In his recent novel, Gone Tomorrow, Gary Indiana's main
character complains that because of AIDS, homosexuality has turned into
"sozialkitsch" and is "being treated as a 'social
problem'": "He cited in particular a dreadfully insipid
'AIDS memoir' written . . . by some hack Hollywood
screenwriter" (184). The writer in question is Paul Monette, and
the memoir is Borrowed Time, perhaps the most famous AIDS narrative yet.
Borrowed Time was the first, and has been the only, narrative about AIDS
to become a national best seller. As such, it was applauded because
"for many people . . . [it] humanized the tragedy of the
disease" (Fein). Many people, here, means many straight people,
since for many gays and lesbians, the AIDS crisis had an all too
humanized face already. Indiana's character's complaint is
that the memoir has translated personal tragedy into a socially accepted
representation by transforming the historicity and specificity of a
particular illness into a generic public display. The memoir's
publication date, 1988, was a year of continued anger and activism by
ACT-UP and others in response to blatant inaction by the Reagan
administration. Borrowed Time's brilliance is in its ability to
corporealize this anger onto the body of the lover, Roger. But by doing
this, it also decorporealizes male homosexual desire by reproducing
standard generic tropes. A favorite subject matter for film, television
and literary melodramas has been stories of illness and handicap,(1) and
AIDS, "the epidemic of the century,"(2) is no exception. In
this essay I want to explore how two authors, Paul Monette and John
Weir, engage with the problem of melodrama. Both Monette, in Borrowed
Time, and Weir, in The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, tell the
story of a gay man's illness and death due to AIDS. Both inscribe
melodramatic structures in their narratives. But while Monette seeks to
show how homosexuals are just like heterosexuals and seems unaware of
the power of melodrama to eradicate male-male desire, Weir
self-consciously engages with the insufficiencies of the genre and calls
for a rearticulation of representational strategies to account for
historical specificity and to encourage specific forms of activism both
in the battle for the lives of people with AIDS and against homophobia.
Douglas Crimp argues that to write uncritically in a bourgeois genre
reinscribes its most traditional conventions (248), which for gay male
subjects, contains and, perhaps more importantly, eradicates male-male
sexuality. But in her discussion of cultural products produced for
women, Tania Modleski describes ways in which narratives resist male
domination even as they seem to condone it (23-25). Modleski describes
counter-plots which undermine the hegemonic force of the main plot:
"these plots have had to be 'submerged' into more
orthodox ones just as feminine rage itself, blocked in direct
expression, has had to be submerged, subterranean, devious" (25).
The main plot is the one that will enable the reading or viewing public
to "recognize" the events as "realistic," as
something that can happen. But the counter-plots abuse this constructed
reality by suggesting that there are other equally significant plots
which the main plot and the reading public may refuse to recognize.
Recognizable narrative structures are important because they are
mechanisms of coherence which allow an audience to receive and process
the representation. By writing novels that use narrative "with a
vengeance," gay writers can represent the ambivalences and
contradictions of being a gay subject in a homophobic world.(3) The key
would be to engage self-consciously and critically with these narratives
to answer Crimp's call for denaturalizing the bourgeois homophobic
tradition which standard narrative structures inculcate.
Melodrama is a conservative generic style which uses sensational
incident and violent appeals to emotion to get its point across. It uses
a Manichaean structure to propel its protagonists from one crisis to
another:
[Melodrama has] operated . . . as a site for struggles over deeply
disturbing materials and fundamental values. Melodrama became for the
Western world the ritual through which social order is purged and sets
of ethical imperatives are clarified. Using shared, public symbols, this
ritual that is melodrama resolves not crises of order but crises within
order . . . . [M]elodrama has focused on the problems of the individual
within established social structures. (Byars 11)
The crisis of individual subjects is paramount, and their method of
incorporating themselves back into the social order is the main focus of
the plot. The social order is assumed to be adequate to fill the needs
of all individuals; problems arise when an individual cannot recognize
how her/his needs are being met.
The heightened rhetoric and consolidation of experience into an
established social order are sometimes reflected in cultural criticism
about AIDS. For example, in his 1990 survey of literature about AIDS,
John Clum argues that "[i]t is that almost obsessive focus on
memory - memory of desire - that is a central characteristic of gay
literature in the Age of AIDS" (667). He claims that because of the
AIDS crisis "[n]ot only are men lost, a culture is waning"
(650). Clum assumes that there was at some point a unified gay culture
which AIDS is trying to eradicate. Clum seeks to articulate the
differences between the various representations he discusses while
condensing the myriad of different literary responses to the AIDS crisis
into a single systematic genre - AIDS literature. Arguing that the
subject matter of AIDS transcends other generic choices, he homogenizes
literature dealing with AIDS into a predetermined set of themes and
structures. This homogenization is characterized by an assumption of a
unified gay past that was somehow "better" or "more
whole" than the present which, if it hadn't been for AIDS,
would have rationally evolved and continued. Other critics have argued
that reinscribing the myth of a unified gay culture deflects critics
from "the energetic and multi-fronted response of the gay community
itself to the current [AIDS] crisis" (Nunokawa 312). Clum's
article reveals the tensions that result when a critic seeks to describe
a unified gay culture through the specificity of different AIDS
narratives. Clum is convinced that a culture is "dwindling"
even as he shows how the AIDS crisis has inspired a gay literary
resurgence.
One reason for Clum's argument about the centrality of
"memory of desire" is his choice of Paul Monette as
"[t]he paradigmatic writer in this new barren land of displacement,
pain, and loss" (648). Monette's autobiography is,
understandably, obsessed with memory and with desire. His strategy is to
articulate his memories and his desires with heightened rhetoric; for
example, Monette writes: "Now we would learn to borrow time in
earnest, day by day, making what brief stays we could against the
downward spiral from which all our wasted brothers did not return"
(183).(4) As a writer of movie novelizations and screenplays, Monette
uses his skills as a melodramatist to construct a story that will
heighten the effects of normalcy by which he defines his and his
lover's relationship and the effects of AIDS'
"invasion" of this normalcy.
The structure that Monette sets up relies heavily on a contemporary
rearticulation of a romance tradition which positions two doomed lovers
against an outside evil which succeeds in killing the lovers'
bodies. This has the paradoxical effect of heightening their love to a
non-human level. This transcendent love is evident at the beginning of
the narrative; describing Paul's first meeting with Roger, he
explains, "I suppose we'd been waiting for each other all our
lives" (10). Monette describes the intensity of their relationship
this way throughout the book; they were fated to meet each other and
their lives became complete by meeting: "For if there was no man
out there who was equal and simpatico then what was the point of being
gay?" (10). Now of course, it is debatable whether there is a
"point of being gay," but clearly Paul believes that without
Roger his life would have been less meaningful. Roger, himself, declares
"'But we're the same person. When did that
happen?'" (314). The first three chapters present a picture of
a secure and happy couple, of a couple with all the money and power they
could possibly want or need. As John Clum points out, it is the gay
version of the American dream (649-50).
Paradoxically, it is Roger's diagnosis that creates the energy
and passion that are strangely muted in the first few chapters. As
Chapter 3 ends and they learn that Roger has pneumocystis carinii
pneumonia (PCP), the narrative intensifies as an enemy appears to test
them: "'We'll fight it, darling, we'll beat it, I
promise. I won't let you die.' The sentiments merged as they
tumbled out. This is the liturgy of bonding. Mostly we clung together,
as if time still had the decency to stop when we were entwined. After
all, the whole world was right here in this room" (77). Monette
anthropomorphizes AIDS into an enemy which threatens the suburban bliss
of their love. Time and space cease to operate at this moment; time
stands still, and the entire world is in the room. Denis de Rougemont
writes that in traditional heterosexual romances, passion allows the
lovers to transcend the boundaries of good and evil and the constraints
symbolized by the moral order (39). De Rougemont believes that passion
is actually a repressed longing for suffering and death. The lover can
reach self-awareness only by risking his life and being on the verge of
death (50-51).(5) In the romance tradition, real life (the life of
marriage and monogamy) is death, so the romance heroes seek a passion
which will provide a more meaningful, and energetic, one:
The essential unhappiness of [romantic] love is that what they desire
they have not yet had - this is Death - and that what they had is now
being lost - the enjoyment of life. And yet, far from this loss being
felt as privation, the couple imagine that they are now more fully alive
than ever and are more than ever living dangerously and magnificently.
The approach of death acts as a goad to sensuality. (53)(6)
In transcending time and space, Paul and Roger's relationship is
transformed from the stable, secure gay bourgeois couple to the romantic
heroes battling death: "I didn't start heroic, but it turned
out there was no place else to go" (84). Monette centers the couple
in a heroic battle against adversity. The lovers united against
adversity is a common theme in melodrama and sets up a specific
narrative expectation which Monette provides in the rest of the book.
The remainder of the narrative is an account (particularly detailed,
with lots of useful information about the status of AIDS medicine in the
mid-80s) of Roger's illnesses and death.
Monette positions himself as the active hero trying to save his
lover's life, but a hero who is unproductive and incapable of
handling responsibility, all evidence to the contrary. In this, he
departs significantly from the heterosexual romance tradition in which
the hero, the man, is a man of action and always accomplishes his goals,
particularly if it means saving his lover's life. Instead, he
portrays himself as hysterical and frenetic. He comments regularly that
he is falling apart, that he feels hopeless; while Roger remains rather
stoic and calm, he feels that everything is out of control. In fact,
looking only at what Paul accomplishes, he is clearly highly successful
in both protecting Roger from insensitive and uncaring people and in
making his last year as comfortable as possible. He is also linked into
several underground AIDS care and information systems which makes him
extremely knowledgeable and able to steer Roger into productive
treatments. Yet, these successes are suppressed in the narrative by
Paul's insistence on his inability to cure Roger or to beat AIDS or
to cope emotionally. They would be effective counter-plots, but Monette
systematically debases these efforts. He discounts his own abilities
because when "Roger died then [he] died" (84). The narrative
is not only the exposition of Roger's death, but also the death of
Paul, if not physically than psychically. Once one member of a romance
duo dies, then the other one's life becomes meaningless: "Now
that he's gone, the cup of my own health is neither half full nor
half empty. Just half" (2). Since in the romance tradition, the
lover can reach self-awareness only by risking his life and being on the
verge of death (de Rougemont 50-51), for Roger's death to have some
meaning, Paul must also symbolically die. Although they have risked
death together, which has lifted their love into a new, heightened state
of passion, once it is over, Paul is paralyzed and hollow. Hence, he
must downplay the very heroic actions that he takes. As a result, the
possibility of a homosexual romantic hero is undermined.
Roger, as lover, is calm, stoic, mainly silent, and a model of tact
and poise. He is described as a model Greek citizen. Paul uses Roger as
a foil for his supposed inability to do anything:
"Paul, we have to accept our fate," said Rog, firm and
unsentimental. "There's no other choice."
"But I can't," I whined, and I meant I won't. Yet
even as I said it, it struck me how Greek Roger's attitude was. I
can't express how small I felt just then, or how alone, as I looked
at Rog in the dark and understood he had reached a kind of acceptance.
(220)
There are moments when Roger breaks down, usually when his health is
particularly poor, but Paul needs to reify Roger as someone worthy of
protecting and so describes his lover as an impossibly ideal individual.
Monette paints AIDS and the medical/government establishment in broad
strokes of evil and menace. Although Roger's doctor and Paul's
psychiatrist are allies, Monette makes it clear that medicine's
impersonality and government inaction along with AIDS are enemies which
must be overcome to cure Roger. He uses the prejudice against AIDS
sufferers, the insensitivity of HIV negative men, and the insufficient
scientific data to create a picture of a conspiracy to destroy Paul and
Roger. Paul finally blames this on homophobia: "But the mission of
the homophobe is more pernicious even than his morality. He wants every
one of us to be all alone, never to find the beloved friend" (125).
Homophobia is pernicious in America, but Monette conflates all of our
society's negative social elements with AIDS to create an
overwhelming, invincible villain. This tactic helps clarify the
Manichaean nature of the melodrama; Roger and Paul are good, AIDS and
all of society's problems are condensed into one undifferentiated
bad character. This "bad" character is so large and complex
that any action taken to overcome it will always be inadequate.
But perversely, the story needs AIDS; without it we would never have
heard of Paul and Roger's relationship. Homophobia has in the past
meant that gays could not discuss the intricacies of male-male
sexual/emotional bonding. AIDS has given gays an excuse for explaining
to a dominant heterosexual society the reality of homosexuality, but
only because AIDS can be used as a narrative device to explain gay men
out of the social order. AIDS may not only kill gay men, but also
contain them in a heterosexist paradigm that marginalizes them and makes
them unimportant.
Ellis Hanson writes that "notions of death have been at the
heart of nearly every historical construction of same-sex desire"
(324). He points out that homosexuality often has a "living
dead" status; homosexuals do not have all the vitality of
heterosexuals yet are a danger to them. In the AIDS documentary, for
example, we do not see people who are living with AIDS, but
"spectacular images of the abject" (324). Borrowed Time
reflects this construction even in the first sentence: "I
don't know if I will live to finish this" (1). The book has a
foreboding sense about it that is echoed time and again. Monette's
melodramatic narrative which must lead to death reinforces this sense of
doom and living death. At the beginning of the book, Roger is already
dead, both literally and figuratively; Roger and Paul's
relationship is a weak replica of what it once was. This is especially
true since Paul, himself, is HIV positive and, in the terms that he sets
up, could die at any moment. Since his lover died, he feels that his
life is incomplete and meaningless and so there is no sense that one
could live a productive life with AIDS.
In Paul's efforts to reify Roger, he blames himself for bringing
AIDS into their relationship through his need to make up for "lost
time" through casual sex. However, he goes even further: "But
the disease wasn't drawn to obsessive sex or meaningless sex. Sex
itself, pure and simple, was the medium, and the world out there was
ravenous for it" (33). However, gay men are not sick because of
sex; they are sick because of a virus. Sex is not the cause of the
disease, and sex is still possible even when one has it. Monette's
statement reflects the way AIDS has been conflated with sex to demonize
homosexuals. If sex causes the disease, then one should not have it.
However, since society needs to propagate, some people will need to have
sex to reproduce. This sex will be heterosexual, so really only
homosexuals should not have sex. Borrowed Time unwittingly reinforces
this social value through its generic choices and like the romance
heroes who never marry, never breed, and never have a stable calm
relationship, Monette's heroes (and by extension all AIDS sufferers
and by further extension all homosexuals) are destined to doom and
destruction.
I am arguing that the social structures that made Borrowed Time so
popular reflect the values of the dominant society reflected in the
melodramatic novel form. Borrowed Time is a memoir and so theoretically
the events that occur in the book are fact. However, Monette could have
structured it in a variety of ways. By choosing this particular
approach, he gets mired in the heterosexism of the contemporary version
of the romance tradition, melodrama.(7) There are suggestions of
counter-plots: the "history" of care of people with AIDS, the
success of Paul's efforts to make Roger's life more
comfortable. But we might wonder, at least I do, why in the 1980s
counter-plots of homosexual desire are necessary, why Monette cannot
celebrate the innovation and strategic power of homosexual desire rather
than claim its inadequacies. There are other choices. Crimp's call
for self-consciousness in the writing of narrative acknowledges both the
difficulties implicit in using established narrative structures to
explain homosexual desire and the possibilities of fore-grounding these
difficulties in queer narratives. John Weir's The Irreversible
Decline of Eddie Socket gestures toward this self-consciousness by
explicitly addressing the power of melodramatic romances (particularly
those suggested by Hollywood) over gay men.
Eddie Socket also traces the (remarkably) rapid decline and death of
its main character due to AIDS. Eddie is an emotionally paralyzed
twenty-eight year old, living in New York with his best friend Polly
Plugg. He is both romantic and nihilistic: "Waiting longingly for
the love of his life, he had had sex with men he liked, or didn't
like, but none of them stayed, and none of it really mattered" (5).
Eddie has a brief affair with Merrit, his employer Saul's lover,
falls deeply in love, but is rebuffed. He is diagnosed with AIDS, takes
a trip to California, comes back to New York deathly ill, and, after a
hospital stay, dies. Saul and Polly take most of the responsibility for
Eddie's care, and the experience changes their lives: Saul leaves
Merrit; Polly leaves New York.
The one obvious difference between Borrowed Time and Eddie Socket is
that Weir's book is a novel and not an autobiography. It may seem
odd that I am comparing two works that are clearly of different genres
particularly after my complaint that critics tend to condense all AIDS
literature into one genre. But I am not interested in problems of
generic choices in "autobiography" or "the novel."
Both purport to tell a story; I am interested in choices of narrative
structure, how the story is told. For example, Crimp points out that in
And the Band Played On, Randy Shilts structures the "facts" in
a "conventional novelistic fashion" that erases gay male
identities, including Shilts's own (244-45). Both Borrowed Time and
The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket tell the story of a gay
man's death due to AIDS, and both are using traditions of romance
and melodrama that are particularly meaningful in Western society. It is
how they use these traditions that interest me here.
One thing that is possible in a novel that is not quite possible in
an autobiography is that Weir can tell the story from multiple points of
view. Weir uses both limited third person and first person from various
characters' points of view. This automatically multiplies the
voices, positions, and meanings of events. This also problematizes the
narrative form. Although generic choices will help the reader make sense
of the events, Saul suggests that in this case simple generic categories
aren't sufficient: "So I guess that makes this comedy. Or
maybe a tragedy reframed? A crisis at the center of an unflappable
world, a hot subject in a cold frame? Or the other way around, a cold
subject in a hot frame. It's a disproportionate response to
ordinary circumstances, or an inappropriate response, you know, to
tragedy" (199). Eddie's story does not fit any generic
category, particularly tragedy, because: "If Shakespeare's
tragedy is limited to kings and aging men and tortured princes, well,
that leaves the queens out altogether. What do you call a roomful of
dying queens" (199). Saul directly questions the generic
possibilities for understanding AIDS death stories, and points to one of
the novel's general concerns: the way genres script stories and how
AIDS deaths can be fit in, if at all.
All the characters are obsessed with Hollywood; there is a profusion
of references to Hollywood films, usually melodramas, or to strong
female stars or roles. One chapter's title is "Duel in the
Sun"; characters refer their actions to those they've seen in
film, "[t]hat is worthy at least of Margo Channing" (59);
Eddie has renamed his mother Doris Day. References to films often occur
because characters place themselves within the film narrative; for
example, while thinking about The Razor's Edge, Eddie has a
"fantasy of being brought back from the edge of despair by a
dark-haired lover (though preferably someone more intriguing than Tyrone
Power)" (15).
However, Weir critiques the relationship between Hollywood films and
social/sexual reality, usually through the character of Saul, who uses
Rebel Without a Cause to reflect on how homophobic representations often
translate into homophobic behavior. In the movie, "Sal gets the
coat, and dies, and Jimmy gets the girl, and they procreate. The jacket
has become a shroud, it clothes the dead, Sal Mineo, the homosexual. So
Jimmy Dean becomes a man, at Mineo's expense" (146). His
lover, Merrit, can safely be a homosexual as long as these structures
are given the weight of truth: "he's forty-five years old, his
parents still don't know he's gay. They think he's Jimmy
Dean. They think he only hasn't given up the coat, he hasn't
put his childhood aside. His homosexuality. They don't know that
it's possible to be a man and not deny your homosexuality"
(146). Film scripts enable society to contain, eradicate, or ignore,
possibilities of sexual difference.
This does not mean that these scripts do not have a tremendous power
or that anyone can be free from them, even people who may not find their
own subjectivity represented in them. This is partly due to their
sometimes eerie connection to reality. Toward the end of the novel, Saul
watches Panic in the Streets, a film "set against the background of
epidemic loss. A plague" (225). The film, although dating from the
1950s, hauntingly reflects contemporary society: "I mean, I'm
not inventing this, I come from back-to-back memorial services, I leave
my lover in the street, I walk into a film about an epidemic disease
spread by attractive men in well-tailored suits and dark-skinned
immigrants from distant lands. Haitians and gays, right?" (225). As
part of an intertextually diverse culture, in which different media
often reflect similar anxieties and concerns, films suggest ways of
living, being, and understanding. We cannot ignore the way film scripts
reflect society's views on a whole host of issues, but we can find
these scripts wanting.
Eddie's problem is that he can't distance himself from
these scripts. Film is the model for his self-conscious performance with
which he leads his life. References to his life as performance abound in
the novel; they are "his little devices to keep himself out of the
world" (4). His constant refrain is, "who am I quoting?,"
as if he has no direct communicative skills. Eddie is living a
nihilistic dream of the hip, gay, urban youth because: "He was
afraid of the world, ironically, because of how much he felt he
deserved. He was a white boy, after all, an American, and he secretly
had the greatest expectations. He was trapped between an overwhelming
sense of entitlement and the paralyzing suspicion that his actions,
whatever they were, wouldn't reverberate" (4). Film
characters' actions always reverberate, he believes, so he places
himself in these dramas. On the surface, he seems nihilistic and
uncommitted; however, this nihilism is part of a nostalgia for romance.
Eddie transfers his desire for reverberation onto those he loves, in
particular Merrit, who is "someone whose actions reverberated in
the actual world" (19). Merrit is his romantic hero. As such, Eddie
casts himself as the passive lover who must spur Merrit into action,
preferably by putting himself in danger. When Eddie learns his diagnosis
and is unable to tell anybody, he decides to tell Merrit hoping that he
will respond with some romantic gesture (he doesn't). He goes over
scripts in his head of how he will tell Merrit, and how Merrit will
respond (it doesn't work). But, at the moment when Merrit seems the
most distant and the most unwilling to be romantic, Eddie becomes
"more determined to have his moment" (136). Eddie
characterizes romance as a series of moments which punctuate an already
scripted narrative.
Merrit cannot respond because of his own AIDS hysteria; most of his
friends have died of AIDS. During their first date, for example, when
Eddie's stove catches fire: "Eddie regarded it as a hopeless
moment of romance, but Merrit went quickly to the stove and put out the
fire. . . . He was not just agitated, but was no longer there in the
room, for the crisis had projected him into a private world of accidents
and plagues in which nothing was casual, not even laughter"
(44-45). Merrit's experiences with AIDS preclude a response to a
potentially romantic situation. Merrit refuses to participate in
Eddie's romantic moments because he is haunted by "his
ghosts" (173). He finds himself dwelling on decay and destruction:
"Everywhere he went in the world, the known community was
deteriorating" (168). Merrit reflects both Clum and Monette's
understanding of the impact of AIDS on the "known [gay]
community." It is deteriorating, and there is nowhere to go.
Weir, however, does not personify AIDS, and he is unsympathetic to
Merrit's position. AIDS does play a role in the negotiation of
romance and love; it serves to underline already existing weaknesses in
characters and situations. Weir does not blame AIDS (the disease) for
these weaknesses. Rather, people's responses to AIDS further the
action and focus the characters on the instability of contemporary
society and its romanticization of the past. For Eddie, in particular,
this means that he is unable to do anything to intervene in his own
health emergency.
After learning his diagnosis and being unable to tell anybody about
it, Eddie embarks on a trip west. Sitting in a McDonald's in San
Francisco with a drag queen named Eulene, he says, "I want to be
somewhere that things I expect are somehow correspondent to the things I
really get. I just don't want to hope anymore for something
I'm not going to get. I don't want magic anymore. I want the
truth" (188). But the "truth" that he is looking for is
not there:
My life has been this, like, totally projected thing, this fantasy
experience, which takes place either in the past, which is my
mother's, or the future, which was supposed to have been mine. And
they're both completely romantic, only mine is worse because
it's so naive . . . .I'm the optimist, and she's the
cynic, that's the final twist. In real life my mother knows that
people die, and I do not. (189-90)
Eddie realizes that his nihilism, which is based on not getting what
he wanted, is a romantic naivete that there are things that he deserves.
He calls himself a "disappointed romantic" (191), claiming
that his "feelings are cliches" (191-2). If romanticism is not
sufficient to explain the AIDS epidemic, than neither is nihilism.
Whether he is romantic or nihilistic, Eddie will die of AIDS. In some
ways, the remarkably rapid decline of Eddie at the end of the book
signifies the death of both ideals. Both romanticism and nihilism assume
that there are some transcendent things (relationships, ideals, values)
which are permanent. Romanticism assumes that they existed in the past
and have somehow been lost. Nihilism assumes that they do not exist, but
that therefore there is no reason for living because living is
meaningless without them. To paraphrase Saul: "[romanticism] is a
longing for the past that never was[;] . . . [nihilism] is . . . when
you miss the future that will never be" (243). Because of
Eddie's inability to intervene in his illness, he dies
"spectacularly."
Both Polly and Saul are foils to Eddie's paralysis, primarily
because they are the only characters who do anything when confronted
with Eddie's illness. Polly and Saul, in different ways, offer
alternative trajectories for action. Polly is characterized early in the
book as "pragmatic" (5), as someone who is aware of objects
and their relations to her: "She had a feeling for texture and
shape, a sensual pleasure in objects, which Eddie admired" (8).
Another word to describe it might be "materialist" (although
Weir never uses the word). But Polly herself modifies this idea. It is
not only that she can position herself correctly in a materialist world,
but that that position is linked to some internal core:
Her life was not external, it wasn't as Eddie said once, merely
a sequence of motion and fact, which she could reproduce at any moment,
as if she only had to freeze the frame and show how things looked.
Although she was a visual artist, she didn't live as if things had
only appearances. For there was an internal logic to the arrangements of
things, emotional and physical, an inner-connectedness that she felt
Eddie missed. (34)
Eddie is seduced by the images he sees on the screen. Polly moves
beyond the images, into a relationship between them and her own desires.
Her description of Eddie's position "as if things had only
appearances," suggests that this is a construction ("as
if"), but that she feels an essential
"inner-connectedness" which creates meaning. Her form of
pragmatism, then, is both materialist and essentialist. Objects exist,
with which she has a material relationship, and which in turn connects
with her inner self.
This inner self, however, is not transcendent or eternal. Instead, by
the end of the novel, Polly insists on her own historicity which has
constructed this inner self: "This is the life I am having. This is
my life. . . . I am feeling this way now because of how my parents
raised me, in a certain place and time, in this century, America. I have
these feelings. It's heredity, and it's environment, and I
believe I have free will within certain limitations. I am free to act
within those parameters" (266-67). Polly here asserts that her life
has been constructed by a set of historical moments, which are quite
different from the moments that Eddie desires. Her moments are not
planned, but are effects of historical processes. By the end of the
novel, Polly has decided to leave New York since she moved there because
she was seduced by Eddie's romanticism.
Saul also has a relationship to moments and objects. He desires what
he calls his "gay moments." He describes what these are via an
explanation of the film I Could Go on Singing. The gay moment is that
moment in which Judy Garland is preparing herself for a performance:
"The audience is pounding and shouting, they're angry,
she's terribly late. She tosses her head, briefly and defiantly,
just for herself, right before she goes on. She does it for herself.
That's her gay moment" (255). Eddie's moments are
recognizable in social space through their assumed truth and permanence.
Saul's, however, are moments in which actions are revealed as
contingent, as defiant gestures which acknowledge that one's
performances are, to a large extent, already scripted. He suggests that
we "[r]emember that [we're] queer. It's helpful in
life" (255). One foregrounds and insists on the contradiction of
having one's identity within a context that labels one as
"queer," which places one outside the social order, making one
identity-less. The insistence of identity as a defiant gesture to
homophobia both historicizes and materializes this identity by
self-consciously constructing it before society's eyes.
Saul's story in this novel is really about loss, the loss of
friends and community, and the loss of his relationship to Merrit. But
this loss is manifested through Saul's relationship to objects.
Objects become the sign of loss and one's implication in the loss:
"Door keys are lost, and wallets are lost, and houses and cities
are lost. Friends are lost, too, eleven in the past nine months, and
lovers are lost. Even grief is lost, finally, and then you mourn the
loss of that" (275). Love becomes another embodiment of this loss,
but "[e]ven losing Merrit, I think, is easy enough, if only I put
him in his place in the room, among the fixtures of a life that I no
longer lead" (275-6). Saul is part of a community which he must put
away and replace with a new one. The community is not a mythic gay
community, but one made of his friends, the people with whom he had
contact but who do not represent the entire body of gay men. The last
paragraph of the novel is an itemization of things that Merrit and Saul
shared so that Saul can put them away, emotionally, and move on to his
next setting or historical moment. This is like his gay moment in so far
as it is something in which Saul materializes both for himself and for
others. It is a moment that is performed through the careful
manipulation of objects, and by insisting on its authenticity no matter
how fleeting. It does not seek to naturalize a set of transcendent
principles, acknowledging that historicity must be flexible and
adaptive.
Eddie's death brings into focus the impotence of romanticism. By
assuming that there are transcendent values that we can aspire to, we
search for things outside the world, ignoring the pain and suffering (as
well as the joy and happiness) around us. Romanticism and the romance of
nihilism may only be a method of avoiding intervention in an epidemic,
and intervention may be what is required in one, both of AIDS and of
homophobia.(8) Weir both uses and questions melodrama self-consciously,
allowing the narrative and the commentary on narrative to modify
each's power to produce myths about AIDS and homosexuality. Monette
abandons any hope of working through the epidemic through his generic
choices, by debasing his heroic efforts, and by proving that homosexual
love cannot hope to conquer all, thereby making it less worthy than
heterosexual love.(9) Weir questions whether any kind of ideal love is
possible; claiming that the AIDS crisis is a crisis of romantic love,
turns it into a personal problem aired for public consumption, Gary
Indiana's complaint of "sozial-kitsch." To reclaim social
space as large numbers of people are dying requires more materialist
action to provide the historical conditions for new community relations.
Weir's argument is that AIDS is a communal problem, a problem of
learning to find new ways of inter-connectedness, rather than a social
problem, something to be gotten rid of along with those people who are
infected/affected by it.
ENDNOTES
I am grateful to both John Ganim, in whose "Medieval
Romance" seminar (of all things) this essay began life, and George
Haggerty for their advice and moral support. I am also deeply grateful
to the anonymous readers from College Literature who gave me insightful
comments that helped shape this essay.
1 For example, in the film, Magnificent Obsession, Bob Merrick (Rock
Hudson) resumes his medical studies, becomes a neurosurgeon, and cures
Helen (Jane Wyman) of her blindness for which the three leading
ophthalmologists had declared no cure. He does this because he loves
her, but can only love her if she is whole again, not handicapped (Meyer
268). He must cure her, because she must be perfectly healthy to be a
worthy partner.
2 As it was described in an A&E television broadcast.
3 This argument is my rearticulation of Teresa de Lauretis's
argument in "Strategies of Coherence" 107-126. In this
article, de Lauretis theorizes how women, who are marginalized by the
Oedipal narrative, can use them it to represent their contradictory
subjectivity.
4 For the purposes of this essay, "Monette" will be used to
indicate the author, Paul Monette, and "Paul" will be used to
indicate the character, Paul Monette.
5 In the translation of de Rougemont that I read, the translator used
the pronoun "he" although de Rougemont used "on."
Although this may just be the quirk of the translator, I would like to
believe that the use of "he" is deliberate in that women do
not willingly participate in the formulation of this myth. In The
Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, Polly asserts that it is Eddie who
is the romantic and that she is a realist who got swept up in
Eddie's romance. The participation of women in romance may be under
duress.
6 Importantly, de Rougemont is talking about heterosexuals which I
think points out the impossibility of heterosexual romance traditions as
well. I have always wondered why gays and lesbians seek to mimic
straight romantic traditions when they seem to lead to such dire
conclusions.
7 In fact, I am not the first person to note Monette's
investment in melodrama. Reviewing Monette's Afterlife, John Weir
calls the novel a "hollywood melodrama" and points out that it
has a "peculiarly tragic nihilism" (Weir, "Gay").
In Becoming a Man, his National Book Award winning autobiography of
his coming out process, Monette acknowledges some of the weaknesses of
the earlier work, weakness which I have focused on: "I decided to
write this book because so many people told me, after reading Borrowed
Time, that Roger and I appeared to have a perfect relationship, seamless
and undefended, all the bullshit burned away" (BM 174). He admits
that some people see him as a "love junkie" (BM 175) and that
his definition of love can be seen as "romantic mush" (BM
176), and although he never apologizes for this (why should he?), he
also acknowledges that this comes from a life-time of self-hatred:
"Convinced I was the most unloved, the most unlovable man
who'd ever lived" (BM 174). Becoming a Man is, in many
respects, as melodramatic as Borrowed Time, but he seems more aware of
the problems of the earlier narrative, periodically reminding the reader
that, "In any case I speak only for myself when it comes to love,
careful not to insist that everyone belongs in pairs, or indeed that a
couple constitutes the highest reach of earthly passion" (BM 175).
8 By a strange quirk of fate, the week that Paul Monette died, the
New Republic published Weir's ruminations on the death of his
friend, writer David Feinberg, in which he bluntly criticizes ACT-UP and
the rage which was its founding principle because "[a]part from
anger, one of the implicit faiths of ACT-UP is selfishness" (RR
12). Weir asserts that expressing anger should not be an end in itself:
"Like David, I thought that if I got angry enough, he would not
die. I was wrong, and so was he. ACT-UP was wrong. Anger is a useful
strategy - so is foolishness - if it remains a strategy, and does not
become faith. . . . Anger generates nothing but anger. It doesn't
express truth, it glorifies ego" (RR 11-12). This article resonates
with some of the themes of Eddie Socket. In both, Weir argues that no
one is "too special to die" (RR 12), and that more needs to be
done than just venting anger, or wallowing in self-pity. He is more
interested in forging new communal ties, than whining about approaching
death, something that, unfortunately, no one can escape: "I would
have done anything to help him, but finally, what David wanted rescuing
from wasn't AIDS. He hated AIDS, but more than that, he hated being
human" (RR 12). The rage he sees in Feinberg romanticizes the idea
of "humanity," because it assumes that there is something
wrong with dying, as if we haven't lived up to our potential by
dying.
9 After all, in Magnificent Obsession, Rock Hudson does succeed in
curing Jane Wyman, and in traditional romance, the couple always dies
together often because of a misunderstanding.
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Douglas Eisner received his Ph.D. in English from the University of
California, Riverside.