Style: A Queer Cosmology 9781479825028

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Style

Postmillennial Pop

General Editors: Karen Tongson and Henry Jenkins Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns

The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening Jennifer Lynn Stoever

Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green

Diversión: Play and Popular Culture in Cuban America Albert Sergio Laguna

Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries Derek Johnson Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing Michael Serazio Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities Mark Anthony Neal

Antisocial Media: Anxious Labor in the Digital Economy Greg Goldberg Open TV: Innovation beyond Hollywood and the Rise of Web Television Aymar Jean Christian More Than Meets the Eye: Special Effects and the Fantastic Transmedia Franchise Bob Rehak

From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry Aswin Punathambekar

Playing to the Crowd: Musicians, Audiences, and the Intimate Work of Connection Nancy K. Baym

A Race So Different: Performance and Law in Asian America Joshua Takano Chambers-­Letson

Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility Alexis Lothian

Surveillance Cinema By Catherine Zimmer

Anti-­Fandom: Dislike and Hate in the Digital Age Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Edited by Melissa A. Click Gender in World Music Social Media Entertainment: The New Roshanak Kheshti Intersection of Hollywood and Silicon Valley The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Stuart Cunningham and David Craig Comics Ramzi Fawaz

Video Games Have Always Been Queer Bonnie Ruberg

Restricted Access: Media, Disability, and the Politics of Participation Elizabeth Ellcessor

The Power of Sports: Media and Spectacle in American Culture Michael Serazio

The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games Ebony Elizabeth Thomas

The Revolution Will Be Hilarious: Comedy for Social Change and Civic Power Caty Borum

The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities Tara Fickle

Digital Masquerade: Feminist Rights and Queer Media in China Jia Tan

Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and The Privilege of Play: A History of the Global Rise of Video Games Hobby Games, Race, and Geek Culture Christopher B. Patterson Aaron Trammell The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging Rebecca Wanzo

Unbelonging: Inauthentic Sounds in Mexican and Latinx Aesthetics Iván A. Ramos

Hip Hop Heresies: Queer Aesthetics in New York City Shanté Paradigm Smalls

Style: A Queer Cosmology Taylor Black

Sonic Sovereignty: Hip Hop, Stories of the Self: Life Writing after the Indigeneity, and Shifting Popular Book Music Mainstreams Anna Poletti Liz Przybylski

Style A Queer Cosmology

Taylor Black

NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS New York

N EW YOR K U N I V ER SI T Y PR E S S New York www.nyupress.org © 2023 by New York University All rights reserved Frontispiece: Quentin Crisp as the Angel of Peace, by Panja Jurgens. Photograph, 1996. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Black, Taylor, author. Title: Style : a queer cosmology / Taylor Black. Description: New York, NY : New York University Press, [2023] | Series: Postmillennial pop | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022059258 | ISBN 9781479824991 (hardback ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479825004 (paperback ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479825011 (ebook) | ISBN 9781479825028 (ebook other) Subjects: LCSH: Queer theory. | Style (Philosophy) | Literary style. Classification: LCC HQ76.25 .B578 2023 | DDC 306.7601—dc23/eng/20230130 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022059258 This book is printed on acid-­free paper, and its binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Also available as an ebook

For Glas

Contents

Introduction: The Elementals of Style

1

Part I: The Mystery of Personality: Queerness as Style

25

1. Quentin Crisp, Queen of the Birds: On Queerness, Repetition, and Style

33

2. It Takes a Sheep: Flannery O’Connor’s Backward Prophets

59

Part II: The Arrow of Time: Style and the Problems of History and Originality

91

3. The Poe Machine: Style and the Strange Futures of American Literary Studies 4. Shadow Kingdom: A Bob Dylan Ghost Story Part III: The Critic as Stylist: Toward a Theory of Attunement

96 127 151

5. The Musical (Re)Turn: Listening in American Literary Criticism

158

6. The Intensive Zone: Pragmatism, Postmaterialism, Object-­Oriented Ontology, and Other Forms of Belief as Method

178

7. Ambivalence and Attunement: On Our Field Formations and Deformations

217

Coda: The Universe That Encloses the Universe

249

Acknowledgments 253 Notes 257 Index 283 About the Author 291

Introduction The Elementals of Style If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-­greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first-­greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy. —­Dorothy Parker

There are two books titled The Elements of Style that were written and published within roughly the same period of time. One of these texts has been forgotten, but the other will no doubt be familiar to readers as the one originally written by William Strunk Jr. in 1918 and revised and rewritten in 1959 by E. B. White. This is a guidebook that Strunk developed and distributed among his students during his long career as a professor at Cornell University. To this day, it is revered by many people. If you are like me, you probably first found out about Strunk and White’s Elements of Style as a recommendation from someone criticizing your writing. Strunk’s is a how-­to book for those who wish to express themselves and perhaps find the business of doing so in written form somewhat challenging. The 1959 edition includes introductory notes from E. B. White that give readers a sense of Strunk himself, the man who edited himself out of The Elements of Style. White was a student of Strunk’s at Cornell who took it upon himself to resurrect his professor’s “little book,” which White calls “Will Strunk’s parvum opus, his attempt to cut the vast tangle of English rhetoric down to size and write its rules and principles on the head of a pin.”1 Strunk’s sympathies are with readers rather than writers, whom he admonishes to communicate in as precise a manner as possible. In rule after rule and bullet point after bullet point, Strunk advises his students 1

2 | Introduction

against bloated and overly stylized sentences (such as this one) and tells them instead to get to the point, by cutting any unnecessary words weighing down their prose. In doing so, Strunk neither defines nor gives a direct take on style itself, an omission that nonetheless suggests his working classification of it as something akin to technique. Strunk’s Elements of Style believes in style as denudation. One of his characteristic injunctions is given in the chapter titled “Elementary Principles of Composition”: “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”2 There is another book called The Elements of Style that appears more alert to just how precarious this process can be. This one was published in 1915 by a British scholar by the name of David Watson Rannie, who wrote elsewhere about William Wordsworth. Unlike Strunk, who, to his credit, follows his own orders by being as concise as possible, Rannie defines style in a much more capacious and even mysterious manner. While Strunk proposes style as a prescription for better and clearer writing, Rannie’s approach to the subject is decidedly more descriptive in nature. Rannie argues that he understands style to be “only another word for expression.”3 Style is not some extant system of rules for Rannie; it is totally embedded within the nature of expression itself. Rannie is open to style’s naturally opaque status as a term of analysis and defends that opacity throughout his work. Not given to rules but oriented instead toward provocation, Rannie describes “style” as a word that is always used but almost never defined except as that which it is not, namely, as a way to describe the way we ornament language. On this, he says, “If Style were only idiosyncrasy, or the literary accent of a school, a nation, or an age, it might well be something which we could recognize when we saw or heard it, but of which we could give no rational account or analysis.”4 With that said, Rannie insists on his notion of style as bound up in “the whole of expression” and argues that far from being some insignificant term, “the study of Style is really the study of literature itself; and that only by understanding Style by distinguishing its processes and methods, and taking note of its failures and triumphs, can we know

Introduction | 3

literature.”5 As opposed to Strunk’s identification with a certain kind of reader (rushed, impatient, and in need of the information as straight as it can be delivered), Rannie’s alliances seem to be with authors, the ones engaged in the enigmatic process of expression. The author’s style is, in Rannie’s terms, “the essential part of literature. Subtract style, and only what is ancillary to literature remains: literature itself is gone.”6 Rannie’s method hinges on a notion of style that is too broad to write on the head of a pin, as Strunk might have had it. Rannie’s sadly forgotten tome on the elements of style is an important addition to Strunk and White’s guidebook. While Strunk and White prescribe style and repackage it as a set of rules, Rannie offers it to his readers a way of understanding expression. Both approaches are useful, but one book seeks to exhaust the subject of style by reducing it to sets of rules and the other leaves it open for future use. To use an analogy from the classic film The Wizard of Oz, Strunk is like Glinda, the beautiful Witch of the North; Rannie is like the disruptive but mesmerizing Wicked Witch of the West. As you shall soon understand, I have always identified with the Wicked Witch of the West, and Style: A Queer Cosmology sides with authors (rather than readers) and sees style as not always neat, tidy, and pretty but as always something to reckon with.

All or Nothing This book argues that style is personality in its purest form; it is a rudimentary source of differentiation. Style is elemental. And I mean “elemental” here in all the ways the term will allow—­elemental as in the primary features that make up a structure or thing, when, for instance, we are talking about what distinguishes one person from another and how our sense of that distinction reveals itself through personality. When we speak of someone’s style, we are speaking of how they look, how they act, their tastes and predilections, their overall manner of expression. But I also argue that style is open to another of the definitions of “elemental,” which is more mythological. “Elemental” can refer to some naturally occurring force embodying the powers of nature. A lightning bolt, for instance, is the by-­product of the atmosphere’s immanent elemental forces. “Elemental” can even describe supernatural or godlike energies that prefigure and give meaning to materiality itself—­the

4 | Introduction

stylists of mythology or cosmology. This book offers up something like the elementals of style, or a notion of style as (an) elemental—­style, in other words, as the rudimentary source of difference that distinguishes one thing from another, something perhaps, more closely aligned with myth than fact: an immaterial force or energy, perhaps supernatural in essence, that imbues everything under the sun. Style, in other words, is more, I think, than we assume it to be. It is more than we dream of in our philosophy. When it comes to style, it is either all or nothing. Either style is everywhere and therefore inexhaustible as a subject of analysis or it is fickle and meaningless, referring to nothing more than personal preference. It is my aim to convince you of the former approach to style. My hope is that without exhausting my subject (or the attentions of my readers), I can convince you of my admittedly magically conceived notion of style as a force that prefigures and encloses the universe and supplies it with difference. To talk of style is not the same thing as speaking of aesthetics, which I understand to be a way of analyzing that which we as humans consider beautiful or not. Analyzing style means dialing into the nature of expression in search of difference. Writing about style means looking and listening for those qualities that demarcate or particularize one individual from another. Like Strunk, I believe that a stylist ought to strip away all of those things that do not emanate from and reinforce their sense of style. Writing is, for me, one of many adjuncts of style, but writing—­like any other form of expression—­reveals rather than adheres to style. Following Rannie, then, I want to insist on style’s centrality to the study of literature and all of the expressive arts. Taking style seriously in this manner means attuning ourselves to it and accepting its multiple and, sometimes, truly abstract states of being. To write about style is to cultivate a sensitivity (or an ear) for those fleeting and often ephemeral revelations of style that convey themselves through personality, mystery, and difference. Style: A Queer Cosmology has its roots in American studies and queer studies. Its key term and title—­“style”—­is a familiar word that nonetheless conveys meanings and applications that, over time, we may have forgotten we knew. In common parlance, “style” is often equated with stylishness. Following Strunk and White, style is also something like a code, a way of composing oneself according to the dictates of con-

Introduction | 5

vention.7 Both notions of style emphasize the ways we, as individuals, find meaning from without rather than within by fashioning ourselves into something other than what we are. Style: A Queer Cosmology proposes not so much a new but an “unknown known” way of seeing the world, cultivated by iconic and subterranean American stylists from Edgar Allen Poe through Flannery O’Connor to Quentin Crisp, Nikki Giovanni, Andy Warhol, Toni Morrison, Bob Dylan, and back again.8 I represent these and others as capable of fashioning themselves from within to become more like themselves. As a scholarly intervention, this book seeks to engage not in the familiar narrative myth of American newness but in the critical work of revival and attunement—­retuning terms and ideas that seem familiar to open up more expansive and deeper forms of engagement. In Style, I develop the runic insights of Zadie Smith, who defines “attunement” as a process of heightened awareness, an orientation toward “the breakthrough” as the ideal practice or principle of criticism. It is, in her words, “emotional overcoming, . . . a retuning from nothing, or from a negative, into something soaring and positive and sublime.”9 Attunement happens when an American system of myths and symbols blossoms into an awareness that is capacious and immanent. It is the instinctive practice of a constellation of American stylists who, each in their own way, seem strangely aware of themselves and whose creations—­whether artistic or philosophical—­engage in self-­creation and becoming. “Attunement” is the central critical term and the critical practice I advance in this book. In a sense, “attunement” allows the critic to replicate the artist’s achievement of style, that is, to borrow a phrase from Quentin Crisp, becoming themselves by being more themselves than nature made them. Style: A Queer Cosmology introduces itself to literary studies at a time when the field finds itself at an impasse and wanting to reconsider its primary purposes and methods. Conversations surrounding “postcritique,” for instance, typify the desire for scholars to realign their reading and writing practices with the text itself, to reenergize criticism and experience criticism anew. The literary critic and theorist of interpretation Rita Felski’s Hooked: Art and Attachment (2020) and The Limits of Critique (2015) argue that our scholarly apparatuses are getting in the way of more genuinely critical and deeper forms of engagement with the text.10 Her own and others’ contributions to the field of “postcritique”

6 | Introduction

demonstrate a palpable anxiety as to whether we, as literary scholars, are being critical in the correct ways.11 According to this line of thinking, we seem to divide ourselves into two camps: those who, because of politics, are too critical and those who, from their aestheticized distance, are not critical enough. There is a general feeling of dislocation and dis-­ease that guides this latest moment in our ongoing story of literary critical frameworks. The bottom line seems to be that literary critics want a way back into their work with and on texts. Style is here to help. It argues that without doing away with our critical faculties, it is possible to reintensify the ways we read and discuss texts by an emphasis on style as the expression of personality and difference in its purest, but also most inclusive, forms. I offer retuning as a mode of critical reinvigoration and invention—­ retuning, in this sense, as both a reparative and future-­oriented act of enhancement and revivification, retuning our work and ourselves the way we retune an old, but beautiful, piano when it starts to sound a bit harsh or even retuning the way one retunes a guitar from standard to another, perhaps strange and minor, key. To move beyond the attachment to or defense of “critique” that drives postcritique and its doubters, I offer a way through contemporary fashions in literary reading—­which have moved us from the depths of close reading all the way to what Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus term “surface reading.”12 I also address the queer studies response to postcritique, which insists, in spite of itself, on identitarian notions of queer critical methods, only in the name of what it calls “affect.”13 To carve a path through all of this, I offer what I call “intensive reading” practices that search for those qualities embedded in the text that are not so easily measured and not always even material. The practice of style is a way of reattaching to the world vis-­à-­vis modes of reading and representing literary texts. Both critique and postcritique are only one of many gestures of style. As a contribution to a scholarly conversation, this book does not set up another “post-­” to add to the ongoing story of literary criticism. Through its retuning of the literary critic into the stylist, this book is meant to be both reparative and future-­oriented, using elements that are already at our disposal. The book moves within current debates and terms to remind us of what we as literary critics are truly inclined to un-

Introduction | 7

derstand and represent, namely, abstract and ephemeral concepts (like the literary) that are emergent and impossible to calculate. In doing so, I engage with other literary critics but also add to the discussion a critical genealogy of philosophers whose work is explicitly conceptual.14 My hope is to reinvigorate a notion of literary analysis that seeks to produce new concepts about who we are and what we do rather than to prolong old debates. We need to recommit ourselves to the study of things and qualities that are immanently literary and not to social scientific categories like “identity”: style instead of fashion, singularity over universals, personality instead of identity, the emergent and not the new, questions rather than answers, the mystery of becoming, of personality, of style. Style: A Queer Cosmology assembles texts, performances, and personae from American culture high, low, and in between that engage in ethical, creative, and performative modes of what I call “abundant revelation.” It moves back and forth through time, sketching American cosmologies within the canon, by figures such as Poe, O’Connor, and Bob Dylan. Each of Style’s “conceptual personae” (Deleuze and Guattari) are peculiar, garrulous, and untimely, by which I mean more attuned to themselves and to their modes of conceptual invention than to various forms of convention or fashion.15 They perform style by leaning into and becoming more like themselves, both in their works and in their self-­presentation.

What Is Inside As a work of American studies, Style operates from a primary belief in the supremacy of those very American myths: popular culture and personality. It views the nation from its underside and tends, as a matter of course, toward those who elaborate or dramatize the inherently extraordinary or grotesque. I turn to American artists, authors, and scholars who draw out the subterranean elements of our culture in order to show us who we forgot that we were. I am fascinated by what Flannery O’Connor has described as “the mystery of personality,” and this book offers up some very queer notions of what I think she means there. Style traces its lines of conceptual analysis across time and space in a manner truly queer, following Eve Sedgwick’s notion of the term as transitive, “relational, and strange.”16 I focus on peculiar and idiosyncratic figures who are untimely and self-­

8 | Introduction

knowing, who seem out of place but sure nonetheless of their position in the cosmos, requiring that we attune ourselves to the particular ways that these figures know and become more like themselves. Part 1 comprises close readings and dramatizations of a number of peculiar and particular examples of self-­fashioning and presentation, some quite contemporary. It engages with O’Connor’s notion of the grotesque, Quentin Crisp’s queerness, and what I see as their shared belief in personality as a stranger and ultimately more capacious concept than mere identity.17 I complement this notion by introducing a constellation of queer studies scholars—­Eve Sedgwick, Wayne Koestenbaum, Hilton Als, Kara Keeling, José Muñoz, Karen Tongson—­and others who seem attuned to the intensive properties of personality as opposed to the extensive, measurable properties of identity. Part 2 deals with the problem of history as a kind of disaggregating narrative force that in its telling, as Quentin Crisp has said, “points always in the direction of diminishing difference.”18 Its two chapters turn to Poe and Dylan as eschatological thinkers, always concerned with glimpsing or dramatizing the beginnings and ends of the universe. In Poe’s projection of himself as an author for an audience “two thousand years hence,” he emerges here as a stylist of the future.19 Dylan, on the other hand, plays the part of Mr. History. He brings with him the burden of what Greil Marcus has termed Dylan’s “old, weird America.”20 In line with this, Dylan appears in this part as a kind of necromancer, as someone who knows how to commune with the dead. Part 3 carves out critical pathways toward what the scientist, Jesuit, and excommunicated priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin theorizes as “the within of things,” or that place beyond the solid material world where things are “ephemeral” (Muñoz) and “immanent” (Deleuze and Guattari).21 Beginning in chapter 5, this part listens and feels around for a subterranean sense of the musical as the ultimate mode of style and becoming. In chapter 6, I feature the work of humanities scholars who found a way to extend their work beyond the accepted limits of their disciplines. I think of these figures as stylists who manage to overcome or attune the otherwise competing forces of convention (methodology) and style (personality or instinct). This part concludes with chapter 7, which deals with the problem and promise of scholarly field formations and moves toward a notion of criticism as an individual mode of self-­creation and cosmology.

Introduction | 9

Some Further Queer Contexts: Critical and (as) Personal Style follows and enters into conversations happening in literary studies, feminist theory, queer studies, and American studies. In general, though, I go wherever I see someone pushing the boundaries of their disciplinary (or interdisciplinary) frameworks and toward something stranger. I find critical and creative inspiration in works by scholars who linger on a particular subject long enough to do something that is more like an artist’s portrait than an analyst’s case study. I am drawn, in other words, to the ways that personality leaps out of the frame and understand that this is only possible if the one sketching the portrait is willing to take their time and lean into the mystery. I have been influenced by a genealogy of queer studies scholars who stay with and read with the grain of exemplary individuals who, for the life of them, cannot help but exceed the theoretical or narrative frame. José Muñoz has obviously been a great influence in this regard, particularly for the way he engages recursively with a certain set of individual figures across his work in service of his theorization of queerness, utopia, performance, and being. Beginning with his first book, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999), through to his final posthumously published The Sense of Brown (2020), Muñoz assembles critical subjects the way that a theatrical impresario gathers together a cast of characters to play in his productions.22 Across his work, Muñoz displays the kind of sustained interest in his subjects—­such as Kevin Aviance, Nao Bustamante, Vaginal Davis, and Carmelita Tropicana—­that is sustained and complex, more like a friendship than some kind of distant, clinically abiding interest. Muñoz’s methods are therefore in line with the notion of queerness set in motion by Eve Sedgwick, who understands the term “queer” as “a continuing movement” across or athwart objects, desires, and persons that is always and already “relational, and strange.”23 Muñoz engages thoroughly and recursively with the personalities he assembles in service of his theorizations of a queer utopic then and there.24 The relationship across figures is a space of self-­realization and becoming for scholars following through on Sedgwick’s transitive and strange notion of queerness and Muñoz’s recursive engagement with his cast of theoretical characters and coconspirators.

10 | Introduction

Another of these figures is Jack Halberstam, an important touchstone in queer studies with whom I engage across this book. His 2012 The Queer Art of Failure is of particular interest to me, in part for its description of a queer stylistic approach to the archive (Halberstam makes a case here for the “silly archive”). The book begins by quoting one of Quentin Crisp’s most infamous aphorisms: “If you try and don’t succeed, failure may be your style.” Halberstam emphasizes queer failure, articulating its many different kinds, while missing or mishearing the most important note in Crisp’s quip, which has to do with style as a method of becoming more like yourself. Retuning Crisp’s aphorism to emphasize style, I come up against Halberstam’s literalist rendering of queer failure. The central concept of my book—­and, indeed, of all my intellectual energies—­came to me in spite of myself. Many long, dark years ago, I was a graduate student searching for a purpose, a project, to call my own. By the end of my first year of course work in American studies, one of my wise faculty advisors warned me that if I was not careful, I would end up “a jack of all trades and a master of none.” As she was a social historian and American studies PhD herself, I thought the comment strange, especially since she had had no trouble publishing articles and books and held what looked like an intellectually stimulating position as a university professor. She explained that her warning had to do with the pitfalls of interdisciplinarity. To be fair, I had to admit I had only discovered the term toward the end of my undergraduate studies when, without having completed enough courses in any one discipline, a kindly registrant suggested I declare myself a major in “interdisciplinary studies.” The term felt like a blessing, as if I was being given permission to transform a kind of failure to learn into a form of quasi-­specialty—­a failure’s alibi. Unlike so many other key moments in my life when authority figures confronted me with what they called my lack of an “executive function,” as a psychiatrist once put it, or “focus,” to cite any number of progress reports written by my teachers, I am sure this college official had no idea that she was responsible for a shift in my orientation toward learning. This moment of evaluation burned away the stinging (and stinking) memory of previous evaluations such as a parent-­teacher conference with my eighth-­grade English teacher, who warned my parents that, based on my present behavior, I was destined to become “a bottom-­feeder.” I thought of this epithet years later, taking in the kinder

Introduction | 11

and more apt advice from my graduate school mentor, who, I think, was asking me to devote myself to a particular disciplinary path laid out in the field of American studies. Notwithstanding that, her advice came at a moment when I found myself totally, and at last, focused in on what I wanted to do and say as a writer, thinker, scholar, and human being. It was around the time that I had this conversation that I came in contact with, “discovered,” the life and works of Quentin Crisp. Depending on who, where, and (most likely) how old you are, this name may or may not ring a bell (though my book will certainly change all of that). To put it briefly, Crisp was an outrageously effeminate homosexual who found himself, for most of his life, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Born in England—­a country that he hated and that, by all accounts, hated him too—­in 1908, Crisp lived in relative obscurity for most of his life. Part exhibitionist, part martyr, Crisp left his suburban home for London in the late 1920s, deciding no longer to conceal his effeminate nature or personality but rather to accentuate it: “brazening it out,” as he would often say. Crisp finally found some fame late in his life following the publication of his autobiography, titled The Naked Civil Servant (1968). By the time it was transformed into a made-­for-­television film starring John Hurt, Crisp was granted the national and then international acclaim that he seems to have been born to enjoy. Strangely and belatedly, Crisp’s battle with and against the outside world ended, or rather shifted in his favor. I took to Crisp with the zeal of a newly converted prophet. By the end of my first year of graduate school, I was dressing like a dandy and carrying an umbrella around rain or shine. Adopting—­or copying—­Crisp’s appearance, I also took up what I considered to be his cause. I had business cards printed up with my name and a new title: Professional Failure. For years after reading Crisp’s autobiography, I was hung up on the word “failure,” completely ignoring or taking for granted (as we do) the more innocuous-­seeming term “style.” The path forward through my graduate course work and toward the dissertation stage then came into view as I followed by the light of Crisp’s queer failure. The reading lists and papers that followed coalesced around what was by that time an acceptable and even conventional (a strange word to use in this context) queer studies project. It was during the early stages of my deep dive into Crispian failure that I was introduced at a professional mixer to Halbers-

12 | Introduction

tam, who had just completed or was just completing his book The Queer Art of Failure (2011). Serendipitously or, more likely, as a response to my rather ridiculous Quentin-­drag, Halberstam quoted his new book’s epigraph: “If you try and don’t succeed, failure may be your style.” That same line had been the one that hooked me too, though, over the years, I have come to comprehend its intended meaning differently. Halberstam’s book is, of course, the work on queer failure that the world needed, and especially at that time. It was released just over a decade after Crisp’s death in 1999, and so much had changed for queer people in the worlds in which Crisp lived. By 2011, political visibility for gays and lesbians in the United States was already a foregone conclusion. While not the same as acceptance, whatever that may be, the recognition and solidification of an LGBT cultural and political agenda offered queers a permanent place to live out of the shadows and in the harsh light of normality. Gay marriage, too, was just around the corner in the United States when Halberstam was writing his book on queer failure. Debates were still happening within “the community” over the merits of marriage and military service as political goals for a future movement. Halberstam’s—­and others’—­insistence on queer failure can be seen as one last theoretical holdout against the coming tide of tolerance, acceptance, and permanent political visibility for the so-­called queer community living in the United States. It seems that the vitriolic disgust and hatred that heterosexuals once held for their queer brethren had waned. Perhaps, one hopes, these changes in law and sentiment are a product of “real people,” as Crisp always called heterosexuals, coming to their senses and opening their hearts. If that were the case, then, how should individuals and communities of sexual and gender minorities, all accustomed to failure as a way of life, cope with all of this sudden success? Crisp imagined this dilemma in one of his earliest television interviews, given in 1968 to Bernard Braydon and unearthed later by the British Film Institute. Here you find Crisp in his decidedly British stage of himself—­ which is to say colder and bitchier than his latter-­day American persona, who was fatuously affable. The interviewer asks Crisp about recent legislation in the United States addressing what he calls “the problem of racial tolerance” and wonders if the same kind of political shifts might be in store for homosexuals. Crisp answers affirmatively and in doing so imagines what it will feel like to finally be received by the very same

Introduction | 13

people who once beat you up and called you a queer: “Unfortunately, of course, toleration has come in a form that is slightly insulting. That is to say, one imagines that the message when it come would read: ‘Forgive us for having for so long allowed our prejudices to blind us to your true worth and cross our unworthy threshold with your broad-­minded feet.’ Instead, the message now reads: ‘Oh come in. The place is a mess. You’ll love it.’”25 Crisp’s pert statement about “toleration” is performed here in an appropriately nonplussed way. Crisp does not really believe in politics and is therefore unmoved by the idea of legislation offering anything to him or people like him. Perhaps this ambivalence is the result of Crisp’s acceptance of himself as a lifelong failure, unaccustomed to and affectively unprepared for success and visibility. Or, more likely, Crisp’s somewhat catty but calm bemusement stems from the fact that he has the airs of a prophet. As such, he takes a longer view and therefore understands change to be incremental—­if not incidental—­in nature. Legislation, he explains to Brayden, “makes almost no difference. It is the result of public opinion.” The eventual acceptance of queers by “real people” is, in this sense, nothing more than “the work of time and not of people.” If tolerance and enlightenment are inevitable, then, Crisp would have us believe, they are hardly cause for celebration. Interpreted cosmically, they might even be signs that we—­who were once so exciting and terrible that everybody hated us—­no longer matter: “Enlightenment does not produce tolerance; tolerance is the result of boredom. The facts have to be repeated over and over and over and in the end people say, ‘Alright so you’re queer, just talk about something else.’ And then the work is done.”26 Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure picks this story up where Crisp leaves off: namely, at the other end of what Crisp calls in the interview with Braydon “the arrow of time, which points always in the direction of diminishing difference.”27 Standing at the gate of almost complete acceptance of LGBT people into the US body politic, Halberstam’s book represents one final evaluation of the realities and benefits of political, social, cultural, and professional failure. Fully aware of the fact that, as its introduction states, “failing is something queers do and have always done exceptionally well,” Halberstam refuses to sentimentally turn queer negatives into straight positives.28 Instead, the book digs in and rides the wave and reads with the grain of queer failing and flailing as it asks us

14 | Introduction

to ponder the ethical, political, cultural, and even academic alternatives to success. If life is a game that we all have to play, then queers have had centuries of experience in coming up short. Halberstam’s approach is to turn this loss into political resistance. Halberstam connects the drive to succeed as professionals to a Foucauldian notion of disciplinarity. I take Halberstam’s critiques of the fantasy of success as seriously as I do his critical visions of alternative routes of expression and intellectual fulfillment. Throughout the book, Halberstam presents queer failure as a methodology and antidote, not only to some abstract, tragic notion of heterosexual success but to the state’s larger project of controlling and inhibiting the bodies and desires of its subjects. Targeting, as he puts it, “the academic in the circulation and reproduction of hegemonic structures,” Halberstam’s book is meant to challenge those of us engaged in this work to consider how we might be undone by our individual attachments to or notions of professional achievement.29 Success, in this instance, is not so much an abstract goal or even an individual feeling as it is a well-­established, even bureaucratic form of psychic dominance that reinforces itself via codes and modes of conduct. Halberstam quotes Foucault on this subject—­“Disciplines will not define a code of law, but a code of normalization”—­adding that academic disciplines in particular “qualify and disqualify, legitimate and delegitimate, reward and punish; most important, they statistically reproduce themselves in order to inhibit dissent.”30 Following up on Foucault’s call for us to replace dominant or disciplinary modes with “subjugated knowledges,” Halberstam rides the wave of queer failing and flailing to other analogous calls for ways of thinking outside of the mainstream. The Queer Art of Failure assembles other theorists—­to name only a few, Jacques Rancière, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Fred Moten, Stuart Hall, Saidiya Hartman, Toni Morrison—­who Halberstam argues compel us to resist the allure of success and to fail better.31 Under the banner of what he coins “low theory,” Halberstam’s project then engages in a kind of undisciplined approach to the work of intellectual engagement, one that revels in what it cannot know or do rather than celebrating what it has supposedly figured out or mastered by way of professional expertise. “As long as there is an entity called high theory,” Halberstam explains, “there is an implied field of low theory.”32 This space of low theory is where, for

Introduction | 15

Halberstam and others following his lead, queer studies is not so much doomed as destined or permitted to flourish. In this space, all of the refuse from high culture and high theory is left for the rest of us to pick up and admire in our own ways. Low theory is, as Halberstam argues, totally permissive and indeed turned on by its willingness to take in that which is deemed too silly or meaningless for proper consumption. Taking on these discarded or unserious texts and objects, then, Halberstam’s low theory proposes a theoretical practice or knowledge “that works at many levels at once, as precisely one of these modes of transmission that revels in the detours, twists, and turns through knowing and confusion, and that seeks not to explain but to involve.”33 Queer failure, then, is both a thing that can be accounted for and studied and also a way of doing things that, as scholars, we should cultivate and protect if we are to absolve ourselves from the games we are destined never to win.

How Does It Feel? Style and the Minoritarian Everyone and everything has a style, but not everyone is a stylist. A stylist is someone who goes from not being able to help it to doing it on purpose. They are failures who have transfigured failure into something else. These people are usually marked with one or many qualities that estrange them from others. Whether these markers are externally reinforced—­such as through codes of racial, sexual, gendered, or classed identification—­a nd/or internally reiterated via an odd or off-­putting personality or disposition, the young or would-­be stylist is usually someone who has been forced to grow up as a kind of stranger to others. These are minoritarian figures whose alienation from other people produces in them a kind of second sight. Such a figure grows up learning the answer to a question asked by W. E. B. Du Bois in the opening pages of his The Souls of Black Folk and reiterated by Muñoz in his chapter “The Transmission of Brownness” in The Sense of Brown: “What does it feel like to be a problem?”34 Muñoz allows us to think about how “feeling like a problem” can also become (and perhaps is already) a mode of self-­recognition. Taking his cues from African American scholarship developing Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness, Muñoz sees this concept of “feeling like a problem” as a way to feel both excluded from a dominant culture and identified

16 | Introduction

with or recognized through one’s own relationship with others who are standing on the outside looking in. “Feeling like a problem is,” Muñoz explains, “a mode of minoritarian recognition. . . . [It] is not simply an impasse but, instead, an opening.”35 Here, Muñoz means “minoritarian” not in terms of statistics—­as connected to an American notion of “minority politics”—­but in the way that Deleuze and Guattari describe it, especially in their book Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. “Minor,” for Deleuze and Guattari, is connected to escape. A minority politics is in that position precisely because it is outnumbered by the majority; a politics of the minoritarian is a politics on the move from the mainstream, toward passages and throughways of its own making. At the beginning of their book, Deleuze and Guattari liken the world (and the text that creates a world) to a castle. In representing it, they describe its façade, its many doors and windows inviting entrance into or from it. They also move us in their rat-­or insect-­like way toward what they describe as the infinite number of subterranean and hidden passageways into which one can “burrow . . . [with] multiple entrances whose rules of usage and whose locations aren’t very well known.”36 Kafka was, of course, more than just an author: he was a stylist, and we know this by virtue of the existence of the concept of the Kafkaesque, which does not simply describe Kafka’s literary works but the world that precedes and encircles those text. Through Deleuze and Guattari, it becomes clear, I argue, how Kafka uses language as a way to cultivate his style, how, they argue, “using the path that Yiddish opens up to him, he takes it in such a way as to convert it into a unique and solitary form of writing.”37 They discuss Kafka’s use of Yiddish as a way to move through and disaggregate the major languages in which he was fluent: German, Czech, Hebrew, and so on. Yiddish is not a language of its own, nor is it necessarily something like a patois or minor version of a dominant tongue. It is, Deleuze and Guattari argue, a more “theatrical” mode of engaging with and speaking in major languages, a way of experimenting with the boundaries of each as they fold into one another and form another dialect that is always on the move and never settled down into a discrete formula.38 “It is a language,” Deleuze and Guattari explain, “that is grafted onto Middle-­High German and that so reworks the German language from within that one cannot translate it into German without destroying it.”39 As a minor language, it is always on the move, never

Introduction | 17

staying put. Or, as Deleuze and Guattari aptly state, “One can only understand Yiddish only by ‘feeling it’ in the heart.”40 This “feeling it” that they speak of is not of the sentimental but of the sensational variety. Yiddish makes its own sense that is registered only by being spoken or acted out. It is language that burrows into and then moves from one linguistic body to another—­like a tick, to use one of their favorite metaphors. A minor literature, for Deleuze and Guattari, is therefore to be measured in terms of its affective capacity. This is what Muñoz means when he picks up their concept and uses it to chart queer of color deterritorializations of dominant forms of knowledge such as identity, identity politics, and individualism. The question “What does it feel like to be a problem?” is an invitation for queers of color in particular to engage with so-­called identity politics, through something approximating Gayatri Spivak’s notion of “strategic essentialism.”41 To respond to the question is to open deeper forms of self-­recognition and self-­or world-­ making that bely minority-­politics models of understanding. “Feeling brown,” Muñoz argues, is “a way of being in the world, . . . [which is] not the same as being seen or perceived as brown.”42 This feeling is the opposite of a label that is imposed on the subject; it is also distinct from a form of recognition in that it is, like all feelings, unwieldy and prone to its own flights or fancies. “Feeling brown” is neither here nor there yet always on the horizon (the then and there of queer futurity, as he would put it in Cruising Utopia). But this “feeling” is also a kind of worldview or a “theoretical hermeneutics” that is completely tethered to Muñoz’s sense of being and becoming in the world.43 “Feeling brown” is, for Muñoz, “the glue that coheres group identifications.”44 The feeling is not the same as the identity, but it describes how we come to know and believe in our forms of social categorization so intimately. What Muñoz calls “feeling brown” is, I argue, something like a style that precedes and makes use of culturally constructed categories like identity. He and I are both trying to describe the process by which the immeasurable and immaterial force of personality, style, or feeling comes into and ultimately moves through discrete social containers. Style is a problem that convention tries to solve. “Feeling like a problem” is similarly a mode of minoritarian recognition for Muñoz in that it moves inward, away from the purview of majoritarian culture and toward its own strange passageways where it can become more aware of itself. This is

18 | Introduction

an identity politics that is also on the move toward—­or evolving into—­ something more cosmic. The minor subject becomes more in tune with itself by burrowing into itself, via a Du Boisian double consciousness, into a kind of performative queer ambivalence around what it “feels” like to be a problem in the world. I feel in tune with Muñoz’s approach to Du Bois’s very important (and loaded) question and see my notion of style as being a way for minoritarian subjects to experience life more fully, by cultivating style as a kind of cosmic second sight that looks beyond what is apparent and obvious to others. This awareness gives the stylists a renewed sense of control in their dealings with the world. Style is, in the end, a way of transfiguring limitation into possibility. It is a process of fabricating one’s way out of failure, toward endless possibility. On this notion of critical and creative fabrication, I follow behind other queer scholars, critics, and artists who emphasize the creative, world-­building functions of queerness. I align this book with those who treat such acts of innovation, becoming, and fabulation with the seriousness they deserve, resisting the more common tendency to treat fantasies skeptically. Part of what I do, in other words, involves a bit of my own critical sorcery that I can think of, through Muñoz (via Ernst Bloch) as a kind of queer world-­building that is registered in material and temporal terms. Following Muñoz’s emphasis on deferral in the project of queer world making, I am inspired to imagine the artistic movements through or against the arrow of time as being done in the works (songs, books, whatever) themselves but also mysteriously and sometimes supernaturally in the ephemeral traces they leave that seem to come from what Muñoz describes as some distant “then and there” time beyond the horizon of the present.45 Through Muñoz and other scholars of performance and critical speculation, I am therefore able to work with a sense of queerness that is nonheterosexual but also strange and always heterotopic.46 These include the figures working in and around what Tavia Nyong’o has described in his book Afro Fabulations as critical practices that bring with them a kind of “race against time and the ‘changing same.’”47 “The changing same,” which Nyong’o picks up from Amiri Baraka’s famous 1967 essay on R&B, began as a way for Baraka to theorize the interconnectedness of Black musicians and Black music critics (or, as Baraka puts it, “the same family looking at different things”).48 After Baraka, “the changing

Introduction | 19

same” became, Nyong’o argues, the “key trope of temporality in black cultural studies” that finds a certain rhythm by relating the two opposing points of view and seeing them as permanent fixtures in the ever-­ evolving modes of Black creative production.49 Nyong’o links his own work’s interest in performative and critical methods of disaggregating our sense of time to the Black queer theorist Kara Keeling, and he insists on the “angular sociality of the changing same,” which, he maintains, can be a mode of “doing history that is a showing of the doing of history, and in that showing, history’s undoing.”50 Nyong’o is not disinterested in the familiar critical tropes so much as he sees in or through them a possibility for thinking and doing otherwise. Nyong’o has offered up the notion that “critical poetics of afro-­ fabulations are a means of dwelling in the shock of . . . reality without ever becoming fully of it.”51 I take this to be an aspiration toward a mode of interpretation and representation that both confirms and denies the validity of the realness of history or linearity of time. I also see in and around Nyong’o’s Afrofabulist critical tradition a way to think through and into the whiteness of American history by inventing the past. Chapter 5 of this book is my contribution to this growing movement or refrain. Here I pivot around Nikki Giovanni’s poetic redescription of Middle Passage as the first iteration of human space travel, with its captive inhabitants playing the part of the earliest explorers of the New American World. Her poem “Quilting the Black-­eyed Pea (We’re Going to Mars)” insists that those explorers who had to leave a known world in order to travel across an unknown body and into an unknown universe also managed to communicate with one another in spite of their linguistic differences by humming and then through song. Following Giovanni’s line of flight, it is possible to consider the Negro Spiritual as America’s first and primary literary object-­language and the entire business of literary production that came after as necessarily bound to the refrains imagined in those earliest works of American literature.

American Cosmologies Giovanni’s is one of many American cosmologies in this book that seeks to redescribe history. She is, like other stylists, someone who cannot help but think cosmologically. And cosmology is storytelling—­fabulation. It is a

20 | Introduction

way of understanding the universe by imagining its beginnings. The theoretical physicist and astronomer Chanda Prescod-­Weinstein says as much throughout her 2021 book The Disordered Cosmos. Here, she describes cosmology as “a deeply human impulse [to understand and describe] . . . a sense of where we came from and why we are here.”52 Stylists are, likewise, naturally drawn to understanding the universe better by virtue of developing a more and more acute consciousness of who and what they are and how they came to be. What may look like “a problem” from the perspective of the outside world is nothing other than the raw materials of a style, namely, all those things that fall under the category of personality. I think of the stylist’s attunement to themselves as a kind of becoming-­cosmic. There are any number of answers from stylists to Du Bois’s prompt at the ready but none as tuned into his frequency, I might argue, as Zora Neale Hurston in her essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” Thinking back to her growth from a young girl in Eatonville, Florida, to a college student attending Barnard College and artist flourishing in New York City, Hurston describes her earliest years fondly. Eatonville was, she says, an “exclusively colored town” that only saw whites passing through on their way somewhere else. Ever the analyst, Hurston writes about waiting for these white strangers to pass by and sometimes stop to ask for directions, which gave her an opportunity to take in the strange theatrics of social encounter: “The front porch might seem a daring place for the rest of the town, but it was a gallery seat for me. My favorite place was atop the gate-­post. Proscenium box for a born first-­nighter. Not only did I enjoy the show but I didn’t mind the actors knowing that I liked it.”53 In this space, young Hurston is blissfully unaware of the problem of her Blackness, and white people are merely like weather systems that passed through her town. But things changed for Hurston when, at thirteen, she was sent to school in mixed Jacksonville. “When I disembarked from the river-­boat,” she writes, “I had suffered a sea change. I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl.”54 The second part of Hurston’s short essay begins with this statement: “But I am not tragically colored.”55 From there, the essay is an accounting of Hurston’s various efforts at overcoming this otherwise-­crippling state of becoming something she was not. This is an essay about Hurston’s efforts at attuning herself to herself, of figuring out not only what it is like for her to see what is out there in the world for her but also what

Introduction | 21

that world (and those people occupying it) will see when they look at her. From her preferred position atop her family’s front porch watching the world go by, Hurston becomes the author of her own performance of herself. She takes what she discovers belatedly are crippling disadvantages and turns them—­almost magically—­into the elements of her transformation into an idealized version of herself: “I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world—­I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”56 This oyster knife that she deploys is used partly for her own purposes, but it is also a form of self-­protection. The world is her oyster, and she is ready to pry it open. Hurston eventually leaves the relative comfort and safety of her Black Eatonville universe for the wider, whiter world. At the time that she wrote “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” she was the only Black student enrolled at Barnard College and portrays herself there as the Black One “among the thousand white persons,” as “a dark rock surged upon, and overswept.”57 As a minority member of the student body, Hurston would have had plenty of opportunities to cling to one of many social identities laid out for her that would have helped her announce and make sense of her precarity. Hurston is ambivalent—­which is to say tuned into and moving beyond her social identities. Her Blackness is important for her, but only as a key to unlocking a more abstract and fulfilling sense of who she is. Whereas, she says, in Eatonville, she does “not always feel colored,” at Barnard, she “feel[s] [her] race.”58 This feeling does not only register itself in negative terms. Like Kafka, she burrows into the racial epithet as she describes “feeling” Black in musical terms, comparing her cosmic reaction to a jazz set played at the New World Cabaret to her white date’s more placid take on what he had heard. The orchestra swells, and Hurston is transported elsewhere, to some mythical kingdom where Blackness flourishes as pure sensation. At the same time, she is juxtaposed by her friend, whose inability to feel what she feels reveals his own lack (of his own style): “The men of the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly.”59 In this moment, Hurston becomes herself by tuning into herself. Through this feeling—­of being in that club, of being Black, of being a problem—­Hurston can escape the “veneer we call civilization” and move away, into the stratosphere, where she

22 | Introduction

will be transfigured. It is at this moment—­or on this frequency—­where, she says, “the cosmic Zora emerges.”60 Style escapes—­à la Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the minor—­ but it also returns to the real world enhanced by its movements back and forth between the world we instinctively know and the one we are forced to exist in every day. Style is a way to synthesize who we think we are with who the world tells us we ought to be. Without the sense of purpose that style provides, the minoritarian subject is left without a course of action. In this context, the world blames them for their limitations and then cynically shames the outcast for not being able to adapt to its majoritarian standards. Style makes it possible for the minoritarian subject to make the most out of limitation, not by magically replacing it with something else but by unlocking its capacity to limit as well as expand one’s capacity to do business with the outer world. For minoritarian subjects of any and every variety, style is also the way to see yourself into and also out of (or beneath) the whole business of identity development that marks so much of the political and cultural landscape of twenty-­first-­century America. This is, in part, what I think Muñoz means when he suggests that feeling like a problem is a mode of minoritarian recognition leading to a better sense both of what it feels like to be a problem and of what is problematic or interesting even about feeling in and of itself. After all, Du Bois’s question leads immediately to a consideration of his identity as Black man in America, but this is, as he himself suggests in his book, an indirect or abstract way to think about his own experiences. A genuine way to respond to a question like “How does it feel to be a problem?” is with a direct answer that moves past the triangulating discourses of social identity and toward a more abiding and irreducible version of oneself that is able to answer the question honestly. Minoritarian subjects can, in other words, look to the scripts given to them by whatever identity category or categories to which they belong, or they can use those same scripts as a first step toward a deeper awareness of the nature of alienation itself, which begins in the more mysterious and formless universe of human limitation from which we all are shaped. Style, like Du Bois’s double consciousness or Muñoz’s minoritarian recognition, is a mode of ambivalent belonging to the world and to the identities it requires us to bear as we move through it. A stylist knows

Introduction | 23

the difference between style and identity; they understand, in other words, that they cannot live in a dream state, rejecting the way that the world sees them. A stylist is likewise totally aware of what disadvantages them but also keenly attuned to the possibilities inherent in cultivating those same disadvantages into a way of becoming. Stylists are those who are for whatever reason supremely aware of or even saddled by their individual style as they make their way through life.

Blue Broxton, “HRH QC,” ink, May 2020

Blue Broxton, “Our Lady of Andalusia,” ink, May 2020

Part I

The Mystery of Personality Queerness as Style Mr. Sargent said, “A portrait is a likeness with something wrong about the mouth.” But really a portrait is more than that. . . . A really good portrait is more like you than your own face. —­Quentin Crisp, “Having Style” A good story is literal in the same sense that a child’s drawing is literal. When a child draws, he doesn’t intend to distort but to set down exactly what he sees, and as his gaze is direct, he sees the lines that create motion. Now the lines of motion that interest the writer are usually invisible. They are lines of spiritual motion. And in . . . [“A Good Man Is Hard to Find”] you should be on the lookout for such things as the action of grace in the Grandmother’s soul, and not for the dead bodies. —­Flannery O’Connor, “A Reasonable Use of the Unreasonable”

Portraits of the Stylist The Quentin Crisp quote in the epigraph is available only on some remote part of the Quentin Crisp Archives webpage. Yet I find myself circling it again and again. It contains ideas that never stop making meaning of themselves. As for the first part, from Mr. Sargent, I take Crisp to be extrapolating here on his idea of the arrow of time and specifically on his notion of style as difference in its purest form. As I argue in the introduction, style is in its pure state uncontainable. While it is possible to think of an artist as belonging in the most abstract way to a particular historical moment or canonical framework—­and as creating or embodying a period or genre style—­it is also true that style always exceeds its frame. “A portrait is a likeness with something wrong about the mouth” is another way of saying that a portrait is somehow more striking than that which it portrays. The “something wrong about the mouth” is the 25

26 | Part I: The Mystery of Personality

portrait’s style. It is what differentiates it not only from others hanging on the wall but also from the subject it imitates. The “something wrong about the mouth” is another way of describing style ontologically, as what we might also think of—­via Charles Sanders Pierce, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and Brian Massumi—­as related to the virtual: that part of our sense of life that is immaterial and ephemeral but nonetheless very real.1 Like the virtual, style is abstract in its very nature but nonetheless capable of making things mean. It is what Elizabeth Grosz would term an “incorporeal” force that prefigures and is also embedded within whatever body it can be found.2 When we gaze on a portrait, we are admiring not the exact replication or abstraction of human life but the human life intensified and made into art. We are admiring the mystery of human personality, which is most evident in the ways that same personality exceeds or escapes its frame. Style is, once again, a portrait of a face with something wrong about its mouth. Extending from Crisp’s quote, it is clear that style is not only an ontological or virtual field of difference but also a process by which one can differentiate oneself—­a production of potentiality, will, and the human spirit, a mode of self-­conversion akin to what happens in Nikki Giovanni’s famous poem: “I turned myself into myself and was // jesus.”3 Style is an aspirational act of transforming—­or transfiguring—­yourself into yourself. It is a way around nature. The boundaries we construct around our personalities are different, in the end, from the kinds of containers or abstractions, like artistic canons or scholarly field formations, that I discuss in part 1 and again in part 3 of this book. A portrait is a human being transformed into art, which is, Grosz argues, “what enables chaos to appear as sensation, as intensity, without imperiling or engulfing the subject.”4 Frames are a way of capturing or intensifying the human experience of life, which is essentially chaotic. All the expressive arts register our attempt at capturing the essence—­or style—­of the human. A human being, like a portrait of that human being, cannot be paraphrased, but heaven knows we try. “Artists never accept for long the limitations of their medium,” Crisp says. “They never seem aware that these are what give their art its style.”5 In failing to accurately re-­present the human in artistic form, we affirm the true vitality of life, of style.

Part I: The Mystery of Personality | 27

Some Queer Birds This part of the book is about strange creatures who cannot help but become even more strange. It is, in other words, about queerness as a way of life or a style. It features stylists who will dramatize and embody my argument that style is a way of exaggerating that which one cannot help but be. Crisp and O’Connor commit themselves to the propagation of their individual styles. This book, and indeed this first part, veers toward the queer utopic elsewhere theorized by José Muñoz by following the trail of its own eccentric birds. Along the way, it will get its inspiration from describing and then glorifying the preening and fatuous displays of one particularly curious man whose relationship to sexual identity is formed around his self-­indulgent inability to adapt himself to his surroundings. Following this path, I portray queerness here as everything but identity. It is made up of the stuff that logics of identity abbreviate, such as personality, habit, tendency, orientation, and style. The chapters in this part feature and attempt to sketch portraits of two figures who were well aware of the lifegiving powers of limitation. In doing so, I follow in the path of a number of scholars working in queer studies, broadly conceived, who seem instinctively attracted to personality instead of identity, critics like Hilton Als, who, especially in his treatment of Dorothy Dean in The Women, signals his critical awareness of the complex, messy, and otherwise larger-­than-­life figures and personae that cannot be contained by any one identity or metaphor.6 I am thinking, for instance, of the homosexual opera queen described by Wayne Koestenbaum as a kind of critic and coconspirator with the singing diva. Even in his silent reverence, the queen finds himself connected to and bound up in what is happening onstage, transfiguring silence and distance into connection and attunement: “The opera queen’s throat is inactive and silent while he listens; the singer’s throat is queen. But the act of intense, grounded listening blows to pieces the myth that we can know precisely where emotion or an experience begins. I am not a singer, but I have a throat, and I am using it to worship and to eat opera, to ask questions of opera so that opera might eat me.”7 Part 1 recognizes the ways Crisp and O’Connor carefully utilize the creative power of limitation, which is a word that corresponds to the portrait with something wrong around its mouth and the distortions in a child’s drawing. As we will see in chapter 1, on Crisp, style can be a way

28 | Part I: The Mystery of Personality

of making what we might otherwise think of as our most unfortunate attributes into a way of life. The raw materials of Crisp’s style—­his homosexuality, sure, but also his effeminacy, which always bordered on the bizarre—­left him with plenty to work with. In the end, the same qualities that set him apart from the rest of the world and indeed caused him good reason to fear violent disapproval became the components of his style, allowing him to enter into what he describes as “the profession of being.” As Crisp says, “Our identity is just a group of ill-­sorted characteristics that we happen to be born with.”8 Style is a process of gathering up those “ill-­sorted characteristics” and polishing them up into a way of life. “This polishing up process,” Crisp maintains, “makes your life so formal that by comparison the life of a Trappist monk is an orgy.”9 If the advanced stylist must, like a monk, develop habits that enrich their performance of style, this part of the book focuses in on the very peculiar yet absolutely attuned habits of two practitioners of advanced style: Flannery O’Connor and Quentin Crisp. In Crisp’s case, I am interested in the ways that, in his persistent retelling of his life story in his memoirs and his public performances, he fashions his ambivalence into a kind of self-­made formalism. To call Crisp an effeminate homosexual is only half the story; as a stylist, he knows that identity categories are shorthand, a way of familiarizing and defanging his entire style. In chapter 2, I turn to O’Connor and her work as a fiction writer in order to explore how she constructs her characters so that they might reveal “the mystery of personality.” Here, I remind readers of O’Connor’s original plans to become a cartoonist and explore the ways she ends up working in her story writing as a caricature artist works—­“like a child,” as she says, whose literal rendition of what she sees reveals an aspect of reality that an older person has learned to overlook. In a speech given to would-­be fiction writers, she advises her audience to adopt “the habit of art,” a term she associates with the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain: “Art is the habit of the artist; and habits have to be rooted in the whole personality. They have to be cultivated like any other habit, over a long period of time, by experience.”10 In part, what she tells them is simple: in order to become a writer, one must write as a matter of “daily practice”11 We might think once again of the life of the Trappist monk as an orgy compared to the life of the writer/stylist. “It is a fact,” she continues, “that fiction writing is something in which the whole personality takes part—­the conscious as well as the unconscious mind.”12

Part I: The Mystery of Personality | 29

The act of writing is a descent into this zone where the conscious and unconscious—­or the actual and the virtual—­commingle to produce something tangible that bears traces of the mystery of existence. For O’Connor, a bad story is one that tries to get around this somewhat-­opaque process by forcing onto its characters and plot some theme or notion that the writer wants their work to represent. Writers have to realize that “the meaning of a story has to be embodied in it” and that, like all meanings, it must be experienced to be understood.13 Writers and readers must have a full encounter with the story as it is laid out, from beginning to middle to end. The artist or writer, in other words, must work through the limitations of their physical medium in order to reveal something deeper than what the product itself can convey. A story cannot be paraphrased because it carries within it a meaning that, O’Connor argues, “is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.”14 Likewise, characters are all potential vehicles for the revelation of style. Hulga’s wooden leg, for instance, in “Good Country People,” began for O’Connor simply as an attribute making this character unlike the others but began, as she descended further and further into its plot, to accumulate stranger kinds of meanings: “And when the Bible salesman steals it, the reader realizes that he has taken away part of the girl’s personality and has revealed her deeper affliction to her for the first time.”15 As a prosthetic, the leg is limitation materialized, and like all limitations, this one is laden with certain meanings that have to be experienced to be understood. O’Connor did not force this message onto the story or even expect the wooden leg to deliver it when she was writing. More than being a symbol for the woodenness of Hulga’s soul, the leg became so loaded with implication that it could not help but exceed its own frame. It is imbued with mystery, with an emergent property only accessible by a full experience of the story. As an adjunct for Hulga’s style, the leg can be removed literally but not spiritually. The wooden leg is an inextricable part of who Hulga really is—­for better and worse. Style is not exactly a way of being free from the world so much as it is a manner of becoming freer in it. Chapter 1 defines queerness as something like a personality problem that exhibits itself early in someone’s life and gets exacerbated over time. Whether or not we like it, we are all bound to become who we are. No amount of fixing or doing can change our style. This is something that queers know by heart. After all, and as Crisp shows us, one sign of a budding queer will be their inability to pass the norma-

30 | Part I: The Mystery of Personality

tive milestones of intellectual, social, and developmental achievement. I realize that I am projecting a bit, but I have my reasons; I suppose it takes one to know one. At any rate, what is queer about me as a scholar and writer is my tendency toward a very particular form of what Sedgwick calls “perverse” or “overreading,” which, as she puts it, is “never a matter of my condescension to texts, rather the surplus charge of my trust in them to remain powerful, refractory, and exemplary.”16 This kind of practice is normally overcome in childhood but, as you will see, has stayed with me to the point of becoming a preferred methodology for literary analysis. Mainstream—­which is to say heterosexist or straight (a nice way to say “square”)—­narratives about development suggest that this is a stage to be overcome, that adult readers ought not to identify so wholly with the texts that they consume. The implications of this reach beyond our habits as readers. Someone who is and identifies as queer is also someone who must, at all odds and in spite of the prevailing wisdom, go their own way, which in this case is more than a cliché. Use of the word “queer,” Sedgwick argues, “seems to hinge much more radically and explicitly on a person’s undertaking particular, performative acts of experimental self-­perception and filiation.”17 As such, I want to make a case here for the performance of queer singularity and individuality that is not, in its essence, negative or antisocial. The peacock is, after all, something of a social animal. While he is not that good at blending in or getting along with others, he does like and indeed sometimes require the attention of a crowd. Taking my cues from Sedgwick and Muñoz, I understand excess and repetitive performances of self-­reflection as reflections of queer potentiality or utopia. Style is as style does. This a law that applies to all living forms, but it is only stylists who are actively and consciously engaged in the reiteration of this fact of life. In the world of nonhuman animals, peacocks seem especially cognizant of themselves as stylists in this sense. In order to show you what I mean, I need to bring some of these concepts to life, to draw out some of the characteristics of the peacock. I have to depend on someone who knows and appreciates the habits of this noble (if sometimes tedious) creature. Crisp is also a “conceptual persona,” as Deleuze and Guattari might have it, of style. His version of being himself is always already a performance of his theory of how we can become ourselves or, better yet, as becoming-­peacock. Conceptual personae act out philosophical concepts; they are, Deleuze and Guattari explain, “the becoming or the subject of a philosophy” that “must always be reconstituted by the reader.”18

Part I: The Mystery of Personality | 31

The behaviors of the stylist are easy to overlook as excessive and useless in and of themselves. With that said, there is an ethical dimension to style that has to do with the expression of freedom. Here I am thinking of ethics along the lines of Grosz’s description of the practice in its earliest form, by the Stoics: “Ethics . . . [as] the elaboration, in other words, of freedom, not a freedom from cause or constraint, but a freedom because of it.”19 This expression of freedom is bound up in the event itself and is, Grosz argues, essentially teleological, “directed to an end or finality, one’s place in the cosmos as ordered by divine living pneuma.”20 She traces this practice through to Nietzsche and his amor fati, the love of fate: “to live in the present as if one’s fate depended on it, with complexity, obscurity, unknown causes, imponderable effects, with concern for what one can control and indifference to what one cannot.”21 Here, too, style emerges as a form of idealism; it is something like what Grosz terms an “incorporeality” in that it requires physical expression and manifestation. It is not, however, the same as a Platonic ideal. Its ends are justified by its own means. Or, perhaps more accurately, as Muñoz might describe it, style is a potentiality, a “means without an end.”22

Blue Broxton, “Queen of the Birds,” ink, May 2020

Figure 1.1. Resident Alien, Jonathan Nossiter, 1990. (MOMA Online Collection)

1

Quentin Crisp, Queen of the Birds On Queerness, Repetition, and Style

Style and the Peacock Have you ever spent time with a peacock? We have all heard of them, and most of us have surely seen them; but to truly appreciate a peacock, one must be willing to endure his very particular personality. Not long ago, I had the opportunity to spend a few years living in Los Angeles, California. There is a town called Arcadia that sits just a few miles to the northeast of downtown Los Angeles. A man named Elias J. “Lucky” Baldwin brought the birds over from India around the turn of the twentieth century in order to decorate his ranch and also help thin out the snake and snail populations. Today some of these birds roam the grounds of the Los Angeles Arboretum. Others, however, have spread out beyond the confines of this manicured space and into suburban Arcadia. The itinerant peacock even made its way to the official Seal of the City of Arcadia, where it poses with feathers gathered in a train behind him against the background of a Spanish Mission and the San Gabriel Mountains. In spite of their esteemed position in Arcadia’s history and status as legally protected beings under contemporary local laws, the birds are not beloved by the human beings who live in the houses that run along the peafowl’s streets.1 When I was living in Los Angeles, I would often go out of my way to spend time with the feral peacocks, peahens, and peachicks that call Arcadia home. Each time I paid a visit, I got a keener sense of what a nuisance it must be to live near these supposedly merely decorative creatures. In discussions with dog-­walking or baby-­strolling denizens of Arcadia, I found out that the birds are worse than annoying. They like to destroy flowerbeds, peck at shiny things (like fenders of new cars), 33

34 | Quentin Crisp, Queen of the Birds

and howl at all hours of the night. In my own experience, the birds are, like other species of their kind, very repetitive, routinized animals. It is ironic that the peacock in particular has been lionized over the years as an object of physical and even divine beauty when, in reality, it is quite an unruly, homely, and obnoxious creature. This does not mean that the bird is not worthy of our attention or respect. In fact, notwithstanding its essentially irritating characteristics, my attraction to these feral peacocks had to do with their unadulterated, unsolicited presentation of themselves unto others. I spent a lot of time in the presence of these birds, observing their perplexing behaviors and noticing the very many ways they reminded me of Quentin Crisp, whose particular manner of preening and parading himself in public resonates so much with the peacocks roaming Arcadia’s suburban streets. Like these birds, Crisp was singular and tended to go his own way. He always lived as an alien amid a crowd of strangers. Whether you know him or, more likely, once did and have since forgotten, my hope is to resurrect Crisp in the public imagination. In short, he was a notoriously effeminate man who found himself on Earth at the wrong time and in the wrong place. Born in 1908 and forced to endure most of his lifetime in England, life was never going to be easy for him. After all, as he always said, England is a country that does not even like effeminate women. Imagine being a hennaed man, “blind with mascara and dumb with lipstick,” waltzing the streets of 1930s London, trying to remain calm even while you were causing quite the stir.2 For most of the twentieth century, the world had no idea who Quentin Crisp was. It took the 1968 publication and subsequent television adaptation of his autobiography, The Naked Civil Servant, to introduce Crisp to his future audience. Until his latter-­day fame—­on what he routinely referred to as the smiling and nodding racket—­he was merely notorious. For most of his life, he was a local nuisance, whispered about by his neighbors as he passed them in the street, frightened, no doubt, by the site of an exaggerated and effeminate creature who was, as he has admitted, hooked on exhibitionism.3 Of course, they were not always frightened. More often than not, these people were angry. As his appearance “progressed from the effeminate to the bizarre,” the reactions of his neighbors became more and more heated.4 If his way of being was a kind of protest against their prejudices against him, then

Quentin Crisp, Queen of the Birds | 35

Crisp had to learn to accept and anticipate their violence as a kind of counterprotest. The public’s perception of Crisp as an effeminate homosexual put him in danger. He learned to anticipate and even exaggerate all the worst qualities that an angry mob might have otherwise beat him over the head with. Crisp’s theory of style is that it is an alternative to identity and a path to self-­preservation. Whereas identity is given to us from without, one may achieve a sense of personal style from within. He wants us to become more like ourselves by becoming stylists. The beginnings of style involve a journey to the center of our personalities and then a move back out into the world carrying the information we have found about what makes us who we are. Stylists distinguish themselves by virtue of their ability to repeat and then become more like themselves; they know that life is an opportunity to reflect what we know of our style by reiterating it in our daily performances of ourselves. Like peacocks, stylists are both gifted and doomed by their own need to remake the world into one long platform on which they perform their rituals of style. In the end, Crisp’s theory of style contains a kind of cockeyed message of hope for everyone on Earth. We all have style, but we are not yet all stylists. He envisions a scenario in which we have, each in our way, laid down the abstract burdens placed on us by our conventional identities and put in their place chains of our own making. Crisp’s own autobiography contains signs of someone who was, from birth, strangely sure of himself yet totally incapable of fitting in or getting on with the rest of the world. Far from conveying his brokenness, Crisp’s backward habits become his trademark. Through style, Crisp learns that accentuating his appearance was his only cause for self-­protection. Approximating a peacock with his tail spread, Crisp deployed his innate effeminacy to get ahead of the accusations and the sneers. He learned to stop the world in its tracks.

The Profession of Being You may be asking yourself about Crisp, Apart from talking about himself, what did he do? Keeping in mind that Crisp did not really believe in politics (and much less a gay version thereof)—­he calls it “the art of making the inevitable appear to be a matter of wise human choice”—­and

36 | Quentin Crisp, Queen of the Birds

that he was never popular with other homosexuals, who have historically considered his particular form of self-­interest off-­putting, Crisp could never rely on the safety that comes with traveling with a community of like-­minded individuals.5 If you read Crisp’s autobiography or watch the film, you get a sense of just how precarious his life was out on the streets of pre-­gay-­liberated London. When he was not simply raising eyebrows or irritating his fellow travelers, Crisp attracted the kind of attention that reaches out and touches you, usually in the form of a shove or poke but also, depending on the time of day and the mood of any given crowd, a series of kicks and punches. Violence of this kind was usually preceded by laughter, then scorn, and sometimes offered up in the form of a bad joke or rhetorical questions such as “Who the hell do you think you are?” Who indeed? Crisp, like so many other effeminate homosexuals before and after him, understood the fine line between being the butt of a joke and the object of violent attention. Rather than adapt new routes or hide behind masculine clothes, Crisp’s response was to lean into himself, wearing more makeup and moving around fragrantly. Flaunting himself in this way, Crisp came to understand style as a survival mechanism. Unlike, for instance, Oscar Wilde’s notion that in matters of importance it is not sincerity that counts but style, Crisp came to understand that they were the same thing. Style, according to Crisp, is “an idiom arising spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained.”6 To put it another way, it involves understanding that which you cannot help but do and doing it to a greater degree. Style can be a way of gaining control of one’s social world. For a homosexual, it can become a formal process of neither confirming nor denying the horrible things that real people say about you. In Crisp’s case, this amounted to something like what E. Glasberg describes as “[refusing] to insist on the essence of . . . [one’s] homosexuality preferring instead indirection and gesture” as a way of becoming your own setup and punch line.7 Rather than wait for the ire of his reluctant audience when he waltzed down the streets of London, Crisp chose to shock and irritate his potential attackers and counterprotesters into submission. Like a peacock that has finally decided to spread his notorious tail feathers, the effect of this kind of exhibition can be startling. When we witness a peacock’s full display, it is easy to assume that he has done so for the benefit of his au-

Quentin Crisp, Queen of the Birds | 37

dience, transforming himself from an odd-­looking, odd-­sounding bird into a grand object of beauty. The peacock does what he does partly out of a desire to be seen but mostly because he is compelled by his nature to do so. As a bird among birds, the peacock is practically defenseless. He is quite literally weighed down by his beautiful trail and equipped with wings that do not permit him to do much flying. His beauty is all he has been given. I would like for you to think of the peacock as a creature utterly in tune with its style. This is not the same as saying that the peacock is a creature with more style than, say, a chicken. Everyone and everything has a style all its own, but not all of us are aware of this fact. On the other hand, however, humans have plenty of ways to replace our style with prefabricated, conventional forms. Fashion, for instance, is the opposite of style. It is the belief in stylishness, of swimming with the tides of cultural whims. It is a chicken believing it can dress up in peacock drag and get away with it. (These are notes for Mr. Wilde.) Style is consistent, clear, and repetitive. If you accept your style and give yourself over to becoming more like yourself every day, then you will find that, over time, you change less and less. Style, as Crisp has told us, is a way of letting other people know who you are by the way that you look, “[cutting] the deadwood out of living conversation.”8 A peacock knows all of this to be true. He appears always preternaturally aware of his style and commits himself to the lonely profession of being like himself. As in the example of Crisp, the peacock is an exhibitionist through and through. While he may cause delight (or disgust) in others, the peacock is never to be distracted from his ultimate goal. He takes himself very seriously. The rebellious spirit and congenital inability to fit neatly into one’s time or place are two definitive components of any serious practice of style. In these two ways, Crisp proves this to be so by virtue of his having survived in the way he did: a self-­evident homosexual who neither knew nor passed through any kind of “closet.” What Crisp has to offer us with regard to his enactment of a theory of style is a way of transforming being in time into an endless process of becoming: a transvaluation of life into a self-­sustaining set of habits that attempt to align one’s body and spirit with the sometimes unrecognizable and not immediately knowable elements of the world. To be clear, style is about singularity; it is difference in its purest form. That said,

38 | Quentin Crisp, Queen of the Birds

style is not a state of exception. Even boring people have style. Think of the Kardashian family or their pop-­cultural forebear Andy Warhol, a boring person who turned his boringness into a cause.9 While we all have style, Warhol and Crisp are two perfect examples of stylists: creatures aware of and constantly reiterating the essence of their style. According to Crisp, “style is, in its broadest sense, consciousness.”10 It is, in other words, a way in which one can come to know and properly identify oneself: a repertoire. Stylists must take great efforts at achieving and reproducing singularity and difference against the arrow of modern time, which diminishes difference. So, as much as style produces consciousness, it also governs and enforces an untimely quality in those who choose to follow its directives. Far from being a more natural way of existing in the modern world, style is actually a process of constructing an artificial sense of time and of the future against logic and against the proper order of things. Style is, in Crisp’s terms, “never natural; its nature is that it must be acquired.”11 Once this is done, the risks and rewards of style become clear. In the great scheme of things, style is a lonely business. That said, it is not a form of antisociality. Crisp, like any other abnormal and gorgeous bird, needed a crowd and an audience.12 Even though he never felt like a human being and could not easily mix into the real world disguised as one, he did manage to find a way to live as the one among the many: a rare bird on display for all the world to see. Understanding himself as essentially predisposed to being at the mercy of the world, Crisp turned style—­which is to say, becoming more like himself with every move and gesture—­into something like a kind of queer idealism, which, as Muñoz reminds us, is embedded within every “queer feeling of hope in the face of hopeless heteronormative maps of the present where futurity is indeed the province of normative reproduction.”13 In this sense, Crisp’s endless project to perfect and preen the raw materials of his style into a repertoire to perform before the rest of the world takes on something akin to a world-­building project, complete with all of the attendant “philosophical contours of idealism” central to queer futurity.14 The world that the stylist creates is a work of art that must understand and constantly give birth to itself. The strength of Crisp’s style lies in his ability to understand himself as gorgeously abject and foreign. It is his uncanny confidence and his very odd way of going

Quentin Crisp, Queen of the Birds | 39

about describing and performing himself that make Crisp an untimely figure worth exalting. The peacock’s beauty is neither a beauty that invites physical affection nor one that draws its audience near; it is instead the kind that commands its silence as it bears witness to something that seems both real and unreal. Like the startled and anxious spectator who stands at the feet of the peacock, waiting for him to unfurl his feathers on them, the stylist that Crisp personifies and imagines relies on this very kind of mystery and detachment to keep his subjects in line. Glamour is the glue that binds the peacock to the stylist, an affective force that, according to Crisp, “exists where something not clearly defined seems to be promised but never given” and is, in the end, “a far more powerful force than mere prettiness.”15 It is not in the peacock’s nature to understand this matter in any other way: he is totally incapable of understanding the world in which he lives and the ground on which he struts as anything other than his own sacred territory. Depending on your point of view, the adult peacock is either beautiful or ugly. Likewise, Crisp cultivated a public image of himself as both a peacock, modeling for art students, and something far plainer: a naked civil servant who came to work each evening, removed his clothes, and stood in front of a room of housewives and hobbyists. Like any peacock, he seemed born with an innate sense of himself as untimely and beautiful. He begins his autobiography describing this state of backwardness: “From the dawn of my history I was so disfigured by the characteristics of a certain kind of homosexual person that, when I grew up, I realized that I could not ignore my predicament.”16 Rather than hiding himself away in this broken place or even confessing his sins to the world, Crisp quickly learned that his survival was bound up in becoming “not merely a self-­confessed homosexual but a self-­evident one.”17 Style became his way of remaining and becoming more like he was. By exaggerating and preening his effeminate mannerisms and features, Crisp found in style a way of exercising “the last vestiges of [his] free will by swimming with the tide—­but faster.”18 Style is not, in this case, something you do or even just something you are. Style is not even beauty. It is a form of stubborn commitment to repetition as a source of articulating difference. The private trauma of being homosexual, of being born a mistake, can become a public performance of individuality and sexual difference if

40 | Quentin Crisp, Queen of the Birds

that trauma is transformed into a routine and procession. Rather than hide away from the world, Crisp was able to offer himself to it: “I put my case not only before the people who knew me but also before strangers. . . . As soon as I put my uniform on, the rest of my life solidified round me like a plaster cast.”19 Style, following Crisp’s example, is not something to be possessed but something that must be projected outward. It is a form of queer sociality that is constructed around difference, which is something akin to Muñoz’s sense of “utopian performativity . . . [that] suggests another modality of doing and being that is in process, unfinished.”20 Whereas Sir Thomas More envisioned utopia spatially, as an island, through Muñoz it is possible to see it temporally and ephemerally vis-­à-­vis deferment and imagination. It is possible, then, to code Crisp’s repetitive performances of style as a way of building a queer utopia. Repetition of the same, in this case, becomes a way of deferring change of any kind to another place and another time. A life lived in time with one’s style is a life reduced to the essentials evident in staying alive. As this is so marvelously displayed and exemplified by the peacock himself, style ought to be forevermore understood as a habit—­not something that you merely revert to or get done in by but that you immerse yourself in and dedicate your every thought, movement, and sensation to. The peacock is employed in the never-­ending propagation of this image. From the moment a young peacock hatches and enters the world as a homely, paste-­colored bird, he begins his endeavor to become more and more like himself every day, until his image and his style have become so perfect that the whole world collects around him as his frightened yet totally desperate audience. Even so, from these drab beginnings, the young peacock spends his first two years on Earth practicing for what is in store for him—­actually behaving as if he was fully formed and believing in the amazing sight of his full plumage, even though it is not yet physically present. Once fully grown and perfected, however, the peacock cannot expect the immediate and total adoration that he knows he is due. Most people, according to Flannery O’Connor, “are genuinely affected by the sight of a peacock, even with his tail lowered, but do not care to admit it; others appear to be incensed by it.”21 The kind of queerness texturing the life of the peacock is not only about the eccentricity of his beauty but also about his incessant need to display and withhold

Quentin Crisp, Queen of the Birds | 41

this quality. Its power is in his capacity to attract and then disfigure the attention heaped on him by his audience. However, understanding the world in only the ways his nature inclines him to, the peacock is, in the end and thankfully, ignorant to this piece of information. Peacocks are useful to understand not as stylish or icons of style but as style. What is more, they not only embody style but are embodied by it in equal measure. Style is not a matter of constructing life as an artistic endeavor but of reducing it to its most artistic nature—­a way of intensifying existence. Just as the sight of a peacock is hard to fully comprehend or take in for the human spectator, so too does the presence of someone or something reduced to their style also perplex. All movements a peacock makes are beginnings, all gestures and displays repetitive in nature, yet still theirs is a total art: all parts are in service and in conjunction with the entire effect of their beauty. As such, it would be easy to call the peacock repetitive and shallow. Sure, he is beautiful when he is in full display, but waiting around for that moment to occur means submitting yourself to the very fickle whims and fancies of the peacock himself. With him, what little you see is all you are likely to get. Even the peacock must reckon with the fact that he is, for the most part, nothing more than a silly creature to those who sit in his audience. This predicament is reminiscent of a scene in The Naked Civil Servant that serves as the culmination of a whole series (indeed, a lifetime) of violent confrontations between Crisp and the public. One night, while walking home from dinner, Crisp experiences what has become a familiar routine: a drunken mob of men takes him into its notice and seizes upon him, first in the form of taunts and jeers and then through more physical means of communicating disdain. Once again, Crisp finds himself on the ground, suffering the kicks and blows raining down on him by his attackers. Sometimes, these men run out of steam on their own; other times, however, they do not. Knowing that he had no other resources available to him but his wit (and, indeed, that trying to defend himself in any way would make the men attack him more mercilessly), Crisp deploys his style as a survival technique, in this case by using humor. He says, “I must have annoyed you gentlemen in some way,” which makes them laugh.22 Sure, he is the butt of the joke, but he is, in this instant, also the one telling it. It is his understanding of his style that allows him to become both setup and punch line. While the

42 | Quentin Crisp, Queen of the Birds

passage is certainly sad, it is an object lesson in overcoming tragedy—­ not by trying to get around or fix it in any way but by making it into a way of life. In one way, Crisp’s statement appeals to the men’s disdain for homosexuality; indeed, he admits that his “joke” was an expression of his belief that “all heterosexuals, however low, . . . [are superior] to any homosexual, however noble.”23 We can believe what he says about the lowliness of homosexuals, but that is just another of his funny little jokes on us. The fact that Crisp regarded himself as a mistake and that he cultivated this sense into a style is what allows him to survive in one piece. The queer is aware of the jokes made by real people at their expense, and this awareness is registered not only on their sleeve but also on their face, gestures, and voice too. What happens to them then becomes the comedy that encases the queer tragedy. In Crisp’s case, however, and in Crisperanto, his system of codes and rules for himself and others similarly afflicted and/or naturally attracted, style is the manner through which stylists turn the joke about themselves around. Still, by writing his autobiography through a series of aphorisms and self-­deprecating jokes, his life was far from a series of interpellations, sneers, and jokes on him. Crisp’s own rules about style and instructions regarding its cultivation use his story as the platonic example. Crisp, as he puts it, was born a mistake, always and already a dead loss: “As soon as I stepped out of my mother’s womb onto dry land, I realized I had made a mistake—­ that I shouldn’t have come.”24 However, with his own brand of concerted passivity and laziness, Crisp did what must have appeared to his family and anyone who came into contact with him at a young age as laziness and existential stigmas, by wallowing in his failure and making them not only his way of life but also his badge of honor. The stylist is in this way not only involved in the eternal profession of being but also in the continuous process of becoming. With an idea of himself, Crisp was able, even from an early age, to consolidate his own self-­project. In addition to this, his emphasis on style and stylizing himself amounted to Crisp’s projection of this idealized version of himself. Even as young and almost formless thing, Crisp showed signs and exhibited glimmers of future grandeur as he made the most of what might be politely called his unique position in life and in his family by accumulating as much attention and control over others as he could—­

Quentin Crisp, Queen of the Birds | 43

from parading about in front of the easily distracted help his parents hired to terrorizing every resident of their home with his presence, Crisp showed early and exemplary signs of a stylist in the making, displaying not only the perseverance but also the detached indifference required of any celestial being.

The Dark Room of His Mind Crisp’s latter-­day transformation into a (minor) media star and (resident alien) American constitute his greatest acts of style. In his wonderful but woefully unread and definitely out-­of-­print book How to Have a Lifestyle, Crisp shows us how queer queer can be and how American he has always been. This book registers his essential belief in the glory and power of personality—­that very American myth—­and in its pages, he instructs us all how to live according to the logic of our personalities (our styles) rather than the conventions laid out for us by society. This is not a simple task, and certainly Crisp’s book is not another vapid “just be yourself!” workbook. Crisp argues that style takes immense concentration and a willingness to become strange in the eyes of the world. Crisp was the child of what he always described as “middling, middleclass middlebrow [English] people,” and when it was time for him to pack up and leave home, his parents expressed more concern for his unemployability than they did for his obviously odd characteristics.25 Crisp spent his first eighteen years lost in between his dreamworld and the one that he was forced to occupy. “To most children,” he writes, “I suppose there is a difference in degree between their imaginary and their real lives—­the one being more fluid, freer, and more beautiful than the other.”26 Crisp’s experience of growing up is the product of his moving back and forth between these two poles of desire: “In one I was a woman, exotic, disdainful; in the other, I was a boy. The chasm between the two states of being never narrowed.”27 Whatever identity Crisp left home with is, in other words, marked by his recognition that “fantasy and reality were not merely different; they were opposed.”28 During that long and disharmonious chunk of time, it seems, Crisp’s father tried to ignore his son and go on as if nothing terrible had happened, while his mother, classically, indulged his fantasies by reading him romantic poetry and taking him to the cinema. Through

44 | Quentin Crisp, Queen of the Birds

Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake, Crisp filled in his dreamworld with “fair ladies and brave knights.”29 Crisp’s real aspirations came into sharp focus, however, in the darkened “forgetting chamber” of the movie houses, where he first encountered all the great stylists from Hollywood’s silent era. Though he reports that his mother did so in a kind of consciously condescending manner—­“In my mother’s view, the pictures were alright for children and the lower classes, but they were trivial and, worse, they were American”—­it is here, protected from the harsh light of reality, that Crisp’s begins his initial transformations into himself: “In those darkened temples people lived the vivid hours of their lives; the dreary residue endured outside passed like a trance. It is useless to ask which level of experience was the more real. Reality is the only dream in which our enemies believe.”30 The movies converted Crisp, first from a middle-­class British boy into an American. More importantly, though, it gave Crisp an altar on which he could safely place his dreams. His ritualistic visits to the cinema became a religious experience for Crisp, who gained in the process an ability to transfigure what might have otherwise been a tragic life led in that discordant space between reality and fantasy into something more alluring and livable. As he took in the performances of the great star-­stylists—­Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Rudolph Valentino—­Crisp did what praying people do when they clasp their hands and attune themselves to a higher power: “We knew the stars as we knew God. They were all-­pervading but remote; we created them, but their fate was not our fate and they remained intractable, unlikely to respond to our prayers.”31 Unlike the personal God that we have dragged down from Heaven and remade in our own base image, the gods of Crisp’s imagination are more powerful and awesome because of their distance and their glamour. It was in these movie theaters, worshiping at the feet of Hollywood personae, that Quentin Crisp made his earliest conversions into himself, an American at heart. It should come as no surprise that Crisp took his lessons in style that he found in the movies and made them into a kind of cause. Traces of his elegiac descriptions of the stars are found in Crisp’s writing on visual art and on Michelangelo in particular, whom he credits with a natural capacity “to work from within”: “He described not the delights of touching or seeing man but the excitement of being Man.”32 Michelangelo’s paintings communicate to the viewer not just representations “of living

Quentin Crisp, Queen of the Birds | 45

people but of what it is like to be alive.”33 The Hollywood stars, likewise, conveyed life artistically, magnifying its qualities and making them sparkle. In his devoted practice of going to the movies, Crisp insisted on cultivating viewing practices that resisted the typical occurrence wherein “life and art make that fatal movement toward each other.”34 Outside the doors of the cinema and back on the streets of the “real world,” Crisp was able to conceive of his life as a process of retaining that which made it artificial, resisting always the urge to translate fantasy into reality. Crisp’s self-­education in style gave him a way to overcome whatever problem he might have had with his overwhelming dream life, but it did not promise him immediate financial success in the world that awaited him. Indeed, you could think of The Naked Civil Servant less as a memoir than an account by the world’s most unemployable “man” on his shoddy record of making a living. He reports moving in and out of jobs that he had no talent for but that suited what we might think of kindly as his artistic temperament. Without any talent (he says) for any of these things, Crisp wrote books on window design, taught tap dancing, and worked as a technical artist. He also spent a good deal of time on and off the dole (a position he was certainly more qualified to handle). It is not until he stumbled into a position working as a life model in the suburban art schools that Crisp found something he was really good at. Here, he found that, unlike “real people,” he had a natural talent for posing in the most unnatural stances for longer periods of time than other models of his kind did. This job gave Crisp an opportunity to enact and embody the lessons he learned over the years spent in the seats of the movie houses. From his position at the front of the drawing room, Crisp was able, he writes, “to force upon the students the qualities that I felt life drawing ought to possess.”35 Rather than take on the position of a mortal human, Crisp presented himself the way God might should he descend down to Earth from Heaven. From the dais and stripped of his clothing, Crisp then performed his ultimate act of overcoming reality by replacing it with his fantasy. The pleasures he gained by living totally in the present and according to the whims of his style gave Crisp the kind of fervor normally reserved for saints: “I was determined to be as Sistine as hell.”36 The television-­film version of The Naked Civil Servant brought the book and the man who wrote it out of notorious obscurity and into the public consciousness. Before the film was commissioned, Crisp was

46 | Quentin Crisp, Queen of the Birds

merely known as an eccentric queen who haunted the streets and cafés of what he called London’s “hooligan districts” of Soho and Chelsea. The fact that it was released on television rather than theaters means that the film had to be broad enough to appeal to an otherwise unwitting audience forced to choose between watching it and the nightly news. Had the film been made into the sort of offering that Crisp regularly described as “utter festival material,” it would have certainly been a more highbrow but minor affair. In this case, the film would have been attended by the types of people interested in an effeminate homosexual’s self-­confessed story of “total humiliation [and] total failure.”37 This audience would include, of course, other homosexuals and sympathetic heterosexuals either slumming it with the queers or else longing for some recognition for their charitable interest in such a sordid affair. In this alternate universe, The Naked Civil Servant might be taught in film classes as a significant example of early queer cinema or worse: as sociology. Its existence would in this case be intermittently made known to the rest of the world through its inclusion in the Criterion Collection, with its recurrent “discoveries” of great works of art left in the dusty bins of days gone by. The Naked Civil Servant, however, made its way into the homes of the British television-­viewing public in 1975, and then, more importantly, a year later, it crossed the ocean and entered the living rooms of average Americans. Though Crisp is portrayed in the movie by John Hurt, The Naked Civil Servant opens with Quentin Crisp himself, standing in his room in Chelsea and addressing his audience directly. It is unclear what the producers wanted to convey in including the real-­life subject of this fictionalized story as the first thing viewers take in, much less a man as peculiarly himself as Crisp. It is clear, however, that Crisp has his own designs for his introduction, which works like a spell that he casts over the entire film. In his address to his television audience, Crisp introduces himself as quite unlike them: When these people came to me and said, “We should like to make a film of your life,” I said, “Yes, do. Films are fantasies; films are magical illusion. You can make my life a fantasy as I have tried but failed to make it.” But then they said, “But we want the film to be real, you know, real life.” And I said, “Any film, even the worst, is at least better than real life.”38

Quentin Crisp, Queen of the Birds | 47

This scene contains the essence of Crisp’s work on style and specifically his notion of it as a force of naturally occurring difference—­of mystery—­that has to be handled with care. Had the film tried to present Crisp’s life story according to laws governing realism, it would have lost out on the spirit of his actual experience of living, which was, as his book and the film register, a process of becoming more like himself every day. His autobiography is, as he says, the story of total failure, but it is also a record of his cultivation of style: of finding out who he was and then becoming more like himself with every word and gesture. The Naked Civil Servant is presented in a broad manner to a broad audience, and it is not high art. But it also does not succumb to the trappings of the then-­ popular genre of docudrama, which, Crisp complains elsewhere, “wants television plays to look like the news.”39 The Naked Civil Servant instead pursues its own inherent sense of Crisp’s difference, which cannot be easily paraphrased. He was a great and extravagant person, but he was never anything resembling relatable; and the film succeeds in preserving those elements of Crisp’s style that set him apart from the real world. In spite of Crisp’s demure praise of the film, he knows that it cannot help but demonstrate the strength of his style, which sets him apart not only from other homosexuals (“I am a minority within a minority”) but from real people leading real lives.40 As a nude “life model,” Crisp reinterpreted life as grander and stranger than it really is. For someone who spent his early years studying the overwrought gestures of the silent film stars, becoming a naked civil servant gave Crisp a platform for acting out his dreams, becoming by keeping himself locked in one of those unnatural poses. Modeling tapped into his orientation toward exhibitionism and martyrdom; it also suited his talent for being rather than doing. He was famous on the suburban art-­school market for his incredible capacity to hold the queerest poses for the longest time. By doing so, Crisp made the most of his material vessel, testing the limits of his body’s capacity to communicate his style. Perhaps it was in these moments of grand standing that Crisp started working on his theory of style so that he could communicate what he knew to the rest of the world. In the section of How to Have a Lifestyle titled “The Professions and Style,” Crisp describes what he sees as the three types of occupations available to readers who “may be so old-­fashioned that they still have

48 | Quentin Crisp, Queen of the Birds

jobs.”41 Even though Crisp warns stylists against taking work of any kind, he knew from experience that even having a genius for poverty (which he certainly had) is not in and of itself a means of survival. Following Crisp, the ideal occupation for a stylist is in the profession of being. There are very few open positions in this rarified industry, which counts God (or, as Crisp might say, “You Know Who”) as one if its most valuable employees. At the bottom of the heap are “the making professions,” which involve the kind of labor the name implies: “manufacture, the visual arts . . . and all manual labor.”42 All of these extract what might otherwise be the raw materials of someone’s style and transfer them instead into objects for sale. Yes, like Karl Marx, Crisp was keen to the alienating effects of our labor: “All such occupations should be avoided like the plague.”43 And when it comes to what we might otherwise think of as the more creative positions available in the making professions—­such as writing and painting—­Crisp has the worst things to say. The problem here is not only in the extraction of creative energy but also style itself. Whenever, Crisp warns us, we talk about style in association with the arts, “it refers not to the practitioners but to the thing he creates.” Crisp finds nothing more depressing than the idea of an artist being upstaged or even “made ridiculous” by their art: “Cries of dismay have been known to spring from the lips of readers of lurid romances or musclebound adventure stories when they first catch sight of the ill-­favored authors of these books.” He continues his line of thinking: “In England, if anyone is shown a huge great piece of concrete with a hole in the middle of it, he at once says, ‘It’s a Henry Moore!’ but if he saw Mr. Moore himself, it is probable that he would not have the faintest idea who he was. All that chiseling, all the chipping has therefore been in vain.”44 For a stylist, it seems, anonymity is an even deadlier disease than alienation. In between the high and low are “the doing professions,” “which [encompass] teaching, politics, sports, crime, and show business.” Whatever the material benefits associated with these individual jobs might be, Crisp explains, “the true reward is experienced simultaneously with doing the work.”45 The doing professions encourage you to cultivate your personality into a form of communication with the public. Day by day, the stylist employed in a doing profession fashions a more and more useful style. Unlike the by-­products constructed by “the making profes-

Quentin Crisp, Queen of the Birds | 49

sions,” style in this case “does not pass into an object but remains entirely in the practitioner himself.”46 As for how one evolves—­or transfigures—­ one’s way out of the doing into the profession of being, Crisp is more opaque. The keys to this kingdom are, however, palpable across his work, especially when discussing the great stars of the early Hollywood solar system: Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, and especially Greta Garbo. These dignitaries of the profession of being are the ones who have figured out how to transform acting into being by remaking films that they appear in into adjuncts of their personae. A stylist of this caliber must, Crisp argues, “invent his own clichés and then persist in them until, if other people use them, their source is instantly recognizable.”47 This process of self-­invention is certainly what he did in in the life rooms of those night schools in front of his captive audience of housewives and hobbyists. It also what the silent film stars, his great archetypes of style, managed to accomplish in transforming fame into infamy by transfiguring themselves as stylists. Though style is self-­oriented, one of Crisp’s unalterable laws is that, in spite of its inherent complexity, it is nonetheless possible to convey one’s sense of style to the outer world immediately and on the surface. A stylist knows how to communicate with the world through an expression of style as difference from it. Though style is essentially a force made up of things that make us singularly like ourselves and unlike other humans, it can also be a way to communicate with others, a calling card of sorts. Instead of stylishness, which communicates that we are up-­to-­date with the latest laws of fashion, style immediately lets someone who meets you know who you think you are. As Crisp says, “This cuts the deadwood out of living conversation and makes plain to your friends and even to strangers what questions you can profitably be asked.”48 This meant accentuating the key components of his persona, which meant becoming even more eccentric and bizarre than nature might have intended. As for how this played out in Crisp’s negotiations with the outer world and exactly what deadwood his practice of style cut out of his daily conversations? “Nobody ever talks to me about the weather.”49

50 | Quentin Crisp, Queen of the Birds

Oz Again (Boiling Down Style) Style is not at all an embellishment as certain people think, it is not even a matter of technique, it is—­like colour with painters—­a quality of vision, the revelation of the private universe that each one of us can see and which others cannot see. The pleasure an artist affords us is to introduce us to one universe the more. —­Marcel Proust, “Swann Explained”

Even though my present (and persistent) interest in style began with Quentin Crisp, I have always been fixated on it. My first encounter with Crisp was, as I have shown, dramatic and revealing. Midway through my first viewing of Jonathan Nossiter’s 1991 documentary Resident Alien—­which follows Crisp around as he stalks about Lower East Side circa 1987–­1989—­my skin pricked up and pupils dilated, and I experienced a familiar feeling of pleasure and wickedness that brought me back to early childhood. The first time I felt this terrible joy of recognition was watching The Wizard of Oz, around the time in the first part of the film when Dorothy’s happy survey of the multicolored Munchkinland is rudely interrupted by the first appearance of the Wicked Witch of the West, who storms onto the scene/screen in a ball of fire that seems to emerge from bowels of the Earth far beneath the surface of the Yellow Brick Road. Interrupting the frivolity and joyousness of Dorothy’s early moments in Oz, the Witch is not the least bit happy. Stalking around and pointing her crooked green figure into the round and doughy face of our beautiful heroine, the Witch snarls, “Who killed my sister? Who killed the Witch of the East? Was it you?” Dorothy and the Wicked Witch of the West will, as you probably know, go on to have a complicated relationship in the rest of the film, and even though most children are supposed to side with our dear, doe-­eyed Kansas girl, I, very notoriously, took up with the Witch from the first time I clapped eyes on her. Far from being scared of the Witch, I wanted what she had: namely, the power to enter a room and, by virtue of her monstrous personality, make it her own. As my own mother and father would gladly tell you, my captivation with the Witch also revealed my own natural predilection for repetition. As the

Quentin Crisp, Queen of the Birds | 51

story in my family goes, I was known to sit with one leg hanging over the side of my child-­sized rocking chair for hours watching the movie and proclaiming “Oz again! Oz again” until someone rewound the tape and started it again. I was not there for the plot and certainly not for Dorothy (who foolishly gives up a chance to be Queen of Oz so that she can return to her homely Aunt Em and Uncle Henry) but to take in every scene featuring the Wicked Witch with the energy of a newly converted religious zealot devouring a sacred text. My attraction to her personality and power I now know was an early sign of my interest in style. The seeds to my own eventual attachment to her were already growing by the time of my first moment of revelation that set me on the path leading to the publication of this book. I can pinpoint the exact scene when this transformation/recognition recurred: Crisp is a member of a raucous dinner party, one of many colorful and obscurely notorious guests culled from the long list of latter-­day downtown bohemians like Penny Arcade, Al Goldstein (editor of Screw magazine), Michael Musto, and Holly Woodlawn. Crisp, like everyone else seated at the long table, seems to be enjoying himself thoroughly; the whole thing is decadent and glorious, like a party at the end of the world. The scene is interrupted and cut up by footage of Crisp holding court at a decidedly less glamorous locale: namely, addressing members of SAGE (that is Senior Action in a Gay Environment) in a dimly lit room inside the New York Gay and Lesbian Center on West Thirteenth Street. At the dinner party, Crisp is laughing and showing off. He is in his element. At the SAGE gathering, he is performing his act, but to an audience much less amused by his antics. One kindly-­looking lesbian asks him about a comment he had made on a recent episode of The Sally Jesse Raphael Show, wherein he made a distinction between “homosexuals and real people.” The woman speaking resents him for saying this and is subsequently cheered on by others gathered with her in that very serious meeting room (the same meeting room, incidentally, where the AIDS activist organization ACT UP was founded and Larry Kramer made some of his most harrowingly angry speeches about what he described as “a gay plague”). “This is the kind of thing that feeds directly into homophobia,” the soft-­spoken but firmly earnest elderly lesbian explains to Crisp, “and I really feel you ought to be cautious about things like this. Or do you believe that we are not real people?”50

52 | Quentin Crisp, Queen of the Birds

The speaker is of course reasonable (and even correct) to take Crisp to task for speaking in such a way on a program such as The Sally Jesse Raphael Show, which readers who watched daytime television in the mideighties through the early aughts will recall was a step above Jerry Springer and one below Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey. What this means is that Crisp was speaking right to the middle (and middlebrow) of the American populace, who, as this woman suggests rightly, sees Crisp not so much as a representation of himself as much as a representation of all homosexuals. With this, Crisp is given an opportunity to distinguish his performance of himself as an individual rather than a member of a group. His response, in other words, identifies the tension between style and identity. Crisp tells the woman and the rest of his audience that he will be very careful in the future not to deign to speak for other homosexuals in such fraught popular media settings. He then goes on to reiterate his original point, which has to do with his clear sense of his own personality (and its limitations): “I myself, of course, do not feel real.” With this, finally, Crisp gets a laugh from his audience, who finally shows that it is in fact gay in both the political and temperamental senses of the word. Like any good comedian, Crisp keeps the joke (but also the truth-­telling) rolling: “I do think of myself as artificial, . . . as an invention.” The film then cuts to three gay talking heads who sum up Crisp’s political relevance as a strangely queer homosexual man living in New York City in the politi-

Mr. Crisp and SAGE. (Screenshot from Resident Alien)

Quentin Crisp, Queen of the Birds | 53

Mr. Crisp on Sally Jesse Raphael. (Screenshot from Resident Alien)

cally charged time in which he did. The first is Marshall Kirk, coauthor of After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Homosexuals in the 90s.51 He describes Crisp as “a very unhappy man” and “a gay Stepin Fetchit,” all too happy to make fun of himself to please his straight audience. Michael Musto, Village Voice columnist and knower of all things downtown, continues along this loaded line of reasoning: “[Crisp] is the man who has always said that if he was asked to sit in the back of the bus he would do so.” These very charged analogies trade on a very American concept of Blackness as the most abject and violated category of human subjectivity. The remarks are given in distinct spirits: Kirk is lambasting Crisp, and Musto is, in his way, complimenting Crisp’s campy detachment. But they are both making fun of Crisp, which, of course, we must accept as part of Crisp’s own design. Earlier, in London, Crisp became accustomed to the inevitably violent reactions from real people unhappy with his willful and flagrant way of occupying public space. In America and in the late eighties, Crisp found himself not so much the sole representation of homosexual depravity as he once felt himself to be in England but a member of a legitimate minority, a status that entailed certain duties to his social identity as well as to his fellow members, duties that, as we have seen, Crisp was bound to mess up. The self-­deprecation that Crisp allowed into his performance of his style obviously did not hold with other queer-­identified people who worried that the jokes he told about himself would reveal something ugly about them. Kirk and Musto each render Crisp a kind

54 | Quentin Crisp, Queen of the Birds

of minstrel figure who shucks and jives for the straight man. This is their way of responding to—­or heckling—­Crisp’s performance of himself, of getting his jokes about homosexuality off them and onto him. It is their way of painting him with his own tar brush. By the time Crisp brings his show to America, he is just a funny old “man” going through his repertoire on a new stage. He is the queer version of the tired and huddled masses that Lady Liberty never imagined washing up on her shores. That said, he was happy to oblige, performing in small theaters but also anywhere he could find an audience: from street corners to his regular booth at the Cooper Square Diner, where he appeared daily to recite his usual lines for bemused tourists who agreed in turn to pay for his eggs and coffee. In America, Crisp’s edges were softened, and the audience is (usually) more delighted than angry at him. And he always sang for his supper. Another talking head featured in Resident Alien is someone who helped Crisp make his way onto New York’s “peanut circuit.” His name is Guy Kettelhack, onetime literary agent of Crisp and coauthor of The Wit and Wisdom of Quentin Crisp (1984). Perhaps because of this professional relationship (or more likely his own unique wisdom), it is clear that Kettelhack truly gets Crisp. Kettelhack is presented (here and elsewhere in the film) rather memorably slicing mushrooms, which will soon go into a sauce that will be served at the aforementioned dinner party at the end of the world. Punctuating his own repetitive slicing gestures, Kettelhack talks about Crisp’s notoriously repetitive and predictable way of presenting himself in public: “If Quentin is a heroic figure in the history of the gay movement, it is not because of . . .”—­at this point, Kettelhack stops for a very pregnant pause, trying to think of how he will describe a man he knows rubs his fellow queers the wrong way but whom he obviously sides with temperamentally—­“. . . what he has to say. . . . It’s because of his life.” Though I feel instinctively that I agree with the spirit of what Kettelhack says here, his statement is interesting because it gets things (at least in my mind) in the exact wrong order. As Kettelhack well knows after years of editorial and coauthoring work with him, Crisp became who he said he was. In another scene, Kettelhack explains what it was like to know Crisp in his Golden Era. People who meet Crisp more than once all complain that he repeats himself, always saying the same thing. “He does that for a real reason,” Kettelhack main-

Quentin Crisp, Queen of the Birds | 55

Mr. Crisp at the dinner party. (Screenshot from Resident Alien)

tains, “because he’s worked very hard on what he has to say. . . . This is the distilled essence of what he has to say. And he’s gotten it right! So why come up with new words to say it?” Why, indeed? When we see Crisp in this film, he is already approaching eighty, securely within the final act of his performance of his life, which imitated and then replicated the version he had by then presented for fifteen or so years in his actual one-­man show, An Evening with Quentin Crisp. By then, in fact, what mattered to Crisp was not so much who he was as what he said about who he was. The filming of Nossiter’s Resident Alien features a man who has totally come into his own style, whose lines had been written and memorized years ago and who knew how to say exactly what he came to Earth to say. Just before viewers are taken out of the mire of all this talk of Crisp’s scandalous political import and back to the fin de siècle dinner party, we are transported to Crisp’s room, where he is free to speak to the audience directly: “The worrying thing to me about the gay community is that they are fighting for their rights. And I don’t think anybody has rights. If we all got what we deserved [in his best Greta Garbo voice], we would staaaarvvvvve.” The film is back to the party, loudly blaring a raucous chorus from the end of act 1 of Mozart’s Die Entführung, and Crisp is once again in his element, sitting at the head of a table of misfits who, like him, do not mind being artificial if it means they get to live in a world of their own dreams. If it seems banal at this point to say that Crisp’s dream was to make the whole world his stage, then perhaps it would be more accurate to consider his goal to remake everyone on Earth into his audience. As we

56 | Quentin Crisp, Queen of the Birds

have seen, Crisp was most comfortable on any stage, which could be large (such as on a daytime talk show), medium (in front of an audience of his political peers), or small (at a dinner party or in “conversation” with individuals). No matter the platform or venue, Crisp’s version of himself became the same. The version of himself that Crisp invented and polished onstage in his show became, eventually, who he was in any event. As a master stylist who devoted himself completely to becoming more and more like himself every day, Crisp engaged in repetition in order to clean up his act, which also meant transforming whatever private or anonymous version of himself that existed into his dream of who he was. Style is not a matter of mere expression or flourish, as Proust would have it, but a process by which one remakes oneself into oneself. Style is “the private universe” that reveals itself not only in an artist’s or stage performer’s work but also in the daily rituals of being (on Earth and in time) in which a stylist engages. Reality is transformed—­or transfigured—­by a stylist’s dreams of who, at first, they want to be. Style utilizes the elemental powers of repetition, reworking being (oneself) into becoming (more and more like oneself). A lesson for the taking: style exists somewhere between our dreams and realities. It moves back and forth between these two worlds, giving shape and texture to what we feel and do. Proust’s very apt notion of style gets us here: style is not merely flourish or technique. It is the quality of someone’s personality that manages to come through in their daily rituals of performance and reproduction—­performance, in this case, of their personality or style and reproduction of their social categories or identities. The identity is the frame, and style is the feeling or sensation that comes through when you take in the whole portrait. Style is a way of allowing one’s fantasies to reveal themselves by cleaving their real life. “Style,” as in the central term in this book, is the frame, but my personality is what fills in its space. From my earliest obsessions with and imitations of the Wicked Witch of the West all the way through to my current encounters with Crisp and the other stylists I represent in these pages, I have been fascinated by the kinds of creatures who seem so full of their own personality as to burst out of whatever frames we might want to give them. The Witch was beautiful and fierce. Even in her melted-­down state, the Witch was still a smoking puddle of green ooze that radiated more personality and color than anyone or anything in Dorothy’s black-­and-­

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“I’m Melting”: style boiled down. (Screenshot from The Wizard of Oz)

white homeland (the same homeland that, at least in the film, she ran back to). You can boil her down, but the Witch always comes back. Rewind the tape and start the whole thing over, and she will always return to invade Dorothy’s dreams. In the same way that the Witch could not help but upset whatever scene she entered, I remain fixated on and in league with those stylists like Crisp who are always, cosmically out of step. Before Crisp, and even without his notion of style, all of this would be true of who I am and who and what I am drawn to as a scholar. “Style” is the term I have chosen because it is, I think, the best way to communicate that space between my dreams and real life. What is so alluring about the Witch is what is also alluring about Crisp and his peacock brethren. These are stylists of the highest order, sure, but they are also natural outsiders who turn alienation and defeat into a cosmic calling card. Without style, these creatures are defenseless. But with style, it is us, their unwitting audience, who must bow down to them. These stylists turn this defenseless into a cause, martyring but also exhibiting themselves to the rest of us like Christ on the cross.

Screenshot, “Do You Reverse?” (1932)

2

It Takes a Sheep Flannery O’Connor’s Backward Prophets

In 1932, British Pathé News released a curious film reel titled “Do You Reverse?”1 Its introductory intertitle reads, “Here is an odd fowl, that walks backward to go forward so she can look behind to see where she went!” We are then shown a young girl trying unsuccessfully to balance a chicken on her shoulders. The narrator introduces her to the audience: “Here’s Mary O’Connor of Savannah, Georgia, holding the only chicken in the world that actually walks backward. When she advances she retreats; to go forward, she goes back; when she looks ahead she’s going astern; and when she arrives she’s really leaving.” The chicken in question was not born walking the wrong way; it was taught to do so by the little girl. In the end, “Do You Reverse?” is the chicken’s fifteen minutes of fame. For the little girl, however, it was a sign of things to come. She would, over the course of her lifetime, own all sorts of birds and continue to incorporate a fowl aesthetic into her public persona. But that is not quite the point. As it turns out, teaching the chicken to walk backward was more than a little parlor trick. “Do You Reverse?” is the first of many examples of little Mary Flannery O’Connor’s abiding interest in all things backward, mysterious, and, indeed, queer. Flannery O’Connor lived with and admired peacocks, and her collection of peacocks was an expression of the tendencies she already had toward unusual beasts. As an act of style, this assemblage is telling. After all, as Susan Sontag has argued, “every style embodies an epistemological decision, an interpretation of how and what we perceive.”2 As we already know, O’Connor started with chickens. Like Crisp, who always proclaimed to be led only by what “[his] nature inclines [him] to believe,” O’Connor says it was “instinct and not knowledge” that led her to peacocks. In an essay from 1961 called “The King of the Birds,” O’Connor explains how her nascent affiliation with 59

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chickens was guided by her underlying interest in bizarre and beautiful creatures. Like the characters that would later appear in her stories, the birds that O’Connor desired and cultivated were very queer indeed: “From that day with the Pathé man I began to collect chickens. What had been only a mild interest became a passion, a quest. I had to have more and more chickens. I favored those with one green eye and one orange or with overlong necks and crooked combs. I wanted one with three legs or three wings but nothing in that line turned up. I pondered over the picture in Robert Ripley’s book, Believe It or Not, of a rooster that had survived for thirty days without his head; but I did not have a scientific temperament.”3 To put this another way, O’Connor saw beauty in and came to identify with nature’s mistakes. Her love is appropriately more mystical than that and her words too fabulous and solemn to pause to answer what might otherwise seem like an obvious question: “Why own so many peafowl? What in the world are they good for?” To this, O’Connor delivers “no answer . . . because it deserves none.”4 While the peacock is certainly a gift and a thing of beauty for the human eye to see, his natural state of being can be a tyrannical one, as every gesture and moment of his life is focused on the commencement of his glory and his power unto others. O’Connor, like me, recognizes herself as a devotee of the peacock not out of symbolic jest or gesture but in total seriousness and out of utter instinct, claiming “I am always being asked why I raise them, and I have no short or reasonable answer.”5 Perhaps her orientation toward the bird is part of a deeper spiritual connection to his understanding of himself and his world. After all, the peacock was once associated with Hera, the wife of Zeus, and, at least in the Book of Kells, represented alongside Christ. It is unclear whether the peacock is aware of all of this, but he does move around in the world with a certain majestic flair. The peacock is only capable of understanding his existence in exactly the way his nature inclines him to. He acts by instinct and, as O’Connor shows us, tends toward others who do the same. What begins as “only a mild interest became a passion” for O’Connor, who starts with a small collection of peacocks that grows into a multitude of birds.6 Eventually, she finds herself at their service: “I intend to stand firm and let the peacocks multiply, for I am sure that, in the end, the last word will be theirs.”7

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O’Connor grew up to become a novelist and short story writer who worked from and on the subject of the US South. She would come to be called, among other things, a “backwoods prophet,” which is, to begin with, a slight play on words.8 Backwoods is a place and backward is a direction, but they are essentially the same: either way is the wrong way to go. O’Connor’s stories were written for audiences that could not take the content or messages contained in her stories straight. She wrote mostly (and consciously) for a northern secular audience that was likely to look down on the eccentric and extreme representations of southern life and culture that she makes in her work. Devoted as she was to her region and Catholic faith, O’Connor resists the urge to defend either; to do so would only exacerbate her readers’ sense of intellectual and moral superiority. Working within grotesque literary tradition, O’Connor crafts stories that are both violent and comic and create meaning in and through the formal use of distortion. She became famous for her ability to construct characters that are simultaneously bizarre and relatable, otherworldly and all too human—­another variety of what some people might see, like peacocks, as nature’s mistakes. Protagonists like Hazel Motes of Wise Blood (1952)—­an arresting, wild-­eyed boy who returns home from an unnamed foreign war with a burning desire to start a new church devoted to spreading the news that God is dead—­are embodiments of O’Connor’s abiding interest in backwoods, backward-­thinking creatures as well as her understanding of the grotesque as an art form that is “interested in possibility rather than in probability.”9 In grotesque fiction, she explains, “we find that the writer has made alive some experience which we are not accustomed to observe every day, or which the ordinary man may never experience in his ordinary life.”10 Motes and other protagonists across O’Connor’s oeuvre are “backwoods prophets” partly because they seem to confirm, on the surface at least, all of the pejoratives that one might associate with the twentieth-­century white southerner: ignorant, hateful, inbred, primitive, Bible-­thumping, and so on. Yet, underneath the surface and beyond the limits of the probable lies something more mysterious. These same characters contain what O’Connor terms “an inner coherence” that is, for her at least, divinely given.11 To reveal this mysterious and irreducible force, O’Connor’s stories must delicately readjust the balance of things. In other words, she must teach her readers—­whether they know

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it or not—­to identify with the internal mechanisms guiding the actions of the most improbably alien characters that populate her stories. An O’Connor story is, in this sense, constructed in such a way that its reader finds themselves in the same position as her pet chicken, carefully trained to think and move backward. As it turns out, “Do You Reverse?” is the first of many artistic creations in which O’Connor enacts and gives shape to the regressive gesture. O’Connor’s style is apparent in the affiliations she makes with strange birds of all types—­both human and nonhuman. It is in these associations that we can see the essential queerness embedded in her personality. There are many explanations available that might clue us in to why O’Connor might be inclined in this way, chief among them the fact that she was always in the wrong place at the wrong time. A devout Catholic writing in and on the extremes of the Protestant Bible Belt, O’Connor knew a thing or two about always moving in the wrong direction. As for me, an inveterate homosexual, backwardness comes naturally. While I cannot and would not speak or give a name to O’Connor’s sexuality, she was and remains extremely queer.

Stupid Is as Stupid Does O’Connor was drawn to and indeed had a congenital knack for seeing the worst in her fellow humans. Before she bore this out in written form, she did so visually, aspiring from an early age to become a cartoonist on the level of James Thurber. As a follower of O’Connor’s, I was aware of this fact before the 2012 publication of Flannery O’Connor: The Cartoons, edited by Kelly Gerald and Barry Moser. Still, though, seeing the images in print and assembled in one place helped to confirm what I already felt I knew about her vision and how that vision manifests itself in her art. Like the one I include here, all of the O’Connor cartoons suggest a creator with a very particular, peculiar, and grotesque view of her fellow humans. The figures are garish, angular, and unbeautiful. They are obviously composites of human beings and drawn with an intense kind of familiarity, but there is still this abiding sense of estrangement hanging over these images that relates to my own sense of O’Connor as a writer (and, apparently, visual artist) who was very much a product of and alien in her region. In the cartoons and her stories, O’Connor works

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with and through the formal limitations of the caricature, sketching human characters that are loud, brash, and immediately recognizable on the one hand but also sort of flat and unsympathetic on the other. Flipping through the collection, it is easy to see what the editors mean when they say in the book’s official description that it is in this period of her artistic life that “O’Connor learns how to set up and carry a joke visually, how to write a good one-­liner and set it off against a background of complex visual narration.”12 On the other side of this, we read her stories the way we read or watch cartoons, and this is the case because of the way that O’Connor has sketched her characters. They are all cartoonish, and like all cartoon characters, they rely on and manipulate an audience’s quick and easy judgments of them as representing certain types of people. O’Connor expects her audience to be entertained by her characters but not to see themselves reflected in them. Even before O’Connor found her talent for storytelling, she was known, to friends and relatives in her hometown, Milledgeville, as possessing a unique and uncanny ability to notice the strange side of life in her hometown. She was known in her college years at Georgia State College for Women (GSCW) as the campus cartoonist, exhibiting a talent not only for her depth of vision but also for a perceptive understanding and use of social satire as a way of being in the world.13 Alumnae from GSCW, interviewed by Jean Cash for her book Flannery O’Connor: A Life, all remark on the fact that they did not know that O’Connor was a fiction writer until she began to garner national attention; her work as a cartoonist, one woman remarks, remade the campus and its community into a work of O’Connor’s own creativity and insight: “She was such an amusing cartoonist who patterned her cartoons after an exaggerated physical picture of herself. She could make us all look like her—­yet keep her own special identity that she emphasized in her cartoons.”14 As a stop along the way to becoming the storytelling artist she was bound to be, this information about O’Connor’s cartooning habits is instructive in our effort to understand the true elements and nature of her style. O’Connor was a formalist of her own design, and the vision that she exhibits in her work is, like the cartoons she drew characterizing life at GSCW, one that reduces the world and its living figures to their most basic, immediately knowable elements. If, as her classmate suggests, the world that O’Connor creates looks and sounds more like her

Flannery O’Connor, “The Unattractive Ones.” (Flannery O’Connor Archives, MARBL Library, Emory University)

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than anyone else, we may assume her approach to be one based purely on her own instincts, her own version of the world dictated by her style, which provides her with “the sharpest eye for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable,” making her a specialist in the art of “draw[ing] large and startling figures.”15 O’Connor’s style is marked by her grotesque appreciation for combining the comedic and deadly serious. In her fiction as well as her drawings, O’Connor depicts characters who think themselves superior and who attempt to and fail at getting one over on those whom they consider to be their social and intellectual inferiors. I am fascinated by the various forms of congenital inadequacy and lack given to us in the form of her characters’ stupid, recalcitrant, and fatuous ways. These artistic representations of lack are what O’Connor specializes in as a writer and believer. Cognitive dissonance, stupidity, freaks: these are all products of O’Connor’s mind and work, the coins of her literary realm. Far from being insults, these “negative capabilities,” as Keats (or, for that matter, Marianne Faithfull) would have it, are O’Connor’s gifts to us, the habits of her art, her style.16 To read with the grain of style is to do so according to its own internal mechanisms. It is to see and feel in time with the author’s style. Reading O’Connor in this way involves attuning oneself to her peculiarities, in her own terms, as a “prophet of distances” who sees fiction writing as “a matter of seeing near things with their extensions of meaning and thus of seeing far things close up.”17 This process that she likens to prophecy I call “style,” a familiar word describing a strangely familiar force that, over time and in educated misuse of the term, we might have forgotten. As Gilles Deleuze might have it, style is a reiteration of difference.18 Style is the foundation of personality; it is the wheel within the wheel, the “something wrong about the mouth” in a portrait.19 It is an orientation. Or, to quote that notorious idiot Forrest Gump, who certainly got at least this much right, “Stupid is as stupid does.”20 While many reviews of O’Connor’s stories consider her interest in poor, white, Protestant folk to be glib or condescending, her interest is actually the product of a deep, morally conscious dedication to creating an artistic response to the world that she knew—­foreign and intensely provincial as it always was. “The religion of the South,” O’Connor wrote in a letter to her friend John Hawkes, “is a do-­it-­yourself religion,

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something which I as a Catholic find painful and touching and grimly comic.”21 She continues here to explain in fact how serious her work is beneath its exaggerated surface: “I don’t think you should write something as long as a novel around anything that is not of the gravest concern to you and everybody else and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction for the Holy and the disbelief in it that we breathe in with the air of the times.”22 This severity that O’Connor invests in her work is what modulates the unserious-­seeming content of her fiction. The artist who deals in this kind of created distortion has to, O’Connor argues, “remember that what he is rearranging is nature, and that he has to know it and be able to describe it accurately in order to have the authority to rearrange at all.”23 The combination of her theological concern with human salvation with her artistic tendency toward the most exaggerated and cartoonish forms of life are not only a product of her engagement with the literary grotesque but also the mark of her style. As O’Connor knew well, there was a cultural gap between the demographic of her general audience (northern, urban, secular, white) and the figures depicted in her stories (southern, thoroughly religious, agrarian, mostly white and tangentially Black). As a result, she anticipates and works on the kinds of responses she expects from readers who consider themselves morally, culturally, and intellectually superior to the characters that populate her stories. The fact that O’Connor’s life as a publicly read and sometimes interviewed southern author working during the civil rights movement—­or the South’s Second (failed attempt at) Reconstruction—­meant that “topical” issues having to do with cultural and political battles over segregation and integration weigh on how and why O’Connor’s stories were read as allegories for what she terms “Southern degeneracy.”24 The historical context surrounding and giving meaning to O’Connor’s work is important for her as just that: context. Desegregation was and is a mighty messy process that unearthed and brought to the fore all of the white South’s ugliest fantasies regarding racial purity, superiority, and inferiority. Because O’Connor worked in and through the limitations of a certain kind of realism, all of this political and social context matters when reading her stories. To view any of them, however, only through the lens of her own day’s politics is to miss out on the direction of her art. O’Connor was a realist of a type, but her aim was always to dwell in

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the real world and particularly on its surfaces in order to provide an estranging effect for her readers. Like everyone else, O’Connor is and was a product of her environment, and while her stories convey this fact on the surface, there are troubles and curses lying dormant just beneath or behind that which we can see always waiting to reveal themselves. O’Connor was, in the end, no Erskine Caldwell or Eudora Welty. Her stories are something more akin to Kafka or Poe, two authors who, like O’Connor, dwell in the real world’s shadows. Her work is more like Pilgrim’s Progress than To Kill a Mockingbird. To put this another way, O’Connor knew that her average reader looks down on the types of poor, white trash that they find in her stories. They look at the stories and the figures represented in them in the same way they would a cartoon. Like any cartoon characters, O’Connor’s are designed to appear wild and entertaining and without much depth. Although O’Connor’s stories seem juvenile in their cartoonish simplicity, there is a deep and abiding seriousness underlying O’Connor’s fiction that stems from her theological concerns about the coeval dramas of human salvation and the illusory nature of evil. Contemporary O’Connor criticism foregrounds this fact and takes on her Catholicism in readings of her work today. Yet her religiosity—­or, more accurately, this artistic and spiritual context—­was never a part of the public’s sense of what she is up to in her stories. None of this was or is a mistake: O’Connor was never interested in writing stories for or about the most pious among us, and she wanted her work to be read for its capacities to work within the limits of realism. She works carefully in her formal designs of characters to stay within the same limits that a caricature artist might have to recognize: forcing our attention only on the surface of things and never taking the easy, sentimentalized roads to telling us what she cannot show as writer and artist. Working like any caricature artist, O’Connor keeps things on the surface and readies herself for an audience that consider themselves to be the superior equivalents of the startling and shocking figures depicted in her fictional worlds. Contemporary readers who cannot see past the limits of their own perceived intellectual, moral, cultural, and political superiorities, racial supremacies, and other foolish pieties of the sort display what O’Connor, as a Catholic, would have understood as symptoms of pride—­as ugly, by the way, as a peacock’s tail seen from behind.

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Reading her stories, it becomes more than clear what is so toxic about this sin but also why it is the worst on that notorious list of Deadly Sins. O’Connor creates a chain of fools who encircle the world in and outside her fiction. She also cultivates her own persona as an author working out of and on the South to an audience that is about as “outside” as you can imagine. Whereas her region is governed theologically, for instance, her readers believe that God is dead. These secular, cosmopolitan northerners look down on O’Connor’s characters as being foolish, undeveloped, and politically sinister. The South’s continued belief in God is, for these readers, no more or less foolish and problematic than its insistence on its outmoded forms of racist governance. White or Black, O’Connor’s characters are like sponges who soak up all of this negative projection that she anticipates her readers will hurl at them. They are, in other words, caricatures, but they are not the only ones displaying the kinds of idiocy that she anticipates or makes use of. She knows that her readers will look down not only on her characters but also on the worlds her characters represent to them. She also knows that in witnessing the often violent and always dramatic conversion or revelation experiences of her protagonists, her readers will read from a great cultural and spiritual distance and consider themselves only witness to the cartoonish display offered up in any O’Connor tale. But O’Connor has a plan for her readers too, whose complicity in or identification with her characters may not always be obvious or on the surface but is designed nonetheless to reach them latently and mysteriously. Writing to her friend Maryat Lee in 1959, O’Connor compares this kind of embedded and unanticipated effect to a slow-­acting medicine: “The thing to do is write something with a delayed reaction like those capsules that take an hour to melt in your stomach. In this way, it could be . . . [read] . . . on Monday and not make them vomit until Wednesday, by which time they would not be sure who was to blame.”25 She knows that her readers will not consider themselves implicated in the moral dilemmas presented in her fiction. But O’Connor’s stories are parabolic in nature and indeed cast a long shadow. Her readers are, like her protagonists, unwilling to confront themselves, but that is just what O’Connor is after. This is not the same as saying, by the way, that O’Connor forces readers to confront their prejudices in sentimental fashion. She is inter-

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ested in the moments when we all find ourselves finally seeing ourselves for who we are (and who we have always been). Self-­recognition—­or style—­is mighty hard to come by, and sometimes it takes violence to force us into that sometimes-­nauseating state of awareness. O’Connor must be noted for what Hilton Als has rightly described as her “startling antisolipsism: She describes, never preaches.”26 As an extension of this, I also consider that in addition to her tacit theological seriousness, O’Connor does have much to say about “topical” issues and the ways that we as Americans engage in and with them. While her stories tend more to the margins of things, she does admit to engaging in “the topical” in her story “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” which features the dialectical struggle of two cartoonish representations: one of the old white South (a mother who is afraid of integration) and one of the new progressive white South (her son who cannot wait for the old guard to be torn down) as they travel by bus through your typical southern city.27 Of this story and her sense of the sentiments caricatured there, O’Connor has said, “The topical is poison. I got away with it in ‘Everything That Rises’ but only because I say a plague on everybody’s house as far as the race business goes.”28 To Als’s description of O’Connor’s antisolipsism, I add that when it comes to topical issues, O’Connor is interested in exploring and revealing their moral depths but resists the urge to moralize or sentimentalize. As an artist, she works only on the surface and at the level of what we are conditioned to see. At the same time, though, she is ultimately drawn to that which is mysterious and we cannot or, because of our pride, will not see. O’Connor works, then, between the poles of her characters and her readers, who feel superior to them. The idiocy moves in circles around itself, and O’Connor makes good use of it, not only formally in her stories but also anagogically, in the belated effects it may have on her unwitting readers. Foolishness is more than an aspect or theme in O’Connor’s work. It is also a part of her negotiation with her readers, whom she expects will read through the lens of their supposed superiority. As a kind of psychic projection, foolishness is, after all, a vector of ressentiment. It is based on fantasies of superiority and inferiority: two trap doors that O’Connor has set, for her characters but also for her readers who may not see themselves as implicated.

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Deaf, Dumb, and Blind: Backward Conversions Reading a short story can be, O’Connor argues, like “standing a foot away from an impressionistic painting.”29 Close up, everything looks one way and makes sense, but if you step back further from the stories—­or the paintings on the wall—­you begin to see less and less detail until eventually you find a new kind of sense when everything comes into focus. Once this happens, O’Connor explains, “you suddenly see that a world has been created—­and world in action—­and that a complete story has been told, by a wonderful kind of understatement.”30 The meaning of a story is embedded in the full experience of it, which extends beyond the time it takes to read it from beginning to end. O’Connor’s meanings are always belated and surprising, and interpreting them involves a willing suspension of our analytical capacities and a willingness to read “with a certain grain of stupidity.”31 From her first novel, we see an interest in those things that defy analytical certainty. We see idiots and zealots of all kinds driven by compulsions they can neither comprehend nor explain. Her characters are always unaware of their predicaments or the world around them, like Hazel Motes in Wise Blood, who cannot for the life of him escape his one true love, Jesus Christ. His is a one-­track mind set in motion, with a belief that he can escape his fate even as he barrels toward it. Motes needs to lose his physical sight in order to see what has been plain about his fate for his entire life, and the novel is, if anything, a story about a man who learns to humble himself before his life-­affirming limitations. In O’Connor’s preface to the second edition of the book, she calls Wise Blood “a Christian malgré lui . . . written by an author congenitally innocent of theory, but one with certain preoccupations.”32 Malgré lui describes someone who cannot help but do what they try not to do. This person’s failures are of the congenital variety in the sense that they are sincerely committed. These preoccupations, of course, have to do with Christ: a figure, perhaps, of no great consequence to secular readers but one of immense symbolic and material importance for O’Connor. The fact that Motes tries, and fails, to escape that figure proves his worth to O’Connor, who, unlike the secular reader she imagines, sees Motes’s dignity evidenced in his inabilities, in his repeated failures to “get rid of that ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind.”33

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Motes’s inability—­or his stupidity—­is a site of potentiality, a capacity even. His failures are also a source of moral judgment for O’Connor, who, according to Henry T. Edmonson, uses Wise Blood, in part, to reckon with the shadow cast by nihilism onto her contemporary world. Motes’s eventual blindness and incapacitation is a product of what Edmonson terms O’Connor’s “muted optimism” and perhaps also, in the grand scheme of things, one of many forms of God’s cruel jokes on humanity.34 Motes’s downfall is of critical importance to O’Connor, and it is but one of many examples of her commitment to stupidity and fanaticism as a tool for her own spiritual becoming. She then asks, following Motes’s example, “Does one’s integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do?”35 O’Connor is describing what she would term the “mystery of personality” and what I think of as style. She underscores the idea that these two properties—­personality and style—­ cannot help but reveal themselves, and they often do so through limitation, through a careful manipulation of innocence—­innocence not as a platonic or blameless state but rather as a way of being in the world characterized by ruin and lack. O’Connor’s own congenital innocence is the same, in fact, as Hazel Motes’s in that it is embedded within and reflective of who she is. We are all, like Mr. Motes, confined to the limitations of our own capacities. These limitations reflect our own congenital innocence and are, in the end, what we know we are stuck with. For O’Connor, Motes’s integrity is evident only in his repeated failures to escape the shadow of Jesus Christ that seems to be cast, in spite of his best efforts, over his entire life. Free will is not a given for O’Connor; it is an ongoing drama that began in the Garden of Eden and continues to unfold and build momentum with each passing hour. The reader who assumes this fact to be of mere contextual or sociological importance does so at their own peril. You become the butt of the joke. Motes’s genius, or his style, is in his persistent blindness of character, his unwitting and relentless stupidity. This stupidity follows him like a shadow or a ragged figure in the trees of his mind. O’Connor’s stories represent her as a rather unfeeling author, but that is only because of the sincerity of her vision, which resists easy sentimentalization.36 It is not that O’Connor does not have sympathy for her characters or that she does not identify with them in any way, just that her sense of identification is born out of her sense of their—­or our—­common displacement

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from God. For O’Connor, this gives life an uneven and chaotic quality, and one can sense this across her body of work, which performs the drama of human displacement through various representations of dissonance as the primary way that humans experience themselves. Dissonance can be registered in any number of ways—­all of them suggesting disconnections, disunions, gaps between one thing or idea and another. The term has its roots in music theory and describes the presence of two competing and discordant sounds or movements at play within the same body of work—­a mingling of disagreeable sounds that together compose their own incongruous harmonies. O’Connor’s stories convey this dissonance through her numerous freaks, who are what Deleuze and Guattari would characterize as her “conceptual personae.”37 As concepts, these freaks, accordingly, form a wall across her work. These freaks-­as-­concepts are, Deleuze and Guattari argue, “center of vibrations, each in itself and every one in relation to all the others, . . . [which] is why they all resonate rather than cohere or correspond with each other.”38 They are a conceptual wall, or a chain, of fools and freaks. O’Connor has carefully crafted remarkable, interesting, pitiable, pitiless, wonderful, and horrible characters that demonstrate her interest in the mystery of human behavior and, ultimately, of the drama of salvation. She expects that, as readers, we will want to distinguish ourselves from the characters, who seem too bizarre to be true. That said, the stories themselves work away at our sense of moral distance from the action occurring on the page to such a degree that, if they have succeeded, we find ourselves with an upturned sense of right and wrong. In the end, one loses one’s ability to tell one freak from another. When O’Connor delivered her lectures on the grotesque tradition in southern fiction, she knew this to be the case. “Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks,” she says, “I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.”39 Read any of her stories, and it becomes clear just what O’Connor means by this statement and, more to the point, how it feels to find yourself in a world full of freaks, caught up in their personalities, and, whether you like it or not, implicated in the problems that they create for themselves. To be a freak in O’Connor’s universe is to be blind to oneself, to somehow misunderstand the nature of one’s own built-­in limitations, which is to say to be unaware of your own style.

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The freak is not so much embodied by any of the classic idiot characters sprinkled throughout O’Connor’s work—­like the “young” Lucynell Crater featured in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”—­so much as the ones who think they know better, who are inoculated by their own idiocy, which is so embedded in their personality that they themselves can no longer detect its presence.40 These types of characters are always undone by others who can sense their failed sense of style. Lucynell Jr.’s mother, Lucynell Crater Sr., is a fine example of this kind of character who finds themselves done in—­carefully and thoroughly—­by a man whom she felt to be her natural inferior, Tom T. Shiftlet, a one-­armed drifter. When we first meet the three characters featured in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” we can see how settled and sure the old woman is of her superiority (intellectual, social, familial) and just how unaware she is of how she appears to others. Lucynell Jr. sits on her front porch with her daughter, “a big rosy-­faced girl” who “was completely deaf and had never said a word in her life.”41 Lucynell Jr., who in spite of her childlike state is already thirty years old, cannot speak for herself when her mother describes her to a potential suitor as a girl of fifteen or sixteen. The central action of the story then occurs between Lucynell Sr. and Shiftlet, a wayfaring stranger who comes in from the distant landscape, adding some excitement to the desolate Crater farm. At least on the surface of things, his arrival does not cause much stir, and this suits the old woman just fine: “Although the old woman lived in this desolate spot with only her daughter and she had never seen Mr. Shiftlet before, she could tell, even from a distance, that he was a tramp and no one to be afraid of.”42 Tramp or not, Shiftlet commences to unscrew all of the old woman’s psychic and emotional defense mechanisms with the expertise of a master mechanic. While, for the entire back-­and-­forth with Shiftlet, the old woman feels herself to be one step ahead of him, he sets trap after trap for Lucynell Sr. With one arm and a more complete sense of his style, Shiftlet baits her with the kinds of loaded but mindless small talk that readers of O’Connor already know she has a particularly keen ear for. This is the same banal yet evil drivel that, for instance, you hear from the Grandmother of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” or Ruby Turpin, in the first half of “Revelation,” before the ugly girl in the doctor’s waiting

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room tells her who (or what) she really is.43 Shiftlet unfurls his platitudes and clichés and in so doing gets Lucynell Sr. right where he wants her. Tough and impervious as she pretends to be, the old woman cannot help but opine with him on such subjects as cars that are not made like they used to be, how sweet and good mothers can be, how innocent girls are not like they used to be, and on and on. Shiftlet’s mode of conversation is orchestrated to appeal to the old woman’s pride and feed the blind spots embedded in her personality. Though she thinks herself the only one in the story who is not a fool, Tom T. Shiftlet plays the old woman like a fiddle. By the end of the story, Shiftlet makes off not only with the broken-­down automobile that Lucynell Sr. hired him to fix but also with her idiot daughter, whom he marries and then leaves in a roadside café fast asleep next to her bowl of ham and grits. The manner in which the old woman’s undoing occurs is, on a dramatic level, not unique in the least. In fact, if you read the Bible, you realize that this kind of flattery and coaxing that happens to characters like Lucynell Sr. is exactly the kind deployed by that old snake Lucifer himself, who has been tempting and flattering even before the beginning of time. Though none of the characters featured in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” are treated sentimentally, this does not mean that the narrator of the story disallows us as readers to be concerned with them on some deep level. What Lucynell Sr. lacks is self-­regard for her style, and it is this deficiency that spells doom not only for herself but for her daughter, both done in and had by the hardly subtle wiles of Tom T. Shiftlet. Without a sense of limitation, or style, one cannot accept the intrusions of grace. Accordingly, grace has to come to O’Connor’s characters through force, often inelegantly and always through violent means. The moment when, for instance, the Misfit shoots the Grandmother of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is also the same moment that she admits defeat and finally stops all of her talking. When he says of the Grandmother to his partner, “She would of been a good woman . . . if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life,” the Misfit is also, in spite of himself, speaking the truth.44 Staring down the barrel of his gun, the Grandmother finally shuts up and stops all of her attempts at tricking her murderer, which began with an appeal to his imagined pride in himself as a “good” (read: Christian, white) man and ended with her tacit betrayal of Christ, who the Misfit insists did not raise the

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dead. A good Christian lady finally finds out what others have known all along: that, whether she was churchgoing or not, her faith was only ever in her own sense of superiority over others. Her pride was more real to her than God, whom she deployed and spoke for when she needed in the same ways Lucynell Sr. does on behalf of her deaf and dumb daughter. God and Lucynell Jr. are avatars for the pride of their respective betters. It is only when the Grandmother hears her own betrayal for herself that she is able to confront the fact of what Ralph C. Wood has rightly termed her “practical atheism.”45 Quivering and mumbling up at the Misfit, the old woman speaks one of her final lines of this and her life story: “Maybe he didn’t raise the dead.”46 Having said that, something shifts in and outside her, a veil is lifted, and, even though she is seconds away from her demise, the Grandmother finally does something that she has not planned to do, reaching up to the Misfit and proclaiming, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!”47 When he recoils from her touch in a way that the narrator equates to a hand pulling away from a snake that had just bitten it, it is clear to readers that even though this last intrusion of sentimentality comes finally not from the Grandmother’s overweening sense of pride but from somewhere more mysterious and divine, there is no saving her from what comes next. The three bullets that he lodges into her chest come in the very moments following her final and only real moment of self-­reflection. This is a conversion experience that, as O’Connor describes, cannot occur without characters such as the Grandmother “seeing themselves in a kind of blasting, annihilating light.”48 For a woman who always felt like she knew how to get herself over on others, it must have felt strange indeed to finally find herself saying something that she did not plan to say. When she reaches up to the Misfit and calls him one of her babies, the Grandmother is given a momentary but also an enduring opportunity to enter into the kind of annihilating state of conversion that O’Connor describes here. This violent intrusion of grace occurs only after the Grandmother is able to lay down all of her emotional and psychic weapons of self-­defense. Here, and elsewhere in O’Connor’s work, we can get a sense of her true concern for the salvation of her characters’ souls explicitly in her careful and deliberately violent disaggregation of their forms of blindness to themselves, which are always constructed

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and reconstructed on the level of sentimentality: apparent to us through the characters’ willingness to speak in empty platitudes and clichés in order to shore up their sense of pride and superiority. Though the Grandmother’s conversion experience only lasts a moment, O’Connor does care for her. Her particular experience of the “blasting annihilating light” of conversion is the same as anyone else’s. This is, O’Connor continues, “a blast that will last a lifetime.”49 Conversion is a state of becoming that occurs only when characters are able to witness that which estranges them from themselves, that which makes them a freak. As O’Connor says, this does not always happen so quickly and cleanly as in the case of the Grandmother. Sometimes, as she explains in a letter to her friend Betty Hester, conversion comes in stages, deepening itself as it unfolds: “I don’t think of the conversion as being once and for all and that’s that. I think once the process is begun and continues that you are continually turning inward toward God and away from your own egocentricity and that you have to see this selfish side of yourself in order to turn away from it.”50 The conversion experience that O’Connor discusses here is a kind of ongoing self-­ recognition, a state of becoming that is, like all becomings, nonlinear and uneven, the same kind of conversion that Rob Wilson describes as “the will to conversion-­as-­life-­becoming.”51 This is the exact opposite of a narcissistic mode of self-­reflection, which is really one of many ways in which we participate in evil, which is a turning toward oneself and away from God. As a conversion experience that does not end, O’Connor’s violent and annihilating version of self-­recognition hinges on our seeing ourselves and all our limitations—­our style—­in the harsh and impersonal light of reality. All of O’Connor’s characters carry within them the beginnings of their own undoing, which can occur via either conversion or destruction. These two potentialities are always unknown to these same characters, who cannot see themselves or their futures because of their sense of intellectual and social superiority. As we have seen, it is the sentimental belief in this material superiority that becomes an altar of doom for O’Connor’s characters, one they do not recognize they worship. That O’Connor’s narrators have no sympathies or compassion for these characters is far from a sign of her own authorial forms of detachment from or projection onto these characters. In fact, O’Connor’s fictional

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attacks on the uses of sentiment are the site of her actual concern for the plight of her characters’ souls. This lack of compassion is exactly how O’Connor’s theological concern for and awareness of the tragedy of human displacement from God reveals itself. In witnessing fatuous and unknowing protagonists walk into their own traps, readers are, whether they know it, also forced to confront their own dependence on a false and romanticized version of themselves just before they are forced, violently but according to their unknown will to convert, to meet their own doom. Formally, it is the dialectical positioning of the two old women featured in O’Connor’s “The Life You Save” and “A Good Man” against wily and no-­good men that allows them and us as readers to witness the process by which they are undone. By the time we meet Lucynell Crater Sr. and the Grandmother, they are more than set in their ways, and it is clear that in each case, these ladies have a sense of purpose that is predicated on their belief in themselves not only as good people but as good people who are in many ways superior to others. Engaged in dialogue with Shiftlet and the Misfit, both of these women are carefully and expertly disabused of this sense of social supremacy by men who know exactly how to play into and then take advantage of their weaknesses. The source of both characters’ weakness is also the same as their confidence. Lucynell Sr. and the Grandmother depend on an absent and unspeaking other whom they in turn speak for in order either to deflect what they see as their weakness or to reflect back what they hope to be their strengths of character. So, while it takes an outsider, and a criminal one at that, to enter the frame and strip these women of their superiority complexes, it takes this deaf and dumb third party for the whole process of self-­recognition and violent conversion to take place. For Lucynell Sr. to make herself feel superior, she has at her disposal her loving and dauntlessly simple daughter. As for the Grandmother, she has her notion of “God,” whom she speaks for and whose divine supremacy she takes advantage of if and when she sees fit. All these protagonists—­Motes, Crater, and the Grandmother—­are prophets by design. But they would be the last to know. What keeps them from seeing any of this—­from, in other words, seeing themselves—­is their sense of supremacy over others. They are proud of themselves, in other words, and derive this sense of pride by saying, in essence, “I’m

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with stupid.” This slogan is pure Americana: made famous, of course, by being emblazoned on T-­shirts that one imagines can only be purchased at gas stations, flea markets, or county fairs. Simple, but poetic in its way, “I’m with stupid” really gets to the heart of what I have been discussing in this chapter. When we say someone is stupid, we are obviously also saying that they are inferior to the one calling them stupid. There is nothing complex about this. But this is the more fascinating part of the deal: presumably, the person who walks with the one wearing the T-­shirt “I’m with stupid” is in on the joke or at least does not mind being referred to as such. Perhaps this is because, as Avital Ronell has argued in her book Stupidity, stupidity is always already sure of itself or at least strangely incapable of being insulted. Sometimes, smart people play dumb to get one over on another: this is the strategy taken by Shiftlet in his carefully orchestrated play on Lucynell Sr.’s worst traits. But sometimes, Ronell says, “when stupidity is not being played but instead inserts itself without remorse, it paradoxically plays on the side of truth, or at least it poses itself as a replica of absolute knowledge.”52 One way to apply or interpret Ronell’s claim would be to say that the person who stands next to or with the one who truly believes “I’m with stupid” is there to confirm the truth of that claim, but in a sideways manner. “I’m with stupid” can also mean that I contain stupidity, that stupidity is with me and I with it. In speaking for Lucynell Jr. or God, the respective characters in these stories also reveal themselves to be truly and ravenously empty, guilty no doubt of the sin of pride that they achieve by virtue of their false and egocentric senses of supremacy. That they do not know how obvious all of this is makes them ignorant to what we, as readers, can see as plainly as day. Their projections outward onto their romanticized and blank receptors of their ego trips are also tacit reflections of their own inferiority complexes. This all speaks to the fact that stupidity is a personality trait but also, elementally, a style.

Necessary Idiots Of course, Lucynell Sr. and the Grandmother are not the only two characters undone by their dependence on a useful idiot. Among other things, O’Connor seems to depend on these kinds of blank and

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uncomplex characters as playing a central role in the violent undoing of her faithless and unlikable protagonists. Writing to Cecil Dawkins in 1958 of her recently finished second novel, The Violent Bear It Away, O’Connor concedes, once again, “I have an idiot in it. I wish I could do it without the idiot but the idiot is necessary.”53 The idiot in this case is Bishop, who acts as a go-­between for his father, Rayber, and his cousin, Francis Tarwater. Bishop is another ancillary character who has some kind of intellectual disability and cannot speak or act on his own. The son of a schoolteacher and would-­be authority in child psychology, Bishop is the perfect companion to Rayber, who seems to have an endless need to express and prove his expertise. Bishop is necessary here as a source of constant revelation of Rayber’s inadequacies as a man. Rayber thinks of himself as truly devoted to his son’s well-­being when the action of the novel makes it clear that because of his need to be superior, he has developed a twisted sense of devotion. His was “a love without reason, love for something futureless, love that appeared to exist only to be itself, imperious and all-­demanding, the kind that would cause him to make a fool of himself in an instant.”54 Of this passage, Ralph C. Wood argues that in spite of Rayber’s professed atheism, his relationship with Bishop provides the otherwise cerebral protagonist with an opportunity to experience something approximating Christly, unconditional love for the other. “Like few other rationalists,” Wood says, “Rayber understands the true meaning of divine love. Precisely because Bishop’s ‘uselessness’ makes him incapable of any reciprocal exchange, any return of the love that he might receive, Rayber sees the boy as an unbidden gift.”55 In spite of the fact that Rayber is essentially a nihilist, Wood maintains that he has within him a “mystical desire to love everything absolutely and without qualification.”56 The fact that this love and attention is focused on his relationship with his congenitally limited son, who is in essence a blank canvas for his father’s projection of inferiority and superiority, adds a grotesque texture to what Wood describes for us as Rayber’s otherwise earnest need to “love everything absolutely and without qualification.” He relies on Bishop to confirm his goodness and know-­how and in doing so finds himself in a kind of trap wherein his love and his sense of pride are achieved only through a love that is on the surface sentimental and self-­serving. The opposite of this kind of gluttonous love is what Wood

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describes as an “authentic love,” which is “always costly, at one ‘imperious and all-­demanding.’”57 This kind of blasting, self-­annihilating love is available to Rayber, in spite of himself, throughout the novel, but it takes the untimely death of his son Bishop for Rayber to see the forest for the trees. By unwittingly contributing to the events surrounding Bishop’s tragic death by drowning, Wood argues, “O’Connor’s narrator sets forth the pain of absolute loss, the damnation of being unable to love.”58 Bishop is, as O’Connor describes in her letter to Dawkins, a necessary and tragic element in the dramatic undoing of Rayber, who is too smart for his or Bishop’s own good. Just as Bishop is not by any stretch the only necessary idiot deployed in O’Connor’s stories, Rayber is related to a whole host of other main characters who are intelligent in the classical sense but also totally incapable of the kind of self-­reflection that comes with deeper forms of recognition and awareness, from a sense of style. We see this problem especially in characters that have degrees from institutions of higher learning. Consider Joy-­Hulga in “Good Country People,” for instance, with her PhD in philosophy and a wooden leg to match her wooden personality; or Asbury, the phony suffering artist of “The Enduring Chill”; or, most obviously, Sheppard from “The Lame Shall Enter First,” who is really only an updated version of Rayber: another schoolteacher and expert in child rearing who thinks he was born to tend to the weakest and dumbest among us.59 All of these characters are intelligent and have degrees to prove it. They also all require a host of idiots to keep them company. As Sheppard’s name suggests, these self-­righteous characters do not live in a vacuum; they are all drawn to and consider themselves the natural leaders of sheep, which, as Ronell reminds us, are nothing but the idiots of the animal kingdom: “Sheep have a history, indeed a historicity, and they have grown to stand for stupidity itself—­or at least this would be how contemporary man inscribes the sheep.”60 In spite of all of the worldly achievements or knowledge that these characters undertake or take pride in, there is nothing that they can do to disprove the fact that they are attracted or cathected to stupidity. They require corresponding dull characters to prove, again and again, the truth of their intellectual superiority. Which brings us back to one of our central critical clichés, but with more to pile on. The rhetorical arrow pointing outward from

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the phrase “I’m with stupid” always moves in both directions. Another way to say this might be, once again, stupid is as stupid does. Unlike for O’Connor’s more unlikable and illiberal characters like the Grandmother, Motes, or Lucynell Sr., she presumes that her nonsouthern readers will sympathize and even identify with characters like Sheppard, who are educated, cerebral, and altogether “reasonable” types. But in sympathizing with Sheppard, one finds oneself implicated in his eventual downfall. You become one of O’Connor’s necessary idiots, proving once again that it takes a sheep to catch a sheep.

“A Jungle of Shadows”: American Curses O’Connor’s awareness of the truly toxic effects of superiority complexes, racial or otherwise, informs not only the action of her stories but also her tacit negotiations with her imagined audience. No one is left out. In a letter written to her friend Betty Hester in late summer 1963, O’Connor provides an updated reaction to a story written by Eudora Welty for the New Yorker magazine titled “Where Is the Voice Coming From?”61 A month before revising her opinion, O’Connor is straightforward in her praise for the piece, telling another correspondent, “Nobody else could have got away with it or made it work but her. . . . I want to read it again.”62 Written from the perspective of a racist, socially downtrodden, and otherwise violently ignorant young white man, Welty’s short story was a timely retelling of the story of Medgar Evers’s murder from the perspective of his imagined next-­door neighbor. With regard to its length, this short story lives up to its name. It does not dwell too long with this fictionalized murderer, who is not presented as being the most complex of characters. As for his motives for killing his neighbor, the character says, “I done what I done for my own pure-­D satisfaction.”63 Writing from a contemporary time when racist murderers are treated as somehow more complex and fascinating than this, Welty’s stark and reductive representation of Evers’s assassin seems significant. She humanizes him, but only to the extent that readers can see what happens to a human when they internalize insane fantasies of racial superiority. Indeed, Welty’s main character is so limited by this view of the world that he can only see things through this paranoid gaze. Everything is either black or white to him. The simplicity and starkness of Welty’s

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depiction of this particular vengeful and violent white man is appropriate and cleansing to the soul. O’Connor eventually gets around to rereading the story, and while nothing in her letter to Hester suggests that she has amended or taken back her praise for Welty’s skills as a writer, there is something about the story, and particularly O’Connor’s sense of its reception by readers of the New Yorker, that strikes a nerve: “It’s the kind of story that the more you think about it the less satisfactory it gets. What I hate most is its being in the New Yorker and all the stupid Yankee liberals smacking their lips over typical life in the dear old dirty Southland.”64 You do not have to know much about O’Connor to know that she was sensitive to these kinds of projections of inferiority onto degenerate southerners by northern readers, whether by virtue of their disdain or political interest in the region and its inhabitants. O’Connor’s double-­sided reaction to Welty’s story is itself an indication of her own relationship to “the race question,” which, as Angela Alaimo O’Donnell argues in her book on the subject, is typical of O’Connor’s style. This is, she argues, one of many examples of O’Connor’s characteristically “radical ambivalence,” which is O’Donnell’s conceptual contribution to this discussion, but, more importantly, also the title of her 2020 book on the subject of race in/and Flannery O’Connor. In O’Connor’s stories but especially in her letters, O’Donnell writes, “O’Connor acknowledges her deep ambivalence (a word whose root, ‘ambi,’ meaning ‘both,’ suggests double-­mindedness) with regard to racial justice and the supposedly dangerous and disruptive efforts to achieve it.”65 Hovering around and pursuing the implications of this idea, O’Donnell draws our attention to another line in one of very many letters O’Connor wrote to Hester, in which she states, on “the issue” of race, “I hope to be of two minds about some things is not to be neutral.”66 “This inner conflict,” O’Donnell argues, “between aspirational hope and the reality of her own experience is the root and source of the inconsistencies of attitude evident in O’Connor’s writings with regard to race, manifesting an ambivalence that marks her as flawed and deeply human.”67 From here, O’Donnell focuses our attention on O’Connor’s very peculiar ways of always seeing and dwelling in the tense, liminal space created between the many binaries (white/Black, North/South, cosmopolitan/rural) of the US and southern “race” problem.

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As we have already seen, another source of energy (and angst) for O’Connor is her hyperawareness of how her work is read and more precisely who is doing the reading and in what spirit that reading is done. If, like O’Connor, you were concerned about the way we perceive the South to be distinct from and backward compared to the North, you would need no other lens than what O’Donnell describes as “the race problem,” that very thing O’Connor could never help but see in two distinct ways. For herself, O’Connor has shown us how talk of “the race problem” gets used as a journalistic trope implying northern moral and cultural superiority and southern inadequacy and primitivity, both white and Black. In that same 1963 letter to Hester in which she bemoans Welty’s New Yorker readers as self-­satisfied and having a laugh at the poor, dumb old South, O’Connor also talks about her own experiences with questions from concerned but condescending outsiders looking in on the sorry situation of the Southland. Of one newspaper columnist who had mailed her a list of questions mostly about what she terms “the race thing,” O’Connor says this: “She asked in one of them if I thought the race crisis was going to bring about a renascence . . . in Southern literature. I said I certainly did not, that I thought that was to romanticize the race business to a ridiculous degree. In the story that comes out they change the word race in the question to social so that none of it makes much sense. You can’t get around newspaper people. I think they are the slobber-­heartedest lily-­mindedest piously conniving crowd in the modern world.”68 One thing O’Connor chafes against in her projection onto this journalist’s questions about race and the South is her perception that while she is being asked to offer her opinion on the subject, she also—­wittingly or unwittingly—­is being interpolated into a prefabricated production of various American cultural, racial, and regional fantasies of supremacy and inferiority. These two ideas are certainly a creative resource for O’Connor, whose stories make dramatic and comedic use of characters who seem always stuck between the two poles of their own fantasies of superiority and the sad reality of their social and intellectual limitations and spiritual inferiorities. That said, as an author and oft-­interviewed representative of her always already broken and reconstructing region, O’Connor is very sensitive to the ways she is folded into others’ narratives about the degeneracy of southern life and especially to the ways

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this picture of the sorry, stupid South suits the flattering picture that the North has of itself as the cosmopolitan, advanced, and nonracist other side of the nation. In her fiction, O’Connor is confident of her capacity to convey meanings despite her audience’s sense of superiority over her characters. However, when it comes to being drawn into predictable conversations about the “real” world, O’Connor is more wary of her capacities to control the narrative, which seems, at least to her, always to point in the direction of northern supremacy. If the journalistic rendition of “the race problem” is one way of its romanticization of the South during the time of O’Connor’s career as a writer, then deployments of southern stupidity and ignorance are two ways in which this romantic picture of the South is painted by strangers looking in. Her stories contain within them the seeds of revelation for her characters, but they also anticipate the kind of reader who is apt to look down their nose at these characters and consider them too wild to be real but captivating nonetheless. That said, when it comes to context, or to matters related to our (or the historical reader’s) conceptions of life “in the South,” O’Connor understood that she was always working against and on the condescending assumptions of her audience. Believe it or not, O’Connor’s stories are in essence subtly theological. If you know you know, but it is entirely possible to read her work and miss this point. And this is, of course, by virtue of O’Connor’s own design. Her stories are formulated to make the most of what her readers know and do not know about the world, themselves, their style. Though we have the critical awareness today to understand the theological underpinnings of O’Connor’s stories, it is hard to imagine the fact (but no less true) that when she was alive and writing for the public, none of this was clear or expected. Her readers, as she well knew, were cosmopolitan (northern and mostly white), secular types who thought of her (if they did at all) as cut from the same cloth as any of the characters in her stories. This “general reader,” she reports, thinks of the southern writer as always engaged in the business of depicting life in the South as it generally is: “I have found that no matter for what purpose peculiar to your special dramatic needs you use the Southern scene, you are still thought by the general reader to be writing about the South and are judged by the fidelity your fiction has to Southern life.”69 In a culture

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that, at least from O’Connor’s perspective, has killed God and replaced him with other kinds of secular belief systems, literature has taken a hit and lost its capacity to put us in touch with that which is essentially mysterious. In this context, she says, “The social sciences have cast a dreary blight on the public approach to fiction. . . . Today novels are considered to be entirely concerned with the social or economic or psychological forces that they will by necessity exhibit, or with those details of daily life that are for the good novelist only means to some deeper end.”70 As an author dealing in the grotesque, O’Connor trades in the most extreme forms of life and personality available to her imagination. That her readers then—­and, I argue, also today—­misread these fantastic creations as reflections of the typical rather than creative experiments with the possible is sobering indeed. This public approach to literature as necessarily in service of our prefabricated worldviews is the main reason that we can understand the problem of compassion (or the lack of it) in O’Connor’s work. Because, she says, “we have become so flooded with sorry fiction based on unearned liberties, or on the notion that fiction must represent the typical,” we have lost access to literature’s capacity to engender “deeper forms of realism,” which, because of our ever-­growing literalisms, “are less and less understandable.”71 Despite her naming of it as such, this social scientific turn in public reading has not taken place in textbooks or universities but in the pages of magazines and newspapers and in the words of the journalist, who alternates between speaking in the voice of objectivity and in the very American and sentimental tones that express care and concern for the nation. When, for instance, O’Connor says to Hester in that same letter updating her response to Welty’s story that journalists like to “romanticize” the “racial” or “social” situation in the South, she is talking precisely about this issue. The person she is blaming here is not really Welty, whose story she admires, or even the reader, on whom O’Connor herself depends for an audience, but the journalist who makes meaning out the story, who introduces it as another “sign of the times.” This journalistic affect is, for O’Connor, condescending and self-­serving. It sees itself as the arbiter of all things advanced and progressive in the US and anything coming out of the South as already behind the times, necessarily inferior to its Yankee counterpart. The grotesque literary tradition trades

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in something that is, after all, potentially pejorative if you see yourself as outside the scope of its representational capacities. On this, O’Connor says, “Of course, I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.”72 When we (if by “we,” I can mean the person who reads and identifies with the authority of the journalistic voice that introduces and contextualizes southern literature) talk of the “race issue” in the South, we are deflecting the blame elsewhere, miniaturizing what is in essence something more like a curse on our whole damned nation into something more bite-­sized and transferrable. O’Connor seethes at the thought of those self-­satisfied Yankee New Yorker readers smacking their lips and having a laugh at the poor, dumb old South not because she understands the difference between a curse and an insult. Those Yankee readers who think themselves superior and removed from the South imagine implicitly that they are immune from suffering the consequences of a curse. But this romantic notion of superiority will not inoculate anyone. If we needed proof of this impending doom, we could ask the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah, but they are, of course, nowhere to be found.

A Mystery to Be Endured Years after Welty’s story in the New Yorker, another journalist continued the story of what O’Connor described in her letter to Hester as “the race business,” only this time with O’Connor in sight as an object of scorn and blame. Readers of the June 15, 2020, issue of the New Yorker were given an article by Paul Elie titled “How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?” The impetus or timing for this article is here and there. Elie explains that his question is given partly in response to a then upcoming documentary on O’Connor that was released in theaters that summer and later shown on PBS in the winter of 2021 and also as a way of registering his somewhat brief take on (as opposed to actual review of) Angela O’Donnell’s book Radical Ambivalence, which is billed by its publishers as the first book on O’Connor and race.73 In the article, Elie takes O’Donnell to task for what he sees as her apologetic reaction to O’Connor’s racist views as they are registered in her letters to her mother when she traveled to New York and Iowa for graduate school. Though Elie himself has spent decades

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working on and reading O’Connor and even titled his 2003 book The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, he is shocked at the tone of these letters, which were not included in O’Connor’s posthumously published collected letters but made available to the public in 2014 following Emory University’s acquisition of O’Connor’s mother’s effects.74 Though he concedes, “it’s not fair to judge a writer by her juvenilia,” Elie does just that. He feels betrayed or angry to realize that O’Connor was, as he puts it, “a bigoted young woman.”75 Rather than go back and treat his own prose on O’Connor or confront what Harold Bloom would describe as his own obvious “anxiety of influence,” Elie places blame elsewhere for our cultural acceptance of O’Connor’s racist views.76 He turns his attention especially on O’Donnell, whom he caricatures as a scholar too enamored of her own subject to be able to think critically about the very subject (race) with which she is said to reckon in her book. According to Elie, although O’Donnell is “palpably anguished about O’Connor’s race problem, she winds up reprising those earlier arguments in current literary-­critical argot,” by which he means her serious treatment of critical race studies scholarship in her book on O’Connor and race. Elie lambasts her for her attempts at contextualizing O’Connor’s engagement with racist ideologies by conflating these same critical moves with his sense of O’Donnell’s romantic (read: childish) identification with and apologetic approach to her subject.77 I visit Elie’s article not to enter into its discourse or to try to meet its demands but to provide a very contemporary iteration of what O’Connor would describe as the topical approach to her work as a storyteller and now, Elie laments, “canonical” literary figure. It is hard to say exactly what Elie wants from his article or what he considers to be an answer to its central leading question: “How racist was Flannery O’Connor?” This being the New Yorker, one imagines an accompanying cartoon to go with Elie’s piece, and when I imagine it, I see St. Peter, standing at the gates of Heaven and behind a great scale, on which presumably our grotesquely sainted Flannery is being made to turn over her racism for weighing and inspection. I do not say this to take away from the seriousness of Elie’s question but to point out the fact that the question, while serious, is also already embedded in the kind of blame and social-­ political deflection I have spent this chapter dramatizing. As in those fictional examples of someone achieving a sense of moral superiority

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at the expense of someone else whom they insult but who presumably cannot speak for themselves, this kind of blame game does not usually work itself out in the ways we egotistically presume. Elie’s article is really looking for someone to blame, and unfortunately, he lands on O’Donnell and her Radical Ambivalence as a perfect victim of his critical trolling. If we understand Elie in connection to the O’Connor characters I have introduced here, then it is perfectly clear that his need to describe others as inferior (either morally, in his decision that O’Connor is a racist or, intellectually, in his cartoonish rendering of O’Donnell’s critical approaches to matters of race in literature) is loaded. The one thing he genuinely performs in his article is a conversion from a close reader of O’Connor to a reader of O’Connor, who is altered by a renewed sense of her as a racist. But the question Elie has to ask himself is whether this conversion is genuine or whether it is another trick of projection and deflection elsewhere. Maybe he is like Wise Blood’s Onnie Jay Holy, who pretends to convert to Hazel Motes’s Church Without Christ in order to cash in on its offerings. If so, Elie can perhaps excuse this story, with its click-­bait approach to things as a pragmatic way to talk about what he considers to be an important and pressing issue. Or maybe Elie is the latest in a string of cosmopolitan journalist-­types that depend on a romanticized notion of southern decrepitude, which can be imagined in either black or white. But as a lifetime reader of O’Connor, he should know he cannot control where his accusations will land. Of this kind of performance of moralism and superiority that Elie offers in his article, O’Connor has already registered her own response, which we can find in that very same letter to Hester from which we have been deriving so much meaning already: “The topical is poison.”78 Elie, by dealing with an idea of racism as something he is in a position of doling out or blaming on others, nevertheless refuses to engage with himself or his own relationship to O’Connor’s imagination (which, as he knows, has always represented whites in their worst and most racist light). He asks a rhetorical question that is also an accusation. What is it that he cannot see? What does he want? Trying to grapple with the “problem” of race in the US is no different from (and no less impossible than) trying to confront evil itself. The national tendency, as O’Connor has described it, to see every problem pre-

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sented to us in literature in terms of how it reflects the “real” world as we already know it is part of a larger personality flaw that is characteristic of the American condition. Americans are habituated to see themselves as always progressing toward some kind of legal and social perfection, which is a fantasy of social, racial, and personal equality. Readers of O’Connor see things a bit differently, though, as the curses laid on this country are already cast and working out in our daily lives. There is no way back to Eden and of course no equality off in the distance. Once white America decided to fool itself into thinking of enslaving Blacks as normal, it condemned itself. The United States’ story is also a story of all the toxic dissonance that flows from this original sin. American contemporary social ills are not battles for it to win in order to move on toward a more perfect union but visible signs of its eventual undoing, which it has already made for itself. If we think of literature as conveying social issues, it is easy to fool ourselves into thinking that we as readers and citizens can play some part in solving them. But if literature conveys human problems that are deeper, stranger, and more enduring than mere social issues, then the question of what we can get from thinking about literature and its implications gets much harder and more intense to consider. Topical discussions are too often opportunities for the proliferation of all things false and falsifying. O’Connor sees social problems as symptoms of spiritual corruption and takes them more seriously than her readers might often assume. As for “the South” or the issues of “race” in the US, O’Connor has already issued the kind of warning we might expect from someone whose prophetic style allows her to see things as they really are: “evil is not simply a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be endured.”79 O’Connor’s style is defined by her unique capacity to prophesy even as she entertains, to mask her deadly serious interest in human salvation in a grotesque package that is both dramatic and comedic. It is in her stories and in particular in its cast of characters that we see her prophesies played out. She presents caricatures of her fellow humans—­miniature versions of larger and deeper problems faced by her region, the nation, and the universe itself. These are problems from which there is no escape. These problems, like all problems, reveal themselves to us in the form of our personalities: as individuals and as inhabitants of our various earthly re-

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gions. These are problems of style that can only be detected on the level of the anagogical by a highly attuned stylist such as O’Connor who can see the parts we have become blind to. Style is, after all, like a shadow: it follows you wherever you go, and while it may appear larger than life, it is still tethered to the body and dependent on the light. It is no use trying to make more of your style than it will allow or to try to make it into something it is not. To do so would be like trying to escape your shadow. If you read O’Connor, you quickly become convinced that everyone in the world is a freak. Her stories feature figures like Hazel Motes who try in vain to run away from their own shadows. At the same time, it becomes strikingly clear that almost no one in her stories is cognizant of this fact. As a result of this, no character is ever presented to readers in a sympathetic manner. As freaks, we all carry what O’Connor describes as “an invisible burden,” which stems from our experience of life as and through disconnection.80 Because she understands this condition to be felt through our displacement from God, it is only in her representations of dissonance that we are able to understand the true implications of her stories, which are bound up in the theatrics of human salvation, distortion, and fatuousness.

Part II

The Arrow of Time Style and the Problems of History and Originality Our enemy is not so much any one particular period of history as time itself. The arrow of time points always in the direction of diminishing difference  .  .  . Style stands facing the other way; this is mine. —­Quentin Crisp, How to Have a Lifestyle

Walking Antiques Over the course of many years of researching and generally looking into the life and work of Quentin Crisp, I have had many conversations with those who came across him, in either London or New York. I have, for instance, heard from any number of his former neighbors who used to see him waltzing about the Lower East Side. Each of them has said more or less the same thing. Their eyes brighten and pupils dilate, and they speak in the kinds of tones normally reserved for paraphrasing ghost sightings: “I used to see him all the time . . . walking up and down Second Avenue.” What they are not saying, but conveying nonetheless, is that Crisp was as strange as we might imagine. Crisp lived his life in public, always treating the dirty rooms he occupied as recharging stations rather than proper homes. His days would be spent in any number of cafés where he would meet stranger after stranger willing to buy him a meal in exchange for something closer to an intimate performance of his one-­man show than a conversation. He was repetitive, routinized, and predictably selfsame. Day after day, year after year, Crisp stalked the streets where he lived, establishing his path, parading, on view to his surroundings. “True style,” as Crisp says, “changes less and less as it moves toward its perfection, and once 91

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complete, is unalterable by outward circumstances or even by time itself.”1 True to his word, in spite of whatever was happening in the world around him, Crisp never changed his appearance or his habits in any way. Since he did not buy new clothes or change his look, for instance, he could not be said to have ever gone with the tides of this or that trend in fashion. He was effeminate before it was socially acceptable for a “man” to be so, and he was assured about his fashion choices. By the time punk rock came to Crisp’s neighborhood, he was already dressed for the occasion. As he liked to say, he had become, by accident, the world’s oldest teenager. Crisp remained, as all stylists do, like a stopped clock: correct every twelve years or so. While the rest of the world evolved and changed, Crisp clung to his style and in doing so engaged in a singular battle against what he termed “the arrow of time, which points always in the direction of diminishing difference.”2 While everyone and everything else moved ahead in linear fashion, Crisp clung to himself, moving through changes in convention in order to create an alternate world of his own. His performance of style made him a kind of ghost who merely passed through the world that the rest of us occupy. Stylists are, after all, like ghosts, the spectral exceptions to the rules of time. Crisp resisted being in order to become (more like himself). In doing so, he, like all stylists, carved out his own space to occupy. This is how he established his territory.

The Other Side When Crisp writes, in the first half of the quote in the epigraph, “our enemy is not so much any one particular period of history as much as time itself,” he is not flippantly suggesting that stylists are detached from the world (and the periods) in which they live. Rather, he is describing what it feels like to find himself lurking in the shadows of time. A sense of one’s style brings with it a stubborn capacity to resist the dulling effects of time. As opposed to the rest of the world, which is busy evolving, stylists remain fixed, even to foolhardiness. The chapters in this part attune themselves to the creative practices of Crisp’s kindred souls: untimely and peculiar American artists whose works and personae seem oriented to some alternate time and space and who do not, as a result, fit neatly into conventional frameworks of

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genre or period. In chapters 3 and 4, I take a countercyclical look at two men—­Edgar Allan Poe and Bob Dylan—­on either side of the so-­called American literary canon not so much to dispute its existence as a tool for categorizing the nation’s artistic production but in order to defamiliarize its narrative force. Taking up and thinking through Crisp’s “arrow of time,” I move into US history—­and particularly into its bodies of literary, musical, and folkloric production—­in order to gain an alternative sense of (or better yet, feel for) passing time. Following Poe, all American stylists are eschatological in nature. They are, in other words, entranced by visions of the coeval coming-­to-­be and passing away of the world—­entranced by and dedicated to their ongoing dedication to mystery, to what Poe terms “the imp of the perverse.”3 The images, sensations, and concepts that emerge from their works offer us a glimpse into this other world that, I want to argue, exists within—­or more likely beneath and just ahead of—­the natural world as we assume it to be. For myself, I am, in whatever I do, drawn to the archaic, unusual, and exaggerated. In the chapters in this part, I make steps along these lines, trailing Poe’s and Dylan’s stylized reproductions of time that give it an already-­disjointed feel. Along with their objects of art (stories, novels, songs) that one might normally study, I am interested in the way that each of these men has carefully curated his artistic persona. In this American cosmology, the artist (as stylist) never dies. Dylan himself has argued that his deep education in American folk and blues tradition opened up a door to a secret but immanent component of US history. “Folk music,” he has said, offered him “a reality of a more brilliant dimension. It exceeded all human understanding, and if it called out to you, you could disappear and be sucked into it. . . . It was so real, so more true to life than life itself. It was life magnified.”4 Following Dylan’s notion of this alternative temporality in para-­material terms, I am interested in the ways that figures such as Dylan participate in cutting through familiar-­time and building subterranean worlds that exist somehow outside or within time itself. I call that “the untimely.” In Dylan’s memoirs, he translates his initial encounters with folk and blues music as a kind of conversion experience. The musical worlds offered to him by such mythological figures as Robert Johnson and Woody Guthrie gave Dylan the keys to an American shadow kingdom. Dylan describes his process of entering that kingdom in the language of style:

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“Woody Guthrie tore everything in his path to pieces. For me it was an epiphany, like some heavy anchor had just plunged into the waters of the harbor. . . . I felt I had discovered some essence of self-­command, that I was in the internal pocket of the system feeling more like myself than ever before.”5 From his place in this “parallel universe,” which operated according to its own “archaic principles and values,” Dylan has refigured American literature and history as expressions of (rather than containers for) popular music and culture. Ever the fabulist, Dylan becomes a true believer in this alternate universe where the future is old and the past is never passed: “I was beginning to feel like a character from within these songs, even beginning to think like one.”6 The essence of Dylan’s style has since been embedded in his capacity to become himself by becoming mythological. Becoming a stylist takes intense effort (perhaps lasting a lifetime) and a willingness to live as the one among the many, like some Gnostic monk or “resident alien” (one of Crisp’s favorite monikers). More than a self-­oriented mode of becoming, style is also a way of projecting out into the world one’s own exception to the rule inscribed on the arrow of time. Style is whatever exceeds the frames we use to contain or explain the quotidian experience of time as it passes. The familiar narrative structures projected onto time are also ways of retrofitting the lens of the present onto the past, a way of familiarizing history. Whatever or whoever does not fit neatly within the narrative gets tossed out and left hanging by the side of the road. This book—­and this part in particular—­moves around in this zone outside the mainstream. Here stylists live and flourish like weeds, in between the cracks of time. Far from being an inhibiting factor, the fact that stylists are either left out of or wrongly appropriated into our dominant narratives about art is a source of nourishment. Style is that which distinguishes itself and as such resists canon—­or periodization—­and stylists are those figures keenly aware of their alienation from these categories. This is not an argument against the canon so much as an invitation to look at its underside for signs of life. This underside is where stylists flourish like weeds. Otherwise, as Crisp says, the style dies: “if you force a plant into a pot too small for its roots, it will flower in one last desperate effort to propagate its species.”7 If tended to carefully, style can grow in even the dimmest and most acrid of places.

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For a stylist, any engagement with the world is the equivalent of their accidental flowering. According to Crisp, books (or any other objects of art) should not be written out of a desire to write Literature but as a kind of experiment with world-­building. “Writing,” he says, “is a way first to stay alive and then of bringing myself to the notice of the world. It is the world I care about, not the writing.”8 Writing is a gesture that Crisp deploys that expresses his instinctual desire to distinguish himself. “The instinct of birds to sing is not,” Crisp says, “in the hope of attracting mates; it’s the desire to establish territory.”9 Writing, or any other adjunct of style, is, according to Crisp, like birdsong in the sense that it expands one’s grasp of the world. Poe was the first American stylist to go down into the nation’s gutter, establishing territory there. In doing so, he switched on a light for all the unruly spirits who came before and would come after him. As I move ahead, I want to follow this light, down past the bottom of American literature and popular culture. Following the tracks laid out by Poe and Dylan, I hope to offer a sense of this strange and disjointed territory where all stylists belong.

3

The Poe Machine Style and the Strange Futures of American Literary Studies

“Edgar Allan Poe Is Dead” What I have here propounded is true:—­therefore it cannot die; or if by any means it be now trodden so that it die, it will “rise again to the Life Everlasting.” —­Poe, Eureka

Since Edgar Allan Poe’s death in October 1849, he has, in spite of himself and his sullied reputation in this country, remained one of the United States’ most enigmatic and significant authors. His bad reputation, it seems, followed him closely to the grave, arriving steps and bounds before whatever accolades we might now bestow on him. An ornery professional and failed man in many respects, Poe must have had a keen understanding of his precarious position in the public life of the United States even at his most successful moments as author, critic, and poet. His “friend” and literary executor, the Reverend Rufus Griswold (who was, in fact, more of an enemy in disguise), penned an obituary for Poe that was released two days after his death, on October 9, 1849, in the New York Tribune. Edgar Allan Poe is dead. He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday. This announcement will startle many, But few will be grieved by it.1

Marking not so much the end of Poe’s life as the beginning of his considerably more successful and powerful afterlife, Griswold’s notoriously 96

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unkind words ought to be understood as igniting the flames of mystery and complexity that keep Poe and his artistic endeavors alive to this day. As an American literary genius, Poe’s status among his compatriots was and still is on shaky ground. Poe was well read and respected, according to Griswold, in England and continental Europe, but his fame in the United States was broadly based on the common perception of his personality and reputation as a disturbed yet creative man. “But,” Griswold writes, “he had few or no friends; and the regrets for his death will be suggested principally by the consideration that in him literary art has lost one of its most brilliant but erratic stars.”2 A good example of well-­shaded contempt, on the one hand, Griswold’s obituary must still be given credit for providing a starting point for the feedback loops to come of biographies, literary criticism, and popular-­cultural adaptations of Poe’s life and work. In the US, almost no proper introduction to Poe—­whether in the most sophisticated of scholarly treatises or, as most people first greet him, in the most banal grade-­school textbook versions—­refutes, in some major way, the claims made by Griswold marking the news of his friend’s death. That Poe’s work has allowed for this negative publicity to become part of both his charm and his poetic authority is a testament to his style. His death, as Arthur Hobson Quinn argued, “will cause poignant regret among all who admire genius, and have sympathy for the frailties too often attending it.”3 Changing not only the degree to which the American public of his time understood his tormented genius, Poe’s critical legacy has been, to a large extent, based on debates over his problematic reception in the United States. Friendless and helpless, as Rev. Griswold would have us believe, Poe’s ongoing status as a man cast out by his own family, orphaned by the scholars controlling the literary world of his home country, and patronizingly belittled by his biographers is a testament to the power of his personality and, to be sure, the impetus for his sustained life as a significant writer and literary stylist. While this chapter does not focus squarely on Poe as a tormented man and professional failure, it takes from these examples a cue to his broader abilities to control the destiny of his work’s reception and his graven image even, and especially, beyond his actual death. Since I use style as the centerpiece to my presentation of Poe and his writings, my focus is on the literary techniques he uses to implement visions and frameworks for living that create more than the worlds that his tales,

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stories, and poems envision and contain but that build up a whole network or infrastructure of the greater assemblage that we now know as “Poe.” Poe built a literary and poetic machine that worked to formalize the creation of his own literary effects, which appeared in fatuously outdated and complicated forms that we might call baroque, to articulate for himself the ways in which his haunted visions would produce fields of insanity in the reading public of his day and of days yet to come. Moving against the grain of nineteenth-­century culture, which was thoroughly soaked in sentimentality, Poe honed his creative skills to give life to carefully orchestrated works of terror and the grotesque. As many nineteenth-­century critics claimed, Poe, while brilliant, “denied that he possessed the human sympathy to make his work live.”4 His strength—­or, in another word, his style—­as an enigmatic figure is based on the capacities of his literary machine to formalize and produce specters of terror and tales of disgust and woe that haunt and hector, year after year and literary movement after literary movement. The Poe that greets you here is Poe the stylist: Poe, the natural aristocrat of talent; Poe, the self-­consciously mechanical Gothic formalist; Poe, the antisentimental madman; and Poe, the public author of, as he said of idealized readers of his book Eureka, “two thousand years hence.”5 His style is presented here through a combined examination of his personality and his written work: both part and parcel of the same Poe machine. The critical dividing line drawn between biography and text, author and work, is removed to attempt a more comprehensive study of Poe as a stylist employing all these blocks of personality and its intensification. The space between the “inner” or “real” Poe and the one he fabricated has its own place within the greater literary machine, which is tethered to the project and projections of his style. What I have been calling the “Poe machine” is nothing less than what Gilles Deleuze envisioned in his description of the “literary machine,” which, against the grain of psychoanalysis, understands the work from the viewpoint of the creator and the process of creation and values its subsequent production of affects, intensities, and signs. The “literary effect” brought to life here is the result of a more intuitive set of qualifications given to the work, which pay more attention to the literary machine’s attempts at experimentation than its capacity to be clearly interpreted. The sets of questions guiding this kind of approach tend less toward “What does the text mean?” than “What does it do?” and “How does it function.”

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“The modern work of art,” Deleuze argues, “has no problem of meaning, it only has a problem of use.”6 This kind of reading is one dedicated to style as a notion of adherence to the artist’s own ethics of being-­in-­the world and not to the prescriptions of criticism. Reading, in this case, as Deleuze and Guattari explain in their Anti-­Oedipus, “is never a scholarly exercise in search of what is signified, still less a highly textual exercise in search of a signifier. Rather, it is a productive use of the literary machine, a montage of desiring machines, a schizoid exercise that extracts from the text its revolutionary force.”7 The Poe machine creatively responds to the kind of psychoanalytic prodding that was soon to confront its tales and poems. The grotesque effects and affects it produces are useful not as ways of interpreting Poe but instead as ways of characterizing the virality of his style and commitment to surviving by outwitting critical inquiry and investigation. The Poe machine amounts, in the end, to the always expanding and becoming assemblage of Poe’s literary voice: the capacity of his stories and poems to create sensation and the presence of his own hand in the future consumption of his work. Poe is the man, and style is the machine. The Poe machine refers to Poe the stylist. Moving through four periods of literary criticism in which official approaches to Poe found themselves evolving, this chapter offers works from the Poe machine that represent his enduring mutability as an untimely author armed with the capacity to predict and outlive shifting trends in analysis and readership. Poe’s historical and continuing unpopularity among other writers and critics makes him an everlastingly perverse figure and stylist set on having his way, not only with his contemporaries but also with his contemporaries awaiting him in the future.

The Nineteenth-­Century Poe The “real” Poe (to take an invidious adjective from the titles of a modern kind of biography) is a simple, intelligible, and if one may dare to say it, a rather insignificant man. To make a hero or villain out of him is to write fiction. —­John Macy, in an introduction to a 1908 textbook

Part of the problem—­or, for our purposes here, the appeal—­of Poe’s afterlife as an object of critical attention is the many faces, or masks,

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that have been affixed to his image and that obscure appreciation of his work. Poe’s notoriety as a madman and a genius has been the cause of both public disparagement of and fascination with his work. The American public continues to be consumed by its romantic interest in the mystery that is Edgar Allan Poe. While no other attribute has been able to overshadow these two notions of Poe since then, approaches to and characterizations of him have evolved wildly, and the evolutionary process by which Poe gets branded with this or that characteristic is significant in understanding not only the complexity of his mystery but also the strength of his style. As Scott Peeples argues in his book The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe, it is this process, this “enterprise of understanding ‘Poe’ . . . not in terms of fixed, eternal schools or methodologies but rather in terms of historical evolution,” that must be understood as a testament to Poe’s great style and the veracity of his untimely visions of his literary future.8 Since the mid-­nineteenth century, we have seen Poe described in terms beyond simply madman and genius, terms that seem to contradict one another almost as soon as they are decided on: the adolescent writer obsessed with cryptology and the expert and ratiocinator who invented the science-­fiction and crime-­novel genres; the overly emotional and confessional poet and the purely mechanical, professional writer whose works hark back to the baroque era more than they bow to pressures of nineteenth-­century American civility and literary culture; the example of American literary cosmopolitanism and an author adored only by the French, forced on the United States as a result; the natural aristocrat and the down-­and-­out drunken man who turned to a kind of literary prostitution to pay for his meals and boarding with cheap and quickly drawn-­out stories and tales; an expert concerning matters of neurosis and a perfect case study for early psychoanalytic literary critics; a racist who sympathized with the Southern cause to maintain slavery as an economic tradition and a critic of racism who, in stories like “The Black Cat,” “The Gold-­Bug,” and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, anatomized the mind of the white American driven mad by pathological ideas of race and racial superiority; the sexist and the queer; the idiot and the savant. I do not wish to (and cannot) chart each of these competing visions of Poe and his legacy or to decide in which direction scholars ought to point their judgments in essays, biographies, and anthologies to come. I

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am interested in the writing machine that Poe constructed—­combining his personality and his mysteriously charted literary works—­that not only characterizes his style but also seems to have already envisioned oppositional and problematic approaches to his work. As I briefly move through the major trends of literary criticism—­and, especially, American literary criticism—­my goal is to display Poe as flexible and resilient, finding his work and his image to contain a certain timeless quality, always on the lips of academic writers and in the pages of their critical tomes. Poe also displays a remarkable capacity to keep moving, which aids in territorializing the various fields with which his work comes into contact and then pushes them to their own critical limits, deterritorializing them in the wake of his expanding style. While Poe would come to be more fully appreciated in the twentieth century as an artist and creator rather than a newly dead man of whom many friends, associates, and enemies still lived to recount their own memories, the American Poe of the nineteenth century was still bound to his ongoing biography and his professional reputation. In an 1899 article written for The Dial, a Chicago-­based literary magazine, titled “The American Rejection of Poe,” Charles Leonard Moore admits that while Poe was “the greatest intellect America has produced,” echoing Rev. Griswold’s primary statements on these matters, Poe had few friends and did not make much sense to his peers in the literary world.9 “Poe,” Moore explains, was “a logic machine . . . absolutely incapable of those pleasing flaws and deficiencies which allow other people to have a good opinion of themselves.”10 Poe’s reputation preceded him in his nineteenth-­century afterlife: a nationally recognized genius, on the one hand, but also a kind of waif. The man standing behind Poe’s literary creations seemed forever out of place and out of time, too cold and calculating to satisfy the tastes of his fellow Americans during his time on Earth yet also too histrionic and fatuous in his melodramatic tales to find any serious appreciation among the literary intelligentsia of the nineteenth century. In remarks following the public reburial of Poe’s bones in Baltimore, Walt Whitman personalized the broader trepidation with which Poe’s fellow writers, critics, and compatriots had come to accept and understand his significance: “For a long while, and until lately, I had a distaste for Poe’s writings. I wanted, and still want for poetry, the clear sun shin-

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ing, and fresh air blowing—­the strength and power of health, not of delirium, even amid the stormiest passions—­with always the background of the eternal moralities. Non-­complying with these requirements, Poe’s genius has yet conquer’d a special recognition for itself, and I too have come to fully admit it, and appreciate it and him.”11 Like Moore, Whitman developed a belated and precarious appreciation for Poe, who, it seems, is easier to be gracious toward in death than in life. As an American artist, Poe fails, on the one hand, to meet Whitman’s idealistic need for literary works to carry with them a spirit of optimism and hope. At the same time, Whitman, like many others, is, in spite of himself, attracted to Poe’s grotesqueries. In the end, however, this does not constitute a critical dilemma for Poe; the characteristic unease combined with perverse interest that Whitman displays here is, after all, only an intended effect of the Poe machine. We can sense, in other words, part of what makes Poe’s style so alluring. “Why is it,” Moore pleads, “that America has always set its face against Poe? What defect was there in his life and art, or what deficiency in the American character and aesthetic sense, or what incompatibility between these two factors in the case, to produce such a result?”12 His literary and poetical works aside—­and, indeed, very much in spite of his literary and poetical works—­Poe was, in the second half of the nineteenth century, a victim to what Scott Casper has termed a widespread “biographical mania,” wherein biography “was not simply a genre of writing” but “a medium that allowed people to learn about public figures and peer into the lives of strangers.”13 The lives of men and women caught up in and covered by this surge of biographical writing came to serve, in the context of nineteenth-­century culture, as instructive or cautionary tales more than as studies of craft, technique, or genius. Poe’s now notoriously sordid reputation and, more significantly, his tortured inner life came under the microscope of this growing field of biographical exploration and discovery. As a result, and to answer Moore’s questions with regard to Poe’s tarnished reputation as an American author, the public memory of Poe was largely concerned with the lamentable tale of his life as a failed man and author weighed down by a certain time out of mind. Trailing this somewhat hostile form of pity—­or, perhaps, downright contempt—­accompanying American perceptions of Poe came a salutary recognition of his significance in the outer world

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and in the reading practices of foreign lands. Poe’s writings still did not seem to satisfy the desires of his reading public in the United States, which, much like Whitman, saluted his great powers but believed that they were never used to any recognizable, good ends. Beguiled but still bewildered, nineteenth-­century and early twentieth-­century American descendants of Poe seemed to recognize the honor due to him but did not know in what ways, and through which texts, his genius might one day bestow itself on them.14

“The Man That Was Used Up” If one without forewarning begins to read any life of Poe, one feels that a mystery is about to open. There seem to be clues to suppressed matters, suspicious lacunae. The lives are written, like most novels, with hintful rows of stars. A shadowy path promises to lead to the misty mid-­region of Weir. But Weir proves to be a place that Poe invented [in the poem “Ulalume”]. He [Poe] himself was the first foolish biographer of Poe. —­John Macy, 1908

While there are many stories from the Poe machine that one could point to that might provide a grotesque anatomy of the heroic American figure we call Poe, there is one satire, first published in 1839 for Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, that gets right to the heart of the matter. “The Man That Was Used Up,” sometimes printed with the subtitle or alternate title “A Tale of the Late Bugaboo and Kickapoo Campaign,” is a sadly underrepresented Poe story that offers a hilarious and disgusting view of an American hero who, like Poe, is a product of both public attention and private chaos. The story follows a journalist, who also serves as the narrator, on a quest to seek out and report on a General A. B. C. Smith, who has national acclaim for being a veteran and personal champion of the United States Armed Forces. While many readers see General Smith as a send-­up of a General Winfield Scott of the War of 1812 and, later, the Mexican-­American and American Civil Wars, the story really does more to personify the nature of heroic manhood in the nineteenth-­century US and predict the gruesome futures to come for men of popular interest:

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men who, like Poe himself, become part and parcel of the “charnel-­house atmosphere,” to borrow a popular term of the time brought to our attention by Peeples, of the country’s biographical mania.15 All heroic figures are, in the end, liable to be chopped up into bits once the more realistic and seedy aspects of their lives and personalities come to public light. It is only a person’s style that can live on and find the light of day in some untimely future waiting beyond the horizon and off in the distance. The story begins with the journalist-­narrator attempting to recall his first meeting with Brevet Brigadier General John A. B. C. Smith, “that truly fine-­looking fellow,” notorious not only for his bravery and valor in combat but also for his entire commanding presence: “There was an air distingué pervading the whole man, which spoke of high breeding, and hinted at high birth.”16 The entire backstory of General A. B. C. Smith is not entirely given in this short story, yet the context for his greatness seems not only self-­evident but also totally realized in the physical person that is General Smith: an American hero materialized and complete. “His head of hair,” the narrator explains, “would have done honor to a Brutus. . . . Nothing could be more richly flowing, or possess a higher gloss”; even his stubble appears noble and worthy, colored the same “jetty black” as that atop his head, providing the General with “the handsomest pair of whiskers under the sun.” In his mouth sit “the most brilliantly white of all conceivable teeth,” and from his lips pour forth “a voice of surpassing clearness, melody, and strength.” Even his eyes represent wisdom and respect: two ocular organs described here as being “of a deep hazel, exceedingly large and lustrous, . . . [containing] just that amount of interesting obliquity which gives pregnancy to expression.”17 The level of intensive care with which Poe’s narrator focuses on the physical properties of valor and respect should immediately bring to mind the mechanical nature of the hero industry first taking root in American popular culture in the mid-­nineteenth century. The story, as Peeples has argued, “literalizes the ‘making’ of a hero” and satirizes more than a specific or even general icon of American power, as the term “used up” was commonly understood in Poe’s life as a poet and magazine writer to mean being professionally attacked, chopped up in public discourse, and figuratively “murdered, in print.”18 The handsome hero of this story, like so many handsome heroes before and so many to come,

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soon finds himself under the spotlight of journalistic inquiry and, as Peeples might have it, sliced and diced and left for dead. As the narrator continues his recollection of General Smith and his subsequent meetings with him, he finds himself approaching a mystery and unraveling secrets about the real nature of this great man. Men and women in close contact with the General are, the narrator reports, reticent to speak in any indiscreet manner about their knowledge of him and find it easier simply to provide grandiose accolades about his history in battle and the “wonderfully inventive age” with which they all found themselves. Finding something queer about all of this, the narrator continues still in his search for the “real” General A. B. C. Smith, meeting along the way banal comment after banal comment—­like that of the Smith acquaintance Doctor Drummummupp: “Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live: he cometh up and is cut down like a flower!”—­and truism after truism, that eventually seem to speak something in a tune more honest than oblique.19 The air of nothingness surrounding this search is, as in so many other Poe stories, more telling than it is confounding, as the narrator eventually finds himself closer and closer to the real and actual General A. B. C. Smith, presented in all of his disembodied glory. “Mr. Sinivate,” the narrator implores in one of his last dead-­end interviews regarding General Smith’s personage, “is he the man in the mask?” “No-­o-­o!” Sinivate replies, “nor the man in the mo-­o-­on!” Sensing that his quest has been damned from the start and not yet sensing the collective truths that all of these non sequiturs are in fact pointing him toward, the narrator prepares himself to confront the man in the mask—­or perhaps the man on the moon—­and call on the General himself, “the fountain-­head . . . [the] solution of this abominable piece of mystery.”20 Finally at the home of General Smith and led into his dressing quarters by one of his “old negro” servants, the narrator leads himself right into the heart of this story’s mystery, as he finds himself searching the bedroom for a glimpse of the remarkable man but finding only “a large and exceedingly odd-­looking bundle of something that lay close by [his] feet on the floor.” Giving the strange bundle a kick, the narrator is surprised when it produces sound: “‘Hem! ahem! rather civil that, I should say!’ said the bundle, in one of the smallest, and altogether the funniest little voices, between a squeak and a whistle, that I have ever heard in

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all my days of existence.” As the narrator gets his bearing on the situation, he immediately comes to understand that the odd-­looking bundle on the floor producing that squeaky sound is in fact our dear General Smith, who is presently in the process of attaching one of his prosthetic legs, a display that is here compared to “the drawing on of a stocking.” All the while, the General seems sufficiently prepared to wax monumental regarding his historic leadership on the battlefield, assembling himself: “And a bloody action it was,” continued the thing, as if in a soliloquy; “but then one mustn’t fight with the Bugaboos and Kickapoos, and think of coming off with a mere scratch. Pompey, I’ll thank you now for that arm. Thomas” [turning to me] “is decidedly the best hand at a cork leg; but if you should ever want an arm, my dear fellow, you must really let me recommend you to Bishop.” Here Pompey screwed on an arm. “We had rather hot work of it, that you may say. Now, you dog, slip on my shoulders and bosom! Pettitt makes the best shoulders, but for a bosom you will have to go to Ducrow.”21

As the scene moves along, the General’s memories of battle continue as he calls for his wooden teeth and his glass eye and finally adjusts himself into what the narrator refers to as “a somewhat singular-­ looking-­machine” that eventually comes to look, act, and sound like the Brevet Brigadier General A. B. C. Smith familiar to his memory and good sense.22 With the narrator baffled and disgusted, as his readers no doubt are, the story ends rather quickly as the narrator, now finding himself standing in front of his hero, thanks him for his time and finds a quick exit. As the journalist leaves, though, the entire series of confounding events and grotesque displays reveal themselves to him, now in possession of “a perfect understanding of the true state of affairs” and “a full comprehension of the mystery which had troubled [him] so long.”23 The dignified man he had come to greet and report was not, in the end, much of a man at all. Rather, the heroic icon of bravery and duty, General A. B. C. Smith, was a prosthetic process of man, a heaving hulk of honor pieced together with false limbs, wooden teeth, and glass eyes, an “odd-­looking bundle” of a hero made up of a complex machinery of tat.

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The narrator’s excursion is, of course, a fool’s errand, and this story about General A. B. C. Smith—­“the man that was used up”—­is one of many that Poe tells of false journeys and misguided enterprises into and beyond the depths of nothingness. General Smith, as the materialized example of the American hero-­as-­mirage represents the end of the story of the country’s fool’s errand into its own complex system of cultural icons and national heroes. National figures are, in the logic of this satire, made up, phantasms of the American public that are as sure to crumble into disgusting little bits as they are to be revered as representatives of the greatest and the wisest among us. Poe has produced not only a send-­up of hero-­worship in the United States (if not a very canny understanding of a President Trump) but also a predictive joke on the biographers and critics to come, interested in getting to the bottom of his own personal story and his own artistic genius. The search for the “real” Poe is as befuddling and unnecessary as the search for the actual General A. B. C. Smith: either way, the fool-­ as-­expert or fool-­as-­reporter is forced to confront the reality of nothingness in order to tell their tale. We should attribute this very small and seemingly childish satire of biographies and critical tomes to come to the strength of Poe’s style. In the end, Poe’s style, unlike General Smith’s manhood, is able to remain in tact as the truth of the stories continues to reveal itself generation after generation and century after century of American media and literary culture. The machine here is a machine of style, which is more than nothing: it is the material production of nothing. In this story, Poe displays his characteristic use of mirages as ways to lure his subjects—­his audience—­into his trap.

The Psychoanalyzed Poe An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection. —­Henry James, 1876

Formal criticism of Poe and his body of work were, as we have seen, subject to the whims of nineteenth-­century American culture that focused squarely on his character, reputation, and personality as clues to his lasting worth as a national author and potential icon in

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the growing pantheon of US literature. Poe’s notoriety has been based primarily on a combined understanding of his disposition toward the grotesque and the horrible in his poems and tales as well as a self-­ evident conception of his own personal battles with addiction, mental illness, and spiritual strife. While popular records of the story of Poe’s inner self promoted ideas that he was indeed congenitally suffering from various mental and behavioral maladies—­among them, “cerebral epilepsy,” alcoholism, tuberculosis, and outright insanity—­it was not until the advent of Freudian psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic literary criticism that his pathologies took on a clinical tone and began to attach themselves to the public’s readings of his texts.24 The popular interest in the submerged and secret lives of public men was made official in the development of psychoanalytic theory, which ultimately worked to provide precise scientific methods and a new language for the same practices taking placing during the period of “biographical mania” in the United States. Visiting the US in 1909, Sigmund Freud himself is reported to have whispered to his traveling companion Carl Jung, “They don’t realize we’re bringing them the plague,” meaning that his psychoanalytic theories would, as is certainly clear today, colonize the minds of individuals living in the twentieth century and beyond.25 Freud’s studies of madness, the unconscious, and mental health in general defined and stratified a whole series of explanations for personal deficiencies, “turning,” as he famously said, “hysterical misery into common unhappiness.”26 Psychotherapeutic management, in other words, promised to serve its populations by detecting and treating their various states of neurosis and mechanisms of defense. As Freud’s theories entered the popular-­cultural arena, they also found a comfortable home within the halls of the literary establishment in, especially, Europe and the United States. Psychoanalytic literary analysis soon offered its own ways of reading texts, and as Peeples argues, while it “at first must have seemed like nothing more than a new set of tools that could be used to perform the same old tasks of author study,” it, in fact, provided a model of close reading that “[enabled] critics to make bolder claims about, in this case, Poe’s ‘mind’ and ‘character.’”27 Reading soon became part of the analytic process, and as Henry James once opined, the majority of Poe’s audience would come to fully under-

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stand that he was in fact an author of insanity and an author that was insane. Henry James’s remark that an appreciation for Poe’s work insinuates a “decidedly primitive stage of reflection” makes a strong connection between the personality of Poe-­the-­author and the work left behind for readers to decipher and to judge.28 While James’s remark was given in the context of a nineteenth-­century culture obsessed with its negative impressions of Poe’s character—­Poe the charlatan, Poe the drunk, Poe the reactionary critic, Poe the mentally ill and spiritually diseased, Poe the author of adolescent literature—­its core sentiments found clinical confirmation within the context of psychoanalytic literary criticism. In the 1933 book Edgar Poe: Etude psychoanalytique, Marie Bonaparte reads Poe’s texts in order to determine the general neuroses affecting each of them and, in fact, telling the “detailed case study of a highly neurotic man who happened to be a writer.”29 Poe has since been taken up by psychoanalytic critics as a neurotic, a psychotic, and someone clinically insane—­the author, in this case, is tethered to their work and also to the clinician’s official report. Artist are treated the way any patient is treated within the context of the psychotherapeutic conversation, and as a result, “the text” at hand is this official report, which pays less attention to the formal attributes of literary creation and more to the cohesive vision created of the author and his work.

“The Philosophy of Composition” Nothing is more clear than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its dénouement before any thing be attempted with the pen. It is only with the dénouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention. —­Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition”

The first step in an artist’s development of their style is a commitment to becoming conscious—­conscious of the effect of their personality on the work, conscious of the affective capacities embedded within their

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body of work, and conscious of the processes through which its various attributes combine and form a unified mode of expression. In the essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” Poe imagines and formalizes the components of his style and articulates his own writerly focus on the self-­conscious formation of literary and poetic effects in his work, especially the projection of beauty. While this document is and could be significant regarding any number of critical debates waiting to face him in the future of literary criticism, “The Philosophy of Composition” is significant here in responding to the regulations set in place by a kind of psychoanalytic analysis that neglects the artist’s ability to control and foresee the effects that their writings have and that Poe’s style was indeed focused on self-­consciously producing. Poe wanted grotesque imagery and literary sensations having to do with the neurotic, the deranged, the horrible, and the insane. “The Philosophy of Composition” is Poe’s intuitive response to forms of critique-­to-­come that might neglect his style. “Unity of effect” is the prized possession that Poe prescribes for anyone wanting to enter into the business of writing literature or poetry, and “The Philosophy of Composition” is, above all else, Poe’s most direct address on the development and cultivation of style. The writer should, in Poe’s mind, begin “with the consideration of an effect,” “keeping originality always in view.”30 Style is, as always, never a matter of accident or improvisation; it is, rather, the formal process through which an individual takes control over their image; for an artist, style is the very logical and mechanical procedure by which effects of personality and created work combine themselves into a unified literary machine. It is the only system available to artists concerned first with effect and second with originality of content, expression, and intensity. While style is often viewed as, in part, an exposition against the role that intuition comes to play in the creation of literature and poetry, for the stylist and indeed as elaborated by Poe here, style is a self-­governing process that involves artistic codes, mannerisms, and intentions. The objective is much more than merely writing literature; Poe’s goal was to himself become literature, to make a place for himself in the ongoing history of literary culture wherein the “Poe” style of literature would remain self-­evident and self-­enforcing. Thus, the name “Poe” has come to signify more than an author’s name but also

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an entire subfield within the history of American literary culture. The unified components of his literary machine accomplish this and form what James would call “the figure in the carpet.”31 “An artist,” Poe explains, in a piece titled “A Genus Irritabile” from his Marginalia, “is an artist only by dint of his exquisite sense of Beauty—­a sense affording him rapturous enjoyment, but at the same time imploring, or involving, an equally exquisite sense of Deformity or disproportion.”32 A writer’s talent, then, is based on their initial recognition of a particular sensibility or proclivity to life that Poe terms “the poetic irritability,” which in turn is utilized by and transformed into productions of beauty in the creation of their work. Only “one thing is clear,” Poe argues: “that the man who is not ‘irritable,’ (to the ordinary apprehension,) is no poet.”33 In other words, an artist, or indeed a literary “genius,” as Poe would have it, is always someone marked by a certain set of mysterious and antisocial attributes that both set them apart from other members of their generation and also secure a place for them in the future as a great stylist both out of place and out of time. In fact, as Poe continues to elaborate this idea, “What the world calls ‘genius’ is the state of mental disease arising from the undue predominance of some one of the faculties. The works of such genius are never sound in themselves and, in especial, always betray the general mental insanity.”34 The labor that Poe has put into the creation of his style, then, should be seen as his own project of cultivating the kind of genius that strives to make poetry out of insanity and beauty from general decay. His Marginalia writings speak to his own self-­consciousness about the ongoing development of his style, and “The Philosophy of Composition” is the document that finds Poe formalizing his untimely undertaking. It is in many ways also Poe’s prophetic response to psychoanalytic criticism of his work, as it charts a clinical logic to his artistic procedures and literary effects. Like any earnest attempt at elaborating one’s style, “The Philosophy of Composition” finds Poe in a tone both earnest and prescriptive. The relatively short article is as much a set of instructions for writers-­to-­ come as it is Poe’s own challenge to refine his image of himself as a stylist and to define for critics of the future how his works and persona ought to be judged and categorized. In short, Poe suggests three

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main ideas regarding works of poetry and literature having to do with length, method, and what he terms a desired “unity of effect.” There is, for instance, “a distinct limit, as regards length, to all works of literary art—­t he limit of a single sitting.”35 The point here, for Poe, is extracting from the work the ultimate effects of sensation; he wants readers to be consumed totally by the work and not by the outer world or even themselves. The degree to which a work of literature or poetry is able to maintain a capacity to effect this set of attributes and the extent to which it can affect and sublimate its reader are, for Poe, a matter of almost scientific precision, especially as it pertains to his own creative endeavors.36 Poe’s concept of artistic method, then, clearly diverges from any conceptions of works that arise from bouts of disorganized artistic intuition or emotional frenzy. The writer, in this latter instance, is deprived of their own ability to predict or ensure the quality of their own vision of beauty and therefore vulnerable to whims of critics to come—­critics who feel invited to have their way with determining for themselves the motivations guiding works of literature and poetry as well as, in turn, their momentary worth. “When,” Poe writes, “men speak of Beauty, they mean, precisely, not quality, as is supposed, but an effect—­t hey refer . . . just to that intense and pure elevation of soul—­not of intellect, or of heart.”37 By outlining a precise method through which writers and poets dedicated to beauty and to the beautiful might formalize their literary effects, Poe is also pointing toward a vision of the self-­conscious artist who has developed a process of creative intuition, or style, that combines the “intense and pure elevation” of the soul, the intellect, and the heart. Poe’s method is really an ethical commitment to artistic overcoming: an artistic will to power that gives the literary creator the capacity not only to maintain their sense of dignity as it pertains to the reception of their bodies of work but also to resist the homogenization of their style. Before commencing the writing of a story or a poem, the writer should, in Poe’s view, already confirm for themselves what the end of the work will be and what exact effects and affects it would produce. Readerly response, then, whether registered through emotion or critical inquiry, is an irreducible component of the work of art. Just as Poe suggests stories only long enough to be consumed in one sitting so that

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there can be no space outside of its consumption, the unity of effect is important in ensuring that there be no response outside the vision of the originary vision, of the stylist themselves. All other matters that are normally considered primary in the process of literary criticism—­ plot, tone, characters, color, conflict, theme, and so on—­are secondary in this instance, as the writer insists on their own authority. Applying this logic to himself, Poe provides an elaborate explication of the execution of perhaps his most well-­k nown and revered works, “The Raven.” First confirming that beauty would be the ultimate province in which his poem would remain, Poe explains his secondary writerly decisions having to do with tone, length, and application. The tone, Poe writes, would be “one of sadness,” explaining, “Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.”38 Sadness, then, would become the emotional register of “The Raven,” which Poe intended to operate as a kind of ongoing refrain of melancholy. A certain repetition of delivery and spirit characterize any reading of “The Raven,” which remains in the musical space of sadness, never resolving or finding an outside to the intended unity of effect. Even the phrase “Nevermore,” which finds its way into the poem as the Raven’s own solitary refrain, is intended here as a material enforcement of Poe’s melancholy effect. The word, he explains, embodies the sound of melancholy and is “at the same time in the fullest possible keeping with that melancholy which [he] had predetermined as the tone of the poem.”39 The sound of the word, its musicality, its very material signify more than meaning here, as “Nevermore” operates as the refrain of the poem’s unity of effect. It is the tone of sadness and, in its material weight and sound, the production of unresolved sadness. “Nevermore” (much like “Lenore,” published two years before “The Raven” in 1843) is Poe materialized for readers-­to-­come as “emblematical of Mournful and Never-­ending Remembrance.”40 While certainly open to (and, indeed, a victim of) literary criticism to come, “The Raven,” and “The Philosophy of Composition” as a whole contain within them Poe’s predictive efforts at maintaining his own artistic control and securing for himself a significant role to play in future revelations of his works’ mysteries. For Poe, style comes before content. He is like a gambler who controls the house, and style is the game he plays with his readers. And there is no way to beat Poe at his own game.

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The Modern Poe The substance of Poe is refined; it is his form that is vulgar. He is, as it were, one of Nature’s Gentlemen, unhappily cursed with incorrigible bad taste. To the most sensitive and high-­souled man in the world we should find it hard to forgive, shall we say, the wearing of a diamond ring on every finger. Poe does the equivalent of this in his poetry; we notice the solecism and shudder. . . . It is when Poe tries to make it too poetical that his poetry takes on its particular tinge of badness. —­Aldous Huxley, “Vulgarity in Literature,” 1930

As Poe’s work continued to be read in the twentieth century, it found itself subject to new forms of critique that attempted to move past considerations of an author’s biography and the historical circumstances in which a work of literature was written and into a text-­based practice of evaluating and analyzing texts in and of themselves. The New Criticism, as it is commonly referred to in the American academy, formalized this shift in analysis. Thought to have begun officially following the 1941 publication of John Crow Ransom’s The New Criticism, it prescribed methods that, on the surface, seem more in line with the ones Poe might have preferred in his nineteenth-­century dreams of a readership-­to-­ come.41 According to the doctrine of the New Criticism, readers should maintain an air of objectivity as they move into a text, focusing less on the particulars of an author’s background, intentions, or context and more on the effects that a text contains within it. The New Criticism’s manner of approaching literature contains within it a formal procedure for investigating the nature of any text’s literary effects, emphasizing, among other things, syntax, word choice, tone, setting, and sound. In this case, the text is seen as an architecture-­in-­itself and is to be considered only for the world it creates and enforces, detached from any subjective consideration of anything that may lie outside it (the author, the author’s other works, intertextual conversations between this work and other works, etc.). Poe’s place in all of this is complicated. On the one hand, as “The Philosophy of Composition” implies and as Peeples argues in his chapter

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“Out of Space, Out of Time: From Early Formalism to Deconstruction,” Poe “has been regarded as a forefather of critics who emphasized textual unity and whose readings demonstrated how various elements in a poem or short story work together to produce a subtle but ultimately coherent meaning.”42 His emphasis, in other words, on the unity of effect in a literary text signifies his prediction of and desire for the kind of analysis that New Criticism embodies: a system that points toward the text in order to ascertain its vitality as a living, breathing literary machine producing effects and affects. Still, though, the match made between Poe and the American New Critics cannot be seen as perfect. Tied up in broader nationalist movements in US culture to determine a “respectable” and “dignified” canon of American literature, Poe’s reputation as the author of seedy and disreputable tales and poems preceded him in his official biography, despite the objective distance that New Critics attempted to place between their own reading practices and those harking back to the nineteenth century. As Peeples reports, Poe’s work—­and especially his poetry, seemingly ready made for grade-­school recitation—­was seen by many New Critics as “embarrassingly popular” and, at best, only a somewhat elevated example of juvenilia.43 As Huxley’s quotation from his essay “Vulgarity in Literature” in the epigraph to this section attests, Poe’s bad reputation as a poet and storyteller who was at once overly stylized and mechanical and messy and overly dramatic deepened when subjected to the kind of “objective” analysis and evaluation that became a standard of midcentury New Criticism.44 The unity of style suggests the hermeneutic effect of the text, but the problem is that Poe cannot be read in a vacuum. There is no way to subtract Poe’s style from any of his writings. The issue here, and indeed even in the case of the New Criticism’s valorization of Poe as an author focused on the significance of textual unity, is that Poe is flattened, that his style is not understood to be capable of producing affects and concepts as well as formal literary effects. Poe was a stylist as much as an author or poet, and his body of work shows his desire to participate in “the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts.”45 Poe’s various literary effects (or, perhaps, literary becomings) relating to the hysterical, the horrible, the grotesque, the Gothic, and the sublime are not merely present: they are also the products of Poe’s style, which, in Deleuze and Guattari’s

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terms, have to do with experimentation and the invention of concepts. For Deleuze and Guattari, there is an already living, ongoing list of conceptual fabricators—­stylists—­in existence: a group of writers/philosophers who accede to the idea that the only concepts that make their way into the work should be the product of the author’s own imagination and creation. They write, “Every creation is singular, and the concept as a specifically philosophical creation is always a singularity.”46 In this sense, then, the literary effects produced by Poe’s literary machine must also be understood within the broader context of his own philosophical project to create singular concepts and blocks of sensation that relate back to his own self-­conscious creative processes and, indeed, his style. A purely objective analysis of any Poe tale or poem is incomplete—­ and not because it lacks the contextual specificity of Poe’s biography or the sociohistorical context of his work but because it neglects the more important ontological work contained within and still being elaborated by the Poe machine. Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” exemplifies how he deals with and ultimately overcomes the trappings of official, objective literary concepts like the uncanny and the sublime.

The Haunted Poe The intimate and uncanny relationship between the house and the Ushers parallels that which exists between the clock and the hands that “dwell” within it and are wholly governed by its mechanisms. —­Jean-­Paul Weber Everything in Poe is dead: the houses, the rooms, the furniture, to say nothing of nature and of human beings. —­Allen Tate, “Our Cousin, Mr. Poe”

First published in 1839, Poe’s story “The Fall of the House of Usher” is a text both cathected to and overcoming the form of the literary sublime. The action of the tale follows the lead of the speaking narrator, a friend of a certain Roderick Usher, a man for whom the narrator holds great esteem both for his aristocratic upbringing and his worldly disposition. Having received a letter from Mr. Usher stating that his entire family had

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fallen ill, the nameless narrator is invited to pay an extended visit to the House of Usher so that he may provide some solace. When the narrator arrives at the house, he finds, as Alan Tate has pertly described in the epigraph to this section, the family itself, its house, its furnishings, and the whole surrounding atmosphere to be dead or dying.47 The narrator describes in minute detail the fatuous display of death and decay foisted on him by even his first glimpse of the House of Usher, likening the sensation to some “hideous dropping off of the veil”: I had been passing alone, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. . . . With the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. . . . I looked upon the scene before me—­upon the mere house, and the simple landscape feature of the domain—­upon the bleak walls—­upon the vacant eye-­like windows—­upon the rank sedges—­and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—­with an utter depression of soul.48

The description not only sets the stage for this grotesque tale but also signals Poe’s thorough participation in tropes related to the sublime and, as critics would come to know it, the uncanny. Common effects of Gothic or grotesque works of literature, the physical manifestations of doom and gloom here are, in one sense, part of Poe’s artifice of sadness, his style. Much of the vulgar tone here—­and, certainly, of the kind of vulgar literary devices about which Huxley was snobbish—­is meant to create a double sensation for the reader, who, at once, shares the narrator’s desire to shield himself from the manifestations of decay in the story and, at the same time, finds themselves drawn into Poe’s grotesquerie. Preimagining theories of the Uncanny and, ultimately, overcoming the trapping of the Gothic narrative form, “The Fall of the House of Usher” is indicative of a will to power inherent in the Poe machine: one inspired by his overwhelming dedication to perversity and to the sublimation of literary forms of the past and even from the future. While many readers, as Hoffman has argued, “are put off from Poe by the décor of his writing,” Poe has nevertheless proven a capacity to force his readers into close proximity with the beating heart of insanity that unfolds and blossoms within his poems and tales. Sublime indeed,

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Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” is a product of his devotion to the power of horror in the name of the horrible itself, his vision of the House of Usher built on an aesthetics of decay: it is, Hoffman explains, “a function of Poe’s theories of both poetry and fiction that so many mannerisms be interposed between reality and the reader.”49 “The Fall of the House of Usher” is thus more a product of what Poe called the “Imp of the Perverse” than a clear-­cut example of his abiding by the literary styles relating to the sublime. All humans are, according to Poe, drawn to an innate sense of perversity that constantly couples itself with the coeval desire to be well and to maintain a level of sanity. Still, Poe writes in his “The Imp of the Perverse,” “We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss—­we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from danger. Unaccountably we remain.”50 With “The Fall of the House of Usher,” readers are invited into a perverse journey by the narrator, who, like us, stands dizzy and scared at the precipice of disaster yet is somehow lured by “a cloud of unnamable feeling.”51 “The Sublime man,” Deleuze argues, “subdues monsters, poses riddles, but knows nothing of the riddle and the monster that he himself is.”52 In Poe’s story, readers are met, arguably, with the narrator as the embodiment of this figure of “the Sublime man,” who is subject to the wicked game of perversity played out in the action of plot but still an object of Poe’s style of not only exploring sublime terror but also producing intensities that make it a reality. The nature of this game is not, admittedly, unique to Poe in the greater category of Gothic literature. Characterizing tales of this sort as “a descent into disintegration,” Chris Baldick, in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, explains that Gothic stories are “already half-­way to sending themselves up,” resisting precise canonization by a strange double performance: both parodying and occupying their place within Western literature.53 The architecture of the Gothic story is much like that of the Gothic building: it memorializes and is ultimately ruined by ornate and peculiar remnants of the past. However, unlike Gothic structures that still stand in all of their haunted gory, the Gothic story folds in on itself, always in the very middle of telling its story. Neither totally nostalgic nor entirely removed from the ways of the past, the Gothic narrative builds and is built on what Baldick calls “a kind of homeopathic principle,” wherein Gothic writers “[borrow] the fables and the nightmares of a past age in order to

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repudiate their authority,” intent on conjuring up ghosts of history that their stories only seek to escape and steal away from.54 Poe’s story is, in fact, an untimely send-­up of the critical history of the sublime. The character Roderick Usher is often considered to be Poe’s own vision of himself, as Roderick bears a striking physical resemblance to his author—­“A cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid and luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but of a surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew model, but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations; a finely moulded chin . . . [and] an inordinate expansion above the regions of the temple”—­as well as an emotional air of melancholy befitting the most familiar caricature of Poe.55 The name “Usher,” on the other hand, is also Poe’s own joke on the name of James Ussher: a man, along with Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, with whom we might associate the infrastructure of traditional theories relating to the sublime.56 Arguing that the tale “performs a dramatic negation of the architecture of sublime theorizations inherited from European intellectuals,” Sean Moreland has made a compelling case for reading into Poe’s character Roderick Usher a more direct—­though, for today’s audiences, perhaps only a well-­shaded reference—­critical overcoming of the tropes associated with the literary sublime. While “The Fall of the House of Usher” certainly attends to many of the most obvious sensibilities associated with the sublime, it, in this regard, also participates in a kind of “negative sublimity,” which, according to Moreland, overcomes the critical and aesthetic binaries inherent to any dominant form of the kind, including Burke’s ideological separation of matters of beauty and sublimity, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s distinction between fancy and imagination, and Anne Radcliffe’s division of terror and horror.57 The Usher house itself is the manifestation of all of these traits. Upon entering, the narrator describes a building bursting with overwrought Gothic metaphor and decoration: “Its principal feature seemed to be that of an excessive antiquity. The discoloration of ages had been great. . . . In this there was much that reminded me of the specious totality of old woodwork which has rotted for long years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the external air.”58 Overindulging in stereotypical Gothic trappings, the House of Usher is both an exceedingly familiar image and a ridiculously histrionic and overdetermined dramatization

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of all of the collected elements of the sublime, with their binaries and distinctions torn in half and melded into one great piece of rotting flesh. And Poe’s message for future audiences? Totality is an illusion. Taken as a send-­up not of itself but of the Gothic story and the conventions of the sublime literary production, “The Fall of the House of Usher” seems like Poe at his most perverse and mordant state of being. Sublimity, for Burke, contains within it the power to “anticipate our reasonings” and “hurry us onward,” “even,” Moreland claims, “in opposition to them.”59 The fact that the story repudiates, as Baldick would have it, the authority of theorists of the sublime by simply mocking them and presenting the architecture of their official logic as already decaying and dead at the core makes “The Fall of the House of Usher” seem like a recognizable piece of Gothic storytelling. Its reality, on the other hand, represents Poe’s immense and very strange “Imp of the Perverse.” The collapse of the house at the end of the story and the fall of the familial “House” brought about by Roderick’s demise—­leaving him, in the words of the narrator, only “a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated”—­signify Poe’s successful figuration of Gothic and sublime tropes and his literary transfiguration of them into the greater work of the expanding Poe machine, which, again, longs to create terror for terror’s sake and grotesquerie in the spirit of the grotesque that beckons its readers into the ever-­populated fields of blossoming chaos that Poe has built into his vision of the future.60 The New Critics sought totality and objectivity, but they were unprepared for Poe, who knew ahead of time that these were mirages. He set a trap and they fell in.

Beyond Here Lies Nothin’ I have graven it within the hills, and my vengeance upon the dust within the rock. —­Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym These three compendia of his themes—­ Pym, Eureka, “Usher”—­each edges inexorably toward apocalypse, the unavoidable condition of wisdom, by a different route. In Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym we go clear around the earth, upon the sea; this is the Total Voyage of Discovery. —­Daniel Hoffman, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe

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In 1967, Roland Barthes famously announced the demise of the author. In his essay “The Death of the Author” (La mort de l’auteur), Barthes continued and expanded on the initial notion popular among American New Critics that the literary work be dislodged from any consideration of its author’s biography, political background, or historical context. Taking this a step further, Barthes also argues for a literary criticism so focused on the work at hand that even authorial motivation or intention be cast aside in order for a more text-­based form of analysis to take place. Describing literature as being written by a multitude of indiscernible voices, Barthes claims that the space of literature is in fact “that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that creates.”61 A “disconnection” happens in the writing of literature and in the development of the author’s own literary voice. The author experiences a loss of subjectivity: “writing begins,” Barthes says, once “the author enters into his own death.”62 The information provided by an author’s official biography and indeed any critical attention paid to their professed aims in the creation of their work is, for Barthes, an obstacle for any valid criticism of the text. The solution, he maintains, is to develop texts without authors, to avoid “impos[ing] a limit on that text.”63 Critical explorations of the truth of a text or its author are games that Barthes thinks too easy. He wants to recognize the ways in which this academic “discovery” disallows deeper analysis, unburdened by identity and prescriptive subjectivity. Literature, which Barthes points out would better be understood as “writing,” needs to be liberated from critical practices that seek to establish originary “meanings.” Comparing this semiotic approach to an “anti-­theological activity,” Barthes directs his ethical claim toward a kind of criticism unmoored from the “truth” of history and from the cult of truth itself: a “truly revolutionary” stance, he argues, that, in the end, is a way of refusing “God and his hypostates—­ reason, science, law.” “The text itself,” he argues, “plays (like a door, like a machine with ‘play’) and the reader plays twice over, playing the Text as one plays a game, looking for a practice which re-­produces it, but, in order that that practice not be reduced to a passive, inner mimesis.”64 For Barthes, literary games are played only in the reading, or re-­ creating, of literature. This would be sad news indeed for Poe, who imagined himself the ultimate stylist and perverted genius, designing

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tales and poems that not only conjure up immediate and palpable sensations for their readers but also lead them deeper and deeper into the chaotic landscape of the Poe machine, sublimating and consuming them in the process. Still, Barthes’s essay should be recognized for its significant role in bringing about and announcing a shift in official literary criticism, away from the formalisms of the New Criticism and toward the new formalisms of the postmodern age. Just as Poe in many ways provided arguments in advance against Barthes’s fantasy of a text-­based and author-­absent criticism, Barthes’s arguments in “The Death of the Author” were not without their own contemporaneous critique: most notably Michel Foucault’s “What Is an Author?” parodies Barthes’s essay on the death of the author, making a joke that Poe was always already in on. Foucault argues for a less apocalyptic critical understanding of the author of literature: “The Author is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes and chooses. . . . [It is] therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.”65 Foucault’s “author function” allows for a more fluid and open-­ended discursive relation to occur between text and work, author and text. Foucault playfully asks how and in what ways critical conceptions of an author’s body of work might be expanded, asking, for example, what the impact might be of the future publication of Nietzsche’s marginal notes, his scribblings, his laundry list, his date book.66 Foucault’s essay, in the end, points toward a recalibrated analytics of literature and criticism wherein the author, the work, and even the deconstructive “text” might deterritorialize the very limits that disconnect them from their potential creative power. This theory of the work—­which Foucault recognizes as an underdeveloped field—­is in fact embedded within the Poe machine.67 For Poe, writing was not merely a personal matter but part of his commitment to the vitality of his style, to its ongoing health and affective capacity to continue its labor into a world-­to-­come. As Deleuze has argued, certain writers “attempt to make life something more than personal, to free life from what imprisons it.”68 Such attempts aim at the untimely—­existence outside of time and space, unencumbered by the truth of life, free even from the evolving “truth” of scholarship and criticism in the future. Poe is a paradigmatic American artist who aimed at the untimely. His no-

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vella The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is a predictive response to debates about the death of the author. Another kind of hoax in and of itself, the story not only undoes Poe’s own relation to his own author function but also opens mysteries relating to the truth of authorship that still hang in the balance. The first publication of Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym occurred in 1838 for the Southern Literary Messenger. Serialized in two sections, Pym is Poe’s only novel-­or novella-­length piece and is thought by many scholars to have been completed under financial duress as Poe was, at the time of its release, suffering a series of professional failures as a working short story author and poet. Even though Poe himself later dismissed Arthur Gordon Pym as “a very silly book,” it has somehow—­ and strangely—­remained one of his most enigmatic and significant creations. Similar in many ways to his philosophical treatise on time and space, Eureka—­which he states would be properly read and understood only “two thousand years hence”—­Pym is an untimely masterpiece attempting to represent and ponder the mysteries of the universe.69 In Eureka, Poe addresses cosmological concerns in a more direct, scientific manner. In The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, he dramatizes exploration, pushing it to its most grotesque and deranged degree. Pym and Eureka also set themselves apart from the other works in Poe’s opus in that they seem to summarily defy any clear or conventional analysis—­a fact that, considering both stories deal squarely with matters of exploration and discovery, we must agree amounts to another of Poe’s ongoing jokes with his audience of the future. The mystery of nothingness is at the heart of Poe’s labor in Pym and also an abyss left wide open and unresolved in the conclusion of the story, somehow securing Poe’s place at that nothingness toward which we all move and into which we all perish. Pym itself is, as Peeples has argued, “at once a mock nonfictional narrative, adventure saga, bildungsroman, hoax, largely plagiarized travelogue, . . . spiritual allegory, . . . [and] one of the most elusive texts of American literature.”70 Poe, in his own sordid way, has succeeded at territorializing and deterritorializing literary forms and concepts of authorship in the construction of his Narrative. Borrowing from the various genres that Peeples mentions, Poe’s stylized relation to the novella works at the same time to disaggregate their discursive power. Poe distances himself from this “very silly book,” on the one hand, and overtly

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plagiarizes from a series of travelogues, scientific treatises on discovery, and classic works of prose and lyric, and his critical ambivalence toward his duties as a professional writer and public literary figure constitutes a desire to toy with, and ultimately overcome, his reputation and sense of obligation to “Literature.”71 While the story is meant to be a direct representation of Arthur Gordon Pym’s experiences on board the whaling vessels the Grampus and then the Jane Guy toward the South Pole, Poe has created a fictional “Poe” whose responsibility it is to write down and report the action of this story and, ultimately, announce the sudden death and disappearance of The Narrative’s protagonist. Here, the “death” of the author is only a doorway through which Poe confirms his creative control over the telling of Pym’s tale, which, in the end, is a discovery narrative based on the themes of misreading, miscalculation, and blindly sailing into disaster. As for the general plot of the book, Pym begins in ways recognizable to the genre of the literature of discovery and adventure on the high seas, a familiar and also adolescent form of storytelling that, in this instance, finds a young Arthur Pym of Nantucket stowing away on a whaling vessel that is headed south. We encounter mutinies, rotting corpses, cannibalism, and general decay along Pym’s journey to the South Pole. As the story reaches its end, and as Pym eventually meets his doom, the Jane Guy ultimately encounters an island called Tsalal, which is inhabited by a strange group of Black natives for whom the appearance of whiteness signifies pure evil and death incarnate. As Pym discovers of a series of hieroglyphs written on stone that are translated from a blend of Hebrew, Arabic, and Egyptian letters into the words “To be shady,” “To be white,” and “Region to the South,” a terrible void of whiteness is foreshadowed and brings about the apocalypse, as Pym and the inhabitants of Tsalal are engulfed into the white cataract of the sea: “And now we rushed into the embrace of the cataract, where a chasm threw itself open to receive us. But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.”72 The details of Poe’s Narrative are deserving of their own book of analysis, so let us focus here on the ways in which Pym operates as a cautionary tale of misreading and the misadventures associated with

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discovery, a theme that mirrors the Poe machine’s logical disaggregation or deterritorialization of its own literary genres and forms. It is difficult indeed to find just the right term or even set of descriptive words that suit Poe’s very strange Narrative. On the one hand, it cannot aptly or simply be characterized as a “Poe” story—­in fact, Pym constitutes both a confounding and mysterious moment in the trajectory of his life as a writer. And yet the piece remains as a definitive and singularly significant text in the whole story of American literary production. In it, Poe not only gathered together and recast histories and narrative tropes made by writers before him but also generated a model and a source for American stories and histories to come. Herman Melville’s Moby-­Dick is, of course, among the most notorious of Pym’s future intertexts. The problem of situating and properly describing Pym’s story is not merely about its mischaracterizations in American literary criticism and American historicism but about the very nature of the work itself. As Poe writes it, he plays wicked games. Beyond the obvious, or at least already documented, issues facing readers of Pym—­Poe’s use of a fictionalized author for his presentation of the novella, its being the product of a practical move made by Poe-­the-­writer for surviving the capitalist economy, the lack of seriousness that he seemed to take in producing and formulating this “very silly book”—­its queerness has to do with the stories it carries within and with it. I propose that we read the story as a joke—­a joke that does not quite make sense in its delivery and almost never causes laughter in anyone except its teller. In this sense, Poe as author laughs at his audience and regards literary historians and scholars as thieves—­a foreshadowing, of course, of Bob Dylan, who, as we will see in chapter 4, takes up this mode of artistry in the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries. Critical readings of Pym or of Poe’s perverse method of writing are a mistake—­not because what we say about the stories and narratives is unfounded but because it misses Poe’s punch line. As a text that steals from and recapitulates all the texts that came before it, Pym introduces us to Poe as the stylist-­thief, someone both widely copied and also markedly unread in the world of American literature—­Poe as both genius and idiot. At the heart of Pym lies the matter of Poe’s great joke: beyond here lies nothing—­nothing done and nothing said.73

Screenshot, Shadow Kingdom (July 2021)

4

Shadow Kingdom A Bob Dylan Ghost Story An artist has to be careful never to really arrive at a place where he thinks he is “somewhere.” You always have to realize that you’re constantly in the state of becoming and as long as you stay in that realm, you’ll be alright. —­Bob Dylan, in No Direction Home Don’t get up gentlemen, I’m only passing through. —­Bob Dylan, “Things Have Changed” People don’t live or die, People just float. —­Bob Dylan, “Man in the Long Black Coat”

The Underground Story Bob Dylan called the title of his thirtieth studio album, Time Out of Mind (1997), a line lifted from the opening paragraphs of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.”1 In the story, the narrator describes the Usher family as existing in a strange, fatuous state, living and passing their time on Earth more like ghosts than like men: “I was aware, however, that his very ancient family had been noted, time out of mind, for a peculiar sensibility of temperament, displaying itself, through long ages, in many works of exalted art, and manifested, of late, in repeated deeds of munificent yet unobtrusive charity, as well as in a passionate devotion to the intricacies, perhaps even more than to the orthodox and easily recognizable beauties of musical science.”2 “Time out of mind” is 127

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a cliché from days gone by, one that Poe left on the ground for Dylan to pick up in 1997, when he released this album that would mark one of many points in his career when he would “come back” from bouts of temporary obscurity. While not necessary or certain, “time out of mind” evokes a way of thinking that is at once eternal, immemorial, out of step, and out of tune, a way of being in the present while still obsessing over and living through ghosts of the past. Whereas Poe was drawn to the future, as we will see in this chapter, Dylan is driven backward, into the graveyard of the national imagination. Like Poe, Dylan is more comfortable lurking around in the shadows. Dylan in his career has used his songs and honed his public persona to restage long-­forgotten stories, fables, and traumas from America’s past. Bringing them into the present and giving these old, arcane ways of being and feeling new life, Dylan has done more than make himself the historian of folk traditions that, as he says in his 2004 memoir Chronicles Volume One, “if nothing else, makes a believer out of you.”3 Setting his sights in the present on the “parallel universe” still living in old folk songs and hymns, Dylan has found a way, in his music and performances, to chase after what he refers to as “a reality of a more brilliant dimension,” one that “exceed[s] all human understanding.”4 Dylan does really dig up the past in his work; he finds ways of proving that the graveyard of America’s history has not yet been properly buried. His presence on the scene has stirred up the spirits of the past that, in his songs and through his very formalist devotion to the folk music genre, have never gone away. Dylan’s musical catalog embeds an entire history of the country by tuning into restless voices in the wilderness. “More true to life than life itself,” he writes in Chronicles, these voices, passed down through generations and looming ever larger over the American culture as a result, constitute “life magnified.”5 History here is a process, a style, and folk music is the method by which Dylan achieves his style—­that is, how he becomes himself by simultaneously accessing the past while eluding the homogenizing force of the arrow of time. Dylan’s visions are, as he says, haunted by “vividly drawn archetypes of humanity, metaphysical in shape, each rugged soul filled with natural knowing and inner wisdom. Each demanding a degree of respect.”6 While we will want to emphasize the strength of movement and liveliness involved in Dylan’s historical

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crossings, it is also fitting to understand Dylan’s story as a series of ghost stories. He is neither here nor there. A ghost has the freedom to escape, one thing Dylan has been trying to do since he appeared on the scene. Having been called a legend almost from his first appearance, Dylan has been well aware of his precarious position in the mass production of himself as a musical icon and unwilling spokesperson of a generation. “It’s like being in an Edgar Allan Poe story,” he told a 60 Minutes interviewer in 2004. “You’re just not that person everyone thinks you are.”7 Folk music has, as he has said, given him a view of “the truth about life . . . even if life is more or less a lie.”8 As with any folk song, the grain of Dylan’s style both speaks to a context and yet somehow remains timeless as well. The names, faces, histories, and locations that his songs move through sing of a world lost and seem to warn of a future world gone wrong. As an artist and stylist, his territory is constantly expanding. As a man and an untimely public figure, Dylan has already predeceased himself. Dylan’s songs and his public persona repeatedly and consistently resist the call to speak for the nation or his generation. He feels a devotion to a time out of mind, a vision of the future weighed down by restless voices from the past: a past revealed through ghosts—­les revenants—­whose hard times and presences find new life both in Dylan’s songs and in the governance of his long career. As an American stylist, Dylan should be studied for his uncanny abilities to find power and meaning in rhythms, feelings, histories, manners, and meanings long forgotten but by no means dead. These songs possessed and converted Dylan into himself; the songs “played in [his] head, they always did. Folk songs were the underground story.”9 Have you ever seen a ghost? No. But you have heard of them. —­Bob Dylan, “Spirit on the Water”10

We study history very closely, and it is often said that we must understand our past to understand our present, even to understand where it is we might be headed. This is all well and good, but what makes history history is the fact that its fate has already been sealed, its meaning already crystallized for our present use. And while anthropologists and

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certain cultural historians emphasize the histories of various tall tales, mythologies, and legends passed down from generation to generation, why, at least in the United States, has there not been a move to study the strange contents and style of folk songs more seriously? We need a field of study that believes in ghosts. A livelier approach to the folk tradition in the US must necessarily include an understanding of how certain stories, names, romances, and feuds still play themselves out and elaborate their conclusions into and beyond our present day. A key feature of many a folk composition is, on the one hand, its storytelling component: the facts of certain significant and/or traumatic past events are given to us in ways that can satisfy the historian or cultural scholar looking for details of obscure and long-­forgotten facts. Popular folk songs like “Long Black Veil” (1959), “Delia” (1928), or “Frankie & Johnny”/ “Frankie & Albert” (1899) do, on the one hand, simply tell a story.11 The events in “Delia” and “Frankie & Johnny”/ “Frankie & Albert” actually occurred at one point in time; “Long Black Veil,” broadly describes the feelings of a man—­who could be any man—­falsely accused of murder.12 Still, these songs have had a power over time that amounts to more than just the fact that they have been sung, resung, adapted, and readapted. A unifying cultural myth or icon of folklore that simply operates as a historically changing metaphor is simply that. American culture is full of Santa Clauses, Easter Bunnies, and President Washingtons chopping down cherry trees, but these figures are only sentimentalized objects, nationally recognized fairy tales that give citizens a sense of commonality and meaning. What is unique about the kinds of folk songs I address in this chapter and chapter 5 is that they are strange, that they tell stories that, while containing occasional historical facts that may constitute their origins, are in effect believable because they rely on archetypes that always seem, or at least, in the singing of them, become, contemporary. An appreciation for folk songs is not the same as nostalgia; in fact, since folk music relies on appropriation and reappropriation, the power of suggestion and influence of the songs lies in their capacity to become something else at different times. An approach to American history via folk songs is a view of the past as an ongoing ghost story still being told or a gaping wound still felt in the world. In the folk tradition, history is a becoming. What has passed always waits for some future opportunity for a reinven-

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tion, a retelling, or a revision. An appreciation for history is by no means necessary, for example, to understand the weight of a song like “Frankie & Albert.” No one needs to ask who Frankie is or why she shot her Albert down in order to feel familiar with her case. Frankie was a good girl Everybody knows Paid one hundred dollars For Albert’s new suit of clothes He was her man, but he done her wrong Frankie went down to Twelfth Street Lookin’ up through the window high She saw her Albert there Lovin’ up Alice Bly He was her man, but he done her wrong Frankie pulled out a pistol Pulled out a forty-­four Gun went off a rootie-­toot-­toot And Albert fell on the floor He was her man, but he done her wrong13

The weight of this very real, archival chain of events pales in comparison to the song’s ability to transform young Frankie into any girl at any time. “A folk song,” Dylan writes in Chronicles, “has over a thousand faces and you must meet them all if you want to play this stuff.”14 A singer, in other words, must not only take on the responsibility for Frankie Baker’s life story but must also convey a worldview and style based on the American folk music tradition. In order to perform any of these songs legitimately, the performer is asked to allow all of the intricate details and violent intentions that the songs carry with them to penetrate their skin. It is as if these songs have no origins or original authors, that they are simply there, passed down from artist to artist and from author to author.15 These are more than just old stories waiting to be told; folk songs are restless ghosts moving around the landscape, ready to take possession of new bodies of transmission.

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A folk singer must, as Dylan says in Chronicles and as Nietzsche once claimed in Beyond Good and Evil, feel old even at the beginning of life.16 The key for Dylan is not to become an expert of or even medium for this material but to become the material itself. The ghosts of folk music inhabit and then become him. The burden of these songs is one that the folk singer agrees to carry into the future, lest their power be lost and forgotten. In Dylan’s time on the American popular music scene, he has made this task his own. As he explains, in the liner notes to his 1993 album World Gone Wrong, an acoustic album containing his renditions of ten popular (but at that point obscure) American and English folk songs, “there won’t be songs like these anymore. factually there arent any now.”17 History is not something that did happen but something that is happening, could happen, will always happen whether it is studied or not. At every turn in Dylan’s career, he has always come back to the folk tradition, has always made it his duty to see that these songs and these tales live on and find new meaning. At the end of “Frankie & Albert,” after the judge has sentenced and convicted poor Frankie to death, she stands on the hanging scaffold, “Calm as girl could be / Turned her eyes up toward the heavens / Said ‘Nearer, my God, to Thee,’” transfiguring herself and her story into something grander and more imposing than the mere facts of the story itself. Like the woman in “The Long Black Veil” who stalks the hills around her dead lover’s grave for eternity or the man who mourns his dead Delia over and over again, Frankie’s last act is more like a curse on the world-­to-­come.18 Songs, if they succeed in any way in and of themselves, are concepts—­rolls of the dice on a future moment and in a future landscape. They tell us what has happened in order to display what will always happen and what still is. The America that Dylan finds in his songs is drenched in a tradition that is constantly being crucified and resurrected, where “the suffering is endless and the punishment is going to be forever.”19 The sound that results, and continues to perfect itself, in Dylan’s performances is the pure sound of time out of mind—­ described aptly, in fact, by David Sexton of the Sunday Telegraph, in his review of Dylan’s 1992 album of folk standards Good as I Been to You: “Dylan sounds now, in comparison to his younger self, like one of those ghosts . . . but a powerful ghost. The effect is not so much nostalgia . . . as deeply inward.”20 The feedback loop of history has become the bedrock

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of Dylan’s songwriting method as he makes an entire career out of a religious and formalistic approach to the American folk music method.

Ghostly Passages through America’s “Invisible Republic” I had already landed in a parallel universe, anyway, with more archaic principles and values; one where actions and virtues were old style, and judgmental things came falling out on their heads. A culture with outlaw women, super thugs, demon lovers and gospel truths, . . . streets and valleys, rich peaty swamps, with landowners and oilmen, Stagger Lees, Pretty Pollys and John Henrys—­an invisible world that towered overhead with walls of gleaming corridors. It was all there and it was clear—­ideal and God-­fearing—­but you had to go find it. —­Bob Dylan, Chronicles

Greil Marcus, a music historian and rock critic who has been writing about Dylan since the late 1960s, released a book in 1997 about Dylan’s collaborative effort with The Band, The Basement Tapes, that he titled Invisible Republic. When published in paperback, it was retitled The Old, Weird America.21 Marcus characterizes the spirit driving the Basement Tapes recordings as a resurrection of the 1952 Folkways Records release Anthology of American Folk Music; he presents the songs that Dylan and The Band perform as being “palavers with a community of ghosts.”22 The kinship recorded here—­from Dylan and The Band back to the 1952 Folkways record back to the country and folk songs from the 1920s and ’30s that it originally conjured up—­emerges out of Dylan’s abiding fidelity to the these old and would-­be forgotten songs. This is something much stranger than nostalgia. Marcus quotes Band member Robbie Robertson’s take on the Basement Tapes sessions in order to set up his own argument about the supernatural power of the recordings and, in particular, the impact of Dylan’s style: “[Dylan] would pull these songs out of nowhere. We didn’t know if he wrote them or if he remembered them. When he sang them, you couldn’t tell.”23 Writing that these songs or, rather, these ghosts “were not abstractions,” Marcus has done important work in guiding a reunderstanding of American history through

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folk music: its relationship with the past is always strange, out of time, and coming from places that only those who sing the songs attempt to imagine and make real again. Dylan himself, in Chronicles, celebrates Marcus’s take, landing on his term “Invisible Republic” to describe the world that he found, as a young stylist, in American folk music. Folk songs, for Dylan, became his “preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic.”24 Indeed, Dylan’s Chronicles, in its reference to the biblical books of Chronicles, provides a timeline and narrative of Dylan’s life in American folk music more than it gives its readers a straightforward presentation of the man’s life from beginning to end. Dylan’s participation in folk music and his membership in the “Invisible Republic” of other folk revivalists and performers through the years have been a process of education and possession. Chronicles details Dylan’s constant movement toward the truth that folk songs contain, a truth that, as in the biblical example, preexists time and language. Folk music became a way of making Dylan into a man outside of time and into mythology. From the time he became Bob Dylan (and no longer Robert Zimmerman), he developed an immediately confounding relationship to mass culture that would only become starker in the years to come. “Mainstream culture,” he writes, was “lame as hell and a big trick. It was like the unbroken sea of frost that lay outside the window and you had to have awkward footwear to walk on it.”25 The education he received from the folk music community would be the framework from which he would build an alternate universe in his songs. While, as he complains, “I didn’t know what age of history we were in nor what the truth of it was,” Dylan, as a public figure and artist, attuned his senses toward the parts of America’s past that looked like nothing and sounded like nowhere at the same time.26 His consciousness as a folk singer and conjurer of strange American histories became, for him, a rearview mirror and an escape route out of mundane and banal contemporary times. As far as Dylan’s own American origins, he seems to have come simultaneously from everywhere and nowhere too. Born in Duluth and raised in Hibbing, Dylan spent his entire childhood under the dark skies and on the sparsely populated grounds of the Mesabi Iron Range

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in northern Minnesota. His rendering of his early life emphasizes his brief introductions to American folk traditions. It is from his extreme position at the northernmost point of the Midwest that Dylan takes his earliest steps on the long journey through the backwoods and backwaters of the American folk music world. He becomes entranced by the mysterious world he encounters in these dilapidated and worn-­out traditions and tries to find a way to see himself reflected and transfigured by them. The version he reconstructs of himself as a young man becomes then a kind of mytho-­folkloric creation of his own wherein he describes how he became a musician in order to communicate with the dead. Dylan feels at home in the past and more in tune with voices that call out from the wilderness than he does in the mainstream of American popular culture. His tone is spooky, stark, and foreboding. Dylan’s self-­mythology—­h is style—­is made from stuff of ghost stories and strange old folk tunes: “What I recall mostly about Duluth are the slate gray skies and the mysterious foghorns, violent storms that always seemed to be coming straight at you and merciless howling winds off the big black mysterious lake with treacherous ten-­foot waves. People said that having to go out onto the deep water was like a death sentence. Most of Duluth was on a slant. Nothing is level there. The town is built on the side of a steep hill, and you’re always either hiking up or down.”27 These details of Dylan’s memory are significant for understanding the affective template from which his songs would arise. As in any piece of American folk music, the land that Dylan can call his home colors and pollutes the visions that appear and reappear in his songwriting. Songs like “Scarlet Town,” from Tempest (2012), and “Girl from the North Country,” released on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963) and again with Johnny Cash on Nashville Skyline (1969), articulate a sense of the world that lives always under the slate-­g ray skies of northern Minnesota.28 In “Girl,” Dylan sings a love song to a lost woman, one whom the singer meets while on tour with a traveling carnival, up “where the winds hit heavy on the borderline.” The sense of loss that the song romances is for the place that Dylan left—­a story that is acted out here by a sorrowful traveling man calling out for the one he has abandoned, the one who he hopes is wearing a coat so warm that it will “keep her from the howlin’ winds.” He leaves his salutations because he knows that he will always be gone, that he is bound, like a

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ghost, to pass through to another town and another time. He will not be back. While becoming Bob Dylan meant leaving Minnesota, it also meant leaving his family and his family name behind to freeze in the North Country he once called his home. The worlds and times through which Dylan would travel in his music would be more mystical, and his process of artistic becoming would come to be charted through the pleasures he finds in crisscrossing American time and space. One avenue through which Dylan finds inspiration and gains insight into other musical and cultural worlds is the tradition of American blues music, originating in the Deep South at the end of the nineteenth century with rural, mostly Black singers singing about the world around them. The tradition of American blues singers is a mystical one. In ways that Dylan has tried to emulate in his own work, it can be credited for opening up an alternate, submerged American universe full of stark, obscure figures and songs that both seem like they have been around forever and that no one has ever heard before. Highway 61, immortalized in Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited (1965), provided him with material access into this parallel universe.29 Running along the Mississippi River from New Orleans to the city of Wyoming, Minnesota, Route 61 has been seen by many people to be the gateway into the world of American blues music. Songs were recorded before Dylan’s about Route 61 (notably by Sunnyland Slim in 1957), but his “Highway 61 Revisited” transfigures the highway into a sublime vision of America.30 Many Dylan critics place significance on the song and the album from which it emerges as marking out a place in his postacoustic, electrified music; some, like Michael Gray, have gone so far as to see the song as not only describing but marking the beginning of the chaotic 1960s—­forecasting America-­as-­burlesque: a place where all the notable figures from the past live out situations and personalities not yet imagined and not yet imaginable.31 Highway 61, the place that Dylan calls “the main thoroughfare of the country blues,” begins, he says, “where I began.”32 It is the same place where, in the song, God tracks down Abraham, where Mack the Finger asks Louie the King where he can find forty red, white, and blue shoestrings, where the beginning of the world plays out like a never-­ending comedy, and where the singer imagines the beginning of World War III.

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Dylan’s beginnings, and the country blues’ beginnings, are set on their course in this song. Highway 61 Revisited is a significant album to be considered among Dylan’s collection of albums but not because of any electric guitars or thanks to any social critique embedded within it. The magic of this song, and certainly of this highway traveling from Minnesota down through to New Orleans, is in creating an ancestral bond between Dylan’s music and the country blues songs that came before it. It is, as he says, “the same road, full of the same contradictions, the same one-­horse towns, the same spiritual ancestors. . . . It was my place in the universe, always felt like it was in my blood.”33

“He Had a Face like a Mask”: Dylan’s Many Conversions It’s just Halloween. I’ve got on my Bob Dylan mask. . . . I’m masquerading. —­Dylan, to his audience at Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall, October 31, 1964 How proud and wonderful—­ also modest—­ is this Bob Dylan.  .  .  . As a teacher I should like to be able to give a course as Dylan organizes a song, as astonishing producer rather than author. And that it should begin as he does, suddenly, with his clown’s mask, with a technique of contriving, and yet improvising each detail. —­Gilles Deleuze, in conversation with Claire Parnet, Dialogues II

Many people will tell you that Dylan’s songs and his public persona obfuscate, that he tries at every step to hide behind the content of his music, and that he deflects public attention. To be certain, the themes of masquerade and alienation do weigh heavily on Dylan’s work and also on his performance of himself as a public figure. Masks appear again and again throughout his career: think of “The Man in the Long Black Coat” (Oh Mercy, 1989), whose titular man “had a face like a mask”; the young man in “Masters of War” (The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, 1964), who “can see through your masks”; the born-­again Dylan, who urges unbelievers in “When He Returns” (Slow Train Coming,

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1979) to “surrender your crown, on this blood stained ground / Take off your mask”; or, certainly, the white-­face mask that Dylan wore on his famed Rolling Thunder Revue in 1976.34 Against the grain of conventional American wisdom on Dylan, any deep or serious consideration of his style is always self-­revelatory. Dylan’s masks are only artistic modes of projecting uncomfortable truths in his work that popular wisdom and conventional interpretation cannot, in and of themselves, see or appreciate.35 The masks are also indicative of Dylan’s always-­ converting style, which is marked by his susceptibility to possession and transfiguration. Dylan’s transformation from Robert Zimmerman to Bob Dylan was, in fact, the first of many to come. But there is a difference between the new identities that Dylan takes on for himself and those affixed to him by others. Dylan has been called many bad things since his emergence on the scene—­“Judas” when he went electric in 1965, a paranoid recluse when he took a hiatus from public life and moved with his family to Woodstock, New York, from 1971 to 1973, and, continually, a plagiarist and a thief for his approach to appropriating and reinventing melodies and songs from the past.36 But, to him, the most damning of all the titles given to him was the one that crystallized earliest in the career, the one he has never been able to shake: Bob Dylan, “The Voice of His Generation.” The title “voice of his generation” has hung around his neck like an albatross since it was bestowed on him, causing, in the bulk of his career, accusations of letting his public down, ruining his good work, and not living up to his true abilities. Dylan’s resistance to the moniker “voice of his generation” permeates his relationship to the press. On the one hand, he is wry and comical in his attempts to state that they had him wrong; on the other, he is constantly suffering, “like being in an Edgar Allan Poe story,” under the weight of his false reputation.37 Dylan’s aversion to these monikers has less to do with politics than it does Dylan’s sense of—­or protection of—­his style. To think of him as representative of anything mainstream is to mishear his more abiding alliances, which, as we now know, are to the spirit world. Dylan is an agonist by nature, and his aversion to interviews offers him an opportunity to rewire them and, in turn, strengthen his style. If you are willing to side with him and go along with his jokes that you—­ and even he—­may not get, there is much to be learned about the main-

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tenance of vision and style against undo pressure, which, in Dylan’s case, amounts to just about any pressure. Members of the press—­who, in a 2012 interview Dylan terms “wussies and pussies”—­have never had an easy time figuring out Bob Dylan.38 The press has been befuddled by his ambivalence to their praise, and headlines like “Spokesman Denies That He’s a Spokesman” sum it all up.39 Dylan has always insisted that the nature of the media’s interaction with him is adversarial and confounding. He has asked for it. Dylan writes, in Chronicles, “I was sick of the way my lyrics had been extrapolated, their meanings subverted into polemics and I had been anointed as Big Bubba of Rebellion, High Priest of Protest, the Czar of Dissent, the Duke of Disobedience, Leader of the Freeloaders, Kaiser of Apostasy, Archbishop of Anarchy, the Big Cheese.”40 The solution? Dylan’s only hope for maintaining any sense of power over his work would be to toy with the press, to lie to it: “I’d have to send out deviating signals, crank up the wrecking train, create some different impressions.”41 Creativity, for Dylan, is a precious thing and something to be guarded fiercely against outside forces that would tie it down, interpret and deaden its meaning. Since Dylan was lauded almost from the first moment the media learned of his existence in the 1960s Folk Revival, his senses were keen and defensive, and his recalcitrant behavior in the face of public scrutiny would become his only way of securing for himself a sense of ownership over his style. In other words, while he was given very little of anonymity, it became the prized possession of Dylan’s creative life; and since he has survived so much under the public spotlight, he has utilized his time with the media to navigate a way out, to pull up by the roots any notion of him as spokesman for anything or anyone. Dylan’s infamous 1965 press conference in San Francisco crystallized his frantic and often-­obnoxious behavior in the face of media scrutiny; indeed many of the questions and answers given at that event sealed an uneasy deal between Dylan and any of his future interviewers. Here, a number of obvious and obviously significant questions were asked and immediately unscrewed by Dylan’s impish reverse-­ engineering. From this moment on, Dylan had communicated to the press exactly which questions he could not and would never be able to answer:

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Do you think of yourself primarily as a singer or a poet? I think of myself as a song and dance man. In a lot of your songs you are hard on people. . . . Do you do this because you want to change their lives, or do you want to point out to them the error of their ways? I want to needle them. Josh Dunson in his new book implies that you have sold out to commercial interests and the topical song movement. Do you have any comments, sir? Well, no comments, no arguments. No, I sincerely don’t feel guilty. What’s your new album about? Oh, it’s about, uh—­just about all kinds of different things—­rats, balloons. They’re about the only thing that comes to my mind right now. What do you think about these interviews? You see the songs are what I do—­write the songs and sing them and perform them. That’s what I do. . . . Anything else interferes with it. I mean, anything else trying to get on top of it making something out of it which it isn’t, it just brings me down. . . . It just makes it seem all very cheap.42

While Dylan does rail against the notion that, as the voice of his generation, he is an icon of the charmed sixties subculture, his interviews display his remarkable talent for defending his style from paraphrase or reduction. The media’s interest in Dylan is entirely based—­both materially and spiritually—­on a shared interest in what he, his songs, and his persona can do for them, what product exactly it is that he is selling them. In their attempts to flatter him in their questions about the true meaning and import of his music, the media does no more, in Dylan’s eyes, than try to use him up. However, unlike the “man that was used up” that Poe once imagined, Dylan has tried to shift the power dynamic between himself and his inquiring audience.43 He has cultivated his mystery in a self-­conscious endeavor to maintain his distance and, in turn, his dignity. While the media questions him, attempting, repeatedly, to uncover his secret, Dylan sneers, dodges, and hides behind answers that replace the overblown images of him with shoddy caricatures of himself as nothing more than “a song and dance man”—­an untimely strategy if there ever was one. The seriousness of Dylan’s music is hidden

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away and protected from public scrutiny behind his perplexing, hilarious, and often-­paranoid style in interviews. Indeed, it is only behind his “Bob Dylan mask” that the man can maintain any grain of dignity for himself or his art, which travels beneath and behind the floorboards of contemporary time, place, and meaning. Even to adoring members of the public who do not represent the media, Dylan is cagey and withdrawn. To fans, gawkers, and even other popular musicians, Dylan always keeps his distance and keeps quiet—­ and this is something we must learn to appreciate as a blessing. When he decided to move out of New York City to nearby Woodstock—­a relatively unknown upstate hamlet at the point of Dylan’s arrival just before the famous Woodstock Festival—­in order to find some privacy, it did not take very long for him to feel invaded by hordes of fans, traveling hippies, and revolutionary wanderers, all descending on his home in hopes of an audience with the King of Anarchy, the Voice of His Generation Himself. Stating, “I wanted to set fire to these people,” Dylan seethes in Chronicles, “These gate-­crashers, spooks, trespassers, demagogues were all disrupting my home life. . . . Each day and night was fraught with difficulties. Everything was wrong, the world was absurd. It was backing me into a corner. Even persons near and dear offered no relief.”44 Aside from the obvious, the problem here is no different from the one posed by the press in their endless, if somewhat bemused and affable, attempts at accessing Dylan’s sense of style. The fans who descend on Dylan, looking for some deeper meaning and connection with him, disrespect the spirit of generosity between the artist and their audience. Dylan saw, and sees, himself as never more than what he ever was, “a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous mist.”45 As leader of his generation, Dylan came to feel immediately more like a scapegoat for social issues that he did not understand and a contemporary world gone absolutely mad. It is no wonder, then, that Dylan has matched his relationship to his audience to his aggressive relationship with the press. Following his disrupted period in Woodstock, he figuratively—­and, if we believe him, literally—­drove his popularity off the rails, falling victim, he says, to a bad motorcycle accident in 1966, beginning a long period of reclusion—­a period from which he has never truly reemerged. “I had been in a motorcycle accident and I’d been hurt, but I recovered. Truth

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was that I wanted to get out of the rat race. Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on. Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest for me and I was seeing everything through different glasses.”46 Since then, he has wrestled with the public in a number of ways, erring always on the side of reauthorizing himself as the one who controls the sound and the scope of his music and his career, shifting things jerkily as if driving a motorcycle off a cliff or a slow train off its rails. In a 2012 interview with Rolling Stone, Dylan seems obsessed with presenting the notion that he actually became a different person during this period, that he was transfigured following the motorcycle death of a Hells Angels driver named Bobby Zimmerman: “I can refer you to the book [the Sonny Barger biography]. It happens gradually. I’d say that that accident, however, if you want to call it that, I think that was about ’64? [Referring to the death of Bobby Zimmerman, which, in fact, took place in 1961.] As I said earlier, I had a motorcycle accident myself, in ’66, so we’re talking maybe about two years—­a gradual kind of slipping away, and, uh, some kind of something else appearing out of nowhere.”47 As in the case of his accident, Dylan may be fooling around here. That said, he shows, once again, that he truly believes in ghosts and in the ghost stories he uses to narrate the arc of his career as a public figure. He is a conversion machine, and these conversions contextualize his more infamous turn to evangelical Christianity that came in the late 1970s. Following an album (Street-­Legal, 1978) and a tour that seemed more like a latter-­day Elvis show in Las Vegas—­with heavy, glitzy orchestration that stunned critics and followers alike—­Dylan emerged in 1979 as a born-­again Christian, releasing a string of three gospel records (Slow Train Coming, 1979; Saved, 1980; Shot of Love, 1981) and took his evangelical show on the road, enraging fans by neglecting secular music and giving angry sermons from the stage about their shared destination in hell.48 Although he is still considered the voice of his generation, Dylan, like Poe, writes and sings into the future. But, like Hank Williams in his Luke the Drifter stage, Dylan becomes reborn as a gospel singer. In doing so—­as Rob Wilson argues in his own poetic-­prophetic take on Dylan in Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted—­Dylan also uses his many “conversions and counter-­conversions” to utilize his own myth-­making schemes to see into the nation’s future: “Via relentless

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processes of conversion and counter-­conversion, Dylan’s will to activate metamorphosis as life principle abides at the core of his gift as a didactic poet of American prophecy and denunciation, as he goes on daring . . . to write his autobiography in colossal cipher and to render (as Emerson demanded) ‘America [as] a poem in our eyes.’”49 Dylan takes off his folksinger mask and adorns himself with a gospel-­singer mask and is converted from himself into another version of himself. He does this, as Wilson argues, as a way to uncover the artistic-­poetic roots of the “born-­ again” experience. Dylan is resurrected as a man of the people, a man conscious of the Word, a Man of Constant Sorrow. His conversions are neither flat nor unidirectional (like the arrow of time); they are circular, recursive, and prophetic. Before and after Dylan’s gospel era, he has always come back to the folk tradition, has always made it his duty to see that these songs and these tales live on and find new meaning again and again. His turn to Christ, his crossover into gospel—­and, specifically Black gospel—­ spiritually deepens his relationship with American folk music. The vision of time that Dylan finds in his music and yearns for so deeply in his gospel records has him imagining what is beneath, what remains, and what will be. Dylan’s notorious and admittedly strange turn to a kind of new-­age apostolic Christianity, in the late seventies, was inspired by the popular phenomenon following a 1970 book by Hal Lindsey with Carla C. Carlson titled The Late Great Planet Earth. This book approached then-­contemporary discourses concerning pollution, political unrest, and international relations through the lens of the apocalypse. It saw in the world around it signs of the coming end of time; through literal, foreboding adaptations from the book of Revelation, it pointed out and then named the individual fibers of the universe that, in its view, were beginning to unravel. Dylan read this book around the same time that he had a strange, supernatural encounter with the divine, somewhere in the middle of Arizona, in a hotel room following one of his endless dates on the road. “Jesus did appear to me,” Dylan says, “as King of Kings and Lord of Lords. . . . There was a presence in that room that couldn’t have been anybody but Jesus. . . . Jesus put his hand on me. It was a physical thing. I felt it. I felt it all over me. I felt my whole body tremble. The glory of the Lord knocked me down and picked me up.”50 This is another dramatic instance of Dylan’s endless conversions and crossovers being

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always in search of the root of things—­not only in an epistemological or metaphorical sense but in a material sense. From Dylan’s earliest position as a Jew from the Upper Midwest, his style has maintained the ancient Hebrew tradition of making the absolute concrete. The cultural paths connecting him to the Deep South—­via the Mississippi River and Highway 61—­only set the stage for his more mysterious acceptance and transfiguration of southern tradition. His adaptations of and crossovers into American folk genres have given these old forms new life. As we have seen, he is prone to conversions, and in a 2015 interview, he recalls a kind of ghostly encounter with the edges of his radio dial. Here, Dylan describes a late-­night encounter with the Staple Singers: “One night I was lying in bed and listening to the radio. I think it was a station out of Shreveport, Louisiana. I wasn’t sure where Louisiana was either. I remember listening to the Staple Singers’ ‘Uncloudy Day.’ And it was the most mysterious thing I’d ever heard. It was like the fog rolling in. I heard it again, maybe the next night, and its mystery had even deepened.”51 This foggy mystery clung to Dylan, and certainly we can hear his process of reckoning with what he heard that night at work in his gospel albums; but the sensations and the percepts—­of another world, floating up the Mississippi River and radiating across the radio dials—­were always there in his music, from “Like a Rolling Stone” to “Solid Rock” and beyond. The song in question has deep Gothic roots—­the otherworldly reverberation of Pops Staples’ famous tremolo guitar and the rich, handsome voice of Mavis Staples cast a spell. These old songs have a way of taking flight and calling out to us. In this case, “Uncloudy Day,” a song out of the South, moved to Chicago, where it was recorded by the Staple Singers, then back down to Louisiana, where it gets electrified and transmuted across the radio waves. Stylists of the folk genre, Dylan and the Staple Singers both take part in bringing these old songs to life. They are our American mystery plays, calling up and exorcizing the historical conditions of enslavement, Reconstruction, and the Great Migrations. A religious song, no matter its age, is as useful a tool as any other to access, understand, or reveal the presence of God. As a songwriter, Dylan works with and through his oblique references to these myths and modes of music and meaning making. He is a stylist of indirection and limitation. His work in that medium offers illusive glimpses of his mind,

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without exhausting his artistic vision in song after song after song. One might expect Dylan’s religious music to rely on his mastery of surreal imagery or to employ elevated metaphors and symbols. Instead, what you get in Dylan’s conversion era are songs that are explicitly grounded in the material, in the simple, in the elemental aspects of the universe. His effect is at once contemporary and historical, timely and antique. In his song “Solid Rock,” from the 1980 album Saved, Dylan makes this rough and noisy journey behind the arrow of time, which points always to diminishing difference (to dust, that is) and to a future of foregone conclusions, into the “solid rock / made before the foundation of the world.” A song that is interested in experimenting with the notion and the music of this foundation, “Solid Rock” is an experiment with his musical and conceptual style.52 In his performance of the song, you hear Dylan at, perhaps, his most urgent, his most fulfilled. A performer often known for his cool, detached affectations and demeanor, Dylan is full of life, filled up with some kind of vision that escapes immediate recognition—­born again, surely, but also overtaken by his artistic escape into the dust and the sediment of the Earth’s history and out of the blocked-­out, solid musical time of its future. This is a spiritual song, yes, but one rooted in reality, one that finds the spirit in the place where it meets the bone. “It’s the ways of the flesh / The war against the spirit / Twenty-­four hours a day / You can see it and you can hear it / Using every angle / Under the sun / And he never give up, ’til the battle’s lost or won.” The song is doing battle with the war against the spirit, the arrow of time; in defense of itself, it creates a “wall of sound” (like Phil Spector’s wall of sound) as a will to power. An act of style, the song tries to make a life for itself, using creative expression and sonic momentum to build up an untimely rhythmic wall of aliveness in a world that seems dead. Here, Dylan’s spiritual becoming is also an opening up to the future already embedded in the Earth’s sediment casting its shadow on the present. And it is in that direction that the song moves, sounding the bell of power, layering dirty, earthly guitars and a tight-­sprung roiled-­up melodic rhythm section. The song’s melody is negotiable, just a foundation for Dylan’s sermon, an adjunct for his style—­in fact, he breaks up his melody line into chunks interrupted by a pulsing rhythm of sound—­a ll the while chasing a sense of the universe that is justified in its solidity, which understands that

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the spheres of the universe that are endowed with thought and feeling cannot exist without a physical principle of spiritual coherence and energy. And, even after the song has finished, still it builds momentum, it spreads, like water or fire—­hanging onto the solid rock made before the foundation of the world.

“The Drifter’s Escape” The key to Bob Dylan, the essence of his style—­the thing that makes him more and more like himself—­is in his zone of crossing-­over, in his artistic escapes, in the way that his songs and his career moves from sound to sound, genre to genre, and through his visions of the history of the Earth and its impending futures. Dylan’s movements are Earth-­ bound, terrestrial. His various crossings are made in order to chart new territory for himself, to stretch out, and to continue to elaborate the times and places where his music belongs. This kind of motion, this form of creative expansion, is, of course, an organic and very natural way of being. Birds do it too—­they sing only in order to announce and expand their own territory, to frame for themselves a bit of the world’s chaos that they can call their own. Dylan is just like that bird, singing songs and crossing over into the genres and temporal flows that he wants. His songs are possessed by charmed spirits and made up of expressions and creative resources capable of making things and worlds possible. This kind of style resonates

Screenshot, Masked and Anonymous (dir. Larry Charles, 2003)

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with Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of the word as “the moment when language is no longer defined by what it says, but by what it causes to move, to flow, . . . a pure process that fulfills itself, and that never ceases to reach fulfillment as it proceeds—­art as ‘experimentation.’”53 Dylan’s always-­converting style is also an opening up to the future already embedded in the Earth’s sediment, casting its shadow on the present. Born-­again becoming is, like all becomings, based in the admirable and mysterious self-­recognition of life. Dylan opens up to the promise made by Christ in John 16:12–­13: “I have yet many things to say to ye, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth.” Dylan’s style offers him an indirect way of approaching this truth, which is to say the future. So he is, in the end, a kind of prophet, but not of his generation so much of the great distances between our future and its forgotten pasts. Dylan’s songs are vehicles for the transmission of these strange prophesies. In turn, the prophetic vision must, as Flannery O’Connor has argued, reveal the supernatural within the natural world as it is.54 This means, in other words, that the material components of the future are based in mystery, are ineffable and imperceptible. For our purposes, the “natural world” that O’Connor speaks of is, in temporal terms, right now. A sense of the future and what it holds can intervene into our experience of the present—­it can flash right before our eyes. In order to sense its coming and going, one has to have the instincts of a prophet—­the kind of instincts Dylan has. One has to be open to interrupting our experience of time, to believe in the presence of the infinite in the present. In Dylan’s so-­called gospel records, he found himself dealing with the most complex, unanswered questions. By keeping things simple, by confining himself to the material or elemental, Dylan achieves the ability as an artist to see and to make us see objects that define and defy the modern world. The songwriter, like the novelist, “begins [their] work where human knowledge begins—­with the senses.”55 Every part of the song must be bound by something material, must be solid as rock and dependent dramatically on creative distortions of that concrete world for the revelation of meaning to occur. The kind of vision required here is of the prophetic variety, and Dylan is, as Flannery O’Connor would have phrased it, a “prophet of distances.”56

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The theologian, like the artist, tries to represent the universe within the limits of their material understanding of it. Both are prophets, in the highest sense, in that their works are primarily concerned with and defined by the limitations of their forms. Dylan’s overtly Christian records do more than simply mark a particular, discrete moment or set of moments in his career. His overtly religious visions reveal related visions in earlier songs. That is one way prophecy works—­as a by-­product of its capacity to overcome time. Often, it takes some act of violence for us to see beyond the present and into the future. Dylan has, after all, always been a prophet of doom rather than a voice of his generation. You can clearly hear this in his iconic, early songs “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Chimes of Freedom,” “Gates of Eden,” “A Hard Rain’s a-­Gonna Fall”: I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warning Heard the roar of a wave, that could drown the whole world57

These early songs seemed advanced, even strange coming from the mouth of the blue-­eyed boy singing them. Dylan is not sermonizing, however, but projecting his style onto a future that already seems ruined. By the time we get to the late ’70s–­early ’80s, Dylan is sensing the same doom but with a clearer sense of purpose. I want to close with a flash (a bolt of lightning) with a scene from the end of the 2003 film Masked and Anonymous. The setting is a benefit concert at the end of the world—­t he book of Revelation dramatized and acted out in a circus tent. As the band plays and Dylan sings, you meet a cast of characters—­each struggling to communicate, unable to find meaning in anything. In the final moments, as the song ends, you hear a broadcast come in over the radio, buried underneath Dylan and his band and the sound of the static: “They have reached the depth of thirty miles. Scientists have measured the temperatures down there. . . . They have lowered microphones down into the pit and heard the sounds of millions of suffering souls. Dr. Samosa and the Project Center have determined that the center of the Earth is hollow. ‘Hopefully,’ he says, ‘whatever is down there will stay down there.’”58 This is an untimely return to Poe, who was also obsessed with the center of the Earth, which in this case is dragging

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the future back down into itself. As the final event unfolds, as the signs of the coming convergence of beginning with end, as everybody finally kneels to pray, the Drifter sings and finds his way out. In the background, Dylan is singing an updated and electrified version of “Drifter’s Escape.” Against the backdrop of the inevitable beginnings of the end—­of the story of the Apocalypse unfolding—­a nd cross-­ wired with news of tortured souls shouting from the hollowed center of the earth, Dylan and the members of his end-­of-­t he-­line band sing a song about escape: “Oh, help me in my weakness” I heard the drifter say As they carried him from the courtroom And were taking him away “My trip hasn’t been a pleasant one And my time it isn’t long And I still do not know What it was that I’ve done wrong” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  . . . Just then a bolt of lightning Struck the courthouse out of shape And while everybody knelt to pray The drifter did escape59

Shadowy and imposing, Dylan, the drifter from the arrow of time, escapes behind a bolt of lightning and is off into the shadows. His words and his graven image have conjured up the image of a world lost and a world gone wrong. He is a shadow boxer and a parable maker here to tell us that our time is running out. He passes out of the frame and moves on. “Ain’t it funny,” he sings later, “the end of time has just begun.”60 Though he would be more comfortable hanging around in the nation’s graveyards, Dylan has remained on Earth. His style is with the ghosts that history would like us to forget. In the flesh, Dylan has appeared to us in the form of a predeceased man always in a state of becoming more like himself. He is a resurrection artist, a shape-­shifter, and revelator. We will leave him now, but he will return in the pages of this book-­to-­come.

Part III

The Critic as Stylist Toward a Theory of Attunement

Flipping a Hidden Switch At the start of the year 1932, Lloyd Arthur Meeker was merely a spiritually curious fellow living in Nashville, Tennessee. Then, as the story goes, he had a dramatic experience that lasted for three full days. During this time, Meeker sensed some inexplicable voice or force within himself take over his critical faculties. Like so many other visionaries who came before him, Meeker was not content to keep this odd occurrence to himself. He sat down at his kitchen table to experiment with what psychic mediums and ghost hunters refer to as “automatic writing,” essentially submitting himself fully to the will of whatever powerful and strange force was emanating from within him, writing in time with the strange rhythms of his inner voice. Since he was American, it should come as no surprise that Meeker then commenced to start a new religion based on the product of these late-­night automatic-­writing sessions.1 Writing under his new pseudonym, Uranda, Meeker became the founding member of his own church, still in existence to this day: the Emissaries of Divine Light. According to their website, “Lloyd” (as they call him) “had been searching for a higher level of self awareness” and was able to realize—­vis-­à-­vis his three-­day encounter with his “illuminated mist”—­ “that the guide he was searching for was himself.”2 Meeker’s revelation, then, is different in kind from those experienced by other prophets, like Joseph Smith, who were altered by an exterior voice. With Meeker tapping into the voice and directives of a voice coming from within himself, then, it is easier to think of his awakening along the lines of the one performed by Dorothy Gale at the end of The Wizard of Oz, when she wakes up at home, with a bump on her head, realizing that the more 151

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exciting Land of Oz was only a fantasy that she had created for herself and that she would never again have to look beyond the limits of her own backyard. Inspired and altered, Meeker wrote books and spread the word of his newly acquired spiritual practice, which he called “attunement.”3 Believing the body to be a temple of God, Meeker sees attunement as a way of tapping into one’s own divinity, a spiritual practice of ordaining or becoming heavenly. Through something like prayer or meditation, it is possible, then, to enter into a process of endless spiritual regeneration. “All living things,” Meeker’s church now teaches, are immanently “hardwired . . . [with] the natural ability to renew themselves and evolve.”4 Attunement is a way of flipping one’s “hidden switch,” which turns on all of the creative forces of the universe. “Attuned to the Divine,” the church says, “we become an expression of the Divine in the World.”5 From this rarefied state tantamount to Nirvana or Transfiguration, a church follower is then able to share the gifts of attunement with others via a healing practice that seems very similar to reiki or qigong. Attunement practitioners, as they are called, use their hands (but not touch) to tap into what Meeker called someone’s “Pneumaplasm,” which describes the nonmaterial field of energy—­the aura—­surrounding a body.6 In an attunement session, one can expect a spiritually advanced practitioner to turn on the light of one’s spiritual (pneuma) plasm (matter). One can then follow in the hallowed footsteps of one Uranda—­né Lloyd Arthur Meeker—­toward a path of constant self-­becoming and spiritual regeneration. “Once that switch [attunement] is flipped,” the Emissaries of the Divine Light advertise, “it sets in motion an ascending spiral where mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual states work in concert to increase joy and creativity.”7 You will be relieved to know that this is Uranda’s only appearance in this book and that the chapters in this part are not an extension of his religious mission. With that said, I offer Meeker’s story of conversion and his church’s definition of “attunement” sympathetically. As if I were an Emissary of Divine Light, I am interested in the practices of people with a heightened awareness of who they are. I am also fascinated by the rituals invented by these attuned figures to help them become even more like themselves. What Meeker’s descendants call “attunement practitioners,” I think of as stylists: those figures that, Quentin Crisp

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writes, “embod[y] nobody’s dreams but their own.”8 A stylist is one who has taken “a journey to the interior,” as Crisp says, and come out on the other end altered and renewed by the knowledge gained from one’s movements within.9 A stylist is the embodiment of their own dream, and style is that same dream intagliated, inscribed into both their body and their history so that the interior reflects the exterior. Style is, in other words and as Crisp has said, “at its broadest sense, consciousness.”10 But more than an individual state of consciousness or mode of becoming, style is also, as I have been arguing, a way of being in the world, a mode of sociality. Crisp, for instance, by becoming more like himself, managed to renegotiate his relationship with the outside world, which seemed for so long hell-­bent on beating him into the ground. By taking in and accentuating those qualities that made him repulsive to his neighbors, Crisp transformed ostensibly negative traits such as effeminacy and exhibitionism into a way of introducing and insinuating and then exalting himself over others. It is possible, then, to think of Crisp’s example of style as a process of attunement wherein he not only achieved a state of total self-­awareness but also cultivated a practice of engaging with others by encouraging them to tap into their own styles. He became himself, in other words, but he also became a missionary of style. His work on himself allowed him to take control of the arrow of time by resisting its imperatives to change into something he was not. As a stylist, Crisp resisted evolution in order to enter into what he termed the “profession of being.” He revealed becoming as being’s “hidden switch.” Style is a frequency one can tune into in order to achieve this state of self-­becoming and a tune one can then transmit to others when it becomes time to spread the good news. We are all already stylists: “We shall find we already have a golden city when we have all become divine beings.”11 Like Meeker, Crisp was a prophet of his own design who wanted the rest of us to know that the source of regeneration comes from within, not from the social world or from social religion.

Bringing Criticism into Harmony The Oxford English Dictionary defines “attunement” simply as “an attuning or bringing into harmony.”12 It is a musical metaphor derived from the verb “attune,” which came about in the late sixteenth century,

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describing the process by which otherwise-­discordant sounds or voices are brought into accord.13 The first use of the noun “attunement” appears in W. R. Alger’s 1866 book Solitudes of Nature and Man, where he describes “the healthy attunement of the discordant faculties and forces of the soul.”14 Alger was an American Unitarian minister, and his book, which carried the alternate title The Loneliness of Human Life, was a philosophical treatise and how-­to book for those who wished to live in total solitude.15 In writing the book, Alger had to reconceive of loneliness as a way of life rather than a pathology or prison sentence. His attendant notion of attunement is his way of overcoming the negative connotations associated with this kind of hermeticism. As a means of seeking harmony in aloneness, attunement provides neither an escape from nor an attachment to others. Rather, it is the process, Alger argues, by which one cultivates the otherwise-­negative loneliness into a way of being and becoming. Alger finds in the “discordant faculties and forces of the soul” an opportunity for the cultivation of a more harmonious manner of existence. Through attunement, he achieves his style. The final part of this book moves across a very wide array of voices, genres, and styles to find examples of attunement in literature, music, philosophy, and critical prose. Following in the path of Uranda and Alger, I am dialing into the more contemporary frequency of Zadie Smith in her 2012 essay “Some Notes on Attunement.” In it, she describes her sudden and dramatic conversion from a lifelong repulsion to the songs and voice of Joni Mitchell. Against the grain of what she thought was her solidly established musical taste, Smith’s “Joni epiphany came through [her] back door, while [her] critical mind lay undefended.”16 Attunement occurs, once again, through a kind of conscious bringing together of otherwise-­disharmonious forces, and in Smith’s example, the opposing sides are occupied by her culturally derived taste in music and her body’s habituated reaction to its sound. One of these forces she considers to be up to her and settled; the other, she finds, has a capacity to surprise. Smith goes from not being able to hear Mitchell to being unable to escape from her body’s response of unanticipated delight. Smith is transformed from a self-­proclaimed “Joni Mitchell–­hating pilgrim” into someone or something else. She describes driving in a car and being forced to listen to the song “River” on the album Blue, complaining to

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her driver that the opening riff is nothing but “Jingle Bells.”17 Readers do not witness what happens to Smith in the interim and how exactly that song works its way into her consciousness. We are only told that she finds herself humming the song to herself later, an outward sign of some inner realignment. Smith does not show us how this operation of what Flannery O’Connor might call grace operates from within; we only get to see glimpses of her revelation from without. Her newfound delight expresses itself bodily. Like Hazel Motes, who tried to resist his overwhelming desire for Jesus by preaching that he was dead, Smith has to examine her heretical relationship to Joni Mitchell’s music as symptomatic of her instinctual desire for her inevitable attunement to it. These days, Smith reports, Joni Mitchell’s songs effect “uncontrollable tears.” She has been converted into herself in spite of herself, struck by what she describes aptly as an “emotional overcoming, disconcertingly distant from happiness, more like joy—­if joy is the recognition of an almost intolerable beauty.”18 Smith learns to let go of her previously held notion of her critical self as somehow in opposition to or lording over her uncritical faculties. She is unable, in the end, to guard herself from the flood of sensations she was always bound to have in listening in a Joni Mitchell song. Smith’s revelation is one of many that I seek out in the chapters to come, which bring together and try to work through or retune dissonant modes of being in the world. I am particularly interested in finding a harmonious way through situations like Smith’s that unnecessarily posit the “critical” against (and always superior to) the “uncritical.” My approach to attunement resonates with the one offered by Rita Felski, who defines it—­via Zadie Smith, Stanley Cavell, and Martin Heidegger—­as “a real, if fragile, achievement: a testimony to our connections with others.”19 She compares the state of attunement to mood, something that is as hard to translate precisely as it is easy to understand instinctively. Attunement, like mood, explains “how one finds oneself in relation to the world, an overall orientation or disposition. . . . [It] alerts us to the ways in which we are always predisposed.”20 Continuing to think through her understanding of attunement and mood, Felski adds a caveat, arguing that while the latter can be understood to be “intentionless,” the process of attunement requires a more conscious form of application. While it is possible to experience any number of moods on one’s own, Felski

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argues, “attunement . . . involves a distinct other. There is a directed response and a vector of attention.”21 When, for instance, Smith hated Joni Mitchell, she knew this to be the case because listening to her music always put her in a sour mood. The process of attuning herself to the joy of Blue was Smith’s experience—­first unconsciously and then, postconversion, forcefully—­of submitting her habitual hatred to her latent joy and coming out on the other side changed and renewed. Attunement is the process by which something unknown and unanticipated is recognized and comes into the world. Smith’s reaction to Blue registered first on the level of her body’s reaction to the sound of Joni’s beautiful wailing. She is, of course, not the only one to be converted by a song, and it is appropriate that attunement is first and foremost a musical metaphor. The gooseflesh, the raised hair, the dilated pupils: these are all the body’s ways of calling the human to attention, tuning them into themselves from the outside in. Attunement is the conscious acceptance of and incorporation of something new or unexpected into one’s way of being in the world, when something that seems to be counterintuitive reveals itself to have been there all along, to in fact be a direct conveyance of instinct or intuition. Attunement is a process of bringing the immanent world to life. Chapter 5 begins with the fact of Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize in Literature and predictable critical reactions maintaining that he is or is not sufficiently literary for such an honor. Rather than join either side of this debate, I carve a third way through it, arguing that Dylan’s award confirms that American literature has always been musical. Chapters 6 and 7 each begin by thinking about love, the ultimate harmonic illusion, which is a fantasy of attunement. In chapter 6, I lament the way the literary scholar is taught to overcome their so-­called amateur approaches to reading and interpretation by learning the tricks of the trade and becoming, in the end, a more sober and serious critic. I present contemporary movements in literary scholarship such as postcritique and autotheory as symptoms of a profession in need of a way to move past the oppositional distinctions made between the critical and the uncritical. I see these latest critical movements as expressions, in other words, of the inevitable attunement of literary studies, wherein criticism encompasses the serious and the unserious, the highbrow and the low, the popular and the scholarly.

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In both of chapters 6 and 7, I turn toward and away from the field of literary studies toward analogous movements in philosophy to find resonant examples of scholars behaving like stylists, breaking away from the safety of method and tuning into the sometimes unruly and mysterious desires to think outside the bounds of professional convention. Chapter 7 picks things up here, beginning with a description of a scholar’s falling out of love with their professional persona and in love again with style. I move quickly across American literature—­to theoretical mathematics to philosophy to birdsongs to a cluttered nest in a Los Angeles flophouse—­in search of stylists who have successfully transformed their ambivalence into attunement, who have, in other words, flipped a switch, turning on some hidden light shining on a world where style lives, a world where style sings.

5

The Musical (Re)Turn Listening in American Literary Criticism Seen the arrow on the doorpost Saying, “This land is condemned All the way from New Orleans To new Jerusalem” —­Bob Dylan, “Blind Willie McTell”

Vegetables and Death In the middle of the 2016 presidential campaign season—­on the morning of October 13, 2016, to be exact—­the nation woke up to a break in the endless Trump-­Clinton news cycle. Bob Dylan had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. At least since the publication of his memoirs Chronicles: Volume One in 2004, there had been mention each year of the possibility that the Nobel Prize committee might consider Dylan for his contributions, written and sung, to global literary culture.1 David Remnick, writing that day for the New Yorker, published a piece online titled “Let’s Celebrate the Bob Dylan Nobel Win.” Here, with a gesture toward one of Dylan’s latter-­day masterpieces, he writes, “Ring them bells! What an astonishing and wonderful thing!”2 And for a few hours that morning, this was the news in the United States. Those musically inclined citizens around the country must have been grateful for this necessary and wondrous interruption of what was an otherwise tedious and decidedly unmusical moment in American history. It did not take very long for other stories to come into view and indeed for the charming spell cast by Dylan’s untimely and cosmically accurate award to break. Questions of his qualifications as a “literary” 158

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figure were immediately asked, and resentments toward him and what he represents as a giant in the field of American music and popular culture—­or, as he cruelly describes himself in Chronicles, “a folk-­rock relic” of a time gone by—­rose to the surface.3 To adequately address this controversy means accurately assessing what understanding critics have of the two operant terms defining the debate over Dylan’s Nobel Prize: “music” and “literature.” Novels, plays, poems, and stories are all accepted as sufficiently literary objects. Perhaps this is because of the written nature of these modes or genres of expression, we might just as easily characterize them as creative works that are world-­building in nature. In this way, these modes are not unlike any other kind of artistic creation, from the visual to the musical. And what is literature anyway? Books? Words? Certainly some of those people decrying the validity of Dylan’s Nobel Prize on the basis of the nonliterary nature of his work might appeal to some prescribed, literal concept of literature that precludes performance or song. Leaving grandstanding or gatekeeping gestures of this kind to the side, perhaps we should view the Nobel Prize committee’s decision as an opportunity at last to arrive at (or perhaps return to) an understanding or definition of literature that is more capacious: perhaps in relation to its effects rather than its objects or artifacts, or even in relation to its aspirations or its style. For Dylan, songwriting has always been his way of exploring and expanding his sense of history. He is interested in histories both minor and major but especially in the overlooked and antique forms of life that sometimes get overlooked in our progressive march toward the future. Time takes its toll on everything. Even a rock lying on the ground in the forest experiences history in its own quiet and anonymous way. Walk out into the forest, and you will see it sitting there with green moss covering its face. The view of that moss and that rock is what most people think of as the truth of history. But the rock has another side and indeed another story to tell. Turn it over, and it does not look quite as pretty: instead of green moss, you will find worms, bugs, and dirt covering the rock’s underside. This is the side of the rock, of history, that interests Dylan and his career-­spanning efforts to sing what he once called his “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”4 In a strange and freewheeling early interview with Playboy magazine, Dylan explains his orientation toward what he calls “traditional music”

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and what, arguably, he conceives of as the musical alternative to our nation’s dominant, sedimented notion of history: “Traditional music is based on hexagrams. It comes about from legends, Bibles, plagues, and it revolves around vegetables and death. There’s nobody that’s going to kill traditional music. All of these songs about roses growing out of people’s brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels—­they’re not going to die. . . . Traditional music is too unreal to die.”5 In his characteristically opaque style, Dylan has just offered his own answer to the question “What is literature?” For Dylan, literature is one of many expressions of those historical “hexagrams” from which he says traditional music emerges. Novels, poems, songs, dances, paintings are all expression of these everlasting subterranean myths and stories humans have told themselves, time out of mind, about themselves. That Dylan is attuned to the queerer elements of these traditional myths says something about his personal disposition but also, without question, has to do with his being an American artist. The national tendency toward big sentiments has created a population that has been notoriously prone to superstition and abuses of its credulity.6 These are the same qualities, we must not forget, that created an opportunity for Donald Trump to ascend to the presidency in 2016. Dylan’s “traditional music” is an understanding of culture as a kind of battle between “the present” and the will of those “garrulous outraged baffled ghosts” once described by William Faulkner.7 These ghosts, according to Flannery O’Connor, “cast strange shadows, particularly in our literature.”8 This influence cannot necessarily be detected (or, for the deconstructionists, dissected) from the literature but can be felt and sensed in the way all ghosts can be felt and seen: as presence, in terms that are intensive and by their very nature impossible to abstract or measure exactly. In that same essay, O’Connor describes what she refers to as both the grotesque and modern romantic tradition in American literature, which she says can be traced from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Edgar Allan Poe to the folk tales of the Western Frontier to Faulkner up to her own body of work. The story she tells here resonates with Dylan’s representation of traditional music’s attachments to its “vegetables and death.” O’Connor’s framing of a grotesque undercurrent in American literature revolves around literary representations of superfluous feeling and inveterate superstition that are nothing if not American in style.

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The value of the literary works in O’Connor’s subterranean canon are in their abilities to give life to ghostly and garrulous forms that haunt our national imagination. What she describes here as “deeper kinds of realism . . . [that are inherently] less and less understandable,” we might want to translate into musical terms. The kinds of stories told here are not the kind that appeal to our mainstream notions of “the real.”9 Indeed, O’Connor is, like Dylan, interested in that ugly and messy other side of the rock that lies in the forest, the one that most of us simply step over in our march through the woods. The writer who wishes to demonstrate the fact of this grotesque alternative reality must do so not through the use of dominant logic but by virtue of their capacity to translate the mood or feeling of something that is used to being hidden away. The lines of communication between “literature” and “music” as genres or bodies of cultural production are not always clearly delineated. The American composer Arthur Bergh found this to be true in his early attempts at transposing Poe’s “The Raven” into a musical score: “In the case of Poe’s Raven,—­in my early childhood I was gripped by the tragic intensity of the poem, and determined that I would someday make a musical setting of it, provided I were fortunate enough to develop a gift for writing. I carried the ominous bird in my mind for several years and when I finally decided to attempt translating its moods into a musical portrait the work literally wrote itself.”10 What Bergh finds in Poe’s narrative poem is something like an earworm, a song or fragment of a sound that can get stuck in your head until you find a way to get it out. Because Bergh is a musical composer, of course, his mode is through the transcription of “The Raven” into song. As he says, the line of flight from Poe to musical adaptation of Poe was only able to occur once Bergh was able to obviate his notion of the poem’s so-­called literary or narrative qualities and instead ride the wave of influence given to him by its intensive components (mood, feeling, tone). Even if you are not a musical composer, it is possible to read novels in this manner and, if we take O’Connor seriously, even necessary if we are to truly appreciate the strange messages embedded within American literature. “The writer,” she argues, “who writes within what might be called the modern romance tradition may not be writing novels which in all respects partake of a novelistic orthodoxy.”11 This writer (or critic) is one who is attuned to the fact that “life is and will remain essentially

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mysterious . . . [and that] what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go through it into an experience of mystery itself.”12 There are, it seems, more than one way to read a story, and we can establish that there are at least two levels available to us: the literal (where extensive and familiar qualities exist, reiterating our received sense of the world) and the other, what we might call the grotesque or the musical, where intensive and ghostly characteristics live and to which we can only hope to partially attune our senses. A musical approach to “reading” or otherwise consuming literature is one that follows the whims of our instincts and reactions. “A respect for the sensory quality of literature,” according to Camille Paglia, represents “the greatest honor that can be paid to the art work, on its pedestal of ritual display.”13 Criticism, in this sense, should seek to re-­create the sensation of reading-­feeling. It is, in Paglia’s decidedly Dionysian-­American sense, less of a cerebral exercise than it is something more akin to “ceremonial revivification, . . . a commemorative magniloquence . . . inflated with psychoeconomic value.”14 In re-­creating or representing our sense of a text, we necessarily reassemble the parts that shimmer and spark with affective power. If we listen or attune ourselves to literary works, we might find the act of interpretation occurring in those fleeting moments when we feel, right before we think. This kind of reading follows the now well-­known American dictum, from Duke Ellington, “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.”15 The work itself—­be it a song or story—­is to be judged based, according to O’Connor, on its “vitality” or its mysterious ability to present something that is “alive, however eccentric its life may seem to the general reader.”16 According to Gilles Deleuze, in the essay “On the Superiority of Anglo-­ American Literature,” “The highest aim of literature . . . is [to] leave, to escape, is to trace a line.”17 For Deleuze, the style of Anglo-­American literature in particular is in its authors’ willingness and attunement to escape one level of reality for another, more mysterious dimension, toward a place where “everything is departure, becoming, passage, leap, daemon, relationship with the outside . . . [toward] a new Earth.”18 A novel and a song are but two ways artists try to move toward or attune themselves to this other space that these critics have thus far been trying to describe. To think of these two modes as categories is to limit their vitality, to ignore their world-­building mechanisms (opaque as they might be).

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Disaggregating our sense of the differences between literature and music is the first step in attuning ourselves to their forms of change and becoming. We might think of “literature” in the same way Dylan describes “a song,” which, he says, “is like a dream, and you try to make it come true. They’re like strange countries that you have to enter.”19 Far beyond the realm of the needling concerns that some people may have or have had concerning Dylan’s worthiness as a Nobel Prize winner are broader and more cosmic questions of how Americans see themselves reflected in their popular culture. An American approach to matters of literature and music is to see these as expressions of our nation’s popular culture, which is defined progressively rather than prescribed by any attachment to tradition. Put another way, by the time Dylan won a Nobel Prize in Literature, it already did not matter to the average American whether his musical creations had so-­called literary value. Americans know that, like others who have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, Dylan will live on into the future by virtue of the liveliness and complexity of the musical creations—­and worlds—­he has offered up over the years. Dylan’s Nobel Prize in Literature allows us once and for all to disaggregate these categories of “literature” and “music”—­to be less serious, in other words, about what they are in some abstract sense so we can get to the more important and serious business of considering what it is that they (songs, novels, poems, stories) make us think and feel. Dylan allows us to think of how music can be literary. But let us also consider the ways literature can be musical. And if we follow his lead out into the wilderness of our national imagination, we might, once and for all, have a suitable answer to one of his more infamous questions or refrains: “How does it feel?”20

Pop Criticism I wish I knew how It would feel to be free I wish I could break All the chains holdin’ me —­Nina Simone, “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” (Silk & Soul, 1967)

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How does it feel How does it feel To be without a home Like a complete unknown Like a Rolling stone? —­Bob Dylan, “Like a Rolling Stone”

It would be impossible for this chapter to offer up some tidy review of the ways American scholars and critics have come to think about and theorize popular music and literature. To do so would be read against the grain of the United States’ national style, which is defined by its ongoing belief in the future of popular culture itself rather than in the governing mechanisms and rules offered up by cultural traditions of the past. Instead, I want to insist on a particularly American form of literary criticism that is or at least allows for something like a “musical” approach. This somewhat ambivalent distinction between these genres emerges not only from a lack of official canon or artistic tradition that one finds in countries in Europe but also from the United States’ historically centralized and thriving popular culture. To do literary criticism as an Americanist is, in the wake of Leslie Fiedler, to remain suspicious and ambivalent of “tradition” and canonization while also poised toward and attuned to what is happening on the ground, outside the mainstream and indeed in the popular culture. Contemporary literary critics working in and on “America” are able to take advantage of this “pop” approach to scholarship in large part because of the significant work done by Fiedler to carve out a space for the American scholar and public intellectual. Portraying himself as a “pop critic,” Fiedler describes his inclination away from a more highbrow moniker thusly: “I have never known anybody who became a literary critic deliberately. Certainly I—­after I gave up dreaming of becoming a cowboy, a fireman, a garbage collector, a revolutionary, an actor, a foreign correspondent, and a mouthpiece snatching gangsters from well-­merited punishment—­settled for thinking of myself as a poet-­novelist and a teacher.”21 Fiedler’s representation of his aspirational self reveals a characteristically American attachment to all of the icons and personae of our popular, and decidedly middle-­ and lowbrow, culture. He continues by characterizing his approach to literary study as predicated on an unerring sense of his own adolescent

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wonder rather than any kind of serious expertise: “Even in the field of criticism I have remained an amateur, a dilettante, a ‘specialist’ in nothing; preferring approximate insights to documented ‘facts’ and passion to precision or rigor.”22 Ironically, even though Fiedler never dedicated an entire book to the subject of music and American literature, he can be credited for creating the world in which this kind of analysis and conceptual writing has flourished. Indeed, speaking to the Chicago Tribune concerning Fiedler’s legacy, the author David Ritz describes the yearly gathering of the Pop Music Conference in Seattle as populated with “children of Fiedler.”23 Speaking in the same publication, Greil Marcus, rock critic and public intellectual, characterizes the fact that Fiedler did not write about popular music per se as ironic.24 Describing the influence he detects—­or, more appropriately, hears—­in fellow music critical expressions of Fiedlerean “fun and fearlessness,” Marcus, as well as Ritz, makes it clear that Fiedler unlocked an array of critical writing that was musical in nature and tone. Pointing out that, for Fiedler, “there was no way Elvis Presley was going to mean as much to him as Absalom, Absalom!,” Marcus points out that this is not because Fiedler maintained some rigid sense of distinction between these forms.25 For Fiedler, Faulkner is, like Presley, a product of American popular culture. There is no line demarcating one from the other with regard to taste or tradition, and what Fiedler has offered us is a way to approach both seriously (but without taking ourselves too seriously). The way to deal with literature and music is, then, a matter of style, of following the directives of one’s instincts as a participant in and consumer of popular culture. In the same way that John Berger taught us how to think about the ways we see visual art, Fiedler taught us how to feel, critically. The musical turn in literary criticism is an invitation to consider the ways we hear and listen to the world as it is reflected in the artistic creations of our artists.26 With Fiedler, American critics have the permission to study and pursue cultural criticism in a way that feels authentic. In his work, namely, Love and Death in the American Novel, Fiedler created a field of American criticism that centered popular culture. Beginning here, Fiedler dedicates his creative and critical energies to doing away with the unnecessary—­and un-­American—­distinctions among high-­, middle-­, and lowbrow culture. Fiedler understands and indeed takes for granted

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the idea that there is scholarly value in closing the gap between high and low by constructing a sui generis notion of popular culture that includes everything and includes everyone, from the specialist to the so-­ called mass or lay consumer. Like Dylan, Fiedler’s work chases after this dream of his, which, to quote a review of his work by Stephen Tatum, is always looking “to cross the border and close the gap . . . [by advocating for] a subjective criticism that integrates popular and classic literature, and that in practice concentrates on myths, fables, and archetypes (not theme structure, metaphor, signifier) in order to show how literature moves readers viscerally toward release, toward ecstasy or rapture.”27 Whereas Fiedler’s critical writings allow him to wander out into the spaces created by the American novel in search of this place outside the borders, Dylan learned to write songs by making analogous journeys into the strange and wild world of American folk music. Reading is, for Fiedler and Dylan, akin to a vision quest; the creation of a work of art or a text is, then, an exercise in reflecting on and perhaps materializing the sensations and prefabricated elements of knowledge that one finds on their trip. While this is not the same as listening, Fiedler’s notion of reading is one that takes advantage of the affective qualities built into our hearing practices. When we listen to a song, we do so partly in tune with its lyric (if it has any), but the other part of us is wrapped up in the way the song makes us feel and focused then on how or where those feelings take us. Music is a conveyance to another dimension. This is something that Americans know well: “Folk songs,” Dylan reports, “were the way I explored the universe, they were the pictures and the pictures were worth more than anything I could say.”28 These pictures appear in countless Dylan songs, sometimes one after the other and in overwhelming fashion as in “A Hard Rain’s a-­Gonna Fall,” with its lists of things seen, heard, and felt by its protagonist blue-­eyed boy.29 The meaning is not in the words themselves or even in the way that they sound when you hear them sung. The “jewels and binoculars that hang from the head of a mule” in “Visions of Johanna” are symbolic and meaningful but only in a way that relates to one’s sense of the rest of that song, which is as much about America as any novel.30 Following Fiedler, it is possible to respond to and represent these works through what he calls “myth-­criticism,” which is a way of approaching history as a kind of fantasy or, better yet, in a state of fan-

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tastic revery, a way of seeing the “facts” of past events as they relate to the ongoing drama of mythological creation. In doing so, Fiedler credits himself with tracing “the peculiarly American myths . . . from the beginnings of our history to what really threatens to be its end: from the moment when ex-­Europeans first encountered the non-­white denizens of the New World to those fatal years during which we dropped the bomb on non-­white Hiroshima and launched our last wilderness war in Vietnam.”31 Fiedler sees the end of the myth of the United States etched into its historical record, and he sees this news projected back. Like Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which describes the sharp contrast between the “sullen darkness now [hovering] above us” and below a “shrouded human figure . . . [with skin the color of] the perfect whiteness of the snow,” Fiedler sees his dream in black and white.32 Dylan too, in his own apocalyptic vision in “A Hard Rain,” sees “a black branch with blood that kept drippin’,” “a white ladder all covered with water,” and “a white man who walked a black dog” and finds itself in a desolate place “where black is the color, where none is the number.” All of this spells doom.

Exploration and Encounter: An American Refrain We’re going to Mars for the same reason Marco Polo rocketed to China for the same reason Columbus trimmed his sails on a dream of spices for the very same reason Shackleton was enchanted with penguins for the reason we fall in love It’s the only adventure —­Nikki Giovanni, “Quilting the Black-­Eyed Pea: We’re Going to Mars”

In a 2017 interview, the American poet and scholar Nikki Giovanni finds herself discussing space exploration and Middle Passage. Referencing her poem “Quilting the Black-­Eyed Pea: We’re Going to Mars,” which imagines a group of Black astronauts watching Martians watch them as

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they descend from their craft, Giovanni makes the case that NASA—­the United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration—­should study Black history.33 As a woman raised in and still living in Appalachia, Giovanni says that she has spent her entire life gazing up at the vast, quiet blanket of stars in the sky, dreaming and scheming about life. A self-­proclaimed “space freak,” Giovanni refers to Mae Jemison, the first Black woman to go into space and a fellow Appalachian, as a cosmic relative. Both Giovanni and Jemison come from a line of space explorers—­namely, kindred enslaved African women who were, in Giovanni’s estimation, the first and true explorers of the so-­called New World—­and like astronauts who fly into the unknown crevices of outer space, these travelers have the phenomenological experience of leaving a known (Africa) and traveling across unknown oceans into alien territory (the Americas). Giovanni’s focus here is not just on the devastating effects of enslavement but also on the story of survival that is necessarily also a part of history for those who, perhaps in spite of everything, were strong enough to be able to make it across the ocean. Black women held the key to this survival map, which was communicated, she argues, through song: So we had the people coming across that ocean, not knowing where they were going, but knowing, whatever it was, they were not gonna go back to where they used to be. So somehow or another, they had to make a decision—­how do we go forward? But it had to be a woman, because—­we’re back to the manger. We’re back to Mary. We’re back to that’s what women do—­it had to be a woman who said, “I need to settle my people down.” And when you consider that there were a lot of languages going on—­ she didn’t speak English, at that point. They didn’t speak Swahili, at that point. There were many languages. The only common language is going to be [hums]. So when we get to what is going to ultimately become the United States, these people had created a way to speak to themselves, to each other, through the language, through spirituals.34

This song, which cannot be accurately transcribed—­e xcept by “[hums]”—­is a line that runs from America’s beginnings into its futures. This hum, which predates linguistic communication and defines the experience of the earliest explorers of this “new world,” is a refrain that

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gets played again and again. These spirituals form the earliest parts of American folk culture, a subterranean but very lively part of our experience of being in the world. Composed as such, these songs become what will be, in Dylan’s words, “folk music, . . . a reality of a more brilliant dimension . . . [exceeding] all human understanding.”35 This cultural territory is made up of folk heroes and mythical figures that never really die: “A culture with outlaw women, super thugs, demon lovers and gospel truths, . . . streets and valleys, rich peaty swamps, with landowners and oilmen, Stagger Lees, Pretty Polly and John Henrys.”36 American popular culture has no grand artistic traditions that it has to follow, only an awareness of the power of this “invisible world,” Dylan describes, “that towered overhead with walls of gleaming corridors.”37 Awareness of this world takes a kind of faith in the unknown and untimely but also a capacity to hear these ghostly voices as they call out from the wilderness. Those early spirituals that Giovanni describes are still detectable, still composing themselves out in that bright but invisible realm of folk tradition. To hear them, you have to have a kind of attention that privileges the knowledge of feeling, but you also need a historical approach that emphasizes attunement: which is a relative of listening and not reading, a kind of recognition of the informative power of feeling and sensation.38 If one wanted to think of a way to hear this historical refrain in American literature, it might take something akin to Fiedler’s notion of “myth-­criticism” of American history, and the resulting product might be something akin to a psychoanalytic case study. In writing this story, it would be impossible to ignore the ways that the US is shaped materially and indeed fractured emotionally and spiritually by the psychic trauma of those earliest moments of racial encounter between Black and white. These symptoms are pathologically embedded within the American psyche and personality and are hardly ever referred to literally as much as they are enacted incidentally. To account for them is to be attuned to their presence, a kind of critical gaze that is nuanced and knows how to move beyond the literal or material level toward the emotional and spiritual forms of life. A clinical or purely literate approach to racial discourse in the United States is an evasion of its constituting intensive qualities and effects. Race and racism can be represented materially, but they can also be detected

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by sound, tone, sensation, and feeling. Here I am thinking of Toni Morrison’s essays on American literature as an example of the capacity of criticism to engage not only with what is said and written but also with what can be felt or intuited. Analogously—­albeit from the other end of the telescope—­to Arthur Bergh’s efforts to transpose Poe’s “The Raven” into musical form, Morrison’s literary criticism approaches the text with concepts and principles that we might consider musical. She is interested in how race and racism feel, in the surprising points of resonance and dissonance produced by the United States’ racial compositions. From the earliest incantations of racial discourse made by white Westerners, it has communicated and enacted its “truth” on two levels: by influencing and appealing to logic and reason and also through the careful manipulation of those forces of meaning that are better left unsaid, like feeling and instinct. In Morrison’s literary critical work on American literature and what she terms the “white imagination,” she has dedicated considerable energy to teasing out the material from the immaterial forces and effects of race and racism in order to confront the most difficult and imperceptible psychic forces that undergird US racial fantasy. In one of her last essays, titled “Romancing Slavery,” she looks at early accounts of enslavement written by and for those who did the enslaving. She reads daily journals and logs written by plantation owners such as Thomas Thistlewood, an eighteenth-­century upper-­middle-­class Englishman who relocated to Jamaica to oversee a sugar plantation. Here she finds bloodless, routinized representations of slavery: “a diary minus reflection or sustained judgement, just the facts, . . . [evidence of a man who] did not wonder about slavery’s morality or his place in its scheme.”39 Morrison describes Thistlewood’s accounts of daily life on the sugar plantation as a kind of process of his own tacit or unconscious acceptance of his participation in the “psychological work of Othering—­of convincing oneself that there is some sort of natural and divine delineation between the enslaver and the enslaved.”40 For herself, Morrison takes this diagnosis even deeper, past the material forces of race and racial violence and even behind the psychological effects of its various discourses, down to the point where, to quote Miller Williams, “the spirit meets the bone.”41 Morrison represents Thistlewood to her readers as someone driven to a kind of spiritual depravity, as a man who is able to describe in the same emotional tone the price of sugar per pound as the number of enslaved

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women he has raped in any given week.42 This violence has taken its toll on Black bodies and souls, but Morrison is also aware of and wants her readers to confront the idea that it also affects and dooms whiteness. Quoting and expounding on a line from Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)—­“I can testify, from my own experience and observation, that slavery is a curse to the whites as well as to the blacks. It makes the white fathers cruel and sensual; the sons violent and licentious; it contaminates the daughters, and makes the wives wretched”—­ Morrison has her own point to make about the psychic and spiritual effects of slavery (and indeed of race itself) on whites: “The necessity of rendering the slave a foreign species appears to be a desperate attempt to confirm oneself as normal. . . . Even assuming exaggeration by the slaves, the sensibility of slave owners is gothic.”43 Morrison takes Jacobs’s description of slavery as a curse seriously by relating it more broadly to the entire business of racial othering. She sees in the historical record evidence of the earliest forms of sublimation and tacit acceptance of the evils of racial violence as the source of future reenactments of the same. Morrison’s white imagination is gothic, then, in the same way that Fiedler describes Faulkner’s South as “a world of gothic terror described as historical fact.”44 The traces of the kind of terror described by Morrison and Fiedler here are hard to come by because they are so fleeting and shadowy in nature. Because the nation has transformed its earliest forms of racial discourse, which were predicated on violence and insanity, into self-­evident fact, one must accept that any proper analysis of racial fantasy must, as Morrison argues, be attuned to the fact that, in the US, “in matters of race, silence and evasion have historically ruled literary discourse.”45 Morrison approaches Thistlewood’s papers with the same idea she has in mind when reading pieces of fiction by white authors writing in the modern era. She is interested in what happens when someone overlooks, naturalizes, and indeed sublimates the insanity of racial superiority and the evils of enslavement and in what effects can be detected when one shifts one’s attention “from the described and imagined to the describers and imaginers; from the serving to the served.”46 Morrison recognizes race as a kind of curse or pathology in the sense that it cannot help but mindlessly reiterate racism, which she reminds us came before any communicable notion of racial identity or difference.

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How, then, she asks, do supposedly enlightened nations and individuals “accommodate slavery’s degradation?” Answering herself, she describes two paths, the first being “by brute force” and the other, “romancing it.”47 Approaching the American literary tradition, Morrison’s use of the term “romance” is, as they say, loaded. She sees in the young and violently emotional country “a blank page waiting to be inscribed” and a concurrent “body of literature produced by the young nation [that serves as] one way it inscribed its transactions with these fears, forces, and hopes.”48 In spite of the country’s youth and the opportunities given to Americans to overcome the habits and dreads of old Europe, Morrison’s analysis of early American literature is rife with examples of a nation burdened and tied down malgré lui: “For a people who made so much of their ‘newness’—­ their potential, freedom, and innocence—­it is striking how dour, how troubled, how frightened and haunted our early and founding literature truly is.”49 As O’Connor does in her own account of the dark romantic tradition in American fiction, Morrison finds in authors like Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne symptoms of “anxiety imported from the shadows of European culture.”50 Looking and listening for evidence of what Melville describes as “the power of blackness,” Morrison engages with the same wild fiction that O’Connor read and wrote herself.51 These are grotesque works of literature that, O’Connor argues, are “almost necessarily going to be violent and comic, because of the discrepancies that it seeks to combine.”52 These discrepancies are moral in nature and, as we have seen, seem always preoccupied with enforcing racial difference.

The Blues, “God’s Language” This train is bound for glory, this train, This train is bound for glory, this train, This train is bound for glory, If you ride it, you must be holy, this train. —­“This Train” (American gospel standard)

The space of literature registers what it feels like to endure the problem of racial difference, and these feelings are by their very nature difficult to pin down or translate. From this vantage point, Morrison argues that American authors have used romance as a way of staging a “head-­on

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encounter with the very real, pressing historical forces and contradictions inherent in them”; indeed, far from being an evasion of history, this kind of romance, she argues, “offers writers not less but more; not a narrow a-­historical canvas but a wide historical one; not escape but entanglement.”53 Searching for evidence of all of these feelings and attempting to transform or translate them into literary forms involves an acceptance of the fact that, as Arthur Bergh once discovered when trying to turn Poe into music, feeling is more informative than that which logic can convey. Morrison’s encounters with and meditations on the gothic power of Blackness on the (white) American imagination are conducted in a manner that recognizes the ascendency of immaterial forms and forces of reason. The effects of race on US history can be felt wherever you want to go or look, but they are often not, in a very American way, commented on as such. The terror and insanity that were accepted as normal centuries ago by the earliest citizens of the nation have become part of the invisible structure holding up and giving life to the nation into the present moment. This Gothic tendency, as Morrison or Faulkner might have it, or grotesque combination of two incommensurate parts, can be detected by virtue of a feeling more than anything else. And while there are plenty of ways to describe this feeling, none seem more apt—­and certainly none more American—­than “the blues.” As critic and, of course, acclaimed fiction writer, Morrison is familiar with the possibilities of language in conveying the complexities of the human condition. That said, she knows the limits of language, of the ways deploying it forces us to take part in definitions and insinuated meanings that are way beyond our intentions. She recognizes this dilemma again and again in her work but never as poignantly as at the beginning of The Bluest Eye, through the narrator’s introduction of the tragic protagonist of the story, Pecola Breedlove. Apologizing, in a way, for the sad story that is to come, the narrator says that, while the story will hurt, the experience of that hurt must be felt. Following this, “There is really nothing more to say—­except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.”54 This “how” is, among other things, the sum total of Pecola’s experiences of life, which are defined by her experience of endless catastrophe, violence, and isolation. With the novel’s plot established on its first page, the rest of it is like one long blues number. Pecola’s got the blues. Pecola lives the blues. Pecola is the blues.

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The blues is an American musical form that gives voice to the joys and sorrows of the nation’s history. With regard to its formal qualities, a blues song is usually immediately recognizable as such by its call-­and-­response pattern and its use of what is referred to as “blue” or “worried” notes, which are minor notes, usually altered or discordant varieties of third, fifth, and seventh scale degrees.55 The blues is a living combination of feelings: good and bad, here or there, high and low. In an interview with John and Alan Lomax, the famed folk and blues singer Lead Belly describes this intermediary or liminal space where the blues dwells: “When you lie down at night sometime, it ain’t too hot and it ain’t too cold, but you turning from side to side. What’s the matter? Blues got you. When you get up in the morning, the blues is walkin’ ’round your bed. You may have a mother and a father and a sister and a brother and maybe a girl friend, and none of them ain’t done you nothin.’ Anyhow you don’t want no talk out of ’em. What’s the matter? The blues got you.”56 If one wanted to convey the liminal, low-­down type of feeling that Lead Belly describes in words, there are infinite possibilities. But there is something about language alone that is almost too particular and too focused on the individual experience. A blues song takes advantage of what words can communicate but also, obviously, only insomuch as it is also able to transfer a feeling or a message through sound. Those “worried” notes that the blues communicates in are the ones that get this feeling across. A blues song is not played strictly in a major key, and it deviates from the standard sound of your standard popular musical composition. It communicates in what Morrison has described as “God’s language”: “[The blues] is plumbing the music for the meaning that it contains. . . . Seldom does it center on the information, the meaning the artist is communicating by his style, via his aesthetics.”57 As a fiction writer, Morrison translates literature into American musical forms such as jazz and the blues. You can hear this in the indirect yet impactful role sound has to play in the process of communicating meaning to her readers. In a discussion of the opening lines of Beloved—­“124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom”—­ Morrison discusses the decisions she made in her choice of words and the sounds they evoke, fully aware of the fact that it is the “sound of a text clearly invokes the musical quality of the dialogue and the language chosen to contextualize it”: “There is something about numerals that makes them spoken, heard, in this context, because one expects words to be

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read in a book, not numbers to say, or hear. And the sound of the novel, sometimes cacophonous, sometimes harmonious, must be an inner-­ear sound or a sound just beyond hearing, infusing the text with a musical emphasis that words can do sometimes even better than music can.”58 The blues is also a way of representing historical fact, of establishing how it feels to be alive. The blues is, Ralph Ellison once wrote, “an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy, but by the squeezing from it a near-­tragic, near-­comic lyricism.”59 The cumulative effect of historical trauma and pain embeds itself into a single blues refrain such as “I’m going down the road feelin’ bad.” The whole story is already there, and in past present and future tenses. The blues tells the story of what it feels like to be Black in the United States. In the seminal work of LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Blues People: Negro Music in White America, he describes it in this way: “Blues means a Negro experience, it is the one music the Negro made that could not be transferred into a more general consensus than the one the Negro gave it initially.”60 Nikki Giovanni carries this message ahead in her poem titled “The Blues,” reminding us of that song that was once sung on that slave ship by those early American pioneers headed out across an unknown ocean into uncharted territory: Some folk think the blues Is a song or a way Of singing But the blues is History A way of telling how We got here And who sent us61

To listen to the blues is to listen with the grain or in the groove of what Morrison terms this “inner-­ear sound,” which is revealed or happens in between things: between, perhaps, the meaning we attach to a word and the noise we associate with it. Morrison is describing a liminal space between these two and suggests a kind of musical reading practice that is aware of what happens in the intermediary between word and sound. Whereas, in

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Ways of Seeing, Berger once argued that to learn to see a painting, we had to understand that “seeing comes before words,” that “the child looks and recognizes before it can speak,” a musical approach to reading is one in which hearing comes in between words.62 A song understands that emotion and meaning are conveyed in the space of listening, which happens between the perception of a word and/or a sound and the meaning we assign to it. This chapter began with a line from a Dylan song titled “Blind Willie McTell,” an outtake from his 1983 album Infidels. The song is an ode to a bluesman and fellow songster from a time gone by who, like Dylan, had a kind of musical disposition and a telepathic mind to go with it. McTell was, in Sean Wilentz’s terms, a musical “sponge” and a “human jukebox—­a performer who could provide, on demand, what people on both sides of the color line, affluent and poor, and in the countryside as well as the city, wanted to hear, including the latest hit records.”63 It would make sense to apply any of these terms to Dylan, who is a living arbiter of an infinite variety of antiquated and otherwise-­forgotten American musical traditions. When critics call Dylan unoriginal or a plagiarist, they make a decidedly unmusical (and mistaken) accusation. You can hear, smell, sense, and see all of those influences in musical form. Dylan, like his songster relative McTell, soaks up history and folk/ popular traditions and reframes and refracts what he has collected over time in song. The refrain of Dylan’s musical ode to McTell spells out his sense of his admiration and seals the bond between the two: “Nobody can sing the blues / Like Blind Willie McTell.” The song travels, verse by verse, across history and through a kind of cosmic desert. I traveled through East Texas Where many martyrs fell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . See them big plantations burning Hear the cracking of the whips Smell that sweet magnolia blooming See the ghosts of slavery ships I can hear the tribes moaning Hear the undertaker’s bell And nobody can sing the blues Like Blind Willie McTell

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Dylan’s song enacts the kind of historical and textual attunement that this chapter has attempted to convey. When Dylan sings, “Nobody can sing the blues / Like Blind Willie McTell,” he is also saying that nobody knows the past who does not have the blues. The blues is a particularly American incantation of what Morrison calls “God’s language,” that universe that encloses the universe, a dimension that is perceptible but only through a concentrated form of openness or attunement.

6

The Intensive Zone Pragmatism, Postmaterialism, Object-­Oriented Ontology, and Other Forms of Belief as Method I believe, like most people, not that of which logic can convince me but what my nature inclines me to believe. —­Quentin Crisp, “Do You Believe in God?” Any fool can believe what is obviously true. It takes a genius to believe what is a palpable lie. —­Quentin Crisp Opportunities may come along for you to convert something—­ something that exists into something that didn’t yet. That might be beginning of it. Sometimes you just want to do things your way, want to see for yourself behind the misty curtain. . . . You want to say something about strange things that have happened to you, strange things you have seen. You have to know and understand something and then go past the vernacular. —­Bob Dylan

Back to the Garden: Belief and Method Does literary studies have a method? This is a question that those who are employed in the business of literary studies, critique, and/or theory have been asking themselves—­whether or not they know it—­since the origins of the profession. An easy answer to the question is yes, literary studies’ method is reading and interpretation. Following from this point, it is the job of the scholar of literary studies to deploy reading and interpretive practices that help us make even more meaning out of the text than might have otherwise been apparent. The literary scholar is less like a car mechanic who knows where all the parts go and what makes 178

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the thing run than an inventor or fabricator. As a form of expertise, literary studies has a duty to engage with texts in order to create its own concepts and ideas. Reading and interpretation are two (of many) ways that a literary scholar activates that which is conceptual and emergent in the text. Far from being passive forms of engagement, reading and interpretation are, in my terms, practices of style (of making something more like itself). Reading and interpretation are anything but quiet and reflective modes; they are in fact forms of attuning our instincts with knowledge. You could call this a method if you like, but to do so would insinuate that it could be reproduced and passed around for others to use as such. But style is stranger and more singular than this: it is not the same trend or practice that is ready-­made for others to try on. When we talk about methods in literary studies, we are really talking about—­desiring—­the kinds of ready-­made frameworks or movements that give scholars a sense of belonging and purpose that is given to them from without rather than within. Like the platform shoe or tapered jeans, certain things come in and out of fashion in literary studies methods. New Criticism, New Historicism, poststructuralism, queer theory: these are all examples of moments, movements, or trends that have come and gone from the literary critical landscape. But the problem is—­and will always be—­the fact that the work of making something mean something is still done by means that are hard to account for or calculate in any exact measure. In this chapter, I am interested in how we as critics think about things that are in their very nature unmeasurable. I search in and around the official boundaries of literary critical scholarship for examples of critical stylists who conceptualize all those things—­like style, mood, temperament, consciousness—­that are real but resistant to paraphrase. Whereas a literary critic sees and feels around in a book for ideas and feelings, a physicist sees the world as full of matter. The accounts they make of the things of the universe fall into two categories: those with extensive and those with intensive properties. The first of these refers to the properties of a substance that rely on the amount of matter present to form a measurement. For instance, a glass of water has extensive properties that are specific to itself that can be measured, such as its volume, mass, and weight. These are that water’s extensive properties. There are also intensive properties that do not depend on the amount of matter pres-

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ent. That same glass of water has a freezing point, boiling point, color, and density. The amount of water in a glass does not alter its intensive properties, which seem to be self-­contained and self-­evident rather than extractable or measurable. I demonstrate my argument, which reimagines criticism as an act of style on par with Crisp’s description of believing in one’s nature rather than logic or reason. Along these lines, I draw attention to theorists whom I consider would-­be stylists by virtue of their desire to move away from conventional methods and toward a place I call the intensive zone, where prescription ends and style begins. This intensive world is composed of qualities that can be detected but not measured precisely. There is a difference, for instance, between the exact temperature and what it feels like to stand naked and feel for yourself. Extensive properties are those that can be measured exactly and predictably, like height or weight. An intensive property—­or quality—­is something that we can detect but that we cannot calculate in any precise way: the density of an object, for instance, or its hardness or sheen. Both intensive and extensive properties are valuable and real, but it is easy to see how practitioners of literary studies might have developed a kind of method envy, especially when it comes to comparing themselves to their institutional siblings in the sciences and evaluative social sciences with their charts, numbers, graphs, and, most obviously, grant money. As such, this chapter makes a case against any social scientific turns in humanistic inquiry in general and literary studies in particular. A scholar of the humanities is never going to find the cure for a disease, but that does not mean that they are unable to help us understand the nature or sensational qualities of dis-­ease. I am interested in how scholars in the humanities register all of this and how, more precisely, they move back and forth between style and convention, between that which their natures incline them to do or believe and that which logic can convince them. How does the scholar-­stylist find a way to flourish in the space between their personality and their methodology? I want to move through the anxieties and aspirations we have invested in our discussions about literary studies methods and methodologies. After all, this is a book written by one congenitally unscientific thinker who feels nonetheless inspired by the almost magical way a physicist sees the universe as overflowing with matter that we can measure and that

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which we can only detect. Style is the concept that allows me to engage in a methodology that runs against the grain of social science and works out its concepts outside materialism and oriented toward other modes of representation, re-­creation, and analysis that acknowledge the other part of the world that is not only physical. It engages in a way of sensing and knowing the world that is based on the experience of life as it is lived. Its key term—­“style”—­emphasizes the way that we make ourselves and the world around us in ways that are dependent on how we experience ourselves and life as we live it. Style is self-­inventive and emergent; fashion is a convention, a system or code of rules that we use to name and account for something that is too much like itself. Fashion is a way of translating mystery, of dressing it up in more familiar terms. As is the case in the distinction between intensive and extensive properties, this is just one more object lesson in the problematic nature of our systems of knowledge. As a critic and reader, I am still captivated and not yet done with my fascination with the human being, a figure that I contend is essentially mysterious and worth more of our attention as such. While this book is not meant to dispute any particular critical framework, it emerges out of a concern that in refining our theoretical lenses and applying them to texts, we have remade the universe into something that is totally accountable to our own systems of measurement. In short, we have forgotten how to reflect on that which is essentially mysterious and does not rely on or even contain a material dimension. This book is a revival of sorts, resurrecting and reminding us of our duty as humanists to account for or bear witness to those things that belie scientific abstraction. The universe is teeming with mysterious and capacious forms of life that are ineffable and remarkable in and of themselves, not so much properties as qualities that can be detected.

Method Envy Humans, like other forms of matter, can be compared to one another and accounted for according to their extensive properties. We all have a height and weight, for instance. Social science has added other ways to abstract and compare ourselves in terms of various categories of identity: our race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and so on. As humanists, our interest is decidedly in the behavior, thoughts, and futures of human

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beings. My profession has taken up various modes of measuring what we see in texts that runs along a parallel path to the physicist’s search for extensive property values. Partnering with social scientific terminology and combining it with various theoretical turns, we have come to a moment when almost everything we see and feel—­not only in a text but in the world—­has a corresponding term of evaluation. The terms and metaphors we use to characterize the ineffable are essentially our tools of translating intensive qualities into extensive properties. We experience ourselves as humans on an individual basis first and foremost, and those experiences inform and affect the way that we are in the world. Our personalities and dispositions are ours alone, but it is possible—­through any number of logical means—­to resolve these otherwise-­idiosyncratic forces by affixing them with a label that renders them quantifiable. An identity, for instance, is what you get when you take a personality and abstract it into something that can be counted and recognized from without. But what about those things (qualities, affects, forces) that cannot be measured or accounted for in this manner? What of those intensive but also imprecise and indirectly accessible things that exist with or without a physical body? In the pages to come, I face and then turn away from literary studies and toward our colleagues and compatriots working in philosophy. This is done in part out of a sense of admiration for the work of the philosopher, which is, at least following from Nietzsche, always in search of other ways of being in the world, always fabricating and inventing concepts and modes of becoming. Beginning, however, in the United States with one of its greatest philosophers, William James, I give a kind of prehistory to the current movements toward autotheory and postcritique. The problem was then what it is now: that we internalize what we have learned from various institutions of scholarship and in the process have become too cynical or detached from the world, losing sight of our purpose. In giving this backstory and traveling across the train tracks to philosophy, my argument is that we are constantly facing and perhaps not learning the same lesson: that skepticism is an important part of our critical modes, yet we should reserve our cynical judgments for the systems of knowledge that we have been taught rather than the precious and fragile resources like curiosity and wonder that we carry with us throughout life and into our scholarly endeavors. We should understand

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and accept method as an opportunity to talk about style—­which is to say individual tendencies or approaches to the practices of reading and interpretation—­rather than trends, movements, or fashions in literary critical convention. But how did we get here? And is it possible to reclaim our right to define what counts as “serious” scholarship or criticism in the humanities? After all, the notion of our work being rigorous is, as we all know, hardly a given outside of English departments. Once operating at the center of colleges and universities, English departments are at this very moment trying to adjust to life in the outer galaxy. With shrinking class sizes and fewer and fewer undergraduate majors, English departments have one or two options moving forward: either adjust to their new position in the cosmos and find contentment there or, more tragically, convince themselves that there is a way back to the center. Like someone going through the motions of a late midlife crisis, these departments are now in the process of trying to get back to where they used to be. They are figuratively combing their hair to cover up the bald spots and applying more and more makeup to cover over the natural signs of wear and tear. In real life, English department movers and shakers are trying to re-­ present themselves to their administrative betters as more serious than ever. As a result, they deploy more and more forms of expertise and modes of hyperspecialization as evidence of their efforts at getting back to where things were. All the while, though, these fixers of literary study know what anyone who has ever tried to “go back” has always known: that you cannot.

Now Dry Your Tears If any of what I have said about literary studies has upset or annoyed you, hold fast; there is another story to tell about the business of literary study within and outside institutions of higher learning. In spite of what the comb-­over or makeup industries want you to believe, there are ways to age gracefully. To begin with, literary scholars need to remember why they do what they do. This means fairly and accurately assessing the ways that we all found and hopefully continue to find our way into literature, which was through that whole series of unserious affective states (like love, attraction, and affiliation) that might have caused our

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beleaguered gatekeeper to toss our statement of application into the dustbin. There is nothing more serious than love. Don’t believe me? Ask Oedipus what he thinks, or for that matter Lorena Bobbitt. More cynically, I might also add that there is nothing more serious than love of one’s career, which is arguably more common among so-­called critics than their love for what they do. I am not here to prescribe that we all revert to our “love for literature” as a way back into our work with texts. In fact, what I want to argue is that we reconsider and revive our sense of what counts as “serious.” In the “good old days” of high enrollments and utter seriousness, we consumed what the institution served us eagerly, enjoying our place at the head of academe’s table. We internalized what we were then given about what it means to be important and serious, and now that we find ourselves sitting somewhere else, let us not regurgitate the institution’s values into codes of conduct that are nothing but symptoms of decadent self-­loathing. And there is always the matter of the humanities’ insoluble sibling rivalry with its counterparts working in the evaluative social sciences—­method envy. But let us not go there—­at least not all the way. Debates about what does and does not count as “serious” literary study have been raging long before I came around. In the 2015 book The Limits of Critique, Rita Felski focuses on the ways we prescribe and proscribe the practice of criticism/critique, especially through the ways that we represent the institutional avatar of “the literary critic.” While she is, in the end, hoping to break free of the limitations we have imposed on ourselves in the form of our professional codes of conduct and fashion, she is interested in cataloging the various ways that “we” generally (as literary scholars and critics) internalize and reinforce official codes of conduct. This is a book about fashions in literary criticism rather than a collection of individual exceptions to its various rules and whims. Not unlike Bruno Latour’s classic move on science, we find Felski not so much inventing an alternative to critique, which she admits has reached its limits and requires revaluation, but engaging in a kind of sociological overview of the field’s codes of conduct and measures of success.1 Taking her cue from Paul Ricoeur, Felski sees the literary critic as someone who cannot help but abide by a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” Attentive, she argues, to the “pervasive presence [of suspicion] as mood and method” in con-

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temporary literary criticism, Felski’s book is full of examples of literary critics whose expertise puts them at a distance from and who seem to be struggling against their chosen texts. In characterizing her way into this book, Felski begins, as I do here, with a description of the critic before their training: “Is it not evident to even the most guileless of graduate students that texts do not willingly yield up their meanings, that apparent content shrouds more elusive or ominous truths?”2 The lesson that the young and tender-­hearted scholar has to learn is that critique is hard work, that accessing meaning or implication in a text is a task involving more than merely reading and describing what you have read.3 Across Felski’s book, it becomes clear that the officially sanctioned labor of critique is harder in its edges and more rigorous in its manners than love. A budding literary critic has to learn to master their text by way of their hyper-­knowledge of it: “Seizing the upper hand, critics read against the grain and between the lines; their self-­appointed task is to draw out what a text fails—­or willfully refuses—­to see.”4 The critic is, according to Felski’s depiction, almost at war with the text. Far from loving or being attuned to it, the critic engages in a process of military-­ style intervention into the world that the text creates and back out again. This “style of interpretation,” as she calls it, is predicated on and “driven by a spirit of disenchantment.”5 In the rest of the book, Felski goes on to describe and redescribe this mode of critique that is governed by skepticism, distance, and disenchantment. There is an argument to be made here about her use of the term “style” when she is referring to conventions or fashions in literary criticism. Indeed, her whole book is, as she describes it, “a close-­up scrutiny of a thought style” that is given to us not on the level of individual expressions (of style) but from on high, with regard to shifting moods in literary critical convention.6 Felski’s is not the only kind of critical lamentation going. One can look at the concurrent conversation around autotheory, for instance, and find a very resonant discussion among figures who think of themselves more as “theorists” than “critics” but who nonetheless sing a song that is in direct harmony with the one offered to us by postcritique. In each case, a field of study or system of knowledge has reached a threshold, evidenced by its own scholars of note lamenting the fact that it has entered a state of decadence in which things that were once open-­ended have been foreclosed. This is a time when questions get turned into an-

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swers; what felt at one time “new” and unconventional has become the very definition of conventional wisdom. Whereas so-­called postcritics want to find a way back to the text (back to reading, pleasure, enchantment, and so on), autotheorists want to carve out a path that leads them back to “I.” As one can read in Robyn Wiegman’s introduction to a 2020 special issue of Arizona Quarterly on the growing field of autotheory, there is almost a group migration away from the big figures/fields of “theory” like Marx, Freud, and their Frankfurt School descendants toward writers and intellectuals, such as Maggie Nelson (whose 2015 book of memoir and “theory” the Arizona Quarterly issue calls autotheory’s “north star”), working in public-­facing venues and modes.7 Whereas the MLA convention used to be the site of all kinds of groundbreaking and unconventional thinking (and fodder for lazy New York Times journalists wanting to peer in and make fun of what academics do when we are alone together), it seems the New Yorker has become the home of the most cutting-­edge public-­facing scholarship. Interest in autotheory seems to come from academic “theorists” wanting to mix memoir and first-­person analysis back into their high theory. Presenting itself, of course, as a “new” moment in academic discourse, this is really nothing more than a recurrent desire to bring criticism back to style and away from convention. Instead of research statements and articles, autotheorists want to write meditations. They want to explore and expand style, to use the space of criticism as an opportunity think about how what they do with and to texts approximates something like a worldview, or what philosophers of old would call Weltanschauung. But this is nothing new, and the “I” that apparently speaks behind the curtain of high theory is always available to us, even if we have to push through the layers of information, knowledge, and professional training to get back in touch with who we forgot we were. For the moment, though, I do not want to get implicated in these various academic movements as such. Instead, I want to drift in another direction, toward that notion of Weltanschauung, where, I argue, everyone really wants to go. I believe Felski, for instance, when she says, almost elegiacally, that contemporary literary criticism is too taken up by a pervasive “spirit of disenchantment” and furthermore join her in wanting to exorcise this demon from our minds so that we can get back to the work we as literary types were born to do. Instead of critique as

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a mode of suspicious reading, Felski wants to argue for the important work of “freeing up literary studies to embrace a wider range of affective styles and modes of argument,” and I am firmly on board for this task.8 What I have to offer is another definition of—­or attachment to—­style that moves past the seriousness of expertise and professionalism, that nonetheless knows its course and, for whatever it is worth, does take itself seriously. Style is not in opposition to fashions or convention but a way through them, to the other side. The stylist is not opposed to so much as ambivalent about official codes of conduct. They are by their very nature unable to believe in or take part in the fantasies of uplift and success prescribed to all of us by institutions and their ever-­shifting value systems. Rather than add to Felski’s book-­long description of critique as a suspicious, disenchanted, and skeptical “thought style,” I want to explore and flesh out a sense of criticism as reflective of the various moods, feelings, and attachments that prefigure and live outside the box labeled “literary criticism.” How did we come to naturally associate critique and analysis with disenchantment? It seems that, at least in part, we got to where we are by letting institutions dictate and imagine what does and does not count as “serious” work. Instead of understanding seriousness as a symptom of an individual style, we have commodified it and reformed it into a one-­size-­fits-­all kind of institutional moralism that we must learn, consume, and then regurgitate every step of the way. This is, I argue, a fatal mischaracterization of seriousness as something beyond or outside us, as something we must learn to do by polishing up and maybe even doing away with those things about us that are critically silly or amateurish, like style and belief.9

William James and the Prehistory of Postcritique Allow me to skip the needle. Instead of belaboring the contemporary state of literary criticism in its present decadence, I would like to look backward, toward what I refer to here as a prehistory of postcritique. I turn now to the United States academy at the turn of the twentieth century, with the figure of William James: a man who toiled in the spaces between philosophy, the sciences, and the then-­adolescent social sciences. From this vantage point, the story I have been telling here—­and

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indeed the one Felski and her postcritical allies tell in their own ways—­is part of a recurring theme or refrain that seems always to indicate a common desire for an already-­situated discipline of study to move on from itself and toward something else.10 James began his career as a pioneer in the field of psychology and is also remembered as one of the United States’ earliest and most significant philosophers. Unlike his brother Henry, who moved to London and in his expatriated bliss went on to become more English than the British, William James toiled in the fields of American science and philosophy in order to produce what is a very significant body of work that waded into that dark, liminal space/nonspace between the material forces and immaterial qualities constituting and affecting human experience. As an American philosopher, James worked at a distance from “the Continent,” which allowed him the intellectual and creative space necessary to write essays and lectures that still feel fresh and unencumbered by the weight of tradition. He began his career as a student of physiology at Harvard University, and indeed James spent most of his time as a professional researcher involved with the stuff of the material world. Eventually James grew out of this mode of scientific inquiry and toward questions of human consciousness and experience. While working as an instructor of anatomy and physiology in Harvard, James came in contact with the writings of European theorists like Pierre Janet, who would later be credited with making psychology a legitimate field of scientific inquiry. Eventually James moved himself away from physiology, accepting the position of assistant professor of psychology at Harvard in 1881. As the story goes, his first time attending a lecture on experimental psychology was when he gave his first lecture to a room of students enrolled in his course. At this time, James was still a scientific thinker looking for whatever evidence he could find and analyze from the material world. Notwithstanding his training, though, James remained curious about those things of the universe that are not explicitly physical. His interest in human awareness and mental states signifies an orientation toward the world of intensive qualities and away from the cold, hard laboratory of scientific inquiry. Because of his characteristic tendency to move out toward the edges of whatever professional conventions in which his writings engaged, James experienced both the problems and joys asso-

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ciated with what we now term “interdisciplinarity.” This is to say that James’s style forced him to confront the problem of balancing his sense of style with his perceived duties as a scholar or critic trained to think and do along certain prescribed lines. This problem seems to get worse when the critic loses a sense of their style by replacing individual experience (of the text, of knowledge, of wonder, curiosity) into prefabricated methods or modes of describing the world. In response to this kind of dilemma, James suggests the pursuit of what he terms throughout his writings a “radical empiricism,” which is way of turning one’s experiences into consciousness and consciousness into critical thought. By the time James coined the term “radical empiricism,” he had already been doing its work, outside the bounds of rationalist thought and knowledge. This is to say that he had a natural orientation toward studying and taking seriously those intensive—­rather than extensive—­ properties that belie exact calculation or literalization. Throughout his work, which begins in the hard sciences and then moves into psychology and finally toward his famous study The Varieties of Religious Experience, James finds himself again and again coming up against the limits of what he is able to do and say according to the dictates of his given professional surroundings. Moving from the body to the mind and finally into the realm of belief, it is James’s critical seriousness about things that elude exact professional inspection or calculation that sums up his style as a thinker and scholar. Though not exactly the same, I think of radical empiricism as James’s conceptual framework for considering and cultivating his style. He describes philosophy at its logical limits, at a point where one can either follow the familiar paths that had already been carved out or seek another way, not around necessarily but through, a burrowing and a conversion (of knowledge back into experience, of fashions or conventions into style).11 James’s writing is impatient with the familiar; like a proto–­Jim Morrison, James seems to want to break out of the familiar onto its other side. He laments “a curious unrest, . . . a loosening of old landmarks, a softening of oppositions, a mutual borrowing from one another on the part of systems anciently closed, and an interest in new suggestions, however vague, as if the one thing sure were the inadequacy of the extant school-­solutions.”12 For James, radical empiricism is the opposite of rationalism. This distinction is also James’s

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chosen analogy for understanding the difference between curiosity and familiarity, between philosophic invention or change and dyed-­in-­the-­ wool philosophic knowledge formations (what he calls “extant school-­ solutions” in the preceding quote). A radical empiricism bases its sense of truth on its experience of the world, whereas a reductionist approach seeks vindication for its prefabricated notions of truth. Rationalism has the benefit of tradition and institutional legitimacy, whereas empiricism runs the risk of appearing amateurish and unserious. That said, if we work within the limits of James’s dichotomy, we can only call radical empiricism the open-­minded and capacious style of thought and reason. Truth is not a given in this case; it has to be experienced to be learned. Here again we find ourselves at another example of the inherent conflict between experience and convention, style and fashion, or the one and the many, which James describes elsewhere as perhaps the primary problem of philosophy.13 At stake here is a view of the universe, which a rationalist views as whole and unchanging and a radical empiricist understands vis-­à-­vis their experience of it: “Rationalism tends to emphasize universals and to make wholes prior to parts in the order of logic as well as in that of being. Empiricism, on the contrary, lays the explanatory stress upon the part, the element, the individual, and treats the whole as a collection and the universal as an abstraction.”14 Radical empiricism takes a reparative approach to the problems inherent in reductionism, which he says stems from “ordinary empiricism,” or a way of thinking that does see the world in all its various parts but does not do enough to make sense of the connections between things. Listing his empiricist forebears—­George Berkeley, David Hume, James Mill, John Mill—­James wants to enhance philosophy’s capacity to do “ full justice to conjunctive relations”; “we can imagine a universe of withness but no nextness; or one of nextness but no likeness, or of likeness with no activity, or of activity with no purpose, or of purpose with no ego.”15 James’s “mosaic philosophy” assembles all of these parts in a way that enhances and tunes into not only the parts themselves but also the spaces and gaps between them.16 He chooses the visual metaphor here, but his style is also musical. These are all notes that, together, make up his composition of the universe, which is multilayered and overflowing with its own irreducible forms and forces of distinction and difference. Radical empiricism is his way of tuning into this noise, of turning the

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radio dial back and forth until you hear something that makes sense. It is his way of engaging with all of those unserious and unmeasurable qualities—­like love—­t hat undergird life and give it meaning: radical empiricism as style. Those who are engaged in contemporary debates about the practice of critique or theory have much to learn from James’s earlier engagements with philosophical methods. This recurrent longing to move away from or through familiar methodological practices is also a desire to move into the pluriverse that James describes beautifully and abundantly in his work on radical empiricism. It is also a latent desire for style as a way to move past the familiar and into what I call the intensive zone, which is that place outside, beneath, and within the physical world where things are obvious, measurable, and as plain as day. We do not need to find our way toward this desire for intensivity; it is already there—­often in our earliest, amateurish tendencies, in our “love” for what we do as readers, interpreters, and representers of texts and textuality. The lesson here is in realizing that methods necessarily create and then reach breaking points. The amateur is, let us not forget, not just the unprofessional but also the lover or admirer. But what of the professional, trained critic who wants to tap back into the love that was always there? Part of the problem is that our educations into and services of institutional modes of thought give us new kinds of pleasures—­the pleasures not so much of reading and experiencing texts but of proving something prefabricated to be true by virtue of our professional rendering of that same text. These pleasures are more like vindication really, and they are right in line with the kinds that James decries in his description of reductionism in philosophy, which are in service of their own claims over truth. James asks us, then, to consider the difference between reductionism and radical empiricism, between methodology and style. Methodologies require evidence, and we tend to distinguish between evidence that is obvious and a given and evidence that is ephemeral and harder to pin down. Because of James’s radical empiricism, it is possible to think deeply about what gets placed outside the bounds of methodological inquiry. James’s conceptual gesture turned on a light, carved a space beyond the familiar of criticism and theory where one can encounter those forms of experience and knowledge that are often nonmaterial and subsequently seen as less provable and less serious.

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James has invited us to explore this space/nonspace outside the material or rationalist world and return to it with an enhanced sense of the intensive qualities of life. Writing from this liminal vantage point in between the disciplines, James sums up his and others’ dissatisfaction with the dictates of their profession as “due to the most part to a feeling that they are too abstract and academic.”17 Continuing in this line, he describes the general disenchantment in a way that seems almost exactly in line with postcritique, broadly, and, in particular, Felski’s more contemporaneous view of the literary critical scene. In both cases, the study (of literature, philosophy, the mind, or the body) is somehow distanced from and can no longer see that which it used to know and take part in: “Life is confused and superabundant,” James writes, “and what the younger generation appears to crave is more of the temperament of life in its philosophy, even though it were at some cost of logical vigor and of formal purity.”18 Like Felski, James sees his profession in a kind of decadent state, taking itself seriously in and for all of the wrong reasons. James wants to find a way back into life and out of the decadence of professional accuracy and expertise. In his case, this is done by reclaiming the banners of “seriousness” and rigor from the cold and icy grips of the academic institution. The literary critic is represented across Felski’s book as someone who is always already playing by the ideological rules of the institution. To be fair, graduate training is and should be concerned with laying out the protocols and jargon associated with any given practice of professional scholarship. But like other industries, these rules are also accompanied by a set of aspirational guidelines and affects that the serious literary critic is bound to want to adopt into their work with and on texts. This is why Felski’s The Limits of Critique dwells for so long in what she terms the various “moods” of academic critique. For me, “mood” seems to be inherently personal and usually a way that I measure or indicate my own (often private and illogical) reaction to what is happening in the world around me. For Felski, though, a mood is something more akin to a trend or a “moment” that is in fashion. Studying all of this from above (rather than within) the world of literary criticism, the mood of the day that Felski characterizes is one that she describes as full of incredulity and cynicism. Here she sees a critical field soaked in “entrenched disbelief,” which operates in a kind of echo chamber, producing “a le-

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gitimizing of the status quo through disbelief.” She continues, “Academic cultures are governed by distinctive protocols and behaviors, including a stance that we might call professional skepticism. That is to say, a detached, dispassionate, and skeptical demeanor has become a defining stance of modern purveyors of knowledge. . . . Critique is [therefore] a form of contemporary ‘knowledge work’ that is grounded in the values of analytical distance, professional autonomy, and expertise—­qualities that critics reproduce in their own modes of discourse even as they question them.”19 It all seems so dreary. The entire universe of literary criticism seems, at least in Felski’s rendering, to foreclose the possibility of genuine resistance or change from within. The literary critic learns from even before the first day of graduate school to call into question or at the very least hide away their unserious forms of emotional or personal attachment to literature. This means that, even before the first day of the first semester, this critic-­in-­the-­making learns to think of themselves suspiciously, to look with shaded eyes and earnest disappointment at who they were before they learned to polish up their childish reading habits into mature and successful modes of literary critique. As a possible rejoinder to all of this, there is a persistent kind of utopianism undergirding Felski’s otherwise-­sobering review of the field of literary critique. Gesturing toward what has become known as the field of postcritique and offering what might be its central intervention or aspiration, Felski argues that “critique is not just a matter of content (‘knowing that’ something is the case) but also a matter of style, method, and orientation (‘knowing how’ to read a text or pursue a line of reasoning) involving emulation of both tone and technique. Ways of thinking are also ways of doing.”20 I am in line with the spirit of this statement even if I view its terms from the other end of the telescope. To begin with, the final statement is true but also contains another truth that the stylist knows instinctively to be so: ways of doing are also ways of thinking—­as a force that precedes us, as what Gilles Deleuze (via Henri Bergson) might term a pure “virtuality” or what I think of as style.21 A virtuality is, vis-­à-­vis Deleuze, a sense or component of “reality” that is immaterial and ideal but very much a real thing in and of itself. The virtual emanates from what we might call the “imaginary,” a world where we permit only children and child-­like minds to dwell but that we can access if we are able to disaggregate the knowledge we have been given of

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the so-­called real world. Style is a kind of sincere trust in this imagined, virtual sense of who we are before we are expected to become someone else. At the same time as it is a sense of who we “really” are, style is also a practice of enacting that sense, over and over again, until one finds a way of becoming more like oneself (rather than the other way around).

Everybody’s Talking: Consciousness, Pragmatism, and Other New Words for Old Ideas Stylists create and cultivate themselves according to the limits of their form and the logic of their dreams. Critics wishing to behave in this manner need to take their senses and orientations more and not less sincerely, for it is through these virtual modes that change and elaboration become a possibility. One place to begin is in the realm of experience, a place that is made up only of ideas, a pure virtuality. For this, again, it makes sense to turn to James, who fabricated philosophical concepts that provide us access to that world of ideas and feelings that exist alongside, outside, and within the material. In doing so, we follow along a certain ethical track already carved out by Bruno Latour (who, as I have mentioned, heavily influenced Felski and her postcritical allies), who warns himself and others interested in the practice of social critique that we must learn to adopt and hone “a stubbornly realist attitude—­to speak like William James.”22 Latour is not arguing for more and more frameworks and abstractions; indeed, the empiricism and realism that Latour imagines is not of the social scientific variety. He is arguing for a critical method that takes its own senses of the real seriously—­that works to fabricate its own ways of studying and knowing the innumerable components of existence. To speak like William James—­of existence or the real—­is necessarily to engage in a zone that is purely virtual and to speak in a way that is inventive and conceptual. James is a great American philosophical stylist who moved up to and through the limits of disciplinary convention, toward a self-­generating mode of coming to know and describe the qualities and meanings of experience. James’s “radical empiricism” believes in and redescribes experience as knowledge. This is a line of thinking that runs alongside and even harmonizes with my own notion of style as both form and content. One reason we like to separate style

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from content is that we believe style to be ineffable in nature, difficult to pin down, and impossible to materialize exactly. We are happy, on the other hand, to accept the idea of form as that which imbues content, as the idea behind the thing. But paired in this way, it is form that gets the short end of the stick. If content is the way we understand something to be concretely and form is its opposite, then form is immaterial, both a nonmateriality and something closer to what that word otherwise implies: unimportant, trivial, subjective, and so on. We do not consciously mean this, I am sure, when we separate form from content or style from fashion, but the underlying values are hard to ignore. In other words, it is easier to place value on things that we can see, touch, and sense physically. It is also true that we place more use on things that we can measure, calculate, capture, and, most importantly, compare to other things. This is why we as a culture—­and in the names of institutions—­prefer fashion to style, content to form, and knowledge to experience: because we want replications of what we know that we want. It is easier and more obviously pleasurable to seek out things that suit this kind of worldview, to, for instance, place more value on something’s “content” because it is measurable and, in one way or the other, more material than its form, which we tend to think of as of secondary importance. What we need to get around or through this phenomenon are ways of thinking that place these terms on an even playing field, to think of form and content as two modes of indirectly expressing those huge, immeasurable, and nonmaterial forces—­like experience or style—­that are not and will never be precisely calculable. In spite of James’s education, he was always on his way to becoming a philosopher. Indeed, by the time James published his textbook titled Psychology (1907), one can feel that he was coming up against the limitations of his professional training, which instructed him that evidence is material in nature. Here, in the opening page of his book, James accedes the point, stating squarely that psychology is “to be treated as a natural science, . . . [tasked with the creation of a clinical] description and explanation of states of consciousness as such.”23 Obviously the practice of psychology has, since the time of James, been accepted as a legitimate field of scientific and medical research, but that does not discount the fact that its primary concerns—­as described succinctly here by James—­ are with things that are ineffable and often resist inspection of any kind.

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To think about the mental lives of human beings is necessarily to move into a space that is partly material and partly immaterial. This is also a way of saying that the analysis of mental states must accept that its evidence is going to be neither solely material nor solely immaterial. While there are arguments made that render human consciousness in totally material terms, there is still no way to translate something like thought or mood into physical properties. These are and will always be beyond the scope of material conversion. This is a fact that hides in plain sight throughout James’s Psychology textbook, which moves chapter by chapter through the various human sensations (touch, sight, hearing, taste), adhering as much as it can to the logic of physical evidence. It looks at the body and its surfaces for descriptions and explanations of our experiences of sensation. James can explain, for instance, human sight physiologically, anatomizing the various parts of our eyes to explain what and how we see. In doing so, he, of course, also uses the form of the eye to describe the limits of sight, showing the limitations of the human body to explain what it cannot physically accomplish. All of these explanations bear the mark of a physiologist’s view of things, which one realizes is limited by its dependence on the physical realm when James comes up against those intensive qualities that we all know as humans color our existence. In the chapter entitled “Pain,” for instance, James reaches the end of his anatomical rendition of the sensation of pain only to come up against a kind of existential confession: that, as he says, “the physiology of pain is still an enigma.”24 The enigma in this case is due to the fact that pain is not exactly or precisely measurable, that its sensation is registered via a whole host of intensive experiences of qualities like “heat, cold, and pressure . . . [that are essentially] indistinguishable when extreme—­we only feel the pain.”25 “The pain,” as he describes it, is both immanently recognizable as something we experience as human beings and inherently incalculable as an exactly comparable sensation. Pain is, after all, in the body of the beholder. Science can study it but cannot fully or accurately represent it. Like all other human experiences, the exact nature of pain escapes the frame. It is both too bodily and not bodily enough to warrant a purely material study. It is what James refers to as one of the “common sensations” (“Taste, smell, as well as hunger, thirst, nausea, and other so-­called ‘common’ sensations need not be

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touched on in this book, as almost nothing of psychological interest is known concerning them”) of being human that are also the blind spot of scientific analysis.26 Once James moves through the various parts of the body in order to explain the scientific basis of human experience, his Psychology textbook takes a decidedly philosophical (and nearly poetic) turn, around the middle of the text, where he has a chapter on “streams of consciousness.” Our mental lives are made up of what he calls here “chopped-­up bits” of sensations, memories, and experiences that all tend to shape the presentation of ourselves in intensive terms—­in the form of our personality, temperament, habits, and so on. He likens our overall “consciousness” to something like a river or a stream that contains and carries all of these chopped-­up bits of information along with it, creating in effect our continuous sense of ourselves in and of the world.27 When something happens to us in the past, it informs our sense of the present. This memory, this bit of information—­which was once registered physically perhaps on the body and certainly in the brain cavity—­flows into and gives a purpose or meaning to our experience of the present moment as it passes us by. This “remembrance” of our time gone by is, for James, more fluid than mere knowledge of that which has occurred. Whereas knowledge is rational and must be consumed from without, remembrance is, James argues, more “like a direct feeling; its object is suffused with a warmth and intimacy to which no object of mere conception ever attains.”28 James uses the example of two boys who fall asleep together and wake up the next morning, each with his own remembrance—­his own stream of consciousness—­of the night before carrying them into the next day. Each boy, he points out, remembers his own while merely conceiving of his bedmate’s state of awareness.29 Consciousness is composed of more than the facts of having gone to bed, slept, and then awoken in the same bed that you were in when you dozed off. It is infused, James says, with the sensation of intensive “qualities of warmth and intimacy” that make up a remembrance but are, at the point in which he writes his textbook, beyond the limit of official evaluation, suited instead for researchers of the future who are able to adequately represent that which resists exact representation. For the time being, though, James does conceive of a philosophical concept, that of the stream of consciousness: “Consciousness, then, does not appear

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to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as ‘chain’ or ‘train’ do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.”30 In using a metaphor—­a stream—­to convey and carry away the specifics of physical sensation, James reimagines consciousness in a manner decidedly reflective of human habit and belief. We are more than our physical bodies, and experience is something far greater and more nebulous than one brain function after the other. Everything that happens to us on the physical realm is transformed into memory, into metaphor, and blends into that stream of consciousness that carries us from past to present and on into the future. Even a bolt of thunder, in James’s poetic vision, is more than a material happening: “The thunder itself we believe to abolish and exclude the silence; but the feeling of the thunder is also a feeling of the silence as just gone.”31 The event of thunder comes into our present view and makes its effect, but it is also and at the same time an experience, a feeling, a remembrance of thunder that came before and a vision of thunder to come again. Thunder is also a way of revealing the silence: an imperceptible force enclosing (preceding and following) that which can or cannot be perceived, felt, and quantified on this material realm. Up to this point, I have been dealing—­perhaps carelessly—­with two distinct types of immaterial forces: the intensive, a property that does not depend on the amount of matter present, and the ephemeral, a quality that can be felt and is inherent in the experience of living but cannot be measured. The weather is an intensive property embedded with ephemeral qualities. Thinking about it breaks up and forces me to confront these two threads running through this chapter thus far. When we speak of the “weather,” we are speaking, in some sense, of things that are measurable but immaterial, such as temperature or air quality. But there are other times when talking about the weather is not exactly talking about the weather, which is exactly the idea behind that old Mark Twain aphorism (that, in actuality, he seems not to have said at all): “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody is doing anything about it.”32 Here, “the weather” is a container for all sorts of fleeting moods and notions, a way for human beings to converse about nothing in particular in a particular sort of way.

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The weather is, in any event, a metaphor. A term with the Greek root metapherein, meaning “to transfer,” “metaphor” implies the transfer of a meaning of something onto something. It is the way that we both represent a thing and transfer the meaning of that representation back onto that thing. There is “the weather” that a meteorologist can forecast and measure out and “the weather,” our actual experience of being in the world and feeling it all. So there is a difference between intensive properties and ephemeral qualities of life, and there are some things that can be measured that do not have material forms. None of this changes the fact that, if we believe Bob Dylan (as this writer tends to), “it don’t take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”33 There is weather and “weather.” And there are metaphors and metaphors. Some of them stick around and become so real that we forget their truly oblique natures. Some of the terms used, for instance, by psychology to represent (re-­present) the human back to itself—­the self, memory, pain, joy, and the like—­can be measured and detected on a material basis at the level of the brain’s activity. Others, though—­like habit, demeanor, will, association, consciousness, and so on—­are likewise metaphors for human feeling but exist in such a manner as to not be measurable. A psychologist, such as William James, deals in these two types of metaphors to do their work, which is partly engaged in the realm of scientific proof and analysis and in the kind of representational labor engaged in by novelists and poets. Like James’s artistic brethren, he is stuck with words as tools of his trade, words that seem to both perfectly suit and never quite do justice to the complexities of human experience. Describing consciousness is a lot like describing the weather in that it is both always accurate and inaccurate; it involves mere description and artistic innovation. James’s stream of consciousness metaphor is not built on any notion of its exact measurability; it is a metaphor that is built in such a way as to remain in its imaginary, metaphorical state and not to be transformed into something with an exact or exacting definition. It is not, in other words, a scientific category. James’s invention of the term is an example of his orientation toward the kind of conceptual and artistic innovation that, according to Deleuze, comes from the imaginary space of literature. When James demonstrates his notion of a stream of consciousness that flows like a river, carrying bits of information along with it, he does more than merely explain or teach

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the subject of psychology. Here, he is writing and entering into a mode of becoming. In the essay “Literature and Life,” Deleuze describes this process as occurring in those imperceptible liminal gaps between that which is material and that which is not and will never be. To think into this area is very much like burrowing into the earth, though in this case the direction of the writer’s burrowing is not earthly. This kind of writing is, Deleuze explains, “not to impose a form (of expression) on the matter of lived expression”; instead, it is “a process, that is, a passage of Life that transverses both the livable and the lived.”34 Representing the human experience is an effort of digging into and revealing both the apparent and mysterious components that make up our experiences of life. For James, this work is both artistic and philosophical in that it, as he says, is not just a technical pursuit. In his book Pragmatism: A New Word for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907), James describes his philosophical approach as inspired more by reading books than scientific training: “The philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos. . . . Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens out the widest vistas.”35 To philosophize along these lines is to engage in something that is decidedly artistic, even literary. Like a novelist, James’s notion of the psychologist-­philosopher finds their ways of seeing the world in books and other forms of art. The world that James re-­creates in his work is a world full of metaphors that never become objects, of fantasies that enclose and emerge from the natural world while still remaining on their ephemeral plane of existence. In doing so, James is oriented toward a Deleuzian mode of becoming, which moves away from metaphors that are like objects and toward those that remain imperceptible. Writing and thinking in this manner is, Deleuze argues, “inseparable from becoming: in writing, one becomes-­woman, becomes-­animal or vegetable, becomes-­molecule to the point of becoming-­imperceptible.”36 These forms, or metaphoric objects, are disaggregated in this process of becoming, which is directed toward their truly ephemeral components. Thinking and writing about the human experience is, then, a way of thinking about what one is not, of reflecting back on one’s own sense

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of what it means to be alive and human indirectly, by virtue of one’s imagining the plight of the other. This work cannot help but be creative and conceptual, and it moves, Deleuze shows us, toward a universe that we can neither see nor measure in physical terms. Thinking and writing in this way is a mode of becoming-­other that is something like an “empiricist conversion,” a way of imagining and experiencing that is oriented toward what Deleuze calls a “zone of proximity, indiscernibility, or indifferentiation where one can no longer be distinguished from a woman, an animal, or a molecule—­neither imprecise nor general, but unforeseen and nonpreexistent, singularized out of a population rather than determined in a form.”37 Writing or thinking in the direction of this ephemeral space is also linking up with what Deleuze describes here as the “point of becoming-­imperceptible.” Re-­membering something is a creative act that enters us into this kind of zone. Recalling and re-­ presenting the events of the past is a way of deepening the stream of consciousness, which flows from the present moment into a future zone that cannot be seen. Living makes us human, and recalling the experience of life is what makes us otherwise. Experiencing and reflecting on life is necessarily a kind of conversion, from human to becoming-­human.

Mystical Conversions: Object-­Oriented Ontology, the Incorporeal, and Other Modes of Interpretation beyond Materialism Is there a way to read and interpret beyond the limits of what we call materialism? There can be no life, at least on Earth, beyond materiality, but life would have no meaning or reflective value if it were not for our experience of its qualities. Meaning is the process by which a human being makes sense of all of the stuff (which is to say objects, materials, physical sensations) and qualities (the ephemeral, subjective, imaginary) of living. It is the mode of travel taken between the very real and physical world made up of objects and things and the immanent universe composed of intensive properties and ephemera. Meaning-­making is a process by which one lives and then conceives of living. This is an extension of Descartes’s “I think therefore I am,” which allows us to understand how humans come to understand themselves as such, how “I” became “I” in my own mind. Thinking, according to Descartes, creates us as humans. The search for and discernment of meaning is how

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we, as human beings, create and reflect not only the physical world we occupy but also the immaterial universe that encloses and emerges from that world. Materialisms of all sorts—­whether from Marx or the Vatican—­give us a sense of what things mean, in and of themselves and to one another. As systems, they insinuate a kind of ordering of things, governed by the values attached to these meanings. All power flows ultimately back to the giver of the meanings, whose primacy is reflected back to itself by itself. When, for instance, “man” appears in Genesis, he commences to name all of the creatures in his view: cow, sheep, snake, pig, and so on. In the act of naming these things, of transforming them from unknowns into known objects, he has enacted the world’s first metaphor, the first transfer of something meaning onto nothing. An animal, say a pig, becomes itself once its properties—­its objectness—­are linked up with and transferred into its qualities. The snout, flat nose, pink skin, snorts, cloven hooves, and curly tail all make up the object we know, thanks to Adam, as a pig. The pig is a material thing, an object and all of the qualities we associate with that object. Its name—­“pig”—­is a metaphor uniting the pig as an object and a bundle of qualities associated with that object. If we believe Aristotle, who says in Poetics that the creation of metaphor is a sign of genius, then Adam was the first of many conceptual artists remaking things by transferring meaning onto them—­no different, really, than Andy Warhol, who remade an entire midcentury American supermarket into an art gallery. “Metaphor,” Aristotle argues, “is the application of a strange term either transferred from the genus and applied to the species or from the species and applied to the genus, or from one species to another or else by analogy.”38 The act of naming something, of transferring a meaning onto something, is an artistic act. When Adam names the pig, he not only makes the pig into a thing but also engages in a work of conceptual magic whereby he estranges it, in its purely objective state, from itself, transferring onto it “a stranger term” of his own. Like Warhol, he sees something that exists before him in the world and remakes that something into something in and of his own image. He makes the pig mean something, which is not altogether a material occurrence. There is something happening at the same time, but not on the same physical plane, that has more to do with mysticism than pure materialism.

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To think, read, or write outside of materialism is not the same as reading against or beyond materiality. An other than or outside of materialist reading of something like Adam’s story in Genesis is one that is oriented toward that strange intermediary zone between the real and the unreal, the physical and conceptual or ephemeral. In this way, I at least partly follow in the tracks of Graham Harman and his Object-­Oriented Ontology (OOO), which is aware of and tuned into “the deep divide or tension between an object and its qualities.”39 Harman sees this difference as something of particular interest to both artist and philosopher, two occupations that specialize in re-­creating the world in such a way as to render it more complex and more divergent than it was before. These are both distinct from scientific practices, Harman points out, because they seek to draw out the distinctions between on object and its qualities. “In science,” he says, “the whole point is to replace a proper name like ‘RX J185635-­3754’ (a real neutron star in the constellation Corona Australis) with a more tangible list of definite properties of this object.”40 The astronomer’s job, in other words, is to “replace the vague, place-­holding name of this neutron star with the fruit of definite qualities proven to belong to it: such as being roughly 400 light years from Earth, and having a diameter of somewhere between 4 and 8 kilometres and a surface temperature of around 434,000 degrees Celsius.”41 The labor he describes—­of replacing a proper name with qualities—­is like Adam’s naming of the pig but from the other end of the telescope. In both cases, there is a transfer of meaning between the world of objects and the ephemeral realm of qualities in service of a preexisting body of knowledge. By naming the pig, Adam has performed a kind of mystical conversion. He enhances the system of human language and in doing so expands the human’s preeminence over other animals living on Earth. When the astronomer descries the quality of the neutron star, they strengthen the body of knowledge we call “astronomy,” the scientific study of the stars. These are both worthy endeavors insofar as they are engaged in the labor of building up these material apparatuses in the form of knowledge. But art and philosophy are different from science in that they are interested in expanding and bringing to the fore those things or forces that distinguish an object from its qualities. This immaterial zone is not one where, Harman argues, philosophers or artists “search for knowledge” in a manner he describes as a “literalist enter-

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prise that identifies an object with all of its components and effects that truly belong to it.”42 To say that philosophy, for instance, is not a literalist endeavor is a rather radical claim for Harman to make. In doing so, he is insisting on it as a practice of conceptualization and reflection that is interested in what we know and what we can never truly know. Harman says that a literalist notion of philosophy forsakes the possibilities of thinking about the world as composed of something other than physical objects. Even so, he acknowledges his critique of literalism as something that might make other philosophers nervous, since it implies that if we move away from a literalist definition of the universe we might end up without anywhere to be. The literalist might ask themselves, Harman says, “how do we save ourselves from a series of unverifiable mystical claims?”43 This kind of nonliteralist practice is one that seeks out Deleuze’s imperceptible zone where nonmaterial things exist. Harman’s critique of literalism is exactly in its refusal to acknowledge that there is another universe and that making contact with it can only be done through somewhat-­magical means. Elizabeth Grosz, well-­known for her striking contributions to the fields of materialist feminism/philosophy, has contributed to this discussion of materialism and its limits in her latest book, titled The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism (2017). Like James, she finds herself up against the limits of her own philosophical tradition and wants to find a way through to its other side, a kind of intellectual conversion that she performs via her engagement with a long line of philosophers who work and think in the intensive zone. These thinkers are submerged, however, because they do not fit the needs of contemporary philosophical debates and methods. Grosz concedes, early on, that these days, “just about everyone is a materialist.”44 With this in mind, she makes her task in this book to address what is normally assumed to be materialism’s opposite: idealism. While Grosz is far from abandoning her own commitments to thinking in material terms about bodies and their many becomings, she finds herself in the position that all untimely thinkers come to encounter at some point in time. That is, with Grosz having committed her intellectual energies to the cultivation of a subject that has come to be accepted and even made popular across the humanities and sciences, her introduction to The Incorporeal has to deal with differentiating her present work (from others but also from herself).

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Grosz acknowledges that, amid the ever-­growing fields of new materialisms that keep cropping up, “it is almost impossible to find an explicit and credible contemporary advocate of idealism.”45 Grosz is not the missing idealist, and her book is not a hunt through the dark woods of philosophy in search of one. Rather, she is fascinated by the idea of an alternative philosophical narrative that moves athwart rationalism and dualism. Without pretending that it is possible to transcend this ideological binary (to do otherwise would require idealistic solipsism and, more importantly, defy the laws of matter), Grosz traces a path back in time, bringing to light a “strain of counterphilosophy” that, while hidden in the shadows, has never disappeared.46 Running alongside or perhaps underneath (but never against) the grain of Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, Hegel, and Heidegger is a pathway populated by philosophy’s others: “alien” thinkers and creators who believe otherwise. “Idealism,” she explains, “at best lurks unknowingly within avowedly materialist texts.”47 To begin this work of thinking along the lines of idealism, Grosz must first shake off the dust that has accumulated over time. As such, her book begins by addressing the historical distinction made between matter and idea (mind/body, form/content, etc.) that informs and describes the dominant forms of philosophy alive in the West since its inception.48 The “incorporeal” becomes Grosz’s name for that which has a name and presence but cannot be adequately explained through the lens of a strictly rationalist materialism. Her book is “an exploration of the incorporeal conditions of corporeality, the excesses beyond and within corporeality that frame, orient, and direct material things and processes.”49 It is, in other words, an inquiry into the very things that frame and make life on Earth real and constitute our sense of being alive, a complex and nonreductive take on the overabundant forms that make up existence. Grosz’s work produces, throughout, what she refers to as “an extramaterialism,” which names her commitment to and curiosity regarding idealism’s role in the “framing conditions of materiality,” in the “inherence of ideality, conceptuality, meaning, or orientation that persists in relation to and within materiality as its immaterial or incorporeal conditions.”50 She offers an alternative to the idea of “mind over matter,” whereby ideas are privileged over form, by turning to philosophers who understood ideality and materiality to exist in a more active and less hierarchical state of being and becoming. “Ideality

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and materiality,” she maintains, “are not two substances but two ways in which the real is distributed.”51 The figures populating her genealogy of counterphilosophy (the Stoics, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Deleuze, Gilbert Simondon, Raymond Ruyer) represent a still-­living, if inconsistent and mercurial, intellectual tradition. As such, Grosz’s journey is not to be understood as against or beyond reductive materialisms but as into philosophy’s subterranean world. This, like style, involves what Quentin Crisp describes as a “journey to the interior,” yielding results that are meant to enhance and vivify (as opposed to destroy or replace) life as we know it.52 Style is for me what Grosz finds resonating between her disparate thinkers: a kind of, as she terms it, “ontoethics,” “a way of thinking about not just how the world is but how it could be, how it is open to change, and, above all, the becomings it may undergo.”53 Style is, in other words, both a way of being and a potential practice of becoming. The stylist is attuned to or aware of this practice and subsequently commits themselves to living within the limits of their style. The cultivation of style is, then, primarily a therapeutic exercise that, like philosophy, seeks wisdom and consciousness within as a way to expand and evolve without. Far from a frivolous undertaking, style is, especially in the ways that Crisp would have us understand it, a mode of survival and a form of living. As such, this is a projection of one’s imaginary vision of oneself into the future: a way or producing a future, virtual self by way of what Deleuze calls “Vision”: “At the limit, the imaginary is a virtual image that is interfused with the real object, and vice versa, thereby constituting a crystal of the unconscious. . . . ‘Vision’ is the product of this doubling or splitting in two . . . this coalescence.”54 Crystals are, like stylists, self-­ created. Theirs is, in Grosz’s words, “a process of self-­creation, which begins to elaborate a distinction, or a permeable difference, between an interiority and an exteriority, a distinction or border between two sites unfolded from one, capitalizing on the bifurcation that emerges between energy and information.”55 The way a crystal comes into being is in other words through its way of thinking. It is a way of doing that is also a way of imagining. The object lesson here for literary criticism is in the possibilities of thinking along the lines of the virtual, of pursuing lines of inquiry that adhere to our instincts rather than the systems of knowledge available to us in the form of professional mandates and

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protocols. The stylist-­critic understands implicitly that there is no use distinguishing between the form and content of something. Engagement with texts is one (of many) opportunity for the stylist to enact and then reenact that which they know to be. What we call “critique,” then, ought to be considered one of many habits of the stylist: one of the ways that the stylist recognizes and becomes more like they are, a kind of radical empiricism—­or even speculative realism—­that adheres to the dictates of instinct and belief while at the same time constantly veering away from (or moving deep into) systems of knowledge that are and will always be outside of us.56 This suggests that a reading practice outside of materialism insinuates that one is engaging in something closer to an idealist practice. These two terms—­“materialism” and “idealism”—­are typically thought of to be in direct opposition. The first sees the world in physical terms and understands human consciousness of that world as related to and reflective of the human’s interaction with the material world. Matter, in this case, is static and unthinking; the human mind is the creative force that interacts with and gives meaning to matter. For a materialist, this occurrence is a physical phenomenon that occurs at the level of brain activity. Expressions of consciousness—­ thought, creativity, action—­can be reduced to the physical mind and body’s interaction with the material world. In a materialist worldview, reality is tangible, touchable, and measurable. Idealism, on the other hand, sees reality as an immaterial phenomenon. Reality is what humans perceive it to be. For an idealist, consciousness is something that cannot be precisely measured or accounted for. It is an experience of being in time that reflects back on itself as it moves from one moment to the next. From my perspective and, I think, that of any other human being, the idea that one is either a materialist or an idealist seems preposterous. Life seems to be a combination of material occurrences and ephemeral happenings. When I hear a song that reminds me of an earlier time in my life, I am sure the feeling I get is at least partly registerable on the level of my brain’s activity and my body’s reaction to or revelation of my feeling. I can get goosebumps, become excited in the pit of my stomach, or blush with irritation as I find myself conveyed from this moment to another via my experience of a song. On these levels, this experience is merely my body enacting my consciousness. But there is another level

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to all of this that frankly does not relate to my sense of myself as a physical body but instead as a coexistent thinking, feeling, and conceptualizing being that sits with and accompanies my body as it moves through life. This part of me is the part of me that decides what things mean, that experiences meaning as a phenomenon of life. Both of these parts of me—­t he physical and the abstract—­exist. Of course, none of what I am saying is new. Plato split the mind from the body long ago, and Descartes, whom I have already mentioned, cleared up a lot of the mystery of human experience when he explained the workings of mind and matter. But it is this split that I am interested in, not so much as an opportunity to think about the critical differences between materialism and idealism or body and mind. This is the domain of “proper” philosophers, who have explained and can explain the significance of this difference far better than I. With that said, I am also operating with a certain kind of suspicion about my own allegiances since, at least by the look of things, I am more likely to align myself with those thinkers we might call “idealists” who see human consciousness as an immaterial phenomenon. Declaring myself an idealist would mean contradicting the spirit of my work, which aspires to work to disaggregate structures of knowledge, even idealist ones. But contradictions like these are exactly where and how moments of change or disaggregation occur. Without contradiction, thinking becomes a process of reinforcing the familiar. What I need to do is accept the contradictory nature of my aspirations and tendencies as a critic: to write outside of materialism not by clinging to idealism but by burrowing into that zone that exists between and within these two otherwise-­oppositional categories. This has to be done by a kind of mysticism, as I have said, but not the kind that your average magician or mystic might claim access to. After all, the mystic, Harman reminds us, is generally thought of as the polar opposite of the rationalist, and this is nothing other than a perfect analogy for the idealist and materialist. “The mystic,” he says, “generally claims direct access to reality just as the rationalist does, even though the mystic claims to arrive there through spiritual means rather than intellectual ones.”57 Harman places the word “direct” in italics to emphasize an important point here, which is that both of these practices insist that they are the ones tasked with and equipped for relating or transferring reality to the

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rest of us. The mystic and the rationalist are both like traveling salesmen who roll into town, each with his own bill of goods. OOO takes another tack, though, toward that intensive zone of difference of which I have been writing. Rather than claiming to have, via the spirit or material world, a mainline to reality, Harman claims that he “rejects the priority of both of these methods equally, given our [practitioners of OOO] view that indirect access to reality is generally the best way to work with it.”58 A reading into or of reality and human awareness of it that is neither materialist nor idealist is one that works, apparently, in indirect and oblique fashion. Something like an argument that is built on a nonmaterialist reading that is also not squarely invested in an idealist philosophical practice is one that has to be very aware of itself. This kind of argumentation is deliberate about being open; it extrapolates meaning by making deliberation into something other than what it is. “Deliberation” contains the Latinate root libra, which recalls the famous scales of the astrological sign, insinuating counting and balance. The act of deliberation is weighed down by itself. An indirect analysis of this weight, of this scaling, might mean thinking not about what is being weighed or what the scales tell us about what we know. Indirect deliberation might mean thinking about the nature of balance, thinking against the grain of calculation by accepting, patiently and willfully, the path of miscalculation and experimentation—­a reading practice that is rooted in something close to Deleuze and Guattari’s description of style as “the moment when language is no longer defined by what it says, but by what it causes to move, to flow, . . . a pure process that fulfills itself, and that never ceases to reach fulfillment as it proceeds—­art as ‘experimentation.’”59 This kind of style is in search of something emergent. It is a process of becoming rather than a being. Style is a reading practice in intensity, of variation. And with this, we arrive back at a point made by Harman: that philosophy is more akin to art than it is to science, and following that train of thought, philosophers should resist the urge to engage in literalist readings and renderings of the world that presuppose their direct vision of it as such, whether in purely material or ideal terms. We also arrive at another, perhaps more American way to look at all of this, which is about overcoming the skeptic’s claim to rationalism and the mystic’s hold over all things immaterial.

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“I Believe What My Nature Inclines Me to Believe”: Belief and/as Styles Here I would like to turn back to William James’s pragmatism and, more importantly for my purposes, his emphasis on temperament and belief as vectors of philosophical thought, expression, and style. These are both immaterial forces that are, in some way, measurable in James’s work, and they relate very much to my own sense of style as an ontology (the way that one is), as a mode of becoming vis-­à-­vis the various modes of creative expression available to us in the arts and philosophy. James’s attunement to temperament and belief are another way into or beneath the gap between materialist and idealist thinking. For James, it is not merely our perception of life that matters but our self-­made and self-­reflective modes of belief in reality that truly constitute our experience of consciousness and bring together its physical elements and ephemeral qualities. Belief is an active state of consciousness that is partly aware of itself and partly ingrained over time. Following Harman, I want to argue that it is an indirect way to philosophize consciousness, on the trail (or tail) of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of style as a reading practice that “is never a scholarly exercise in search of what is signified . . . but a productive use of the literary machine, . . . a schizoid exercise that extracts from the text its revolutionary force.”60 I would also like to think about belief as a reading practice that combines reflection, interpretation, and experimentation. This kind of reading practice is one that moves according to its own embedded logic, that follows its nose. It is an expression of, to use James’s term, a philosopher’s temperament, which is the driving energetic force leading their thought. A philosopher, according to James, “trusts his temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes in any representation of the universe that does suit it.”61 This is a critical re-­vision of the world made according to what a philosopher is inclined to believe according to their disposition, their temperament, a primary mode of analyzing experience—­of radical empiricism—­rather than a cerebral practice of reenacting the accuracy of rationality. As a way of introducing Pragmatism, James lays out the lines of division that define philosophical endeavors so that he can move into and between them with his self-­professed “new word for some old ways of thinking.” He sees, on the one hand, rationalism, which “starts from wholes and universals, and makes much of the unity of things,” and em-

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piricism, which “starts from the parts, and makes of the whole a collection.”62 From this vantage point, James describes rationalists as monistic in their thinking, as embedded in a worldview that resists or disputes the existence of duality in the universe, that sees everything flowing back to the same source. This depiction of rationalism as taking on a kind of religious approach to its universalisms seems counterintuitive in a post-­ Enlightenment world where we understand rational knowledge to be the domain of scientific inquiry, squarely outside the realm of theology. For James, however, there is something in the rationalist’s belief in reason and knowledge and their concomitant rejection of belief and superstition that makes it not into theology’s opposite but the other end of its serpent’s tail. Both monotheistic theological and rationalistic philosophical systems tend toward an absolute view of the universe. The concepts embedded in a purely rationalist philosophical work are meant to build up our reasonable and actual understanding of the world in toto. What James wants is something closer to what he describes here as empiricism, as something accepting plurality and contradiction as an irreducible force in and of the universe. Without taking a side that is directly opposite to a cold and clean monistic rationalism, though, James enters via the in-­between zone with an eye on disaggregating the artificial distinctions. Here, he finds an opportunity for change, for what he describes as “a philosophy that will not only exercise your powers of intellectual abstraction, but that will make some positive [connection] with this actual world of finite lives.”63 He wants, in other words, a philosophy that knows how to move back and forth between the abstract and concrete, a philosophy, in fact, of movement between the world that we can feel, touch, and see and the one that emerges from it, in forms that escape our material grasp. Lamenting the way that we tend to abstract philosophical matters from the ordinary stuff of “real” life, James recounts the beginning section of the thesis of one of his students: This young man, who was a graduate of some Western college, began by saying that he had always taken for granted that when you entered a philosophic class-­room you had to open relations with a universe entirely distinct from the one you left behind in the street. The two were supposed, he said, to have so little to do with each other, that you could not possibly occupy your mind with them at the same time. The world of con-

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crete personal experiences to which the street belongs is multitudinous beyond imagination, tangled, muddy, painful and perplexed. The world to which your philosophy-­professor introduces you is simple, clean and noble. The contradictions of real life are absent from it. Its architecture is classic. Principles of reason trace its outlines, logical necessities cement its parts. Purity and dignity are what it most expresses. It is a kind of marble temple shining on a hill.64

The philosopher embedded in this kind of fantasy is one equipped with what James calls a temperament of “refinement.” These kind of thinkers “exquisitely satisfy that craving for a refined object of contemplation which is so powerful an appetite of the mind.”65 But how in tune are these kinds of refined thinkers with the ways of the world? How can one toil in the muck of philosophical world-­building and come out clean? On this, James challenges, “I ask you in all seriousness to look abroad on this colossal universe of concrete facts, on their awful bewilderments, their surprises and cruelties, on the wildness which they show, and then tell me whether ‘refined’ is the one inevitable descriptive adjective that springs to your lips. Refinement has a its place in things, true enough. But a philosophy that breathes out nothing but refinement will never satisfy the empiricist temper of mind.”66 James’s issue here is not with philosophers who work in abstraction so much as with the idea that they live in some realm away or removed from the one that the rest of us occupy. In the same way that Harman reminds us of the division between mystical idealist and hard-­edged materialist as being one that OOO fills in, James is interested in disaggregating the one separating the refined, rationalist philosopher from their wild-­eyed counterpart. Whereas I find Harman useful, perhaps counterintuitively, for thinking about the limits of materialism, it is James’s notion of the refined rationalist philosopher that calls to mind the extent to which a purely idealistic, immaterial system of thinking can be self-­limiting. On this strain, he says, “we find men of science preferring to turn their backs on metaphysics as on something altogether cloistered and spectral, and practical men shaking philosophy’s dust off their feet and following the call of the wild.”67 As he takes his description further, James admits its somewhat-­didactic manner. In spite of that awareness, he quips, “If philosophers can treat the life of the universe abstractly, they must not complain of an abstract treatment of the life of

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philosophy itself.”68 Here, James trades temperament for temperament. His oversimplification of the problem of philosophy is demonstrated through his caricatures of a particular type of philosopher’s mannerisms and tendencies—­in other words, their styles. James does this, though, because he recognizes that it is at the level of temperament or style where philosophical concepts first appear. How a person is apt to think, respond to, and characterize the world around them informs and affects the way that they think abstractly or philosophically. We are all inclined to believe in that which we are already oriented to. Style and temperament are two ways of capturing what we also refer to as someone’s personality: that emergent and irreducible force of a person and their way of being in the world. Style and temperament are, in other terms, forms of modulation and variation: immanent forces that are recognized in terms of movement and action.69 Temperament is James’s way of thinking through the intensive qualities of philosophical conceptualization. Like the temperature outside, this is another thing that is measurable but not concrete. James’s arguments move along the intensive lines of temperament. What he is saying basically is that philosophy is nothing more (or less) than an expression of philosophical personality, a tradition based, in other words, firmly in the realm of style. This is James’s pragmatic way into and around what he sees as overdetermined philosophical arguments or camps, of moving into the gap that is laid between, for instance, materialists and idealists or, in his own terms, the “tough-­minded” and the “tender-­minded” among us. Pragmatism is a way through rather than into familiar philosophical debates; it is, James argues, “a method for settling metaphysical disputes that might otherwise be indeterminable.”70 Between the “tough-­minded” materialist who sees the world as made up of physical matter and approaches facts skeptically (thinking that they must be proven in order to be accepted as true) and the “tender-­minded” idealists who tend more toward religious and dogmatic acceptance of (or belief in) their (spiritual, intellectual, personal) view of the world lies the pragmatist. Instead of asking or taking one position or the other in questions such as “Is the world one or many?—­fated or free?—­material or spiritual?” the pragmatist operates via a method that seeks to “interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences.”71 This method is not an answer so much as a disaggregation of the debate that is conducted by trying to understand what is at stake for either side. When

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James looks at a conflict between a materialist and an idealist, he does not see two opposing philosophical conventions so much as two distinct and irreducible styles in conversation. This is not so much a debate where there is an answer at stake as it is a reiteration of either side’s sense of the world, a performance of temperament and style. To make his point, James uses a now-­famous example of a “ferociously metaphysical debate” over a man chasing a squirrel around a tree: “This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction, and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this: does the man go round the squirrel or not?”72 James’s way into this debate is its own kind of solution to its central question. His answer is that each side is right depending on what it means by “go round the squirrel.” If one means “go round” as in move from north to east to south to west and back again, then yes, the man went round the squirrel. If, on the other hand, you mean whether the man was able to get in front of, then to the right of, then behind, and finally to the left of the squirrel, then no, he did not get round. Thusly distinguished, James argues, “There is no occasion for any farther dispute. You are both right and both wrong according as you conceive the verb ‘to go round’ in one practical fashion or another.”73 Admittedly, as a representation of James’s pragmatist approach to great metaphysical debates in the history of philosophy, this example does seem on the surface to be rather trifling. James’s ambivalent approach might even seem to be a way out of the debate rather than a way through it toward something else. But it is easy to conflate the ability to see both sides of something—­ambi-­valence—­with apathy. Additionally, James’s “solution” seems on the surface like nothing more than a kind of blank linguistic claim reiterating the fact that we all attach our own meanings to words according to our preferences. But James is not interested in language per se or in developing an agnostic way out of metaphysical conflicts built on word games. James is interested in understanding how each side of a debate thinks, in accepting each position as predicated first and foremost on a philosopher’s temperament. A philosophical claim is, then, nothing more than a reflection of how a philosopher is already inclined to think. That same philosopher’s man-

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ner and mode of argumentation are a way not only of reflecting their own temperaments but also of seeing those reflected back at them and then cultivating what is thereby reflected into a method, a way of seeing and being in the world. The pragmatist is concerned, in the end, not with the production or reproduction of knowledge (epistemology) but with cultivating a more enhanced understanding of how it is that we, as individuals, sense, interpret, and come to know the world as such. A pragmatist is interested in both the hard and soft components of the universe and believes ultimately in both materialist and idealist endeavors. Instead of taking one side or the other, the pragmatist attends to the personality at work in these philosophical debates, recognizing, in the scheme of things, that “we receive in short the block of marble, but we carve the statue ourselves.”74 This is James’s own way of saying that philosophical inquiry is a mode of expressing style: a way of cultivating our sense—­our consciousness of—­the universe by expressing, reflecting on, and then reiterating our growing sense of ourselves. Mysterious and oblique as this may sound, what I am describing is nothing more or less than all of the extra stuff of the universe that is not material, that cannot be measured but still exists. In some sense, orienting ourselves toward this oblique but knowable part of the universe underscores all of the great studies of the world and ourselves. Theology, cosmology, ontology, biology: these are all ways of attending to and searching for ways of grasping the ineffable. God, the cosmos, life itself: these are all oblique and incomplete ways of referring to the intensive part of the universe, that huge, immanent force that both encloses and emerges from the physical world. We all know and come in contact with this force by virtue of our experience of life as it is lived. Life is essentially a chaotic and inspiring mixture of experiences of things we can recognize from without and things that can only be reckoned with from within. Academic modes of thought hold the same promise and danger of organized religion. Both are vehicles for humans to reflect themselves as humans and get in contact with the mysterious and ways of knowing ourselves through an intense relation with that which is outside of us and not immediately knowable. They are pathways to something inherently impersonal or somewhere imperceptible. They are direct paths of communion with that which is always already indirect and oblique. All of this is enough for any religion or body of

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thought to continue to generate thought and inspire change among its practitioners. It is the point at which one of its followers has decided they have arrived at a point that things get murky. We are interested in the mysterious, in the divine. And we have invented many ways of seeking out the otherwise mysterious and self-­directed qualities of life that inform how we experience the physical world. But more often than not, we recodify the immaterial in material terms, re-­creating the intensive qualities of the universe in our own image, dragging the gods out of the heavens and piling them up like rocks on the ground. Style is a way of transvaluing life into an elaboration of one’s beliefs. More than just “being oneself,” style is also a way to refuse becoming that which one will never be. Style is a way of redirecting one’s energy away from “that which logic can convince” and back toward the information embedded within us instinctually. Style is an expression of belief in the immanent, in that world that encloses and precedes the one introduced to us by our systems of knowledge. With all of this said, style is not a dropping out of the conventional world. It is in fact a process of finding a way to live in the “real” world while also maintaining awareness of or belief in another world achievable by virtue of one’s sense of style. If style is achieved to its fullest capacities, it is, Crisp says in the opening pages of The Naked Civil Servant, not simply a way of going against the grain but, in fact, a way of exercising “the last vestiges of [one’s] free will by swimming with the tide—­but faster.”75 Style is a way of combining that which can be known about the world vis-­à-­vis systems of knowledge with an immanent sense of the world that can be achieved through concentration and the cultivation of one’s personality into habit or even cosmology. And when Crisp says “it takes a genius to believe what is a palpable lie,” he is talking about this very trait. Style is a way of replacing the lies of the world with lies of your own making. A stylist achieves an awareness of the world that cannot be recognized or measured according to the modes of truth finding or telling conducted in the name of logic. Style is, in other words, a sincere belief in all of those things (or qualities) about life that logic or knowledge can never completely know. It is impossible to measure, for instance, one’s personality. But that does not mean that it cannot be detected. A stylist combines—­or attunes—­ what they can be taught about with what it feels like to be alive. It is a way to swim faster than evolution, a way of escaping the arrow of time.

7

Ambivalence and Attunement On Our Field Formations and Deformations I can’t sing a song That I don’t understand —­Bob Dylan, “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” Darling, without an orchestra how in the devil could one sing? —­Royce Reed

Falling Out of Love My graduate training is in American studies, a field that was initially the offspring of Cold War–­era English and history departments in the United States hoping to piece together some narrative about the nation that suited its adolescent sense of itself as both a world power and also, narcissistically, the center of the world, perhaps even the world itself. Over the decades, of course, American studies has become something else altogether. While it has provided an academic territory for those of us interested in working in the space in between major disciplines of study, it has also fostered intellectual movements and outlets that seek to alter or deterritorialize the academic body itself. American studies was, one imagines, supposed to be a constant source of American exceptionalism: a solid (and stolid) tree standing in the field of academic disciplines. What was once the brainchild of a conservative element in US academe grew down and out, like a rhizome, across and beneath the intellectual landscape. With that said, I am not here to discuss the history or futures of American studies per se; and this is not another study of field formation. I am interested, in fact, in quite the opposite: in future field deformations 217

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that are the inevitable outcome of invention and creativity—­which is to say the cultivation of style—­from the margins of our profession. I argue here that perhaps the most important part of deforming an already established mode is a critical ambivalence to its benefits. These changes happen slowly and in the form of a kind of disillusionment that, to me, somewhat mirrors the process of falling out of love with someone. Love is, after all, based on a kind of harmonic illusion: a sincere belief and investment in the idea that you have found “the one.” Graduate training in the humanities is a bit like this. Students come in knowing how to read and write but soon learn very specialized ways to apply these skills; the pleasures of “analyzing” or “unpacking” a text soon become the entire focus of that same person’s habits as a reader and critic. By the time a PhD is in this person’s hands, they can consider themselves wedded to their academic discipline. For the most part, scholars become even more invested in this relationship; their identity as official members of this or that scholarly field or movement becomes the trademark of their career. But there are those that stray, those whose energies and attentions lead them away from the profession and back to the thing that they have been trained to study or explain. That thing—­or, as we all say, “the text”—­is the literature scholar’s first love. The fields of study and critical methodologies we spend time learning and internalizing in graduate school often give us a sense of having mastered our capacities to understand and situate the text in the broader world. But that does not leave much room for whatever mysterious forces make up and drew us to the text in the first place. Moving away from, or falling out of love with, a recognizable mode of critical inquiry can and should be predicated on a desire to revisit those things that were most attractive and desirable about the text, those things that cannot be explained in full. With all of this in mind, I am not here to dismiss our efforts as professional scholars in the humanities. I am here to remind us of what existed before the harmonic illusion of graduate training, that attraction to the intensive and unknowable qualities of literature that can only be brought about by something emergent. Think of this chapter as a collection of stylists and me as their collector. The thinkers and figures I present in the pages to come all, in one way or another, exist on the margins, and this chapter will present them to you one after the other. Now imagine the constellation of figures in

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this chapter as analogs: discrete entities that exist together in the material world, resonating and rhyming in the way that living creatures do. Consider these very peculiar and particular case studies in the creative and critical potential of ambivalence, which is the ability to attune one’s senses to a world that is something other than material, where concepts live and sensations exist, without bodies to call their home. The lines of relation between such figures are yet to be drawn; this chapter is in large part an act of carving these out. As in the other parts of this book, the figures I choose are mine, and it is my hope that readers will be interested not only in those choices but also in what kinds of assemblages they too can make of their own idiosyncratic stylists.

Ambivalence, the First Step to Attunement In particular, I am inspired by the combination of ambivalence and attunement that motivates interdisciplinary work (and might reenergize what is being produced by those who are laboring out of the contemporary English or literature department). My sense of attunement is, admittedly, idealistic and always comes back to the definition provided by Zadie Smith in her essay on Joni Mitchell. Here, she describes her long struggle with and against Mitchell’s catalog and the eventual moment when she lets her guard down and experiences something sudden and unexpected in the music that she names attunement: “an emotional overcoming, disconcertingly distant from happiness, more like joy—­if joy is the recognition of an almost intolerable beauty.”1 My sense of ambivalence is that it is an important step on the path away from the expected and toward the state of attunement that Smith describes. Ambivalence is the first step to attunement. Ambivalence, in this case, is to be understood as a capacity to understand or sense something in two ways. While the term is often used in common parlance to refer to a kind of boredom or nonchalance, I am insisting on its proper definition. In fact, the Latinate roots of the word suggest a kind of conscious simultaneity: ambi means “both,” and valentia refers to “strength.”2 In what follows, I introduce figures who have reached the critical or creative limits of their discipline and/or artistic practice. In each case, I represent these figures as particularly drawn to concepts

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and practices that are outside the scope of traditional practices. Tending toward the abstract and “the incorporeal,” these scholars and artists display the kind of critical ambivalence that I am describing here, which is a capacity and tendency to think and create in two ways: the abstract and the material, as a member of a discipline and as a divergent or liminal actor.3 None of these figures comes out of what we might call traditional literary studies, but I am interested in the ways that their styles might resonate with my own approach to reading and writing about the intensive qualities of the literary work. At the same time, disregarding or flouting the values or prescriptions of a traditional academic enterprise is not necessarily the same as rejecting them wholesale. Radical changes to overly familiar methodologies happen gradually; put another way, methodologies evolve. At some point, for instance, in the early years of American studies, scholarship began to move away from the original point of view. The idea of a national literature or historical record gave way, bit by bit, to divergent points of view that, in the end, transfigured the field formation into fields of plenty. While it might seem obvious to explain these shifts by reference to external social and political factors—­such as the civil rights, feminist, Black and Brown Power movements, to name only a few—­that does not give us a sense of the smaller, more molecular changes that occurred on the ground within American studies discourse that also contributed to its own evolutionary changes. These kinds of changes, or becomings, can express themselves in ways that are harder to account for or indeed to count at all. That is because the quality of these signs is often intensive in nature: hard to calculate but definitely there. The connections (sociological, material, textual, canonical, theoretical, etc.) that we learn to make are often just imaginary (professional) attachments that I would suggest we all remember to forget. Ambivalence is also not usually elevated beyond the level of the individual to anything resembling a movement or trend. It is sometimes evident in tone or attention (or even inattention) to certain details that either reconstitute or disaggregate a standard sense of an academic narrative or methodology. Eventually, even the most successful and popular trends in scholarly research and writing begin to fade away. The earliest stages of this waning period reveal themselves on the page, where all the symptoms (early, middle, and late) of ambivalence are registered.

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Far from merely indicating a late, decadent stage in the life of a field, it is possible to see ambivalence as a point of divergence and becoming, as one among many moments when a no longer useful or interesting mode of thought becomes something else entirely. Ambivalence is, of course, only half the equation. For one, without a component approach to literary study that reinvigorates criticism, ambivalence would by itself be nothing more than an empty, petulant gesture. However, the most interesting and useful changes to or deterritorializations of any discrete methodology are also ways of attuning one’s critical faculties to the energies and rhythms embedded within “the text” and textual analysis on the whole. There is a moment in the life of any mainstream doctrine when it becomes too rote and loses its power to do what it set out to do in the first place. In the world of literary analysis, this usually occurs when a methodology becomes too recognizable and easy to use without much thought. When it is only an application, it loses its capacity to change at all. Or, as Flannery O’Connor writes in a short essay titled “The Teaching of Literature,” the problem begins when a whole profession begins to see art through the eyes of its official methods: “The fact is, people don’t know what they are expected to do with a novel, believing, as many do, that art must be utilitarian, that it must do something, rather than be something.”4 Following this, she then turns to a well-­worn image, depicting the nation’s scholars and teachers of literature as “like blind men who went to visit the elephant—­each feels a different part and comes away with a different impression.”5 Without an appreciation for what we do not already know about a text, it becomes impossible to get even the remotest sense of what it is. Professionals employed in the service of overly staid literary critical methods end up in the dark, tugging on O’Connor’s proverbial elephant for meaning. Things change at the point when practitioners start to gain a sense of the emptiness of these rituals and move themselves (and the directions they take in their writing) somewhere else. The characteristic ambivalence personified by these escapees of the literary industrial complex is the emergent property of changes to come. These changes, or divergences, take flight in the actual work, which is newly attuned to the beingness of a text, which, once you stop battering it again and again with the same old answers, comes back to life.

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Those same divergences from the standard American studies narrative that I have already described also obviously occurred analogously across the university landscape, in major and minor fields alike. Michael Moon, professor of English, American studies, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Emory University, describes the changes to traditional, more established university curriculums as being the result of “emergent academic fields and flourishing sub-­projects of this or that English department.”6 The story he tells is familiar if we think of the ways that the various “studies” (ethnic, gay/queer, feminist, Black etc.) emerged out of English departments in the second half of the twentieth century. Having said that, I am interested in the metaphors he uses to represent these changes—­namely, the idea that these divergences or “sub-­projects” are both emergent and flourishing. These are two qualities of any naturally occurring, rhizomatic form. An emergent quality, or property, is in its nature impossible to predict and difficult to quantify. At the same time, it is not difficult to experience or represent if you are open or attuned to it as it (be)comes into existence. Minor or divergent field formations all have their beginnings as emergent practices and affective approaches to what were familiar scholarly manners and methods. It is easy enough to look back over the decades and contain these deterritorializing gestures within the confines of, say, feminist theory or critical race studies. It is something else entirely to attune oneself to the divergent forms of analysis that are flourishing right now and spreading out into the future. These intellectual becomings do not yet have a name or container (panel, special issue, call for applications) where they can be easily stored. It has been my hope in writing this book that style can be the kind of open-­ended territory into which we search for all that is too excessive and brilliant for easy containment. These divergent fields of inquiry have now been in existence for a number of decades. For those of us doing (which is to say writing, reading, researching, and teaching) literary studies, this has been a blessing. There is no longer a monolithic belief in or defense of a “Great Books” approach to an English or literature curriculum, and, in fact, most of the work done in the university classrooms has to do with defamiliarizing and particularizing the entire idea of the canon. With that said, these same approaches that were once motivated by an insistent ambivalence regarding the traditional nature of literary study have now established

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well-­worn and even official methods of their own. The familiarity that I have been describing with regard to dominant, late-­stage trends in literary analysis can take hold in even the most remote, minoritarian movement away from the mainstream. As soon as a field forms and becomes visible, it seems to start speaking in its own specialized language. What begins as a collective ambivalence and effort to escape the requirements of the profession tends to become, in a relatively short amount of time, a newly prescriptive mode in and of itself. To be clear, I am not arguing against the existence or continuation of our minor fields. In fact, they are a necessary component in the deterritorialization of the humanities writ large. However, to be vibrant and active into the future, these established fields need to nurture and accept their own deterritorializations. There is an understandable tendency to categorize historical changes to academic methodologies by establishing individual alterations or deformative gestures into groups. Once these groupings are given a name, they become fully formed fields, established and stratified into existence. From this position, with roots set down, you have what we call a field formation. At the exact instance that this is so, it becomes possible for (or even inevitable that) the slow and nonlinear process of change and deterritorialization to begin. Again, these alterations or becomings occur at the level of the individual scholar, often in unrecognized and intensive forms of relation to the requirements of their chosen field of study. What begins as an unchecked ambivalence eventually becomes a more evident mode of eschewing convention. In my own work, this pattern emerged around my choice of objects of analysis. Colleagues would ask, with good reason, why I selected or how I came to choose the figures I assemble in my work. Of course, the natural and honest answer to this query would be that I did so instinctively, that I selected them because I wanted to do so. I realize that this answer is insufficient with regard to how my work pertains to or disciplines its form according to the spoken and unspoken rules governing the fields I travel through. That said, what began as a clear symptom of my professional ambivalence became, for me, a pathway toward a greater attunement with and through the objects and texts I analyze. In other words, even though I never felt as though I had a truthful and constructive way to justify my rather-­idiosyncratic assemblage of texts, my instincts told me that that was beside the point.

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While I am willing to admit my own failure at providing a clear and professionally discernable “framework” or “roadmap” at the beginnings of my work that indicates my intervention into already-­established fields, I have come to understand that this is a by-­product of my own ambivalence, a sign of my desire to become something else. I do not say any of this to offer myself up as some kind of exception to the rule or an example of someone exceptionally committed to change. In fact, I think what I have experienced—­with regard to wanting to overcome the requirements of my professional field as well as, concomitantly, a desire to engage with my chosen objects and texts in order to understand and experience the world in a new, not fully recognized way—­is what all scholars experience. As a matter of fact, this is how all evolutionary changes occur: one by one by one. Looking back on things, in hindsight, we can explain the past according to the needs of the present. It is entirely possible to make sense of where we think we are headed according to our sense of what historical container we think our work belongs in. But that does not do a thing to attune us to where we are headed. The changes to come are messier and harder to account for and flourish, to recall Moon’s language, spontaneously. This change is, like all change, idiosyncratic and sometimes random. It can be seen in the expression of style by individuals engaging in and inventing new forms of criticism, thereby breaking with tradition and in doing so disaggregating the fields from which they operate. Historical narratives require that we group these individual aberrations together so that they can tell their stories neatly and cogently; evolutionary becomings are, in and of themselves, not so easily gathered.

The Nightingale’s Code: Recursive Stability and Nonlinear Histories When we take stock of history, it is our tendency to compartmentalize or normalize that which has occurred in the past. The ways that we tell these stories then become familiar and coagulate into modes of explanation that have a way of rendering what was once aberrant or inventive into something familiar and characterizable. Of course, when we look toward the future, we allow ourselves a bit more doubt, satisfied with the idea that we do not fully know what may or may not happen. Whereas

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history may be a score that we feel we have more or less already settled, the future is always a roll of the dice. In spite of our nuanced approaches to the past, it is difficult to resist the urge to explain history away. The future is, on the other hand, an incomplete answer to the question “What will we become?” Talking or writing about the future, then, becomes an act of invention in and of itself, a kind of joyful ambivalence regarding what can and cannot be. But what if we applied the same affective disposition that we hold toward imagining the future to our historical record? What if we look at the past as an entire network of unanswered questions and incomplete answers that reverberate and live on into the present? What if instead of thinking of the past as a score that has already been written, we understand it more appropriately as a refrain that is always already being played? Manuel DeLanda is one such thinker and stylist who attunes himself to these propositions. DeLanda is a conceptual artist, philosopher, and architectural theorist who specializes in, among other things, a new materialist approach to history. His second book, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, established DeLanda as someone interested in a totally reanimated and finely attuned approach to the ways that we think about and describe historical processes. As the title of his book suggests, he deals with a rather large swath of human and geological time. Each chapter takes up its own concept or idea, following its paths and divergences across roughly the same thousand-­year time period (1000–­2000 AD). He recasts and deforms the familiar historical narratives of geology, biology and linguistics by disaggregating these molar bodies of knowledge into an infinite number of tiny, molecular offshoots and occurrences. He describes his book as a work of “deeply historical philosophy, which holds as its thesis that all structures that surround us and form our reality (mountains, animals and plants, human languages, social institutions) are the products of specific historical processes.”7 For DeLanda, these processes are more than metaphors. Indeed, the whole book (if not his career as a public thinker) is dedicated to studying these processes as real, material happenings that occur, one by one by one by one, throughout time. Because he is doing this from a philosophical standpoint and not as a historian, DeLanda can nourish his intellectual and creative journey by not knowing fully what he is looking for in the past. The philosopher is, after all, in pursuit of wisdom and, unless they

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have become a cult leader, satisfied by the fact that wisdom is never fully attainable. More than that, however, DeLanda is also ambivalent about the requirements placed on him as a scholar. In doing so, he is able to attune himself and his work to something else, to reconceptualize his relationship to the fields of study from which he emerges in positive and virtuous, rather than negative and vicious, terms: “This type of philosophy must of necessity take real history as its starting point. The problem is, of course, that those who write history, however scholarly, do so from a given philosophical point of view, and this would seem to trap us in a vicious circle. But just as history and philosophy may interact in such a way as to make an objective assessment of reality impossible—­when entrenched worldviews and routine procedures for gathering historical evidence constrain each other negatively—­they can also interact positively and turn this mutual dependence into a virtuous circle.”8 From this position, DeLanda argues for an approach to history that is conducted physically rather than textually.9 For someone interested in representing a thousand years of nonlinear changes to life on Earth, this means that DeLanda is arguing for a kind of constant attention to and desire to encounter those things that are, in and of themselves, dynamic and creative. The story, or stories, that DeLanda’s book tells do not add up to any one thing, and in the end, one gets an overwhelming sense of history as something accidental, chaotic, and constantly reoccurring. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History is not, he says, “a chronicle of ‘man’ and ‘his’ historical achievements, but a philosophical meditation on the history of matter-­energy in its different forms and of the multiple coexistences and interactions of these forms.”10 His attunement to these forms becomes his way of seeing the world as it is by dislocating it from and destratifying its so-­called history. DeLanda’s critical imagination flows, in large part, according to his recursive analysis of the writings of Gilles Deleuze. Even though Deleuze has left a rich and varied catalog of philosophical works, DeLanda returns to a handful of ideas and openings that energize his thinking. In the fields of mathematics, linguistics, and computer science, recursive analysis is a process of repeated interpretation or application of a rule or principle. A truly recursive practice can and should be able to repeat itself indefinitely. When used according to already existing rules governing fields of study, recursion can work to reestablish the

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norm. A grammatical rule, for instance, becomes a rule by virtue of its repeated use. This is neither good nor bad, necessarily, but this is more similar to the kind of recursion that haunted Nietzsche, who dreamt of the eternal return as a recursive state imposed from without. When a recursive strategy is cultivated intuitively and on an individual level, however, it can motivate an endless supply of inventive and deterritorializing energy. What you need is a simple idea or precept that you cannot help but be drawn in by again and again; once you have determined what this is, your work with any text or in any medium will be set out for you. You just have to follow your nose. In my own case, of course, this concept is style (being yourself but on purpose) and the primary persona Quentin Crisp (“style is an idiom arising spontaneously from the personality, but deliberately maintained”).11 In DeLanda’s case, one of these key points of recursive inspiration has to do with his desire—­vis-­à-­vis Deleuze—­to destratify existence. As DeLanda explains, in a 2009 lecture titled “Immanent Patterns of Becoming,” Deleuze asks us to think of everything in the world as divergent, of the world itself as constantly in flux. This manner of conceptualization goes against, DeLanda carefully argues, a transcendental framing of the Earth and its history, which imagines that everything living is and was the creation of an unchanging, distant God figure. In this case, matter is fixed and inert; it does not exist without its relationship to its transcendent creator. While the transcendental world is one full of rigid, arboreal forms, there is also another space that Deleuze says is immanent. Something immanent does and cannot be created, and it does not require a material body to exist (though it can rise up and take shape in a variety of physical forms). These immanent forces exist, according to DeLanda’s reading of Deleuze, on a spiritual plane that bears no resemblance to anything in the world that we know. This space—­which Deleuze refers to intermittently in his work as “the plane of immanence”—­is what DeLanda calls a “virtual space,” which, he argues, is “populated by patterns of becoming . . . [full of] pure possibilities [or] pure potentialities.”12 It is important to understand that neither Deleuze nor DeLanda rejects the “actual” or familiar notion of world but that they are asking us to find creative and critical ways of attuning us to these other spaces that are immanent to the world but not transcendental. Bearing this out, DeLanda’s lecture

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on immanent patterns of becoming turns to Henri Poincaré, whom he describes as “the last grand genius of mathematics.” Poincaré cultivated a form of abstract geometry called “topology,” which is an offshoot of conventional mathematics that is interested in the properties of things that can be reshaped and deformed, things, in other words, not analyzed by traditional metrics. Whereas geometry typically looks at objects that are rigid and do not change shape, Poincaré was interested in those things that are inherently changeable, that can be altered physically by stretching or folding them (keeping them intact but changing their physical form). Describing topology as “the most abstract geometry we have,” DeLanda finds in Poincaré’s work a manner of “[extracting] immanent patterns of becoming from a much wider set of phenomena than pure algebra.”13 While most of the world is, in fact, rigid and geometric in a classical Euclidean sense, DeLanda—­through his recursive work on Deleuze—­wants us to imagine the objects that do not fit into this space. He says that these objects that do not come from a prefabricated, actual space that is metric but come from another, immanent virtual space “populated by patterns of becoming.”14 Just as Poincaré and others like him worked to imagine a space outside the linear, stratified boundaries of Euclidean mathematics, scholars and artists wishing to deterritorialize their own fields must also orient themselves toward an awareness of this extra, not altogether knowable immanent plane. One cannot, in this case, rely on anything other than instinct to begin this line of flight away from the familiar and toward the abstract. In DeLanda’s lecture, he describes the qualities of this virtual space as something akin to a dream or a drug trip. When you are in either of these states of awareness, you have sensations and forms of recognition that are impactful but very difficult to carry back with you or represent to the “real” world. We cannot achieve a sense of it without a willingness to disregard the world that seems so familiar and stratified. The only way to travel toward this immanent plane is in a nonlinear fashion, away from the sedimentary, linear forms of thought and toward the chaos of pure potentiality.15 The kinds of abstract notions that I am describing—­that attract thinkers like Poincaré, DeLanda, and Deleuze—­are expressions of a critic’s sense of style, and as such, their very nature is often oblique. To think or create in such a way that one is oriented toward what DeLanda de-

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scribes as “immanent patterns of becoming,” one must be satisfied and even energized by the fact that there are no answers or points of arrival in sight. In many ways, thinking and creating in an abstract manner are more akin to an artistic than scholarly practice. A painter, for instance, is forever trying to materialize the series of intensive forms—­images, sensations, percepts, moods, personalities, and so on—­that exist in their imagination. This painter knows that what appears on the canvas is never an exact replica of that which they have imagined, and so they paint picture after picture trying to do justice to an idea or sensation that can never totally come into being. If this painter is dedicated to their craft, then they are satisfied with this insoluble dilemma, and they come to understand that art is the product of this failure to materialize the immaterial. However, most of us are not artists, and perhaps because of this, it is easy to satisfy ourselves with tasks that we feel we can complete in an officious and respectable manner. In the world of academic writing, one can find professional and even personal fulfillment in working within the frameworks and conventions of one’s given field of study. There is no need whatsoever to break away from one’s own field formation. With all this established, however, change does occur, and fields do deform. The arrow of time always points toward the future. The evolutionary changes that do happen are a result of the individual exceptions to the rule, the singular aberrations that alter the course of what is to come. Those individuals that deterritorialize the world in which we live do so by way of chance and invention. They are, in other words, artists of a kind. DeLanda’s lecture deals with these problems having to do with an individual’s creative expression, and along these lines, he draws our attention to the French organist and composer Olivier Messiaen, who is remembered for, among other things, his transcription of birdsong into musical composition.16 To prepare himself for this, Messiaen obviously had to spend a good deal of time observing birds and taking note of the different forms that birdsong takes. Bird sounds are, as we know, a way of life, and the sounds that birds make are made for biological reasons: to communicate with one another, sure, but also to mark out their territory. Most of what we hear from the bird kingdom comes in the form of chirps. These chirps, DeLanda explains, are the territorializing gestures that birds make; they are genetic reflections of their birdness.

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These sounds are common and were less interesting to Messiaen, who found himself drawn in particular to the birds that do something more than chirp. Nightingales and blackbirds, for instance, sing and their songs sound stranger and more beautiful than the incessant and predictable chirping expressions made by most birds. Unlike the territorializing chirp, the birdsong is an invention, an expressive gesture oriented toward a deterritorial zone of becoming. According to DeLanda, Messiaen considered nightingales and blackbirds in a category above their fine-­feathered brethren. Because they invent songs that are not already embedded or inherent in their genetic makeup, Messiaen called these unique birds “stylists.” And like all stylists, these birds express themselves in order to become more like themselves than even nature intended. In doing so, these bird-­stylists destratify not only their own universes and worlds but ours as well. Without their songs, the world would only be made up of repetitive, territorializing chirps. Because of their strange and incessant art-­making habits, the universe is, thankfully, much more complex and multilayered than that. I have introduced you to this bestiary of artists, philosophers, and thinkers, in part, because they are innovative and inspiring for anyone interested in exploring the sensations and percepts that exist beyond the limits of the familiar. But I began by thinking about the narratives we have concerning academic fields and specifically the attention that is paid to minor field formations that spring up and settle down. Again, while these are very important to study and indeed guard against institutional deconstruction or disaggregation, I am trying to think about the more imperceptible, molecular kinds of changes that also occur over time that do not fit into the narratives or containers we have at our disposal. These deterritorializations or field deformations occur on the level of the individual scholar and are expressed by an attunement to the kinds of intensive differences that do and cannot settle down and take up roots in the great field of academic disciplines. Think of intensive differences, in this case, as you might weather systems. A heat system is intensive; a cold front is also an intensivity. The qualities of these forces—­their intensive differences—­are what makes them alive, what gives them their capacities to affect the world. These kinds of intensive differences that are a part of our material lives are obvious and

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noticeable but hard to paraphrase or pin down; intensive differences are, according to DeLanda, a required part of any open and evolving or becoming universe.17 Once you combine these weather systems into one unified warm temperature, they lose their distinctions, and what was once their intensive differences becomes entropic and no longer exists. This is not an argument against combination or warm weather; after all, the combination of weather fronts is a cosmic inevitability. Likewise, mine is not an argument against minor field formations but an interest in and attunement to the intensive differences that have life and exist prior to and/or outside the spaces where we—­through practice, narrativization, and professionalization—­store them for safe keeping. The figures covered in the past few pages—­DeLanda, Deleuze, Poincaré, Messiaen, Messiaen’s nightingales and blackbirds—­have all traveled to that space beyond territorialization where intensive differences still exist as such. They all—­the humans at least—­emerge out of and indeed toil professionally in traditional and recognizable fields of study such as philosophy, mathematics, and music. These are all historical practices of making the abstract concrete and knowable, of attending to and obliquely translating intensive differences from the conceptual plane into the world of concrete, composed, and metrically governed terms. While some, or most, professionals understandably focus on the second half of this equation and spend their time and energy focused on what use abstract or conceptual thinking has for the real world, there are some figures who understand themselves to be more affiliated with that other imperceptible universe where abstract things remain abstract and concepts live and breathe. In Deleuze and Guattari’s final book What Is Philosophy?, they place special emphasis on artists, philosophers, and scientists, who, they argue, “seem to return back from the land of the dead” in their works.18 What or where exactly this “land of the dead” is they do not precisely say (or, better yet, they represent obliquely in a thousand ways throughout just this one book).19 What they seem to mean is a space not where all things have passed on but where the dead still live and chaos reigns. These three practices, Deleuze and Guattari argue, “cast planes over the chaos . . . [and] are not like religions that invoke dynasties of gods, or the epiphany of a single god, in order to paint a firmament on the umbrella. . . . Philosophy, science, and art want us to tear open the fir-

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mament and plunge into the chaos.”20 In Deleuze and Guattari’s works, they become more than just men or women; they become “conceptual personae,” the “true agents of enunciation.”21 It is not Manuel DeLanda, Gilles Deleuze, Henri Poincaré, or Olivier Messiaen who journeys back and forth between the intensive zones (the land of the dead, the plane of immanence, chaos, the firmament) and the world as we know it but another version of themselves as conceptual personae who make this movements back and forth, thereby allowing us to experience what it is they have to display. “In philosophical enunciations,” Deleuze and Guattari explain, “we do not do something by saying but produce movement by thinking it, through the intermediary of a conceptual persona. . . . Who is ‘I’? It is always a third person.”22 In my terms, these are not only figures who have come to understand style as an intensive difference but thinkers and artists attuned to the endless elaboration and sensation of that difference as such: stylists, in other words, who have submitted themselves to the profession of being and becoming more like themselves than even nature may have intended. Those who travel to this “land of the dead,” who find themselves attracted by or attuned to the chaos of the firmament, are all worthy of our attention, for they are the only ones who, like the nightingales and blackbirds, know how to sing the songs of the becoming universe. These figures, or conceptual personae, are analogs for abstract concepts. This is not the same as saying that they are ideas that have been materialized or made concrete; indeed, saying so would in effect drag them down to the level of the familiar and mark the end of what is essentially mysterious and vibrant about them. A thinker or artist oriented toward the abstract will learn to protect the oblique and abstract characteristics of those things that come to us from Deleuze and Guattari’s “land of the dead.” If someone wants to know that which essentially cannot be totally known, then it becomes necessary to fully experience and cultivate the space between the virtual and the familiar in a way that maintains the intensive differences between the two. Beginning with Nietzsche—­a man who, in his writings, surely traveled back and forth between the worlds of the living and the dead—­it has become possible to attune oneself formally to the oblique nature of immanent concepts by writing dramatically (as opposed to merely critically). Since the philosopher is, by name, the one who loves wisdom, Nietzsche sought in

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his work to animate and sensationalize the entire process by which one looks for (encounters, finds, does not find, loses sight of, regains . . .) wisdom in the universe as the ultimate philosophical practice. Deleuze describes this “new conception of philosophy” as one that disaggregated the entire formal practice, essentially deterritorializing the field as it was and will be. Nietzsche displaced the old notion of philosophy as a process of discovering wisdom and the philosopher as the creator of knowledge with one in which the philosopher works instead through interpretation and evaluation. According to Deleuze, “interpretation establishes ‘the meaning’ of a phenomenon, which is always fragmentary and incomplete; evaluation determines the hierarchical ‘value’ of the meanings and totalizes the fragments without diminishing or eliminating their plurality.”23 In other words, Nietzsche treats his concepts as living, breathing things with characteristics that he must represent and partially bring to life on the page. In doing so, Nietzsche must recognize and work within the limitations of his medium and also maintain his curiosity about his subject. He must conduct himself in much the same way as a stage actor who has to perform the same character night after night without depleting their attention for or attraction to their own sense of who that character is or ought to be. These are dramatic processes by which one seeks to demonstrate, animate, and personify a concept without exhausting its capacities to become or inspire attention. Nietzsche’s work on the concept of nihilism was, for instance, never exhausted because he engaged with it and cultivated it to such a degree that it kept producing meaning. As a concept, nihilism is always relevant and changing shape; as its conceptual curator, Nietzsche saw his written work as a space where he could dramatize nihilism in as many different shapes and forms as possible. By attuning himself to the vitality of the concepts that he treats in his work, Nietzsche also attunes himself to and affirms the significance of life itself. To treat philosophy as a profession of translating the abstract into concrete terms—­as a form of style—­would be to attune oneself to the end of difference, and of life, as we know it.

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From Confidence Men to Originals (a Queer Formula) What might all of this mean to those of us invested in reading and interpreting literature? When it comes to works of fiction, one would assume that the literary critic is already attuned to and in search of the intensive qualities that give life to the novel, story, play, or what have you—­in other words, one would assume a formally trained critic who started out on their path out of an intuitive, perhaps even impulsive, orientation toward the world of art. Schooling and professionalization tend to transform what Eve Sedgwick refers to as her (stubbornly maintained) “perverse” reading practices, which, she says, are “never a matter of my condescension to texts, rather of the surplus charge of my trust in them to remain powerful, refractory, and exemplary.”24 Put in this way, an attraction to fiction and knack for literary criticism are symptoms of a kind of attunement to one’s adolescent ways of sensing and reflecting the world. This section deals with a classic piece of American literature—­ Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener”—­that most anyone who is familiar with American studies or Americanist literary theory has come across. Rather than present any representations of this text by literature scholars, I look elsewhere—­to other disciplines (namely, philosophy and cinema studies) to see how they interpret and mobilize their interpretations of “Bartleby.” In doing so, I am less interested in the professional injunction to “read” or “cite” the primary text myself, instead only dealing with the figure of Bartleby as a kind of conceptual persona who, in and of himself, lives and breathes. I am inspired by Bartleby in part because of his well-­known ambivalence, summed up by his repeated phrase “I would prefer not to,” but my attraction to him and this phrase is really because of the way it operates performatively to disaggregate or merely overcome the rules governing social language. Bartleby’s ambivalence becomes his life force, a source of balance in a world that seeks to—­but ultimately can never—­undo him. Melville’s story is, in the end, a testament to the limits of the text and Bartleby’s capacity to evade or escape its reach. This is a story that seems perfectly attuned to the practice of what Sedgwick so rightly describes as perverse reading. It also contains within it a germ of “radical ambivalence” to the rituals of our professions in the “academic industry.”25

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The fact that the field of literary studies has become so specialized and industrious makes it difficult not to lament the populations of individual “perverse readers” being disciplined and fielded into “movements” or “camps” of “like-­minded” scholars who go back and forth from their university campuses to the basement-­level ballrooms of nondescript hotels where they undergo the corporate rituals of professionalization. We gather together in these well-­lit yet windowless chambers of air-­conditioned privacy and talk not so much about our shared orientations or fascinations as our latest appropriation of the methodological conventions of our disciplines, fields, and subfields. A panel presentation can only last so long, and as the conventional wisdom goes, it is important to, if nothing else, clearly “signpost” the scope of one’s argument into an ongoing discussion about literary criticism. We then introduce “texts” as a way to get back to the work of proving the validity of a methodological intervention. To be a successful presenter, you need to offer your audience a discrete “takeaway.” Like a pop star moving through a concert set list, it is the old, familiar “hits” that strike up the most appreciation from the audience. On the conference circuit, this means orienting your performance of textuality to an already known manner of conducting literary criticism. If, for instance, you find yourself traveling in “queer studies” circles, then your audience can expect whatever object you are presenting to reflect something familiar about its sense of queerness. Considering the fact that queerness is, in and of itself, strange and bewildering, the irony of this particular professional evacuation of meaning is not lost on me.26 But all academics, like pop stars, are not made alike. There are, of course, plenty of musical acts that perform their “hits” in a way that meets their audiences where they are at, that do not shake things up. There are, as we know, others (Joni Mitchell, Lauryn Hill, Bob Dylan) who are more experimental in their approaches to their catalogs. This latter group does not do this out of any inherent antagonism toward the audience and certainly not because they do not like playing live concerts. The artist who eschews the familiar in favor of the experimental does so as a result of their dedication and attunement to the creative possibilities inherent in musical performance. But what about conceptual or abstract performances of academic knowledge? Are those modes of interpretation and representation on the horizon for literary studies?

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For a presentation to truly take this deterritorializing path away from the familiar, the individual scholar would need to do so in a particularly dramatic fashion. Like Nietzsche, one would have to cultivate an already apparent ambivalence toward the laws governing one’s field of study into a process of encountering the subaltern and strange components that those same fields seek to normalize. This might mean moving away from a sense of ourselves in groups of people who share methodological approaches and also to our ever-­static notions of “the text” that we seek to study through the lens of these scholarly conventions and toward a more disaggregated and messy sense of ourselves as individual travelers in the great field of literary inquiry. After all, what is being an “expert” in—­rather than a stylist who engages—­literary criticism anyway? The moment we presume to have mastered a literary “text” is the same moment when it loses its literary qualities, which are made up of intensive differences. The scholar or professor of literature would do well to admit to what we do not know and to make these various unknowns a part of what we seek to explore, amplify, and dramatize (but not resolve or answer) in our work with and through literature. Expertise is, after all, a kind of trick that we play. At our worst (our most pragmatic), we are all like the characters featured in Herman Melville’s The Confidence-­Man, which is, of course, not so much about a single confidence man but a whole boat of them, all trading tricks and traveling down the river on the same jerking boat.27 The contemporary scholarly gathering is, in its present state, a product—­ and producer—­of our collective ambivalence. In its current form, the academic conference circuit reproduces experts and confidence men one after the other, then herds them into groups. At the very least, the academic conference ought to resemble (if it is to resemble anything at all) a reunion of like-­minded souls and not—­as in its current form—­ something closer to a corporate trade convention. Without doing away with these gatherings, we need to find a way to subvert our own rituals of professionalization and imagine, instead, a space where we indulge one another’s impractical orientations and fantasies. The academic gathering could be a stranger affair, a place where we take flight and attune ourselves back to those early, “perverse” orientations and attachment to the literary that brought us here in the first place. Instead of fields of confidence men, we could have networks of divergent originals.

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If we are going to imitate any member of Herman Melville’s cast of characters, it ought to be Bartleby, a true original who could not help but do things his own way. He is, of course, the main character in Melville’s story “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street,” a man hired by a Financial District law firm to do clerical work who, initially, does his job well and gains the praise of his employers, only to then surprise and disappoint them by refusing to do any work (and, eventually, anything) at all. In one sense, this is a story about one man’s growing ambivalence, about his professional life and eventually life itself. At first, he refuses to work, but by the end of the story, its protagonist also refuses to even eat. Bartleby’s famous response to his boss’s repeated requests for him to do something other than what he is doing (which is nothing) is, “I would prefer not to.” The labor of survival, of going on and playing part in the fantasies of others, is too much for Bartleby, who lives according to the will of what Deleuze describes as his “queer formula.”28 Much has already been made of this story, especially in the ways that it services political economic critiques of capitalist enterprise. For instance, Slavoj Žižek typifies this kind of adaptation of Bartleby in his regular turns to the story for explanatory power. This is especially the case in a short video made in 2012 regarding the Occupy Wall Street movement, which Žižek describes as one of history’s recurrent “Bartleby lessons”: “The message of Occupy Wall Street is I would prefer not to play the existing game. There is something fundamentally wrong with the system and the existing forms of institutionalized democracy are not strong enough to deal with problems.”29 Considering that the movement in question took place in the same small district of New York City as Melville’s story and that Occupy literalized Bartleby’s fictional endeavors to slow business as usual in the financial district to a halt, Žižek’s comparison (and others like it) is fair enough. This kind of adaptation of Melville’s story sees Bartleby as a metaphor for collective angst and the social change that can result when that angst is translated into political terms. But Bartleby was not a part of any group, and the story is perhaps best understood as a representation of his very singular and out-­of-­the-­ordinary form of ambivalence that only became more and more pronounced as you read from beginning to middle to end. Bartleby is presented with the opportunity to coalesce with others in the story, which features not only his bosses and the other extractive forces

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who take from Bartleby. He is in the company of coworkers, fellow men who have no reason to side against Bartleby but who, through Bartleby’s repeated and repeatedly odd refusals to do, find themselves at odds with our strange hero. Another familiar reading of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” that can be traced at least back to Leo Marx’s 1953 article “Melville’s Parable of the Walls” is that the story reflects Melville’s own depression and dismay regarding poor criticism and circulation of Moby-­Dick, which was released in 1851, a mere two years before “Bartleby” was published anonymously in Putnam’s Magazine. Marx describes “Bartleby” as “a parable having to do with Melville’s fate as a writer” and, in general, a story “about a kind of writer . . . who obstinately refuses to go on doing the sort of writing demanded of him.”30 From here, it would be easy to use the story as a kind of mirror for our own sense of Melville’s psychological state, or at least to see “Bartleby” as representative of his feelings of professional failure following Moby-­Dick’s infamously cold reception in the nineteenth-­century US. But this line of thinking is, like Žižek’s political adaptation, too familiar and too easy. Instead of being a living, breathing form of ambivalence that has the capacity to do otherwise, these kinds of representations of Bartleby render him a bit motionless and miss the parts of him that cannot and will not modify easily to other circumstances or examples. I admit, however, to being more convinced by Marx’s emphasis on the role of the writer and of the story as, perhaps, a commentary on the life and work of a writer in this world. Writing is, of course, a potentially thankless task, and as I have been describing, this has much to do with the idea that one must transform that which is immaterial and abstract into something concrete and transferable onto the page. These “takeaways,” as we call them, are just that: ideas, feelings, and concepts that writers have tried to reproduce in other terms and in a form that can be given away. Perhaps it is useful to think of Bartleby as a kind of singularly ambivalent writer who had had enough of this “vicious circle,” to quote DeLanda once again, called “professional life.”31 But still, Bartleby is not a metaphor for or representative of anyone or anything other than Bartleby. Ambivalence is a very individuated sensation that cannot be replicated into a mass phenomenon, and in many ways, this is a story that proves this to be so. “There is nothing particular or general about

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Bartleby,” says Deleuze; “he is an Original”: “Originals are beings of Primary Nature, but they are inseparable from the world or from secondary nature, where they exert their effect: they reveal its emptiness, the imperfection of its laws, the mediocrity of particular creatures, . . . the world as masquerade.”32 Like any stylist, Bartleby is not only aware of his nature but also so aware of it that he seeks to do nothing but reinforce and reenact it. His recursive statement “I would prefer not to” is his way of being and becoming more like himself, which is to say more attuned to his own intuitive ambivalence, than even nature might have made him. As a source of inspiration for the writer or scholar interested in cultivating their style by eschewing the conventions of their professional fields, Bartleby is a perfect model. His is a guileless and pure form of critical ambivalence that can take flight, reorienting his energies elsewhere, beyond the familiar and toward the peculiar of his own sensibilities. Bartleby’s circular logic, his ability to always come back to his “queer formula,” is how he disaggregates the vicious cycle of productivity and corporate time management that otherwise held him and controlled his destiny. While it might make sense to translate Bartleby’s refusal as indicative of his having given up on life, it is inherently possible to find in his radical insistence on his own ambivalence a kind of hope for futures that are not mere reproductions of an unsatisfactory and familiar past. Like Deleuze, Kara Keeling is a scholar and writer oriented toward the utopic and strange promises held in Melville’s story and performed by its untimely hero. Her latest book, Queer Times, Black Futures, incorporates Bartleby as a recursive figure, literally a part of her book in between its main chapters where she comes back to his “queer formula” for inspiration. Her manner is musical in the sense that she treats his ambivalence as a refrain that is still being composed that she must, within the formal limits of the academic book, attune her readers to again and again. In it, she hears something like “a sense that the past is not done, and that futures still might be excavated from within it.” “Because Bartleby saves what was not,” she continues, “he works at the level of the imperceptible; what never was cannot be redeemed, yet remains, piled up in a present that need not be, but is.”33 For Keeling, Bartleby is a kind a revelator, and his ambivalence is an arrow pointing toward a queer future time, which is

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structured on a Glissantian kind of opacity where all things are “bent not toward redemption, but ‘de-­creation.”34 Bartleby’s “formula,” as Deleuze would have it, is of a time without territory, a future predicated on nothing that is familiar to those of us living in its past. “I would prefer not to” is a refrain that is still playing itself out, reverberating quietly underneath the busy hum of industrious confidence men toiling in their fields. In Deleuze’s work with Melville’s “formula,” he warns against confusing what he terms “true Originals” with figures that are “simply remarkable or singular, particular.”35 When, for instance, Žižek describes the Occupy Wall Street movement as a recurring “Bartleby lesson,” he is thinking of Melville’s character concept along the lines of the remarkable or particular, rather than as an original. Something of Bartleby’s liveliness and his ability to unsettle scores is lost in translation when his very queer form of ambivalence is translated into a metaphor (just as, for instance, any kind of queerness is evacuated of meaning when it is made into a blanket term). Originals are just that. “Each original,” Deleuze maintains, “is a powerful, solitary Figure that exceeds any explicable form: it projects flamboyant traits of expression that mark the stubbornness of a thought without image, a question without response, an extreme and nonrational logic.”36 This is not the same as saying that originals are exceptional creatures that we should necessarily hold up on high (though the history of fashion and lifestyle advertising may have convinced us otherwise). An original cannot be copied; in evolutionary terms, it makes sense perhaps to think of an original as a mistake or mutation: a bad copy of the Platonic form. No one would aspire to be like an original any more than they would wish to follow Bartleby’s path of nothingness all the way down to the tomb. But originals have something to teach or show us, which they can only understand because of their distance from the rest of us. “The original,” Deleuze says, “is not subject to the influence of [its] milieu” and has “nothing general about [it], and [is] not particular—­ [it] escape[s] knowledge, def[ies] psychology.”37 It is by virtue of the original’s strangely singular nature that it draws its capacity to deterritorialize. Bartleby’s recursive utterance—­“I would prefer not to”—­is a reflection of his intensive difference, a kind of “livid white light,” to borrow from Deleuze, that reflects the truth of what only he knows about life: “something inexpressible . . . something unfathomable.”38

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Keeling focuses on this passage in Deleuze’s essay on Bartleby in order to attune her reader to what it has to say about the connection between sound and movement, to, in other words, the musical nature of “true Originals.” Keeling describes the ways “sound and movement mark the limits to which Bartleby’s queer formula pushes language and signification.”39 From Bartleby, Keeling takes a line of flight toward Grace Jones, whom Keeling describes as “an Original.”40 Keeling’s Jones, like her analog the scrivener, must work through her subaltern position as a “Slave to the Rhythm” and “Corporate Cannibal.” Jones’s uncanny and highly stylized performances of these songs do more than protest or even mock the political economies that they name-­check. Like Bartleby, Jones is condemned to her true originality, which is only reinforced by her capacity to travel through the categories governing social existence. Keeling bears this out in her reading of Jones’s memoir and the music video for “Corporate Cannibal”: “Jones’s celebrity persona is flexible, transversal, refusing to be pinned to any fixed state—­Black, woman, West Indian, American, African. Her celebrity transduces fixed states, sometimes through negatives—­not Black, not woman—­and sometimes through conjunctions—­but Jamaican, but science fiction.”41 Jones’s “errantry,” as Keeling describes it, is a principle of her originality, an example of one singular being’s inability to occupy any social or political territory neatly or discreetly. Though many people have tried (and no doubt will try) to imitate her, Grace Jones is too complex and divergent to be copied or remade in any fashion. Like Bartleby, it is her utter and singular strangeness that makes her what she is: a divergent human form that is on the move and headed for the cosmos. For Deleuze and Keeling, “the Original” is the one that cannot be copied and escapes redundancy. Bartleby and Grace Jones are two avatars for this line of thinking that allow each of them a glimpse or sense of that which is unfamiliar and deterritorialized. All of this relates to what Deleuze describes in his Melville essay as “the formula,” which “annihilates ‘copying’ . . . [as well as] all particularity, all reference.”42 By “formula,” here, Deleuze seems to mean something like a plan (a regimen, a diet, a spell, etc.), since, as he says at the end of the essay, “Bartleby is not the patient, but the doctor of a sick America, the Medicine-­Man, the new Christ or brother to us all.”43 Bartleby’s ambivalence, summed and summoned up by his recursive statement “I would prefer not to,” is the

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path his formula takes toward what Deleuze describes as “an ever expanding zone of indiscernibility or indetermination,” that place, in other words, where “Originals” come and go, where intensive differences live and breathe and concepts take shape.44 Bartleby’s formula—­“I would prefer not to”—­is, Deleuze says, “neither an affirmation nor a negation” but is absolutely “ravaging, devastating, and leaves nothing standing in its wake.”45 There is something “contagious” about Bartleby’s ambivalence that attracts Deleuze’s attention that I can relate to and that I would like to follow elsewhere, toward another original with her own formula, who knows how to sing her own transfigurative and lonesome song of ambivalence.

Note by Note: Ambivalence as Revelation A little over ten years ago, in the early days of YouTube, I came across a short video—­two minutes and eighteen seconds, to be exact—­that would explode into my consciousness. Titled “Royce—­You Know Nothing!,” the clip opens with a close-­up on its titular star, Royce Reed: a glamorous and angry-­looking woman who looks like she, for one, has stared into the abyss and lived to tell the tale. She is heavily made up, cosmetically and otherwise. She is wearing pearl earrings and a necklace to match; her silk blouse is tiger print, and on top of her head is a black fur hat, which is both a statement piece and a crown of thorns. The clip catches Royce midmonologue. She is angry, and her words only make her feel more so; her displeasure has a way of circling around itself (like a buzzard or a prowling cat waiting to feed): “Liszt, Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Grieg. I know all about. . . . I know how to play it internationally, . . . internationally composed symphonies. God! This shit! Garbage! Garbage that I don’t want! Why would I have to be a victim of all this garbage, that crap that you like?” At this point, it is not clear to whom Royce is speaking, but her target soon comes into focus. Royce continues her lecture: “You know nothing about classical music, opera. Nothing! Nothing! You can’t sing an opera. You know nothing.” We then hear a disembodied woman’s voice (the camera, like me, cannot look away from Royce’s mean and knowing mug): “That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy it.” Unlike Royce, who is entirely remarkable—­from her looks to her manner of speech to her emotional disposition—­this

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Screenshot, “Royce—­You Know Nothing!”

other voice is flat, plain, and relatable. Whatever it is about this other, unmusical person, it seems only to feed Royce’s rage. Moving from her somewhat-­monotonous shriek to a higher pitch, Royce answers her familiar friend: “You know nothing. I sing everything perfectly. Note by note. You know nothing. Oh God on a wheel!”46 The camera finally moves away from our star and shows us who we—­and Royce—­have been listening to: another woman of a certain age, dressed in a colorful kaftan with long peroxide-­blond hair. While everything about Royce is angular and cold, this woman seems jolly and warm. She is stretched out on a double bed, attending to her friend’s tantrum but seemingly unmoved by whatever insults might come her way. She tries to talk Royce down, to change the subject somehow and lift everyone’s spirits by talking, for whatever reason, about various nightclub acts she has seen in Las Vegas in a time gone by: Martha Raye, Milton Berle, Lena Horne. Like her looks, Marilyn’s tastes are plain and middling. It should come as no surprise that Marilyn’s attempts at rerouting Royce’s energy are fruitless and that, in fact, they only remind her of

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why she was so upset in the first place. Pleading with Marilyn over and over to “just shut up!” Royce stands up, hovering over the double bed, grasping the stem of her wine glass, Bob Dole style, and filling her lungs up with sufficient air to put an end to her roommate’s nonsense. She is screaming now and composing herself like a wet cat looking for revenge: “Oh Jesus Christ! . . . I wanna live in a world that I’m used to! Coming home and putting on my opera, my concertos. Not living in this shithole. . . . This shithole downtown! Where all my money is gone . . . gone! This garbage hole! Oh my God! This garbage hole!” For some context, Royce Reed and Marilyn Hoggatt are two older women who share an apartment in a single-­room occupancy hotel in downtown Los Angeles called the Stillwell.47 I mention this because it becomes obvious at this moment in the short clip that Royce is complaining about her diminished circumstances (which viewers can see laid out before them). Royce is, on the one hand, going on about where she has found herself—­in “this shithole downtown”—­but one gets the sense that Royce’s complaints come naturally to her and that, wherever she might have found herself, she would be dissatisfied in the extreme. Though she may have considered her fate—­whatever it was—­to be tragic, I do not think of Royce’s situation in this way. Her form of self-­awareness is inspirational, and like Bartleby, she has a kind of queer formula for enacting her difference from others. Whereas Bartleby has his one-­liner, Royce has a fistful of her own, each composing a separate refrain about her ambivalence regarding the things of this world. Thirteen years after this first Royce and Marilyn video was posted to YouTube in 2007, the man behind the camera finally published a nearly three-­hour documentary feature titled Royce & Marilyn: God on a Wheel.48 Until this moment, there were only a handful of very brief clips of Royce and Marilyn available, and I had to nourish myself on whatever scraps of Royce I could find. I found myself returning to her again and again for inspiration, each time feeling a sense of renewed attunement with her righteous anger. “This shithole downtown,” “this garbage, this crap that you like,” “this vermonhole,” “this shiiiiiiiit”: these are the recursive registers of Royce’s ambivalence that come up whenever I find myself in a situation or location that seems banal or tedious. Everything that is familiar and plain about the world (and personified by her poor, suffering friend Marilyn) gets in Royce’s way, clouds her judgment, and interferes with her abil-

Ambivalence and Attunement | 245

Screenshot, Royce & Marilyn: God on Wheel

ity to do what she wants: to live in a world that she is used to where she can listen to her operas and her concertos, all of which she knows, she says, perfectly, note by note. Royce’s ambivalence is angry and circular, but it is only really in service of her desire to be attuned to the sound of another world, where everything is as it should be and not at all like it is. Marilyn’s steadfast ordinariness only makes Royce feel her isolation and resentment more keenly. At one point, she makes this case as clear as it could be: “Why should I have to be a victim of all this garbage, this trash that you like?” In response, Marilyn coos and nods, trying to soothe and hopefully coax Royce out of her mood. While this is not the music that Royce wants to hear, there is a kind of rhythm to the sound of these two women talking—­or, more pointedly, not talking—­to each other. The only difference is that only one of them is truly singing. Royce is like Messiaen’s songbirds: each time she hits one of her familiar notes (garbage, shithole, shut up!), she increases her rage and also her capacity to hold attention on that rage. This is an act of style in the grandest sense—­or, as Deleuze might have it, a “formula” performed by Royce: “an Original,” who is not subjected to the influence of [her] milieu . . .

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[but who] on the contrary . . . throws a livid white light on [her] surroundings.”49 Royce’s jabs at Marilyn are a refrain that seek a musical becoming or escape. Marilyn, on the other hand, is limited by her contentment to be where and who she is. She has her own refrain (“well, I’ve had to adjust,” “I’m not basically unhappy,” “well all right”), but Marilyn is never doing more than reacting to Royce. In so many ways, Marilyn lacks originality. After all, the nightingales and blackbirds that filled Messiaen’s musical fantasies are the exception of the bird kingdom. Most of the feathered creatures flittering about and making noise are merely chirping: expressing their genetic disposition to make themselves known and to stake out territory. The refrain is, Elizabeth Grosz reminds us, a part of all life, even the most elemental. All living organisms respond to and make “vibratory rhythm part of the operation of its organs.” She continues, “The tapping a child makes in wandering around aimlessly, the humming we sometimes unconsciously perform, . . . the small piece of annoying music that sticks in our heads despite our loathing it—­these are all versions of the refrain.”50 These rhythmic expressions are indications of life, but life at its most annoyingly simple and repetitive. These are genetic registers of consciousness that do not change and are certainly not on their way to becoming anything orchestral. In fact, at this level, the refrain can actually “prevent music while at the same time being the smallest anticipation of music to come.”51 The refrain is a key component of any animal’s instinct to create a home, to territorialize.52 On this note, the YouTube clip depicts both Marilyn and Royce noisily trying to make their hotel room (“this shithole downtown”) a home. But it takes a special kind of creature (an Original, a stylist) to become musical, to take the elemental components of the refrain and move toward a musical elsewhere. Like any songbird, Royce’s refrain is part territorializing (“this garbage hole”) and deterritorializing (“I want to live in a world that I’m used to!”), which is to say partly a reflection of her real life and aspiration toward what she feels she deserves. When Royce speaks (or, as evidenced in other videos, dances),53 she forges as escape from her life as an inmate of the Stillwell Hotel, away from the shithole downtown and toward some musical place beyond the horizon of possibility. Whereas Marilyn represents who we all are at our

Ambivalence and Attunement | 247

most basic and obvious, Royce is who we would be if we had a sense of what it meant to want to live in a world that we are used to. When Royce speaks of this place, she truly sings. Even in her anger, one can get lost in the music, which, Grosz reminds us, “is the reverse movement, the liberation of these harmonic and rhythmic patterns from their originating location . . . beyond the smallness of the refrain and on . . . to forms as not yet conceivable on the plane of composition.”54 We should study and memorize Royce’s gestures and repeat her statements like beatitudes. We should transpose her music and perform it with a full orchestra.

“Quentin Crisp as the Angel of Peace,” photograph by Panja Jurgens, 1996. (Panja Jurgens, They Call Themselves Queens: The Transformation Series [Zurich: Edition Stemmle, 1996])

Coda The Universe That Encloses the Universe

As St. Gregory said, every time the sacred text describes a fact, it reveals a mystery. Perhaps we should consider him an early stylist? Now, religion is not style. That said, its attendant practices offer a useful analog for considering the ways of style. It is a desire to know the universe and the mysteries of the universe. Religion is an opening up to or acceptance of the fact that one can never truly know. It is an attunement with the incomplete answer. As an ongoing source of inspiration and habit, then, we might think of religious practice as a way of searching out mystery and forging a path against the arrow of time. Ever the missionary, Quentin Crisp spent the latter part of his life—­ roughly the late ’70s until his death in 1999—­onstage, not so much performing as he was preaching style. At the end of these events, Crisp would turn to his audience and accept questions. One evening in New Orleans, someone from the audience asked him if he believed in God. To begin with, he provided his short answer, which was “no.” Explaining that, since he was someone who believed in not that which logic could convince him but what his nature inclined him to believe, Crisp could not find it in himself to have faith in a God susceptible to prayer-­as-­petition. Going on, he said, “it does not seem sufficiently humble to me to imagine that whatever force keeps the planets turning in the heavens is going to stop what it’s doing to give me a bicycle with three speeds.” In his subsequent remarks, Crisp said something that, when I first heard it, stopped me cold: “But if God is the universe that encloses the universe, or if God is the cell within the cell, or if God is the cause behind the cause, then this I accept absolutely. And if prayer is a way of aligning your body with the forces that flow through the universe, then prayer I accept.”1 This was a perfect thing for him to have said and, more im249

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portantly, the most instructive comment that I can imagine closing with concerning the fundamentals of style. Style is, like God, never totally achievable but always somehow still available. Theology, philosophy and the sciences are all driven, I would argue, by a common set of desires to encounter and understand the unknown. Philosophy, for instance, is a discipline based on a love of wisdom, and if philosophers were to ever announce that the work of understanding the mysteries of wisdom was finished, then they would be too. In the United States, theological and scientific thinking have obviously been pitted against each other for far too long, shadowboxing in the arena when their aims to pursue mystery resonate with each other. For those of us working in the humanities, we must consider the ways in which we are to forge ahead in time considering the primary questions that we have and will always in one way or another endeavor to answer—­chiefly, “Who are we?” The ways we have attempted to attend to this mystery have obviously taken various shapes over time and through our various schools of thought. I might suggest, however, that we make a mistake when we assume to have reached any final conclusion. There was a time, for instance, when we thought we had all the answers; we seem to have, since then, moved into a moment when we tell ourselves that we have all the questions. What I would like to call for is a remembrance of our foundations and a renewed spirit of curiosity about the work that we do while we are on Earth. Style is, after all, a process not of accumulation but of denudation. Strip away all the dead wood and work with the materials that remain. We should also not get too concerned with marking the shifts between this and that state of the humanities. Evolution has a way of happening on its own—­indeed, it has a sense of its own. It would be tempting, at this moment, standing next to all the various road signs marking post-­ this or post-­that, to try and consider what is next . . . as if our knowledge needed to develop in some kind of neat, teleological fashion. Still, there has been a shift that, I think, accounts for the emergence of writing in the humanities confronting intuition, affect, instinct, ontology, and survival and turning amicably toward theology and the sciences. There are fundamental terms that have, in recent decades, fallen out of fashion in the humanities that, I would argue, we should consider as we continue our labor. Words like “truth,” “personality,” “spirit,” and

Coda | 251

“endurance” have been covered over with quick fixes—­in the names of essentialism, relativism, identity, and even postidentity. But these concepts, these unfashionable terms, are our solid rocks—­they have been there, and they will be there whether we acknowledge them or not. This is not to say that we ought to return to and name any of these archaic terms in a spirit of blind nostalgia. But, indirectly, we can return to the core of these admittedly large and messy words and carry their spirit back into our work with literature, art, and criticism. “Style” is the term I choose to bring with me as I continue to chase after the very big questions that underlie and define my work as a scholar in the humanities, but it is just one word that can and I think will be able to stand next to many others—­some (like “becoming,” “overcoming,” “transfiguration”) that already exist and some that have yet to see the light of day. Style is my way of fixing my attention on that cell within the cell, cause behind the cause, and universe within the universe. On my way, I take with me the coins of our critical realm—­metaphor, symbolism, representation, analogy—­as tools for moving indirectly toward the within of things. While these tricks of the trade are old, they are what we have to work with since, after all, what we do as scholars is rely on indirection as a path toward inspiration. Style is not always clearly detectable, but neither are the forces that hold the world together. All of this is enough for me. Style is a solid rock. The tracks beneath the train. The cell within the cell. The universe that encloses the universe.

Acknowledgments

I should begin by acknowledging the editorial team at NYU Press, who have made publication of my book a reality. Special thanks to Furqan Sayeed for keeping things moving along and to Eric Zinner for his encouragement and perception of this book’s countercyclicality. It is an honor to be added to the roster of NYU Press’s Postmillennial Pop series, and I thank its editors, Harry Jenkins and Karen Tongson, for including me in their universe. The John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University offers Faculty Manuscript Workshops, and it was a real blessing to have been offered an opportunity to have a draft of this book read, critiqued, and reenvisioned by a group of generous and cosmically discerning colleagues from Duke and beyond. The FHI Manuscript Workshop gave me the sense and structure needed to make this book, and I will forever sing its praises. Thanks first and foremost to Sally Kornbluth and the Duke Office of the Provost for funding this opportunity. And thanks, of course, to my reviewers, from Duke and beyond: Joseph Donahue, Thomas J. Ferraro, El Glasberg, Elizabeth Grosz, Wayne Koestenbaum, Corina M. Stan, Marianna Torgovnick, and Priscilla Wald, Rob Sean Wilson. I would also like to thank Chris Chia for steering the ship and Sylvia Miller for her critical insights before, during, and after the workshop. I extend my deepest gratitude, too, to the captain of the FHI ship, Ranjana Khanna, for her collegiality and friendship. I am also grateful to the individuals who have assisted in my work with archival materials. Thanks to Phillip Ward, executive director of the Quentin Crisp Archives, for giving his time and sharing Quentin with me and also to Jean Harvey, photographer and friend of Quentin Crisp, who took me into her London home when I was just getting into things. Thanks to the folks at Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library and especially to Andrew Kingston and Kathy Shoemaker, who accompanied me during a critical visit to Atlanta 253

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in the summer of 2019. I am likewise indebted to the staff of the Flannery O’Connor Collection, which is a part of the Ina Dillard Russell Library at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville, and to Irene Burgess, executive director of the Andalusia Institute, for all the work she has done to widen the scope of O’Connor scholarship. I would like to acknowledge the following people, all figures from my life as a graduate student of American studies at Rutgers-­Newark. I thank Susan Carruthers, Ruth Feldstein, H. Bruce Franklin, Jyl Josephson, Laura Lomas, Jasbir K. Puar, Tim Raphael, and Robert Snyder. I am also grateful to Clement Alexander Price, who is no longer with us but remains, in a gigantic way, an exemplary public scholar. I also want to especially acknowledge Charles Russell for seeing something in me (even when I could not) and Beryl Satter for going above and beyond in her mentorship over me when I was only a hopeful (if willful) graduate student. I am indebted, too, to the following colleagues and cohort companions made in my early years of study at Rutgers: Reniqua Allen-­Lamphere, Roseanna Alvarez, Paul Heideman, John Johnson Jr., Laura Martin, Lara Merlin, Jonathan Perez, Sean Singer, Christina Strasburger, Rosie Uyola, and Ayoka Yejide. There are many kind souls who enriched my experience as a member of Duke’s intellectual community. First, I am grateful to those in my home department, English, who welcomed me and continue to show me the ropes. I am thankful to the departmental administrators: Catherine Beaver, Sabrina Carr, Michelle Dove, Matia Guardabascio, Quantà Holden, and Lisa Olds. I offer my thanks to the following colleagues, who have offered their time and wisdom, thereby impacting my work: David Aers, Dominika Baran, Sarah Beckwith, Faulkner Fox, J. P. Gritton, Tsitsi Jaji, Melissa Malouf, Robert Mitchell, Michael Valdez Moses, Akhil Sharma, Cathy Shuman, Charlotte Sussman, Julie Tetel, and Julianne Werlin. I am especially grateful for Michael D’Allesandro and Jarvis McInnis, the other two members of a trio to which I blessedly belong. Special thanks, too, to the following members of the wider Duke world who have, at one point or another, offered insights that impacted my thinking: Elizabeth Ault, Neal Bell, Beth Eastlick, Sophia Enriquez, Valeria Finucci, Michael Klien, Virginia Ramirez-­Deltoro, Sarah Rogers, Jeffrey Storer, Anna Storti, Ara Wilson, and Jenny Wood-­Crowley. I am especially glad to be a part of a world of inspiring American studies scholars at Duke. Thanks to Hunter Augeri, L. J. Cooper, Cao-

Acknowledgments | 255

imhe A. Harlock, Amber Manning, Maggie McDowell: current and former graduate advisees and coteachers. The following is an incomplete list of people who—­over many years—­have done or said something that changed my way of thinking. For being insightful and generous, I would like to thank the following: Linell Ajello, Kadji Amin, Jay Arora, Julie Blair, Jane Bradley, Bevin Branlandingham, Julian Talamentez Brolaski, Bruce Bromley, Sarah Chinn, Abbie Cohen, Paisley Currah, Samuel Every, Nicole Fermon, Andrea Fontenot, Jen Gaboury, Colby Gordon, Molly Grote, Paula Hildebrand, Joey Jenkins, Sarah Kessler, Tom Léger, Katie Liederman, Shelly Mars, Madison Alexander Moore, Rupal Oza, Rosalind Petchesky, Ben Pollak, Raymond Ricketts, Alex Sim, Ashley Tellis, Stuart Torgovnick, Jeanne Vaccaro, Kirin Wachter-­Grene, Olympia Bruce Wolk, Meyda Yegenoglu, Genevieve Yue, and Natasha Zaretsky. I am indebted to Barbara Foley and Andrew Parker, who advised my dissertation and taught me how to think deeply and critically. I cannot say enough about my appreciation for Frances Bartkowski, who chaired my dissertation committee and, more importantly, showed me how to grow as a scholar and human being. Above all, Fran models attunement with the world, and I cannot imagine my intellectual life without Fran’s guidance and friendship. I have been a member of two small writing groups, the first of which came together during the early months of the COVID-­19 pandemic, rescuing me from what might have been a terribly alienating period of working through this book. Thanks to Amin Ahmad for his generosity and vision and to Ben Janse for his unique ability to open things up. I am especially indebted to Marianna Torgovnick, who organized both writing groups and kept me inspired to write. I am also thankful to Marianna for her professional mentorship and, more importantly, for being a true friend. Special thanks to Tom Ferraro for his mentorship and depth of vision, which extends beyond the beyond. To Liz Grosz, thank you for the friendship and for instructing me in the ways of becoming. Thanks to Guy Kettelhack for his cosmic laughter and for sharing his wonderful creatures.

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I am so glad to call Kathy Rudy a human-­friend and nonhuman-­pack member. She has made Durham feel like home again. Thanks to Karen Tongson, who models public scholarship and intellectual comradery for us all, and for always being there to refill the cosmic cup. How grateful I am to know and be accompanied on this curious journey by Priscilla Wald, who is so kind and freethinking. I thank her for her expert mentorship and for all those walks. I, for one, think the chicken cheated. Thanks to Rob Wilson, for all the Dylan talk and for being a bootleg brother to the end. I thank my father, Malcolm Black, for showing me how to love music and in doing so giving me my first lessons in being an intellectual. Thanks also to my aunt, Jean Carden, a stylist who has always seen and supported me in my endeavors to become more like myself. And thanks to my mother, Teresa Blemings, whose instincts about other people and ways of seeing past the surface of things I inherited. Thanks for showing me how to see things like they are and for rewinding the Oz tape over and over again. Thanks to my sisters, Louisa Black and Lauren Canup, for their unique lessons in style. And to Steve Blemings, thanks for everything that you do. Thanks to Blue Broxton, for the art, the friendship, and the bearded ladies. Thanks to Uthman Ebrahim for making life into a musical and to Joe Troop for breaking my arm. And thanks to Terry Hicks, who taught me how to teach. This book would be nothing if not for the friendship and insistent guidance provided by El Glasberg. Glasberg and I have been talking about music since the first time we met, way back when. Since then, Glasberg has shown me the way to becoming-­predeceased. And I’ve still got that advice oozing out of my ears. And what to say about my lifetime love and little friend, Chase Checkers Black? My appreciation for you is infinite and impossible to sum up or pin down. So, rather than trying, I’ll just say this: you’re a top bird. Finally, all praise is due to our dog, Phaedra, who sat patiently by my side as I wrote the pages of this book, even though she would rather have been outside chasing tennis balls. And no thanks is offered whatsoever to her sister, Mika: our cat who interrupted me every chance she could get.

Notes

Introduction

Epigraph: Quoted in Sam Roberts, “‘The Elements of Style’ Turns 50,” New York Times, April 21, 2009. 1. William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White, The Elements of Style (New York: Macmillan, 1959), vii. 2. Strunk and White, 17. 3. David Watson Rannie, The Elements of Style (London: J. M. Dent, 1915), 5. 4. Rannie, 6. 5. Rannie, 8. 6. Rannie, 8. 7. Strunk and White, Elements of Style. 8. I borrow the phrase “unknown known” from Slavoj Žižek but with different ideas of it than he conveys. His term comes from his philosophical response to and extension of Donald Rumsfeld’s now-­infamous argument for US invasion of Iraq predicated on “known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.” CNN, “Rumsfeld/Knowns,” YouTube, March 31, 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=REWeBzGuzCc; Ippolit Belinski, “Slavoj Žižek on Donald Rumsfeld (unknown knowns),” YouTube, November 11, 2016, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=ql80Klk4pSU. 9. Zadie Smith, “Some Notes on Attunement: A Voyage around Joni Mitchell,” New Yorker, December 9, 2012. 10. Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Felski, Hooked: Art and Attachment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020). 11. See Elizabeth Ankler and Rita Felski, eds., Critique and Postcritique (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 12. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108, no. 1 (Fall 2009): 1–­21. 13. See Heather Love, “Critique Is Ordinary,” PMLA 132, no. 2 (2017): 364–­370; and David Kurnick, “A Few Lies: Queer Theory and Our Method Melodramas,” ELH 87, no. 2 (Summer 2020): 349–­374. 14. Some of these are rather new: Graham Harmon’s Object-­Oriented Ontology; Manuel DeLanda’s Deleuzian assemblage theory to create a nonlinear description of history; Elizabeth Grosz’s work on the limits of materialism that results in her invention of an “onto-­ethics.” Others are older: Deleuze and Guattari, for instance,

257

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especially as they come together for their final project in What Is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) on the work of conceptual invention and becoming; Nietzsche’s dream of overcoming resentment and moralism; William James’s discipline-­defying work on that very American concept “belief.” 15. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “Conceptual Personae,” chapter 3 in What Is Philosophy? 16. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), xii. 17. See Flannery O’Connor, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, ed. Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 36–­50. 18. BFI, “Bernard Braydon Interviews Quentin Crisp (1968),” YouTube, June 25, 2009, www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFPqDUQKmt8. 19. Edgar Allan Poe, Eureka: A Prose Poem (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1997), 40. 20. Greil Marcus, Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (New York: Picador, 2011). 21. José Esteban Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts,” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (1996): 5–­16. See discussions of “the plane of immanence” in Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 22. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Muñoz, The Sense of Brown (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020). 23. Sedgwick, Tendencies, xii. 24. Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence”; and José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009). Throughout his work, one appreciates the sui generis nature of one of Muñoz’s earliest conceptual inventions, that of ephemera as evidence. 25. BFI, “Bernard Braydon Interviews Quentin Crisp (1968),” YouTube, June 25, 2009, www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFPqDUQKmt8. 26. BFI. 27. BFI. 28. J. Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 3. 29. Halberstam, 11. 30. Halberstam, 10, quoting Foucault, Society Must Be Defended (2003), 38. 31. Halberstam, 12–­16. 32. Halberstam, 16. 33. Halberstam, 15. 34. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Bantam, 1989), 1–­2; José Esteban Muñoz, “‘Chico, What Does It Feel Like to Be a Problem?’: The Transmission of Brownness,” chapter 5 in The Sense of Brown, ed. Joshua Chambers-­Letson and Tavia Nyong’o (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 36–­46. 35. Muñoz, Sense of Brown, 36–­37.

Notes | 259

36. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 3. 37. Deleuze and Guattari, 25. 38. Deleuze and Guattari, 24–­26. 39. Deleuze and Guattari, 25. 40. Deleuze and Guattari, 25. 41. Gayatri Spivak coins the term “strategic essentialism” in a 1984 interview with Elizabeth Grosz, “Criticism, Feminism and The Institution,” Thesis Eleven 10, no. 11 (1984): 184. 42. Muñoz, Sense of Brown, 39. 43. Muñoz, 40. 44. Muñoz, 40. 45. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia. 46. See Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” Architecture/ Mouvement/Continuité, October 1984, 1–­8; Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: Norton, 2019); Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Madison Moore, Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018). 47. Tavia Nyong’o, Afro Fabulation: The Queer Drama of Black Life (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 21–­26. 48. Nyong’o, 22. 49. Nyong’o, 22. 50. Nyong’o, 23. 51. Nyong’o, 26. 52. Chanda Prescod-­Weinstein, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred (New York: Hachette, 2021), 68. 53. Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” in I Love Myself When I Am Laughing and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive (New York: Feminist Press, 1979), 147. 54. Hurston, 148. 55. Hurston, 148. 56. Hurston, 148. 57. Hurston, 149. 58. Hurston, 149. 59. Hurston, 149. 60. Hurston, 149–­150.

Part I. The Mystery of Personality

Epigraphs: Quentin Crisp, “Having Style,” Crisperanto: The Quentin Crisp Archives, accessed April 17, 2021, www.crisperanto.org; Flannery O’Connor, “A Reasonable Use of the Unreasonable,” in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, ed. Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 113.

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1. See Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (New York: Zone Books, 1990). 2. See Elizabeth Grosz, The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics and the Limits of Materialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). 3. Nikki Giovanni, “Ego Tripping (there may be a reason why)” (1968), Poets.org, accessed April 19, 2021, https://poets.org. On the difference between potentiality and possibility, see Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 9. 4. Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 61. 5. Quentin Crisp, The Wit and Wisdom of Quentin Crisp, ed. Guy Kettelhack (London: Century, 1984), 73. 6. Hilton Als, The Women (New York: Noonsday, 1996). 7. Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (New York: De Capo, 1993), 156. 8. Quentin Crisp, How to Have a Lifestyle (New York: Methuen, 1979), 47. 9. Crisp, 47. 10. Flannery O’Connor, “Writing Short Stories,” in Mystery and Manners, 101. 11. O’Connor, 88. 12. O’Connor, 88. 13. O’Connor, 96. 14. O’Connor, 96. 15. O’Connor, 99. 16. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 5. 17. Sedgwick, 9. 18. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 64, 63. 19. Grosz, Incorporeal, 50. 20. Grosz, 51. 21. Grosz, 51. 22. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 10.

Chapter 1. Quentin Crisp, Queen of the Birds

Parts of this chapter appear in Taylor Black, “Apotheosis of the Peacock: On Queerness, Repetition, and Style,” ASAP Journal 5, no. 3 (2020): 639–­666. 1. Alison Bell, “Peacock’s Tale Reaches Back to Baldwin,” Los Angeles Times, May 9, 2010, A38. 2. Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 43. 3. Crisp, 43. 4. Crisp, 44. 5. Nigel Kelly, Quentin Crisp: The Profession of Being (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 174. 6. Quentin Crisp, How to Have a Lifestyle (New York: Methuen, 1979), 8.

Notes | 261

7. E. Glasberg et al., “The Butch Throat: A Roundtable,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 30, no. 4 (December 2018): 76. 8. Glasberg et al., 8. 9. See Wayne Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol: A Biography (New York: Viking, 2001). In the introduction, Koestenbaum argues that “deciding to love boredom gave [Warhol] an advantage: he overcame the repugnance that prevents the wary from delving into the unknown” (10). 10. Crisp, How to Have a Lifestyle, 8. 11. Crisp, 31. 12. Still, as I witnessed time and again in Arcadia, if a peacock does not have a suitable audience, he will seek out a mirror (or something approximating a mirror, like a shiny car door or pool of water) so that he can admire and even challenge himself to an argument. 13. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 28. 14. Muñoz, 28. 15. Crisp, How to Have a Lifestyle, 7–­8. 16. Crisp, Naked Civil Servant, 7. 17. Crisp, 7. 18. Crisp, 7. 19. Crisp, 7. 20. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 99. 21. Flannery O’Connor, “The King of the Birds,” in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, ed. Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 12. 22. Crisp, Naked Civil Servant, 67. 23. Crisp, 68. 24. Crisp, 2. 25. Shane Bordoli, “Seven Men—­Quentin Crisp (1970),” World in Action (Granada Television, 1970), YouTube, February 18, 2018, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=wTRntQUhipc&t=6s. 26. Crisp, 10. 27. Crisp, 10–­11. 28. Crisp, 10. 29. Quentin Crisp, The Last Word, ed. Phillip Ward and Lawrence Watts (San Diego, CA: MB Books, 2017), 3. 30. Quentin Crisp, The Wit and Wisdom of Quentin Crisp, ed. Guy Kettelhack (London: Century Hutchinson, 1985), 70, 71. 31. Crisp, 75. 32. Crisp, Naked Civil Servant, 125. 33. Crisp, 124. 34. Crisp, Wit and Wisdom of Quentin Crisp, 73. 35. Crisp, Naked Civil Servant, 124.

262 | Notes

36. Crisp, 125. 37. Crisp offers this pert description of his autobiography in his interview with Bernard Braydon: BFI, “Bernard Braydon Interviews Quentin Crisp (1968),” YouTube, June 25, 2009, www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFPqDUQKmt8. 38. Opening sequence, The Naked Civil Servant, dir. Jack Gold, writ. Philip Mackie, feat. John Hurt, Patricia Hodge, and John Rhys-­Davies (Thames Television, 1975). 39. Crisp, How to Have a Lifestyle, 25. 40. Shane Bordoli, “Seven Men—­Quentin Crisp (1970),” World in Action (Granada Television, 1970), YouTube, February 18, 2018, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=wTRntQUhipc&t=6s. 41. Crisp, How to Have a Lifestyle, 81. 42. Crisp, 83. 43. Crisp, 83. 44. Crisp, 83. 45. Crisp, 107. 46. Crisp, 107. 47. Crisp, 77. 48. Crisp, 7. 49. This was one of Crisp’s many quips that he was known to repeat again and again. Among other places, Crisp’s quote can be found as the epigraph of Guy Kettelhack’s poem “The Weather,” Act Three—­Guy Kettelhack—­Poetry & Ephemera (blog), April 13, 2008, https://guykettelhack.blogspot.com. 50. Resident Alien, dir. Jonathan Nossiter (New Video, 1991). 51. Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Homosexuals in the 90s (New York: Doubleday, 1989).

Chapter 2. It Takes a Sheep

Parts of this essay appear in Taylor Black, “Useful Idiots: Flannery O’Connor and the Curse of Superiority,” Arizona Quarterly 78, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 111–­127. 1. British Pathé, “Do You Reverse? (1932),” YouTube, April 13, 2014, www.youtube. com/watch?v=dtnV-iD2QlI. 2. Susan Sontag, “On Style,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Picador, 1961), 35. 3. Flannery O’Connor, “The King of the Birds,” in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, ed. Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 4. 4. O’Connor, 11. 5. O’Connor, 4. 6. O’Connor, 4. 7. O’Connor, 21. 8. For a useful discussion of the now familiar moniker “backwoods prophet,” see Jordan Cofer’s The Gospel According to Flannery O’Connor: Examining the Role of the Bible in Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 35–­40.

Notes | 263

9. Flannery O’Connor, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” in Mystery and Manners, 42. 10. O’Connor, 40. 11. O’Connor, 40. 12. Flannery O’Connor, Flannery O’Connor: The Cartoons, ed. Kelly Gerald and Barry Moser (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2012), back cover. 13. Many of these cartoons drawn for GSCW’s Spectrum can be found in O’Connor, Flannery O’Connor: The Cartoons. 14. “Interview with Sarah Rudolph Miller,” Jean Cash Papers, Flannery O’Connor Archive, Georgia State College and University, Milledgeville, GA. 15. Flannery O’Connor, “The Fiction Writer & His Country,” in Mystery and Manners, 26, 34. 16. See John Keats to George and Thomas Keats, December 22, 1817, in The Complete Poetical Works of John Keats, Cambridge Edition (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1899), 277; hear Marianne Faithfull, Negative Capability (Panta Rei, 2018), LP. 17. O’Connor, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque,” 44. 18. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 222. 19. Quentin Crisp, “Having Style,” Crisperanto: The Quentin Crisp Archives, accessed May 11, 2021, www.crisperanto.org. 20. Forrest Gump, dir. Robert Zemeckis (Paramount Pictures, 1994). 21. Flannery O’Connor to Jon Hawkes, September 13, 1939, in The Habit of Being, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 350. 22. O’Connor to Hawkes, 349–­350. 23. Miscellaneous Drafts, box 236, folder A, Flannery O’Connor Archive, Georgia State College and University, Milledgeville, GA. 24. O’Connor, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque,” 38. 25. Flannery O’Connor to Maryat Lee, September 6, 1959, in Habit of Being, 349. 26. Hilton Als, White Girls (San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2014), 129. 27. Flannery O’Connor, “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” in The Complete Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), 405–­420. 28. Flannery O’Connor to Betty Hester, September 1, 1963, in Habit of Being, 537. 29. Flannery O’Connor, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” in Mystery and Manners, 79. 30. O’Connor, 79. 31. O’Connor, 77. 32. Flannery O’Connor, “On Her Own Work,” in Mystery and Manners, 115. 33. O’Connor, 115. 34. Henry T. Edmonson III, Return to Good and Evil: Flannery O’Connor’s Response to Nihilism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002), 36. 35. O’Connor, “On Her Own Work,” 115. 36. In a 1955 review of A Good Man Is Hard to Find, O’Connor’s second major publication following Wise Blood, a reviewer for Time magazine described this col-

264 | Notes

lection of “ten witheringly sarcastic stories” as being the product of yet “another Southern lady whose work is highly unladylike. . . . Her instruments are a brutal irony, a slam-­bang humor, and a style of writing as balefully direct as a death sentence. The South that simpers, storms, and snivels in these pages moves along a sort of up-­to-­date Tobacco Road, paved right into town.” In the end, as the Time reviewer complains, “nobody is noble in these stories. These are the ‘maimed souls’ and the ferociously maternal types whose footless magnanimity seems unfailingly to destroy those around them.” “Such Nice People,” Time, June 6, 1955. 37. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 38. Deleuze and Guattari, 23. 39. O’Connor, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque,” 44. 40. Flannery O’Connor, “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” in Complete Stories, 145–­156. 41. O’Connor, 150. 42. O’Connor, 145. 43. Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” in Complete Stories, 117–­116; O’Connor, “Revelation,” in Complete Stories, 488–­509. 44. O’Connor, “Good Man,” 133. 45. For more on what Wood terms the Grandmother’s “practical atheism,” see Ralph C. Wood, Flannery O’Connor and the Christ Haunted South (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), 38–­41; see also Wood, “Climbing into the Starry Field and Shouting Hallelujah: O’Connor’s Vision of the World to Come,” in Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Flannery O’Connor, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Infobase, 2009), 103–­118. 46. O’Connor, “Good Man,” 132. 47. O’Connor, 132. 48. O’Connor to Betty Hester, January 21, 1961, in Habit of Being, 427. 49. O’Connor to Hester, 427. 50. Flannery O’Connor to Betty Hester, February 4, 1961, in Habit of Being, 430. 51. Rob Wilson, Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted: An American Poetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 10. In my description of conversion as nonlinear, I am deeply indebted to many different conceptualizations and (re)configurations of conversion as a creative, ethical, spiritual, and mythopoetic mode of becoming. These ideas run through Wilson’s body of work but are presented most forcefully in his book Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted. See, for instance, the way he describes this American mythopoetic tradition, which hovers around Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James, in the opening pages of his introduction, especially pages 3–­7. 52. Avital Ronell, Stupidity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 43. 53. Flannery O’Connor to Cecil Dawkins, October 26, 1958, in Habit of Being, 301. 54. Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear It Away, in The Complete Works, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Library of America, 1988), 401.

Notes | 265

55. Wood, “Climbing into the Starry Field,” 107. 56. Wood, 107–­108. 57. Wood, 108. 58. Wood, 108. 59. Flannery O’Connor, “Good Country People,” in Complete Stories, 271–­291; O’Connor, “The Enduring Chill,” in Complete Stories, 357–­382; O’Connor, “The Lame Shall Enter First,” in Complete Stories, 445–­482. 60. Ronell, Stupidity, 54. 61. Eudora Welty, “Where Is the Voice Coming From?,” New Yorker, June 28, 1963. 62. Flannery O’Connor to Betty Hester, August 3, 1963, in Habit of Being, 533. 63. Welty, “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” 64. Flannery O’Connor to Betty Hester, September 1, 1963, in Habit of Being, 537. 65. Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), 6. 66. Flannery O’Connor to Betty Hester, March 23, 1957, in Habit of Being, 210, quoted in O’Donnell, Radical Ambivalence, 6. 67. O’Donnell, Radical Ambivalence, 6. 68. O’Connor to Hester, September 1, 1963, 537. 69. O’Connor, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque,” 37–­38. 70. O’Connor, 38. 71. O’Connor, 39. 72. O’Connor, 40. 73. Flannery: The Storied Life of the Writer from Georgia, dir. Elizabeth Coffman and Mark Bosco, S.J. (Long Distance Productions, 2020). 74. Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003). 75. Paul Elie, “How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?,” New Yorker, June 15, 2020, www.newyorker.com. 76. See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 77. Elie, “How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?” 78. O’Connor to Hester, September 1, 1963, 537. 79. Flannery O’Connor, “The Catholic Novelist in the Modernist South,” in Mystery and Manners, 209. 80. O’Connor, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque,” 44–­45.

Part II. The Arrow of Time

Epigraph: Quentin Crisp, How to Have a Lifestyle (New York: Methuen, 1979), 25–­26. 1. Crisp, How to Have a Lifestyle, 16. 2. BFI, “Bernard Braydon Interviews Quentin Crisp (1968),” YouTube, June 25, 2009, www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFPqDUQKmt8. 3. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Imp of the Perverse,” Graham’s Magazine 28 (July 1845). 4. Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 236.

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5. Dylan, 244. 6. Dylan, 240. 7. Quentin Crisp, The Wit and Wisdom of Quentin Crisp, ed. Guy Kettelhack (London: Century Hutchinson, 1985), 18. 8. Crisp, 43. 9. Crisp, 43.

Chapter 3. The Poe Machine

Epigraph: Edgar Allan Poe, Eureka: A Prose Poem (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1997), 4. 1. R. W. Griswold, “Death of Edgar A. Poe,” New York Daily Tribune, October 9, 1849, 2. 2. Griswold, 2. 3. Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 644. 4. Scott Peeples, The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004), 2. 5. Bryllion N. Fagin, The Histrionic Mr. Poe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1949), 23. 6. Quoted in Daniel W. Smith, introduction to Essays Critical and Clinical, by Gilles Deleuze (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xxii. 7. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-­Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 106. 8. Peeples, Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe, xi. The epigraph to this section is quoted in Peeples, 24. 9. Charles Leonard Moore, “The American Rejection of Poe,” The Dial 47 (January16, 1899): 41. 10. Moore, 40. 11. Quoted in Sidney Kaplan, “An Introduction to Pym,” in Poe: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert Regan (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 1967), 147. 12. Moore, “American Rejection of Poe,” 40. 13. Scott Casper, Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-­ Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 2. The nineteenth-­century interest in spiritual mediums is also resonant here: another pathway through which public desire to peer into the unknown made itself a part of the popular culture. 14. All that is said here seems to strangely mirror—­or predict—­the buzz and snark surrounding Dylan’s Nobel Prize win. 15. Peeples, Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe, 11. The epigraph to this section is quoted in Peeples, 24. 16. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Man That Was Used Up,” in Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Vintage, 1975), 68. 17. Poe, 68.

Notes | 267

18. Peeples, Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe, 25. 19. Poe, “Man That Was Used Up,” 69. 20. Poe, 70. 21. Poe, 70. 22. Poe, 70. 23. Poe, 71. 24. See Harry Lee Poe, Evermore: Edgar Allan Poe and the Mystery of the Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 11–­12. 25. Peeples, Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe, 29. 26. Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies in Hysteria (New York: Penguin, 2004), xxx. 27. Peeples, Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe, 29–­32. 28. Henry James, “Charles Baudelaire,” The Nation 22 (1876): 280. 29. Quoted in Peeples, Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe, 41. 30. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” Graham’s Magazine 28, no. 4 (April 4, 1846): 163. 31. Fagin, Histrionic Mr. Poe, viii–­ix. 32. Edgar Allan Poe, “A Genus Irritable,” in The Unknown Poe: An Anthology of Fugitive Writings, ed. Raymonde Foye (San Francisco: City Lights, 1980), 36. 33. Poe, 36. 34. Poe, 37–­38. 35. Poe, “Philosophy of Composition,” 164. 36. “Holding in view these considerations, as well as that degree of excitement which I deemed not above the popular, while not below the critical, taste, I reached at once what I conceived the proper length for my intended poem—­a length of about one hundred lines. It is, in fact, a hundred and eight” (Poe, 164). 37. Poe, 164. 38. Poe, 165. 39. Poe, 165. 40. Poe, 167. 41. John Crowe Ransome, The New Criticism (New York: New Directions, 1941). 42. Peeples, Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe, 63–­64, 43. Peeples, 64. 44. Aldous Huxley, “Vulgarity in Literature,” in Collected Essays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1967), 161. I realize that Huxley’s comments were made a good fifteen years before the “official” commencement of the New Criticism, but I think they embody the level of criticism aimed at Poe in the decades to come. 45. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 2. 46. Deleuze and Guattari, 6–­7, 47. Allen Tate, “Our Cousin, Mr. Poe,” in Essays of Four Decades (Chicago: Swallow, 1968), 385–400. 48. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” in The Tell Tale Heart and Other Writings (New York: Bantam, 1982), 25.

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49. Daniel Hoffman, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972), xiii. The Weber quote in the epigraph to this chapter is quoted in Hoffman, 157. 50. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Imp of the Perverse,” in Unknown Poe, 61. 51. Poe, 61. 52. Gilles Deleuze, “The Myth of Ariadne according to Nietzsche,” in Essays Critical and Clinical, 100. 53. Chris Baldick, introduction to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, ed. Chris Baldick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), xxiii. 54. Baldick, xiii–­xiv. 55. Poe, “Fall of the House of Usher,” 29. 56. Sean Moreland, “‘Torture[d] into aught of the sublime’: Poe’s Fall of the House of Burke, Ussher, and Kant,” in Deciphering Poe: Subtexts, Contexts, Subversive Messages, ed. Alexandra Urakova (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2013), 53–­65. 57. Moreland, 54. 58. Poe, “Fall of the House of Usher,” 28. 59. Moreland, “Torture[d] into aught of the sublime,” 56. 60. Poe, “Fall of the House of Usher,” 43. 61. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image-­Music-­Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 142. 62. Barthes, 142. 63. Barthes, 147. 64. Barthes, 147, 162. 65. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 119. 66. Foucault, 103–­104. 67. Foucault, 103–­104. 68. Quoted in Smith, introduction to Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, xv. 69. Poe, Eureka, 40. 70. Scott Peeples, Edgar Allan Poe Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1998), 55. 71. Some of the sources he plagiarizes include Captain James Cook’s tour on the Resolution, Benjamin Morrell’s A Narrative of Four Voyages (1832), John Cleves Symmes Jr.’s Hollow Earth hypothesis, Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), and folklore associated with the Flying Dutchman. 72. Edgard Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, in Tell Tale Heart and Other Writings, 375–­379. 73. This is a riff on Bob Dylan’s “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’,” track 1 on Together through Life (Columbia Records, 2008), LP.

Notes | 269

Chapter 4. Shadow Kingdom

Epigraphs: No Direction Home, dir. Martin Scorsese (Paramount Pictures, 2005), DVD; Bob Dylan, “Things Have Changed” (Columbia Records, 2000), 7" record; Dylan, “Man in the Long Black Coat,” track 5 on Oh Mercy (Columbia Records, 1989), LP. 1. Bob Dylan, Time Out of Mind (Columbia Records, 1997), LP. 2. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” in Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Vintage, 1975), 177. 3. Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005), 256. 4. Dylan, 236. 5. Dylan, 236. 6. Dylan, 236. 7. 60 Minutes interview with Ed Bradley, CBS, December 5, 2004. 8. Dylan, Chronicles, 71. 9. Dylan, 103. 10. Dylan, “Spirit on the Water,” track 2 on Modern Times (Columbia Records, 2006), LP. 11. “Long Black Veil” was first recorded by Lefty Frizzell in 1959 on Columbia Records. Dylan never recorded it but has performed it in concert hundreds of times. 12. “Frankie & Johnny” / “Frankie & Albert” first appeared in response to the 1899 murder of a seventeen-­year-­old Allen or Albert by a twenty-­two-­year-­old woman named Frankie Baker in St. Louis. The first iteration was composed in 1899 by Bill Dooley of St. Louis (titled “Frankie Killed Allen”). The first version that was recorded and released commercially was in 1904 (as “He Done Me Wrong,” by Hughie Cannon. See Cecil Brown, “Frankie and Albert/Johnny,” Encyclopedia of African American Popular Culture 2 (2011): 542–­546. Delia Green, a young Black woman from Savannah, Georgia, was the motivation for the 1908 song “Delia” (and, in later iterations, “Delia’s Gone”), first recorded by Blind Willie McTell of Atlanta in 1928. See Southern Folklore Quarterly 1, no. 4 (December 1937); Sean Wilentz, Dylan in America (New York: Doubleday, 2010), 117–­131. Here is Dylan on “Delia” in the liner notes to World Gone Wrong (Columbia Records, 1993): “delia is a sad tale—­two or more versions mixed into one. the song has no middle range, comes whipping around the corner, seems to be about counterfeit loyalty. Delia herself, no Queen Gertrude, Elizabeth 1 or even Evita Peron, doesnt ride a Harley Davidson across the desert highway, doesnt need a blood change & would never go on a shopping spree.” 13. Bob Dylan, “Frankie & Albert,” track 1 on Good as I Been to You (Columbia Records, 1992), LP. 14. Dylan, Chronicles, 72–­73. 15. Interestingly, there was lots of flak given to Dylan following the release of Good as I Been to You in 1992 (the first of two collections of traditional material) regarding his decision to list himself as composer of all thirteen songs. The editor’s review of the album in issue 114 of Folk Roots magazine asked, “Why has this rich old has-­ been copyrighted every damn track as Traditional Arranged Dylan?”

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16. “In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche talks about feeling old at the beginning of life. . . . I felt like that, too” (Dylan, Chronicles, 73). I am still searching for the specific reference Dylan makes here, though he is not one to be trusted with regard to seeking out accurate references or archives. The connection between Nietzsche’s description of the pleasure to be found “beyond good and evil” and Dylan’s own religious conviction to folk music that makes his work so untimely and that marks it with a “time out of mind” is one that deserves closer examination. 17. Dylan, World Gone Wrong (Columbia Records, 1993), LP. 18. Lefty Frizzell, “Long Black Veil,” side A of single “Long Black Veil” (Columbia Records, 1959), 45 RPM record. 19. Dylan, Chronicles, 86. 20. David Sexton, review of Good as I Been to You, Sunday Telegraph (London), November 1, 1992. 21. Greil Marcus, Invisible Republic / Bob Dylan’s Old Weird America (New York: Henry Holt, 1997). 22. Bob Dylan and The Band, The Basement Tapes, recorded June–­September 1967 (Columbia Records, 1975), LP; various artists, Anthology of American Folk Music, recorded 1926–­1933 (Folkway Records, 1952), LP; Marcus, Invisible Republic, 86. 23. Marcus, Invisible Republic, xvi. 24. Dylan, Chronicles, 34. 25. Dylan, 34–­35. 26. Dylan, 35. 27. Dylan, 230. 28. Bob Dylan, “Scarlet Town,” track 6 on Tempest (Columbia Records, 2012), LP; Dylan with Johnny Cash, “Girl from the North Country,” track 1 on Nashville Skyline (Columbia Records, 1969), LP; “Girl from the North Country,” track 2 on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (Columbia Records, 1963), LP. 29. Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited (Columbia Records, 1965), LP. 30. Sunnyland Slim, “Highway 61,” B side of “It’s You Baby Single” (Cobra Record Corporation, 1957), 10" shellac. 31. Michael Gray, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (New York: Continuum, 2006), 321. 32. Dylan, Chronicles, 240. 33. Dylan, 240–­241. 34. Bob Dylan, “The Man in the Long Black Coat,” track 5 on Oh Mercy (Columbia Records, 1989), LP; Dylan “Masters of War,” track 3 on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (Columbia Records, 1963), LP; Dylan, “When He Returns,” track 10 on Slow Train Coming (Columbia Records, 1979), LP. 35. For more on this idea, see Gilmore’s discussions of Dylan’s self-­revelations in the context of his public persona, in Gospel of Bob Dylan. 36. While there was general backlash after the release of his Bringing It All Back Home (Columbia Records, 1965) for moving his sound away from the stripped-­down

Notes | 271

acoustic folk music of his earlier records to a more electrified hipster sound, it was at his concert in Manchester in 1965 that the journalist John Cordwell screamed “Judas!” as Dylan and his band began to play “Like a Rolling Stone.” This event has been recorded on Dylan’s Live 1966: The “Royal Albert Hall” Concert, an official bootleg released by Columbia Records in 1998. 37. Interview with Ed Bradley, 60 Minutes. 38. Mikal Gilmore, “Bob Dylan Unleashed,” Rolling Stone, September 27, 2012. 39. Dylan, Chronicles, 119. 40. Dylan, 119–­120. 41. Dylan, 120–­121. 42. Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan, the Essential Interviews, ed. Jonathan Cott (New York: Wenner Media / Rolling Stone Press, 2006), 61–­80. 43. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Man That Was Used Up,” Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, August 1839. 44. Dylan, Chronicles, 116–­117. 45. Dylan, 115–­116. 46. Dylan, 114–­115. 47. Gilmore, “Bob Dylan Unleashed.” 48. Hear Bob Dylan, Street-­Legal (Columbia Records, 1978), LP; Bob Dylan at Budokan (Columbia Records, 1978), LP; Slow Train Coming; Saved (Columbia Records, 1980), LP; Shot of Love (Columbia Records, 1981), LP. 49. Rob Wilson, Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted: An American Poetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 173. 50. Dylan, Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, 276. 51. Robert Love, “Bob Dylan Uncut,” AARP Magazine, January 22, 2015. 52. Bob Dylan, “Solid Rock,” track 5 on Saved. 53. Quoted in Daniel W. Smith, introduction to Essays Critical and Clinical, by Gilles Deleuze (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), xxxv. 54. See Flannery O’Connor, “Catholic Novelists and Their Readers,” in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, ed. Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 169–­190. 55. Flannery O’Connor, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” in Mystery and Manners, 42. 56. See O’Connor, 42. 57. Bob Dylan, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” track 1 on Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan; “Chimes of Freedom,” track 4 on Another Side of Bob Dylan (Columbia Records, 1964), LP; “Gates of Eden,” track 9 on Bringing It All Back Home; Dylan, “A Hard Rain’s a-­Gonna Fall,” track 6 on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. 58. Masked and Anonymous, dir. Larry Charles (Sony Pictures, 2003). 59. Bob Dylan, “Drifter’s Escape,” track 6 on John Wesley Harding (Columbia Records, 1967), LP. 60. Bob Dylan, “Can’t Wait,” track 10 on Time Out of Mind.

272 | Notes

Part III. The Critic as Stylist

1. See Timothy Miller, Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (New York: Continuum, 2005), 595. 2. Emissaries of Divine Light, “About Emissaries of Divine Light,” accessed May 8, 2021, https://emissaries.org. 3. See Lloyd A. Meeker, The Divine Design of Man (Loveland, CO: Universal Institute of Applied Ontology, 1952); and Uranda, The Third Sacred School, vol. 7, Health, Healing, and Attunements (Loveland, CO: Emissaries of Divine Light, 1986). 4. Emissaries of Divine Light, “What Is Spiritual Regeneration?,” accessed May 8, 2021, https://emissaries.org. 5. Emissaries of Divine Light. 6. Attunement Guild, “Pneumaplasm,” accessed May 8, 2021, https://attunement.org. 7. Emissaries of Divine Light, “What Is Attunement?,” accessed May 8, 2021 https:// emissaries.org. 8. Quentin Crisp, How to Have a Lifestyle (New York: Methuen, 1979), 166. 9. Crisp, 47–­48. 10. Crisp, 7. 11. Crisp, 46. 12. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), s.v. “attunement.” 13. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “attune.” 14. William R. Alger, The Solitudes of Nature and Man; or, The Loneliness of Human Life (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1866), 348. 15. See Gary Scharnhorst, “Howells and W. R. Alger: An Overlooked Review,” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews 3, no. 4 (1990): 171–­174. 16. Zadie Smith, “Some Notes on Attunement: A Voyage around Joni Mitchell,” New Yorker, December 9, 2012. 17. Joni Mitchell, “River,” track 8 on Blue (Reprise, 1971), LP. 18. Smith, “Some Notes on Attunement.” 19. Rita Felski, Hooked: Art and Attachment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 49. 20. Felski, 49–­50. 21. Felski, 50.

Chapter 5. The Musical (Re)Turn

Epigraph: Bob Dylan, “Blind Willie McTell,” recorded May 5, 1983, track 14 on vol. 3 of The Bootleg Series (Columbia Records, 1991), CD. Parts of this chapter appear in Taylor Black, “Folks and Blues Methods in American Literature and Criticism,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), article published April 20, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1253. 1. Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004).

Notes | 273

2. David Remnick, “Let’s Celebrate the Bob Dylan Nobel Win,” New Yorker, October 13, 2016, www.newyorker.com; Bob Dylan, “Ring Them Bells,” track 4 on Oh Mercy (Columbia Records, 1989), LP. 3. “Wherever I am, I’m a ’60s troubadour, a folk-­rock relic, a wordsmith from bygone days, a fictitious head of state from a place nobody knows. I’m in the bottomless pit of cultural oblivion. You name it. I can’t shake it.” Dylan, Chronicles, 147. 4. Bob Dylan, “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” track 1 on Bringing It All Back Home (Columbia Records, 1965), LP. 5. Bob Dylan, interview with Nat Hentoff, Playboy, March 1966, included in Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, ed. Jonathan Cott (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017), 99–­118. 6. For an excellent historical account of credulity in American culture and literature, see Emily Ogden’s Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). 7. William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Vintage, 1986), 4. 8. Flannery O’Connor, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, ed. Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 45. 9. O’Connor, 39. 10. Quoted in Claire McGlinchee, “American Literature in American Music,” Musical Quarterly 31, no. 1 (January 1945): 114. 11. O’Connor, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque,” 39. 12. O’Connor, 41. 13. Camille Paglia, “Sexual Personae: The Cancelled Preface,” in Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 116–­117. 14. Paglia, 117. 15. Duke Ellington and Irving Mills, “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)” (Brunswick Records, 1932), 78 RPM shellac. 16. O’Connor, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque,” 39. 17. Gilles Deleuze, “On the Superiority of Anglo-­American Literature,” in Dialogues II, by Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 36. 18. Deleuze, 36–­37. 19. Dylan, Chronicles, 165. 20. Bob Dylan, “Like a Rolling Stone,” track 1 on Highway 61 Revisited (Columbia Records, 1965), LP. 21. Leslie Fiedler, “On Becoming a Pop Critic: A Memoir and a Meditation,” New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly 5, nos. 1–­2 (Autumn–­Winter 1982): 195. 22. Fiedler, 195. 23. Scott Timberg, “Giving Pop Culture Critic Leslie Fiedler His Due,” Chicago Tribune, June 11, 2008, www.chicagotribune.com. See David Ritz, Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye (New York: De Capo, 1985).

274 | Notes

24. See Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 25. Timberg, “Giving Pop Culture Critic Leslie Fiedler His Due.” 26. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (New York: Penguin, 1972). 27. Stephen Tatum, “What Was Literature? Class Culture and Mass Society by Leslie Fiedler (review),” Western American Literature 19, no. 1(Spring 1984): 58. 28. Dylan, Chronicles, 18. 29. Bob Dylan, “A Hard Rain’s a-­Gonna Fall,” track 6 on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (Columbia Records, 1962), LP. 30. Dylan, “Visions of Johanna,” track 3 on Blonde on Blonde (Columbia Records, 1966), LP. See Joseph Donahue, Wind Maps I–­VII (Berkeley, CA: Talisman House 2018). 31. Fiedler, “On Becoming a Pop Critic,” 198. 32. Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Gordon Pym: A Romance (London: Downey, 1898), 261–­ 262. 33. Nikki Giovanni, Quilting the Black-­Eyed Pea: Poems and Not Quite Poems (New York: HarperCollins, 2011). 34. Krista Tippet, interview with Nikki Giovanni, “Nikki Giovanni: Soul Food, Sex, and Space,” On Being with Krista Tippet, March 17, 2016, https://onbeing.org. 35. Dylan, Chronicles, 236. 36. Dylan, 235–­236. 37. Dylan, 236. 38. See Zadie Smith, “Some Notes on Attunement,” New Yorker, December 9, 2012. 39. Toni Morrison, “Romancing Slavery,” in The Origin of Others (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 7–­8. 40. Morrison, “Romancing Slavery,” 8, quoted in Ta-­Nehisi Coates, foreword to Morrison, Origin of Others, xii–­xiii. 41. Miller Williams, “Compassion,” in The Ways We Touch: Poems (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 55. 42. Morrison, “Romancing Slavery,” 8–­9. 43. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Boston: Boston Stereotype Foundry, 1861), 81; Toni Morrison, “Being or Becoming the Stranger,” in Origin of Others, 29–­30. 44. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2008), 475–­476. 45. Toni Morrison, “Black Matters,” in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 9. 46. Toni Morrison, “Disturbing Nurses and the Kindness of Sharks,” in Playing in the Dark, 90–­91. 47. Morrison, “Romancing Slavery,” 6. 48. Morrison, 35. 49. Morrison, 35. 50. Morrison, 36.

Notes | 275

51. See Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980). 52. O’Connor, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque,” 42–­43. 53. Morrison, “Romancing the Shadow,” 36–­37. 54. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Vintage, 2007), 6. 55. See Jeff Todd Tilton, Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). 56. Quoted in Our Singing Country: Folk Songs and Ballads, coll. and comp. John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2000), 364. 57. Toni Morrison, “God’s Language,” in The Source of Self-­Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Mediations (New York: Knopf, 2019), 293. 58. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 3; Morrison, “God’s Language,” 292. 59. Ralph Ellison, “Richard Wright’s Blues,” Antioch Review 50 (50th Anniversary Issue), nos. 1–­2 (Winter–­Spring 1992): 62. 60. LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002), 94. 61. Nikki Giovanni, “The Blues,” in Make Me Rain: Poems & Prose (New York: HarperCollins, 2020), 28–­29. 62. Berger, Ways of Seeing, 7. 63. Sean Wilentz, “Many Martyrs Fell: ‘Blind Willie McTell,’ New York City, May 5, 1983,” in Bob Dylan in America (New York: First Anchor Books, 2011), 193–­194.

Chapter 6. The Intensive Zone

Epigraphs: Quentin Crisp, “Do You Believe in God?,” in The Wit and Wisdom of Quentin Crisp, ed. Guy Kettelhack (London: Hutchinson, 1985), 127; one of many answers given by Crisp in his interview with Granada TV’s World in Action program: Shane Bordoli, “Seven Men—­Quentin Crisp (1970),” YouTube, February 18, 2018, www. youtube.com/watch?v=wTRntQUhipc; Dylan, Chronicles, 51. 1. Bruno Latour, even from his position in sociology, is well-­known to be a thorn in the side of scientists writ large. His interest in the practices and evaluative measures used by laboratory scientists emerges in his first book, written with Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), and continues throughout his career. See Latour, “When Things Strike Back: A Possible Contribution of ‘Science Studies’ to the Social Sciences,” British Journal of Sociology 51, no. 1 (2000): 107–­123. 2. Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 1. 3. At stake here is also the idea that a literary critic ought to resist the text in front of them lest they be drawn in by it uncritically and emotionally. This concept of critical resistance was also prevalent in 1970s feminist literary criticism in the US. See, for instance, Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981). 4. Felski, Limits of Critique, 1.

276 | Notes

5. Felski, 2. 6. Felski, 2. 7. See Robyn Wiegman, “Introduction: Autotheory Theory,” Arizona Quarterly 76, no. 1 (2020): 1–­14; Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf, 2015). See also Hilton Als, White Girls (New York: McSweeny’s, 2015); Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (New York: Penguin Random House 2020); Wayne Koestenbaum, Figure It Out: Essays (New York: Soft Skull, 2020); and Zadie Smith, Intimations (New York: Penguin, 2020). 8. Felski, Limits of Critique, 3. 9. See Leslie A. Fiedler, “Toward an Amateur Criticism,” Kenyon Review 12, no. 4 (Autumn 1950): 561–­574; Saikat Majumdar and Aarthi Vadde, eds., The Critic as Amateur (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). My phrasing here is also a nod to, a riff on, Eric Lott’s always recurring book Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 10. See Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski, eds., Critique and Postcritique (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 11. When we think of “burrowing,” we have to think of Deleuze and Guattari (though particularly Deleuze, who was more suited stylistically to animal metaphors and conversions than his partner was). Burrowing is the way of all deterritorializing animals and insects. Rats burrow into the earth. Ticks burrow into the skin. Change happens from within. For all things related to conversion and worlding, see Rob Wilson’s work, especially Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 12. William James, “A World of Pure Experience,” in Pragmatism and Other Writings (New York: Penguin, 2000), 314. 13. See William James, “The One and the Many,” in Pragmatism and Other Writings, 58–­73. 14. James, “World of Pure Experience,” 315. 15. James, 316. James is careful to describe the work of “ordinary empiricism” carefully and reparatively. He is, after all, a living component of its genealogy. See James, 315–­316. 16. James, 315. 17. James, 314. 18. James, 314. 19. Felski, Limits of Critique, 46. 20. Felski, 26 (emphasis in original). 21. See Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism (New York: Zone Books, 1990); Quentin Crisp, How to Have a Lifestyle (New York: Methuen, 1979), 8. 22. Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?,” Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004): 231. 23. William James, Psychology (New York: Holt, 1907), 1 (emphasis in original). 24. James, 67–­68. 25. James, 68.

Notes | 277

26. James, 69. 27. James, 158–­159. 28. James, 158. 29. James, 158. 30. James, 159 (emphasis in original). 31. James, 159–­160. 32. Stacy Conradt, “8 Things Mark Twain Really Didn’t Say,” Mentalfloss, September 4, 2019, www.mentalfloss.com. 33. Bob Dylan, “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” track 1 on Bringing It All Back Home (Columbia Records, 1965), LP. 34. Gilles Deleuze, “Literature and Life,” in Essays Critical and Clinical (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 1. 35. William James, Pragmatism: A New Word for Some Old Ways of Thinking (Auckland, NZ: Floating Press, 2010), 8–­9. 36. Deleuze, “Literature and Life,” 1. 37. Deleuze, 1. For more on Deleuze’s notion of “empiricist conversion, see John Rajchman’s introduction to Deleuze’s Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2001), 17–­19. 38. Aristotle, Poetics, 1457b.7 (Loeb trans.). 39. Graham Harman, Object-­Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (London: Penguin Random House UK, 2018), 75. 40. Harman, 75 (emphasis in original). 41. Harman, 75. 42. Harman, 75–­76. 43. Harman, 61. 44. Elizabeth Grosz, The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 6. 45. Grosz, 17. 46. Grosz, 8. 47. Grosz, 17. 48. Grosz, 15–­16. 49. Grosz, 5. 50. Grosz, 5. 51. Grosz, 251. 52. Quentin Crisp, How to Have a Lifestyle (New York: Methuen, 1979), 47–­48. 53. Grosz, Incorporeal, 1. 54. Gilles Deleuze, “What Children Say,” in Essays Critical and Clinical, 62–­63. Onto-­ ethics is a concept developed in Grosz, Incorporeal. 55. Grosz, Incorporeal, 178. 56. For a brief introduction into the post-­Kantian field of “speculative realism,” see Robin Mackay’s editorial introduction to Collapse 2, no. 1 (March 2007): 3–­13. 57. Harman, Object-­Oriented Ontology, 62. 58. Harman, 62.

278 | Notes

59. Quoted by Daniel W. Smith in his introduction to Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, li. 60. Smith, li. 61. James, Pragmatism, 9. This is very reminiscent of the two Quentin Crisp quotes in the epigraphs to this chapter. 62. James, 12. 63. James, 19. 64. James, 20. 65. James, 21. 66. James, 21. 67. James, 21. 68. James, 29. 69. This sentence is a riff on Smith’s excellent introduction to Deleuze’s Essays Critical and Clinical, particularly this sentence: “Style is a set of variations in language, a kind of modulation, and it is through style that language is pushed toward its own limit” (li). 70. James, Pragmatism, 35. 71. James, 35–­36. 72. James, 34. 73. James, 35. 74. James, 168. 75. Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant (New York: Penguin, 1997), 1.

Chapter 7. Ambivalence and Attunement

Epigraphs: Bob Dylan, “Goodbye Jimmy Reed,” track 6 on Rough and Rowdy Ways (Columbia Records, 2020), LP; Quandox2, “Marilyn, Mr. Bunny and Royce!,” YouTube, April 27, 2007, www.youtube.com/watch?v=PV6KKQxdO34&list=PLB35BD8ACD4DF 0034&index=2. 1. Zadie Smith, “Some Notes on Attunement: A Voyage Around Joni Mitchell,” New Yorker, December 10, 2012. 2. For more on this notion, see Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020). 3. Elizabeth Grosz, The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 6. 4. Flannery O’Connor, “The Teaching of Literature,” in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, ed. Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 123. 5. O’Connor, 123. 6. Michael Moon, “English Departments at a Crossroads,” Remaking the University (blog), January 31, 2014, http://utotherescue.blogspot.com. 7. Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 1997), 11. 8. De Landa, 12.

Notes | 279

9. “When we study a given physical system, we need to know the specific nature of the fluctuations that have been present at each of its bifurcations; in other words, we need to know its history to understand its current dynamical state” (De Landa, 14). 10. De Landa, 21–­22. 11. Quentin Crisp, How to Have a Lifestyle (New York: Methuen, 1979), 8. 12. European Graduate School Video Lectures, “Manuel De Landa. Immanent Patterns of Becoming. 2009 2/14,” YouTube, February 12, 2010, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=G5QsM7wYLrc. 13. European Graduate School Video Lectures, “Manuel De Landa. Immanent Patterns of Becoming. 2009 1/14,” YouTube, February 12, 2010, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=jKqOic0kx4U 14. European Graduate School Video Lectures, “Immanent Patterns of Becoming 2/14.” 15. European Graduate School Video Lectures, “Manuel De Landa. Immanent Patterns of Becoming. 2009 10/14,” YouTube, February 16, 2010, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=OA10XOIX_A4&list=PL6B5A83A988919471&index=10. 16. European Graduate School Video Lectures, “Manuel De Landa. Immanent Patterns of Becoming. 2009 11/14,” YouTube, February 16, 2010, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=k7e0JfUdIgw&list=PL6B5A83A988919471&index=11. 17. European Graduate School Video Lectures, “Manuel De Landa. Immanent Patterns of Becoming. 2009 8/14,” YouTube, February 16, 2010, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=P79_hJ9B90o&list=PL6B5A83A988919471&index=8. 18. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 202. 19. Elsewhere, Deleuze elaborates and renames this plane of immanence “the virtual.” See the titular essay in his collection Immanence: A Life (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2012): “A life contains only virtuals. It is made up of virtualities, events, singularities. What we call virtual is not something that lacks reality but something that is engaged in a process of actualization following the plane that gives it its particular reality” (31). 20. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 202. 21. Deleuze and Guattari, 65. 22. Deleuze and Guattari, 64–­65. 23. Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 65. 24. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 4. 25. Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020). 26. For a more inspiring take on queerness as something that is always already an “open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning,” see Eve Sedgwick’s essay “Queer and Now” in her book Tendencies.

280 | Notes

27. Or, for that matter, we are like the figures caricatured in Camille Paglia’s essay “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf,” in Sex, Art, and American Culture: Collected Essays (New York: Vintage Books, 1992). 28. See Gilles Deleuze, “Bartleby; or, the Formula,” in Essays Critical and Clinical (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 29. Big Think, “Slavoj Žižek: Don’t Act. Just Think. | Big Think,” YouTube, August 28, 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgR6uaVqWsQ. 30. Leo Marx, “Melville’s Parable of the Walls,” Sewanee Review 61, no. 4 (Autumn 1953): 603. 31. DeLanda, Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, 12. 32. Deleuze, “Bartleby; or, the Formula,” 83. 33. Kara Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 41, 49. 34. Keeling, 49. 35. Deleuze, “Bartleby; or, the Formula,” 82. 36. Deleuze, 82–­83. 37. Deleuze, 83. 38. Deleuze, 83. 39. Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures, 110. 40. Keeling, 146. 41. Keeling, 171–­172. 42. Deleuze, “Bartleby; or, the Formula,” 71. 43. Deleuze, 90. 44. Deleuze, 71. 45. Deleuze, 70. 46. Quandox2, “Royce—­You Know Nothing!,” YouTube, April 27, 2007, www.youtube. com/watch?v=pGldM85dXYs. 47. For more of a backstory, see Steven Mikulan, “Forever Fabulous,” LA Weekly, June 2, 1999, www.laweekly.com. 48. Royce & Marilyn, “Royce & Marilyn. God on a Wheel,” dir. Bill Geerhart and Andrew D’Ambrosio (Wallabout Films, 2017), August 12, 2017, https://vimeo. com/229393348. 49. Deleuze, “Bartleby; or, the Formula,” 83. 50. Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 54, 51. 51. Grosz, 51–­52. 52. Grosz: “Every refrain, for Deleuze and Guattari, has three basic components: first, a point of order or inside—­a home, nest, or space of safety that filters out or keeps the forces of chaos temporarily at bay . . . ; second, a circle of control that defines not only a safe inside but also a malleable or containable outside, a terrain to be marked, a field to be guarded (a cat sprays strategic objects at the boundary of its territory, a bird marks the field below its nest as the space of its sonorous and rhythmic performance); and, third, a line of flight to the outside, a movement of

Notes | 281

migration, transformation, or deformation (the long march of lobsters across the ocean floor, the path of migratory ducks or monarch butterflies flying north or south each year)” (52). 53. Quandox2, “Royce—­Make Believe Ballroom Waltz,” YouTube, April 26, 2007, www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvLC4nfXIgs. 54. Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art, 54.

Coda

1. Quentin Crisp, The Wit and Wisdom of Quentin Crisp, ed. Guy Kettelhack (London: Century, 1984), 127–­128.

Index

A. B. C. Smith, General (char.), in Poe’s “The Man That Was Used Up,” 103–­7 academe: ambivalence in, 218–­25, 234, 236; conferences in, 235, 236; deterritorialization in, 217, 221–­23, 227–­29, 231–­32, 236; field formation in, 5, 8, 217, 220, 222–­23, 229–­31; graduate training in, 192–­93, 218; humanities in, 8, 156–­57, 180–­84, 217–­23, 250–­51 Adam, in Genesis, 202–­3 Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe, The (Peeples), 100 Alger, W. R., 154 Als, Hilton, 8, 27, 69 ambivalence: attunement and, 157, 219–­21; Bartleby and, 234, 237–­42; Crisp and, 13, 28; definition of, 219–­20; Du Bois and, 22; Dylan and, 139; Hurston and, 21; James and, 214; literary scholars and, 157, 164, 218–­26, 234, 236; Muñoz and, 22; Nietzsche and, 236; O’Connor and, 82; Poe and, 124; queer, 18; Royce and, 244–­245 American: exceptionalism, 89, 217; studies, 4, 7, 9, 10–­11, 217, 220, 222, 234 “American Rejection of Poe, The” (Moore), 101 Anthology of American Folk Music (Folkways Records), 133 Anti-­Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Deleuze and Guattari), 99 Aristotle, 202, 205 attunement: ambivalence and, 157, 219–­ 21; Bartleby and, 239; Crisp and, 5, 92,

152–­53; defined, 5, 153–­56; DeLanda and, 225–­27; Deleuze on, 162; Dylan and, 134, 177; Felski on, 155–­56; literary scholars and, 8, 156–­57, 164, 179, 221–­22, 230–­31, 234, 236; Meeker on, 152; Morrison on, 171; musical approach to, 162–­63, 169; Nietzsche and, 232–­33; O’Connor and, 65, 90, 161–­62; Royce and, 245; Smith on, 5, 154–­56, 219; stylists and, 7, 20, 23, 157, 206, 216, 232 autotheory, 156, 182, 185–­86 backwoods prophets. See prophets: backwoods Baldick, Chris, 118–­20 Baraka, Amiri, 18–­19, 175 Barthes, Roland, 121–­22 “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (Melville), 234, 237–­42, 244; Deleuze on, 237, 238–­39, 240–­42; Keeling on, 239–­40, 241; Marx on, 238; Žižek on, 237, 240 Basement Tapes, The (Dylan and The Band), 133 Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted (Wilson), 142–­43 beauty: peacocks and, 34, 37, 39–­41, 60; Poe on, 110, 111–­13, 119 belief, 187, 189, 198, 207, 210–­11, 213, 216 Beloved (Morrison), 174 Berger, John, 165, 176 Bergh, Arthur, 161, 170, 173 Bishop (char.), in O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away, 79–­80

283

284 | Index

Blackness, 15, 18–­22, 53, 81–­89, 124, 136, 143, 168–­75 “Blind Willie McTell” (Dylan), 158, 176–­77 “Blues, The” (Giovanni), 175 blues music, 93, 136–­37, 173–­77 Blues People: Negro Music in White America (Baraka), 175 Bluest Eye, The (Morrison), 173 Burke, Edmund, 119–­20 Carlson, Carla C., 143 Casper, Scott, 102 Chronicles Volume One (Dylan), 128, 131–­ 34, 139, 141, 158–­59 Confidence-­Man, The (Melville), 236 consciousness: Crisp and, 38, 153; double, 15, 18, 22; Dylan and, 134, 140; James on, 188–­89, 195–­99, 215; O’Connor and, 28–­29, 61, 65; philosophy on, 197–­99, 201, 206–­8, 210, 215; Poe and, 109–­12, 116; psychology on, 188–­89, 195–­97 content, form and, 194–­95, 205, 207 conversion: Dylan and, 93, 142–­45; empiricist, 201; Meeker on, 152; O’Connor on, 75–­77, 88 cosmology, 4, 7, 8, 19–­20, 31, 123, 183, 200, 215–­16, 241 Crisp, Quentin: ambivalence and, 13, 28; attunement and, 5, 92, 152–­53; consciousness and, 38, 153; failure and, 11–­13; ghosts and, 91, 92; history and, 92–­93; humor of, 36, 41–­42, 51–­54; life of, 11, 34–­36, 43–­48, 91; on personality, 8, 35–­36, 48, 52, 180, 227; as prophet, 11, 13, 153; queerness and, 8, 11–­13, 29, 38, 40, 42, 43, 46, 52–­54; representation of, 52–­ 53; style and, 5, 10, 25–­28, 35–­43, 48–­51, 56–­57, 91–­95, 152–­53, 180, 206, 216, 227; theology and, 44, 45, 48, 178, 249–­50. See also individual works by title criticism (literary), 5–­7, 156, 234–­36; ambivalence and, 218–­21; attunement and, 5, 219, 221, 234; limits of, 184–­87,

191–­93; method in, 5, 178–­84, 194, 218, 220–­23, 236; musical approach to, 162, 164–­66; myth-­, 166–­67, 169; New, 114–­15, 120–­22, 179; post-­, 5–­6, 156, 182, 185–­88, 192–­93; psychoanalytic, 98–­ 100, 108–­9; style and, 6, 183, 186–­87, 189, 193–­94, 206–­7, 228, 236 Dawkins, Cecil, 79–­80 “Death of the Author, The” (Barthes), 121–­22 DeLanda, Manuel, 225–­31, 238 Deleuze, Gilles: on Bartleby, 237–­42; on conceptual personae, 7, 30, 72, 232; DeLanda on, 226–­28; on difference, 65; on Dylan, 137; on formula, 237, 240–­42, 245; on Kafka, 16; on language, 16–­17, 147, 209; on the literary machine, 98–­ 99, 115–­16, 210; on literature, 122, 162, 199–­201; on minor literature, 16–­17, 22; on plane of immanence, 8, 227–­28, 232; as “an Original,” 238–­42, 245; on philosophy, 231–­33; on the sublime, 118; on virtuality, 26, 193, 206, 228 Descartes, 201, 205, 208 disenchantment, 185–­187 dissonance, O’Connor and, 65, 72, 89–­90 double consciousness. See consciousness: double “Do You Reverse?” (O’Connor), 58–­59, 62 “Drifter’s Escape” (Dylan), 149 Du Bois, W. E. B., 15, 18, 22 Dylan, Bob: alienation and, 137–­142; blues music and, 93, 136–­137, 173–­177; folk music and, 93, 128–­35, 139, 141, 143–­44, 166, 169, 176; ghosts and 129–­33, 135–­ 36, 142, 144, 149, 160, 169, 176; history and, 8, 93–­94, 128–­34, 146, 159–­60, 176; humor of, 138; life of, 134–­36, 141–­44; literature and, 93–­94, 158–­61, 163, 166; mainstream culture and, 134; masks of, 137–­38, 141, 143; media and, 138–­41; music of, 127; mythology and, 93–­94,

Index | 285

130, 134, 135, 167; Nobel Prize of, 156, 158–­59, 163; Poe and, 127–­28, 129, 138; as prophet 142–­43, 147–­48; the South and, 136, 144; style and, 5, 7, 93–­94, 128, 135, 138–­41, 146–­47, 149, 159–­60; theology and, 142–­48 Elements of Style, The (Rannie), 2 Elements of Style, The (Strunk),1–­2 Elie, Paul, 86–­88 Ellison, Ralph, 175 Emissaries of Divine Light, 151–­52 empiricism, 190, 194, 211; radical, 189–­91, 194, 207, 210 ephemeral, 198–­201, 203, 207, 210 Eureka (Poe), 96, 98, 123 Evening with Quentin Crisp, An, 55 extensive properties, 162, 179–­82, 189 “Fall of the House of Usher, The” (Poe), 116–­20, 127 Felski, Rita, 5, 155–­56, 184–­88, 192–­94 Fiedler, Leslie, 164–­67, 169, 171 field: deformation, 229–­30; formation, 5, 8, 217, 220, 222–­23, 229–­31 Flannery O’Connor: The Cartoons (Gerald and Moser), 62–­63 “Frankie & Albert” (Dylan), 130–­32 “Frankie & Johnny” (Dylan). See “Frankie & Albert” (Dylan) freaks (literary concept): O’Connor’s and, 65, 72–­73, 76, 90 Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, The (Dylan), 135, 137 Freud, Sigmund, 108, 186 folk music, 93, 128–­35, 139, 141, 143–­44, 166, 169, 176 form: content and, 194–­95, 205, 207 Foucault, Michel, 14, 122 “Genus Irritabile, A” (Poe), 111 ghosts: Crisp and, 91, 92; Dylan and, 129–­ 33, 135–­36, 142, 144, 149, 160, 169, 176; Poe and, 127–­28

Giovanni, Nikki, 5, 19, 26, 167–­69, 175 “Girl from the North Country” (Dylan), 135 Good as I Been to You (Dylan), 132 “Good Man Is Hard to Find, A” (O’Connor), 25, 73–­78 gospel music, 142–­44, 147 gothic (literary concept), 98, 115, 117–­20, 171, 173 Grandmother (char.), in O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” 73–­78, 81 Gray, Michael, 136 Grosz, Elizabeth, 26, 31, 204–­6, 246–­47 grotesque, the (literary concept): O’Connor and, 61, 62, 65, 66, 72, 79, 85–­86, 89, 160–­62, 172; Poe and, 98, 99, 102, 103, 106, 108, 110, 115, 117, 120, 123 Guattari, Félix: on conceptual personae, 7, 30, 72, 232; on Kafka, 16; on language, 16–­17, 147, 209; on the literary machine, 98–­99, 115–­16, 210; on minor literature, 16–­17, 22; on plane of immanence, 8, 227–­28, 232; on philosophy, 231–­33 Guthrie, Woody, 93–­94 Halberstam, Jack, 10–­15 “Hard Rain’s a-­Gonna Fall, A” (Dylan), 148, 166, 167 Harman, Graham, 203–­4, 208–­9, 212 Hazel Motes (char.), in O’Connor’s Wise Blood, 61, 70–­7 1, 77, 81, 88, 90, 155 Hester, Betty, 76, 81–­83, 85, 86, 88 Highway 61 Revisited (Dylan), 136–­137, 144 history: blues music on, 173–­75; Crisp and, 92–­93; DeLanda on, 224–­27; Fiedler on, 166–­67, 169; Dylan and, 8, 93–­94, 128–­34, 146, 159–­60, 176; nonlinear, 224–­27; Nyong’o on, 19; problem of, 8 Hoffman, Daniel, 117–­18, 120 Hoggatt, Marilyn, 243–­247

286 | Index

“How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?” (Elie), 86–­88 How to Have a Lifestyle (Crisp), 43, 47, 91 humanities. See academe: humanities in humor: Crisp and, 36, 41–­42, 51–­54; Dylan and, 138; O’Connor and, 61, 63, 65, 71, 78; Poe and, 103, 107, 119, 122, 123, 125 Hurston, Zora Neale, 20–­21 Huxley, Aldous, 114, 115, 117 idealism, 204–­5, 207–­9, 210, 212–­15 idiots (literary concept): O’Connor’s and, 70, 73, 74, 78–­81 “Immanent Patterns of Becoming” (DeLanda), 227–­29 immaterialism: abstractness of, 8, 17, 26, 152, 181, 191, 195, 198–­99, 203, 207, 211–­12, 215, 229, 232, 238; definition of, 181, 201–­4; feelings and, 17, 169, 194, 196, 198–­99, 219, 229, 238; Harman on, 203–­4, 208–­9, 212; idealism and, 207–­10, 213–­15; immeasurability of, 17, 181, 195, 215, 216, 219, 229; incorporeal and, 205–­6, 220; James on, 188, 191, 194–­202, 210–­14; limits of, 212; racism and, 169–­70 imp of the perverse, 93, 118, 120 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Jacobs), 171 incorporeal, 26, 31, 204–­6, 220 Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism, The (Grosz), 204–­206 Infidels (Dylan), 176 intensive: differences, 230–­32, 236, 240, 242, qualities, 8, 160–­61, 169, 179–­82, 188–­89, 196–­99, 213, 215–­16, 218, 220; reading, 6; zone, 180, 191, 204, 209, 232 interdisciplinarity, 9, 10, 189, 219 Invisible Republic (Marcus), 133 Jacobs, Harriet, 171 James, Henry, 107, 108–­9, 111

James, William, 182, 187–­92, 194–­200, 204, 210–­15 Jemison, Mae, 168 jokes. See humor Jones, Grace, 241 Jones, LeRoi. See Baraka, Amiri Jung, Carl, 108 Kafka, 16, 21, 67 Keeling, Kara, 8, 19, 239–­40, 241 Kettelhack, Guy, 54–­55 “King of the Birds, The” (O’Connor), 59–­60 Kirk, Marshall, 53 Late Great Planet Earth, The (Carlson and Lindsey), 143 Latour, Bruno, 184, 194 Lead Belly (guitarist), 174 “Life You Save May Be You Own, The” (O’Connor), 73–­75, 77–­78 Limits of Critique, The (Felski), 5, 184–­88, 192–­94 Lindsey, Hal, 143 literalism, 10, 85, 162, 203–­4, 209 literary critique. See criticism (literary) literary studies, 5–­6, 9, 156–­57, 182–­84, 187, 220, 222–­23, 235. See also criticism (literary); method “Literature and Life” (Deleuze), 200 Loneliness of Human Life, The (Alger). See Solitudes of Nature and Man Love and Death in the American Novel (Fiedler), 165 Lucynell Crater, Jr. (char.), in O’Connor’s “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” 73–­75, 77–­78 Lucynell Crater, Sr. (char.), in O’Connor’s “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” 73–­75, 77–­78, 81 Macy, John, 99, 103 “Man in the Long Black Coat, The” (Dylan), 127, 137

Index | 287

“Man That Was Used Up, The” (Poe), 103–­7 Marcus, Greil, 8, 133–­34, 165 Marginalia (Poe), 111 Marx, Leo, 238 Masked and Anonymous, 146, 148–­49 masks: Dylan and, 137–­38, 141, 143 “Masters of War” (Dylan), 137 materialism: definition of, 201–­2; extra-­, 205; Grosz on, 204–­6; Harman on, 203–­4, 208–­9, 212; idealism and, 204, 207–­10, 213–­15; incorporeal and, 205–­ 6, 220; James on, 188, 195–­96, 210; limits of, 204, 212, 229; new, 225; racism and, 169–­70. See also immaterialism Meeker, Lloyd Arthur, 151–­53 Melville, Herman, 125, 172, 234, 236–­38. See also “Bartleby, the Scrivener” “Melville’s Parable of the Walls” (Marx), 238 Messiaen, Olivier, 229–­30, 231, 232, 245–­46 metaphor, 199–­200, 202 method: literary studies and, 5, 178–­84, 193, 218, 220–­23, 236; philosophy and, 189, 191, 194, 204, 209, 213–­15; style and, 2–­3, 8, 10, 157, 180–­81, 183, 189, 191, 193 Misfit, the: in O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” 74–­75, 77 Mitchell, Joni, 154–­56, 219, 235 Moby-­Dick (Melville), 125, 238 mood: Felski on, 155–­56, 184–­85, 192 Moon, Michael, 222, 224 Moore, Charles Leonard, 101, 102 Moreland, Sean, 119–­20 Morrison, Toni, 5, 14, 170–­75, 177, 189 Muñoz, Jose, 8–­9, 15–­18, 22, 27, 30, 31, 38, 40 Musto, Michael, 51, 53 mysticism, 202, 204, 208–­209 myth-­criticism. See criticism (literary): myth-­ mythology, 3–­4; Dylan and, 93–­94, 130, 134, 135, 167

Naked Civil Servant, The (Crisp), 11, 34, 41, 216; film of, 34, 45–­47 Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, The (Poe), 100, 120, 123, 167 Nashville Skyline (Dylan), 135 New Criticism. See criticism (literary): New New Materialism. See materialism: new Nietzsche, 31, 132, 182, 227, 232–­33, 236 Nobel Prize: Dylan and, 156, 158–­59, 163 nonmaterialism. See immaterialism Nossiter, Jonathan, 32, 50, 55 Nyong’o, Tavia, 18–­19 O’Connor, Flannery: attunement and, 65, 90, 161–­62; as backwoods prophet, 61, as cartoonist, 28, 62–­64; consciousness of, 28–­29, 61, 65; on conversion 75–­77, 88; dissonance and, 65, 72, 89–­90; foolishness and, 68, 69, 72; freaks and, 65, 72–­73, 76, 90; grotesque and, 8, 61, 62, 65, 66, 72, 79, 85–­86, 89, 160–­62, 172; humor of, 61, 63, 65, 71, 78; idiots and, 70, 73, 74, 78–­81; on mystery of personality, 7, 28–­29, 71; peacocks and, 40, 59–­61; queerness and, 59–­60, 62; race and, 66, 68, 81–­89; religion and, 61, 62, 65–­72, 74, 76–­77, 84–­85; the South and, 61, 65–­68, 69, 72, 81–­89; stupidity and, 62, 65, 70–­7 1, 78, 80–­81, 84; style and, 5, 7, 27–­28, 59, 62, 63, 65–­66, 69, 71–­72, 74, 89–­90; upbringing of, 63; on writing, 29. See also individual works by title O’Donnell, Angela Alaimo, on “the race problem,” 82–­83. See also Radical Ambivalence Object-­Oriented Ontology (OOO), 203, 209, 212 Occupy Wall Street, 237, 240 Oh Mercy (Dylan), 137 Old, Weird America, The (Marcus). See Invisible Republic

288 | Index

“On the Superiority of Anglo-­American Literature” (Deleuze), 162 Originals, 238–­42, 245 Paglia, Camille, 162 Parker, Dorothy, 1 peacocks, 30, 30–­37, 39–­41, 59–­61, 67 Pecola Breedlove (char.), in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, 173 Peeples, Scott, 100, 104–­5, 108, 114–­15, 123 personality: Crisp on, 8, 35–­36, 48, 52, 180, 227; mystery of, 7, 28–­29, 71; Poe’s use of, 97, 98, 101, 107, 109; queerness in, 29, 43, 62; style and, 3–­4, 6–­9, 17, 20, 26–­27, 35–­36, 43, 56, 65, 110, 213, 216, 227 perverse reading, 30, 234–­235, 236 philosophy: genealogy of, 154, 157, 182, 187–­97, 200, 203–­5, 209–­15, 225–­26, 231–­35. See also names of specific theories and individual theorists “Philosophy of Composition, The” (Poe), 109–­15 plane of immanence, 8, 227–­228, 232 Plato, 205, 208 Poe, Edgar Allan: on beauty, 110–­13, 119; Dylan and, 127–­28, 129, 138; genius of, 97, 100, 102–­3, 111, 121, 125; ghosts and, 127–­128; gothic and, 98, 115, 117–­120; grotesque and, 98, 99, 102, 103, 106, 108, 110, 115, 117, 120, 123; humor and, 103, 107, 119, 122, 123, 125; on imp of the perverse, 93, 118, 120; machine, 98–­99, 101–­3, 116, 117, 120, 122, 125; mental illness and, 97, 100, 107–­11; new criticism and, 114–­15, 120–­22; psychoanalysis and, 98–­100, 108–­9; reputation of, 96–­ 103, 107, 109, 115; self-­consciousness of, 8, 98, 109–­12; style of, 5, 7, 95, 97–­102, 107, 110–­13, 115, 117–­18; sublime and, 115–­20; terror and: 98, 118–­20. See also names of individual works

Poincaré, Henri, 228, 232 Postcritique. See criticism (literary): post-­ pragmatism, 210, 213–­15 Pragmatism: A New Word for Some Old Ways of Thinking (James), 200 Prescod-­Weinstein, Chanda, 20 prophets: backwoods, 61; Crisp and, 11, 13, 153; Dylan and, 142–­43, 147–­48; O’Connor and, 59, 61, 65, 77, 89 Proust, Marcel, 50, 56 psychoanalysis. See criticism (literary): psychoanalytic psychology: field of, 188–­89, 195–­200 Psychology (James), 195–­200 queer: ambivalence, 18, 240; failure, 10–­15; formula, 237, 240–­42; methodology, 6, 14, 30; personality, 7–­8, 29; studies, 4, 6, 8–­15, 27, 179, 222, 235; style, 27, 40; utopia, 9, 17, 27, 30, 40; world making, 17–­18, 38 Queer Art of Failure, The (Halberstam), 10, 12–­15 queerness: Crisp and, 8, 11–­13, 29, 38, 40, 42, 43, 46, 52–­54; Dylan and, 160; O’Connor and, 59–­60, 62; Poe and, 125 Queer Times, Black Futures (Keeling), 239 “Quilting the Black-­Eyed Pea: We’re Going to Mars” (Giovanni), 19, 167–­68 Quinn, Arthur Hobson, 97 race problem, 81–­89 Radical Ambivalence (O’Donnell), 82–­83, 86–­88 Rannie, David Watson, 2–­3, 4 rationalism, 189–­90, 192, 197, 205, 208–­12 “Raven, The” (Poe), 113, 161, 170 Rayber: in O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away, 79–­80 recursive analysis, 226–­27 reductionism, 190, 191 Reed, Royce, 217, 242–­47 remembrance, 197–­98, 250

Index | 289

Remnick, David, 158 Resident Alien, 32, 50, 52–­53, 54–­55 Ritz, David, 165 Robertson, Robbie, 133 Ronell, Avital, 78, 80 Route 61, 136 Royce & Marilyn: God on a Wheel, 244–­45 “Royce—­You Know Nothing!,” 242–­44 Sally Jesse Raphael Show, The, 51–­53 “Scarlet Town” (Dylan), 135 sciences: hard, 187–­88, 189, 196, 203, 204, 250; social 85, 180–­82, 184, 187, 194 Sedgwick, Eve, 7–­9, 14, 30, 234 serious study, 155–­56, 183–­84, 187, 190–­93 Sexton, David, 132 Simone, Nina, 163 slavery, 168, 170–­72, 175, 176 Smith, Zadie, 5, 154–­56, 219 Slow Train Coming (Dylan), 137 social sciences. See sciences: social “Solid Rock” (Dylan), 144, 145–­146 Solitudes of Nature and Man (Alger), 154 “Some Notes on Attunement” (Smith), 154–­55 songbirds, 229–­30, 232 South, the: Dylan and, 136, 144; O’Connor and: 61, 65–­68, 69, 72, 81–­89 spirituals, 168–­69 Staple Singers, the, 144 Strunk, William Jr., 1–­3, 4 stupidity (literary concept): O’Connor and, 62, 65, 70–­7 1, 78, 80–­81, 84 sublime, the (literary concept): Poe and, 115–­20 style: Crisp and, 5, 10, 25–­28, 35–­43, 48–­51, 56–­57, 91–­95, 152–­53, 180, 206, 216, 227; definitions of, 3–­5, 15, 17–­18, 22–­23; Dylan and, 93–­94, 128, 133, 135, 138–­141, 146–­47, 149, 159–­160; humanities and, 185–­87, 189–­91, 193–­94, 206, 209–­10, 213–­16, 218, 220, 224, 251; immensurability of, 179–­81, 194–­95; O’Connor

and, 28–­29, 62, 65–­66, 71–­72, 78, 90; personality and, 3–­4, 6–­9, 17, 20, 26–­27, 35–­36, 43, 56, 65, 110, 213, 216, 227; Poe and, 95, 97–­102, 107, 110–­13, 115, 117–­18; reading and interpretation as, 179, 183; religion and, 249–­50 “Tale of the Late Bugaboo and Kickapoo Campaign, A” (Poe). See “The Man That Was Used Up” Tate, Allen, 116, 117 Tatum, Stephen, 166 “Teaching of Literature, The” (O’Connor), 221 temperament, 179, 192, 197, 210, 212, 213–­15 Tempest (Dylan), 135 terror (concept): Poe and, 98, 118–­20 text, the: in literary criticism, 218, 221, 236 theology, 215, 249–­50; Crisp and, 44, 45, 48, 178, 249–­50; DeLanda on, 227; Dylan and, 142–­48; James on, 211; O’Connor and, 61, 66–­69, 76–­77, 84–­85 Thistlewood, Thomas, 170–­7 1 Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, A (DeLanda), 225–­27 Time Out of Mind (Dylan), 127–­28 Tom T. Shiftlet (char.): in O’Connor’s “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” 73–­74, 77, 78 topology, 228 uncanny, the (literary concept), 116–­17 uncritical. See serious study unity of effect, 110, 112–­13, 115 Uranda. See Meeker, Lloyd Arthur Ussher, James, 119 Varieties of Religious Experience, The (James), 189 Violent Bear It Away, The (O’Connor), 79–­80 virtual, the, 26, 29, 193–­94, 206, 227–­28, 232

290 | Index

Warhol, Andy, 5, 38, 202 Ways of Seeing (Berger), 176 Weber, Jean-­Paul, 116 Weltanschauung, 186 Welty, Eudora, 67, 81–­83, 85–­86 “What Is an Author?” (Foucault), 122 What Is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari), 231 “When He Returns” (Dylan), 137–­38 White, E. B., 1, 3

Whitman, Walt, 101–­3 Wiegman, Robyn, 186 Wilde, Oscar, 36 Wilson, Rob, 76, 142–­43 Wise Blood, 61, 70–­7 1, 88 Wizard of Oz, The, 3, 50–­51, 56–­57, 151–­52 Wood, Ralph C., 75, 79–­80 World Gone Wrong (Dylan), 132 Žižek, Slavoj, 237, 238, 240, 257n8

About the Author

Taylor Black is Assistant Professor of English at Duke University. He specializes in twentieth-­century American literature, queer theory, and popular music studies. Style: A Queer Cosmology is Black’s first book, and he is currently working on its sequel, which is currently titled Cult of Personality: An American Romance.

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