Melancholy Utopia: Loss and Fantasy in Contemporary American

Literature and Film

by

Julia Patricia Wallace Cooper

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements

for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English

University of Toronto

© Copyright by Julia Patricia Wallace Cooper, 2016 Melancholy Utopia: Loss and Fantasy in Contemporary American

Literature and Film

Julia Patricia Wallace Cooper

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English

University of Toronto

2016

Abstract

My project examines sites of social and psychic resistance to forfeiting loss in contemporary literature, film, and philosophy. I call these textual, cinematic, and performative spaces of resistance melancholy utopia. Working at the intersection of affect theory, queer studies, and psychoanalysis, I argue for the utopian potential in the protracted grieving of melancholia.

The pathologization of grief in contemporary Western culture proceeds from the incessant demand for productivity inherent to late-stage capitalism: extended mourning is unproductive and economically inefficient, an emotional nuisance. Therefore, I focus on the violence that is intrinsic to the temporal demands made on mourning and argue that there is an innate counterhegemonic impulse in the melancholic’s steadfast grief. The melancholic

ii subject resists the violent injunction to “move on” from her sorrow and creates instead an affective utopia that allows him or her to experience his or her pain and new forms of thinking. By focusing on post-1945 literature and film, I chart the “ugly” affect of melancholia and the contemporary salience of utopian dreaming. Although the authors and directors through whose work I develop the concept of melancholy utopia are otherwise diverse, they share a preoccupation with the relationship between loss and fantasy. My first chapter interrogates critical analyses of grief (Jacques Derrida), failure and lack (Judith

Halberstam; Jacques Lacan), queer futurity (Lee Edelman), and utopia (José Muñoz). My next three chapters chart melancholy utopia and the alternative kinship relations it fosters in the kitchens of the American South (Carson McCullers; Harmony Korine), in the literary archive (David Foster Wallace), and in New Queer Cinema (Jennie Livingston; Sean Baker).

Each chapter illustrates melancholy utopia as the nexus of pain and hope in modern grief.

My project thus has broader implications for rethinking the discursive limits of kinship, love, and ethical fidelity in our contemporary moment.

iii Acknowledgments

I am forever grateful to my supervisor Professor Mari Ruti for her guidance, support, and unrelenting encouragement throughout this project. I am also thankful to my committee members Professors Sara Salih and Naomi Morgenstern for their invaluable insights. I would like to thank the other mentors who have been generous to me and my ideas over many years: Manish Sharma and Omri Moses at Concordia University, Ara Osterweil and Sean

Carney at McGill University, Mark Knight at Lancaster University, Eli Friedlander for his seminar on Walter Benjamin at The School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University in

2015, Jennifer Friedlander at Pomona College, and finally, Larry Switzky, Cheryl Suzack, and Corinn Columpar at the University of Toronto. You are—as Frankie Addams would say

—the we of me.

I am grateful for various forms of financial support received over the course of this dissertation through the Ontario Graduate Scholarship, the V. A. De Luca Memorial

Fellowship, the University of Toronto Award for the Study of the United States, and the

University of Toronto Fellowship.

Thank you to my friends and family for standing by as I worked through what it means to write, feel, and live with grief. To my sweet Tim Macleod, for the bliss.

This dissertation is dedicated to my mom Patricia Wallace, who, if she were here, I would say: this has all been for you, and it has all been worthwhile.

iv Table of Contents

Abstract ii Acknowledgements iv Table of Contents v List of Figures vii Introduction: The “Problem” of Melancholia and The Promise of Utopia 1 1. Loss, Enjoyment, Failure 26 Filling the Lack 30 The Birth Pangs of Biopolitics 32 Grief’s Strange Temporality 40 Fidelity 44 Psychoanalysis and The Political 48 Enjoying Loss 55 Failure 58 The Queer Negative 67 The Anti-Relational Turn 72 2. Spectres in the Southern Kitchen: Carson McCullers and Harmony Korine 81 A History of the Back-of-House 84 The Member of the Wedding 87 Kitchen Conversations, Strange Intimacies 95 Foreclosing Queerness 106 Another Kitchen: Gummo 110 Kitchen Revolt 116 Generating New Social Analogies 125 3. David Foster Wallace and The Melancholy Utopia of Articulation 128 A Split View: The Wallace Criticism 132 Wallace’s Self-Help Library 144 Inside Suicide: “Good Old Neon” 154 — THE END. 160 The Meaning of “Whatever” 168 Psychoanalysis and Cézanne’s Apples 170 The Pale King and Abiding Melancholia 177 4. New Queer Cinema Then and Now: Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning (1990) & Sean Baker’s Tangerine (2015) 183 The Arrival of New Queer Cinema 186 Ball Culture & Paris Is Burning 196 Venus Xtravaganza and Fantasies of Whiteness 201 “Just Enjoy It”: Finding Satisfaction in Lack 215 Tangerine, A West Hollywood Epic 222 The Ambivalence of Whiteness 226 Silence in the Laundromat 229 iPhone Politics: Beyond The Selfie 233

v Conclusion: Returning to Disappearance 243 Works Consulted 250

vi List of Figures

Figure 1: McRay, Percy. Miriam Burbank. 2014.

Figure 2: Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I, 1514.

Figure 3: Judie Bamber, I’ll Give You Something to Cry About (Dead Baby Finch),1990.

Figure 4: Emma Kisiel, Squirrel 2, 2011.

Figure 5: William Safie, Typical American House, Moscow, 1959.

Figure 6: Jennie Livingston, Venus at the Ball, Paris Is Burning, 1990.

Figure 7: Sean Baker, Sin Dee Pulls Dinah, Tangerine, 2015.

Figure 8: Jennie Livingston, Venus Xtravaganza, Paris Is Burning, 1990.

Figure 9: Sean Baker, Sin Dee and Dinah, Tangerine, 2015.

vii Introduction

The “Problem” of Melancholia and The Promise of Utopia

Figure 1: McRay, Percy. Miriam Burbank. 2014. nytimes.com. Photograph.

Miriam Burbank died. It was a June day in New Orleans in 2014. Burbank was only

53 years old, but she had made arrangements for her funeral. There, her embalmed body sat upright at a table with a cigarette in one hand and a wineglass in the other. Her light black skin had a waxy finish. A pair of thick, black sunglasses covered Burbank’s eyes and a glossy shoulder-length wig framed her face and shoulders. Like many of the dead, she wore her finest: diamond earrings, gold watch, and a silk scarf. On the table in front of her was an ashtray and lighter, a pack of menthol cigarettes, and a couple of small New Orleans Saints helmets in honor of her favorite team. Behind Burbank was a large screen TV and a half empty bottle of Jack Daniels. According to The New York Times, this scene recreates how

1 2

Burbank “had spent a good number of her living days” (Roberston). With those days now behind her, Burbank’s funeral is a scene of prosopopoeia: her corpse is meant to look as though it is a body still in action, perhaps even about to speak. But more than this, the unlikely still-life registers that Burbank is gone, but not quite. Waiting expectantly at her table, Burbank is making a visual and prosopopoeic address from before—and not yet beyond—the grave.

As Diana Fuss remarks in her study of the modern elegy, a corpse testifies to an absence, and “a corpse negates interiority” (44). The cadaver is the empty remains of someone who, until very recently, once was. So when a corpse “speaks” as it does in the elegies of Fuss’s study, or when a corpse appears as though it is about to speak, as it does in the instance of Burbank’s funeral, the corpse is misbehaving. We associate death with disappearance rather than with appearance, and, yet, in the context of Burbank, what is gone reappears in a makeshift sort of way.

This form of lifelike funeral staging is relatively new to the United States, and it breaks with conventional mourning rituals in more ways than one. Burbank’s service shirks the solemnity of traditional mourning rites by having her body mimic life rather than death.

However, solemnity is not replaced by a flippant irreverence. In a sense, those who are left to grieve can be with their loss for a bit longer, and a peculiar comfort is given room to emerge. In this unconventional scenario, Burbank has orchestrated a novel encounter between her mourners and their loss that has the timbre of fantasy. According to Julia

Kristeva, one way of understanding fantasy is as the “intimate creation of representations” (63). Kristeva writes that the Greek root of fantasy (fae, faos, fos) 3

“expresses the notion of light and thus the fact of coming to light, shining, appearing, presenting, presenting oneself, representing oneself” (2002: 63). In this respect, the unfolding of fantasy is like shining a light upon the shadowy corners of one’s inner life.

Indeed, this funeral stages a certain representation of Burbank (orchestrated by Burbank herself, in anticipation of death), and she appears to her mourners in the peculiar glow of the fantastical. The uncanny corpse, in a manner of speaking, poses some significant questions about grief: how do we experience loss? And how might we begin to renegotiate the terms of public grieving in order to make room for fantasy? Burbank’s New Orleans funeral presents an alternative way of relating to grief. The question remains: alternative to what?

On the surface, the peculiar contortion of Burbank’s dead body into a pose of aliveness might seem like a spectacle that functions as a denial of death. Burbank’s undead appearance could be construed as a refusal on her part to accept death. And yet, the conventional North American funeral is not lacking in its own elements of the spectacular we have perhaps just grown accustomed to them. Traditionally, the dead body is partially, if not completely, hidden from view. It is encased in a casket and meant to look asleep, or, reduced to ashes in an urn or ornamental box. Often cloaked in religious ritual, the body of the dead is obscured and mystified. Veiled in religious convention at the same time that it is rendered sterile by scientific and funeral discourse, the corpse is a site of alienation. Swathed in ritual, the traditional funeral does not allow for a confrontation with death. The mourner who is left behind to grieve might well feel isolated from her loss due to this process of mystification.1

1 I will alternate between using masculine and feminine pronouns throughout this dissertation. 4

In contrast to these conventions, Burbank’s still-life funeral presents an encounter with loss. For to see someone in the same position as when they were alive—like Burbank smoking a cigarette—is to be able to see what is irrevocably lost. The dead subject’s limbs may be in a familiar pose, her gold watch will remain unchanged, but the light is out behind those sunglasses, and her fingers are not curled around her menthols like usual. Thus, the staging of the corpse as lifelike facilitates an avowal of loss. This funeral blurs the sharp edges of grief by allowing the mourners a flimsy fantasy of Burbank’s return. However, what this return enables is not a delusion that the dead has risen, but a confrontation with disappearance itself. Mixing feelings of pain with those of hope, loss is staged in a tableau non-vivant for the mourners. Burbank’s funeral is not an attempt to stave off loss; instead, it is an attempt to come into closer contact with it.2

Burbank’s funeral is an example of a concept that I will expand upon in the following chapters: melancholy utopia. Melancholy utopia is a psychic, textual, or in this instance, literal space where grief and fantasy are entwined and loss abides. The words “melancholy” and “utopia” may seem an odd pairing, as the former is often associated with despair and isolation, while the latter is associated with hope and collectivity. Yet, there is a radical potentiality to melancholia that finds its analog in the concept of utopia. Melancholia can be utopic not only in the sense of a fantastical refuge from what Freud termed the reality principle, but also as an important reimagining and remapping of how things could be, a

2 There are, of course, market underpinnings to this funeral scene: although the cost of Burbank’s service is not disclosed, The New York Times reports that these lifelike funerals first appeared in Puerto Rico in 2008 where pricing starts at $1,700 (Roberston). By comparison, in the U.S., the National Funeral Directors Association reported in 2014 that on average a funeral costs upwards of $27,000 (qtd. in Wells). Regardless of how extravagant or modest your service is, the funeral industry capitalizes on the economics of grief—and the industry is booming. 5 reconfiguring of how affective experience is negotiated interpersonally and in contemporary society. Melancholy utopias are psychic spaces that disrupt social expectations and limitations on feeling and its expression; they are loci of resistance against the social and political hegemonies that constrain the range of affective experience that is deemed appropriate or acceptable in the public sphere. I am interested in thinkers and texts that dream from the space of their melancholia toward something—some utopian mode of relationality—that resides beyond current possibilities. The concepts of melancholia and utopia share a resistance to forfeiting an ideal, a refusal to accept that what is literally absent must also be affectively gone from our lives. To this I would like to add that melancholia, like the concept of utopia, rejects the present—it refuses the order of the day.

In this dissertation I read melancholia as an affect that holds immense potential in reshaping how we relate to loss, to the other, and to our own enjoyment. The impetus to “get over” one’s grief and to take courage is, at least in part, the consequence of a collective fear of death and of the unknowability of the event of loss. We do not know grief until we experience it, and there is always the possibility that it will extend itself indefinitely.

Burbank’s funeral is illustrative of how grief can be reimagined and renegotiated in our contemporary moment to include dream, fantasy, and an engagement with loss. This scene of the undead dead is a way for the mourner to relate to her loss anew. The funeral scene is utopic in its renegotiation of how the mourner comes to understand the loss of what and whom she has loved. One of the terms of this renegotiation is that fantasy be permitted to play a role in grief’s extended process. By reworking the tacit mourning contract, where restraint and mystification reign, melancholia is paired with dreams of utopia. If the past is 6 the province of the melancholic who maintains a fidelity to her loss, than the future is the province of the utopian—and who is to say she cannot bring her loss with her? The invocation of Miriam Burbank is here to set the scene for an inquiry into the relationship between grief and fantasy, melancholia and utopia in American cultural production after

1945.

Freud and Psychic Revolt

Freud called mourning “a great riddle” (1915: 306) and described it as a process full of contradictions and puzzling characteristics. In particular, he was confounded by melancholia: extended grief that seemingly has no end. Freud sets out to probe this riddle in

“Mourning and Melancholia” (1917). He draws a rather stiff line contrasting the “healthy” mourner who is able to complete the work of mourning in a timely fashion with the “sick” melancholic who fails to move on from her loss. He acknowledges that grieving something or someone we have lost is painstaking work, and yet he nonetheless castigates the melancholic who fails to do so swiftly. In his estimation, melancholia signals a grieving subject’s incapacity and—perhaps more significantly—unwillingness to get over her loss.

Freud says that in mourning the subject gradually learns to let go of what she has lost, and ultimately redirects her love to a new object. The work of mourning consists of the successful detachment from the lost social bond, the quelling of the libido’s fixation on the object “by devaluing, disparaging and, so to speak, even killing it” (267). For Freud, the process of breaking the mourner’s attachment to what or whom she has lost is a violent, even a murderous, one. What Freud describes is a psychic fight to stay alive, a killing off of the 7 lost love object to enact its death a second and final time in order to free desire. This violence stems from the fact that our psyches resist letting go of what we have lost. This painful work of moving on from loss is a gradual process that is carried out “bit by bit” instead of all at once (245). This protracted letting go—that is “carried out piecemeal”—has the effect of prolonging the existence of the lost object in the psyche for a little while longer

(245). In the end, though, the process of mourning is complete when the healthy griever has successfully untethered herself from what she has lost.

The ill melancholic, on the other hand, refuses to complete this work. Freud writes that in mourning there is a “mental constellation of revolt” that is exacerbated and elongated in melancholia (248). Everyone knows that loss is inevitable, and yet, when loss happens, our psyches resist confronting this basic fact. In the face of loss, the psyche revolts against reality. Freud draws a distinction between the well-adjusted mourner who finishes the labor of grief and moves onto loving new objects, and the problematic melancholic who won’t stop loving what she has lost. The melancholic’s extended grieving is her way of prolonging the existence of what has been lost in her psyche not just for a little while longer, but forever.

In her reading of “Mourning and Melancholia,” Mari Ruti explains the complex affective layers that are bound up in the experience of melancholia. Ruti notes that the melancholic’s intractability in relation to his loss “is partly due to the ambiguous nature of the loss in question: the melancholic knows whom he has lost––knows the identity of the person who is no longer available––but not ‘what’ he has lost in that person” (forthcoming). Ruti writes:

In other words, the melancholic is mourning not just the loss of a given person but also

the affective promises that this person offered but that have now irrevocably vanished. 8

The melancholic’s grief, in short, arises in part from the fact that he will (now) never

know what he could have had with the person who has been lost; it is the loss of future

possibility––as well as the promise of plenitude and wholeness that the loved object

tends to contain––that is so painful. (forthcoming)

Death thwarts the future. As Ruti points out, when someone dies we become all of a sudden unmoored from everything we “could have had” with that person. For instance, when we lose someone, we lose much more than just the person we knew: we are losing the chance to resolve old disagreements, and we are losing the possibility of ever disagreeing again. In short, we lose the future. With this elucidation of the melancholic’s ambivalence at hand, it perhaps becomes easier to understand the melancholic’s resistance to moving on. The melancholic is not ready to give up on the affective promises the future once held, and so she becomes wary of the future altogether. Instead, she looks backwards toward her loss. What we can glean from Ruti’s reading of Freud is a simple truth: part of the reason that it can be difficult to “get over” the loss of a love object is that we might not be done loving it. What the melancholic recognizes is that even in death the work of loving has no end.

The germs of this realization—that grief is an ongoing labor of love—are there in

Freud’s essay. For even though Freud castigates the narcissistic melancholic, he still attributes some value to his somber insights, and the stark contrast he has drawn between mourning and melancholia begins to falter. His essay contains a tacit acknowledgment of the inherent value of melancholia in the sense that Freud praises the melancholy subject’s clarity of vision and insight. Of the melancholic Freud writes: 9

When in his heightened self-criticism he describes himself as petty, egoistic, dishonest,

lacking in independence, one whose sole aim has been to hide the weaknesses of his

own nature, it may be, so far as we know, that he has come pretty near to understanding

himself; we only wonder why a man has to be ill before he can be accessible to a truth

of this kind. (246)

With the qualifying statements “it may be,” and “so far as we know,” Freud admits to the complexity of melancholia and the potential for self-understanding it may hold for the subject. In his hedging tone, Freud seems to lament that the melancholic “has to be ill” in order to gain an understanding of man’s alienated condition. The melancholic’s self- approbation (his deprecating self-criticism) is not the sign of a pathological disorder, then, but is what gets him “pretty near” to an accurate understanding of himself as fragmented, vulnerable, and finite. Freud writes that the melancholic possesses “a keener eye for the truth than other people who are not melancholic,” and that he is therefore able to comprehend the complex internal work of grieving in a way that others cannot (246). The melancholic intuits something about the nature of love and loss that remains obscured for the “healthy” rest of us. Here, Freud gestures toward a prophetic strain in the pathologized affect of melancholia

—an access to profound truths.

Freud’s sense of a prophetic impulse in melancholia lingered, and he returned to his theorization of protracted grief in The Ego and the Id (1923). There, acknowledging a complexity in loss that had not previously been fully accounted for, he recapitulated his original notion that the attachment to the lost object is completely severed in the work of mourning. He considers the possibility “that the character of the ego is a precipitate of 10 abandoned object-cathexes and that it contains the history of those object-choices” (29). That is to say, because the ego stores the history of abandoned object-cathexes, its shape is determined by this history. This in turn implies that a person’s identity cannot be dissociated from the losses he has accumulated over time. The ego incorporates the lost object, absorbing it into the self. Freud’s initial model of mourning resists the affective value of sustained grief, but even he comes to see how melancholia maintains a fine balance between living on and remaining steadfastly and perpetually committed to the loss of the love object.

Thus, Freud’s reconfiguration does not require an ultimate letting go of the lost object: it precipitates instead a melancholic identification allowing for its preservation in psychic form. As Freud admitted already in “Mourning and Melancholia,” “by taking flight into the ego love escapes extinction”; a melancholic fidelity thus emerges from the subject’s refusal to relinquish the loss that inheres within (257).

The Angel of Melancholia

Working at the intersection of psychoanalysis, affect theory, and queer studies, I argue for the utopian potential in the protracted grieving of melancholia. Queerness has long been associated with illness and pathology, just like melancholia. But queer theory, queer texts, and queer cinema have also rejoiced in the bliss of living outside of the status quo, beyond the discontents of the present moment. During the last two decades, queer theory has worked hard to recuperate negative affects like melancholia from pathologizing medical and cultural discourses. In the tradition of Eve Sedgwick’s reparative hermeneutics, David Eng,

Judith Butler, Ann Cvetkovich, Heather Love, Sianne Ngai, José Muñoz and others have 11 recast “bad feelings” such as melancholia in a recuperative and critical mode. In this dissertation, I have also drawn inspiration from the critical insights of Ruti, Kristeva, Todd

McGowan, Lauren Berlant, Jacques Derrida, and, of course, Freud. I will draw extensively on these thinkers as I extrapolate on the concept of melancholy utopia. But first I would like to step back for a moment and look to Walter Benjamin in order to clarify what the protracted grieving of melancholia has to do with the hope and potentiality of utopia.

In his study of the Paris Arcades Benjamin wove the visual with the philosophical, the personal with the critical, and arguably became the world’s first media critic—the prototype for an interdisciplinary way of seeing the world and of expressing those discoveries. For many, Benjamin also represents the problem of populist aesthetics and of bridging the schism between the bourgeois world of art and Marxist politics. Can there be a truly popular art that cuts across class lines and does not efface the labor that creates it?

Benjamin while deeply enmeshed in the Marxist politics of the Frankfurt school, was also drawn (like his contemporary Herbert Marcuse) to the new science of psychoanalysis and the irrational drives of the unconscious mind. What is more, he was navigating these shifting terrains of political and critical thought in tandem with the dawn of cinema. Quite understandably, then, Benjamin has come to represent many different things to many different thinkers.

It is due to Benjamin’s transdisciplinary thinking that he is regularly cited in media, critical, and queer theory. Over the last decade, the invocation of Benjamin has often been in reference to his angel of history as described in “Theses on the Philosophy of

History” (1940). The angel of history, which Benjamin takes from Paul Klee’s painting of 12

1920 “Angelus Novus,” is a central trope in Love’s Feeling Backward (2007), it appears throughout Eng’s The Feeling of Kinship (2010), and it surfaces in numerous other texts in cultural studies.3 As Love explains, the angel of history is “a key figure in recent work on loss and the politics of memory, trauma, and history. In contemporary criticism, Benjamin’s sacrificial witness functions as something like an ethical ideal for the historian and the critic”

(148).

With its back turned to the future, the ruins of the past at its feet, the mournful angel of history has, as Muñoz points out, come to represent a melancholic way of being in the world. Yet, in a more critical assessment than Love’s, Muñoz writes that he resists using

Benjamin’s striking images of history and progress in his own work because Benjamin “has been well mined in the field of queer critique,” so much so that his paradigms “now feel almost tailor-made for queer studies” (15). Along closely related lines, Eli Friedlander contends in Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait (2012) that there is a tendency to fetishize Benjamin (especially his images such as the angel of history) as a solitary genius, divorced from any philosophical genealogy. To do so, warns Friedlander, is to lose sight of the rigor of his philosophical insights and to deny Benjamin’s rightful place in the canon of post-Kantian thinkers.

With the words of Muñoz and Friedlander in mind, I have chosen to give the angel of history a moment of repose. Instead, in my study of grief and fantasy, I want to call upon

3 The angel of history plays a central role in Homi Bhabha’s conception of the historical event in The Location of Culture (1994). In an interview published in Artforum Bhabha described the influence of Benjamin on his work as “formative,” and went on to say that the angel of history “haunts” his work of cultural analysis (qtd. in Mitchell 82). In Specters of Marx (1994) Jacques Derrida links the angel of history with the ghost of Hamlet’s father in order to probe the question of what prompts ethical action. Javier Sanjinés invokes the angel of history throughout his study of decolonization, Embers of the Past (2013), and similarly, Henry A. Giroux (2011) turns elegiacally to Benjamin’s angel in his essay on neoliberalism and “the death of the social state.” 13

Benjamin’s overlooked angel of melancholia.4 The sorrowful angel of melancholia is depicted in Albrecht Dürer’s engraving entitled “Melencolia I” (see figure 2). Dürer’s

Figure 2: Dürer, Albrecht. Melencolia I. 1514. Engraving. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. winged creature is taken up by Benjamin in his Trauerspiel, a study of the origin of German tragedy first published in German as Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels in 1928. In the

Trauerspiel, Benjamin writes that “melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge.

4 In a review for boundary 2 of Walter Benjamin’s Selected Writings, Eli Friedlander remarks that “many characters, types, figures of wisdom or peculiar thoughtfulness people Benjamin’s world,” including those “who take time itself as their object, such as the three angels: Klee’s angel of history, Dürer’s angel of melancholia, and Baudelaire’s angel who has lost his aura” (64-65). I am grateful to Professor Friedlander for pointing me away from Klee’s angel (whose wings are overburdened by constant citation) and toward Dürer’s. 14

But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them” (157). Benjamin understood that melancholia had a bad reputation, but he was interested in the knowledge that emerges from the melancholic’s supposed narcissism. He understood that contrary to popular belief there inheres something prophetic in the melancholic’s way of seeing the world. Benjamin reminds us that “the view that prophetic ability is furthered by melancholy is an ancient one,” and that genius and madness have been linked to melancholia as far back as Aristotle (147). However, unlike the Greeks, who saw the melancholic’s prescience as a foretelling of future sorrow, Benjamin argues that these prophecies proved the melancholic’s ability to see backward with clarity.

Melancholia is an affective mode of signification that is conventionally seen as irrational, chaotic, narcissistic, and thus as an impotent tool for philosophy. In this sense,

Dürer’s engraving is striking for providing a more complex representation of melancholia.

His etched portrait shows the angel with shoulders and wings slightly hunched, chin on hand, a furrowed brow with eyes cast into the distance in contemplation. An unused geometry compass and abandoned nails lay next to the winged figure, while sand falls through the hourglass that is perched behind his head, marking the unceasing march of time.

Next to the hourglass is a “magic square”—a small square containing integers that add up to the date of the engraving: 1514 (the same year as the death of Dürer’s mother).5

5 On the horizon is a banner held up by a small fanged creature that reads “Melencolia I” with the sun descending behind it. Art historians, such as Erwin Panofsky and later, Philip Sohm, have concluded that the “I” in the title does not refer to the self, but rather to the first of three categories of melancholia as defined by Cornelius Agrippa as “Melencholia Imaginativa.” According to Sohm, “to assimilate the diverse ideas of Saturn, geometry, and melancholy, Dürer…turned to the German philosopher Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim and specifically to his De Occulta Pbilosophia” (16). Sohm explains that “Agrippa envisioned three types of melancholy, each associated with man’s three faculties of perception. Melancholia imaginativa, inspired by Saturn, is cognitively limited to the physical world and hence inspires the practitioners of geometry such as astronomers, architects, and artists” (16). 15

According to Benjamin it is crucial that Dürer included a “magic square” that inscribed Jupiter within the image in order to temper the “dismal forces of Saturn” and melancholia (151). As Benjamin explains, melancholy man has traditionally been understood in reference to Saturn, that volatile and fiery planet known for its “spiritual powers” and its correspondence to revelatory self-introspection (151). Art historian Philip Sohm elaborates on this point, and writes that “the magic square on the wall and the wreath of lovage worn by

Melancholy are talismans used to attract the healing influence of Jupiter to offset the excess of Saturn” (16). The “excess of Saturn” is tempered by the balancing force of Jupiter, for

Jupiter is associated with equilibrium. Benjamin remarks that with Jupiter by its side, Saturn becomes “the protector of the most sublime investigations” (151). This link between the prophetic but dangerous potential of melancholic Saturn and the stabilizing force of Jupiter is an important one. What sets this engraving, and indeed this angel, apart from other representations of sorrow and contemplation for Benjamin is the prescient philosophical question this depiction of the melancholic posed: “how it might be possible to discover for oneself the spiritual powers of Saturn and yet escape madness?” (151). How can a melancholic absorb the distant light of deep contemplation without hunching too far over the abyss? How can he keep his footing at the edge of solipsism?

One way of thinking about the relationship between melancholia and utopia is as something akin to the balancing forces of Saturn and Jupiter. The negative affect of melancholia holds myriad potential to help the subject reorient herself toward loss and toward her relationship to the other. The fidelity that springs forth from melancholia is what keeps the subject close to her loss and facilitates an embrace of finitude. Queer theory and 16 affect theory have served us well by recuperating negative feelings like melancholia and insisting on their psychic and social value. Nevertheless, I do not want to valorize melancholia without acknowledging that it has its dangers. Trumpeting the transformative power of melancholia is not enough, for melancholia can also plunge its subject so deep into the recesses of grief that there appears to be no way out. What this cosmic partnership of

Saturn and Jupiter throws into relief is the limit to melancholia’s prophetic or sublime potential. Every Saturn needs its Jupiter. Grief still hurts, but the melancholic needs hope too. Melancholy utopia is the nexus of that pain and hope. It is a psychic space where the subject’s contact with her loss is prolonged and given a fleeting futurity. The backward looking glance of Saturnine melancholia is matched by the Jupiter-like stare of utopia.

Utopia and Its Discontents

The word utopia first appeared in English about five hundred years ago, denoting an imagined place where everything is perfect. It is often repeated that the word is based on the

Greek ou and topos, which translate to “not” and “place” or “no place” (OED). This translation is taken as proof that utopia is nowhere, that it is nothing, that it does not and never will exist. However, although it is true that utopia has the character of the phantasmic,

I do not want to be so quick to dissolve it into nothingness. I wonder if instead of taking the etymology of utopia to mean “no place” we considered it in its component parts? Rather than thinking of utopia as an impossibility, what if we think of the word as containing nothingness (the “not”) at the same time that it holds the potential for actualization (the

“place”)? That is to say, utopia contains both the ideas of nothingness and potentiality: it 17 holds “no place” at the same time as “the potential for place.” When we talk about utopia, then, might we actually mean “leave some room for it to take place?”

Muñoz thought so. His Cruising Utopia (2009) brims with hope that even though utopia is always on a future horizon, we may glean insights from it in the now. Utopia and queerness are inextricable for Muñoz, for like utopian reflection, “queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing” (1). Muñoz challenges the principles of negativity that have come to be associated with queer life. From his viewpoint, “the aesthetic, especially the queer aesthetic, frequently contains blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning futurity” (1). Needless to say, we associate utopia with perfectibility, not with failure. For instance, Muñoz’s study of utopianism comes out of a longer tradition of critical idealism (not pessimism) that he traces back to the writings of

Kant, the works of Ernst Bloch, and other members of the Frankfurt school. Muñoz is not naïve to the fact that disappointment is a part of utopian dreaming, but he persists in his belief that idealism is “indispensable to the act of imaging transformation” (9). Muñoz is persuasive when he says that disappointments “need to be risked” if certain critical, emotional, and political obstacles are to be breached (9). But I wonder if disappointment might be intrinsic to utopianism, a part of the larger problem of conceiving of utopia in the first place? So in searching for this queer map of utopia, I find that it is useful to outline its relationship to disappointment.6 To think of disappointment as an unfortunate consequence of utopian dreaming might be somewhat misdirected. What this conceptualization of utopia

6 Literature has taken us to the “places” of utopia for centuries, from Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), to parts of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872). In their various shades of satire, these works have also outlined the relationship between utopian dreaming and disappointment in important ways. 18 tacitly presupposes is that disappointment could be avoided if only we did not risk dreaming of better worlds. However, disappointment is not merely a burden to be shouldered, nor is it the collateral damage of utopianism. Our disappointments are also what get us dreaming. We do not need to make do with disappointment or make peace with the notion that disappointment is an unfortunate and inevitable consequence of utopian thought. We owe our very fantasies to the disappointments that surround us and compel us to imagine the world otherwise. Without disappointment we would be stuck in “the quagmire of the present,” as Muñoz calls it, without ever realizing our paralysis (1). In other words, disappointment is the condition of possibility for utopian longing. Without being disappointed with the present we would never reach for something better.

The conventional understanding of utopia as a place of fantasy and hope is certainly not wrong, but this conception does not fully account for the bad feelings (like disappointment, fear, melancholia) that spur utopian thinking. These negative affects strengthen and clarify an image of utopia, namely that utopianism is not about tolerating disappointment in the name of a better futurity; utopia is to be found in the recesses of our disappointment. In other words, utopia is only utopia in so far as it relates to loss and the structure of our desire. The fact that utopian feelings can be disappointed does not lessen the force of the subject’s imaginative longing for something else. Likewise, the realization that utopian plans will fail to actualize does not necessarily result in disappointment: disappointment has been there all along. This dynamic between disappointment and longing is one that the melancholic understands intuitively. Disappointment is what compels us to plot the ideal coordinates of utopia in the first place. 19

That said, I am not interested in “tarrying with the negative” or of championing bad feelings as somehow good (Muñoz 10). I believe that there are more complex ways to relate to negative affects such as melancholia than either fetishizing or pathologizing them. I agree with Cvetkovich’s (2012) assessment that “a search for utopia that doesn’t make a simple distinction between good and bad feelings or assume that good politics can only emerge from good feelings”; for like Cvetkovich, I believe that “feeling bad might, in fact, be the ground for transformation” (2-3). This is to say that interrogating the transformational potential inherent in bad feelings is an important facet of my theorization of melancholy utopia. Love perhaps says it best in Feeling Backward when she remarks: “a central paradox of any transformative criticism is that its dreams for the future are founded on a history of suffering, stigma, and violence. Oppositional criticism opposes not only existing structures of power but also the very history that gives it meaning” (1). There is pain at the heart of oppositional criticism, but, as Cvetkovich and Love note, there is also hope that such critique may become grounds for transformation—for making history anew. My project illustrates the ways in which pain and hope are inextricable, and it is via queerness that we will see this imbrication most clearly.

Redefining the Radical

The conventional understanding of the radical––as in “radical” critique or “radical” politics––is that the radical is what exceeds the normative. This suggests that the radical is an excess, a too much. This notion of the radical as an outpouring or spilling over of feisty agency has led to its association with loud, bold, brash, and often rhetorically violent modes 20 of thought and political action; when we think of the radical, we usually have in mind drastic revolts, ruptures, or upheavals. But in this dissertation, I will illustrate that this is not the only way to think about radicalness: although the radical is often understood in violent or aggressive terms, not all forms of revolt look, sound, or feel the same. To quote Maggie

Nelson: “I’ve never been able to answer to comrade, nor share in this fantasy of attack” (27).

I think the radical is what reworks and reimagines the normative, not what obliterates it. Therefore, the radical looks quite different in the literary, cinematic, and theoretical texts that I draw upon in the following chapters from the portrait of radicalness that I have just drawn. That is because the forms of resistance that surface in melancholy utopia radicalize the normative in a psychic rather than material sense. This modality of the radical is similar in spirit to what Kristeva calls intimate revolt (2002: 12). In intimate revolt the subject engages in her own form of resistance to convention by turning toward the revolutionary capacities of psychic life. This subject of revolt rejects the way things have always been and enacts small revolts on a psychic level, over and over again. By constantly rejecting the norms and strictures that inscribe her, the subject is perpetually engaged in the act of interpretation. By returning to “the little things” and by sustaining “tiny revolts” on a daily basis on a psychical level, the subject leaves open the possibility for new interpretations of the world and of relationality to take hold (5). In so doing, she leaves open the possibility for resistance to manifest in other forms, such as in writing, thinking, and art. Kristeva writes that “what makes sense today is not the future (as communism and providential religions claimed) but revolt: that is, the questioning and displacement of the past. The future, if it exists, depends on it” (5). For Kristeva, “this work of revolt, which opens psychical life to 21 infinite re-creation, continues and recurs, even at the price of errors and impasses” (6).

Simply put, Kristeva’s intimate revolt is the work of interpretation; it is the small and often innocuous labor of reimagining—in seeming utopian flights of fancy—social mores or normative behavior. Kristeva laments that modern man’s “psychical curiosity yields before the exigencies of so-called efficiency,” but not all hope is lost: intimate revolt protects the realm of fantasy by carving out the space for the subject to remain curious, interpretive (11).

The labor of this interior revolt may appear inconsequential or fruitless, much like the work of utopian dreaming can seem silly or trivial, forever without consequence. But insofar as intimate revolt protects the private sphere of fantasy and enables its flourishing, it also transforms the way that we relate to interpretation and meaning. Confronted with discourses of efficiency and productivity, “we can still contemplate the rebellious potentialities that the imaginary might resuscitate in our innermost depths” (13).

Importantly, the interpretive work of intimate revolt inspires more concrete forms of political engagement. To quote McGowan—who has rigorously argued for the political project that inheres in psychoanalysis—“the most radical act today—[is] that of interpretation” (forthcoming). As McGowan is quick to point out, that does not mean that interpretation takes the place of political action. Yet, effective political action begins with a psychic shift in thought. The subject must look critically at an oppressive system like capitalism for example and interpret how it functions and where its problematic allure lies.

This psychic shift can only take place if the subject is willing to interpret the world around her—if she is willing to acknowledge and to name her dissatisfaction with the present. In the words of McGowan, “the act of interpretation requires seeing what is hidden amid 22 obviousness. What seems self-evident must itself become subject to interpretation” (forthcoming). Interpretation comes first; thinking beyond the present moment—imagining otherwise—is a radical act in and of itself.

In a similar vein, melancholy utopias do not overturn hegemonic demands, but rather offer an opportunity to step aside from them, if only just for a moment. In sum, the radical pulse of the melancholy utopia is psychic, intimate, and interpretive in nature. In suturing

Kristeva’s formulation of psychic resistance to the utopian impulse that I see as inherent to melancholia, I work toward the possibility of disrupting the dominant social forces of late stage capitalism that seek to quell the radical aspects of affective life. As I will argue in the chapters that follow, although you cannot exit the social order, a series of sustained breaks from it can begin to reveal its cracks. These fissures and hairline fractures can feel ephemeral and inconsequential when and if they begin from the phantasmatic. For fantasies do not have tangible political trajectories that would render them overtly or conventionally useful. The staging of loss and melancholia through the phantasmatic is animated by a utopian longing that does not easily or always translate into more visible idealism such as activism or politics. That is not to suggest that activism or politics should be abandoned or ignored in favor of fantasy and psychic revolt. However, what this model of interpretive resistance presents is a way of engaging in revolt without performing and reproducing the masculinist tropes of bygone revolutions.

My aim over the course of this dissertation is not to fetishize any simple act of resistance to the status quo as radical. However, I want to emphasize that not all reworkings of the normative manifest in recognizable ways: resistance may be figured in ways that are 23 not familiar. I am drawing on texts that privilege psychic revolt and utopian world-making and thereby redefine the radical, for I believe that we need to think about how the radical operates and how it can be measured when and if its effects are not material. We cannot return to a time before patriarchy or capitalism––and even if we could, we would be unlikely to find it a prelapsarian paradise. We can, however, reveal the fractures in systems of power that inscribe the contemporary subject under capital by creating small but sustained pockets of thinking and loving otherwise. As Homay King writes in her discussion of the Occupy

Wall Street movement: “in our world as it currently stands, there is no way to return to zero, no magic eraser. But we can blur and soften some of its most worn-in grooves” (167). There are forms of resistance that do not hew to violence. There are ways of occupying language and thought that make “room for another world, even if not yet actualizing it” (167). It may be perhaps that the only way to find a chink in the armor of neoliberalism and late capitalism is through small, fleeting moments of revolt that destabilize its foundations on a regular basis.

Looking For Melancholy Utopia

The authors and directors through whose work I develop the concept of melancholy utopia are diverse in kind. What brings these artists and thinkers into orbit with one another is a collective attempt to grapple with the relationship between loss and fantasy. My first chapter, “Loss, Enjoyment, Failure,” lays out the theoretical framework of this project. With the help of Michel Foucault, Berlant, and Sara Ahmed I trace the rise of biopolitics and discuss the neoliberal conceit of “the good life.” Focusing on the ways in which queer life 24 has been misaligned with death and negativity, I problematize narratives of American exceptionalism and privilege discourses of failure and disappointment.

Chapter Two, “Spectres in the Southern Kitchen,” charts the melancholy utopias in the Southern kitchens of Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding (1946) and

Harmony Korine’s independent film Gummo (1997). In both texts, the kitchen is the space in which characters indulge fantasies of patriarchy’s collapse and the emergence of queer kinship formations. I argue that these melancholy utopias present a post-Oedipal portrait of belonging. More specifically, I consider the analogical correspondences between characters and the ways in which they are able to connect on an affective level despite their differences in race, class, and queer desire.

Chapter Three, “The Utopia of Articulation,” extends this study of grief and relationality to the life and works of David Foster Wallace. In this chapter, I analyze

Wallace’s most earnest attempt to trace the contours of the self-other relationship in his short story “Good Old Neon” (2004). Drawing on the late author’s archive and personal library of self-help books, I argue that the act of writing was his utopia. For Wallace, articulation itself was an attempt to connect his solitary and oftentimes painful experience of melancholia to a broader human experience.

With chapter four, I turn to the cinematic. I consider how New Queer Cinema (NQC) is a genre of (and in) mourning for the lives lost to AIDS during the Reagan years. I discuss

NQC as a failed movement that nonetheless marked an important shift in queer image- making and that extends to our contemporary moment. I analyze Sundance Film Festival darlings Paris Is Burning (Jennie Livingston, 1990) and Tangerine (Sean Baker, 2015), both 25 of which offer complex portraits of queer and trans kinship. When read together, Paris Is

Burning and Tangerine tell a nuanced and affecting story of queer love that highlights the pain and bliss—or, the melancholy utopia—of life in contemporary America.

Melancholy utopia signals grief and disappointment not only as sites of pain, but also as central to our capacity to love. In each text, the irrational and often inconvenient melancholia of characters allows for new modes of belonging to take shape. Throughout the subsequent chapters, I assert that the melancholic can be read as a subject who resists the political management and containment of life. More precisely, I demonstrate how her loyalty to loss is utopian and how her psychic resistance to the status quo begins to fray the boundaries of the normative. By way of small, sustained revolts, the melancholic ignores the demand to get over her loss; instead, she brings it with her into the utopian future. 26

Chapter One

Loss, Enjoyment, Failure

The utopian form might not make the alternative possible, but it aims to make impossible the

belief that there is no alternative.

—Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness

“Enjoy Change! Savor The Adventure And Enjoy The Taste Of New Cheese.” This double injunction to enjoy change and novelty comes from Dr. Spencer Johnson’s Who

Moved My Cheese? An A-Mazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life

(1998). This self-help book tells a parable of mice and men who live in a maze and search for fulfillment in the form of cheese. The mice are the heroes of this story because of their adaptability, efficiency, and lack of fear, while the two small humans (named “Hem” and

“Haw”) are stifled by their intellect, complex belief systems, and fear of change. Hem is the stunted and defiant melancholic who wallows in his sorrow and fails to move on from the loss of his original cache of cheese, while Haw comes to see the value in quickly adapting to his changing situation and laughs at how supposedly “silly” Hem’s negative emotions are.

The book is replete with suggestions for how to learn resilience and flexibility, such as, “The

Quicker You Let Go Of Old Cheese, The Sooner You Find New Cheese,” and “Move With

The Cheese And Enjoy It!” Cheese, then, is a not-so-subtle metaphor for desire and its many 27 objects, from career goals to actual possessions, and having it, we are told, “Makes You

Happy” (30).

Therapeutic narratives like Who Moved My Cheese? offer a reductive account of human life, bluntly delineating the boundaries of psychic experience and the parameters of what one ought to feel in the wake of disappointment, change, or loss. The basic lesson of

Who Moved My Cheese? is to move on from loss, to scurry from depression, and to increase productivity in order to maximize enjoyment. Here, the enjoyment of desire ranks supreme, as does the necessity to avoid dampening the satisfaction of others. Unwittingly, this New

York Times bestseller scripts the tenets of neoliberalism and lays bare the capitalist demands that are continually placed on social and affective life in contemporary North America. It also unconsciously presents the rudimentary principles of Freud’s paradigm of mourning and melancholia: the melancholic Hem needs to forget what he has lost and redirect his desires to a new object in order to move on with his life.

This pathologization of the melancholic, and an emotional policing of how long one ought to grieve, clearly persists beyond Freud’s time to our own era. The protracted grieving of melancholia continues to be regarded as synonymous with sickness, as though there is something medically and even morally wrong with holding onto loss. It is also seen as an emotional nuisance. This is evidenced by the fact that the standard leave from work for bereavement in North America is typically three unpaid business days. The message is clear: get over it and get back to work. Indeed, productivity and efficiency are heralded as virtues while affects like melancholia are denigrated as character flaws. 28

In Cruel Optimism (2011), Lauren Berlant offers a trenchant critique of neoliberal society by examining fantasies of the “good life”—fantasies of happiness, upward mobility, job security, enduring intimacy, political and social equality, and autonomy—that underpin contemporary culture. Our attachments become cruel when what we (optimistically) want the most becomes the obstacle to our flourishing. Although fantasies and experiences of optimism are not inherently cruel, they become harmful when they instigate a form of repetition compulsion, what Berlant describes as “a sustaining inclination” to return (and return, and return) to the scene of fantasy (2). This constant return is motivated by the hope and expectation that this time things will be different, that this time “nearness to this thing,” or object, or person, or idea, “will help you or a world to become different in just the right way” (2). It is this frantic call to fulfill one’s every desire, wish, and whim in the hopes of total transformation that characterizes and crowds the quotidian experience of life under regimes of capital.

In the words of Hilton Als, a “Coca Cola optimism”––a marriage of capitalism and pop psychology––has come to characterize American culture post-1945. Or, as Sara Ahmed

(2010) argues with reference to Western culture more globally: being sad is not a viable option. Not only is a sunny disposition expected of contemporary subjects under regimes of capital, but optimism is almost a necessary corollary to citizenship. In such a context, an affect like melancholia is seen as an impingement on the happiness and well-being of others; to remain in a state of sorrow is to encroach upon the fantasies of the good life that govern collective life. Ahmed remarks that we have been taught to believe that we have a responsibility to be happy for others. Happiness has become instrumentalized, something of 29 an ethical duty. Generally speaking, Ahmed demystifies the well-worn assumption that happiness ought to be what societies and individuals collectively strive for. And, as many other scholars in affect theory have done in recent years, Ahmed takes “bad feelings” as her starting point. Most relevantly for my purposes, she turns specifically to melancholia in order to dismantle the pervasive and dominant logic of happiness. The value of Ahmed’s argument lies not in the mere distinguishing of good and bad feelings, of happiness and unhappiness, but in her articulation of the continual ambivalence the subject feels between and amidst these affects. To be ambivalent is to hold feelings of love and hate simultaneously in equal or shifting measures. Ahmed understands the ambivalence of melancholia as a mode of resistance to fantasies of the good life that insist on happiness as the gold standard of a life worth living.

Like Ahmed, I will proceed by suspending the belief that the pursuit of happiness is invariably a good thing. I turn instead to the pathologized, irresponsible attachments of the melancholic. Despite the pressures to move on from loss and to pull oneself up by one’s proverbial bootstraps, sorrow cannot be shaken off. Loss adheres to, and fundamentally changes the makeup of, the subject who feels it. Put differently, I want to focus on the violence of the demand that the affective labor of grief be done quickly so as to bring out the counterhegemonic potential of melancholia, of the refusal to speed up the process of grieving. More specifically, I argue that in disregarding the ethical duty to be happy, in embracing the possibility of endless mourning, the melancholic stalls the flow of productivity and efficiency by refusing to quit his grief.

30

Filling the Lack Refusing to move on from loss is no easy or popular task, for our society flees from protracted grieving. To live in contemporary North America is to live in a culture guided by the injunction to experience life to the fullest and to live that fullness at every moment.

Steeped in consumerism and constantly questing after the fulfillment of desire, the modern

American subject is acculturated to the notion that desire is quenchable, that our fundamental lack (as Lacan would have it) can be filled (as Lacan would certainly not have it), and that one ought to seize each and every day. There is little room for the enduring grief of melancholia in a culture that privileges and insists on a sovereign and autonomous subject who scurries uncritically from one peak experience to the next.

Call it lack, spectrality, weakness, foreignness, or simply the other, what many psychoanalytic and postrustructuralist thinkers like Freud, Blanchot, Lacan, Derrida, and

Judith Butler all share is the belief that at the core of being is not fullness nor impermeability but loss. It is perhaps Lacan who best describes the centrality of this loss in his discussion of the subject’s constitutive lack and the perpetual mourning that it impels. According to Lacan, ego formation takes place during the mirror stage in the first six to eighteen months of a child’s life when he identifies––or more correctly, misidentifies––his reflection as a coherent

“self” for the first time, as a whole that is distinct from the bodies of others that orbit around him. This comforting coherence and sense of wholeness is an illusion, but the child does not understand it as such. And these feelings of autonomy and centrality cannot be sustained when the child enters the symbolic order. The child’s entrance into the social world demands a sacrifice of wholeness in the sense that socially intelligible subjectivity pivots around a 31 void––a void that undercuts any and all illusions of autonomy or self-sufficiency. The subject experiences a sense of extreme and painful loss upon entering the symbolic order as the illusion of a coherent self disintegrates; as a result of crossing into the symbolic order, the subject emerges as a subject of lack, a subject who is henceforth driven by an unquenchable yearning for his pre-symbolic wholeness. The subject comes to organize his desire around that void, and though he may search for things and people to fill that nagging emptiness, these cherished objects (be they a lover, a friend, another primary social bond, possessions, or accolades) are always-already a stand-in or placeholder for the originary site of loss—what Lacan calls das Ding, or, the Thing.

The Thing is, simply put, the lack at the center of subjectivity and at the core of one’s being, and it is there that both drive and desire are wedded to the same melancholic purpose.

As Mari Ruti (2005) argues, the Thing “functions as a melancholy object of loss that can never be recovered for the simple reason that it was never (in reality) lost in the first place” (17; emphasis added). Given that the loss of the Thing is a fantasy, that the subject has not in reality lost anything, it is a misconception that the void of subjectivity can be filled. But this does not keep the subject from reaching for objects and people of desire in order to encounter traces of the Thing, “to look for its luster in more mundane substitutes” as it were (17). Ruti explains that it is the fantasy of this primordial loss that “engenders a whole host of important psychic effects, bringing into existence the Lacanian subject of lack

—a subject who is forever plagued by the sense of having been robbed of something unfathomably precious” (17). The fantasy of recovering what the subject has lost (and what 32 she senses has somehow been stolen from her) is a strong and unshakeable one, and she search for echoes of this “unfathomably precious” object in new love interests.

Though from the very start the subject has a sense “of having been robbed” of some

Thing dear to her, it is important to note, as Ruti does, that the loss of this originary melancholy object gives rise to a variety of psychic effects, not all of which are painful.

There is, of course, always the danger that in searching for the traces of das Ding a subject may be lured into cruel attachments with abusive, addictive, or destructive fantasies (as

Berlant warns). However, Ruti implies that it is also possible that from the quest for wholeness arise some of the better things in life, such as the capacity for intersubjectivity and love. Ruti lists transformative amorous encounters, eye-opening pursuits, and the enjoyment of eating cake among the pleasures that result from the pursuit of the elusive

Thing. Expanding on Ruti’s analysis, I would add that it could be argued that fantasizing a more pleasurable world is not invariably a bad thing. At the same time, I want to hold onto

Berlant’s insight that when the subject remains trapped within neoliberal fantasies of perfectibility, when “the good life” is the ideal and sole aim of human pursuits, enjoyment becomes null.

The Birth Pangs of Biopolitics

I am certainly not the first person to draw on Freudian and Lacanian formulations of mourning and melancholia to elucidate the affective hold that sorrow has over us. Many theorists—from Julia Kristeva, to Butler, to David Eng, and Anne Anlin Cheng, to name a few—have gravitated toward theorizations of melancholia to recuperate experiences of loss 33 and instances of melancholic identification.7 My interest in the “negative” or “ugly” affect of melancholia participates in a longer tradition of counterhegemonic thought that finds its origins in psychoanalytic and poststructuralist discourses, and has grown exponentially in tandem with and in reaction to the rise of neoliberalism and, as Foucault’s final lectures name, “the birth of biopolitics.”8 Foucault’s theorization of biopolitics is central to understanding how psychic life and affects such as melancholia are managed and contained within contemporary neoliberal regimes. Foucault advanced the notion of biopolitics in the

Collège de France lectures from 1978-1979 as an extension of his work on governmentality, which sought to register the emergence of contemporary liberal government through disciplinary power and self-regulation. Governmentality signals the mentality or rationality of government, and commensurately, the practices and techniques through which individuals are governed.9 According to Foucault, the rationale of government in liberal society is to avoid social ill and to seek health and prosperity for individuals. Personal choices thus become sites of biopolitical regulation, and the moral and ethical impetus of the citizen, then, becomes the same as that of the state: to avoid all ill and to pursue the good.

The health sciences (namely psychiatry, medicine, and social work) become a crucial strategy for pursuing this “good.” For instance, “population” and the management of large

7 See Julia Kristeva in Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1992); Judith Butler in The Psychic Life of Power (1997); Butler, David Eng, and David Kazanjian in Loss: The Politics of Mourning (2002); Anne Anlin Cheng in The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (2003); as well as in Eng’s work, The Feeling of Kinship (2010). 8 Here, I am clearly referencing the ideas of queer theorists Heather Love and Sianne Ngai. “Bad” or “ugly” feelings can take many shapes beyond that of melancholia. Broadly speaking, the most attention has been paid to the following negative affects: gay shame (Sedgwick, Miller, Crimp, Warner), trauma (Cvetkovich), failure (Halberstam), disidentification and exclusion (Muñoz, Cheng, Ahmed). Some other notable and productive interventions into these discourses are: Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects (2007), Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (2010), and Adam Phillips’s Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life (2013). 9 Cf. Nikolas Rose (2006). 34 groups of people becomes a powerful administrative concept that opens up new types of subjectivities that are amenable to liberal governance. Now that we have a population—a large social body reducible to statistics—we also have the ability to calculate risk through discourses of medicine and public health. Under the auspices of population health, any activity or personal choice that detracts from the state imperative to avoid ill and seek health can be calculated as a risk on an individual and social level. For example, smokers are continually reminded of the risk that their habit poses to their own health and to that of others. Similarly, gay men are warned of the risks associated with unprotected and promiscuous sex, and such behavior is deemed medically and morally irresponsible. These actions (of which smoking and unprotected sex are merely two examples among many) are admonished under regimes of modern liberal government as reckless and harmful to the individual and to the broader public.10 Admittedly, common sense is likely to dictate that such warnings about the detrimental effects of smoking and the dangers of contracting AIDS are quite reasonable, but that is because the framing of these behaviors as “risky” takes place through an authoritative medical discourse that legitimates their censure with statistics. The most pervasive of the health sciences, medicine, is a biopolitical discourse that exists to substantiate and reiterate institutional power. Not only is responsibility increasingly shouldered by the individual, but that individual’s choices and desires are frowned upon by the larger public if they do not conform to the moral attitude of the liberal state.

10 In Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on The Subculture of Barebacking (2009), Tim Dean discusses these “risky” behaviors and the subjects who actively defy cultural campaigns and mandates to pursue good health above all else. He analyzes the controversial practice of “barebacking,” wherein gay men eschew condoms and enjoy unprotected sex despite the threat of AIDS. 35

The health sciences have inaugurated a culture that seeks to regiment life as a means to avoid “premature” mortality. This institutionalization of life and the constant calculation of risk conveys the implicit idea that death can be averted, delayed, and controlled. This hyper-awareness of the risks that threaten the healthy body fosters a fear of death that is ubiquitous (cancer is everywhere), yet death itself becomes less visible. In this manner, biopolitics seeks to do away with the ritualization and spectacle of dying in favour of the administration of life through the fear of death. If sovereign power historically exercised control over the body––so that the body was humiliated and tortured on the scaffold in the late eighteenth century for example—biopower in the modern age is incorporated into the body itself; it is no longer external to it. The effects of biopower thereby become somatic, policed internally by the subject herself and, increasingly, by communities and publics.11

To wit, the punitive capacities of biopower have been absorbed into the self and nefarious health risks lurk all around us, but death itself is regarded as avoidable for the responsible subject. This distorted relationship to mortality in part accounts for why discourses of “life” (seizing the moment, getting the most out of life, living a healthy lifestyle) have gained more cultural traction than discussions of death, loss, and melancholia.

We grasp for the fulfillment of desire instead of grappling with our fears, and the result is a cultural silencing that surrounds and enshrines death. Hence, the fear and repression of death

11 Recently taking up and expanding on Foucault’s The History of Sexuality (1976) Beatriz Preciado (2013) shows how since the 1950s, capitalism has come to manufacture desire and control affects. With an eye turned to the impact this has had on formulations of gender and sexual identity, Preciado contends that the biopolitical forces of today do not just govern subjects but actively invent them from the inside out. In our contemporary conjuncture, biopower is no longer discernible as a coercive law, but “is more versatile and welcoming,” managing subjectivities through “disciplinary architectures” like schools, hospitals, prisons, demographics, manuals, and discourses of public health (68). As a consequence of the internalization of disciplinary power through these various means, the fear of mortality has been co-opted to control and punish the modern subject. It is by way of this shift in external punitive power to internalized biopower that the fear of death becomes a tool for regulating how bodies desire and how they behave sexually and politically. 36 is enmeshed in the rise of biopower and capitalism. This fear is furthermore closely tied to conceptions of precariousness and the dead body itself.

With the rise of secularism during the Enlightenment, a distinct shift took place around conceptions of the dead body. Traditionally an object of veneration, in the Age of

Reason the corpse became an object of scientific study, leeched of its sanctity but filled with the promise of new knowledge (Fuss 45). By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, industrialism and medical research had successfully converted the body of the dead into a scientific specimen: a cadaver conceived of in parts and organs and ready for dissection. It is around this time, according to Philippe Ariès (1981), that cultural anxieties around death began to balloon and “crossed the threshold into the unspeakable, the inexpressible,” and with the waning of religious influence and the safety net wrought by belief, talk of death began to diminish (405). Moving into the late nineteenth century, we can see the cultural silence surrounding death exacerbated by the emergence and boom of an official funeral industry. At this time, the fledgling funeral industry further commodified the corpse and the cost of dying, managing death through its “bureaucratization—its rationalization, depersonalization, and objectification” behind the walls of institutions (Fuss

25). In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a powerful culture of hospitalization institutionalized death and rendered it even more opaque; the event of death has become muted, distant, firmly cast as a far-off phenomenon, and with the help of a relentlessly growing pharmaceutical industry—literally sedate.

With this increased institutionalization of death, it may come as little surprise that discussion of the work of mourning and the protracted labor of melancholia has similarly 37 been relegated to the shadows of mainstream culture. Joan Didion’s mourning memoir The

Year of Magical Thinking (2005) is something of an anomaly, for it is an account of the challenging task of trying to navigate the imperviousness of the health care system in the

United States and the rationalization of affects like melancholia. In December 2003 Didion suddenly lost her husband of thirty-nine years, the author John Gregory Dunne, to a heart attack while their daughter Quintana was struggling to survive in intensive care at a New

York City hospital. A year after John’s death, Didion compiled the short elliptical passages and reflections she had written over the course of those twelve months. In The Year of

Magical Thinking Didion narrativizes the startling departure she experienced from rationality as her mind processed this loss. John’s sudden absence occasioned for her a turn toward “magical thinking”—an experience of acutely affective responses to objects, people, and memory. In one such moment of magical thinking, Didion recounts looking at her dead husband’s shoes and deciding not to move them from beside the bed because she intuits that he will need them when he returns. Though cognizant of the impossibility of John’s return,

Didion indulges in her mind’s new magical register and holds out an irrational belief in her lost love object’s reappearance in the not-so-distant future.

To be sure, The Year of Magical Thinking is not without its faults. Didion’s overt and uncritical class privilege pervades the text. In her grief, she retreats to luxury hotels (“the

Beverly Wilshire seemed…the only safe place for me to be”) and drops casual references to lunches at the Ritz. And yet, despite Didion’s many tone-deaf moments within the text, she nonetheless gives voice to what is conventionally the silence of grief. Conspicuous consumption aside, I found solace in Didion’s articulation of loss. In a similar vein, though 38 the poet and memoirist Maggie Nelson criticizes Didion’s attempt in her follow-up memoir,

Blue Nights (2011), to disavow the privilege in which Quintana grew up, she also sees value in Didion’s words. (Blue Nights, Didion’s account of losing her daughter, is a tragic sequel to

The Year of Magical Thinking.) Of Blue Nights and Didion’s denial of Quintana’s privilege,

Nelson reflects: “these remarks were a pity, since her account of ‘what came later’—

Quintana’s death, on the heels of the death of Didion’s beloved husband—underscores

Didion’s more interesting, albeit disavowed subject, which is that economic privilege does not protect against all suffering” (97). Didion’s two mourning diaries are swathed in an aestheticizing economic privilege, but as Nelson points out, that privilege does not protect

Didion from her grief. In this sense, it becomes clear that Didion’s attempts to stave off suffering through luxury and class comfort inevitably fall short. What her writing reveals is that no one is impermeable to loss.

The strength of The Year of Magical Thinking lies in Didion’s articulation of the irrationality that accompanied her mourning work. For instance, throughout the narrative

Didion’s departure from rationality comes into stark contrast with the sterile and impassive hyper-rationality of the American health care system and its professional jargon. Her affective thinking clashes with its institutionalized language, and it is in the waiting room of a hospital where she confronts the starkest expression of how she ought to behave in the face of grief. In shock from John’s death and from a recent relapse of Quintana’s, Didion answers a social worker’s question with an expressionless and measured response. The social worker then off-handedly diagnoses and praises Didion as a “cool customer” in the wake of her loss

(15). Her composure in that moment is interpreted as grit, and is indicative of the resilience 39 that has come to be expected of neoliberalism’s subjects. Moreover, the designation of the bereaved as a “customer” is a significant moment of slippage in the social worker’s speech that reveals the economic interests of American health care. The moniker “cool customer” strikes Didion as particularly ironic since her thought process continues to disengage from any rational or “cool” calculation of John’s death.

Didion’s memoir is a document of her struggle to figure out how to react to the shock of her sudden loss: it is a quest to find a more capacious model for how to grieve in our contemporary moment. Didion finds herself grasping for the language and behaviors of grief and bereavement, and, always a journalist, researches what has been written on the work of mourning. She does not find much. Citing the works of Ariès and social anthropologist

Geoffrey Gorer, Didion describes a shift in the 1930s toward an increasingly widespread taboo against talking about death. Over time, this shift relegates grief to shameful corners of the cultural imaginary. In Death, Grief, and Mourning (1965) Gorer anticipates the scathing critiques of today’s critical theorists who lambaste neoliberalism’s relentless protection of its secular trinity of resilience, profit, and progress. He rightly descries the new duty he saw gaining traction in both the United States and England to enjoy oneself and to “do nothing which might diminish the enjoyment of others” (60). Moreover, he notes the growth of culturally sanctioned frustration with those who do not successfully hide their grief “so fully that no one would guess anything had happened,” but who indulge instead in the inconvenience of their sustained mourning (60).

There is a helplessness in grief that does not sit well with imperatives of happiness and health. Biopower capitalizes on the obligation of happiness and makes it seem as though 40 living a life that brims with pleasure and fulfillment is simply a matter of choice (as

Johnson’s symptomatic self-help book proclaims, just find new cheese!). The calculation of risk and avoidance of “premature” mortality is a kind of attempted mastery over death that does not make room for failure or sadness, nor does it account for the structural conditions based on class and race that enable some lives to avoid risk while others are immersed in it.

Grief’s Strange Temporality

In contemporary biopolitical regimes, desire is instrumentalized and the negative aspects of affective life are largely obscured or pathologized. However, in melancholy utopia, subjects have the space to resist the pervasive myth of happiness and defy the compulsion to master death. Consequently, melancholy utopia fosters new modes of enjoyment that are grounded in loss and vulnerability instead of in fantasies of wholeness and impermeability. In thinking through the political dimensions of melancholy utopia and its capacity for cultivating new circuits of satisfaction through loss, I find it useful to turn to

Derrida’s later writings, which acknowledge that grief is not a question of mourning or melancholia, but a continual exchange between mourning and melancholia. Significantly,

Derrida also articulates the satisfaction that comes from avowing the finitude that inscribes us as human.

Derrida describes the time of sorrow not as something static (as the time of melancholia is often understood) but as an extended mourning process that anticipates death from the beginning of life. This view of mourning and melancholia resists an understanding of grief as a teleological process with a sure end point. This view of mourning and 41 melancholia also resists the notion that grief must be a violent “killing off” of the lost object, as it was originally described by Freud, for Derrida talks about the process of grieving in terms of anticipation.12 In his last interview, he describes anticipatory or “originary” (2007:

26) mourning—mourning that anticipates the other’s death before it arrives—and his own experience of a “melancholic revolt” occasioned by the deaths of his friends and colleagues

(25).13 In Derridian terms, to experience a psychic “melancholic revolt” is to refuse to detach oneself from the lost love object; it is to affirm the ongoing and perpetual force of that original attachment. In this model, we mourn the other from the very start of life, not merely at its end; we anticipate the other’s death from the moment we encounter her, and it is this anticipatory grief that imbues love and friendship with some of its most ardent meaning. In

The Politics of Friendship (1994) we find a succinct account of grieving as “the very respiration of friendship,” a vital caring that comes from anticipating the future loss of the other (14). Derrida writes that this anticipatory mourning, “without which the act of friendship would not spring forth in its very energy,” invigorates and opens up the space of relationality—it is what makes loving possible (14).

For Derrida, the anguished labour of anticipated grieving “haunts and plunges the friend, before mourning, into mourning,” which is to say, this melancholic fidelity is taken up in advance of, and beyond, death (2005: 14). Derrida thus writes: “I feel myself—and in advance, before any contract—borne to love the dead other. I feel myself thus (borne to)

12 Specifically, in The Politics of Friendship (1994), The Gift of Death (1999), his posthumously published collected essays and eulogies entitled The Work of Mourning (2001), and in his final interview with Jean Birnbaum (2004) in the French daily newspaper Le Monde. 13 Derrida wrote essays, eulogies, and letters of condolence theorizing friendship and mourning after the deaths of Roland Barthes, Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean- François Lyotard, and other great thinkers of his generation. 42 love” (12). The work of mourning is at once external and intimate to death, anticipating its futurity at the same time that it haunts the present moment. Surviving the other—even before she reaches death—is therefore the essence, origin, and the possibility of friendship. Survival is “not simply that which remains,” writes Derrida, “but the most intense life possible” (2007: 52). The time of relationality is thus a temporal genre that is always-already uncertain, coiled in contingency, spun into existence by the other’s death and our survival of it.

In describing the relationship between time and loss in grief, Derrida names this movement back and forth between the past and future a “strange temporality”:

A memory is engaged in advance, from the moment of what is called life, in this

strange temporality opened by the anticipated citation of some funeral oration. I live in

the present speaking of myself in the mouths of my friends, I already hear them

speaking on the edge of my tomb. (2005: 5)

Here, the suggestion is, perhaps unsurprisingly, paradoxical. Memory is a mode of thought that recounts and reconstructs our experiences (or fantasies) of the past, but if “a memory is engaged in advance,” as Derrida claims it is from the beginning of life, is memory also a mode of thought that constitutes the future? This image of the friend standing “on the edge” of one’s tomb is an “anticipated citation” in so far as this graveside address exists in the future: it has not yet happened. By caring for the friend we bring this citation—this future

“funeral oration”—into existence, thus opening up a non-linear temporality and engaging a memory in advance of the event of death. Put another way, by loving the other I agree to stand at the edge of his tomb when he dies; when I consider how he will do the same for me, 43

I am remembering an act of fidelity that has yet to occur. Like melancholia, this “strange temporality” of grieving and fidelity does not move chronologically, as it similarly resists the notion that loss can have a telos or end point. Instead, fidelity is imbued with a potentiality that is always on a future horizon. Derrida recognizes that our connection with the other is meaningful not because it is a certainty, but rather because it is only a possibility. He imagines a world devoid of instability and asks, “What would a future be if the decision were able to be programmed, and if the risk [l’aléa], the uncertainty, the unstable certainty, the inassurance of the ‘perhaps’, were not suspended on it at the opening of what comes, flush with the event, within it and with an open heart?” (2005: 29). The future and the possibility of our relationships are perched on a threshold of the uncertain, and it is that very instability that makes space for our ethical choices, the risks we take for the possibility of connection.

At the heart of Derrida’s claim that mourning is an ongoing process of preparation and expectation is the belief that all work is the work of mourning. As a consequence of this interminable work of mourning—this perpetual work, this preparation for and anticipation of the end of life—love and friendship are infused with their meaning: “love or friendship would be nothing other than the passion, the endurance, and the patience of this work” (146).

If we are the sum total of the work and love with which we imbue our relations to others, if the work of mourning starts at the beginning of life and not at its end, then to mourn and to lose the self in that process is our perpetual state of being. Mourning is the most human of experiences; it insists on memory and on loss, and its expression is at once the most futile and urgent act. 44

Fidelity

The matter of fidelity is something that I want to map out in greater detail, since it is a crucial component of the ethical potential inherent to melancholy utopia. What is especially pertinent here is that the bond between melancholia and utopia is forged in their resistance to forfeit an ideal: it is in their unwavering fidelity to loss and hope, respectively, that they correspond. And it is by tapping into the vulnerability and lack that founds us as subjects—and the death drive that animates that lack—that we can enjoy and find satisfaction in the recesses of our loss. So we may begin by asking: What does fidelity to loss and hope mean? Fidelity is a form of affective dwelling, of steadfastness, not necessarily in or to the past, but inflected by that past, and, at the same time, directed toward a future moment that is always in a process of becoming. To this end, I understand the melancholic’s unwavering fidelity to her loss as an iteration and fulfillment of Lacan’s famous injunction to not cede on one’s desire. By this Lacan means, briefly put, that one should not compromise on one’s desire in exchange for social acceptance and recognition. For this kind of acquiescence can trap one in hegemonic relations that stifle the possibility of satisfaction (for

Lacan, these demands emanate from the Other, whose desires can engulf one’s own).

Alain Badiou—arguably the contemporary thinker most closely associated with the concept of fidelity—interprets this Lacanian injunction to mean “do not give up on that part of yourself that you do not know” (2002: 47). I will preface the following analysis by saying: in linking my analysis of melancholic fidelity with Badiou’s ethical paradigm for revolutionary politics and desire, I will be drawing on him in an unorthodox way with which he would likely disagree. This is not merely to be incendiary, but to demonstrate that the 45 melancholic’s fidelity to loss has much in common with Badiou’s formulation of the ethical subject’s fidelity to the “truth event”—and that these commonalities are worth throwing into relief to understand the way that steadfastness and idealism are pathologized in contemporary society as irrational or inconsequential. It is from this perspective that I want to suggest that Badiou perhaps has not fully considered the implications of his theory for modalities of being that are not overtly transformative or revolutionary, such as melancholia.

But first: the truth-event. The event for Badiou is an exceptional and epiphanic vision that flashes into consciousness and disappears just as quickly, but which radically transforms the individual who is captivated by it into the “subject of truth.” Put slightly differently, it is the event that brings the subject into being. Reaching beyond the ordinary, the event is an experience of the exceptional that enables a distance from personal interests. Badiou gives the example of Galileo discovering and announcing the principle of inertia prior to any modern science or theory of physics as an event, since Galileo pursued what he thought to be true beyond reason and ultimately shook the foundations of established scientific knowledge.

Along related lines, Badiou deems Marx to be a representative of the truth-event for political thought because he was able to name the void at the center of bourgeois society around which it is built and upon whose labour it depends: the proletariat. The effect of such sudden insights is transformative, for it can shatter many of our preconceived notions of morality and everyday life, and can appear to turn everything we thought we knew upon its head.

In this regard, the event opens up the “possibility of the impossible,” as Badiou puts it, and that which was once unfathomable flares up and drastically disrupts the routines and expectations of the status quo (39). Though the event itself can never be planned, 46 orchestrated, or mastered, fidelity to it means maintaining an allegiance to its radical disjointedness with the established order of everyday life and anticipating its future resurgence or apparition. More specifically, Badiou considers the problem of maintaining a fidelity to our ideals—of not giving up on that part of yourself that you do not know—in the face of political opposition, or worse, cultural indifference.

Fidelity to one’s ideals, then, is a commitment to standing apart from the status quo and resisting the lure of assimilation and the luxury of apathy. Galileo and Marx rejected the established order of the day and resisted the call of complacency to or assimilation with it; instead, they pursued modes of inquiry that that were deemed apocryphal, spurious, or simply impossible, and in so doing, irrevocably changed modern science and politics. Their fidelity to these philosophical and political events was maintained beyond reason and without regard for social recognition or acknowledgement. They remained steadfast to the possibility of scientific and communist revolutions respectively, and to the complete upheaval that each would eventually occasion.

In Badiou’s terms, the event provides the subject with a degree of critical distance from quotidian existence and provides a clarity of vision that recalls for me Freud’s subtly envious diagnosis of the melancholic whose “illness” renders “accessible” to him certain truths about the human condition. While it may feel nearly impossible to maintain a fidelity to an absence, however deep it may run, the melancholic breaches that impossibility; there is no return to a “normal” life that has not been effected and affected by the event of loss. In this regard, like Badiou’s truth-event, the melancholic’s fidelity to loss is closely imbricated with 47 the concept of utopia and Lacan’s ethical injunction, as it fosters a space of affective dwelling and a place of refuge from the demands to betray or cede on one’s desire.

I find it interesting that, despite the fidelity that grief occasions, Badiou does not consider loss a viable category of the event. He clearly states that there are only four possibilities: political, philosophical, artistic, or amorous. Loss, for Badiou, is far from the realm of the exceptional event that the subject of truth apprehends. However, I want to read

Badiou against himself to suggest that like his subject of truth who struggles to cope with the drastically altered cadences of a life turned upside down by the event, the melancholic grapples with the burden of her loss because her attachment to it is deemed pathological at every turn. I want to ask why love, for Badiou, is an ethical force but the loss of love is not?

Consider the following: if falling in love is as disorienting and transformational as

Badiou decrees it to be—if love causes the subject to reframe her perspective on the world and fundamentally changes how she comes into contact with that world—then how is it that losing that love, being torn from it irrevocably, does not constitute an event of equal or parallel consequence? I want to argue that the critical distance from everyday concerns that the melancholic attains due to her fidelity to the event of loss is a mode of opting out of hegemonic circumscriptions regarding how she ought to behave in the wake of loss. The melancholic’s fidelity to loss ignores the common notion that grief is an affliction that will pass with time, engendering a non-chronological relation to that loss.

Even more fundamentally, I would like to consider the possibility that melancholia is constitutive of subjectivity as such and that the event is consequently not something outside of us to be grasped in an esoteric ethical moment of truth, but imbedded in us as subjects, 48 springing forth from the loss (the Lacanian lack) that haunts us as social beings. I would like to propose that the loss that founds the subject is also a truth-event of sorts but that it may be difficult to apprehend as such because it can only be grasped retroactively: it does not arrive in a messianic flash of truth but quietly and gradually over time. Certainly, this creative interpretation of Badiou’s conception of fidelity is unconventional. However, the need to revise and rethink the political and ethical possibilities of loss in a biopolitical age that seeks to deny aspects of psychic life that are unproductive impels and even demands such interpretive infidelity.

I creatively usurp Badiou’s interpretation of fidelity in order to demonstrate how the melancholic’s commitment to loss is not only disorienting in relation to the social world, but also ethical. There will always be the urge to halt, stymie, or abruptly stop the work of mourning and move on—there will always be the temptation to cede on one’s desire—not the least because melancholia hurts. But the melancholy utopia is buoyed by the subject’s persistent and abiding fidelity to her loss––whether constitutive or more circumstantial––and her desire to remain steadfast thus animates that void with ethical perseverance. One might say that to inhabit the melancholy utopia is to occupy, if only briefly, that part of ourselves that we do not know.

Psychoanalysis and The Political

Mourning is often understood as a reparative process, while melancholia is seen as the failure to successfully complete the work of mourning; it is seen as a state of being stuck.

But as I have begun to argue, loss cannot be easily shaken off. The experience of 49 melancholia, I want to suggest, gives such unshakeable grief a dwelling place. Moreover, the melancholic, who takes up and perpetually performs the exhausting psychic labor of grieving, does so often to the detriment of her other social bonds. As I have mentioned, I believe that this antisocial tendency in melancholia should not be read as a rejection of the social tout court. Nevertheless, I admit that the extended mourning characteristic of melancholia can potentially fray or sever the subject’s surviving social bonds: the melancholic’s steadfast privileging of the lost object means that she spends all of her energies in trying to maintain her fidelity to this object. What is more, this extended labor is, in practical terms, always to no avail, since all the mourning in the world does not return what has been lost. So not only does the melancholic’s prolonged sorrow threaten what social relations she may still have, but it is also, in the crudest sense, all for naught. The exhausting but inexhaustible labor of melancholia is useless.

This allows me to formulate the relationship between melancholia and resistance in yet another way: it is the very uselessness of melancholia, the relentless perpetuity of the subject’s fidelity, that makes it, paradoxically, “productive.” I place “productive” in quotation marks because I want to signal that melancholia’s “productivity” cannot be cast in the economic terms of neoliberal capitalism: it is fiscally irresponsible, credit damning, and precarious in the sense that it prevents a swift return to the labor force. From this perspective, the melancholic’s prolonged affective labor of grieving seeks to undo the very logic of capitalism. She opts out of this logic by toiling without producing anything, by refusing to make her work useful. The melancholic’s decision to opt out of hegemonic 50 conscriptions of how one ought to grieve amounts to a political act––one that psychoanalysis can help to illuminate.

In making this argument, I counter the prevalent idea that psychoanalysis is a depoliticized mode of thinking, an introverted pastime within which only the rich can wallow. I will grant that this charge is not totally unfounded—Freud himself addressed the classist dimension of his therapy and noted that his attendance to the ills of the leisure class necessarily annexed psychoanalysis from any engagement (beyond the individual) with the social. He famously regretted that psychoanalysis was reserved for the higher classes, and also suggested that the lower classes might be better off with their fantasies, delusions, and compulsions than with a “cure” that would facilitate a more perceptive encounter with the harsh realities of their impoverished existence. Freud was skeptical that the laboring classes would want to part with their neuroses “because the hard life that awaits them if they recover offers them no attraction” (1919: 168). In his pessimism, he saw emotional and material impoverishment as too heavy a twinned cross to bear, reserving psychoanalysis for those who could afford the psychic upheaval of recovery.

In Cold Intimacies (2007), Eva Illouz argues that, via Freud, a therapeutic discourse emerged in America in the early twentieth century that successfully and firmly entrenched emotional life in an economic logic. Freud made the self an object worthy of study, revealing the ways in which the unconscious might be an untouched trove of meaning and knowledge.

Psychological ideas like dream analysis, slips of the tongue, and the Oedipus complex came into the cultural lexicon in the U.S. and emotional norms were elaborated and consolidated through this discourse of self-discovery. Beginning with Freud’s lectures in America in 1909 51 and 1915 at Clark University, the therapeutic discourse he inaugurated spans the twentieth century and serves to institutionalize the self and consolidate systems of power through a project of self-liberation. By Illouz’s account, Freud’s impact on American psychological, sociological, and popular culture must not be underestimated. For it marks a historical moment when the border between the public and private spheres became intractably entwined. As a result, emotions associated with intimate worlds took on the economic properties of exchange and currency in the public sphere—what Illouz refers to as

“emotional capitalism.”

Though the concept of emotional capitalism is a useful one when thinking historically about the rise of self-help literature and the institutionalization of psychic life,

Illouz misconstrues Freud’s cynical comments about recovery and its relation to class standing as proof that, in her words, “psychic misery can be capitalized on” (41).

Furthermore, Illouz’s two studies of Freud’s thought are curiously narrow in scope.14 Illouz draws only on his early lectures at Clark University and from them extrapolates that therapeutic discourse—and, therefore, psychoanalysis—is bereft of political insight or rigor

(2008: 19). Like many before her, Illouz focuses solely on Freud’s early theory of the sexual drive and ignores the central and political importance of his later discovery of the death drive in 1920.

In this context, Todd McGowan’s analysis of the death drive is pertinent. McGowan reads the centrality of the death drive to psychoanalysis as the latter’s political kernel. In this

14 Cf. Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (2007), and Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help (2008). 52 regard, McGowan offers an important corrective to Illouz and to the tendency of many scholars to primarily focus on Freud’s early work. McGowan takes on the challenge of giving political salience to the insights of psychoanalysis by engaging the later Freud of the death drive. It makes sense that Freud’s theory of the sexual drive would be more seductive to critical theorists and historians than his formulation of the death drive. The self- destruction associated with the death drive seems a less likely place to find a viable politics than sexuality, but McGowan’s text suggests—against these odds—that it is.15

McGowan argues that the death drive provides an “oasis of enjoyment” apart from

“the capitalist drive to render everything useful and banish whatever remains unproductive” (2013: 249). In other words, the death drive, for McGowan, breaks capitalism’s utilitarian logic, generating the kind of “useless” enjoyment that does not contribute to the subject’s future-oriented projects of self-actualization. I will return to the details of McGowan’s analysis shortly, but I want to say right away that it seems to me that melancholia accomplishes a similar break and therefore potentially offers a similar “useless” enjoyment. On the one hand, melancholia does not produce anything that can be co-opted in material terms, nor can it be usurped by the capitalist drive toward usefulness; counter to capitalist logic, melancholia stages grieving for grief’s sake. On the other hand, the melancholic’s futile yet ceaseless work of soliciting the return of what is absent arguably

15 McGowan reminds us that beginning with Aristotle, the basic aim of political activity has been a quest for the good; from a psychoanalytic perspective, however, “there is no good at all” (5). This realization is the main contribution that psychoanalysis makes to political thought. Psychoanalysis has “no political axe to grind,” as it were, and it has no illusions that the pursuit of the good is the aim of political life (4). That is because psychoanalysis understands the good as an ideal that is trying to fill a lack that can never be filled. In other words, the closer we get to an ideal of a good society, the closer we get to the void hidden within that illusory ideal. Psychoanalysis is able to discern that “the good is not just an unrealizable ideal but a deception incapable of orienting a coherent and sustainable politics” (6). Thus, psychoanalysis does not fall prey to ideology because it has no fantasies of the good or of the good life to lose. 53 offers a degree of enjoyment. This mode of enjoyment is not compelled to fill the lack left by the lost object. Perhaps even more fundamentally, it may not even be compelled to fill the lack left by the originary loss of the Thing. Or, to state the matter in yet another way, it bypasses the vision of the good life offered by normative society, finding satisfaction instead in repeatedly coming into contact with the primordial void of subjectivity.

This idea––that there is a satisfaction to be had from the encounter with the primordial void of subjectivity––needs more explanation. This is where McGowan’s theory of the death drive is helpful. McGowan believes that a psychoanalytic understanding of the death drive and the centrality of loss offers, in the wake of Marxism’s failure in the twentieth century, a viable path toward an emancipatory politics for the twenty-first century.

Importantly, the death drive, for McGowan, is not the same thing as “the drive to die”; rather, it signifies the death “that occurs within life” (35). More specifically, McGowan asserts that the death drive brings us face to face with the foundational act of loss that marks us as subjects, and further proposes that we need to embrace this act of loss, this death within life, instead of attempting to overcome or bypass it. For McGowan, subjectivity “emerges through a break, through a moment in which death is injected into life and thereby throws life off its course” (241). This “break” cleaves life and death, subject and social, together, and McGowan—an astute reader of Lacan—reminds us that the subject’s entrance into language and sociality is also an introduction to alienation and loss. The entrance into the symbolic order is painful precisely because it is predicated on the sacrifice of a seemingly coherent world (a world in which we were unequivocally at the center, or so we thought). 54

Even so, we sacrifice the comfort of our solipsistic world and emerge as subjects as a result of this cleaving and alienation. We become social beings through this primary loss.

The subject’s entrance into sociality happens in tandem with the loss of the Thing.

She “gives up” the Thing in order to gain entrance into the realm of the social. The sacrifice at the site of subjectivity holds allure because it promises a fulfillment and satisfaction that the self, alone, cannot: others can give us pleasure that we alone are incapable of, and, as a result, the subject “accedes to the call of sociality” (28). Yet, as we know, we never really

“had” the Thing to begin with. In this sense, the sacrificial act that inaugurates subjectivity is actually the sacrifice of nothing, of a wholeness that never existed in the first place. As

McGowan writes, the “site of primordial deprivation” that we all share is a site of loss, but it is the loss of nothing; we give up something we never possessed in the first place.

By acceding to the call of sociality, then, the subject reckons with the no-thingness of existence. According to McGowan, locating the subject’s origin in lack promises “to revolutionize our thinking about the struggle between life and death” because it insists on the affinity between life and death in the formation of subjectivity and of social life (240). This is not to suggest that this act of sacrificing the Thing does not have a powerful hold over us, but here I want to suggest that there is a mournful agency—a melancholic potential—that arises from the originary loss that is the price of the social bonds (and burdens) of relationality. Expanding on McGowan’s suggestion that our lack is a site of potentiality, I want to argue that although the sacrifice of nothing is tragic and painful, it is also the prerequisite for relations of care. We do not have to chase down death or wait for a post- foundational loss to occur before life and the other become important. The loss of our first 55 love object is what we all have in common and it is how we come into sociality. So despite the ostracization of melancholia as an emotional aberration, it is an affect that we all experience as speaking subjects upon entrance to the social world.

Enjoying Loss

The melancholic’s source of satisfaction does not come from a miraculous return of the lost object, but from the useless labor of trying to conjure that impossible return. There is enjoyment, as Freud’s grandson Ernst famously demonstrates in his game of fort/da, in loss and its restaging. In a recent essay, Diana Fuss (2013) gives a reading of the fort/da game

(translated as “gone!” and “here!”), first described by Freud in Beyond The Pleasure

Principle (1920). Fuss argues that in the modern period, psychoanalysis looked to how the child mourned as a way of understanding grief’s processes. Accordingly, she names Ernst

“the most accomplished mourner,” and here it is worth quoting Fuss at length:

Ernst teaches his grandfather, Sigmund Freud, the technique of mastering loss before it

has even happened. In Freud’s account of his grandson’s game of fort-da, little Ernst

learns to master his mother Sophie’s daily absences by starring in his own theater of

mourning, “himself staging the disappearance and return of the objects within his

reach.” The action at the heart of this performance centers on a game played with a

wooden reel and a piece of string—a kind of play within the play, and more

specifically a revenge drama. Throwing away the spool, Ernst “revenge[s] himself on

his mother for going away from him”; reeling the spoon back, he makes himself

“master of the situation.” By repeatedly rehearsing the moment of his mother’s 56

disappearance—making Sophie vanish as if she had never existed—little Ernst

succeeds in nothing less than making grief itself disappear. The game of fort-da is

fundamentally a story of premature mourning: a young boy invents a way to

compensate for a lost love object before this object is “gone” for good, thereby

offering the new science of psychoanalysis its first model for proactive and proleptic

mourning.

It is Fuss’s contention that Ernst succeeds in “making grief itself disappear” through the game of fort/da and thereby proactively compensates for the future disappearance (death) of his mother. I would like to propose that this account of loss mistakenly attempts to render

Ernst’s game a performance of mastery in which he anticipates and intercepts the trauma of losing his mother. Fuss’s interpretation of the fort/da game and Ernst’s unconscious motives falls in line with Freud’s similar attempt to explain this scene of play through the positive force of the pleasure principle.

The vignette of fort/da is one of Freud’s many examples in Beyond The Pleasure

Principle meant to demonstrate precisely that: the “beyond” of the pleasure principle. Freud notes in his observation of the game that it is the first half—the disappearance of the reel (the

“gone!”)—that the boy re-enacts most frequently (leaving out the pleasurable reappearance, the “here!”, of the latter half of the game). This presents a ruffle in the theory of the pleasure principle since Ernst repeats the object’s disappearance more often than its pleasurable re- appearance. Freud ends up illustrating a failed example of the pleasure principle. By watching Ernst’s game of fort/da, and by exploring other phenomena later on in the text that similarly thwart the pleasure principle, Freud suggests that pleasure is not the ultimate aim 57 driving us. For Ernst, as for all subjects, there is a draw toward enjoyment that lies beyond the pleasure principle. There is another aim, the death drive, that compels us and that can often override the life instincts of the pleasure principle.16

By reading the scene of fort/da with the death drive—rather than with the pleasure principle—in mind, it is possible to restate the problem in Fuss’s interpretation of the game as follows: she interprets this competition between life and death instincts as Ernst’s avoidance of trauma (pain). This is to say that she misreads the scene of fort/da as the subject’s mastery over death through proleptic mourning and the triumph of the pleasure principle. By reading the boy’s game as an attempt at mastery, Fuss fails to acknowledge that

Ernst’s satisfaction springs from his failure of mastery and his enjoyment of this repeated failure. His game does not obstruct or hinder his mother’s quotidian disappearances, but engages with them and with his simultaneous lack of control over and over again. Fuss’s account of fort/da appears to be symptomatic of the contemporary capitalist drive to master loss and to make mourning useful.

But mourning is not useful. That is not its function. In my reading, the fort/da game that Ernst plays does not showcase the placating impulses of the pleasure principle. Rather,

Ernst shows us through his triumphant “fort!” and through the repeatedly staged disappearance of his spool how satisfaction is born of the death drive. As counterintuitive as

16 Before turning to a discussion of the death drive, Freud first discusses (at length) the repetition compulsion. Although most critics see a clear distinction between these two, McGowan notes that Freud makes no clear demarcation between the drive and the compulsion, and moves back and forth between them. McGowan explains that “many interpreters of Freud distinguish between repetition compulsion and the death drive because Freud’s discussion of the latter through a biological metaphor seems to associate the death drive with actual death rather than repetition” (295). It is this back and forth structure of the text that reveals “the concept of the death drive as Freud’s way of theorizing repetition compulsion rather than as an altogether new concept” (295). Rather than associating the death drive with “actual death,” McGowan suggests we become attuned to the structure of Beyond The Pleasure Principle in order to understand the death drive via repetition and failure. 58 this may seem, Ernst’s enjoyment comes from disrupting his own desire for the mother’s return and derailing the smooth path of the pleasure principle. It may be that little Ernst enjoys the pull of the death drive and the reenactment of his loss because it unconsciously reminds him of the fundamental lack that founds him as a subject and marks his entrance into sociality. What Ernst performs is not mastery, but vulnerability. Counter to Fuss’s reading, Ernst’s play is not a form of proactive mourning, for he is not compensating for a yet-to-be-lost object; instead, he is recalling and deriving pleasure from a return to the originary loss of subjectivity. For as Ernst demonstrates in his playful encounter with the death drive, there is a satisfaction in attempting to return to this original scene of sacrifice— precisely because in this moment the subject gets as close to this inaugural void of relationality as he ever will. We originate as subjects through loss, not through its deflection, and as the game of fort/da demonstrates, the engagement with this loss (and its useless repetition) is its own form of enjoyment.

Failure

While melancholia is by no means a distinctly modern affect—medieval physiologists already described it in the late fourteenth century as the excess of black bile in the body—it holds particular political salience in our contemporary age of biopolitical capitalism. By dwelling in his sorrow and reckoning with the death that shapes and colors life, the melancholic resists the repression of death that contemporary neoliberal society attempts to enact, thereby opting out of the hegemonic restrictions continually placed on psychic life. It is not often that we are encouraged to see what is hopeful or even attractive in 59 weakness, let alone pressed to consider how loss and melancholia may occasion new forms of satisfaction beyond the realm of happiness.

Remember that melancholia is commonly understood (even by Freud himself) as the failure to complete the work of mourning: it is viewed as an inability to get on with and to get over. I want to focus on this failure––on this inability to forget and move on––because it brings to bear the value of loss and impotence. What failure brings into relief are the fault lines in narratives of mastery—the cracks in biopolitical thinking and its conceptions of loss and grief as things to be avoided (and ultimately mastered) through calculated risk. Failing contests the idea that if we simply knew more (about saturated fats, about antioxidants, about

AIDS) we could somehow master, bypass, or skirt vulnerability. Here, it is important to emphasize that mastery is not invariably a bad thing, and failure is not invariably a good thing. It does not quite work like that. There may be myriad ways in which feelings of autonomy and success and agency have nothing to do with mastery. (For example, not all healthy lifestyle choices are the result of the subject’s denial of mortality: long-distance running can ease feelings of anxiety, going to yoga can be calming, eating well can taste and feel good.) And yet, when it comes to death and loss there is a hubris in notions of mastery that misconstrue finitude as something that can be effectively managed with enough research and a positive outlook.

My attempt to tease out the ethical and political potential of the failure to get over our losses shares important conceptual avenues with recent efforts within queer theory to think through the complexities of failure. Judith Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure

(2011) perhaps offers the most obvious example of queer theory’s fascination with failure, 60 for Halberstam declares––in terms that resonate with mine––that failing is “a refusal of mastery” (11).17 Halberstam’s text is an archive of untold histories that uses examples from popular culture as a way of telling otherwise: of finding alternative modes of talking about family, memory, love, and desire that break with hegemonic narratives of success, reproductivity, and positivity. As the title The Queer Art of Failure suggests, the connection between queerness and failure is one that Halberstam privileges, and one that I want to situate in a larger conversation about ethics and negativity. Halberstam draws attention to the ways in which social and symbolic webs of signification have long since knit queerness and failure together, showing how their coupling can be reclaimed by queer subjects. In tune with the critical voices of Lee Edelman, Heather Love, and others, she argues that to “simply repudiate the connections between queerness and negativity is to commit to an unbearably positivist and progressive understanding of the queer” (98).

Much of contemporary queer theory has been vocal in theorizing the important link between queerness and negativity, positing that loss, failure, and queerness are central to resisting pervasive discourses of American exceptionalism and neoliberalism. Donald Pease defines U.S. exceptionalism as “an academic discourse, a political doctrine, and a regulatory ideal assigned responsibility for defining, supporting, and developing U.S. national identity”; in short, it is a national ethos characterized by a belief in the United States’ uniqueness and global superiority. The works of Halberstam, José Muñoz, Beatriz Preciado, Sianne Ngai,

Lisa Duggan, Michael Warner, Elizabeth Freeman, and others urge us to resist imperialist

17 Halberstam has switched back and forth throughout her career between “Judith” and “Jack,” feminine and masculine pronouns. Since The Queer Art of Failure was published under the name Judith Halberstam, I will be using the feminine pronoun to avoid confusion. 61 thinking such as this, to ignore the call of neoliberal assimilation, and to instead embrace the political potential of queerness and negative affects. In so doing, they imagine, to borrow a phrase from Muñoz, alternatives to the “here and now” of our hegemonic present and envision ways of opting out of it (1).18

The aim of Halberstam’s archive is to dismantle “the logics of success and failure with which we currently live” in order to understand the value of failure and its consequent negative affects (such as disappointment, longing, melancholia, and disillusionment) (2).

Unsurprisingly, the resistance that many subjects—queer or not—feel in relation to failure is the result of an overemphasis on and celebration of mastery, knowledge, and positive thinking that is native to American exceptionalism, which Halberstam calls the “toxic positivity of contemporary life” (3). It is this part of Halberstam’s argument—its ability to elucidate the counterhegemonic potential of failure—that I find compelling and that I will be drawing on in what follows. However, before proceeding it is important to acknowledge that her study is not without imperfections. A critique of The Queer Art of Failure is that it is written from the privileged perspective of someone who can (based on geographical location, class status, and race) afford to fail. Although Halberstam’s focus on the dismantling of positivist logics is an important contribution to a critique of neoliberalism, I would argue that the radical pitch of The Queer Art of Failure and outright cheerleading of failure lessens the force of her argument. In some ways, Halberstam relies too much on our inheritance of Foucault’s theory of reverse discourse. Though there are thoughtful and

18 Barbara Ehrenreich perhaps offers the most pointed critique of the cloyingly positive outlook of dominant discourse in Bright-Sided (2009), diagnosing blind optimism as an affliction born of “a desire to believe that success happens to good people and failure is just a consequence of a bad attitude rather than structural conditions” (13). This diagnosis resonates with the potential that I see in melancholia. That is to say, extended grieving is itself misunderstood as “a bad attitude” and not as an unwavering fidelity to an ideal. 62 productive case studies of “history’s losers” in its pages, Halberstam’s polemical text feels at times as though it is simply inverting failure and decreeing it a new form of success— reversing the dominant discourse, so to speak.

Even so, The Queer Art of Failure is still useful in thinking through the affective toll that narratives of exceptionalism take on subjects. Here it is worth signaling a dominant and popular trope in American culture that stands in firm contrast to the concept of finding satisfaction in failure and loss I have been discussing: self-reliance. The trope of self- reliance is a structuring principle in the American mainstream and can be traced from Ralph

Waldo Emerson’s (1841) seminal essay to contemporary films and television shows that champion essentialist fantasies of upward mobility and repudiate loss (think of the popularity of based-on-a-true-story films like The Pursuit of Happyness [2006] with Will

Smith, which reduces the struggle of homelessness to a matter of willpower, or the comedy

Weekend At Bernie’s [1989], where, despite being dead, Bernie has a great party-filled weekend). In Emerson’s text, relation and success are articulated as matters of choice, and belonging becomes a matter of autonomous “spiritual affinity” with certain others (165).

“Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company,” writes Emerson, “do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor?” (165). The shirking of ethical responsibility that underpins the axioms of self-reliance, upward mobility, and genius in Emerson’s text is paradigmatic of a persistent myth in contemporary America of sovereignty and choice. Denying the structures of power that inscribe and reinscribe privilege through white male heteronormativity, 63 neoliberal society insidiously perpetuates the language of opportunity, immortality, and positivity that has come to define understandings of freedom and enjoyment.

The trope of self-reliance is another iteration of positive thinking that distorts the realities of economic and ontological precarity. Many considerations of the self and its relation to the external world, like that of Emerson’s, fail to acknowledge the fact that bodies and lives are precarious; they fail to acknowledge that the “me” does not exist in isolation and is exposed and vulnerable to the world in which it is situated.19 Success is often mistakenly understood as only the result of hard work (with little or no regard for other determining factors like class privilege), and death is not a matter of ethics, but of circumstance. It seems fitting that Halberstam’s study of failure features a picture of loss on its cover, for her analysis displaces the centrality of such Emersonian narratives by cataloguing various portraits and film stills of losers, odd-ball cartoons, and gender-bending subjects. The cover image of Halberstam’s book is California artist Judie Bamber’s I’ll Give

You Something to Cry About (Dead Baby Finch) (1990)—a painting of a shrivelled and dead

Figure 3: Bamber, Judie. I’ll Give You Something to Cry About (Dead Baby Finch).1990. Oil on canvas on board. Los Angeles.

19 For an in-depth discussion of ontological precarity, see Judith Butler’s Precarious Life (2006). 64 baby bird (see figure 3). The small creature is captured on its back in photo-realist detail, its minuscule beak pointing defeatedly and diagonally upward and off-center.

Here, the correspondence between failure and death is a felt one. Halberstam elucidates on this link in her analysis of Bamber’s avian subject: “the deployment of scale … makes relevance relational and contingent but also turns the still life into something queer, into a limit, a repudiation of duration, longevity, versatility” (118). The connection of the contingency of meaning and the “repudiation of duration” in Bamber’s portrait is a productive one, for it uncovers the cultural tendency to disavow sorrow and the end of life.

The title itself, I’ll Give You Something to Cry About (Dead Baby Finch), is almost a challenge to the viewer to mourn the painting’s tiny animal subject. The title comes from the old saying, often spoken by an angry parent to his child, that “if you don’t stop crying, I will give you something to cry about.” The title evokes the refusal of authority figures to allow for negative feelings, and in this way, signals the common pathologization of affects like melancholia. The painting thus resists sentimentality with its stony, threatening title, but at the same time induces feelings of grief by choosing to depict the death of such a helpless and vulnerable creature.

As Halberstam notes, the baby finch—in its small but central scale and as an unorthodox object of study—is also crucial to the political salience of Bamber’s work.

Halberstam correlates the portrait’s resistance to sentimentality (manifest in the title) with an avowal of the finitude of life. Halberstam continues: “the juxtaposition of the words dead and baby [in the title] unites ends with beginnings and reminds us that sometimes an end is not a new beginning: an end is an end is an end” (118). The dead baby finch stands in 65 synecdochically for the finitude and negative feeling that positive thinking forcefully represses and distorts with its sentimental attitude toward birth and life. Consider, for example, the prolific tendency in North America to focus on new beginnings and the start of life rather than its end, and the conversation and fanfare that surround birth, but the silence and static rituals that tend to cloak death.

Emma Kisiel’s photographic series At Rest (2011) offers another visual riposte to

American exceptionalism and the cultural fear of confronting death. In her portraits of roadkill on American highways, Kisiel brings into focus the detritus of American progress and expansion by photographing animals that were struck as they attempted to cross the road. Normally left to decompose or to be disposed of by highway maintenance crews,

Kisiel built memorials around the lifeless animals at the location where their small bodies were found. In “Squirrel 2” the rodent lies on its side with arms stiffened straight out in front of itself, a small puddle of dried blood on the pavement where its nose rests (see figure 4).

Figure 4: Kisiel, Emma. Squirrel 2. 2011. At Rest Series, Portland. emmakisiel.com. Photograph. 66

The top half of its crescent-shaped body lies on the painted white line that marks the edge of the road. The white line that the squirrel has crossed over onto invokes the finitude that marks the limit of life—it is a literal finish line. On the asphalt surrounding the squirrel

Kisiel has formed a circle made from grass, rocks, and soil to enclose the animal from the vast stretch of highway around it.

The circle constructed around the dead squirrel out of objects and materials from nature are in contrast to the hard, unnatural pavement. This circular memorial mimics the shape of the corpse, whose tail is curled upward toward its head. The effect is an encasing of the animal back into the natural world, into what is now a completed circle of life. The amber tones of the rocks, fur, and blood keep the eye moving in a circular motion from the inner circle of the corpse to the ritualized outer circle built by the artist. This diminutive memorial compels the viewer to pause over the body at rest and to confront the animal’s common connotative association with garbage or “roadkill.” The photograph and Kisiel’s constructed circle makes a ritual out of what would otherwise be dismissed as trash. The artist invites the viewer to bear witness to a small moment of death, perhaps so that he may become more attuned to the finitude and vulnerability that inscribes all life. This roadside photograph also represents a relatively rare moment in which animal death is individualized and recognized.

Like Bamber’s baby finch, Kisiel’s “Squirrel 2” is a memento mori—a reminder of one’s own death—but it is also a moment of counterpoise to the pervasive myths of progress and resilience that herald our contemporary era. Resilience is a characteristic not unlike self- reliance. Resilience is the ability to rebound or quickly recover from insult, injury, shock, or 67 illness—it is to be “buoyant, irrepressible; adaptable, robust, hardy” in the face of disaster and loss (OED). There has been a growing discussion concerning the “resilient subjectivities” that liberalism seeks to produce and consolidate: subjectivities that can withstand and adapt to the grind of modernity’s vapid positivity, exponentially rising debt loads, and raging wealth disparities.20 To that end, I view At Rest as a series of spectral portraits that demonstrates the failure of resilience; they are photographs of nonhuman animals who have collided with the oppressive force of their environments and not survived.

In its diminutive size and visceral vulernability, Kiesel’s “Squirrel 2” speaks to broader discourses of finitude and melancholia. Finally, the animal at rest asks of its audience: what happens with the discarded remains of American exceptionalism?

The Queer Negative

And yet, not all queer hope is lost. The counterhegemonic potential of melancholia— its tendency to resist the repression of the supposedly “bad” aspects of emotional life— comes into clearer focus when we understand it as an affective utopia. The introduction to

Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Here and Now of Queer Futurity (2009) begins with Oscar

Wilde’s pithy appraisal that a “map of the world that does not include utopia is not worth

20 This is not to suggest that resilience is necessarily a bad quality to have; for many subjects resilience is a necessary trait, a mode of survival and a way of making life liveable. However, in our neoliberal age, avoiding the possibility of catastrophe or confronting trauma is no longer the aim, argue Brad Evans and Julian Reid in Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously (2014). Counter to the notion that catastrophe is a rare and traumatic event, Evans and Reid suggest that today, catastrophic events are misunderstood as inevitable occurrences that are problematically framed as opportunities for personal growth. In this light, we can see resilience as a neoliberal trait that relegates the subject to survival mode and denies the value of loss. Resilience has become a didactic mode that discourages people from questioning why their communities are in harm’s way, or why a crushing debt load is now the norm for most Americans, or why the majority of the American carceral system is populated by young black men, or why reproductive rights are largely legislated by men. Instead, the neoliberal subject is tasked with viewing these situations as moral lessons in personal responsibility. 68 glancing at” (1). There is a hopefulness both in Wilde’s original words and in Muñoz’s citation of them: a belief that utopia is something worth imagining and worth plotting.

According to Muñoz, “there has always been something queer about utopia” (170), and there is something utopian about queerness—they are idealities and modes of desiring that strive for more, that “feel beyond the quagmire of the present” (1). For Muñoz, “the here and now is a prison house,” and the present continues to be mired in hegemonic systems of power that curtail the imaginative potential of subjectivity and of political collectivity (1). It is queerness that allows us to see and feel beyond these circumscriptions and to create alternative ways of being in the world, to “dream and enact new and better pleasures,” and ultimately, to draw new maps for ourselves (1). Aware of the potential critiques that his utopian reading and dreaming will occasion, Muñoz writes that “shouting down utopia is an easy move. It is perhaps even easier than smearing psychoanalytic or deconstructive reading practices with the charge of nihilism” (10). Nonetheless, above the din of current cynicism,

Muñoz insists that queerness is about hope and futurity.

Muñoz argues that “queerness is not yet here” and that it is the future that is the domain of queerness (1). Queerness is a potentiality always on the horizon. Therefore, I want to suggest that queerness and utopia share an anticipatory structure that departs from the

“straight time” of teleology and empiricist history.21 At the same time, Muñoz’s conception of the temporality of queerness and utopia is not hostile to the past; on the contrary, it mines the past for queer performances, affects, and archival remains that are queer aesthetic

21 Muñoz’s notion of queer time is indebted to Halberstam, whose In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (2005) alerts the reader to straight temporality and how “straight space” is continually constructed and imposed. 69 blueprints for a different relation to the future. Muñoz theorizes an experience of temporality that is both backward looking and forward turning as the time of utopia. He contends that the work of reaching a utopia, or of achieving a utopian ideal, is never done. This is to say that utopia is never full realized, but rather is in a state of constant potentiality.22 Muñoz is concerned not with the present moment, but with engaging (both intellectually and affectively) the “then and there” of forgotten or overlooked pasts (1).

Like Halberstam, Love, Berlant, and Eng, Muñoz resists conventional understandings of time that insist upon often stagnant and violent historicisms. Rather, Muñoz articulates new approaches to temporality that are anticipatory and yet to come, but that also dwell and excavate from unacknowledged archives and overlooked pasts. Disappointment, Muñoz reminds us, is a large part of utopian longing, and failure must become a viable option if new and better maps are to be drawn. The non-linear temporality of utopia that Muñoz describes, the continual process of becoming that does not sacrifice the past or the loss that marks it, is also the time of grief and fidelity. For as Derrida’s elucidation of mourning and melancholia makes clear, melancholia is not at war with the future. Melancholia is only antithetical to narrow understandings of futurity that see loss as something to be overcome or done away with as swiftly as possible. Melancholia does not void or annul the future, but rather extends itself indefinitely and perpetually upon its horizon.

With this horizon in mind, I want to take this conception of temporality a step further to suggest that melancholia and utopianism are ateleological modes that resist and defy

22 Theorizing utopia through the lens of Ernst Bloch’s three volume philosophical treatise The Principle of Hope, Muñoz distinguishes, like Bloch, between abstract and concrete utopias, emphasizing the need to anticipate and reimagine the future with a critical and politically transformative imagination. 70 teleological relations to hope and loss. An ateleological mode disrupts and unhinges chronological time, resists “static historicisms,” denies capitalism’s unrelenting march of progress, and above all, occasions an opportunity to think critically about our relationship to loss and time (17). We attempt to structure and hierarchize time in order to imagine that the experience of loss will eventually come to an end. To cast this in slightly different terms, there is a prevalent compulsion to order time as a way of attempting to defer or even circumvent the pain that absence and isolation incites. Remember Freud’s insistence, for example, that the work of mourning is completed once one has successfully killed off the lost love object and found a new one. But as Barthes proposes in Camera Lucida (1980)— written upon the death of his mother—loss has absolute duration and cannot be effaced by time (a suggestion that has no place in Freud’s original temporal paradigm of mourning). “It is said that mourning,” writes Barthes, “by its gradual labor, slowly erases pain; I could not, I cannot believe this; because for me, Time eliminates the emotion of loss (I do not weep), that is all” (75). For Barthes, there is a motionless quality to mourning that resists the imposition of a temporal teleology—such an imposition is an indecent attempt to lessen the magnitude of, or disavow, the other’s death.

It is possible to withdraw from linear relations to time by dwelling in loss and potentiality and thus disengage from a hierarchical insistence on (and calculation of) experiences of temporality. It is via the ateleological nature of melancholia and utopia that one can opt out of the rational arithmetic imposed on affective life. In disrupting teleological attachments to time, the ateleological mode provides the space to think “beyond the moment” (17), as Muñoz would have it, and to insist on the “concrete possibilit[ies] for 71 another world” (1). Utopia has no telos, for utopia is the nowhere, the no place that is the product of our desire (for a better world than the one we live in) coupled with our anxiety

(that the world we live in is as good as it gets). Though utopia is a space of nothingness, deterritorialized, evanescent, and forever unattainable, it is not a nihilistic or solipsistic concept: utopias are perched out of straight time.

Following Derrida (1994) (who follows Shakespeare’s melancholic Hamlet), “the time is out of joint” (1). The temporality of utopianism is awry, askew, errant; it exists otherwise and without relation to chronology. The non-teleological character of utopia means that its emancipatory promise and potential are not mired in historicism nor beholden to hegemonic blueprints for the future. Utopia’s atemporality makes possible a space imbued with possibility and brimming with potentiality—always on an unfurling future moment.

Utopias are in relation and analogous to the future insofar as they are contingent and anticipatory, committed to ideals that mobilize affects and transform current sociopolitical conditions in their very impossibility. Utopian dreaming awakens us to the possibility of changing the conditions of our dissatisfaction. Through this interpretive dreaming, we can strive for a better model of citizenship, belonging, equality, and pleasure, if only (for the moment) in small increments. By reworking, plotting, imagining, and hoping for new and better worlds, we become less inured to the demands and abuses of contemporary life under regimes of capital and the disparities in wealth and rights to citizenship that it produces.

The melancholic knows that what she has lost is never to return, but by restaging its return through dream, thought, and fantasy, is able to engage anew with what is perpetually absent. Likewise, she who believes in utopia knows that her ideal society will never 72 actualize, but by insisting on its necessity and charting its tenets and principles, engages with the nothingness of utopia and reckons with the lack that constitutes us as subjects. Utopian thinking requires a leap of faith that surely it would be easier and more comfortable not to take, and melancholia demands a fidelity that is without a doubt exhausting. Apathy and complacency are easy enough, but mustering hope and sustaining relations of care requires us to avow the imminence of loss. The avowal of loss brings about its own form of enjoyment—exhorting us to imagine beyond the present moment.

The Anti-Relational Turn

It will be clear to many that Muñoz’s project is a direct intervention into, and refusal of, the discourse of the “antirelational” or “antisocial” turn in queer theory, which dismisses political idealism and notions of hope and utopia, collectivity, or belonging. The “so-called antirelational thesis” and theories of queer negativity find their origin in Leo Bersani’s

Homos (1995) and have been significantly expanded on by Lee Edelman in his now seminal

No Future (2004) (Muñoz 11).23 Positing a model of queer negativity, Edelman argues that the figure of the homosexual is closely associated in the cultural imaginary with the antisocial and the death drive. The premise of this antirelational turn, then, is that the queer subject has always been associated with death and negativity and seen as a nonproductive and perverse scourge on the future. According to Edelman, instead of shirking this association the queer subject should embrace the pull of the death drive and forego the futurity that society so reveres.

23 See also Tim Dean (2000; 2009) and Christopher Lane (2001). 73

Edelman proposes that rather than pushing back against the affiliation of queerness and negativity by seeking heteronormative belonging through adoption, military service, marriage, and so forth, the queer subject should relinquish all claims to the social and embrace his inner destructiveness. This withdrawal from the social and abandonment of hope and futurity situate the queer subject in an ethical register close to Lacan’s “real,” pulsating with jouissance. That is to say, the queer subject would cross the threshold of the pleasure principle, he would relinquish all claims to language and the social, and he would exit the symbolic order through an embrace of the death drive. The ethical work of the queer subject consists of a nullification of the future and of the promise of “reproductive futurism” that monogamy, childrearing, and other forms of heteronormalization ensure (2). Edelman writes that

far from partaking of this narrative movement toward a viable political future, far from

perpetuating the fantasy of meaning’s eventual realization, the queer comes to figure

the bar to every realization of futurity, the resistance, internal to the social, to every

social structure or form. (4)

In short, the proverbial buck of the future stops with the queer. To be sure, No Future represents an important intervention into popular debates around gay assimilation and increasing right-wing impulses within the mainstream LGBTQ movement to normalize queer culture by aligning gay communities with family values and the sacrosanct importance of the child.24 To think ethics beyond the realm of kinship and reproductive expectations is to refuse assimilation to a future circumscribed by those same exclusionary limits; it is to insist

24 See Bruce Bawer’s A Place At The Table: The Gay Individual in American Society (1993). 74 that queer desire (disavowed by culture as narcissistic and future-negating) can offer an important mode of opting out.

In this respect, and from his post-Lacanian standpoint, Edelman importantly brings into relief the ethical potential inherent to the death drive—a move I am obviously sympathetic to. His understanding of the death drive as the means of opting out of capitalism’s hegemonic regimes paved the way for much of queer theory after No Future to consider and expand upon the ethics of negativity and antisociality. By diagnosing the cultural phenomenon of the revilement of queerness and the ways in which gay life is consistently maligned as a stand-in for death itself, Edelman espouses an unprecedented, uncompromising, and radical ethics of queer theory. Edelman names the death drive an

“inarticulable surplus that dismantles the subject from within,” polemically insisting that the drive names what the social sphere understands as the queer: total negativity, opposed to all forms of sociality (9). Briefly put, the death drive has the ability to destabilize the subject and to disabuse her of fantasies of mastery, revealing the lack that forms her. But that is not where Edelman sees the drive’s ethical potential. Instead of avowing the loss that founds us as social subjects, Edelman’s answer to society’s disavowal of queerness is a turning away from the social.

Like Edelman, I reject teleological understandings of time, desire, and yes, the sentimentality that is so often associated with futurity. However, his suggestion that the queer subject access the realm of ethics through a repudiation of the social leaves little room for a viable, livable, identity. Even his ally Bersani wonders in his otherwise glowing review of No Future what to do with Edelman’s captivating rhetoric; Bersani writes that the text “is 75 so powerful that we could perhaps reproach [Edelman] only for not spelling out the mode in which we might survive our necessary assent to his argument” (Bersani; emphasis added).

How does one “assent” to Edelman’s argument—which would mean a complete embrace of the death drive and a plunge into the Lacanian real—and still live? What is left after

Edelman?

What Muñoz asks forcefully of Edelman is, which queer bodies can afford to sever all ties and dependencies with the social world?25 As opposed to the “shattering orgasmic ruptures” (Muñoz 14) of jouissance described in No Future, Muñoz aligns his queer project with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “reparative hermeneutics”—a making amends with the violent histories and cultural repression of queerness toward a new and ameliorable futurity

(12). Having hope for a socially viable identity is not the same thing as conforming to the strictures of the heteronormative, and imagining a better future is not akin to ring-wing assimilation. It may well be that queerness and melancholia will always be aligned in the cultural mainstream with negativity. And it is vital to understand and affirm this link.

However, that does not mean that either queerness or melancholia must be understood as essential negations of sociality.

I am grateful to thinkers like Halberstam and Edelman who affirm the link between queerness and negativity and articulate the need to opt out of patriarchal systems that inscribe sexual difference and productivity at the center of the social pact. Likewise, the

25 Muñoz highlights Edelman’s paranoid footnote number 19 in Chapter One of No Future where he attempts (unsuccessfully) to account for the classist dimension of his argument. Muñoz argues that Edelman’s defensive (but also flippant) attempt to set himself unequivocally against “identity politics” and the critiques of future critics simply “does not do the job” (95). Moreover, Muñoz points out that the future is not held in trust for all children. Many queer youths of color do not fit the mold of society’s hope for reproductive futurity. Muñoz argues that “”it is important not to hand over futurity to normative white reproductive futurity,” but to call on a political utopian imagination to see a different and new future for queer subjectivities of all ages and races (95). 76 model of the melancholy utopia that I put forth does not follow a tidy teleology of emotional process that would adhere to the efficiencies and exigencies of late-capitalism and narratives of progress—it is instead resistant to these very pressures. However, even though I am indebted to progressive thinkers like Edelman for their contributions to queer theory and ethics, and even though antirelational approaches like No Future are certainly important interventions, I believe that they ultimately bankrupt both subjectivity and the death drive of their political and ethical potential. Polemics like Edelman’s, as rhetorically seductive and energizing as they might be, are “romances of the negative” that do not get us any closer to a realizable ethics of the death drive (Muñoz 11). In order to ensure that my own work on melancholic fidelity—which is aligned in many ways with a politics of opting out—is sutured to lived experience and sociality, I want to distance myself from the antirelational turn in contemporary critical and queer theory that has taken opting out to a literal extreme.

To this end, I find myself echoing Muñoz’s sentiments that we must return to the social sphere so as to reshape and reconstitute the contingent boundaries of belonging that it inscribes. Muñoz writes, “antiutopianism in queer studies, which is more often than not intertwined with antirelationality, has led many scholars to an impasse wherein they cannot see futurity for the life of them” (12). Utopianism is not antithetical to counterhegemonic discourse and critical ripostes to neoliberalism’s rising tides, and “hope is spawned of a critical investment in utopia, which is nothing like naïve but, instead, profoundly resistant to the stultifying temporal logic of a broken-down present” (12).

In critical tune with Muñoz, Eng (2010) offers a less polemical approach to the politics of opting out than Edelman. In response to the way many queer, racialized, and 77 pathologized subjects are dispossessed by our contemporary conjuncture, Eng suggests that we turn toward our affects, particularly melancholia, as a way of opting out. His text gives an astute analysis of contemporary exclusionary models of belonging and critiques the way in which the term “queer” has been evacuated of its political salience and force. It may seem counterintuitive to discuss belonging and kinship at the same time that we have been talking about the antisociality of melancholia. However, as Muñoz’s and Eng’s studies demonstrate, though an affect like melancholia brings to light painful histories of loss and failure, turning toward it is not a negation of relationality altogether. Though melancholia is radically negative—isolating and resistant in important ways—it also opens us up to the capaciousness of our psychic lives. Opting out does not have to mean a complete repudiation of the social, but it does require a rethinking of it and the boundaries that inscribe its limits.

Eng contends that the dominant language of kinship in contemporary American culture remains anchored in the Oedipus Complex, an ideal embodied by the white middle- class nuclear family, not only for heterosexual couples, but increasingly for homosexual couples and individuals as well. This foundational myth of psychic development hinges on a violent narrative of sexual difference and heterosexuality that denies the multitudinous character of desire—be it queer, feminine, or transsexual. As a result of this exclusionary model of intimate relation, the contemporary queer subject has unconsciously remolded the shape his desire takes, opting into patriarchal traditions in order to conform to the structure of Oedipalization. In turn, the state’s legitimization of certain forms of gay and lesbian citizenship (such as same-sex marriage and military service) has produced a “queer liberalism” that paradoxically fortifies normative politics of family and kinship. 78

We can thus think of the subject of queer liberalism as one who opts into, rather than out of, normative politics. Hence, queer liberalism is a problematic consolidation of pragmatism and “the economic interests of neoliberalism and whiteness” that have rendered the term “queer” critically impotent—a word that is now synonymous with “fitting in,” instead of its prior associations to trenchant social critique (xi). Eng warns that the increasing economic disparities that mark the contemporary moment are left willfully unacknowledged and are enshrined by “a pervasive language of individualism, personal merit, responsibility, and choice,” which denies the unlevel “playing field of the neoliberal market” (5). The pervasive myths of meritocracy and integration laud the queer subject who can successfully make a spot for himself at the table, as it were, and perpetuate the false assumption that all subjects of neoliberalism are on equal socio-economic footing with equal access to wealth, social stability, protection, and visibility.

In contrast to neoliberalism’s cutthroat moral attitude, the feelings of kinship espoused by Eng are “the collective, communal, and consensual affiliations as well as the psychic, affective, and visceral bonds” that entwine us in relationality, though they can often be vexed in relation to a painful or melancholic history (2). Eng demonstrates the reparative potential of turning away from the violence of historicist accounts of the past to privilege what he calls emotional analogies and memory’s affective correspondences: he urges us to turn toward the site of our melancholia. The definition of analogy is a correspondence with things, not to them, and it remains within our power to affirm those correspondences and acknowledge that we as humans are bound by the same limits. For Eng, these analogical correspondences “keep the past affectively alive in the present, providing a site for the 79 reconstitution of melancholia’s social residues,” and reconfigure affect as a tool for “political disenchantment” and social reform in the future (186). Eng suggests that “in this way, affect becomes the site of history as a doing in futurity” (186). Thus, turning toward negative affects like melancholia is not a negation of the future, but rather the forging of a new relation to it.

In other words, affect is a “psychic glue” that allows unforeseen and unexpected correspondences to emerge between past and future moments. It is not language that binds affect “so much as affect comes to reconstitute words and things through unacknowledged correspondences—dialectical images driven apart by historicism but driven together by emotion” (193). This refusal to bow to the violence of historicism and to bury traumas in the folds of the past positions affect as a site of “individual and collective repair” (186). Eng’s text offers a final rallying call to generate new analogies, to re-write the past and in so doing, enact it differently in the future.

***

As subjects we are confronted with a lack that we mistakenly think can be filled: we think that nearness to this person or accumulation of those things will replenish the lack that resides deep within us. Thus, the cultural tendency in North America is to repudiate the loss that constitutes us as subjects and to disavow, master, and attempt to bypass losing. Much like a utopian ideal that may never be realized, there is the possibility that melancholia may never come to an end, but both take on the challenging psychic labor of imagining other relations to loss, of channeling hope and grief in order to think about our relationship to the world we live in and to reflect on those who share it with us. Melancholy utopia avows the 80 pull of the death drive—not as a means of opting out of social life altogether but so as to acknowledge the loss that constitutes us as subjects and the finitude that marks us as human.

Importantly, there is satisfaction in a return to the scene of loss, despite the subject’s continual failure to recapture what is lost (to grasp the Thing), for it renders proximate the originary loss of subjectivity.

To acknowledge the limits of being and the enjoyment that we derive from our loss is to come face to face with our vulnerability and to risk the uncertainty of this confrontation; it means looking at ourselves in the light of our lack, and perhaps more precariously, offering this view to those around us. As she is continually pathologized as an unproductive citizen, the melancholic is attuned not only to the weaknesses of others, but also aware of her own bodily and psychic limits. In fixing her “keener eye for the truth” on the perpetual work of mourning, as Freud suggests, the melancholic exemplifies the impossible and necessary potential of living otherwise (1917: 246). 81

Chapter Two

Spectres in the Southern Kitchen: Carson McCullers

and Harmony Korine

On days when warmth is the most important need of the human heart, the kitchen

is the place you can find it; it dries the wet socks, it cools the hot little brain.

—E.B. White, 1956

Intimacy is not the new prison. The need for connection

might establish another politics, some day.

—Julia Kristeva, Intimate Revolt

In Chapter One I sketched the contours of melancholy utopia and traced the contemporary political salience of rejecting the injunction to dissociate from grief as quickly as possible. I argued that forfeiting one’s experience of loss for the sake of efficiency

(keeping one’s chin up; getting over it) is endemic to the demands of late-stage capitalism and that to resist this call to productivity is an integral mode of resistance. This resistant modality is fostered by melancholy utopia: a space where subjects can dwell in a process of protracted grieving and even garner enjoyment from their fidelity to loss. I am drawn to this idea of dwelling in the wake of one’s loss, for, in the words of Heidegger, “the basic character of dwelling is to spare, to preserve… dwelling itself is always a staying with 82 things” (150-51). In this sense, there is fidelity in the act of staying with things. The aim of this chapter is to look at how this melancholic persistence takes shape and to see where, and in which spaces, grief happens. Melancholy utopia is not only an object of study—a series of case studies drawn from film, literature, and theory—emphasizing the intersectionality of utopian longing and ethical fidelity. Just as importantly, it is also a critical mode of interpretation, a method of reading that responds to neoliberalism and biopolitical

(mis)conceptions of mourning as a task to be accomplished in a timely manner. In addition, melancholy utopia is a space of intimacy and exile—that is, intimacy with loss, and exile from the normative constraints placed on psychic life and imagination.

In this chapter I turn to two artists who left the American South, preferring as they did, a self-imposed exile to New York City. Here, I will fix my attention on Carson McCullers’s small but not slight novella The Member of the Wedding (1946) and Harmony Korine’s independent film Gummo (1997). The setting of both McCullers’s and Korine’s texts is the

American South (although, as we will see, there is a telling obfuscation of the South in

Gummo) and in each we see melancholy utopias emerge in the traditionally feminine space of the kitchen, its subjects disrupting domestic labor. In The Member of the Wedding, as in

Gummo, the conventional family system has in large degree disappeared, and it is replaced by alternate kinship structures. We are presented in each with a fantastical post-Oedipal landscape. For Korine’s misbehaving teens, as for McCullers’s tomboy protagonist Frankie, it is the demand of normality and the repression of difference and queerness that the characters resist. They defy the injunction to mold one’s sexuality to the rigid heterosexual imperative and to bow to the Oedipal triumvirate of the nuclear family. As a result of this 83 resistance, the kitchen becomes the space in which to recast the imaginative potential of psychic life in light of loss—not in spite of it.

The muzzled queerness of McCullers’s prose bears a different imprint from the brash depictions of teenage ennui by l’enfant terrible Korine, not least because of the four and a half decades separating the two artists. However, despite their differences in historical moment and genre, their art reveals traces of the South that they abandoned, and, more crucially, illustrates a mutual interest in imagining the kinship and affective possibilities opened up by the fantastical collapse of patriarchy. In The Member of the Wedding and

Gummo it is within the walls of the southern kitchen that the fantasy of patriarchy’s failure takes hold. There is a long and fraught history embedded in those walls—of servitude, racism, gender inequality, and fears of the abject—but as a consequence of this sequestering of the other to the kitchen it is also a place where the patriarchal has not traditionally tread. It follows that because of gendered and racialized notions of housekeeping the southern kitchen is a space where other affiliations, unconstrained by patriarchal surveillance, have been able to take root.26

26 There are various kitchens and significant kitchen scenes in American literature that I could have turned to as case studies, from the two kitchens of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), to Gilman’s distaste for the kitchen, the redemptive potential of Dilsey’s kitchen in Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury (1929), the Invisible Man’s rejection of any domestic space in Ellison’s novel, the decaying linoleum in Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (1955), or the kitchens in Monique Truong’s or Amy Tan’s more contemporary texts. There has even been a prominent southern kitchen recently depicted in fiction and film by way of Kathryn Stockett’s The Help (2009). Nonetheless, I focus on McCullers’s and Korine’s works because of their post-Oedipal fantasies and the spectral haunting in each kitchen—they depict intimacy and melancholia in a way I have not seen elsewhere. 84

A History of the Back-of-House

In the southern kitchen there exists a vexed history of cultural anxiety over race, class, and disease—and these spectres remain in the kitchens of post WWII and contemporary texts. The kitchen only emerged as a distinct space in American homes in the nineteenth century, replacing the older site of cooking and heating, the hearth. According to Kyla

Wazana Tompkins, the hearth had been at the center of the home, a shared space of eating, gathering, reading, and socializing. However, with the development of the kitchen and its architectural move to the back of the house, “the life of the hearth as social space” was left behind (196). Although domestic technology advanced, rendering the hearth obsolete in its inefficiency, authors like Hawthorne and Melville continued to wax nostalgic for the “old- fashioned” kitchen hearth in their writings.27 Of course, the modern kitchen is a space of socialization (as we will see in The Member of the Wedding), but it is not the same as the bourgeois socializing that revolved around the hearth. Rather, as Tompkins puts it: “the articulation of the kitchen as a separate room from the rest of the house…paralleled the articulation of class difference in the antebellum United States,” with masters at the front of house and servants in the back (16). The hearth was replaced by a room devoted solely to food production that was, for the most part, in the hands of black cooks.

One might imagine that with the architectural conversion of the hearth at the center of the house (around which much of the household activity orbited) to the kitchen at the back- of-house, the boundary between servant and master would have come into even starker relief

27 See Melville’s lament of the onset of modernity in his short story “I and My Chimney,” [1856] in Tales, Poems, and Other Writings (2002). Similarly, Hawthorne bemoans “the invaluable moral influences which we have lost by our desertion of the open fireplace” in “Fire Worship” [1846] (in Mosses from an Old Manse, 2003). 85

—and in some ways it did. Yet, as Tompkins is quick to point out, the cook, as both servant and witness, held a liminal position wherein she retained pertinent and intimate knowledge of her employer’s family and habits, but also threatened illness, disease, and poisoning. She was always looming with the potential to radically invert the household’s power dynamics.

Corollary to this looming threat, the kitchen became a space of “blood and guts, plucked chickens and cooked tongue,” a space of “cutting, scraping, peeling, and boiling,” and other eviscerating tasks central to the economy of the home (10). As the one responsible for these tasks, the cook performs her labor in the kitchen, but it is also there that she “threatens to speak,” and “to infuse the food she produces—that her employers will eat—with the stifled political affect that the walls of the kitchen are supposed to contain” (17).

Thus, with the emerging kitchen there arose a more permeable boundary between speaking and eating, cleanliness and the abject. As a consequence, the cultural valences of the kitchen in relation to the rest of the home shifted throughout the century: this new space evolved in tandem with social changes such as gender ideologies, civil rights, and an emerging immigrant serving class. Even at its inception during the first half of the nineteenth century the kitchen was already, as Tompkins writes, “a significant political and cultural battleground” with various associations to the hearth and its patriarchal centrality to the home (50). Tompkins sees kitchens as not only “sites of utopic possibility, of the possible inversion of classes of people, and of the worlding dreams of early feminism,” but also as dystopic spaces “whose abjection in the internal economy of the home” allows for a disruption of domestic labor and a surfacing of the repressed (racism, slavery, and class difference) in the everyday work of the kitchen (10). 86

Droves of American families migrated to the suburbs in the 1950s and the post-war kitchen underwent rapid technological changes that drastically altered its function and appearance. Their kitchens were built in U and L-shapes to allow for more counter space, and homeowners opted for walls and appliances in more muted colors and pastels (Hellman).

As the American kitchen evolved architecturally, its internal focus on cooking moved further and further outside of the home. To wit, in 1956 the head of the Food and Drug

Administration (FDA) declared: “our industry will not have done its job until housewives buy most of their meals as packaged, ready-to-serve items” (Bacon). And so it was that processed foods—from Jell-O, to spam, to TV dinners—became central to Americans’ eating habits, and cooks looked for ways to decrease the amount of time spent in the kitchen.

If anyone doubts the historical or cultural importance of the American kitchen since

WWII he need look no further than the Moscow Kitchen Debates. In 1959 Vice President

Nixon visited Russia at the pinnacle of the Cold War to “debate issues of interior design and

Figure 5: Safire, William. Typical American House: Moscow. 1959. nytimes.com. Photograph. 87 domestic gadgetry” with Nikita Khrushchev (see figure 5) (Hellman). Nixon brought the

American home with him in the form of an exhibition that included “model homes and kitchens with the latest technology, American supermarket displays, and even fashion shows with vignettes from life in the United States” (Hellman). Welcoming the Russian public into the space of the American kitchen was a way of advertising the American Dream (replete with free Pepsi) and enticing a communist country with the promise of apple-pie domesticity. Needless to say, it did not work. Tensions ran high during the debates and

Khrushchev derided the whole spectacle as emblematic of American capitalist greed.

At the same time, cooking shows began to appear on television with the earliest (James

Beard on PBS) debuting in 1946, the same year that The Member of the Wedding was published (Smithsonian). Between 1946 and 1995, eight cooking shows premiered on

American television and the spectacle of the kitchen (of watching food prepared that would not be eaten) became an increasing locus of interest in the cultural imaginary. In 1999, the

Commerce Department would proclaim it “the year of the restaurant,” indicating that more

Americans are eating outside of the home than ever before.28

The Member of the Wedding

In a 1946 review of McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding George Dangerfield concluded that the novella was about “three really weird people sitting in an even weirder

28 As a New York Times article from 2009 entitled “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch” reports: “The Food Network can now be seen in nearly 100 million American homes and on most nights commands more viewers than any of the cable news channels” (Pollan). Actual cooking has declined as viewership has risen, and “today the average American spends a mere 27 minutes a day on food preparation (another four minutes cleaning up)” which is less than half the time spent in 1963 when Julia Childs’s “The French Chef” debuted in the United States (Pollan). 88 kitchen” (31). What may be read as a glib or moralizing assessment of The Member of the

Wedding is also an accurate one. McCullers’s kitchen dwellers do not embody the normative.

Berenice is a one-eyed cook who has never recovered from the death of her first husband

Ludie Freeman (although she has remarried three times), and John Henry is a boy philosopher who is described at one point as standing in the kitchen “like a little old woman dwarf, wearing the pink hat with the plume, and the high-heeled shoes” (123). Then there is the androgynous Frankie Addams, a queer twelve year old tomboy who feels alone and on the fringes of her tiny backwater town in Georgia. Frankie’s mother is not spoken of, and her father is largely absent; Mr. Addams is constantly working and disinterested in his daughter.

Driven mad by loneliness and the August heat, she decides to “join” her brother’s upcoming wedding in Winter Hill. She does not want to marry her brother Jarvis and his fiancé Janice, not exactly. Frankie pictures running away with the two of them after the wedding— somehow becoming a part of their marriage vows and their contractual promise to belong to one another—and shedding her status as outcast.

The novella is divided into three sections that gradually move from the dreamy, molasses-like flow of time in Part One to the more chronological account of events in Part

Three. Set mostly over a weekend in late August 1944, the narrative flashes forward in the final section to the following November. At the novella’s onset, Frankie is experiencing an acute summer malaise that the text suggests is borne of a distasteful first sexual encounter with a neighborhood boy. She pushes this memory to the side when it pops into her consciousness, but she is made equally anxious by other thoughts, such as the mysterious war overseas that is conscripting young men like her brother. 89

The radio—never turned off in her house—delivers garbled dispatches from the war, and its persistent hum goes largely unnoticed. This radio is described as playing a mixture of stations: “a war voice crossed with the gabble of an advertiser, and underneath there was the sleazy music of a sweet band,” and its cacophony of endless mixed messages aggravates

Frankie’s unsettled psychic state (10). Later, her voice will be garbled much like the radio messages. In a crucial scene near the novella’s end, Frankie’s voice will cross with those of

Berenice and John Henry in an impromptu moment of singing. The result will be soothing rather than rattling, but in the novella’s beginning, she cannot find such comfort. Until then

(when their voices join in song), in contrast to her dark, cloying thoughts and her “mashed” heart, Frankie looks forward to the wedding as a refuge, and sees it as “bright and beautiful as [the] snow” that never falls in Georgia (17).

When a twenty-eight year old newly married McCullers was writing The Member of the Wedding, her husband Reeves McCullers was one of these conscripted young men fighting overseas. In unpublished letters to him, now collected in the archives of The Harry

Ransom Center, McCullers describes more than once the difficulty of the writing process and speaks candidly about her fear and loneliness during this time. In a letter to Reeves dated

January 15, 1945, one year before the publication of The Member of the Wedding, McCullers writes that without him near her she experiences “a sense of terror about the simplest things.” She admits: “Sometimes I’m afraid to cross the streets, or again when I am riding on a bus I suddenly know the back wheels are coming off.”

The loneliness that nags Frankie in the text sounds strikingly similar to the author’s own admissions of “anxiety neurosis” and fear in her correspondence with Reeves. The 90 phrase “Frankie was afraid” is a refrain in Part One, but unlike McCullers, the young protagonist is unable to pin down the source of this fear. In other letters from around the same time, McCullers tells Reeves that although she sits down to write each day, her mind

“wanders and hunts” for him, and that there “are times when, out of unconscious self protection, the imagination grows numb and fails to function” (January 8, 1945). Traces of this writer’s block cannot be found in the finished text (considered by most critics to be her best), but McCullers’s helplessness during this period does come through on the page in the figure of Frankie, whose anxieties about the war and where she belongs in the world permeate the novella.

***

In The Wedding Complex (2002), Elizabeth Freeman reads Frankie’s desire to join the wedding as a form of patriotism—as a young queer girl’s wish during WWII to invent a relationship to her country without getting married. Freeman examines the way that the idea or fantasy of the wedding reproduces certain forms of belonging and reimagines new ones.

Freeman wonders, “in what ways the kinds of weddings people have, or dream of having, or thought they had, might be indices for forms of social life made possible in one domain but impossible in another, or in one historical moment but not another” (5). It will not come as news that matrimony—with its consolidation of the promise of reproductive futurity, to borrow Edelman’s useful phrase—has always excluded non-heterosexual couples and other queer subjects uninterested in monogamous partnerships. Yet, Freeman’s study brings to light more than this obvious fact, for it signals the ways in which texts that highlight the wedding as a production are able to “return to and rework the possibilities embedded in the 91 ritual itself” (5). That is to say, texts like McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding engage with the spectacle of the wedding in unorthodox ways to reimagine what the meaning and cultural capital of the ritual may be.

From Frankie’s perspective, there is nothing subversive about wanting to join the wedding; she is bored of her small town and sick and tired of being lonely. Freeman writes that “the wedding indexes a wish to be private, unremarked on, and safe, to draw boundaries that could demarcate one’s own particular social space—but also a desire to be officially recognized, to address spheres of power beyond family or nation, to be connected with, as

McCullers puts it, ‘everybody. In the world’” (43). Frankie’s need for connection also manifests in her wish to donate her blood to the Red Cross so that she may be bound to soldiers the world over on either side of the war, her DNA pulsing through the veins of

“Australians and Fighting French and Chinese,” as though “she were close kin to all of these people” (23). It is not the Germans or “bombs” or “Japanese” that frighten Frankie, but the way in which the war excludes her, “and because the world seemed somehow separate” (24).

Frankie cannot escape her lonely life by joining the bonds of brotherhood promised by the army, nor can she make sense or order of the chaos the war has wrought on everyday life.

The wedding offers in Frankie’s mind a mode of escape and belonging.

Frankie despises the sense of being adrift, which is why she feels the need to belong so ardently. Frankie frets over her unbelonging and laments all the clubs of which she has no membership: Berenice has her own family and a tight-knit church, soldiers in the army have their unspoken fraternal pacts, and even “the criminals on chain-gangs” have each other

(clearly, Frankie is not discerning in her jealousy) but she has nothing but her lonesome I 92

(42). “All other people had a we to claim” she thinks, and considers herself excluded, though she too has a club, just not one she likes. Frankie “had no we to claim, unless it would be the terrible summer we of her and John Henry and Berenice—and that was the last we in the world she wanted” (42). So while Frankie assumes that others are contentedly affiliated

(even if this means that they are literally bound to other people as members of chain gangs are) she does not consider that she has a real we of her own since she does not choose the we of her, Berenice, and John Henry. Frankie’s envy of the chain gangs is not earnest, but offers a glimpse at her naïve logic and the way that her loneliness has distorted her fantasy of belonging. She believes that literally any other mode of belonging is better than the one she finds herself in.

When part way through writing The Member of the Wedding McCullers realized that she would have Frankie fall in love with the wedding of her brother and his bride, she described it as an “illumination” that “focused the whole book” (Savigneau 125). McCullers saw this misshapen love triangle, formed by Frankie’s wish to be a member of the wedding pact, as an epiphany in the creative process—which, in a letter to Tennessee Williams, she named a “divine spark” (125). Metaphors of light, from illuminations to sparks, seem apt when thinking through the queer fantasies that constellate a text like The Member of the

Wedding. For, to want to join a wedding is a queer wish. Frankie’s queer wish is a way for

McCullers to discuss her protagonist’s queerness without directly naming her burgeoning homoerotic or non-binary desires. What is more, it is through Frankie’s fantasy of joining the wedding that McCullers reworks the possibilities of existing kinship affiliations in the text:

The Member of the Wedding offers a way of thinking through the possibility of queer wishes 93 coming true. The novella suggests that if it is possible to join a wedding, perhaps other drastic changes to the original tripartite kinship structure (such as homosexuality) are possible too. The narrative is as concerned with fantastically re-imagining the terms of the marriage contract as it is with letting queer desires and melancholic attachments come to light.29

Part One begins with Frankie in the kitchen fixating upon a visit earlier that afternoon from her brother Jarvis and his bride-to-be, Janis, when they announced their engagement. Frankie looks to their union as a tangible (though foreign to her) example of belonging that she is eager to feel. Frankie’s loneliness transmutes into a feeling of abandonment as she closes her eyes and thinks about the couple riding on the train away from her and back to Winter Hill. She thinks to herself: “they were them, and leaving her, and she was her, and sitting left all by herself there at the kitchen table” (29). She thinks of

Jarvis and Janis as one unit, as “them,” while she, on the other hand, remains a single and paltry “her.” Not only are the couple a coherent and unified “them,” but their union actively excludes Frankie. She understands their departure and their coupledom as “leaving her” behind. Frankie’s thoughts are simultaneously on her brother and his fiancé on the train and on her lonely self in the kitchen—caught between movement and belonging, stasis and loneliness.

29 Sexual difference had been eclipsed in McCullers criticism until the 1970s. Rachel Adams’s “‘A Mixture of Delicious and Freak’: The Queer Fiction of Carson McCullers” (1999) rectifies this with a compelling account of the deviant body and the potential for queerness in the novella. Adams argues that McCullers engages in “a project of social criticism that, at its most penetrating, reveals the links between sexual intolerance and racial bigotry, and, at its most hopeful, recognizes … the queer inconsistencies and excesses at the center of the social order that contain the possibility for its refashioning” (19). 94

These feelings of abandonment are tempered by Frankie’s fantasy that despite these differences, “a part of her was with them, and she could feel this part of her own self going away” (29). Moments after her mournful sense of being abandoned, she imaginatively inserts herself into the couple’s train trip. Here, the narrative shifts into the realm of

Frankie’s imaginary and she narrates the train ride from an omniscient third person perspective. She imagines:

The train was traveling to the North. Mile after mile they went away, farther and farther

away from the town, and as they traveled to the North, a coolness came into the air and

dark was falling like the evening dark of wintertime. The train was winding up into the

hills, the whistle wailing in a winter tone, and mile after mile they went away. They

passed among themselves a box of bought store candy, with chocolates set in dainty,

pleated shells, and watched the winter miles pass by the window. Now they had gone a

long, long way from town and soon would be in Winter Hill. (32-33)

She feels Jarvis and Janis moving farther and farther away, but there is a part of herself, she insists, that has joined them. In reality, Frankie begins to walk around the kitchen table in circles, letting her imagination spiral into the realm of fantasy. As she circles her body through space, Frankie’s mind telescopes out to the train and the distance it is travelling.

Frankie imagines the coziness of a tripartite “they” and pictures passing a box of chocolates around as she, Jarvis, and Janis jointly consider their approach to Winter Hill. Frankie has successfully elbowed her way into the exclusive “them” of Jarvis and Janis. Her spectral presence in the scene imbues every detail with meaning, from the coolness of the evening air 95 to the pleated chocolate wrappers, and she envisions a calmness and quiet sense of belonging that in reality eludes her. And so she creates a new affiliation for herself: “She loved her brother and the bride and she was a member of the wedding” (46). Frankie decides: “They are the we of me” (42) and “she was no more afraid” (46). At last, the cloying fear that has been nagging her through Part One dissipates as she comes to this affiliating conclusion.

Kitchen Conversations, Strange Intimacies

As for the “even weirder kitchen”—as Dangerfield assessed—in which Frankie,

Berenice, and John Henry spend their afternoons, its walls are covered by John Henry’s drawings. This creates for the already anxious Frankie an unsettling feeling of sitting in an asylum, hemmed in by the lunatic scribbles of an unhinged stranger: “they sat together in the kitchen, and the kitchen was a sad and ugly room. John Henry had covered the walls with queer, child drawings, as far up as his arm would reach” (6). These “queer drawings of

Christmas trees, airplanes, freak soldiers, [and] flowers” leave Frankie feeling agitated, even though she has drawn some of them herself, and in the evening light “the kitchen looked strange to her” (9). The kitchen is described as square, grey, and quiet, with splintery floors and a kitchen table in its center around which the threesome frequently gather.

When critics discuss the kitchen in The Member of the Wedding, they focus on the prison-like atmosphere described in Part One. For example, Judith Giblin James points out the “stifling security” of the kitchen and Frankie’s longing to escape its confines (111).

While Barbara A. White asserts that it is the world outside that excludes Frankie and not the kitchen that isolates her, she admits that both spaces are suffocating (96-97). It is not 96 surprising that scholars read the kitchen in this way: Frankie herself describes the fading summer light falling on the kitchen floor in bars as those of a penitentiary, and she expresses her anxiety repeatedly in Part One. In addition to the kitchen’s oppressive heat and Frankie’s exhaustion with being an outcast among her peer group, she is repeatedly chastised by

Berenice for her queer idea to run off and join her brother’s wedding.

In one such moment, Berenice censures Frankie by saying: “I never before in all my days heard of anybody falling in love with a wedding. I have knew many peculiar things, but

I never heard of that before” (82). And in another, when Frankie descends the stairs wearing layers of poorly applied lipstick and an ill-fitting orange taffeta dress she has bought for the wedding in Winter Hill, Berenice tells her matter-of-factly that she resembles a human

Christmas tree in August (90). As Frankie comes downstairs to model the dress, she anticipates Berenice and John Henry’s criticisms and immediately personifies the kitchen as a third, disapproving member of the chorus. The narrative is focalized through Frankie who thinks it is “as though the four walls of the kitchen watched her, and the skillet hanging on the wall was a watching round black eye” (89). Hence, Frankie’s sense of entrapment in the kitchen is particularly acute in Part One of the text, but it is her own overwhelming sense of unbelonging that traps her there. What frightens her is not the space she dwells in, so much as the wide and incomprehensible world beyond it.

Despite Frankie’s vociferous moments of frustration with the kitchen and her time spent there with Berenice and John Henry, the scene of her fantastical train trip discussed above also illustrates the emotional security she feels within it to imagine herself otherwise.

In Part Two, Frankie’s queer wishing is allowed to flourish in the space of the kitchen and 97 she, Berenice, and John Henry fill the afternoon hours sharing secrets and reflecting on grief, love, and gender. By nurturing and voicing their fantasies they foster a melancholy utopia within their southern kitchen.30 As a consequence, the summer meal chronicled in the novella’s second part has a different feeling than their other afternoon dinners.

In Part Two, the limited third person narrator likens the dusky time of afternoon with the earlier days of summer when Frankie, Berenice, and John Henry would sit around and

“sometimes begin to criticize the Creator” (96). On this late afternoon, the three of them sit around the kitchen table as twilight nears. Once more, they begin to daydream about how they would change the world if they could. This communal work of interpretation is a frequent occurrence, and when each character maps the world as they would have it if they were God, it is a familiar re-telling, a repetition with a difference. Berenice’s repetition is of a “round and just and reasonable” world (97). A world where “no Jews [are] murdered anywhere,” where there is “no starving,” and where there are “no hurt colored people” (97).

Her vision is more pragmatic than the fantastical world John Henry imagines—“a mixture of delicious and freak” where dirt is made of chocolate and flowers are made from candy—but both are idealistic (96). Berenice’s final pronouncement is that her love Ludie Freedman

30 In Strange Bodies: Gender and Identity in The Novels of Carson McCullers (2003) Sarah Gleeson-White argues that place functions as “an index of feminine identity” in McCullers’s works and in twentieth century women’s Southern Gothic writing more broadly. She asserts that this indexing of femininity through place— here, the kitchen of The Member of the Wedding—registers “confinement which has been woman’s traditional lot” (18). Gleeson-White’s assessment is problematic insofar as it annexes McCullers into a tradition of women’s writing that ghettoizes her craft. Gleeson-White contends that place is used to effect claustrophobia in the works of Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and McCullers, and although this is by no means poor company to be in, it reinforces a gender binary that The Member of the Wedding purposely throws out of orbit with its androgynous protagonist and her cross-dressing sidekick. Frankie’s wish to join the wedding and to nudge her way into a “we of me” threesome is proof of this agitation. Despite Gleeson-White’s narrow view of the function of space, she gets closer to the complexity of gender in McCullers’s texts and to her Southern literary inheritance when she discusses Frankie’s “grotesque androgyny” (98). Gleeson-White sees McCullers registering gender as not only “nomadic,” but also as the tension between “gendered subject possibilities” (98). According to Gleeson-White, this proliferation of gender identifications results in the grotesque subject—a subversive agent of errant sexuality (1). 98

“would be alive” (97). The return of her lost love object is as important as the cessation of genocide and global hunger—encapsulating the prominent place of grief in Berenice’s imaginary.

Frankie would improve the world by “leaving out summer altogether, and adding much snow,” casting off those wanting to fight in a war to a designated War Island, and most significantly, planning it “so that people could instantly change back and forth from boys to girls, which ever way they felt like and wanted” (97). Her melancholic longing is for a gender fluidity that appears as foreign, as impossible, as snow falling regularly in the

American South. It is through these kitchen conversations that the three characters vocalize their visions of utopia, each born of melancholic attachments and experiences of loss. These utopian revisions of creation are well-worn among these three, and they set them up for the different more in-depth conversation about relationality that follows.

Now the atmosphere of the kitchen is leisurely, and as Frankie, Berenice, and John

Henry slowly eat their meals they “let the food have a chance to spread out and settle inside their stomachs” before continuing their dialogue (103). As they eat in rounds they also digest their conversations, letting their ideas spread out and settle too. The meal that is described in

Part Two is inflected by Frankie’s morning spent wandering the town, her encounter with a drunken soldier at the Blue Moon Café, and by her insistence that it is “the last afternoon” before she leaves forever to join the wedding in Winter Hill. This long kitchen sequence is also significantly shaped by Frankie’s need to express her longing for human connection, a feverish desire that she has been attempting to sate all morning. 99

Frankie draws an analogy between her afternoon in the kitchen and the center of a failed and fallen cake. Frankie finds “an unfamiliar sweetness in the known old kitchen ways and tones,” enjoying the collapse of her active morning into the sweet passivity of afternoon hours spent in the kitchen with Berenice, and the day-dreaming John Henry (91). Frankie does not understand why adults consider fallen cakes a failure, for she enjoys “the damp, gummy richness near the center,” and likewise relishes her “wasted” hours of kitchen talk

(91). This kitchen talk results in a sensorily potent space to reimagine the social order, making room for queerness, racial equality, and the articulation of anti-normative desires.

Significantly, the space these characters create to philosophize love and death and to vocalize their visions of utopia is temporary and transient; these radical moments of rethinking social bonds are not sustainable within the novella. However, although these instances of rethinking the social eventually collapse upon themselves, the characters are better off for having uttered them at all. In this way, the charged space of remaking that

Frankie, Berenice, and John Henry evoke through their kitchen conversations is like one of

Berenice’s failed cakes, rich and sweet despite its fall.

Sitting around the table with Berenice and John Henry, Frankie (who has changed her name to the more mature moniker “F. Jasmine”) takes their conversation about Creation in a different direction by using new words to express her need for relation. The difficulty of this expression signals the affective rather than linguistic nature of connection “since it was more a matter of feelings than of words or facts, she found it difficult to explain. When she spoke of connections, Berenice gave her a long, uncomprehending stare” (96). Frankie tries to explain not only her encounter with the soldier, but also the “new unnamable 100 connection” (66) she feels with various strangers she passes on the streets and her strong need “to be recognized for her true self” (74). The words she tries to find to capture these feelings are described as flowers waiting to be plucked: “her heart was dark and silent, and from her heart the unknown words flowered and bloomed and she waited to name them” (140). When she is finally able to express her view of relationality, it is the simplistic articulation of a twelve year old, but it also possesses a clarity of vision that this queer kitchen space has made possible:

Doesn’t it strike you as strange that I am I, and you are you? I am F. Jasmine

Addams. And you are Berenice Sadie Brown. And we can look at each other, and

touch each other, and stay together year in and year out in the same room. Yet always

I am I, and you are you. And I can’t ever be anything else but me, and you can’t ever

be anything else but you. Have you ever thought of that? And does it seem to you

strange? (136)

Frankie focuses on sensuous proximity (“we can look at each other, and touch each other”) and the peculiarity of its relationship to the nonetheless distinct self (“always I am I”). In this moment, she realizes that being with another person, or joining a wedding, will not dissolve her singular identity into that of another, or into a more manageable, less freakish one.

Significantly, “strange” (a word Frankie repeats twice in this instance and that is used a total of thirteen times in the novella) means “of or belonging to another country; foreign, alien” (OED). The irony of the word’s meaning lies in Frankie’s obsession with belonging.

She is fixated on belonging to the wedding, and yet her affiliation with the word

“strange” (she not only repeats it, but is herself strange) signals her as alien, as foreign. On 101 foreignness, Amy Kaplan remarks that the notion of the nation as home—the familiar idea that the house is a microcosm of the larger state apparatus—“relies structurally on its intimate opposition to the notion of the foreign” (59). Kaplan goes on to explain that the idea of the “domestic” has in fact a double meaning insofar as it connects the familial space with the nation by “imagining both in opposition to everything outside the geographic and conceptual border of the home” (59). This is to say, both home and nation depend on an exclusionary border that delineates and keeps at arm’s length, the foreign. If Frankie is strange, and to be strange is to be alien, it follows that Frankie is in “intimate opposition” with her home and her nation. Yet, Frankie does belong, she belongs paradoxically to strangeness, and not to the normality that she (or the nation) craves.

Although Berenice usually chides Frankie and is at odds with her utopian visions

(disagreeing, for example, that the laws of human sex are imperfect), here she tries to find some common ground. She concedes to Frankie:

I think I have a vague idea what you were driving at…We all of us somehow caught.

We born this way or that way and we don’t know why. But we caught anyhow. I born

Berenice. You born Frankie. John Henry born John Henry. And maybe we wants to

widen and bust free. But no matter what we do we still caught. Me is me and you is

you and he is he. We each one of us somehow caught all by ourself. (144)

The utopian visions conjured by Frankie, Berenice, and John Henry reflect what they desire at the same time that they reveal the constraints of their reality. Berenice identifies a limit to their kitchen dreaming and their desires to “widen and bust free” when she says that regardless of what they want, they are ultimately “still caught” by class and identity. Frankie 102 and John Henry represent the queer subject floating between masculinity and femininity, while Berenice is a black servant “caught” in the struggle for civil rights and mourning a lost love.31

Frankie meets Berenice’s formulation of “caughtness” with a reversal: “at the same time you almost might use the word loose instead of caught. Although they are two opposite words…People loose and at the same time caught. Caught and loose. All these people and you don’t know what joins them up” (145). Berenice wishes to break free from the constraints of race, poverty, and the pain of grief, but Frankie longs to be caught in a comforting confinement. Frankie yearns for the normal because that is precisely what she is not. One could say that Berenice would rather be loose while Frankie would prefer to be caught. While Berenice is “caught” more than Frankie or John Henry as a black working- class woman in the American South, she expresses a feeling of social confinement that the other two can relate to: a feeling Rachel Adams calls “the tyranny of the normal” (19).32

Along closely related lines to what I have been suggesting about the characters’ queer wishing, Adams understands the kitchen as a transformative space of “collective imagining” (36). Adams writes that

31There is reference throughout The Member of the Wedding to a “Freak House” pavilion on the fairgrounds at the edge of town that frightens and horrifies Frankie (19). As Adams points out, rather than symbolizing a distinct site of otherness and difference in the novel, McCullers’s representation of the freak show fails to make clear “the distinction between deviance and normality” (22). Instead, the Freak House suggests that the characters are each “in some sense, a freak who cannot conform to normative standards of comportment and physical appearance” (22). 32 There are other scholars who have likewise noted the generative aspects of the kitchen and the conversations therein. For instance, Oliver Evans interprets Berenice as Frankie’s teacher of Platonic wisdom, a black Socrates leading “a long twilit kitchen seminar” on questions of the soul and belonging (111). Then there is Patricia Yaeger, who views the kitchen as the place for serious political work where the characters explore gender-bending bodies and investigate utopian social goals (109). 103

each occupant of the kitchen takes a turn weaving a fantasy that reflects individual

longings while, at times, interweaving the fantasies of the other two…this model of

collective imagining that can momentarily bridge differences in age, race, and

gender among its collaborators is especially important in the work of remaking. (36)

There is a moment not long after the discussion of Berenice’s desire to “bust free” and

Frankie’s wish to be anchored in which the three characters spontaneously and simultaneously burst into tears. Even though “their reasons were three different reasons… they started at the same instant as though they had agreed together” (147). It is as if this tearful outburst marks the exhaustion they collectively feel from the labor of utopian dreaming. This tearful scene is the culmination of all of the things they cannot say, or fail to find the right words for, and it fades just as quickly as it unexpectedly surged up. As the three catch their breath, the narration attempts to account for what caused their tears:

John Henry was crying because he was jealous, though later he tried to say he cried

because of the rat behind the wall. Berenice was crying because of their talk about

colored people, or because of Ludie… F. Jasmine did not know why she cried, but

the reason she named was the crew-cut and the fact that her elbows were so rusty.

(122)

We are told that “often they would sing like this and their tunes were sweet and queer in the

August kitchen after it was dark. But never before had they suddenly begun to cry” (122).

This shared emotional outburst is the climax of a long crazy summer of suppers and song, for like their recurring conversations of Creation, they would regularly “all at once begin to sing…until at last the tunes began to merge and they sang a special music that the three of 104 them made up together” (147). A different chord has been struck between them and their singing has allowed them to connect in a new, visceral way. After talking about what rattles them the most—identity, freedom, and belonging—their voices come into cadence with one another and they “join up” not in words but in melancholic tune.

This time, inflected with the heft of their existential reflections on relationality, their

“sweet and queer” notes and tears become a performance of the non-visible, of what I want to suggest is the ambivalence of melancholia. As Freud’s original theory of melancholia explains, there can be ambivalence in the subject’s relationship to her loss, in part because she may not always know the source of her grief (122). Just as aspects of the self can remain opaque to the subject, so too can moments and emotions resist interpretation. The significance of this scene does not lie in the transparency it brings to the characters’ psychic states, but in its depiction of their affective correspondence to one another. Their spontaneous and simultaneous tears are a trace (as Barthes would say) of an absence. Their collective tears bear an imprint of the lack that constitutes them but which cannot be seen (be it the melancholia of gender, race, or something else that is unknown). Their discussion that afternoon has been a reflection on loss and liminality and this shared outburst indexes the melancholic fidelity at the heart of their kitchen conversation, and in this moment they perform their lack.

To underscore the significance of this scene in slightly different terms: this emotional outburst evokes the queer bond that the three of them have forged through dialogue and song, but it also indexes the constitutional lack that founds them each as subjects. Although they discuss their unique experiences of melancholia (albeit often in circuitous and indirect 105 fashion), what haunts these conversations is also an originary loss. Frankie and Berenice’s exchange about the struggle for freedom and the fear of being adrift is an unconscious reckoning with the fact that—whether one is caught or loose—we become subjects through loss. This originary act of losing follows us through life and colors our relationships. Hence, to borrow Peggy Phelan’s phrase, “disappearance is the expression of subjectivity itself” (148). This is to say, that in the wake of loss one is confronted with the void at the center of each subject. Fort! Da!

The melancholy utopia of McCullers’s southern kitchen—encapsulated most strikingly in the tearful and spontaneous song—performs a mode of resistance that is impermanent and invisible. What renders it invisible is the psychic nature of the characters’ connection and the way in which they have come into synchronicity on an unconscious level (their crying begins at the same instant “as though they had agreed together”). The kind of resistance performed in the kitchen is transformative in a psychic sense and it encourages a new utopian mode of relationality that does not repress lack, melancholia, or difference. David

Eng (2010) explains that “the non-visible indexes the realm of forgetting,” so that what cannot be seen might nonetheless be felt (183). The “in-between” of the non-visible—here, an intense and surprising moment of connection—“marks losses that can only be indexed by acts of haunting and imagination” (183). This liminal moment of intimacy occurs spontaneously and connects the characters on a psychic and affective level (rather than on a purely rational plane).

The kitchen scene ends as it began: with a reflection on the waning daylight. With the electric lights now on, “the walls of the kitchen were crazy drawn and very bright,” and the 106 three characters squint their eyes as if coming out of a stupor, blinking “as though they were three strangers or three ghosts” (123). This image of them as disembodied ghosts is striking because their conversation has led them to convene on an affective plane and to ignore, if only temporarily, the physical limits of their bodies. But the haze of their sensorially potent kitchen afternoon soon dissipates with the entrance of the patriarchal: the sound of Frankie’s father “trudging slowly down the hall” (123). The re-emergence of the patriarchal figure of

Mr. Addams dispels the frisson of their kitchen conversation and “the final kitchen afternoon was over at last” (123).

Foreclosing Queerness

The final section of The Member of the Wedding reinstates linear time and takes the reader forward to the following November. Here, the fugitive potential for transformation that was dreamt of in the kitchen subsides. Whereas the kitchen talk suggests a remolding of social bonds (such as Frankie’s desire to join the wedding, and thus to triangulate the heterosexual couple), and allows for queer and gender-bending desire to be performed, at the novella’s end, no actual overturning of sexual norms occurs beyond the kitchen walls. The conclusion has been read as a dark repression of the narrative’s queer potential and of

Frankie’s maturation, and to some extent this is true.33 The space of vulnerability, desire, and social reconstitution that these three shared is a radical site that McCullers does not sustain.

33 Cf. Irving Malin’s “The Gothic Family” in Psychoanalysis and American Fiction (1965); Robert S. Phillips’s “Painful Love: Carson McCullers’ Parable” in Southwest Review (1966); Margaret McDowell on Carson McCullers in Twayne’s United States Authors Series (1986); and Louise Westling’s “Tomboys and Revolting Femininity” in Critical Essays on Carson McCullers (1996). 107

As some have argued, the text succumbs instead to the reign of the normative.34

For instance, Frankie has failed to nestle into the we of Janis and Jarvis, and Berenice is ousted from her job when Frankie and her dad decide to move to “the new suburb of town” (she falls back on a passionless but practical marriage for financial support) (158).

The move to the newly developed suburbs is a nod to emerging postwar suburbanization and the geographical assimilation that will sweep the United States in the coming post-war years.35 In a harsher reinstatement of the normal, the queer John Henry dies after a gruelling ten days with meningitis. The transience of the queer ideas of Frankie, Berenice, and John

Henry is placed into stark visual relief by the remodelled kitchen. The walls of the kitchen are literally white-washed at Mr. Addams’s request as he prepares the house for sale, and the manic and imaginative drawings of the children are covered over once summer reaches its end. The paint’s obfuscation of the children’s scribbles in the novella’s end marks an antiseptic repression of creativity and free expression.36

The novel’s conclusion shows the collapse of the radically affirmative moments of the kitchen conversations, and normality eventually overwhelms the text’s overtly queer potential. But strangeness is not entirely thwarted in the novel’s conclusion, nor is the transformative effect of the last kitchen dialogue completely subdued. The spectre of John

34 Cf. Louis Auchioncloss, “Carson McCullers” in Pioneers and Caretakers: A Study of Nine American Women Novelists (1965), and Margaret McDowell (1980). 35Around this time, Frank Lloyd Wright envisioned moderately priced suburban homes that would embody American democratic ideals. His term for this architectural idea was “Usonia,” combining the words “utopia” and “U.S.A.” Caroline Hellman remarks that “although many Usonian homes were built, Wright’s larger vision of widespread Usonian communities was never realized. Only two such cooperative communities were formed, in Michigan and New York State during the 1940s and 1950s.” Alas, the utopian suburb never made it to Georgia. 36 At the turn of the century, the domestic science movement (with its fixation on eliminating bacteria) encouraged homemakers to “paint their kitchens white and coat their countertops and sinks in enamel in an effort to fight the germs that lurked there” (Bacon). Mr. Addams’s decision to paint the walls of the kitchen seems like a similar purging of “dangerous” germination (here, ideas about race and gender). 108

Henry and his intimate exchanges with Berenice linger for Frankie like “a hush—a hush quivered by voiceless words” (190). The difficulty of naming the sensation of connection resurfaces here. As Mark Schorer suggests, the story ends on a note of equipoise whereby

Frankie is about to “discover the nature of her identity,” for which “the materials necessary to that discovery she already possesses” (91). Which is to say, the radical space of the kitchen has given Frankie the means to begin to understand the complex and nuanced relationship between self and the other, queerness and convention.

Without the restrictive framework of the patriarchal, McCullers’s subjects have been able to interpret their social bonds in a new light. And there is a glimmer of hope at the end of The Member of the Wedding that the odd kitchen dialogues will have a lasting effect on

Frankie. Her newfound friendship with Mary Littlejohn (whose name evokes Frankie’s lost cousin and his brazen gender-bending) hums with a queer potential, even as our protagonist appears to be assimilating into a more conventional adolescent rhythm. Frankie may accept her heteronormative feminine sexuality by the novel’s close, but her new friendship with

Mary glimmers with a tacit lesbian potential. In this respect, Frankie’s love for Mary and their exciting future plans to travel the world together parallel Frankie’s desire to join the

Winter Hill wedding and honeymoon. In her ardor for Mary, Frankie holds onto the queer possibilities she dreamt of in the kitchen. In the wake of her revolt against the “normal” with

Berenice and John Henry, Frankie clasps tightly her inner freak; and while the energizing work of remaking in the kitchen proves unsustainable, it is nonetheless transformative.

In terms of the text’s queer possibilities, it seems worth noting that McCullers spent five years writing The Member of the Wedding (originally titled The Bride and Her Brother), 109 and paused during that time to write The Ballad of The Sad Café (1951). The Ballad of The

Sad Café is a novella chronicling another complex love triangle: this one between an

Amazonian-like woman Miss Amelia, a hunchbacked beloved, and a nasty husband. There, the financially independent Miss Amelia is destroyed in both body and property by the story’s close. Critic Louise Westling suggests that Miss Amelia’s fateful ruining is a symbolic consequence of her refusal to conform to society’s ideals of femininity. Westling elaborates on the relationship between the two texts to suggest that for McCullers, The

Ballad of The Sad Café was “a new tale which explored Frankie Addams’s anxiety in a bold new way,” and when the author returned to finish The Member of the Wedding “she knew that Frankie would have to submit as Miss Amelia had not” (159). Westling contends that in

The Member of the Wedding McCullers destroys the novella’s symbols of deviance by killing off John Henry and having Berenice leave and plan to marry a man who does not make her

“shiver” like Ludie did. However, at the end of The Member of the Wedding there remains the deviance and revolt of Frankie to consider. When Berenice warns Frankie that Roman

Catholics like Mary Littlejohn worship “Graven Images” and want “the Pope to rule the world,” Frankie delights in “silent terror” and feels a “touch of strangeness,” that completes

“the wonder of her love” for Mary (191). It would seem that she has found some shared foreignness after all.

What is more, despite the return to the normative at the close of The Member of the

Wedding, there is a sense of lasting transformation for the characters. As Dangerfield observes, nothing “or almost nothing occurs here, and yet every page is filled with a sense of something having happened, happening, and about to happen” (31). Time passes differently 110 in the kitchen of The Member of the Wedding; it does not quite move chronologically, but is, as Dangerfield describes, anticipatory and backward looking. It is the time of melancholia, perched out of teleological time. As an instance of melancholy utopia, the kitchen frisson does not overturn existing power imbalances, nor does it leave any record. Rather, in its engagement with affective structures of feeling and longing, the kitchen resistance performed by the “we” of Frankie, Berenice, and John Henry is an agentic transformation that is unconventional and impermanent. What the kitchen conversations of The Member of the Wedding illustrate is that there are ways to opt out of conventional understandings of grief, gender, and kinship without retreating from the realm of the social altogether. Agency and the capacity for transformation are often articulated in materialist terms, but the resistance of Frankie, Berenice, and John Henry does not look like a conventional mode of revolt. There is an anti-capitalist logic at play in their kitchen that disrupts and resists the flow of domestic work and social convention. This kitchen outburst lives only in the present and quickly dissipates moments later, never to be spoken of again—leaving an invisible yet indelible trace.

Another Kitchen: Gummo

Stepping into the decaying linoleum kitchen in Korine’s independent film Gummo

(1997), we have undoubtedly left behind the “old kitchen ways” of The Member of the

Wedding. Notwithstanding the fifty years and difference in genre separating these two works,

Korine’s first feature film also hones in on the restlessness of adolescence and the melancholia of kinship. In analyzing Gummo, I will focus on one scene in particular where a 111 group of friends is assembled in a kitchen during a house party. There, they proceed to smash and kick a kitchen chair as though it were a longtime enemy, cheering at its annihilation. The mix of euphoria and frustration unleashed upon this inanimate object is unexpected—who or what are they fighting?—and this element of invisibility resonates in revealing ways with the tearful kitchen outburst in The Member of the Wedding.

Korine’s storytelling is non-linear and he mixes media in a cinema vérité style, the result of which is a discontinuous series of snapshots of dreary adolescent life that visually skirts the line between documentary and fiction. In his first auteurist sleight of hand, Korine blurs fiction and reality by filming Gummo in his native Nashville, Tennessee—deep in the

American South—but chooses to set the film in the midwest, in the small town of Xenia,

Ohio. Next, Korine offers the primal scene of the town’s economic and moral decay. In a scratchy voice-over narration at the film’s very beginning we learn that the town has lost most of its fathers in a tornado.37 As a consequence of this lack of patriarchs, Gummo presents an alternative portrait of intimacy and kinship in small town America where the nuclear family is nowhere to be found and has been replaced by new adolescent communities of care. Following from Frankie’s fantastical re-imaginings of affiliation and her queer wishing, I will turn to Gummo and consider further how modes of kinship are reformulated when patrilineal structures of family and desire are uprooted and psychic life is left open to interpretation.

37 The middle-America setting of the film, combined with a mythical tornado, recalls, as Tom Austin O’Connor notes, “the Kansas scenes in The Wizard of Oz (1939)” (9). There was also a real tornado that hit Xenia in 1974: a “fact” that lends a false sense of reality to Korine’s fictional world (White 116). 112

In Gummo, the viewer is dropped in medias res into Xenia’s fatherless world where new systems and libidinal arrangements are constantly unfolding. Although the loss of the town’s paternal figures is both mourned and celebrated in certain moments, Korine resists the temptation to revel in a triumphant “end” of patriarchal relations. Without denying the absent center of the Oedipal arrangement, Korine depicts how the lack of fathers allows for alternative bonds of intimacy, sociality, and affect to take hold. Lacking the constraints of normative family structures, the film’s adolescent subjects roam the town freely, earning their own modest incomes, authoring their own erotic portraits, and releasing their aggression on animals and inanimate objects—but, notably, rarely onto each other. I am interested in the ways in which grief and resistance are negotiated in the film, not just the grief of this primary scene of trauma (of losing the father), but also the myriad other melancholic identifications characters have in the film: being poor in America, being queer in America, being black in America, being disabled in America, simply being a teenager in

America.

Gummo follows a cast of characters who live in trailer parks and dilapidated houses.

Garbage-strewn streets and highway overpasses serve as the backdrop for the film’s young characters, from the skateboarder who inexplicably wears fuzzy pink rabbit ears, to the three sisters Darby, Helen, and Dot (the latter played by Chloë Sevigny, one of the film’s only professional actors), and two teens Solomon and Tummler who search for ways to foil their nemesis Jarrod. There are numerous other subjects who come in and out of Gummo, the majority of whom Korine says he cast from local Walmarts and Burger Kings. The film’s origin tale of its non-professional actors—cast locally, living poor—suggests that Gummo is 113 also interested in emphasizing the role of fantasy in a mise-en-scène of poverty. Take for instance Darby, Helen, and Dot, who celebrate their changing bodies and talk about their growing sexual appetites in the privacy of their shared, shabby bedroom. Their bedroom has the trappings of teenage life from posters to stuffed animals, dirty clothes, and scattered pieces of make-up. But despite their own relative sense of comfort and emotional safety, when they leave the house they are confronted by an adult man who punctures the dreamy haze of their intimacy when he tries to pick them up for sex and repeatedly calls them

“trash” when they decline. They successfully defend one another from his advances and hiss and scream at the aggressor who keeps yelling at them: “[sex] is nothing new for trash like you!” In a reversal of conventional stories of sexual assault and burgeoning feminine desire, the sisters are emboldened instead of scared. Undeterred by the adult man’s insults and attempted assault, they continue their sexual exploration elsewhere and on their own terms, and they remain the authors of their sexual development. For example, one of Gummo’s last scenes is framed by the non-diegetic sounds of Roy Orbinson’s “Crying,” and shows Helen and Dot splashing and kissing a teenaged boy in a swimming pool. Their encounter is impish and playful, altogether lacking the aggression and disdain of the earlier run-in.

***

Korine’s film was lambasted by critics when it premiered in 1997, and I would argue that was the case precisely because it is grounded more firmly in fantasy than in reality. To talk about poverty and to reflect on race in America is a contentious move for a white independent filmmaker, and not devoid of politics—but what seemed to upset Gummo’s early reviewers, such as The New York Times’ Janet Maslin, was Korine’s representation of 114 poverty and race through fantasy rather than the pragmatic. The insult of Gummo for its early critics was that it aestheticized poverty without presenting a solution or project of revitalization. It was not fantastical in a science-fiction sort of way, but in a banal one. As

Benjamin Halligan explains in New Punk Cinema (2005), “Gummo met with widespread criticism and condemnation upon its release; many felt Korine exploited the dispossessed that he filmed—offering a questionably voyeuristic experience masquerading as an exposé” (182). Thomas Carl Wall notes that The Motion Picture Association of America issued Gummo an “unprecedented ‘R-restricted’ designation for nihilism” (312), and even sympathetic critics, like Adrian Gargett who otherwise saw artistic value in Korine’s film, charged it with “idiotic and shockingly brutal incidents of teenage criminality” (Gargett).

Without mincing her derision, Maslin called Korine a wunderkind “turned loose with a camera and the Emperor’s new clothes,” whose “aimless vision of Midwestern teen-age anomie” was not worth her time or that of her readers. She wrote hyperbolically that “no cockroach wrangler was needed for ‘Gummo’: Mr. Korine just shot the film on genuinely filthy sets. Dirt is no crime, but willful stupidity should be.” She named Gummo “the worst film of the year” and scoffed at Korine’s decision to cast nonprofessional actors, referring to them pejoratively as “freakish individuals.” Maslin concluded that Gummo “wallows so indulgently in the lives of its dead-ended characters that it shows none of the tough pathos behind ‘Kids.’”38

38 Maslin’s preference for Larry Clark’s “vastly better” Kids (1995), whose script was written by a nineteen year old Korine, is telling. There, teenage boys loiter across the island of Manhattan in a haze of pot smoke and middle-class privilege spreading AIDS while Clark’s camera lingers on their half-naked bodies with an unfettered voyeurism. The only redeeming component of Gummo for Maslin was the choice of “the estimable” French cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier as director of photography, who she hastens to note has worked with heavy weight directors Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader. 115

Korine does not offer up a political polemic on wealth disparity in the United States, but rather he delves into the psychic lives of bored teenagers to see what might dwell there.

Embracing the range of bodies and affects of his subjects, Korine creates a world devoid of a heterosexual imperative, which enables queerness and transgendered identities to claim space on screen. In Gummo, the town of Xenia is an economic failure and a scourge of liberalism’s fantasies of American prosperity. But, importantly, it presents an unthreatening place where disabled, aging, female, ill, transgendered, albino, and racialized bodies co-exist for the most part with relative ease.

In formal terms, Korine relies on the use of handheld cameras, fragments of Super 8 and 35mm film footage, polaroid photography, discontinuous narrative, and other experimental and destabilizing techniques to make visual the interior worlds and social dynamics of his characters. Unlike Maslin, I see the film as portraying neglect without judgment, and as making poverty an object of study without trying to pathologize or correct it. Like John Cassavetes, one of Korine’s noted influences, Korine cast friends, non- professional actors, and himself in Gummo to achieve the immediacy of the cinema vérité style (White 115). Korine once said in an interview that “there’s no such thing as realism in film…I’m only concerned with the poetry of realism, a supposed realism, and that’s what

Gummo is” (Ramos 1997).39 The film’s “supposed realism,” with its layered uses of media and its nonlinear structure, perplexed mainstream audiences, and Korine’s unadorned style

39 Korine was not interested in clarifying his casting process or any other part of his directorial vision to his critics. In the interviews he did to “promote” Gummo (on The David Letterman Show for example) Korine gave nonsensical answers to questions, choosing instead to recount his recent dreams and to spin tales of his Trotskyite parents. From these interviews he has come to be known for his slippery public persona and playful manipulation of biographical facts. 116 came at once too close to reality and not near enough for his detractors.

Kitchen Revolt

Much of Gummo is focused on moments of autonomy such as the one experienced by

Darby, Helen, and Dot that toy with unreality and successful revenge (a gleeful and easy escape from a potential pedophile). This vignette of the sisters reveals the film’s interest in off-beat bonds of kinship that defy patriarchal power dynamics, yet it is the kitchen chair scene that I want to focus on in greater detail. It is a celebratory moment of destruction in a dingy kitchen that, although more enigmatic than the sisters’ plot line, is similar in its emphasis on camaraderie and resistance. The kitchen in Gummo is all white, but with a thick overlay of dirt and grime that is in keeping with the rest of the film. Perhaps it comes as little surprise that there is no eating in Gummo’s unkempt kitchen. The eating that does occur in the film happens outside of the kitchen, and is not associated with homemaking. As if to provoke the audience’s repulsion and inspire a visceral reaction, Korine has one of his central characters, Solomon, eat a plate of spaghetti and tomato sauce while soaking in a bathtub whose water is muddied and brown. Inexplicably, to the left of Solomon’s head, a piece of fried bacon is fastened to the tiled wall above the bathtub with scotch tape.40

The marriage of food, filth, and bathing in this scene inspires an experience of the abject. In Hatred and Forgiveness (2010), Julia Kristeva argues that “aversion to food is the most basic, most archaic form of abjection” (185). There, she talks about the skin that forms

40 In reference to this scene, German director Werner Herzog told The New York Times: “when I saw a piece of fried bacon fixed to the bathroom wall in Gummo, it knocked me off my chair. Korine [is] a very clear voice of a generation of filmmakers that is taking a new position. It’s not going to dominate world cinema, but so what?” (Fuller). 117 on the surface of warm milk as an example of the abject: that which is fascinating and repulsive at the same time. Kristeva contends that the abject is a violent jolt, a reminder of the mother’s body from which we were expelled along with other viscera, and thus the abject is fascinating, unsettling, and it “solicits desire, but desire is not seduced: frightened, it turns away; disgusted, it rejects” (184). This bathtub scene is a reminder of Xenia’s lack of mothers and other adults, and Solomon’s bathing elicits the abject in order to subvert assumptions of how a child ought to be reared, and to sully notions of good housekeeping.41

However, even though Gummo’s kitchen is not being used in the traditional sense as a place where food is prepared and shared, and even though its cupboards may be bare, it remains a site of hospitality and kinship.

The kitchen scene is like most in Gummo: presented without context, one part of a rambling narrative that shares glimpses into the social lives of Xenia’s teenagers. There is very little dialogue between the characters, but subjects on the outside of the lopsided circle shout words of encouragement as two white men (one scrawny, one brawny, both shirtless) take turns smashing a metal and plastic-upholstered chair into the kitchen floor. A thin, raspy voiced woman wearing a bandana sits cross-legged on the only other chair in the room and cheers them on, saying “get him! Get him dead!” The taller of the two men then takes the chair above his head and slams it into the floor, throwing the weight of his body into it. The upholstered upper half of the chair pops out of its frame and flies toward the leering woman, narrowly missing her and landing on the linoleum floor. The skinnier of the two men

41 Solomon does spend time with his mother at one point in the film, but it is not a scene of maternal care. She tap dances in the basement in her dead husband’s shoes while Solomon solemnly lifts make-shift weights. Holding a gun to the back of Solomon’s head she half-jokingly threatens: “smile! You came out of my womb, and I’ll stick ya right back in my womb if you don’t smile!” 118 launches into his own assault on what remains of the chair and knocks out the rest of the upholstery by thrusting his bent knee into the seat. The atmosphere is gleeful as the motley group of friends watch the men destroy the chair as though they were engaged in a televised

WWF match. They complete their shared destruction of the chair and one of the men throws its mangled remains into an overflowing garbage can, spitting a mouthful of beer onto it, completing the disposal with a flourish that elicits even more laughter. He rests back against the wall of the kitchen with folded arms and loosely crossed ankles, a look of satisfaction on his face.

It is a striking scene, full of bravado and mirth—and likely not initially read as a utopian space. But as the characters stand in a circle enclosing the destructive act of their friends, something unexpected happens: aggression is diffused and sociality is rendered non- threatening for all bodies present. On the edge of this scene is one of the film’s only African

American subjects (played by non-professional actor Bryant L. Crenshaw whose credit reads

“Midget”), a little person whose dwarfism has him stand in visible contrast to his able- bodied peers. There is a sense of threat that permeates this kitchen encounter, the potential that one of the more visibly different bodies (the thin woman’s or the 4’10” black man’s) will bear the brunt of the group’s aggression. But they do not, and the fight is a victimless crime. The African American man in this scene is one of the only black subjects in a film representing predominantly the white poor. But it is not just the tone of his skin that marks him as different, and it is not just his extremely small stature either, but also the white t-shirt that he wears with the Star of David, referencing Judaism; later in the film he will also divulge his homosexuality. Coded as a site of intersecting differences in race, bodily ability, 119 religion, and desire, the man is by all accounts over-determined—as a site of interpretation he frustrates a simple reading. In this way, Korine renders him a figure that is deliberately resistant to interpretation, yet impossible to ignore.

As a gay, Jewish, black dwarf in the American South he resists visual legibility and signification (we cannot tell simply by looking at him what his character “means” or symbolizes. Is he one of these identities? Is he meant to be read as all of them at once?). One possible reading of this black character is that his impenetrability—the challenge he poses to interpretation—is a disavowal of race. That is, Korine’s choice to mark the black subject hyperbolically as other could be understood as an act of excessive obfuscation: one could argue that he relegates one of the only people of color in the film to the clouded depths of alterity; this little man has too many identities at once and is thus inscrutable. However, I do not think this resistant subject of interpretation ought to be understood as a symbol of impenetrable otherness.

I would like to suggest that his inscrutability is an aesthetic strategy and a mode of black resistance—what Daphne Brooks in Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of

Race and Freedom (2006) has termed “opacity.” Here, the character’s opacity disrupts the flow of white desire that surrounds him. However, what marks this scene as different from those in other texts where black characters resist the alienating conditions of white, racist worlds is this character’s clear camaraderie with the group. That this enigmatic character remains unharmed in this scene—and more than that—that he is a heckling part of this surge of aggression, suggests that the other may be opaque, he may be a complex palimpsest of overlapping identities, but he need not be cast off as inscrutable. I read him as I do the other, 120 equally confounding characters in the kitchen, as indicating a moment in which the film acknowledges the difficulties with interpretation: particularly, the complex inheritance of classism and racism in the South in a space (the kitchen) that is symbolic of these tensions.

In considering the complexity of this highly coded body, it might prove productive to turn to Rosarmie Garland-Thomson. Writing about representations of disability in American culture, Garland-Thomson reveals how often the disabled are depicted as exotic aliens

“whose bodily configurations operate as spectacles” (9). But in Gummo, although

Crenshaw’s dwarfism (a recognized condition under the Americans with Disabilities Act) has him stand in juxtaposition to the larger bodies around him, he is not the spectacle. Garland-

Thomson contends that “the disabled figure operates as a code for insufficiency, contingency, and abjection—for deviant particularity—thus establishing the contours of a canonical body that garners the prerogatives and privileges of a supposedly stable, universalized normalcy” (136). In Korine’s film, abjection and contingency belong to all bodies (including spaghetti-eating Solomon and the kitchen chair wrestlers), and not only to those of the differently-abled. There is no privilege, no stability, and certainly no

“universalized normalcy” in the world of Xenia, and thus the film does not instantiate the problematic depictions of disability that Garland-Thomson finds (and derides) in so much of

America’s cultural productions. Along closely related lines, anthropologist Robert Murphy writes that disability is incorrectly understood as “a social malady,” where disabled bodies are seen as “subverters of an American Ideal, just as the poor are betrayers of the American

Dream”—rogue citizens whose bodies are a form of treason (qtd. in Garland-Thomson 41).

All of Gummo’s characters are the subverters and betrayers that Murphy evokes. And even 121 though there is little somatic similarity among them, in the words of Garland-Thomson:

“their shared experience of stigmatization creates commonality” (15).

Although it may seem that two white men unleashing aggression is a reiteration of patriarchal power (it is a familiar image that appears to repeat a typical, masculinist power dynamic), I argue that in this instance, and in the broader context of Gummo, this unlikely wrestling match is a distorted mirroring and dissembling of patriarchal power. The white male violence that is depicted in this scene is not a reiteration of existing power hierarchies but is rather a mimicking of patriarchal power that is rendered impotent. In part, this reading stems from the characters’ “shared experience of stigmatization,” an experience of marginalization that produces a kinship among them, and which is evidenced by the black man’s safe inclusion as an observer in the kitchen spectacle. A conventional image of masculinist aggression is reflected in this kitchen scene, but its power is diffused instead of reiterated when the “fight” unfolds without harm to the more socially precarious bodies in the room. Following the patriarchal conventions (in film as in life) that many of us have become inured to, the spectator might have a preconceived idea of who ought to be hurt in a scene such as this. But when no body gets hurt, it is the spectator’s assumptions about violence that are laid bare. Remember that a similar subversion of the viewer’s expectations of violence occurs in the scene with the three sisters and the aggressive stranger. There, the middle class man’s assumption is that casual sex is “nothing new” for poor, white “trash” like them. The girls not only prove this assumption to be false, but when they effortlessly and happily escape the man, they also subvert the audience’s unspoken expectation of their sexual assault. 122

Moreover, it is important to contextualize this kitchen scene with the two aggressive men within the larger project of Gummo, which, as an independent film, is itself on the margins of the cultural mainstream and Hollywood convention. With a small budget (an estimated 1.3 million dollars), and limited distribution and box office sales (grossing a mere

$87,400 domestically), Korine’s debut film was a commercial failure (IMDb). Yet, as we can deduce from the film’s poor critical reception and Korine’s playful manipulation of the truth in his public appearances to “promote” the film, the director was not interested in Gummo’s commercial success or in its adherence to cinematic convention. Gummo is a film text on the fringes of a capitalist industry that is dominated by big budgets and well-worn and problematic depictions of violence and racism.42 Gummo’s formal characteristics and non- linear editing are further evidence that Korine was not interested in making a film that followed convention, but rather which played with viewer assumptions. Significantly, Korine was not in the room when this chair scene was shot, and his hierarchal position as director was excluded from the space. Korine’s decision to remain outside of the kitchen was likely aimed at achieving a sense of immediacy characteristic to the cinema vértié style, but it also effaces the patriarchal role of director from the characters’ encounter with the chair, leaving only the trace of Korine’s absence.43

42 North America’s cinematic history has no shortage of racist stereotypes and depictions—from America’s first feature-length film, D.W. Griffith’s explicitly racist The Birth of a Nation (originally titled The Clansman) in 1915, to Song of The South (1946), through the Shirley Temple films of the 1930s and 40s with their obvious anxieties over miscegenation, to Mickey Rooney in yellow face in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), and to the wealth of “white savior” films that proliferate today, such as The Last Samurai (2003) with Tom Cruise. In its representation of race relations, Korine’s independent film can hardly be said to resemble its Hollywood counterparts. 43 When interviewed by Tod Lippy, Korine described this experience of listening to the scene from the other side of the door, where he wondered: “what if the chair won? What would the man feel if the seat cushion of the chair got the better of him, of if he got tangled up in its legs and felt that his opponent, although not necessarily alive, had been too worthy an adversary? I imagine the man’s self-worth would diminish if the chair stood there bent and laughing” (269). 123

Indeed, there is no pinning down or mastering a film as discontinuous and formally fragmented as Gummo. The unintelligibility of character and chair cause the viewer to discard the subject-object binary (men vs. furniture) and to look instead at how bodies interact together in space. With their flailing limbs and curse words, the two men in the center of the circle are engaged in a phenomenological rather than pragmatic struggle—they are wrestling an absence, a ghost. As Wall remarks, “they cheer loudly as a chair is dismantled…and then idly stare at the debris as if searching for the significance of what they had done” (313). It does not seem to disconcert anyone in the room that the two shirtless men choose not to direct the brunt of their anger onto a sentient form. Instead, the small crowd jeers in encouragement and personifies the chair as “that motherfucker,” and “that piece of shit,” remaining unconcerned with the absence of a physical foe.

What exactly is being fought or resisted in this scene is never named in the film: it could be the disenfranchisement that these subjects experience, it could be their grinding poverty, or it might be something more elusive, such as a historical trauma. As Fredric

Jameson suggests, “what hurts…can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as some reified force” (102). What hurts is not always visible, a truth that Gummo’s kitchen revolt renders palpable. In this particular scene, we see dual acts of haunting and imagination as the ghosts of the southern kitchen are consigned to oblivion and, with them, patriarchal assumptions of how kinship ought to look. Rather than a tidy parable of how new modalities of relation may emerge in a post-Oedipal world, Korine offers only fleeting moments of utopian possibility, and they are moments characterized by loss, not by perfection. In this post-Oedipal landscape, there is a radical potentiality that emanates from 124 the microcosm of Xenia that is born of its lack. This is not to say that the film presents to its viewer a utopia where all formerly entrenched systems of power have been overturned or where social equality reigns. No, there is not a safe space for every one in Gummo. The film presents the spectator with scenes of aggression, with power imbalances, and with the threat, more than once, of gendered violence. Instead of a meticulously plotted dream world where problems or issues have been resolved, the utopian impulse of Gummo’s alternative kinship structures is undeniably a work in progress.

Yet, Gummo’s kitchen scene generates a new analogy for kinship and negative affects.

The film suggests that the dissembling of the patriarchal may begin with the creation of new collectivities and reconfigured modes of social kinship. As Kaja Silverman (2009) has noted, we cannot change the past, nor erase its histories of subjugation, but we can generate new analogies for how we conceive of the past in our present moment. Korine deploys affect to reengage with histories of pain, both racialized and gendered. Hence, by creating analogies between subjects and their spaces (even those with heavy historical burdens like that of the southern kitchen), there lies the possibility that the repetition compulsion of the patriarchal can be broken.

With the collapse of the patriarchal in mind, I want to argue that Gummo successfully dislodges the Oedipal arrangement and its centrality to kinship. This dislodging is manifest throughout the film in scenes of off-kilter social formations, and yet it does not change material realities. This is to say, depicting a world on screen that is devoid of patriarchal hierarchies does not bring that world immediately into being. The men’s smashing of the chair does not result in a sustained and lasting breakdown of patriarchy, but the film does 125 nonetheless give the viewer new ways of interpreting kinship relations and re-imagining communities of care. The film’s freedom from the circumscription of hegemonic family relations and social structures allows for original interpretations and analogies of belonging to emerge. Gummo’s scenes may be discontinuous, and the film may very well “wallow indulgently in the lives of its dead ended characters” as Maslin accuses, but in its rejection of an overarching, coherent narrative, it presents the spectator with a fantasy of alternative kinship in which to linger. From the remains of a painful national history of racism, economic disparity, ableism, and homophobia, Korine allows for a queer community of kinship to momentarily flourish. This radically diverse collectivity dislodges the Oedipal stronghold of normative kinship relations and turns toward new forms of intimacy that avow bodily, psychic, and sexual difference.

Generating New Social Analogies

In this chapter, I have considered some of the alternatives opened up by melancholy utopia. Such as: how are grief and the rejection of happiness negotiated in this space, and what does psychic resistance look like? In McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding and

Korine’s Gummo, characters engage in this work of re-imagining one’s relationship to loss and interpretation. Each text’s unconventional approach to time, melancholia, and normative desire results in small moments of resistance that lead to queer relational transformations— they are emotional outbursts that register the non-visible nature of loss and its psychic effects. The counterhegemonic character of the melancholy utopia fosters a space to hold onto melancholic attachments, but it also fosters modalities of resistance to the containment 126 and management of affective life. Frankie’s kitchen dreaming allows for her, Berenice, and

John Henry to articulate what they long for the most, from acceptance to queer love, while

Gummo’s characters are able to express anger without hurting one another or having to name the source of their frustration.

We tend to think of the psyche as a site primarily of alienation and existential strife, but our interior worlds can also be a space of collective reimagining and endless potentiality.

In both The Member of the Wedding and Gummo, the characters’ kitchen outbursts present the possibility of assuming a collective rather than alienating relationship to loss and forgetting. These transient spaces of reorientation in both the novella and the film awaken the characters to desires and frustrations that have otherwise lain dormant for them. These characters are permitted to linger with their negative affects and to belong on their own terms. Unconcerned with the constraints of time and the normative demands on affective life, these southern kitchens become spaces of counterhegemonic resistance. That radical moments occur in the kitchen is symptomatic of the fraught histories of gender, class, and race tensions in the American South. Consequently, to tarry in the southern kitchen is to sit with the spectres of an abject past. However, the kitchen spaces in McCullers’s and Korine’s texts do more than contain painful histories. More importantly, these kitchens also engage the realm of fantasy. In so doing, McCullers and Korine project worlds beyond the restrictive

Oedipal one—where young adults are left to form their own social pacts, to vent their frustrations without object or consequence, and to explore gender and desire. Some critics designate femininity in the kitchen as a state of captivity or repression, but I argue that the 127 feminine and queer in the texts’ back-of-house are fleeting but radical disruptions of the patriarchal, rather than concessions to it.

To return to the question of exile and intimacy which opened this chapter, we can say that while both McCullers and Korine left their native southern states for New York City, each continued to reflect on their southernness in their art long after their departures. Phelan suggests that “the document of a performance…is only a spur to memory, an encouragement of memory to become present,” and we might say that the South remained this “spur to memory” for these migrating artists (146). Their texts are documents that encourage a resurfacing of memory in the present moment. This melancholic time (awry, anticipatory, confused) enables the kitchen dreaming we see in The Member of the Wedding and the collective revolt of Gummo. Yes, there are feelings of confinement expressed in the kitchen, and certainly, the kitchen is traditionally a domestic space sullied by servitude. However, as I have argued, the kitchen is also a space of radical inversions. The kitchens in McCullers’s and Korine’s texts allow for new forms of relation to be imagined and performed alongside the ghosts of racism and servitude that also reside there. The Member of the Wedding and

Gummo occupy this historically charged space in order to reformulate kinship models, to express psychic frustrations, and to make room for utopian longing.

128

Chapter Three

David Foster Wallace and The Melancholy Utopia of Articulation

It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

—Elizabeth Bishop “One Art”

IT IS IN YOUR SELF-INTEREST TO FIND A WAY TO BE VERY TENDER.

—Jenny Holzer

By highlighting the utopian fantasies that inhere in melancholia I have argued in the two last chapters for its revolutionary and transformative capacities. To that end, I have insisted that the intimate nature of psychic revolt and the radical potential of imagining the world otherwise is important to consider, but I have also emphasized that I do not want to glorify the struggle of the melancholic subject. In this chapter I will analyze the late David

Foster Wallace’s short story “Good Old Neon” (2004) and consider how his personal struggle with depression and his fears about the potential for navel gazing in therapy inform his melancholic fiction. “Good Old Neon” is narrated from the perspective of a dead man who recounts the events leading up to his suicide: it takes the reader deep into the folds of a melancholic mind and in so doing asks her to rethink her ideas about finitude and vulnerability. 129

I have said that what melancholia and utopia have in common is a refusal—a stubborn fidelity—to forfeit an ideal. Wallace, as I show in this chapter, refused to give up the hope that art, and the act of articulation in particular, could save him from the solipsism of his own impossibly sharp mind. For Wallace, who lived with depression and addiction for most of his life, solipsism was something to fear and introspection threatened to devolve into a hellish narcissistic loop if he was not careful. Fiction and his interest in imagining the intricacies and neuroses of another person’s interior life was arguably a way of diffusing the acute sense of alienation that he lived with and that his lifelong struggle with depression exacerbated.

I argue that while Wallace had anxieties about being trapped in his own thoughts, he also understood that keen insights about social and psychic life could be gleaned from melancholia. Wallace sought to lay bare the neuroses, patterns, and desires at home in psychic life and to plunge his readers deep into the mind of the other. The act of articulation itself was Wallace’s melancholy utopia—not exactly a fantastical refuge from the disappointments of adult life, but a space to explore them in detail; a space where experiences of alienation could be looked at closely, shared, and thereby rendered less isolating through their circulation.

Wallace’s writing is not melancholy utopia in the same way as we have seen it in the fiction of Carson McCullers: he does not dream new worlds where patriarchy has collapsed and racial trauma has begun to fray, for example, nor does he wish away all pain and suffering. Wallace understood suffering and melancholia as a central and necessary part of the human condition. “Part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of 130 suffering,” he told literary critic Larry McCaffrey (127). Wallace continued by saying: “if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own” (127). Wallace refers to the imaginative identification between self and other that fiction makes possible as a “vicarious experience” of suffering (127). Thus, writing fiction was for him an affective utopia to explore the recesses of our collective disappointments. For Wallace, moving beyond solipsism meant becoming aware of the unique interiority of the other. It also meant paying attention to the banalities of quotidian existence—the unsexy ways that people get themselves through the day. His interest in vicarious experience led him to search for and articulate the sublime in the everyday, and to uncover the remarkable in the boring. (“Good

Old Neon” is interested in boredom to some extent but this theme is crystallized in Wallace’s last, unfinished novel The Pale King, published posthumously in 2011). The effect of

Wallace’s commitment to imagining the experience of the other is fiction that is inherently social.

As the stanza from Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art” in the epigraph illustrates, there is a need and a struggle to write about loss and melancholia. If the proposition that you can “master” the “art of losing” is not entirely literal (the poem’s speaker sounds like she is trying to convince herself of this possibility as well as the reader), the process of writing loss certainly is. Yet, to successfully write of grief or sorrow is not so much to have mastered the art of losing, but rather to have moved (if only incrementally) beyond one’s unique and solitary experience of loss. To put grief into words is to make public a private feeling, and there is comfort in that. As Bishop demonstrates with her parenthetical and italicized “(Write 131 it!),” the act of articulation is an urgent one, and it can be a triumph too—hence the exclamation point. Along similar lines, Wallace writes in “Good Old Neon,” “What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant” (151). Yet, sketching the outlines of “one tiny part” of human experience is precisely what Wallace risks in his fiction (151).

The author’s willingness to risk unintelligibility for the sake of a more authentic articulation of the human condition is both melancholic and utopic in nature. That is to say, art becomes the means through which Wallace attempts to render his melancholia less debilitating by tracing its personal contours for a reading public. Wallace’s writing demonstrates his belief in the potential for art to connect his feelings of alienation with those of his readers. In this way, the act of articulation comes from a place of both pain and hope.

Thus, Wallace’s desire to put into words “one tiny part” of human interiority—and to forge a link between his pain and the other—is melancholy utopia. With stories like “Good Old

Neon,” Wallace successfully translates his isolating experience into the broader human context of negative affects and vulnerability. To be more precise, melancholia in Wallace’s fiction is not simply the pain of being hemmed in by depression or existential dread: it is the fear of being totally alone in that pain. Writing was for Wallace an attempt to curb the impoverished feelings of an alienated self and to connect his solitary and oftentimes painful melancholia to a broader experience.

In this chapter I will address key strands of current scholarship on Wallace, particularly the resistance that some critics have to acknowledging his interest in 132 vulnerability and the expression of sentiment. I will discuss Wallace’s archive and his personal library of self-help literature in order to consider how popular psychology relates to his ongoing literary legacy. Following this, I will analyze “Good Old Neon” to show how

Wallace warps temporality in order to access his character’s interiority, how the ironic word

“whatever” (repeated throughout the story) functions to signal sincere affect instead of to obfuscate it, and how the narrator’s resistance to psychoanalysis betrays a curiosity for a therapeutic cure of some kind.

A Split View: The Wallace Criticism

While visiting Wallace’s archived papers in Austin, Texas, I thumbed through the author’s copy of Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005)—a best-selling non- fiction account of how our brains process thoughts by The New Yorker staff writer Malcolm

Gladwell. I was searching for underlined passages, hopeful that I would find a snide margin comment or two about the banality of the prose, the thinness of the argument, or about

Gladwell’s penchant for pithiness (“insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out”). I knew that Wallace had loved television, movies (his review of Terminator 2 remains one of the best there is), and that he consumed popular culture willingly and often, so it was not that I assumed he would turn up his nose at Blink. Yet, I was expecting that Wallace—fascinated by the complexity of human thought and dedicated to philosophical investigations into concepts like infinity—would have had at least some sarcastic bons mots for a pop writer like Gladwell who simplifies his subject matter to a series of soundbites. I found none. 133

The conception I had of Wallace as a humorous but unforgiving social ironist is a popular one. Hence, I went into the archive expecting the trenchant, even acerbic cleverness that Wallace displays in much of his fiction and non-fiction writing. The Wallace I was expecting to find was the same one who comically skewers the luxury cruise industry and its simulated fantasies of relaxation in his essay for Harper’s (later republished as “A

Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” [1997]). This sarcastic Wallace recounts hearing “upscale adult U.S. citizens ask the ship’s Guest Relations Desk whether snorkeling necessitates getting wet” and describes a general unease with the notion of pre-packaged tourism and American gluttony. Or, perhaps I was expecting to find the satirical Wallace of

Infinite Jest (1996)—his 1,079 page novel that is, in part, about a video so entertaining that people would die of hunger and thirst rather than stop watching it.

Wallace is often thought of as a cynic, a cocky author whose immense talent was forged in the fires of postmodernism and in the verbose tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Don

DeLillo, Donald Barthelme, and John Barth. This has led some critics to declare that “for all its peerless pyrotechnics, [Wallace’s writing] lacked heart. It was writing for young men too clever for their own good, by a youngish man way, way too clever for his” (Adams).

Catherine Nichols, Stephen J. Burn, Tim Armstrong, and Robert C. Hamilton have all aligned Wallace with postmodernism’s extending influence and have emphasized his kinship to the literary movement’s founding fathers.44 Marshall Boswell, one of the earliest and most prolific scholars of Wallace studies, argued in 2003 that the author confidently situates

44 See for example Nichols’s “Dialogizing Postmodern Carnival: David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest” (2001); Burn’s 2011 review of Consider David Foster Wallace edited by David Hering; Armstrong’s “Man in a Sidecar: Madness, Totality and Narrative Drive in the Short Story” (2012); and Hamilton’s “‘Constant Bliss in Every Atom’: Tedium and Transcendence in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King” (2014). 134 himself “as the direct heir to a tradition of aesthetic development that began with the modernist overturning of nineteenth-century bourgeois realism and continued with the postwar critique of modernist aesthetics” (1).

According to Boswell, Wallace saw himself as a part of the literary genealogy of modernism and postmodernism. Yet Boswell also insists that “Wallace proceeds from the assumption that both modernism and postmodernism are essentially ‘done’” (1). As he asserts, Wallace’s “work moves resolutely forward while hoisting the baggage of modernism and postmodernism heavily, but respectfully, on its back” (1). This is an example of the kind of machismo that runs through much of the scholarship: Boswell portrays Wallace as a man’s man, a hulking figure “hoisting” heavy literary movements and flipping them into submission.

Boswell—the editor of three collections on Wallace—consistently paints the author in these hyper-masculine strokes. Moreover, he is dismissive of the moments of vulnerability in Wallace’s writing. For instance, when The Pale King was published in 2011 Boswell

(2012) bemoaned shortly thereafter the existence of an “unfortunate popular conception of

Wallace as a technically dazzling and intellectually sophisticated writer of self-help narratives designed to ‘save us’ from solipsism, loneliness, addiction, and so on” (465). Not only is Wallace a brooding wrestler of a writer in Boswell’s portrait, but Boswell balks at the idea of reading emotion or hope in Wallace’s writing. Boswell blames the introduction to

The Pale King, written by Wallace’s long-time editor Michael Pietsch, for presenting the novel as a study in boredom and awareness instead of as Wallace at his most political.

Boswell complains: “nowhere in his introduction does [Pietsch] touch upon the novel’s 135 political concerns” (465). Wallace’s interest in boredom is not anathema to his “political concerns,” but Boswell assumes here that the two are incompatible.

Yet Boswell does not always look for proxies for his critique of Wallace’s emotionality. Sometimes he goes directly after Wallace himself. For instance, he censures

Wallace for his sentimentality in a commencement address that he delivered to the graduating class at Kenyon College in 2005. This speech, which, after Wallace’s death, was published as a short book entitled This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant

Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (2009), is Wallace at his most frank and accessible. He offers advice to the new graduates about learning to practice awareness and about avoiding the trap of “basic self-centeredness” that comes naturally to all of us. It is, as its cumbersome title suggests, a heartfelt reflection on compassion and cohabitation—on how to be empathetic in an apathetic world that is inundated by more screens and distractions than ever before. Aware of the hazards of slipping into cliché, Wallace asks his audience to “bracket for just a few minutes [their] skepticism about the value of the totally obvious” and to consider that “in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance.”

Here, Wallace risks his reputation as an ironist to defend quotidian platitudes. Yet, despite the clarity with which Wallace makes optimistic claims in his speech (“You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship”),

Boswell reduces the Kenyon address to an anomaly in Wallace’s oeuvre. For Boswell, the speech fuels that “unfortunate popular conception of Wallace” as a sentimental writer (2012:

465). Yet, I think it is an exaggeration to say that the “popular conception of Wallace” is of a 136 sentimentalist. As I will soon demonstrate, those closest to Wallace argue that critics and scholars have been reticent to acknowledge the author’s interest in vulnerability. Boswell’s claim that the dominant conception of Wallace is of a sentimental writer reveals the literary critic’s distaste for the popular more than it reveals anything about Wallace as an author. It is as though a conception of Wallace drawn from his Kenyon College speech or from Pietsch’s introduction to The Pale King is wrongheaded simply by virtue of its popularity. Clearly, this popular version of Wallace does not align with Boswell’s preferred image of Wallace as a political, macho writer.

Another critic who like Boswell seems to want to preserve an image of Wallace as a

“serious” and unsentimental writer is Burn. And like Boswell, Burn wishes to distance critical analysis of Wallace’s work from the author’s more hopeful or sentimental statements.

Also an editor of many Wallace collections—some co-edited with Boswell—Burn makes totalizing claims about the status of Wallace Studies that reflect a shared viewpoint with

Boswell. Although Burn acknowledges that Wallace’s writing invites plural viewpoints (or, in his words: “theoretical lenses find a rich breeding ground” in “the kaleidoscopic nature of the Wallacian text”), he also suggests that there is little room left at the table of Wallace

Studies for new approaches (xii). Burn writes:

Although the coming years will likely bring variorum editions, juvenilia, and

perhaps newly discovered short stories, such additions will fill out the total body of

his work, but will surely be little more than adjuncts to a fictional project that is

now already complete. At this point, much of the ground-clearing critical work on

Wallace’s fiction has also been completed. (x) 137

Not coincidentally, this “ground-clearing” work has been “completed” by Boswell and Burn.

Burn’s assurance that future critical scholarship will be “little more than adjuncts” to

Wallace Studies is exemplary of his narrow and territorial approach to Wallace scholarship. I do not think it is a stretch to conclude from comments such as these, then, that new approaches (especially those that are interested in teasing out the author’s complex relationship to melancholia and vulnerability) will be dismissed by Wallace scholars like

Boswell and Burn.

Boswell and Burn both present Wallace as serious, unsentimental, and as an unfortunate victim of scholarship that is less rigorous than their own. But a second, a contrasting, view regards Wallace as being interested both in fiction’s redemptive possibilities and in creating an emotional connection with his readers. Wallace’s widow, the multimedia artist Karen Green, said in an interview after her husband’s death that

“cleverness, particularly for someone as clever as David, is the hardest thing to give up. It’s like being naked, or getting married as opposed to having one-night stands. People don’t want to be thought of as sentimental. Writers don’t anyway” (qtd. in Adams). But it seems like Wallace was willing to at least consider the potentialities of sentimentality, for Green reports that she and Wallace often joked about whether or not he should let his “inner sap” out in his writing: “I thought the inner sap should be allowed out sometimes,” says Green,

“I’d argue that sometimes when a piece of writing, or a piece of artwork is too clever it loses that ability to connect” (qtd. in Adams). Wallace’s friendly rival Jonathan Franzen casts

Wallace in a similar light as Green in his memorial in The New Yorker. Franzen writes that 138

Wallace had “been very explicit, in [their] many discussions of the purpose of novels, about his belief that fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.”

Another champion of Wallace’s “sap” is Zadie Smith—a contemporary and close friend of the author. Smith’s essay, “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: The Difficult Gifts of David Foster Wallace” (2010), serves as a much needed corrective to the Boswell-led criticism that has pushed too quickly, too insistently, to categorize Wallace as a cynic. In an essay and a farewell to her friend after his suicide, Smith writes of Wallace that he was “as interested in communication as he was in finitude,” and that he was, “in the broadest sense, a moralist: what mattered to him most was not the end but the quality of our communal human experience before the end, while we’re still here” (266). She laments that some critics view

Wallace as a writer who feared emotional connection and who hid behind his cleverness.

Instead, according to Smith, the opposite is true: “his stories have it the other way around: they are terrified of the possibility of no emotional connection” (274).

Smith also has qualms with Wallace’s Kenyon commencement address, but not for the same reasons that Boswell does. Smith critiques the marketing of the Kenyon speech after Wallace’s death. Its packaging in a sleek and compact book makes Wallace appear far more pithy and axiomatic than he actually was (or was interested in being). Here, it is worth quoting Smith at length:

This short piece appeared in many newspapers when he died and has recently been

repacked as a Chicken Soup for the Soul-style toilet book (sentences artificially

separated from one another and left, like Zen koans, alone on the page) to be sold

next to the cash register. If you believe the publicity flack, it is here that Wallace 139

attempted to collect ‘all he believed about life, human nature, and lasting fulfillment

into a brief talk’. Hard to think of a less appropriate portrait of this writer than as the

dispenser of convenient pearls of wisdom, placed in your palm, so that you needn’t

go through any struggle yourself. Wallace was the opposite of an aphorist. And the

real worth of that speech (which he never published, which existed only as a

transcript on the Internet) is as a diving board into his fiction, his fiction being his

truest response to the difficulty of staying conscious and alive, day in and day out.

(267)

Smith does not condemn Wallace for the moments where his “inner sap” comes through in the commencement address, and it is not with Wallace’s message that she takes issue. Rather,

Smith sees the speech as bearing the imprints of Wallace’s broader aims as a fiction writer.

She argues for the value of the emotionally vulnerable strands in Wallace’s work, though she understandably regrets their distillation into hokey posthumous “pearls of wisdom.”

The tome that launched Wallace into literary fame, Infinite Jest, encapsulates the complicated and sometimes fractious aspects of the author apparent in the differing scholarly perceptions of him. Infinite Jest is off-putting in its sheer heft. The prose is purposely challenging and labyrinthine (with copious footnotes that extend for pages and contain both pertinent and frivolous details) and can be alienating to read. The novel’s central themes, depression and addiction, may add to this sense of alienation. And yet, many readers approached the demanding text with zeal when it was first published.

After the book’s release, avid fans formed an online reading group and invited people to join them in “Infinite Summer”—a challenge to read Infinite Jest over the summer of 140

2009 between June and September. “Infinite Summer” was an exercise in commitment and diligence (indeed, the group called themselves “endurance bibliophiles”) and the project suggests that a reader might need some encouragement to get to the end of so difficult a text

(infinitesummer.org). (Also telling of the challenging Infinite Jest reading experience is a popular tote bag I have seen slung over the shoulders of many young literati that reads

Endless Bummer—cleverly referencing the summer reading group and the novel’s morose subject matter.) Wallace wanted his readers to make the effort to engage with the text, despite, or maybe because of, its difficulty. He was not interested in merely entertaining, and he challenged people to think more deeply and critically than that. Wallace’s footnotes in particular encourage readers to be aware of the labor of reading instead of being lulled into complacency (like Smith says in her critique above, Wallace was not the type to drop pearls of wisdom without making you work for it, but he did want you to get the pearls).

According to his biographer D.T. Max, to this end, Wallace pushed to include a subtitle to Infinite Jest on the “frontispiece” of the novel that would read: “A Failed

Entertainment” (200). Wallace’s editor did not think this titular promise would help with sales of the novel—who would buy a book that admits its failure to entertain the reader?— and the subtitle was excised from the published version. That final manuscript is a dense, frustrating, and sometimes boring novel about the circularity and frustration of addiction. In its lack of entertainment, it is an exercise in awareness. Form and content mirror one another in Infinite Jest as the reader is denied the escape from reality—or at the very least a lulling parallel to reality—that much of contemporary fiction grants. Instead, a committed reader of

Infinite Jest will find herself, much like the residents of the novel’s halfway house, trying to 141 acclimatize to the tedium of not being entertained and to the new task of attunement. In this respect, reading Infinite Jest can make one aware of how hard it can be to stay focused on one thing, but also how rewarding that focus may prove to be.

In the same breath that Wallace wanted to include a little postmodernist “warning” to his readers about the challenging work of reading Infinite Jest in the form of a frontispiece, he also sincerely cared that they read it. He was not warning off readers, he was inviting readers to proceed with care and attention into the work. For instance, in a letter to DeLillo,

Wallace voiced his concern that no one was actually reading Infinite Jest, but merely talking about it. That is, he worried that the novel was not a Failed Entertainment after all, but rather another glossy and successful one. Wallace wrote DeLillo about his concerns and drew a parallel between the thoughtless hype that his book was garnering and DeLillo’s novel White

Noise (1985). In DeLillo’s novel two characters drive past the Most Photographed Barn in

America: an idyllic outbuilding in a field of sunflowers that no longer serves its original purpose, but instead has garnered touristic appeal because it captures the idealized conception of what a barn in America ought to look like. Wallace explains:

I…tried my best to tell the truth and to be kind to reporters who hadn’t read the

book and wanted only to discuss the “hype” around the book and seemed willfully

to ignore the fact that articles about the hype were themselves the hype (for about a

week there it seemed to me that the book became the Most Photographed Barn,

everyone tremendously excited over the tremendous excitement surrounding a book

that takes over a month of hard labor to read). (qtd. in Max 226) 142

The labor of reading Infinite Jest is not to be taken lightly, according to Wallace. Despite the dense irony of the novel, Wallace was sincere in his writing of it and concerned about (not detached from) its reception with readers. He did not want to be considered a central part of the zeitgeist if the tradeoff was that no one would actually read his work.45

In wanting to be the first to forge the trail of Wallace studies, scholars have hastily declared an all-encompassing narrative of Wallace—a tendency that has only increased in speed and fervor since his death. There may be differing versions of what this unified narrative is (Wallace the Serious Writer or Wallace the Sentimentalist for instance), but scholars and critics on all sides seem certain that theirs is the right one. I would like to find a middle ground between these extremes and to understand in what ways these versions of

Wallace overlap. In The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (1971) the poet and writer A.

Alvarez disparages how when an author commits suicide his or her death “becomes the whole point of the story” (55). Writing in the context of Sylvia Plath’s suicide, Alvarez remarks upon the ways in which critics came to view her poems as ghoulishly validated as

“serious” by her act. It is as though Plath’s decision to commit suicide lent her poems a gravitas that scholars were otherwise blind to. That Plath was a female poet certainly figured into this narrative, and yet there is a similar risk that Wallace’s suicide may overshadow his writing. That is why it is crucial to look at Wallace’s fiction not only from the dominant

45 Echoing these concerns over a decade later in his unfinished novel The Pale King, Wallace has one of his characters, a manager at an IRS processing plant, announce to a group of new employees: Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality—there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth—actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested. (229) If Wallace wanted the subtitle to Infinite Jest to be “A Failed Entertainment,” the subtitle to The Pale King could have been “Entertains No One.” The unfinished work was his most sustained project in awareness and gives insight into the value he found in the recesses of melancholia. You might say that a novel about taxes is as boring as it can get, and yet Wallace saw in the most unlikely places fiction’s potential to transform how we see and are in the world together. 143 perspective of him as an angst-ridden postmodernist. When does Wallace let out his “inner sap?” What happens then? Is writing about melancholia an inherently sappy endeavor?

I will demonstrate how central these more “sappy” moments in Wallace’s writing are to understanding his faith in fiction’s ability to bridge the gap between feeling trapped in the interiority of one’s own mind and the collective experience of being human. As Wallace put it to McCaffery: “I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves” (127). It is here, trapped in one’s own mind but nonetheless trying to articulate that claustrophobia, where melancholia and utopia converge.

I view Wallace’s more emotionally vulnerable or “sappy” texts not as anomalies, but as central to his body of work. After all, the McCaffery interview and the Kenyon College speech took place twelve years apart and thus cannot convincingly be written off as nascent reflections on fiction or naïve talk geared to millennials. Rather, they are examples of

Wallace’s abiding interest in conveying vulnerability through writing and bridging the gap between the self and the other. Wallace told McCaffery that “really good work probably comes out of a willingness to disclose yourself…open yourself up in spiritual and emotional ways that risk making you look banal or melodramatic or naïve or unhip or sappy, and to ask the reader really to feel something” (148-49). Appearing banal “or unhip or sappy” is how

Wallace spoke about sincerity and vulnerability in his fiction, and as I will argue, it is how he approached the task of putting his isolating experience of melancholia into writing.

In his interview with McCaffery, in his Kenyon College speech, and as I will show with “Good Old Neon,” Wallace risks looking banal in his articulation of quotidian 144 challenges and his attention to minute and “unserious” details of everyday life. He did not do away with irony, but his fiction reveals that his signature ironic detachment appears in tandem with sincere attempts to connect to the reader. What Wallace’s subtly optimistic view of writing reveals is that irony and affect do not need to be understood as mutually exclusive.

My focus is on Wallace’s faith in the act of writing and his belief in its ability to connect the individual (who is “marooned in her own skull”) to the world and to the people around her.

Wallace’s Self-Help Library

In 1989 when Wallace was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for addiction he had already written two books (The Broom of the System [1987] and Girl With Curious Hair

[1989]), attempted suicide once, and moved from a habit of smoking marijuana to a debilitating dependency on alcohol. Max recounts that before entering the hospital Wallace was pursuing a graduate degree in philosophy at Harvard, but he “was no longer writing successfully” and was once again suicidal (94). According to Max, not being able to write was the author’s marker of rock bottom and he hoped that if a drunk version of himself could not produce good writing than perhaps “a sober one might” (94).

Wallace’s move from the psychiatric hospital to a halfway house named Granada

House where he began to attend AA meetings proved to be fruitful—both psychologically and literarily. Max writes in The New Yorker that “Granada House was to be the improbable solution to this problem, altering his approach to his work and putting him on the road to producing, in remarkably short order, his masterpiece, Infinite Jest.” Wallace attended recovery meetings and listened to stories of substance abuse, gathering insights for his next 145 novel but also confronting the reality—as relayed to him by hospital staff—that if he continued indulging his addictions he would be dead by the age of thirty.

Wallace’s parodying of therapeutic discourse—particularly psychoanalysis but also other forms of psychotherapy—arguably comes, in part at least, from a fear that the expression of repressed emotions amounts to a form of navel gazing. Although Wallace did not shy away from articulating the pain of being human that he saw contemporary society wanting to ignore, he was clearly anxious about the potential solipsism of recovery and the individualistic work of psychotherapy. His anxiety surrounding self-reflection and the direction in which its insights were moving—hopefully outward, but potentially stagnating within the self—manifests most clearly in his hyperbolic depictions of psychotherapy and his mockery of therapeutic terminology in his fiction. There are traces of Wallace’s disdain for psychoanalysis and psychotherapy throughout his works, from Infinite Jest, to Brief

Interviews with Hideous Men (1999), to “Good Old Neon” that betray this anxiety. As Smith notes, the author was concerned that the language of psychotherapy was “a language meant to heal the self that ends up referring only to the self” (272).

In “The Depressed Person” Wallace mocks the language of psychotherapy but, as

Smith puts it, with “cheap laughs, got too cheaply” (276). Take for example his description of the depressed person’s time spent at the Inner-Child-Focused Experiential Therapy

Retreat Weekend, which

could have represented a real turning point…had the rage and velour-cushion-

pummeling not left the depressed person so emotionally shattered and drained and

traumatized and embarrassed that she had felt she had no choice but to fly back 146

home that night and miss the rest of the I.-C.-F.E.T.R. Weekend and the Small-

Group Processing of all the exhumed feelings and issues. (60)

Here, Wallace repeats therapeutic jargon (“Inner-Child-Focused,” “exhumed feelings and issues”) and deploys clichés (the allegedly cathartic practice of punching pillows) to lay bare the paradox of the therapeutic attempt to heal the self. In this instance, the paradox is that the depressed person goes on a psychotherapy retreat in order to excavate her repressed feelings, but the result of doing so is that she needs to leave and be by herself in order process the excavation of her repressed feelings. She reaches out via psychotherapy in order to feel less alone and ends up needing to be alone in order to recover from psychotherapy. A hellish catch-22.

Even while exaggerations such as these demonstrate some of the cynicism that

Wallace was known for, it is simply too easy to say that his relationship to therapy writ large was one of irreverence. Alcoholics Anonymous offered a more communal and community- based approach to introspection than psychoanalysis for the skeptical Wallace. It is true that the simplicity of the twelve-step program seemed almost absurd to him at times, but Wallace nonetheless found solace in its clear, straightforward structure. Max explains that for Wallace

“order, no matter how foreign the context, was always easier […] than the unstructured world” (96). For Wallace, wanting to make sense of the world and to bring some structure to it included, unsurprisingly, books.

In 2011 a freelance journalist, Maria Bustillos, wrote a long-form essay for the online publication The Awl detailing Wallace’s annotations in his personal collection of self-help books. Wallace owned and heavily annotated a collection of self-help books, which reveal an 147 earnest interest to engage with the pop psychology of writers like Gladwell and others.

Alongside his copies of Gladwell’s Blink and The Tipping Point (2002), Wallace owned and annotated a handful of texts on the themes of self-improvement and psychological self- inquiry. These include Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child (1981), John

Bradshaw’s Bradshaw On: The Family: A Revolutionary Way of Self Discovery (1985),

Ernest Kurtz’s The Spirituality of Imperfection (1992), and The Divided Self (1960) by R. D.

Laing, as well as titles by self-help guru Willard Beecher, psychologist Neil Fiore, holistic health expert Andrew Weil, and inspirational writer and psychiatrist M. Scott Peck.

In her article Bustillos delves into a detailed summary and speculative analysis of a handful of the highlighted passages and annotated margins of Wallace’s self-help books.

Bustillos explains that

there has been a natural reluctance to broach questions surrounding the tragedy [of

Wallace’s suicide] with his family and friends…But there are indications—

particularly in the markings of his books—of Wallace’s own ideas about the sources

of his depression, some of which seem as though they ought to be the privileged

communications of a priest or a psychiatrist. But these things are in a public archive

and are therefore going to be discussed and so I will tell you about them.

Bustillos uses the archive as a way to talk about the author’s depression and eventual suicide. And she covers a lot of ground in her analysis, underscoring the autobiographical aspects of Infinite Jest and Wallace’s cagey responses to his participation in Alcoholics

Anonymous (AA) (“the Eleventh Tradition of AA requires members to refrain from speaking publicly about their affiliation with that organization,” explains Bustillos). She also 148 ruminates at length about what certain underlined passages from Bradshaw’s and Miller’s books could signify in relation to Wallace’s struggles with depression and melancholia.

Speculative in nature, the essay moves back and forth between excerpts from published interviews with Wallace and his personal annotations—or “privileged communications” as Bustillos refers to them. The main thrust of her argument is that the more popular literature in Wallace’s library deserves the same scholarly and critical attention as the Hegel and Wittgenstein. Honing in on the self-help literature, Bustillos concludes that

“along with all the Wittgenstein, Husserl and Borges, he read John Bradshaw, Willard

Beecher, Neil Fiore, Andrew Weil, M. Scott Peck and Alice Miller. Carefully.” Bustillos’s piece is also peppered with assessments of Wallace’s character, drawn from his fiction, his marginalia, and from an interview he gave to Rolling Stone writer David Lipsky in 1996.

Rolling Stone never published the interview and it was only after Wallace’s suicide that

Lipsky turned their conversation into the book Although of Course You End Up Becoming

Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace (2010). This interview was conducted over three days while Lipsky shadowed Wallace at the tail end of his Infinite Jest book tour. The two men spoke about everything from the purpose and function of contemporary American fiction, to Wallace’s desire to be married, to his dogs, to addiction and television.

In his conversation with Lipsky, Wallace says something that resonates with the argument I have made in this chapter: “I just think to look across the room and automatically assume that somebody else is less aware than me, or that somehow their interior life is less rich, and complicated, and acutely perceived than mine, makes me not as good a writer” (41). Here Wallace clearly articulates the point I have emphasized, namely that 149 focusing on the interior life of another person was a way to move beyond the solipsism of his own complicated and melancholic mind. This desire was also about wanting to be a good writer. The kind of writing Wallace described to Lipsky—a sort that does not assume the author’s superiority or his more complex interior life—is exactly the type of fiction Wallace described three years earlier to McCaffrey as “risky.” You will recall that he told McCaffrey that “really good work probably comes out of a willingness to disclose yourself … open yourself up in spiritual and emotional ways that risk making you look banal” (148-49).

Writing that takes an emotional risk makes the author vulnerable to charges of sappiness, and here Wallace insists once more on the necessity of that gamble.

Bustillos’s article is an important acknowledgement of Wallace’s interest in the ordinary, and of his attention to the other in his fiction. However, within a few months of

Bustillos’s article appearing online, a part of the Wallace library collection was removed from The Harry Ransom Center where Wallace’s papers and personal books are archived and available to the public. Responding to news of this archival excision, Bustillos wrote a second post on The Awl website explaining that “it appears that all the books referenced in that piece have since been removed from the Ransom Center’s collection of Wallace’s papers. The collection, which used to contain 320-odd books, now contains 299.” The decision to censor the Wallace archive was made by the Wallace literary estate that is composed primarily of his widow Green, his publisher Little, Brown, and editor Michael

Pietsch, and yet the logic behind which titles were removed remains unclear. For instance, the archive no longer includes the books by Miller or Bradshaw, but Laing’s and Gladwell’s are still accessible, as is An Adult Child’s Guide to What’s “Normal” (1990) by John and 150

Linda Friel, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing

Expectations (1991) by Christopher Lasch, and other self-help books.

Perhaps the marginalia of the withdrawn books was too personal in the minds of the executors of the literary estate or the members of the Wallace family. For instance,

Bustillos’s article drew attention to marginal comments in Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted

Child written in Wallace’s hand that are deeply personal and clearly reference tension in his relationship with his mother. As Bustillos reports, one comment reads: “Becoming what narcissistically-deprived Mom wants you to be—performer” (qtd. in Bustillos). Another comment declares that “it is worse if the parent is smart—she knows what it looks like to be a good, healthy parent” (qtd. in Bustillos). According to Bustillos, Wallace also underlined a sentence that read: “Such a person is usually able to ward off threatening depression with increased displays of brilliance, thereby deceiving both himself and those around him,” and added a comment next to it that said, “Mom fostered this illusion” (qtd. in Bustillos). One can see why the intimate tone of Wallace’s annotations might have prompted the removal of these volumes. In addition, it is possible that those holding the keys to the Wallace papers wanted to preserve an image of the author as “serious” or cynical like his postmodern predecessors.

However, Wallace did not hide his struggle with depression and addiction, and he revealed much of himself in his fiction. The fact that he read and reflected on advice from self-help literatures might not come as a surprise to his readers who have noticed the 151 autobiographical details in Infinite Jest or read his revealing conversation with Lipsky.46 This handful of self-help books (those that were removed and those that remain in the archive) and their marginalia are evidence of the author’s curiosity about the intricacies and obstacles of human relationality. What these books and their annotations could be said to reveal is an author researching pop-psychology for the sake of his fiction, or a man searching for answers to the relational problems and emotional obstacles he faced living with addiction.

More likely, Wallace’s library is proof of both pursuits—an intellectual and personal interest in the bonds and limits of intimacy and the possibilities for a therapeutic “cure.”

For instance, the work of recovery from addiction was something Wallace struggled with and he searched throughout his life for literatures and therapies that could support him.

In Bradshaw On: The Family (one of the books that has been removed from the archive, but whose highlighted passages are preserved in Bustillos’s article), Wallace underlined a passage about Bradshaw’s resistance to seeking help for his addictions. The underlined section reads:

In my previous go round I felt the 12-step program was too simple for me. I had

degrees in theology and philosophy and had taught both of these at the University

level. I felt that my problems were more complex than with most of the people I met

46 The David Foster Wallace Literary Trust has not commented on the choice to rescind part of the collection, but they have spoken out against a recent film adaptation of Lipsky's published conversation with Wallace for Rolling Stone. When production started on the film adaptation, End of the Tour directed by James Ponsoldt, the literary estate released a statement voicing its concerns. The estate says that Lipsky’s “article was never published and David would never have agreed that those saved transcripts could later be repurposed as the basis of a movie” (qtd. in Kellogg). What is significant for the purposes of understanding the excision of part of the library archive is the latter part of the estate’s statement regarding End of the Tour: “Most importantly, The David Foster Wallace Literary Trust and David’s family prefer that David be remembered for his extraordinary writing. The Trust remains open to working with a range of artists who are interested in respectful adaptations, and will vigilantly protect David’s literary and personal legacy” (qtd. in Kellogg). There is a stated preference by the estate of how Wallace’s reputation is to be maintained, and that is by his published writing and not by his personal asides. 152

at the meetings. My drinking was a symptom of a deep and profound sensitive soul.

I was one of William James’ twice-born super-sensitive ones. This, of course, was

all hogwash! Intellectuals create the most grandiose denials! (qtd. in Bustillos)

Here, Bradshaw writes of the “too simple” 12-step program and the way in which it warred with his personal idea of his intellect and education. These concerns would not have been foreign to Wallace, although ultimately it was with the 12 steps that he was able to find some respite from his tendency to overanalyze and deconstruct every thought he had. The collective experience of therapy was a better fit for him than a more individual approach such as analysis. AA offered an opportunity to get out of his head and to bring recovery back to fundamental basics whose logic was plain: “one day at a time,” as it goes. In an interview with Salon, Wallace said of AA:

for me there was a real repulsion at the beginning. ‘One Day at a Time,’ right? …

But apparently part of addiction is that you need the substance so bad that when

they take it away from you, you want to die…Something as banal and reductive as

‘One Day at a Time’ enabled these people to walk through hell…That struck me.

(qtd. in Miller)

That is, it was precisely the simplicity of the 12 steps that Wallace could not argue with, and with that came the relief of not having to argue. When Wallace found Alcoholics Anonymous his respect for therapy grew and developed into a sustained personal practice. Perhaps the communal aspect of this therapy, with its open discussions of addiction and a sponsor- 153 system, may have assuaged some of his fears of existing in a narcissistic loop.47

In one of the popular psychology books that does remain in the Wallace archive,

Laing’s The Divided Self, a watershed text on mental illness, I discovered a telling note scribbled in the margin that also makes reference to AA. Wallace underlined in pink and black pen these lines from Laing, which explain the feeling of engulfment: “the individual dreads relatedness as such, with anyone or anything or, indeed, even with himself, because his uncertainty about the stability of his autonomy lays him open to the dread lest in any relationship he will lose his autonomy and identity” (44). Next to Laing’s analysis Wallace wrote “AA—sacrifice it.” From this marginal aside we can extrapolate that Wallace could relate to what Laing describes as the dread that individuals experience when confronted with the possibility of losing themselves in the process of relating to another person or “even with himself.” Wallace’s annotation suggests that in AA the fearful individual takes the risk of potential engulfment and sacrifices autonomy for the sake of recovery.48

Throughout these chapters I have been talking about mastery and any attempt to master loss in predominantly negative terms. I have gestured to the unrelenting and detrimental positivity of self-help narratives. These narratives, I argue in Chapter One,

47 Smith also makes sure to highlight the fact that Wallace was able to find support in a therapy that is “by its nature a communal activity” and which “places therapeutic emphasis on a ‘buddy system’” (270). 48 Wallace is also known to have tried other forms of therapy beyond self-help literature that have been documented in great detail in Max’s biography of Wallace. For example, we know that Wallace was open to finding spiritual support beyond books and registered for a weekend retreat in “Engaged Buddhism” led by the Vietnamese Zen master Thích Nhất Hạnh. According to his website, “Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh is a global spiritual leader, poet and peace activist, revered around the world for his powerful teachings and bestselling writings on mindfulness and peace. He is the man Martin Luther King called ‘An Apostle of peace and nonviolence.’ His key teaching is that, through mindfulness, we can learn to live happily in the present moment —the only way to truly develop peace, both in one’s self and in the world” (plumvillage.org). Colloquially, the Thích Nhất Hạnh community is considered pop-Buddhism—a melee of Eastern spirituality and zen philosophy made palatable and accessible for Westerners. Wallace’s attempt to participate fell short, however, because the retreat requires all members to abstain from smoking for the weekend, which Wallace found intolerable. 154 crowd contemporary North American discussions of mental health and ethics. Pop psychology, I have suggested, attempts to sterilize affective life by trying to make each component of it make sense. And yet Wallace seems to have found some solace in the self- help books in his personal library precisely because they offered paradigms for structuring the chaos of psychic life. The choice to censor the author’s literary estate gives the impression that Wallace’s attempts to self-analyze and to seek outlets for his existential angst ought to be hidden from view. But I would assert that Wallace’s interest in self-help and pop- psychologies should not be considered shameful—if anything, these different means of expanding his understanding of the self and awareness are proof of a capacious and curious mind.

Smith suggests that readers consider the Kenyon address a springboard into

Wallace’s fiction, and likewise, I argue that his interest in self-help literature illuminates rather than obscures the underlying interests that gird his own writing. Wallace’s inquiry into alternative therapeutic attempts and literatures reveals the same thing his fiction drives toward, namely, some potential answers to his abiding interest in, to use the author’s own words, “what it is to be a fucking human being” (McCaffery 131).

Inside Suicide: “Good Old Neon”

Wallace’s most important and sustained attempt to render visible the interiority of a melancholic mind is his short story “Good Old Neon,” upon which not much scholarly criticism has been written despite the general agreement amongst critics that it is his best work of short fiction. “Good Old Neon” is told in the first person by an affable narrator 155 named Neal, who at the onset of the story has already committed suicide by driving into a bridge abutment. Neal’s tone is highly colloquial and the story opens with short, declarative sentences and unadorned language that lulls the reader into a sense of camaraderie or intimacy with him. The story, which in its handwritten draft stages Wallace titled “Fraud” begins with the statement: “my whole life I’ve been a fraud” (141).

Neal explains that he is trapped in his fraudulence. He is a good reader of people and can easily trick them into liking him. He does this almost pathologically, which renders him inauthentic. Disgusted with himself, with his “talent for ingratiation,” and with his pathological aping of modesty, Neal remains unable to engage genuinely with others (173).

He continues in a clear and openly confessional vein: “I’m not exaggerating. Pretty much all

I’ve ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people” (141).

Neal is self-reflexive and incredibly smart—and in that regard his quick-fire mind is also a curse because it never ceases. He feels hemmed into his own mind in a way that does not allow him to escape his self-doubt, his anxiety, or his constant editorializing. This double- bind of Neal’s intelligence is articulated by him as a “fraudulence paradox” (147). Neal is like Holden Caulfield, Salinger’s precocious young narrator whose view of the world is wrought by his anxiety and overcompensated for by his bravado. There is self-loathing, a disgust with himself that Neal shares with Holden, but also an agile intellect that never slows its tempo.

When he is trying to enjoy the most intimate moments with another person Neal is hyper-aware of how he ought to be feeling in that moment and thus performs a feeling instead of experiencing it. In his mind’s eye, this leaves Neal unable to have an authentic 156 relationship with anyone—and this inability is what leads him to commit suicide. Neal confesses:

Pretty much all I’ve ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me

in other people. Mostly to be liked or admired. It’s a little more complicated than

that, maybe. But when you come right down to it it’s to be liked, loved. Admired,

approved of, applauded, whatever. (141)

The use of “whatever” here sets the tone for Neal’s storytelling and is indicative of his tendency to sidestep moments of sincerity because he is afraid of them. In this instance, the use of “whatever” is meant to diffuse his admission that “when you come right down to it,”

Neal wants to be loved and acknowledged just like anyone else. His confession of vulnerability is slightly offset by the flippancy associated with a word like “whatever.” He performs an ambivalence where really there is none.

Neal announces rather than confesses his status as a dead-on-arrival narrator by the third page of “Good Old Neon.” Neal takes a short pause from talking about how he has always felt like an inauthentic person, a “fraud,” and addresses the reader by stipulating: “I know this part is boring and probably boring you, by the way, but it gets a lot more interesting when I get to the part where I kill myself and discover what happens immediately after a person dies” (143). Thus, the news of Neal’s suicide does not serve as a plot twist or a big reveal and is announced in an aside. The narrator’s death is presented as a lure to the reader—the part where “Good Old Neon” will get “a lot more interesting.” As opposed to being the tragic crux of the story, his suicide is both ordinary and revelatory: a “thing” or 157 plot point that he will get to soon, and a scene that leads him to “discover” what transpires immediately after death (time is thus revealed to be plastic and malleable).

Part of this internal tug of war between Neal’s wish to be loved and his fear of appearing needy unfolds in his turn toward analysis. Having tried a number of other therapies and self-help programs to help himself escape his own fraudulence paradox, Neal tries psychoanalysis before ultimately giving up and committing suicide. As he puts it: “I tried analysis like almost everybody else then in their late twenties who’d made some money or had a family or whatever they thought they wanted and still didn’t feel that they were happy” (141). Neal enters psychoanalysis with the hope of finding some kind of cure to the torment of his own mind, but once again he is anxious about not wanting to appear as though he lacks insight or intellect.49 He does not want to “fall” for psychoanalysis or be duped by a process as seemingly simple as free association. Retreating from his vulnerability just as quickly as he acknowledges it, Neal swiftly concludes that he is smarter than the analyst—a clownish and sexually repressed man named Dr. Gustafson who lacks the intellectual acumen to decipher the logic of his analysand’s fraudulence paradox. With the return of his fragile arrogance, Neal’s hope for a cure, for a psychic balm, for brief respite from his own mind, quickly dissipates.

49 It is important to note that neither Freudian nor Lacanian psychoanalysis is particularly interested in a “cure” for its analysands. After many years as a psychoanalyst, Freud determined that patients do not actually want a cure—they like their symptoms. For Freud, then, the aim of undergoing analysis is to lessen the force of your pain to a tolerable degree, to dampen “your hysterical misery into common unhappiness” (1895: 305). As for Lacan, he had no illusion of a therapeutic cure either. He saw psychoanalysis as a way for the subject to get closer to the truth of her desire through inquisition. Neal thinks his skepticism of a potential “cure” inhering in psychoanalysis is an obstacle to his flourishing. He worries that because he does not have faith in finding a cure to his fraudulence he never will be cured. However, psychoanalysis makes no such promise in the first place. 158

By delving immediately into teenage memories of intimacy with others (“once I got…Angela Mead to let me put my hand on her breast”) and by foregrounding his wish to sort out his feelings of fraudulence, the narrator appears plainspoken, honest, and not interested in hiding anything from the reader (141). Yet, there are two revealing moments in the final pages of the short story that come as surprises, subtly hidden until now. First, the reader discovers that she is sitting next to Neal in the car as he speeds toward his intentional death, and that she has unwittingly been there since the beginning of the story (a point I will return to). The second unexpected twist occurs in the long final paragraph of “Good Old

Neon.” There, Neal explains that “the reality is that dying isn’t bad, but it takes forever. And that forever is no time at all. I know that sounds like a contradiction, or maybe just wordplay.

What it really is, it turns out, is a matter of perspective” (181). Directly following this statement—that the reality of dying and the time it takes is “a matter of perspective”—the narrative shifts perspective from Neal’s to that of a character winkingly named David

Wallace.

The fictional David Wallace blinks while scanning his old high school yearbook and briefly sees Neal’s picture. In this split second he wonders what led the charming athlete who was a year ahead of him in school to purposely crash his electric blue corvette years later into a bridge. The narrative narrows in on

David Wallace trying, if only in the second his lids are down, to somehow reconcile

what this luminous guy had seemed like from the outside with whatever on the

interior must have driven him to kill himself in such a dramatic and doubtlessly

painful way— with David Wallace also fully aware that the cliché that you can’t 159

ever truly know what’s going on inside somebody else is hoary and insipid and yet

at the same time trying very consciously to prohibit that awareness from mocking

the attempt or sending the whole line of thought into the sort of inbent spiral that

keeps you from ever getting anywhere. (181)

The character David attempts to reconcile what the golden boy athlete he knew in high school looked like from the outside “with whatever on the interior” drove him to commit suicide. “Good Old Neon” articulates the desire to understand the interiority of another person, and to keep at bay the reflex to mock the attempt to know what goes on inside the head of the other. It is at this point that we realize that the entire story we have just read has been in the blink of David Wallace’s eye.

Even though Neal sidesteps scenes of his vulnerability with words like “whatever” and comical asides about his analyst, the story’s final lines and the introduction of David

Wallace, an empathetic subject, make it clear that Neal’s flippancy and laissez-faire attitude about his own death mask an earnest hope for connection, not annihilation. Ultimately,

Wallace asks the reader to not shirk the sentimental in favor of the critical or the sarcastic.

“Good Old Neon” ends with the character David Wallace reflecting on Neal’s death and the impossibility of ever truly understanding what led him to commit suicide—and yet here the reader is with a story in her hands (written by the real David Foster Wallace) that attempts to articulate that very impossibility. Although the story’s theme is melancholia, the fact that such a psychically capacious and empathetic text exists shimmers with utopian promise.

That the story is told from the perspective of a dead man means that “Good Old

Neon” is a ghost story of sorts. But it is also an extended confession, a suicide note, a 160 eulogy, a psychoanalytic case study, an academic abstract—a story that slides between genres and constantly points to its own construction. Boswell reads Oblivion and “Good Old

Neon” in particular as further proof of Wallace’s “unrelenting pessimism,” and contends that the stories in the collection “yearn for escape, for a release from the prison-house of interiority, but offer no exit” (qtd. in Burn 168). Though this is a reading that is available in the text, I read “Good Old Neon” against this critical grain and as an example of Wallace’s belief in the redemptive power of articulation: an attempt to convey and diffuse the feeling of alienation via writing.

Wallace’s short story approaches death and the contours of the suicidal mind with levity and sardonic wit, attempting to render accessible to the reader an experience of radical otherness. By narrating from the decidedly unsettling perspective of the dead suicidal subject, Wallace creates a space to explore a state of alterity. There is a playfulness that comes through in Wallace’s writing despite its hefty subject matter. Wallace uses a vernacular tone throughout “Good Old Neon,” but he also tries to show Neal’s melancholic interior landscape. Hence, there is levity and sincerity—the mix of which strikes a chord between Wallace’s inner ironist and his “inner sap.” By formally rupturing the narrative structure of the story and breaking from traditionally conceived notions of sequential time,

Wallace finds new ways to talk about affect, writing, and finitude.

— THE END.

Considering the value that Wallace places in being attuned to the everyday cadences of the mundane—his interest in the banal, the unadorned—it is not surprising that Neal’s 161 moment of death in “Good Old Neon” is anti-climactic. Wallace resists a teleological narrative of death, both formally and theoretically, and represents time and death in an extending and rolling present moment that is experienced affectively before it is understood rationally. Wallace structures the story so as to recreate for the reader this experience of sensing what is happening before knowing. In this sense, Wallace aspires to illustrate what

Lauren Berlant has formulated theoretically as the episodic.

Speaking of temporality in Cruel Optimism (2011), Berlant argues that “the present is perceived, first, affectively: the present is what makes itself present to us before it becomes anything else, such as an orchestrated collective event or an epoch on which we can look back” (4). According to Berlant, the present is an unmediated affect as opposed to an intelligible object—it is a temporal genre that is first sensed, and from then on is “under constant revision” (4). If time is first encountered affectively then it follows that “in an ordinary environment, most of what we call events are not of the scale of memorable impact but rather are episodes, that is, occasions that frame experience while not changing much of anything” (4). Berlant explores the different registers of “impact” of lived experience—the vagaries, banalities, the quotidian, the mundane—in order to consider death not as an event, or as a moment of rupture or traumatic shock as many thinkers have theorized it, but rather as inscribed within life (101).

Similarly, “Good Old Neon” asks the reader to consider the present as a stretched out moment, an infinite now that can never be measured. The story focuses on an instinctual, experiential relationship to time. The clearest articulation of this episodic view of 162 temporality comes in a footnote near the story’s end. It is there that Neal describes the present in the following way:

One clue that there’s something not quite real about sequential time the way you

experience it is the various paradoxes of time supposedly passing and of a so-called

‘present’ that’s always unrolling into the future and creating more and more past

behind it. As if the present were this car—nice car by the way—and the past is the road

we’ve just gone over, and the future is the headlit road up ahead we haven’t yet gotten

to, and time is the car’s forward movement, and the precise present is the car’s front

bumper as it cuts through the fog of the future, so that it’s now and then a tiny bit later

a whole different now, etc. (179)

In this moment, Neal’s reference to the car reveals to the reader that she has been in an automobile with the narrator for the length of the story, the same car that Neal purposefully crashes in order to end his life. The phrase “nice car by the way” is a moment of epiphany where the reader finally realizes she is in the car with the suicidal Neal. This phrase is also an instance of recursion. Recursion is the placing of one component inside another similar component, like a linguistic matryoshka doll nesting symbols or figures within one another.

In this instance, the mention of the car returns us to the story’s opening and the other couched references to the setting. It causes the reader to go back in her mind and revise her understanding of how the story has unfolded and ask: “were there earlier clues that I was in the car with Neal this whole time?”

Up until this point in “Good Old Neon” not much has been revealed to the reader about the mise-en-scène. Even though near the beginning of the story Neal addresses the reader 163 cryptically by saying, “you’re wondering why we’re sitting here in this car,” he does not provide an explanation or any further description of the setting, and the “we” remains ambiguous (169). It is not until nearly twenty pages later that there is another mention of the reader’s position in the story: “You’re thinking here’s this guy going on and on and why doesn’t he get to the part where he kills himself and explain or account for the fact that he’s sitting here next to me in a piece of high-powered machinery telling me all this if he died in

1991” (169). This reference to sitting “in a piece of high-powered machinery” does not necessarily come to make sense until the later footnote confirming the reader’s seat next to

Neal in the car. Through this recursive slight of pen, the reader is situated in a present that is under constant revision, in a “now and then a tiny bit later a whole different now,” as Neal puts it (179).

At the end of this extended half-page footnote we get the moment we have been waiting for—the details of Neal’s suicide:

what if in fact this now is infinite and never really passes in the way your mind is

supposedly wired to understand pass, so that not only your whole life but every

single humanly conceivable way to describe and account for that life has time to

flash like neon shaped into those connected cursive letters that businesses’ signs and

windows love so much to use through your mind all at once in the literally

immeasurable instant between impact and death, just as you start forward to meet

the wheel at a rate no belt ever made could restrain—THE END. (179) 164

Here, Wallace puts forth an alternative and episodic model of temporality that makes room for affective experience by challenging the way that time and death are conceived and hardwired in our minds as unfolding in a “straight line” like an unwavering teleology.

Neal’s death is relegated to a footnoted periphery, which even further interrupts a chronological reading of the narrative and disrupts sequential time. The final “action” of the story exists in this vignette, this short episode that occurs away from the main narrative and closes abruptly with a capitalized and resounding “THE END.” (179). Since this announcement of the end is in a footnote, an appendage to the body of the text, the short story is not in fact over and “Good Old Neon” continues for two more pages. Therefore, the footnote marks a conclusion, a telos that possesses a riddling quality and suggests that death, or “THE END,” cannot always be understood in linear terms. The boundaries of the temporal erode here and Neal’s death is conceived of outside of a teleological discourse as episodic and even banal. That is to say, death is not understood within the story as an exceptional event that annihilates the ordinary. It is ordinary.

It is through a cryptic use of setting and the distortion of time that Wallace diffuses the scale of Neal’s suicide and he frames the instant of death as an almost quotidian episode.

Rather than depicting Neal’s death as a coherent, measurable instant—and as the plot’s apogee the reader has been led to expect— the story places this confounding and philosophically reflective moment of death in a footnote. The jocular and mocking tone of

Wallace’s text can be interpreted as a resistance to the representation of suicide as an impenetrable, unknowable, absolutely singular event. Instead, it renders death and suicide 165 anecdotal experiences that can be relayed and communicated, and even shared with the reader who is brought into the moment of death.

This alternative model of temporality opens up a discussion of human connection and our ontological relationship to the other. Considering the effect of the constraints of language and sequential time, Wallace writes: “words and chronological time create all these total misunderstandings of what’s really going on at the most basic level” (151). Significantly, it is precisely this “most basic level” that Wallace wants us to (re)consider. If language can barely offer a sketch of what is happening in someone’s mind, and time as we know it is an insufficient tool to help us unravel the vast complexities of thought and feeling, then what is the most basic level of shared understanding? Considering these obstacles, is it even worth trying to reach it?

Despite the shortcomings of language and the trick doors of time, Wallace does arguably succeed in sketching an outline of “what’s going on inside.” One of the significant ways that Wallace describes this interior space is as a room that contains the universe, but a universe that the other can only catch a glimpse of:

You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that

flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone

know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like

everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that

get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see

under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other through these

tiny keyholes. (178) 166

Even though the attempt to try to “see each other through these tiny keyholes” is lamented to some extent here, as it signals the seeming impenetrability of the interiority of the other, it also points to a recognition of one’s own broad and intricate being. It is because Wallace challenges the boundaries of time, language, and death in the story that a more intuitive approach to relation and affective experience comes into relief. Wallace reminds us in this moment that relation is about looking beyond the self. If we only look, there are moments when we can break out of the constraints and inadequacies of linear time and language and experience the present affectively in a flash “like neon” (179). Amidst the melancholia of misunderstandings and unintelligibility, this flash is a utopian moment of accessing the other.

Here the rigidity of time gives way—if only for an instant—to the utopian possibility of access.

This reconception of time as a series of moments, each of which is “an infinite sea or span or passage of time,” reconstitutes temporality as plastic. This malleable time “makes room for the universes inside of you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul” (179).

Rethinking the boundaries of time facilitates a rethinking of one’s ontological boundaries, which Wallace here suggests may be similarly permeable and pliant. This model of reconceiving time’s movement takes account of the immeasurable complexities of the human mind; it acknowledges how much of our thought cannot be communicated through language and it situates the reader in an alternate, affective present.

The flashing neon image of the text’s last footnote suggests an optimism in “Good Old

Neon” that the multitudinous nature of being and the interiority of the other may perhaps be 167 seen, if only momentarily, in a flicker of an instant that transcends alterity. “Of course you’re a fraud, of course what people see is never you,” concludes Neal, who recognizes for the first time that if fraudulence is inevitable—it is not necessarily a fundamental obstacle to relation. He continues,

And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if

you know it’s only a part. It’s called free will, Sherlock. But at the same time it’s

why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of others, or to laugh, or speak

in tongues, or chant in Bengali—it’s not English anymore, it’s not getting squeezed

through any hole. (179)

In other words, it can feel good to acknowledge your own unintelligibility, to “break down and cry in front of others,” to be vulnerable, to not make sense.50 As Neal says, “of course you try to manage what part [people] see” of you, of course most people want to be liked and understood. However, what is most poignant about Neal’s reflection on intelligibility is the exhaustion he pinpoints at its center and the sensation of relief that can come with letting go of coherence. The reason that it feels good to break with one’s intelligibility, be it through tongues or tears, is because to always be coherent is exhausting work. Perhaps it is in our least intelligible moments that we make the most sense.

50 Another way of understanding what Wallace may mean when he says that these performances of unintelligibility or alterity are “not getting squeezed through any hole” is to borrow from Lacan and think of them as ungoverned moments of jouissance, fleeting flights from the symbolic order and experiences of painful pleasure. That is to say, our relationship to the real (and to that which we unrelentingly desire most) is renewed and forged in these transient moments. 168

The Meaning of “Whatever”

Throughout the story Neal bristles at the earnestness of his search for meaning and yet still searches for a way out of the fraudulence paradox and his melancholia. In an effort to sustain an air of ambivalence with regard to the high emotional stakes of this quest for sincerity (which have become life or death), he repeats the word “whatever” to foster the illusion of his ambivalence. For instance, Neal uses the word “whatever” in describing a moment of epiphany: “I suddenly experienced a flash of self-awareness or clarity or whatever in which I suddenly stopped conning myself and realized that I’d been a fraud all these months” (158). The realization that comes with this moment of insight is that despite

Neal’s attempts to resolve his feelings of fraudulence by undergoing psychotherapy, he remains trapped by his fraudulence. Neal tries to obfuscate the pain associated with this realization (that in the end, there is no hope for him to feel “authentic” or relatable) by classifying his epiphany as “a flash of self-awareness or clarity or whatever.”

While on the level of sentence the use of “whatever” may seem like a trivial marker of indifference (the word rose to colloquial popularity in the ironic era of postmodernism), on the level of discourse it marks quite the opposite: “whatever” is used in Wallace’s fiction to signal moments of vulnerability that frighten the speaker. Far from indifferent, the

“whatever” functions on the level of discourse to bridge the gap between the character’s confessional narrative and Wallace’s theoretical interest in human relationships and the role of language therein. It is also worth noting that Wallace added two additional instances of 169

“whatever” into his final draft of the story.51 These late-stage additions of “whatever” illustrate the word’s importance to the story as a whole and to Neal’s persistent affectation of apathy.

Wallace is famous for his fascination with language and grammar, and his use of the colloquial “whatever” throughout “Good Old Neon” stems from an interest in successful linguistic communication, in getting thoughts and feelings translated into words. For instance, in a typed draft of “Good Old Neon” Wallace left an author’s note at the bottom of the title page for his editor: “What may at first appear to be solecisms or grammatical errors are very likely intentional and meant to be stetted.” A self-proclaimed linguistics nerd,

Wallace spent much of his career correcting and championing grammatical correctness.52 In short, he was a SNOOT. The term SNOOT, coined by the Wallace family, is a colloquial synonym for syntax snobs, “grammar Nazis,” or Prescriptivists (2001: 4). “The word might be slightly self-mocking,” writes Wallace, “but those other terms are outright dysphemisms.

A SNOOT can be defined as somebody who knows what dysphemism means and doesn’t mind letting you know it” (4). Wallace came by this proclivity honestly. His mother Sally

Foster Wallace was the author of a remedial grammar guidebook entitled Practically

Painless English (1989) and her influence on her son’s writing has been noted by critics who have illuminated her enduring linguistic (and psychological) influence.53

51 The David Foster Wallace Papers at The Harry Ransom Center contain three folders for “Good Old Neon” and include: undated handwritten drafts, a second-to-last draft, and a final draft—all of which are marked up in Wallace’s hand. 52 Wallace was extremely grateful to have been asked to serve on the Usage Panel of The American Heritage Dictionary, and his passion for vocabulary is evidenced by the list of words he kept and constantly updated on his computer, cataloguing those he wanted to learn and adding brief notes and definitions. 53 D.T. Max notes that the mother figure of Avril Incandenza in Infinite Jest may easily be read as an imaginative incarnation of Sally Foster Wallace. In the novel, Avril is cofounder of the “Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts” (3). 170

The word “whatever” is like a verbal shrug that is used again when Neal describes his relationship with his doctor. Neal explains that the analyst “seemed genuinely pleased and excited at the idea of being helpful but was trying to exercise professional control over his facial expression in order to make the excitement look more like simple pleasantness and clinical interest in my case or whatever” (146). Neal’s “hope” for help from Dr. Gustafson

(or “Dr. G” as Neal refers to him) is ultimately tempered by the use of “whatever”: it unsettles Neal’s optimism by introducing a small increment of doubt into the doctor’s interest or investment in the case, even if that doubt is entirely produced by Neal himself.

While the use of “whatever” may sound like proof of Neal’s ambivalence, it does something quite different. By attempting to brush off the importance of this flash of clarity and maintain an emotionally-detached stance, Neal reveals just how important the insight is to him. Once again, the excessively casual tone betrays the seriousness of what Neal is trying to communicate: as desperately as he wants to, he cannot escape his melancholic self. When these passages are read in the context of the story as a whole, it becomes evident that Neal’s reliance on “whatever” is about more than avoiding the expression of sentiment. These instances of the “whatever” become markers not of insincerity, but of the (often-bungled) attempt at sincere expression of affect.

Psychoanalysis and Cézanne’s Apples

“Good Old Neon” is a text steeped in psychoanalytic considerations of the mind’s unknowability. The cynical Neal gently mocks the process of analysis at the same time that he engages in the work of self-interpretation. He attempts to pinpoint the primal scene of his 171 fraudulence, he engages in dream analysis, he furnishes the reader with anecdotes of his childhood, his adolescence, and his successful attempts as an adult to manipulate people into liking him. When Neal recounts his turn to psychoanalysis, it is presented as his final, feeble attempt at authentic human connection. He says that he has tried just about everything that might help him tap into a more sincere component of himself, from meditation to the

Landmark forum, but nothing has helped—psychoanalysis is his last best hope.54

Ultimately, the melancholic Neal’s quest is to be loved—even though that admission embarrasses him. Once again, we can see Wallace’s attempt (focalized here through the character of Neal) to balance his interest in vulnerability with the ironic detachment of a serious author. This tension between sincerity and cleverness, or emotional content and its scrutiny, comes through in Neal’s moments with Dr. G. By Neal’s estimation, the doctor is a genuinely kind man, but one who lacks the insight or “firepower” to understand the highly self-aware narrator (147). Dr. G fails to unravel the logic of the fraudulence paradox that plagues Neal’s existence, and in turn, his patient begins to analyze him.

The doctor is described as a gentle buffoon who compulsively and unconsciously twirls his moustache. Neal reads this as a sign of the analyst’s latent sexual frustrations. Neal goes on to tell us that Dr. G is a closeted homosexual whose shame has manifested as cancer in his rectum—essentially, Neal gives the worst possible version of a psychoanalytic

“account” of the somatic effect of the doctor’s repressed sexuality. Neal surmises that “it didn’t exactly seem like a coincidence” that the cancer was in the doctor’s colon and tries to

54 Landmark is a private company that specializes in weekend-long seminars to help people realize they “have the possibility not only of success, but also of fulfillment and greatness” (from the Landmark Education website). 172 explain that “using your rectum or colon to secretly harbor an alien growth was a blatant symbol both of homosexuality and of the repressive belief that its open acknowledgment would equal disease and death” (163). Even if he admits that it is a “repressive belief,” Neal nonetheless draws a punitive link between Dr. G’s cancer and his closeted homosexuality.

This moment is either proof of Neal’s own repressive beliefs, evidence of his flimsy grasp of psychoanalytic theory, or simply a bad joke.

The joke about Dr. G’s closeted desires reads awkwardly in the story because the reader has most likely grown to enjoy Neal’s plainspoken insights about himself (“I didn’t want to seem like just another whining, self-absorbed yuppie”) and his quick wit. To be confronted with a homophobic diagnosis is jarring, and there is nothing about Neal’s characterization that would indicate his tendency for these homophobic thoughts of his doctor. In this moment of backward-thinking diagnosis, Neal might be trying too hard to debunk the insights of psychoanalysis. Neal’s analysis of Dr. G is an instance of one of his jokes falling flat, but it may reveal something about our narrator. Neal’s anxiety over the viability of therapy tips over into his hyperbolic psychoanalyzing of his doctor. Recall, in this context, that in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) Freud repeats

Fischer’s formulation that jokes “must bring forward something that is concealed or hidden” (10). That is, jokes unveil judgments that might otherwise remain unspoken. What is

“concealed or hidden” in this bad joke about Dr. G is Neal’s fear of psychoanalysis’ failure to cure.

What is brought to light in this exaggerated analysis of the doctor is Neal’s anxiety that therapy would not work—that therapy (psychoanalysis or otherwise) could not help him 173 escape the hellish narcissism of his melancholic introspection. The thinking goes that if Dr.

G cannot even see his own repressed desires how could he possibly help Neal discover his?

When it comes to Neal and his attempt to poke fun at the tenets of psychoanalysis, the truth of what he is aiming at—what if my last hope does not save me?—gets lost in the need for a punchline. Neal wants to be funny here, but the joke is too laden with anxieties of misrecognition and so it fails.

Yet, if Neal’s exaggerations are a bit clumsy, and his psychoanalytic theories are overwrought, the psychoanalyst’s office still proves fruitful in Neal’s analysis. In particular, the narrator’s discussion of the artwork in Dr. G’s office offers some insight into his thought process. The “talk” part of talk therapy is made to seem somewhat ridiculous, but Neal does not reduce everything about his psychoanalytic exchange to a wisecrack. Neal tells the reader that “by way of decor, the office wall behind [Dr. G’s] chair had two framed prints, one being that Wyeth one of the little girl in the wheat field crawling uphill toward the farmhouse, the other a still life of two apples in a bowl on a table by Cézanne” (146). Neal follows this description with the parenthetical qualification:

(To be honest, I only knew it was Cézanne because it was an Art Institute poster and

had a banner with info on a Cézanne show underneath the painting, which was a

still life, and which was weirdly discomfiting because there was something slightly

off about the perspective or style that made the table look crooked and the apples

look almost square.) (146)

In this moment of effusive self-effacement, it seems as though the narrator doth protest his ignorance of the art world a little too much. 174

Neal’s brief description of the Cézanne print initially gives the impression that he is nonchalant when it comes to the hope of a psychoanalytic cure for his feelings of alienation.

He is able to dispassionately describe the scene of his analysis without falling into the alleged traps of treatment, such as free association (for a character as hyper-aware of his own mind and cynical of analysis as Neal, free association would be too “simple” a solution to psychic turmoil). As if to reassure the reader of his lack of pretensions, Neal offers a mock confession about how he knew the apple painting was by Cézanne because of the writing on the poster. The parentheses that enclose this confession, along with his declaration of honesty, serve to reinforce the idea that Neal is a modest, down-to-earth character who wants to pause for a moment in his story and make clear that he is no art snob.

But recall that “Good Old Neon” centers around Neal’s articulation of the fraudulence paradox and his ability to say and do exactly what it takes to get people to like him. This pandering is precisely what he is doing with the reader in this parenthetical moment of “honesty.” The narrator is attempting to prove his authenticity by insisting on it in this aside. Although this reveals Neal’s attempt to ingratiate himself as an accessible narrator, there appears to be a moment in the second half of the parenthetical comment where the façade cracks. Neal surmises that “the prints were obviously there to give the analyst’s patients something to look at, since many people like to look around or look at things on the wall while they talk” (146). Essentially, Neal is saying that the paintings are there to allow the analysand to speak more freely to the analyst by having an object to focus on. 175

The painting is there to encourage the analysand to break from social convention— after all, psychoanalysis is not a normal conversation but rather is a conversation about the conversations we have with ourselves and others. And in this sense, the painting works. Neal does take a pause from his analysis of his analyst in order to describe the “discomfiting” experience of looking at Cézanne’s misshapen apples. This is not a revelatory moment where a portrait of Neal’s inner landscape comes into clear focus, nor is it any kind of major breakthrough. Rather, it is an uncomfortable moment for him and this discomfort allows

Neal (and the reader) a short break from his constant editorializing.

That Neal spies this poster in a psychoanalyst’s office is also arguably a clever reference to Lacan. This is not Wallace’s first brush with Lacanian theory, and we know from the extensive criticism on Infinite Jest that Wallace was well-versed in the French analyst’s theories of desire, pleasure, and subjectivity.55 The connection in this Cézanne scene is with

Lacan’s The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1960) where Lacan discusses the role that art can play in the process of sublimation. Counter to Plato’s assessment that art merely imitates reality,

Lacan shows us that the aim and effect of art is much more than mimesis.

For Lacan, art is one way in which the subject can feel closer to the Thing (das

Ding). As you will recall, the Thing is that which we have fantasmatically lost and which has left us with a lack. This lack, emanating from the “loss” of the Thing, animates us as desiring

55 Boswell argues that “Infinite Jest takes on Lacan’s bewilderingly difficult theories about desire, pleasure, subjectivity, and infantile preoccupations with mothers. Although the film, which is the novel’s central metaphor, seems to be the primary weapon of Wallace’s critique—the above description of its contents reads like a direct transcription of Lacan’s ideas—Lacanian concepts permeate the entire novel. Therefore, in the same way that a coherent reading of The Broom of the System first demands a familiarity with Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, a cogent interpretation of Infinite Jest first entails a brief encounter with Lacanian theory. Ultimately, Infinite Jest demonstrates that Lacan’s model of the psychological subject is a seductive but ultimately alienating and harmful idea that can and should be overcome” (2003: 128). 176 and social beings. We unconsciously search for resonances of our fantasy of a whole self in objects and in other people. What draws us to a work of art is not (or is not only) that it strikes us as a precise and accurate representation of the world, but also that it contains a trace of the wholeness that we long for. This unnamable aspect of the work permits, as Mari

Ruti (2012) explains, “something of the Thing’s dignity to float to the surface,” which in turn allows the viewing subject to feel nearer to the Thing itself (132). According to Ruti, “even if art imitates objects, it also simultaneously contains something inscrutable beyond these objects, such as a tone, timbre, or resonance that is highly distinctive yet eludes our grasp” (132).

To illustrate this account of sublimation, Lacan turns to Cézanne—the very artist whose apples Neal spies in the Art Institute poster. Of the post-impressionist’s famous paintings of apples, Lacan writes:

it is clear that in painting those apples, he is doing something very different from

imitating apples—even though his final manner of imitating them, which is the most

striking, is primarily oriented toward a technique of presenting the object. But the

more the object is presented in the imitation, the more it opens up the dimension in

which illusion is destroyed and aims at something else. (141)

Here, Lacan explains that while Cézanne does present the apples by way of imitation, that is not the sole purpose of the still life. Naturalism is not the painting’s ultimate achievement.

Art “aims at something else,” and this something else only comes into focus once “illusion is destroyed” and imitation is exceeded. As Ruti explains, Cézanne “taps into a mystery that resides beyond his skill at imitating the object” (133). The “genius” of his artwork resides in 177 his ability to “capture something about the enigma (and even the sublimity) of the Thing in his representation of an utterly banal object” (133).

Neal’s fleeting discomfort as he looks upon the apples is an example of Wallace’s interest in discovering the sublimity of the ordinary. In Lacan’s account the role of art is to animate parts of our selves and elements of our desire that have laid dormant. Mirroring this,

Neal feels and narrates an uncomfortable frisson. What does it mean that Neal reflects on this replica of Cézanne’s apples? Perhaps he feels a quiver of the Thing, maybe he is whisked away—just for a moment—from his pathological need to be liked, and it could be that in an interior monologue riddled with ironic critique he experiences a brief tinge of vulnerability. In yet another joke about Dr. G’s closeted homosexuality ten pages later, Neal makes sure to brush off the importance of the Cézanne print by referring to the apples as

“two-testicle-shaped-objects-that-looked-deformed” (162). However, in Neal’s flickering moment of discomfort spurred by Cézanne’s apples, Wallace suggests that art might be the last hold out for authentic feeling—a small utopia, hard-won and soon lost.

The Pale King and Abiding Melancholia

It might be tempting to read the moments of tenderness and vulnerability in “Good

Old Neon” as ancillary to the rest of Wallace’s body of work, much like his Kenyon address is annexed from most scholarly consideration. However, there are striking similarities between “Good Old Neon” (written in 2001 and published in 2004) and The Pale King

(published a decade later in 2011) that demonstrate Wallace’s abiding concern for 178 melancholia, sincerity, and the act of articulating otherness; there are some unmistakable but so far unacknowledged parallels in tone and form between the two texts.

The first resemblance is also the most obvious: both “Good Old Neon” and The Pale

King have characters named David Wallace. Roughly seventy pages into The Pale King we have a formal anachronism, an “Author’s Foreword” we are told is from the “real author”

David Wallace. This supposed “real author” calls the novel a “vocational memoir” of his

“thirteen months as a rote examiner” at an IRS processing office in the Midwest. This doubling of David Wallaces is reenacted and multiplied in The Pale King when this “real author” David Wallace recounts his first day and the ensuing incident of mistaken identity whereupon he is confused with another, higher ranked IRS employee named David F.

Wallace. The second point of connection to “Good Old Neon” is that this significant piece of the puzzle is couched within the lines of a long footnote—one much like the dense footnotes of Neal’s confessional narrative and the copious footnotes of Infinite Jest.

The third point of comparison between these two works is a strikingly similar narrative voice. The “real author” sections of The Pale King have the same affected modesty as Neal does in “Good Old Neon” and both narrators repeatedly attest to the veracity of their stories. What the process of narration comes down to for the David Wallace of The Pale

King is “a kind of unspoken contract between a book’s author and its reader,” a tacit agreement to a code that depends on the author’s honesty. As the “real author,” this fictional

Wallace vows to not “jerk” the reader around to the point that she feels “personally dicked over,” or to insult her with the generic conventions so often deployed in memoir (73). “Here 179 is the real truth,” (69) says the David Wallace of The Pale King, “all of this is true. This book is really true” (67). Which, of course, is not true.

Critic Toon Staes suggests that the language of contract in this Author’s Foreword is a self-conscious reference to Philippe Lejeune’s theory of autobiography written in 1975 wherein Lejeune describes “nonfictional life writing” as “a contract of identity” between writer and reader (Staes 423). Staes explains that “implicit in this agreement lies the promise that the narrative is both absorbing and true-to-life. If the contract is breached, readers might consequently feel shocked and betrayed” (423). Whether Wallace had Lejeune in mind in particular is up for debate. Nonetheless, the “real author” conceit (which is in fact a blatant deceit) in The Pale King does reveal Wallace’s preoccupation with the tacit contract of reading that emerges between an author and his audience.

This contract is overtly facetious: the reader knows that the character David Wallace is a fiction. However, this character continually insists on how true The Pale King is and how “real” of an author he is. By having one of his characters speak “plainly” to the reader about contract, honesty, and the truth of this “vocational memoir,” Wallace—the actual author—is pointing directly to the witty breach of the very contract his character is outlining.

This allegedly sacred (but in reality bastardized) contract that David Wallace talks about is indicative of the playfulness with which Wallace stretches formal conventions. What is more, this ironic slippage between David Wallace and David Foster Wallace, fiction and reality, reveals contractual language as something that is inherently, paradoxically, plastic. A form of contract is thus sustained, but one that requires the reader to accept the mutability of its terms (for instance, we know that “all” of this book is not actually true, but does the 180 blatancy of this lie render us somehow complicit in a you-know-that-I-know back and forth with the author?).

In the second section of The Pale King told from the perspective of the “real author”

David Wallace, we have Wallace deploying the use of “whatever” in a sense that parallels the word’s double function in “Good Old Neon.” Here, the seemingly flippant word “whatever” serves as a synecdoche for the layered complexity Wallace is trying to achieve of sincerity and levity, of contract and its breach. In The Pale King David Wallace, newly relocated for work, details living away from home for the first time. In the process, he likens his family to a “for-profit company…in that you were pretty much only as good as your last sales quarter.

Although, you know, whatever” (257-8).

Once again, we see a moment of confession or emotional vulnerability quickly glossed over by the use of a colloquial platitude, this one standing alone in its own separate sentence and suspended for a moment longer with its commas: “Although, you know, whatever” (emphasis added). The “whatever” forces a pause, a re-thinking and re- negotiation of the value of the information transmitted by the rest of the sentence—it is the impetus for discernment. The “whatever” thus functions here to express a surplus of affect at the same moment that it performs an emotional or intellectual apathy. Even though this

David Wallace character distances himself from his unsupportive family structure, he seems to be simultaneously drawing the reader in more closely. In the same way that Neal postures in “Good Old Neon” toward an emotional ambivalence that we discover is a façade (he cares deeply about being understood), David Wallace of The Pale King insists that he is fine without the emotional support of his family when in fact he laments it. 181

David Wallace says that during his time at the IRS processing plant he learned

“something about dullness, information, and irrelevant complexity” (85). This assessment of the knowledge that can be gleaned from the mundane and its “irrelevant complexity” cuts to the heart of Wallace’s repeated use of “whatever” in “Good Old Neon” and in The Pale

King. Wallace’s use of “whatever” encapsulates the split image that Wallace scholarship has of the author: his ironic tone and dense, labyrinthine prose supposedly mark him as unsentimental—but as Smith and Franzen suggest, he was a writer deeply concerned with art’s bearing on the quality of shared human experience.

***

Wallace was compelled not by peak moments of epiphany, but rather mesmerized by the quotidian experience of subjectivity and the function of language therein. The use of

“whatever” in these two texts serves almost as a code word then: we know a character is trying to offset the emotional stakes of what he has just said when he brushes it off with the flippant colloquialism “whatever.” It is in these moments that the appearance of ambivalence performs two things at once: a fear of being vulnerable, and a sincere desire to risk vulnerability and be understood. Here, the utopian tenor of Wallace’s fiction is fragile, spectral, but persistent.

The spectral abounds in Wallace’s writing. For instance, in an early handwritten draft of “Good Old Neon” that I looked at in the archive there is a thought about interiority that has been inserted in square brackets at the end of the story. It reads: “ghosts talking to us all the time—but we think their voices are our own thoughts.” It is not clear whether this was a possible ending to “Good Old Neon” that Wallace was considering, or whether it was merely 182 an afterthought that the author jotted down and literally bracketed for later reflection. The phrase does not appear in subsequent drafts, but despite its excision from the final version it does shed light on the ghostly aspects of the story. In “Good Old Neon” death is shown to be not only episodic––as I have argued––but also ephiphanic: death is somewhat banal for the reader who knew it was coming all along, and yet still surprising. As we have seen, Wallace warps temporality in the story so that we may adjust our linear sense of finitude and our totalizing view of death as an event. The melancholic narrator does step too far off the edge of solipsism—“Good Old Neon” is a story of suicide, after all, and it haunts with a prescience of Wallace’s own end. But this is also a story of the author thinking through the interiority of a suicidal mind and articulating a desire for readers to catch “one tiny little part of it at any given instant.”

Neal’s final crash into the bridge invites an awareness of what the death of the other might feel like: it is an ambitious and delicately executed thought experiment. Neal is a ghost and he does talk to us all the time. He narrates from wherever it is that people go when they die, and as readers we get to experience his stream of consciousness thinking from the inside. “Good Old Neon” renders accessible the spectral, and this suggestion that our thoughts are really the voices of the dead is unsettling, but it is also an odd and utopian comfort to think that even in the darkest corners of our melancholia we are not there alone. 183

Chapter Four

New Queer Cinema Then and Now: Jennie Livingston’s

Paris Is Burning (1990) & Sean Baker’s Tangerine (2015)

Melancholia and illness have always been linked. Since the word’s earliest documented usage in 1398, melancholia has been synonymous with sickness. An imbalance of the humours, a weakness of the brain, or debilitating narcissism, melancholia has had many names, few of them complimentary. When Freud first described this psychic state at length in “Mourning and Melancholia” he contrasted the “pathological disposition” of melancholia to “the normal affect of mourning” (1917: 243). Yet, he also seemed genuinely sorry that the insights of the melancholic only came to him through such pain and turmoil.

Freud offers the following formulation of the melancholic: “it may be, so far as we know, that he has come pretty near to understanding himself; we only wonder why a man has to be ill before he can be accessible to a truth of this kind” (246).

As I demonstrated in the last chapter, David Foster Wallace was one of these men: his depression is what attuned him to profound insights into the human condition, and his depression is also what caused him to take his life. I argued that Wallace’s fiction reveals a faith in art to connect his solitude to the solitudes of others. Art was the vehicle through which he could render his melancholia less acute by translating it into a collective experience. In this chapter I will turn my attention to another set of artists and critics whose 184 relationship to art and collectivity has been through melancholia and illness: the filmmakers of independent and New Queer Cinema.

To define a subject’s mental state through a discourse of illness is to define it in opposition to the normative standard of the healthy. Moreover, if Foucault has taught us anything, it is that things do not get more heteronormative than discourses of health in the twentieth and twenty first centuries. Witness: until 1974 homosexuality was classified as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association. To be gay in the United States before this time was to be allegedly afflicted with a “sociopathic personality disturbance” (Hess). Considered a mental aberration like melancholia, homosexuality supposedly revealed a subject’s lack of moral fibre. In response to this painful association, a reparative and recuperative discourse of homosexual subjectivity soon emerged. The following decade saw the concept “queer” develop within activism, academia, and public discourse not as an angry or pathologizing epithet but as a new and urgent mode of identification during a time of real illness—AIDS.56

Growing directly out of the AIDS crisis of the late 80s and early 90s and in reaction to the ungrieved lives lost to the illness, New Queer Cinema (or NQC) is a movement in filmmaking committed to representations of gay life onscreen. Arising out of decades of homophobia and a new and terrifying disease associated with homosexual intimacy, NQC is a genre of loss. It is a mournful cinematic mode. Yet it also wants to celebrate its queerness.

56 There is no single site of origin for the reappropriated use of the word queer. However, some influential texts and moments in this movement include: the formation of the gay rights activist group ACT UP in 1986 in response to the AIDS crisis, Teresa de Lauretis’s guest edited issue of the journal differences entitled “Queer Theory” (1991), Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1990), Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990), as well as conferences entitled “How Do I Look?” (1989) and “Queer Theory” (1990) held in New York City and the University of California, Santa Cruz, respectively (Rich 2013: xix). 185

A collective work of protracted mourning, the films of NQC make visual the pain, suffering, and bliss of being queer, and it emerged in an America beholden to the right wing administration of then President Ronald Reagan. In this chapter I will reflect on the emergence of NQC—a cinema born of melancholia and full of utopian promise—and its limitations.

I will examine Jennie Livingston’s vibrant, unabashedly queer portrait of gay and transgender life, Paris Is Burning (1990), which debuted at the Sundance Film festival in

1991 and marked the beginning of a new queer era of movie making. Livingston spent a number of years filming Paris Is Burning, a documentary of New York’s queer pier life and the audacious parties—known as balls—of its transgender community. The ball scene is where members dance, vogue, and walk the runway like the fashion models many of them idolize, celebrating their fragile but resilient queer identities. Following this, I will analyze

Tangerine (2015), an unlikely comedy that premiered at Sundance last year and chronicles two trans women living and working on the streets of L.A. The film, by independent director

Sean Baker, was shot entirely on an Apple iPhone.

Moving chronologically from the inception of NQC to our contemporary moment, I will read these two film texts next to one another and consider the melancholy utopias that inhere within both. Paris Is Burning shows its spectators the important space occupied by

NQC in the early 1990s, while the technically innovative Tangerine permits a consideration of queer cinema now. These films reveal similar commitments: to make visual the complex, comedic, and beautiful worlds of their marginalized subjects and to give fantasy and play formal and narrative priority over the realities of political disenfranchisement. Both films 186 emphasize how their queer subjects work to reformulate the limits of kinship and carve out new discursive sites of love.

The Arrival of New Queer Cinema

In 1992, writer and film critic B. Ruby Rich wrote in the Village Voice that a new wave of filmmaking had arrived at long last: New Queer Cinema. Tallying the increasing number of queer films to debut on the festival circuit in recent years, mainly at the Sundance

Film Festival, Rich declared a new moment of queer visibility and cinematic representation.

NQC was a radical avowal of the collective melancholia of the gay community who refused to remain silent over the AIDS crisis. Along with Todd Haynes’s Poison (1991) and Tom

Kalin’s Swoon (1992), Livingston’s Paris Is Burning helped to herald a groundbreaking moment in cinematic history. With Paris Is Burning, Poison, Swoon, Gus Van Sant’s My

Own Private Idaho (1991), and Gregg Araki’s The Living End (1992) as its prime examples,

Rich declared a new queer wave. As Rich reflects, the arrival of New Queer Cinema “was accompanied by the thrill of having enough queer videos and films to reach critical mass and tip over into visibility” (xix). “Visibility” is the key term here, since by the time Rich was writing there was already a canon of queer films to be considered, from those of Andy

Warhol to Kenneth Anger, and yet these works of the American avant-garde were screened mostly for niche audiences and were a part of an underground culture. Rich’s New Queer

Cinema was concerned with being seen and making mainstream gains in gay representation, and yet it also insisted on its links to queer subcultures and the radical politics espoused within those communities. 187

The films that Rich and others named as belonging to the New Queer Cinema were bound together by a few central tenets: the eschewal of positive imagery, an attention to marginalized groups and communities, the defiance of the sanctity of the past, as well as the defiance of cinematic form and convention (Aaaron 3-4). In addition to the works of

Livingston, Van Sant, Araki, and Haynes’s early films were genre-busting works by Cheryl

Dunye (The Watermelon Woman [1996]), Jamie Babbit (But I’m A Cheerleader [1999]),

Derek Jarman (Edward II [1991]), and Marlon Riggs (Tongues Untied [1990]). As Jackie

Stacey and Sarah Street note, NQC coincided with “the emergence of queer theory in the academy, and with AIDS activism beyond it” and it “promised a generative space in which to combine academic and political agendas concerned with representing non-normative sexualities through audiovisual media” (3).

In an expanded and slightly revised version of her 1992 article for the Village Voice, this time entitled “The New Queer Cinema: Director’s Cut” (2013) Rich defines NQC as a period of gay independent filmmaking that took “its first steps in the years 1985-91” and rapidly grew reaching its apex between 1992 and 1997 (xv). Rich’s article in the Village

Voice announcing the new tide of queer cinema specifies that this group of films and videos

aren’t all the same, and don’t share a single aesthetic vocabulary or strategy or

concern. Yet they are nonetheless united by a common style. Call it ‘Homo Pomo’:

there are traces in all of them of appropriation and pastiche, irony, as well as a

reworking of history with social constructionism very much in mind. Definitively

breaking with older humanist approaches and the films and tapes that accompanied 188

identity politics, these works are irreverent, energetic, alternately minimalistic and

excessive. Above all, they’re full of pleasure. (16)

Full of pleasure, yes, but also originating from a homophobic lack of gay representation in film and a growing fear of AIDS across the country. This new genre of filmmaking was a direct response to the denial of gay life onscreen and the maligning of the queer subject in public policy surrounding the spread and treatment of AIDS. It was also, importantly, inflected with the new aesthetics of music videos and MTV and the novel and widespread availability of camcorders.57 NQC sought to document queer life through new media and modes of production.

In her expanded essay, Rich clarifies what the forces were that converged to bring about NQC. She writes that NQC “reinterpreted the link between the personal and the political envisioned by feminism, restaged the defiant activism pioneered at Stonewall, and recoded aesthetics to link the independent feature movement with the avant-garde and start afresh” (xv). Simply put, there were five crucial elements that came together to make NQC possible: “the arrival of AIDs, Reagan, camcorders, and cheap rent. Plus the emergence of

‘queer’ as a concept and a community” (xvi). The significance of the first two elements that

Rich names—the arrival of AIDS and Reagan—cannot be underestimated when considering how and why NQC emerged when it did. Rich writes: “Reagan’s speechwriters never let him utter the word AIDS, apart from a few demands for testing or quarantine. Construing AIDS as God’s retribution for the sin of homosexuality, he and his neocon cronies set the tone for

57 Paris Is Burning was released almost simultaneously with Madonna’s hit single “Vogue” and its accompanying music video. 189 the country” (xvi). Popular blockbuster movies of this period similarly elided even the idea of the ill gay body and instead fêted hard bodied action heroes who stood in for an impermeable, unbreakable American masculinity.

Susan Jeffords argues that during Reagan’s time in office bodies came to be divided into “hard” (male, white, strong) and “soft” (female, non-white, homosexual). Jeffords suggests that Reagan’s presidency was an era of hard bodies in film, from the Rambo franchise (beginning in 1982) to Lethal Weapon (1987), that were white, straight, and male like him. The sinewy and ripped mass of Sylvester Stallone as Rambo, for instance, became linked not only to a sense of America’s aggressive and determined national character, but also came to stand “for the nation itself” (25). These glistening, roguish, and militant hard bodies visually reflected the aggression, power, and masculinity of Reagan’s conservative agenda and became sites of its materialization (24). Reagan himself was often photographed chopping wood or riding horses at his ranch, and “the depiction of the indefatigable, muscular, and invincible masculine body became the linchpin of the Reagan imaginary; this hardened male form became the emblem not only for the Reagan presidency but for its ideologies and economies as well” (25).

If this representation of Reagan found its visual analog in Hollywood’s hulking men, it was in direct and deliberate opposition to the “soft” bodies of homosexuals and those in the throes of AIDS. Reagan’s eight years of presidency propelled forward a conservative, harmful Christian right wing view of homosexuality with such force—with such emphasis— that many artists felt compelled to push back with rich portraits of gay life through video. 190

This chiseled mainstream backdrop makes it easy to recognize the radical impact of NQC and its cadre of films committed to America’s “other” bodies.

Yet, almost simultaneous with the announcement of the New Queer Cinema came a host of queer films that failed to hit the radical note that Rich had originally envisioned. The queer films that emerged after Rich’s Village Voice pronouncement did not accord with her image of a disruptive cinematic movement. As Michele Aaron notes, NQC quickly became a

“contested category” of film that was seen by some as an exclusive club and criticized for its

“U.S.-centricity” (8). For instance, Partibha Parmar, the director of Khush (1991), offered a pointed rejoinder to Rich’s formulation of NQC and what she saw as its racial essentialism.

Parmar writes: “I am wary of talking about an overarching queer aesthetic, as my sensibility comes as much from my culture and race as from my queerness. In queer discourses generally there is a worrying tendency to create an essentialist, so-called authentic queer gaze” (175). As Daniel T. Contreras acknowledges, Parmar’s critique was warranted and would “haunt ongoing discussions of the New Queer Cinema’s accomplishments and its claims of representational revolution and inclusion” (120).58 Contreras maintains that even though queer filmmakers of color were charting a new course of race and sexuality with films like Looking for Langston (Isaac Julien, 1989) and the aforementioned Tongues Untied by Riggs, they were relegated to specific discussions of race in cinema and never brought into larger discussions of NQC.

58 For example, the films of thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (The Adventures of Iron Pussy [2003]; Tropical Malady [2004]) are interested in formal defiance of film convention and hierarchy (the director has only ever worked with amateur actors and his work often and deliberately confuses the lines between documentary, fiction, dream and reality), and align with NQC’s primary concerns, but he has been pencilled into the canon largely in retrospect. 191

Aaron also notes that NQC was disparaged by critics for its “unwarranted optimism: in heralding a minor revolution when a few films do not a movement make” (8). She continues as follows:

Perhaps the most irreparable of charges against NQC is that the promise indicated

by the films of the early 1990s was never fully realised. Despite that initial furore on

the Indie scene, and the dramatic increase in the production of, and audience for,

queer films during the 1990s, a new and enduring sector of popular radical work

failed to materialise. In many ways this is hardly surprising, for how can a marriage

between the popular and the radical be sustained when such an association erodes

the very meaning of each? (7)

NQC did not deliver on its promises. It did not usher in a long-lasting movement in cinema of radical but popular queer film. Yet, even though Aaron posits that NQC did not live up to expectations originally sketched by Rich, she simultaneously argues that the “real impact” and value of New Queer Cinema is “not to be measured by the quantity or quirkiness of potential members, but by the queerer culture it ushered in” (8). As Rich herself asked of

NQC a decade later: “Did it disappear, or is it everywhere?” (2002: 43). Perhaps it is misguided to measure NQC by the enduring relevance of its counter-canon, since what was radical yesterday will not remain so forever. In other words, Aaron suggests that NQC be considered a tipping point, a watershed moment in queer culture and not as a failed movement.

Alain Badiou’s theory of the event and failure can be of some use to us here. He argues in Philosophy and the Event (2013) that a genuine event—a surprise and exceptional 192 break with the everyday flow of the status quo—maintains its status as an event even when it fails. For the event leaves its fingerprints all over the fabric of social and intimate life long after it has faded. There simply is no going back to the way things were before the event: it ushers in a new and altered way of being in the world for the subject of truth who apprehends it. When Badiou writes of the event that “there is a before and an after” he makes sure to underscore that “this break doesn’t cause a transition from an inferior world to a superior world” (26). The rupture of the quotidian by the event does not usher in a new and better world, but it does irrevocably change the subject’s experience of that world moving forward.

Something similar can be said of New Queer Cinema. NQC did not evolve into a sustained mode of queer imaging and politics. In this regard, NQC failed. However, that does not make its emergence any less significant: it was a seminal cinematic moment whose traces linger in contemporary film and queer media-making. The significance of NQC—like one of Badiou’s truth events—remains open and living despite its inability to remain a relevant genre. The ongoing value of NQC may not be obvious, but Badiou speaks of the possibility that the event can remain “quite opaque” (2012: 24). In its opacity, he writes that the event “only finds reality in its multiple resonances within the real world” (24). If we read

NQC as one of these opaque events, then we need to be open to the possibility that NQC might continue to resonate in our contemporary moment in ways that are not patently obvious to us.

Part of the challenge of considering NQC as a radical and ongoing movement today is the way in which many queer films and filmmakers associated with Rich’s essay are now 193 associated with more mainstream cinema. The question of how to sustain what is radical with what becomes popular is a longstanding conundrum of populist aesthetics. Haynes— whose Poison premiered at Sundance the same year as Paris Is Burning—is a good example of this tension. His early films are radical and genre-bending works and yet this cannot be said of his entire oeuvre. Poison—a tripartite story of gay love, horror, and heroism—was among the first to be anointed by Rich as New Queer Cinema. Unintentionally taking up the mantle of NQC’s desire to disturb the status quo, Poison turned into a crucible of left versus right wing political agendas and the issue of government arts funding. Haynes had received a small grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for Poison and the film was consequently accused of obscenity and likened to pornography by members of Congress who held it up as an example of misused government funds.59

Haynes’s Poison proved to be a lightning rod of artistic and political contestation, and his later film Safe (1995) did not shy away from the political either. In Safe, Carol White

(Julianne Moore) is a rich suburban housewife who develops multiple acute allergies to the chemicals that permeate modern life. Carol retreats from society into a hermetically sealed ceramic igloo to outwit disease with the power of positive thinking. In this manner, the film mounts a nuanced critique of American optimism and the wish to rid AIDS (another

“mysterious” ailment like Carol’s) from public view. These early works are said to have grounded New Queer Cinema in a “lack of respect for the governing codes of form or

59 This Puritanical attack on Haynes came a few short years after the U.S. Senate similarly lambasted the works of Robert Mapplethorpe. In 1989, Republican Senator Jesse Helms assembled a group of 100 Congressman to write an angry letter to the NEA for its support of the Philadelphia Museum, which had recently displayed Mapplethorpe’s works. The Senate sensationally denounced photographs by Mapplethorpe that depicted the nude bodies of black males in an exhibition entitled “The Perfect Moment.” Following this controversy, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. withdrew its support of the exhibit. See: Claire Suddath’s “Crackdowns on Creativity” (2011). 194 content, linearity or coherence, indeed, for Hollywood itself” that also characterized the earlier and uncompromising queer films of Jean Genet, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Warhol, and others (Aaron 5).

However, Haynes is often cited as one of NQC’s successful “cross-over directors” and his films have made their way into the mainstream from the queer fringes of film festivals and art house screenings. Popularity is not in itself a bad thing, this cross-over has been in tandem with a certain waning of the director’s radicality. As Haynes’s career has progressed and his fame as a director has mounted, the controversial and avant-garde aspects of his aesthetic have abated. Haynes’s later films such as Far From Heaven (2002) (also with

Moore) and his recent adaptation of a 1952 romance novel by Patricia Highsmith in Carol

(2015), starring Hollywood darling Cate Blanchett, focus on white middle class subjects but without the same gritty critiques that distinguished Poison and Safe. Larger audiences than ever before are seeing Haynes’s works—his art has become popular—but his politics have become more subtle and his images of gay love more muted. In short, Haynes’s subject matter has become more popular but less radical over time. His later films do not even experiment with form in the same way as his earlier works did. Less of an opponent to the

Hollywood mainstream, Haynes has become a part of it.

Even so, should this cross-over into the mainstream be considered a failure on the part of Haynes to live up to the dictates of New Queer Cinema? The goal of NQC as Rich describes it was not simply the positive depiction of queerness or the recuperation of gay life from punitive and unfair associations with illness. The aim of NQC was to fight back against heteronormative consolidations of history, imagery, and love using the new technologies 195 made widely accessibly by the free market like the handheld camcorder. This is a reasonable perspective. However, where Rich errs is in trying to pin down the meaning of “queer” to a static definition. The main flaw in Rich’s theory (which, even in its “revised” 2013 edition is essentially the same as the original 1992 Village Voice essay) is the notion that what is queer cinema and what is not ought to be dictated by the sexual preference and enduring radicality of its directors. As many queer theorists have argued, queerness is a fluid and mobile concept that is always in the process of becoming. In other words, if queerness is to maintain the kernel of resistance at its core, it must not be fixed into a rigid category––whether that be cinematic or otherwise. As important as NQC was at the historical moment of its inception,

Haynes illustrates how the designation of what constitutes NQC quickly outgrew itself.

Butler’s important essay “Critically Queer” (1993) serves to remind us of the contingent character of queer critique. Butler proposes that the deterritorialized nature of queerness must continually be affirmed and avowed over and over again. Butler argues that the term “queer” must safeguard is ability to remain open to critiquing its own assumptions

“not only for the purposes of continuing to democratize queer politics but also to expose, affirm, and rework the specific historicity of the term” (20). Butler’s call to protect the ongoing pluralization of queerness and to insist on its contingency remains pertinent for current discussions of queer theory and cinema. As José Muñoz writes in Cruising Utopia

(2009), “queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality” (1). Muñoz, David Eng, and Judith Halberstam reflect on

Butler’s essay in their introduction to a special issue of Social Text noting that 196

the operations of queer critique…can neither be decided on in advance nor be

depended on in the future. The reinvention of the term [queer] is contingent on its

potential obsolescence, one necessarily at odds with any fortification of its critical

reach in advance or any static notion of its presumed audience and participants. (3)

Queer critique is never still, and its modes of analysis and reading are not carved in stone.

The power of queer critique comes from its lack of strictures and from its ongoing reinvention. This formulation—that the term queer is necessarily contingent and always potentially close to its own obsolescence—resonates with Rich’s question as to whether new queer cinema has disappeared or if it has permeated the culture and is “everywhere.” The fact remains that NQC as Rich envisioned it has disappeared, it is obsolete. However, that does not mean that queer cinema is without contemporary relevance, only that it has expanded its reach, representations, and breached the original bounds set out for it in the

Village Voice.

Ball Culture & Paris Is Burning

“The ball is our world,” says a thin, angular young man sitting in a park with his friends. Next to him, his friend cuts in to say: “the ball is the closest we gonna get to the reality of all that: fame, fortune,” he pauses, “stardom and spotlight.” This group of black gay men are talking to documentary filmmaker Jennie Livingston about the vivacious drag ball subculture in New York City in 1987. Outside in the daylight, these men wear nondescript shorts and striped t-shirts and they appear to conform to mainstream norms of dress. But inside the dance hall where the balls take place, these men are transformed by 197 sequinned blazers, feathered fascinators, statement makeup, and high heeled shoes into another version of themselves. Shot in 16mm, this is the world of the ball; this is Paris Is

Burning.

When Livingston’s documentary debuted at Sundance in 1991 it was met with unexpected praise from critics and filmmakers alike. This was Livingston’s first film and she was an unknown director, but when the film won the festival’s documentary Grand Jury prize it became an iconic part of a new crop of queer films.60 Queer indeed: Paris Is Burning documents the ostentatious voguing balls of Harlem and Manhattan in the late 1980s. The subjects of Livingston’s documentary are the black and latino queens, queers, and transsexuals of the drag ball community. To the applause and whistles of a packed dance hall, participants strut down the runway in various categories vying for “legendary” status.

Thus, the ball is a space of queer celebration where cross-dressing and flamboyant homosexuality is encouraged, but it is also a space of fierce competition.

The balls’ participants are divvied up into Houses each of which has a “mother” who oversees the “children” of the house. The Houses provide a system of kinship that bolsters the subculture of the balls. These divisions encourage competition, but more importantly, they affirm a message of belonging and caretaking. Since the reality of most ball participants is one of exclusion, rejection, and shame, the nurturing nature of the House structure fortifies belonging as central to the community. As Dorian Corey—a longtime fixture of the drag ball community—responds to Livingston’s offscreen question about the House structure: “A

60 A new documentary that pays homage to Paris Is Burning called Kiki premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. Directed by Sara Jordenö, Kiki follows “a group of LGBTQ youths of color” as they “unite to form a safe gathering space” (IMBb). It has been described by critics like Manohla Dargis as a follow-up to Livingston’s film. 198

House? Let me put it down sharply: they’re families.” Likewise, Pepper Labeija, the mother of the House of Labeija, describes this maternal kinship structure as necessary for the queer

“children” who have most likely been rejected by their biological families for being gay. As

Pepper relates to Livingston, the ball culture and its House structure offers a necessary refuge for these young, queer kids, some of whom are living on the streets: “some of these kids are starving…but they come to the ball to live the fantasy.”

It may be because of the recuperative kinship structure offered by the Houses that the balls are a safe space for its members to explore and embody their homosexuality and transsexuality. The balls are fleeting spaces where queer subjects do not focus on the characteristics that mark them as “other” (black, gay, trans) to heteronormative society. As one of the announcers shouts over the microphone to the crowd and contestants: “You have space to do all you intend to.” What brings these queer subjects to the subculture is an increasingly right wing heteronormative culture, a clear exclusion from public social life, but what awaits them at the balls is an exuberant queer space that more closely matches their dreams and projections of themselves.

In the opening sequences of her documentary, Livingston interviews a ball member outside on the city sidewalk. He wears a studded black jacket and his white skin sets him apart from the mostly black bodies that populate the ball scene. But what these men—black and white—have in common is the transformative space of the ball. Just like the men in the park who speak to Livingston’s camera with candor and whimsy, this man also articulates the ball as otherworldly: “it’s like crossing into the looking glass” he says to the unseen director. “You go in there and you feel…a hundred percent right about being gay.” In a rare 199 moment when the viewer hears Livingston’s voice in the film coming from behind the camera, she asks in response to this: “and that’s not what it’s like in the world?” There is a brief pause, and then the man answers with a repetition: “that’s not what it’s like in the world. That’s not what it’s like in the world.” Here, the man repeats his everyday feeling of unbelonging. With this couplet, the man seems to be reminding himself that feeling “a hundred percent right about being gay” is not acceptable in the world beyond the ball. The repetition also functions as an elegiac refrain that this is so.

In keeping with this elegiac tone, I would like to argue that the fantastical world of ball culture is predicated on a collective melancholia that inheres within its queer subjects.

The identities of the men and women of the ball scene are continually, often violently foreclosed by the dominant heteronormative culture. The balls are spaces of melancholy utopia––opening a space for utopia within melancholia––in so far as their members express themselves in ways that are not permissible and are unsafe in other, more public arenas. The gay community in New York City in the late ‘80s existed more than a decade after

Stonewall, but gay rights were being forestalled by the right wing administration of Reagan whose policies and statements pointed a clear and fear-mongering finger at “immoral” homosexual behavior in the early years of the AIDS epidemic. As retreats from this homophobic and transphobic hatred, the balls nourished a subculture that flourished on the other side of the looking glass.

As I mentioned above, one of the aims of the balls—in addition to the freedom of gay sociality and performance—is to win “legendary” status. To become a legend is to have proven oneself on the runway, to have vogued one’s way into mythic status; it is to have 200 fully embodied a self-loving gay subject position. Stated slightly differently, to become a legend one has embraced and become emboldened by “feeling right about being gay.” What is interesting about the balls’ emphasis on garnering legend status is the promise embedded in that title of a futurity. The future-oriented thrust of becoming a legend is a utopian yearning. For to become a legend is to be immortalized in the ball subculture for future generations. To become a legend is to be renowned within the community as being close to perfection. To become a legend is to have achieved status not by denying one’s queerness, but by fully becoming it. In the film, as in the subculture, there is a future for the gay or trans subject who walks the runway with enough attitude, poise, exuberance, and queerness to snatch that legendary title. This queer futurity does not depend on any form of conformity, such as successful class climbing, marriage, or military service. Rather, the futurity of ball culture rests solely on a subject’s ability to perform and inhabit their queerness.61 Indeed, the very term “legend” captures an important characteristic of melancholy utopia: the legendary title will outlast the subject it belongs to. There is something mournful about the very concept of the legend because the word points to the future disappearance of that ball member. And yet, there is also an element of the utopic inherent to legendary status: the ball legend represents a beacon of courage for those who come after her.

61 As I have addressed in previous chapters, Lee Edelman (among others) has discussed the lack of futurity for the queer subject. For Edelman, since the gay man does not contribute to society’s reproductive obsession, he is understood to be the opposite of life—he is a stand in for death. José Muñoz emphatically resists Edelman’s stance for its social nihilism and impracticality. How do you continue to live and breathe as a gay man if you exit the social order by way of Edelman’s deep dive into the Lacanian real? Instead, Muñoz emphasizes queer futurity as being a constant process of becoming in the “then and there”—neither fully forward or backward looking, but a process of both. The legendary status within ball culture is particularly salient to debates of futurity and the antirelational turn in queer theory that will emerge in the two decades following Paris Is Burning. 201

For both the legend and the rookie alike, the balls figure as more real than the outside world. Outside, queer subjects are constantly compelled to mask their homosexuality or transsexuality. But inside, the baroque, loud, and brash balls are spaces of gender fluidity, identity transformation, and gay acceptance that function as a defiant response to the exclusion of non-conforming gender identities from mainstream culture. That is, the utopic world of Paris Is Burning is born of its melancholia. Temporary though recurring in nature, bursting into existence from lack, and shaped by various shades of fantasy, these extravagantly costumed and celebratory queer balls are a quintessential example of what I have been calling melancholy utopia.

Venus Xtravaganza and Fantasies of Whiteness

A significant part of the melancholy utopia of Paris Is Burning is ambivalence. That is, some of the ball categories also reveal an ambivalent relationship to queerness. Instead of traditional drag performances that encourage outrageous cross-dressing and overt gender fluidity, the “realness” categories prize the contestant’s ability to successfully cloak their queerness and to pass as “normal.” These realness challenges range in theme from “School

Girl/School Boy Realness,” to “Military,” and “Executive Realness.” The goal is, as one character puts it, “to look as much as possible as your straight counterpart.” Realness is “to be able to blend—that’s what realness is.” That is, realness is a fantasy of seamless assimilation to the heterosexual norm. The balls are fuelled by fantasies of all kinds: the fantasy of beauty ideals, the fantasy of cisgendered womanhood, the fantasy of belonging. 202

One of the film’s central characters, Venus Xtravaganza of the House of Xtravaganza disrupts any clear delineation of good and bad fantasies or of the pros and cons of realness.

Slim and waif-like, Venus walks the ball runway with the steely and impersonal gaze of a model and a feather boa around her neck like a garland. Her big hair and small body make her appear bold and fragile in equal measure. The film cuts between footage of Venus voguing at the ball to one-on-one interviews where she reclines on a bed or sits on a windowsill in casual summer clothes and a mass of blond hair pinned up in a side bun.

Venus speaks openly about cross-dressing since she was a small child, leaving home so as to not embarrass her religious Hispanic family, and wanting a sex change operation to complete her transformation into a “total woman.” As Contreras points out, Venus’s wish for biological transformation “does not fit into the critical context of drag, but to that of transgender politics” which have been ignored my critics “who are distracted by the familiar drag theatricality of the film” (124). Transgender politics have emerged slowly within feminist and queer debates over the last three decades, but with the arrival of the internet they have now come to the center stage of contemporary activism and discourse. Whereas drag is a mode of performance that revels in its campyness and ostentatious costuming, trans is an act of self-definition that can be overt, private, subtle, or not. The argument for or against gender re-assignment within the transgender community is one of the significant dividing lines among feminist scholars in particular. Sheila Jeffreys and Janice Raymond for instance consider a surgery like the one Venus wishes for—to become a “total woman”—a mutilating act of sadomasochism. They are a part of the outspoken and extreme Trans-

Exclusionary Radical Feminism (or TERF) movement. 203

Then there are those like Butler, Robin Tyler, Sandy Stone, Poppy Northcott and other trans advocates who I see as standing firmly on the right side of this history. Butler opposes Jeffreys and Raymond for their prescriptivism and “feminist policing of trans lives and trans choices,” which aspires to “a kind of feminist tyranny” (qtd. in Williams). There are also prominent feminist thinkers who fall somewhere in the middle of this divisive debate, such as Gloria Steinem. Steinem recently revised her early views on transsexualism, which were first articulated in somewhat rigid terms in the late 1970s and also spoke of re- assignment surgery as a form of “mutilation.” In an Op-Ed in 2013, Steinem clarifies: “what

I wrote decades ago does not reflect what we know today as we move away from only the binary boxes of ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ and begin to live along the full human continuum of identity and expression.” Importantly, surgery and genitalia are not what determine gender identification. As trans woman, actor, and activist Laverne Cox has succinctly stated: “the preoccupation with transition and surgery objectifies trans people. And then we don’t get to really deal with the real lived experiences” (qtd. in McDonough).

Figure 6: Livingston, Jennie. Venus at the Ball. Paris Is Burning. 1990. Film Still. 204

With the benefit of hindsight and the development of transgender politics over the past twenty-five years since the film’s release, we can see a spectrum of queer and trans expression in Paris Is Burning. It is thanks to vocal trans advocates that a more nuanced reading of the film and its complex transgender characters like Venus is now available to us.

In one scene, Venus confidently declares in her soft and wispy voice: “I’d like to be a spoiled rich white girl. They get what they want whenever they want.” Here, Livingston cuts to a still black and white candid photograph of Venus with arched eyebrows and a small smirk, her left arm aloft and dramatically dangling a single high heeled shoe (see figure 6).

Livingston’s choice to cut to this image is a visual affirmation of Venus as a spoiled rich white girl—the still photograph substantiates the trans woman’s claim with the iconography of the subject position she covets. This shot of the grainy photograph also functions as an archive of Venus’s desire, a static document of her longing. Garbed in clinging evening wear with an unwavering stare and a clear love of shoes, Venus does resemble a rich white girl who gets what she wants.

In his collection of essays, White Girls (2013), Hilton Als examines the phenomenon of people from Truman Capote to Louise Brooks appropriating the affectations and attitudes of white women. Als argues that performing the privilege and carefreeness of a white woman has less to do with skin color or class, and more to with a meaningful identification with a coveted cultural cachet these woman seemed to possess. It is white girls who get photographed for magazines and paid to walk runways. It is white girls who are allowed and encouraged to discern between fabrics, appreciate the mist of fine perfume, to be an object of sexual appeal at the same time that they demand propriety. Als argues that White Girl is not a 205 fixed racial or class position, but a personality and a way of being in the world that gay men in particular have been drawn to. Als does not analyze Paris Is Burning in his essays but only mentions it in passing as an “essential” film text.62

One critic who insists on the interplay of race and class in identifications with whiteness is bell hooks. In her trenchant critique of Livingston’s documentary, hooks argues in Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992) that Venus is demonstrative of the way in which the film promotes the idealization of whiteness. hooks contends that with Paris Is

Burning Livingston has chosen to depict a subculture where “the idea of womanness and femininity is totally personified by whiteness” and subjects like Venus are applauded for kneeling at the altar of the white upper middle class (147). More stringently, hooks claims that the documentary is a “portrait of the way in which colonized black people…worship at the throne of whiteness, even when such worship demands that we live in perpetual self- hate, steal, lie, go hungry, and even die in its pursuit” (149). The “we” hooks invokes here is meant to encompass “black people/people of color, who are daily bombarded by a powerful colonizing whiteness” (149). hooks concludes that the whiteness that is “celebrated” in the film is a “brutal imperial ruling-class capitalist patriarchal whiteness that presents itself—its way of life—as the only meaningful life there is” (149). Thus, hooks insists that self-hatred and a colonized false consciousness is at the root of drag culture.

hooks further censures Paris Is Burning’s black subjects who she writes are “all too willing to be complicit in perpetuating the fantasy that ruling-class white culture is the

62 It seems odd that Als would not have considered Venus Xtravaganza in his study, considering that her declaration “I’d like to be a spoiled rich white girl. They get what they want whenever they want” is basically the thesis statement of his book. 206 quintessential site of unrestricted joy, freedom, power, and pleasure” (149). According to hooks, this complicity enables a white audience to revel in their class privilege and enjoy black spectacle without guilt or critical awareness. Who is watching which bodies onscreen has always been important to hooks. hooks first theorized the notion of the oppositional gaze in response to early white feminist film theory. The oppositional gaze is the notion that since black female spectators cannot identify with the white characters they see onscreen, they are neither enchanted nor victimized by what they see. Their spectatorial gaze is formed in opposition. This theory was written in direct response to, and rejection of, Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), which laid bare the film camera’s assumption of a male spectator who views the woman onscreen as a fetishistic object of desire. For hooks, Mulvey’s feminist theorization of the male gaze (which Mulvey expands and revises in a 1981 article) problematically attempts to universalize the female experience of spectatorship without taking into account considerations of race and class. For black female spectatorship specifically, hooks argues that there is no universal experience.

Rather, their gaze is shaped in opposition, such that “critical Black female spectators construct a theory of looking relations where cinematic visual delight is the pleasure of interrogation” (126). The inability to escape into identification with the film’s fiction creates a schism in the black subject’s experience of visual pleasure and gives rise to an antagonistic mode of enjoyment.

There is no denying that hooks’s commentary on black visual pleasure and theories of spectatorship is vital to film studies. Yet, as significant as hooks’s broader contribution to film theory is, her commentary on Paris Is Burning arguably overlooks a central element of 207 the film. In reducing the documentary’s vibrant and bold community to symptomatic self- loathing subjects, hooks denies the fact that fantasies are at times necessary for psychic survival. hooks insists that Venus is worshipping at the altar of whiteness, and she is. Venus has chosen her idols: the high heeled shoe is her icon, the evening gown is her relic. Venus aspires to things associated with the status of spoiled rich white girl that she lacks. Her dream of being a “rich white girl” is about getting what she wants whenever she wants it—it is about the fulfillment of desire on a whim. The unspoken component of Venus’s dream is a wish for safety, for comfort, and for a stable, recognizable kinship that will allow her to live as herself. Speaking of Venus, Contreras offers the following formulation: “the wish to be

‘white’, seems in this case, not simply a psychological pathology, but also a sense of not wanting to be what one is— poor, abject” (126).

Venus tells the camera that she longs to get married and move out to the suburbs. In articulating her fantasy, Venus’s utterance also works to destabilize the norm that she longs for. Her desire for the trimmings and trappings of whiteness articulates a desire to reconstitute the modern nuclear family in such a way that a trans woman can be its matriarch. Venus wants the security of marriage as a socially recognized kinship formation yet she also wants this kinship formation to be malleable enough to include her. Certainly, following the logic of hooks’s argument, it is possible to read Venus’s fantasy as a repudiation of her Hispanic identity and to interpret her fantasy as a cruel disavowal of her identity as a queer of color. However, I want to consider the possibility that Venus’s longing for a different iteration of herself does not need to preclude self-love. Contrary to hooks’s 208 analysis, I argue that Venus fantasizes about a queer futurity of her own. In so doing, Venus both worships and reworks the ideal of white femininity.

In contrast to hooks’s analysis, which conflates performance with mimicry, Butler’s study helps us to think about the film in less categorical terms. While hooks’s primary criticism of Paris Is Burning is that it problematically bolsters whiteness as the norm to which a queer subject ought to strive, Butler argues something quite different. Butler suggests that “at best, it seems, drag is a site of a certain ambivalence, one which reflects the more general situation of being implicated in the regimes of power by which one is constituted and, hence, of being implicated in the very regimes of power that one opposes” (338). What Butler highlights here is the fact that drag performance and gender self-identification cannot escape hegemonic power. All bodies and subjectivities are circumscribed by the culture and systems of power that surround them. Unfortunately, these regimes of power are not instantaneously and lastingly dissembled by acts of subversion.

Yet, Butler also emphasizes the capacity of drag to subvert normative codes of gender. Butler’s analysis is useful in elaborating the performative aspects of ball culture and the ways in which performing whiteness and traditional beauty ideals exposes the unstable nature of heterosexual norms. In Butler’s words, heterosexual performativity “is consistently haunted by that domain of sexual possibility that must be excluded for heterosexualized gender to produce itself”—that sexual possibility being that a queer subject born with the biological traits of a man could become a woman through successful performance and repeated utterance of heterosexual norms (338). 209

Heterosexuality is already shoddily fortified by the accumulation of gender norms performed over and over again. Hence, what a subversive figure like Venus threatens with her convincing femininity is to expose that delicate foundation upon which heterosexuality claims its essential, biological nature. Butler continues: “in this sense, then, drag is subversive to the extent that it reflects on the imitative structure by which hegemonic gender is itself produced and disputes heterosexuality’s claim on naturalness and originality” (338-39). Earlier I noted that Venus’s transsexuality cannot easily be conflated with drag, but what I want to retain here from Butler’s argument is the claim that heterosexuality is itself an imitative structure. Heterosexuality is not quite as natural or original as it proclaims to be if drag or realness can successfully imitate and produce the same effects through performativity. The potential danger of heterosexual performativity—

Venus’s “femme realness”—is that its performance brings to light the identity crisis that always already permeates heterosexuality.

Butler contends that the subculture lays bare the tenuousness of heteronormative gender roles by revealing how all gender norms require constant and continual reiteration.

What is between an individual’s legs does not answer the question of what gender he is, especially if being able to discern his gender depends on his constant avowal of conventional attitudes, gestures, desires, and appearances that align with cultural signifiers of masculinity.

In her critique of hook’s analysis of Paris Is Burning, Butler asserts that reading gay male drag as an expression of misogyny perpetuates a narrow logic which reduces homosexuality to “a heterosexual matrix and the logic of repudiation” (340). Butler thus suggests that the problem with hooks’s argument about the self-hatred endemic to drag culture is that it 210 reduces its subjects to outcasts who hate what they cannot be. Butler continues by saying that

this logic of repudiation installs heterosexual love as the origin and truth of both

drag and lesbianism, and it interprets both practices as symptoms of thwarted love.

But what is displaced in this explanation of displacement is the notion that there

might be pleasure, desire, and love that is not solely determined by what it

repudiates. (340)

In other words, what hooks loses sight of in her explanation of drag’s displaced self-hatred is the possibility that self-love can stem from the very same place.

Butler argues that “the rearticulation of kinship in Paris Is Burning might be understood as repetitions of hegemonic forms of power which fail to repeat loyally and, in that failure, open possibilities for resignifying the terms of violation against their violating aims” (337). The House structure of the ball scene is an excellent example of such subversive resignification: it reifies the importance of kinship structures—leaving all forms of family behind is not presented as an option—and yet the queer version of kinship that emerges opens up the possibility of new kinds of families. These new discursive sites of love avow that the realm of kinship is not closed to the queer subject—far from it. Paris Is

Burning illustrates the intricate relations of care that queer kinship can produce and sustain.

What the mothers and children of the Houses affirm is their ability to love and to be loved.

Butler writes that there is “defiance and affirmation, the creation of kinship and of glory” in the film, but there “is also the kind of reiteration of norms which cannot be called subversive, but which lead to the death of Venus Xtravaganza” (338). For Venus’s fantasy 211 collides with a fatal transphobic reality. Her reformulation of suburban kinship never actualizes. The stakes of Venus’s wishing come into harsh relief at the end of Paris Is

Burning when the viewer learns that she was strangled to death in a motel room and her body was discovered under the bed four days later. Presumably, she passed so convincingly as a cisgendered woman that when the john she was with at the motel discovered her penis, or what in the film Venus more euphemistically calls “her little secret down there,” he killed her for that trespass into heterosexuality. Which is to say, not all forms of defiance are subversive, and some modes of revolt or resistance consolidate existing norms to detrimental, even fatal effect.

Acknowledging the fraught dynamic of realness, passing, and self-love, Butler suggests that analyzing drag culture and sexual norms is difficult precisely because there can be a dual sense of “defeat and a sense of insurrection” in the pageantry of a film like Paris Is

Burning. It “both appropriates and subverts racist, misogynistic, and homophobic norms of oppression,” writes Butler. The “citing of the dominant norm does not, in this instance, displace that norm; rather, it becomes the means by which that dominant norm is most painfully reiterated as the very desire and the performance of those it subjects” (344).

There is pain, then, at the center of ball culture, but there is also pleasure. There is resistance to the hegemony of the status quo, and there is its repetition. There is the reworking of “racist, misogynistic, and homophobic norms of oppression” but there is also their reiteration. Although I would like to be able to say that the drag ball scene successfully rewrites the rules of kinship and sexual expression in Reagan-era America, Rome was not built in a day and Paris does not overturn patriarchy in one fell swoop. Like melancholia 212 itself, the drag performances of Paris Is Burning contain an ambivalence. Never fully one thing, these performances reject and reiterate the heterosexual imperative.

What happens to the heterosexual imperative when non-queer subjects engage in drag or cross-dressing? There are forms of drag and cartoonish cross-dressing in heterosexual culture everywhere: from Charlie Chaplin in A Busy Day (1914), to Robin

Williams as the titular Mrs. Doubtfire, to the multiple examples available in most Eddie

Murphy and Adam Sandler movies. These performances are not subversive, but rather they serve as a release valve for straight culture. The queerness of these drag performances are ultimately “corrected” and cross-dressing characters are restored to a heterosexual matrix before the films’ end. This permits the viewer to indulge in the idea of subverting gender and partaking in the supposedly elicit fun of non-conforming identity, but without risking his own heterosexual intelligibility.

For instance, consider a pregnant Arnold Schwarzenegger and his homoerotic bond with Danny Devito in Ivan Reitman’s Junior (1994). In the name of “masculine” scientific research, Dr. Alex Hesse (Schwarzenegger) artificially inseminates himself and his notoriously muscular body becomes soft, emotional, and “feminine” as the baby grows inside of him. As queer and homoerotic as the film’s subtext may be, the conclusion is definitively heterosexual. In order to assuage any heterosexual panic that may have mounted over the course of the film, once Alex gives birth, the straight female character Diana (Emma

Thompson) swoops in to conclusively declare herself the mother and Alex’s soon-to-be wife.

The nuclear family is restored and potential heterosexual anxieties about the film’s lasting queerness are pacified. 213

Another prime example of the limit of onscreen queerness and of heterosexual

“release valve” depictions is Kimberly Peirce’s Boys Don’t Cry (1999), starring Hilary

Swank in the role of Brandon Teena. Brandon Teena was an actual trans man who passed successfully until, like Venus Xtravaganza, his realness was brutally punished. When the film premiered, it was lauded as a momentous step for queer cinema into the mainstream.

However, since the initial enthusiasm surrounding the film, film scholars have critiqued the ways in which it seems invested in making transsexuality palatable for heteronormative audiences.

Even though the film is sympathetic to Brandon and illustrates some of the injustices he faced, it also assuages the audience’s potential anxieties around gender fluidity and non- conforming gender identities via the celebrity body and real-life heterosexual status of

Swank. Aaron argues that Peirce’s film is “about the spectacle of transvestism,” and “despite its new queer cinema sensibility and elegiac thoughtfulness, it is Hilary Swank’s crossdressed success, her ‘stellar stunt performance’ as Brandon, which made the film an international hit and garnered her an Oscar, among numerous other awards” (260). Aaron remarks that Swank’s feminine appearance at the Academy Awards that year “sniffed of mainstream recuperation” as though “here finally was that ‘original’ identity: the pre- disguise girl missing from the film’s start” (260). If the award show ceremony and the celebrity status of Swank serves as a heterosexual corollary and corrective to the queerness of the film like Aaron suggests, then Boys Don’t Cry is precisely the sort of “release valve” that Butler has in mind. 214

“Release valve” representations such as Peirce’s film indulge heterosexual curiosity around transsexuality and cross-dressing while at the same time foreclosing any potential of lasting or paradigm-shifting trans representation. For instance, the undressing of Swank in

Boys Don’t Cry serves a double function of putting her female anatomy on display for the homophobic characters who demand to know “what” Brandon is while also presenting it to the viewer who may also crave biological facts. There are numerous contemporary examples that substantiate Butler’s assertion that trans representations are often hedged or contained within these strict and clearly gender anxious limits. The favored Hollywood practice of casting straight white men in the role of trans women offers a slew of examples from Patrick

Swayze in the camp classic The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Stephan

Elliott, 1994), to Jared Leto in the triumphantly heterosexual AIDS narrative Dallas Buyer’s

Club (Jean-Marc Vallée, 2013), to Eddie Redmayne’s quaking performance in The Danish

Girl (Tom Hooper, 2015), to name only a few.

What these films demonstrate is that heterosexual anxiety runs deep. Of movies that provide a release for heterosexual fears, or, offer a panacea to hegemonic worry surrounding gender norms, Butler writes:

indeed, one might argue that such films are functional in providing a ritualistic

release for a heterosexual economy that must constantly police its own boundaries

against the invasion of queerness, and that this displaced production and resolution

of homosexual panic actually fortifies the heterosexual regime in its self-

perpetuating task. (339) 215

Thus, resolving homosexual panic onscreen is a “ritualistic release,” a moment of respite for a culture that feels the need to constantly affirm its heterosexuality. With this in mind, it does not seem particularly surprising to recall that the majority of films with queer and trans subjects result in their physical abuse or eventual death. Yes, these depictions are often true to life—as in the murder of Brandon Teena or of Venus Xtravaganza—but it may also be true that the fictional violence done to these subjects in film exceeds historical accuracy. These depictions serve a ritualistic and sacrificial function. The representation of homophobic and transphobic violence is also a form of wish fulfillment for heterosexual audiences unconsciously in need of clear repudiation of the queer. Put simply, perhaps queer and trans characters are almost always hurt or killed in film not because that is (necessarily) their lived reality, but rather because their punitive deaths shore up a heterosexual norm that constantly requires that kind of violent assurance.

“Just Enjoy It”: Finding Satisfaction in Lack

Even though there are myriad moments of gender subversion and queer revolt to celebrate in Paris Is Burning, there are also histories of pain, bad affects, ugly feelings, ambivalence and trauma that inhere in the subculture. It is for this reason––the contradiction of bliss and shame that adheres to the ball culture that Livingston’s documentary depicts–– that this culture so effectively encapsulates the pain and hope of melancholy utopia. Take for instance Willi Ninja, an expert voguer from the House of Ninja who went on to become a famous choreographer after the film’s release and worked, among others, with Madonna, fashion designer Jean-Paul Gaultier, and socialite Paris Hilton. One the one hand, we have 216

Ninja’s soaring success (which was directly tied to the commercial success of Paris Is

Burning). On the other, we have the fact that he died of AIDS-related heart failure at the age of forty-five. That is, there is a tragic parallel between the death of Ninja and that of the strangled Venus Xtravangaza, whose death at the end of the film is one of its most dissonant notes.

In fact, many of the documentary’s subjects have died of AIDS and of complications related to the disease in the twenty-five years since Paris Is Burning was released— including Pepper Labeija and Dorian Corey. When Dorian died, The New York Times ran a photograph alongside her obituary. This was the first time the newspaper had ever printed a photograph of a transwoman in drag (note: she had to be dead first). With Paris Is Burning, the AIDS-related deaths of its subjects ripple out beyond the film and recall the activist origins of NQC while at the same time making manifest and undeniable the melancholic aspects of ball culture.

Yet utopia also persists. Although the film forces the viewer to confront the vulnerability and finitude of its subjects, it also highlights the vital space of imagination, spectacle, and spectatorship carved out by the ball. In the words of Contreras, “what is at stake in Paris is Burning is the question of the value of sheer fantasy and of wish fulfillment on the part of queers of colour” (124). The enjoyment of the subculture does not arise from what happens beyond it but rather from the satisfaction that its subjects find within it. Even if some of the fantasies that the ball contestants entertain are of passing as heterosexual and normative, the ball remains a scene of fantasy where desire is not policed and all bodies are seen. As Contreras contends, what the film makes clear “is that wish fulfillment cannot 217 follow any straightforward political trajectory. This is what makes longing and dream- making such potent and dangerous cultural tools and why the promises of the New Queer

Cinema and representations of queers of colour are important to maintain” (127).

Whether it is satisfied or not, longing is indeed a potent tool. You will recall that in

Chapter One I drew on Lacan’s theory of subject formation and das Ding (the Thing) to help elucidate our complex relationship to lack and satisfaction. According to Lacan, all desire springs from the void that is at the epicenter of our subjectivity. That is to say, our longing comes from loss: when we enter the world as social and speaking beings, we are invariably confronted with a fragmented sense of self. We feel as though we have broken apart from a coherent version of ourselves that was once whole and safe. We never actually possessed that kind of wholeness, but we nonetheless continue to mourn its loss as though it were a lost object. In short, we have “lost” the Thing and are left with a lack. But this lack is not only a source of pain, it is also what animates desire. Lack is the seat of our most profound longings and satisfactions.

It is the legendary Dorian who best describes the satisfaction that comes from lack in the context of the ball. Dorian is a structuring principle of Paris Is Burning, and Livingston keeps returning to her throughout the film as if to interject words of wisdom amidst the loud runway scenes and the busy overlapping conversations on the street. Dorian is perpetually calm in these moments. She sits in front of a small mirror in a dressing gown and skull cap, methodically applying her makeup in a tiny room of her 140th street apartment in Harlem 218 that is overstuffed with years worth of posters, papers, wigs, and dresses.63 Nearing fifty,

Dorian is one of the film’s oldest subjects and recalls the much earlier camp days of the subculture when members modelled their outfits on the headpieces and tail feathers of Las

Vegas showgirls or on old Hollywood icons like Marlene Dietrich, Betty Grable, and

Marilyn Munro.

With these powdered starlets in mind, Andy Medhurst defines camp as “not an entity but a relationship—a relationship between queens and their circumstances” (276). And indeed the circumstances of being a camp queen had changed over the course of Dorian’s decade-spanning career. By 1987, New York City had a bustling ball scene that was attracting new queer subjectivities and all their various, accompanying fantasies. Dorian underscores the generational difference between the old and new divas as a schism between creativity and acquisition. She explains that there

was a time when you could spend a great deal of time making outfits, and preparing for

something. Now they come very quickly. And the moods change, very quickly. But I

come from the old school of big costumes—feathers and beads. And they don’t have

that anymore. Now its all about designers. And it’s not about what you create, it’s about

what you acquire.

However, this divide between the new and old queens is not just a debate about creativity and craft but also about politics. As Glyn David explains, “in its association with a specific

63 Livingston originally began filming Dorian in her apartment at 150th street and St. Nicholas avenue in 1987. Livingston recounts: “the first shoot we did, there was a gun battle right outside. And there were crew members in the van, and they had to go down to the floor of the van so they wouldn’t get caught in the crossfire” (qtd. in Conlon 8). Dorian moved down ten blocks to 140th street and into a slightly safer neighborhood around 1988 where Livingston continued filming (8). 219 subcultural group—gay men—campness is usually seen as politically charged. Pre-

Stonewall, queeny behaviour was an overt, defiant statement of one’s identity; that queens were (allegedly) centrally involved in the Stonewall riots solidified the link between campness and subcultural politics” (55). It is possible, then, to interpret the new queens’ departure from camp as a withdrawal from an old queen legacy of political agitation going back to Stonewall.

Knowingly, Dorian also attributes the new valorization of designer labels and the move away from the campyness of bygone balls to a desire on the part of the young ball children to blend into society. Speaking of the younger generation that is now vying not just for legend status but also for visibility in the world outside of the ball, Dorian explains:

“when [they’re] undetectable, when they can walk out of that ballroom into the sunlight, and onto the subway, and get home, and still have all their clothes and no blood running off their bodies—those are the femme realness queens.” She continues:

I always had hopes of being a big star. Then I look—as you get older, you aim a

little lower and you say, ‘Well, you still might make an impression.’ Everybody

wants to leave something behind them, some impression, a mark upon the world.

Then you think, you’ve left a mark upon the world just by getting through it. And if

a few people remember your name, you’ve left a mark.

As a queer subject living that queerness in America in the twentieth century to have “left a mark” is to have survived and found some measure of satisfaction along the way. “You don’t have to bend the whole world,” Dorian insists, “it’s better to just enjoy it.” Without shifting 220 her gaze from the makeup mirror she concludes: “if you shoot your arrow high—hooray for you.”64

Even though Livingston shot the footage of Dorian in one long interview, she edited the conversation with the grand dame to span the length of the film. As I already noted, structurally the blasé and monotone Dorian is meant to offer moments of repose from the bustling New York City streets and chaotic ball scenes. But Livingston’s camera cannot stay still: despite the cramped atmosphere of Dorian’s apartment, Livingston moves around the space to capture Dorian from different angles. These sometimes clumsy shifts in the camera’s placement have not been edited out in post-production, but rather remain as movements in the scene. Dorian is unfazed by Livingston’s frenetic energy and continues to hold court on her views of the drag ball scene like the queen that she is. Her eyebrows have been carefully pencilled in already, so Dorian works on her lips and the kohl rim of her eyes.

Livingston seems as though she is almost tripping over herself to hear Dorian’s words more closely. The camera jerks as its director climbs over a box or pile of papers, her reflection bouncing off of a full length mirror and into the frame. When the filmmaker’s image appears in the reflection of Dorian’s mirror, the viewer sees Livingston for the first time. Until now we have only heard her voice as she interviews different members and personalities of the ball scene. In the moment of Livingston’s sudden appearance in the frame, the hierarchy of author and subject falters and Livingston is shown as merely an eager spectator herself, in awe of Dorian’s storytelling. Confronted with the apparition of the

64 Dorian Corey is the one figure in Paris Is Burning that bell hooks believed was not deluded by a colonial consciousness. hooks writes that “Carey [sic] speaks profoundly about the redemptive power of the imagination in black life, that drag balls were traditionally a place where the aesthetics of the image in relation to black gay life could be explored with complexity and grace” (155). 221 otherwise invisible director, we are reminded of Livingston’s voyeurism in relation to a world of which she is not a part. Moreover, in this instant of formal slippage—when the invisible director suddenly materializes—the spectator sees her voyeurism mirrored in

Livingston’s. The director’s voyeurism implicates the viewer who has willingly followed

Livingston’s camera into the intimate spaces of the subculture. As the skrim of the documentary’s fourth wall is lifted, the spectator is confronted by her position as an interloper into this melancholy utopia of queer drag life.

Because of this voyeurism, Livingston has been accused by hooks and others of exploiting the community she films and of exoticizing otherness. Although there is a grain of truth to this claim, I do not think that it captures the complexity of Livingston’s relationship to the subjects with whom she interacts. Undoubtedly, her gaze as a director is fraught with the privilege of her position. Yet she does not attempt to deliver a totalizing narrative of the

New York drag ball scene. As she hangs off of Dorian’s every word, the spectator is made aware that Livingston has only scratched the surface of a complex subculture with a long and varied history. Moreover, it seems to me that her position as a Jewish lesbian feminist filmmaker cannot be conflated with an imperial gaze in any straightforward manner.65

For, to feel awe in the presence of a captivating subject is not the same thing as fetishizing her otherness for a whiff of the exotic. Instead, I argue that Dorian’s wisdom and magnetic presence inspires what Ernst Bloch calls “astonished contemplation.” As Muñoz

65 Contreras suggests that “considering that Livingston struggled for at least six years to assemble footage and funding, simply the release of the film itself was a triumph of determination and visibility, which resembles the struggles depicted in the film to achieve ‘stardom.’” Although I do not agree with Contreras that Livingston’s filmmaking comes from as precarious a place as the ball members who beg, borrow, and steal to be a part of the scene, I do think that thematically there is an analogous component of struggle and wish for stardom on the part of the director. 222 explains, astonishment is a critical method in its own right: “astonishment helps one surpass the limitations of an alienating presentness and allows one to see a different time and place” (5). Accordingly, the drag queen’s insights into the ball scene over which she presides are astonishing in their poignancy and they allow the viewer to “see a different time and place.” Even Livingston finds herself so enthralled by Dorian’s observations that her astonishment causes her to physically breach the film’s frame. It is worth noting, as Muñoz does, that astonishment can help us see beyond the alienating present but does not magically transport us to that beyond. Likewise, Dorian may inspire a utopian feeling of astonished contemplation, but this does not lessen the melancholia of her lived experience and untimely death.66

Tangerine, A West Hollywood Epic

In 2015 Paris Is Burning screened in the Collection Section at Sundance in its newly digitally restored condition twenty-five years after its original debut in Park City.

Meanwhile, Baker’s new film was quickly becoming the runaway hit of the festival—in large part because Tangerine was shot entirely on an Apple iPhone 5S (a point I will return to) and cast non-professional actors in the lead roles. Tangerine begins in a fluorescent-lit

66 A criminal case that came to light after Dorian’s death in 1993 illustrates this dynamic between fantasy and melancholia. In a discovery that recalls William Faulkner’s short story “A Rose For Emily,” wherein the skeleton of a former suitor is discovered in the titular spinster’s attic after her death, a mummified man’s body was found in Dorian’s closet. The long-dead man was found with a single bullet hole in his head. The police estimate that the corpse of Robert Worley—missing since 1968—had been there for twenty-five years. There are different theories as to the nature of the relationship between Dorian and Worley, and the potential reasons as to why Dorian may have murdered him, which are explored in detail by Edward Conlon in his essay “The Drag Queen and the Mummy” (1995). Although more dramatic conclusions are indeed available, I think the most likely explanation for this macabre discovery (based on the facts as presented by Conlon) was that Dorian killed the notoriously abusive Worley in self defence and feared the consequences of confessing to a transphobic NYPD. 223

Donut Time restaurant near the corner of Santa Monica and Highland in Los Angeles, one of the city’s unofficial red-light districts. Sharing the restaurant’s namesake confectionary on

Christmas Eve, two black transgender sex workers Sin Dee Rella (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor) celebrate the former’s return from a twenty-eight day stint in prison. “Merry Christmas Eve, bitch,” says Sin Dee lovingly in Tangerine’s opening line of dialogue.

The film’s pacing is quick and the dialogue quippy and laden with casual expletives.

Alexandra is the more poised and soft-spoken of the two women yet she accidentally lets slip that Sin Dee’s boyfriend and pimp, Chester (played by one of the film’s only professional actors, James Ransone), has been cheating on her with a white woman (a scrawny blond prostitute named Dinah, played by Mickey O’Hagan) while she’s been in jail. Sin Dee—her valley girl accent clashing with the constant stream of profanities that come out of her mouth

—storms out of the restaurant and into the streets of L.A. to find Chester and “beat his ass.”

The film’s extra diegetic soundtrack breaks into the scene with simulated gun fire and

Figure 7: Baker, Sean. Sin Dee Pulls Dinah. Tangerine. 2015. Film Still. 224 blaring trap music that gives Sin Dee’s revenge quest an epic feel. Though rarely not moving, Sin-Dee is the still point of the whirling world of Tangerine.

Early on in her mission Sin Dee redirects her search for Chester in order to find the

“white fish” (a slang term meaning a caucasian and cisgendered woman) he has been sleeping with. After hunting Dinah down in a sleazy motel room, each corner filled with a sex worker performing her duties, Sin Dee drags Dinah out by her hair and across town dressed only in a small tank top, boxer shorts, and one sandal (see figure 7). The film eventually crescendos back in the same Donut Time where the news first broke of Chester’s betrayal: but this time Sin Dee learns that it is not just Dinah who has slept with him, but her best friend Alexandra too. This second betrayal does not incite the same high voltage rage that the initial news did. “Just let me make my money so I can go home” a dejected Sin Dee says to Alexandra. Just then, an SUV pulls up alongside the laundromat parking lot where the women stand a few feet apart. Sin Dee goes over to the car to proposition the men inside when the man in the passenger seat throws a cup of urine in her face yelling “Merry

Christmas you trannie faggot.” Following this hate crime, the women retreat into the laundromat where Sin Dee must remove her soiled shirt and the long, caramel blond wig she wears. The women sit down on the plastic bench of the laundromat—Sin Dee with arms crossed and wrapped around her torso and the black unstuffed bra she wears; a nylon skull cap where her wig used to sit. Without her hair her fierceness has dissipated and she looks fragile and vulnerable. Seeing this and feeling guilty for her betrayal, Alexandra takes off her own hair piece and presents it to Sin Dee in an apologetic offering. 225

Interspersed throughout Tangerine and Sin Dee’s angry caper is the storyline of an

Armenian taxi driver named Razmik (Karren Karagulian). One of the women’s frequent customers, Razmik drives around town picking up various passengers before going home to his wife, daughter, and a mother-in-law who is suspicious that his long hours in the cab are proof that he is cheating. He and his family also end up in the final blow-out at the Donut

Time and Razmik is outed as transamorous to a wife who is far less scandalized than her mother. Baker uses this strained nuclear family arrangement to throw into relief the close bond between Alexandra and Sin Dee. These women might not look like family in any traditional sense of the word, but their friendship is stronger than any other partnership in the film. Also significant in this regard is the film’s setting of Christmas Eve. Conventionally,

Christmas is a holiday associated with family and togetherness, but here it proves to be rife with betrayals, grudges, and pent up frustrations. The friendship between Sin Dee and

Alexandra is far from unshakeable, but it offers a safety, security, and love that their social positions as black trans sex workers does not.

Favoring the intricacies of female friendship, Tangerine privileges small kinship pacts over the nuclear family, and it shows the instability of heterosexual norms. Yet,

Tangerine does not try to depict an alternative queer world that is necessarily better or safer for its trans subjects than the world we currently live in. The melancholia that lurks at the edges of Baker’s film comes from the transphobia that always threatens to break into his characters’ lives. The physical and economic precarity of his trans subjects is not elided or softened by the film’s sleekness. Even still, utopia abides in the film. A utopian drive is evident in the film’s formal characteristics: despite the small cameras used to film Tangerine, 226 the narrative appropriates an epic form. The formal components of Tangerine—such as its brash extradiegetic music—present a utopian space that is both popular and radical. The film is shot on a device that is widely accessible, but Tangerine’s aesthetic is singular. As a nexus of pain and hope, Tangerine renders a black trans woman’s fantasies and friendship as complex, mythic, and aesthetically beautiful.

The Ambivalence of Whiteness

Figure 8 (above): Livingston, Jennie. Venus Xtravaganza. Paris Is Burning. 1990. Film Still. Figure 9 (below): Baker, Sean. Sin Dee and Dinah. Tangerine. 2015. Film Still. 227

Traces of Paris Is Burning abound in Baker’s film. Most hauntingly, Tangerine nudges its audience to remember Venus Xtravaganza (see figures 8 and 9). When Sin Dee is cut in profile by the setting sun—the tangerine sky blazing behind her—her image recalls some of the last footage we see of Venus. Standing on the pier next to a silver boom box,

Venus smokes a cigarette coyly matching the camera’s stare as the sun sets on New York

City in the distance. The backdrop to Venus is unmistakably that of New York, and the tall and skinny palm trees behind Sin Dee clearly signal California, and yet there is an affinity between these glowing scenes that bridges their geographical distance. There are so few complex psychological portraits of trans women in film that a delicate kinship is forged between Venus and Sin Dee through these complementary scenes. However, whereas the sunset in Livingston’s documentary marks the end of Venus’s life and is proceeded by news of her murder, the sunset over Sin Dee is not sombre. The setting sun does not signal Sin

Dee’s end—instead, there is a sense that she is only getting started.

Unlike Venus, Sin Dee does not articulate a desire to be a “spoiled rich white girl.”

However, the name that she has chosen for herself “Sin Dee Rella” does evoke a fairytale white girl whose wealth is a birthright (although those riches have been denied her). And yet,

Tangerine has the form of myth more than fairytale: we follow our heroine Sin Dee Rella as she metes out punishment against those who have wronged her while she has been away.

Shortly after Sin Dee learns of Chester’s betrayal she marches to a bus stop at Vermont and

Santa Monica and contemplates her next move. The camera frames her face in extreme close-up as her eyes squint in the bright sunshine of early afternoon. Even though the spectator does not know what thoughts are going through Sin Dee’s mind, as she chews her 228 lower lip and furrows her brow we understand that she is plotting her revenge. The scene itself is simple enough: a woman is thinking about how to get back at her unfaithful boyfriend. Yet, the crescendoing music of a Beethoven symphony serves as the soundtrack and signals the epic nature of Sin Dee’s plans. She may have a name that evokes a nature- loving fairytale princess but a scorned Sin Dee is more mythic than meek.

Sin Dee’s critical appropriation of white womanhood with her valley girl accent and fairytale namesake is fraught with what Butler would call the ambivalence of the heterosexual norm. Sin Dee despises the white girl Chester has been having sex with in part because Dinah is cisgendered, a “real fish.” However, Sin Dee’s loathing for Dinah cannot simply be reduced to a jealousy of the latter’s genitalia. That would be to assume a homophobic logic whereby Sin Dee’s hatred for Dinah is a displaced self-loathing and longing for heterosexuality. But it might also be too simple to say that Sin Dee’s hatred for

“that white fish” is radically apart from a desire for heterosexuality with no relation to it.

The film’s ambivalent figuration of white womanhood is crystallized in its depiction of Dinah. Dinah, Sin Dee, and Alexandra are all sex workers and their labor is represented as inherently unstable throughout Tangerine: it is often conducted in public spaces where they are not welcome and their economic hardship is apparent. None of them are safe and all of them are vulnerable due to the nature of their work. However, the film makes a point to demonstrate Dinah’s position as especially precarious. Although Dinah’s status as cisgender protects her from the transphobia that threatens Sin Dee and Alexandra, that is her only means of protection. Yes, she is white and straight, but she has no security and no privilege that is associated with the norm of heterosexual whiteness. She is poor and she is alone. 229

Whereas Sin Dee has the support and camaraderie of Alexandra’s friendship (as the final laundromat scene demonstrates), Dinah has nothing and no one.

When Dinah returns to the motel where she was dragged from earlier that day by Sin

Dee, she gets turned away at the door. The woman in charge of running the body house has called in another girl to replace Dinah. Dinah is told to wait outside the motel on the curb until she is needed at some indeterminate time in the future. The camera films Dinah from street level as she takes a seat on the pavement in front of a row of gritty motel rooms. Baker angles the camera upward toward Dinah’s knobby bare legs that she wraps her arms around for warmth, and she stares off into the night alone. It is here that Baker makes clear Dinah’s emotional isolation, which is a form of precarity that Sin Dee is safe from. Sin Dee’s jealousy of the white girl cannot easily be classified as a reification of the privilege of white women because the woman that enrages her at the outset of the film has no upper hand to speak of. She does not even have two shoes to her name and nothing resembling the friendship of Sin Dee and Alexandra. (It is actually Dinah, not Sin Dee, who is missing a shoe like the storybook Cinderella. But strung out, alone, and poor, Dinah only resembles the fairytale princess in Cinderella’s early moments of destitution.)

Silence in the Laundromat

Sin Dee’s friendship with Alexandra does not protect her from the world entirely, but it does offer a resilient (albeit fragile) cover when it matters the most. As I mentioned above, the importance of Sin Dee’s friendship with Alexandra rushes quickly to the fore when urine and a transphobic slur are thrown in Sin Dee’s face. The laundromat is a relatively safe spot 230 that the two women retreat to after the hateful sidewalk attack. There are various ways in which the empty laundromat is only a temporary place of repose and the transience of its protection is clear: throughout the film the camera zooms in on signs plastered on motels, restaurant windows and elsewhere that read “no loitering” and “prostitutes not welcome,” but it is late and it is Christmas Eve, and so they have the place to themselves. Although the laundromat is yet another public space where these women are not welcome for too long, it is also where they will wring out the offences done to Sin Dee. The laundromat on Christmas

Eve offers a rare public space made private for the time being.

It seems fitting that after Chester airs out Alexandra’s dirty laundry and their infidelity that the two women would find themselves sitting together in a laundromat.

However, now there is no more talk of Chester. The violence of transphobia permeates the scene, and a deflated and defeated Sin Dee needs to feel safe. Sensing this, Alexandra hands over her wig in an act that is both peace offering and a form of protection. Alexandra fiddles with her own do-rag and says to Sin Dee with a bemused smile: “it actually looks pretty good on you.” When Alexandra puts her wig on Sin Dee’s head it is to smooth over of Sin

Dee’s ruffled surface. As anyone who has (carefully) read Gender Trouble can attest, Sin

Dee does not become a woman merely by putting on a wig. Although gender is performative, it is not something that we put on or take off at will like a hairpiece. Nonetheless, the wig remains an important component of Sin Dee’s appearance. For her, flowing and feminine hair repeats on the level of appearance a psychic truth about her gender. In this context, the following formulation by Butler is relevant: “gender is neither purely a psychic truth, conceived as ‘internal’ and ‘hidden,’ nor is it reducible to a surface appearance; on the 231 contrary, its undecidability is to be traced as the play between psyche and appearance” (24).

Sin Dee does not need a wig to be a woman and the psychic truth of her femininity is not

“reducible to a surface appearance.” Sin Dee is not “made” a woman by her wig, but in the wake of her attack, the hairpiece helps Sin Dee loyally repeat her femininity.

Once the exchange of the wig is complete, the women both smile tentatively. Sin Dee grabs hold of her friend’s hand and looks away before the screen goes to black. The women’s hands are clasped, black fingers entwined and still. The friends’ laced fingers are the film’s final image. This gesture, though small and seemingly unremarkable, performs and insists on queer love. What is more, Tangerine does not give the transphobia carried out by Sin Dee’s attackers any more space than necessary. While their hateful act does hang heavy in the air, their bigotry fails to hold the camera’s attention. In this regard, Tangerine is unlike the aforementioned “release valve” films that seem to take perverse (and largely unconscious) pleasure in the violence done to trans subjects. Instead, the scene’s simple gestures of care—

Alexandra’s wig offering and the women’s clasped hands—transform a scene of hurt and transphobia into one of affection.

These gestures are met with a calm quiet. The silence of this scene is striking, and it extends into the film’s end credits. Only the sound of the dryer can be heard: the clang of metal buttons against the drum of the machine, the flop of fabric falling the short distance from the top of the spin cycle to the bottom. The fragile repose is held in formal terms for a few beats longer. This silent moment of repose forms a contrast with the dramatic and loud music of the day’s circuitous journey. The brash overtures and anthems of the film (the symphonies, the trap music, the pounding bass) do not return as the credits roll, and it 232 remains quiet. Because we are familiar with Sin Dee’s personality at this stage of the story, we know that this silence won’t last (“does she ever shut the hell up?” Dinah asks Alexandra of her friend when the three women are gathered in the restroom of a bar. “This bitch has been talking since the moment I met her” she replies.) The drama will soon begin again for

Sin Dee and Alexandra, but in their hectic world of precarious labor, transphobia, constant surveillance, and the inaccessibility of public space, this hushed moment breaks with the film’s frenetic space.

The tenor of this laundromat scene is both melancholic and utopic: a hate crime that deflates Sin Dee has led them there, but this retreat also offers them a space to heal. Beyond the pain of transphobia and betrayal, there is something else, something more in this silence.

In this instance, the following suggestion by Muñoz (2009) may prove useful: he writes that

“if art’s limit were beauty…it is simply not enough. The utopian function is enacted by a certain surplus in the work that promises a futurity, something that is not quite here” (7). As brittle as it might be, the reparative potential of this long silence points toward something that is not yet here. What this something is remains unclear, untethered, undecided. Perhaps the something that is veiled in the quiet of this scene is a future devoid of transphobia. Or, perhaps the contingent something is another world that is full of gestures of queer love.

What emerges in the silence of this West Hollywood laundromat is the affective promise—“a certain surplus”—between Sin Dee and Alexandra of fidelity and futurity. The soft quiet of this scene flickers with the hope of a better not yet here. 233 iPhone Politics: Beyond The Selfie

Tangerine is one of the first feature length films to be shot on an iPhone.67 Captured with no more than two phones at a time by Baker and cinematographer Radium Cheung, the filming of Tangerine was augmented by an adapter fitted to the iPhone lens and an application called Filmic Pro (Murphy). Speaking with The New York Times, Baker explained that the colours were enhanced and film grain added to the footage in postproduction. Despite these technical augmentations, the use of an iPhone as the film camera gives Baker’s Tangerine a sense of immediacy and reality. He easily captures scenes at street-level and closes in on characters in a way that recalls the tightly framed shots of

Paris Is Burning. Yet Tangerine lays no claim to the documentary form. The film’s use of extra diegetic music and its color saturation in post-production is a constant reminder of the story’s fiction and artifice. The impact of this technical choice is manifold.

In addition to the director’s increased freedom of movement, the use of smartphones as the film cameras allowed for an intimacy with the nonprofessional actors. Far less intrusive than the imposing bulk of a regular camera, the smartphones Baker and Cheung used were able to create an intimacy between the actors and the cameras through physical proximity. Baker, who has worked with nonprofessional actors before, has said that normally his casts require time to adjust to being in front of a traditional film camera. However, since nearly everyone today is familiar with smartphones, there was no need for this period of adjustment—his leads were used to posing and acting natural in front of iPhones. Baker told

67 Mekado Murphy of The New York Times stipulates that Tangerine is “not the first feature film shot entirely this way. The 2014 thriller ‘And Uneasy Lies the Mind’ lays claim to that title, according to its website.” 234

VICE:

For first-time actors, in my experience it takes a week or so to get comfortable with

the idea of cameras being shoved in their face. But with Maya and Kiki, because we

were using a device that they used themselves—they would literally be taking

selfies of each other off-camera—the intimidation factor wasn’t even there;

inhibitions were stripped away, and the comfort and confidence levels were high.

There was no hierarchy. (qtd. in Bastanmehr) iPhones and other smartphones are often used to author digital self-portraits, to create short videos, and to capture in megapixel the different iterations of ourselves. To shoot Tangerine in this accessible form of technology is to invoke this recent history of millennial self- making within the fabric of the film. Baker’s use of a camera phone marks a new moment in the democratization of the film lens. Moreover, this new mode of cinematic production destabilizes the traditionally masculinist power of the camera and the hierarchy of the director who stands behind it. Even though Sean Baker remains a straight white man in the position of director, his choice to shoot on the iPhone nonetheless alters the power dynamics of who is behind and before the camera.68

Baker’s choice is praised by Manohla Dargis of The New York Times who applauds the director for his non-hierarchical approach to his subject matter. Dargis writes that

“Tangerine encompasses dizzying multitudes…it’s a neo-screwball chase flick with a dash

68 Indeed, Baker does not explicitly align his filmmaking with queer cinema but rather with that of Dogme 95. The brainchild of avant-garde filmmaker Lars von Trier, Dogme 95 was a movement that encouraged directors to use standard-definition or low-resolution video, as von Trier did in his film The Idiots. Harmony Korine, whose film Gummo (1997) I discussed in Chapter Two, has also spoken of his indebtedness to Dogme 95. Like Gummo, Tangerine has been made on a micro budget (less than $100,000), yet its executive producers, the much loved and funded Duplass Brothers, lend a financial safety net and mainstream cachet to the film that Korine lacked (which was likely fine with him). 235 of Rainer Werner Fassbinder—but mostly, movingly, it is a female-friendship movie about two people who each started life with an XY chromosome set.” Baker has deliberately chosen to show a very different quadrant of Los Angeles than the one most often projected onto cinema screens. In her complimentary review of the film Dargis remarks that,

this isn’t the usual movie-made city of fallen, monotonously stereotypical angels,

with its suburban mega-fortresses, oceanside views, clogged freeways and Joan

Didion anomie. It is, instead, a viscerally, vibrantly lived-in metropolis filled with

people of different hues who walk (in Los Angeles!), ride the subway (yes, the

subway), hop buses and occasionally jump into the cab of a frisky Armenian,

Razmik (Karren Karagulian), whose home life and passengers all add layers to the

diversified picture.

The diversified picture of life in L.A. that Baker presents is, as Dargis points out, more about the “people of different hues” than about the bleached portrait of Hollywood ennui in

Didion’s California prose. Dargis continues: “unlike a lot of white directors, putatively independent and not, Mr. Baker hasn’t simply looked in a mirror for his inspiration, but into that infinite world of possibility that is other people.” The director’s choice to shoot his movie on an iPhone is central to the diversified images of Tangerine. A simple handheld device connects the film to a host of cultural conversations and to “that infinite world of possibility that is other people.”

However, I want to be clear: I am not suggesting that the Apple iPhone is a utopia- generating device. Nor is it an exemplary piece of ethical technology. Although it is easy enough to fetishize the iPhone—Steve Jobs hoped for as much when he designed a beautiful 236 device that seems precious because it is always close to its own obsolescence—that is not my aim here. Todd McGowan, in his book Capitalism and Desire: Psychoanalysis on the

Market, is right to emphasize the exploited labor behind the sleek screens of Apple products.

Made from conflict minerals in the Congo and manufactured in Chinese factories, iPhones, iPads, and other Mac devices are made possible by the ongoing civil wars and suffering of a poor and unseen other.69 There is no excusing Apple’s deplorable labor practices that defy basic human rights. However, as McGowan also points out, the issue is not with Apple per se: given the chance, another company will gladly take its place. McGowan explains that brands like Apple need to continue developing new devices and advertising their newness lest the products “lose their fantasmatic power” for consumers (forthcoming). The problem, then, is with an economic system like capitalism that depends and indeed thrives on exploitation and vulnerability. McGowan writes that “capital seeks out vulnerable workers because their vulnerability holds the key to the creation of value. The most vulnerable workers create the most value for the capitalist” (forthcoming).

There is no doubt that the iPhone comes from capitalist exploitation. As Benjamin remarks in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History”: “there is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (256). Yet, it is also true that in their barbarism smart technologies like the iPhone hold the potential to reveal and document the exploitation of various subjects under regimes of capital. Drawing on Benjamin once more, I

69 McGowan reports that “the manufacture of iPads has led to great death and destruction in China, including worker suicides, plant explosions, and daily interaction with poisonous chemicals. One of Apple’s suppliers in China, Foxconn, ran into such a problem with worker suicides that it constructed netting around the factory to curb the practice and forced workers to sign pledges saying that they would not do themselves in while working at Foxconn” (forthcoming). 237 think they have the ability to “brush history against the grain” (256). In the context of

Tangerine, what I want to suggest is that Baker’s use of the iPhone calls attention to the ways in which new technologies are being used for purposes beyond their original intention.

Although the smartphone remains a fraught product of capitalism, it also has the capacity to perform an anti-capitalist logic. McGowan argues that “capitalists are not trying to create socially useful products but rather products that foment socially useless desires” (forthcoming). What happens, then, if these same products of capital end up fomenting socially useful desires?

For instance, an important function that smartphones serve in contemporary

American life, beyond the selfie, is the documentation of police brutality. Smartphones have introduced the public to a way of pushing back against state surveillance by turning surveillance against the state. Whereas the popular television show COPS allowed the viewing public to see what arrests of poor Americans looked like—and in turn consolidated an image of the police as serving and protecting that public against thuggish criminals—

YouTube has become the channel to see the uniformed thugs that television cameras did not show.70 Today, the Black Lives Matter movement, which seeks to hold the police accountable for their unprovoked brutality against black bodies, has depended on the technology of iPhones and other camera phones to offer multiple visual testimonies to the denial of black life and citizenship. The arrival of camcorders in the 1980s was to New

Queer Cinema what the smartphone and YouTube are to our contemporary moment: a way for individuals and communities to destabilize the hierarchy of state surveillance and make

70 First airing in 1989, COPS is one of the longest running shows in the history of American television. 238 visible as a form of testimony the lives of marginalized subjectivities. Even some people of color and minorities within the police force are now using their devices to record systemic abuses of power and racial discrimination.71 In this sense, the utopian potential in a smartphone lies in its migration from its intended use. iPhones do not exist outside of capital or apart from the labor that manufactures them, but they do have the potential to frustrate and fray the machinations of capitalism from within.

There is another parallel to be drawn between Baker’s innovative use of technology in Tangerine and subjects who resist the state. Tangerine’s iPhone footage and taxi driver subplot are in unwitting dialogue with another independent film of 2015: Iranian director

Jafar Panahi’s award winning feature Taxi. Considered one of the main directors of the

Iranian New Wave movement, Panahi’s films have continually defied the strict censorship laws of his country, and in 2010 the government of Iran banned him from directing or writing movies for 20 years. Despite living under house arrest as a consequence of his allegedly incendiary art, Panahi has nonetheless made three films since 2010 including This

Is Not a Film (2011) and Closed Curtain (2013).

In Taxi Panahi plays himself. With a mounted dashboard camera capturing the smiling face of the director, Panahi breaks with Iranian censorship and drives through the streets of Tehran picking up a cast of quirky fictive characters in his cab. These passengers hold forth on a series of issues central to life in Iran from Sharia law to film piracy and a

71 Edwin Raymond is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit (filed in August 2015) brought against the New York Police Department by 12 minority officers. It has been reported that with the help of his iPhone, Raymond “recorded almost a dozen officials up and down the chain of command in what he says is an attempt to change the daily practices of the New York Police Department.” According to Raymond and the other plaintiffs, these “daily practices” include violations against the 14th Amendment, which bans racial discrimination (qtd. in Knafo). 239 woman’s right to inherit property. In the same way that smartphones manage to capture intimate, disruptive, or violent moments, Panahi’s dashboard camera allows the director to make a meandering yet politically incisive film documenting and fictionalizing everyday life in Iran.72 In addition to the dashboard camera footage, the film also relies on iPhone and digital video.

Debuting only a month apart at Sundance and the Berlinale respectively, Tangerine and Taxi are in unintentional conversation with each other. The choice of both directors to use iPhones and dashboard cameras is a telling similarity, and their films reinvigorate an interest in accessible technologies that recalls the similar concerns of New Queer Cinema in the early 1990s. Baker’s eschewal of celluloid in Tangerine suggests his desire to mine the artistic, political, and utopian potential of the tiny devices that people are using on a daily basis around the world. Through its low-tech means of production and its polished formal aesthetic, Tangerine is able to bridge the antagonism of what is radical and what is popular without diluting the power of either.

***

The hegemonic repression of AIDS as a “gay cancer” was the impetus for a new kind of filmmaking that pushed to create images of the vibrant and complex subcultures of queer life. Tangerine was not made in the shadow cast by AIDS but it comes at a peculiar time when transphobia is a real and eponymous threat and a popular modality of being. This is to say, trans visibility in popular culture is at an all time high. This shift is due in part to

72 Panahi successfully smuggled the film out of Iran for its debut at the Berlinale Film Festival in February of 2015 where it won best film. How Panahi managed to get Taxi out of Iran has not yet been disclosed. However, it has been reported that Panahi’s This Is Not a Film was slipped out of the country to make its premiere at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival on a USB stick that was hidden inside a cake. 240 outspoken trans subjects like Chelsea Manning and to celebrity personalities like Caitlyn

Jenner and Laverne Cox. The influx of complex and captivating depictions of transsexualism and gender non-conformity in new media can also be traced to the popularity of Jill

Soloway’s television series Transparent. This sea change in popular culture is necessary and is certainly worth celebrating. However, despite Rich’s claim that “trans is the new queer,” the fact also remains that it is not safe for the majority of trans subjects to openly identify as such (2013: xxvii). According to the transgender rights advocate Masen Davis, we are seeing an increase in public awareness and progress in the fight for trans rights, but “at the same time, [trans people] still represent and are part of a community that experiences incredibly high rates of unemployment, poverty and violence” (qtd. in Steinmetz). Baker’s important contribution to this cultural conversation is a film that plays with the disjunction between trans as a popular concept and trans as a precarious reality.

Moreover, the activist traces of New Queer Cinema are to be found in the way that

Tangerine rethinks kinship bonds and actively erodes the entrenched hierarchy of the film camera. With a different set of vocabularies than either Rich or Livingston, Baker’s film uses popular technology to rewrite what is radical about cinema today. Tangerine is a complex and layered portrait of precarious labor, fidelity, and race that uses a small device to make visual the large aspirations and inner lives of its protagonist. In this regard, Baker’s film serves as a necessary reminder that the operations of queer critique are most powerful when they remain contingent, unfortified, and open to reinvention.

The social force and queer potential of Paris Is Burning and the ball scene it depicts does not stem from gay activism or attempts at policy reform. As melancholy utopias, the 241 drag balls are perched out of time and its steady march of progress—for claims to “progress” have rarely benefitted queerness. Instead, Paris Is Burning presents the complex intersections of race and class in an unequivocally queer space. In turn, Livingston’s documentary illustrates the anxiety and ambivalence that permeate heterosexual performativity. This illustration includes femme realness queens like Venus Xtravaganza, who reveals how norms may subtly be dissembled and reworked when recontextualized through the work of fantasy. Livingston’s portrait of queer life also includes—and is astonished by—divas of ball culture’s old guard like Dorian Corey.

Significantly, Dorian offers the provocation to “just enjoy it”—a call to find satisfaction in the repetition and failure of heteronormativity. In the spirit of repetition, there is an element of playfulness in Dorian’s comments that recalls the game of fort/da in Freud’s

Beyond The Pleasure Principle (1920). Like the young Ernst who rejoices not in the reappearance of the spool he has tossed over the side of the couch but in its disappearance,

Dorian finds pleasure not in bending the world with her drag performance but in failing to do so. Paris Is Burning is a film of pleasure and loss, of grasping for the object of desire at the moment of its disappearance: performing a “realness” that does not exist immutably for either the straight or queer subject. What the game of fort/da and the ball scene have in common is the attempt to rid oneself of yearning for what has been lost (the spool, heteronormativity) and to find pleasure in the disappearance itself.

What we can distill from Livingston’s and Baker’s queer texts is an understanding that melancholy utopias have the character of both the ostentatious and the mundane. These utopias manifest in the everyday. However, that is not to say that melancholy utopia is of the 242 present moment. The time of melancholy utopia is always anticipatory and forward folding.

Melancholy utopias are generative spaces of loss and utopian longing hovering alongside the present moment but not fully of it. It is from here—cresting between a melancholic past and a utopian future—that we can hook into the affective promises of a better future, a queerer world, a different, more satisfying relationship to loss and to bliss. The melancholy utopia does not cling to an amnesiac’s future that forgets what has failed or ignores what has been painful. Instead, this space of pain and hope offers a way of reworking the present. The queer dreamers of these melancholy utopias maintain a fidelity to what has been lost while holding fast to an unfurling optimism for what might yet be. 243

Conclusion

Returning to Disappearance

José Muñoz’s first book, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of

Politics (1999) is deeply melancholic. In this book, he argues that a person of color, a queer subject, or a queer of color is a disidentifying subject who “like a melancholic subject holding on to a lost object” taps into the psychic energies of what is gone. Steadfast and unrelenting, the disidentifying subject, in the words of Muñoz, “works to hold onto this object and invest it with new life” (12).73 Along closely related lines to what I have argued throughout this dissertation, Muñoz sees melancholia as “a mechanism that helps us

(re)construct identity and take our dead with us to the various battles we must wage in their names—and in our names” (74). What he calls a mechanism I call fidelity, but what we agree on is that the melancholic takes her dead with her into the future.

Muñoz’s second book, Cruising Utopia, is hopeful. In Cruising Utopia Muñoz elaborates on his idea of a futurity that bears the indelible traces of melancholia, and yet this future is bright. Without denying negativity and disappointment, Muñoz challenges his readers to rethink what queer futurity—an inherently melancholic modality—could look and feel like when bolstered by what some see as a naïve political affect: hope. In the text’s conclusion, he writes that “utopia in this book has been about an insistence on something else, something better, something dawning. I offer this book as a resource for the political imagination. This text is meant to serve as something of a flight plan for a collective political

73 See also “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position,” which Muñoz published in Signs: New Feminist Theories of Visual Culture in 2006. 244 becoming” (189). Taking inspiration from these two texts and Muñoz’s “insistence on something else,” I have elaborated on the vital ways in which melancholia is imbricated in the flight plan of utopia. For me, the concept of melancholy utopia attests to the idealism that lies at the core of each. As I have shown, the melancholic will not accept that her lost love object must be abandoned, and the utopian dreamer remains undaunted by the impossibility of her plans. Despite the pressures to remain a socially intelligible subject (one who is grounded in reality instead of lost in fantasy), the melancholic makes an affective utopia of her grief. In this regard, there is an affective recklessness in the melancholy utopia that admits an insistence: the world as it currently stands is not good or queer enough. It simply will not do.

In September of 2013 Muñoz came to the University of Toronto. Among other things, he spoke about Jean Luc Nancy’s theory of being singular plural. The notion of being singular plural is concerned with thinking the social in terms of co-existence and co- habitation. For Nancy, there is no individual “I” before a collective “we,” and his theorization looks to build collectivity across difference. Nancy does not think of this being singular plural as an erasure of the “I,” nor does he consider the “we” a necessarily comfortable or coherent modality: being singular plural is a mutual exposure to the other, a shared vulnerability. Although Muñoz only began to map out his new research in relation to

Nancy that day, I believe that his “flight plan for a collective political becoming” is a vital extension of Nancy’s project. Muñoz’s thought was consistently invested in a queer and mobilizing being singular plural: a “we” born of critical idealism and awash in an unapologetic discontent with the heteronormative present. 245

Then one month later came the news that Muñoz had died. It was tempting, in my sadness, to think that any chance of an ethics and politics of hope had been lost along with him. But as Freud asks in “On Transience” (1915): do the things and people we have lost really cease to have any worth for us “because they have proved so perishable and so unresistant?” (307). Fragility does not stop us from loving the other—indeed it is the basis from which our relations of care spring forth. This fragile impermanence, which characterizes the human condition and our capacity to love, is also what spurs interpretation.

Despite conventional associations of the radical with material change and overt political action, I have suggested that interpretation is itself a radical act. According to David Eng

(2010), even though “affect is often thought to be eccentric to the domain of the political,” it is affect that can help us to reformulate questions of grief, belonging, and kinship in our contemporary moment (189). In turn, the loss of Muñoz animates both the interpretive and political work that is left to do. Grieving Muñoz means returning again and again to his disappearance and finding some measure of satisfaction in that pursuit. It is a collective temporal distortion that I think he would have encouraged.

But how does one return to disappearance? In some ways, this has been the guiding question of my project: how—through fantasy, articulation, or performance—can we get back to what is lost? It is here that Walter Benjamin can help us one last time. In Berlin

Childhood around 1900 (1950) Benjamin recounts—through the gauziness of his childhood 246 memories—a game.74 He tells the story of “The Sock” that occupied him as a child and that I read as an analog to Freud’s story of fort/da. Benjamin writes:

I would come upon my socks, which lay piled in traditional fashion—that is to say,

rolled up and turned inside out. Every pair had the appearance of a little pocket. For

me, nothing surpassed the pleasure of thrusting my hand as deeply as possible into

its interior. I did not do this for the sake of the pocket’s warmth. It was “the little

present” rolled up inside that I always held in my hand and that drew me into the

depths. When I had closed my fist around it and, so far as I was able, made certain

that I possessed the stretchable woolen mass, there began the second phase of the

game, which brought with it the unveiling. For now I proceeded to unwrap “the

present,” to tease it out of its woolen pocket. I drew it ever nearer to me, until

something rather disconcerting would happen: I had brought out “the present,” but

“the pocket” in which it had lain was no longer there. I could not repeat the

experiment on this phenomenon often enough. (374)

This is a tale of pleasure and loss, of a young Benjamin grasping for the object of his desire at the moment of its disappearance. Excited by the possibility of “unveiling” and finally possessing what he desires, he withdraws his hand only to find that the pocket he reached for is gone. Like the little Ernst who plays fort/da and rejoices not in the reappearance of the spool he has tossed over the side of the couch but rather in its disappearance, so too does

74 Susan Salter Reynolds of the Los Angeles Times writes that Benjamin “intended his memoir Berlin Childhood around 1900 as a goodbye to a city he loved but knew he could never again inhabit. Begun in Spain and Italy in 1932, it was finished in 1938 but wasn’t published until 1950, 10 years after he died of an intentional overdose of morphine while fleeing the Gestapo. Benjamin regarded the book as a series of ‘expeditions into the depths of memory,’ an act of ‘digging’ for the future” (Reynolds). 247 young Benjamin take pleasure in not getting what he wants. The child does not enjoy the game so much as its repetition. Instead of being frustrated by his inability to firmly grasp his object, Benjamin says that he “could not repeat the experiment on this phenomenon often enough.”

To be sure, Benjamin’s account of the game of The Sock is described in more erotic terms than Freud’s portrait of his grandson moving beyond the pleasure principle. Here, the boy enjoys “thrusting” his hand into a warm “pocket”—the anticipation of which is more pleasurable than its unveiling. The eroticism of Benjamin’s account gets at something that is missing from the game of fort/da (or, at least that is missing from Freud’s retelling of it): the desire that beats at the center of losing. In order to understand how returning to disappearance can bring about satisfaction, we need to recognize that the subject’s relationship to loss is not calculated and chaste. The structure and feeling of losing is emotionally ardent.

Importantly, loving what is gone is not about holding onto the delusion that it will return. Rather, “enjoying what we don’t have,” as Todd McGowan would have it, means finding satisfaction in lack. Returning to that lack is what animates us because it shows us that the structure of desire is a structure of losing—it reveals to us that our grief lies nestled in our longing. What the two games as retold by Freud and Benjamin have in common is the attempt to rid oneself of yearning for what has been lost and to find pleasure in the disappearance itself.

In a similar performative spirit, the works I have considered in these chapters look to what is impossible in order to feel what might yet be possible. These texts and theorists have 248 given me the chance to think the pain and bliss of modern grief and life alongside one another. In my opening chapter I insisted that opting out of conscriptions of how one ought to grieve, or how one ought to be with one’s varying shades of melancholia, is a significant modality of resistance. In this way, I teased out the anti-hegemonic character of melancholia.

Going one step further, I argued that protracted grieving performs an anti-capitalist logic that frustrates calls to productivity in our efficiency-obsessed cultural moment.

In my second chapter, I made an unlikely pairing by reading Carson McCullers in tandem with Harmony Korine. I did so in order to think about each artist’s iteration of the

American South from an affective rather than from a strictly historical perspective. This approach allowed me to analyze the fantasies of a post-Oedipal landscape that emerges in both texts. In this way, my analysis focused on the fleeting rearticulations of race, class, and love in these peeling linoleum kitchens.

In my third chapter, I read David Foster Wallace with an eye to affect. I attempted to dissemble the predominant masculinist reading of him as a serious (read: macho postmodern) author. Instead, I honed in on Wallace’s attention to vulnerability and the complexity of the self-other relationship in his fiction. I suggested that “Good Old Neon” performs grief and utopia by warping its own temporal boundaries. In this respect, it illustrates what Derrida calls “grief’s strange temporality” or what Zadie Smith reminds us is also called the recursive: backward glancing and forward dawning at the same time. “Good

Old Neon” renders in close-up the ways in which melancholia is alienating, but it also brings into focus the affect’s prophetic quality. Melancholia, intonates Wallace, may enable us to see—in a flash like neon—the interiority of the other. 249

Finally, in my last chapter, on New Queer Cinema, I traced the resonances of this failed cinematic movement in Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning and Sean Baker’s

Tangerine. I proposed that NQC failed as queer critique because it fixed its parameters too firmly: with Ruby B. Rich as its ringleader, NQC clutched its unwavering tenets tightly and the genre lost its relevance. Nevertheless, like one of Badiou’s truth events, it arguably subverted the conventional flow of cinema. Regardless of its lack of longevity, NQC inaugurated a watershed moment in queer representation. Put simply: there would be no

Tangerine, nor any comparable portrait of trans kinship today, without the emergence of

New Queer Cinema twenty-five years ago.

Melancholy Utopia: Loss and Fantasy in Contemporary American Literature and

Film has been my attempt to answer Muñoz’s call to tap into a queer political imagination. A major component of this attempt has been to underscore the quietly radical acts of resistance that emerge in the affective space of melancholy utopia. In rethinking the conventional divide between the melancholic and the utopian, my project also has called for a reconsideration of the divide between loss and enjoyment. Such a rethinking of enjoyment— where longing and loss are imbricated just like in Benjamin’s childhood game—might take some getting used to. For this approach to grief and to satisfaction insists on an avowal of the impermanence that marks us as human and that connects us to the other. This rethinking also requires a reckoning with the perpetual work of loving otherwise and loving always.

250

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