Recent Gay Novels and the Return to Literary Modernism

Introduction

Introduction excerpted from my book Recent Gay Novels and the Return to Literary Modernism, available for purchase in both paperback and kindle versions.

In Allan Hollinghurst’s prize-winning novel The Line of Beauty (LB), Nick Guest, the character from whose point of view we see the events unfold, is a great admirer of Henry James. Recently out of Oxford, he is doing graduate work on literary style in the novels and stories of James, and he mentions Conrad, Meredith, and Trollope as well. He likes to offer quotations from James to his co-workers, emphasizing lines that are notably and enjoyably mannered. Given a chance to visit one of the great houses of the gentry in the English countryside, he is fascinated by a photograph of James’s visit to the residence around the turn of the century. Asked by a young woman what James would have made of a particular social setting, he replies: “He’d have been very kind to us, he’d have said how wonderful we were and how beautiful we were, he’d have given us incredibly subtle things to say, and we wouldn’t have realized until just before the end that he’d seen right through us.” (LB 123) We know that things are going badly for Nick when he and a friend are sorting lines of cocaine on the cover of a scholarly treatment of James. Though the novel’s events occur in the 1980s, Nick’s aesthetic frame of reference seems virtually to ignore all work of the previous sixty or seventy years. The music we see him discussing or responding to emotionally is from Chopin, Beethoven, Schubert, Richard Strauss, and Wagner. The paintings we observe him viewing are by Guardi, Cézanne, and Gauguin, while he gives a negative valuation of the work of the Victorian painter Holman Hunt. Though he presents himself as an ambitious aesthete, we hear almost nothing of twentieth-century painting except in a snide comment about the collecting habits of a newly wealthy Lebanese merchant in London (the father of his boyfriend). Nick loves the older Kensington Gardens home where he is staying in London with the family of a wealthy former classmate and he feels the same way when he visits the grand English country house, built in the mid-nineteenth century, as well as a centuries-old country villa in Provence. The new buildings he sees going up in London he finds to be a vulgar display of money and luxury without taste. One 1830s residence has been recently converted by an architectural firm and its high tech is “just another style in their postmodern repertoire.” (LB 175). The use of the term ‘postmodern’ here is not a complimentary one. It seems Nick would have preferred the style and feel of the 1830s building.

André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name (CMYN) is another gay-themed novel employing a very rich aesthetic reference scheme that seems to ignore most of the twentieth century, as if one were engaging the cultural world from a much earlier standpoint. It is the early 1980s and we see the world through the eyes of Elio, an unusually studious seventeen-year-old who also enjoys transcribing musical works. Among the composers he mentions are Bach, Handel, Busoni, Lizst, Haydn, Schubert, Mozart, Wagner, and Brahms, and he is fond of traditional Italian street music. He also refers to many writers: Dante, Stendhal, Montaigne, Shelley, Leopardi, Ovid, Homer, Chekhov, and Gogol. He does, it is true, venture a few times into the twentieth century, mentioning Paul Celan, Katherine Mansfield, Giuseppe di Lampedusa, and Italo Calvino. He refers to the last of these, a typical postmodern writer, only to say that he is inferior to Lampedusa, who, we will recall from The Leopard, presents us with an older aristocratic world that must change in order to remain the same. Aciman’s most daring reference to modernist literature comes in one of book’s more vivid images. Elio has fallen powerfully in love with Oliver, a graduate student visiting the family’s summer home in Italy, and they have begun having a sexual affair. Elio, deeply aroused by his sexual fantasies one day and noticing that the shape of a ripe peach on the table by his bedside reminds him of a young man’s buttocks, ejaculates into the peach. Oliver, entering the room shortly afterward, guesses what has occurred and decides to show his closeness to Elio by eating the fruit. Readers of modernist poetry are sure to be reminded here of Eliot’s line in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: “Do I dare to eat a peach?” That gesture in Eliot stands for a larger move into the sensual and possibly messy pleasures of the world, a move that the fastidious Prufrock cannot make. Aciman appears to be calling out Eliot in terms of the implicit homoerotic content of his image, a content that Eliot himself can neither admit to nor act upon. That Eliot is in Aciman’s mind here is shown by further references. Elio wants to tell Oliver: “. . . let us cuddle up, you and I, when the night is spread out against the sky,” another clear citing of Prufrock. (CMYN 96) In Rome he meets a street Dante who quotes from the Fifteenth Canto of the Inferno, the passage about Brunetto Latini, a man being punished for sodomy. Eliot, one of the great enthusiasts for Dante, had especially admired that particular passage. Elio even remarks on an aunt who spoke of her “dreadful years in St. Louis, Missouri,” possibly an indirect reference to Eliot’s hometown. (CMYN 58)

Andrew O’Hagan’s Be Near Me (BNM) introduces us to David Anderton, a Catholic priest in a small, predominantly Protestant town in Scotland. The action occurs in the early 2000s but again the aesthetic reference scheme mostly ignores the twentieth century. David’s preferred music is that of Chopin, and he mentions as well Delius and Borodin, though also the twentieth-century composer Messaien. A favorite quote from Chopin is written in his pocket Ovid. In the field of art he cites Bernini and Fra Angelico. His literary references are to Wallace Stevens, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Swinburne, and Matthew Arnold, and O’Hagan’s title itself comes from a Tennyson poem. David recalls a marvelous time in Florence when a lover of his was describing a scene outside their window by quoting from Shakespeare. Easily the strongest literary influence on his late adolescent life is Proust. At Oxford in the late 1960s he admits that he was part of a group at Balliol that were, in 1965, fifty years out of date. (BNM 182) These aesthetes came to be called the Marcellists, since they spent much of their time imitating Proustian attitudes and testing each other on tidbits and quotes from the great novel, while making fun of the students who were radically political. David falls in love with Conor, one of these socialist radicals, and while going to meet him for a 1968 demonstration he is reading from a book of Victorian poetry. He expects they will live together for life, but Conor is killed in an automobile crash. In reaction to that event David goes to Rome to study for the priesthood and ends up in the small Scotland parish. He recognizes that even more than by reading Proust, his aesthetic attitudes have been formed by the Catholic boarding school he attended. There the monks, with traditions going back to the medieval period, schooled the boys in a quiet, unobtrusive, ceremonial sense of beauty, an attitude that was supposed to shape their gestures and their appreciation of the world as a whole. One recalls here the association frequently made between literary modernism, aestheticism, and Catholicism, with several literary figures converting to the church and with Eliot’s strong Anglo-Catholic tendencies. Eliot might have welcomed David’s tracing of his family origins to Catholic recusants who never accepted the Protestant Reformation. David keeps trying to get the choir master in his parish to sing some of the great Victorian hymns of the nineteenth century, but the man wants to do twentieth-century pieces that David finds to be sentimental rubbish without any stirring musical quality.

In his novel Necessary Errors, Caleb Crain presents us with an American student, Jacob Putnam, who is spending the year 1990-91 as a teacher of English in Prague, right after the Velvet Revolution ended the years of communism. The books he is carrying with him for reading matter are, once again, from more than a century earlier: Melville’s Typee and Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma. Crain leads off one of the long sections of the book with a quotation from Henry James and he has Jacob, in a new Czech bookstore, gravitate to a novel of James. Jacob will realize that a story he has written, about an imagined visit to the graveside of a friend who committed suicide, is repeating several elements from James’s “The Beast in the Jungle.” Rilke, Kafka, and Emily Dickinson are also mentioned and we hear of a Czech writer who dealt with the Parisian surrealists early in the century. He says at one point, with some passion, “I hate postmodernism.”

Jacob, like a character in James, has moved from Massachusetts to Europe to go through something of an apprenticeship in that much older culture. He emphasizes the sheer beauty of Prague, due to the Habsburg Empire’s strategy of using beautiful architecture to give a sense of convincing rightness to their authority, in the way that aesthetic works may also have such an aura of inner necessity and inevitability. One is reminded of the way that characters in James emphasize the beauty of Italy. (Many would find that linkage of beauty and inevitability to be problematic in political arenas, but Jacob seems not to raise this issue, though Crain may implicitly be doing so.) Jacob falls in love with a handsome young Czech man and must decide how seriously to take the relationship, as Chad in The Ambassadors must decide whether to stay in Paris with the French woman who has given him a sentimental education. Although Eliot is not mentioned, there is an interesting resemblance between this novel and The Waste Land. A fundamental structuring device of that poem is an analogy between a personal process of achieving separateness and individuation and a large-scale cultural version of that process. Eliot is asking whether the Christian culture of the modern West has truly distanced itself from the natural religions of West Asia out of which it arose or is just another version of them, while threatening to slip back into them. On the personal level, he is asking whether his own formation as a separate self able to maintain its individual character has been a real achievement or is mostly an illusion, as he slips back too easily into the boundary-blurring structures of early childhood attachments to the maternal world, when gender was more mobile and self-other differentiation more unstable. Both the large-scale slippage on the cultural level and the individual slippage on the psychological level are suggested by Eliot’s reference to the Magnus Martyr church, apparently a successful version of Christianity and masculinity but slipping extremely easily, through its sounds, back into the Magna Mater of West Asia. In Crain’s novel, the parallel is between Czechoslovakia’s attempt to free itself from its communist past and enter a global order of individual freedom and systems of exchange and, on the other side, Jacob’s attempt to separate from certain unsatisfactory attachments in America and form an adult life of his own. With both Eliot and Jacob, the richness of the psychological and literary space that results is due to the fact that one is, like the Czechs, in an unstable transitional realm where different outcomes, different ultimate identifications, are still possible. When Jacob travels briefly to Berlin, a city that represents fully the neoliberal transformation that Czechoslovakia is aiming to make, he finds that he strongly dislikes the place and is happy to return to the transitional state of Prague. Perhaps he enjoys remaining in a similar transitional stage in his own life. We can see that these matters are on Crain’s mind when he has Jacob tutor two very young Czechs in some basic English. In his teaching them a vocabulary used for exchanging items, the entire psychological realm having to do with attachments, losses, separations, relinquishings, and compensations in early childhood seems to be in play, for Jacob as well, and the parallels with the transition of Czechoslovakia to capitalism are clear.

I also consider a second novel by Crain, Overthrow. It has a clear reference to Henry James in that one character is playfully called Hyacinth because he is said to remind other characters of Hyacinth Robinson, the main character of the James novel The Princess Casamassima. That work is an unusual one for James in that it has an explicitly political theme. Robinson is trying to decide between a life devoted to beauty and aesthetic experience and, in contrast, what he feels is his duty to contribute to an anarchist or socialist revolution. A similar competition between the aesthetic and the political is involved for certain twenty-first century individuals in Overthrow, who are part of the Occupy movement in lower Manhattan. Matthew falls in love with Leif, a member of this movement, but also is devoted to the seventeenth-century English literature he is writing about for his doctoral dissertation. If Henry James might exemplify the practice of a subtle reading of other minds, Leif and his friends are experimenting with different ways of reading the mental lives of others. In the background are all the advances in technology, artificial intelligence, and social networking that make new kinds of surveillance and new kinds of knowledge of individuals, and perhaps even a new kind of individuation, possible.    

Three gay-themed novels of the past couple of decades bring us back even more directly to the scene of literary modernism. Michael Cunningham’s The Hours very transparently sets out a range of close parallels with Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. We have extended scenes from three different periods. In the Greenwich Village of the late 1990s Clarissa Vaughn, called Mrs. Dalloway by her close poet-friend Richard because of her first name as well as her character, is out for a morning walk and, like Clarissa Dalloway in Woolf’s novel, is buying flowers for a party she is giving that evening. Septimus Smith, the shell-shocked veteran afflicted by signs of madness in Woolf, is replaced by the poet Richard, whose mental deterioration, causing hallucinations, stems from late-stage AIDS. While Woolf’s Clarissa recalls an intense relationship with another young woman named Sally before she was married to Richard Dalloway, Cunningham’s Clarissa has had a lesbian partner, also named Sally, for almost two decades. Another setting for the novel is 1949 Los Angeles, where a woman whom we discover to be the mother of Richard the poet finds her sense of self so overwhelmed by having a husband and young child that she thinks of leaving. She is able to find a form of liberation in reading Mrs. Dalloway. She has a passionate kiss with a female neighbor and flees to a downtown hotel so that she can have a space of her own for a while. The novel’s third principal setting is 1923, when Woolf herself is dealing with headaches and incipient madness as she tries to write the book that will become Mrs. Dalloway. Even quite minor characters and events in that work have their clear parallels in Cunningham’s novel.

Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys tells the story of Jim Mack and his fellow teenager Doyler Doyle in 1915-16, during the period leading up to the Easter Rebellion in Ireland. They will become lovers and will make a dangerous swim to express their loyalty to each other as well as to Ireland. The title suggests a work by the modernist writer Flann O’Brien, but it is James Joyce who is the deep influence behind the novel. Jim’s father is given long stream-of-consciousness sections that deliberately imitate the Leopold Bloom of Ulysses, and he is, like Bloom, a very decent man of the petit bourgeois who is interested in advertising and in the relationship between Ireland and the British empire. The settings in Dublin and its surroundings are familiar from Joyce’s work: Sandymount Cove, the Forty Foot, the Muglins. One of O’Neill’s characters has clear parallels with another modernist Irish writer, Oscar Wilde; he has been imprisoned for homosexual offenses in England and has a mother who is a staunch Irish patriot. While Joyce can offer a somewhat negative view of homosexuality in Ulysses, as in certain discussions in the chapter whose setting is the National Library (“Scylla and Charybdis”), O’Neill will celebrate the love of the two adolescents. But there may also be a faint hint that a homoerotic element in the Irish nationalist movement, as when Padraic Pearse gathers idealistic boys around him and dresses them in kilts, can have some more problematic aspect to it.

A third novel that goes directly to the era of literary modernism is The Master, by Colm Tóibín. It is an imagined biography of the inner world of Henry James during a pivotal few years of his career. While the external incidents are based on actual events in the life of the writer, Tóibín gives him an interior life in which homoerotic content is richly portrayed. We note his erotic awareness of the servant assigned to him at an Irish castle and especially we observe his longing for the Danish sculptor Hendrik Andersen. Tóibín also makes certain others in James’s social world aware of the shape of his longings, so that they are curious about what his reactions will be to an attractive male guest or servant to whom they have introduced him. The novel tries to show how the ordinary events and conversations of the world get transfigured, through a kind of alchemy, into the fiction of James. My reading suggests that Tóibín does not take advantage of reference to some of James’s own short fiction to richly delineate psychological issues about separation and individuation that James is concerned with and that I am examining in this book.

An eighth writer I am treating is Garth Greenwell. His novel What Belongs To You is narrated by a young American man who is teaching English at a school in Sofia, Bulgaria, in recent post-communist times. We do not get any detailed sense of his reading, but two writers he does mention, Flaubert and Cavafy, are modernist rather than from a later era, and he is teaching Whitman in his poetry class. He comments that just about everything built during the communist period is strikingly ugly, as if it were impossible even to imagine a beautiful and humane architecture for people to reside within. Instead he visits sections of the country that have earlier and more beautiful architectural structures built prior to the twentieth century. He forms an attachment to an attractive young Bulgarian man who expects gifts and loans in return for sexual favors. Such an affair with a younger foreign male was quite typical of homosexual writers during the period of modernism (one thinks of the lives of Forster, Gide, and Isherwood), but the linkage I want to explore is a different one. Greenwell’s book has as a constant theme the association of homosexuality with disgust, contamination, shame, and illness. The narrator’s first tentatively eroticized contact with another boy, in his early youth in Kentucky, ends with the latter vomiting, as if to indicate his disgust and his desire for distance. He meets Mitko in a basement men’s room in Sofia and catches a sexual disease from him, while Mitko’s own health keeps declining badly. One might note that Eliot’s Waste Land is a great modernist poem about the association of modern sexuality with disgust and illness, and Nietzsche, so often an influence on the literary modernists, is also in the background regarding what a return to health on several different levels would look like. Greenwell’s narrator is trying to work through a transition that will place him ultimately on the side of health, while he tries to understand certain earlier childhood structures that have shaped his psyche. A comparison I draw out in some detail is with Kafka, who, like Greenwell, examines the relation of the body to feelings of shame, disgust, and contamination, and who hopes that a turn to a certain kind of practice of literature might ultimately rescue him from being swallowed by such a world of associations.

I examine as well Greenwell’s second book, Cleanness. In nine linked stories the narrator from What Belongs to You believes that a reciprocal, loving relationship with a young Portuguese man has lifted him out of that world where sex was associated with disgust and self-hatred. He feels that he is made clean and whole by the other’s smile and intimacy. Yet even with this success, he finds himself still powerfully drawn to a repetition of sexual experiences of violence, degradation, and self-loss. While visiting an ancient fortress, he criticizes the Bulgarians for often living in an archaic cultural past, but it seems that in him as well archaic psychological structures of the past remain dominant, so that his relationship with the Portuguese man comes off as more superficial and is put at risk, as if he wants to destroy the very advances that the relationship has brought about in him. The appeal of such powerful unconscious structures was a theme of the literary modernists, and Greenwell has an implicit but crucial reference to Nietzsche’s Apollo-Dionysus contrast and a more explicit one to Mann’s Aschenbach, drawn in Venice to an Apollinian beauty that eventually turns into Dionysian destruction, disease, and self-loss.

A ninth writer I consider, James Cahill, has very recently published Tiepolo Blue. In this novel Don Lamb is a well-respected professor of art history at Cambridge University. Like Mann’s Aschenbach he has given himself to rigorous scholarship and writing, with his special area of interest the Venetian painter Tiepolo. He wishes to show that Tiepolo’s paintings and frescoes display far more of the virtues of classicism than many other commentators suppose, with even the seemingly expansive skies expressing precise mathematical proportions. He considers his own life as displaying just such classical virtues. Then a set of unusual circumstances makes him resign his academic position and become head of an art gallery in Dulwich, London. He falls in love with a young man and begins to explore the gay scene in Soho bars and Dulwich parks. As with Aschenbach, he does not have the confident form-giving power that Nietzsche said was necessary to engage with Dionysian energies in a healthy, energizing manner that could support a compelling individuation. He goes downhill instead toward decadence and destruction. Cahill makes the linkage with Mann’s novella extremely clear, for example, when he repeats very closely the scene in Mann where a young-old man with vulgar, unconvincing makeup is hanging around with much younger men and accosts Aschenbach as the boat heads into Venice. In Cahill this encounter takes place on the upper deck of a London bus. 

The brief descriptions show the great fondness of these authors for the writers and themes of literary modernism and, correspondingly, their almost wishing away, or at least ignoring, almost a century of academic literary theory, while also giving little attention to the literary works published after the modernist period. Yet in what sense can we count such attitudes as expressing a return to modernism, as opposed to a mere affection for earlier gay writers such as James and Proust? After all, none of the eleven novels I am considering has anything like the formal experimentation that one finds in Joyce, Eliot, Stein, Dada, surrealism, and so many other modernist examples, though O’Neill’s at some points imitates Joyce. There is not, among these recent writers, a sense that the literary resources available to them are woefully inadequate for conveying the significant contours of reality, as well as the subtle workings of the individual psyche, that they aim to capture. Modernist writers, in contrast, emphasized just such a stark inadequacy, what they saw as a fundamental crisis of representation, in considering the legacy of nineteenth-century literature. They felt they were not offered the literary tools needed to portray what they needed to portray. For certain of the modernists, such basic notions as truth, reality, selfhood, individuation, and autonomy could seem to have become far more problematic and far less defensible in the ways they had been understood by the early thinkers of modernity, and probing the depth of the psyche could seem far more difficult. My selected writers of today write as if they are satisfied that the literary resources available to the ordinary writer of fiction are sufficient for the task at hand, that there is no fundamental crisis of representation. What needs to be represented in their sentences and their images can be captured reasonably well if they work hard enough, with sufficient precision, at constructing these items. So there is one clear sense in which the recent writers at issue here might not classify themselves as “modernist.” And to the extent that they do quite definitely hold certain modernist writers in esteem as they write, their take on the practices of a century ago is a very limited one in terms of the standard range of writers appealed to, such as James, Proust, Eliot, Woolf, and Joyce. There is little reflection in their writing of more radical or demographically diverse authors or of the attitudes expressed by modernism in architecture and music.

We might conclude, then, that these recent writers of gay-themed novels, while they demonstrate a clear affection for certain works of a century earlier, have only a superficial connection to literary modernism, so that the idea of a return to that era will not have, for them at least, much serious content to it. I want to argue against that conclusion, while granting that the formal experimentation and the sense of epistemic and aesthetic crisis that we often associate with modernism are not present in the works I am considering. What has happened, I believe, is that the priorities of literary theory in the academic realm, given ongoing ideological, theoretical, and moral attitudes, have made us emphasize certain aspects of literary modernism while giving too little emphasis to others. It is the latter ones that are richly represented in the recent novels under consideration here. What these novels bring out are crucial literary resources, with their subtle forms of literary value, that the training of students today tends to ignore, very much to their detriment. So I will in this book try to make the connection between these recent gay novels and modernism considerably richer than a mere superficial fondness for certain authors of a century ago.

We need to look at something of the intellectual history of the twentieth century in order to understand what we, in today’s intellectual life, tend to underplay regarding the practices of key modernist writers. When authors early in the century found the literary means available to them to be inadequate, a central consideration was the difficulty of capturing psychological states that were seen as multiple, inconsistent, conflicted, mostly unconscious, and more richly complicated, as well as less moral, than under earlier pictures of the mind. Schopenhauer, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and eventually Freud and many others contributed to a sense of the urgency and difficulty of representing an individual’s mental states accurately. Perhaps one needs a stream-of-consciousness juxtaposing of what seem at first to be nearly random thoughts and perceptions. (Joyce) Perhaps one needs a poem with a great deal of apparent fragmentation and tension, with different styles of diction and different literary references clashing. (Eliot) Perhaps one needs what appears to be an almost scientific reflection on the intricacies of motivation and desire in individuals. (Proust) Perhaps one needs new forms of narrative to capture adequately the psychological experience of women. (Woolf)

Whatever the formal experimentation required to represent the complexity of this new material, this novel landscape of mental life that had opened up, the modernist authors favored by the recent writers I am considering remained committed to the idea that the phenomenology (the “how it feels” of experience) and the psychology of an individual human life matter greatly. Even if one’s conscious activity seems a fragile, often deluded endeavor run through by powerful unconscious drives that one has little hope of understanding well, still the individual’s efforts to shape her life, with her own particular take on it, are not devalued. The more one reads it, the more one finds in The Waste Land, for example, the excavation of a psyche that has very severe stresses on its attempts at a self-sustaining individuation and at a relatively stable gender identity. The power and drama of the poem are due to the fact that a fragmenting and dissolving of the self into structures of language and into de-individuating mental and cultural currents is not an accepted outcome. The centripetal forces attempting to hold the self together, and to find an acceptable way of assimilating its experiences, remain strongly in play. In spite of all Joyce’s experimentation with different available styles of cultural discourse, Ulysses would be boring if Leopold Bloom did not remain a sympathetic human individual trying to make his way as a complicated but moral self in the world, and if Stephen did not show at least the beginning signs of an education toward greater sympathy and maturity. We feel rewarded when Leopold and Stephen finally meet up as foster father and son. We remain curious about the precise motivations and desires of Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors, and we are not wrong to wonder to what degree these mental states may have analogies in James’s mental life as well. Clarissa Dalloway is interesting because she reveals to us the psychological life of a particular individual. There is no overall dismantling of or deconstruction of subjectivity by language (a tired slogan of post-structuralism). Proust’s novel is held together by the long education of a self in its dealings with loss. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers is about the difficult process of achieving individual separateness.  It is true that regarding some of the radical areas of literary modernism such as Dadaism, surrealism, futurism, and perhaps the work of Gertrude Stein, the claims I am making here are less convincing. And modernism in architecture and music would take very different directions from those that I am presenting as most typical of literary modernism. But the writers I use as examples here do form the mainstream of that literary period and it is these that the gay-themed novels I am examining refer back to. 

Modernist writers for their part may indeed put enormous strain on the picture of the self that was taken for granted by many earlier writers. Proust will emphasize the succeeding person-stages, with their changing structures of desire, that take over what has seemed to be a continuous individual life and that allow humans to get over losses by no longer being the self that did the losing. Yet one of the satisfactions of the final volume is that Marcel, precisely by giving an aesthetic shape to his whole life, is in some way securing a form of selfhood that can face up to the deep issues of attachment, loss, grief, and separateness that generated so much anxiety in the young boy described in the first volume. There has to be very considerable continuity in the self, and a strong attachment of older self to younger self, for that strategy to work. The outcome of very much of the work of literary modernism (certainly not all) is that individuation, the character of phenomenological experience, the project of self-formation, the attainment of a degree of self-sustaining autonomy, and the achieved shape of an entire life still matter and are not illusions. It is just that their achievement has so much more that is complicated, fragile, and questionable about it. The same goes for ideas of truth, reality, and representation. We perhaps see how very much more difficult it is than previously thought to bring the reality of the world and of an individual psychological life into view truthfully. But such an investigation has not been dismantled as fraudulent. It has been shown instead to be more important for its very difficulty. If Henry James is one of the crucial writers behind the work of these recent novelists, he insists on advising novelists that a successful novel must offer a strong sense of reality itself coming into view and a convincing picture of the intricate mental maneuvers of the individual. It will show the writer’s mind as a very fine membrane vibrating with the faintest hints of life, with the very pulses of the social air. Such a description seems to be what all the writers I consider are aiming at.

We may get a different picture of literary modernism when we look at it from certain viewpoints that became more fashionable later in the century. One of these is due to the influence of Marxism. On a typical but not the only available Marxist story, the central role of the self-forming private individual, having a considerable degree of self-determination and a personal effectiveness based on individual intentions and experiences, is an artifact of the early stages of bourgeois capitalism and of the Christian emphasis on an individual spiritual life. When E. M. Forster was invited to a writers’ conference against fascism in Paris in 1935 and gave a defense of an English notion of individual liberty and of a somewhat eccentric individualism, he was ignored by the mostly communist audience as old-fashioned and ideologically incorrect. One of the features of capitalism, say many Marxists, is the radical way it eventually undermines whatever is independently determinate in the culture and turns it into a reflection of capitalism’s own system of commodification and exchange. In its advanced stages, this form of production and consumption shapes the mental states of individuals into easily exchanged, easily circulated, very much cheapened commodities, so that the idea of the self-forming and self-determining individual becomes a complete illusion. Individual identities and individual experiences are just more exchangeable units within the capitalist system. They are very thin surface features governed by underlying mechanisms of material production and circulation. It is these systemic and structural features that matter, not how things feel to the individual.

Some Marxist intellectuals may tend, as a consequence, to focus on those aspects of aesthetic modernism that underline the fragmentation, dispersion, and dissolving of the individual self, rather than on the many elements in modernism that still value and support, often through aesthetic means, practices of self-formation and self-making conducted at the individual level. The quirky Marxist Walter Benjamin agrees with his friend Theodor Adorno in finding none of the supposed Hegelian achievements of self-determination, self-sustaining identity, and autonomy to be operating in contemporary modernity.¹ Capitalism, he says, leaves a history of ruins, with empty, valueless forms of subjectivity, so that only a drastic, almost messianic reordering of the self from without can produce a change that might matter. When we speak in certain ways about ourselves with the vocabularies of individuality and subjectivity, when we make claims of self-knowledge and self-determination, we are, on this story, just recycling commodified discursive items that make us more and more the creatures of authoritarian power and of the needs of capitalist exchange. Think of individuals who attend self-help training sessions and end up repeating empty slogans about self-realization. So even an era of great attention to the self, like the present one, may actually be revealing the ultimate emptiness of subjectivity. Adorno finds almost all aesthetic products bankrupt except the most advanced, sophisticated, and iconoclastic forms such as Schoenberg’s music, which can express an autonomy that now is inconceivable and impossible socially. The Marxist critic Terry Eagleton approvingly refers to an analysis of Ulysses by Franco Moretti.² There we see, so it is claimed, that language has been reduced to packaged, commodified forms that can be played with and circulated through the text. On this story Bloom as an individual experiencer seems to get lost in the great shuffle of language. Benjamin, for his part, sees surrealism as the most promising aesthetic and intellectual trend in modernism. Like Marxism, it can ultimately undermine the pretensions of individual subjectivity that still remain in much of aesthetic modernism (though Benjamin also appreciates Proust and translated his work into German). Surrealism, says Benjamin, suggests how we may harness the explosive energies of the unconscious for a social revolution that will transform the structure of selfhood rather than supporting a more traditional bourgeois notion of individual self-formation and self-cultivation.³

A model that was central to many modernist writers, that of using a range of aesthetic resources available from the history of European culture to help shape a form and style of individuation able to sustain itself against pressures both internal and external, will not only be illusory for many Marxists. It will be useless in that it tries to do its work at precisely the wrong level. The kinds of mental moves made by the individual are said to be shallow effects of underlying social and economic machineries. It is only by changing these latter that real change in the self can come about. Suppose one spends a great deal of time in an individual process of self-making. One is simply making moves determined at a level one is unaware of, from which one has no chance of emancipation. One is like a marionette controlled by string-pullers one does not comprehend, most especially when one is making claims about deciding matters for oneself. When a large socioeconomic change occurs, those earlier moves are invalidated and new ones are determined by the novel underlying structures. So one’s individualist project will have been in vain all along. And the changes recommended by the Marxist will involve a socialist, collective, collaborative formation of a new kind of self, not a process of self-formation that the individual takes responsibility for on her own, perhaps while utilizing the aesthetic resources of a capitalist culture.

Since 1970 or so, many have felt that training in literature should aim at promoting the moral and political objectives of a progressive or a more radically left position. Such an interest, it is true, might well be present without depending on any Marxist background. But the peculiarities of American university developments in literary theory, political theory, and cultural studies meant that the Western European Marxist tradition would be strongly influential in those departments. The Frankfurt School Germans, most notably Benjamin and Adorno, might be allied, somewhat awkwardly, with French theorists who were intimate with different versions of Marxism, such as Roland Barthes and Louis Althusser. Even if Foucault in the last part of his career moved away from Marxism in his study of sexuality and power strategies and even if Derrida had an idiosyncratic relation to Marx’s texts that always made his own work primary, one could hardly be an intellectual during certain periods of French life without having some kind of alliance with Marxism, whether Soviet or Maoist. That French influence might support tendencies already present in American studies. Marxism believed in the possibility of a radical reformation of the self in line with socialist principles, so one wished to find very little that was biologically fixed in individuals. The Soviet Union, so brilliant in physics, mathematics, and engineering, did very little in biology because its ideology favored Lamarckian rather than properly Darwinian principles grounded in a relatively fixed biology. At American universities the possibility of drastic social change seemed to depend on the assumption that there is little or no intrinsic character to the individual self. What we count as individuation, gender identity, autonomy, and so forth, can be seen as a matter of social construction rather than of nature or biology. Therefore, individual human selves are for the most part blank slates and quite dramatic social revolutions, ones that would shape and allow for very different kinds of human identities, are possible. A central attention to individual psychology in practices of reading literature, along with an appeal to the power of aesthetic resources in shaping and sustaining the self, may thus be replaced by a sociology attuned to matters of social justice and the construction of a new kind of socialist self. In reading the modernist writers on this new model, we will be less concerned with their individual psychological travails, as they faced profound loss, the pressures of separateness, and anxieties about disintegration in their own lives, than with reading texts to reveal the underlying grammars of a culture, the social-discursive machineries that construct race, gender, otherness, and so forth. If James emphasized the importance for the novel of grasping the feel of reality itself and of portraying the subtle detail of psychological life, a very strong emphasis on social construction may well make reality and the self appear to have little substance of their own, but to be thin constructs that we should refer to with quotation marks as “reality” and “selfhood”, and we should not take the individual self seriously as the elemental site for the experience and interpretation of literature.   

Another twentieth-century intellectual trend contributed to a similar devaluing of the role of the individual self, with its supposedly privileged experiences and its project of self-formation that may have crucial links to the structures of aesthetic experience. That trend involved a radical turn to language or textuality or to the underlying cultural grammars explored by structuralism. Such a turn emphasized the linguistic construction of what we take to be the psychological life of the self, and it supported a practice of using the machinery of language to dismantle or deconstruct what seemed to be the determinate, self-grounding features of a culture, including the psychological states of the individual. So while the linguistic or the structuralist turn is philosophically independent of a relation to Marxism, it tended to support the Marxist deconstruction of bourgeois subjectivity, individualism, and phenomenology. That outcome would be overdetermined in France, for example, by the rather easy intersection there of structuralism, Marxism, and an avant-garde fiction that substituted an exploration of linguistic structures for psychological ones. In the resulting intellectual world, French intellectuals competed to see who could most radically reject all views that might be considered “humanist” in that they assigned a central role to the experiencing human individual. The claim was made that language or textuality on its own had a productive, disseminative character that worked independently of the intentions and meanings that we tried to impress on it. All identities, whether of the self or of any of our intended meanings, got taken up into this machinery of language and were undermined and destabilized by it. Everything is what it is, it was said, only in relation to absent conditions that may be inconceivable and radically arbitrary from the standpoint of one’s present circumstances and that cannot be mastered at all. So any aesthetic emphasis on individual self-formation, individual experience, and personal autonomy must be entirely surrendered as illusory, for these are based on a certain presence-to-self that the radical turn to language has shown to be impossible. 

Theorists such as Derrida claimed that it was a good thing that the individual self was so thoroughly dismantled and dispersed by the machinery of textuality.⁴ For then we were less exposed and vulnerable to the authoritarian systems that constantly attempted to impose various identities on us, in the interest of increasing the power of those systems. Paul de Man, in considering the modernist poet Rilke, said that we misread his work when we supposed that it offered a representation of painful psychological states having to do with personal loss, failure, or depression.⁵ What was taking place in the poems, rather, was that language was reflecting on its own character, on the way that absence and a failure to represent were built into its very structure. That linguistic feature, that absence within language whereby meaning was always being lost instead of fixed, was then projected onto the world as if it were a psychological feature of an individual. What seemed to be psychological tragedy involving personal loss was properly interpreted, said de Man, as merely linguistic self-reference, as about language’s own inevitable self-loss. Attention to language’s machinery thus deconstructed the entire notion of individual mental states that could be reported on. If one actually believes this (I do not understand how one can do so), then one will ignore the ways that The Waste Land remains a report on the psychological pressures on an individual self in considerable pain and anxiety, barely succeeding in holding itself together. The linguistic-structuralist turn and a commitment to Marxism can be seen to join very easily together, for example, in the work of Roland Barthes. He sought to understand texts in a way that removed them ever more radically from being seen as an expression of a writer’s psychological states and he contributed to a strong Marxist demystification of the cultural myths that capitalism employed to support its rule. In America the postmodern novel of the 1970s might push in a similar direction, from perhaps different motivations. The writer might reflect on and play with the conventions of fiction writing in a manner that turned characters into obvious textual constructions whose behavior was shallow and arbitrary, a fictional effect rather than an expression of the rich psychological life we find actually in humans.

It is worth noting how much of historical literary modernism we are thus leaving behind with these various intellectual trends. All the labor that literary modernists put into capturing subtle aspects of the phenomenology of individual experience is strongly devalued. Henry James’s advice that the writer must be like a fine membrane resonating with the subtlest vibrations of the social air and of the mental lives of others seems to be rejected. It is also true that crucial features of the deep intellectual background out of which modernism emerged are severely underplayed. That background owes a great deal to the views of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, for whom a strong role is assigned to the natural, biological origins of humans. On their picture we seem to be perched as fragile selves on underlying Dionysian, oceanic, biological powers that express themselves through us, even against our understanding of what is happening, and that can easily swallow us back into themselves. For Schopenhauer, that structure means that individuation is pretty much a weak illusion. Nietzsche sees matters differently. Even if Schopenhauer’s overall metaphysical picture is correct, he claims, there is still great virtue and meaning in the practices by which an individual gives a distinctive shape, style, and character, and thus a mode of individuation, to her life. He celebrates the excellent individual who has arrived at a compelling style of selfhood and he proposes ways, often both difficult and lonely, by which one can achieve a genuine degree of self-determination, apart from social pressures and modes of social construction. Instead of endorsing the virtues of a dispersive, fragmenting self, he praises both selves and aesthetic artifacts that achieve, without a deep metaphysical basis for identity, a self-sustaining wholeness and a convincingly distinctive style. The power of the Dionysian, oceanic, biological forces goes along with, and is a condition for, the admirable character of the individuation that is achieved and maintained against it. Nietzsche is of great interest because, on the one hand, he is radical in exposing the false metaphysical and religious pictures that have been used to support the idea of the self. For him the self is in its appearances the way lightning is in the flash. He teaches us how multiple and clashing are the forces of the human psyche, as if it were a territory where independent warlords fight for territory and resources and form coalitions when necessary. On the other hand, he then goes on to praise those psyches that can, out of all those tensions and conflicts, generate a compelling overall style of character. Academic literary theorists would tend to endorse Nietzsche’s picture of such a multiple, fragmented inner life but then to ignore the recipes he offers for bringing about greater integration and self-ordering, since these inevitably involve, so they claim, an increased colonization by forces of dominance rather than a genuine achievement of the self, as in Nietzsche’s account of his own development.

Aesthetic form and style become especially powerful for Nietzsche because these express, as well as offering a kind of scaffolding or template for, the ordering power of the self to maintain its style and rhythm of individuation against both external and internal pressures. That is why beauty still matters greatly for him. The compromised, fragile subject working out its anxieties in The Waste Land and the narrator of In Search of Lost Time, among others, can seem to occupy that Nietzschean space where individual psychology, aesthetics, and metaphysics meet. Nietzsche believes that earlier forms of life, from the Greco-Roman to the aristocratic, once had the discipline and confidence to enforce a rigorous individuation, one that generated an enduring style of life as well as admirable individuals with a distinctive character. Such conditions are no longer present in modern societies, he admits, so it is up to individuals to engage in a difficult but rewarding project of self-formation on their own. It is crucial for them, claims Nietzsche, to find a self-sustaining solitude in which they can engage in this project, so that they can resist the shaping forces of the given order, whether it is a liberal-democratic or a socialist one. In shaping an enduring style of selfhood, they will often find the aesthetic resources of literature and music, especially those from earlier cultures that managed to express and embody a worthy style, to be helpful in the process. A typical Marxist view, in contrast, as in the Cultural Revolution in China, is to be iconoclastic toward the art and literature of feudal, aristocratic, and bourgeois periods, since these are ideologically contaminated and will hinder the formation of a new socialist self. Nietzsche favors beauty and style that are well-grounded in, and an Apollinian reaction to, the Dionysian impulses that still drive us and attract us, so that these qualities are intimately related to psychological matters and to the fundamental life tasks of the self. On the other side, most of academic training in literary theory since 1970 will, for political reasons, find form, style, beauty, and biology to be suspect.

Nietzsche offers us a further thought on these matters. At one point he asks us to consider the terrible, awkward, burdensome weight that sea creatures, once naturally buoyant in the sea, must have felt when they first walked up on land.⁶ That is how humans must have felt, he adds, when they had to begin to determine their actions through slow, self-conscious deliberation instead of through the instinctual powers and behaviors that nature has built into us. Nietzsche’s frequent paean to lightness as a virtue derives from his consistent reflection on the pressures of individuation, self-consciousness, agency, and so forth. He is personally interested in the Christian engineering of the psyche that intensified innerness, highly self-aware reflection on the character of one’s intentions, responsibility, and guilt. His insistence that the idea of a faculty of free will is a fiction and that everything unfolds of necessity in the universe is specifically aimed at freeing individuals from the psychological pressure of that Christian engineering. He very powerfully shows both the appeal of a surrender to Dionysian energies that make individuation less burdensome and the appeal of shaping a confident, admirable individuality in the face of such energies. Schopenhauer is thus both a mentor and someone he must clearly distinguish himself from. A great deal of literary modernism, though evidently not all of it, follows in this Nietzschean line. From Captain Vere’s interactions with Billy Budd to Proust’s narrator coming to grips with his separateness through to the son’s development in Sons and Lovers to the pained self of The Waste Land to Aschenbach’s journey to Venice and to so many other characters in so many other works, there is an extraordinary examination of attempts to achieve an enduring individuality against regressive or cultural forces that make that process a difficult one.   

We might, then, surely oversimplifying, see two very different routes out of the era of literary modernism. One would take Nietzsche as its patron and one would take Marx. The latter, in its deep skepticism about any project of individual self-formation, has to deny the entire energy economy of the Nietzschean world and the entire set of practices by which, for Nietzsche, we give shape to what is happening and make it our own. These Marxist-inspired thinkers are deeply suspicious of all those moves throughout Nietzsche’s work by which he attempts to make his mental life, his individual way in the world, and his aesthetic achievements truly his own, for that suggests the entire bourgeois framework of private property. It will not be a surprise, then, that when academics later in the twentieth century take up Nietzsche, they have to ignore so much of what was important to him and introduce a new, postmodern Nietzsche. Derrida in Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles tries to make Nietzsche in advance an advocate of Derridean deconstruction. De Man, writing on Nietzsche, aims to make the Dionysian, oceanic realm that is so important to him a thin projection of, rather than a cresting support for, the linguistic, discursive order. The Nietzschean link between aesthetic creation and a psychology of individual self-formation is simply ignored.

This detour into the intellectual history of the twentieth century allows me to situate the recent writers I am investigating and their relation to literary modernism. It is true that they offer little by way of formal experimentation or new literary styles, and they seem rather confident in the power of the available literary forms to capture the phenomena they have noticed and find worth placing in a novel. But they return precisely to the features of literary modernism that the twentieth-century intellectual history I have been surveying would devalue or erase. Modernist writers found the modern world around them to have become impoverished in terms of conditions for forming the kinds of selves it was worthwhile and admirable to be. In an analogous manner my recent writers, I would claim, find the twentieth-century academic treatment of literature to have severely impoverished the literary resources that modernist writers once made available to us, and that would be especially helpful to students today in coming to experience their own lives. This loss might be more strongly felt by gay writers. In a manner that the work of Greenwell especially makes clear, gay writers may still be working through, often with the help of available literary resources, early issues of individuation, separateness, and identity formation. The Nietzschean aspects of literary modernism would still be helpful in this regard, while the Marxist shaping of literary theory would not be. (We should not be surprised when, in one story in Cleanness, Greenwell has his narrator comment on his love of the oceanic while visiting a Black Sea town that was once a Roman city dedicated to Apollo. In another, while on a trip to Venice, he thinks he sees Mann’s Aschenbach emerging from the sea. The implicit Nietzschean background is clear in both of these references.)

I should say from the start that I do not claim that my sample of recent novelists is a representative one that can stand for the general state of gay or queer literature at the moment. A random sampling of gay-themed novels since the year 1998 (all of my selections have been published since then) might end up emphasizing quite different patterns from the ones that I do here, and the patterns I am curious about emerge most clearly from writers who are, admittedly, not very diverse in ways that a reader sensitive to global cultural developments might hope for. I have a deliberately narrow focus: I think there is something of consequence to be learned by asking why gay male writers in particular might at this moment find some of the themes and structures of literary modernism appealing, and literary theory of the last several decades much less so. (Seven of the nine writers I am treating are themselves gay, while O’Hagan and Aciman, while writing gay-themed novels, appear to be in heterosexual marriages.) Let us grant that there are many more options available for homosexuals today than in most of human history, and the aesthetic option, where aesthetic features serve as a scaffolding and reinforcement for deep psychological issues, may therefore be attractive to far fewer. A gay person today might get married and adopt children. One might become politically radical and press for drastic changes in the social order, in the interests of social justice, while working to fundamentally destabilize all categories involving gender and sexuality. But there will surely remain some gay men for whom the powerful engineering linkages between the psychological project of securing oneself as an individual and, on the other side, the workings of the aesthetic sphere of literature (or of art more generally) remain important to living a human life well. An interest in these connections, sometimes more notably evident in those who are gay, will surely be transferrable to very many who are not. It is a crucial point that all eleven of the novels under consideration here are well-written, sometimes quite beautifully so. That is a central feature of the psychological-aesthetic configuration I am exploring and I wish to examine it further.

Even with all the social changes going on around us, we remain individuals who have to go through challenging trials in becoming a self. As biological beings with brains still shaped by hunter-gatherer existence, we must form strong attachments to primary caregivers when we are young and we will see any isolation from others as painful and dangerous, as if we had been deserted by our tribe out on the savanna. But we must also go through a process of individuation and separation by which we substantially reduce the power of those attachments and learn to live a more autonomous, self-sustaining existence. As cultures become wealthier, more sophisticated, and more diverse in their overall projects, there will be more opportunities for experiencing the pressures of aloneness and separateness. A feature of development in the young is that there are early transitional stages wherein self-other differentiation remains blurry and unstable, as our investments in others may be shifting and oscillating in their meanings. (Is that person truly another individual with whom I am negotiating or is it an externalized version of myself whose needs I am trying to soothe?) We must learn to articulate a more sophisticated, more reliable structuring of self and other and we must more actively shape what has happened to us instead of remaining passive to the whims of our external surroundings. The more developed cultures we are part of will place greater responsibility on us for what we make of ourselves, a turn that may produce both satisfaction and anxiety, as a burdensome, self-conscious deliberation must often take over from instinctual knowledge, just as Nietzsche spoke of. This process of achieving greater autonomy and self-mastery might be very much complicated for some by matters of shaping a gender identity. The shifting structures of self and other in one’s early identifications may affect how that gender identity is conceived in a process of individuation, while free-floating erotic energy may be recruited for basic tasks of self-formation instead of for reproduction. A consequence is that one’s erotic investments may be more about achieving wholeness and integrity in the self than about locating partners for common future purposes. 

An important discovery is that there can be a powerful symbiosis between this challenging project of individual self-formation and the practices of the aesthetic sphere, with each side feeding on the other. The space of literature can resonate intimately with the psychological space in which one is working out various tasks in achieving individuality. A sense of rightness in one’s ordering of items in aesthetic space and a compelling rhythm in the forward movement of prose can stand for the self’s capacity to maintain its style and rhythm of selfhood as various experiences are absorbed that challenge the integrity and continuity of that style. The mood and music of the sentences, with their rising and falling and their patterns of repetition, can suggest psychological experiences of attachment and relinquishing, especially as these arise from our unconscious lives. Literature’s capacities for complexity and compression can open up the literary realm to transitional psychological spaces where identifications may be more mobile and shifting and may compress several psychological levels at once. In the space of literature, then, one may be recalling, mostly unconsciously, earlier childhood mental landscapes and their emotional complexities, and one may be helping to shape a more mature response to them. One may find in literature a cultural technology that contributes to some degree to a redesigning of the psyche, to a more sophisticated or at least more endurable ordering of the emotions. Through certain exceptionally insightful writing one may feel more immediately exposed to the deep metaphysical character of the world and to the elemental psychological structures that emerge in response to it, and one might thus try to establish a more satisfying self-to-other structure of experiencing.

I will have much more to say about these matters in succeeding chapters. The point for now is that this symbiosis between psychological and aesthetic space seems to have been especially strong among many of the literary modernists. Proust’s multi-volume novel, for example, begins with a description of a young boy with extreme difficulty in resolving matters of maternal attachment and separation. Even much later on in the work, the narrator resolves to stay on in Venice while his mother goes to the railroad station for a return to Paris, but then his experience of aloneness is so overwhelming he has to rush to rejoin her. The confident ongoing style by which Proust’s sentences unfold in their complexity will suggest a mastery regarding self-formation and the handling of loss that the novel’s principal character finds difficulty achieving. Mann in Death in Venice explores what happens when a regression to earlier psychological spaces and to more primitive identifications overcomes a selfhood whose architecture, held together by severe discipline to the point of exhaustion, reveals its fragility. It is incapable of being buoyed up on its unconscious energies through a transfiguring self-mastery but has been producing only the appearance of strength. The Waste Land is one of the richest documents we find that investigates the deep strains on individuation and gender identity that arise from the pressures of modern life on weakly formed selves, as well as from the absence of strongly habituating traditions. We could find many more examples, and I will be doing so as I go on.

But we have now at least a first try at understanding why certain gay novelists of today might be attracted by a return to literary modernism. These contemporary writers remain concerned with a project of self-formation that may be aided by aesthetic style as a kind of scaffolding or template or prosthesis for the developing psyche. The psychological-aesthetic space they make vivid may allow access to a transitional mental space where one’s identifications and investments are less stable, more mobile and shifting, and highly compressed in their meanings, and where confident aesthetic form can give a satisfying shape to such fluid mental happenings. Thus Crain’s and Garthwell’s protagonists are young men who travel to Europe to break with earlier, problematic attachments and to work out a shape of selfhood in the transitional period of a turn away from communism in eastern Europe. O’Neill’s Jim Mack is breaking his extremely close attachment to his rigorous Catholic upbringing and coming to identify with someone who represents both sexual deviance and socialism. O’Hagan’s David has faced the death of his lover thirty-five years earlier by returning to an aesthetic world strongly shaped by earlier Catholic tradition. Elio in Aciman’s novel is seventeen and finds himself in a relationship so emotionally intense that the very boundaries between self and other break down and he is unsure on which side of the boundary line he is as he calls Oliver Elio and wishes his partner to call him Oliver. He uses aesthetic and musical experience as a way to shape his emotional life.

These recent writers, then, will find that the tasks they set themselves as writers may be congruent in certain ways with the themes of many of the literary modernists, especially in works from that period with explicit or implicit homoerotic content. The two groups will share an interest in form, beauty, and style. Shaping well-formed sentences with a pleasing architecture and a confident manner of maintaining themselves in the face of emotionally challenging experience will seem related elementally to the very project of one’s maintenance as a self. Literary space may appear to be such that one is teasing out relatively stable forms from fragile circumstances where dissolution threatens the self, as if one were being brought close to destructive oceanic powers and yet were maintaining an elemental but compelling architecture against them. The sentences seem to be arranging themselves against an implicit scene of possible loss and a threat of emptiness. The gay identification with the beautiful male other who seems to embody a secure and appealing style of individuation may transfer itself to an attraction to a well-formed style in the aesthetic order.

The attitudes of these nine novelists may appear retrograde at a time when social action, often with a socialist or Marxist tone, seems a dominant practice expected of those who are morally sensitive and politically active. This point may take on further weight when we note the opportunities that these novels offer, but often seem to evade, for political commentary shaped by socialist sympathies. Crain’s Jacob and Greenwell’s narrator are living in Central European countries that have recently given up on Marxist forms of life, but they are less interested in the virtues and flaws of socialism than in learning how to give an adequate shape to their early-adult lives. O’Hagan’s David falls deeply in love in 1968 with a socialist student and one possibility of the novel, after that student’s death, is that David might commit himself to socialist causes as a way of remembering his lover. But he returns, in a manner deeply satisfying to him, to the conservative aesthetic tradition of his secondary school training with Catholic monks. Hollinghurst’s Nick establishes a life in London in a way that gives him a privileged window on the political and social changes under Thatcher, but he is interested mostly in his own psychological, sexual, and aesthetic development, even if he does offer some fine satire of the manners of Tory party members and business contributors. O’Neill’s Jim is the exception, as, under the influence of his gay lover, he joins not just the Irish revolt but the socialist version of it under James Connolly. But that is in 1916 and has little to do with more recent politics.

The tension between a political, often socialist commitment and a focus on a symbiotic space where psychological and aesthetic issues come together is nicely shown in Crain’s second book, Overthrow. Matthew falls for Leif, who is demonstrating with others at Zuccotti Park during the Occupy movement (though the park is not actually named). But Leif’s tattoo as well as his password refer to a different space, the garden mentioned in seventeenth-century poet Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden.” Matthew is sensitive to this reference because he is a graduate student specializing in the literature of that period. The space described in Marvell’s poem is set deliberately in contrast to that of Zuccotti Park. Marvell’s garden is a domain of confirmed solitude, supported by and grounded in a well-cultivated natural world. The boundaries of the self appear well-maintained by the surrounding trees and the poet can freely imagine, and travel in his imagination to, a wide variety of other places, without having those boundaries threatened. Leif comments that the few trees in Zuccotti Park seem, in contrast, as if they were hothouse office trees brought briefly outdoors, and they offer no protection at all from the different surveillance engines, governmental and non-governmental, that are keeping track of the protest movement. The entire space seems easily appropriated and invaded by external forces with very different purposes, while Marvell’s aesthetic world, represented by the garden, appears to provide for the private individual the very sovereignty that Matthew is writing about in his dissertation. One might say the same thing about O’Hagan’s David finding a satisfying psychological space in the aesthetic traditions of the Church and in the history of music and literature rather than in the socialist, political world that his lover Conor once opened up to him. Aciman’s Elio seems not to follow political events at all but to be immersed in a sophisticated aesthetic universe that he uses to fend off loneliness and depression. So the aesthetic space of Marvell appears to trump the space of social protest when it comes to shaping an individuation that matters and that can be sustained. It seems to offer something of a genuine refuge and resource for making one’s life one’s own against all the pressures today of social media, of having to play constantly to digital crowds, of astonishingly individualized data collection and surveillance. The space of the Occupy movement cannot offer this.

On the other hand, it is a familiar objection that the kind of symbiosis I have been describing between the individual project of self-formation and the deployment of the rich patterns of the aesthetic sphere is a leftover of the ideology of bourgeois humanism, a structure whose habits and attitudes became dominant for a few centuries but must now be overcome. And such a focus as mine, an opponent will argue, will have other limits. Suppose I am right in my description of the interests that writers of recent gay-themed novels have in common with certain of the literary modernists. It does not follow that the constellation of themes and attitudes that those two groups share ought now to be in favor. It would be bad science to draw conclusions about certain medical treatments just on the basis of a demographically very narrow sample, as when studies of heart disease are done only on men. In a similar fashion, let us suppose it is true that the engineering links between individual psychology and the space of literature are of an interesting sophistication in certain modernist writers who were homoerotically inclined white males, such as James and Proust. That may itself be a reason to deploy our resources to bring out connections between psychology and aesthetics that are found in rather different groups, those whose work has tended to be neglected.

It would be foolish to devalue and marginalize historical findings in physics, chemistry, and biology because of the demographic narrowness of the groups that discovered them. But the situation can seem to be different in the case of literature. It is likely that the various architectures and machineries that join psychological needs and anxieties to aesthetic practices are deeply rooted in the particular mental lives of the (usually) men who produced the literary works. The space of literature will then reflect the patterns of identification and investment, of anxiety and instability, that have to do with how males come to achieve a more integral selfhood. These may often not be transferrable to the pathways by which women learn to attain a satisfying individuality. And the patterns in question will also be historically located. Perhaps they will apply especially to those who were living through a certain European (or American) style of constructing bourgeois individuals. During the height of that manner of social construction, the male route to gender identity very often had misogynist and gynophobic aspects. A project of individual male autonomy, with accompanying fears of regressing back into a boundary-blurring identification with the maternal world, might use antipathy toward and fear of women as a strategy of achieving a secure separateness or as an incentive to interpret aesthetic practice on the model of a masculinist heroism. So even if the psychological-aesthetic symbiosis in gay male modernist writers might be a matter of great engineering complexity and curiosity, it may be argued that we should not give our great attention and our scholarly resources to a constellation that can be in significant ways morally questionable.

There are objections as well that might be raised from within the gay world. Two patterns of gay or queer life and thought today seem especially prominent and both may be said to work against tendencies that, so it may well be argued, one finds in some aspects of earlier gay life, including what I have been calling the symbiosis between psychological and aesthetic space. First is the tendency toward long-term marriage and the possible adoption of children. Second is the tendency toward more radical forms of destabilizing the very notion of gender. In the first case, marriage seems a mature adult commitment when compared with repetitive structures of behavior that eroticize and aestheticize a problematic, non-resolved journey of self-formation. In the second case the theoretical deconstruction of patterns of gender and sexuality can seem an intellectual and political advance upon an earlier obsession with beautiful form and compelling style, as well as being more productive of desirable political change. Hegel called the culture of the ancient Greeks one of beautiful individuality. Beauty, he claimed, represented one of the ways in which Geist, or an activity of free self-determination from within, might take on visible form in the world. But he insisted that this particular form of incarnating Geist had to be superseded by more sophisticated embodiments, as in Protestant interiority or in the institutions of the modern European state. Greek culture was powerful, but it was also the expression for Hegel of human adolescence. Even those who do not consider themselves at all Hegelian might come to a similar conclusion regarding beauty. One may seem to identify erotically with the beautiful, well-formed other, as something of a proxy and model for the just-forming self. But maturity requires moving beyond such identifications, and beyond such a strong focus on one’s self-identity, so that one can negotiate with other independent adults regarding the achievement of worthwhile goals, as in marriage or politics. Or from the point of view of radical theory, an emphasis on beauty may represent a regression to various forms of individuation that dominated ancient, feudal, and bourgeois cultures but that have no place anymore in the styles of socialization that radical theory would encourage. Such radical theory is iconoclastic. Like many versions of Marxism, it would erase the remaining structures of previous forms of life in order to thoroughly remake the social order. Beauty, form, and style will likely seem, for those influenced by such theory, to be obsessions only of immature stages of social development. The aristocracy, for example, will often try to express the rightness of its authority by means of a compelling order of beautiful rituals and styles. So will the Catholic church.

I think these concerns, while genuine, can be overplayed. There is the matter, first of all, of just how difficult it is to have access to the mysterious doings by which an unconscious emotional life is shaped into a compelling aesthetic space. The human brain has just about the most complicated engineering design that we know of. We do not understand very well how emotions are felt and expressed, how they interact with cognitive activity, and how they influence and are themselves shaped by the aesthetic qualities of literature such as rhythm, music, mood, metaphor, sequences of images, and the rising and falling patterns of prose. These machineries are so difficult to see into that we should attend where we can to those who give us unusually powerful insight into them, even if the writers who do so are expressing the biases of a parochial position. We might imagine a similar issue arising in the field of music. One might show that at the high point of classical music, in Mozart’s, Beethoven’s, and Schubert’s Vienna, the work of those composers was shaped by psychological states and emotional arcs that are to a considerable degree masculinist, as well as by a history of dance and ceremonial performance closely tied to aristocratic and ecclesiastical settings. But the genius of these composers was such that they seem to have had very rare access to the machineries by which the emotive-cognitive space of the individual psyche and the aesthetic space of music are powerfully joined. Those who are differently situated will do well to take advantage of that special degree of insight into the engineering in question, even as they learn to recognize the existing biases and to control for them in generating new kinds of music. So too with gay literary modernism and its often masculinist prejudices and its biases toward the experiences of white men.

Regarding a general narrative, we should see ourselves as rather late participants in a cultural relay race that has produced astonishing achievements across the generations. We need to keep passing on those achievements to future individuals even when we do not understand fully the source of their power and even as we recognize the unfairness in the matter of who had access to the crucial means of cultural production and who did not. Given the psychological complexity of humans and the different kinds of activity they may come to count as excellent, a good strategy is to keep many aesthetic resources alive instead of impoverishing the landscape through the eradicating effects of our present-day moral and political frameworks. Consider the model of the Cultural Revolution in China, with its radical iconoclasm. Great works of poetry and great works of art from former dynasties were to be censored, and manuscripts and art objects destroyed, because they expressed the values of a feudal or mandarin era. Instead, theater works and posters would praise the workers and the peasants and their ideological role in the new society, which would form new socialist selves not contaminated by, or even sensitive to, the cultures of earlier times. Yet that iconoclastic erasure of the past is now seen by Chinese communist leaders themselves to be a mistake. They are trying to revive the riches of earlier Chinese culture, with children again memorizing the poems of the T’ang and S’ung dynasties. The erasure model links cultural matters too closely to the social conditions in which the cultural artifacts emerged, as if they were simply and purely an expression of such conditions. But those earlier Chinese poets, besides being members of a particular class at a particular time, had insights into a metaphysical understanding of our role in a larger universe, of habits of shaping our emotional lives in relation to that universe, and of ways of handling loss and the ephemeral and fragile nature of human lives. Regarding certain elemental and powerful emotional experiences, there can be considerable continuity across different cultures and different eras.

That last point suggests a further reason why we should not adopt a position that links aesthetic objects too closely and exclusively to the social conditions of their production. We are biological selves and much of the way our emotions are attuned to events in the world will be built into the brain machinery by evolution. We could not have survived otherwise. Many of our anxieties about the fragility of individuation, attachment, separateness, and loss go back to our hunter-gatherer days. But then Homer or Aeschylus or Li Po or Tu Fu may capture complex aspects of our biologically based engagement with nature and with our own existence. We can be deeply moved by their work even if we do not share the social order they emerged from. We may, in a similar manner, have much to learn from gay modernist writers and from the contemporary gay writers who return to them. Even if the social world that brought forward the former group is different from our own and characterized by explicit and implicit bias, we may share enough biologically and in our brain design to be able to make fertile use of their work. And to the extent that differences, including gender differences, are not due to nature’s design but to social conditioning, as will often be the case, we cannot predict just what various groups and individuals in the future will find worth identifying with in the cultures of the past. Those who follow sports will note that as women’s basketball and soccer progress, their games become ever closer to the men’s version of these games, as women are given increased opportunity to express physical aggression and to take pleasure in challenging exercises of physical dexterity. While it may seem that women of the future will typically identify with women writers of the past, that may not be so reliable a prediction as women’s roles change dramatically. So again the gay writers of literary modernism, with their keen insights into the machinery joining psychological space with aesthetic space and even with their very evident prejudices, may provide certain aesthetic and intellectual resources for women facing issues of an ever starker individuation and separateness, once the pressure on them to occupy traditional roles has weakened.

There is a further observation we can make on the difference of attitude between these nine novelists and the majority of those academics working in the literary field for the last several decades. For the latter, the study of literature begins with a deep suspicion about how ideology and power work and about how language works. Oppressive ideologies, it is said, make themselves invisible in the ways they distort our relations with the world and with each other. Language can be a vehicle for carrying such ideological ways of structuring the world. But it can also be a machinery that, in its free running, destabilizes and undermines all our attempts to freeze the world into determinate relations that limit and impoverish our ways of engaging with reality. The task of literary study, then, is twofold for those who accept this theoretical analysis. We have to tease out the hidden ideologies in apparently straightforward reports on how matters stand in the world or on what human interior states are like. And we have to liberate and call attention to the linguistic forces in the text that undermine the way any ideological positions, including metaphysical and epistemic ones, are trying to establish and solidify themselves. We are tempted, as a consequence, to suppose that there is no such thing as reality or truth, no such thing as knowledge about how matters stand, and no such thing as determinate mental states that shape the meaning of what we say. So we would be deeply skeptical about authors who follow Henry James in believing that they can use literature to bring crucial aspects of reality into view or to portray the complex inner life of humans. Training in literature will aim at a supposed theoretical sophistication that allows for pleasure in the dismantling and discrediting of virtually all previous metaphysical and epistemic assumptions. One will look down with condescension at those who still believe that language can do the kinds of things we traditionally hoped it would do, including aiding us in our individual self-formation. The nine novelists I am studying are of interest because they seem to ignore that overall theoretical picture almost entirely. They write as if writing could tell us something of value about the actual contours of the reality around us and about the subtle complexities of human feeling, belief, and motivation. I believe it is a strength that they have not caught on to the vocabularies and attitudes of radical suspicion and critique about the most basic undertakings of humans in the world. At the end of the day we as individual humans face a world that has a powerful reality of its own that we must adjust to; academic practices aimed at dismantling the idea of truth do not change at all the fact that there are diseases brought forth by the natural world, not by language, that may kill us and our friends. A certain modernist irony makes one’s stances toward the world more interestingly complex. A more thorough irony, one trained to adopt attitudes of ideological superiority toward views considered more “naïve,” thins out, devalues, and impoverishes both reality and the literary space that would engage with it.

For those interested in more theoretically and politically radical ways that matters of gender and sexuality might be treated in the academic world, there is an especially prominent candidate: queer theory. This is a discipline that began in the early 1990s, with Judith Butler and Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick two of its crucial practitioners. Some of its aspects can be traced back to Michel Foucault and to some degree even to Nietzsche. As we noted, the latter sees the individual mind not as inherently unified but as a site where different drives, desires, and preferences compete like warlords for resources and territory. Through the annexing or assimilating of weaker forces, or through the forming of alliances and coalitions with other stronger ones, some of these drives may emerge into a more unified operation with a distinctive overall style. So we are by nature multiple, and there may be considerable fluidity regarding which among various shifting mental coalitions are winning out at any time. That mobile, coalition-forming process may be involved, then, with sexual identity. What are the forces that could bring stability, unity, wholeness, and continuity to this highly mobile, unstable system? Some of these might be built in on the basis of one’s biology, so that nature itself determines the strength of certain drives that, in the “warlord” competition of the mental world, are most likely to achieve a degree of dominance and to bring an overall style and character to the individual. On the other side, such stabilizing forces may come from the norms, taxonomies, conceptual distinctions, and disciplinary practices imposed by the social order. Nietzsche speaks often of finding a kind of solitude where one can engage in one’s own project of self-formation, where one is strongly resisting the impositions of that social order and is not playing for an audience of others. He thinks that we become what we are not through conscious deliberation and discussion with others but through an unconscious process determined especially by a deep-lying fatum within us, a rather fixed biological and psychological aspect that we learn to express in various ways but cannot much change. He suggests that an individual’s most basic ways of thinking about gender may be aspects of such a fatum.⁷

Foucault accepts a good deal from Nietzsche but he differs on a key point. He thinks that rigid identity, personal continuity, and a sense of wholeness will emerge only as constructs of the social realm through its forms of knowledge and classification and through the practices of discipline, training, coercion, and surveillance that result from these. Whereas Nietzsche keeps speaking in favor of those powerful enough to achieve an overall and compelling style of individual character, Foucault suggests that in the face of the strength of what he calls the culture’s regimes of discourse-power, the proper strategy must be one that resists identities, that makes the mind a site of multiple, shifting, fluid mental patterns and temporary alliances. He is especially interested in developing such a strategy relative to matters of sexuality. We should multiply and disperse our possible sexual identities, he claims. We should multiply zones of pleasure across the body instead of focusing on phallic pleasure. We should realize that there is no such thing as ultimate liberation from that world of power, discourse, and game-theory maneuvers.⁸ Instead we have to learn strategies that give a twist or spin to the dominant moves of social power, so that their meanings are shifted and they do not quite end up saying and doing what they were supposed to say and do. The solidifying of the mental world into something that fits the given conceptual distinctions of the social order, then, will never quite take place. In the fluid overall situation of both the mind and the culture, a move in the game that seems at first to be one that brings shame and subordination to an individual may become, with a certain stylization, exaggeration, or deliberate distortion, a power move instead that suggests the impoverishment and weakness of the conceptual system that the culture is putting into play.

Foucault’s attitude, rather than Nietzsche’s more biological one, could be made to agree rather easily with theories of radical feminism, since these typically assign very great power to social construction. Gender, it is claimed, is mostly a product of an implicitly violent imposition of rigid categories and practices on a more plastic, shifting, mobile mental life. We are taught to emphasize some of our sexual aspects and to marginalize or repress others, so that we will fit into the socially fixed categories more smoothly. Culture’s rigid taxonomies make us fit our rich and fluid patterns of sexuality into frameworks that seriously impoverish their real possibilities. Without those taxonomies and the enormous investment that culture makes in endorsing them, those qualities we now label masculine and those we now label feminine would be distributed far more unpredictably across males and females in the society. Gender is something we gradually learn to perform and we can learn to do it very differently from the ways now given to us as models. There is almost nothing that is inherently male or inherently female. Queer theory will follow radical feminist theory in the nearly omnipotent role assigned to the social construction of what we mistakenly take to be natural or biological. It is not especially interested in gaining rights and protections for homosexuals. Rather it sees a privileged role for deviant sexualities in challenging the entire framework by which the culture defines, in all areas, what is normative and what deviant, what should be endorsed and what should be marginalized or erased. Cultural acceptance of gay people and of those who claim transgender status will not be enough. Queer theory wants to contribute to a radical political movement that will make us question larger political and social categories that have implicit assessments within them, that is, ways of valuing some individuals or forms of life and devaluing others. It supposes that it is especially in the psychological and social processes by which a society defines sexual deviance that it reveals its most fundamental procedures for structuring its overall valuations that reward some and disqualify others. Queer theory is less an intellectual stance than it is a practice of challenging and undermining social norms, hierarchies, binary oppositions, and so forth, through behavior, whether intellectual or practical, considered transgressive, deviant, and socially devalued. Almost any aspect of social life, well beyond sexuality, can be “queered” if we put into play practices that destabilize taken-for-granted hierarchies and value oppositions. Wherever cultural frameworks are using their energies to create identities, continuities, conceptual stabilities, and valuational hierarchies, the queer theorist will try to introduce disruptive elements and considerations that prevent such processes from succeeding.  

There can be real tensions in certain gay communities regarding such a way of thinking. Very many gays find themselves sympathetic toward two beliefs that the queer theorist may be considerably less sympathetic to. First, many feel from their own experience that sexuality and sexual preference are not as fluid as more radical thinkers would make out. They suppose that they have known from a very young age that they are gay and that various forms of social programming have rather little effect in changing or modifying that identity, even if social attitudes may make their lives much better or much worse. They may believe that finding a biological basis for homosexuality would be a good thing. For then being gay would be an unchangeable, given feature like skin color rather than a choice or a performance, so that the same tolerance is owed to homosexuals as is owed to those of different races. Such an outcome is likely to be ideologically opposed by the queer theorist. Second, many will feel that a compelling model for a well-achieved happiness will be a long-term marriage or marriage-like relationship, perhaps with children. Here too the queer theorist will object and will call this attitude an assimilationist one. Instead of just bringing gays and lesbians onto the privileged side of a long-entrenched cultural divide, the point is to destroy the very terrain that allows that divide to exist.

Where do the nine writers examined here come down on these issues? Only three of the lead characters in these novels are presented as living at a time when a commitment to queer theory might have been a real option for them. But even for those living in a slightly earlier period, such as Crain’s Jacob Putnam and Hollinghurst’s Nick Guest and Aciman’s Elio, there is little in the personality and character they reveal that would make us suspect that, should they be introduced to the concepts of academic queer theory, they would have had any significant degree of sympathy with it. Their forms of sexual preference seem rather fixed as they experience them, they are not very political, and a long-term marriage-like relationship with someone they feel strongly attached to seems very much how they would like their lives to go. If asked, they would likely express the belief that some combination of biological factors and very early psychological development fixes a gay preference rather early and that this preference is not principally a matter of a trained performance in a socially constructed category, even if social pressures certainly impinge on them powerfully. At least as writers of these novels, the authors do not seem to reveal any confidence that academic high Theory will aid them in bringing out what is most interesting in the worlds they are presenting, though the actual political activity of such writers might be rather different from what they reveal in their character as authors. The bottom line here is that these nine novelists are fundamentally interested in five issues that they share with many modernist writers, while queer theorists are more skeptical about these. So there will be difficulties in achieving a common sensibility. The five issues are these. First, literature that counts is likely to be focused on the phenomenology of individual self-consciousness and on the struggles of individual self-formation, of achieving a degree of autonomy while feeling the strong pull of earlier attachments and of a transitional realm of mobile, shifting identifications. Second, literature’s power will often derive from a symbiosis between the special features of aesthetic-literary space and the psychological space of a writer facing great pressures and difficulties regarding the issues of individuation and separateness. Third, to understand the first two of these issues is to understand why form, beauty, and style are so important in the literary and aesthetic realms. My writers might add that queer theory prose is so ugly and strained that it cannot possibly serve the psychological needs that they themselves bring to their writing. Fourth, literature ought to offer not merely convincing perceptions of human psychology but also a precise suggestion of subtle, penumbral mental states that are difficult to capture, rather than a sociological analysis designed to serve a moral and political ideology. Fifth, it is a deep error to use literary training to devalue and discredit just about everything handed down from previous cultures. We are lucky to have a rich set of cultural resources, from many different societies of the past, that make our perceptions today subtler and more sophisticated. In other words, James, Proust, and Woolf can remain for many writers the masters they wish to learn from.    

We should not, then, be quick to conclude that the return of certain recent writers of gay-themed novels to an aesthetic world of a century earlier is a regressive gesture and is to be regretted. These writers may be aware of literary and psychological resources that we would do well not to lose. We need to look at the novels individually to see what strengths they derive from the literary modernist constellation and why they find little that is nourishing to their work in so much of the Theory-oriented and Marxist-oriented twentieth century. On the other hand, I definitely do not wish to present these writers as politically conservative. We live at a time when an LGBTQ Pride parade will offer an exuberant procession of transsexual and queer identities, gender fluidities, pansexualities, and so forth. My hunch is that the writers I am investigating are fully behind such a display. They are glad to see that those once shamed and marginalized now have much better chances to shape a kind of life for themselves in which they can be happy. What they are opposed to, on my reading, is what they see as a great impoverishment of literary resources brought about by academic theory of the last several decades. They wish to make reference to a site of literature, that of literary modernism, in which those resources are unusually rich. They are ready to note important aspects of living a human life that are easily missed when we turn literature into an adjunct of a program of using aesthetic undertakings to achieve a certain ideological picture of justice. I suppose that there is much in queer theory that they will agree with politically. But they also see that there are certain issues about leading an individual life that endure through quite different forms of human existence. These reach to quite elemental experiences that go back into our history yet remain very powerful for us today.

There is a further issue raised especially by Sedgwick about the relationship between homosexuality and modernism.⁹ She claims that in the high modernist canon there is a strong tendency to distance oneself from, or to downplay the sexual significance of, the eroticized male body that is frequently present in these works. That process of disguise and evasion involves two principal strategies. The first of these, she says, takes advantage of an emphasis on the ‘homo’ or ‘same’ in the newly defined homosexuality. If many earlier cultures had often emphasized differences in age, social status, evidence of masculine characteristics, or perhaps ethnicity regarding sex between two males, modern psychological analysis emphasizes the sameness of gender of the two participants. That sameness may encourage a certain slippage that allows for the evasion at issue here. The idea that I sexually desire this male who is clearly other than I am may easily become the idea that I wish, for the sake of my own self-formation, to identify with or idealize this male individual who is in some sense a projected version of myself. Sedgwick considers passages of highly eroticized vocabulary and images in Nietzsche’s work and examines how he seems to evade a homoerotic interpretation of them by claiming various identifications: I am Wagner or I am Dionysus, and so forth. The engineering of a process of self-development and self-securing appears to be at stake rather than a revelation about homosexual desire. What might seem at first like a relationship with a sexualized male other is transformed into a self-to-self relation where integrity, identity, and self-knowledge are at issue. In Wilde, the clearly sexualized attraction of Dorian Gray’s older male suitors toward him is left aside and the story focuses instead on Dorian’s relation with his mirrored self, so that students are trained to see the novel as about the psychologically divided self rather than about homosexual attraction.

The second modernist strategy that evades the explicitly sexualized male image, says Sedgwick, is that of abstraction, a turn way from the male body as erotic and toward a realm of aesthetic forms, concepts, and art’s self-reflection on its own status and practices. Wilde’s Basil Hallward worries that his paintings of Dorian reveal too much of his own illicit desire but then argues that he isn’t interested in Dorian as a body but only as a suggestion of artistic forms and tones that he himself is attuned to as an artist. By turning the eroticized situation into an aesthetic one concerned with formal values, Hallward seems to leave the compromising male body behind. More generally, on Sedgwick’s account, the interpretation of modernist writing can take an apparently sexualized male body and see it as merely a trigger for conceptual, aesthetic, or ethical issues that have nothing to do with homosexuality. Billy Budd is said to introduce issues about convention and nature, about law and morality, about cultural practices of disciplining unruly social drives, and so forth. Death in Venice (not considered by Sedgwick) is said to be about decadence, cultural exhaustion, the notion of beauty, the role of the unconscious, and the like. James’s The Beast in the Jungle seems to be about heterosexual regret rather than about someone who could not have a relationship with May Bartram because he was attracted to young men and had too great a fear of ever exercising that option. The tendency of homosexuality, conceived in the modernist manner, to slip into a more reflexive relation of the self with itself is mirrored in the modernist tendency for literature and art to move from a portrayal of reality to a reflection on themselves as problematic forms of representation.

It may appear that Sedgwick’s analysis does not fit easily into my own story here. She points to structural features of literary modernism that, so she claims, try to hide and disempower the force of the homoerotically desired male body in favor of artistic form and antirepresentational abstraction. I have been arguing that modernist literature provides a fertile field for today’s gay male writers to return to because of the psychological richness of the ways this literature brings the experiencing erotic self into view while placing that self in a broader metaphysical context. But there is no real conflict here. There would be one if what Sedgwick picks out were a general truth about modernist literature: that it moves into a realm of self-reflexive artistic forms that leaves behind the task of representing psychological and worldly reality. First of all, that is not what the literature of high modernism does. Proust, James, Eliot, Lawrence, Woolf, Joyce, and so many others are supremely interested in capturing the subtle reality of how human psychology functions. They are not interested in art that reflects merely on its own devices. Secondly, that is not what Sedgwick herself means. She does talk of a streak of formalism, anti-representationalism, abstraction, and iconophobia in modernist literature, but it is only one particular representation that the modernist must abstract away from, one particular image that is erased or disempowered: that of the homoerotically desired male. The rest of the vast apparatus of realism and of psychological investigation remains in play. So literary modernism will have the resources that I claim it offers to recent gay writers, even if actual same-sex activity was studiously avoided and erotic male-to-male love was displaced as a topic onto more acceptable psychological and aesthetic issues. And when Sedgwick complains that erotic attraction to the male body is transformed by modernism into a self-to-self relation concerned with identification and securing individuation, she is correct. That transformation does indeed occur quite often, but it is not so much a way of hiding the character of one’s eros as it is an accurate capturing of very real and very important psychological processes. When the young child has difficulties in the process of separation-individuation, erotic energy, which is not yet needed for sexual purposes, may often be recruited for the task of securing one’s identity. This may be done through complex investments and identifications that, in the mobile psychological world of the young child, allow self-to-other and self-to-self relations to blur and oscillate. We are not dealing with an adult writer’s cultural strategy of hiding homosexuality so much as with a very common way in which homoerotic investments are in play in the child’s developing architecture of self and other, an architecture that may remain as a strong emotional basis for the relationships and writings of the adult. The complex ways in which homosexuality appears in the modernist writers can make their work more rather than less interesting to a writer of today. The movement from the sexual to the aesthetic was not just a device of disguise because of the time these writers were living in. The very subtle interaction of the space of individual psychology and aesthetic space remains a matter that has hardly vanished from very many gay lives, whatever forms of liberation and political transgression are now encouraged.     

My first nine chapters are devoted, one chapter each, to the nine writers I mentioned above: Caleb Crain, for Necessary Errors and Overthrow; Andrew O’Hagan, for Be Near Me; Michael Cunningham, for The Hours; Jamie O’Neill, for At Swim, Two Boys; André Aciman, for Call Me By Your Name; Garth Greenwell, for What Belongs to You and Cleanness; Colm Tóibín, for The Master; Alan Hollinghurst, for The Line of Beauty; and James Cahill, for Tiepolo Blue.

I then add three chapters that attempt to place these gay-themed works in a useful context.

Chapter 10 addresses further ways that a gay aesthetic sensibility might be treated relative to larger cultural issues, including apocalyptic ones. Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow uses homoerotic aestheticism to stand for the entire effort of the human race to transcend the cycling energies of nature by raising up an artificial world that transforms sexuality into thought, technology, and art. A German SS commander, in the last days of the war, is trying to launch his beautiful male lover into space on the last of the V-2 rockets designed to attack London, a rocket that, so the novel advises, will lead to nuclear missiles that threaten to annihilate the planet. A different account, also apocalyptic, is offered by James Merrill’s poetic trilogy called The Changing Light at Sandover. In this work beings from a higher world, eventually a cast of angels, communicate with the poet and warn him of impending nuclear disaster and the ecological death of the earth, but also claim that gay writers and poets are especially well-suited to spiritualize human culture and fend off such disasters. Still a further apocalyptic account comes from the left, in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. The AIDS crisis seems, in Kushner’s telling, to bring about special revelations from above. These are aimed both at warning humans of threats to the future and at motivating a progressive political coalition of gays, lesbians, women, and African-Americans to bring about a new solidarity and new forms of social change.

In Chapter 11 I consider the life and writing of the French intellectual Roland Barthes as demonstrating, in a manner he would not have intended, the rather bankrupt history of certain intellectual trends of the twentieth century: those that would radically devalue the psychological and aesthetic resources that I am focusing on with my chosen writers. Barthes closely followed French preferences for Marxism and structuralism. These preferences led to a competition among intellectuals to deny any importance to, indeed to treat as empty illusions, human subjectivity and individual phenomenology. Selfhood was seen as such a construction of the anonymous operations of language or of other socio-economic machineries that writers should try to remove the appearances of the subjective or psychological from their work. They should erase fully, in their embrace of anti-humanism, the ties that humanism forged between cultural production and individual self-cultivation, so that the author was said to be dead in the way that God had become. Yet as Barthes during the 1970s had to face the death of his mother, with whom he was extremely close, as well as his increasing openness about the character of his gay affairs, he found it necessary to exploit the very materials of individual psychology and phenomenology that his earlier writings had tried so thoroughly to devalue for ideological reasons. He thus can serve as an example of why the turn to the resources of literary modernism is, for the writers I am examining, such an important strategy.

Chapter 12 gives a detailed reading of Eliot’s The Waste Land to see just how what I have called the symbiosis of psychological and aesthetic matters functions in one of the most typical works of literary modernism. I think this is a richer poem than even many of its advocates have claimed. It considers matters of individuation, both its attractions and its pressures, such that a dissolution of boundaries can be both desired and feared. It sets these anxieties also in the context of worries about gender identity and in the greater context of the attempts by the Christian West to form a self-sustaining form of life against the pull of its earlier origins. Homoerotic allusions, often implicit, are frequent in the poem. We can pick them out and note their significance for the work without making any attempt to classify Eliot’s sexuality, and we can see how they are taken up into the aesthetic space of the poem.

If you would like to read the rest of the book, you can purchase it on Amazon in paperback or kindle version.

1. See, for example, Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938-40, Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, eds., Edmund Jephcott and others, trans. (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2003), 389-400.

2. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 375-76.

3. Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism,” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 2, 1927-34, Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, eds. (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1999), 207-221.

4. See, for example, Jacques Derrida, Circumfession, published as part of Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Bennington (trans.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 291.

5. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 20-56.

6. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (Garden City: Doubleday, 1956), Book 2, Section 16.

7. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Marion Faber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), Section 231.

8. See Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” in The Essential Foucault, Paul Rabinow and Nikolaus Rose, eds. (New York: The New Press, 2003), 25-42.

9. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 91-181.