The Queer Traffic in Literature; or, Reading Anthologically Nat Hurley University of Alberta h, his books! The library of almost every man of like Amaking-up, whose life has been largely solitary … is compan- ioned from youth up by innermost literary sympathies of his type. Dayneford stood now before his bookcase, reading over mechanically the titles of a special group of volumes—mostly small ones. They were crowded into a few lower shelves, as if they sought to avoid other literary society, to keep themselves to themselves, to shun all unsympathetic observation. Tibullus, Porpertius and the Greek Antologists [sic] pressed against Al Nafsewah and Chakani and Hafiz. A little further along stood Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and those by Buonarrotti; along with Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” Woodbery’s “The North-Shore Watch,” and Walt Whitman. Back of Platen’s bulky “Tagebuch” lay his poems. Next to them came Wilbrandt’s “Fridonlins Heimliche Ehe,” beside Rachilde’s “Les Hors Nature;” then Pernauhm’s “Die Infamen,” Emil Vacano’s “Humbug,” and a group of psychologic works by Krafft-Ebing and Ellis and Moll. There was a thin book in which were bound together, in a richly decorated arabesque cover, some six or seven stories from Martrus’ French translation of “The Thousand Nights and a Night”—remorsely [sic] separated from the original compan- ESC 36.1 (March 2010): 81–108 ions. On a lower shelf, rested David Christie Murray’s “Val Strange” and one or two other old novels; along with Dick- ens’ “David Copperfield,” the anonymous “Tim,” and Vachell’s Nat Hurley is an “The Hill,” companioned by Mayne’s “Intersexes,” “Imre” and Assistant Professor in the “Sebastian au Plus Bel Age.” (Prime-Stevenson in Gifford 3–4) Department of English When Edward Prime-Stevenson wrote “Out of the Sun” in 1913, he took and Film Studies at the for granted the ways in which sexuality as a social type was marked “by University of Alberta innermost literary sympathies.” By his account, the genesis of this sense of where she specializes an inner sympathy, which today goes by the name “homosexuality,” was not in American literature, (primarily) sexological or psychoanalytic but the effect of books. Books: queer theory, and “mostly small ones”; books accumulated and organized on shelves; books children’s literature. that “companioned” one “from youth up”; beautiful books with arabesque She is co-winner of covers, translated into English from an astonishing range of languages the Foerster Prize for and cultural contexts. This global library of books standing alongside best essay in American each other, socializing together, enables the main character in “Out of the Literature, co-editor Sun,” the old man Dayneford, to see in them the accumulation of his queer of Curiouser: On the life, broken down into often contradictory pieces, with only a provisional Queerness of Children, coherence, across time, space, and book gutters (perhaps across other gut- and is completing a book ters, too). What Prime-Stevenson both exemplifies and describes in this titled Getting Around: passage is not just the representation of queer life in literature but the ways Circulation and the Rise in which the traffic in literature (its circulation among subcultures as well of the Gay and Lesbian as books’ interactions with each other) produced sexual types. Dayneford, Novel in American after all, “is companioned from youth up” by a library that makes him Literature. up. This “making-up” is an effect of literary circulation (across languages, national literatures, and cultures): in such a single-sentence-spanning library, books themselves come together (and stay apart) as if they were the members of a subculture. This description of the books on Dayneford’s shelves as a historical model of queer “making-up” has fascinated modern-day anthologists of the history of gay fiction. Mark Mitchell and David Leavitt’sPages Passed from Hand to Hand: The Hidden History of Homosexual Literature in English from 1748–1914 (1998) and James Gifford’s Glances Backward: An Anthology of American Homosexual Writing, 1830–1920 (2007) both open with the same passage that appears at the start of this essay. For these edi- tors, the passage exemplifies something fundamentally reflective of the history of gay male writing. Yet virtually no scholarly work takes up and explores the questions that this passage raises for the history of reading and writing queer literature beyond the work of canonical writers and for the ways it offers up a distinctly literary model of queer world-making at the level of both individual type and queer subculture. “The Queer Traf- 82 | Hurley fic in Literature” argues that one way of understanding what is literary about queer history is to read anthologically: to track the accumulated, interactive, side-by-side strains of other texts that make it possible to conceive of queer subjectivity itself as a simple abstraction (the type that Dayneford imagines literature has made him). The simple abstraction of homosexuality (as well as literary categories like “gay novel” that eventu- ally ensued) disguises the complex literary routes and paths that made the abstraction visible as such—paradoxically, as a mode of interiority or a property of the self, whose process of emergence renders opaque the social life of its seemingly inevitable march to emergence. In Foucault’s famous pronouncement, “The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology” (43). What we understand less well are the discrete ways that language comes to make this story. Foucault argues that “There was a steady proliferation of discourses concerned with sex—specific discourses, different from one another both by their form and by their object: a discursive ferment that gathered momentum from the eighteenth century onward” (18). And he points us in particular to “the multiplication of discourses concerning sex in the field of exercise of power itself: an institutional incitement to speak about it, and to do so more and more, a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit articula- tion and endlessly accumulated detail” (18). Institutions and “agencies of power” incite the multiplication of sexual discourses, but they also act as the primary audience for it. What might it mean that this incitement to speak about sex and to accumulate details about the forms of intimacy it generates also produces new audiences for these new sexual “personages” and “life forms”? “Proliferation,” “gathered momentum,” “multiplication of discourses,” and “accumulated detail”: these features of linguistic “ferment” find them- selves literalized in the shelves of Dayneford’s library, showcased at the level of the sentence in the side-by-side collection of titles and evocative of a model of historical reading somewhat out of sync with our own ways of reading the sexuality of the self. Dayneford and his bookshelves also have historical precursors, progenitors, and antecedents. As I will argue presently in this essay, the now minor, late nineteenth-century American writer Charles Warren Stoddard was one such example. But the larger point I propose to make is this: although we have grown accustomed to, and adept at, reading sexuality—particularly homosexuality—as the form of the unspoken, this mode of reading is itself the result of a plenitude, an The Queer Traffic | 83 accumulation of readings that resonate and form a textual pattern by the late nineteenth century. Reading anthologically is a way of understanding the conditions under which that pattern became legible as such. It (reading anthologically) is thus the object of this analysis as well as its methodology. It is the object of analysis to the extent that it highlights the tendency of late nineteenth-century queer male writers to read books and selections of books alongside each other, that is to highlight the evidence of this practice of reading in the form of the writing that it generates. Reading anthologi- cally is, in turn, the methodology of this essay for the ways it demands a mode of reading the literary history of sexuality in terms of the kind of multiplicity that Foucault advocated. The paragraphs that follow constitute an attempt to read beyond the diagnosis of queer life in literature and toward the editorial, archival history of the conditions of its possibility. It is worth taking seriously the generative quality of textual sociability metaphorized in the representation of Dayneford’s books: the force, that is, of books’ social relationships with other books as they move through cultural worlds and libraries—often through acts of rogue circulation. Many of the books in Dayneford’s library may never have been intended as works of queer literature. But through performative acts of reading and collection, these works of literature on Dayneford’s shelves frame and reframe each other as if, collectively, they participate in producing an emergent historical pattern. One product of anthological reading is argu- ably its tendency simultaneously to accumulate and condense detail such that it becomes legible as a type: homosexuality. But since other kinds of writing (like the novel or the long poem) may do just as much to make visible the personage or the case study of the homosexual, perhaps the most obvious evidence of the relevance of reading anthologically in the history of sexuality is the singular book object that has become a staple form of lgbtq literature: the anthology itself. From the Anthological to the Anthology (and Back Again) Historically speaking, the anthological impulse—as a practice of reading and collecting—precedes the emergence of the queer anthology proper. But to access this history of reading anthologically, one is, paradoxically, obliged to start with anthologies themselves.