Unmaking Love: The Contemporary Novel and the Impossibility of Union

Unmaking Love

Literature Now

Literature Now

Matthew Hart, David James, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Series Editors

Literature Now offers a distinct vision of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century literary culture. Addressing contemporary literature and the ways we understand its meaning, the series includes books that are comparative and transnational in scope as well as those that focus on national and regional literary cultures.

Caren Irr, Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U.S. Fiction in the Twenty-First Century

Heather Houser, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect

Mrinalini Chakravorty, In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary

Héctor Hoyos, Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel

Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature

Carol Jacobs, Sebald’s Vision

Sarah Phillips Casteel, Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination

Jeremy Rosen, Minor Characters Have Their Day: Genre and the Contemporary Literary Marketplace

Jesse Matz, Lasting Impressions: The Legacies of Impressionism in Contemporary Culture

Unmaking Love

The Contemporary Novel and the Impossibility of Union

Ashley T. Shelden

Columbia University Press

New York

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

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Copyright © 2017 Columbia University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Shelden, Ashley T., author.

Title: Unmaking love: the contemporary novel and the impossibility of union / Ashley T. Shelden.

Other titles: Contemporary novel and the impossibility of union

Description: New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. | Series: Literature now | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016024430 | ISBN 9780231178228 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231543156 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: English fiction—20th century—History and criticism. | English fiction—21st century—History and criticism. | Love in literature. | Intimacy (Psychology) in literature. | Modernism (Literature)—Great Britain.

Classification: LCC PR888.L69 S457 2016 | DDC 823/.08509—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016024430

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

Cover design: Jordan Wannemacher

For my mother, Roxanna

and my father, Thomas

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Unmaking Love

1. Lesbian Fantasy: Psychoanalysis, the Legacy of Modernist Love, and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood

2. The Ends of Love: Amorous Redemption, the Passion for Negativity, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy

3. Amorous Time: Nostalgia, Temporality, and the Pursuit of Optimism in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty

4. Cosmopolitan Love: Encountering Difference in Hari Kunzru’s Transmission and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled

Conclusion: Otherness, Cloud Atlas, and Contemporary Literature

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

It seems fitting that a book so skeptical of love would never have made it into print without a lot of it. This project began as my doctoral dissertation in the English Department at Tufts University, where I found the support of faculty and friends, who made graduate school fun. Joseph Litvak not only taught me about reading but also remains the paragon of style—writerly, culinary, and sartorial—to which I aspire. Lecia Rosenthal was always willing to talk with me about all things modernist. And Heather Love, the outside reader for my dissertation, offered careful and generous feedback. I relished the time spent working on very early versions of some of these chapters in a writing group with Amy Woodbury Tease and Lauren Byler. I am especially grateful to Jonathan Wilson and the Center for the Humanities at Tufts for giving me a fellowship in my final year to complete my dissertation. My time in graduate school was also enriched by the company of Kristina Aikens, Brianna Burke, Sari Edelstein, Anne Moore, David Palumbo, Meg Toth, and Cynthia Williams. And I had the excellent fortune to meet Holly Jackson, who traipsed all over Boston with me in many unspeakable adventures and who is the best friend anybody could have.

Most of all, graduate school would not have been filled with nearly as much joy were it not for my adviser, Lee Edelman. Lee has always provided what seems like a bottomless reserve of support, encouragement, and love. As my adviser, he challenged and inspired me, tolerated my social awkwardness, and always welcomed me into his office when I needed help or wanted his company. I don’t think I will ever be able to repay him for his astonishing generosity or convey my gratitude for his friendship.

Even as this project began at Tufts University, it also, in some ways, began earlier when I was an undergraduate at Ithaca College. My time at Ithaca College was formative in many ways, and one of the most significant moments was when I walked into Jonathan Gil Harris’s literary theory course; my brain has never been the same since. I am grateful to Gil not only for this utterly transformative class but also for his friendship all these years later. Even though the friends I made there—Frank Baldaro, Adam Bricault, Kim Correll, Camille Lannan, and Regan Schoeler—live far away, they are always with me.

But when I think of Ithaca College, the face I see most clearly belongs to Madhavi Menon, whose mind galvanized me as she taught me about Shakespeare, queer theory, and life. Madhavi has been with me every step of the way through the writing of this book. She has fed me, read many drafts, yelled at me (with love), lifted me up when I was down, and taken care of me in many cities and on two different continents. Madhavi’s brilliance and her immense capacity for love have been and continue to be some of the greatest gifts in my life.

Here in Atlanta, I am grateful to have developed friendships both at Kennesaw State University and beyond. At Kennesaw State, the members of my writing group, Keith Botelho and M. Todd Harper, provided much help in the development of chapter 4. This project has also benefited from conversations with other colleagues in the English Department: Martha Bowden, Katarina Gephardt, Chris Palmer, and H. William Rice. The students in my twentieth-century British literature courses provided the first testing ground for many of the ideas in this book. I am especially grateful to Dean Robin Dorff and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Kennesaw State University for providing subvention funds for the publication of this book. And, beyond the university, I have had the pleasure of great company over many coffees, meals, movies, karaoke, and Broadway sing-a-longs with Jonathan Goldberg, Lynne Huffer, Tamara Jones, Michael Moon, and Colin Talley.

At Columbia University Press, Philip Leventhal has been an amazing advocate for this project; I am grateful for his excellent editorial eye and encouragement throughout this process. I have also been fortunate to work with the coeditors of the Literature Now series—Matthew Hart, David James, and Rebecca Walkowitz—who have been receptive and generous interlocutors. Their support, suggestions, and advice have strengthened and sharpened the arguments in this book. I also owe the anonymous readers and Jane Gallop an immense debt of gratitude. Their attentive readings of various versions of the manuscript improved in myriad ways the final product. An early version of chapter 2 was presented as an invited talk at Emory University; thanks to Jonathan Goldberg for inviting me. And early versions of other chapters were presented at Narrative, the Modern Language Association Conference, and the Modernist Studies Association Conference. Part of chapter 4 appeared elsewhere: "Cosmopolitan Love: The One and the World in Hari Kunzru’s Transmission," Contemporary Literature 52, no. 2 (2012): 348–73. My thanks to the University of Wisconsin Press for permission to include this work here.

There are also people who were part of this book, even if they aren’t aware of it: Jerry Albus, Elizabeth Barragato, Ian Croft, Alicia Edwards, Peter Edwards, Felix Lee, Michael Lee, Phoebe Lee, Sharon Mathis, Kay McDowall, Bruce Merritt, Valerie Merritt, Aaron Sanders, Kim Severson, Barbara Wilson, Christopher Wilson, James Wilson, and Marian Wilson.

My family’s encouragement has been absolutely integral to this project from start to finish. My father, Thomas Shelden; my sister, Hilary Weston; my stepfather, Gerald Paulsen; my grandmother, Marian Lee; and my brother-in-law, Jeff Weston have provided me with much-needed sustenance and love. My mother, Roxanna Paulsen, in particular, has always believed in me, cheered me on, and supported me in too many ways to count. It is most certainly the case that this book would not have been possible without her unflagging, steadfast love.

Finally, this book is also always for Elizabeth Wilson, whose dazzling intellect, love, and patience have forever changed me and my world. The final stages of this book have been fueled by her encouragement, enthusiasm, cooking, and notes written on Post-its. And our conversations have informed every page. Elizabeth’s strength, humor, and intelligence inspire me every day. I never knew what fun life could be until I met her.

Introduction

Unmaking Love

In Academic Instincts Marjorie Garber makes a claim that, at first, might seem straightforward: The job of the critic is to account for love.¹ Garber, of course, means that the critic’s task includes describing how and why one enjoys literature. However, if I willfully misread this passage, then I can hear in it a different sort of charge. This claim—The job of the critic is to account for love—suggests the task that contemporary writers put before us and the task that this book undertakes. In Unmaking Love I account for love: how modernists represent it and how contemporary writers both build on and depart from the modernists’ model. In particular, I account for the transformation wrought on love by the contemporary novel, because, indeed, love has changed. In contemporary literature the meanings of love can no longer be taken for granted; novelists now reimagine love in the negative, dissonant with what we typically take love to be.

Such a drastic alteration to the meanings of love informs the title of this book. What might it mean to unmake love? When contemporary novelists unmake the concept of love, they shatter the idea that is supposed to bind individuals through relations of affection or affinity. By unmaking love, the contemporary novel dismantles romantic idealism and exposes as impossible our collective fantasy that intimacy has the capacity to unite us. Dismantling this myth of amorous union does not destroy the concept of love so much as reorient it. That is, where love is unmade, it is also redefined: the love that is supposed to unify and redeem becomes corrupted with negativity and division.

The negativity that contemporary novelists use to unmake love has an intimate relation to queerness. In his essay Is the Rectum a Grave? Leo Bersani opposes queer negativity to love, reading the former as having radical, subject-shattering potential and the latter as striving for the illusion of redemptive promise. Famously, Bersani identifies the inestimable value of sex as . . . anti-communal, antiegalitarian, antinurturing, antiloving.² Against this opposition of love and the negative, I argue that the contemporary novel exposes the ways in which love is not opposed to queer negativity. Rather, love itself becomes antiloving, that is, imbued with all the corrosive force of the negative. The contemporary novel rejects the idea of love as a coherence-producing force of redemption and, in so doing, suggests that a love inhabited by the negative is a queered love. Queerness, then, cannot be understood simply as shorthand for homosexual identity. Contemporary writers find queerness potentially anywhere: where expectations are thwarted, where organization becomes disarticulated, where multiplicity disturbs and makes impossible unity. Queer love does not name homosexual attachments; instead, it marks social forms that are deformed, affective bonds that do not bind, and social structures that threaten to come undone. In other words, queerness emerges when love fails: to unify, to make the couple cohere, to redeem and erase negativity.

The contemporary novels that I discuss in this book refuse to conceive of love as unity producing. In these novels, love appears, of course, as romantic attachment, companionate marriage, and erotics, but contemporary writers also extend their critique of love to amorous bonds that define ethical, familial, communal, and global relationality. These texts distinguish between different types of love, even as no particular type of love is safe from their critique. Before these more recent works, modernist writers attempted to imagine love in ways that resisted conservative, redemptive fantasies about attachment. However, modernists remained ambivalent about love: they rejected fusion and continued to strive for it at the same time. Contemporary writers rely on this history of modernist ambivalence and build on it in their concept of love. But, there are crucial differences between these two accounts of love. If modernists had the goal of questioning the validity of fusional love, then contemporary novelists’ aims are rather more ambitious. They do not just revise love so much as explode it, making love at times unrecognizable as love. No longer can we (literary or queer critics) simply think of as separate love (union, wholeness) and that which threatens it (negativity, division); rather, contemporary novelists require that we consider these two forces as intimately and inextricably connected. If the critic’s job is to account for love, then the contemporary novel makes it clear that we must not only focus on enjoyment, delight, or appreciation—words that Marjorie Garber associates with the critic’s task—but also, and most important, we must attend to love as the expression of discontent, aggression, and contempt.³

Negative, Queer, Love

Despite the fact that I use combinations of these terms throughout as modifying each other—"queer negativity, for instance—I understand these three terms, negative, queer, and love, as, if not synonymous, at least crucially overlapping with each other. Before turning to the literary component of Unmaking Love—the place where this negative, queer love unfolds—I need to examine some crucial theoretical debates to parse the relation between these three central terms. Psychoanalytic and deconstructive approaches to negativity inform my own approach to love in contemporary novels. In particular, Barbara Johnson’s conception of the the difference within, or otherness, echoes throughout the readings in this book.⁴ And my arguments build on Jacques Lacan’s account of love as a fantasy structure that obscures a negative void, which separates individuals from each other.

Also influential to my thinking are debates about negativity in queer theory.⁵ If negativity is central to a particular form of queer theorizing, love is less familiar to that same intellectual genealogy. As Lauren Berlant points out in Love, a Queer Feeling, negative, queer love has been undertheorized, but the reasons for this undertheorization make sense.⁶ Love doesn’t have the sexy ring of transgression; love doesn’t readily evoke erotic fantasy. Nor can love, as Roland Barthes points out in A Lover’s Discourse, make good on its revolutionary promise because the pure New that love gestures toward is the most worn-down of stereotypes.⁷ In Written on the Body Jeanette Winterson echoes Barthes’s concern when she compares love to the saggy armchair of clichés.⁸ She goes on: It’s all right, millions of bottoms have sat here before me. The springs are well worn, the fabric smelly and familiar.⁹ Love: not too sexy, politically conservative, repetitive, domestic, and even a bit dowdy. Kaja Silverman puts the predicament of love in different though related terms: It [love] has always seemed to lack respectability as an object of intellectual inquiry—to represent the very quintessence of kitsch.¹⁰ Silverman here suggests that love lacks respectability as an object of intellectual inquiry because it registers as too ideologically respectable. After all, the rhetoric of love insistently underwrites the quest for gay respectability in the form of marriage equality through the mantra, love is love.¹¹

Yet, when critics do discuss love in queer theory, it has a strange trajectory. In the case of Leo Bersani’s Is the Rectum a Grave? love stands out as a paradigmatic case of antiqueer conservatism. For Lee Edelman, in No Future, love aims to conserve the integrity of the subject in the face of the death drive’s disarticulating force.¹² Other queer theorists are seduced by love’s utopian promise. José Esteban Muñoz’s embrace of love correlates with his rejection of what he repeatedly calls in Cruising Utopia the romance of the negative.¹³ Muñoz does not explicitly link his project to love as such, even though the description on the back cover tellingly characterizes the book as part manifesto, part love-letter.¹⁴ Beyond this apt characterization, what closely links Muñoz’s suspicion of the negative to love is his avowed investment in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s conception of reparative reading.¹⁵

Along with Muñoz, a number of critics have recognized the potential for reparative reading. Michael D. Snediker separates destruction and reparation, desire and love: I mean to distinguish love’s reparative, resuscitative energies from the oppositely and variously destructive, undoing energies of desire.¹⁶ In a slightly different though related vein, Cindy Patton defines Sedgwick’s use of love in A Dialogue on Love: it has the ring of intersubjectivity, of authenticity, the stems for a fundamental sameness across consciousnesses.¹⁷ Though this passage is not a description of reparative reading, Patton’s gloss on Sedgwickian love is critical. Patton brings together latter-day reparative readers and makes explicit the values that accrue to the understanding of love informed by reparative reading. Reparative love creates unities, dissolves differences, replenishes lack, and aims to make the world a better place. Such accounts of the positive gains of critical practice are in line with what Sedgwick says about reparative reading. It is modeled on the possibility of ‘repair[ing]’ the murderous part object into something like a whole, which then becomes available both to be identified with and to offer one nourishment and comfort in turn.¹⁸

I understand what some queer critics find enabling about reparative reading, even as I don’t share this position. The desire for reparation, for love to have healing power necessarily represses the fact that love is not univocally good; love does not, as Patton suggests, connect and unite us all through a common humanity. Indeed, love can be and is a force of corrosion, despair, division, and inequity.¹⁹ After all, you wouldn’t need to repair the object if you hadn’t already tried to murder it. Reparation, then, looks a bit like the room in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. The room, when David first arrives, is replete with detritus, dirt, and chaos: a single brown and wrinkled potato in which even the sprouting eyes were rotten lies among yellow newspaper and empty bottles, piles of boxes, a discarded violin.²⁰ As the novel progresses, Giovanni wants to make the room better for David because he loves him. So Giovanni attempts to refurbish it, adding a built-in bookcase: he chipped through the wall until he came to the brick and began pounding away at the brick (114). It becomes clear that this act of love is also an act of destruction; Giovanni is trying to make this small room a better place for David, but the more he improves it, the more successfully he destroys it.

Unmaking Love is in conversation with those sentimentalizing definitions of love that view it as the basis of human experience, as the one thing we all can share. This position is perhaps best articulated in the film version of The Celluloid Closet when Tom Hanks speaks about what he thinks is the most important message of Philadelphia: It is all the same. Love is spelled, you know, with the same four letters.²¹ And my point in relation to Hanks’s statement is that the important thing, at least in contemporary novels, is not that love is spelled with the same four letters, but that all the letters in love are different letters every time. The contemporary novel shows us that love is neither unifying nor unified; it is the place of division, divorce, and fissure. We can be seduced by the promise of love’s power to make humanity cohere, but we will be disappointed by its failure to do so.²² The authors I discuss here ask that we rethink what we mean by the word love. It no longer simply means something beneficent, something that can repair and heal wounds.

Unmaking Love stakes its claims about love in stark distinction from both the definition of love as too respectable and the so-called reparative turn in queer theory. As an alternative, I propose a love that builds on Barbara Johnson’s conception of using people as a model for queer love. Johnson paves the way for thinking love queerly, refusing the terms of either conventionality or reparation. Barbara Johnson’s deconstructive reading—and her emphasis on the value of encountering the surprise of otherness—provides not just exciting and provocative models for reading but also, crucially, a different, queer way of understanding love. Her essay, Using People: Kant with Winnicott, argues for the ethical importance and value of using people in our loving relations to others, creating a space of play and risk that does not depend on maintaining intactness and separation.²³ The essay turns on Johnson’s reading of D. W. Winnicott’s idea of the transitional object. Even as Johnson discusses the seven features of this object, in many ways the essay dwells specifically on two related features of the transitional object: 2. The object is affectionately cuddled as well as excitedly loved and mutilated and 4. It must survive instinctual loving, and also hating and, if it be a feature, pure aggression (99). To use people, in other words, is to love and hate, to caress and mutilate, to feel affection and aggression.

In response to Johnson, one could attempt to alleviate the anxiety that this pairing might evoke by keeping the two terms radically separate.²⁴ But Johnson’s reading of Winnicott shows us that nothing can provide the benign sense of love that one might desire. No matter how much one might want to eradicate destruction, mutilation, and hatred from love, these negativities define love. Johnson’s Using People offers an extended meditation on, as she puts it, the whole scenario of destruction and excited love (101). Taking her cue from Winnicott, Johnson is essentially working with a pair of terms that takes the form of a rhetorical figure, hendiadys, about which Johnson writes in A World of Difference: This positing and erasing of difference, this fluctuation of two and one, could perhaps be called a hendiadys (a figure in which, for example, ‘Deconstruction and Criticism’ substitutes for ‘Deconstructive Criticism,’ as Geoffrey Hartman has suggested), the rhetorical figure that most aptly names such versions of the question of the chicken and the egg.²⁵ Johnson’s hendiadys in Using People works not unlike Hartman’s by oscillating between two and one. However, rather than fluctuating between a phrase that separates the two terms (destruction and love) and one that erases the difference between them (destructive love, for instance), in Johnson’s essay, one of the terms almost completely drops out of the discussion. After the passage I’ve quoted, where Johnson sets up the whole scenario of destruction and excited love, the rest of the essay focuses almost exclusively on destruction.²⁶ Johnson’s hendiadys posits and erases difference, fluctuates between two and one by using one term, destruction, as the figural representative for the pair.

When Johnson does finally use the pair again, the collapse of the two terms that the hendiadic structure has established becomes explicit. Johnson writes: "The structure of address animates the object as a ‘you,’ a destroyed ‘you,’ a