on the part of the poet; to the contrary, the very ability to escape personal feeling in poetry is the mark of a person who feels intensely and possesses a strong, even charismatic, personality. In other words, those who make some of the strongest appearances are also those for whom disappearance and dehiscence are vital, and it is precisely by retreating from themselves that these magnetic personalities are able to summon and adumbrate histories and traditions that would be forgotten without them. Transmuting one’s deepest reservoirs of personality and feeling into an impersonal force that traverses history no doubt risks seeming selfish and antisocial to some, but such an impression would be valid only insofar as a presentist understanding of society is vaunted and valorized. Eliot’s prioritization of tradition departs from such presentism, but it also leaves unexamined how one might go about inaugurating a tradition that either does not yet exist or that is too muted or undisclosed to tap into unproblematically. Tantalized by arcadian impulses and by historical groupings of experimental artists, idlers, and idealists, Hermia Druitt accesses a tradition of sorts, but it is a faint and hazy tradition in response to which she delineates (draws it, drew it) her own tradition of queer Black poetry that later becomes available to Mathilda; and this poetry is itself eponymized as “The Fainting Youth,” where disappearing and disappearance lie at the foundation of artistic practice and where the faintness of this youth functions not only as a driver of her further obfuscation or annihilation but also of her eventual resuscitation and revelation. Druitt’s faint, we might say, is also a bit of a feint that lands its historical blow while seeming, at least for a very long duration, never to have made an impression. That we end up still knowing so little about her by novel’s end, despite the scholarly contributions of the interpolated Black Modernists and the sequences that report (albeit most likely as

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Mathilda’s reveries) some of her experiences navigating the elite artistic societies of the 1920s, testifies to the importance of her ongoing impersonality and inscrutability. To the extent that she remains unknown, forever fleeing the scene of her permanent identification, she also remains the engine of Mathilda’s incandescent imagination and creative search for a queer Black artistic past. And if certain intimate aspects of these women’s lives fuse, including the possibility that their status as women was not always recognized, then the novel’s sensitive balance of disclosure, nondisclosure, and compelled as well as chosen disappearance would suggest not so much contra Eliot’s claims as in keeping with his observation that those with the strongest personalities are precisely those who most need to go missing, that Mathilda’s personality can be part of an impersonal tradition. At one point, after dining and dashing from an expensive restaurant, Mathilda and Erskine-Lily reflect that the luxury they poach is “none of it ours” and that they had “none to start with” (365). This mutual lack, Mathilda reflects further, “was skirting close to personal history for the both of us. None to start with. None of it ours. An admission of having a history and not having just materialized, fully formed” (365). The negative language here echoes Stephen Best’s point that Black history and Black inheritance are defined not only by the afterlives of slavery and other entrenched forms of anti-black racism but also by a sense of undoing, nonbelonging, and estrangement that problematizes the very notion of bequeathment. As Best elaborates, echoing some of Elizabeth Freeman’s insights into the limits of “melancholy historicism,” Black subjects are certainly connected by a shared legacy of suffering but they are also connected, less concretely, by a radical alienation from history that often prevents them from identifying positively with a particular tradition, community, or identitarian lineage (Best 10–16). Mathilda and Erskine-Lily did not appear “fully formed” and they cannot avoid entirely the associations of and with their “personal history,” but they are cognizant that the things and trappings they have acquired, including some of the very nodes and modes of thought through which they apprehend themselves, were never meant for them. And so their mutual possession, including their possessive investment in themselves as discrete selves, is invariably, even when it is substantive and succoring and seemingly secure,

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experienced as a kind of chronic dispossession. Everything that is personal is also impersonal—where nothing, even personhood itself, is intended for them as persons—meaning that the paucity of personal details provided by the novel registers their desire to remain under the radar, without a biography, as well as, and more broadly, a constitutive condition of Black and trans life as it is smuggled and stolen, against all odds, from a world premised on its expropriation. Hermia Druitt certainly provides an example of this nothing that is something, this none that is some, and this no one who is someone, and all that she can ultimately bestow upon Mathilda is the knowledge and conviction that there is possibility within impossibility and fecundity within fugitivity—where Mathilda’s escapes compose the afterlives of Druitt’s disappearing designs. I want to conclude this chapter by further exfoliating the idea that the process of revealing Hermia Druitt is deeply intertwined with the history of redacting her. In In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Christina Sharpe argues for “Black annotation and Black redaction” as “two additional forms of wake work,” where “wake work” (113) encompasses a variety of practices cultivated in order to live, always precariously, within the afterlife of slavery and the ongoing brutality of systemic anti-Black racism. Where we might normally think of redaction as a censorious and therefore suspect editorial intervention intended to conceal aspects of the truth—albeit sometimes in order to protect valuable information and vulnerable people—Sharpe argues that redaction can have a clarifying and reparative purpose when attached to Black lives that have been so thoroughly misrepresented by the popular “dysgraphia,” found everywhere from mainstream journalism and police reports to national history, that is “riven with antiblackness” and that perpetually rewrites Black injury as Black aggression (123). For Sharpe, Black annotation and Black redaction—supplying what is missing, removing what obscures a slantwise perspective—work together “not as opposites but as trans*verse and coextensive ways to imagine otherwise” (115). Focused on the multifarious ways in which Black subjects are “made to appear only to be made to disappear” (123), as in the example of a court hearing leading inevitably to prolonged if not permanent incarceration and social debilitation, Sharpe devises and experiments with a redactive process that reverses that punitive order, making various cultural,

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carceral, and media frames disappear in order to access what exceeds the frame of the body’s juridical capture. In one example, she removes all but the eyes of a photographed Black girl so as to imagine what else that girl sees beyond the immediate circumstances of her crisis and imperilment, including the possible and better futures indexed by her searching gaze. Sharpe sees to it that more is seen than what meets the eye, where implicit in her method is the certainty that Black life is never seized or surmised through a neutral optic, meaning that any effort to affirm it, whether in its dignity or desire, must counter that pervasively negative bias with an equally affirmative, and what will seem to many an excessive or even outrageous, imagination. I have been arguing for the eroticism and effectiveness of just such a hypercreativity in Lote, on the part of its central character and of the novel itself, which tasks itself with resurrecting and reimagining histories of Black cultural, aesthetic, and social production that will never become visible or available through the prejudiced lens of dispassionate or disinvested scholarly inquiry. Echoing Sharpe’s reparative method, the novel also performs its own annotations and redactions in the name of Black and trans solidarity and survival. Consider the black rectangle superimposed over Hector’s speech when he deadnames Erskine-Lily in a conversation with Mathilda (452), a protective intervention previewed by an earlier redaction, within Black Modernisms, of Virginia Woolf ’s use of a racist, anti-black epithet (303), as well as a series of redactions that stack up in a chronology of Mathilda’s life and escapes, concealing events of entire years and some of the previous identities, including the original one, by which she was known. But there is also the fact that in the three sections where the novel flashes back to Hermia’s life in the 1920s, narrating those events in the present tense, the headings at the top of the novels’ pages are those same black rectangles, redacting perhaps the title, author, and/or pagination of the text from which these accounts of Hermia are borrowed. Possible reasons for such redaction abound, including the desire to protect a source that escaped Garreaux’s efforts to suppress the specificities of Hermia’s life by absorbing her into his narcissistic synthesis. Crucial to this recognition of redactive activity, though, is the manner in which it is uncoupled from Mathilda’s aesthetic and decadent intentions. No matter from whence they come, the scenes narrating Hermia

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are not introduced by Mathilda, nor are they presented as discoveries of her persistent digging. They are instead interpolated digressions from her archival adventures, and as such they sustain a vital gap between Mathilda and her obsession—a distance her imagination can occasionally traverse and narrow but never ultimately close. One way to read these narrative departures is as examples of Mathilda’s Transfixions, as the places she travels when she fades ecstatically and desperately from her pleasureless present, but configured this way they nonetheless escape her possession, infiltrating her fantasies and occupying her consciousness but never coming securely under her control. In other words, at the level of form the novel enacts the suspension of volition that preconditions a Transfixion, and it also permits Hermia an existence apart from Mathilda’s creative conjuring. If I am highlighting the affordances of Lote’s somewhat sprawling and experimental form, I am also emphasizing what it cannot afford to do, which is to allow Mathilda to repeat, or perfect, Garreaux’s attempt at incorporation, even if her doing so would be truer to Hermia’s queer sense and spirit. What the novel achieves, then, is the expression of an afterlife that does not foreclose on the original life or pretend that everything that has disappeared can be reclaimed; instead, the fragments of Hermia’s life persist as something like the ether, and other, of this novel—the atmospheric conditions of its emergence, where “atmosphere” is understood diachronically as the accumulation of matter and respiration that reach far back in time. As Tobias Menely has argued, Marx’s pronouncement that “all that is solid melts into air” leaves unexamined what actually becomes of that air and the particulate matter it contains. What if reorienting oneself to the “real conditions of life,” which Marx sees as this vaporization’s automatic effect, does not move one past that air but instead places one downwind of it, directly in its path and also dependent upon it for nourishment simultaneously vital and toxic? From this vulnerable but also vivifying vantage point, what has seemingly disappeared appears again, transiting across time and through bodies without ever becoming fully contained in or coincident with them. Stubbornly fugitive—remaining even beyond the capacious grasp of Mathilda’s prodigious imagination—this transverse flesh knows no form while remaining the very form of rebellion.

Conclusion On Birds and Black Life

These chapters on queer disappearance began with a green bird and ended with Black flesh, and while that trajectory might seem idiosyncratic at first blush, it follows the logic of a recent piece of creative nonfiction by the Black wildlife and conservation ecologist J. Drew Lanham. Winner of the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Award of Outstanding Science, Advocacy, and the Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology at Clemson University, Lanham has in recent years exfoliated his environmental expertise across the less scientific genres of poetry and life-writing. In this brief Conclusion, I turn to his 2018 essay “Forever Gone,” which marks the centenary of the extinction of the Carolina parakeet, a green parrot with a bright-yellow head that was once abundant in large swaths of the United States. Linking the parakeet’s demise with plantation slavery’s brutalization of Black bodies and destruction of multiple ecological habitats, Lanham’s essay serves not only as a critical memorial for lost life but also as a cautious meditation on the ethical, political, and imaginative stakes of memorializing that which has been extirpated. Foregrounding the difficulty and ultimate impossibility of his endeavor, Lanham crafts an elegiac form that respects the limits of appearance, the desire for disappearance, and the recessive tendencies connecting him to the birds he mourns. I pluralized birds, because although this particular essay is devoted to the Carolina parakeet, Lanham admits to papering the walls of his office with images of many extinct North American birds, from ivory-billed woodpeckers and heath hens to passenger pigeons and Bachman’s warblers, and to constructing and commissioning countless “facsimiles” in pursuit of “a fantastic aviary that serves to sate a desire to un-doom the wondrous loveliness.” Worth emphasizing in this poetic expression is the Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. Benjamin Bateman, Oxford University Press. © Benjamin Bateman 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192896339.003.0007

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fact that the desire is not, ultimately, sated, because by surrounding himself with this magnificent mausoleum and making so many forever-gone birds reappear, he is simultaneously reminded of how profoundly and permanently they have disappeared. And the Carolina parakeet proves particularly teasing and tantalizing in this regard, as Lanham admits that of all the extinct birds, he has had the most difficulty generating a satisfying likeness of it, in part because the bird’s precipitous decline across the nineteenth century, before the advent of most recording technologies, means that there are no audio files of its voice or videos of its body and only a handful “of black and white photographs of birds kept as pets.” Most of what remains in terms of representation are paintings, from John James Audubon’s early ones of the parakeet itself to paintings by contemporary southern landscape painter Philip Juras that memorialize not the birds but rather the lost “cypress swamps” in which they once flourished. But if the paucity of visual and auditory data plagues Lanham’s tributary and reanimating efforts, so too does the haunting realization—quickened by the juxtaposition of Juras’s lapsed landscapes with a study specimen of a Carolina parakeet at the University of Georgia Museum of Natural History—that the “study skin,” a mere “tube of feathers,” seemed to be studying Lanham as intently as he was studying it. As Lanham elaborates, “most stuffed birds have little tufts of cotton protruding from the holes where their eyes used to be, giving them a zombielike appearance. But this particular Carolina parakeet had glossy orbits of yellow glass eyes instead. It lay there unblinking with unsettling eyes; eyes that gazed through the display case and through me.” What is unsettled here is not the parakeet’s eyes, which are after all locked in an “unblinking” and therefore quite settled position, but rather Lanham himself, who is reminded that in the lost world he is trying to imagine he would have been not merely the spectator of radiant parakeets but also an object of their considerable cognition and consciousness. Parrots, Lanham explains, are among the most intelligent birds, and their intellectual activity is embedded in and routed through their extraordinary sociality. In projecting his unsettledness onto the parakeet, Lanham commemorates the magnificent species as well as the relational webs of recognition it formed with other species, including humans.

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Unlike many of the forever-gone birds, which moved alone or in pairs or perhaps as part of mixed feeding flocks, Carolina parakeets lived and traveled in larger flocks, communicating constantly with each other and forging a social life, and social consciousness, that exceeds the patchwork or pictorial depiction of any one avian individual. Somewhat exceptional in the catacombs of extinct North American birds, Carolina parakeets were exceedingly social and phenotypically special. Lanham claims that the bird “seemed misplaced in the temperate latitudes. The gaudy tropical combination of its emerald green body, sunset saffron in the wings, and tangerine on the head and cheeks didn’t belong here.” Here again Lanham’s apprehension of the parakeet is muddled up with his own self-apprehension, for he sees in the bird’s out-of-placeness an echo and entryway to the displaced African slaves from whom he is descended and to whom he pays tribute as a Black wildlife ecologist committed to making his professional peers reckon with the mutual entanglement of environmental destruction and the history and legacy of plantation slavery. Associating the trials and tribulations of his ancestors with the parakeet’s imperiled attempts to keep its flock alive, Lanham imagines the birds descending on nineteenth-century farmland and assisting the slaves by devouring the cockleburs, poisonous to most animals, that clung to their clothes and frustrated their labor. But because the birds would sometimes also eat the fruit of the fields, rendering them a pest to plantation owners and overseers who wanted them gone—and their flocked sociality, particularly around their own dead, made them easy targets—Lanham also imagines the parakeets fleeing and flying into nearby swamps and marshlands, where they would have then been the clandestine companions of the “Maroons, the self-liberated slaves” who escaped to and lived free within the swamplands into which their various pursuers were too fearful to tread. In other words, the problem but also the payoff of Lanham’s struggle to re-member the Carolina parakeet is that he cannot do so without re-membering many Carolina parakeets as well as many enslaved and liberated Black folks who, according to his interspecific imagination, looked to their avian allies for inspiration and perhaps even solidarity. This emphasis on looking—gazing upward at parakeets in flight or being seized by the parakeet’s quizzical stare—returns us to Christina

186

     

Sharpe’s advocacy of a Black redaction aimed at “seeing something in excess of what is caught in the frame” (117). Recall Sharpe truncating the image of the young girl in order to focus on her eyes and on the beyond of the photo registered by her penetrating stare. Noting that “Juras’s swamps expanded beyond the bounds of the picture frames that held them,” Lanham also mentions the many “wishful sightings” of the Carolina parakeet since its official extinction, and to those apocrypha he adds his own parakeet, “tacked and fastened together with wood glue and wanting.” At the very end of his construction process, and of an essay that both performs and problematizes his repair, he “set two bulging, brown taxidermy eyes in place, and shuddered a bit inside as something gone forever stared back,” after which he “placed him among the rafters of my writing shack, where he now spins in the slightest breeze, bound for someplace far beyond my seeing.” Recognition gives way to recession as the final stress is placed not on the bird’s visual registration of Lanham but rather on the “beyond” that even Lanham’s informed and resplendent imagination cannot apprehend. But if the forever-gone bird cannot, in the end, be revivified, its sense of and orientation to that “beyond” possibly can be. Reflecting on his preferred pastime of birdwatching—in other work he probes the risks Black birdwatchers assume when they venture onto lands where they are perceived as pests—Lanham asserts that “in my escapes to places where birdsong drowns out the news stream and a soaring swallow-tailed kite blinds me to all else except the innate desire to fly in self-determination and free will, the bad disappears for a while and I too am marooned. I become a Maroon—escaping certain bonds to find freedom in the deep recesses of wilderness.” His vision narrowed to, but also widened by, an exclusive focus on freedom, Lanham experiences in his wilderness excursions an intense intimacy with birds and Black forebears. Implicit in this formulation, and resonant with his claim earlier in the essay that naïve returns to and reclamations of wilderness must be corrected by accounting for the Black and Indigenous lives that are constitutive components of that “nature’s” history and degradation, is the deeply ecological insight that when forests and estuaries and marshlands are mowed down or dammed to death, what is lost is not only the natural treasures themselves but also the opportunities for disappearance and recession they provide.

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In his work examining the centrality of quiet, over and against the preferred lexicon of defiance and resistance, to Black life, Kevin Quashie urges “the concept of quiet as surrender—the idea that human subjectivity is not tethered to fighting the social world, but instead could be imagined as the agency to be had in surrendering to the wildness of one’s inner life” (9). Echoing Forster and Maurice before him, while centering race to a degree they never could have and generating reciprocity between Quashie’s inner wildness and the outer wildness of ecological retreats, Lanham laments the loss of wild places where he and birds can fly free and where he can experience and reawaken the flight lines of his ancestors. Without the canopies and creeks and avian cacophonies, Lanham struggles to feel and imagine his way backward to the Black lives that found refuge with and among the Carolina parakeets. Imagination itself requires a fertile and varied ecology, and by placing his model parakeet in his writing shack, where it can spin and whirr and possibly drown out certain distractions, Lanham fuses the recessive and the creative, placing the need to disappear and decompose at the very heart of historical belonging and ethical and political self-composition.

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Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Abraham, Karl 111 African American novel 160–1 Agamben, Giorgio 37–8, 92–3, 110–19, 121, 124–7 “bare life” 162–3 AIDS see HIV/AIDS Althusser, Louis 134–5, 138 Anderson, Patrick 3–4 Anthropocene 2–3, 34, 36–7, 59–60, 130, 133, 141–2 “Anthropocene aesthetics” 33, 72–3 anthropocentrism 142–3, 146 anti-normativity 89–90 Anzaldúa, Gloria 37–8, 117–19 attention economy 34–5 Audubon, John James 183–4 bacteria 53–6 Bahun, Sanja 118–19 Barthes, Roland 85–6 Berardi, Franco 34 Berkowitz, David 96–7 Berlant, Lauren 2, 7–8, 130, 132–3, 142–3 Berman, Jessica 45 Bersani, Leo 11–12, 30, 59–60, 145, 148–9 Best, Stephen 179–80 Bey, Marquis 155–61, 165 bildungsroman 136–7 black feminism 160–2, 165 black history 179–80 black joy 165 “black redaction” 39, 180–1, 185–6

blackness 154–9, 168–9 trans children of color 173–4 Boes, Tobias 136–7 “border intimacies” 2 Bredbeck, Gregory 42 Butler, Judith 6–7, 36–7, 43–4, 64–72, 74, 77–9, 83–4, 147–8 Callen, Michael 96–7 cancel culture 66–8 capitalism 8–9, 12, 135–7, 142–3, 160–3 Carolina parakeet 39–40, 183–7 Carpenter, Edward 41–2 Castiglia, Christopher 114–18, 122–3 Cather, Willa 63, 93 My Antonia 36–8, 64–6, 68–86 Nebraska 63–4, 70–3, 81–4 O Pioneers! 80–1 “On the Gull’s Road” 68–9 Cézanne, Paul 33 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 133 Chaucer, Geoffrey 1 Chauncey, George 80 Chen, Mel 43–4, 156–7 Cleveland Street Scandal (1889) 21–2 climate change 132–3 Cohen, Alfred J. 21–2 A Marriage Below Zero 21–30 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome 44 Colebrook, Claire 43–4, 156–7 colonialism 14–16, 36–7, 55–6, 62, 64–5, 72–3, 77, 154–5, 157–8, 160–3 connectivity 34

196  Conrad, Joseph 149–50 conservation biology 32–3, 55–6, 129–31, 141–4 contact 12–14 Corne, Jonah 57–8 Crary, Jonathan 38–9, 131–3, 142–3 Crimp, Douglas 13–14, 17 criticism 124–5 cruising 145–6, 148–9 Currah, Paisley 156–7 Dale, Alan see Cohen, Alfred J. decay 48–9 Delaney, Samuel 2–3, 12, 14–16, 18–21, 145 depression 5 (see also melancholia) die-ins 16–17 diminution 1, 8–9, 16–17 discretion 1 ‘disidentification’ 2–3, 17–18 displacement 65–6, 72–3, 122–5, 147–8 dominant ideologies 138 drag 6 Druitt, Hermia 154–5, 157–60, 165–72, 176–7, 179–82 Dytor, Frankie 171–3 ecological damage 2–3, 45, 132–3, 142–3 “ecological humility” 54 Edelman, Lee 81–2, 89–90 Eigen, Michael 30–1, 34–5 Eliot, T. S. 175–9 Emmett, Robert 33 endangered species 141–2, 146, 148–51 Enlightenment 133–4, 160–3 Ensor, Sarah 31–2, 145–6, 148–9 environmental critique 130–1 environmental degradation 2–3, 45, 132–3, 142–3 environmental mitigation 129–30, 135–6, 141–2 environmentalism 31–4, 145 Erickson, Bruce 41–3 escape 174–5, 177–8

Evagrius Ponticus 112–15 evasive activities 3–4 exceptionalism 115–17 feminism 30, 137–8 black feminism 62, 160–2, 165 intersectional feminism 91–2 Figlerowicz, Marta 144 Finch-Race, Daniel 33 Finley, Chris 77 Fire Island 37–8, 98–9, 103–4, 115–19, 127–8, 153–4 Fischer, Mike 72–3 Forster, E. M. 37–8 Aspects of the Novel 131–2 Maurice 26, 35–6, 39–45, 187 anal and gastro-intestinal imagery 49–56 liminal zones 56–62 quetzal bird 45–9, 62 (A) Passage to India 35–6, 52–4, 62 fossil-fuel consumption 32–3 Foucault, Michel 21–2, 59–60, 97, 139 François, Anne-Lise 1–2, 142–3 Freeman, Elizabeth 19–20, 159–60, 179–80 Freud, Sigmund 111 gender dysphoria 173–4 gentrification 2–3, 14–16 Giffney, Noreen 43–4 Gill-Peterson, Jules 172–4 Glissant, Édouard 152–7 Goldberg, Jonathan 71, 82–3 Gomez, Marga 17–20 Greaney, Michael 131–2 Great Plains 63 Greenwell, Garth 88–9 Grindr 11–12 Guatemala 45 quetzal bird 45–9, 62 Halberstam, Jack 10–11 Hanhardt, Christina 14–16 Hardy, Thomas 33

 Hartman, Saidiya 157–8 Hayward, Eva 156–7 Henry, Alvin 160–1 Hird, Myra 43–4, 54–5 HIV/AIDS 37–8, 87–91, 93–7, 104–6, 140–1 Holleran, Andrew 38–9 Dancer from the Dance 37–8, 87–93, 108–10 elegiac tone 93–7 Malone 97–104, 119–28, 152–3 melancholia 110–23, 126–7, 152 Wild Swans 88–9, 92, 94–6, 98–100, 103–4, 115–19, 122–3, 125–8 Grief 87–8 Hollinghurst, Alan 87–8, 93–4 homophobia 34–5, 85–9, 95–6, 104–5 human agency 142–3 human exceptionalism 134–5, 143–4 ideology 138 idleness 112–14 imperialism 45–6, 55–6, 61–2, 77, 115–17, 154–5 individualism 30–1, 34–5, 130–1 inter-class contact 2–3, 12–16, 61, 98–9 internalized homophobia 2 intersectional feminism 91–2 intimacy 30–1, 60 James, Caryn 87–8 Juras, Philip 183–4 Kafka, Franz 34–5 Kaye, Richard A. 21 Kingsolver, Barbara 130 Klein, Melanie 19–20 Labouchere Amendment (1885) 21–2 Lacan, Jacques 164–5 Lanham, J. Drew 39–40, 183–7 Lavery, Grace 106 Leavis, F. R. 54 Lee, Hermione 80–1

197

Lewis, Edith 80–1 LGBT politics 2–3, 12 LGBT rights 14–16 liminal zones 56–62, 83–4 Lindemann, Marilee 69–70, 86 loneliness 5, 106 Love, Heather 4–5 Mann, Thomas 123–4 marriage equality 4–5 masturbation 139 Matz, Jesse 42 McCluny, Isabelle 80–1 McFall-Ngai, Margaret 54–5 melancholia 19–20, 37–9, 92–3, 110–24, 126–7, 140–1, 143–4, 146, 152 Menely, Tobias 182 Merrill, George 42 military service 5 Miller, D. A. 85–6, 123–4, 127–8 Millet, Lydia: How the Dead Dream 38–9, 130–52 Millington, Richard 70–2 mitigation 129–30, 135–6, 141–2 modernism 34–8, 158–9, 175–6 modernity 28, 34–5, 59–60 Monet, Claude 33 Moore, Lisa Jean 156–7 Moore, Patrick 89 Morgan, Benjamin 33 Morisot, Berthe 33 Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona 41–3, 140–1 Morton, Timothy 45, 54, 130 Moten, Fred 156–7, 165 Muñoz, José 2–3, 17–21, 121, 134–5 Nancy, Jean-Luc 38–9, 131–2, 142–3, 147–8 nationalism 5 Nebraska 63–4, 70–3, 81–4 negativity 4–5 neoliberalism 2–4, 6–8, 10–11, 18–19, 30–4, 136–7 New York City 12, 14–16, 87–8

198  Newton, Esther 6 nonhuman worlds 41, 44–5, 53–6, 60, 130–1, 134–5, 143–4 normative sexuality 2, 26–8, 43–4, 46–7, 50–1, 90–1, 131–2, 139, 152–3 normative time 157–8, 165 online existence 10–11 patriarchy 69–70 performativity 6–7, 146–7 “peri-performatives” 2–3, 7–8, 43–4, 134–5 perish performatives 8, 16–17, 43–4, 89–90, 92–3, 134–5, 159–60 pinkwashing 14–16 Pinto, Samantha 160–1 Povinelli, Elizabeth 42–3, 59–60 precarity 5, 14–16 privilege 14–17, 89–90, 122–3 progressive politics 5 Prosser, Jay 6 psychoanalysis 30–1, 34–5 public health 3–4, 14–16, 20–1, 104–5 Quashie, Kevin 187 “queer”: definitions 2 “queer art of failure” 10–11 queer black past 39 queer disappearance community spirit 152–3 defiance of neoliberalism 18–19 desirability and endurance 2–3, 7–8 ecology and see queer ecology escape 174–5, 177–8 history 2 queer subjectivity and 106–8, 152, 156–7, 159–61 queer ecology 31–2, 34–6, 38–9, 41–3, 48–9, 55–6, 130 queer spaces 12–16, 30 queer (sub)culture 20–1, 30–2, 63, 104–5, 152 queer subjectivity 106–8, 152, 156–7, 159–61

queer theory 106 quetzal bird 45–9, 62 race 106–8, 154–5 Race, Kane 3–4 racialized queerness 19–20 radical oppositionality 89–91 “recessive action” 1, 7–8, 37–8, 89–90, 92, 110–11 Reed, Christopher 114–18, 122–3 Reiss, Benjamin 135–6, 139, 147–8 rhyme 1 Roberts, Brian Russell 115–17 Rosnick, David 132–3 Ross, Stephen 51–2 Sedgwick, Eve 2–3, 6–8, 26, 43–4, 64, 72–3, 106, 134–5 self-actualization 4–5, 42–3 self-care 152–3 self-centredness 2–3 self-destruction 9–10 self-discovery 153–4 self-effacement 32–3 self-loathing 4–5 set-aside 129–31, 141–4 sexual withdrawal 97–9 Seymour, Nicole 31–2, 42–3 shame 4–5 Sharpe, Christina 39, 180–1, 185–6 Simmel, Georg 34–5 slave trade 157, 160–2, 183 sleep 131–5, 138–52 sloth 112–14, 152 Smiley, Jane 64 Smith, Rachel 150–1 social distancing 87–8, 90–2 social media 11–12 social networks 34–5 Sonnabend, Joseph 96–7 Spillers, Hortense 39, 160–3, 165–6 stamp collecting 46–7 Stephens, Michelle Ann 115–17 stigma 4–5 Stout, Janice 72–3, 76–7

 Stryker, Susan 156–7 subaltern agency 79 subjectivity 106–8, 152, 156–7, 159–61 suicide 5, 8–10, 104–6, 108–10, 140–1 taxonomies 69–70 technocratic solutions 142–3 Tennant, Stephen 158–60, 163–4 Thoreau, Henry David 41–2 Thurman, Wallace 167–8 toxic masculinity 150–1 trans children 172–4 trans subjectivity 54–5 trans-ness 155–9, 171–5 transatlantic slave trade 157, 160–2, 183 transphobia 16–17 Trask, Michael 80 Trevor Project 104–5

urban modernity 28–30, 34–5 utopianism 35–6, 41–2, 92–3, 148–9 Visconti, Luchino 123–4 von Reinhold, Shola: Lote 39, 154–60, 163–73 vulnerability 138 Warner, Michael 2, 7–8, 30–1 weather cycles 133 Weheliye, Alexander 162–5 whiteness 122–3, 168–9 Whitman, Walt 41–2 Wicke, Jennifer 29 Wiegman, Robyn 89–90 Wilson, Elizabeth A. 89–90 Winnicott, D. W. 102 Woodress, James 80–1 Woolf, Virginia 29, 167–8, 181 Wynter, Sylvia 162–3 Yeats, William Butler 37–8, 93

unhappiness 9–10 Uranian love 41–2

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zoos 146–7