I am
currently reading the Dutch translation of The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson.
The book
starts thus :
“October,
2007. The Santa Ana winds are shredding the bark off the eucalyptus trees in
long white stripes. A friend and I risk the widowmakers by having lunch
outside, during which she suggests I tattoo the words HARD TO GET across my
knuckles as a reminder of this pose’s possible fruits. Instead the words I love
you come tumbling out of my mouth in an incantation the first time you fuck me
in the ass, my face smashed against the cement floor of your dank and charming
bachelor pad. You had Molloy by your bedside and a stack of cocks in a shadowy
unused shower stall. Does it get any better? What’s your pleasure? you asked,
then stuck around for an answer. “
In essence,
the book relates how Nelson encounters a lover (the artist Harry Dodge) who is
neither man nor woman, they marry as an act of political protest just before
the law enabling homosexual marriage is revoked in California, and together
they engage in a series of radical bodily experiments. Maggie becomes pregnant
with a sperm donor at the same time as Harry takes testosterone and has breast
removal surgery, with the simultaneity of these changes rendering pregnancy
itself a queer state.
The Guardian
Like her
other autobiographical books, The Argonauts is episodic, fragmentary, and
pointedly acategorical: it’s not a conventional memoir, but neither is it any
of the other genres that it borrows from — not poetry, not scholarly criticism,
not theory, not essay. There are no chapters, only paragraphs, which range from
one sentence to two pages in length. Sometimes these form a sequence; at other
times each stands alone as a self-contained thought. Mostly, the book tells the
story of Nelson falling in love with, marrying, and raising children with Harry
Dodge. It also tells the story of Nelson becoming a mother to the baby Iggy, a
stepparent to Harry’s son, Lenny, and a partner to Harry during a period of
transformation: after nearly thirty years of wearing “smashers,” even to
bed — “doctored sports bras, strips of dirty fabric” that erase any visible
trace of breasts — Harry decides to undergo top surgery and start taking
testosterone. Harry’s bodily transformation parallels Nelson’s during her
pregnancy, and both transformations hint at the title’s meaning. Like the Argo,
the mythological ship that keeps its name even as its parts are replaced,
Nelson and Harry remain the same even as their bodies change. “On the surface,
it may have seemed as though your body was becoming more and more ‘male,’ mine,
more and more ‘female,’” Nelson writes. “But that’s not how it felt on the
inside. On the inside, we were two human animals undergoing transformations
beside each other, bearing each other loose witness. In other words, we were
aging.”
This is one
way to narrate the arc of the book. It is accurate, but also misleadingly tidy:
if The Argonauts eludes easy plot summary, it may be because the plot is not
what anchors the book. What does instead is the character of Nelson’s thought,
which is warm, winning, sprawling, inexhaustible, and above all bent on a
generous kind of self-improvement — one that doesn’t dwell on personal failure
so much as measure old ideas against new experiences, to test if they’re still
capacious enough, still flexible enough, to be true. Anecdotes become
springboards for intellectual gymnastics, which Nelson performs without
pretension; critical theory permeates the book, but she’s not simply showing
off her ribbons. (Nelson holds a PhD from CUNY, where she studied with the
queer-theory heavyweight Eve Sedgwick; she now teaches at CalArts in Los Angeles.)
Her style is vernacular, intimate, and practical: reflections on maternity,
queerness, domesticity, and their representations derive from real questions
that feel urgent because they are. A fondness for the psychologist D. W.
Winnicott, for example, marks the distinction between theory that feels useful
and theory that doesn’t:
In Iggy’s first year of life, Winnicott was
the only child psychologist who retained any interest or relevance for me.
Klein’s morbid sadism and bad breast, Freud’s block-buster Oedipal saga and
freighted fort/da, Lacan’s heavy-handed Imaginary and Symbolic — suddenly none
seemed irreverent enough to address the situation of being a baby, of
caretaking a baby. Do castration and the Phallus tell us the deep Truths of Western
culture or just the truth of how things are and might not always be? It
astonishes me to think that I spent years finding such questions not only
comprehensible, but compelling.
The
italicized line comes from the gender theorist Elizabeth Weed, and it’s one of
many quotations Nelson works seamlessly into her text. These quotations are
almost always rendered in italics, with the original writer’s name printed in
the margin in a pale font. “I’m looking for a thoroughly digested way of
thinking with other people,” Nelson once said of this technique, and digested
seems like the right word. The effect is that other people’s sentences blend
into Nelson’s; they seem to belong there, as residents of her mind she must
contend with.
"If you read
“The Argonauts,” you’ll know that this book—it literally stands on the
shoulders of . . . the wild revolutionary work of so many feminist, queer, and
anti-racist thinkers, writers, activists, and artists. . . . I called those
people in my book “the many-gendered mothers of my heart,” which is a phrase I
steal from the poet Dana Ward, but I do have a specific mother, who’s also here
tonight—Mom, I love you. . . . And, last but not least, thank you, Harry Dodge
. . . who so generously allowed me to write about our conjoined life to make
this book, and it is beyond lucky that you stand by me tonight and every day."
The title
of The Argonauts comes from a Roland Barthes passage that compares a person
saying “I love you” to one of the Argonauts who repairs and renews his ship
during its voyage. Nelson recalls that, feeling vulnerable after having said “I
love you” to Dodge at the beginning of their time together, she sent him the
quote, which suggests that the “task of love and language” is “to give to one
and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new”.
Near the
beginning of the book, Nelson describes her and Dodge getting married hours
before California revoked its legislation on gay marriage and began a
(temporary) ban. “Poor marriage!”, she writes. “Off we went to kill it
(unforgiveable). Or reinforce it (unforgiveable)” – their marriage is both
subversive and the opposite of subversive. She examines different facets of
this, and later remarks on the “assimilationist” bent of “the mainstream LGBTQ+
movement” that has rushed to seek entrance into “two historically repressive
structures: marriage and the military”.
She tells
me that Harry and her talk a lot at home about the hopefulness embedded in much
queer theory that “there’s something about non-normative genders and
sexualities” that encourages a politically radical tendency. “We don’t yet know
how people would behave if we stopped incentivising marriage” financially and
culturally, she says. But for the moment, “the tethering of politics to certain
genders and sexualities has probably passed … The most shocking thing about
Caitlyn Jenner is that she’s a Republican. That’s proof alone that it’s not
clear what politics stem from certain gender and sexuality arrangements.”
Before
meeting Dodge, Nelson was suspicious of the whole idea of family – “for all the
familiar feminist, queer, and collectivity-based” reasons. But Harry, she has
said, used the term “so widely and happily. It really amazed me.” When the two
got married, it was, we learn in The Argonauts, in a temporary chapel room,
with a drag queen at the door who “did triple duty as a greeter, bouncer, and
witness”. Officiating was Reverend Lorelei Starbuck, who listed her
denomination as “Metaphysical” on the forms. The ceremony was rushed, and in
some ways deeply unserious, but the couple didn’t account for love: “as we said
our vows, we were undone. We wept, besotted with our luck.” Then they went to
pick up Dodge’s son, “came home and ate chocolate pudding all together in
sleeping bags on the porch, looking out over the mountain”.
Works by Harry Dodge
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