DFW or DeLillo in his prime could write a great novel about Trump, although I’m not quite sure how you’d swing it. Re: fascism (of whose or of what kind I’ll leave to you to decide) I’m always thinking that someone should write the American equivalent of the sea of fertility, some abyssal nihilist account of the decay of the national angel through disastrous reincarnations from upwardly mobile citizen-prince in the 20th century to gooning groyper in our time.
You'd really need the full DeLillo sensibility for it; they both went to Fordham, them and Lana Del Rey, a strangely coherent trio. I've thought about it, to be sure, organized Sound-and-the-Fury-style around a recurrent image of Ivanka's golden hair glowing like a fiery halo in the sun, perhaps echoed climactically by a nuclear blast, but it's best left to someone else. I'm too sentimental! Your idea sounds good, too, but I'm also too sentimental for that—you should write it! I've never read Sea of Fertility, lest his execution mars the idea (I got the middlebrow version of the idea from David Mitchell).
I'm probably too sentimental for it too-I think you need to be in the blackpill-suicidal-aesthete space Mishima was in to pull off a performance like that, and in any case it's possible that we just aren't suited to it as Americans. I'll see! Brows aside what differentiates Mishima from Mitchell, and what also defuses a lot of his more threatening fascist tendencies is that in the second and again in the final volume he essentially acknowledges that there is nowhere to escape to, that any renewal will be corrupted and that the idealized past probably wasn't anyway. Ironically I think the Sound & the Fury probably is the closest thing in the American canon to that, but even then I remember a professor arguing that Faulkner leaves an opening for redemption in the long-suffering black servants.
I agree with that reading of Faulkner, but it's a bit patronizing (on Faulkner's part, I mean) for all its good intentions. Mitchell's just a regular lib, but his books suggest that redemption is only found in whatever you do in the present moment, not in an idealized past or future (his pasts, presents, and futures are often literally dystopian), which is pretty much what I think too. I also reject pessimism, both on American principle and on the grounds that if you were truly pessimistic you wouldn't bother to write a book.
always a delight to be discussed--I wouldn't posit gay-queer as a binary... as I have written on Substack in that piece complaining about Benjamin Moser, 'queer' has multiple meanings, one of which names the inherent uncanniness of sexuality per se in the way that it resists both our normative moral frameworks and our attempts to corral its slippery energies into cohering around even what we might take to be an anti-normative oppositional identity. In that sense Lawrence and Forster, for example, could be said to be both queer (exploring what's beyond, forbidden, excessive, chthonic, utopian, etc in sexuality) and trying to unqueer it (as prophets, like Whitman and Carpenter as you astutely say, of a new sexual order, liberated, happy, and so on)... it might be indeed interesting to think more about those tensions in their works and the similarities of the authors with the question of their 'sexual identity' (homo/heterosexuality) suspended (along with questions about, say, gender, feminism, etc, in their work), or at least not given analytic priority, focusing on their metaphysics of 'sex' alone to see more how they're playing the multiple and somewhat contradictory roles inherited from the 19th sex-reformers of both rebels and restorers... (Interestingly Lawrence was a big inspiration for gay writer/activist Larry Kramer who wrote the screenplay for Women in Love--which for me is a dreadful movie that reveals Lawrence to be, most of the time, a sort of drearily moralizing Ken Russell--but mileages will vary!)
As to Auden, well, he's homosexual but not gay in the sense of gay literature--his openly gay verse is scant and hardly circulated, although he was part of a closeted network and promoted other such authors such as a young Ashbery (or as Paul Franz has recommended to me, the brilliant Alan Ansen). Wilde too was a married man with children. They were neither of them gay in the contemporary sense, although of course they inspired much of its sensibility (even as much of it is also constructed in opposition to their elitist, Paterian, Romish, sneering, tinkering, arch Great Uncle Arthur silliness)... Lawrence is perhaps closer, backward from Whitman and forward to Kramer, to the modern gay spirit, if we want to keep turning the labels inside-out.
At any rate, it's not a question of setting 'queer' up against 'gay' or anything else. 'Queer' being what it is, it is not capable of being instantiated in an identity, author, text, tendency, etc, except in a self-negating ironic way (what has happened with institutional and academic queerness). Everyone, as a conditional of being a sexual (that is, psychic) agent is queer; no one, as the bearer of any cohrently avowable position, is queer. It oughn't to be a question--which is to say it often is one--of finding that this or that author is excitingly or disturbingly 'queer' in opposition to something 'normative' or 'homonormative', only of tracing, hopefully with the pleasure of wonder along with the occasional dizzy spells of bewildered horror, how such queer stuff as sexuality grounds and undoes the selves, roles, orders etc we cannot make, maintain, or transmit out of anything else...
Thank you, that's so well said I won't add anything to it, except to clarify that when I say "Wilde," "Joyce," etc. I tend to mean their works or (to be obnoxious) their "texts as sites of discourse" or whatever rather than themselves as biographical persons, and therefore if one were to judge them "queer" or "unqueer" it would be in the sense that those works do or do not suggest everything you mean by the word, where the word might even name an infinitely receding horizon of literature, art, even experience etc. as such ("to burn always with this hard gemlike flame..."). So yes it would be stupid to say James Joyce is more queer than W. H. Auden if we're talking about people, but perhaps less stupid to say Ulysses is more queer than September 1, 1939 or Spain—or, to switch it up, The Sea and the Mirror more queer than Dubliners—even if we could find traces of queering/unqueering in all these texts. But as you say, in each of these writers it's probably best to think about the tensions in the work itself rather than in crude opposition to others, despite my personal (no doubt petit-bourgeois fascist) taste for binarizing and ranking.
I suspect the binarizing and ranking is also an inevitable, load-bearing feature of lecturing and fielding questions from Zoomer anons! But right I think we're both sympathetic to the fun of finding the queerness at play in texts (what we might just call er, *hetero*glossia)--and for various reasons both skeptical of the idea that this has anything to do in any obvious way with contemporary politics and identities, which indeed rely on literature but are also always being subverted, surpassed, suspended etc by it... out of the crooked timber of sexuality and textuality something straight and gay is indeed always being unmade...
You have finally worn me down! For months I have been hovering outside the paywall. Your teasers about Major Arcana push all my buttons...it sounds like exactly the sort of book I would love, but I've been afraid to commit, for fear I wouldn't be able to keep pace with your releases. but now that the book is done and published, the pressure is off. I'm still outside your paywall, but I've ordered my copy.
DFW or DeLillo in his prime could write a great novel about Trump, although I’m not quite sure how you’d swing it. Re: fascism (of whose or of what kind I’ll leave to you to decide) I’m always thinking that someone should write the American equivalent of the sea of fertility, some abyssal nihilist account of the decay of the national angel through disastrous reincarnations from upwardly mobile citizen-prince in the 20th century to gooning groyper in our time.
You'd really need the full DeLillo sensibility for it; they both went to Fordham, them and Lana Del Rey, a strangely coherent trio. I've thought about it, to be sure, organized Sound-and-the-Fury-style around a recurrent image of Ivanka's golden hair glowing like a fiery halo in the sun, perhaps echoed climactically by a nuclear blast, but it's best left to someone else. I'm too sentimental! Your idea sounds good, too, but I'm also too sentimental for that—you should write it! I've never read Sea of Fertility, lest his execution mars the idea (I got the middlebrow version of the idea from David Mitchell).
I'm probably too sentimental for it too-I think you need to be in the blackpill-suicidal-aesthete space Mishima was in to pull off a performance like that, and in any case it's possible that we just aren't suited to it as Americans. I'll see! Brows aside what differentiates Mishima from Mitchell, and what also defuses a lot of his more threatening fascist tendencies is that in the second and again in the final volume he essentially acknowledges that there is nowhere to escape to, that any renewal will be corrupted and that the idealized past probably wasn't anyway. Ironically I think the Sound & the Fury probably is the closest thing in the American canon to that, but even then I remember a professor arguing that Faulkner leaves an opening for redemption in the long-suffering black servants.
I agree with that reading of Faulkner, but it's a bit patronizing (on Faulkner's part, I mean) for all its good intentions. Mitchell's just a regular lib, but his books suggest that redemption is only found in whatever you do in the present moment, not in an idealized past or future (his pasts, presents, and futures are often literally dystopian), which is pretty much what I think too. I also reject pessimism, both on American principle and on the grounds that if you were truly pessimistic you wouldn't bother to write a book.
always a delight to be discussed--I wouldn't posit gay-queer as a binary... as I have written on Substack in that piece complaining about Benjamin Moser, 'queer' has multiple meanings, one of which names the inherent uncanniness of sexuality per se in the way that it resists both our normative moral frameworks and our attempts to corral its slippery energies into cohering around even what we might take to be an anti-normative oppositional identity. In that sense Lawrence and Forster, for example, could be said to be both queer (exploring what's beyond, forbidden, excessive, chthonic, utopian, etc in sexuality) and trying to unqueer it (as prophets, like Whitman and Carpenter as you astutely say, of a new sexual order, liberated, happy, and so on)... it might be indeed interesting to think more about those tensions in their works and the similarities of the authors with the question of their 'sexual identity' (homo/heterosexuality) suspended (along with questions about, say, gender, feminism, etc, in their work), or at least not given analytic priority, focusing on their metaphysics of 'sex' alone to see more how they're playing the multiple and somewhat contradictory roles inherited from the 19th sex-reformers of both rebels and restorers... (Interestingly Lawrence was a big inspiration for gay writer/activist Larry Kramer who wrote the screenplay for Women in Love--which for me is a dreadful movie that reveals Lawrence to be, most of the time, a sort of drearily moralizing Ken Russell--but mileages will vary!)
As to Auden, well, he's homosexual but not gay in the sense of gay literature--his openly gay verse is scant and hardly circulated, although he was part of a closeted network and promoted other such authors such as a young Ashbery (or as Paul Franz has recommended to me, the brilliant Alan Ansen). Wilde too was a married man with children. They were neither of them gay in the contemporary sense, although of course they inspired much of its sensibility (even as much of it is also constructed in opposition to their elitist, Paterian, Romish, sneering, tinkering, arch Great Uncle Arthur silliness)... Lawrence is perhaps closer, backward from Whitman and forward to Kramer, to the modern gay spirit, if we want to keep turning the labels inside-out.
At any rate, it's not a question of setting 'queer' up against 'gay' or anything else. 'Queer' being what it is, it is not capable of being instantiated in an identity, author, text, tendency, etc, except in a self-negating ironic way (what has happened with institutional and academic queerness). Everyone, as a conditional of being a sexual (that is, psychic) agent is queer; no one, as the bearer of any cohrently avowable position, is queer. It oughn't to be a question--which is to say it often is one--of finding that this or that author is excitingly or disturbingly 'queer' in opposition to something 'normative' or 'homonormative', only of tracing, hopefully with the pleasure of wonder along with the occasional dizzy spells of bewildered horror, how such queer stuff as sexuality grounds and undoes the selves, roles, orders etc we cannot make, maintain, or transmit out of anything else...
Thank you, that's so well said I won't add anything to it, except to clarify that when I say "Wilde," "Joyce," etc. I tend to mean their works or (to be obnoxious) their "texts as sites of discourse" or whatever rather than themselves as biographical persons, and therefore if one were to judge them "queer" or "unqueer" it would be in the sense that those works do or do not suggest everything you mean by the word, where the word might even name an infinitely receding horizon of literature, art, even experience etc. as such ("to burn always with this hard gemlike flame..."). So yes it would be stupid to say James Joyce is more queer than W. H. Auden if we're talking about people, but perhaps less stupid to say Ulysses is more queer than September 1, 1939 or Spain—or, to switch it up, The Sea and the Mirror more queer than Dubliners—even if we could find traces of queering/unqueering in all these texts. But as you say, in each of these writers it's probably best to think about the tensions in the work itself rather than in crude opposition to others, despite my personal (no doubt petit-bourgeois fascist) taste for binarizing and ranking.
I suspect the binarizing and ranking is also an inevitable, load-bearing feature of lecturing and fielding questions from Zoomer anons! But right I think we're both sympathetic to the fun of finding the queerness at play in texts (what we might just call er, *hetero*glossia)--and for various reasons both skeptical of the idea that this has anything to do in any obvious way with contemporary politics and identities, which indeed rely on literature but are also always being subverted, surpassed, suspended etc by it... out of the crooked timber of sexuality and textuality something straight and gay is indeed always being unmade...
Lol, yes, no one needs to be queered more than some of my beloved Zoomer anons, toward whom I feel an increasing parasocial responsibility.
You have finally worn me down! For months I have been hovering outside the paywall. Your teasers about Major Arcana push all my buttons...it sounds like exactly the sort of book I would love, but I've been afraid to commit, for fear I wouldn't be able to keep pace with your releases. but now that the book is done and published, the pressure is off. I'm still outside your paywall, but I've ordered my copy.
Thank you! I hope you enjoy it, and please feel free to let me know what you think.