Chances Are

Contingency, Queer Theory and American Literature

Valerie Rohy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138290600
• eBook ISBN: 9781351969147
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

This innovative work makes use of psychoanalytic, queer, and narrative theories to read nineteenth and twentieth-century American literature and demonstrate how the concept of contingency—whether chance, accident, luck, or mutation—enriches our understanding of how queer sexualities are articulated.

Perhaps love always carries an element of contingency (our attraction to a particular person can be arbitrary and inexplicable), and a sense of necessity (we find that we cannot imagine life without them). But contingency and chance mean something different for queer subjects. In a heteronormative culture, heterosexuality claims to be necessary (it must be), whereas homosexuality not only could be otherwise, but perhaps it should be otherwise, and probably it should not be at all.

This book outlines why and how issues of chance and contingency should matter to queer theory and queer literary studies. Combining psychoanalytic, queer, and narrative theories, Chances Are considers nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literary texts that formally or thematically involve contingencies of their own, including narrative coincidences and accidents, the role of luck in notions of race and class, and efforts to imagine queer hermeneutic methods that make space for contingency. Literary texts include Edgar Allan Poe's "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" (1842), Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick novels (1868-69), Frank Norris's The Pit (1903) and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth (1905), Frances E.W. Harper's Iola Leroy (1892) and Nella Larsen's Passing (1929), H.D.'s Tribute to Freud (1956), and Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother (2012).

This dynamic and original text would be suitable for students and researchers in literary studies, critical theory and women's and gender studies.

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INTRODUCTION

Taking chances

Perhaps love always carries an element of contingency (our attraction to a particular Other is arbitrary and inexplicable), and a sense of necessity (we find that we cannot imagine life without them).¹ In this realm chance proliferates, from the accidental encounter to calculations of risk. In popular music, one of our richest cultural conversations about desire, we might trace a thread from Daft Punk and Pharrell’s 2013 hit, “Get Lucky,” back to the 1957 Johnny Mathis song from which this book takes its title.² The lyrics of “Chances Are” seem to posit a reciprocity of chance and affection: “Guess you feel you’ll always be the one and only one for me / And if you think you could / Well, chances are your chances are awfully good.” Despite the language of probability, of course, the actual function of the lyric is to remove any element of ambiguity regarding the singer’s feelings. The tautological “chances are your chances are” may suggest a solipsism hardly befitting romance, but it may also indicate an abyssal structure of chance, in which the possibility of getting lucky depends on innumerable larger contingencies. For a gay man, like Mathis himself, those other contingencies might have to do with the vicissitudes of queerness in mid-twentieth-century America: for those willing to hazard public exposure, to start with, what are the chances of finding someone who is that way and not afraid to own it, who is also interested in me?³ The dynamics of the queer chance encounter may be most prominently represented in the practice of cruising, but in a sense cruising merely literalizes a more common effort of guesswork. In 1952’s The Price of Salt, Patricia Highsmith’s young protagonist reflects on the improbable good fortune that led to her affair with a wealthy and glamorous older woman: “the realization that so much had happened after that meeting made her feel incredibly lucky suddenly. It was so easy for a man and woman to find each other, to find someone who would do, but for her to have found Carol—.”⁴ And yet, we would be foolish to cede to ordinary luck the power to explain our intimate encounters and missed encounters, for as Highsmith knows, the world makes life “easy” for some and not others in ways that are far from random.

1 Among recent proponents of this idea, see Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love, trans. Peter Bush (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2012): “the absolute contingency of the encounter with someone I didn’t know finally takes on the appearance of destiny” (43). For Badiou this echoes his notion of the fundamentally aleatory event; see Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York, Continuum, 2005): 191–98 and passim. Slavoj Žižek makes a similar case, writing, “once I contingently fall in love, this love becomes my necessary Fate”; Living in the End Times (New York: Verso, 2011): 28.

2 The latter might have been, but probably wasn’t, played at Chances, a lesbian bar in Houston in the 1990s and 2000s.

3 “Johnny Mathis: Wonderful! Wonderful!” CBS News (May 14, 2017): https://www.cbsnews.com/news/johnny-mathis-great-new-american-songbook/.

4 Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991): 156. On queerness, cruising, and literature, see Michael Snediker, “Whitman on the Verge: Or the Desires of Solitude,” Arizona Quarterly 61:3 (2005): 27–56; and Eric H. Newman, “Ephemeral Utopias: Queer Cruising, Literary Form, and Diasporic Imagination in Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem and Banjo,” Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters 38:1 (2015): 167–85.

This book is about queerness, chance, and contingency, not merely on the level of the individual subject, but also in terms of heteronormative ideology and the literary forms in which it comes to be represented and contested. Joining queer theory with psychoanalysis and narrative theory, I outline why and how issues of chance and contingency should matter to queer theory and queer literary studies. The interlinked strands of the project center on texts that mediate our relation to queerness, chance, and contingency in American literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twenty-first. While this is by no means a historical study, its national focus means that along with notions of queerness and chance that might well apply elsewhere, it also addresses distinctly American cultural formations, such as the mythologies of individualism and the “self-made man,” the legacy of slavery, the invention of the detective genre by Edgar Allan Poe, and the allure of the stock market in the Gilded Age. But instead of historical continuity, what primarily links these texts are the ways in which their representation of queer contingency reflects, often in overdetermined ways, either formal or thematic contingencies within their narratives. In a recent book I argued that the charge that homosexuality, incapable of sexual reproduction, instead “reproduces” itself discursively and artificially, functions to occlude the fact that heterosexuality is in fact artificially and discursively reproduced on a gigantic scale—it is taught, promoted, and learned.⁵ Heterosexuality is no more natural than homosexuality, but it manages to claim privileged status through the ideological conflation of the biological reproduction of Homo sapiens with other-sex genital intercourse, and of both with the constellation of practices, gender roles, beliefs, and exclusions that constitute heteronormativity as a social institution. As Adrienne Rich writes, we must ask “why species-survival, the means of impregnation, and emotional/erotic relationships should ever have become so rigidly identified with each other.”⁶ Some forty years after her publication, it is still imperative to interrogate heteronormativity.

5 Valerie Rohy, Lost Causes: Narrative, Etiology, and Queer Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015): 19–21. Earlier, I briefly discussed the contingency of sexual identity in As You Like It; see “Fortune’s Turn,” in Shakesqueer, ed. Madhavi Menon, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011): 55–61.

6 Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent Leitch, et al. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001): 1765. Arguably, though this is by no means her intention, this observation could describe the conflation of reproduction, sexual intercourse, and affective bonds for men as well in heteronormative culture.

The wager of the present study is that we can better understand these phenomena through the language of contingency and necessity. As Monique David-Ménard explains, “In Aristotle’s ontology, contingency is opposed to necessity. Something is necessary, precisely, if it cannot not have been.”⁷ In Sartre’s formulation, contingency applies to that which “could be otherwise”—it need not be—unlike necessity, that which must be.⁸ I derive the architecture of this book’s project from two critical traditions, both of which identify a dominant structure as contingent, not necessary. The first is perhaps the most vital examination of contingency and hegemony in American literature: African American writing on the contingency of race dating at least from the “passing” motif in nineteenth-century fiction. The supposed race of one’s birth is a matter of pure chance, as is one’s particular phenotypic similarity to, or difference from, the white ideal in a racist culture. But both the ideal and the racist structure behind it are, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., notes, discursive and “arbitrary”—which is to say, historically and socially contingent.⁹ But it is not just that “race,” or even blackness, could be otherwise. As Toni Morrison has argued, American whiteness is contingent on the sustained presence of invented, abject Africanist figures. Such figures are integral to “the process by which the American as new, white, and male was constituted.”¹⁰ As a result, Morrison suggests, whiteness is no less “fabricated” and “mythological” than Africanism. In other words, it is not necessary, for it could have been constructed differently, and thus not be in any recognizable form.¹¹ The temporality of this fabrication is so non-linear as to seem retroactive: Africanist figures are the precondition of white American identity, yet they are themselves created by white American culture. More recent queer of color critiques not only see race as complexly articulated with sexuality, but also seek to demonstrate the contingency of queer whiteness by exposing queer discourses that have excluded people of color.¹² Much as Morrison opposes the white “race of readers that considers itself to be ‘universal’ or race-free,” Roderick A. Ferguson explicitly identifies notions of “transparency” and universality as fallacies serving “heteropatriarchy,” as well as “class and racial exclusions.”¹³ If whiteness and heterosexuality are neither universal nor transparent, they cannot function as natural and necessary; they are defined by a contingency they prefer not to acknowledge. Yet whiteness and heterosexuality are not truly analogous; they diverge in at least one important way. Unlike heteronormativity, white supremacy does not entail the displacement of contingency onto the ideologically devalued term. Blackness, though it is contingently constructed, remains necessary to the production of white identity; in racist culture, it must be; homosexuality, by contrast, bears the burden of the disavowed and displaced contingency of heterosexuality.

7 Monique David-Ménard, “Sexual Alterity and the Alterity of the Real for Thought,” trans. Diane Morgan, Angelaki 8:2 (2003): 142.

8 Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writings, ed. Stephen Priest (New York: Routledge, 2001): 119.

9 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes,” in “Race,” Writing and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986): 5. As I discuss below, chance and contingency signify differently in the realm of ideological formations like white supremacy, which “could be otherwise” but are never “random” effects of luck. On phenotypic luck, see also José Esteban Muñoz on how “the vicissitudes of the fact of blackness, the radical contingency that is epidermalization” reflect a white supremacy articulated through an arbitrary attribute that becomes a life-defining “fact”; Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: NYU Press, 2009): 93.

10 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (New York: Vintage, 1993): 43.

11 Morrison, 47.

12 E. Patrick Johnson acknowledges the intersection of sexual identities with “the concept of ‘race’ as historically contingent and socially and culturally constructed/performed”; “‘Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I know I Learned from My Grandmother,” in Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, ed. E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005): 135.

13 Morrison, xii; and Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003): 3, 6.

This project’s second point of origin is the discussion of contingency and necessity in Marxist and psychoanalytic theories that do not attend to race. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe argue that hegemony is a contingent formation, whose claim to necessity “only exists as a partial effort to limit contingency.”¹⁴ The necessity of hegemony, that is, reflects no original ground but arises from retroactive attempts to fix and literalize differences. In the same vein, Slavoj Žižek draws on psychoanalytic theory to show how a Marxist critique might trace how contingent social formations such as capitalism are falsely presented as necessities. He contends that “capitalism emerged from a contingent combination of historical conditions” but “reinscribed its continge...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: Taking chances
• PART I: Heterosexual necessity
• PART II: Accidental narratives
• PART III: Contingent reading
• Index