Literary Historiography and the Gay Common Reader

 

 

Gregory Woods

Nottingham Trent University

 

 

In the essay that follows I shall be violating two conventions governing the ways in which scholars are expected to speak of literature: I shall work from personal experience, using the first person singular; and I shall comment on, or complain about, reviews of my recent book, A History of Gay Literature.[ ] The justification for these two cavalier breaches of academic etiquette need not, I think, be too elaborate. In the first place, my work derives from a tradition of feminist and, later, gay male scholarship in which the objectivity  of academic modes of speech was held to be illusory  often serving narrowly particular interests even while laying claim to an Olympian universality  whereas an openly acknowledged subjectivist approach to a given topic might illuminate it by placing it in a context of lived social experience. In short, my personal experience as a gay critic may enable me to generalise about the reception of gay literature and gay literary criticism.

            For the most part, heterosexually identified critics attempt to disable the entire gay literary-critical project by applying to it an inescapable Catch-22 regarding which authors and texts the gay critic is to be permitted to comment on at all. Put simply, the problem is as follows. No literature that does not explicitly refer to homosexual acts  or, at least, to the desire for such acts  can legitimately be described as homosexual literature. And yet the critics who impose such rules are also the very men who say that gay literature itself has been undermined by explicit­ness  it was much better when it was indirect, allusive, ambiguous. Jeffrey Meyers is a case in point. He wrote in 1977 (and has not, as far as one can tell, changed his mind since): The emancipation of the homosexual has led, paradoxically, to the decline of his art. [1]

            While working on my history I was aware that even some of the most undissimulating of homo-erotic texts would be fiercely protected by anti-homosexual vested interests. The question loomed heavily over much of my research: would I be permitted to speak of certain homo-erotic texts of the pre-1969 period in anything other than the most tentative terms? Let us take as an example a short poem by the bisexual African-American poet Langston Hughes. Although it is no masterpiece it is useful in as far as it exemplifies a certain kind of non-explicit gay writing which, far from being obscure  or oblique  or coded    all those qualities which heterosexual critics most admire in homosexual writers  is actually, on the contrary, clear and direct and undissembling. The poem is called Joy :

 

            I went to look for Joy,

            Slim, dancing Joy,

            Gay, laughing Joy,

            Bright-eyed Joy 

            And I found her

            Driving the butcher's cart

            In the arms of the butcher boy!

            Such company, such company,

            As keeps this young nymph, Joy![2]

 

If Joy is a woman, the speaker catches her making love with the butcher's boy. If, however, Joy is the abstract noun, the poem means what it explicitly says: I (the male speaker) found Joy (that is, pleasure) in the arms of the butcher s boy. There is no hidden sub-text here. There is, rather, a suggestiveness that is quite open. Wittgenstein s famous diagram of the duck-rabbit works in a similar way. It depicts not a duck or a rabbit, but both at once or in rapid alternation. If you can only see one of them you are not seeing the diagram at all. And yet, even with texts like Joy,  which seem to me to be so transparently gay, the gay critic is accused of reading things into  them. (He would not be so accused if he spoke of them as black literature, of course.)

            So, again: no literature that does not explicitly refer to homosexual acts can legitimately be described as homosexual literature. But gay critics who do, compliantly, confine their deliberations only to texts which do explicitly refer to homo­sexual acts are accused of being obsessed with sex. But gay critics who do apply their scrutiny to texts which do not explicitly refer to homosexual acts and call such texts gay literature or homosexual literature are accused of reading sex into texts which are really  about friendship, or platonic love, or spiritual love, and are accused of thereby revealing the fact that they, too, are obsessed with sex. As a gay critic, I am allowed to write about gay sex  indeed, I am expected to do nothing but that  but I must be insulted for doing so. As a gay critic, I am to be taunted with accusations of obsessive narrowness and thereby encouraged to broaden the scope of my future enquiries. But by doing so I open myself to the automatic accusation of trying to sully the purity of universal texts (which means, of course, non-gay texts) by daring to apply my obsessive narrowness to their Olympian breadth.

            Thus, in some reviews of my History of Gay Literature  a book which, for better or worse, deals with 3000 years  worth of literary history and with cultures from all round the world  I was, not unexpectedly, accused of perverse narrowness. Let the following remarks from the Irish poetry critic and academic Denis Donoghue, in New Republic, exemplify this tendency:

 

There are two main objections to Woods  book. The first is that he writes of gay life as if it consisted of nothing but sex. Gay men, so far as he is aware, do nothing but fuck. They have no other interest in life; they are not concerned withfriendship, family, career, money, power, the weather. You would never divine from this book that there are gay couples as domestically sedate as any legally married couples, and just as interested as anyone else in mortgage rates. The second is that Woods deals only with the genteel tradition in gay literature. You would not discover from this history of the subject that there is a violent, sadistic underworld in gay life.[3]

 

Donoghue appears not to have noticed that the book he is reviewing contains a whole chapter called The Family and Its Alternatives ; nor that the book acknowledges in great detail a sadistic literary tradition descending from Sade himself to the likes of Jean Genet, William Burroughs and Dennis Cooper. It is clear that nothing can stand in the way of the decree that a gay reader must be, by definition, narrowly obsessive. Even some critics who identify as gay adopt the same approach. For instance, the gay British poet Neil Powell wrote that my History was a far narrower book than it at first appears to be, failing to acknowledge that gay writing needn t be about sex. [4]

            A slightly different tactic was adopted by the gay American novelist Dale Peck, who took me to task for the three paragraphs in my book in which I briefly discuss the Pardoner in Geoffrey Chaucer s Canterbury Tales as a possible candidate for the position of having been the first gay character in English literature. Peck calls this my reading of The Canterbury Tales,  as if I had attempted a reading of the whole poem  which I did not. I simply discussed one line of it. Yet Peck therefore accuses me of the customary narrowness: Woods narrows his dis­cussion of Chaucer s massive allegory to a single quotation.  Later in the review he adds: Thus is the greatest English poem from Beowulf to Shakespeare dispensed with in less than a page. [5] By erratic standards like these, the gay critic simply cannot win.

            A number of reviewers have commented that I appear, at certain points in my argument, to be addressing gay readers; in other words, that my book, by a gay man and addressing gay readers, is itself subjective, narrow and distorting. Straight, white, male reviewers (or reviewers who identify as such) are complaining that they feel excluded. When Jeffrey Meyers reviewed my first book, Articulate Flesh (1987), his fiercest criticism of it was that it was primarily intended ... for a homo­sexual audience  and that it was consequently unlikely to convince an objective reader. [6]

            What is at stake in all of these instances is the ownership of canonical literature. Virtually all reviews  positive and nega­tive alike  commented in a proprietory manner on a couple of pages in which I dare to invoke the names of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. This is hardly surprising. The problem appears to be, at its most extreme, that once a text is labelled a gay text it is no longer deemed accessible to the heterosexual reader as having anything but marginal value. It is no longer relevant to heterosexual lives; indeed, it is no longer worth reading. Therefore, all the (hetero) critic s favourite texts have to be defended, as if they were Hollywood stars, against imputations of homosexuality.

            I have been speaking of reviewers. For the most part, these come from outside the academic world. They are professional writers.[7] However, there is another source of limitations on the gay critic. Paradoxically, this is queer theory itself. The slavish adherence to a Foucauldian (or supposedly Foucauldian) orthodoxy has inhibited gay scholars from pur­suing certain kinds of social-historical and cultural-historical research. Michel Foucault s judicious attention to historical development, if not always strictly accurate in its details, did at least alert gay academics to the constructedness of the concept of homosexuality  as an identity, dating from the late nine­teenth century and emanating from Europe. Since Foucault, it has been all the harder for literate homosexual men to make sentimental connections between their own feelings and those of (say) Socrates or Michelangelo or Frederick the Great.

            When Yale University Press first sought comments on my proposal for a history of gay literature, in 1994, they received the following reply from a prominent American queer theorist:

 

Theoretical work on our categories of desire needs to move farther ahead before such a history of gay literature can be attempted; it s possible that by the time Woods completes the project, our understanding of the history of homo-sexuality might have altered enough to place Woods  conceptualization on shaky ground.

 

Note that this commentator does not suggest waiting until historians have completed their task: he or she is only interested in theorists. Theirs is the authority which must not be bypassed. But how could theory ever reach a point of readiness as this commentator envisages? This prohibition is like suggesting that one should not get up in the morning until philosophy has completed its task. These remarks must give us cause for some anxiety: for not only are they stupid, but they also show signs of an authoritarian, not to say bullying, tendency which has emerged among some queer theorists (as perhaps among theorists in general) and which, it seems to me, goes against the grain of gay studies, insofar as these are meant to be an essentially liberatory discipline. Theory is being used by some of its lesser luminaries as Latin and Greek used to be: its com­plexity serves as an effective instrument of, on the one hand, status acquisition and, on the other, exclusion.

            Now, I am not one of those academics who foolishly declare themselves anti theory.  I am too aware of the ways in which theoretical debates have opened up gay studies to many fresh possibilities. But I am willing to declare myself anti some of the uses to which theory is put. In particular, I am opposed to its being used to prevent the opening up of fresh possibilities. I am also opposed to its tendency to override the needs of lesbian and gay readers beyond the narrow limits of the academic world. It is in this tendency that queer theory most conspicuously serves the purposes of anti-homosexual critical thought. I have said that gay critics cannot win, but of course they can: by directly addressing the gay common reader. This is a point to which I shall return in due course. For the moment, let me merely iterate that the gay common reader is not always being well served by the uncommon queer theorist.

            To return to the construction of A History of Gay Literature, let me discuss the kinds of question I had to ask myself when first attempting to plan the book I had been asked to write. Many people asked me them, and I must admit that my answers varied  as they still do. The key point at issue was, of course, the very definition of gay literature  itself. Is gay literature: by gay men? about gay men? the literature that gay men read? If it is any or all of these, how do we define gay ? In its purest form, gay literature is going to be post-1969 texts by gay men about gay men (or about being gay); that is, literature by gay men who identified as such after the onset of the gay liberation movement in 1969  and who choose to write as such gay men (the American novelist Edmund White, for example).[8]

            In its second purest form, gay literature is going to have to be something which would otherwise be called the literature of homosexuality   that is, post-1869 texts by homosexual men, and possibly about them. This would be the post-Foucauldian definition of a culture of homosexuality emanating from a self-identified group which emerges after the coining of the word homosexual  to denote an identity in the late 1860s. Under this heading we would include the work of men for whom there is accepted biographical evidence of homosexuality or bi­sexuality, and in whose work we might expect to find homo-erotic material of some kind  corroborative evidence, if you like. I am thinking of writers like Mikhail Kuzmin, Marina Tsvetaeva and Sergei Esenin; but is their work gay literature  in its entirety or only when dealing with male-male love? What of the works of an earlier writer like Nikolai Gogol  the short stories, for instance, so amenable to gay readings   how much evidence of the author s sex life, or of his dream life, do we need in order to justify gay readings? Clearly, insofar as they are absolutely dependent on the sexuality of the author, both of these definitions are limiting.

            There is a further temptation to include under the gay literature  rubric representations of male-male sexual relation­ships (lasting or brief) from all cultures and all periods, either by men who had such relationships, or by any men. The question that then arises is the same again: do we have to know the details of a writer s sexual life before we can call his texts gay? Moreover, one is further tempted to widen the scope of gay literature  to include representations of male-male love  (as opposed to mere  friendship) from all cultures and all periods, either by men who had such relationships, or by any men. Where does one draw the line between love and friend­ship? Are Leo Tolstoy s many intense, loving relationships with other men to be ruled out of the reckoning merely because no genital contact was involved  assuming that to be the case? In the texts themselves, gay readers will address their attention to such passages as those on comradeship in Gogol s Taras Bulba or those on the sexual apprenticeship of schoolboys in Tolstoy s The Kreutzer Sonata.

            It may be that the best definitions of what a gay or lesbian text is depend on practice. They discard the idea of a stable text, in both senses containing  homosexuality while still on the book­shelf, and approach the question via readership and readings. I have to keep coming back to a remark made by Bonnie Zimmerman back in 1985: If a text lends itself to a lesbian reading, then no amount of biographical proof  ought to be necessary to establish it as a lesbian text. [9] As I added in Articulate Flesh: A gay text is one which lends itself to the hypothesis of a gay reading, regardless of where its author s genitals were wont to keep house. [10] (This is all very well, but it does, of course, raise the problem of exactly what a gay reading consists of. Does it depend on what the reader s genitals do or want to do?)

            If we take Zimmerman s proposition seriously, gay lite­rature  will include any text that is read by a gay person and is therefore informed by a gay reading. Gay literature is literature that serves the gay reader. This would suggest that there is a kind of gay literature which is simply invisible to the reader who is not gay. It also suggests that all literature is potentially gay. Well, why not? The very absence of gay themes from a given author s work may be open to productive gay reading. For instance, it does not seem to me to be possible to read Alexander Solzhenitsyn s The Gulag Archipelago without being virtually deafened by its silences on the homosexual prisoners of the gulags.

            While writing my History, I felt nostalgic for a pre-Foucauldian era when it seemed possible unproblematically to speak of homosexuality trans-historically, trans-culturally. I am thinking of the time (1902) when Edward Carpenter could introduce an anthology of texts about male friendship  with these remarks:

 

In making the following collection I have been much struck by the remarkable manner in which the customs of various races and times illustrate each other, and the way in which they point to a solid and enduring body of sentiment on the subject [of male friendship]. By arranging the extracts in a kind of rough chronological and evolutionary order from those dealing with primitive races onwards, the continuity of these customs comes out all the more clearly, as well as their slow modification in course of time.[11]

 

Now, in the closing years of the century, post-Foucauldian inhibitions (which have prevailed in gay studies in the later 1980s and the 1990s) may be beginning to weaken. It appears that we are beginning to see signs of an essentialist backlash. As the gay historian Rictor Norton puts it, I take the view that there is a core of queer desire that is transcultural, transnational and transhistorical, a queer essence that is innate, congenital, con­sti­tutional, stable or fixed in its basic pattern. [12] The existence of such a core would enable the gay cultural critic to write comparative criticism which is likewise transcultural, trans­national and transhistorical.  Norton makes a similar point, at greater length, in his introduction to an anthology of gay love letters:

 

When one man says to another I love you more than anyone else in the world  it means exactly the same thing whether it is uttered by the sophisticated twentieth-century American literary critic F.O. Matthiessen, or by the seventeenth-century Japanese samurai Mashida Toyo-noshin, or by the fifteenth-century Dutch scholar Erasmus, or by the eleventh-century saint Anselm, or by the second-century emperor Marcus Aurelius. The love of one man for another is the fixed root or core value upon which a gay identity is constructed within historical constraints. It may be true that modern gays have characteristics of a recognizably modern personality, but it is an absurd exaggeration to say that the homosexual  was invented in the late nineteenth century.[13]

 

I have recently been asked to read the proposal for a major History of Lesbian Literature to be published by Yale University Press. (I regret that I am not allowed to name the author, a well-known lesbian critic and writer.) A sentence in the first paragraph of this proposal strikes me as interesting for the relaxed way in which it dismisses  or, at least, sidelines -- the whole of the nature/nurture debate. She says of her proposed history:

 

            Neither essentialist nor social-constructionist, it will           study common themes and motifs of lesbian identity             and relationship across six centuries, while remaining       acutely aware of the differences between an Elizabethan          lady and a modern dyke.

 

While one is tempted to dismiss this as a lazy attempt, on the author s part, to have her cake and eat it, I am not certain that much is to be gained by such lofty academic fastidiousness. On the contrary, this author s strategic sang froid strikes me as the most efficient way of ensuring that lesbian criticism reaches a general lesbian readership. While writing her history, she has put the theoretical debate on hold. It may be that this strategy will become increasingly common as it is increasingly recog­nised as being both available and viable. After all, most gay critics have emerged from a shared belief in and understanding of a gay liberationist ethos whose ultimate aim is to ease the circumstances of homosexual people in everyday life. Such critics cannot afford to go on indefinitely ignoring the needs of the common reader, the person to whom gay criticism should ultimately be addressed, even if only through mediators (such as journalists and teachers).

            By way of a final exemplary enactment of textual-critical processes, let us consider what we should do with a text like this -- Alexander Pushkin s Imitation of the Arabic  ( Podra­zhanie arabskomu,  1835):

 

            Sweet lad, tender lad,

            Have no shame, you're mine for good;

            We share a sole insurgent fire,

            We live in boundless brotherhood.

 

            I do not fear the gibes of men;

            One being split in two we dwell,

            The kernel of a double nut

            Embedded in a single shell.[14]

 

Is the title s invocation of Arabic literary traditions genuine or a pretext? Is the image of One being split in two  a deliberate invocation of Aristophanes  speech in Plato s Symposium; and, if so, is it therefore a deliberate reference to a homosexual tradition? Why is the poem not an Imitation of the Greek ? Is the love which exists between the speaker and the lad mere  brotherhood  a chaste form of intense, masculine friendship   or has it flourished into physicality and does it therefore merit the dutiful boy s apparent tendency to feel shame  for it? It is certainly perceived as an inappropriate relationship by other men  hence their gibes   but is there likely to be any other reason for this than an assumption that man and boy are having sex together? Is the shell  of security and privacy in which the two lovers take refuge a defensive measure, not only against the gibes of men  but also against the sanction of the law? If the boy is the man s beloved for good,  what is to become of the Greek/Arabic proprieties of pederastic involvement, namely the convention whereby a boy ceases to be the beloved once his beard has begun to grow? Will the two friends become an adult couple? Finally, the only matter which can actually benefit from hard research: does the poem s account of an intensely felt love have any correspondence with the life of the poet?

            Gay readings are always going to begin with questions like these. Yet, as I have suggested, such readings are often regarded as being transgressive even before any attempt is made to provide the answers. Merely to have asked the questions is already to have overstepped the mark of propriety. And yet we have to conclude that not to do so is to leave the text   in this case, Pushkin s suggestive little poem  virtually unread. It might just as well have remained, unappreciated, in the archives.[15]

            By contrast, it is the project of those who are involved in establishing and assessing gay literature to bring as many texts as possible into the gay public domain, thereby pointing gay readers in the direction of the texts which might interest them. The theorist of gay literary culture Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick provides an optimistically broad impression of what gay literatures might consist of when, in The Epistemology of the Closet, she offers her own version of a canonical list of gay texts, including various deliberately tentative additions (Brontë? Nietzsche? Joyce?), and then adds:

 

            The very centrality of this list and its seemingly infinite             elasticity suggest that no one can know in advance where             the limits of a gay centered inquiry are to be drawn, or             where a gay theorizing of and through even the         hegemonic high culture of the Euro-American tradition     may need or be able to lead.[16]

 

In other words   and it seems so obvious to be saying it   the subject of gay literary criticism is literature itself. This is why our histories of gay and lesbian literature, contrary to those who accuse us of narrowness, are always likely to be expansive and inclusive.

 

 

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