STYLE and SEXUALITY in MODERN LITERATURE and CULTURE By
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ABNORMAL TONGUES: STYLE AND SEXUALITY IN MODERN LITERATURE AND CULTURE by Scott J. St. Pierre A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in The University of Michigan 2008 Doctoral Committee: Professor Tobin A. Siebers, Chair Professor David M. Halperin Associate Professor Sara B. Blair Associate Professor Nadine M. Hubbs © Scott J. St. Pierre 2008 Acknowledgments Many people contributed to making this piece of work possible. I owe particular thanks to Tobin Siebers who as my dissertation director helped me from the earliest inklings of this project in conceptualizing and outlining its edges. His extraordinary generosity with time and the breadth of his seemingly unlimited knowledge of the field have been invaluable to me. Other members of my dissertation committee, Sara Blair, David Halperin and Nadine Hubbs each asked tough questions and offered consistently challenging and invigorating guidance. This project would not be what it is without their always thoughtful and enlightening responses. I would also like to thank the University of Michigan English department and the Horace H. Rackham School of graduate studies for their generous financial support. Other friends in Ann Arbor, especially those among my English department cohort, offered similarly invaluable intellectual and emotional support. Of these I would especially like to thank my friend Caroline Giordano for always bringing me back down to earth when I needed it most and also for her friendship, professionalism and wit. Lamont Egle and Chad Thomas also deserve special appreciation for their friendship. Finally, I would like to acknowledge my gratitude to John Fisher. His support was perhaps most valuable of all. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgments ii Abstract iv Chapter I. Introduction: Abnormal Tongues 1 II. Lacan and the Subject of Style 50 III. A Personal Quantity, Or, Bringing Out Henry James 80 IV. Gay Hemingway 127 V. Doggy Style: Gertrude Stein, Canine Discipline, and Lesbian Eroticism 162 VI. Conclusion 201 Bibliography 206 iii ABSTRACT ABNORMAL TONGUES: STYLE AND SEXUALITY IN MODERN LITERATURE AND CULTURE by Scott J. St. Pierre Chair: Tobin A. Siebers “Abnormal Tongues” is an analysis of the sexual politics of style. Many interpretive strategies of modern Western thought, it contends, are shaped by a poorly understood, yet powerful sexual technology we call “style.” What seems to circulate as a neutral, even scientific term in literary criticism is instead a supple ideological force that saturates academic and popular culture as one of the most powerful, because one of the most subtle, ways we understand how literary expression makes individuals legible to others as “normal” or as “deviant” sexual subjects. The ancient concept of style is transformed by the expert discourses of modernity in order to secure heterosexuality’s authorized use of language through what it figures as its “natural” condition of clarity and to disqualify homosexuality’s use of language as what it terms excessive stylization. The project examines the major theoretical texts of literary stylistics and psychoanalysis – the two most important modern discourses of style that together iv produced its sexualization – focusing on the cases of three important modernist stylists who have each been appropriated by literary criticism as exemplary instances of style’s presumed expression of authorial sexuality. Ernest Hemingway’s reception both as masculine icon and as a simple and direct writer allow him and his partisans to partake of the privilege and acclaim awarded to the heterosexually-inflected notion of clarity. For Henry James and Gertrude Stein the opposite is the case: each has been understood to produce overly stylized writing that is often read as an expression of the author’s shameful homosexuality. Each of these readings is fuelled by a normalizing demand in the modern West to apply to style what Foucault terms “a hermeneutics of desire.” In opposition to this largely unrecognized practice, “Abnormal Tongues” argues that literary criticism needs a new, non-disciplinary understanding of style that will liberate critique from its problematically phobic heritage and de-couple style from the practice of sexual diagnosis. v Chapter I Introduction: Abnormal Tongues Nothing is more essential to a society than the classification of its languages. To change this classification, to relocate its discourse, is to bring about a revolution. Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth Style has always contained within itself a sort of fifth column, the extraordinary sensitivity to shame that is its basic operating equipment. D.A. Miller, Jane Austen or, The Secret of Style The question then, as now is: How can you recognize one? Then as now we were supposed to betray ourselves, give ourselves away. We exhibited symptoms of our condition. Neil Bartlett, Who Was That Man? A Present for Mr Oscar Wilde When French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan finally published his most famous and influential collection Écrits in 1966, he began it not as we might expect with a discussion of the unconscious, dreams, Oedipus, or any number of other familiar concepts that populate the landscape of psychoanalysis. Instead, he curiously used the brief overture to the book to issue an unexpected but urgent warning about style, a warning that has unfortunately in the decades that followed been largely ignored by literary critics. Taking on a commonly held sentiment, Lacan repeats a familiar dictum only to argue for its glaring fallacy, explaining that: “‘The style is the man himself,’ people repeat without seeing any harm in it, and also without worrying about the fact that man is no longer so sure a reference point.”1 Lacan’s remark stands as a fine preamble to the present study’s goals, a project that means to contribute to the work Lacan pleads for by overturning both 1 Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 9. 1 the widespread notion that style is an infallible index of individual essence and also the harm that assumption is capable of causing, particularly to those (especially lesbians and gay men) who have for a long time been vulnerable to the asymmetrical pains inflicted by such an essentialist understanding and its very public revelations. That Lacan inaugurates his germinal text with this protest against the way many routinely understand style should suggest the importance of his point and yet literary critics in particular, those who have been quickest in the world of Anglo-American criticism anyway to incorporate Lacan’s ideas into their thinking, have been slow to recognize Lacan’s important intervention into the question of style. They have in fact still by and large let stand the problematic idea put forward by a host of modern disciplinary discourses including aesthetics, medicine, criminology, and psychology that style maintains a privileged position as a key marker of personhood – and especially sexual personhood – in the modern West. Taking Lacan’s point seriously, I argue that it is crucial that we take another look at the complex institutional and discursive conditions that converge to make us continue to think, in Buffon’s famous words, that the style is the man, and that we try instead to see style differently as a dense but under-recognized site of ideological struggle that is of central importance not only for literary criticism but also, as the entrance of Lacan and psychoanalysis onto the scene should suggest, for the history of sexuality. Many twentieth century texts testify to the contemporary urgency of Lacan’s neglected injunction. One extraordinarily popular recent film, David Fincher’s Se7en (1995), provides an instructive example of the surprising relevance of this specialized literary category to our everyday lived experience of the world. In the film, Brad Pitt’s Detective David Mills displays an especially astute understanding of the very particularly 2 sexual way that style marks the modern subject. In one brief scene highlighting Mills’ aggressively heterosexual impatience with stylized writing, he reads Dante’s The Divine Comedy at his partner’s suggestion, searching for leads in the bizarre serial murder case he is investigating. Unable to understand and frustrated by the opacity of the text, he explodes: “Fuckin’ Dante ... poetry-writing faggot!”, a populist remark to which we as audience are prompted both to laugh at as well as laugh with Mills.2 Following the outburst he angrily hurls his copy of Dante away as he abandons the difficulty of that “faggoty” text in favor of the welcome, plainspoken accessibility of a newly acquired CliffNotes version. It is Dante’s style, his challenging way of writing, and not simply as the quote would suggest a generic dissatisfaction (“poetry”), that seems to infuriate Mills and solicit his disheartened epithets. Dante is a faggot for Mills not just for writing poetry, after all, but for doing it in a style Mills can’t for the life of him decipher. That reaction to the impenetrable excess of Dante’s style, comic and illustrative of Mills’ character as it is, however, is even more significant for displaying a resilient and deeply sedimented popular understanding about literary style and its accepted signification of homosexuality. That Mills responds with frustrated anger to a difficult text comes as no real surprise – without a doubt many readers of Henry James’ The Ambassadors, for instance, might understandably have felt similar feelings while reading that book. What is perhaps more surprising is that Mills, such a likeable character even to those who might otherwise deplore his not infrequent homophobic outbursts, so readily and so expertly equates Dante’s difficult style with homosexuality. That we are led to identify so strongly with the photogenic Pitt and his character’s working-class, “common sense” approach to the world only underscores the culturally ingrained nature of his knowing 2 Se7en.