Same old

Queer theory, literature and the politics of sameness

Ben Nichols

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526132857
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire LGBT

Same old offers a rethinking of positions that have defined queer theory since its inception in the early 1990s. Steeped in philosophical and political commitments to 'difference', queer theoretical frameworks have tended to assume that ideas related to 'sameness' only thwart and stymie queer forms of life. But this book takes a number of these ideas as its focus – uselessness, reproduction, normativity and reductionism – and reveals their unexpected formal and thematic importance to a range of queer literary genres from across the long twentieth century: fin-de-siècle aestheticism, feminist speculative fiction, lesbian middlebrow writing, and the 'stud file' or record of serial sex. Demonstrating how queer cultural objects often stand at odds with the frameworks that have been meant to help interpret and comprehend them, Same old interrogates the genealogy of the aversion to sameness that has kept those frameworks in place.

1
Useless

The queer associations of fin-de-siècle British aestheticism have been well documented by scholars who have dwelled on the nonconforming sexual lives of figures such as Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and Vernon Lee.¹ Such is the effect and influence of these figures that the very crux of aestheticism – embracing art for art's sake against an apparently inhumane, instrumentalised and utilitarian world – has come to evoke the air of social and sexual transgression. Wilde (1994: 6) of course famously embraced art as ‘quite useless’ but nevertheless central to a revolutionary project of individual self-realisation. Pater adopted an insubstantial ‘position of retreat’ as a means of diverting the public gaze from his homosexuality, finding pleasure in ‘hesitancy, reticence, and indecision’ in a world that demanded decisive participation (O’Connell 2015: 972, 981). Lee positioned herself against the ‘productivist ethos’ of a materialist and consumerist society (Denisoff 2006). This anti-utilitarian energy has also threaded through the subsequent history of queer commentary and representation. David Halperin (2012: 238, original italics) identifies the persistent tendency to value ‘pleasure over utility’ in twentieth-century gay male culture, arguing that this expresses the desire for a better life that can redeem the deprivations of reality within a drearily heteronormative world. Guy Hocquenghem (1993: 108, 148) linked the instrumentality of a capitalist world with the heterosexual reproduction that orients it, defiantly embracing homosexuality as ‘non-utilitarian’ and ‘useless’ within this reproductive order. More explicitly than with the earlier aesthetes, in Hocquenghem's account the uselessness of art aligns with queers’ uselessness in failing to produce children, shibboleths of valuable endeavour in a world whose emphasis on productivity finds an intimate analogue in reproductive heterosexuality. Owing an intellectual debt to Hocquenghem, more recent queer theorists such as Lee Edelman (2004), Heather Love (2007), Elizabeth Freeman (2010) and Jack Halberstam (2011) have been energised by embracing what has seemed useless to queer theory in order to question aspects of the field's self-understanding.

In this chapter, I explore the place of uselessness in the history of queer representation by returning to the moment of aestheticism and in particular to two characters in two novels by Henry James: Rowland Mallet in Roderick Hudson (1875) and Gabriel Nash in The Tragic Muse (1890). These novels are from the history of aestheticism but are also about aesthetes and aestheticism in various ways. As I will go on to argue, they offer a new way of thinking about the centrality of uselessness to queer history. Mallet is an independently wealthy man with a ‘lively suspicion’ (James 1980: 4) that he is a ‘useless creature’ (ibid.: 7) and the novel might be seen to suggest that it is this ambivalent sense of himself and his desire for some form of redemption that motivates his patronage of the fledgling sculptor who gives the novel its title. This patronage, in turn, gives the novel its plot: Rowland takes Roderick to Europe, to give him the opportunity to hone his artistic skill. Futility is restored, however, as all comes to nothing: identifying with his patron in all the wrong ways, Roderick himself becomes a dissipated ‘useless lout’ (ibid.: 352) before, in the end, taking his own life. Gabriel Nash in The Tragic Muse is only the most futile of a host of useless people who populate the novel. In spectral form there is George Dallow who in life cared only for his collection of precious things and eschewed the imperative to play a responsibly political public role. There is Nick Dormer, who, having attained such a role, surrenders it to commit himself to the full-time painting of portraits. But Nash, having influenced Nick in his abandonment of a political career, and always inclined to flippant over-analysis, is the only one thought by Nick's mother to be of ‘no human use’ (James 1995: 470), good for nothing but talking, quipping and theorising: the ‘[in]human use[s]’ of the verbose aesthete.

In what follows, I want to put these novels, and Rowland and Gabriel in particular, in conversation with how uselessness has been taken up most recently by queers in queer theoretical work that has turned its attention to the terrain of uselessness in the forms of failure, backwardness and negativity. As discussed above and in the Introduction, scholars like Lee Edelman, Heather Love, Elizabeth Freeman and Jack Halberstam have for varying reasons looked to apparently unhelpful, dated or outmoded forms of social engagement. Whilst for Edelman this has been to abandon all political intervention as irrevocably complicit in the valorisation of the future, for Love, Freeman and Halberstam the embrace of forms of apparent negativity has helped to problematise what can count as meaningfully political, and to keep politics open to the unexpected effects of what might in many ways seem hopelessly apolitical. This scholarship continues in the vein established by early queer theoretical formulations that sought to hold on to the unknowability of queerness in the face of demands to specify exactly what political use it might have (Berlant and Warner 1995). However, a tension I note in this chapter is that this work often turns its attention explicitly to that which has been deemed ‘useless’, while, at the same time, arguing for how what has been dismissed as useless can, even if only in modest ways, be useful. As Jack Halberstam (2011: 4, 21) writes, turning to the useless, or, in the terms of her project, ‘us[ing] the experience of failure’, can still be a way of ‘making a difference’. In this chapter, I want to suggest that this strategy of legitimising uselessness or failure derives its effectiveness from an implicitly accepted preference for difference over sameness. Moreover, I argue that the James characters that I focus on here can help us reflect on this situation: they neither encourage an embrace of the radical negativity that Edelman endorses nor demonstrate how the uselessness of Rowland and Gabriel can be redeemed through its relation to unexpected political effects, or, in other words, through its fundamental usefulness. Far from suggesting that making a difference is necessary, then, I argue that Rowland and Gabriel show the value, in some contexts, of leaving things the same. Indeed, it is only when, for example, Rowland tries to pander to the pressure to ‘make a difference’ which he feels bearing on him from multiple directions that he takes on the mentorship of Roderick which ultimately leads to Roderick's death. Had he not tried to ‘make a difference’, the novel could be seen to suggest, then at least he would not have made things worse in this way.

It is important to acknowledge, though, that the work cited in the previous paragraph has been offered, sometimes implicitly, in response to those who have castigated queer theoretical writing for its apparently apolitical indifference to strong programmes of political intervention. Like Gabriel, queer theoretical writing has had to defend itself from the suggestion that it is of ‘no human use’, or unable to provide clear programmes for political change, and (unlike Gabriel) it has done this, as in much of the work cited above, by foregrounding how it turns in a more oblique than direct way to political usefulness. Queer theory has been, and continues to be, critiqued by sexuality studies scholars in the social sciences or with strong commitments to historical materialist methods for not being properly political, not meaningfully able to ‘make a difference’ on its own, and insufficiently in tune with the supposed realities of people's lives. Frequently, as I will explore, a feature of these critiques is not to dismiss queer inquiry altogether, but rather to reformulate it and to replace the ‘theory’ in queer theory with ‘studies’. ‘Queer studies’ has come to signify a more materially engaged and politically effective form of queer scholarship that has moved beyond the limitations of ‘theory’. As above, I want to think about the response to this scholarly move that James's characters encourage. Both Rowland and Gabriel come to be associated in their respective novels precisely with ‘theory’ (James 1980: 242) or ‘theories’ (James 1995: 56). As in contemporary scholarship, theory in the novels represents non-applied thought and abstraction, which stands in tension with a prevailing imperative to ‘do’ or commit to practical achievements, but the novels do not suggest that this necessarily needs to be instrumentalised in some way. Indeed, as I suggested above, it is when Rowland tries to ‘make a difference’ that things go down the pan.

One of the reasons that I suggest these novels can encourage reflection on queer scholarship is their established significance within it. Both novels have garnered significant attention from critics across their reception histories who have picked up on queer themes in various ways. Amongst Roderick Hudson's earliest reviewers, Grace Norton recognised an ‘anomalous relation’ (Hayes 1996: 14) between Roderick and Rowland that has, in subsequent criticism, been recognised as more clearly homosexual or homoerotic.² Various contemporary reviews of The Tragic Muse recognised in Gabriel Nash a similarity to the generic representation of the aesthete, and more particularly to Wilde (ibid.: 221, 236, 238). More recent critics have been able to suggest that, owing to associations of the artistic with the queer in the late nineteenth century, the novel's aesthetes like Nash and Nick are homosexual.³ Building on this work, I want to flag up further how Rowland's and Gabriel's queer identities are formed around a specific kind of theoretical uselessness. Yet, at the same time, whilst uselessness may be tied in important ways to queer identities, I also want to think of it in less social and more formal or structural terms. I suggest that what often makes the useless so unappealing is not just its direct social association with queers, but how it is mixed up with a rhetorical dispensation that takes it for granted that only those ideas that can be properly associated with difference are helpful, correct and necessary. The novels are of interest in the context of this book for how they refuse to endorse the imperative to ‘make a difference’. Indeed, while in contemporary idiom ‘making a difference’ means ‘making a positive difference’ – with the value added subsumed into the idea of difference itself – the novels, as I indicated above, show how making a difference can mean making things worse. The novels, I argue, simply do not share an assumption that difference is necessarily for the best.

In important ways, then, this is why I focus on these James novels, rather than on any of the other familiar figures associated perhaps more readily with British aestheticism. That is, whilst it may seem appropriate when addressing uselessness in queer literary history to engage figures like Oscar Wilde or Walter Pater as emphatic proponents of ‘art for art's sake in opposition to the utilitarian doctrine of moral or practical usefulness’ (Mendelssohn 2007: 5), I will argue that the James novels I consider here help us to see some of the ways in which even Wilde and Pater achieve certain kinds of usefulness. Wilde (1994: 6) may claim in the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) that ‘all art is quite useless’, but he makes clear elsewhere that this uselessness could nevertheless have a thoroughly practical or useful aspect in transforming a dehumanising, capitalist world into an egalitarian, socialist one (Wilde 1973). In this sense, Wilde's position could be seen as a progenitor of the contemporary queer theoretical arguments that we saw above in which what is deemed useless is none the less marshalled to various, albeit sometimes modest, forms of usefulness. In his famous ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance (1873), Pater (1986: 153) advocates a way of living that involves surrendering to the gathering of as much sense experience as possible, to ‘getting as many pulsations as possible into [our] given time’. What interrupts this process is the formation of ‘theories’ that distance us from the ‘things we see and touch’ (ibid.: 152). For Pater, it is no good to develop a ‘theory or idea or system’ and no use to formulate what he damningly calls ‘abstract theory’ (ibid.: 153). For him, theory represents a ruinous and damaging alienation from sense experience. As Daniel Cottom (2003: 147) has suggested, Paterian aestheticism's faith in sense experience has parallels with more conservative tendencies in cultural studies to call for a greater focus on the supposed material realities of people's lives which can function as an ‘absolute law to humanity’, over and above anything that might be principally theoretical. James's characters, on the other hand, are never redeemed from their association with theory and the useless abstraction it denotes. James's own reputation and status is also key here: in a review of James's work published in the aestheticist journal The Yellow Book, Lena Milman (1895: 72) criticises his writing for being ‘too analytical’, and lacking in ‘passion’. Such a statement from an important vehicle of aestheticist and decadent work, coupled with the strategies of emphatically aestheticist writers like Wilde and Pater, marks James with a particular kind of uselessness: one that is more concerned with analysis than with simple, sensual fun.

Moreover, as I will explore in the second section below, James's novels demonstrate that the kinds of strategies that can be mobilised to justify both wildly aestheticist and prosaically practical life paths are often the same. Both novels make clear, for example, that what might be seen as both properly useful ‘practical’ and less legitimate ‘artistic’ lives emerge and justify themselves with recourse to difference; both lives are equally attempts to escape the clutches of a sameness attributed to the other life path. So, as we will see, in Roderick Hudson, Mr Striker, the responsible and successful lawyer from whose employment Roderic...