• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

Global Posts building CUNY Communities since 2009 http://tags.commons.gc.cuny.edu "Just Saying Our Goodbyes": Elegies' Queer Interventions into the History of 9/11 In Elegies: A Song Cycle, the 2003 William Finn musical first produced at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center, five performers sing both in honor of and as the lost.[1] More specifically, they perform losses from the life of the gay Jewish composer-lyricist William Finn, embodying and/or narrating the lives of a diverse array of characters linked only by their connections to him. From a nameless English teacher, to Finn’s mother Barbara, to the architect who designed the Twin Towers, to producer/director Joseph Papp, to Finn himself, this musical engages with a range of histories. Some of those histories are obviously public (the events of 9/11, which are presented at the end of the evening); others are seemingly personal (the death of Finn’s mother); all are approached from a queer perspective. Finn (b. 1952 ) is perhaps best known as the composer and lyricist for the 1992 Broadway musical Falsettos, which tells the story of Marvin, a gay Jewish man, and his queer family: his ex-wife Trina, their son, Jason, Marvin’s lover, Whizzer, and Trina’s husband (and Marvin’s former psychiatrist) Mendel. While the first act focuses on these characters as they awkwardly attempt to negotiate their relationships, the second centers largely on Whizzer’s battle with, and eventual death from, AIDS.[2] Finn’s other well-known shows include A New Brain (1998), about a gay musician suffering from a brain tumor, and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (2005), which humorously dramatizes the competition, camaraderie, and struggle for (and against) perfection amongst idiosyncratic children at a local spelling bee. An interest in queer characters is a hallmark of Finn’s work, and Elegies is no exception. I use the term “queer” as a way of describing opposition to normativity broadly writ: a way of tweaking our vision so that we recognize that the normal, the “natural,” is in fact a construction. In this definition sexuality is one kind of normalcy queer challenges, but other structures of power that create and enforce the illusion that there is such a thing as “normal” in the first place, other “regimes of the normal,” can be challenged as well.[3] Elegies is arguably a bit queer in all sorts of ways. Most important to my project here, however, are the ways Elegies queers ideas about history and how it can and should be performed. Elegies challenges normativity in how it presents and structures its histories, as well as heteronormativity in the content of those histories. Initially performed in the highly respected and culturally valued public space of Lincoln Center (and later in other respected theatres in later productions, as well as on the commercially available cast album), Elegies challenge audience expectations about what histories deserve presentation in the public sphere, as well as how those histories should be crafted.[4] Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Elegies’ challenge to normative ideas about history comes from how it takes what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick termed a “reparative” approach, one that performs not simply what “really” was, but also what might have been. By incorporating a range of losses into a profoundly public performance, Elegies queers ideas about what kind of losses are worthy of public memorialization: in other words, what losses can be acknowledged as such in history. I am particularly interested in how Elegies’ reparative approach to the history of 9/11 both reiterates the (hetero)normative narrative of national trauma and subtly insists, through various performance strategies, on a more nuanced representation that incorporates queer lives and losses. Including queer people in histories of 9/11 is profoundly important given that many “moral conservatives” in its immediate 1 / 17 Global Posts building CUNY Communities since 2009 http://tags.commons.gc.cuny.edu aftermath “blame[d] the event on homosexuals and the women’s movement.”[5] Elegies’ complex, inclusive performance of 9/11, and its positioning of the event as one among a range of (queer) personal griefs, offers a chance for audiences to productively reconsider the story we assume we know, creating the possibility for a more nuanced understanding of history—and by extension, the present and the future—to emerge. Before proceeding to a discussion of Elegies itself, I want to briefly elaborate on my use of Sedgwick’s conceptualization of reparative reading. In her essay “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” Sedgwick argues for the importance of moving beyond what she sees as critical theory’s, particularly queer theory’s, dependence on paranoia. Paranoid readings emphasize the revelation of all possible relevant injustices and oppressions, in order to both rouse opposition and protect against unpleasant surprises. This approach limits possibility, as the need to avoid negative surprises in some ways renders negativity inevitable.[6] Sedgwick is critical of the “faith in exposure” this approach relies on, which “acts as though its work would be accomplished if only it could finally, this time, somehow get its story truly known.”[7] This assumption, of course, requires one to ignore the very real possibilities that the story was already known, or that the audience for that story, once aware of the situation, might remain uncaring or unable to help. Reparative reading takes a different approach to exposure and to surprise. According to Sedgwick, To read from a reparative position is to surrender the knowing, anxious paranoid determination that no horror, however apparently unthinkable, shall ever come to the reader as new: to a reparatively positioned reader, it can seem realistic and necessary to experience surprise. Because there can be terrible surprises, however, there can also be good ones. Hope . is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader tries to organize the fragments and part-objects she encounters or creates. Because she has room to realize that the future may be different from the present, it is also possible for her to entertain such painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities as that the past, in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually did.[8] Reparative readings, then, allow for possibility. They are not denials of injustices, past, present, or future; they are, however, readings that don’t see the exposure of those failures as determinative of all possible encounters. The unexpected response is possible, and things can, in fact, happen differently. In her description here, Sedgwick is focusing on the role of surprise and hope in future-oriented work. In my consideration of Elegies, I apply her principle in reverse: that is, by presenting a vision of the past that exposes what was while demonstrating what could have been, this musical allows for the possibility of more just, ethical futures. The affective power of musical theatre assists in this reparative project. Writing about reenactments—large- scale performances of the past in the present moment—Tavia Nyong’o points out that “if reenactment risks reifying the past as it was, the transmission of affect permits us to reimagine as well as to repeat, inserting new subjectivities and new desires into familiar landscapes.”[9] Smaller-scale performances of history like those in musical theatre offer a similarly affective engagement with the past, allowing for the possibility of showing both what was and what might have been (and, by extension, might still be). Elegies takes advantage of this fundamentally reparative possibility by performing histories of trauma and marginalization in ways that acknowledge the injustices of the past while also performing other possibilities, thereby opening up hope for the present and future. I will begin my discussion of Elegies’ reparative work by considering how it fractures the linear temporality associated with traditional history, 2 / 17 Global Posts building CUNY Communities since 2009 http://tags.commons.gc.cuny.edu engaging with time in fluid, nuanced ways that embrace possibilities alongside “realities.” I will then address the ways in which this musical encourages audiences to engage with a range of losses, some obviously public and others seemingly private, and to treat them all as worthy of attention and respect. Finally, I will focus on the final section of the musical, which considers the events of 9/11, and the ways in which performance strategies enable a nuanced, complex approach to this history of a national trauma. Elegies takes a decidedly different approach to most traditional, normative history, which relies on a chronologically organized narrative with a clear rupture between the past and the present. First, the overall structure of the performance is entirely episodic and non-linear, bouncing around Finn’s life without regard to chronological order. The show is essentially organized as a revue, a series of songs linked by theme and subject matter rather than narrative. There is no spoken dialogue, and while some characters recur, many appear or are mentioned only in one number. Second—and more crucially for my arguments here—there is no clear border between past and present in Elegies. This queer approach to temporality comes in part from the very nature of performing history: performances of the past create an experience of co-temporality as the past exists in the unmistakably present time of performance.[10] Elegies takes this a step further, however, by taking a melancholic approach to the losses it represents. According to Freudian understandings of grief, mourning requires the bereaved to reckon with their loss in order to let go of the lost object, while melancholia insists on holding on to the lost. While Freud initially conceptualized melancholia as pathological, alternative understandings of melancholia see it as a potentially ethical response to loss.

Load more

  17

Copy Link