Weekly Readings #49 (01/09/23-01/15/23)

I know not whether laws be right or whether laws be wrong

A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.

The criticism drought continues as I am busy inventing a new kind of novel appropriate to the tastes, interests, and media of our age. I’ll let you know when that’s ready for the public. In the meantime, you might want to head over to Tumblr for an occultist follow-up on last week’s references to Balzac and magic.

For this week’s newsletter, I turn to the politics of sex, gender, and literature. A few months ago, I wrote an essay for Tablet on the startling similarities between queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and her teacher, neoconservative Allan Bloom. There I argued that Bloom’s neoconservatism and Sedgwick’s postmodernism converged on a loosening of personal identity and an erotic elitism that went along naturally with the transition to post-industrial knowledge economies operated by a mobile and intellectual expert class. I ended with a verbal reminiscence of Marx’s famous line from the “Theses on Feuerbach” about understanding the world vs. changing it, as if I thought—I don’t—some concerted collective action might revise the situation.

Tablet decided not to run the piece. I’m glad they did; for one thing, as you’ll see in a moment, they published something better on Sedgwick this week. But I’ve also seen the dangers of becoming too polemical a pundit. A minor Twitter anon recently composed a brief fan (or anti-fan) fiction in which I, standing for some kind of brawling left conservatism, as if I were Norman Fucking Mailer, get into a fistfight with another online intellectual.

For whatever it’s worth, I will not turn 42 for another 12 and a half months.

I do not, however, want to get into a fistfight with anyone; neither do I want to be best known for a caricature of my political positions. How is it that I started out wanting to be a troubadour and ended up tempted to become a dogmatist? In what I hope is a slightly more troubadour spirit, I offer below a perhaps excessively personal reflection on the Sedgwickian piece Tablet did end up publishing.

“In the Shade of Deft Silences”: Queer Theory’s Sphinx Without a Secret

Reading and rereading Wilde through the years, I notice something that his panegyrists do not seem to have even suspected: the provable and elementary fact that Wilde is almost always right.

—Jorge Luis Borges, “About Oscar Wilde”

In Tablet, Blake Smith reckons with the legacy of queer theory’s mother, Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick. In the fearless opening paragraphs, he contrasts Sedgwick with Camille Paglia as two distinct types of women drawn to gay men, striking the essay’s keynote, as he will go on to defend such “typing” against Sedgwick’s putatively “nonbinary thinking” and the binarisms to which it’s given rise in the age of social justice.¹

There are (at least) two sorts of women who love gay men in a way that makes gay men like me nervous. Camille Paglia is one of the best-known representatives of the first sort—along with those other Italian American celebrity fruit flies, Madonna and Lady Gaga: energetic, pretentious, (pop-)cultured women who imagine gay men as their “creative” and “interesting” counterparts.

The second kind—stereotypically nerdy, mousy, and frumpy sweater-wearing—loves gays not as a gaggle of chattering slags who support her self-conception as someone sexy and scandalous, but rather from the safe distance of books. These women read and often write about gay men and gay sex, in an intellectualized fantasy through which they escape their own sexuality. (Why young women of this type increasing purport to be gay men, and pursue surgery in an attempt to make themselves so, is a mystery for another time.)

Sedgwick represents, of course, the second type. I laughed when I read this. Why did I laugh?

In 2012, I received a $4000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to attend a five-week research seminar on “Oscar Wilde and His Circle” at the William Andrews Clark, Jr., Memorial Library.²

The eponymous junior Clark was the bisexual sybarite son of a Gilded Age copper baron. He took his riches into book collecting among other pursuits. Advised to collect a classic and a modern author in the early 20th century, he chose Dryden and Wilde. His library—an imitation Italian villa in South Los Angeles, complete with Renaissance statuary in the lawn’s fountains and grottoes and mythological paintings within the ornate ceiling coffers—now houses the world’s foremost collections on these authors, administered by UCLA.

For five weeks, I would take the bus³ from the Koreatown apartment of the wealthy gay lawyer, philanthropist, and literature-lover who was putting me up—his name was given to me by UCLA contacts as he regularly hosted library fellows—to the gated library-villa in its gritty slum, the homeless sometimes literally slumped against the outer brickwork, there to discuss Wilde and his times with a company of 14 other scholars.

In one way it was an exquisitely balanced company: seven Victorianists and seven students of modernism, a division meant to acknowledge the transitional power of Wilde’s corpus. And this did prove in practice to be the most definitive distinction in the group, cutting across all other lines of difference, as we modernists, who tended to be interested in theory and aesthetics rather than empirical historical context, sighed and rolled our eyes as the Victorianists—incorrigibly historicist—monopolized the conversation with their interminable rambles about when crinoline went in and out of fashion and whether or not Wilde would have known about the latest developments in paleontology. “Jesus Christ, who cares?” the Pater-Woolf-Joyce scholar-lover next to me would mutter under his breath. I would nod in sympathy.

I was, however, only one of two graduate students; the rest were professors, mostly early-career, a handful adjunct or post-doc, most tenure-track. One of the women was then married to a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and computer scientist, not quite a household name but a powerful enough name in those circles. Back then, just pre-pronoun, there were seven men and seven women, though I would be startled if everyone still so self-defined.

I was the only straight male. This was fine. As Iris Murdoch once called herself “a male homosexual in female guise,” so some are male heterosexuals in male homosexual guise. It’s not as paradoxical as it sounds, as one work of queer theory, Alan Sinfield’s Wilde Century, instructs. If I recall a book I academically skimmed over a decade ago, Sinfield explains how in the figure of Wilde two previously quite distinct English male archetypes—the manly swashbuckling sodomite and the hyper-heterosexual female-identified artsy boy—became fused. As a consequence of Wilde’s notoriety, this accident defined homosexual identity for the next 100 years, leaving male-aesthetes-who-never-need-speak-to-another-man in an identity cul-de-sac, one compounded if one is not, by ethnicity and religion, Anglo and Protestant in a country whose culture manages to remain even now the excrescence of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. But I digress.

All that preamble just to say that the women in attendance answered, mostly, to Smith’s cruel description of Sedgwick’s social type: straight women (though they might now call themselves queer) getting their rocks off in the gay canon, just like their now-adolescent weeb daughters up to their eyeballs (as Smith mentions) in boys’ love manga,⁴ more dignified—but how much more?—than straight men gawking at lesbian vids with tumescence in fist. One of my female colleagues in the fellowship, the one married to the Silicon Valley guy, admitted this to the company in so many words. She had married her high school sweetheart and accordingly studied Salomé for kicks.⁵ Which is why I laughed when I read Smith’s opener.

The James Wood of The Irresponsible Self would call this laughter and the prose that provoked it “the comedy of correction.” He identifies it with satire, emblematized by the likes of Swift and Voltaire, where the errant are identified and chastised by the laughter their exposure occasions. To this satire he contrasts realist fiction’s “comedy of forgiveness,” typified of course by Saint Chekhov, where all the mistakes still get exposed in prose, but where we also all share a laugh at our common foibles, unknowable to ourselves. Wood, who came to fame writing in the New Republic in its neocon days, didn’t see the matter very dissimilarly from Sedgwick, who was, after all, Allan Bloom’s student at Cornell. Smith summarizes:

Sedgwick hoped that nonbinary thinking would allow us to escape from the persecutory simplifications of our politics, and perhaps even from the more quotidian and fine-grained operations of snobbishness—those subtle assertions of superiority, the gestures by which I show that I know your type and place it below mine—that lay at the heart of our informal, disorganized, but nevertheless ubiquitous and crushingly powerful systems of status. Who sits with whom in the cafeteria, who talks to whom at the party, who sees whom as a loser: These are judgments no less rigid and cruel than the Laws of Manu.

In other words, Sedgwick calls for the recognition and then the forgiveness of our universal and multi-faceted errancy, a spirit of literary pluralism she ranges against Marx and Freud—those hermeneuts of suspicion, those Enlightenment satirists, those priests of Apollo, those Abrahamic patriarchs—both of them more than happy to explain to us that our account of ourselves is a self-serving fantasy structured by ideology and repression. Marx and Freud don’t respect our self-definition, are not going to call us by our requested pronouns. They are, in the Cold War idiom, totalitarians.

Marx and Freud are enemies shared in common by postmodern theorists and neoconservatives in their surprisingly common quest for democratic pluralism. We might multiply examples. If Bloom/Sedgwick comprises one teacher/student neocon/pomo Cornell odd couple, another is Vladimir Nabokov and his student Thomas Pynchon, the one a reactionary liberal, the other a New Left anarchist, both of them postmodern novelists who hate psychiatry and the state. And if Sedgwick was a she who would almost without a doubt have become a they had she/they lived, can’t we imagine Bill Kristol and David Frum Tweeting that, while such a gesture is not for them, it’s better than, if not Marx and Freud, then Trump and Putin?

Smith doesn’t endorse Trump and Putin. He concludes with a Bloomian call for the restoration of the esoteric to public life in place of the omni-identification Sedgwick’s “nonbinary thinking” so balefully incited, where we all languish inside the glass prison of self-applied and reductive labels while telling ourselves it’s liberation.

One should, Bloom says, know one’s own type (Jew, homosexual, philosopher, etc.) and remain at a “playful distance” from those outside it, with “no expectation of essential progress” toward a world in which the sort of people we are can be publicly recognized and respected. No messiahs, and no end to paranoias and persecutions—but, in the shade of deft silences, the possibility of cleareyed fellowship with one’s own kind.

Instead of a democratic pluralism that has all and sundry toying inexpertly with the kind of play once reserved for persecuted minorities who doubled as aristocrats of the spirit, let’s rebuild that aesthetic aristocracy even in the (temporary) absence of the hostility that gave it shape. This preserves the defense against Marx-Freud’s will-to-power over the private life without swamping the public in mawkish personal fantasies of variable persuasiveness. And it is, Smith suggests, truer to the spirit of the novel, whether Austen’s or Proust’s, which is less a transparent record of credible (fictive) self-accounts than an unpredictably entertaining narrative of human folly and perversity. A narrative, I emphasize: not a name.

1. In Smith’s typifying spirit, I note that I’m writing this in a downtown Starbucks while trying to ignore, at the next table, a blonde girl in sweatshirt and messy bun as she loudly dilates upon her romantic and financial travails to her impeccably rouged gay-enby vizier.

2. Why was I studying Wilde anyway? Because I’d read Paglia’s Sexual Personae when I was 17, that’s why. You can search my dissertation for her name; you won’t find it, unlike Sedgwick’s, for what I hope are obvious reasons. But I remain her student—certainly not the often glib, vapid, and moralistic Sedgwick’s—to this day. The ethnic rather than erotic component of this particular identification will have to await another moment—no, another commentator—to clarify.

3. Like the great Angeleno fantasist mentioned in last week’s newsletter, I mean Ray Bradbury, I don’t drive.

4. Please see my essay on The Heart of Thomas, Moto Hagio’s great graphic novel that founded the otherwise suspect genre, one of whose characters, repaying Wilde’s Orientalist compliment that Japan was “a pure invention,” is overtly modeled on the aesthete. In fact, if you’ve read this far down the page, I will even share a link to an unlisted lecture on the book intended for students in a class on the graphic novel, which puts the book in a variety of contexts encompassing Mishima and Mann as well as Wilde.

5. Insert here your own digression on the rightward political shift by which the queer and queer-affined—boy, girl, and otherwise—turn to Roman Catholicism as the same type of transgressive gesture but in a different direction, when liberalism in its periodic ascendancy over conservatism’s advocacy of custom and common sense drifts too far toward triumphant sentimental imperial technocracy. Right or left, the enemy is always the domestic middle class, even or especially when one belongs to this class.

     “‘My dear Gerald,’ I answered, ‘Lady Alroy was simply a woman with a mania for mystery. She took these rooms for the pleasure of going there with her veil down, and imagining she was a heroine. She had a passion for secrecy, but she herself was merely a Sphinx without a secret.’” (Wilde, “The Sphinx Without a Secret: An Etching”)