Figure It Out

by Wayne Koestenbaum

  A born diarist, Guibert regarded the genre of “novel” with a fatigued, valedictory suspicion: “it is perhaps preferable to circle around the idea of the novel, to dream it, like in Gide’s Marshlands, and to botch it, rather than succeed, since the successful novel is perhaps a very banal form of writing.” He wants writing to be a form of physical adventure—a leap, a plunge, a way to befriend the abyss: “I would like one day to throw myself into a narrative that would be but an event of writing, without a story, and without boredom, a true adventure. . . . The other day I wrote that it was necessary to surrender to pure events of writing (just as the most pure photos are pure events of light).” What is a pure event of writing? Certain French thinkers called it “writing the body,” a phrase that doesn’t get sung a lot these days, though I hope that Guibert’s journal will bring this philosophically inclined subset of body-smeared literature back into prominence. What else is there to write but the body? “Pains in my left eye where it seemed I let a bit of semen penetrate by rubbing my eyes after having jerked off . . .” As in Monique Wittig’s pronoun-slashed The Lesbian Body, every organ, within Guibert’s literary body, intramurally huddles with its mates; his journal invents a body where “semen” and “left eye” belong to each other, even if their spunky wedlock causes distress.

  Maybe no passage in the journals is more heartbreaking and operatic (time-shattering, arrested, polyvocal, Orphean in its compulsion to move forward while looking backward) than Guibert’s description of sex’s proximity to death: “T. and I had started fucking again, but he had to go to his appointment at the ophthalmologist’s. He returns saying it isn’t a conjunctivitis, but a white veil over the eye, he says that it must be a manifestation of AIDS, that he’s going to go blind, I would like to dissolve on the spot; we try to continue to fuck anyway, it’s dreadfully sad, I have the impression that we are adrift between our lives and our deaths, planted deep in my ass, he makes me come looking me in the eyes, it’s too sublime a look, too rending, both eternal and threatened by eternity, I block the sob in my throat passing it off as a sigh of relaxation.” This brutally fluid interlude is remarkable for its punctuation and its lack of punctuation, its ambivalent commas, its wish to thread together life and death, fucking and sightlessness, sobbing and relaxing, writing and enduring, transcription and epitaph, documentary and poetry.

  Transparency is Guibert’s method; transparency—his relatively unadorned language, which combs its hair but doesn’t disguise the disorders of the underlying scalp—perhaps explains why he has not been more frequently translated into English, as if a literature that purported to be see-through couldn’t also claim opacity. In 1991, Atheneum published To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life; in 1996, Sun and Moon released Guibert’s treatise on photography, Ghost Image, reprinted in 2014 by the University of Chicago Press. (In Ghost Image, whose approach to analysis is gossamer récit, Guibert recounted a memorable faux pas. He wrote to Barthes and asked to photograph him and his mother, but received no answer. When Hervé telephoned to ask “if he had in fact received my letter,” Roland said “Haven’t you heard? Maman died ten days ago . . .”)

  Why has no thoughtful publisher translated and published all of Guibert’s works, in trim editions, each cover graced with a photo of the seraphic young Hervé, succulent as Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin’s Nude Young Man Sitting by the Sea or Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson’s The Sleep of Endymion? Literary culture in the U.S.—even at its most adventurous—hasn’t got Guibert’s message, perhaps because his diaristic works emphasize sex and death and an unclassifiably perverted subjectivity, alternately raging and depressed, and perhaps because he clothes his seamy burden in a language unadorned, pellucid, provisional, and loosely constructed. To recirculate Guibert would serve to honor and resuscitate a project that Robert Mapplethorpe and David Wojnarowicz and Jack Smith and Jimmy DeSana and Mark Morrisroe and Félix González-Torres and Paul Thek and Marlon Riggs (and I am culpable for leaving out a thousand other names) also pursued, a cross-personal project that sometimes achieved commercial or media visibility but that mostly fell through the cracks because its practitioners died too soon or left their materials in forms and genres either too perishable or too messy or too bizarre for easy repackaging. To get Guibert’s full message, which isn’t light-years apart from Susan Sontag’s and Frank O’Hara’s New York–based credos (pay attention, live as variously as possible) but that chose for its transmission not the lyric or the essay but the autofiction, the fragmentary self-articulation, casual as a snapshot, would involve questioning straitened notions of what constitutes a polished piece of writing, or a life’s work, or an autobiography, or a sexuality, or a successful venture—and learning, instead, to appreciate the cadences of catastrophe, of self-excavating improvisation, and of unknowingness. Futility and botched execution are the immortal matter of Guibert’s method. Futility and botched execution—combined, in Guibert’s work, with finesse, concision, and a heavy dose of negative capability, which includes a curiosity about the worst things that can befall a body—are undying aesthetic and spiritual values, worth cherishing in any literature we dare to call our own.

  (I began this essay in Baton Rouge. I revised it in New York. I finished it in Miami.)

  (2014)

  RIDING THE ESCALATOR WITH EVE

  To tend her butt, to tender buttons: critic Kathryn Kent taught me that double entendre, at Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s house in Durham, in 1995. I tend now, even in ordinary speech, to sport Eve’s Jamesian syntactical complications feelingly; to insert the adverb where it doesn’t belong; to implement anal innuendo, long my calling card. Last night I dreamt that Gertrude Stein appeared “live” in a production of Four Saints in Three Acts; a trained belter, she sang brightly, with comic exactitude. I want to tell Eve my dream—to stimulate her by saying, “I realized that you were Gertrude Stein—a playful, obscene originator.” But instead, because Eve is dead, I can only repeat to you this sentence—a favorite—from Tendencies: “The most self-evident things, as always, are taken—as if unanswerably—to be the shaming risibility of any form of oblique or obscure expression; and the flat inadmissibility of openly queer articulation.” To be queer and to be unclear, to know that the truest sentence you can write might be the most roundabout, the most misleading, the most addicted to avoidance, the most masturbatory—which simply, didn’t Eve teach us, means the most spacious, the most ready to offer entrance and egress to readers hungering for solitary friction? In December 1991, to escape the MLA convention, Eve and I went shopping in San Francisco. We rode the escalator, up and down, in a Union Square department store. Then we ate Buddha Buns at a restaurant now defunct. I remember Eve saying “Buddha Buns,” singling them out; I was one stimulated recipient of her word-savoring.

  To states of fatigue as well as to states of rapid energy she had the knowledge of how to attach herself; attachment, adhesion (including attachment to her audience, interlocutors, collaborators, students) were her gifts and signatures. She wrote: “I think that for many of us in childhood the ability to attach intently to a few cultural objects, objects of high or popular culture or both, objects whose meanings seemed mysterious, excessive, or oblique in relation to the codes most readily available to us, became a prime resource for survival.” Attach willy-nilly to the most obscure, the most mysterious, that which can’t be pinned down, claimed, husbanded. Attach to sentences, too, more for their atmosphere than for their overt meaning; attach to time itself, including the temporal schism separating 1993, when Tendencies was published, and this dismal yet unavoidably precious “now” of 2018. Attach to the interval, the twenty-five years. Hug the interval. Let yourself be cinctured by that lapse of time you can’t understand or forgive. You can’t—I can’t—forgive 1993 for not being here now with us again and perpetually; I can’t forgive a world that doesn’t attend to 1993’s originary, clause-spangled beatitude. Because she felt “a visceral near-identification with the writing I cared for,” Tendencies authorizes me
, now, to near-identify viscerally with her manifesto-sentences that call for a lavishly invested critical-poetic style. Unanswered questions throng me. I want to ask Eve what happened to the ritually spanked woman in her poem “Lost Letter”; I want to ask Eve about being in bed with Michael Lynch; I want to ask for more details about the ass of Monsieur O., the high school French teacher seen inadmissibly from behind. I can’t forgive 2018 for not taking in gaily a style of critical gaming as amply “showy” as Eve’s. Don’t polarize, I tell myself, following Eve’s example; don’t make a binary of 1993 and 2018 and then act brutalized by a paradigm you’ve coined. We call on the books we’ve loved—the books from our past—to help us measure the present. As everyone seemed to be reading Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism after the recent catastrophe, so please everyone start reading Tendencies to absorb a revelation as oddly simple as the fact “that most people in the world, whatever their gender or sexuality, don’t form or maintain libidinal cathexes toward most other people in the world.” Isn’t the inestimable preciousness of the singular—the individuated, the endangered, the specific—her message to us? Singularity of an adjective—call it adjectivity; singularity of the odd word ruly in her phrase “the ruly ordinariness of this sight.” Singularity of a style, a thought-pattern hammered and glass-blown into sentences that make as many demands—textured, flaming, often nonspecific demands—as possible. Her nonspecificity sometimes tied me up, prompted me to impugn my own hunger for literality. Perhaps it was the half-discernible presence of the specific within the foggy nonspecific that constituted the formidable, mind-teasing allure of her critical movements. She invites us to make kink a home and a homing device to help us disorient any location whose buttons are too neatly fastened. In her prose’s presence I can only ever be indirect.

  Does the academic world any longer have the resources to reward, justify, nurture, and sustain such rhetorical performances as Eve’s, such stressed enactments of critical art? Her performances willfully seduced an audience schooled in deconstruction (and its sequelae) but eager to see those strategies split open by new erotic affirmations and demands. The presence of “Eve” again here wakes in me an impulse to wed verbal exhibitionism with erotic magnanimity—a desire to draw no distinctions between verbal display (engorged rhetoric) and a seductiveness rarely physical but therefore (think foreplay) more tensile with the anticipation of corporeal thrill, as if chiasmus were itself a caress. She practiced, like grand opera at its height, a luxury economy: call Tendencies the Don Carlo of lit crit, complete with auto-da-fé.

  Eve didn’t need the auspices of literary criticism for her brilliance, but she thrived within academia’s thorned embrace. Her work wasn’t produced for professional respectability but was formed by the nearby shadow of those offices—as if Paul de Man and Edith Massey were her project’s joint choir-directors. I’ve never had an adequate way of describing the nature of Eve’s brilliance, her capacity to inflame with a cascade of complications, each etched difference opening in our speculation-tickled bodies a new possibility for treating stigma (debility, clumsiness, flaw) as the origin of a new, impossible erotics. Or maybe it isn’t new. Maybe I say “new” in order to persuade you to adopt this unspecifiable erotics as your own fond possession—an anti-systematic, equilibrium-forging toy, or tool, or entreaty, that doesn’t come with clear directions.

  (2018)

  ADRIENNE RICH’S MUSICAL ETHICS

  If you want to change the world, why write poetry? The great Adrienne Rich, who should have won a Nobel, tried to do both. Ethics, however, for Rich, stood at a remove from amoral sonic pleasure. Poetry’s system of cultivated sounds was, she grew to feel, a patriarchal racket. Her career staged a revolt against tamed sound. Of this conflict—the attempt to reconcile music and ethics—she founded a perpetually astonishing body of work, filled with battle cries, conversion scenes, and illuminating flashes. She followed Walt Whitman’s example—drawing on her own bodily experience, but also exercising, like a census-taker or compassionate sociologist, a democratic wish to compose litanies of representative specimens.

  Curmudgeonly purists criticized her work’s political (lesbian-feminist) core. They ignored the fact that she chose to honor poetry by performing societal inquiries in verse lines that always remembered, in their sinews, the exaltations and laments of such noble elders as John Keats, Langston Hughes, and Emily Dickinson.

  Rich’s work wears veils, but the private life leaks out. We glean that she had a Jewish father (a pathologist) and a non-Jewish mother (a pianist); a sister; three sons; and, for a time, a husband. (Read her groundbreaking Of Woman Born.) We know that the husband killed himself in 1970. (Read her aching poem “From a Survivor.”) We know that she took on a public commitment to lesbian identity and to the struggles against sexism, racism, colonialism, classism, ageism, homophobia. We know that she lived with physical disability: “I write this / with a clawed hand.” Confessional poets (Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton) were once her peers, but Rich steered clear of their hectic charm and flashy, gnarled gregariousness. Rich tempered passion’s eruptions with reason, rhetoric, severity, and a dislike for everything slack, sybaritic, and exclusionary.

  Rich, like John Ashbery, was anointed by W. H. Auden, who picked their books, in different years, for the Yale Younger Poets prize. Both Rich and Ashbery remained lapsed Romantics—turning to nature as counterpoint to doldrums. Ashbery chose fractured pastoral; Rich extracted metaphors from geology, archaeology, astronomy, and biology.

  Rich began her career writing neoclassical lines that Robert Frost might have applauded; by the late 1960s, she had plunged into a breath-based, open-field prosody. Iambic upswing offered a consoling pulse Rich couldn’t repress, but she spiked her iambs with the bitters of broken lines, of staggered, unpunctuated utterance. At the arts of persuasion, Rich worked as hard as Demosthenes on the shore, pebbles in his mouth.

  Gertrude Stein wasn’t part of Rich’s pantheon, but stylistically, they were kin: they shared steeliness, transformative rage, and the self-confidence of genius. Rich grew up in Baltimore, with a doctor father who taught at Johns Hopkins, where Stein had studied medicine. Both women, prophets of stifled passion, went to Radcliffe. Their commonsensical sentences tended to command. Rich and Stein knew that sometimes a sage’s job was to construct riddles.

  As her sibylline method of dismantling patriarchy, Rich trusted, with visionary conviction, the senses—the evidence of heartbeat, blood-flow. She trusted her body’s messages; she also trusted the body of the reader, the “you” that her poems plangently addressed:

  If they call me man-hater, you

  would have known it for a lie

  but the you I want to speak to

  has become your death

  Reading Rich, we become the posthumous you she ardently addresses; we willingly occupy the hot seat of audition.

  Rich’s poems, staged within her investigating mind’s planetarium, bundle together imagistic enigmas, and then pierce the fog with plainspoken moments of reckoning, her syllables paced, lucent, stentorian: “But there come times—perhaps this is one of them— / when we have to take ourselves more seriously or die.” The unconscious didn’t seem to play much part in her work; instead, she chose daylight. To change the world, a poem needs to state its points with blistering simplicity. See the heartbreaking end of “A Woman Dead in Her Forties”: “the body tells the truth in its rush of cells / . . . I would have touched my fingers / to where your breasts had been / but we never did such things.” This avowal may be intimate, but she pitches her voice to echo in the amphitheater. No gesture, in her carefully wrought poems, ever seemed accidental; and yet, starting in the mid-1950s, she dated each poem, to mark it as revocable way station.

  Rich performed her ethical mission by writing lines sensitive to the pulsations and textures of material fact: animal, plant, human, stone, water, planet. Her politics, not abstract, took place in blood vessels. Precarious ecologies stirred her sympathies. Rich was
a natural historian with an ear for the music that politics makes in the body. Listen to her long vowels and keen consonants; listen to the leitmotif of pain. Note the physiologies of words like “crevice” and “gobbets,” “shearing” and “vetch,” “scours” and “debridements,” “pelt” and “cumbrous,” “juts” and “bleak glare aching,” “rootsuck” and “glare-lit,” “crenellated” and “burdock,” “pleated” and “mazed,” “grief-tranced hand” and “the slow-picked, halting traverse of a pitch.” Rich concentrated her music; necessary, dubious, it incarnated her earliest hopes.

  Listening to Rich’s vowels and consonants, we hear her ethics. Racism and patriarchy have pillaged a natural world she elegizes; amid mourning, she intones (in a voice disbursing consolation) such lancing phrases as “the lake’s light-blistered blue,” “the soaked wick quietly / drinking,” “striated iris stand in a jar.” Nor forget “crimson stems veining upward” or “the dry darkbrown lace of seaweed.” Observe “the bridgelit shawls” and the “sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air.” Pay homage to “firegreen yucca under fire-ribbed clouds / blue-green agave grown huge in flower” and the spectacle of “bloodred bract from spiked stem / tossing on the ocean.” Learn from a rainbow “arching her lusters over rut and stubble.”

  Join the perverse visionaries whom Rich salutes in “Natural Resources”:

  My heart is moved by all I cannot save:

  so much has been destroyed

  I have to cast my lot with those

  who age after age, perversely,