QUEER ORIENTATION IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY
AMERICAN LITERATURE
By
MICHAEL G. PARKER
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Department of English
CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY
August 2016
ii
CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES
We hereby approve the dissertation of
Michael Parker
candidate for the degree of Doctorate
Committee Chair
T. Kenny Fountain
Committee Member
Michael Clune
Committee Member
Mary Grimm
Committee Member
Laura Hengehold
Date of Defense
12 May 2016
*We also certify that written approval has been obtained
for any proprietary material contained therein.
iii
Acknowledgements
This dissertation is the culmination of seven years of idea generation and
refinement regarding queer orientation. The project began during my first semester of
graduate school when I wrote a seminar paper on the orientation of characters in Toni
Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Jazz toward their Southern homes after The Great
Migration. Additional threads of this project can be found in papers I wrote about Hedwig
and the Angry Inch, Moby Dick, and Alain Locke’s “The New Negro.” I am deeply
grateful for those teachers who fostered my approach to literature by looking to
orientation, including Thrity Umrigar and Marilyn Mobley.
I consider myself lucky to have worked with and under a series of mentors who
shaped this dissertation project directly. I want to thank Mary Grimm for her spirited
discussions of the works of literature I selected and for directing me to include one work
in particular. I am grateful for the experience and teaching of Michael Clune whose
perspective on literature inspired much of my critical approach, specifically his emphasis
on literature as doing something and as being worthy of close inspection. Laura
Hengehold deserves many thanks for assisting me with revising my work with
philosophy and for meeting with me to discuss the entirety of this project over coffee.
To T. Kenny Fountain, I have more thanks than I can possibly express in this
section. I want to thank him for taking me on as a mentee seven years ago when I started
at Case Western Reserve University, for fostering my interest in and dedication to queer
studies and theory, and for the countless hours spent in meetings and over email,
discussing this dissertation and many other projects. For his guidance, his dedication, and
his warmth, I am truly thankful.
iv
I would like to thank the English Department at Case Western Reserve University
and especially my graduate cohort. Special thanks to Kristin Kondrlik for many phone
conversations about this project. Thanks to Cara Byrne with whom my project shares a
special kinship. I am forever thankful for her support, her friendship, and her empathy as
we both approached subjects left largely untouched by more established threads of
scholarship.
I would like to thank my family, especially Donna Didyoung Marks and Kenneth
Marks for their support and enthusiasm about my education and my scholarship. I would
like to thank George Didyoung, whose small donation over a decade ago kept my
educational spirit intact. I wish I could thank him in person. And finally, I would never
have succeeded with this project without the many hours spent by Troy Kaczorowski. He
read every phase of this project. He listened to my ramblings and supported the
development of my argument. I am thankful for his love.
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Table of Contents
Introduction .................................................................................................................................... 1
1. Beginning with Willa Cather’s “Paul’s Case” ..................................................................... 1
2. Queer Orientation, a Definition and My Intervention ....................................................... 5
3. A Brief Overview of “Queer” and Psychoanalytic Frameworks in Queer Theory and
Literary Criticism ...................................................................................................................... 8
3.1 A Turn to Queer Phenomenology..................................................................................... 15
3.2 A Queer Orientation’s Relationship to Context and Experience ..................................... 18
4. Return to Paul ...................................................................................................................... 22
5. There’s No Place Like Home............................................................................................... 31
6. Orientation and 20th-century American Literature .......................................................... 36
Chapter Two: Queer Orientations to Art and Musical Sensation ........................................... 43
1. Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 43
2. Hollywood’s Queer Aesthetics in West’s The Day of the Locust ...................................... 50
3. Tod’s Artistic Orientation ................................................................................................... 55
4. Orientations to Faye and Violence ..................................................................................... 60
5. A Turn Away from Community ......................................................................................... 69
6. Queer Orientation in McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter ...................................... 70
7. Orientational Oasis .............................................................................................................. 75
8. The Objects of Desire........................................................................................................... 82
9. Reading Mick’s Orientation................................................................................................ 85
10. An Orientation to Music and Sensation ........................................................................... 89
11. Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 92
Chapter 3: Orientation to Suffering ........................................................................................... 95
1. Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 95
2. Concerning the Outlier in Another Country: The Blues, Literary Criticism, Identity,
and Rufus ................................................................................................................................ 103
3. Rufus and the Question of Race........................................................................................ 110
4. Rufus and Queer Desire .................................................................................................... 121
5. Vivaldo’s Queer Orientation to Suffering ....................................................................... 123
6. Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 134
Chapter 4: An Orientation to History ...................................................................................... 136
1. Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 136
2. A Queer Orientation to Time ............................................................................................ 139
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3. Queer Experience in the Past ............................................................................................ 143
4. Dana and History as Non-Linear...................................................................................... 151
5. The Importance of Sensation for Dana ............................................................................ 156
6. Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 165
Chapter 5: Queer Theory and Samuel Delaney’s Queer Orientation ................................... 167
1. Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 167
2. Contact as Social Potential and Political Statement ....................................................... 175
3. An Orientation to Sex and Community; an Orientation Away from the Negative...... 184
4. The Role of Experience and Looking Backward ............................................................. 190
Chapter 6: Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 196
1. A Review of Queer Orientation ........................................................................................ 196
Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 205
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Queer Orientation in Twentieth-Century American Literature
Abstract
by
MICHAEL G PARKER
My dissertation looks to works of literary fiction in order to assess how the narratives
approach and describe the orientations of queer characters. I argue that queer characters
possess an orientation that is askew, slanted, and/or non-normative. A queer orientation,
therefore, describes the directionality of a person and this directionality to objects,
spaces, times, and ideas draws upon a person’s experiences, desires, feelings, and wants.
An orientation describes both a direction and a framework that then shapes perceptions
and this is important for literary studies because it revises how we approach queer
identity by considering both sexual objects and objects which may not be sexual.
Introduction
1. Beginning with Willa Cather’s “Paul’s Case”
In the critical scholarship on Willa Cather’s “Paul’s Case,” significant attention
has been paid to Paul’s supposed queerness. These readings find in Paul’s experience
with a randy boy from Yale a framework through which to read the rest of the narrative,
and thereby explain Paul’s behavior. Similarly, some criticism, influenced in part from
biographical readings of Cather, focuses on metaphorical understandings of Paul and his
experiences within the narrative in order to explore and explain his identity.1 Larry Rubin
contends that Cather incorporates “a number of broad hints” regarding Paul’s sexual
orientation, that while weak when taken individually, point to Paul as homosexual
through their accumulation (Rubin 127). Jane Nardin, responding to Rubin’s claim of
sexuality as metaphor, suggests that contextualizing Cather’s story and understanding the
problem of “being gay” in early 20th century America shifts the discussion of sexual
orientation away from simply metaphor. Nardin claims that Cather’s story can be read
through Cather’s other writings, specifically when Cather writes about “the thing not
named” and that her writings work both within and against the taboos of 19th and 20th
century America: “the nameless presences from the way same-sex intimacy was treated”
(Nardin 33). After all, Cather’s short story, published in 1905, could not make obvious
Paul’s homosexuality.
1
See Marilee Lindemann, Willa Cather: Queering America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999)
and Jonathan Goldberg. Willa Cather & Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). Both Lindemann
and Goldberg discuss elements of Cather’s biography as important to understanding some elements of
her fiction. I do not wish, however, to overdetermine the relationship they draw between her biography
and her work. Instead, I merely point to their works of criticism as examples of bibliographic influence.
2
While I agree that Paul’s sexuality adds to the complexity of Cather’s work, I
contend that what is most interesting about Paul is not only his sexual orientation, but
also his queer orientation to the world around him, including spaces (the opera and New
York), certain dramatic flourishes and performances (colors, flowers, dress), time (a
future in New York), and his aesthetic sensibility and sensations, specifically how his
surroundings and the people near him are stylized.2 I argue that Paul’s queer orientation
to these phenomena offers a more robust understanding of his identity. By looking for
evidence of Paul’s physical and cultural orientation, which is often non-normative, we
can better account for the way he experiences himself as queer and how he is queered by
others. Paul’s queerness is not just derived from how he might desire a particular sexual
object; instead, his queerness results from the way he is directed to and oriented by his
conscious expressions of desire, his longing for objects, spaces, and times which he
believes New York will offer. This quasi-phenomenological reading not only recasts
Cather's work but also introduces a way of understanding queerness, in 20th-century
American Literature, as a non-normative orientation to aesthetic phenomena, objects,
sensations, and experiences.
2
In his essay, “Aesthetic Sensibility,” Arnold Berlant describes the changes to understanding aesthetics in
works of philosophy and scholarship. Berlant notes that aesthetics is no longer defined just as accounting
for the “beauty or the pleasing quality of things” (2). Aesthetics is now applied to other aspects of
experience such as “everyday life” and “community” (2). Berlant traces the definition of aesthetics as a
“perception by the senses” from its Greek root, to objectification of art objects, and later to an
amalgamation of these concepts wherein aesthetics came to both describe art and a person’s perception
of, or relationship to it. Aesthetic sensibility, a term I use throughout this dissertation, describes a focused
aesthetic, and therefore, “perceptual awareness” (4). Thus, an aesthetic sensibility concerns an “aesthetic
engagement” which describes the experience of a person. An aesthetic sensibility then articulates the
relationship between a person and an art object. In the case of Paul, his aesthetic sensibility is focused
principally on dress. Because the style of dress Paul enjoys is attached to a moneyed class, the
corresponding spaces in which to be dressed appropriately, or with flourish, take on outsized importance.
3
This dissertation looks to orientation, and specifically queer orientations, as a way
to discuss experience, expressions of conscious desire (or want), and the objects and
spaces to which these expressions of desire are directed. My reading of orientation is thus
directional in nature because it incorporates the manner in which people approach and
orient themselves to the world around them, a world characterized by their experiences of
it. Orientation thus describes a directedness towards objects, spaces, or phenomena, and it
also describes how objects, spaces, or phenomena influence one’s directedness. For
example, if we turn to the opening to Cather’s short story, we are introduced to Paul
undergoing an inquisition by his teachers and principal, and this scene demonstrates both
Paul’s disconnection from and rejection of social and behavioral norms as evidenced by
his orientation to aesthetics. The meeting between Paul and those charged with his
education is in response to a series of “misdemeanours” resulting in his suspension from
school (Cather 468). This episode is the first case against Paul in so far as his teachers,
principal, and father all find Paul’s behavior perplexing and in need of rectification. But
as much as everyone seems to identify something wrong with Paul, the offenses he has
committed are difficult to articulate. The teachers describe Paul as possessing “disorder
and impertinence,” but the root cause of this “disorder” is unknown (468). In short, there
is something off about Paul. When he enters the room to face the faculty, the problem of
Paul being “off” is made clear. He enters “suave and smiling. His clothes were a trifle
outgrown, and the tan velvet on the collar of his open overcoat was frayed and worn; but
for all that there was something of the dandy about him, and he wore an opal pin in his
neatly knotted black four-in-hand, and a red carnation in his button-hole” (468). In
contrast to the style of dress and demeanor he presents are the expectations of the
4
teachers, who view his appearance, and specifically the red carnation, as “not properly
significant of the contrite spirit befitting a boy under the ban of suspension” (468). That
the teachers feel this way about Paul points to a problem between how Paul expresses his
desires, as evidenced through his dress and style, and how he is expected to express
himself in relation to his environment.
There exists a disconnection between expectation and actuality for Paul and his
teachers. Here Paul is described as not dressed appropriately; his dress is almost
“offensive” given the seriousness of the meeting (468). And yet, Paul appears
unconcerned with how his teachers view him. His suavity and smile, in addition to his
eyes, “remarkable for a certain hysterical brilliancy,” are part of a larger “theatrical”
countenance that they view as a form of “contempt . . . which he seemingly made not the
least effort to conceal” (468). These theatrics, which Philip Page claims demonstrate both
the “actual and metaphorical roles” that underlie Paul’s case reflect Paul’s commitment to
a part disconnected from his social context (Page 553). The expectations of the faculty
are that Paul should look remorseful and his dress should reflect this feeling.3 The social
norms Paul rejects expect him to behave or conform his behavior to what is considered
acceptable.4 The faculty also appear to desire some form of respect from Paul. But Paul’s
3
If we look to Kenneth Burke’s understanding of orientation, then Paul’s teachers possess a specific
expectancy in relation to behavior. They expect Paul to behave as would be appropriate given their
conditioning and their understanding of his conditioning. That his behavior does not confirm causes them
to doubt his choices. More discussion of Burke’s description of orientation occurs later in this
Introduction.
4
I adapt my understanding of social norms from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Social norms
are defined as resulting from the interaction between a person and their environment. Norms are not the
result of planning, in so far as no body or government is responsible for their construction. Instead, norms
are seen as a ‘grammar’ of sorts whereby a person’s behavior is understood according to a collective
belief in their attributing to a social good. Social norms therefore maintain a desirable social structure or
order. In this dissertation, the norms that characters from works of literary fiction respond to, dismiss,
and/or reject, are those which describe what is desirable. What is non-normative, therefore, describes
5
dress seems to belie any genuine investment in the proceedings. He is uninterested in
what is occurring because he does not wish to return to school. Instead, what Paul’s dress
and performance demonstrate are an orientation to a particular lifestyle drawn from his
aesthetic sensibility: that of the dandy. Because of his relationship and devotion to the
dandy aesthetic he is not oriented appropriately to the proceedings around him. He is
disoriented from and rejects the social norms and expectations of his teachers, his father,
and his school.
2. Queer Orientation, a Definition and My Intervention
My reading of Cather’s Paul illustrates the importance of considering orientation
for 20th-century American literature, specifically when discussing how literary characters
are directed, exist within, and experience their environment. Orientation opens up new
ways to discuss desire and identity by looking at the relationships between characters and
the spaces they inhabit. This is important for scholars of American literature to consider
because most often discussions of characters are rooted in categorizing or cataloguing
them according to fixed understandings of identity rather than more dynamic notions of
identity as a response to contingencies. For example, because Paul is understood as gay
by literary critics, his choices in dress and his behavior become responses to and evidence
of his same-sex desire. “Paul’s Case” is then read through discourses of same-sex
attraction. His desire for men serves as a way to understand the rest of the narrative
because his relationship to his environment is fixed by way of his sexuality. Therefore,
Paul’s sexuality becomes a tool through which to describe his experiences, and thus his
experiences become symbolic of or symptoms of his sexuality.
those behaviors which divest from, contradict, or otherwise are incongruent with social norms and
expectations.
6
Symbolic or symptomatic readings of works of literary fiction have been
critiqued, most notably by Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, as removing from practice
elements of those works which are on the surface. Best and Marcus describe how
symptomatic readings construe elements of the text as “symbolic of something latent or
concealed; for example, a queer symptomatic reading might interpret the closet, or
ghosts, as surface signs of the deep truth of homosexuality that cannot be overtly
depicted” (3). These same readings will also and often look to what is excluded from a
text and determine that the very absence of something is more important than what is
present. For Best and Marcus, the symptomatic reading conflates the complexity of the
work with what is hidden. The surface of the text is therefore deceptive, and one must
mine under the surface in order to grasp and illuminate what the text is truthfully
depicting.
In contrast to symbolic or symptomatic readings, this dissertation analyzes works
of literary fiction by considering the surface of texts. Best and Marcus define the surface
of the text as “what is evident, perceptible, apprehensible” (9). My dissertation employs
close readings of works of literary fiction as a way to address what is occurring on the
surface, beginning with Willa Cather’s “Paul’s Case,” and later Nathanael West’s The
Day of the Locust, Carson McCullers’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, James Baldwin’s
Another Country, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, and Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red,
Times Square Blue. I use a quasi-phenomenological approach adapted from Maurice
Merleau-Ponty and Sara Ahmed in order to illuminate an understanding of queer identity
through careful attention to characters’ orientations to spatial and cultural fields. By
spatial and cultural fields, I mean literal, physical places (cities, places of business, and
7
definable communities) and less easily mapped, cultural, and social spaces (networks,
communities of peers and friends, and relationships) which exist within a cultural and
historical context (urban America after 1900). I do this in order to demonstrate the
importance of considering orientation, or the way characters inhabit, experience, and are
directed towards their world. This is particularly important when analyzing characters
marked as queer or ones who experience themselves as queer. Despite queer theory's
repeated call to expand the term beyond gay or lesbian identity, literary criticism often
approaches queer characters by focusing on their sexual desires and drives. Thus
inevitably, a character identifies as or is labeled queer because they experience same-sex
attraction or because their behavior contradicts gendered norms. While these readings are
important, they do not always account for the complex relationships between queer
persons and objects. After all, queerness implies a perspective on the world that is
somehow askew, oblique, or slanted. A queer orientation, then, can describe one's sexual
object as well as a non-normative directedness to objects, spaces, time, and communities,
which may not be sexual.
In the following sections of this introduction, I describe the relationship between
my dissertation and Queer Theory and literary studies by way of the term “queer” and my
use of desire. I then contextualize my turn to phenomenology in literary studies and
describe how phenomenology provides a vocabulary to describe the phenomena I argue
are already present in these works of literary fiction. I draw my phenomenological
vocabulary from the work of Sara Ahmed, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others. A
discussion of experience and its relationship to phenomenology will follow. The
8
introduction will then return to a reading of Cather’s “Paul’s Case,” before ending with a
brief outline of my chapters.
3. A Brief Overview of “Queer” and Psychoanalytic Frameworks in Queer Theory
and Literary Criticism
Queer theory and literary studies are often interconnected scholarly spaces. Works
of queer theory regularly analyze works of literary fiction in order to address a larger
argument regarding queer identity or politics. Literary criticism often incorporates how
queer theory uses “queer” as a heuristic for analysis. However, how queer is used and
ultimately defined are the subjects of much debate. Theorists often disagree over how to
use the term “queer.” For example, one of the principle arguments, advanced by Judith
Butler in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex,’ is that queer must be
redefined to include more than gay and lesbian identity; yet, in their reading of literary
and film texts, many of these same critics and theorists inevitably point to characters that
are conventionally non-heterosexual. Thus, even as they call for a more expansive, less
exclusive, and radical notion of queer, by pointing to gay or lesbian characters, queer
theorists inadvertently conflate queerness with gay identity. For example, Leo Bersani, in
Homos, focuses his analyses of 20th-century French literature from André Gide, Marcel
Proust, and Jean Genet on gay male subjects and on the existence of an antisocial element
in the gay male psyche and in gay male politics, more broadly. Bersani’s argument asks
us to consider the role of the homosexual in society, or whether “a homosexual [should]
be a good citizen” (Bersani, Homos 113). He then concludes his argument by noting how
the presence of antisociality asks us to “rethink what we mean and what we expect from
communication, and from community” (181). Bersani’s project addresses the desires of
9
gay men to be accepted into society.5 His project also considers the implications of those
desires by way of a polemic directed at those who seek to assimilate or strip gay and
queer identity as being inscribed by “erotic tendencies” (2). While Bersani’s analysis of
works by Gide, Proust, and Genet demonstrate the importance of same-sex desire for gay
male identity, he also renders gay and queer as synonymous. He performs a symptomatic
reading of works of French literature because he infers that those works he analyzes
describe a psychical condition found in all gay men. Although queer theory more broadly
argues for a more extensive and less definable understanding of queer6, theorists like
Bersani and Lee Edelman, whose own complicated analysis of queer desire as opposing
the “underlying structure of the political” (Edelman 13), rely almost exclusively on gay
male characters from literature and film (lesbian desire is noticeably absent7).
A focus on gay/queer male sexuality in these examples is understandable when
considering the traditional frameworks used by theorists and critics for understanding
desire. Queer is often read as gay or lesbian, and gay and lesbian identities are often
categorized by focusing on sex and desire. The traditional frameworks for understanding
both sex and desire are heavily psychoanalytic. Eve Kosofky Sedgwick contends that the
use of psychoanalysis is necessary because “psychoanalytic thought . . . remains virtually
5
Bersani uses “invert” in Homos as a synonym for homosexual or queer. The “invert” is, within
psychoanalysis, an person with an inverted sexuality. This means that the one’s sexual orientation is not
directed outward toward the opposite sex but rather inward; it is inverted, and therefore the object of
sexual desire mirrors oneself. Bersani often codes the invert within the aesthetic of sameness: the
homosexual desires the same sex.
6
For more information over the meaning of “queer” to Queer Theory see Annamarie Jagose’s Queer
Theory: An Introduction. Michael Warner’s “Introduction” to Fear of a Queer Planet is also notable.
7
For further discussions on the limitations of their arguments with regards to subjects not identified as
male and white, see Jose Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia and Judith (Jack) Halberstam’s In a Queer Time
and Place. Of particular note is Halberstam’s response to Bersani from a 2005 MLA Conference debate on
the role of the antisocial thesis within queer theory. Halberstam critiques Bersani and Edelman for their
reliance on a “well-defined canon of gay male aesthetic production” (Halberstam 823).
10
the only heuristic available to Western interpreters for unfolding sexual meanings”
(Sedgwick, Tendencies 74). Both Bersani and Edelman, as noted earlier, understand their
readings of queer subjectivity, and subsequently, antisociality through readings of
Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and their theories of the death drive.8 Thus, what is
desired on the part of a queer person (read gay man) is in response to a series of nonconscious drives.
For example, a reading that focuses on Paul’s same-sex attraction reads the
products of his desire as reflections of, or stemming from, these same-sex desires. This
type of reading analyzes Paul through an outside lens because threads of psychoanalytic
thought are mapped onto the narrative. In the case of Paul, what becomes important to a
method extracted from psychoanalysis are those moments in the narrative which comport
with psychoanalytic proscriptions. Thus, the scene described in Cather’s short story
where Paul spends an evening with another boy from Yale takes on outsized importance,
and subsequently, this scene is used as a means to understand the rest of the narrative.
The reliance on psychoanalysis reduces Paul, and more broadly, a queer person to
psychical moments, drives, and subconscious desires. What becomes important for a
psychoanalytic understanding of a queer person is the sexual object, which I see as an
important yet limiting strategy. An outside-in-approach to reading and analyzing works
of literature is important, but it limits the analysis to those features which are already
identified or described in other scholarship. In addition, the framework for approaching
the text largely predetermines the types of readings that scholars of American literary
8
See Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Civilization and Its Discontents. See Lacan’s Ecrits.
Additionally, see Bersani’s Is the Rectum a Grave?: and Other Essays and Edelman’s No Future: Queer
Theory and the Death Drive.
11
fiction can perform. Psychoanalysis does provide frameworks for approaching how desire
is discussed because it has catalogued and processed desire, including non-heterosexual
desire, by way of case studies. These frameworks help assess the sexual lives and
meanings of characters in works of literary fiction. They help assess the relationship
between characters and sexual objects and they also locate the underlying impulses and
drives which assist in explaining these sexualities. Focusing on desire by way of sex and
sexuality, however, does not allow for an exploration of literary fiction in which
characters express non-sexual desires. Psychoanalytic frameworks and other approaches
to desire which rely, in part, on psychoanalysis also do not address how characters are
directed in and to their worlds unless the focus of that direction is sexual. These
frameworks often do not account for how characters perceive and experience themselves
in relation to their worlds.
My dissertation analyzes selected works of 20th-century American literary fiction,
starting with Cather’s “Paul’s Case,” not by using outside frameworks to address desire
and how desire and the politics of the desire play out in the text. Instead, I address desire
as it is already described in the text. I use the frameworks these works of literary fiction
already provide through descriptions of characters’ experiences and desires which
articulate their orientations and their frameworks for perception. Investigating orientation
complicates how we read and approach works of literary fiction by adding additional
layers or avenues through which to understand the text. In the case of Cather’s “Paul’s
Case,” focusing on orientation does not remove same-sex desire in this reading, but rather
it addresses how people experience all forms of desire, whether or not these desires are
sexual in nature. Because some of these desires are not explicitly sexual, an analysis of
12
orientation allows for a more robust understanding of both the text and the politics of
desire played out in the text.
While psychoanalysis largely remains the go-to framework for approaching
desire, other theorists, like Lynne Huffer, call for a contestation of queer theory’s reliance
on psychoanalysis as its regular heuristic. Huffer writes that while psychoanalysis
provides “a seemingly infinite store of stories about sexual experience” (137), a reliance
on psychoanalysis nonetheless drains away the “complexity of experience” (36, emphasis
in the original). The “complexity” of experience that Huffer points to includes
experiences that are not necessarily or always sexual, and thus they do not fit the
proscriptions of a psychoanalytic framework. Huffer turns to Michel Foucault for a
broader understanding of queer desire, and others have taken a similar path. J. Jack
Halberstam asks us to consider those who “often live outside of capital accumulation,”
such as ‘ravers, club kids, HIV-positive barebackers, rent boys, sex workers, homeless
people, drug dealers, and the unemployed” as examples of queer persons (Halberstam,
Queer Time 10). His list includes queer persons who are read as such because they
engage in non-normative sexual practices, while also including queer persons who live
outside of normative times and spaces. A person’s relationship to temporality is therefore
one condition of queerness, a point also made by Elizabeth Freeman who argues for an
understanding of queer identity in relation to the “chrononormative,” which are social
norms that structure a person’s relationship to time (3).
Freeman describes queer identity as disconnected from dominant social and
behavioral norms marked by class and sexual and social reproduction, which in turn
position a queer person as “asynchronous [sic]” or “out of joint” (19). Jose Esteban
13
Muñoz also discusses queer people as out of time when he notes queer’s relationship to
Utopian futurity (Muñoz 1, 26). Time is important to this dissertation and to the works of
literary fiction I analyze. Some of the characters experience themselves as out of
alignment with social norms regarding time. For example, social norms which regard
maturation, marriage, and reproduction are often rejected. In addition, some characters
experience time differently than their more normative counterparts.
This dissertation draws from these theorists who view queer as not just a series of
non-conscious drives, but as an identity that describes a relationship to social norms. I
ask the question: instead of reading literary texts by way of desire rooted in a
psychoanalytic framework, how might our understanding of queer subjectivity and queer
identity change if we read those same works of literary fiction through an understanding
of orientation rooted in how works of literary fiction describe an orientation or
directedness to and in their world? In essence, I turn to a more phenomenological
framework which describes non-normative sexual orientations as well as orientations
which are non-normative in ways that are not always expressly sexual. I focus my
analysis on those lived experiences of characters, and I argue that these experiences
articulate expressions of desire, and vice versa. This means that I read experience and
desire as concepts which are mutually constitutive. The sum total of experience,
connected to one’s experience of identity, history, and space, and their aesthetic
sensibility affects how a person comes to desire (or want something) and the subsequent
framework through which they then experience the world.
Returning to Paul, we can see how his rejection of social norms renders him as
non-normative. As such, Paul can be interpreted as a queer person in so far as queer,
14
beyond recalling sexual orientation, also defines that which is non-normative. Just as
orientation is directional, queer is also directional because queer etymologically connotes
meanings such as oblique and slanted (from the German and Latin roots, respectively).9
Thus, the term queer functions particularly well when discussing orientation. Queer, then,
describes the relation of a subject or an object to space, and specifically how a subject or
object exists within space. Subjects are oriented, become oriented, and self-orient to
bodies, peoples, communities. Queer can include those who identify as gay (an
overarching term for sexual orientation, as in gay and lesbian) but it also encompasses
any person or group who lives in a manner defined as oblique or slanted. This means that
my analysis of queer subjects will also include characters who are heterosexual but
nonetheless queered because of their orientation as well as characters who are non-white,
and female. I will be looking at characters who self-identify or are identified as queer
within works of literary fiction. After all, being queer can be both inwardly and
outwardly generated: people can feel queer in a particular environment or space because
they do not feel that their particular orientation meshes with others in the same
environment; a person can be made to feel queer because others perceive their orientation
as out of line.
To understand this better, we might consider Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of
an experiment, in his Phenomenology of Perception, in which a subject is placed into an
unfamiliar space. The unfamiliar space is a queer location in this analysis because
9
The OED discusses the etymology of queer as borrowing from the German quer for crosswise, and
directed sideways. The historical root of queer is, however, not fully agreed upon with some scholars
contending that its Germanic roots are less certain. Huffer traces queer to both the German quer and the
Latin obliquus. While the root of the word is debated, all sources agree that queer connotes oddness,
strangeness, or out of sorts.
15
Merleau-Ponty reads the subject of the experiment as feeling “inverted and unreal”
(Merleau-Ponty 293). The subject slowly acclimates to the queer space by reorienting the
body and adjusting to the space through sensory analysis. This adjustment means that the
subject moves from feelings of disorientation and being “slantwise” (289) to feeling
properly oriented and possessing “clear perception” (292). For Merleau-Ponty, the
subject in this experiment is queer when they first enter the space, and they remain queer
until they reorient themselves, or become accustomed to the space. This is a useful
apparatus for thinking about how subjects experience themselves as queer in particular
moments. It also demonstrates the desire, at least on the part of the subject in the
experiment, to not feel queer. Movement between feeling queer and feeling not queer is
important to this dissertation because it showcases that queer, as a category of identity, is
not always totalizing. I show that queer is not ontologically fixed because queer subjects
can or may choose to seek out spaces in which the potential for no longer feeling queer
increases. Queerness can be lessened in these new environments, spaces, and
communities, even as it also can be exaggerated to those who observe these characters
from the outside. Similarly, queerness may be exaggerated because, as this dissertation
shows, a character may not be interested in locating a space comprised of like-minded
people. They may, instead, be oriented to a concept or a mode of sensation only they
experience.
3.1 A Turn to Queer Phenomenology
My turn to a more phenomenological reading of orientation and desire is a result
of a turn in literary studies toward perception, experience, and phenomenology: how we
as readers perceive literary texts; how texts depict perception through narration; and how
16
texts describe a person’s perceptions. Charles Altieri notes this call to action when
arguing for a “phenomenology of value” in Wallace Steven’s poetry. Altieri draws from
phenomenology because it describes “how consciousness comes to appear as it
participates in or constitutes various elemental states of awareness” (Altieri 9). Therefore,
what Altieri argues for is an understanding of how Steven’s poetry perceives value.
Michael Clune argues for something similar when he notes that literary criticism’s “best
opportunity for creating new knowledge” is to describe what literature does by
accounting for perception (Clune 17). This turn in literary criticism toward perception,
experience, and phenomenology is also occurring within queer theory. Sara Ahmed’s
understanding of a queer phenomenology is important here because it begins the process
of discussing the importance of orientation vis-à-vis queer identity and that by
considering orientation we can account for how queer persons perceive, live within, and
experience their worlds.
Sara Ahmed argues, most notably in Queer Phenomenology: Objects,
Orientations, Others, that people who are queer possess a specific orientation to their
world. 10 This queer orientation, as she defines it, can be labeled as askew or out of line in
so far as what is not queer can be labeled as in line. Ahmed argues that what makes a
person queer is the same process that renders a person not queer. All people for Ahmed
“acquire orientation through the repetition of some actions over others” (Ahmed 58). The
orientation one assumes is dependent on the repetitive relationship between the person
10
Ahmed’s analysis of queer orientations, specifically orientations that are “offline” or “askew” is
foundational for my dissertation while also serving as a text with which to intervene. Ahmed’s text
ultimately concludes with a political recipe for queer people. In this sense, she is not just describing a way
of looking at orientation, she is prescribing the intended effects of a queer orientation on a person and
therefore a person’s identity.
17
and the objects surrounding them. Straight orientations are those which repeat a socially
recognized or approved direction toward an object. Her reading of a straight orientation is
literal here because, for her, a straight orientation “follows a straight line, which is
presumed to lead toward the ‘other sex’” (70). Straight orientations thus follow a line
toward the opposite sex (men are directed toward woman, and vice versa). Similarly,
straight orientations incorporate other objects which are recognized as important to
heteronormativity.
Queer orientations are those that repeat different actions or express relationships
toward objects which are not always aligned with the norm. Thus, a queer person might
be oriented toward the same sex as a potential love object just as they might not view the
family as a unit, or a communal relationship, in which to recognize importance.
Diverging from the “straight line,” queer orientations then run counter to, cross over, or
approach different sets of lines. These lines are directed toward objects, “values, capital,
aspirations, projects, and styles” (86) which demonstrate not just an orientation out of
alignment with norms, but which become “contorted” and “twisted” (91) because they do
not repeat gestures associated with following proscribed norms. Ahmed looks to the term
queer as incorporating, and sometimes producing an orientation which understands itself
in relation to norms which govern not just sexuality but other behaviors, aspirations, and
desires. Queer is thus contingent, and it is recognized as much for what it repeats as what
it does not. While this focus on the non-normative inhabits her work in so far as her use
of queer incorporates a broader understanding of the term, she concludes her argument by
resituating queer as synonymous with gay and lesbian. A queer person and a queer
orientation are therefore recognized most importantly in relation to compulsory
18
heterosexuality. The queer orientation then becomes a failure to be oriented to the “ideal
sexual object” (91). While queer certainly denotes sexual orientations which are not
straight, I argue that other dynamics, for example an investment in aesthetics, or
sensations, objects, ideas, and the like, might also denote a queer orientation. Therefore, a
heterosexual person who is oriented or directed toward a particular aesthetic idea or
phenomena, and who also approaches their environment through a framework vested in
understanding their world through a desire to see this phenomena, is also oriented queerly
if that aesthetic idea does not conform with the norm.
3.2 A Queer Orientation’s Relationship to Context and Experience
This dissertation builds upon what Ahmed outlines with regards to orientation;
however, I do not restrict myself to only discussions of sexual orientation nor do I take
“straight” as a literal representation of an orientation, just as queer is not a literal
skewing. Because this dissertation incorporates readings of desire that are not always
erotic, my definition of queer is broadened to include characters of wide ranging
orientations from works of 20th-century American literary fiction. What makes these
subjects queer is not always their sexual orientation, but rather their orientation to
normativity and to what normativity expects and demands. Queer is thus the result of
experience and specifically how experience shapes a character’s orientation. Queer
orientations differ because the object(s) to which a character is oriented is not the same
from one character to the next. Paul is oriented to New York, fashion, and other aesthetic
flourishes stereotypically associated with being a dandy. The other works of literary
fiction included in this dissertation incorporate different forms of queer orientations
including an orientation: to artistic styles and aesthetics, in the case of Tod Hackett from
19
West’s The Day of the Locust; for Mick Kelly from McCullers’s The Heart is a Lonely
Hunter, sensation she can only receive from certain forms of music; in the case of Rufus
from James Baldwin’s Another Country, a multitude of orientations including to friends
and family as well as suffering and a corresponding framework associated with suffering;
and Vivaldo from Another Country, who more firmly experiences an orientation to
suffering whereby he disconnects from social norms which expect otherwise; for Dana in
Octavia Butler’s Kindred, her family’s history which she comes to experience through
time travel; and the past as the site of sensory pleasure and sexual contact between men,
in Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. Each of these characters
possesses an orientation which is askew or slanted in relation to the social norms that
structure their lives and the lives of their peers. While the characters all possess a
different orientation, what aligns them is a desire to experience a particular type of
sensation or aesthetic phenomena that is non-normative. Thus, neither the source of the
sensation nor aesthetic phenomena, nor the framework through which a character
expresses desire is the same. As a result, the measure of the orientation’s queerness is
contingent on the social and cultural context in which it occurs. If a queer orientation
describes how a person is directed in their environment and thus experiences their
environment, then to understand the orientation is also to understand the social norms that
are rejected, ignored, or downplayed by the person as a result of their orientation. A queer
orientation is therefore dependent on context.
By arguing that a queer orientation is dependent on context, I do not mean to
suggest that the term is flimsy, or without a structured meaning. Because queer is
directional, and because it connotes an alignment with the non-normative, it always
20
describes an orientation that is askew and slanted. What differs, depending on the
context, is what is considered askew or slanted. Context both adjusts and determines the
experiences and the sensations of a person who identifies as queer. Similarly, experience
articulates how a person relates to a particular context, or their spatial and cultural field.
Joan W. Scott’s understanding of experience is useful here as she argues that experience
is a process that is continuously shaped by discourse, context, and identity. For Scott,
experience does not delineate a “prior existence of individuals” (Scott 27); it is not only
something a person just has. Instead, experience is also productive. Experience produces
identity, just as identity articulates how a person experiences something. Maurice
Merleau-Ponty draws a similar conclusion by noting how sensory experiences are
interpretative (Merleau-Ponty 247). A person does not just experience or perceive
something independently; rather, a person’s perceptions draw upon a host of prior
experiences, relationships between objects, and histories. It is the sum total of a host of
factors, experiences, and identities which influence how we approach discussions of
queer orientations.
For Kenneth Burke, a person’s orientation is produced through a series of
judgments as they relate to experience, and these judgments condition motivations that
are either “right” or “wrong” in terms of proper orientation. People therefore judge their
environment and are shaped by their environment to possess an orientation. A “right”
orientation addresses an appropriate critical understanding of an experience; a “wrong”
orientation is in response to a “trained incapacity” whereby the person assumes that an
experience with a particular phenomenon will always reproduce its original, or its trained
meaning (Burke 10). Burke writes that “a given objective event derives its character for
21
us from past experiences having to do with like or related events” (Burke 7). Burke’s
understanding of the framework people use to approach a particular object or event is
derived from the complex intertwining of experience, identity, and desire (want, need,
wish). His claim is similar to those made by Joan W. Scott and Merleau-Ponty. Burke’s
understanding of orientation also hinges on “expectancy” (18). Expectancy for Burke
references how a person is trained, or socialized, to respond to a particular phenomenon.
The person comes to expect certain results, rightly or wrongly, as a result of the
accumulation of judgments. Expectancy, or experience, and judgment are thus related in
so far as they are what serve as the instigators and products of experience.
3.3 Queer Orientation
I understand orientation as describing the relationship between a person and an
object and the relationship between the object and the person. Orientation is therefore the
product of experience and desire; it describes the directedness of a person to their world.
In addition, orientation comprises the framework through which a person approaches an
object. Elizabeth Grosz, through an analysis of Merleau-Ponty, characterizes orientation
as dissolving the boundaries between subject and object. She notes that “subject and
object, mind and body” are interrelated (Grosz 103). Those objects to which a person is
orientated become not just something which influences experience but something which,
through the expression of desire to the object, become integrated with experience. Here
the relationship between “the sentient and the sensed and of the sensed to the sentient”
illuminates the orientation of the person and how the person understands their
relationship to the world and therefore their identification with or identity in the world
(Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible 142). These relationships cannot be parsed
22
easily such that a queer orientation, for example, denotes an orientation to a particular set
of objects, but rather the queer orientation is derived through a reciprocal relationship, an
“intertwining” of the person and the object. What is queer here is both the person and the
object. Orientation as in the physical relationship and the framework through which a
person understands an object is the product of experience, and it continues to shape future
experiences. Orientation pertains to desire and how desire is consciously expressed
because orientations are products of the mutually constitutive relationship between
experience and desire.
4. Return to Paul
The opening paragraphs to Cather’s short story present Paul as not fitting in; he
does not belong according to his peers nor does he feel that he belongs. Scholarship on
“Paul’s Case” all agrees that Paul is an outcast. Judith Butler reads Paul as incapable of
cohering to norms (Butler 163). Page notes the conflict between Paul’s “inner self and his
social role” and that this disparity presents itself through Paul’s theatrical nature (Page
553). Paul’s theatricality is seen through his relationship to his own identity, and
specifically how he views his identity as a stylized performance. Michael N. Salda argues
that Paul is disconnected from his world because of his imagination and that his
imagination produces fantasies in which “he loses track of time, place, and self” (Salda
114). Jane Nardin describes these imaginative bouts, and Paul’s eventual escape to New
York, as an expression of his desire for a “new identity.” She writes that Paul chooses the
feminine over the masculine, “consumption over production, and . . . art over arithmetic”
even though these choices expose him to “constant persecution” (Nardin 40). Thus,
scholarship sees Paul as participating in acts of fantasy and performance as a way to
23
handle the disconnection between his internal desires and his environment. The external
performance becomes, in these readings, a way to misdirect attention from his internal
state to his outside mannerisms. Each of these critical analyses of Cather’s Paul address
his relationship to his own identity as lacking in security and as a result, Paul is routinely
claimed to be aimlessly experimenting with different traits in order to secure or create an
identity. By looking to how Paul is (dis)oriented within his environment, however, I
argue that his identity is not easily reduced to just an external conflict. Instead, Paul’s
(dis)orientation demonstrates that what Paul is seeking is a different space in which his
identity is experienced as potentially less queer; he consciously expresses a desire to exist
in an environment where his orientation is in greater alignment. The conflict arises
through a disconnection between his internal conscious desires and his external
circumstances.
When Paul is classified as not belonging and as being an outcast, these
classifications demonstrate a problem with his orientation. To internally possess a sense
of belonging, or to be recognized as belonging in a particular spatial or cultural field,
one’s performance would align with the social norms and values present within the
environment. When one is aligned with the social and cultural norms of a particular
space, then one is said to be a part of the group or at least in alignment with that group.
And Paul is not participating in or oriented to his peers or his environment. Instead, he
lies, although not for pleasure, “but to make himself noticed and admired” in order to feel
like he fits in with his environment (Cather 485). These lies, that he possesses
connections to famous people and that he is important socially, only further the
disassociation. His performance is discordant with those of his setting.
24
Social settings are governed by certain expectations and norms and in order to
belong to a group in that setting one must employ actions and deploy performatives11 that
meet those expectations and norms. Judith Butler argues that “acts, gestures, enactments”
become performative as “fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal
signs and other discursive means” (Butler, Gender 185, emphasis in the original). What
is performative, in this instance, is the repetition of norms being played out on the body
and by the body. Thus, a person, in order to be in alignment, is expected to repeat certain
norms and discard others. Orientation to certain spatial and cultural fields, because it is
also governed by norms, can also be read as performative. Ahmed, in her work on queer
phenomenology, discusses how groups are “formed through their shared orientation
toward an object” (Ahmed 73). The teachers within the Principal’s office all share an
orientation toward certain behaviors and standards considered most “appropriate” for a
pupil of Paul’s age. Paul’s dress and his attitude are the first pieces of evidence that his
orientation is not to the objects and ideas that his teachers expect; the manner in which he
expresses his desire does not repeat the norms considered appropriate.
We might wonder how Paul, born and raised in Pittsburgh like his teachers,
classmates, and family, possesses a different orientation to his environment. To imagine
that Paul should express the same orientation assumes that all people encounter the world
similarly and that each object or idea that one experiences produces a similar sensation.
11
For Butler, performativity is powerfully associated with gender. One’s gender results from the “play
between psyche and appearance” (Bodies 234, emphasis in the original). Gender is therefore not
ontologically fixed; it is, instead, contingent on the interplay between the psyche and the body. Although
we can see how gender relates to contingency, gender’s performative nature, and therefore its reliance
on norms to be recognized as in line or out of line, means that for many people the performatives
associated with a particular gender or identity are policed. In the case of Paul, the performatives he
deploys do not match the expectations of his peers.
25
However, Paul’s experience is unique to him, and he is queered by this experience when
juxtaposed against the expectations of others. There are many facets that condition Paul
to act, dress, and desire as he does, but perhaps the most important factor in this equation
is Paul’s sensory experience and history. When this experience is coupled with a
conscious expression of desire to not feel bored or forced to act and exist in a manner
which he finds boring, the experience and expression of desire come to articulate oneanother. Merleau-Ponty, in his response to proponents of objectivism, empiricism, and
intellectualism, considers how objects and experiences do not possess an inherent
component. He writes, “there is nothing in the appearance of a landscape, an object or a
body whereby it is predestined to look ‘gay’ or ‘sad’” (Merleau-Ponty, PoP 27). Instead,
what creates sensory experience is the relationship of a body, the amalgamation of
previous sensory experiences on that body, and the orientation of that body to an object.
Thus, the expectations emphasized by the teachers and other influences in Paul’s life rely
on a belief that others will experience things similarly. Paul possesses a different
relationship to the world around him as evidenced by his dress in the schoolroom, his
general demeanor, his response to his employer, Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Hall, and his
desire to live according to specific aesthetic principles he gathers from newspapers,
magazines, other forms of media he simply consumes.
Paul’s attraction to a particular Wildean aesthetic is driven by the sensations he
derives from sitting in close proximity to art, listening to music, and observing those
people whose economic status allow them to regularly consume such offerings.12
12
The Wildean aesthetic, most easily extrapolated from his “The Decay of Lying” and “The Soul of a Man
Under Socialism” presents an artistic manifesto in which artistic creation is upheld over artistic
reproduction. Beauty is the end goal of artistic creation, something to which Paul also aspires—though he
never creates. Wilde writes, “The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is
26
Working as an usher at Carnegie Hall, Paul regularly experiences the performances of
others on stage, and the narrative is clear when describing how Paul’s reaction to and
relationship with these performances is different from others in attendance. He enjoys the
pomp of the concert hall because concert goers dress according to a particular standard
that allows for a great degree of artifice. He finds the experience of formal dress
“exciting” because the clothes are “very becoming” even though they accentuate “his
narrow chest, about which he was exceedingly sensitive” (Cather 471). In contrast to the
offensiveness with which his body and his personal style are received at school and by
his peers, the concert hall allows Paul to feel more comfortable and confident with both
his body and his body’s femininity. The other ushers may reference him as “crazy,” they
may “put him down on the floor” and sit on him (471), but the dress, because it gives him
the space to perform in a “vivacious and animated” manner without fear of reprisal,
marks Carnegie Hall as a location in which Paul feels at home.
Whereas concert goers appear to appreciate the performance, they do not appear
to affix their identity to the notes emanating from the instruments, the vocal chords of the
dive, or the constant performance of the staff. Although the narrative describes Paul’s
response to the music as not specifically related to the music itself, it does note his
ecstatic response to what the music engenders: “the first sigh of the instruments seemed
to free some hilarious and potent spirit within him . . . he felt a sudden zest of life; the
lights danced before his eyes and the concert hall blazed into unimaginable splendor”
beautiful” (Wilde, Soul 268, emphasis in the original). Thus beauty is the product of the person. It is also,
according to Wilde, not to be found in nature. The natural is instead subordinated to the artificial and the
artificial is “fashioned for our use and our pleasure” (Decay 970). Such tropes extend through Wilde’s
oeuvre, in which, for example, the portrait from The Portrait of Dorian Gray provides more pleasure than
the actual living subject of the portrait.
27
(Cather 471-72). It should be noted that Paul’s first sense of elation with regards to the
music is when he is dressing. The “excited” state dressing produces is juxtaposed with
the “preliminary flourishes of the horns” (471). Paul’s ecstasy, although it cannot be
attributed solely to the music, appears to manifest as the result of a combination between
the music and the environment. His dress accentuates his experience of the music and
vice-versa. Here the lights that “danced” and the concert hall that “blazed” before him all
suggest an affective response to the music. His sensory experiences change the way he
perceives the spaces and his body in those spaces. By considering Merleau-Ponty’s idea
about perception and the manner in which orientation affects both a subject and an object,
a better understanding of Paul’s relationship to his social environment, or Paul’s “case”
develops.
Merleau-Ponty writes that phenomenology approaches a “study of the advent of
being to consciousness” (Merleau-Ponty, PoP 71). The emphasis on consciousness, with
an emphasis on conscious experience, distinguishes Merleau-Ponty and other
phenomenologists from practitioners of psychoanalysis who approach analysis of a
person through a series of drives and other unconscious explanations. The emphasis on
conscious experience is rooted in analyzing and understanding the perspective of a person
and their perception. Again, the framework through which a person perceives their
environment and the manner in which the environment affects them are of importance to
phenomenology. Rather than understand the relationship of a person to their environment
as a response to internal drives and therefore configuring the drive as that which is most
important to understanding the person, phenomenology considers the relationship
between the person and their spatial or cultural field as important and unique to the
28
person’s understanding of identity. The emphasis, therefore, for phenomenology is the
uniqueness of experience. Experience is always rooted in perspective and perception.
Thus the relationship of the body to space, and space to that body articulates the
orientation of the person to phenomena. Those things that are perceived, for MerleauPonty, are “already” subject to “interpretation” because the person doing the perceiving is
always bringing into focus an understanding of their own experience (247). When Paul
enters Carnegie Hall his awareness of himself exists, surely; however, the music brings
his own consciousness into focus. The changes in his perception of the concert hall
demonstrate how his orientation to certain facets of the music brings about changes to his
perceptive abilities.
The music creates a different, almost transcendental feeling for Paul because his
orientation is such that the object (the music) elucidates other objects (the music hall),
which then begets a sense of what the music hall symbolizes—a particular aesthetic. In
contrast to the transcendence that ambient music and the environment gives Paul, the
world outside of the concert hall is noticeably duller. While his experience at the concert
is described in terms of Paul being “free” such that he can easily “forg[e]t” both his
teachers and his father, his life outside of the performance is one wrought with negative
emotions. When this particular concert ends, Paul finds himself “irritable and wretched”
(Cather 472). This sharp change in emotion for Paul suggests not just a strong attachment
to the music but also the potential of the music in altering Paul’s experience. Paul does
not wish to live in a world where he feels “the waters close above his head” when forced
to return to his normal life (473). He would prefer to experience “each of these orgies of
living,” rather than “the physical depression which follows a debauch; the loathing of
29
respectable beds, of common food, of a house penetrated by kitchen odors; a shuddering
repulsion of the flavorless, colorless mass of every-day existence” (473-474). The
quotidian repulses Paul; it repels him. The use of “common, flavorless, and colorless” as
descriptors all point to a desire on the part of Paul to experience their antonyms.
Paul’s orientation to opulence and the sensations that lavishness provides
reposition Paul away from the working class attitudes of his peers and neighborhood. For
example, Paul’s father wants him to grow and mature to be like another young man who
himself circumvented a belabored “loss of time and strength that a sowing of wild oats
might have entailed” by marrying the first woman he found and settling in to be a “young
man with a future (476).13 Paul finds this man’s lifestyle and conversations about it to be
“deadening” (477). Instead, Paul directs himself to imaginative accounts of another space
in which to live. The narrative describes these imaginative longings as representations of
what he truly wants. Rather than physically looking in on a space as he does through the
windows of the Schenely Hotel, Paul desires a space where he is participating and
experiencing the “exotic, a tropical world of shiny, glistening surfaces and basking ease”
(Cather 472). Paul’s desires as described here do not change; they are secure and firm.
But when these desires are threatened from the outside because others, specifically his
father, understand them to be inappropriate, Paul responds by attempting to make them
13
Much of queer theory extends and expounds upon the relationship of a queer person (specifically gays
and lesbians) to the future. For Lee Edelman, queer subjects are the bearers of society’s “death drive” in
so far as they cannot participate in what he references as “reproductive futurism” (Edelman 4). Gays and
lesbians cannot biologically reproduce, at least within the confines of gay and lesbian relationships, and
therefore they are by their very nature non-reproductive. Other queer theorists devise similar
understandings of queer identity vis-à-vis futurity and reproduction. Leo Bersani argues that gay anal sex
is another version of the death drive where the rectum signifies death, both literally and figuratively
because of HIV/AIDS and a lack of reproductive capacity (Bersani, Rectum). Others, including J. Jack
Halberstam and Elizabeth Freeman, locate a queer person’s inability to possess a future in line with
normativity because of the queer person’s relationship to family, community, and time.
30
permanent. In order to do this Paul steals money from his employer, takes the train to
New York, and obtains a room at the Waldorf. Once he arrives, the narrative is quick to
describe Paul’s lack of equivocation and the confidence with which he approaches his
trip. Paul had “not once, but a hundred times . . . planned this entry into New York. He
had gone over every detail of it . . . and in his scrap book at home there were pages of
description” (480). From the opening of Cather’s short story until his arrival in New
York, Paul is not just imagining his life in another space, he is also making preparations
to locate that space and experience it. His orientation, evident through the way he
expresses his desire through dress, his relationship to music, and his hatred of what is
common all leads him to New York.
The train to New York and the city proper affect Paul by promising opposites—
they represent more permanent versions of his experiences at Carnegie Hall and when
standing outside the windows of the Schenely Hotel. Paul’s conscious desires are
opposite those of his community. As a result, opposition is what Paul seeks but this
opposition is an expression of his orientation already at odds with his home environment.
The performance of the singer, the sound within the hall, and the dress all provide Paul
with a capacity to escape and imagine himself as participating in a different community.
These experiences, in contrast with his relationship to Pittsburgh and his peers, produce a
desire to extend sensation. Because Paul is oriented to experiencing sensations derived
from certain aesthetic principles his orientation redirects him. In Pittsburgh he feels that
he does not belong and that he is “unequal” (474). New York, on the other hand,
promises to be the location for Paul to find his equality. Equality, or to be equal, means
multiple things here. Paul believes that he can feel equal with others because he would
31
share a similar orientation to the environment. Paul would also be on equal footing and
therefore not the subject of ridicule from peers and teachers. Being equal also means that
Paul would achieve some sort of equilibrium with the surrounding spatial and cultural
realms; New York would be a space where his mannerisms and desires that result from
his orientation would not code him as an Other.
5. There’s No Place Like Home
In order to more fully experience and surround himself with the sensations and
aesthetics to which he is orientated, Paul escapes to New York City. Whereas in
Pittsburgh Paul feels isolated and incapable of fitting in, in New York he feels at home.
Paul sees “at a glance that everything was as it should be” (480) in his hotel. New York
allows him to experience a “curious sense of relief” (481) because he no longer believes
he lives in a space that is incongruent with his performance and his desires. New York
allows Paul to experience what he desires and as a result his orientation to his desires
does not contrast with the surrounding values—he is no longer queered by his
differences. Thus, we might think of orientation, at least as it is used in Cather’s text, as a
directional tool for alleviating or accentuating queerness. This means understanding
Paul’s orientation as queer while in Pittsburgh because it differs from the orientations of
those around him (queer, in this usage means different). If Paul is queer in Pittsburgh,
then the space of Pittsburgh, along with those who live there, is normative. His teachers,
friends, and father are all oriented to what Pittsburgh represents in so far as they appear to
share in the values of the city. They repeat those values, as Ahmed discusses, as
performatives such that the “spaces and bodies” they inhabit “become straight as an
effect of repetition. That is, the repetition of actions, which tends toward some objects,
32
shapes the ‘surface’ of spaces” (Ahmed 92). Ahmed’s use of “straight” is a stand-in for
normativity. Thus, Pittsburgh as well as those people who inhabit the city are straight
because they are shaped through repetition of certain values and norms. Paul fails to
repeat those norms as the result of his orientation and is marked as queer.
The trip to New York gives Paul access to a space where all of his desires are met.
He does not feel himself to be out of line. While his clothes in Pittsburgh were the subject
of derision from outsiders, they also, because they are described as “out-grown” and
“frayed and worn,” demonstrate a level of fraudulence on Paul’s part. Although Paul
could distract the attention of others on the fraying of his garments by wearing
flamboyant flowers and opal pins, he was never able to fully encapsulate what he
envisioned for his appearance with his actual dress. New York, and the addition of money
change that. He spends many hours carefully crafting his dress when he first arrives. And
in response, Paul is quick to note that “everything was quite perfect; he was exactly the
kind of boy he had always wanted to be” (482). Paul comes to experience himself as fully
belonging to the space and culture in which he now exists.
Other scholars argue that Paul’s experience in New York is less about coming
home, or experiencing a sense of feeling at home, and instead address New York through
Paul’s relationship with the boy from Yale as a sort of coming out. Nardin notes the
increase in sexualized description within the narrative concerning Paul when in New
York. She notes how Paul experiences a “spasm of realization” while noting the
“thousands of human beings as hot for pleasure as himself” (Cather 483). Rubin reads
much of the narrative as providing a homosexual subtext and that New York gives Paul
the ability to openly express his homosexuality. While I agree that Paul through his dress,
33
his mannerisms, and his femininity is coded as a homosexual, the pleasure that both
Nardin and Rubin witness in Paul is more firmly attached, and problematically so for the
narrative, to an aesthetic and “the omnipotence of wealth” (483). I do not argue against a
reading of Paul’s sexuality as gay, but rather, I argue that Paul’s gay sexuality -- his
gayness -- is less important for the narrative because he does not appear interested in
seeking out a specific sexual object. Instead, Paul is described as “not in the least abashed
or lonely. He had no especial desire to meet or to know any of these people; all he
demanded was the right to look on and conjecture, to watch the pageant” (484). Thus
while Paul’s sexuality shapes certain facets of his appearance, what Paul desires most and
what he is oriented to is not a specific person from whom he might receive sexual (or
even romantic) pleasure, but rather an environment where he is accepted and therefore
can observe the wealth on display. New York is the reverse of the scene in the narrative
where Paul, standing outside of the Schenely Hotel, looks in from the windows at the
opulence and wealth and imagines himself to be a part of the scene he views. He is no
longer standing outside; he is no longer unable to view the performances uncomfortably.
Instead, he is one of the performers and “he felt now that his surroundings explained
him” (484). For Paul, New York means “nobody questioned” his clothes and it “would be
impossible for anyone to humiliate him” (484). New York, at least taken at face value,
extends to Paul a feeling of being oriented properly to the surrounding environment.
To no longer be the subject of ridicule because one’s orientation is now in
alignment means that Paul no longer feels queer when in New York. If we think of being
queer as not just an element of sexual orientation, but rather as a relationship to
normativity and as an expression of many orientations to spatial and cultural fields, then
34
Paul is queer(ed) when he lives in Pittsburgh and no longer queer when he is in New
York. On the one hand, Paul does appear more at home when he is in New York and
therefore his orientation appears in line with his environment. Paul believes as much
when he feels that his environment “explained him.” And while the narrative does give
Paul a certain sense of reprieve from having to explain himself and he no longer must
“assert his difference from other Cordelia Street boys,” the narrative describes Paul as
still not fully belonging to the environment in which he so desperately wants and needs to
seem at home (485). Returning to the question of feeling out of place that haunts Paul
while in Pittsburgh, the narrative points to a series of odd, strange, and out of place
moments regarding Paul, his lifestyle, and his environment. Earlier within the narrative,
Paul’s clothes are depicted as cheap and threadbare and they do not conform to his dandy
aesthetic. When he steals money and purchases new clothes in order to fit in Paul
believes he has mitigated this problem. While he is not the subject of derision from others
because his clothes make him appear to belong, Paul is no more realistically a part of his
environment than he was before. The money he uses to purchase his attire is not his; he
does not work for or earn the money. Access to money is essential in order for Paul to
both maintain and achieve the aesthetic properties that he desires. Because his funding is
not permanent, his access to this world is short-lived.
In a similar sense, Paul’s own aesthetic desires are rooted in consumption, itself a
problem of fitting in for the narrative. When he visits the art museum in Pittsburgh, Paul
is affected by the art, but his affectation is exhilaration not because he studies or
appreciates the paintings he views, but rather because he can “los[e] himself” in the
works of others (470). Paul may be interested in aesthetics, but he is not interested in
35
their creation. He is described as having “scarcely ever read at all” and that what he
desires most is a jolt of sensation, which he receives “quickly from music; any sort of
music” (478). That Paul is uninspired to work or create anything positions him, as David
A. Carpenter writes, as a “philistine and characteristically inclined to avoid any
meaningful entry into substantive life” (Carpenter 597). Carpenter argues that Paul
prefers the final product of his appearance and that this final product, or performance, is
what determines his “sole worth” (597). The polemic against Paul’s aesthetic preferences
which the narrative creates is often read in relation to the enmity Cather possesses toward
Oscar Wilde. Eve Sedgwick references Cather as an “effeminophobic bully” who
positions Wilde as a “criminal of Luciferian stature” (Sedgwick 168). Carpenter, David
Halperin, and Claude Summers also argue that Paul is a thought experiment on Wilde,
linking Paul’s desire to be an aesthete, his role as a dandy, and Paul’s belief that “the
natural nearly always wore the guise of ugliness” (Cather 477). The ugliness of what is
natural can be seen in Paul’s response to his life in Pittsburgh where what is natural—his
house, school, family, peers, and class—are seen as obstacles to what is beautiful. Beauty
for Paul are those unnatural things of which his fantasy about New York derived from
media and the resulting trip serve as examples. Paul believes that a “certain element of
artificiality seemed to him necessary in beauty” (477). This treatise on art and beauty,
drawn from Wilde is what disorients him from his surrounding world.
Because Paul is never fully oriented to his environment as a result of his class
status and his aesthetic beliefs, and because he cannot imagine living in a world in which
these two elements of his desire preclude him from experiencing and sensing the
environment as he wants, Paul removes himself from his environment altogether. He
36
commits suicide using the train that previously brought him to New York. In a manner
consistent with his aesthetic impulses, Paul cannot locate the strength to kill himself
through any other means. The gun he possesses is too “shiny” and “he disliked the look
of it, anyway” (487). Thus Paul chooses the train, the mode of transportation that brought
him to New York and which links him to his community of like-minded peers when he
lived in Pittsburgh for his final action. This plot resolution is striking because Paul
expresses a desire to belong to a community, but while this desire is present he is not
interested in participating in the community (per se). That he uses the train, which
previously took him away from his relationship to the community in Pittsburgh, only
furthers this reading of disinterest. He is uninterested in people. He is only interested in
the aesthetic conditions of that community. As such, he is almost doubly queer for the
story (he only wants certain aesthetic principles--he wishes to consume, never create--but
at the same time he is incapable of truly participating because of a lack of money and
because he appears to lack all forms of empathy.) He is completely self-absorbed with
artifice, which influences his sexual orientation and his orientation to New York and not
Pittsburgh to achieve a certain aesthetic condition. In many ways neither the community
nor the people seem to matter. And, as a result he never fits in until his death in which he
“dropped back into the immense design of things” (488).
6. Orientation and 20th-century American Literature
I begin my dissertation regarding orientation in 20th-century American literature
with Cather's "Paul's Case" because it incorporates queer as an identity dependent on
one's physical and cultural orientation. Paul’s queer identity relies on reading Paul’s
orientation to his world not just as a product of his sexuality but also as a product of
37
desire to seek out and experience a lifestyle that includes his aesthetic values. Thus, Paul
is not just queer because he is gay, a product of his sexual orientation, but also because he
is oriented to spaces and cultures that are at odds with social and behavioral norms. His
orientation is askew; he desires an aesthetic more than family and work. Within the
narrative he orients himself to another community that he believes shares in his aesthetic
value. He thus seeks out a community in which to de-accentuate, presumably, his
queerness. While this desire to make himself less queer is temporarily achieved, in so far
as Paul remarks that New York is home, he possesses neither the capital nor the resources
to sustain this involvement. And to outsiders, Paul is no less queer because his orientation
has not changed; instead, only the environment in which his desires are expressed has
changed.
What results from considering orientation when reading Cather’s “Paul’s Case”
complicates how literary analysis traditionally understands Paul’s queerness. The
consideration of orientation does not remove his sexuality nor the comparisons to Oscar
Wilde that dot the critical landscape. Instead, orientation places Cather’s Paul within a
canon of fictional characters in 20th-century American literature whose orientations are
bent and twisted such that their experiences and desires, and their corresponding
frameworks for perception, can be read as directed away from social norms which govern
behavior. Questions of queer’s relationship to sex and desire course through the literary
works that comprise this dissertation. Similarly, questions of sexuality, race, gender, and
class are also taken up in relation to community and a character’s orientation to that
community. Cather’s narrative begins my discussion because it includes one way that
queer is often defined, through sexual orientation, while also including a character whose
38
queer orientation is well-established because he does not participate in a community as
proscribed by social norms. What these two, often competing ways of discussing queer
identity demonstrates, is a dependence on orientation in order to experience one’s
environment as a person who carries the label of, or who is marked by outsiders as queer.
By defining queer as an orientation (queer is askew, oblique, slanted, of doubtful origin),
I understand queer as an adjective that describes a particular trait involving one's relation
to the world, but also an adjective to describe a person’s experience in the world. I am
interested in reading how subjects within literary texts inhabit their worlds. Cather’s Paul
services this aim in that he comes to experience his surroundings as the result of both his
sexual orientation and through his desires to objects, spaces, times, and communities that
articulate orientations that are not necessarily sexual.
The rest of this dissertation closely analyzes works of 20th-century American
literature by looking to orientation. In Chapter 2, I analyze Nathanael West’s The Day of
the Locust and Carson McCullers’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. I argue that Tod, from
West’s work of fiction, and Mick, from McCullers’s work, experience an orientation
which is queer because it is principally directed toward aesthetics and sensations that are
extreme or exaggerated and out-of-alignment with social norms. These queer orientations
to aesthetics and sensation shape the manner in which these characters both interact with
and receive their environments and communities. The expressed desire to more fully
experience an artistic aesthetic or sensory pleasure articulates that character’s orientation;
the expressions of desire become more extreme and exaggerated. As these expressions of
desire are directed at art and music, these characters’ orientations become increasingly
queer in the context of social norms governing behavior and socialization because the
39
orientation to an aesthetic or a sensation can no longer be located within their
environment and community. As a result, each character becomes oriented to scenes of
seeming fantasy or to an idea that is impossible to achieve.
In Chapter 3, I turn to James Baldwin’s Another Country. I argue that Baldwin
describes through Rufus, a character who experiences desires for inclusion and isolation,
to family and friends and to loneliness, and to queerness and normativity. Rufus’ multiple
orientations demonstrate that he is torn between social norms and his desires to both
follow those social norms and reject them. Baldwin’s narrative makes clear the
impossible pressure emanating from external and internal desires through Rufus. In
contrast, Baldwin’s narrative juxtaposes Vivaldo, who like Rufus, expresses an
orientation toward and a desire for suffering throughout the narrative. Both Rufus and
Vivaldo experience suffering, and in the case of Vivaldo, desire to exist as an author who
looks to suffering as a way to live. What distinguishes these two characters is their
intersectional relationship to their environment and their social context. Rufus, because
he is an African-American, “bisexual,” male is beholden to more extreme forms of social
pressure and thus a queer orientation, although desirable at times for him, is seemingly
impossible for him as well. Vivaldo experiences privilege as a white male and therefore
his desires and his orientation are met with less resistance.
Chapter 4 turns to Octavia Butler’s Kindred as a work of literary fiction that
describes a characters who finds herself oriented to history which she experiences
directly as the result of time travel. Her desire for direct knowledge of personal and
family history and the sensations that these moments provide are made manifest through
violence as a result of queer relationship and identity vis-à-vis her peers. This orientation
40
to history is queer because of both where and how it occurs for Dana; she travels through
time and therefore inserts herself into a historical narrative. She is compelled through
time because like the characters analyzed in the proceeding chapters of this dissertation,
Dana experiences herself as dismissed by the prevailing social and behavioral norms
which disseminate from family, culture, and larger social institutions. What makes Dana
unique, however, is that her orientation is more complicated vis-à-vis how she expresses
desire because what she appears to express desire for, independence, freedom, and selfawareness, is at odds with her orientation to direct experience which often threatens her
freedom and her safety. This chapter will examine how Dana’s experiences, including
her identity as a black woman married to a white man, the treatment of her by others, and
the editing of her family’s history, and her desires for knowledge about herself, her
relationship to history, and writing inform her orientation both to the present and the past
as queer because it is out of time.
Chapter 5 analyzes Samuel R. Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue.
“Red” illustrates the framework of Delany’s orientation; “Red” is also a performance of
his orientation. It articulates his experiences in Times Square while cruising for sexual
contact by way of his desire to return to a space which allows for contact. It is an
argument about perception and sensory experience, or more specifically, about contact
and how contact is important not just when considering the development or design of a
space, but how it is necessary and foundational to whole groups of people. Contact is a
demonstration of orientation that seeks to create a community of other people with the
same orientation. This chapter analyzes Delany’s orientation rooted in the past. I will
focus on Delany’s experiences in the past and his recounting of them in “Blue” and
41
“Red” as examples of a queer orientation. I do this because the past houses both sexual
and non-sexual memories for Delany, which are rooted in pleasure and an urban
aesthetic. What makes this orientation queer is not just its backwardness, but also its view
of an urban aesthetic in which cruising and contact preferably take place; the urban is a
necessary component of the sex act. Additionally, because Times Square Red, Times
Square Blue is a work of philosophy and theory, I am interested in the effects of this
orientation toward the past on the framework outlined. This framework for developing
an urban space is predicated on the notion of pleasure derived from contact which is
drawn from experiences in the past. His framework is about reproducing an orientation
toward contact in others.
This dissertation looks to orientation because it makes more complex our
understandings of literary characters. I turn to phenomenology for a vocabulary to
describe the orientations of characters already present in these works of literary fiction. I
do not, however, apply phenomenology to my readings. Nor do I seek to replace
psychoanalysis with phenomenology. Both of these moves would just lead to a
symptomatic reading of the text. By looking to the surface of these works through close
reading and by considering how these works describe characters and their orientations, I
note how these works reveal moments of failure when trying to apply or read them
through psychoanalytic, phenomenological, or other lenses. These literary works are
grappling with philosophical and practical problems, specifically the relationship between
the individual and social norms as well as ideas of otherness. And we, as critics, can
better understand how these works of fiction address these problems by attending to and
accounting for the works’ queer orientations. These ideas of otherness, for example, are
42
described throughout the dissertation as something that shapes a character’s orientation
from the outside, and as something a character responds to through their orientation.
Orientation thus demonstrates the usefulness of expanding literary criticism’s toolbox to
include phenomenological approach, while it also makes aware the problems of simply
applying outside frameworks onto a text. As aesthetic texts that offer new and sometimes
startling ways of experiencing in the world, literature does not need to be read through
some theoretical lens to be meaningful. The value is there, not just in its depths but also
on its surfaces, there in the queer ways characters are oriented to the world.
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Chapter Two: Queer Orientations to Art and Musical Sensation
1. Introduction
In the Introduction to this dissertation, I begin my argument about queer
orientation in 20th-century American literature with Willa Cather’s “Paul’s Case” because
of Paul’s orientation to living as a dandy in New York City which he expresses through
his dress and aesthetic sensibility. Paul’s queer orientation, which results from his
identity, experiences, and desires, articulates his framework for perception, just as his
perceptions mutually influence his experiences and desires. Thus, “Paul’s Case” is a
narrative about both a physical orientation which is queer and a framework which is
queer because it is dependent on the mutually constitutive relationship between
experience and desire. Paul’s orientation is evidenced outwardly through his dress and
through his travel to New York City and this orientation is queer because Paul openly
rejects social norms which are used as a guide for behavior. While “Paul’s Case” was
published in 1905, similar preoccupations with queer orientation inhabit literary works
for the remainder of the century. At their root, these preoccupations with queer
orientation and identity become the debates central to queer theory such as how to define
queer as a term, and they also articulate a problem in approaching expressions of desire in
literary criticism. The most commonly used heuristic, psychoanalysis, is discussed in
detail in the Introduction, and these readings interpret queer characters as determined by
non-conscious drives. In this chapter, I approach two works of 20th-century American
literary fiction which are often analyzed through a psychoanalytic approach. I again turn
to orientation as a way to understand how the central characters’ experiences and desires
in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939) and Carson McCullers’s The Heart is
44
a Lonely Hunter (1940) shape their orientations and their frameworks for perception and
how these orientations are queer.
Both West’s and McCullers’s works of literary fiction are routinely analyzed
using psychoanalytic models which fall under the symptomatic model of interpretation
outlined in the Introduction. These psychoanalytic approaches are germane in so far as
both West’s and McCullers’s works of fiction incorporate tropes common to the field of
psychoanalysis in the 1930s. Just as Paul can be classified as an invert, given the
prevailing thoughts on sexuality in the late 19th and early 20th century to which Cather
has access, West’s characters are often read through an understanding of group
psychology and its relationship to violence and McCullers’s characters are read as
representations of something stunted, of demonstrating an arrested form of development.
Daniel Aaron, drawing upon a quotation from West concerning the scope of his work,
believes that Freud serves as the prime interpretative force for The Day of the Locust.
“Freud is your Bullfinch,” West writes, and thus Freud serves as an application to read
and understand the characters and situations given voice within the narrative (Aaron
310).14 In a similar nod to Freud, H.N. Lukes reads West’s Tod Hackett, an artist and the
main protagonist, as experiencing a frustrated consummation of desire with Faye, a
young actress, such that expressions of his sexual desire culminate in aligning with a
dangerous mob as a result of his death drive (Lukes 195). McCullers’s “freaks,” a term
used many times within the narrative, are equally psychoanalyzed as well as
pathologized. Early criticism of McCullers’s novel regarded her characters as displaying
14
In a rather interesting maneuver, Aaron also notes that the quotation he uses from West is widely
debated regarding its tone. Given that West’s work is often read as satire, Aaron notes that critics,
including Stanley Edgar Hyman, reference West’s claim as “Westian leg-pull’ (310).
45
“physical deformities” which reveal the “distorted spirits of [the characters’] inner lives”
(Kohler 418). Thus, the inner psychic torments of the characters manifest as bodily
mutations. More recent criticism does little to dispel this notion of the relationship
between the inner psychic realm and the body and its appearance. Constance Perry, for
example, claims that Mick Kelly, a tomboyish adolescent, achieves little artistic success
because of her “devastating sexual initiation” (Perry 36). Thus, for Perry, and for other
critics discussed in detail later in this chapter, her actions of harming her body are read as
signs of an inner sexual confusion and torment.
While I agree that the characters found within West’s and McCullers’s works of
fiction experience psychological torment, my approach focuses not on reading the
characters’ psychoanalytically but rather on attending to the orientations of the
characters. I look to the character’s physical orientations to art and sensory experience as
articulating their experiences and desires. I also describe the frameworks for perception
these characters perform, in essence, their aesthetic sensibilities, as a result of their
orientations to art and sensory experience. This approach does not dispense with
characters possessing psychological interiority; instead, I argue for the use of a different
vocabulary and for a reading which looks to the surface of the text in order to understand
how desires are made known externally and how characters are made aware of their own
desires. In turning to orientation and a quasi-phenomenological approach, I look to the
philosophy of Edmund Husserl, who refers to perception as an “explicit awareness” to
objects and that these objects shape consciousness. Husserl’s understanding of the
relationship between a person and an object is similar here to Joan W. Scott’s, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty’s, and Kenneth Burke’s understanding of experience and perception as
46
continuously shaping identity, which in turn articulates desires, and vice versa. A
lengthier discussion of these points can be found in the Introduction to this dissertation.
The relationship between a person and an object is also explored by Sara Ahmed, who
contends that this relationship shapes the orientation of both the object and the person
within space; the relationship between the person and the object, and vice-versa, thus
providing each with an orientation. Ahmed writes that “bodies become orientated by how
they take up time and space” (Ahmed 5). This means that people are continuously being
oriented through their experiences and desires for ideas, objects, aesthetics, phenomena,
and spaces.
Additionally, one’s orientation can be observed through a physical disorientation.
In the Introduction, Cather’s Paul experiences disorientation in Pittsburgh and a sense of
grounding or being oriented when in New York. Thus Paul is oriented to certain objects
and aesthetics that he believes can be more routinely experienced in a city like New
York. To be clear, Paul’s experience of New York is both short-lived and one-sided. The
narration that occurs when he is in New York only describes those spaces Paul enjoys.
Paul is not interested in, nor is he oriented to the parts of New York that are similar to his
home neighborhood in Pittsburgh. These working class spaces can be avoided because
Paul temporarily possesses the monetary resources to ignore them outright. The
relationship between characters and objects by way of orientation and disorientation is
also explored in West’s and McCullers’s works of fiction. Both authors, like Cather,
explore characters who experience a sense of disorientation within their principal
communities and like in Cather’s short story, these characters are directed to a different
space that they believe will allow for a more robust experiencing of their desires.
47
However, unlike Cather’s Paul, West’s and McCullers’s characters’ queer orientations
become even more consuming. Each character is oriented to experiencing greater and
greater forms of sensation, whether through artistic composition or from music.
Just as Paul is oriented to a specific aesthetic lifestyle, Tod Hackett is also
orientated to aesthetics as the result of his aesthetic sensibility and his desire to paint. He
is recruited from art school and seeks the fame and fortune that Hollywood promises. His
initial orientation is articulated through his desire for both fame and a specific artistic
aesthetic that he believes he can achieve as a painter. As he is consumed by his
attachment to this aesthetic, he comes to interpret his environment and the people he
encounters according to his aesthetic sensibilities. The narrative concludes with Tod’s
aesthetic sensibility coming into alignment with his perceptions of his environment. This
scene is described as a seeming-fantasy whereby Tod experiences his environment as a
painting and himself as a figure in that work of art. The narrative is unclear as to whether
what Tod is perceiving is actually occurring, or whether what Tod is perceiving is only
occurring for him alone. Thus, I use fantasy to describe Tod’s experiences because they
are not capable of being easily explained. I do not, however, use fantasy to suggest that
Tod experience fantasy as something dream-like, or that he is disconnected from or
unaware of what is occurring. For Tod, those scenes within the narrative are real to him.
To an outsider and on the surface of the narrative, they appear as scenes of seemingfantasy.
I read Tod’s experiences in art school, his rejection of artistic norms, and his
desires to be a famous painter as producing his queer orientation and his framework for
perceiving his world. Tod’s framework for perception is most notably observed through
48
his relationship to Faye, whom he experiences as one-dimensional, and therefore she
serves as a prime object on which to map his aesthetic desires. He also performs a similar
interpretive act on Los Angeles through his framework. In McCullers’s narrative, Mick is
also interested in fame but she desires most to have the opportunity to listen to and
occasionally compose music. Other characters also express a desire for experiences
which cannot be routinely found within their environment: Dr. Benedict Mady Copeland
seeks racial equality and Jake Blount wishes to both educate American workers with
Marxist ideology and witness a Socialist uprising. In both West’s and McCullers’s
narratives, these orientations are directed at seeming-fantasies or impossibilities; the
spaces, sensations, and experiences they desire are not practically realizable within their
spatial and cultural fields.
In this chapter I argue that Tod, from West’s The Day of the Locust, and Mick,
from McCullers’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, experience an orientation which is queer
because it is principally directed toward artistic and musical sensations, often at odds
with the social norms of their environments. I read elements of these characters’ desires
and aesthetic sensibilities as involving moments of seeming-fantasy and impossibility
because the things they desire most are fantastic, in the case of Tod, or heavily restricted,
in the case of Mick. Nonetheless, these queer orientations to art and music shape the
manner in which these characters both interact with and receive their environments and
communities. The relationship between Tod and Faye serves as one example of Tod’s
orientation to his surrounding environment and the interplay between how he ultimately
perceives and translates that environment vis-à-vis his aesthetic sensibility can be seen
through his drawings of Faye which he experiences as real interactions. Within the
49
narrative, Faye represents many things: beauty, purity, and sex; however, she is never
regarded as anything other than an abstraction. Faye is a canvas on which to paint desire,
and this is most notably seen through Tod’s evaluations of her artistically and
aesthetically and how she becomes the focus for his painting, The Burning of Los
Angeles.
McCullers’s characters’ experience more varied orientations in that they each
desire a different outcome. This unifies them, and they come together at various moments
within the narrative around Singer, the deaf-mute. They are all physically oriented to
Singer, who like Faye, functions as a person on which to translate their desires; he is a
canvas and this is expressed through their assumption that he shares in, and is similarly
oriented to the same objects and experiences as them. But, just as Tod openly admits to
desiring a connection with Faye that is ultimately hampered by a more robust expression
of desire for aesthetics, McCullers’ characters also look past connections that are
afforded through Singer with the other outcasts. Like Paul, who prefers being alone when
he locates a “community” of similarly oriented people in New York, West’s and
McCullers’ characters are oriented in space and to others not because they wish to openly
share in communal elements, but rather because the space to which they are oriented
more fully allows for expressions of desire for art and music. Tod becomes oriented to
Los Angeles as a place that will make him famous, and then once there, he comes to
evaluate his environment and its inhabitants according to an increasingly narrow aesthetic
framework derived from other artists and his own expressed desire to paint a masterpiece.
Mick removes herself from normative social interactions with others, including
relationships with boys, because they do not match the intensity of sensory pleasure she
50
derives from listening to music. In each instance, the expressed desire to more fully
experience an artistic aesthetic or sensory pleasure articulates that character’s orientation;
the expressions of desire become more extreme and exaggerated. As these expressions of
desire are directed at art and music, these characters’ orientations become increasingly
queer in the context of norms governing behavior and socialization because the
orientation to an aesthetic or a sensation can no longer be located within their
environment and community. As a result, each character becomes oriented to scenes of
seeming-fantasy and impossibility.
2. Hollywood’s Queer Aesthetics in West’s The Day of the Locust
West’s narrative constructs Hollywood as both a physical geographic space and a
conceptual space which allows for different perceptions to be made. Hollywood is
therefore a location in California as much as it is a space onto which people map their
desires as a result of their perceptions. This means that Hollywood is both real, in that it
exists, and mutable because people physically alter Hollywood in order to create what it
is they desire. Hollywood becomes a performance space upon which people are able to
perform and project their desires. The opening pages of West’s The Day of the Locust
demonstrate the manner to which Hollywood is constructed as a performance space,
specifically the product of every conceivable aesthetic wish and desire meant to satisfy
the whims of a potential audience. The homes of its residents are a mish-mash of designs
including “Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and
Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible combination of these
styles” (West 61). Alongside houses built to reflect the aesthetic impulses of their owners
are the depictions of the residents who also dress according to whim. Characters walking
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the street are dressed in “sports clothes which were not really sports clothes,” while
others wear a “yachting cap,” a “Norfolk jacket and Tyrolean hat,” and “slacks and
sneaks with a bandanna” that do not serve their original or intended purpose (West 60).
Here both homes and clothes are removed from their original settings. The houses display
an architectural disconnection with the environment, and the dress of characters is
similarly disconnected from its context. The buildings and clothes are constructed to
denote a particular appearance; they are meant to connote, for Tod who observes them, a
“desire to startle” and a need for “beauty and romance” (61). Here Tod notes how
appearances or performances do not also connect with interiority. His aesthetic sensibility
locates a problem, a form of incongruence between outside and inside. He is
simultaneously bothered by the aesthetic performance through architecture and dress, and
yet he is also appreciative of it because he sees elements of his own aesthetic sensibility
in the grotesque performance. Tod’s description also establishes Hollywood as a space
where different aesthetic orientations converge and where a desire for an aesthetic can be
made manifest through artifice.
The idea that Hollywood is portrayed as a space in which desires can be satisfied
through architecture and clothing is central to West’s narrative as well as many historical
conceptions of L.A. (See City of Quartz). Hollywood does this, in part, by embracing
queer orientations and expressions of desire not aligned with conventional norms; in
West's narrative, this is part of the city's allure. People come to Hollywood because of its
location as the center of the film industry and because of its capacity to allow for, or the
illusion that it allows, not just an ability to openly express queer desire but also the ability
to achieve what it is one desires. In the criticism of John Keyes, Hollywood functions as
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“the Land of the Wish” (Keyes 165) and Rita Barnard references West’s Hollywood as
not just the location where films are produced but also a place that is “itself such a
fantasy” (Barnard 326). For Barnard, Hollywood is doubly-fantastic. The fantasy of the
movie set is one element and the fantasy of the urban space surrounding the studios is
another. Tod’s account of the architecture and the residents of Hollywood makes clear the
lack of a boundary between the set and the street. Just as houses abut other houses of
every style, life on the studio lot showcases a mélange of characters and styles. Tod
witnesses an “army of cavalry” which disappears behind a “Mississippi steamboat” (West
59). Importantly, these scenes are immediately followed by Tod witnessing people
clothed to reflect a location not consistent with their environment. There is not a
separation between the scripted world of the studio and the surrounding environment.
Screen and stage blend with the domestic sphere. Each is a fantasy and each is a product
of a person’s desires in Hollywood to construct and experience their fantasies. Built in
California, a house which reflects a Samoan hut evinces its builder’s attachment to the
Pacific island. Clothing meant for mountaineering is repurposed for the street while still
redirecting a potential audience back to the mountains. In both cases, the orientation of a
person to a particular aesthetic is brought to life through artifice. That the artifice used by
people in Hollywood is depicted as strange only serves to enhance the strangeness, or
queerness, of its inhabitants. If desire is responsible for the construction of the artifice,
then these individual desires can also be classified as out of alignment with one another.
This lack of alignment is conveyed by the rule-breaking aesthetics of the community’s
appearance as much as it is catalogued by the orientation of people away from norms
associated with community development and toward individuated, oftentimes selfish
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interests. The result of these orientations is that the community of characters described
within the narrative share little in common, aside from their desire to achieve some sort
of fantasy through the development of artifice.
Films are known versions of artifice meant to construct a temporarily believable
fantasy. Sets and performances are both manufactured and everything is scripted; sets and
performances are meant to provide an illusion. Thus while it might be startling to witness
a steamboat juxtaposed against various groups of European military, the spatial
discordance is expected within the confines of a studio. Within the novel, problems arise
when the crafting of illusions inhibits continuity in everyday life. The houses are one
example of producing discordance, and this is noted by Tod who refers to the architecture
as “horrible” and “monstrous” because it fails to follow any “law, not even that of
gravity” (61). The failure of the architecture to follow laws extends to the builders
because of the “materials used” in construction and to the people who “fancy” the
construction (61). Each level of construction involves some level of deception and this
produces discordance. For example, Claude Estee, a screenwriter and friend of Tod, is
one such person who builds a reproduction of a plantation where he performs the role of a
Civil War officer. On his veranda, Claude “teetered back and forth” and “made believe he
had a large belly.” (68). His role-play extends to his speech when he orders a “mint julep”
from a black servant, but the performance is broken because his appearance is not
completely aligned with the part he plays. Claude’s desire to act as a portly colonel is
difficult because “he had not a belly at all. He was a dried-up little man with the rubbed
features and stooped shoulders of a postal clerk” (68-69). The mint julep he orders from a
black servant is brought instead by a Chinese man, and the mint julep is replaced with a
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Scotch and soda. His appearance belies his desire to perform as a specific character. But
the level of disconnection between reality and desire does not inhibit Claude from
continuing his performance, it simply inhibits others from seeing him as anything other
than the character he plays within the stage he has constructed. His desire to play a role is
expressed by his commitment to performance. This commitment to performance makes it
difficult for Claude to distinguish fantasy from reality. The expectations of Claude’s
audience do no align with how Claude imagines that the audience perceives him. This
mismatch produces, for Claude, a queered orientation to audience in general.
If, as David Fine writes, “role playing has become indistinguishable from living”
(Fine 199) for West’s main characters, then an orientation to role playing can be
understood as the expression of a person’s desire. Tod Hackett comes to Hollywood at
the behest of a talent scout, who likes Tod’s drawings, and to learn the trade of costume
and set design. His orientation is twisted between his job and his education as an artist
and he plays the role of serious artist through the narrative. Faye Greener hopes to
become a screen siren and her commitment to playing roles extends from the bit parts and
background performances she gives on screen to her everyday interactions with her peers.
Homer Simpson is directed to and becomes oriented to Hollywood’s promise for
relaxation, health, and revitalization. His role is to be pure of thought and he is oriented
to a belief in purity. Each of these character’s roles extends to others. Tod sees the people
that surround him as part of his artistic preoccupation; they become subjects for his work.
And Homer extends his desire for purity to his peers by choosing to see them and their
actions as representative of innocence. For each of these characters, their experiences and
their desires which articulate their orientations are notably selfish: others only participate
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in so far as they have roles to perform even if they are unaware of the performance. This
means that competing orientations are often disregarded and features of other people that
conform to the aesthetic sensibilities or frameworks are exaggerated. An orientation to
an aesthetics in art and sensation therefore exaggerates the perceptions of the surrounding
environment such that other connections, including those of an intimate nature, are
inhibited (thus becoming impossible).
3. Tod’s Artistic Orientation
Because Tod Hackett is the principal narrator of West’s Locust, the relationship
between his own aesthetic sensibility, scenes of seeming-fantasy, and his environment are
first introduced through his perceptions of his surrounding environment. These
perceptions respond to his orientation; they describe his aesthetic attachments. For
example, Tod, the Yale trained artist and recent transplant to Hollywood, is first oriented
to the paintings of Winslow Homer, when in school. However, this orientation is shortlived and he rebels and swears to “never again do a fat red barn, old stone wall or sturdy
Nantucket fisherman” (60). No longer receiving pleasure when composing a painting,
Tod perceives himself as stuck by being forced to pursue, and therefore become forcibly
oriented toward, “illustration or mere handsomeness” (61). Not wishing to lose creative
control over his work, he comes to Hollywood after being discovered. This act of
rebellion, or as Tod’s classmates accuse him, a form of “selling out” is similar in nature
to Paul in Cather’s short story (61). Paul appears to rebel when he steals money and
travels to New York, but both the stealing and the travelling are in response to his
orientation to a specific aesthetic, which he believes he can locate in the city. In much the
same way that Paul’s orientation directs him to New York, Tod is directed to Hollywood.
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He is directed because his aesthetic sensibilities are out of alignment with his education
in that he fails to follow or desire the type of artistic expression his training encouraged.
Tod’s failure to follow the path already carved for him results in and indicates his
queer orientation. He is not oriented to Homer, the painter, and the pastoral and familiar
subject-matter which comprises Homer’s work. He is not interested in the static and
repetitious paths of his former peers. Instead, as is apparent from the novel's opening
pages, Tod prefers the bent and twisted nature of the grotesque. He is oriented to
grotesques, to the aesthetic of blending comedy and tragedy and of the quality of
terrifying, and yet beautiful constructions. He prefers, as J. Jack Halberstam outlines in
her The Queer Art of Failure how the grotesque encapsulates the negative. Halberstam
argues that queer people often fail to be oriented toward social norms in so far as they
host “negative affects, such as disappointment, disillusionment, and despair” (Halberstam
3). In a similar manner, Sara Ahmed writes that queer bodies fail in that they fail “to
orient [themselves] ‘toward’ the ideal” (Ahmed 91). This ideal, heterosexuality for
Ahmed and positive affects for Halberstam, is taken up by the Homeric aesthetic Tod
describes and to which his education directs him. His classmates reproduce illustrations
in the Homeric style and as a result they follow in a lineage that is already long
established. Tod rejects this lineage, and his desire, expressed through other artistic
forms, the grotesque, and finally destruction, bends and warps his orientation. This
bending of his orientation is seen through the way Tod describes his environment. His
orientation to his world encodes his perceptions of it, just as his perceptions influence his
orientation. Here his experiences and his desires are mutually constitutive and they
articulate his orientation which is his aesthetic framework.
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Tod is oriented to a specific artistic aesthetic and he sees the world according to
this aesthetic. Experience articulates perception, and vice versa for Tod. Thus Tod’s
relationship to art shapes his relationship to his environment just as his experiences in his
environment articulate his relationship to art. Merleau-Ponty argues that space cannot be
confused “with the orientation of one’s own body” but the orientation of the body
“indubitably contributes” to how space is constituted, and therefore perceived (MerleauPonty, PoP 290). The perception of space is thus the result of “the contents of
experience” whereby experience and perception mutually influence one another (290).
These two concepts, perception and experience, cannot be separated from one another
because they articulate each other, and this is seen through Tod’s relationship to his
surrounding spatial and cultural field. Tod is oriented to art both as an occupation, he
routinely describes himself as a serious “artist”, and as a way of living in so far as he
describes and perceives his surrounding environment according to his artistic aesthetic
(West 118). He is bent in a particular direction and he sees his surrounding environment
as also bent. This latter claim is noted in the opening pages to West’s narrative because
Tod, as the narrator, provides the description of the studio, the architecture, and the
people on the streets. The houses which “know no law” which results in a “monstrous”
and yet still beautiful, although flawed, creation are objects of great interest for Tod.
What interests Tod in these houses are their aesthetic similarities to the artistic aesthetic
he finds most appealing at the time. At the moment the narrative opens, Tod is enamored
by Francisco Goya and Honoré Daumier (60). Both Goya and Daumier produce satiric
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works.15 Tod describes the houses and the people as satires and grotesques as like they
are painted by Goya or Daumier.
Tod is oriented to satire and the grotesque and this orientation also shapes how he
perceives the people who surround him and his relationship to them. For example, when
Tod first meets “Honest Abe Kusich,” he describes Abe’s appearance with rhetorical
flourishes that emphasize his oddities. Their first meeting involves Tod stumbling upon
Abe, a dwarf, kicked out from a woman’s apartment without his clothes. The context to
this encounter is important because it explains Abe’s appearance; however, the context is
deemphasized because of Tod’s orientation to the grotesque. As a result, Abe is not just
“rolled up in a woman’s flannel bathrobe” because he is forced to wear a woman’s robe
for want of other attire; instead, he is oddly dressed in a woman’s bathrobe from which a
“slightly hydrocephalic head” emerges (63). Here Tod is drawn to what makes Abe
freakish. He focuses not on the mundane elements of his predicament but on his body’s
large head juxtaposed with a woman’s garment. Later, the desire to focus on Abe’s
strangeness is expressed when he paints him in a series of lithographs as a dancer, in
addition to Faye and her father. He sees Abe not as he really is, but instead as he wants
him to appear in his painting. He paints Abe not as the “little man” who is dressed in a
green Tyrolean hat offset by a suit. Instead, he represents Abe as he prefers to see him, in
“shoes with long points and a leather apron” (64). This change from how Tod initially
perceives him to how he represents him in art demonstrates the manner in which Tod’s
15
Goya’s satire is well documented. See Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen’s discussion of Goya and his use of
women as satire in The Straw Mannequin, in which women are seen tossing a male doll into the air. Other
notable discussions of Goya’s satire involve his representations of war as noted by Kieran Cashell in
Aftershock: The Ethics of Contemporary Transgressive Art. Daumier worked as a cartoonist for a journal of
political satire (National Gallery of Art). In addition, see Martin Rogers’s “Monstrous Modernism and The
Day of the Locust.”
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aesthetic sensibility influences his relationship to others. Abe is dressed in one manner in
the narrative, but in Tod’s artwork—how he perceives his environment—he is more
appropriately dressed in another way. Tod appears to prefer and is oriented to the revised
version of Abe. His orientation to Abe as a fantasy is expressed through his emphasis on
certain facets of his appearance, most notably reproduced in his lithographs.
The lithographs, in addition to the descriptions of the surrounding environment,
explore the relationship between Tod’s orientations to art and to the grotesque. His
lithographs meld with the real Abe Kusich, and as a result, the division between art and
life and fantasy and reality is made less clear. Within the lithograph series, an audience
stares at Abe and these looks cause Abe to “spin crazily and leap into the air with twisted
backs like hooked trout” (62). The relationship between audience and performer in the
series of lithographs is similar in function to the relationship between Tod and his
environment. The performers dance and as a result of the audience they restructure their
performances to produce a series of ridiculous and contorted positions. The relationship
between the audience and the performers is one of give and take, with ultimately the
audience possessing more control. Tod acts in a similar manner with his environment. As
Tod acts on and perceives his environment, first only on canvas and later as the
boundaries of the canvas stretch to incorporate the surrounding environment, the actors in
that environment assume more contorted and extreme positions. Tod, in effect, is reshaping his environment by having it not just conform to but also exaggerate his own
orientation. If his orientation to spatial and cultural fields is bent by his attachment to a
specific artistic aesthetic, then he is further queering those objects that enter his field of
perception. Tod experiences his surrounding world as if it is just like the paintings he
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produces and wants to produce. His desire for artistic greatness becomes expressed
through the way he sees people. What results from his orientation to art is the evaluation
of his environment as nothing more than art objects that help him compose his artistic
works.
4. Orientations to Faye and Violence
While Tod initially orients himself to an aesthetic which mirrors the paintings of
Goya and Daumier, he later finds the works of the Italian fantasists alluring because they
produce greater sensations of “Decay and Mystery” (132). In addition, he is also
interested in and oriented to Faye Greener. Faye is both a sexual object for Tod as well as
an art object. The former role is the subject of substantial literary criticism, which often
posits Tod’s relationship to his surrounding world as derived from a series of drives and
unconscious desires. These drives and desires are most often discussed through Tod’s
relationship to Faye. While Faye is symbolic for Tod, other readings position her as an
embodiment of “Hollywood cinema” (Blyn 24), who, because she is unattainable by Tod,
becomes a symbol of “eroticism inextricable from violence” (24). She is also read as the
“immortal whore” (Reid 131) or as the siren that Tod embodies during his siren scream
which closes the narrative (Lukes 195). The tendency in each of these readings is to view
Tod’s relationship to his world as influenced not by his orientation to art where his
relationship with Faye is a by-product of this orientation but as the result of
unconsummated sexual desire. According to these readings, he fails to garner Faye’s
sexual or romantic interest and therefore his relationship to her and his violent fantasies
of her are symptomatic of this failure. Failure, then, produces Tod’s fantasies of Faye as
symbolic. He fantasizes about Faye because he cannot possess her. I understand Tod’s
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relationship to Faye as more complicated because I see his perceptions of her as
generated by his aesthetic orientation. Thus, the fantasies constructed around Faye are a
product of his orientation to aesthetics and the grotesque.
Tod certainly sees Faye as a grotesque and his perception of her is not necessarily
shared by his peers. For Homer Simpson, Faye is like a child in that she both “dressed
like a child of twelve in a white cotton dress with a blue sailor collar” (West 94) and
because she responds to him like a child. Simpson comes to take Faye in when her father
dies, to support her financially, and to assume a role as a father figure. He appears to
solely focus on Faye’s innocence in so far as he fails to perceive, or choose to perceive,
her sexual maturity. When Faye is in bed with “the Mexican . . . both of them naked and
she had her arms around him” he does not see the episode as sexual in nature (170).
Instead, Homer responds to the situation as Faye being “sick” (170) and he serves as a
guard and protector of her. Simpson’s orientation to purity occurs at other moments
throughout the narrative. Before he moves to Hollywood and when he worked in a hotel,
he visits the room of a guest where he is fully “conscious only of the heavy odor of
alcohol and stale tobacco” (85). These scents, however, do not cause Homer to perceive
the woman lying in bed as anything more than a “little boy” (85). Failure to fully register
and assess a situation without orientational bias also affects his relationship to Faye.
When he first meets her, Simpson notes “her odd mannerisms and artificial voice” (94).
While he is aware of these affectations, his desire for purity, expressed through his
unequivocal denial of non-pure characteristics, shapes his relationship to Faye. She is
also a symbol of purity and when she disrupts Simpson’s fantasy of her as pure, he
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experiences “shame” and erupts with violence when other people he imagines as innocent
demonstrate otherwise (West 170).
Tod appears to perceive the world antithetically to Simpson. While Faye is looked
upon as pure by him, Tod focuses and perceives her first as beautiful, then as a grotesque,
and finally as a symbol of destruction. In each instance, and for each character, Faye
functions as a different object in which to be oriented toward. She houses purity for
Simpson and humor, satire, pain, and pleasure for Tod. In effect, she is simultaneously all
of these things because of how characters perceive her. Faye is also other things within
the narrative. She is an actress without talent on stage or screen but she possesses a
considerable ability to convince and sway her audience when performing elsewhere. But
while she possesses her own agency and acts according to her own whims and desires,
Faye’s role as an object for Tod is notable because it encapsulates how his orientation
evolves. Because Tod’s perception of Faye differs throughout the narrative, she is an
object to pursue and to romantically desire, and he also sees her as central figure in his
yet to be painted masterpiece, The Burning of Los Angeles, she becomes a gauge to assess
Tod’s orientation. She is a constant and what is variable is Tod’s interpretation of her.
That she functions as an object of orientation and that Tod’s assessment of her changes as
the narrative progresses signifies the importance of orientation in evaluating his
relationship to his world.
Just as Tod prefers to see Abe Kusich as he is represented in his series of
lithographs, he focuses on Faye as he imagines painting her. She becomes an art object to
study, represent, and dissect. When he initially meets Faye, he desires her and this desire
leads him to move from one apartment to the next in order to be near her. She becomes
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an all-consuming object of attraction, but this attraction is unrequited. He desires her and
yet he knows that “he had nothing to offer her, neither money nor looks, and she could
only love a handsome man and would only let a wealthy man love her” (67). Although
she routinely turns down his offers for dates, a relationship, and sex, Tod is still drawn to
her. In many ways, Faye functions like Hollywood for the other inhabitants Tod earlier
describes. She is a dream, a fantasy, and possessing her would be the ultimate form of
achieving fantasy for Tod. He is oriented to her and to her beauty, but this orientation is
also perverted by his orientation to art.
His orientation, often read as a sign of just sexual frustration, is noted in the
evolution of his relationship to Faye as an object. Both sexual frustration and aesthetic
alignment are demonstrated through his evaluation of a signed photograph he possesses
of Faye. The language he uses can be read as resulting from both sexual and artistic
desire; however, because of his overarching orientation to aesthetics, Tod’s expressions
of sexual desire are often described in terms most closely affiliated with aesthetic
concerns. The photograph, in which Tod presumes Faye “was supposed to look inviting”
becomes instead a symbol of Faye’s monstrousness (West 68). Her “sullen smile” is not
an invitation to “pleasure” (68). It is, however, an invitation to death. Tod sees Faye’s
smile as evidence of “murder” whereupon “if you threw yourself on her, it would be like
throwing yourself from the parapet of a skyscraper. You would do it with a scream. You
couldn’t expect to rise again. Your teeth would be driven into your skull like nails into a
pine board and your back would be broken” (68). That Tod would be “glad to throw
himself” onto her is commonly interpreted as a signal of a “repressed death drive” (Blyn
24), culminating in a fantasy of “sexual desire in a deathly jouissance” (Lukes 195). What
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is missing from these interpretations is the recognition that Tod is not approaching Faye
as a person; instead, Tod is performing a critique of a photograph and this critique is
subjected to his own interpretative methods. Just as the audience bends and twists Abe
and the dancers in the series of lithographs, Tod too is bending Faye to conform to his
aesthetic demands and he imagines his body as bending and breaking when encountering
Faye. Tod does not perceive Faye as she exists to others, but as he has experienced her in
relation to his own orientation. He is imagining Faye, not just as potential sexualized
object, but as a sexualized grotesque. Here he applies the same model he uses to paint his
lithographs and through which he evaluates the architecture of Hollywood. And like the
houses he imagines as monstrous and yet also beautiful, he too sees beauty in his
interpretive fantasy of Faye.
Tod fantasizes about Faye and these fantasies of her as a potential object of study
and of art are all consuming. She is “so completely artificial that he found [her]
charming,” and he likens spending time with her to being backstage and witness to a
“ridiculous play” complete with “stupid lines and grotesque situations” (West 103-104).
Faye is, for Tod, a blend of comedy and tragedy encapsulated by over-acting and
exaggerated “affectations” (103). These perceptions of Faye are connected by Tod to his
relationship to his world. Tod is, in effect, seeing space through, as Merleau-Ponty
argues, the “contents of experience” (Merleau-Ponty, PoP 290). Just as Hollywood
represents a space for the potential to realize what one desires most, Faye serves as a
character on which to map desire. While she possesses her own agency, to the men who
circulate around her, Faye is nothing more than an object capable of being sculpted to
conform to what they want. Thus she moves from serving as a sexual object and a
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grotesque to representing Tod’s ever more morose, but no less fantastic, relationship to
his environment.
As Tod becomes engrossed in painting his “masterpiece,” The Burning of Los
Angeles and as his experience with Faye changes, so too does his relationship to her as an
object of interest and to his overriding aesthetic. His previous orientation to perceiving
the world satirically never connected him with his surroundings. He remains disoriented
as the result of his inability to connect with the world through non-aesthetic means. His
relationship with Faye exemplifies this lack of connection because he continues to
experience denial from her. What results are a new orientation and a new way to see Faye
in which she is reinterpreted as a source of disenfranchisement and disaffection. This new
interpretive strategy is seen through the progression of Tod’s artistic orientation away
from Goya and Daumier and toward the Italian fantasists, including Francesco Guardi
and Monsú Desiderio because he believes they best encapsulate “Decay and Misery”
(West 132). This shift in allegiance to a new set of artists can be understood not just as an
element of his education and his rebellion, but also as a product of his perception, roleplaying, and aesthetic sensibility; the shifting becomes part of a larger statement as to
Tod’s orientation. Each of his artistic allegiances corresponds with a particular context,
and he approaches each artist as a result of his evaluation of and orientation to his
environment. The environment at Yale and its emphasis on artistic tradition influences
him to initially express himself as if he were Winslow Homer. As Tod reorients himself,
he desires the tradition of Homer less. When transitioning to living in Hollywood, and
because he sees his landscape and environment as satirical, he becomes attracted to Goya
and Daumier. As he becomes more jaded and as his relationships with his peers,
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specifically Faye, sour, he turns to the “tortured” and “demolished” worlds found in the
Italians (132).
When Tod turns to the Italians Fantasists for inspiration he experiences evergreater forms of isolation and rejection. Faye is increasingly less hospitable to his
advances and his relationship to other characters becomes coded with an increasing level
of hostility and violence. Where once Tod notes the appearance of people, specifically
those who “come to California to die” (60) as present in his environment, now Tod
begins to perceive his surroundings as a series of violent potentialities. He observes his
world through this attachment to violence, in effect he is oriented to the violence he
believes he perceives in his environment. As his relationship to human connection
becomes increasingly difficult, his orientation to human connection and intimacy with
others becomes less important. Tod, in effect, turns away from socially interacting with
his peers. He becomes less interested in human relations, and he becomes oriented,
instead, to looking at, critiquing, and experiencing those around him according to his
aesthetic framework. Whereas earlier, Tod experiences his environment through a
blended orientation to art and a desire to experience some degree of human connection,
now he perceives his environment only through his artistic apparatus. His The Burning of
Los Angeles serves as evidence of this turn away from humanity and his orientation is
such that all expressions of desire are directed at the masterpiece he wants to complete.
When planning The Burning of Los Angeles, Tod imagines Faye naked in the “left
foreground” and she is being “chased by a group of men and women who have separated
from the main body of the mob” (108). In Tod’s thoughts on the painting, Faye is a
victim of mob violence. She is responding to the mob by running away, having been
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stripped of her clothes. Criticism of Tod’s painting focuses on the mob and mob violence,
through a reading of West’s understanding of group psychology. Alex Vernon claims that
West’s narrative is almost Biblical in nature when it ends with a live version of Tod’s
“painting.” He writes that violence spreads the “infection of an impurity, like the plague”
much as a plague of locusts devastates a field (Vernon 136). Erika Doss also locates the
violent core of West’s narrative wherein West acts as an heir to “Le Bon and Freud’s
theories about dangerous and deviant crowds” (Doss 27). Both read Tod as an observer
and a prophet—something Tod also believes himself to be—of the violent tendencies of
people who, when collected, will surge and break like a wave of energy. Criticism notes
how the crowds are the focus of analysis and Tod’s relationship to the crowds is one of
an objective and enlightened observer. But Tod is never an objective person simply
standing along the sidelines. He is an agent of the violence within the narrative because
the violence that is described is rooted in his perception.
Because The Burning of Los Angeles focuses much of Tod’s attention throughout
the narrative, he becomes consumed by it. Just as he previously saw other characters as
representations of his lithographs, and just as he often focuses on reading and critiquing
characters as if they are works of art, Tod’s understanding of the masses, seen in the
violent mob that closes the narrative, is dependent on his orientation to violence which
responds to his aesthetic values. The crowd may indeed respond violently at the end of
the novel, but the manner in which it is described is dependent on Tod’s evaluation and
relationship to it. Tod looks to his surroundings as his not yet painted masterpiece, and he
projects his painting onto the scene. In essence, his environment and his perceptions of it
intertwine:
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Across the top, parallel with the frame, he had drawn the burning city . . . for the
faces of its members, he was using the innumerable sketches he had made of the
people who come to California to die . . . in the lower foreground, men and
women fled wildly before the vanguard of the crusading mob. Among them were
Faye, Harry, Homer, Claude and himself (West 184).
Here Tod’s understanding of the mob is infused with his composition. His narration of
the action recounts how he imagines his painting, now slightly different in form than his
earlier renditions where Faye serves as the focal point. The mob explodes and the
surrounding environment is consumed by its violence just as Tod is consumed by and
oriented to the violent potential that makes up his aesthetic values. In this description of
the action, the ability to separate what actually happens on the street from Tod’s
perception and translation of it as a work of art is difficult. Instead, what is depicted is
Tod’s consumption by his orientation to aesthetics and their fantastic nature.
Whereas earlier in the narrative, Tod observes his surroundings and revises his
observations to fulfill his aesthetic desires, now he is engrossed within and becomes an
artistic object. This means that he no longer sees himself as just a casual observer of
others, which he can then represent aesthetically in art. He too is a part of his painting
and he places himself in the foreground of his work; he sees himself as an aesthetic.
Because he now sees himself as an object, like Faye, Abe, and Homer, his orientation to
aesthetics, and therefore how he perceives his environment, is self-directed. This means
that Tod perceives his world through his aesthetic sensibilities and he perceives himself
as participating in a world constituted by those same sensibilities which is described as a
seeming-fantasy. The Burning of Los Angeles represents, then, the moment where Tod’s
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orientation to aesthetics and his environment merge. The painting is where the division
between fantasy and reality is obscured, and Tod’s desire for a world governed by his
aesthetic attachments is expressed most fully.
5. A Turn Away from Community
Although Tod achieves, to some degree, a space to engage with and express his
desires within an artwork, he never locates a community that shares in this engagement,
nor does he appear interested in a community as West’s narrative concludes. His
orientation to aesthetics, while similar in nature to others in Hollywood who achieve a
certain aesthetic through structured performances (a la Claude Estee and his plantation),
never allows him to locate a community of like-minded peers because he is uninterested
in forming or finding a community. Each person that makes up Tod’s social group
possesses a wildly divergent orientation from his, and whereas they all might be
catalogued in bent, and therefore queer fashion, their queerness is the only trait they all
possess in common. To be queer in orientation, therefore, is not enough to spur
community formation because queerness does not take one form. Tod is queer because he
desires a particular artistic aesthetic at odds with the mainstream normative culture
beyond the fantasy of Hollywood. He expresses this desire for an aesthetic through his
orientation to art and to how he perceives his environment. Other characters are queer
because of their orientations to what they desire, like Faye and Homer, for example,
because they routinely assess their surroundings and their peers according to a governing
logic and a framework derived from aesthetic sensibilities, their experiences, and their
desires: Faye regulates those around her by separating them into those who function like
the men she imagines to resemble heroes from films and those who are not; Homer
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chooses to deny, at least initially, any signs of impropriety or a lack of purity. In each
instance, a character is oriented to a concept which is seemingly fantastic and this
exaggerates an already queer orientation.
While the characters in West’s narrative share queer orientations, these
orientations are never synchronous in so far as the objects to which they are oriented and
the frameworks through which they respond to their environment are not shared. Where
the desire for fame might link Tod with Faye, the pursuit of fame, artistically for Tod and
cinematically for Faye, are not synonymous; instead, their desires isolate these characters
further as they become engrossed by their own actions within, assessments of, and
responses to their spatial and cultural fields. In a similar manner, Carson McCullers’s The
Heart is a Lonely Hunter incorporates characters whose orientations to desired objects
produce isolation. But whereas West’s narrative includes expressions of desire for
individuated goals for the characters alone to experience, McCullers’s characters gesture
to spaces where their desires will exist, at least in theory, within communities of similarly
oriented people.
6. Queer Orientation in McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Hollywood, as it is described in West’s narration, is an environment where
queerness appears as a permissible, even commonplace trait. When Tod locates a group
similarly oriented to violence at the conclusion of the West’s narrative, a fusion of
internal and external orientations occurs. Tod becomes an object in his painting that is
overlaid with the riot on the street. And whereas this scene physically harms Tod and he
appears delusional, the norms present in his environment do not pressure him to change.
Tod comes to experience violence. But this violence never redirects Tod nor does it serve
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as a form of caution; instead, Tod, as the narrative ends, imagines himself painting his
masterpiece; he has located a space where his queerness is mitigated. When he is in the
police car, Tod retreats even further into painting. His framework of art and his
perception literally intertwine. In terms of community, difficulties only arise for Tod, and
for others, because their commitment to their own desires prevents them from achieving
anything more than superficial relationships.
The environment McCullers describes within The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
differs greatly from West’s Hollywood. West’s characters live within or move to
Hollywood and they all appear to believe that their location will foster the development
of what they desire most. McCullers’s characters live within a quasi-urban Southern town
and the town’s apparent lack of opportunities, both economically and emotionally, are
central to the corresponding orientations of its inhabitants. While West’s characters are
oriented to art and film and the resulting belief that each will enable fame and will be
supported by their environment, McCullers’s characters orient themselves to concepts
that they believe are neither present nor available. For Tod, all of Hollywood is queer,
whether as the result of its architecture and its inhabitants or his commitment to a certain
aesthetic which we receive through the narration. The characters who populate
McCullers’ work of fiction do not exist within a society so similarly organized. Instead,
the central narration of Mick, Dr. Copeland, Jake, and Singer articulates how the
characters experience their orientations as queer as a result of both an environment and an
identity which makes it difficult for them to experience what they desire most.
Because the characters in McCullers’ narrative do not appear as aligned with their
environment, their orientations create tension. For example, on the one hand, each
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character expresses desires for intimacy derived from a community of like-minded
people. This communal desire would provide a respite from feeling as an outcast. On the
other hand, each character is also oriented to experiencing something more concretely,
more permanently. They express a desire to locate a space to become enmeshed and
experience what it is they desire most. The desire to experience community, where
interpersonal relationships are conceivable important, and the desire to experience, or the
capacity to experience, unimpeded, their desires occasionally overlap. However, for
much of the narrative the orientation to what is most desired interferes with their ability
to connect with others at home. Thus, characters often fail to recognize one form of
community where it exists in the vicinity because of the presence of other desires, even
though this desire for community is pervasive. For example, Jake Blount desires to
educate other workers about Marxism, but he frequently expresses this desire through
drunken ramblings in which “he was not addressing anyone around him in particular, nor
was anyone listening” (McCullers 20). Dr. Benedict Mady Copeland finds himself
regularly thinking about the “strong true purpose” (167) in which blacks would not just
speak up, but would also act and think in a manner significant to African-Americans. He
finds himself obsessed by his calling to purpose, and yet he is routinely interrupted by his
job practicing medicine and halted by the disinterest of his peers in pursuing his politics.
Both characters experience difficulty connecting with others even though they greatly
desire, to some degree, a connection. This difficulty in connecting with others is
described within the narrative as a by-product of how the world sees them and to what
they are oriented. Much as Paul in Cather’s short story feels out of place in Pittsburgh,
McCullers’s characters also experience themselves as not fitting into their environment
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which labels them as queer and which they experience as outsiders. Thus, they are
described as misfits and “freaks” who espouse, like Jake, a “queer kind of politics” (20),
or who, like Mick, appear uncomfortable with their bodies such that she picks “at the
front of her blouse to keep the cloth from rubbing the new, tender nipples beginning to
come out on her breast” (35). Jake’s “queer” Marxist political leanings place him at odds
with the capitalist barons of his town. Described by Biff, Jake is a hodge-podge of
accents and conversational threads. He discusses the locations in which he has lived
while using “words a foot long” only to “then slip up on his grammar” (20). He is of
undetermined origin and ultimately, for Biff, appears as a “man thrown off his track by
something” (21). Jake does not belong in town because he is both an outsider, in so far as
he has moved there, and because he speaks in a manner not fitting of the town’s
predominately working class population. His actions are considered performance driven
in that they appear disingenuous, and as a result, others pay him little heed. Mick’s
nervousness and discomforting display of scratching also characterizes the experience of
someone not comfortable with her identity or her body.
These two descriptions, along with those Biff provides of the other central figures
found within McCullers’s narrative, serve to locate the characters in space. They exist
within their small Southern town, and yet, they are outsiders. They appear disoriented to
outside observers, and they often experience bouts of disorientation internally in so far as
they feel out of place and frequently appear to aimlessly wander through town. Jake is a
drunken, and often-incoherent mess, while Mick is uncomfortable with her body, its
changes because of puberty, and elements of her class. Neither seems to cohere to their
environment. Sara Ahmed writes that bodies “that are out of place, in the spaces in which
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they gather” may experience disorientation (Ahmed 170). Here disorientation is the result
of being oriented differently. A person’s orientation “gets in the way of inhabitance,”
according to Ahmed, “even if [orientation] points toward inhabitance as its goal” (170).
For Ahmed, a person’s lack of orientation to an environment, thus their disorientation,
does not preclude the existence of an orientation, or the presence of a desire, to become
oriented. The existence of an orientation to community, itself a normative construction,
and another orientation, a queer orientation to fantasy, are what drive McCullers’
narrative and the experiences of the characters therein. In the case of Jake, he expresses
his desire for inhabitance through his persuasive speeches. He wishes to locate other
people who either already share in his politics or who, through persuasion, will share in
his politics. He speaks of Marxist ideology with others and around others in order to
persuade them. That he does this at moments when no other person is listening only
highlights his desire to be persuasive and his framework through which he views his
world. Thus, although he experiences disorientation as evidenced by his inconsistencies
and these inconsistencies label him as not oriented properly, he still expresses a desire to
locate a community in which to inhabit—in which to feel at home. But here, this
expressed desire interferes with connections to others and coherence; it produces a
disorienting effect because of the context. While in West’s narrative, a queer orientation
is permitted in Hollywood, the location of McCullers’ narration does not easily permit
such freedom. Thus, whereas West’s Tod can become more fully enmeshed in
experiencing what it is they desire, even if those experiences happen in fantastic ways,
McCullers’ characters are restricted, by class, race, gender, and social and behavioral
norms, from accessing what they desire most. Instead, the characters experience a
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constant tension between their orientations and a more restrictive environment. What
results for McCullers’ characters are that they partition their desires and they come to
experience routine disorientation. During the day, they conform, at least outwardly, to
some of the social and behavioral norms and expectations of their environment. At night,
and in private, their orientations become expressed. They never, however, fully realize or
experience the things to which they are oriented. Instead, they experience those things—
community or musical sensation—temporarily or only in parts.
7. Orientational Oasis
Biff’s New York Café, an obvious symbol within the narrative representing
desires to escape the current environment, acts as a space to mitigate disorientation in
others (relationships with Singer and Singer’s bedroom appears to serve as the other
space). His café is one hub for people experiencing disorientation because he avails his
business to them at late hours when “outside the street lights had already been turned off”
(McCullers 15). People appear within and are consequently oriented to his business
because judgment from outsiders is relaxed when they enter the restaurant. They desire
this relaxation late at night when the distractions of the day, often the result of norms
governing work, play, and the body, are no longer as rigid. Works of queer theory often
point to night as a time and space for queer people to gather. Jack Halberstam writes that
queer “uses of time and space develop, at least in part, in opposition to institutions of
family, heterosexuality, and reproduction” (Halberstam, Time 1). For Halberstam, queers
live “when others sleep” and proliferate within spaces “others have abandoned” (10),
meaning that their experiences often do not align with people oriented to norms. Such
lifestyles are often pathologized, Halberstam argues, because they highlight a different
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commitment to experience and to time. Elizabeth Freeman makes a similar argument
through her discussion of the chrononormative (3) and its effects, she argues, on
regulating progression through and in accordance with normative time.16 In effect,
queered persons are oriented to different times than their normative counterparts.
In McCullers narrative, night is the time for the characters to be most active.
During the day, work and school restrict a person’s pursuits; free time occurs at night.
Thus, because Biff’s Café is open at night, people who find the night affords them a time
to stray, often end up at his restaurant. Night is therefore the time that both allows for and
exaggerates feelings of disorientation. The other characters come to his café because they
are lonely or alone, and they can orient themselves without social pressures. Night is
therefore a restless time, but the Café allows them to relax, even if momentarily. Biff
comments on this, and his desire to keep his business open at night as a location for
relaxation, because for him, “night was the time” to “rest” (McCullers 426-427). He
believes that “he would never have seen [them] otherwise;” a reference to the people who
“came in one at a time and ordered little and stayed long” (426). These people are the
“freaks” whom Biff empathically observes and in whom he sees reflections of himself.
His business is therefore a reflection of a desire, both personally and professionally, to
engage with a segment of the population who would not come out during the day. While
the Café may provide a temporary distraction, Biff both selfishly and caringly keeps his
restaurant open in spite of the diminishing economic returns because it offers people,
other “freaks”, like him as his wife describes (17), with a space to be around other people
similarly removed from society. For Jake, the café is a space to drink beer and orate on
16
Ahmed argues for something similar. She notes that time is something to which people are oriented (a
concept that will be most important in Chapter 4 of this dissertation).
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his ideas regarding working conditions and socio-economic inequality. For Mick, the café
is a space that does not highlight her changing body and her often-fraught relationship
with her peers even if her relationship to her body is still a point of concern.
Although the café serves as a central space in which to gather, it also highlights
the difficulty these characters have in terms of becoming oriented and inhabiting or
participating in a community. Jake speaks to no particular audience and Mick lurks
around the café conspicuously endeavoring to go unnoticed. For Mick, the Café is one
space in which to avoid her peers, but it does not free her from her own insecurities. So
while both the café and night allow her escape, neither the time nor the location affords
her with the consistent comfort of feeling like she belongs. The character of Singer,
however, does appear to lessen the effects of not belonging and strangeness that others
experience. As a result, he becomes one object that others are oriented toward.
Functioning like Hollywood in West’s narrative, Singer is an object on whom the other
characters map and transfer their emotions and desires. While Hollywood allows for
every conceivable iteration of identity, aesthetic, or performance to be achieved, Singer
serves as a symbol for the potential communities the other characters wish to inhabit and
the sensations they wish to experience. On the one hand, each character desires
something conceptual, and this concept requires others to participate in order to make the
concept or the dream realizable. On the other hand, each character is not forthcoming
about their goals and desires, and therefore they experience isolation. Singer represents
the perfect person in which to experience a public and yet private community.
From the moment Singer is introduced within the narrative, his role as a symbol
and as a person to whom other characters are oriented is described. Biff recounts Singer’s
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appearance and personality as including eyes, which “made a person think that he heard
things nobody else had heard, that he knew things no one else had ever guessed before”
(30). Here Singer is exceptional. He possesses a quality that makes him appear as always
knowing, or capable of knowing and understanding the greatest depths of others. He is
almost omniscient in nature. This description of Singer by Biff is, however, a reading of
him not rooted in any interaction with Singer aside from observation. Singer, a deaf and
self-imposed mute, never articulates or acknowledges understanding. Instead, he refrains
from communication because he imagines that others find his voice to be “like the sound
of some animal or that there is something disgusting in his speech” (13). He remains
silent, only occasionally writing words on a notepad he carries with him in order to make
simple requests. This silence, though allowing the others to acknowledge his disability,
never interferes with their perception that he understands them. His silence is understood
as engrossed and uninterrupted listening. The other central figures therefore disregard
Singer’s disability by interpreting his silence as meaningful. He is thus a fantasy space.
Jake sees Singer as unique in so far as “the man had listened. He had talked himself
hoarse, but he could remember the expressions on the man’s face better than anything
that was said” (66). Singer is, therefore, for Jake, the audience he so desperately desires.
Dr. Copeland also sees in Singer’s face and countenance a level of kindness he has never
before received from another white man. Mick reads Singer as a kindred spirit. She finds
herself imagining the type of music he hears and what he might say, if he could, because
she associates him with her most private internalized desires regarding music. She thinks
that he “reminded her of this music” that plays in her mind and to which she finds herself
oriented (64). And like the music, she is equally drawn to Singer and his company.
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Just as night draws people to Biff’s Café, nighttime also draws other people to the
company of Singer in his room. There, he kindly entertains his guests in silence with “his
hands stuffed tight into his pockets” (110), while they prate about their most pressing
needs. His silence allows the other characters to continue with their fantasy uninterrupted.
Singer is a part of this fantasy, and his silence provides the others with a level of comfort
they rarely experience. For them, Singer and their relationship to him is intimate in
nature. Just as Jake imagines Singer understands his every word, Mick too believes “he
understood every word she said to him” (109). In a way that the Café cannot, Singer
relaxes Mick’s apprehension about her goals and desires. She finds herself talking to him
about “some of her plans that she would not tell anybody else.” And when she is in the
company of him, she fails to feel “embarrassed” or tense as she does with others (109).
Here we see how Singer functions for the others. He is a symbol, a blank canvas on
which they cannot just project their desires, but from whom they experience a fusion
between their external and internal needs. If Jake’s most public desire is expressed
through his political speeches and his internal desires are to find a community where he is
not “lonesome”, then Singer embodies, he believes, a person who feeds both (77).
Singer’s non-responsiveness and his friendliness means that for Jake, he is an attentive
listener and a comrade in the struggle against capitalist exploitation while he is also a
“friend” (73).
There is no doubt in the narrative that Singer enjoys the company of his cohort.
He considers them friends, and they also view Singer as a friend. They are oriented to
him because they suppose that he is just like them. While Singer is queered because of
his disability, each character supposes that the manner in which he experiences his world
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as queer is similar in constitution to their own.17 He is, therefore, a product of
interpretation and construction, and within the narrative, and this plays out through the
rumors and stories passed between the central characters and the other inhabitants of the
town. To them, Singer is a reflection of themselves, or what they desire him to be: “The
Jews said that he was a Jew. The merchants along the main street claimed he had
received a large legacy and was a very rich man” (239). Union members imagine him to
be an “organizer,” and other people of all ethnicities and backgrounds tell stories in
which Singer is a representative of their cause. Through his refusal to communicate and
his function as a black object on which to project desire for others, Singer serves as an
oasis for the novel's main characters. He alleviates Jake’s loneliness and makes Copeland
feel like another person shares in the “one true purpose.” For Mick, Singer is a fellow
musicophile such that she imagines him managing her career as a composer and
musician.
But just as the New York Café provides a space for people to gather without
establishing a connection with one another, the relationship each character imagines they
have with Singer is equally one-sided. If one of the most pressing needs of the characters
is a desire for community, then Singer seems to give them an opportunity to locate a
community with the other characters who visit him. One evening, Copeland, Jake, Mick,
and Biff all visit Singer simultaneously. Singer serves them all but notices that the mood
of his guests is atypical. Copeland remains standing, Jake drinks beer, Mick listens to
music, and Biff sits on Singer’s bed observing the others. Here they perform as they do in
17
Singer is also queered in terms of his sexual orientation. Many literary critics, including myself, read his
relationship with Anton as the product of homosexual desires. That this relationship is unrequited, in
some senses, only situates Singer more fully with the cohort of misfits because it demonstrates a similar
orientation to fantasy—here the fantasy is that Spiros Antonapoulos is in love with him.
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any other public environment. They politely interact with one another but they never
communicate, or seek to communicate with each other in a way any more intimate than
as if they are strangers. Instead, “each person addressed his words main[ly] to the mute.
Their thoughts seemed to converge in him as the spokes of a wheel lead to the center
hub” (253). Even though other people are also in the room, they isolate Singer as the
focus of their thoughts, words, and actions. He is the center of attention for them, an
object to which to be oriented, and a version of their desire translated onto another
person. They are all oriented to him, but this orientation precludes them from
experiencing the community, or intimacy for which they also express desire. Their
orientation blinds them to experiencing the company of others also present in his room,
much as it also blinds to them experiencing Singer. Because they all imagine Singer to be
what they want him to be, and because this imagined form of Singer is tied up with the
dreams and desires they feel most bound to, they ignore the potential companionship of
other people who similarly experience isolation.
For Joseph R. Millchap, this scene “reveals . . . the destructive failure of
everyone’s dreams” (Millchap 14). In Millchap’s argument, Jake is oriented to a dream of
converting others to follow the tenets of Marxism. In Singer, he believes he locates a
person who supports this cause. But, because he fails to have a relationship with Singer
rooted in two-way communication, he misreads Singer’s support. Instead, he blindly
supposes that because Singer sits patiently listening to his words, drinks beer with him,
and never speaks that he is in agreement. For Mick and Copeland, similar scenarios play
out and thus they all come to experience Singer through an evaluation that he shares in
their attachment to their personal fantasies; his fantasy is their fantasy and therefore his
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orientation is theirs as well. The belief that Singer is orientated similarly fosters a belief
that they share intimacy with him, but the intimacy that they share with him is false; it
does not last. Because they locate one people with whom they feel a level of intimacy,
they ignore other potential sources of comradery. Their orientation to fantasy thus comes
to dominate their other expressed desires and it restricts their access to community.
8. The Objects of Desire
Each character’s orientation creates isolation. Singer is but one part of the
fantasy-scape for the characters. While he is a real person, they never learn details about
his life, understand his struggle, or come to know him. Instead, they construct him as
sharing their desires. They perceive him as similarly oriented to the things they most
desire. The reasoning for remaking Singer into a reflection of their own image is that they
all experience great degrees of isolation from their surrounding environment. Mick feels
that “she wasn’t a member of any bunch” (McCullers 126), a phrase she repeats often
both to herself and to those who question her about her relationships. Like many around
her, she is the daughter of a working class, and by all means, economically struggling
family. She attends school, babysits her brothers, and experiences regular adolescent
torments such as a body undergoing puberty. And yet, she experiences her situation as
that of an outcast. This lack of belonging extends from regular peer groups to larger
organizations such as the Girl Scouts. At one moment in the narrative, Biff asks her
whether she is a Girl Scout, to which Mick replies: “I don’t belong to them” (21). Here,
her quick answer elucidates her relationship to her own sex and gender. The Girl Scouts
is an organization for other girls, and Mick is routinely reminded that her behavior is not
appropriately feminine, a behavior which serves to exclude her.
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Because she is not appropriately feminine and because she feels excluded from
participating in activities and organizations marked as appropriate for girls, Mick is the
subject of much criticism from her family. Exclusion brings about shame for her sister,
Etta, who is a model of appropriate femininity and “primped herself all the day long”
(50). As a result, Etta antagonizes Mick for her dress, stating “it makes me sick to see you
in those silly boy’s clothes” (50). Biff notices a similar style to her dress by pointing to
her “khaki shorts, a blue shirt, and tennis shoes . . . at first glance she was like a very
young boy” (21). Biff’s description of Mick here in combination with his observation that
she appeared nervous about her changing body demonstrates the manner in which
outsiders both perceive and attempt to influence Mick. She is biologically a woman but
her mannerisms and affectations are masculine; she is a stereotypical tomboy. She
dresses incorrectly, enjoys dirt and playing in construction sites, and openly informs
others who attempt to pressure her that “I’d rather be a boy any day” (51). Yet, her
changing body interferes with this exclamation.
Being a boy would mean many things for Mick, it would allow for greater access
to music, and it would relieve some of the tension she experiences at the hands of others
and from herself in relation to the expectations other’s hold regarding her behavior.
Boyishness is something she can also understand in contrast to the strangeness her
changing body produces. To be a boy means not having to change her behavior, and this
is something she understands. Puberty, however, creates confusion. She thinks, “nothing
much happened that she could describe to herself in thoughts or words—but there was a
feeling of change” (117). Here Mick is, as Catherine Martin argues, seemingly unable to
articulate “the experience of her changing body and emerging sexuality” (Martin 8). She
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lacks the vocabulary to express her experience of change. But outsiders notice and they
inform her as to what the changes mean. Whereas her behavior appears acceptable for a
young girl, Mick’s changing body marks her attachment to boyish styles of dress and
activities as non-normative. While Biff does not endeavor to critique her, her sisters,
Portia, her family’s cook, and how she perceives others’ responses to her body engender
in her a sense of queerness. She regularly assesses her world as producing a “queer
feeling” (McCullers 132) and as a result, these queer feelings often exacerbate her
disorientation. She comes to experience her relationship to her peers as one of
disconnection. What she desires both externally and internally is at odds with what others
believe she should desire.
One area of external strife Mick experiences is her relationship to stereotypical
gender norms and the disconnection she feels between how others view her and how she
views herself. At a party she throws for her peers, these gender stereotypes are
highlighted for her. She remarks that she is “five feet six inches tall and a hundred and
three pounds, and she was only thirteen. Every kid at the party was a runt beside her,
except Harry, who was only a couple of inches shorter” (134). This comparison, whereby
Mick juxtaposes herself against her peers, demonstrates to her that she is abnormal. She
is too tall for a girl and the only other person near her height is a boy, who is still a few
inches shorter. The result of this episode is that Mick, although biologically female, does
not feel connected to her femininity in a manner similar with her peers. Her height, her
voice, and her behavior, expressed through her attraction to certain aesthetics and types
of play, further disconnects her. The resulting relationship between Mick and her body
vis-à-vis social norms and expectations is therefore persistently out of alignment. Mick
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perceives her gender one way, while the outside world endeavors to direct her and fix her
gender in other ways, like her sister Etta.
9. Reading Mick’s Orientation
Volumes of literary criticism are devoted to Mick’s confusion regarding her
relationship to femininity, but these responses almost always (over)determine Mick’s
bodily confusion as articulating a confused and burgeoning sexuality. Sexual orientation
and gender are therefore conflated and intertwined in these readings that respond most
notably to Mick sleeping with Harry at a Girl Scout Camp. While the sex scene with
Harry is important to Mick and the narrative, I argue that the sex scene more concretely
elucidates Mick’s orientation to music and that the failure of the sexual scene is indebted,
at least in part, to Mick’s sensory expectations and demands. After biking on a hot day to
the camp, Mick comes to desire Harry, she notices Harry’s naked body and that a form of
“excitement was in her” (McCullers 327). The sexual encounter follows this excitement,
but it does not produce the intended effects for Mick. Instead, sex is described as Harry
clutching Mick’s body during penetration while chanting “Oh, God . . . over and over”
(329). Mick is less ecstatic about the experience, and she distracts herself with objects
and concepts in the distance. She feels that “her head was broke off from her body and
thrown away. And her eyes looked up straight into the blinding sun while she counted
something in her mind” (329). The disconnection between her expectations and the act
are notable. Here both Harry and Mick lose their virginity. There is build-up to the act’s
culmination in the form of conversation and voyeuristic foreplay. But the act itself does
not meet the expectations Mick possesses; instead, Harry penetrates her and quickly
finishes. Mick appears to not receive any bodily pleasure from the act and as a result her
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mind ventures elsewhere. Mick locates the blinding rays of the sun and fantasizes and
fixates on its intensity of sensation.
Other literary critics argue that Mick’s attachment to outside sensation and her
metaphorical disembodiment is in response to the confusion between her earlier
tomboyishness, her now more feminized body, and sexual trauma. Martin argues that
Mick is “no longer a thinking subject, but a passive body, subject to the activity of
others” (Martin 8). For Martin, Mick’s sexual experience incites a “violent break from
comprehension and articulation” (8). This violent break is made obvious through the head
severing Mick experiences. Louse Westling notes that Mick loses freedom “when she
accepts her sexual status as a woman” (Westling 159) which similarly positions Mick as a
wholly changed person as a result of having sex with Harry. Constance M. Perry, noting
how Mick’s body becomes increasingly more feminized as the result of outside pressure
and puberty, argues that her tension and social awkwardness, in combination with this
“devastating sexual initiation” (Perry 36) creates later artistic failure. Similarly, this
sexual episode is categorized by Jack B. Moore as producing “profoundly disturbing”
psychological knowledge of the self (Moore 77). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak points to
Mick’s “body-mind bind” (Spivak 132) but this schism between body and mind is read,
by Spivak, as Mick’s body directed by desire to her brother, while her mind ventures
elsewhere.
For these scholars, Mick’s sexual awakening is a fundamental change with respect
to her orientation to her own gender and self. They point to this sex act as traumatic for
Mick such that it creates for her no opportunity or path to resist social pressure and
pursue what she desires (the sensations she receives from music). Noting that Mick is
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traumatized, Moore reads sex as Mick’s symbolic death, which he references as
maturation, and thus the sexual initiation, or entrance into “womanhood” becomes a
literal death of, as Perry asserts, “her identity and her artistic dreams” (Perry 42). For
each of these literary scholars, the sex scene within the narrative, is the primal scene for
Mick. Their psychoanalytically inspired analyses assert that Mick’s sexual initiation is so
horrid that it restructures her identity, thereby shifting her orientation.
But each of these readings overdetermine the manner in which sex, sexual
attraction, and sexual orientation influence and traumatize Mick. By looking to Mick’s
orientation as it is expressed both before and during sex with Harry, I argue that the site
of trauma for Mick is a realization that bodily pleasure and connection with others does
not satisfy her. While she is excited by Harry and desires him sexually, the sexual act
only heightens her own knowledge that she derives more pleasure from other forms of
sensory experience. Before sex, she hears a bird, who “sang a sad, clear song she had
never heard before. One high note like an oboe—and then it sank down five tones and
called again” (McCullers 328). She is similarly oriented to a sensations regarding
location, in which she imagines herself at the Gulf of Mexico where “cool bay breezes
blew all the time” (329). Her attention is not focused on Harry, instead Mick is already
detached from the experience of her body as the sex act commences. Her mind is hearing
and imagining those things she regards as most important. Thus when she thinks during
sex that “it was like her head was broke off from her body and thrown away” (329) she
comments not on a shattering of her ego or a cleaving of the self, but at the failure of the
sex act itself to provide her with an intensity of sensation she derives from certain parts of
her environment. This sex act, therefore, emphasizes a particular form of bodily pleasure
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not connected to her mind; it is divorced from the sources she is oriented toward which
provide her with pleasure. Sex, although new, does not equal the sad song of the bird, the
Gulf breezes, or the “blinding sun” (329). Instead, sex is not satisfying; it does not create
a level of intimacy with others similar to the intimacy she receives from sensory
experiences. She mentions as much to Harry when she says, “I didn’t like that” (330).
What she likes most is music, and she cannot seem to share her desire for music or
experience a relationship with someone else who fosters this desire. Instead, she
determines that her love for music is too strange, her goal of being a famous composer
too outlandish, such that she avoids mentioning it with those around her because “some
kind of music was too private to sing in a house cram full of people” (64). She is aware of
the discordance between her orientation to music and her environment which pressures
her to behave, dress, and be directed to goals of family and femininity. She strikes out
against these norms, telling Harry she will never get married to a man (330), and drawing
graffiti on a wall which includes the names of “EDISON . . . DICK TRACY and
MUSSOLINI,” only to overtake these capitalized male names with her initials “M.K.”
and a word that denotes her place, “PUSSY,” in relation to them (45). Here Mick denotes
the conflict present over her desires. She desires music, not relations with a boy or to
dress a particular way. She wants to be a famous composer, but this want, this
orientation, because of her gender and her class is out of reach. Thus what queers Mick is
that she not only feels odd because of how others’ view her, but also because what she
desires most is a masculine occupation, or at least an occupation encoded as masculine
courtesy of the names she scribes and routinely hears in relation to her musical longings.
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Her preoccupation is thus a seeming-impossibility for her because it involves seeking out
and maintaining a level of intensity not realizable in her environment.
10. An Orientation to Music and Sensation
Such a level of sensory intensity comes most frequently for Mick through music.
Throughout the narrative she seeks out spaces in order to listen to music. Often venturing
out alone at night, she sits under the open windows of houses in “the rich parts of town”
in order to hear music (McCullers 123). These episodes are in response to her orientation
to music. Like Paul, Mick locates open windows and radios in order to feel the rhythm
and become consumed by the melodies of famous compositions. Music is a desire that,
when the object of the desire is absent, she desires more greatly. But unlike Paul, Mick
also wants to participate in the creation of music; creation of music provides her with
even more opportunity to listen to seductive melodies and chords. Because she is
consumed by her orientation to music, listening to it is simply not enough to satisfy her
needs and as a result, she seeks out more spaces in which to fulfill her desire to listen.
Listening inspires her desire to create and in turn, her creations demand that she locates
more material in order to listen.
Her orientation appears throughout the narrative when she finds herself
publically, and uncontrollably humming a “piece by a fellow named Mozart” (135) in
front of others. She locates a piano in a crowded gymnasium where she is often “hit on
the head with a ball” in order to practice the instrument and begin her compositions
(193). These moments are comprised of learning chords and scales, repeating pieces she
hears from other sources, and composing new music. Mick finds that composing “was
better than just copying tunes. When her hands hunted out these beautiful new sounds it
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was the best feeling she had ever known” (193). Composition is powerful for Mick. It is
not just alluring; it is something that affects her with a level of intensity she cannot locate
elsewhere. Composing music holds such strong resonance that Mick expresses herself
through it; she believes that her identity, even realness as a person, depends on it. Her
devotion to music as art becomes a way of measuring her experience: “This was her,
Mick Kelly, walking in the daytime and by herself at night. In the hot sun and in the dark
with’ all the plans and feelings. This music was her—the real plain her” (144). The
perception of music and its sensorial experience provides Mick with a means of
registering and defining herself. Here music is not just a desired object and an object to
which Mick is oriented, music is also the means through which she experiences her
world. Music provides Mick with an apparatus to see her world; through it, her
experience to time changes and it engenders in her a sense of being. Sensory experience
invests, as Merleau-Ponty writes, a perceiving body with “value” in so far as the
relationship between the body and the sense experience, and vice-versa, articulate
“communication with the world” (Merleau-Ponty, PoP 61).
The “value” of music for Mick is not just her response to it but its capacity to
affect her by bringing into focus her own desires. In effect, listening to music enacts and
further shapes Mick’s orientation to it. Greater experience with music shapes her
orientation and as such this orientation to music, to sensory experience, and ultimately to
a fantasy that she can locate a space to consistently experience things of that nature come
to overtake Mick. One evening she finds herself out walking: “she walked slow . . . for a
long time she walked without noticing the direction” (McCullers 140-141). She finds that
she had been drawn to the house where she often listens to music but this evening “the
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radio was no good . . . somebody sang popular songs that all ended in the same way. It
was like she was empty” (141). Here Mick evaluates music according to how it makes
her feel. Popular music, lacking in novelty, is something she does not desire, as
evidenced by her expression of emptiness. Therefore, a specific type of music, music
which is new, or which affects her newly each time, is what she desires; this type of
music provides her with feeling such that it influences how she moves in the world.
Michael Clune, in his work Writing Against Time, outlines how literature, art, and music
have been preoccupied with time and ultimately, with how some forms of literature, art,
and music create aesthetics in order to stop time. Clune categorizes these features as
elements of the “Romantic quest to defeat time” (Clune 17). For Clune, the Romantics
endeavor to deny the “temporal constraints of perception” (19). As such, the quest to
defeat time is the quest to make a work of literature, art, or music as something which is
perceived as novel or new with each encounter. In Mick, this impulse to defeat time is
also the product of a queer orientation toward a fantasy composed of sensory experience.
It is akin to Paul’s “orgies of the living,” something to which Paul is oriented but
cannot fully locate. Mick too finds it difficult. At first she fails to find her kind of music
on the radio at the house, and setting out to leave a new program begins by playing
Beethoven’s Third Symphony. She initially “only halfway listened because she wanted to
walk some more and she didn’t care much what they played. Then the music started.
Mick raised her head and her fist went up to her throat” (142). This music is new to Mick,
when she encounters the same symphony later it retains this newness, and this defining
trait interrupts her movement. She initially set out to walk away from the open window.
This evening she determines she would not experience the elation that music provides.
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Then the symphony begins and her movement stops. She is frozen and “only the first part
of the music was hot inside her heart. She could not even hear what sounded after, but
she sat there waiting and froze, with her fists tight” (142). Music is power and it is
powerful; it has the ability to affect Mick and its effect changes how she experiences her
world. With music, Mick’s heart burns with intensity. Without music, or without music
that retains newness, Mick is left feeling isolated.
11. Conclusion
While Mick locates spaces where her internal and external orientations fuse
through the sensation provided by music, she never accomplishes making that fusion in
space permanent. Because she is requested to work in order to help support her family
and lacks the requisite training to pursue a musical career, Mick is inhibited from always
experiencing the object of her expressed desires. Class is therefore a limiting factor for
her, and for others in McCullers’ narrative, in locating in any permanent fashion the
object of one’s orientation. Class also assists in marking her orientation as queer. She is
too poor and too uneducated, musically speaking, in order to fully develop the musical
talents she believes she possesses. Although class is a limiting agent, because Mick is
also oriented to sensory pleasure from listening to music, she does locate moments in
time to satisfy her desires. What she cannot do is make those moments more permanent.
This inability to make permanent or experience more permanently the object to which
one is oriented is also similar to Paul in Cather’s short story. The sensations she derives
from music can only be consistently experienced if she were to possess the financial
ability to not work or the ability to pursue music as a career. Therefore, although music
maintains importance for her such that she assumes payments of a radio, she is denied
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access to music as an occupation because of her economic status and gender—a point she
makes when she writes the names of male composers on a wall.
The inclusion of external factors which limit a queer orientation separates
McCullers’ narrative from West’s. While West’s characters are never described as
wealthy or of possessing enough income in which to exist a leisurely lifestyle, income
does not appear to inhibit Tod’s ability to experience his orientation to aesthetics and to
perceiving his world through a framework derived from this orientation. Although Tod’s
community is composed of only him, his evaluation of his environment through his
aesthetic ideals means that he comes to experience every facet of his existence through
his framework. Because his orientation concerns his perspectives on aesthetics and it is
something primarily located in his narration, his mind, and his art, his wealth does not
preclude him the types of experiences he desires most. This means that his queer
orientation to art exists unimpeded from the dominant social and cultural norms which, if
he were not in Hollywood, would most likely affect him.
The case of Tod’s queer orientation is an outlier in this dissertation because unlike
Paul or Mick, he is not subjected to the same level of intervention socially and culturally.
Tod experiences white male privilege, stemming from his upbringing to his time at Yale,
and although he is oriented in a queer manner, his queerness is more permissible both as
a result of his location and his station. The experiences of Paul and Mick demonstrate a
different response to a queer orientation. While Paul is also white and male, he faces
punishment and expulsion from school because of his attitude and dress, and he also
faces legal ramifications for endeavoring to access a community of similarly appointed
people without working for or possessing the money necessary to do so. Mick is policed
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by her family and community because of her non-normative expressions of gender and
her passion for music is hampered because of the economic needs of her family and the
social and cultural norms associated with young women.
The next chapter builds upon these elements associated with a queer orientation
and identity by looking to two characters from James Baldwin’s Another Country and
examining how identity politics, stigma, and bigotry influence the ability to pursue one’s
expressed desires if they are queer.
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Chapter 3: Orientation to Suffering
1. Introduction
In the Introduction to this dissertation, I argue that Paul from Cather’s “Paul’s
Case” possesses a queer orientation because he rejects social norms regarding behavior,
education, and work, and instead expresses a desire for an aesthetic lifestyle he believes
he can experience more robustly in New York City. The desire for an aesthetic lifestyle
replaces the values his family and community hold and endeavor to instill in him in
Pittsburgh. The second chapter outlines the manner in which Tod Hackett and Mick
Kelly, from West’s The Day of the Locust and McCullers’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter,
possess a queer orientation toward artistic aesthetics and sensory derived from music.
Tod is oriented to various artistic style which he expressed through an aesthetic
sensibility derived from the works of Italian fantasist painters and Mick is oriented to
musical novelty. These desires articulate the characters’ experiences such that each finds
themselves looking for objects, spaces, and sensations that satisfy their desires. At the
same time, because of their orientation these objects become a part of their orientation;
they approach their environment through a framework rooted in what they desire most.
For Tod, this framework can be seen early in the narrative through his analysis and
interpretation of his surroundings. As the narrative progresses, this framework becomes
more consuming, and he can no longer differentiate between his interpretation and what
is happening around him. His orientation, because it rejects social norms regarding
personal behavior and social interaction, changes how he perceives his environment.
Mick’s orientation is similarly constructed in so far as she prefers the sensations she
derives from music such that she neglects to build relationships with others. In all three
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works of literary fiction, a queer orientation is identified through a rejection or dismissal
of norms. Paul, Tod, and Mick all reject or dismiss norms because they interfere with
their ability to desire something. Whether this rejection or dismissal is successful is less
important because each character still possesses a queer orientation to the objects,
aesthetics, and concepts that they desire and which, in turn, renders their orientations
non-normative.
Although written nearly 40 years apart, West’s and McCullers’s works comport
with elements of Cather’s narrative and when taken together, they begin to reshape how
scholars of literature can approach discussions of queer orientation and ultimately queer
desire. Paul, Tod, and Mick are not queer because they express desire for same-sex
objects as same-sex desire is noticeably absent from their narratives; instead, they are
queer because their orientations position them as askew in relation to culturally accepted
norms regarding behavior. Each of these characters are orientated to an aesthetic of dress,
behavior, and space, an artistic aesthetic, or sensation that is non-normative. Were a
reading of Paul, Tod, or Mick’s queerness to only focus on non-heterosexual, and
therefore, non-normative sexual orientations, then a more complex understanding of each
characters’ orientations by way of experience and desire articulated through a framework
for perception would be lost. For example, in the case of Tod, same-sex desire is absent
from the text; he is by all accounts a heterosexual man. But Tod’s heterosexuality does
not preclude him from experiencing his world through a queer orientation because what
he desires most, as evidenced by his expression for aesthetics, is not normatively
heterosexual in nature. His desire for aesthetics trumps his heterosexuality and this means
that in order to fully excavate the narrative, a new lens for discussing desire is necessary.
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A quasi-phenomenological approach demonstrates Paul’s, Tod’s, and Mick’s queerness
as the result of their relationship to the spaces they inhabit and the social and behavioral
norms which govern those spaces. In addition to their queer orientations with relation to
object choice, these characters also appear to seek spaces in which their orientations
might be shared with others, in essence, they look to exist within communities of likeminded people. But, while they seek communities composed of similarly oriented people,
they are not invested in nor do they work to foster the development of such a community.
They do not seek to share or nurture the development of relationships with others like
them. In essence, much as the characters themselves reject norms in favor of fulfilling
their expressed desire for certain objects, aesthetics, and concepts, they also reject norms
which govern association with others. They simply wish to exist in a space where their
orientations are not the subject of ridicule, oppression, or limitation.
This chapter builds upon what the Introduction and Chapter 2 argue in relation to
queer orientation in 20th-century American literature by looking to how characters in
James Baldwin’s Another Country are oriented in their world. Baldwin’s characters
experience a diverse set of orientations. Rufus, for example, is oriented to his family and
friends, music, and different types of communities. He also expresses a desire for none of
these things because he, at times, openly describes himself as seeking out isolation,
rebuking communal investment, and pursuing a queer sexuality with both men and
women. Rufus admits to desiring suffering through these actions described here, but
because of his identity as an African-American, ‘bisexual,’ man, his desires are thwarted
by the complexity of his identity’s intersections with social norms disseminating from
various groups and communities. In contrast, Vivaldo, a friend of Rufus and a fellow
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artist, similarly expresses a desire for suffering. Because he is not beholden to the same
intersectional arrangements and social pressures, his desires are met with fewer
limitations. As a result, Vivaldo comes to experience a queer orientation toward suffering
as a lifestyle, as an artistic attitude, a mode of experience, and a framework to perceive
his environment. In the narrative, both Rufus and Vivaldo’s experiences and desires can
be seen through their relationship to and interpretation of blues music. They both
interpret the blues by focusing on suffering but only Vivaldo sees suffering as something
ultimately desirable and at times pleasurable. Rufus’ experiences of pleasure are more
complex because of the way his identity intersects with suffering and with social norms,
writ large.
In Baldwin’s Another Country, I examine how the narrative describes Rufus’
many orientations to both normative and non-normative objects and ideas and Vivaldo’s
queer orientation through their atypical relationship to suffering, how the experience of
suffering and a desire to suffer produces a framework, and how an orientation, or a desire
to be oriented to suffering, in the case of Rufus, structures communal formation. What
renders a character as queer, here evidenced through a relationship to suffering not
interested in narratives of transformation or overcoming, reshapes how they respond to
others and how they experience themselves. I look to suffering within the narrative
because it is an experience to which the main characters are oriented or desire to be
oriented. Rufus sees suffering as a component of his life. He experiences suffering
because of his identity. That he, at times, appears to desire suffering marks those
moments in the narrative as queer because of sufferings relationship to social norms. In
contrast, Vivaldo sees suffering as a way to experience not just himself in relation to his
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environment, but also as a means of being a writer. To write is to suffer. An example of
this orientation is made most clearly evident through Richard’s account of his wife Cass’s
evaluation of writers. Richard, when speaking about how Cass evaluates him as a writer,
notes that: “Cass doesn’t like writers . . . not if they make a living at it, anyway. She
thinks writers should never cease starving and whoring around” (Baldwin 245). Although
this account is second-hand and although Cass attempts to deny Richard’s evaluation of
how she approaches writing as a craft, Cass repeatedly rejects Richard as a successful
author because she does not value his written word. She states that she is not “attracted to
any of those literary colonies” that he wants to join, a critique of the type of writers who
exist within such spaces (245). She also references her husband, who is published and
mildly successful, as not a “real writer” and instead, she upholds Vivaldo, her friend and
a person struggling to put words to the page, as someone who may indeed become one
(275). Cass’s relationship to a writer’s behavior and to suffering, here outlined through
her understanding of writing, is but one example of the manner in which characters
within Baldwin’s narrative orient themselves to suffering as a concept, as a lifestyle, as
an aesthetic, and as an orientation to the world. Cass prefers suffering because for her it
may create a “real writer,” rather than simply a person who caves to the artistic pressures
of the public.18 The “real writer,” if Richard’s description of Cass is accurate, is one who
consistently struggles, and this consistent struggle disconnects from narratives concerning
progression and transformation.
I focus on the relationship of characters within the narrative to suffering and how
this relationship disconnects from models of transformation because transformation or
18
This is similar to Tod’s aversion to certain types of art.
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removing oneself from that which causes suffering is a normative model. Dominant
cultural and social norms present happiness as the thing to which one should be oriented,
a concept made clear in Ahmed’s Promise of Happiness and Lauren Berlant’s Cruel
Optimism.19 Ahmed argues that happiness, or “the very promise of happiness is what you
get for having the right associations” because “to be on the side of happiness . . . means
that you are on the side of the good” (Ahmed 2-204). Ahmed’s work points to a
phenomenology of happiness, whereby happiness is offered as a model for appropriate
means of orientation. Ahmed traces happiness as desirable, whereas suffering and other
stereotypically negative states are things that should be overcome. Baldwin’s characters
disconnect or want to disconnect from this model of overcoming; they instead are
oriented to suffering and this orientation results in them locating pleasure through
objects, actions, and spaces which induce suffering. In some ways, this orientation to
suffering looks like an orientation to masochism, whereby the characters might be said to
prefer the pain that suffering produces over the possibility of pleasure that happiness
through transformation and a movement away from suffering might provide.
Additionally, the characters’ orientations toward suffering could be read as a form of
resignation. Such a reading presumes that the characters would prefer something other
than to suffer, and for all except Rufus, this does not hold true. What I argue instead, is
that the portrayal of a queer orientation to the experience of suffering in Baldwin’s
narrative divests from the norm because it rejects normative ideas regarding not just
transformation, but also how people experience pleasure. To suffer means to endure or to
19
Berlant crafts an argument wherein optimism is tied to normative narratives. For her, optimism, is an
aim and optimism is often attached to objects in that one must aim for those objects.
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sustain loss or damage. Therefore, an expressed desire for suffering would involve an
expressed desire to endure and to sustain the experiences that condition suffering.
If Paul, Tod, and Mick receive pleasure not through human connection but rather
as the result of objects, aesthetics, and experiences, then Baldwin’s characters too can be
read as receiving pleasure through objects and situations which result from their
orientation to suffering. This orientation is seen through how the characters interact with
and experience their world, the objects to which they are directed, and the framework
through which they evaluate their surroundings. I argue that this orientation to suffering
is most notably seen through their relationship to and interpretation of the blues. If the
characters are oriented to the experience of suffering, then the blues is part of that larger
experience. They listen to the blues and they experience the music and the lyrics through
an interpretative framework associated with suffering. Interpreting the blues as a musical
genre invested in suffering is not new. Scholars have long discussed the use of the blues
as providing a means of expression, in essence an outlet, for negative experiences
including suffering.20 What Baldwin’s characters do that is different, however, is divest
from the notion that suffering is a temporary condition. They do not desire reaching for
something better, or the promise of something better, and within the narrative their desire
20
For more discussion of the relationship between suffering and the blues see Ulrich Adelt’s Blues Music
in the Sixties: A Story in Black and White. Adelt discusses interpretations of the blues that often reduce it
to a musical form about “suffering and suffering alone” (Adelt 100). Adelt’s analysis critiques the
appropriation by white artists of the blues and what is seen as a “commodification of suffering” whereby
people address suffering as something which ails everyone (77). Other works of criticism, including David
Evans’ “Bessie Smith’s ‘Back-Water Blues’: the story behind the song,” discuss the experiences of suffering
which shaped Smith’s music. These experiences include racial hatred but also other phenomena including
natural disasters. Other works comment on Baldwin’s own use of the blues, specifically in “Sonny’s Blues.”
John Claborn notes that suffering is communal and that it is an inevitable part of black experience (92).
These interpretations of the blues as including the experience of suffering, also discuss redemption in
some form. One suffers because it is one’s lot, but suffering might beget redemption (especially by way of
Christian belief). In Another Country, this redemptive narrative is disconnected from the experience of the
blues.
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to suffer reshapes how they imagine themselves in terms of the future and in relation to
social and behavioral norms. In this chapter I analyze the orientations of Rufus and
Vivaldo to suffering and to the blues. Rufus possesses multiple orientations one of which
has him interpret the blues and, in turn, see suffering as desirable. However, Rufus is torn
in that he is influenced by multiple communities (black, white, straight, artistic). He
simultaneously wants to not disappoint members of these communities and yet he
expresses a desire to extricate himself from their influence and gaze. Thus his desires to
both please and separate himself from outside influences and others position him in this
dissertation as a character whose capacity to feel directed or oriented is limited. His
identity restricts his ability to simply reject social norms, let alone divest from them. As a
result, his varied orientations produce a great sense of disorientation and disillusionment.
Vivaldo is a character whose orientation toward suffering is not fully developed until he
experiences what it means to suffer, both at the hands of his lover, Ida, and as a result of
his often fraught relationship to his writing and his environment. Vivaldo, however,
possesses what Rufus does not, privilege, whiteness, a more simplified intersectional
identity. Thus by the conclusion of Baldwin’s narrative, Vivaldo is firmly attached to his
orientation toward suffering. By looking to and re-reading these characters in relation to
suffering and the blues and by understanding how their orientations are presented, this
chapter offers a new understanding of Baldwin’s narrative which is traditionally read
within literary criticism as a fictional work engaging primarily with questions of identity
and identity politics. Therefore, for traditional literary criticism, the objects and
experiences found desirable by subjects are in response to or available because of a
character’s identity. Instead, by considering the blues, a desire for suffering, and the
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experience of pleasure through suffering, I argue that orientation more thoroughly
explains the characters’ relationship to their world and their identities by accounting for
how their experiences and their desires are mutually constitutive. Queer orientations thus
describe and delineate a relationship to the world rooted in the experiential.
2. Concerning the Outlier in Another Country: The Blues, Literary Criticism,
Identity, and Rufus
The importance of the blues to Baldwin and his narratives cannot be overstated.
Josh Kun, when cataloguing the relationship Baldwin had to Bessie Smith and the blues,
claims that Smith’s songs and their inclusion within his writing “reveals as much about
his approach to race as it does about his belief in the possibilities of gay male desire”
(Kun 309). Kun draws from Baldwin’s own admission, found in his “The Discovery of
What It Means to Be an American,” that Smith, “through her tone and cadence . . . helped
me to dig back to the way I myself must have spoken when I was a pickaninny . . . she
helped to reconcile me to being a ‘nigger’” (Baldwin, Nobody 5). What Baldwin claims
here in his essay on his relationship to America, once living in France, and what Kun
notes, in his analysis of the blues and Smith, is that the blues connects Baldwin to his
history, both familial and lived. This connection provides Baldwin with an apparatus to
understand his racialization. Baldwin further notes, in his essay on the “The Uses of the
Blues,” that Smith and her genre of music allow African Americans, through listening, to
think beyond race (Baldwin, Blues 164). This thinking beyond race, or transcendence, as
Kun argues serves as a point of entry to discuss Baldwin’s Another Country, its
incorporation of the blues, and its characters for scholars (Kun 313). The blues for them
becomes a vehicle by which to explore and explain the characters, their relationships to
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one another, and their desires as looking to transcend the conditions outlined within the
blues.
I agree that the blues function as an in road to Baldwin’s larger narrative, and I
also agree that the relationship that each character holds toward the blues is bound up
through expressions of desire. Where I diverge from Kun, and from other works of
literary criticism, is in the depiction of the relationship or orientation expressed between
the characters and the blues. The characters within Baldwin’s narrative are oriented to the
blues both for emotional and aesthetic reasons and they approach the blues and their
environment through a framework of suffering. This framework articulates both their
experiences of suffering and their desire to suffer, even if they also hold other desires that
are antagonistic to suffering as a model. My understanding is a departure from the
manner in which literary criticism has worked with the blues in Another Country.
Baldwin’s use of the blues is approached tangentially by Kevin Ohi, who notes that
Bessie Smith’s lyrics interrupt the text to serve as a reminder of “grief” and as a callback
to Rufus’ death earlier in the narrative (Ohi 275). For Ohi, Smith’s songs are therefore a
device to remind both the reader and the characters within the narrative of past tragedy.
They are affective devices, a point also made by Adam T. Jerrigan, who reads the
inclusion of Smith’s “Backwater Blues” as “plaintive” and as “mimetically” connected to
Rufus (Jerrigan 190). Jerrigan looks to a passage where Rufus and his friend Vivaldo are
together and Smith’s song plays in the background on a phonograph as support for his
claim. This passage shows Rufus listening to Smith and that he approaches Bessie’s
lyrics as if for the first time through a new method of analysis. He is drawing from his
own experiences and desires as a way to interpret and connect with the blues:
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“for the first time Rufus began to hear, in the severely understated monotony of
this blues, something which spoke to his troubled mind. The piano bore the singer
witness, stoic, and ironic. Now that Rufus himself had no place to go—‘cause my
house fell down and I can’t live there no mo’, sang Bessie—he heard the line and
the tone of the singer, and he wondered how others had moved beyond the
emptiness and horror which faced him now” (Baldwin 49)
Smith’s lyrics, in which her home is no longer standing, evokes Rufus’ sense of isolation
and his homelessness. He recently is without a job, a home, or the stability these things
provide, and this loss of a home resonates with his feeling of isolation from Vivaldo and,
more generally, his peers. Working through the lyrics and how they echo his own
experience, Rufus wonders how others have progressed away from a state of suffering.
He wonders how they have escaped. Jerrigan argues that this passage points to Rufus’
desire for escape, that Rufus by wondering how others have “moved beyond” elicits his
own desire for a similar progression. While it might be easy to imagine this act of
wondering as an expression of his desire for escape, the narrative belies this intention.
Instead, Rufus notes the improbable nature of progression, that he finds it impossible to
“forget” especially those experiences “that hurt so badly, went so deep, and changed the
world forever” (50-51). Here Rufus makes known his understanding that experience
cannot be escaped; experience articulates his relationship to the world in the present. His
past experiences evoke his emotional state, and it shapes his own orientation to the
world—here it represents his orientation to past relationships, and it indicates how he
desires his orientation to be understood. His interpretation of the blues codifies such an
understanding of the past as always shaping his present. Therefore, for Rufus, the act of
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wondering presents a conundrum: how do people not just escape the present, but also the
past? Unfortunately for Rufus, his asking the question speaks to the impossibility of the
answer. There is no escape from his past experiences as he already acknowledges. And
yet, Rufus still wonders.
To wonder, as Rufus does, is to acknowledge the existence of narratives which
portray escape and progression as not just desirable, but also possible. While Rufus
understands that others have achieved escape, he does not know how they have done so.
In addition, his realization that such a thing for him is impossible means that his
relationship to and his interpretation of the blues is more complicated than simply
desiring suffering. Ohi’s argument that the inclusion of the blues is for affective effect, or
Jerrigan’s argument that the blues are sentimental because they similarly provide an
“affective field” which works as a symbol of harmony and dissonance within the
narrative (Jerrigan 191) positions the blues as metaphor. The blues trace the innerworkings of the characters for the reader. These statements are partially true in so far as it
appears that Smith’s “Backwater Blues” affects Rufus by reinforcing his own relationship
to experience. However, Rufus is oriented to elements of the blues, or what he determines
the blues to mean as a result of his framework. Within this framework, “Backwater
Blues” is a representation of Rufus’ experience; its affective power lies in its capacity to
resonate as a musical version of Rufus’ experience. It is a “witness” to his experience, as
Jerrigan rightly claims (Jerrigan 191). How the blues are interpreted also points to them
as an object or state of desire. Rufus’ wondering about experience, escape, and suffering
means that he desires some element of the blues.
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The blues are, however, not the same for Vivaldo. While they provide experiential
wonderment in the case of Rufus, they articulate a certain form of joy, wrapped up in the
simultaneous experience of pain and pleasure, in the case of Vivaldo. For example, while
Rufus reflects on Smith’s lyrics, Vivaldo is also listening to the words, and his response
is quite different. Vivaldo responds to Smith’s voice by requesting more. He speaks to
Smith, inviting that she “sing it” (Baldwin 51), a sign that he connects to the lyrics in a
different manner from Rufus. Whereas Rufus responds to the lyrics by wondering about
the experience of others in addition to his own experiences, Vivaldo experiences a form
of sensory pleasure derived, in part, from his own experiences. Their relationship to the
music is self-reflexive. The blues remind both Vivaldo and Rufus of past experience, but
Vivaldo extracts moments of pleasure and delight from the reliving of and reexperiencing of past turmoil, whereas Rufus can only sporadically locate a desire for
suffering.
The difference between how Vivaldo and Rufus respond to the blues and to
suffering is important when considering and understanding both characters and their
importance to the narrative. Readings which incorporate a reading of the blues only do so
to note Rufus’ sense of isolation or as commentary on his race. They often neglect to note
that Vivaldo, Ida, Eric, and Cass also experience isolation and that the blues articulates
how each responds their isolation. For the other central characters in the narrative, the
blues both describe the pain and pleasure that are bound up in their experience of
isolation and they similarly reference their desire to suffer. Vivaldo, like the others,
embraces, or at least comes to embrace, his relationship to suffering which he perceives
as central to the blues, a point I will discuss in a later section of this chapter. Rufus,
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however, cannot fully embrace his experience of suffering. To embrace suffering would
mean to not wonder about how others escape; it would mean accepting and delighting in
one’s experiences no matter their quality. Instead, Rufus only desires suffering at specific
moments when the pleasure he experiences is most extreme, like when he is having sex.
He desires suffering less at other moments because he identifies suffering as a condition
which outsiders create. He sees outside groups as disappointed with him and this causes
him to suffer. While he might describe himself as uninterested in these viewpoints, he
also wants to experience inclusion in different communities. He speaks to love and
acceptance. He often contradicts these notions of acceptance by seeking out anonymity,
through which he rebukes any and all relationships with others. As a result, Rufus
experiences multiple-orientations. He is oriented in multiple directions and to multiple
objects and the multiplicity of his orientation means that he does not take up one position
entirely. Thus he appears as continuously disoriented because the objects to which he is
oriented change depending on his desires and their relationship to the social and
behavioral norms which pressure him to act in certain ways.
Rufus’ experience of disorientation results from his relationship to social norms
and community pressures. Unlike Vivaldo, who enjoys privilege as a white male which
allows him to disconnect from and reject social norms, Rufus, as a black, bisexual man,
cannot simply disavow norms. If social norms expect one to eclipse suffering, or to view
suffering as a condition one must transgress, then Vivaldo only experiences social and
behavioral norms which disseminate from his own white community. Rufus experiences
norms from both black and white communities. Were he to reject those norms which
disseminate from white people, he would potentially face injury and harm. Were he to
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reject those norms which disseminate from the black community, he would also face
some form of injury or harm. Rufus experiences an intersection of norms from various
communities that make it difficult, if not impossible to escape from one set of them.
Thus, the agency Rufus has over his own experience and desire is more limited. In
Baldwin’s narrative, we see him desire certain types of orientations, but his attachment to
both black and white communities largely limit how these desires are expressed. As a
result, I read Rufus’ disorientation, in essence his multiple orientations, as him not
possessing an orientation. He never experiences a directedness within the narrative;
although, he does articulate a desire to feel oriented. A queer orientation, although slanted
or askew in nature, functions as an orientation, as does a normative orientation. Rufus
never fully engages with or expresses either orientation in full. Rufus can neither fully
reject norms nor does he fully embrace the non-normative. This makes him different from
the other characters who reject norms and experience an orientation which includes a
desire for suffering (seen in Vivaldo’s evocation of Bessie Smith).
In the next sections, I discuss Rufus’ multiple orientations and their relationship
to intersectional identity. I approach these orientations through a discussion of the
intersection of race, gender, and sex that manifest through sexual attraction and sexual
intercourse. I conclude my discussion of Rufus by analyzing his expressed desire to be
queer and how this desire is not allowed for him because of his race, gender, and
sexuality and that it also conflicts with his desire for a more normative orientation. I then
turn my discussion to Vivaldo and his orientation to suffering.
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3. Rufus and the Question of Race
Rufus’ disorientation is both a byproduct of his experiences and his desires
regarding inclusion and transcendence, or rejection and rebuke. These seemingly
disparate orientations are described from the moment Rufus is introduced within the
narrative. Here, walking the streets, Rufus is torn between nourishing his bodily needs—
sustenance and release—and avoiding all human contact because of shame regarding his
appearance. He at once thinks about being seen by an old acquaintance who would “lay
enough bread on him for a meal or a least a subway fare” while also hoping “that he
would not be recognized” (Baldwin 4). The tension he experiences between desires for
both recognition and anonymity demonstrates a problem for Rufus. On the one hand, he
wants to be left alone; he appears to outwardly embrace disconnection. On the other
hand, he is directed by social norms which expect him to behave in a particular manner.
In this same scene where his bodily hunger is at war with his desire to remain
unrecognized, Rufus refuses to enter a bar he formerly frequented for fear of both
recognition and of the experience of shame that this recognition will enact. This shame
connects with knowing Rufus and the history that he can neither escape nor desire to
forget. He thinks that, “they could scarcely bear their knowledge, nor could they have
borne the sight of [him], but they knew why he was in the streets tonight, why he rode the
subways all night long, why his stomach growled” (4). Here Rufus acknowledges how
the threat of being seen or recognized is the threat of being known. He does not wish to
be known as another victim and he does not wish to be acknowledged as having failed as
a musician and as a black man. His backstory of having dated both white women and
men, having violently and routinely assaulted one of them, and having worked as a
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prostitute who makes money from men would all condition him outside of the warm
embrace of his community because he does not easily fit into prescribed norms regarding
race, sex, and gender.
Therefore, Rufus experiences a sort of tearing. He is torn between an orientation
to a community which previously included him, albeit briefly, and an orientation away
from this community which he experiences as judgmental. One orientation is beholden to
norms which are derived socially by way of his family and community and which govern
the manner in which he interacts with the larger black community and his family; his
other orientation, demonstrated through his relationships with white women and men and
his desire to be left alone are cast as inappropriate according to norms and discourses
which seek to limit the expression of certain desires along racial, gendered, and sexual
lines. When reflecting on growing up, he recalls how his family and community believed
him to be a “’bright kid,’ that he would ‘go places’; and they made it clear that they
expected him to go, to which places did not matter” (61). Whereas his community
possesses a desire for Rufus to make it and for him to be an exemplary model of a black
citizen, he finds himself incapable of following in this preordained path. He internally
divests from this model of living. He believes that “he did not belong to them” (61), a
sign of his expressed desire for control over his own life and its direction. Although he
manages to internally disconnect from normative models of progress, he also does not
entirely break free from these models because it would install a more permanent sense of
loneliness and isolation.
To embrace loneliness would mean to be at peace with the concept and Rufus
identifies himself, along with many others, as not possessing the “equipment with which
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to enter” a space of “solitude” (60). Instead, Rufus exists in limbo not fully committed to
or wanting of either of his dueling orientations. This tension between norms which
disseminate from his family, friends, community, and society governing how he behaves,
whom he dates, and what actions he performs are largely a result of his race, gender, and
sexuality. The relationship between social and family pressure and Rufus’ identity is the
subject of much scholarship. Often this tension is understood by other scholars as only
derived from his identity and how his identity creates experience. Rufus is therefore
understood and critiqued through lenses which dissect his race and his sexuality and the
manner in which these categories of identity, and sometimes their intersections, produce
an interior sense of disorientation in an environment which sees both black and bisexual
as problematic.
Guy Mark Foster, detailing the history of scholarship on Baldwin’s narrative,
notes that prior to the 1970s, the “dominant white (literary) establishment . . .
condescended to view Baldwin through the lens of his Civils Rights activism” (Foster
395), which means reading Rufus as participating in a dialogue with societal desires for
equality and rights. Later forms of scholarship, especially those who approached Baldwin
through the lenses of critical race or queer theory, compartmentalized or “subdivided
Baldwin” into his component parts (395). This means that readings of Baldwin were
produced through an understanding of his identity, an identity which is ontologically
fixed (black or gay or civil rights minded because of his race) and that readings of his
narratives used his identity to focus again on race and sexuality as entry points into
understanding Rufus and his political purpose.21 This political purpose is, as Aliyyah I.
21
A significant amount of scholarship discusses Baldwin in relation to political movements shaped by race
including black power and gay liberation. See Matt Bell’s “Black Ground, Gay Figure: Working through
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Abdur-Rahman argues, that Baldwin’s narrative through Rufus, his suicide, and the
response to his death by other characters within the narrative repudiates “standards of
masculinity and racial imperatives that exert repressive control.” (Abdur-Rahman 108).
Abdur-Rahman notes that after Rufus’ suicide, his friends notably seek out “love,
equality, and brotherhood” and that ultimately this denotes Baldwin’s desire to “see
realized in the United States . . . equal protection and equal access . . . without regard for
their sexuality, gender, or race” (108). Therefore, Baldwin’s narrative becomes symbolic
of the push for civil rights not just as they relate to race but to all manner of
identification.
Outside politics similarly infuse the scholarship of Stefanie Dunning, who argues
that the Baldwin’s narrative critiques nationalist discourses, and specifically Black
Nationalist discourses, through Rufus who fails to be masculine enough because of his
sexuality. Therefore, she notes that the narrative is a “meditation about the issues of
nationalism through the tropes of racial and sexual desire” (Dunning 104). Dunning reads
instances of interracial same-sex eroticism in the narrative as exposing “that our racial
and sexual selves can never be homogenous or circumscribed” (99). While Dunning
notes that Rufus complicates discourses that endeavor to essentialize experience as the
result of a fixed category of identity, her argument relies on the assumption that the
interplay between race, sexuality, and gender is the only method through which to
understand how a person experiences the world. Foster’s conclusion is similar to
Dunning’s in so far as he produces an intersectional reading which seeks to complicate
Another Country.” See Robert Scott for discussions of the rhetoric of black power used in Another Country.
See Barry Gross for discussions of blackness. See Douglas Taylor for an analysis of Baldwin, Norman
Mailer, and Eldridge Cleaver on the role of masculinity.
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how identity is understood, and therefore the political ramifications of the novel speak to
identity as complicated and always heterogeneous.
While I do not disagree that intersectionality revises a reading of Baldwin’s
narrative because it complicates how the characters found within can be viewed, the push
to read a character only through an understanding of their categorical identity has a
tendency to reduce that character to a series of tropes often understood in relation to
Baldwin’s own biography and more broadly to American society. Additionally, when
critics point to intersectionality, they treat a character as a product of a diverse set of
identity categories. These identity categories are still approached discretely, however, and
are thought to produce the sum total of a person’s experience. I do not disagree with other
critics who note that race and sexuality, and the intersection of the two, shape experience.
But to assume that such categories of identity are the only thing through which people
experience their environment is to reduce a person, or a character as understood only as a
result of their identity. These modes of criticism also apply outside understandings of
race, sex, sexuality, and gender to the narrative. This means that criticism reads and treats
the characters symbolically as analogs to an external politics. For example, Rufus,
because he is black, male, and bisexual, is understood to desire or envision a space for his
diverse identities to exist removed from systems of oppression. This understanding is
rooted in the commonly held belief that people who are oppressed desire nothing more
than to remove the yolk of oppression and be welcomed into a diverse, and therefore,
heterogeneous society. But, as argued earlier, this desire for escape is complicated and
undermined by Rufus’ own realization that such a thing is not possible, nor necessarily
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desirable for him. Instead, part of Rufus expresses a desire for suffering as evidenced by
the types of relationships he seeks out and how he performs when in those relationships.
By looking to and considering Rufus’ own orientation to race and sexuality, I
argue that external politics do not account for the complex relationship Rufus possesses
toward his own race and sexuality. For example, readings that only look to those
instances within the narrative where Rufus is most aware of his identity belies Rufus’
own experience of disorientation and how his experience of disorientation is derived from
a framework associated with norms and expressed desires for the non-normative. When
reflecting on his previous relationship with Eric, Rufus notes that he “had despised him
because he came from Alabama” (Baldwin 45). Readings that focus only on race point to
this passage and the descriptions of the relationship between Rufus and Eric, and later
Leona, as symbolic. Eric and Leona, both born in the South, are a “symbolic South” for
Rufus and therefore all of his actions with respect to both are configured through a binary
of North and South and black and white. Kevin Mitchell points to Rufus’ thoughts here as
evidence of his victimhood born out of the “dehumanizing legacy of slavery, southern
violence, racial oppression and Jim Crow” (Mitchell 26). Rufus therefore only
experiences his world as a result of his race and the legacies of racial suppression are
what influence his relationship to the world. At times, Rufus expresses his understanding
of his world and his interactions with others through a paradigm of race which comports
with models which expect him to be angry, and these moments are often filled with fear
and hatred. However, during other moments in the narrative, Rufus chooses to complicate
how the entrapments and historical legacies of race inform his desire. He possesses a
more complex attachment to Leona and Eric than just that of black male to white
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southerner. His relationship with Leona is one of those experiences he cannot escape in
conversation with Vivaldo, and his relationship with Eric he recalls, immediately after he
notes how he despises him because he is from the South, as also filled with joy. Here,
Rufus notes Eric’s “stormy blue eyes, his bright red hair, his halting drawl” (Baldwin 45)
and these sensations being recalled note an experiential pleasure that he can locate in the
simultaneously painful and joyous relationship he once had with Eric.
Whereas the other characters within the narrative appear to experience an
orientation toward suffering in every facet of their existence, from the quotidian, to art,
and within relationships; Rufus only engages with, finds desires for, and receives
pleasure from suffering when he is in a relationship with another person. In some senses,
to be in a relationship is to suffer as all of the characters in Baldwin’s narrative appear to
suffer more when in a relationship. To be clear, suffering also occurs outside of
relationships. To suffer is therefore a condition not dependent on one particular set of
circumstances. However, relationships make obvious suffering within the narrative. For
example, relationships allow Rufus to manage the anger he possesses for his
environment, as seen in his response to Eric’s Southern heritage, just as they also allow
for expressions of desire for the non-normative. Within a relationship he can combine his
orientation to social expectations, specifically expectations which presume him to be
enraged, with a desire for suffering. One space in which his norm-derived framework and
his outwardly expressed desire for the non-normative are potentially intertwined is when
he sexually desires another person. These spaces are both inflected by race and
experiencing the world as a racialized other as much as they are the result of an expressed
desire for the non-normative. Here the non-normative is both the white lover and the
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experience of pleasure and pain in which a relationship with a white lover, encoded as
they are racially and historically, reproduces a painful past within the throes of sexual
pleasure.
If existing in public presents Rufus as continuously disoriented as the result of
normative expectations, his own desire to satisfy those normative expectations, and his
simultaneous desire for the non-normative, then those moments in the narrative where he
engages in sex and relationships act as a temporary respite, for Rufus, to experience and
satiate non-normative desires. Sex and relationships relax or mitigate his competing
orientations. When in a relationship with another person, Rufus appears to not be bound
by certain social expectations, although expectations still do circulate in his awareness.
For example, when he begins dating Leona the pull Rufus experiences between norms
governing behavior, “he wanted to hear her story,” and his expressed desire for continued
isolation, “and he wanted to know nothing about her” encapsulate his inner turmoil (22).
On the one hand, Rufus identifies with the assertion that traditional relationships involve
communication, sharing, and knowledge. On the other hand, Rufus appears to desire none
of these things because it detracts from, what is in this scene, sexual desire tied up in pain
and suffering for and derived from Leona. The desire to not know also calls back to an
earlier moment within the narrative in which Rufus does not wish to be known by others,
even though that moment chronologically occurs after he has met Leona. Similar tension
between norms and expressed desire also complicate and further layer this sexual
relationship with Leona. Norms critique and make illegal their relations, and the potential
to break norms by rejecting regulations governing interracial sex and relationships makes
the sex act and the future relationship with her that much more alluring. Thus, the
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relationship he has with Leona and an earlier one with Eric, are notable for their capacity
to enliven Rufus. His relationships are also notable because they are private. Without the
gaze of his family, community, and society, Rufus appears as in greater control and this is
demonstrated within the text through Rufus’ ability to temporarily experience an
orientation because he feels himself to be directed.
Rufus experiences himself as directed or oriented within the narrative when he
engages in queer sex (meaning sex which is non-normative). These moments articulate a
queer orientation directed at experiencing simultaneous bouts of pain and pleasure tied up
with narratives of suffering often encoded literally and metaphorically in the sex act. In
essence, the sexual act becomes a repository for an aesthetics derived from suffering.
Pleasure and pain are also the result of the way in which these sexual acts and
relationships both draw from and draw out racial narratives, perform them, and revise
them.22 In the narrative, sexual desire and the sex act itself are described as both painful
and pleasurable, a mixture of fear and freedom, and a space in which the past and the
present converge. One such instance involves Rufus and Leona having sex on the balcony
of a party. Here, he penetrates her, and the narrative describes him as “moving faster and
thrusting deeper . . . and, shortly, nothing could have stopped him, not the white God
himself nor a lynch mob arriving on wings. Under his breath he cursed the milk-white
bitch and groaned and rode his weapon between her thighs” (22). An act which begins as
peaceful, described as a “rocking and rising and falling motion, barely suggestive of the
22
Revision is a topic with a long history in the scholarship on African American literature. See Henry Louis
Gates Jr’s discussion of revision and signification in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American
Literary Criticism, in which revision involves renaming and that “to name our tradition is to rename each
of its antecedents, no matter how pale they might seem. To rename is to revise, and to revise is to
Signify” (xxiii).
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violence of the deep” (21), becomes at once a space where the language used to describe
it involves a mixture of Jim-Crow imagery, violence against women, and potential
violence against Rufus. The experience of lynching and the real threat to Rufus, as a
black man having sex with a white woman, is noted by him as he penetrates her. The
threat of lynching becomes more real as he gets closer to orgasm and his violent thrusts
are directed at giving her “something to cry about” (22, emphasis in the original) a literal
attempt to dole out as much pain as he experiences. The verbal threats he directs at Leona
coincide with his own feeling of strangulation, which is his explanation of the sensory
experience he derives from almost achieving orgasm. The pain of experience is therefore
intertwined with the almost unbearable pleasure he achieves in the culmination of
orgasm.
For other scholars, this scene is important because it recalls Rufus’ pain as a black
man and how his experience of race is entangled with Leona and love-making. AbdurRahman notes that “the grammar of rape and violent death conditions” used to describe
their sexual act is both a representation of their “genuine desire for each other” as it is
also born out of their histories (Abdur-Rahman 102). The act, therefore, becomes a
metaphor, an “acting out their nation’s racial drama” through sex (102). Similar
arguments are put forth by Mitchell and Jenny James, who locates this moment between
Leona and Rufus as symbolic of the “violence and suffering that mark twentieth-century
American race relations” (James 45). These readings look to Rufus’ and Leona’s
relationship as symbolic of a larger racial struggle. While it is true that race, racial
experience, and racism inhabit and influence the discourse surrounding the sex act here
and that the sex act assumes a tenor derived from these discourses, the sex act also
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complicates narratives of race. The language used to describe the sex is violent, but his
penetrative force and her receptive willingness are described as something which
provides both of them not just with pain, but also with extreme sensory pleasure. For
Rufus, the pain is derived in part from the optics of the act—he is with a white woman.
This pain is also extremely pleasurable for him as it positions him closer to climax. The
pleasure of orgasm is bound up with the all too real and perceived potential that is death.
He experiences them as the same thing when he “felt himself strangling, about to explode
and die” (Baldwin 22). Similarly, Leona experiences pain and pleasure. She cries, moans,
and is reduced to speaking in sentences he “couldn’t understand” (22). For both of them,
their desire for each other, a desire which is non-normative, plays out through violence,
domination, and submission and these are encoded as both something which produces
suffering and as something which also allows for a certain degree of pleasure.
When scholars read this scene as a metaphor for racism and note the imagery used
to describe the scene, they see Rufus’ actions as just reenacting the violence of racism
and the history of discrimination in America. And while the sexual act certainly performs
racist discourses, what makes this scene of note is the manner in which Rufus literally
experiences the trauma which surrounds race as something from which to receive
pleasure. He gets off on the social taboo of being with a white person just as much as he
achieves orgasm through the potential for real violence. Rufus is therefore violating
Leona and social norms while also placing himself in a situation which enacts emotional
violence on himself, through the re-experiencing of racism, through the threat that their
sex act poses to his freedom, and through the aesthetics of the act. In this sexual act,
Rufus’ desires for Leona as expressed through the relationship between violence,
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suffering, and pleasure momentarily present him with a queer orientation. He is oriented
to experiencing an act which is racialized but unexpectedly so. Whereas scholars read
racism and race, in general, as a condition for Rufus’ disorientation, the play of race and
racism within the sexual act and Rufus’ deployment of racialized discourses demonstrates
that the pain of racism is something for which he, at times, expresses desire. To be clear,
I do not wish to argue that Rufus seeks out potential racist threats to his person, but rather
I argue that during this sexual act he expresses a desire, born out of his own agency, to
perform and re-experience racism aesthetically. The sexual act serves as a space to allow
for this performance and as such it also allows for Rufus to connect with a narrative of
suffering brought about by his relationship to race and Leona. He possesses a similar
orientation when with Eric, and both relationships, encoded as they are by race, speak to
a capacity for pleasure tied to race and sex and expressed through a queer orientation to
performances where both categories of identity can be complicated.
4. Rufus and Queer Desire
While the sex act described between Rufus and Leona, and the discourses that
inform Rufus’ relationship with Eric, delineate a queer orientation to race and sex
through aesthetics and bodily pleasure for Rufus, they are just temporary respites from a
more punitive orientation to behavioral and social norms he also expresses. This more
normative orientation and framework is consistently reenacted by Rufus who cannot
seem to fully embrace a queer desire for suffering and a queer orientation to its aesthetics
located outside of the sex act. Queer, as it is being used here, qualifies multiple identities
and modes of experience. On the one hand, Rufus uses queer as an indication of and
reflection on his previous desire with Eric. Queer is therefore synonymous with gay.
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Queer also speaks to his non-normative relationship with Leona. Both uses of queer,
however, connote a sexual orientation that is non-normative: he desires both men and
women. This queer orientation to sex and relationships is, however, rarely experienced
consistently. Instead, Rufus principally experiences disorientation, and this disorientation
is not encoded in the narrative as queer which is a strong departure from Cather’s,
West’s, and McCullers’ descriptions of disorientation which are tied up with
experiencing the world queerly. Baldwin’s narrative posits a queer orientation as
something more concrete; it might differ from its normative counterpart, but it
nonetheless is an orientation. Because Rufus experiences multiple orientations, one of
them queer, he finds himself in a space between normative and queer orientations to his
spatial and cultural fields. Returning to the scene in which Rufus converses with Vivaldo
about escape and as the blues play in the background he asks Vivaldo, “have you ever
wished you were queer?” (Baldwin 51). This scene begins with him speaking about his
relationship with Leona just before he asks Vivaldo the question. He references this
relationship as “eating” him up and that in spite of this pain he found himself drawn to
her (51). He notes how “she can’t help it. And you [meaning Rufus] can’t help it. And
there you are” (51). Through dialogue, Rufus points out his own evaluation of his
relationship and his desires. He assesses that each party came together as if compelled by
some force. Neither he nor Leona can help how they express desire for each other and
how this desire is tied to stereotypically negative conditions. He is therefore consciously
aware of these desires and how they evolve from the interplay between experience and
identity, but he is not entirely comfortable with how these desires are expressed. On the
one hand, he believes that the sexual play between him and Leona is “the greatest lay I
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ever had. Ain’t nothing we won’t do” (70). On the other hand, this superlative sex is not
enough for him because he finds himself encapsulating additional, and more normative
expectations into the relationship including love. Therefore, what initially drew him to
Leona, his queer orientation to sex, violence, and race, begins to unravel. Thus, when he
expresses his wish to be queer, he expresses a desire to return to the fraught, passionate
and painful play that began his relationship with Leona. These concepts would be
maintained, he believes, were he to be queer because to be queer in this manner would be
to assume an orientation outside of a boundary. It would take him away from walking “all
up and down that street, too” (52) a nod to the directional nature of queer which Rufus
cannot seem to assume.
5. Vivaldo’s Queer Orientation to Suffering
Whereas Rufus struggles as the result of a persistent disorientation, which is only
relieved within the narrative through his tragic death from suicide, the other characters,
most notably Vivaldo, manage to demonstrate a more firmly expressed orientation.23 This
queer orientation recalls elements of Rufus’ narrative: it takes up suffering as an
aesthetic, an object, and an experience to embrace and desire within the narrative. Rufus,
however, is never fully directed to suffering. He is regularly excluded from desiring
suffering as an alternative means of existing within his environment. Rufus therefore
experiences a continuous level of incongruence with his environment. He wants to
experience those things which provide him with pleasure and pain but those objects and
aesthetics which provide sensations of pleasure and pain are at odds with his similar
23
Rufus’ suicide mimics Paul’s death at the end of Cather’s short story. Rufus jumps from a bridge and the
narration describes the clarity of his vision just after jumping. This narration is similar to Cather’s
description of Paul, who experiences a new type of sensation just before jumping in front of the train.
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desire to experience a sense of community. Thus his expressed desire, or wish, to be
queer can be seen as a way of being oriented in one manner. This queer orientation would
disengage with those elements of community to which he finds himself attached by
allowing him to embrace his queerness.
In some ways, Vivaldo is in a position similar to Rufus. In conversation with
Rufus, he too wishes he were queer and he similarly understands himself as lonely. But
unlike Rufus, he is less attached to external expectations and norms governing behavior
which results from his privilege as a white man. Instead, he manufactures his own
expectations which result from his commitment to an artistic aesthetic bound up in the
concept of suffering which rejects and divests itself from norms. This artistic aesthetic is
described through Vivaldo’s relationship to writing and his framework for perception
which sees both writing and the blues as incorporating suffering. He experiences the
blues as presenting a model of suffering and this articulates both his experiences and his
desires. This model can be found in his own relationship to writing. Writing, like the
blues, does not catalogue, for Vivaldo, the people who surround him. Instead, the blues,
like his writing, incorporates narratives about people “whose troubles he could bear”
(71). These people, are those he prefers to encounter because he invents them; they do
not possess the “troubles of real people” (71). As such, he can enmesh himself in their
experiences and their problems as a way of removing himself from feeling “tired”
because of “the strain of attending” to others and “friendship” (71). This passage
evidences Vivaldo’s own relationship to others and his environment. He is both
expressing a desire to be removed from having to share in others’ pain and troubles as he
is expressing a desire to experience similar, but nonetheless, fictional troubles found
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within verse and narration. These fictional forms more closely align with his own
experiences, as some are fictional derivatives of his own experiences, and therefore he
finds himself enjoying their pain. He is capable of enduring it; he can “bear” it. In order
to do so, however, Vivaldo must embrace isolation. He does this within the narration
when conversing with Rufus when he articulates his preference for the fictional forms of
suffering over which he is master, and he does this throughout the narrative when he
approaches and discusses his sense of alienation and the pleasure he receives from feeling
alone all of which produce suffering for him.
The recognition that Vivaldo possesses regarding his orientation to fiction, to an
aesthetic bound up in suffering, and to suffering himself through isolation and alienation
from others, is a sign of his own self-awareness. Granted, Vivaldo’s self-awareness is not
complete and it grows throughout the narrative. This growth, however, is not a sign of the
narrative serving as a bildungsroman or of a coming-of-age tale. Instead, self-awareness
for the narrative involves understanding one’s orientation and how that orientation
articulates a mode of perception. An embracing of suffering is the end result of this selfawareness. Self-awareness is thus related to orientation, and in the case of Vivaldo, a
queer orientation through which suffering is seen as a means to exist within an
environment where other narratives, such as progression and happiness, prove
inaccessible. The idea of self-awareness and its relationship with a queer orientation is
different for Rufus. Rufus experiences intermittent or ephemeral orientations to suffering.
Vivaldo, on the other hand, makes known that suffering is a state which he wants to
experience more fully, or at least that he comes to desire more fully as expressed through
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his interpretation of the blues, found through his request to hear more of the recorded
version of Bessie Smith, his desire to write, and his relationship with Ida, Rufus’ sister.
Whereas the characters within Baldwin’s narrative largely critique a desire to
know others, self-awareness is considered desirable. Ernesto Javier Martinez, writing
about the relationship between identity and self-knowledge, characterizes Baldwin’s
narrative as emphasizing “the often deeply menacing process of acquiring self-knowledge
in oppressive contexts” (Martinez 783). For Martinez, self-knowledge is tied to identity
and specifically, within the narrative, to shedding identities such that “something new and
epistemically more adequate” are taken up by the characters instead. Shedding identity is
seen as a metaphoric suicide through which one uncovers an understanding of the self,
layer by layer. This desire for self-knowledge can be glimpsed in Rufus’ behavior when
he refuses to commit to a categorization of his sexuality. But the self-knowledge that is
awakened in him through sexual experiences is often trumped by the shame that these
experiences enact, and this shame is tied to being known or understood through a
category of identity which upsets the narrative of him being a good black man. In many
ways, Rufus does not experience an internal sense of shame and fear when he
experiences the world under his own volition. Again, it is external social and behavioral
norms, norms which note his incongruence with community and society, and norms
which force categories of identity upon Rufus that cause Rufus to experience shame
because of his disorientation. Externally produced shame thus makes the incongruence he
experiences with his environment more troubling for Rufus.
Shame is less troubling for Vivaldo because he does not care about the outside
world, nor does he appear to face repercussions because of his race. Thus, Vivaldo pays
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little attention to external norms; instead his experience of disorientation, when it exists,
is conditioned internally through self-shaming and denial regarding intimately knowing
elements of his own desire as this would counter the narrative he has worked to maintain
in regards to his own identity. He fights against a self-awareness of his attraction to some
men, an attraction that is rooted in both same-sex and homosocial desire, and this
attraction is literally bound up with the concept of suffering. For example, in
conversation with Cass in a car immediately preceding Rufus’ funeral, Vivaldo recalls
how he and a group of friends once violently assaulted another man because he was gay.
They forced him to sexually pleasure the group and then beat him and left him to die.
Vivaldo reflects on this experience and wonders whether he is still of a similar nature to
the violent homophobe he was when young. This earlier experience mimics the sex scene
between Rufus and Leona in terms of violence and in terms of how the sexual act is both
a site of pleasure and disgust. Vivaldo notes similar understandings of sex with men, or
potential sex with men, throughout the narrative from preoccupations with penis size and
“nightmares in which this same vanished buddy pursued him through impenetrable
forests” (134). These scenes are most often treated within literary criticism as
psychologically based. In this particular instance, Vivaldo dreams of a black man whose
penis he once saw in a bar. This sighting involved a measuring contest. For critics, the
obsession with black male size and potential male inadequacy is seen throughout the
narrative regarding both Vivaldo and Eric as related to white fear and awe of the
“mythical” penis of the hypersexualized black male (Abdur-Rahman 104). These
recollections and dreams of black men are also seen as metaphors for Vivaldo’s pent up
homosexual desire for Rufus (Dunning 106). Whereas I agree that Vivaldo is at times
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oriented to men as sexual objects, I argue that his relationship to men as sexual objects is
more complex and is therefore inadequately described through a homosexual paradigm.
Instead, Vivaldo’s relationship to men is more appropriately understood by way of his
orientation. He is not attracted to men as a category of sexual objects. He is instead
attracted to some men, just as he is attracted to some women, specifically those who
bring about some experience of suffering. His relationship to suffering is via queerness
rather than being attracted to a general maleness.
Returning to the narrative, and by looking to how the narrative describes
Vivaldo’s orientation to men, women, and sex more broadly, it is clear that reductive
measures which endeavor to explain Vivaldo’s sexuality are too simplistic. Again, when
talking with Cass in the car, Cass, in a moment of narrative clarity, acknowledges the
importance of this scene to the characters still alive within the narrative. For Cass, and
later for Vivaldo, the violence directed at the gay youth is also tied up with desire and
with emotional violence directed at the self. It is a violence that Vivaldo initially denies
because to acknowledge it would to change the manner through which he approaches his
world. Acknowledgment would not make Vivaldo gay, just as his sexual experience with
Eric toward the narrative’s conclusion does not make him gay, instead it adjusts his
capacity to easily understand his identity through already defined categories. Certainly,
he could come to claim bisexual as a potential identity, but Vivaldo is not attracted to
both sexes in a way that comports easily with sexual orientation’s usual taxonomies. His
sexual orientation is not attached to a specific sexed object, it is, rather, attached to a
particular sexual experience, the sex of the partner is unimportant. Much as Rufus
experiences a racial double-consciousness and this is evidenced through his routine
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disorientation, Vivaldo experiences a sexual double-consciousness. He experiences
different, yet ultimately pleasurable and painful sensations from his encounters with both
Ida and Eric. Just as Rufus comes to acknowledge that his desire for Leona is both
outwardly and inwardly violent and that the sexual act is a rooted and expressed through
his desire to bundle pleasure with pain, Cass notes how Vivaldo’s experience, were he to
analyze and understand it, would reshape his orientation to the world. She thinks that
“secrets, the secrets of everyone, were only expressed when the person laboriously
dragged them into the light of the world, imposed them on the world, and made them a
part of the world’s experience” (112). What Cass notes through Vivaldo’s recollection is
the manner in which self-knowledge, specifically self-knowledge which counters
dominant norms regarding behavior, comes to be denied. She also notes how denial is
unfortunate and more painful than an act which embraces a non-normative understanding
of the self. Thus, for Vivaldo, a queer orientation involves the taking of this denied self,
rooted as it is in expressed desire for certain types of sexual experiences with others, and
bringing it to the fore. His internal and external orientations will intertwine and this will
be possible within the narrative because he does not fully care about outside expectations.
Unlike Rufus, who experiences the pressure of expectations when his experience
of himself and his desires do not align with social and behavioral norms (his
intersectional identity as understood from the outside), Vivaldo is not required to
maintain such appearances. His process of gaining self-knowledge and his orientation to
suffering are therefore more public. Certainly, Vivaldo is drawn to elements of isolation
but his embrace of both isolation and the self-knowledge this creates is not bounded by a
desire to also maintain a particular appearance. When recounting his understanding of his
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family and the norms to which they are oriented, Vivaldo is dismissive. He sees his
family as “ashamed of him” but he also finds their choices and desires unfulfilling
(Baldwin 130). They are the type of people who “did whatever it was they were supposed
to do, and they raised their children.24 And perhaps he didn’t like these people very much,
but, then, he didn’t, on the other hand, know them” (130). Here Vivaldo expresses neither
outrage nor sadness for his lack of knowledge regarding how others live, including his
family, and for their supposed disdain for his own relationship to the world and
experience. He finds the way in which communities are often thought to be threaded,
through knowledge and sharing, to be boring and uninteresting. He similarly finds
possessing a connection built upon these premises with others as unappealing. Rather, he
prefers and expresses a desire for alienation, an alienation which keeps him as a stranger.
To conceptually remain a stranger means to disconnect from those expectations
which demand an understanding of the other. These expectations are often addressed by
sympathy, sharing, and progression. One would move from stranger, to acquaintance, and
then to friend under this paradigm. For Vivaldo, such a notion of communal investment is
not desirable. But this lack of communal investment does not mean that he desires to
remove himself from all forms of sociability. Instead, Vivaldo divests from relationships
and narratives which are enforced and codified through norms regarding knowing the
other. This process is difficult and accomplished in stages because it is most easily
performed when alone. When he visits Harlem, for example, his sense of alienation is
exaggerated. In effect, he is viewed as not fitting in because of the “color of his skin
24
Vivaldo’s family is, in effect, participating in well-established norms regarding family. Norms associated
with family and with children are discussed through queer theory. See Lee Edelman’s discussion of
reproductive futurism and Sarah Ahmed’s discussion about family lineage and reproducing the family line.
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contested his right to be there” (132). Whereas his whiteness exacerbates his experiences
of strangeness—his self-assessment becomes congruent with that of the outside—
Vivaldo experiences his being seen as a way to make “visible and therefore, almost
bearable” his feelings (132). This act of making visible his alienation compares with the
framework Cass outlines earlier, as it makes known to Vivaldo to what he is oriented. His
experience of alienation allows him to discover how he is oriented to alienation and how
it makes him feel “more alive . . . for he had moved in a blaze of rage and selfcongratulation and sexual excitement, with danger, like a promise, waiting for him
everywhere” (132). This capacity to embrace danger, to recognize that it is a concept
which is desirable because it promises some form of pleasure just as much as it threatens
with pain, denotes Vivaldo as existing out of alignment. Here he is out of alignment with
norms which require investment in others. Harlem provides a space in which to make
known or obvious to Vivaldo an already existing element of himself and it does so
because of his race. His privilege affords him with the opportunity to experience, in
essence, his own queerness by travelling to a different location. In addition, his
experience of queerness in Harlem also does not pose a threat to his person. He can travel
to Harlem and resist certain social and behavioral norms without fear of what queer mean
to others.
It is also in Harlem where Vivaldo can experience his sense of alienation in
relation to music. Harlem is the site of clubs and bars which serve as performance spaces
that Vivaldo frequents. It is also the space where he first hears Ida sing, earlier at Rufus’
funeral, a song that Rufus had sung for her many times. The song repeats the lyric, “I’m a
stranger, don’t drive me away” (119). The lyrics are not invested in making known the
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person who sings. The category of stranger is never critiqued. Instead, being a stranger is
given a haunting and powerful level of importance. There is no expressed desire in the
song to make the stranger known; instead, the song simply regards the stranger as
someone “you may need . . . some day” (119). For Vivaldo, the message derived from
this song is important. It ties to his own experience as a stranger in Harlem. It frames his
experience of alienation and his own sense of self-knowledge as dependent, to some
degree on feeling “alone” (120) as he does both at the funeral and elsewhere. It also
speaks to an orientation to relations with others in which being a stranger or an
“unknown” is a plausible condition because it disconnects from the notion that a person is
capable of understanding or truly knowing another person, or that this is a laudable goal
(172).
The desire to be a perpetual stranger, to embrace the consequences that being a
stranger promotes, conditions Vivaldo, and the other central characters, in a way that
restructures how communities and relationships can be considered. Conceptions of
romantic love and sacrifice are upended, and instead, connections are drawn between
people because they are like-minded. These connections are made more concrete through
sex and through a shared relationship and approach to the blues. Sex and the blues are the
two experiences which thread the characters together. The blues are the thing, as Vivaldo
sings in his head, that “my baby gave me” (313). They are the thing that is shared
between people and because the blues are not interpreted as materially invested in escape,
instead they incorporate consistent articulations of longing, feeling isolated, experiencing
pain, and locating pleasure, they structure relationships along similar principles. To be
oriented to the blues and to share the blues with another is, for Vivaldo, related to sharing
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and experiencing misery. This means that the relationships that appear within the
narrative incorporate people who possess a shared orientation to suffering. These people
live according to an aesthetics of suffering. It is through a growing understanding of the
self and an acknowledgement of the self as oriented queerly to the world that Vivaldo
comes to embrace both his relationship to suffering and to rejecting norms regarding
relationships with others. Through Ida he sees this potential early on in their relationship
when he describes how he views her and how he does not know her as a “mystery,
containing like all mysteries, the possibility of torment” (172). His understanding of Ida
as mysterious and as something to which he receives pleasure, and ultimately pain is
rooted in his increasing detachment and rejection of norms which regulate how
relationships should be. Although initially Vivaldo adapts these norms to his relationship
with Ida such that he endeavors to know and understand her, as his own awareness
increases and as his orientation to suffering becomes more pronounced, he becomes less
attached to a relationship with her in which they must know each element about the other.
Instead, the mystery that he sees early on, the mystery that troubles him and causes him
to suffer, becomes a thing from which to experience all forms of sensation.
The realization that his relationship with Ida, among others, must not be
predicated on norms regarding investment is directly tied to his understanding of the
blues. In each formative scene with Ida, and similarly with Eric, the blues plays in the
background. The blues highlight and generate both the aesthetic of suffering at key points
in the narrative and the manner in which suffering is seen as an experiential condition
that creates opportunities for both pain and pleasure without an expressed desire to
escape from those very same conditions. The blues are sung by Ida immediately
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following a sexual encounter with Vivaldo in which he experiences a joining of their
bodies. This joining is seen as a “struggle” in which both Vivaldo and Ida become
intertwined through their love making (176). For Vivaldo, he cannot separate himself
from Ida during the act, their shared orientations to suffering noted through the
description of their sex as “ruthless” and “vicious,” brings them together (177). Here she
sings about just wanting to “feed/This hungry man of mine” (179) in which hunger
references both a literal need and a need to feed sexual desire through an act which
mimics violence and which mixes violence, passion, and compassion together. The blues
are therefore a callback to experiences, both painful and pleasurable, as much as they
condition the way the characters experience these very same moments.
6. Conclusion
The blues, in effect, mimic the experiences of the listener. Rufus interprets the
blues as articulating his experience and of demonstrating the inevitability of suffering
because of his blackness and his simultaneous experiences of desires for acceptance and
isolation, for relationships and sex, and for anonymity. The blues are interpreted
differently by Rufus than they are for the other characters, who do not see suffering as
inevitable, but rather as desirable. Just as the scholarship on the blues from earlier in this
chapter note the presence of suffering throughout blues music, what suffering means, or
whether suffering is seen as a condition one transgresses is debatable. For Vivaldo and
others, the framework through which they interpret the blues recognize longing, hope,
and at times a wish for a better life. They note desires which seem to comport with
normative narratives regarding love and success. But at the same time, the blues also
offer no resolution. They incorporate no acknowledgement of escape nor do they seem to
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suggest that escape is desirable. Instead, the blues artistically inform a listener that
endurance is the only path. As such, the blues reinforce a model for living which is the
antithesis of norms. Rufus, as much as he sees a capacity in the blues to speak to his
experience and to serve as an aesthetic to share with others, cannot escape the punishing
norms directed at him from the outside which he takes up at various moments in the text
in earnest. Vivaldo experiences an easier time of disconnecting from norms, because of
his race and because his whiteness allows him to more easily avoid defining himself
according to social and behavioral norms. Additionally, just as Tod Hackett perceives
Los Angeles through an interpretative framework derived from his desire for a nonnormative artistic aesthetic, Vivaldo and the other characters in Baldwin’s narrative
understand the blues through their own orientation to suffering.
The relationship between orientation, experience, and desire is further explored in
the next chapter of this dissertation. Octavia Butler’s Kindred includes a character who is
queer because of her race and gender. Like Rufus, Dana experiences her own identity as a
black woman married to a white man as discordant with the social and behavioral norms
emanating from her family and from society. Dana experiences suffering as a result of
her queer orientation to direct experience made manifest through violence. In addition,
what makes Dana different from Rufus, and from the other characters in Baldwin’s
narrative, is her relationship to time. Dana experiences time as queer and she evolves in
her relationship to her own orientation as a result of time.
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Chapter 4: An Orientation to History
1. Introduction
In the Introduction of this dissertation, I discuss how queer orientations are not the
same from one character, or person, to the next. Context, which includes social and
behavioral norms that differ from one historical period to the next, changing locations,
and other cultural differences inform the manner in which a queer orientation is
constituted. Because an orientation is articulated by the relationship between experience
and desire, and because experience and desire are mutually constituted, an orientation
describes a way of being in the world.25 I describe this way of being in the world as
askew or slanted because the aesthetics, objects, phenomena, and spaces characters direct
themselves toward as a result of an orientation are considered by those characters and
their peers as largely non-normative. In the Introduction, an orientation to the nonnormative is analyzed by way of Paul, whose sensory experience and desire for dress
articulate his orientation to New York and his framework for addressing the objects that
comprise his surroundings. Later chapters read Tod Hackett’s and Mick Kelly’s
orientation to aesthetics in art and musical sensation and Rufus’ consistent disorientation
and Vivaldo’s orientation to suffering.
In this chapter, I examine another work of 20th century literary fiction that
describes a character whose orientation is queer (in ways similar to those discussed in my
earlier chapters). Octavia Butler’s Kindred depicts a character who finds herself oriented
to personal and familial history, specifically her ancestors’ experiences as enslaved
peoples. She comes to directly experience her history by travelling back through time.
25
See my discussion of Joan W. Scott, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Kenneth Burke in the Introduction.
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These experiences include violent episodes which appear to connect her both with the
past and the present. This orientation to history is queer because of both where and how
it occurs for Dana; she travels through time and therefore inserts herself into a historical
narrative. She is compelled through time because like the characters analyzed in the
proceeding chapters of this dissertation, Dana experiences herself as dismissed by the
prevailing social norms which disseminate from family, culture, and larger social
institutions. What makes Dana unique, however, is that her orientation is more
complicated vis-à-vis how she expresses desire because what she appears to express
desire for, independence, freedom, and self-awareness, is at odds with her orientation to
history which often threatens her freedom and her safety.
Dana, for example, finds herself oriented to history, and specifically the history of
her ancestors in pre-Civil War Maryland. As an African-American woman, her
orientation to the Antebellum South and its laws and ideas governing the rights and
treatment of blacks means that she is oriented to a space and a time which appears to
limit her freedom. These limits placed on her person are at odds, at least at face value,
with the other characters I have discussed whose queer orientations are often directed at
spaces which they believe will allow them to more freely experience what it is they desire
most. Butler’s Kindred adds to the complexity of understanding orientation because
through an analysis Dana, we are introduced to an orientation to something undeniably
unpleasurable and which also is the result of feeling compelled.
Pleasure is important to all of the characters from earlier chapters. While Dana
experiences some pleasure as the result of her orientation to the past, she nonetheless
finds herself in situations where she witnesses extreme forms of pain and trauma and later
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in the narrative personally experiences things that are painful, traumatic, and potentially
deadly. She, however, is nonetheless compelled to participate in, experience something,
or act in a way that is dangerous. Dana is compelled to travel through time and act in
ways that are detrimental to her well-being. To be directed toward experiences which
threaten personal safety run counter to the dominant social norms she encounters which
largely laud safety and security as desirable features. Dana’s queer orientation is thus
non-normative because of its directedness, but it is also non-normative because it
positions Dana as out of time. She travels through time to the past where the enslavement
of blacks is the norm. This chapter will examine how Dana’s experiences, including her
identity as a black woman married to a white man, the treatment of her by others, and the
editing of her family’s history, and her desires for knowledge about herself, her
relationship to history, and writing inform her orientation both to the present and the past
as queer because it is out of time.
In the remainder of this chapter, I closely examine time again through close
readings of Dana; however, I also consider the end result of her orientation, that her
orientation to history which she comes to directly experience shapes her orientation,
including to violence. The framework through which she perceives violence is rooted in
her desire for realness. This begets a greater potential for violence which becomes more
extreme as violence and danger occur with greater frequency. Considering orientation
revises the criticism and scholarship on Butler’s Kindred which often reads Dana as a
character who experiences grave tragedies. Literary criticism focuses on the politics of
Dana as a black woman and the effects of race on her in both the present and in the
Antebellum South, rather than how she also experiences both the present and the
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Antebellum South as the result of her orientation to an experience of time and to history.
While critical approaches which expose the underlying politics of a work of fiction are
important, they overlook how Dana’s relationship to the past is about more than slavery
or understanding her own familial relationship. Her relationship to the past, I argue,
draws from her own occupation as a writer and as a person invested in the direct
experiencing of situations which cannot easily be recreated through the written word. The
failure of words to accurately portray the aesthetic and sensory experiences of a person
are highlighted here in a section of this chapter where they are made most obvious with
regards to Dana’s loss of her arm.
This chapter first returns to the works of literary fiction examined earlier by
noting how time functions for the characters already discussed. An analysis of Dana’s
relationship to time and to time travel will follow. A close reading of Dana’s relation to
history and violence in Butler’s Kindred will demonstrate that her major character is not
just oriented to a notion of time, but rather that her orientation involves a non-normative
experience of time. She is both oriented to a different time and because she can travel
through time, she comes to experience the past and the present as no longer
chronological, but rather as overlapping and synchronous. The final section more fully
examines Dana’s relationship to violence, and her narrative accounts of violent situations
in the past, to more richly understand her character and her orientation.
2. A Queer Orientation to Time
All of the characters analyzed thus far from works of 20th Century American
Literature possess a queer orientation that involves times in important ways. The
characters possess relationships to the present that comport with examinations of time
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and queer identity made in works of queer theory and literary criticism. The major
characters in these four works can be understood as possessing a resistant relationship to
time in so far as they reject some norms and markers that denote a normative progression
of maturation through time. The relationship between maturation and queer identity has
already been examined in relation to Paul and Mick, and a number of queer theorists
discuss this point at great length. Jack Halberstam critiques the norms that privilege “the
emergence of the adult from the dangerous and unruly period of adolescence as a desired
process” (Halberstam, Time 4), in addition to codes of normalization which encourage
maturation as a sign of success (Failure 10). Elizabeth Freeman also discusses maturation
in relation to time and capital, arguing that queer identity’s disconnection from dominant
social and behavioral norms marked by class and sexual and social reproduction in turn
positions a queer person as “asynchronous [sic]” or “out of joint” (Freeman 19). What
Halberstam and Freeman point to is an understanding of the queer subject as already
disconnected from time because time is regulated by norms.
Other works of theory argue for a similar relationship between time and norms,
especially when time is considered in relation to biology and society. Lee Edelman
argues that queer people are disconnected from the future, for example, because the
future is the rhetorical home of the child and heteronormativity’s promise. Time for
Edelman is structured through reproduction. Time works to “affirm a structure, to
authenticate social order, which it then intends to transmit to the future in the form of its
inner Child” (Edelman 3, emphasis in the original). Here Edelman describes one element
of the antisocial thesis, where to be antisocial is to disconnect not from futurity, but rather
from the models of futurity that discourse stereotypically offers. The antisocial thesis is
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similarly explored in earlier works by Leo Bersani who asks whether queer subjects
should be good citizens (Bersani, Homos 113). The thesis is again reapplied in
Halberstam’s and Freeman’s works of theory regarding maturation. Reproduction is one
key element of time’s relationship to maturation in so far as social norms expect adults to
mature, settle down, and reproduce, but maturation also includes subscribing to other
norms associated with adulthood that inscribe ethics of work. Time is therefore a subject
routinely explored in works of literary criticism and queer theory.
These works of fiction present characters who are oriented to the present and/or to
a future built upon an ideality that draws upon the present. They are not overly concerned
with the past or some other time as is Dana from Butler’s narrative. Their orientations are
instead rooted in a desire to experience or sense something more directly, with greater
frequency, or with greater intensity in the present, or a future where their desires in the
present can be achieved. For these characters, the present is most important, and the
future is often viewed only as an ideality.26 Paul is oriented only to the present. He
conceives of a future time in New York because it will allow him to more greatly
experience what it is he desires. However, once in New York, and once his father aims to
retrieve him, Paul no longer imagines a future for himself. A future bereft of his aesthetic
pleasures is not a future worth having for Paul, and this explains part of his reasoning to
end his life by suicide. Tod is similarly not invested in a future because by the conclusion
of West’s narrative, Tod is fully immersed in a painting/reality hybrid, which is the
product of his own orientation to artistic aesthetics. Mick Kelly, on the other hand, is
invested in the future because it is sometime in the future that she hopes to find a space to
26
The future functions in some ways as a Utopian space. Jose Esteban Munoz discusses the future as
always over the horizon for queer people.
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listen to, and perhaps compose, music. She therefore seeks a future that will allow her to
experience more freely what she experiences only fleetingly in the present. Thus,
characters are principally oriented to the present while they also experience, at times, an
orientation to the future because the future is a means for living out some wished for
experience of the present.
For Vivaldo in Baldwin’s narrative, the future does not appear as different from
the present and because he is oriented to suffering and his framework involves
interpreting suffering as a condition one endures. His orientation toward suffering means
that he embraces, to a large degree, the thought that he will always suffer both in the
present and in the future. Additionally, because Vivaldo experiences privilege as a white
male, social and behavioral norms and pressures affect him with fewer consequences.
Vivaldo’s orientation to suffering stands in sharp contrast with Rufus Scott, who
expresses a desire for a similar orientation to Vivaldo, but whose experience as a black,
bisexual male means that the pressure from society is far greater and less forgiving.
Edelman’s understanding of time as encoded through reproductive futurism is
certainly at play in the works examined here. All of the characters discussed in this
dissertation are uninterested in reproduction. However, these characters do not just
disconnect from the future because their orientations are not directed toward biological
reproduction or reproductive aesthetics and rhetoric. Instead, the future is interesting to
these characters only in so far as it promises to offer them, to some degree, spaces or the
means of experiencing what it is they want.
Octavia Butler’s Kindred introduces a significantly different orientation to time
by including a character whose experience literally challenges chronological time. The
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narrative centers around Dana's involuntary ability to time travel, thus the spaces to
which she is directed are out of time. While Paul, Tod, Mick, and Vivaldo physically
move through space, Dana travels through time and space. In this chapter, I analyze
Butler's depiction of time travel as much as I do the movement or the expressed desire for
movement of a character from one space to another from earlier chapters. In Butler’s
narrative, time travel occurs in response to an expressed desire to experience something
different, whether it be a different historical moment, a different culture, or new
sensations and aesthetics. Time travel is thus the result of a queer orientation to time
made obvious. Dana does not conceive of time as a series of linear events or as easily
demarcated into past, present, and future. Time as it is regularly understood is linear.
Characters who have a unique access to time travel therefore automatically subvert or
queer time's accepted construction because they have special access to a non-linear form.
This allows for all sorts of various queer relationships and orientations to time and space
because typical ideas of one’s life progression cannot be assumed. Dana’s experiencing
of time is similar to Merleau-Ponty’s critique of it. Merleau-Ponty argues that although it
seems that “the present is the consequence of the past, and the future of the present”
(Merleau-Ponty 477), time is rarely so easily compartmentalized. Instead, time is more
appropriately viewed as an accumulation of events, not a succession of events. In other
words, how time is perceived is related to a host of factors including history, social and
behavioral norms, culture, and one’s orientation to all of the above.
3. Queer Experience in the Past
Butler’s Kindred examines the effects of time travel and the direct experience of
slavery on Dana and her husband Kevin. Kindred involves Dana traveling back through
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time, meeting her ancestors, and experiencing both the tedium and the trauma of life on
the plantation. The narrative begins by describing Dana as already possessing a
challenging relationship to time. In the opening pages of Butler’s work, Dana is in the
hospital recovering from losing part of her arm. She and her husband are asked what
happens and neither of them can fully detail the events that transpired. Her husband
discusses how he tells the “truth,” or “I told as much of the truth as I could” to the
authorities (Butler 11). Dana, for her part, notes how the truth would never be believed by
others. She mentions to Kevin that the truth would have kept him “locked up—in a
mental hospital” (11). While Dana is aware of the ramifications of the truth for Kevin, the
truth is inaccessible for her because she is without the words to explain what has
occurred. She refers to her arm loss as an “accident,” but in her mind she remembers “the
way I had been hurt . . . the pain” (10). The problem for Dana here, and throughout the
narrative, is that her relationship to the world around her, to normative perception of
time, is different. Dana, at this stage, understands that she has been travelling through
time to the past. She also knows, partially, how her arm is lost in a struggle with Rufus
Weylin, her ancestor. What she cannot explain is a reason for this event because her
framework for perception is different. Her experience of time is not their experience of
time. She is not aligned with social and behavioral norms that govern how time should be
experienced in 1970s America. Her orientation is such that she is directed toward
experiencing a past that her family and her friends view as unacceptable and impossible.
Before the time travel episodes even begin, she is already queer because of her race,
marriage, and career as a writer. She has already been abandoned by family members and
marginalized by her peers because of non-normativity which includes her race and
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gender, her marriage to Kevin, a white male, her chosen career as a writer, and her lack
of knowledge about her own history. Thus, while she is marked as queer in the present
because of her misalignment with social norms and expectations emanating from her
family, her friends, and society at large, she is in this scene demonstrating her orientation
to and queer experience of time and history. After time travel, she is marked as such by
the loss of her arm to the past, as well as the ability to communicate with others how she
experiences time, because her experience of time and her orientation to it would simply
not be believable outside of her marriage.
When in the past, her relationship to her own queer orientation is different. While
she is similarly queered in the past because of her status as a free and educated black
woman in a relationship with a white man that is not forced upon her, she experiences
herself differently because she is surrounded by opportunities to directly experience her
family history which compel her to travel to the past in the first place. Much as New
York amplifies Paul’s queer orientation, the Antebellum South exaggerates Dana’s
queerness to outsiders. The process of time travel produces physical disorientation for
Dana because it is difficult for her to describe its effects. As she travels back through
time with greater frequency and in longer stretches, she increasingly identifies with the
past through her relationships with ancestors and her increasing familiarity with the
institution of slavery. She sees the past and the Weylin Plantation as something like a
“refuge” (Butler 37), and while she experiences trauma, danger, and violence in the past,
each time she time travels she notes how “it was so much like coming home” (192).
Identification with the past as a kind of home means that Dana locates a form of sociality
with the past and its inhabitants. Additionally, just as Dana is compelled to experience the
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past as a result of orientation to it and the opportunity for kinship that it affords, she
wants to experience the past and its sensations no matter how horrific, in order to fulfill
both her expressed desire to write and to satisfy her desire for direct experience. Time
travel affords Dana, like the train to New York does for Paul, types of experiences she
identifies as more real because they have not been filtered. Time travel allows her to
engage with more extreme sensations, with threats, and with challenges to her individual
freedom.
Throughout the narrative, Dana catalogues her time in the past as a way to revise
the history that has disseminated to her from her family and from society. This desire is
most apparent when she describes her family’s Bible and how it erases, itself a form of
violence, the details of her family’s history. She notes that these family records are
incomplete as they incorporate names with little other information. The original writer,
Hagar, Rufus Weylin’s and Alice Greenwood’s daughter, kept dutiful records, but other
useful information, such as Rufus being white, was erased from the historical record.
Surmising “no doubt most information about [Hagar’s] life had died with her. At least it
had died before it filtered down to me” (28), Dana’s trips into the past give her access to
a more direct form of knowledge, meaning that she gets to subjectively experience and
bear witness to elements of her family’s past. She also, in turn, comes to experience less
abstract forms of violence, like the erasure of history. While this satisfies one desire she
expresses, the past and her chasing of extreme sensations, provide literal consequences
for her in the present.
Dana loses her arm on her final trip back from the past that serves as a literal
consequence of her queer experience of time, which makes her orientation to that
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experience more pronounced with each trip back into her history. Dana does not
experience time, or history, as linear because the past and the present are not discrete
moments in Dana’s life. The effects of one-time period on the other also do not flow
unidirectionally: in so far as the past does not occur before the present. Instead, time
overlaps for Dana, and subsequently for those who surround her. This overlap is first
noticed by Dana through a conversation with Rufus. She asks him to recall their first
meeting when he nearly drowns, and he responds that he remembers her; although, he
does not remember meeting her physically. He does not remember her being at the river
or as the person who saved him from drowning, but rather he remembers her in the
moments leading up to him being saved. He states that,
“I couldn’t remember—maybe because of the way I saw you. I told Mama, and
she said I couldn’t have really seen you that way . . . with my eyes closed . . . I
saw you just as I stepped in the hole . . . in the river. I was walking in the water
and there was a hole. I fell, and then I couldn’t find the bottom any more. I saw
you inside a room. I could see part of the room, and there were books all around”
(22).
In this scene, Rufus remembers Dana as she exists some 160 years in the future. He sees
her in her new house, surrounded by books, and dressed in pants. He sees her as she
herself experiences what is, then, her present. Dana’s own narration of this moment
matches Rufus’ descriptions. She is in her living room “sorting books into one of the big
bookcases” (12) when she first travels through to what she believes is the past. The
relationship between the past and the present, as demonstrated through Rufus’s visions of
Dana, and later through Dana’s movement through time, indicates a collapsing of time.
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The past and the present are thus experienced together in this instance through Rufus’s
witnessing of Dana in her present. Dana experiences this collapsing of time or an
overlapping experience of time through Rufus’ memory and through her own
perceptions. She feels that both eras occur with some degree of simultaneity (a point
expressed by Rufus here), which is reinforced each time she travels from one era to the
next, and realized when she notes how time continues to pass in either the present or the
past when she experiences one or the other.
Although she experiences time as non-linear, she is the only character, outside of
Kevin and to a small degree Rufus, who shares in this experience of time. As a result, the
lack of linearity and the effects of time travel are rather disorienting to Dana. This
disorientation is most notably seen through her own descriptions of time travel,
specifically those moments which immediately precede and follow travelling through
time. Time travel produces disorienting effects for Dana. The same moment, which Rufus
describes just before and in between his almost drowning in the river, is described by
Dana as nauseating. She states to Kevin that “something is wrong with me” as she notices
his appearance dissolve into a “blur of gray pants and blue shirt” (13). Similar
descriptions regarding time travel follow. Her next trip involves her feeling that “the floor
seemed farther away than it should have” and that the table she reaches for in order to
“steady [herself]” disappears before she can grab it (19). Because time travel occurs
rapidly, Dana cannot properly orient herself to it as an object or a space. She can prepare
for time travel, by tying items to her body, but she cannot plan for or align herself with it
because the amount of time it takes to transport herself from one space to another is too
brief. These descriptions of her experiences of disorientation as the result of time travel
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are noteworthy because they establish that she is not oriented to time travel per se. She
does not express desire to travel through time to the past. She does, however, express
desire for some sort of experience of the past. She wants the knowledge that these
experiences will give her regarding her family history. She similarly wants direct access
to experience in order to revise those narratives that disseminate to her and which will,
because she is a writer, flow from her. These desires to directly experience history and a
different time articulate her orientation and her queer experience to time.
Dana’s queer experience of time is apparent through her own descriptions of the
spaces she finds herself in when she travels through time. The present, while
recognizable, is a space that renders her confused at moments. The past, although she is
far less familiar with its geography and its details, is never fully seen as a confusing
space. Thus, we can read Dana’s orientation as more fully directed at the past, than the
present, and not to the ephemeral transition from one time to the next. This orientation is
depicted in the narrative through the extreme clarity with which she describes her
surroundings, especially when in the past. For example, when she first arrives in
Maryland, in a location and a time not yet known to her, she does not experience
continued disorientation. Instead, she notes how after “everything vanished” she was
“outdoors kneeling on the ground beneath trees. I was in a green place. I was at the edge
of a woods. Before me was a wide tranquil river, and near the middle of that river was a
child splashing, screaming . . .” (13). Dana’s narration of time travel is interesting
because her transition from one space and time to the next is not met with confusion;
instead, only the brief moment she spends time travelling is upsetting. She does not
recount a moment of gaining her bearings, but rather she steps through time into
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Antebellum Maryland as if her surroundings, while new, are there to be perceived and
enjoyed.
The apparent lack of confusion with which she enters the past is contrasted
strongly with how she reenters the present. The verdant scene that unfolds before her in
Maryland, the realization that a child is drowning, and her subsequent saving of the child
are all taken in stride by Dana. It is only when she travels back to the present that she
becomes confused. Much as the opening pages detail Dana’s own perceptions of lacking
a proper vocabulary to explain her predicament, time travelling back to the present and
the ensuing disorientation equally strip her of her voice. The transition leaves her “sick
and dizzy,” her vision blurs such that she cannot distinguish the features of the people
near her, and then she is returned to her living room unable to account for what had
happened to her. She finds that she is unable to express details, responding to Kevin’s
question. She tells him that she would explain in greater detail, “if I knew what to tell”
(15). Even after she recovers some degree of bearing in the present, the details she
recounts are lacking in sensory and aesthetic specificity. Kevin lacks the context in which
Dana’s actions took place, and Dana too is still too close to the experience in order to
narrate this episode coherently. She states that “There was a river . . . woods with a river
running through. And there was a boy drowning. I saved him” (15). These lines describe
how words lack the ability to fully connote the meaning of personal experience. It is only
after she begins to process her experience, and approach it as she would a written work,
that Dana can put to words the elements of what occurred. Revision affords her with an
opportunity to recall “things that I hadn’t realized I’d noticed. The trees I’d been near for
instance, were pine trees, tall and straight with branches and needles mostly at the top. I
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had noticed that much somehow in the instant before I had seen Rufus” (16). She
similarly recalls other facets of the scene from differences in styles of dress and spoken
accents different from her own. What this demonstrates is not just a relationship with the
past that is altogether different from the present, but a relationship with the past that
involves a greater investment in its aesthetics and sensory experiences.
4. Dana and History as Non-Linear
Scholarship on Butler’s Kindred routinely analyzes time, time travel, and history
as important to both the movement of the narrative and to Dana’s character and its
development. By traveling from 1976 Los Angeles to early 19th Century Maryland, Dana
must wrestle with the concept of time, how it differs from one historical moment to the
next, and how it affects a person through the experience of it. However, rather than focus
on time as something Dana experiences as non-linear, some critics compartmentalize
time and how Dana is exposed to and experiences it by reading each era she lives in as a
discrete space. By doing this, critics focus on the differences, rather than the overlap,
between contemporary Los Angeles and the Antebellum South for Dana. Joanna Russ, in
a review of Kindred, notes that Dana’s present “difficulties in being black are nothing
[compared] to her past ones” (Russ 96). David LaCroix argues for something similar
when he argues that the past is an era that “assumes the inferiority, availability, and
enslavement of black women” (LaCroix 110). Russ’ and LaCroix’s assertions about the
past for Dana, while not historically inaccurate, are premised on the notion that the past is
always horrible and the present is preferable.
Butler’s narrative seems to confirm this assertion through depictions of brutality,
violence, and oppression which occur in the past. It is in the past that Dana sees the
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buying, selling, and beating of enslaved people. The past is also the site of Dana’s own
beatings. One such instance involves her being whipped by Tom Weylin, the owner of
the plantation and Rufus’ father, who discovers Dana teaching another enslaved person
how to read. Dana’s describes being “dragged” and “knocked” until the whip “came—
like a hot iron across my back, burning into me through my light shirt, searing my skin”
(Butler 107). This depiction of a whipping scene provided by Dana mirrors those found
in other canonical narratives about enslavement, such as those written by Harriet Jacobs
and Frederick Douglass. Dana, like the narrative in many slave narratives, is caught and
punished for being educated and/or educating another person. While this scene, among
others, positions the past as a location where just being black is a punishable offense, let
along being black and possessing agency, the past is not the only space in which violence
and oppression occurs for Dana. In the present, Dana too knows violence. Her peers all
hold an expectation of violence toward women. This expectation is seen in the response
from law enforcement to Dana’s hospitalization which frames the narrative, their
suspicions of Kevin, that “these men were trying to blame Kevin for ‘hurting my arm’”
(9). The present day has not removed the threat of violence because violence against
women is still common. That the narrative begins and ends with violence in the present
dispels the notion that the past is demonstrably different. What is different, however, is
the regularity of violence for Dana. The present largely exempts her from directly
experiencing violence; the past places violence as front and center.
For scholars, the critical difference made between the past and the present is the
existence of the institution of slavery, and while Butler’s work of literary fiction is
regularly understood as a neo-slave narrative, it is not just a narrative about enslavement.
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Angelyn Mitchell notes how the past functions as a space for Dana to experience how
“the past shaped and continues to shape the present” (Mitchell 52). Mitchell argues that
Dana is like the sankofa of African folklore, which is visually depicted through a bird
whose neck is craned back over the body. The sankofa’s body is therefore physically
oriented to both the present and the past, with a noticeable schism between body and
mind where the body is directed toward the present and the mind, or head, is directed
backwards. The interplay between the past and the present is therefore literally
experienced on the body of the sankofa, just as Dana experiences both the past and the
present on her body.
Other critics, notably Guy Mark Foster, have argued for the importance of
considering the relationship between the past and the present as equally, if not more
important to Dana, as just the past. Foster argues that criticism overdetermines slavery’s
role in Butler’s novel. He writes that Kindred “is not so much about slavery as it is about
how black Americans learn to renegotiate the history of slavery within their present-day
circumstances” (Foster 147, emphasis in the original). Foster’s point about slavery and
how narratives about slavery disseminate to black Americans and within AfricanAmerican communities is important to consider because it reads Dana as always, already
identified through certain discourses. What underlies Dana’s predicament and what
ultimately compels her to travel through time is the legacy of enslavement. Slavery is,
therefore, the object that haunts Dana. Its echoes can be found in the way others treat her
relationship to Kevin and in her relationship to her environment, more broadly. For
example, Dana’s family abandons her because they would prefer to will their property to
the “church than leave them to [her] and see them fall into white hands” (Butler 112).
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Kevin’s family responds similarly by barring him and Dana from their home. Because of
familial responses, Dana’s interracial marriage is read as potentially “undermined” by
slavery’s legacy (Foster 144). Other scholars argue that the institution of slavery is
mapped directly onto Kevin, noting that Kevin and Rufus are doubles of one another such
that Dana’s marriage to Kevin is read as a “form of oppression not unlike chattel slavery”
(Steinberg 470). These claims, however, rely on reading Dana and Kevin’s relationship
consummated through mutual consent as a modern representation of Rufus’s nonconsensual relationship with Alice Greenwood. Thus, some critics point to the present as
seemingly more problematic for Dana because it is a space in which she experiences not
just the effects of institutionalized racism and economic oppression, but also the echoes
of slavery.
Rather than separating the past from the present into discrete time periods which
Dana experiences with little overlap, and rather than thinking that the past is just a
haunting essence which infiltrates the present only through the dissemination of its
legacy, I argue that Dana’s relationship to the past and the present is more complicated
because she personally experiences both time periods. She lives in a present that is
influenced by the past, she experiences first-hand the past and these experiences
influence her relationship to her present, and vice versa. Additionally, and as the narrative
progresses, the demarcation between past and present blurs. This means that Dana’s
experiences in the present and the past are separated by mere seconds, or the time it takes
her to travel from one era to the next. The lack of separation between the time periods
also means that her experiences in one time are not easily marked as only belonging to
that time. What results is that the past is not just an oppressive space separated from a
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preferable present, nor is it just a legacy; the past and the present, the good and the bad of
each time period overlap and intertwine. This intertwining of time periods can be seen
through how time is described to Dana in the narrative and ultimately how it is
experienced.
In addition to the non-linearity of time, examined earlier in this chapter, the
passage of time, and how it is not consistent from one era to the next, is also important
for Dana and her own relationship to the past and the present. Dana comes to realize this
lack of consistency after her first time travelling episode. When in Maryland, Dana has
time to recognize the cries of Rufus drowning, venture to the river he is in, rescue him,
resuscitate him, and stare down the barrel of a rifle threating her. She perceives this trip
to have taken “a few minutes. Not long” (16). However, Kevin informs her that her
absence lasted “no more than ten or fifteen seconds between the time you went and the
time you called my name” (16). The discrepancy between the past and the present in
terms of time’s passage is important, but seemingly negligible in this instance. As Dana
experiences the past in greater length, the dilation of time between past and present
becomes more extreme and more important. At one point in the narrative, she is in the
present for a period of days, while Kevin is still in the past. When she returns and after
some months working on the plantation, Kevin reappears after travelling north to Canada.
Dana notes how the five-year difference in time’s progression had changed him: “his face
was lined and grim where it wasn’t hidden by the beard. He looked more than ten years
older than when I had last seen him” (184). Thus the effects of time are not consistent.
Here Dana has experienced a few months of time’s passing: part of Kevin’s absence she
spent in Los Angeles and the remainder she spent on the plantation. Kevin has now
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traveled from Maryland to the North, and back. She observes through his aging and his
scarring that “time, hadn’t been any kinder to him than it had been to me,” a nod to the
effects of history for whites during the age of enslavement, while also acknowledging the
uniqueness and relativity of a person’s relationship to time. How time is experienced
differs between Dana and Kevin. This is made obvious in this instance because of time’s
dilation between the eras, but it is also noted in how Dana reflects on Kevin’s change in
appearance and her wondering what these changes “made of him” (184). This question,
which she asks of herself about Kevin, points to the subjective relationship between time
and context. Time affects Kevin in ways that are not always similar to how it also affects
Dana. She understands that how she experiences the past is due to her identity, her
education, and the knowledge she brings to bear on the past from the future. Additionally,
how Kevin is oriented to time differs from Dana’s own orientation because she finds
herself more thoroughly drawn to the Antebellum South and with the resulting sensations
life on the plantation provide her. Being drawn to the past in this manner is not without
complications for Dana, however.
5. The Importance of Sensation for Dana
While Dana’s relationship to time is discordant with norms because she does not
experience it as linear nor does it progress for her at the same rate from one era to the
next, her orientation to the two different eras (present day Los Angeles, and antebellum
Maryland) and the social and behavioral norms which govern them is similarly
conflicted. This conflict is initially addressed by Kevin after her first return from the past.
Kevin comments on how he perceives Dana’s relationship to the past when he argues that
her time travel is the result of her already existing mindset regarding the past. He states:
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“you had already seen the Bible. You know about those people—knew their names, knew
they were Marylanders” (Butler 46). Thus for Kevin, Dana is already looking back to the
past. She possesses an orientation to the past derived, in part, from her reading of family
history. He reads her subsequent travels into the past as the result of her being compelled
to seek out her family’s history. And, Kevin is correct in his assessment of Dana. She
expresses as much when she discusses wanting to learn about her family. Dana affirms
Kevin’s perceptions about her own relationship to the past when she is in the past. There,
she recalls how “Hagar had filled pages of it with her careful script. There was a record
of her marriage to Oliver Black . . . then someone else had taken up the listing. So many
relatives that I had never known, would never know. Or would I?” (28-29). Here Dana
provides one of the underlying reasons for her relationship to Maryland and the
plantation. She notes how she might meet some of her ancestors. While Dana is not yet
certain that she will fill in the gaps of her family tree, her hopeful tone demonstrates a
desire, expressed because she has traveled back through time to the past, of meeting those
who are long forgotten.
Her expressed desire to meet her family is a by-product of her education in the
present and a result of literal experience of the past. While it is in her present that she
reads about the past, the past adjusts how she receives this information in the present as
the narrative progresses. Early in the narration, Dana’s education stems from written
accounts and shared family history. But from the moment she travels back into time, she
realizes that her education is not complete. Literary criticism often reads the past as
providing Dana with knowledge. Mitchell refers to Dana’s journey into the past as a
“journey of self-possession and self-discovery” (Mitchell 53). It is a “rebirth of sorts” for
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Dana (53). Sherryl Vint argues that Dana not only learns by moving into the past, but that
by going back into time Dana is confronting “racist history” and learning about herself
not just as a subject but as an “object” as well (Vint 248-249). These readings are
important to consider because they interpret Dana as not just affected by the past, but also
as influenced by her subject-hood formed in the present. Mitchell’s and Vint’s arguments
also consider the influence of Dana’s subject-hood formed in California and its
relationship to her subject-hood in Maryland. Sarah Wood makes a similar point when
she argues that the realities of life in Maryland “progressively strip-away [sic]” Dana’s
20th century subject-hood (Wood 89). Experiencing the past ultimately remakes Dana
into a 19th-20th century hybrid version of herself. This scholarship reads the past as a
temporal passage for Dana to survive. The past is a test that, once completed, will result
in a coming-of-age for Dana. Even when criticism looks to some of the underlying
desires for Dana’s relationship to the past or that she is compelled to visit the past, these
desires are interpreted as a vehicle that will allow for Dana’s growth. By considering
orientation, especially Dana’s shifting orientation when in the past away from being a
passive voyeur to an active participant engaged with the history she seeks, I argue that
Dana does not so much grow, or come-of-age. Instead, I read Dana’s orientation as
redirected partially away from the overarching premise that she will obtain objective
knowledge about her family toward a sensory and perception based model, where the
environment and the plantation aesthetic feed the desires she expresses. In this reading,
Dana’s orientation to and experience of the past is less invested in the specifics of history,
or for that matter meeting and interacting with many of her ancestors, as much as it is
about sharing in sensations of the time, building friendship/kinship with one relative in
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particular, and in experiencing violence and danger related to both the era, the plantation,
and Rufus, her kin.
A relationship to danger is the reason Dana is drawn back into the past in the first
place. She first travels through time because Rufus is drowning and she is compelled to
save him. In doing so, she places herself at risk because neither Rufus, his mother, nor his
father understand who she is, where she has come from, or what she is exactly. Danger,
therefore, sets the stage for Dana’s encounters with the past, and it is danger and the
increasing level of danger which begets violence which both draws Dana back to the past
and allows her to travel back to Los Angeles. Dana discusses her thoughts on violence in
the Antebellum South with Kevin, soon after her second return. She describes how she
has only indirectly experienced it thus far. She states that she has been “watching the
violence of this time go by on the screen long enough to have picked up a few things”
(48). Dana thus uses forms of media in the present to provide information about
phenomena she has not yet directly experienced. Media, therefore, provides a form of
second-hand education. But just as second-hand accounts of her family’s history prove
unreliable for Dana, these dramatized versions of violence she consumes are equally as
undependable. Drawing a comparison between her experience and how she views it as
lacking, she concludes that the past allows for a more direct relationship to and with
experiences that may include danger and violence by asserting that “most people around
Rufus know more about real violence than the screenwriters of today will ever know”
(48). This statement demonstrates the critical force of Dana’s own framework, or
interpretative model associated with the past and the present. The present includes the
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experience of violence for her in narrative form. The past, she believes, provides a more
real account of violence.
The difference between a narrativized version of violence and a first-hand or
direct experience of violence is similar in its construction to how Dana perceives the
differences between familial history passed down both in text and orally and returning to
the past to bear witness to that very same history. The former omits details and for Dana
as a writer, these details are important. The latter presents its own challenges including
the threat to her person and the potential for irreversible harm. While Dana learns that she
too will not be able to fully articulate these experiences in written form later, that words
cannot account for the complexity of her experiences including her perceptions and
sensations, the latter type of direct experience is still preferable for Dana. Although these
threats are very real for her, they still do not override the level of sensation she derives
from direct experience of her history. The pull to not just observe but participate in
history is far too great for Dana, and the narrative plays with this concept with greater
and more dangerous potential. Dana’s first trip back to the past involves Tom Weylin
pulling a gun on her. The rifle’s proximity and the threat it poses returns Dana to the
present. On her next trip to the past, she again saves Rufus from his own cavalier attitude
to safety and self-preservation. She does not immediately return to the present after her
act, and she decides to venture into the woods to seek out her other ancestors. When in
the woods, she encounters a party of eight white men riding horses in the middle of the
night. While she identifies the threat they pose to her, recounting that “if they saw me,
they might take me along with them as their prisoner. Blacks here were assumed to be
slaves unless they could prove they were free—unless they had their free papers.
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Paperless blacks were fair game for any white” (Butler 34), she does not venture away
from them. Instead, she follows them to the Greenwood cabin. Once at the cabin she
witnesses a horrific scene. The white men tie a black man visiting Alice to a tree and
begin whipping him. Dana’s narration of the event, from just a few feet away, reveals her
own complex relationship to the situation. She is terrified and enraptured by the action.
She describes how she “could literally smell his sweat, hear every ragged breath, every
cry, every cut of the whip. I could see his body jerking, convulsing, straining, against the
rope as his screaming went on and on. My stomach heaved, and I had to force myself to
stay where I was and keep quiet” (36). Here the horrors of the scene unfolding in front of
her makes her ill. It is too powerful and disgusting for her. And yet, she cannot stop
herself from viewing it, processing it, sensing what is happening to the man tied to the
tree. Dana is not receiving pleasure from these sensations and from the aesthetics of
violence she is witnessing, but she is nonetheless compelled to continue to view them.
While the violence she is witnessing commands her attention, Dana reflects on
scenes of violence from contemporary Los Angeles which are far less alluring. She
juxtaposes the sensory intensity of the whipping against recorded and sometimes
performed, and therefore artificial violence from the present. She remembers that she
“had seen people beaten on television and in the movies. I had seen the too-red blood
substitute streaked across their backs and hear their well-rehearsed screams. But I hadn’t
laid nearby and smelled their sweat or heard them pleading and praying” (36). The
memories Dana recalls of violence on television and in film demonstrate the
underwhelming characteristics of violence for her in the present. There is separation
between her and the act. This separation from the action is similar to how Paul
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experiences himself in front of the Scheneley Hotel. Paul, at the hotel, looks in through
the window at a scene that he is both enamored by and desirous of. The scene is only
quasi-fulfilling and he returns home later in the evening to fantasize about its details and
nuances. Dana, whether sitting in her living room or in a large theatre, is similarly
disconnected from acts of violence. She cannot smell the act. She cannot sense the fear.
Instead, she comments on the artificiality of the scene, the “too-red blood” that attempts
to mimic, but nonetheless does not capture the real thing. These scenes captured on film
and television do not contain the same amount of power or richness for Dana, and as a
result, she is not drawn to them in the same way she is drawn to violence in the past. But,
just like Paul, Tod, and Mick from earlier chapters, an intensity of experience is also a
part of Dana’s orientation. Thus, while she is drawn to violence, she becomes inured to it
effects. She therefore finds herself in situations where the threat of violence escalates in
order to satisfy what is ultimately a desire to experience a level of sensory and
experiential intensity.
As the narrative progresses, the threat of violence and the direct experiencing of
violence increases for Dana. She is hunted, beaten, and whipped in the past. She attempts
to take her own life by cutting open a vein. She learns that without increasing intensity,
she cannot return to the present, or so it seems for the structure of the narrative. Her final
experience of violence, however, demonstrates how her orientation to it, her feeling of
being compelled to experience it, reshapes her entire relationship to the present. Over the
course of her visits to the past Dana creates a relationship with Rufus Weylin that is both
functional and perverse. She befriends him, teaches him to read, and attempts to mentor
his behavior in order to ameliorate his prejudices. She does this while ensuring that he
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impregnates another one of her ancestors, in order to ensure her continued existence in
the present. However, because of the dynamics associated with race and gender in the
Antebellum South, Dana also becomes an object of affection for Rufus. He sees himself
as more powerful and entitled to her body, much as he sees himself and by extension all
whites as more powerful and entitled to the bodies of all blacks, enslaved or free. This
dynamic, whereby Dana must navigate an increasingly hostile relationship to Rufus,
comes to a head long after Rufus has ensured Dana’s familial legacy in the future. In this
scene, Dana and Rufus are discussing his recent sale of another enslaved person, a person
he believes was sexually attracted to Dana. They discuss the children of Alice, now dead
from suicide, and how Dana should stay in the past in order to nurture them. Although
Dana is oriented to the past, she is not compelled to play out a role that is not her own.
She, like the other characters analyzed in this dissertation is not child oriented.27 As a
result, she declines the offer and rebukes his advances. While Dana has considered the
past as her home and her refuge from the present, and while the past has provided her
with levels of sensory intensity and experience she deems as unavailable in the present,
she is not oriented to staying permanently in the past. She is, nevertheless, still oriented to
the past and her experiences there.
In this final scene in the past, Rufus attempts to rape Dana. They are in the attic of
his house, Dana is on the palette reserved for her as a quasi-enslaved woman and Rufus is
next to her. They discuss what has occurred, his loneliness and hers. Dana connects with
Rufus one last time remarking that “The words touched me as no others could have. I
knew about loneliness. I found my thoughts going back to the time I had gone home
27
Again, See Lee Edelman’s discussion of reproductive futurism; Ahmed’s discussion of family lines; and
Freeman’s argument about the chrononormative.
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without Kevin—the loneliness, the fear, sometimes the hopelessness I had felt then”
(258). In this passage, Dana’s own analysis of her orientation and the experiences it
produces are made clear for her. She understands that her relationship to the past has
changed her relationship to the present. The past allows her to bear witness and
participate in a history she had previously considered to be inaccessible in narrative form.
While the past provides her with this access, it is also corrupting. It produces isolation for
her and it is ultimately scarring. The past is access to a family she never knew, but now
does. The past is also like a prison. She comments on Rufus’ grip on her arm, how it goes
from “caressing to imprisoning” and her relationship with him: “I could accept him as my
ancestor, my younger brother, my friend, but not as my master, and not as my lover”
(259-260). Realizing that Rufus cannot as easily define their relationship as she does, she
stabs him. Unlike the other scenes of violence which Dana observes and directly
experiences, this moment involves her physically harming the physical connection she
has to the past. For decades, as tracked from the past perspective, she has travelled back
through time to rescue Rufus. This connection affords her with many opportunities. It
also now threatens her life. When she stabs him she experiences another round of
disorientation brought on by the slippage of herself between time periods. She vomits.
She convulses with “terrible, wrenching sickness” (260). And, she loses her arm. Rufus,
still semi-conscious, is holding onto Dana as she begins to slip back to the present. He
does not let go and, as a result, she leaves the part of herself still held by him in the past.
When the narrative begins Dana is in the hospital for losing part of her arm. When
the narrative ends, she has recovered, as much as is possible from the psychological and
physical trauma of her journeys into the past and the injuries she received when there.
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While she is back in 1976, she is nonetheless still oriented backwards to the time she
spent in Maryland, to the plantation, to Rufus, and to the site of her trauma. She, and
Kevin partly, cannot escape their relationship to the past and to their experiences in the
past so much so that her first excursion after leaving the hospital is a trip to Maryland.
Here Dana and Kevin are travelling the countryside of Maryland looking for evidence of
the Weylin Plantation. Although she has personally participated in the history she is
seeking, Dana is still searching for evidence of what has befallen her. Going to Maryland,
she hopes, will provide her with information, much as going back into the past will fill in
the gaps of her family history. Unfortunately for Dana, the historical record is all that
remains of her own experience and it, like her family Bible, is missing key information.
She finds herself repeating similar actions, locating an “old newspaper article—a notice
that Mr. Rufus Weylin had been killed when his house caught fire and was partially
destroyed” (262). She similarly seeks out additional information venturing with Kevin
“back to Baltimore to skim newspapers, legal records, anything we could find” hoping to
identify information about her family and what occurred (263). But little information
exists in the historical record, absent her own direct knowledge of the events.
6. Conclusion
Dana’s orientation and how it becomes increasingly exaggerated due to the
intensity of her physical experience is similar in nature to the orientations already
explored throughout this dissertation. While the objects differ, no other character
analyzed from a work of 20th century American fiction in this dissertation is oriented to
first-hand experiences of violence, the orientation is still similarly structured. Like Paul,
Tod, Mick, and Vivaldo, Dana’s orientation to an aesthetic or sensory experience
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becomes all-encompassing. Paul’s orientation is more fully developed and fully explored
when he is in New York, the space that houses, he believes, the potential for him to
experience his aesthetic. Tod’s artistic aesthetic overwhelms his capacity to identify
reality from fantasy. Mick rebukes sexual relations with her neighbor and other
connections with people and instead prefers the intensity and newness of certain musical
pieces. And Vivaldo more firmly entrenches himself in an aesthetics of suffering in order
to fulfill his own belief in his artistic abilities. Dana’s orientation is a little different in its
level of effect. While she does not receive the same level of pleasure as do the characters
from the other works analyzed thus far, she is nonetheless compelled to the past. Her
orientation to history and the past does not relax even after the loss of her arm, a literal
leaving of part of herself in the past. In this way, queer orientations demonstrate a level of
attachment to sensory and aesthetic experience on the part of a person such that all other
forms of experience fall flat.
In the next chapter of this dissertation, I explore Samuel R. Delany’s Times
Square Red, Times Square Blue. I argue that Delany’s narrative, in which he is the
narrator, demonstrates and performs a queer orientation to the past and specifically to
those experience that occurred in the past. Delany is therefore oriented to time, like
Dana, but his orientation is to a memorial time, a time that was previously experienced
but is nonetheless gone. The orientation is therefore about recovery and loss. It is about
re-experiencing the past. It identifies those moments now gone as more real, more
radical. This is Delany’s thesis based on his own experience and which he extrapolates to
the entire queer community, even when the queer community writ large was not a part of
the original experience.
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Chapter 5: Queer Theory and Samuel Delaney’s Queer Orientation
1. Introduction
This dissertation has thus far examined works of literary fiction which describes
characters whose orientations can be considered askew or slanted as they relate to the
social and behavioral norms of their given environment and contexts. I have argued
throughout that a queer orientation is a useful hermeneutic for approaching works of
literature because it adds to and sometimes revises the critical readings of those works by
looking to aspects of characters which may have been overlooked according to the
dominant modes of investigation in literary studies. My analyses take into account
experience and desire, where experience shapes identity, and vice versa, and where
identity is always shaped by objects, discourses, and histories.28 Experience and desire
mutually form and inform each other, which forms our orientations – both our
frameworks for perceptions and our sense of directedness, but also our interests, our
feelings, and our beliefs. Thus, my understanding of a queer orientation as askew or
slanted describes a relationship to the world drawn from layers of experience and desire.
This relationship is mutually constitutive, and this means that neither experience nor
desire can be compartmentalized when analyzing how or to what a character is oriented.
Whereas this dissertation’s first four chapters are focused on works of 20th
century American literary fiction, this chapter departs, slightly, from considering literary
fiction and, instead, focuses on a work of non-fiction, one that merges memoir,
philosophy, and theory. Samuel R. Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue is two
essays: “Times Square Blue” captures Delany’s experiences in the porn cinemas and
28
Again, see Joan W. Scott on identity and experience from the Introduction.
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other establishments around 42nd Street in New York City. “. . . Three, Two, One,
Contact: Time Square Red” is an argument about city redevelopment and planning which
crafts a framework drawn from those personal experiences outlined in “Blue.” I include
this text for examination here because Delany performs a queer orientation. Through his
framework regarding sexual contact and through his discussion of the past, Delany
demonstrates both an orientation that is backwards in time and how this backwardness
articulates his framework regarding New York City, and more broadly other urban
spaces. Delany is oriented backwards in time, similarly to Dana from Octavia Butler’s
Kindred. Dana’s orientation, however, toward direct experience made manifest through
the appearance of violence is in the past. She only experiences the history, both personal
and familial, to which she is directed for the first time in the narrative. She is therefore
oriented toward a different time that is outside of her chronology. Delany’s “Blue”
illustrates an orientation which is askew because it is backwards, a point made by
Heather Love that will be examined further in the coming pages, and because it is
directed toward a memory of a specific time. Dana does not have an experience of the
past before she time travels. The only information she possesses about the past is indirect.
Delany’s orientation and the performance of this orientation through his framework,
however, are directed at those things he has previously experienced. Both “Blue” and
“Red” catalogue his sensory and intellectual experiences in and around New York City’s
Times Square, recounting his experiences of the people who worked in the area as well as
those who, along with Delany, cruised its theatres, stores, and streets.
While both essays return to the past and to past experience, “Red” illustrates the
framework of Delany’s orientation; “Red” is also a performance of his orientation. It
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articulates his experiences in Times Square while cruising for sexual contact by way of
his desire to return to a space which allows for contact. It is an argument about perception
and sensory experience, or more specifically, about contact and how contact is important
not just when considering the development or design of a space, but how it is necessary
and foundational to whole groups of people. Contact is a demonstration of orientation
that seeks to create a community of other people with the same orientation. If contact is
what he experiences and what he desires, then contact becomes his perspective. He
perceives his world through a framework influenced by a desire for contact. Delany
argues that because of his past experiences a significant number of other people would
benefit from what contact affords: sex, conversation, and the potential for something
more. This means that while Delany’s own orientation and his narrative’s orientation is
backward because of its rootedness in past experience, it is also directed outward toward
a community and toward the creation of a community of like-minded people. Because his
framework draws upon his personal experience in the cinemas of Times Square its
“polemical thrust is toward conceiving, organizing, and setting into place new
establishments—and even entirely new types of institutions—that would offer the
services and fulfill the social functions provided by the porn houses that encouraged sex
among the audience” (Delany xvii). Thus, he understands his polemic as a method for
urban planning that will fulfill his desire for contact, even if the establishments in which
contact occurs are “new” or ultimately different.
As I discuss in the introduction, one of my interventions in this dissertation is to
expand how queer is used because it incorporates both sexual orientation and orientations
that are also non-sexual. I do this, not as an act of reclamation, but rather as a means to
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address characters in works of literary fiction as more than just cyphers for same sex
desire.29 These works, as this dissertation has argued, include characters who are queer
because of their orientations – a queerness that involves not just sexuality, but also one’s
relation to objects, spaces, and ideas which are non-sexual in nature. Delany’s work is
important to this thread of my argument because it showcases how queer can function
both as an adjective to describe a sex act or a sexual identity (or orientation) which is
non-normative (Delany self-identifies as gay). Delaney’s work also describes a larger
orientation toward experience and memory which includes both sexual and non-sexual
objects (Delany’s orientation, or more specifically his narrator’s orientation toward the
past and the performance of this orientation as a framework for organizing the urban
space).
Delany’s work is also of value because it performs a relationship to memorial
time not yet examined in this dissertation. While queer theory has argued about queer
identity vis-à-vis time, as examined in the previous chapter, Delany’s work does not
simply disavow symbolic or normative time even though it critiques both. Rather, he
offers a framework oriented toward the past and therefore toward a different time, a
memorial time as described earlier. This memorial time can be better understood by
considering loss and its influence on identity, as Heather Love does, in her work Feeling
Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Love notes that queers have “been
seen as a backward race” because they are “understood as a throwback to an earlier stage
of human development or as children who refuse to grow up” (Love 6). This
29
Meaning, I am not repurposing queer for to revise its meaning. I neither seek to delete its negative
connotations nor its history of abuse. Instead, I am using the term more inclusively by considering its
applications to both sexual and non-sexual contexts.
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backwardness or refusal to grow up is similarly discussed by Halberstam, Freeman, and
Kathryn Bond Stockton30, who all note a tense relationship between queer people and
normative progressions of time. This dissertation has taken up these elements, notably in
relation to Paul, Mick Kelly, and Vivaldo. Because queer people experience a
backwardness according to Love, they are also associated with a degree of stigma and
shame because of their relationship to their world, their relationship to norms including
family and reproduction, and their historical relationship to deviant and “abnormal” sex
and relationships. Love continues that queers are “perverse, immature, sterile, and
melancholic” (6), a point that can be reaffirmed by looking to the titles of works of queer
theory including Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure, the edited collection on Gay
Shame from a conference on the same subject, or Douglas Crimp’s Melancholia and
Moralism.
The look back, or feeling backward as Love argues, is a feature of queer identity,
at least in its theoretical discussions, because it demonstrates tension for queer people.
We look backward in spite of discourses which suggest queers are better off currently.
She argues that we still experience similar emotions to those from the past (shame, loss,
lack, negativity, etc.). Queers therefore memorialize the past as the site of loss or injury.
On occasion, queer people seek to advance beyond this site of loss. Love describes the
tension she sees in theorists and writers who desire “to resist damage and to affirm queer
existence” (3). Thus queer writers, theorists, and other people are oriented to the
historical archive and to queer experiences in the past as a means of demonstrating
30
Stockton’s The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century argues that all children
develop not through a series of progressions which propel them forward, but through a series of sideways
increments. She argues that norms inevitably regulate this sideways growth. Queer adults, however,
continue to exist sideways.
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queer’s negativity or antisocial power (Bersani, Edelman), its transformative power
(Halberstam), or to at times disavow the past.
Delany, however, does not memorialize the past as the site of loss or injury.
Instead, the past has been injured and lost because of the present. The loss is not located
in the past; the loss is located in the present. Thus, the past which he returns to in “Blue”
and which frames his argument in “Red” is something to recover and create again.
Additionally, the past is a space, a memory that is overwhelmingly positive. It is the site
of experiences which provide “high-interest returns that make cosmopolitan life wonderfilled and rich” (Delany 199). Thus Delany’s argument here, as elsewhere in the
narrative, regards the urban as providing for a better social life. He returns to the past and
to his own experiences because it is the site of promise, of a form of radical potential.31
The past is also formative. It is home to his foundational experiences of sexual pleasure
through cruising and contact. Delaney advocates a return to (or at least nostalgically
revisits) an era of sexual liberation where gay men could enjoy casual sex without
condoms and without some class barriers. I argue that this return to the past is part of
Delany’s and the narrative’s backwards orientation. Both his physical orientation and his
framework are directed toward a time viewed as more promising because within that
moment spaces exist where cruising and contact are plentiful. He is oriented toward a
feeling of physical pleasure. His physical orientation is expressed through his desire for
sex. He desires sex with men, and he is subsequently oriented to spaces where sex with
men can be easily had. He is also oriented to spaces where he can commune with others
31
Queer Theory often invests in an idea of queer’s radical potential. Edelman and Bersani both structure
their arguments around the radicalness of queer’s relationship to subjectivity. Halberstam, again, sees
queer, through trans, as a potential way to transform our gendered, spatial, and sexual politics.
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(before, during, and after sexual contact). Both sex and conversation are seen as
important. His orientation to the porn cinemas is therefore the result of both desires (it is
a space where he can satisfy his want of sex and his want of conversation).
While Delany’s narrative includes some discussion of negative and horrific
events, the past is largely divorced from the negative affects that Love and other theorists
so closely attribute to queer existence throughout history. Neither shame nor loss is
attached to experience. Additionally, homelessness and drug abuse are considered as a
part of the social matrix of Times Square, but they are remembered and analyzed through
Delany’s own experiential framework regarding contact. Thus, these stereotypically
negative components of the urban space are reduced in impact. They are seen not as
negative effects of the urban, but as welcome additions to the diverse matrix Delany
identifies as necessary to his thesis. Other traumas, including HIV/AIDS, are largely
deleted from Delany’s record of Time Square, as well. The downplaying of trauma can be
read as adding to the persuasiveness of the polemic. They speak to the politics of
Delany’s rhetorical moves, a politics which largely attempts to deconstruct fear-based
rhetoric emanating from elected officials, city planners, and the general public. While his
criticism is important, they also belie the larger argument surrounding diversity that
Delany proffers. He writes that life is “at its most rewarding, productive, pleasant when
large numbers of people understand, appreciate, and seek out interclass contact and
communication conducted in a mode of good will” (Delany 111). Because of Delany’s
orientation, I argue, the resulting politics of his framework largely and perhaps only
address spaces for men like himself, who wish to seek out areas to engage in contact and
cruise.
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This chapter will analyze Delany’s orientation rooted in the past. I will focus on
Delany’s experiences in the past and his recounting of them in “Blue” and “Red” as
examples of a queer orientation. I do this because the past houses both sexual and nonsexual memories for Delany, which are rooted in pleasure and an urban aesthetic. What
makes this orientation queer is not just its backwardness, but also its view of an urban
aesthetic in which cruising and contact preferably take place; the urban is a necessary
component of the sex act. Additionally, because Times Square Red, Times Square Blue is
a work of philosophy and theory, I am interested in the effects of this orientation toward
the past on the framework outlined. This framework for developing an urban space is
predicated on the notion of pleasure derived from contact which is drawn from
experiences in the past. His framework is about reproducing an orientation toward
contact in others. It follows that, if sex and conversation are pleasurable for Delany, then
others will find it equally as pleasurable. Of course while this framework is delivered
through a larger polemic for a broader audience, it specifically targets those with similar
experiences or who want to experience sex and conversation in the same way that Delany
describes. Redevelopment threatens this framework and his ability to fulfill his desires,
however, because Delany argues that only the city, or the urban aesthetic, allows for such
an experience of contact. Redevelopment threatens Delany’s past experiences and his
sense of fulfillment. He has lost his pleasure. He has lost those spaces that gave him sex
and conversation.
I read Delany as attached to and oriented backwards to the past that he has lost; it
no longer exists as it did—it has been paved over or rebuilt, quite literally through
redevelopment. It has been regulated by government and social and behavioral norms
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which discredit and discount the importance, Delany argues, of cruising and contact. The
past is a space that provided a level of sensory intensity and experience such that it
becomes the focus of his orientation. He is directed backwards to it because he desires
those types of experiences that the past afforded, just as he argues for a return to an
economy and a geography that mimics the past somewhere in the future. In this sense,
Delany’s orientation and his narrative’s orientation are askew in so far as they
demonstrate a phenomenological backwardness to queer existence (the site of loss merely
changes time periods from the past to the present). For Delaney, this queer orientation is
sexual because it incorporates a significant attention to sensual and sexual pleasures,
sexual objects, and other forms of sexual desire. Additionally, this orientation also
involves non-sexual forms of connection because it describes an urban form of contact,
an urban aesthetic in which sex and cruising should take place. Thus, the urban and the
sexual are indistinguishable for Delany throughout his narrative. In the remainder of this
chapter, I examine Delany’s theory of contact, and I discuss how his desire for contact
influences his framework which gestures toward the future, is Utopian in its ideal, but is
rooted in a backwards orientation. I then examine the experiences Delany offers, how
they provide a level of sensory pleasure for him, and the importance of the urban and the
urban aesthetic.
2. Contact as Social Potential and Political Statement
The second half of Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue responds,
largely, to the changes taking place in Times Square along and around 42nd Street in New
York City. He writes that these changes involve the “destruction of acres of architecture,
numberless commercial and living spaces, and, so far, the permanent obliteration of over
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two dozen theater venues” (144). The destruction of these venues, which have afforded
Delany and many others countless hours of pleasure, is also the death of “complex social
practices, many of which turned on contact, affecting over any year hundreds of
thousands of men and women” (144). For Delany, the removal of this ability for him and
others to engage in “complex social practices” is at the heart of his polemic. Contact,
Delany argues, is a form of social good. Contact can involve sex, and it does routinely
within Delany’s narrative, but it also affords communication across lines associated with
sex, sexuality, gender and gender identity, race, and class. This form of contact, which he
associates as a service of “good will” (111) is largely rooted in Delany’s belief that given
the current Capitalist market, people are happier when they engage in pleasantries with a
diverse group of people.
While contact is first and foremost an approach to urban life that emphasizes sex,
it also involves communication for Delany, namely encounters with others in public and
public/private spaces, like porn theatres and bars which are the locations of his sexual
encounters. He imagines contact as promoting a full-litany of communicative possibilities
“between the classes” that are “specifically sexual and sex-related” (120). Delany wants
these sex and sex-related interactions to occur across a broad spectrum of people, ranging
from “male and female, gay and straight, old and young, working class and middle class,
Asian and Hispanic, black and other, rural and urban, tourist and indigene, transient and
permanent” (xx). And because these are sexual encounters between consenting persons
(legal age is not necessarily factored into his equation), contact may also involve
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remuneration for services rendered.32 In both “Blue” and “Red,” Delany catalogues the
hustlers, prostitutes, drug dealers and other local dwellers that set up shop on the street
corners and in the balconies of the porn theaters in Times Square. He writes that
“occasionally men expected money—but most often, not. Many encounters were
wordless. Now and again, though, one would blossom into a conversation lasting hours”
(15). Contact may or may not be about money, but it always involves something akin to a
transaction. Conversation is not necessarily important to contact, but the potential for
conversation is. That contact may not lead to conversation and may not involve verbal
communication seems paradoxical given the role communication plays in Delany’s larger
argument. However, Delany also views the touching of bodies, sex, and orgasms as forms
of communication. Thus, contact represents two things: the immediate act involving two
or more people and the potential for more acts to follow.
Contact is a form of sociality, akin to, but more expansive in its definition than
those provided by other queer theorists. Leo Bersani, for example, constructs a model of
anti-sociality in Homos and elsewhere that involves readings of literary fiction which
depict sex acts between men similar to those encounters Delany describes. However, for
Bersani, the lack of conversational, or relationship potential, in the acts demonstrates a
more interesting condition, an antirelational element of gay men serving as a
“precondition [to] sexual pleasure” (Bersani 161). Delany’s idea of contact is quite
different. Jose Esteban Muñoz refers to Delany’s theory as “anti antirelational” because,
while pornographic, it nevertheless involves “communal rapture” (Munoz 14). And this
32
Within the narrative, Delany learns that he had, over the years, a sexual encounter with Jonathan
beginning when Jonathan was 15. Delany also remarks that he wished “sex movies had existed . . . and
been an option for me” when he would have been the same age (Delany 83).
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focus on the communal can be found in Delany’s works of literary fiction as well. For
example, cruising, which is the set up for contact, is described in Delany’s Tales of
Nevèrÿon. Tales narrates the experiences of Gorgik, at once free and at other moments in
the narrative enslaved, and his budding interest in men. Early in the narrative, Gorgik
sees another enslaved boy and he is described as “wanting desperately to move away,
[Gorgik] stood staring for seconds, minutes, hours at the boy . . . only seconds, he
realized when, a breath later, he was walking on. Reaching the other alley, he stopped. He
took three more breaths. And a fourth. Then he looked back” (Delany, Tales 33). Here
Gorgik stares, begins to walk away from the collared boy, turns around and looks again,
continues walking, and turns around yet again. He is fascinated by the boy; he fixates on
him.
We might imagine this scene taking place on a modern city street. A man walks
past another man. He finds the other man interesting, perhaps attractive. He continues to
walk past the man, but every few steps he looks back hoping to see whether the object of
his attraction is performing the same action. In this first stage of potential encounter, or
desire-laden public contact, the first man cruises the second man. Cruising may
sometimes lead to sex, a point Delany describes at great detail throughout Times. One
particular instance involves Delany and a man named Hoke. He first cruised Hoke, had a
“half dozen encounters in the Capri in as many months” that were largely “wordless”,
and then these encounters developed into a regular string of no-strings attachments rooted
in friendship (Delany, Times 97-98). Hoke is described in the narrative as “meaty.” (97).
His hands are notably large, a facet of his body that Delany finds appealing, and his penis
is “generously uncut” (97). And while the sex with Hoke is described as satisfying, and it
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is indeed important to Delany’s larger argument, it is the after-effects of sex, the
conversations with Hoke that prove to be just as pleasurable and important. The
relationship that develops is largely a string of no-strings attachments. But these
attachments, the sex both in public and in private, serve as a vehicle for what Delany
describes in another work of literary fiction, The Motion of Light in Water, as a “being for
others” (Delany, Motion, 183).33
This being for others concerns connections between like-minded people. Contact
is first and foremost about sex, and then it is about the potential for conversation and the
like-mindedness of the people who participate. Contact occurs between people who all
want some degree of sexual pleasure. Delany himself admits to this desire on his part, he
is oriented to a specific type of sexual pleasure and a particular type of sexual object, and
thus his theory of and desire for more contact derives from experiences like those with
Hoke. The theory of contact is also framed as a response to what Delany sees occurring
around him. Contact may allow for sex, communication, and relationships to potentially
develop, but it is equally political. Contact is a response to development and change.
Delany writes, “My argument’s polemical thrust is toward conceiving, organizing, and
setting into place new establishments—and even entirely new types of institutions—that
would offer the services and fulfill the social functions provided by the porn houses that
encourages sex among the audience” (Delany xvii). These “new establishments” are
directed against a style of redevelopment underway in New York City that affects a
person’s freedom. The freedom that Delany references here is not the “’freedom’ to ‘be’
‘gay’” (193), but rather the freedom to experience being gay, or being attracted to men in
33
At one point in Motion, Delany recounts a cruising and sex scene in the truck park at the end of
Christopher Street. This scene involves countless men engaging in sex acts.
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particular social and spatial situations. He writes that many gay institutions, like the
cinemas, bars, sex clubs, and truck stops which dot this narrative, “have grown up outside
the knowledge of much of the straight world” (194). They are, in essence, counterpublics,
existing alongside, but out-of-sight of social and behavioral norms which govern more
public spaces.34 Delany argues that these spaces are necessary fixtures in the socialization
of gay men, among others.
Michael Warner makes a similar argument in his work The Trouble with Normal:
Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life by describing the changing store front displays
along Christopher Street in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Warner discusses how
the changing laws put forth by the administration of Rudy Giuliani have allowed “the city
to padlock dozens of stores and clubs” (Warner 150). The effects of these law changes
are the removal of people from the streets, Warner observes, which results in the “erosion
of queer publics” (161) as he saw and defined them. In a piece he coauthors with Lauren
Berlant called “Sex in Public”, Warner and Berlant outline what this redevelopment
means to gay men. If new establishments seek to provide a different kind of space for
people to shop, dine, and live, then old establishments are seen as critical to the
socialization of gay men. The theaters, clubs, and “explicit sexual materials” are the tools
that allowed gay men “to find each other, to map a commonly accessible world, to
construct the architecture of queer space in a homophobic environment, and, for the last
fifteen years, to cultivate a collective ethos of safer sex” (Warner and Berlant 191). Thus
34
Counterpublics, most notably discussed in Michael Warner’s Publics and Counterpublics, where a public
involves belonging because one is a “certain kind of person,” or one inhabits “a certain kind of social
world” (10). Counterpublics are defined as in “tension with a larger public” (56). Counterpublics are
comprised of people who, while also part of a public, are “marked off” or marginalized. (56).
Counterpublics are therefore structured according to different mechanisms, different protocols.
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what Warner and Berlant point to is the importance of contact not just politically but
socially.
Tim Dean points to Delany’s theory of contact as a useful apparatus for thinking
about interactions between people, mostly men. He writes that “engaging conversations
occur and intimate friendships develop in the transitional spaces that punctuate sex
institutions” (Dean 34). Dean here is referencing those very same theatres and bookstores
that Delany includes while also adding other venues, including bathhouses and other sex
clubs that cater to men. Munoz also points to Delany’s portraits of “pornographic
communal rapture” (Munoz 14) in Times Square and how this theory of contact is
Utopian in so far as it is premised on the idea of social potential. I see Delany’s
configuration of contact as both Utopian, because it is rooted in a future politics, and also
experiential because it draws from lived experience. Delany is certainly Utopian when he
describes contact as “the intercourse—physical and conversational—that blooms in and
as ‘casual sex’ in public rest rooms, sex movies, public parks, singles bars, and sex clubs,
on street corners with heavy hustling traffic, and in the adjoining motels or the
apartments of one or another participant” (Delany, Times 123). For Delany contact exists
everywhere, and he believes that “such occurrences are central to [his] vision of the city
at its healthiest” (126). This form of contact where desire circulates takes both sexual and
non-sexual forms in the public spaces where people of all classes, races, genders, and
ethnicities interact. Contact is therefore the form of sociality which is needed. Instead, he
sees contact and what it affords as threatened, and thus he argues for a return to contact.
Delany sees this ability to socialize as he wants as threatened. Even though social
and political discourses make it more acceptable to be gay and to be out at the time
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Delany writes Times, there is little cause for celebration if those institutions that have
served as the object of his desire and orientation are closed. Political and civil leaders,
and a general public, who stigmatize these locations that afford Delany and others the
ability to engage in forms of sexual contact, become the focus of criticism which results
from his orientation. He argues that “the city has instituted not only a violent
reconfiguration of its own landscape but also a legal and moral revamping of its own
discursive structures, changing laws about sex, health, and zoning, in the course of which
it has been willing, and even anxious, to exploit everything from homophobia and AIDS
to family values and fear of drugs” (xiv). Delany’s argument here, as elsewhere, critiques
what corporations, politicians, and families define as progress. He sees them as impeding
the natural development of the city. To threaten the city is to threaten the types of
pleasurable activities Delany argues the city as a space naturally encourages.
This line of argumentation is similar in tone and in content to that made by Jane
Jacobs; however, Delany updates Jacobs’ argument by including sex. Jacobs’ seminal
work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is perhaps the most famous example
of an anti-city planning text. Jacobs derides the current economic policies and
development in American cities in the 1960s: “people who get marked with the planners’
hex signs are pushed about, expropriated, and uprooted much as if they were the subjects
of a conquering power” (Jacobs 7). Redeveloping city neighborhoods creates areas that
“dull” and are “inert” which “contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else”
(585). Jacobs, instead, calls for a city that is lively, where all classes, all ethnicities and
backgrounds interact with one another in a public arena. Functioning as the life-blood of
cities she illustrates the importance of sidewalks in bustling neighborhoods—where
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people live, businesses exist and passersby (often strangers within the neighborhood)
observe, buy and engage with the locale.
Busy streets promote diversity in her observations, and the interclass, interracial,
and intersex contact that occurs allow for the cities’ “own regeneration, with energy
enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves” (585). What Jacobs
calls for is less involvement in strategically reformulating the way in which the city looks
and feels (the city is not the suburb). Restriction, redevelopment and inorganic planning
inhibit the ability of the city and its parts from functioning correctly. The functioning of
the city is like the functioning of any other organism, Jacobs writes. She imagines the city
as a “complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use . . . this order is all composed
of movement and change . . . an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and
ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other” (Jacobs
65). By describing the city as an “intricate ballet,” Jacobs not only personifies the urban
space, she ascribes to it a particular artistic aesthetic. The city, in its unblemished,
unplanned for form, is high art. Delany makes a remarkably similar argument to close his
two essays. He writes:
“Interclass contact conducted in a mode of good will is the locus of democracy as
visible social drama . . . [it] is the lymphatic system of a democratic metropolis,
whether it comes with the web of gay sexual services, whether it comes through
the lanes of heterosexual services . . . or in any number of other forms (standing in
line at the movie, waiting for the public library to open, sitting at a bar, waiting in
line at the counter of the grocery store or the welfare office, waiting to be called
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for a voir dire while on jury duty, coming down to sit on the stoop on a warm day,
perhaps to wait for the mail—or cruising for sex” (Delany, Times 198-199).
Much like Jacobs’ simile, Delany casts the city as a complex organism in which
thousands of different actions and the potential for different actions comprise the larger
whole. While Jacobs references the city as a ballet, however, Delany chooses to construct
a more corporeal city. The city is a body and his idea of contact is the “lymphatic
system.” The lymphatic system is part of the body’s larger immune system. It carries
lymphocytes and white blood cells around the body. It carries away waste products, like
bacteria. In essence, the lymphatic system partially maintains the health of the larger
body. Delany’s choice of simile here is interesting, given the argumentative context. If
contact is the city’s lymphatic system, it both maintains health and it carries away waste.
It is both productive and abject. It is nonetheless vital to the overall health of the system.
Additionally, it is a highly ironic turn of phrase given the role of HIV/AIDS in the lives
of gay men and the subsequent downplaying and at times, outright dismissal of its effects
within Delany’s narrative.
3. An Orientation to Sex and Community; an Orientation Away from the Negative
The role of HIV/AIDS in Delany’s narrative is complicated. To be fair, Delany
does reference HIV/AIDS and the stereotypes and fears about it that circulate in
discourse. He, as noted earlier, critiques those broader discourses of moral panic as
injurious and problematic. He sees them as partially responsible for what is occurring to
his theatres and cruising spaces, and as a result, he derides those discourses as nothing
more than fear based propaganda. Delany is correct when he assesses that city planners
are not interested in the safety of people in Times Square. Nor are they interested in
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“reducing the level of AIDS or even about driving out perversion . . . nor is it about
reducing commercial sex, hustling and prostitution” (161). They invoke fear, instead.
And while it is true that such propaganda exists, Delany is quick to dismiss that
HIV/AIDS widely affects the spaces to which he is oriented.35 He writes that of the two
great epidemics which hit the theaters, crack and AIDS, crack was “very much the
leading villain of the two” (41).
The near absence of HIV/AIDS from the larger narrative follows a similar thread
in Delany’s argument that reduces the effects of most negative experiences. For example,
while Delany celebrates the transactions that comprise contact, and even discusses and
describes the sex workers who share the spaces where sexual contact occurs, he
diminishes in importance, their place in the social hierarchy of the theaters and on the
street. He romanticizes the “professional prostitutes and hustlers—women generally
averaging between, say, twenty-three and forty-five, and men somewhat younger” as
good for the area (159). (#). While the “’five-dollar whore or ‘hustler,’ often fifteen-,
sixteen-, and seventeen year old girls and boys who would go into a doorway and do
anything with anyone for the four to eight dollars” (159) are viewed as bad for the area.
Those professional sex workers developed organically through the economy of the city.
Those “whores” and “hustlers” seeking out crack gained territory when the city sought to
exert its influence and redevelop the area. No matter the cause, Delany sees the former as
beneficial, and the latter as detrimental.
Ricardo Montez, commenting on Delany’s own relationship with sex workers and
other people of a lower socioeconomic class, critiques Delany relationship with young
35
Berani’s “Is the Rectum a Grave” is an essay that investigates many of these rhetorical threads
surrounding HIV/AIDS and gay male sexuality.
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sex workers who target the cinemas for money as paternalistic saviorhood. Montez writes
that Delany speaks to what he considers rewarding, sexual contact, but his most
rewarding exchanges involve “the opportunity to project his own notion of what the other
needs. In this way, his romantic interclass contact can remain unsullied . . . offering
goods instead of money, Delany limits the possibility for trade, for the men to make
decisions for themselves as to what they need” (Montez 430). In particular, Montez
excoriates Delany’s decisions to provide sandwiches and other food items to those who
seek money in exchange for sex. He sees Delany’s exchange of one good for another as
limiting the agency of sex workers, who are often young men of color. Delany’s response
to sex workers is also made more complex by his own views of prostitution and hustling
from his categorization of good versus bad forms of sex work, to his view that sex work
is just aesthetically unpleasing. When recalling the live strippers who would perform at
the front of the theater and then, after the show, seek out money from the audience for
private performances, Delany writes that he viewed the “whole thing” as “too mercenary,
too formalized” and that such performances “in general aren’t my thing” (Delany 58).
This view of stripping, like the view of hustling and prostitution, aligns with Delany’s
overarching view that the city is an organic space. The forms of contact that organically
evolve are preferable. In contract, those elements of the cinema or experiences at the
cinema which Delany feels are staged or contrived, or which require payment for services
rendered are critiqued as they demonstrate an orientation discordant with Delany’s desire
for contact.
While Delany sharply separates good and bad forms of sex work and other forms
of monetary exchange for sex, he also glosses over other negative features which take
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place in the cinemas he frequents. Violence, for example, is discussed, albeit briefly in
Times. And whereas Delany describes some horrific scenes including robberies and fights
“or even [where] bodily injury is done to a customer” (157) in the theaters, he is also
quick to argue that such scenes of violence are rare. These occurrences, Delany
concludes, are never “random” (157). Instead, they follow a pattern: violence is directed
at those who are naïve or who are not familiar with the processes and behaviors found in
the cinemas. He writes, “if you frequent the place, quickly you learn from where and/or
from whom [violence] is going to come. A stranger or a first-time visitor is probably far
more vulnerable to that violence than a longtime, frequent habitué of the facility” (157).
These lines demonstrate a paradox for Delany’s overarching theory of contact as it relates
to others. His argument is predicated on the expansion of, and greater access to forms of
sexual contact. Violence, however, might threaten those who seek out this form of
contact for the first time. And yet, Delany does not see violence as a problem.
I agree that violence does not occur elsewhere in the city, and in rural areas as
well. I also do not argue with the fact that violence is rarely random. I do argue that
Delany’s own experiences of pleasure in the cinemas, which he defines as his happiest
moments, excludes experiences of those spaces which differ from his own. He excludes
those opinions, desires, and orientations to the theater which do not seek out male and
homosocial forms of contact. He is, in effect, blinded by his own desire to the
experiences of others because his orientation is derived from personal experience, and
because his personal experience is largely positive. It stands to reason that such threats to
his personhood were both rare or of little importance. Delany specifically mentions how
because contact is rooted in like-mindedness, that people who came to the theaters could
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easily determine what other people should be sought out, and who should be left alone.
Delany’s performance of his orientation is similar here to Tod Hackett’s assessment of
Los Angeles, its aesthetic, and the behaviors of its inhabitants are clouded by his own
framework to a particular artistic aesthetic, Delany too is shaped by his own pleasurable
experiences such that his assessment of the cinemas and the experiences of others is
potentially flawed.
Because Delany’s argument is principally about male sociality and sexuality,
queer feminists take issue with his larger approach. While he does include one memory
of a woman in the theater with him, a friend and colleague who was intrigued by
Delany’s own stories as found in the draft of “Blue,” he overlooks criticisms provided by
women regarding their experience of personal safety. He and his friend Ana spend a few
hours in the theater. She witnesses live sex acts among the audience and altogether the
afternoon passes uneventfully, Delany believes. When asked whether she would return
and perhaps partake in the offerings, she replies “no . . . I was scared to death!” (30).
Rather than validate her experience and discuss the reasoning for her fear, Delany instead
responds in text to dismiss her personal experiences. Again, as his experiences in the
theaters have been mostly pleasant, he imagines that every other person would naturally
engage with the atmosphere in a similar manner. He writes that “I don’t see any reason
that a woman (or women) couldn’t take any (or every role) I’ve already described or will
go on to describe for any (and every) male theater patron” (32). The roles, that he
describes, however, largely regard men interested in sexual contact with other men.
Whether those men are gay, straight, bisexual, or somewhere else on the sexual
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orientation spectrum does not matter. They all come to the theater for one thing only:
sexual contact with men.
The absence of women from the narrative and the inability to account for widely
different orientations to sexual pleasure and sexual contact in spaces heretofore taken up
by and populated largely by men is criticized by Jack Halberstam, who comments upon
Delany’s idea of contact and specifically how it occurs in certain geographic spaces:
urban spaces with diverse populations. The focus on the urban is seen as antagonistic to
rural and suburban geographies. Additionally, the inclusion of only men is read by
Halberstam as allowing for “no role for women in this subterranean world of public sex”
(Halberstam 14-15). The absence of women is telling to Julie Abraham, who applauds, on
the one hand, “his men having sex with men” as a “racially and class-mixed group,”
while women achieve only token status. She writes, “the female figures in their city
[women featured in porn films in Times Square theatres or hailed in sexual terms on
Forty-second Street . . . are only objects around which men negotiate their own racial,
class, and sexual status” (Abraham 287). Abraham’s critique here returns to an argument
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick makes regarding homosocial behavior and desire. Sedgwick, in
Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, discusses how two men
triangulate their desire for one another through a third figure, always a woman. She sees
this triangulation as bound to the ideas of “rivalry and love” (Sedgwick 21). Delany
points to this very same notion of the erotic triangle when he comments on the porn being
shown in the theater. He writes that the movies being shown were largely heterosexual,
male homosexuality was largely absent, “but its absence from the narrative space on the
screen proper is what allowed it to go on rampantly among the observing audience”
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(Delany 79). Thus even though Delany considers women, he notes that they are often
nothing more than objects around which homosexual desire circulates.
4. The Role of Experience and Looking Backward
The criticisms of Delany’s larger argument are valid, especially as it concerns
those people most at risk for violence and exclusion including prostitutes, hustlers, and
other sex workers, and women. While lines of critique about Delany’s patronizing
relationship to certain classes and his deletion of whole genders and sexes from the
narrative are certainly founded, they also overlook the importance of his personal, firsthand experiences in the theaters and how they shape his larger argument which targets
those with similar desires. His orientation addresses those who share a similar orientation.
If we conceive of the polemic in “Red” as drawn from experiences outlined in “Blue,”
and a performance of his orientation to contact, then it is not surprising that both, because
they are rooted in sexual contact with other men, and because Delany defines himself as
gay, emphasize male sexuality and sociality. The importance of experience has been
approached thus far in this chapter as it relates to Delany’s larger argument regarding
contact, specifically as it relates to the qualities of the city. In this section, I want to return
to those experiences and discuss the type of sensory pleasure Delany receives from them,
and thus why these experiences of pleasure influence his orientation in the present and
why they demonstrate a directedness, or orientation, back into the past.
Delany views the cinemas as spaces which socialize and educate men about sex
and about sexual pleasure through contact. While education and socialization are the
global issues that Delany attends to in his argument, those regarding pleasure and
specifically his experience of pleasure and being surrounded by others also in the throes
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of pleasure are equally as important. Earlier in this chapter, I analyze how Delany
remarks that he wishes he had the experience that the cinemas and other cruising venues
provided him as an adult, when he was a child. This statement is provided through
remembering encounters with Jonathan, then a teenager when he and Delany first played
in the theater, and now an adult, when he and Delany discuss their earlier encounters and
how they shaped and continue to shape their sexual orientations and their orientation to
spaces and experiences, more broadly. Delany reminisces over the sharing of pleasure,
noting how “everything I did to him, five minutes later he did to me—unusual enough to
note in the general exchanges of the theater” (81). The reciprocity of male sexual contact
is important to Delany’s experience of pleasure, though encounters where he is the
principle giver are equally as titillating. But his encounter with Jonathan also reinforces
Delany’s belief that the cinemas and the forms of sexual contact that they offer, in
addition to the potential for conversation, are important to the formation of a gay identity.
He critiques the loss of freedom to sexually explore with other men, and he relives the
importance of these experiences to his own identity with and through a conversation with
Jonathan. Quoting Jonathan, Delany writes, “the first few times I came in here, I was
scared to death. I didn’t know what the fuck was going on. So I just did everything I saw
anybody else do . . . and I tell you, it was fuckin’ wonderful” (82). For Jonathan, and also
for Delany, the importance of the theaters is rooted in the experience of pleasure that is
mutual. Jonathan remarks that his favorite experiences are those that involve mutual oral
pleasure, or other exchanges. The cinemas therefore serve as a space that not only
encourages but allows for the experiences of pleasure between men. And as Delany notes
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later in his memoir, he deems this experience of pleasure with a “general population of
encounters with different men” as having made him feel his best (83).
The addition of pleasure, or the ability to experience pleasure in the spaces in and
around Time Square, adds to Delany’s overall experience of happiness. Pleasure,
however, comes in multiple forms. Pleasure can be had through acts of voyeurism, for
example, as when Delany describes the acts of a young straight “gorgeous” “kid”
“beating off” (21). The description that follows is one that focuses on the youth of the
actor and his sexuality on display for all. Delany writes that he “glanced at the young guy
. . . when suddenly he put back his head, black hair glimmering in the screen’s light in
rhythm with his fist. He blinked twice, closed his eyes, clamped his teeth, and, as his lips
pulled apart, in two large gouts and a smaller, from his speeding grip his fluids arched
into the black between his khaki knees” (21). Here Delany recounts not just the
exhibitionism of a young man in the theater and his own voyeuristic qualities, but also
how the experience is pleasurable because it is aesthetically pleasing. It is memorable
because the young man is both young and virile. The young man is also unabashedly
open about his own desires to perform. When juxtaposed against another scene involving
a man, “a forty-year-old Asian man, somewhat heavy, in a suit jacket and sitting a row
behind him,” who also orgasms at the same time “a bit less spectacularly” (21), one of the
conditions for Delany’s experience of pleasure becomes noticeable.
While his argument for contact involves a diverse array of people coming together
to engage in sexual pleasure with one another and then potentially being afforded the
ability to converse and build communal ties, the experience of contact is largely
remembered through the youthful participants, stereotypical specimens of manhood
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including the fetishization of hand size and blue collar working attire, and/or appreciation
for more pronounced male genitalia. While it is true that those who come to the cinemas
around Times Square are from many backgrounds, and these visitors also include men of
all races, sizes, and sexualities, the sheer number of men who visit allows Delany to focus
on his own sexual proclivities. His argument allows for diversity, but he is directed at a
specific type of maleness. For example, Delany recounts his experience with Jeff, who
while not attractive, and “probably homeless,” when standing “before a urinal, slouched a
leisurely eight to ten inches back from the porcelain fixture” (12). Additionally, a
condition for Delany’s own experience of pleasure is that the all-male sex scenes be
nothing but “fulfilling and mutually satisfying” encounters (88). The awkward first time
sex episode which Carson McCullers describes via Mick Kelly, where the sensory
pleasure provided by music is more engaging, more satisfying, and more desirous than
the corporeal experience of penetration, is largely absent.
The deletion of awkward sex scenes, of less pleasurable encounters, and a whole
host of other negative interactions as explored and explained earlier in this chapter is part
of Delany’s orientation toward the theater and to forms of contact the theater affords.
Certainly, negative events occur and less pleasurable sexual experiences also happen, but
their deletion, or their decreased significance, demonstrate that the past, including the
cruising and contact, is largely remembered as pleasurable. Thus Delany’s engagement
with the past, his orientation back to his experiences in the theaters and cinemas in an
around Time Square and 42nd Street, is about a directedness back to an experience of
pleasure. Pleasure there and then was plentiful, as Delany remembers it. Pleasure now is
largely absent. When reflecting on the past he writes toward the end of his polemic that
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“we need contact,” a referencing both his own relationship to the cinemas and the
anecdotes he has retrieved from others like him (175). He mourns the loss of contact and
the potential it afforded him, commenting that its loss has “already made my life,
personally, somewhat more lonely and isolated” (175).
Given his admission that the loss of this opportunity to cruise the theaters and
engage in forms of sexual contact has made him more “lonely,” it is noteworthy that
Delany protests against viewing his own relationship to the past and to his past
experiences as backwards in terms of orientation. He comments that his engagement with
the past in “Blue” and its importance to the larger argument in “Red” is not an act of
nostalgia or a longing for the good ol’ days because those affective conditions would not
include a critical distance or a level of introspection with the material. He writes that the
most important aspect about the encounters that occurred in the theaters “was that mutual
pleasure was exchanged” (56). This mutual pleasure, he acknowledges, “colored all their
other aspects” (56), regarding how not just the encounters, but the spaces in which they
are contained, and the city which created them would be viewed. Pleasure therefore
shapes his relationship both to the past and to the people he encounters. The cinemas
allow Delany to satisfy one of his sexual desires through the young and younger people
who populate the seats and balconies. The cinemas also provide him with a limitless
supply of potential sex partners. While Delany might not be nostalgic for the past because
his polemic regarding contact is not about reopening the theaters, he is interested in the
creation of new spaces in the city that allow for experiences similar to those all-male sex
scenes. Delany both advocates and demonstrates a queer orientation, which takes the
form of backward directedness, because the past is the site of bodily and sexual pleasure,
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both of which inform his theory of contact. He is oriented toward contact and he frames
his argument regarding contact as developing new spaces for it to occur but he does this,
not by requesting a return to the past but rather, by recalling a past in which his desire for
contact is met.
The other characters explored in this dissertation direct themselves toward a
present/future where their orientations are less exaggerated, or where their orientations
allow them to fit in. Dana is the outlier to this observation. Delany’s queer orientation
and his performance of this orientation in both “Blue” and “Red” complicate further this
element of queer orientation because it demonstrates that the future is not always
desirable. Delany does not seek out a future nor does he experience his desires being met
in the present. He is directed backwards, oriented toward the past and to past experience
because of pleasure and because the act of recalling the past is a part of his orientation.
The past is where he locates others who share in his orientation. If contact is about both
sexual and communal forms of pleasure, then the past is where Delany experiences a
space comprised of like-minded people. The past is his version of Paul’s New York,
whereas the present disconnects him from experiencing pleasure and fulfillment.
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Chapter 6: Conclusion
1. A Review of Queer Orientation
The Introduction to this dissertation opens with an exploration of Paul from Willa
Cather’s “Paul’s Case” that examines elements of Paul’s relationship to his environment
not widely considered in the critical scholarship on Cather’s short story. Critical
scholarship principally focuses on Paul’s sexuality, that he is gay, and that Cather’s
narrative elucidates his sexuality by way of references to Paul’s taste in clothing, his
aesthetic preferences, and his rendezvous with another boy from Yale. Critics argue that
Paul’s sexuality encodes his behavior and thus, his preferences for fashion, color, and
sensation become symbols of his sexual expression. He likes to dress and behave as he
does because he is gay. I do not disagree with readings of Cather’s short story which note
his sexuality and I also agree with criticism that argues that Paul’s sexuality is largely
made manifest through symbols because homosexuality could not be publically addressed
at the time Cather composed “Paul’s Case.” I however argue that these readings of Paul
by way of his sexuality reduce his behaviors and his desires to a singular product of his
gayness. Paul is gay because he is effeminate; he is gay because he is similar to a dandy;
he is gay because Cather’s narrative is a thought-piece on Oscar Wilde. These analyses of
Paul are important readings for literary studies, but they nonetheless overlook and/or
dismiss elements of Cather’s narrative because they only read Paul by way of his
sexuality.
Focusing on Paul’s sexuality and that his desires, writ large, are the product of his
sexuality is the type of analysis literary studies largely performs because of the heuristics
available to discuss desire. Most approaches to desire disseminate or are drawn from
197
psychoanalysis as Eve Kosofky Sedgwick notes in the introduction. Psychoanalysis does
provide frameworks for approaching how desire is discussed because it has catalogued
and processed desire, including non-heterosexual desire, by way of case studies. These
frameworks help assess the sexual lives and meanings of characters in works of literary
fiction. They help assess the relationship between characters and sexual objects and they
also locate the underlying impulses and drives which assist in explaining these
sexualities. Focusing on desire by way of sex and sexuality, however, does not allow for
an exploration of literary fiction in which characters express non-sexual desires.
Psychoanalytic frameworks and other approaches to desire which rely, in part, on
psychoanalysis often do not address how characters are directed in and to their worlds
unless the focus of that direction is sexual. These frameworks often do not account for
how characters perceive and experience themselves in relation to their worlds.
While Paul can be interpreted as gay, largely by determining what is not included
within the narrative proper and understanding what is excluded by way of Cather’s
biography and the larger social and cultural context in which she writes, Cather’s
narrative also describes Paul as possessing a physical and cultural orientation that is
decidedly non-sexual. In the narrative, we see Paul openly express desire for sensations
he believes he can only locate in works of art, music, types of dress, and physical spaces.
He experiences pleasure when sitting in an art museum, listening to music, watching
wealthy people perform their class through their style, wearing certain clothes, and being
around, but not socializing with others who share his tastes. The accumulation of these
experiences and his expressed desires to experience situations where they are more likely
to occur mutually constitute an orientation to the world that cannot just be ascribed to his
198
sexuality. Certainly, Paul’s sexual orientation influences how he is directed to his world,
but his orientation to objects, aesthetics, and spaces which are largely non-sexual are
equally as important for a robust understanding of Paul’s identity.
When critical approaches analyze Paul and focus on his sexuality using a
framework inspired, in part, by psychoanalysis, they do so through an outside lens.
Threads of psychoanalytic thought are then mapped onto the narrative. In the case of
Paul, what becomes important to a method extracted from psychoanalysis are those
moments in the narrative which comport with psychoanalytic proscriptions. Thus, the
scene described in Cather’s short story where Paul spends an evening with another boy
from Yale takes on outsized importance, and subsequently, this scene is used as a means
to understand the rest of the narrative. An outside-in-approach to reading and analyzing
works of literature is important, but it limits the analysis to those features which are
already identified or described in other scholarship. In addition, the framework for
approaching the text largely predetermines the types of readings that scholars of
American literary fiction can perform. My dissertation analyzes selected works of 20thcentury American literary fiction, starting with Cather’s “Paul’s Case,” not by using
outside frameworks to address desire and how desire and the politics of the desire play
out in the text, but rather by looking to the frameworks these works of literary fiction
provide through descriptions of characters’ experiences and desires which articulate their
orientations and their frameworks for perception.
In this dissertation, I turn to phenomenology, specifically Kenneth Burke,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Sarah Ahmed, for a working vocabulary to describe what
works of 20th-century American Literature already include. Burke offers analyses of
199
literary fiction a way to discuss how experience is shaped through an accumulation of
interactions and judgments with one’s environment. Merleau-Ponty addresses how one’s
environment shapes the physical orientation of a person, just as how a person experiences
their identity by way of their environment shapes the person’s orientation and framework
for perception. Ahmed discusses queer orientations, which are those that demonstrate a
directedness toward objects that social and behavioral norms consider inappropriate or
off limits. For Ahmed, a queer orientation is therefore one directed away from the
normative including narratives associated with family, children, and community. My turn
to phenomenology is a turn to an underused body of philosophy which addresses desire.
However, because phenomenology is largely invested in discussions of desire and of
understanding a type of being in the world which is dependent on describing the
relationship between subjects and objects, it is does not provide a framework through
which to read works of literature from the outside-in. Instead, phenomenology, again,
provides us with a vocabulary to describe what is already being demonstrated and
described in the text.
Because Cather’s narrative describes what Paul desires, how he experiences his
world, and how he is directed, the terminology provided by phenomenology can be used
to understand and describe Paul’s orientation. Paul is described as being different,
sometimes strange, and often as eliciting behaviors which his peers deem as
inappropriate. His expressed desire to continue behaving in ways that are out-of-line only
further illustrates that Paul has an orientation to his environment that is different. This
difference is described within the narrative as strangeness which is often a synonym for
queer. Queer has multiple meanings in scholarship. Queer describes gay and lesbian, but
200
it also has historically been used as an adjective to describe people who are strange, who
live differently, or who are odd. The introduction to this dissertation catalogues those
theorists and scholars who use these terms interchangeably. I argue in the introduction,
and throughout this dissertation, that a queer orientation is one which is not necessarily
sexual in that it can be directed toward elements which are non-normative when
compared the characters’ social peers. A queer orientation is therefore considered to be
askew because it is not directed toward socially approved objects, spaces, aesthetics, and
phenomena.
Paul’s queer orientation is described in Cather’s narrative through his orientation
to physical and cultural spaces, dress, sensation, and aesthetics. This orientation largely
divests from and rejects social and behavioral norms. Paul experiences himself as queer,
as a result, and he is approached as queer by his friends, family, and teachers. This twoway dynamic of internality versus externality demonstrates the interplay between Paul’s
internal orientation toward aesthetics and his socially perceived sexuality and femininity.
This dissertation begins with a discussion of Cather’s Paul because her short story
describes a character whose way of being, whose experience of, and whose orientation to
the world is queer. By attending to how Paul is oriented beyond his sexuality, a more
complex reading of him occurs that revises the critical scholarship.
A queer or non-normative orientation that is not restricted solely to sexual objects
has not been considered in the scholarship on the works of literary fiction found in this
dissertation. Instead, the central characters of Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust,
Carson McCullers’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, James Baldwin’s Another Country,
Octavia Butler’s Kindred, and Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
201
have been largely approached through discussions of desire which focus on sexuality or
by using other critical methodologies which interpret and examine the characters by way
of external frameworks. Tod is examined by way of his relationship to Faye and his
sexual desire for Faye is used as a tool to understand his approach to art and other
characters. Tod, however, comes to Los Angeles with an already established orientation
to art and this pre-dates his interactions with Faye. Mick is analyzed by understanding her
relationship to gender norms and through a framework derived from her first sexual
experience. Mick, like Tod, is oriented to music and to sensation long before that sexual
encounter. Rufus and Vivaldo are seen as symbols of America’s race problem and are
understood through the history of race relations; their behaviors are catalogued by
understanding how race and sexuality intersect in the outside world. Rufus and Vivaldo
each possess a more complicated relationship to race and sexuality as demonstrated by
their experiences and desires and by their orientations to suffering. Dana is read through a
similar understanding of race, gender, and sexuality, but she is also read through the
corpus of historical narratives on enslavement. The historical aspect of Dana’s orientation
is important because it shows an orientation to time that is both backward looking and
non-normative without being sexual in nature and so it fits into the existing queer
scholarship framework but in a novel way. And, Samuel R. Delany performs an
orientation to forms of sexual and communal contact by reflecting on the past, while
scholarship most often focuses on his political polemic.
All of these works, describe characters by way of an orientation. The works of
literature, and in the case of Delany, memoir, quasi-ethnography, and theory, all include
characters or a narrator whose orientations are askew. If literature is both a work of art
202
and body of work which describes the world, then the works of literary fiction included in
this dissertation all point to an important phenomenon which critical scholarship often
excludes. Scholarship which reads Paul as gay addresses one element of experience that
Cather’s short story takes up through her narrative. Cather’s narrative, however, also
describes a different phenomenon; it notices that a character can possess a different way
of experiencing and being in the world. The phenomenon Cather describes regards what
it means to be queer, or how queer can be defined. Her short story, published in 1905,
therefore frames a century of American literary works also interested in questions of
queer identity.
I stated in the introduction that Cather’s narrative includes one way that queer is
often defined, through sexual desire that is non-heterosexual. Cather’s narrative also
includes another way to define queer. If Paul possesses a queer orientation that
incorporates both his sexual and his non-sexual experiences and desires, then Paul is
queer not just because he is gay, but also because he is oriented as he is in the narrative.
Cather’s narrative can therefore be examined as describing a phenomenon similarly to the
other works of literary fiction in this dissertation. They all describe characters whose
orientations to the non-normative are experienced. They all describe characters who
desire things that are non-normative. These descriptions dot the literary landscape of 20thcentury American fiction and they complicate how queer can be regarded.
For example, Tod Hackett is not gay, and yet he experiences himself as queer in
the context of West’s narrative. He is already queer when he is a student at Yale because
he is not interested in following a particular artistic lineage; he is already disregarded
established norms. He becomes more queer when he moves to Los Angeles and he
203
experiences himself in an environment that allows him to more vigorously express
desires for an aesthetic. To classify a straight, white male as queer might appear
problematic, but West’s narrative describes Tod by way of his orientation as queer.
West’s narrative therefore elucidates a phenomenon that is overlooked by scholarship
which uses queer as a synonym for gay or lesbian. Similarly, the other works of fiction
describe characters whose queer orientations do not rely on homosexual behaviors and
therefore do not comport with the standard sex-based definition of queer.
By turning to phenomenology and by looking to how characters are described
within works of literary fiction, I argue that 20th-century American literature illustrates
another way to think about, discuss, and describe queerness. These works point to an
important phenomenon dating back to at least Cather’s short story. Queerness is
approached in these works of literary fiction sometimes by way of sexual orientation but
also by way of an orientation to the world which is askew or slanted and therefore nonnormative. These works, when read with a phenomenological vocabulary, update how we
as scholars of literary fiction describe queerness and queer desires, the frameworks that
we use, and the ways queer theory, largely embedded in readings of literature, uses queer.
The century long literary evolution discussed in this dissertation shows how queer
orientations and identities shift and change. Queer moves from describing Paul, a white
working class boy in a working class white city who never proclaims himself to be gay
but is coded as such based on his orientation to aesthetics. Queer then describes Tod, a
straight while male, who is similarly oriented to a non-normative aesthetic, but one that is
not typically coded as same-sex queer. Nevertheless, Tod and Paul share similarities in
how they approach their own experiences and desires. Mick overlaps with Tod because
204
of her orientation to art, but her explicit sexual experiences and her gender complicate her
identity and orientation. Additionally, neither her sexual orientation nor her gender are
used by her as a primary method of her self-identification. Mick, instead, identifies
closely with her sensory experiences. In Chapter 3, queer moves to describing complex
intersectionalities of race, gender, and sex through Rufus and Vivaldo. Here their artistic
orientations quite literally make up the background (the blues are used as scenery in
Baldwin’s narrative) and they become the focus of their frameworks for perception. The
blues also note, through their interpretation, a relationship to suffering through queerness.
A similar relationship to suffering can be found in my analysis of Dana. Through Dana,
intersectionalities change and progress from Baldwin’s narrative and we begin to see
queer describe experiences of time. Delany’s performance of a queer orientation ends
this dissertation and it is publically directed at experiencing same-sex contact and
sociality. Delany’s queerness, when juxtaposed with Paul’s lack of self-awareness,
demonstrates a foundational shift in the social and behavioral norms which contextualize
what can be considered queer. The shifts in what queer describes in these works of 20thcentury American Literature demonstrates the need to consider works of literary fiction
from new angles. Orientation is one approach because it makes more complex our
understandings of queer identity where orientations to the non-normative, to non-sexual
objects, ideas, aesthetics, and other phenomena have largely gone unremarked.
205
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