© 2013 Philip M. Longo ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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© 2013 Philip M. Longo ALL RIGHTS RESERVED AN ARMY OF LOVERS: EROS AS ATTACHMENT IN WRITING OF THE AMERICAN SEXUAL REVOLUTION By PHILIP M. LONGO A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in English written under the direction of Marianne DeKoven and approved by ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey October 2013 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION “An Army of Lovers: Eros as Attachment in Writing of the American Sexual Revolution” by PHILIP M. LONGO Dissertation Director: Marianne DeKoven This dissertation argues that Eros as an intimate force of attachment plays a crucial role in the development of alternative social and political forms during the American sexual revolution. Sixties counter-cultural novelists and radical theorists employ a politicized discourse of Eros to imagine new forms of belonging apart from the oppressive social and political constraints of postwar America. Novelists such as Henry Miller, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Pynchon, James Baldwin and Toni Cade Bambara craft “erotic communities” in their texts, while political theorists such as Herbert Marcuse, Norman O. Brown, Hannah Arendt and Audre Lorde articulate them in their theories. Erotic communities emerge as social entities out of the relational contradictions of postwar America and are defined by the social constraints of intimate attachment. While most critics have viewed sexuality in postwar America through the lens of the complete liberation of pleasure from repression, I argue that many American writers are interested in developing alternative social constraints to Eros, not eliminating social constraints completely. They articulate these constraints through the discourse of sexual intimacy as attachment, imagining and developing social models based on interdependence, reciprocity and democratic engagement, elements they see lacking in postwar social structures. This dissertation concludes that alternative relational and social forms in postwar America emerge through intimate connection, and it aims to provide a critical ii method to better understand and interpret them in postwar American literature and culture. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I have been fortunate enough to have an “army” of family, friends and colleagues that has supported me during the writing of this dissertation. I am thankful for the financial support of the Rutgers English Department including several Mellon Summer Research Awards that financed research for this project. Several colleagues have been generous readers and friendly interlocutors including Tyler Bradway, Bryan Conn, Joshua Fesi, Octavio Gonzales, Kathleen Howard, Nimanthi Rajasingham, Natalie Roxburgh, Debapriya Sarkar and Mary Rush Yelverton. At Rutgers, in addition to my committee, I am grateful for the advice of John Kucich, David Kurnick and Carter Mathes. I also thank my UC Santa Cruz colleagues, particularly Chesa Caparas and Kimberly Lau, and the Oakes Core students who continually bring new relevance to James Baldwin and Audre Lorde. I have been blessed with outstanding and supporting friends who continually live out my literary fantasies of connection: Jessie Moore, Matthew Wagers (and Billy), Jackie Bender, Christopher Robles and Leslie Barnes. Finally, for a lifetime of support and love, Mom, Dad and Adam, this dissertation is dedicated to you. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract of the Dissertation ii Acknowledgements iv Introduction 1 Chapter One: Hesitant Steps Away From Dualism in The New Cult of Sex and Anarchy 39 Chapter Two: The Irreducible Strangeness of Pleasure and The Perceptible Hazards of Love in Pynchon’s Sixties Writing 82 Chapter Three: Love is Another Country: Erotic Publics in Baldwin’s Sixties Writing 135 Chapter Four: From Within Outward: Patterns of Relationality in Bambara’s The Salt Eaters 184 Conclusion: What’s Funny About Peace, Love, and Understanding 233 Works Cited 245 v 1 Introduction “For that which should guide human beings who are going to live fairly throughout their lives can be implanted by neither blood ties, nor honors, nor wealth, nor anything else as beautifully as by love.” - Phaedrus, Plato’s Symposium “My voice rings down through thousands of years To coil around your body and give you strength, You who have wept in direct sunlight, Who have hungered in invisible chains, Tremble to the cadence of my legacy: An army of lovers shall not fail.” - “Sappho’s Reply,” Rita Mae Brown “It was a moment of extreme sexual experimentation. Group sex, homosexuality, casual sex hookups were all tried as we attempted to break out of the repression of the past into the revolutionary future. As with so much in my life, I needed a theory rationalizing what we were doing. I argued publicly that since sex was the ultimate intimacy in human relations, we were building collectives bonded with this intimacy among all members, not just between monogamous couples. I remember one ride from Chicago to Detroit in which all fourteen or so of us, writhing naked on the floor of the van while hurtling down the interstate–legs, arms, genitals, interlocked with no particular identity attached. A strange, truly disconnected feeling.” - Mark Rudd, member of the Weather Underground1 Although sex was extensively liberated from social and political regulation during the sixties, the political valence of sex in the period is not limited to liberation. Eros can imply disconnection from the social world but also connection or something else entirely different. In Rudd’s recollection of his years with the radical leftist group the Weather Underground, sexual experimentation freed from traditional constraints is viewed as a political project–a necessary, perhaps even the necessary component of a revolutionary 1 This recollection is taken from the documentary film The Weather Underground (2002). A slightly revised and expanded version in Ruddʼs memoir, Underground (2009), explains that “our sexuality ideology proved to be disastrous. Smashing monogamy drove many good people out of the collective...Instead of bonding people into a true collective, what we were doing created fragmentation and alienation” (165). In Ruddʼs recollection, few of the Weather collective “ever looked back on the sexual experimentation with nostalgia” (166). 2 future. And yet for Rudd, this political project easily slips into mere hedonism or youthful explorations; sex’s political meaning becomes reduced to either politically naïve liberation or a socially meaningless act of personal self-fulfillment. At the same time, the Weather Underground understands the power of sex to bind the collective beyond traditional sexual couplings (depending on your view of the Weather Underground, this may seem either creepy or clever). But for Rudd, this connection of bodies is experienced as a strange disconnection. The bodies on the van floor flow together as individual identities submerge to group identity. Eros destroys old attachments and creates new ones with alternative constraints; it both disconnects and connects, disorients and organizes.2 Much has been written about sex as disconnection and disorientation in the sixties and it remains a potent metaphor of liberation from a repressive social world. This dissertation argues that just as important, and largely ignored, is the way sex became the idiom for understanding alternative forms of social attachments, what I term erotic communities. However, it is this binary understanding of Eros as either social connection or antisocial disconnection, what has been famously critiqued as the “repressive hypothesis” by Michel Foucault, that American writers and theorists during the sexual revolution find limiting. Rather than laboring under the repressive hypothesis, these writers and theorists attempt to escape its narrowing of the social and political relevance of desire to simply a release from oppression. As such, they conceive of Eros as a fundamentally productive social force, not as an oppositional, antisocial force of liberation. As demonstrated above, these two understandings of Eros as a force of connection and as a force of disconnection 2 I have capitalized Eros in keeping with the Platonic, Freudian and Marcusean traditions. While much of these traditions see Eros as either a divine or biological force, I am committed to tracking its development and morphology as a historical concept–not an essence–through the dissertation. 3 often exist simultaneously during the sexual revolution in America. However this dissertation argues that the primary political relevance of Eros for American writers and theorists is as a force of attachment. Eros provides these writers a language to describe, critique, and offer alternatives to postwar society. Sexuality is more than an antisocial force of liberation from “The System,” the sixties understanding of the integrated social totality of the nation-state, economy, family, culture, etc.; it is a way of articulating new forms of social belonging and political solidarity. Social and political theory was eroticized in the sexual revolution and the counter- cultural and New Left movements of the sixties. The sexual revolution provided unheralded opportunities for new types of erotic relationships and social forms among many in America. Although these opportunities were not equally distributed, the possibility of an erotic organization to society animated