Cover of the Melville House edition
(2016) [a]
I've said it before, but it's worth repeating: Maggie Nelson is one of those very rare individuals who probably deserves the title of
genius; an original and insightful writer who produces work that is both
lyrical and philosophical [b].
I still think she has an unfortunate tendency to overshare and give us just a little too much personal information, but that might just be me being a bit uptight and prudish [c]. And, for all the times when I want to look away from the page, there are many more occasions on which I'm grateful as a reader for her honesty, courage, and intelligence.
And so, let's take a look at The Argonauts (pp. 1-74), but please note this is more a response to the lines or paragraphs that most resonate with me, rather than a review of the book as a whole (some aspects of which, even if central - such as sodomitical parenthood - I don't really care about [d]).
I.
Nelson tells us that before she met the great love of her life, the artist Harry Dodge, she had "spent a lifetime devoted to Wittgenstein's idea that the inexpressible is contained - inexpressibly! - in the expressed" [3] [e].
It was this profound but paradoxical truth that enabled Nelson to keep her faith in language - words are good enough! - and continue writing. But then Dodge, "equally devoted to the conviction that words are not good enough" [4], obliged her to reconsider the matter; perhaps words were "corrosive to all that is good, all that is real, all that is flow" [4] and that to name is to kill; perhaps we can't conceptualise and articulate the world clearly (and non-destructively) after all.
However, I'm not sure that Nelson, as a writer and poet, ever quite accepts this; a little later she asks: "How can the words not be good enough?" [8].
II.
Nelson has always thought it a little romantic to allow "an individual experience of desire take precedence over a categorical one" [10].
And I agree, it is romantic to just love Thelma, Alice, or Nicolas Poussin, rather than identifying oneself in terms of a fixed sexuality, although maybe that's easier for me to say than for someone who is (or has been) persecuted or discriminated against for their queerness; I don't have to worry about how certain pieces of legislation, such as Clause 28 or Prop 8, are going to impact on my life [f].
III.
This is very similar to how I feel and act when it comes to home improvements and domestic chores: I don't want to lift a finger "to better my surroundings" [14], or even keep things ship shape and Bristol fashion. I prefer to literally let things "fall apart all around" [14] and then, "when it gets to be too much" [14], just move on and flee the scene.
IV.
This is an undeniably correct observation (one that reminds me of something Baudrillard might have written, although Nelson credits the idea to Lacan, whose idea of the Real is not quite the same as the former's):
"To align oneself with the real [...] can feel good. But any fixed claim on realness, especially when it is tied to an identity, also has a finger in psychosis." [17]
In other words, whilst aligning with a real or natural identity can be a source of pride and pleasure, it can also bring with it a touch of horror and be impossible to sustain for 24/7; no one can be themselves all day every day, can they?
There have to be moments when we don't quite feel ourselves and we take a breather from reality.
V.
I like the fact that Nelson doesn't just keep banging on about difference and otherness; the fact that she acknowledges that encountering sameness can also be important, "as it has to do with seeing reflected that which has been reviled" [31].
And this encounter with sameness can also allow self-discovery: "To devote yourself to someone else's pussy can be a means of devoting yourself to your own." [31]
And I suppose that matters; although not as much as the "shared, crushing understanding of what it means to live in a patriarchy" [31] - the kind of sentence which one simply has to let pass when reading an author like Nelson, who passionately believes that there is "some evil shit in this world that needs fucking up" [33], such as the phallocratic order and capitalism, even if she has "come to understand revolutionary language" [33] as a mixture of fantasy and fetish.
VI.
This is pure liberalism: "I support private, consensual groups of adults deciding to live together however they please" [37].
The problem is such groups don't live in a giggly bubble on the moon; they have neighbours and they belong to wider society and so their decisions and lifestyle choices invariably impact others. They also inhabit the planet with other species and, like Nelson, I think our relationship with animals and plants in sacred terms.
VII.
"Even if women are consulting the same satellites, or reading from the same script: their reports are suspect ..." [47]
This remark about the perceived difference in reporting accuracy between male and female weather reporters is interesting. I'm not sure, however, that the reason for it is the one Nelson (and Luce Irigaray) imagine; i.e., that women are somehow removed as a sex from the language game that assures objective coherence and predictive ability.
But there does seem to be some sort of difference involved based on sex and a woman's greater attunement to her own body in relationship to the world; it's very rare that the Little Greek, for example, will say it's cold outside (giving reference to the air temperature), preferring instead to tell me she's feeling cold.
So yes, it's a different (more subjective) way of articulating reality; but I don't think this is the result of patriarchal forces looking to silence women or discredit their weather reportage.
VIII.
I'm grateful to Nelson for mentioning the poet and literary scholar Michael Snediker (whom I didn't know of) and his book Queer Optimism (2008). For his critical examination of waxing lyrical - as summarised here - is one I find very interesting.
For there is something problematic (and irritating) - particularly to a working class sensibility - when writers indulge in histrionics. Even issues of "maximum complexity and gravity" [56] can be discussed without exaggerated language and overarching concepts which can sometimes negate the "specificities of the situation at hand" [56].
(This returns us to Wittgenstein and the idea of speaking plainly.)
IX.
Is transitioning from one gender to another (or even just floating somewhere in-between) really the same as a becoming as Deleuze and Guattari understand it?
I don't think so. But perhaps Nelson's reading of the above on this topic is superior to mine; more true to the radical spirit of everybody's favourite nomad philosophers and certainly she and Harry Dodge know more about gender, sexuality, and identity issues than I do.
Thus, best perhaps that I say nothing further here: for I don't want to run the risk of being thought presumptuous or another comfortably cisgendered straight white male know-it-all, who has forgotten (or is yet to learn) that "the best way to find out how people feel about their gender or their sexuality - or anything else, really - is to listen to what they tell you [...] without shellacking over their version of reality" [66].
But then, having said that, this sounds suspiciously like an attempt to silence those who don't care about personal truth and refuse to value lived experience above everything else.
X.
On my first day at school, I cried when they pinned a name badge on me and tried to remove it (true story). Ten year later, I smiled when Poly Styrene informed her audience that identity was the crisis (having already seen that) [h].
Thus, like Nelson's professor of feminist theory, Christina Crosby, I would be mortified were a student - or anyone else - to hand me an index card and ask me to write on it how I identified and then pin it on my lapel. For like Crosby, I've "spent a lifetime complicating and deconstructing identity and teaching others to do the same ..." [73]
Notes
[a] The Argonauts was originally published in the United States by Graywolf
Press, in 2015. The first UK edition, published by
Melville House, followed in 2016, and it is this edition to which all page numbers given in the text refer.
[b] In 2016, a year after the publication of The Argonauts, Nelson was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship; known to many as the genius grant. See the two-part post 'Heathen, Hedonistic, and Horny: Notes on Maggie Nelson's Bluets (2009)' (5 Sept 2024): click here.
[c] See the post 'Can a Writer Ever Overshare? On Maggie Nelson's Self-Exposure' (9 Sept 2024): click here.
[d] I'm sure Nelson would say it's this indifference to parenting - particularly the maternal - that disqualifies me from being a feminist; see pp. 48-52 and the story of a seminar with Jane Gallop and Rosalind Krauss. Nelson stands with the former, but I have to admit, I'm slightly more sympathetic to the latter.
[e] I don't want to split hairs - though some say that philosophy is nothing other than the endless splitting of hairs - but I'm not sure Wittgenstein quite said this.
What he said, rather, was that the inexpressible (i.e., that which can be shown and, aguably, that which mysteriously matters most) forms the background against which
whatever we can express has its meaning. In other words, context - not containment - is the crucial word here.
See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 16. A revised edition of this work, ed. G. H. von Wright, was published by Blackwell in 1998.
[f] Like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, I want to use the word queer to include "all kinds of resistances and fracturings and mismatches that have little or nothing to do with sexual orientation" [35].
On the other hand, one feels obliged to acknowledge historical and contemporary prohibitions aimed specificaly against those who identify as lesbian or gay, for example. As Nelson notes, this is kind of like wanting it both ways.
But then, there is "much to be learned from wanting something both ways" [36] and Nelson concedes that "annoying as it might be to hear a straight white guy" who is comfortably cisgendered talk about queerness, "in the end it's probably all for the better" [36].
[g] I'm referring to the single 'Identity' released by X-Ray Spex (EMI, July 1978): click here.
Before heading to part two of this post - which can be accessed here - readers might like to see an earlier post anticipating this one, entitled 'Argonauts' (26 Aug 2024): click here.
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