10th June 2024
Dr. Naoise Murphy, Maynooth University
Octavio R. González, Misfit Modernism: Queer Forms of Double Exile in the Twentieth-Century Novel (Penn State University Press, 2020).
Misfit Modernism offers an answer to the question of what to do with queer theory, and modernist studies, after intersectionality. Octavio R. González grapples with a familiar problem for politically-engaged criticism: that people, as Black feminism teaches us, ‘do not live single-issue lives’.[1] The cultural category of the ‘misfit’ is his response to the impulse to make queerness stand for all forms of marginality; an alternative term that is capacious enough to hold diverging vectors of difference, but that emerges organically from the cultural imaginary of a period before ‘intersectionality’. His ‘misfit modernists’ experience forms of ‘double exile’ that we might now term ‘intersectional’ — too queer or dark-skinned within their family unit, while also facing collective forms of social marginalization stemming from racism, misogyny, or heterosexism. Through modernist forms of narration, these misfits theorized this complex form of cultural alienation, while being left out of the story of the transcendental, universal (read: white, male) modernist subject.
The major contribution of this study is González’s intervention in that unhelpful binary that has developed in queer studies, what he glosses as ‘the schism between the intellectual legacy of white queer theory — sexuality-without-gender or race or any other mark of difference — and the overcorrection that I see in queer of color critics who insist on the bankruptcy of the antisocial thesis of homosexuality’ (5). Negative affects, bad feelings, antisociality: these are over-identified with ‘white modernist queer archives’, while ‘critical and affective utopianism’ is assigned to queers of color (6). In his compelling analysis, the reductionism of this split is self-evident. Put simply, feeling bad is not only the province of the depressed white gay or trans boy, and people of color should not have to hold all our desires for the utopian future that lies beyond the horizon of queerness. González’s ‘misfit modernist’ texts provide ample evidence for forms of feeling bad beyond the easily-caricatured sad white queer (theorist).
The authors gathered by González under ‘the freak flag of misfit modernism’ (xiv) are Nella Larsen, Wallace Thurman, Jean Rhys, and Christopher Isherwood. His readings move between the lives and works of these four figures, showing how they metabolized experiences of cultural nonbelonging through forms of modernist narration. The term ‘misfit’ is useful because it describes both individual and collective experiences of being outside the societal mainstream: the ‘despised mulatto’ (53), the ‘total misfit’ (88), the ‘underdog’ (125), the ‘nonconformist’ (155). These figures offer ways of talking about marginality that precede our contemporary rubrics of identity, a refreshing intervention that returns some historical specificity to queer reading practices. Indeed, even more of this historically-grounded approach would have been welcome. Thurman, the subject of the third chapter, is firmly located in his cultural milieu, and his acerbic personality is allowed to take up space, which brings his opposition to the contemporaneous New Negro movement into clear focus. A particular strength of this study is its refusal of idealistic accounts of queer and Black life in the early-twentieth century. The Thurman chapter is particularly good on context, contestation, and contemporary reception — indeed, some of the strongest moments in the book as a whole result from this rich sense of groundedness in the fully-realized cultural and social world of 1920s Harlem.
González’s frustration with self-serving, distorting ‘recovery’ projects is palpable. He comments that ‘Rhys is seemingly always being rescued by sympathetic readers’ (128), observes how Thurman is neither black, gay, nor literary enough for critics. His methodological approach, therefore, opposes all kinds of critical ‘rescue’, including the comfort blankets of institutionally-sanctioned theoretical frameworks. Rather than ‘deflect’ from the discomfort of these texts by psychoanalyzing them, or aspiring to ‘scientific’ methods, González wants us to ‘stay close to troubling misfit structures of feeling’ (42), through close textual attention to the novel form. This methodological innovation — termed ‘immanent reading’ — does not need quite so much explanation or underlining for its novelty; it is an intuitive and compelling way of doing literary criticism. González invites us to ‘wallow’, like his gloomy misfit modernists. This works best in the chapter on Thurman, whose opposition to notions of collective uplift chimes in interesting ways with antisocial queer theory. This analysis draws out the continuing relevance of this kind of antisocial stance in a public culture increasingly interested in celebrating, and selling, ‘queer joy’. Through Thurman, González advances an antisocial queer-of-color critique: ‘rather than peddling redemption, Thurman is more interested in documenting the impasse of internal and social subjugation’ (118).
Methodological concerns become more salient in the chapter on Rhys, framed by a resistance to psychoanalytic readings of her masochism. For González, her novel Quartet ‘thematizes the oppressive authority of institutional epistemologies’ (131), including psychoanalysis, which is shown to be pathologizing, oppressive and misogynistic. Rhys’s technique of hypothetical focalization forces the reader ‘not to classify, but to understand’ the misery of the protagonist (135), another effective form of narrative ‘wallowing’. The final chapter on Isherwood returns to a more sustained focus on the problems of queer studies. In González’s account, A Single Man stages the conflict between ‘gay’ and ‘queer’ — between individualist gay identity and queer as non-identitarian collective opposition to regimes of the normal. Negotiating these divergent impulses before they were named as such, Isherwood advocates for solidarity with other minority groups, other ‘nonconformists’, through his modernist ‘ethos of ascetic queer impersonality’ (156).
The ‘Coda’ serves as a powerful riposte to the canonical vision of white queer modernism, using Nella Larsen’s subtly ironic correspondence with Gertrude Stein as an entry point. The selection of texts studied here provides plentiful evidence that in this period, ‘queer was elaborated in intersectional ways, at times salient more so for its racial, ethnic, and regional marginality than that of sexuality itself’ (193). González’s point is clear: ‘Queerness wasn’t born white, it was whitewashed’ (188). His sensitive, expansive attention to intersecting forms of alienation, nonbelonging, and negative affect makes this narrow vision of queer modernism impossible to sustain.
Sources
Image Credit: Misfit Modernism cover, 2020, Penn State University Press
[1] Audre Lorde, ‘Learning from the 60s’ in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1984), p. 138.
The Modernist Review 