“Who hasn’t felt like a hybrid in times of stress.”[1] The question, minus a question mark, appears thirty or so pages into Dodie Bellamy’s The Letters of Mina Harker. The sentence stands out, taking up a full paragraph. The brevity is an anomaly in a book where sentences and paragraphs run on. In Mina Harker and in New Narrative—a late-twentieth-century movement that sprang from the San Francisco Bay Area’s writing community—subjectivity is hybrid, and so is genre.
In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mina works as Van Helsing’s “plain-Jane secretarial adjunct.”[2] She makes information digestible, transcribes and orders notes, journals, and letters. In Mina Harker, set in the San Francisco of the 1980s and 1990s, Dodie, possessed by Mina, takes over the role of frenzied scribe. Several years in the making, Bellamy’s Mina Harker inspired another project that would be published first; Real: The Letters of Mina Harker and Sam D’Allesandro compiles more letters from Mina, interspersed with responses from fellow New Narrative writer D’Allesandro (here appearing as Sam) and his own alter ego, SX. As personal as the confessions gathered in Mina Harker or Real may be, the voice that relays them is impersonal in design. The narrator in any given passage may be one or some combination of the above characters and personae. Who is speaking for whom and who occupies whose unconscious are up for debate. The narrator is a hybrid.
New Narrative founder Robert Glück, too, dramatizes hybridity through possession in his novel Margery Kempe. Glück weaves together two love stories: one between the famed mystic and Jesus, the other between the narrator and L., his lover. Vectors of identification and idealization get predictably tangled. In the sentence, “As Margery, I wake up and enter the dark street hoping to catch a glimpse of Jesus and trying to avoid him,” for instance, the narrator’s use of “as” may indicate comparison, imitation, or incarnation.[3] Mina Harker and Real trade Glück’s religious imaginary of possession for a folkloric one. By no measure a holy event, a vampire’s visit initiates a descent into the underworld. As Christopher Breu remarks, the vampire is a “liminal creature … stalking the borderlands between life and death, technology and atavism, the biological and the cultural, and the textual and the material.”[4] The vampire, that being who moves through (fourth) walls and transforms targets from within, epitomizes the perverse nature of New Narrative’s subjective hybridity.
A vampire’s intrusion in late-twentieth-century San Francisco hints at genre hybridity, as well. Mina Harker and Real add horror and gothic conventions to New Narrative’s blend of novel and memoir, sex writing and manifesto, popular-culture scrapbook and aesthetic theory. Both books employ the epistolary mode, trading hefty plot for chronologically ordered letters that chronicle the highs and lows of sex, romance, and friendship.
The “times of stress,” wherein one feels like a hybrid, correspond to the worst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the U.S. Mina Harker and Real hinge on a loose analogy between vampires and people with HIV/AIDS. Moral panics have fed and been fed by a fear of blood contamination. People with HIV/AIDS have been portrayed as monstrous beings with an irrepressible and perverse sex drive—beings whose mere survival, even as undead, poses a threat to the masses. “All modes of writing and communication were affected by the worldwide AIDS epidemic,” Bellamy and Kevin Killian recount, “but for New Narrative, with its twin commitments to political action and full sexual expression, AIDS really threw us for a loop.”[5] D’Allesandro died of AIDS in 1988, at age 31. His last letter in Real is from 1987. In it, Sam writes, “Everything’s leaking out. … I’m getting away. I’m running away. … Already gone.”[6]
“Who hasn’t felt like a hybrid in times of stress.” The phrase sounds fatalistic. In times of stress, one will feel vampiric: scattered, restless, self-estranged. At the same time, both Mina Harker and Real insist on making hybridity emboldening. Vampires can weaponize their desires. Their power of seduction is irresistible. They are their foes’—and at times their friends’—worst nightmares. Bellamy and D’Allesandro do not strictly register a feeling of hybridity brought about by stress; they intensify it. Their treatment of hybridity exemplifies the conflation of sex and death drives that, as some queer theorists have argued, boosts an opposition to the sentimental politics of futurity.[7] One popular response to dominant framings of queerness as a threat to the family unit’s integrity is to uphold a respectability politics, or to endorse the “good” queers who, by virtue of benefiting from wealth and whiteness, can inhabit normative structures just as well as their heterosexual counterparts. The strand of queer theory associated with the “antisocial thesis” veers away from such a politics of limited inclusion. If they are to be cast as enemies to reproduction, the argument goes, queers might as well embrace this negativity and figure social life in its midst.
Bellamy’s stress-induced hybridity is best grasped as a riff on impersonality. Although New Narrative accommodates big personalities—charismatic figures who captivate crowds and exhibit a penchant for self-mythologization—their writing tells a different story. It dissolves personhood, making it look unnatural. “One way of approaching impersonality,” Sharon Cameron offers, is as “a penetration through or falling outside of the boundary of the human particular. Impersonality disrupts elementary categories we suppose to be fundamental to specifying human distinctiveness.”[8] Bellamy and D’Allesandro’s selves are distributed across various occupations: authors and narrators and characters. An array of beings, real and fictive, crowd the first person.
A certain impersonality may be detected in queer theory’s most influential figurations of relationality. In a treatise on public interactions, including anonymous sex, in New York City, Samuel R. Delany argues that “life is at its most rewarding, productive, and pleasant when large numbers of people understand, appreciate, and seek out interclass contact and communication conducted in a mode of good will.”[9] According to Leo Bersani, cruising provides a social model where “a deliberate avoidance of relationships might be crucial in initiating, or at least clearing the ground for, a new relationality.”[10] Sex pushes us beyond ourselves, prompting us to reencounter ourselves as not-quite-ourselves. Though we may disavow it, ego-shattering, as Bersani sees it, is inescapable. Still, both Delany and Bersani argue—the former far more moralistically than the latter—that impersonality ought to be cultivated, for it opens onto ways of life that loosen heteronormativity’s hold on kinship. Despite some friction between queer theory and New Narrative’s treatments of impersonality—Mina would likely scoff at models of relationality that so often, and so quickly, take the appearance of a world without women—the two traditions share a wish: that the aftermath of shattering will feel binding rather than isolating, that impersonality will reshuffle itself into communality.
* * *
New Narrative has cultivated impersonality by manipulating voice. In his “Long Note on New Narrative,” Glück explains that the movement has embodied incommensurates: “Too fragmented for a gay audience? Too much sex and ‘voice’ for a literary audience?”[11] This voice, as Glück indicates earlier in the “Long Note,” is the author’s, subtracted in Language poetry. “Too much sex and ‘voice’” has to do with authorial intrusions, appeals to readers, indulgent sex writing, gossip, chatter, and rumor. “Too fragmented” has to do with a critique of the sovereign self—a self-present, self-governing being—and a linguistic attunement to vulnerability, openness, and exposure. Not only has New Narrative refrained from giving up either voice or fragmentation, conveying “urgent social meanings while opening or subverting the possibilities of meaning itself,” but it has made the two virtually synonymous.[12] At the peak of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Bellamy and D’Allesandro depersonalized voice to model collectivity on the redistribution of a fragmented self rather than the assembly of individuals.
Audible and textual voices commix within New Narrative. Writers have incorporated extratextual elements (a heckle from a reading, a whisper from a workshop), elevating ambient chatter to the rank of narrative voice. In a snappy essay, Glück calls the notion of queer voice “a conceptual mudpuddle.”[13] “Yet,” he writes, “I recognize it when it hails me.”[14] The concluding paragraph reads, “When I look at the sky, it becomes a homosexual sky. When I sit in a chair, it becomes a queer chair. I exhale queer atoms. Words are homosexual when I use them, or do I attract queer words? As for masculinity, I go through life assuming I am pretty neutral, that I am not easily identified. When I hear or see myself on tape, I think, ‘Omygod, what a big fag!’”[15] By “queer voice,” Glück primarily means queer style: the ways of perceiving and representing the world that are specific to queer people. Strikingly, Glück’s description of this textual voice leads him to its sonic qualities. Hailing generally involves vocal address. More to the point, Glück’s concluding passage conflates queer style with the archetype of the “gay voice,” or the lisp, timber, accent, or inflections associated with gay men. By reading his own writing or listening to himself speak—experiences that here appear analogous—Glück understands himself as part of a group.
Narrative voice in Mina Harker and Real accommodates an expansive group of characters and personae. In the first letter from Mina Harker, dated July 3, 1986, we encounter the narrator through the interjections and interruptions of various entities:
Dear Reader,
KK says all horror novels begin with the locale and a description of the weather, “The Reader likes to feel situated.” It’s a cool clear San Francisco night, streetlights diffuse the vast panoply of the heavens but if you drive an hour north the stars are astonishing, the sky speckled like the black-suited shoulders of a guy with really bad dandruff, so many holes in the black your heart speeds for a moment what if the black collapses a misty glow flows along my recumbent silhouette, long white gown, long white neck, a livid face leans toward the bed, translucent claws lift my hem immobile thighs, white, white over my breasts floats Nosferatu’s head, an exaggerated egg-shape, powdery with pointed ears, his lips stretch open pencil-thin, taut I am so aroused my clit flicks like a tongue so tender is his bite but I will never love him, he’s too weird too intense from my open throat dark rivulets curve sucking sounds in stereo suck across the suck dim air of the Roxie Theater and suck dissolve in the audience’s laughter faces radiant with ridicule and popcorn I shout, “That’s me on the screen, you assholes!” The laughter pauses then soars, fine grains of salt stinging the corners of its collective mouth. Who am I anyway?[16]
Before the setting of Mina Harker is described, The Reader is privy to a reflection on the necessity of such a description in a horror novel—and this insight comes from KK, rather than Mina or Dodie. KK is Kevin Killian, Bellamy’s late spouse. The account of the setting quickly spirals out of control. A seemingly interminable sentence accumulates clauses that alternate between mundane observation and explosion of desire. The interplay between roman and italic typefaces suggests a struggle: Mina speaks through Dodie as the latter tries, desperately, to speak for herself. The lengthy paragraph ends with a cry relayed in bold capitals: “my lives my deaths multiple as orgasms HARKEN THE WORDS OF MINA HARKER, FORTUNE COOKIES FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE.”[17] Perhaps it is Dodie who, mid-sentence, jumps in to declare that she has surrendered to Mina. Perhaps Mina, intoxicated by her power, is referring to herself in the third person.
New Narrative’s “I” points to the author and also, always, elsewhere. It is the source of a voice that is in some way personal but that cannot be possessed solely by its originator. In a suite of videos featuring New Narrative writers, Cecilia Dougherty interferes with voice to heighten the dissonance between authors and their words. Shot in Bellamy and Killian’s apartment in 2004, Kevin & Cedar stars Killian and Cedar Sigo.[18] The eight-minute video opens with Killian, Sigo, and Doherty (off-frame) hashing out matters of blocking and framing. Then, Killian, facing the camera, recites Sigo’s poem, “Theme.” Behind Killian and in profile is Sigo, his head tilted and his face expressive. He silently mouths the words he has written. Sigo is, in essence, lip-synching to Killian’s reading of Sigo’s poem. Shortly after, Killian recites his own poem, “Who.” In the video’s latter half, Killian and Sigo joke around. We hear fragments of their conversation, some matching the image, some not. Killian’s reflection on the cadence of Sigo’s poetry, for instance, is heard as the men cuddle in bed, apparently silent. The text of poems by both authors is superimposed onto the footage.
Sigo’s lip-synch and the friction between image and sound throughout Kevin & Cedar make voice ambient, ghostly. Voice does not exactly coincide with any one of the bodies featured on-screen. The depersonalization of voice generates a soundscape of intergenerational intimacy. It also raises questions of authority, for we, as viewers and listeners, do not know why Killian, a white poet, is speaking for Sigo, an Indigenous poet raised on the Suquamish Reservation. The on-screen dynamic, whereby Killian appropriates Sigo’s poetry, is mostly tender and a little invasive.
There would be no New Narrative voice to speak of without appropriation. The movement’s writers have reproduced each other’s work and cited predecessors, with or without credit. Rob Halpern touches on the practice in an essay, “‘Where No Meaning Is’: Appropriation & Scandal in the Writing of Robert Glück,” that doubles as a letter to Killian:
One might say that it’s by way of scandal that we make meaning in the shadows of what can’t be said. Like gossip, which Bob defines as a pleasure “based on a manipulation of shared codes and a continuum of experience,” scandal is one way whereby a community comes to know itself as the unspeakable crosses that mobile threshold of the speakable, pressuring proprietary norms—referring both to property and decorum—while challenging the false division between the personal and the impersonal. In other words, scandal formalizes a problem of politics.[19]
I agree with Halpern that appropriation can challenge proprietary norms—the idea that a voice, for instance, belongs solely to an individual. But for appropriation to be encommoning rather than marginalizing, all parties involved need to consent to the practice. And there is, of course, no way to guarantee such consent. The appropriators might not realize that they have appropriated until they are called out. The appropriated might withdraw their consent out of a dissatisfaction with the way their words have been recontextualized. Or, in a situation like the one staged by Kevin & Cedar, the line between tutelage and appropriation, between amplification and silencing, might be ever shifting.
* * *
In the fall of 2017, Eric Sneathen and Daniel Benjamin held, with great success, the conference “Communal Presence: New Narrative Writing Today” at the University of California, Berkeley. Hype, gossip, and zingers powered the venue. The chatter was mostly laudatory, with an asterisk: the majority-white contingent of writers at New Narrative’s core didn’t seem so representative of the Bay Area’s culture and population.
A few days prior to the event, Killian and I had conversed. He had once seen a video of a presentation I had delivered on Bellamy’s The TV Sutras. In typical New Narrative fashion, he had removed the barrier between inside (writer) and outside (critic) and invited me to participate in staged readings of two of his plays. During that conversation, I asked Kevin a few questions about the relation between voice and community in New Narrative. I was days away from delivering what would become the present essay, and I sought to validate my hypotheses. I was curious, yes, and temerarious, eager to prove to this legend that we shared a language. Excessively patient and generous, Kevin entertained my Big Ideas about his Actual Life. Then, as if to forestall the conference chatter, Kevin addressed the question of New Narrative’s majority-white constitution. The topic was in the air.
Kevin said that New Narrative had always been welcoming to all writers. As he and Bellamy write in their notes to the anthology Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977–1997, “New Narrative was always looking for new recruits—we took anybody who took even a passing interest in transgression or Bataille or Chester Himes or pop music.”[20] Writers Who Love Too Much and the “Communal Presence” conference honored the writers of color who had shaped and been shaped by New Narrative, including R. Zamora Linmark, Gabrielle Daniels, Roberto Bedoya, Renee Gladman, and Trisha Low. To reject New Narrative wholesale, as Kevin noted, would be to dismiss the contributions of those writers. I agreed with Kevin that an account of New Narrative as exclusively white would reproduce the racist exclusion it sought to denounce. And I believed him when he assured me that New Narrative had been welcoming. Yet it now strikes me that the movement’s openness—the readiness with which it had assimilated voices into its canon—was precisely what caused my conference interlocutors and me some discomfort.
Appropriation is likelier to fulfill a communal function if it is lateral or from below—if the appropriated are as privileged as, or more privileged than, the appropriators. Privilege can be hard to measure and, as Lauren Michele Jackson demonstrates in White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue…and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation, appropriation’s affective circuits—shaped by aspiration, desire, envy, and defensiveness—are sinuous.[21] New Narrative’s formula has been to appropriate indiscriminately. Sometimes the result looks like hospitality, sometimes it looks like theft, and often it looks like both. In Kevin & Cedar, Sigo benefits from Killian’s approval. And yet, what we witness is a white poet reciting the words of an Indigenous poet who, present but silent, resorts to lip-synching. Likewise, Mina Harker mobilizes the concept of hybridity without addressing its close association with writers of color as well as transcultural and transnational writing.
My point isn’t that New Narrative’s practice of appropriation has some positive consequences and some negative ones. So much is true of most artistic projects. Rather, the assumption that impersonality, once intensified, will turn into communality puts on us, readers and spectators, the burden of figuring out, provided that we are willing to do so, how texts trace and retrace a “sonic color line”—Jennifer Lynn Stoever’s term for the reproduction of racial hierarchies through the management of sound and voice.[22] It would make sense to say of most literatures that they invite interpretive and reflexive work that transcends what the author actually puts into words. But it is New Narrative we are talking about. One of the movement’s guiding principles has been to anticipate possible reactions to its discourse with metadiscourse. The reticence to theorize appropriation in racial and cultural terms signals one area where New Narrative deviates from its own agenda.
* * *
In Mina Harker and Real, Bellamy and D’Allesandro hold on to impersonality’s communal promise. This isn’t to say that their version of impersonality feels good; it does not. In these novels, narrative voice is a conduit for aggression. The letters reveal growing animosity between Mina and her vessel, Dodie, and between SX and his vessel, Sam. In a letter from Real dated June 6, 1985, SX rages,
I should let Sam write next time. It’s just that he keeps fucking up—he wants to please Dodie too much. I don’t really give a shit. I’m the top in this relationship, what I decide goes and if he doesn’t like it I just send him away. He’s in New York now, no he’s in bed now, no right now he’s sitting in the green chair, staring at the wall. I made him feel bad about everything in his life so I could get some work done tonight.
Sam—speaking of—would love to be locked in a very small house for about a week now. That’s what it’s like, Mina. I’m barely keeping him on track. He’s most creative when the circumstances around him are in chaos. Then he goes into a corner and writes just one little spot’s worth of zen order. It’s all therapy of course, even he would admit that I think. Of course I control him. I’m the little animal inside of him. I’m eating him. I’m building him each day. I make him do things. I’m the one that leaves those cigarette burns on this belly at night—he wakes up and tries to forget. He wakes up and tries to forget, he tries to forget and go back to sleep, he wakes up and remembers. I’m the one that won’t let him sleep sometimes, if I’m not sleepy I don’t let him sleep. I need him to entertain me.[23]
~
I can control him, Mina, believe me, I’m in control. Listen—he’s out of control, I’m the one in control here but I can’t control him all the time. He really doesn’t know how to hold anything back. He is not safe—he always throws out a lot of things right off that anyone could use to infect him with later. It’s not that he doesn’t know any better, that’s the funny part, I mean he certainly does know better, when he acts cynical it’s not an act at all, it’s more like just the tip-tip-tip of the iceberg, but it’s more like he just has no control at all. That’s how I can get him really whipped up, really good and confused, make it so it’s like his brain is on fire. I don’t give a fuck what happens to him really, I’m just using him. He needs me. Sam’s been impossible for exactly three weeks.
Your friend live inside
SX[24]
Who is SX? He is a guardian, a master, a vampiric creature who steals Sam’s vitality while keeping him alive. SX uses Sam, sometimes with a purpose, sometimes for the hell of it. The image of the animal eating Sam from the inside and the language of infection make SX a personification of HIV/AIDS. SX is against Sam; he is in Sam; he is Sam. SX’s survival threatens Sam’s, but if SX were to die, Sam would soon follow. SX’s forcible occupation of Sam’s voice registers the impact of HIV/AIDS on embodiment and experience while exceeding medical frameworks. The unharmonious cohabitation that typifies narrative voice converts the logic of immunity—a body attacking itself—into a toxic relationship.
Complaining about oneself or one’s alter-ego presents an excuse for commiseration. Somewhere in Real, Mina confesses, “SAM I AM IN LOVE WITH AN INAPPROPRIATE OBJECT. There it’s out—oh god—I’m so embarrassed.”[25] Elsewhere, Sam (the letter’s signatory, here referring to himself in the third person) describes his first encounter with Dodie: “At the party Sam was nervous talking to Dodie, wondering if when she excused herself for the restroom it was a ploy to abandon.”[26] Sam giggles at his own insecurity at the same time as he seeks confirmation. It wasn’t a ploy to abandon me, was it? he is implicitly asking. The question invites a response, then another—and soon enough, ongoing exchanges form a sturdy foundation for friendship. Mina’s own account of her first encounter with Sam is rather sweet: “We talked for the longest time about travel and Joan Didion. The room was full of famous gays and I wondered why is this attractive young man hanging around me. His shoulders hunched ever so slightly and I knew: safe. I was the safest thing within 10 feet. Sam, did you realize that our entire relationship is parties or their literary equivalents? Without a plastic glass of wine in your hand I wouldn’t recognize you.”[27] Split open, either by the meanest of self-directed attacks or by benign confessions of embarrassment, D’Allesandro and Bellamy extend themselves beyond themselves and toward each other.
New Narrative is a product of assembly. The movement’s writers have asserted the importance of the workshops that Glück and Bruce Boone led at the bookstore Small Press Traffic, and their texts overflow with anecdotes about what so-and-so said at a reading or a party. Throughout Mina Harker and Real, Sam, SX, Dodie, and Mina trade gossip about the people with whom they have slept (or not) and the people with whom those people have slept (or not). But eventually, in both novels, assembly comes across as a luxury. In a passage to which I will return, Mina reports that Sam was once too sick to attend his own reading at Small Press Traffic. The theorist Judith Butler might interject that the individuals who cannot assemble nevertheless enjoy representation within the imagined collectivity generated through speech acts.[28] New Narrative’s intervention into literary voice, however, does not aim to extend representation to people who are too sick to assemble or have died. It aims to keep them alive or revive them.
Bellamy and D’Allesandro respond to the contingencies of the HIV/AIDS epidemic with a divisive, rather than additive, politics of voice. The authors break narrative voice open, or intensify its impersonality, to make room for intimacy between interlocutors. New Narrative’s impersonal voice, then, entails two motions: a centrifugal one, through which the self is split, and a centripetal one, through which the shattered self redistributes itself into a communal structure.
The traffic between “I” and “we” approximates Mladen Dolar’s equation between voice and ventriloquism. “Every emission of the voice,” Dolar conjectures, “is by its very essence ventriloquism. Ventriloquism pertains to voice as such, to its inherently acousmatic character: the voice comes from inside the body, the belly, the stomach—from something incompatible with and irreducible to the activity of the mouth.”[29] The voice, Dolar continues, “appears in the void from which it is supposed to stem but which it does not fit, an effect without a proper cause.”[30] Voice’s status as ventriloquism by another name is obvious in Dougherty’s Kevin & Cedar. The short film complicates the traditional dichotomy between ventriloquist and dummy, between giving voice and miming vocal emission. Here, the ventriloquized figure—Sigo—is also the ventriloquist’s dummy. As Killian recites Sigo’s poetry, the latter appears increasingly out of sync with his own words.
Ventriloquism, in Mina Harker and Real, is a way to let the dying and the dead be heard. A voice tied to D’Allesandro but irreducible to him keeps the author’s alive. In a eulogy for D’Allesandro—a long letter that makes up the last third of Real—Mina recalls,
When you were too sick for your reading at Small Press Traffic we all read parts of your work. I dreamt I unearthed an old video you starred in—my picture tube gasped when you came onscreen, muscular, bare-chested, tanned skin gleaming with oil, platinum hair glowing like cumuli a man more beautiful than any mortal an Adonis. … I burst into tears shaking the bed in extravagant spasms. KK awakened and took me in his arms, “You okay?” When I told him my dream he said, “You know what Adonis is, Mina?” “What?” “An anagram for NO AIDS.”[31]
When Sam becomes too ill, Mina and others read his writing, including their correspondence. Mina at once speaks for Sam and lets Sam speak through her. Impersonal voice persists as a revival tactic in the twenty-first century. The recent passing of Killian felt historic in part because he was one of the first core New Narrative writers to die after the epidemic’s worst years and of causes unrelated to HIV/AIDS. Killian died in June 2019. I am finishing this essay just over one year later. Mina’s ventriloquism of KK relays his input from beyond the grave.
* * *
New Narrative’s gambit has been that a voice constituted through bitching, gushing, flirting, and fucking would hold together a community threatened by an epidemic, by gentrification and insufficient institutional support, and now by age too. But sometimes bitching, gushing, flirting, and fucking do not feel like copresence or solidarity. They just feel like bitching, gushing, flirting, and fucking.
* * *
In “Views of the Same Light: On Nostalgia, Collective Making & How It All Bends,” a blog post on SFMOMA’s Open Space portal, Trisha Low examines New Narrative’s practices of resuscitation in light of the politics of keeping alive a movement so tied to the HIV/AIDS crisis. Low recounts a family dinner where an acquaintance described a LARP (Live Action Role Play) scenario. On day one, participants develop a persona that may involve aspects of their own personality but must be distinct in some fashion. We are firmly in New Narrative territory. Day two is a throwback party set in the Seventies: “Some people are dancing, or taking drugs, or hooking up in small groups or large ones. Everyone is the best version of who they want to be.”[32] Day three features a very different party, set ten years later. Some attendees have been given slips of paper indicating that they have died and may only interact with other players as ghosts. Attendees cry, share stories and memories, and kiss gently. “The realization hits me,” Low writes,
What my acquaintance is describing is a fictional recreation of the AIDS crisis in the form of a role play game with sexual gratification at its center. I try to stanch my initial reaction, which is one of unmitigated horror. “How could anyone participate in a situation eroticizing the AIDS crisis, an event almost akin to a genocide?” I ask my acquaintance. It seems as though its purpose is to find a more interesting sexual experience, entertainment, or some false or cathected emotional catharsis. “Well, part of what you say is true,” they say. “Yeah, it’s kind of icky.” But they also point out to me that the people who choose to take part in this kind of role play span a diverse demographic, and include a significant number of actual survivors of the crisis. …
What I do know: imagining utopias [is] a necessary part of living. But it seems dangerous to do so by fetishizing a moment past. To desire so strongly to return to it that you would relive some movie-magic reenactment of its hardships for the purposes of individual pleasure.
But I guess it seems to do some good, for some. An illicit closet fantasy. I don’t know.[33]
As the post later reveals, Low’s ambivalence about the eroticization of mourning in the wake of the HIV/AIDS epidemic parallels an ambivalence about present-day attachments to New Narrative. Low, too, takes us to the “Communal Presence” conference, where, due to wildfires, the air was thick with smoke. She participated in a panel on New Narrative and its legacy that loosely coincided with the publication of the collection From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice, edited by Rob Halpern and Robin Tremblay-McGaw. Low shares her notes on the public discussion: “The truth is, I don’t believe that New Narrative as a set of practices, or as a community of writers, can be divorced from its historical context—the ’70s gay rights movements, the ’80s AIDS crisis, the landscape of a very different Bay Area.”[34] For Low, to keep New Narrative’s methods and principles intact and to abide by them in the present would amount to perverse LARPing:
Indeed, it would be silly to love New Narrative so much that we would want to reproduce it exactly, or (impossibly) try to emulate the conditions that produced it—and if we did, it would likely be some flimsy facsimile. But perhaps we can reformulate its methods, perhaps we can strive to form a relationship to our art that interacts with our current moment in the way that New Narrative authors did with theirs. Why be nostalgic to suffer the past when there is so much to face in the Bay Area of 2017, where the landscape has begun to literally burn?[35]
Low does want to preserve something of New Narrative: its commitment to activism in the face of doom. But, she contends, the project of addressing present conditions requires methods and principles that deviate from those of the heyday of New Narrative, including, presumably, the impersonal voice as an animating and reanimating device. For New Narrative to live on, it must let its departed writers rest in peace. I think I agree. I don’t know.
Notes:
[1] Dodie Bellamy, The Letters of Mina Harker (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 37.
[2] Bellamy, The Letters of Mina Harker, 9.
[3] Robert Glück, Margery Kempe (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1994), 87.
[4] Christopher Breu, Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 128. Breu here draws on Nina Auerbach and Laurence Rickels.
[5] Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian, “New Narrative Beginnings 1977–1997,” in Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977–1997, eds. Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian (New York: Nightboat Books, 2017), xviii.
[6] Dodie Bellamy and Sam D’Allesandro, Real: The Letters of Mina Harker and Sam D’Allesandro (Hoboken: Talisman House, 1994), 60.
[7] See Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
[8] Sharon Cameron, Impersonality: Seven Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), ix.
[9] Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 120.
[10] Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 59.
[11] Robert Glück, Communal Nude: Collected Essays (South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2016), 16.
[12] Glück, Communal Nude, 16.
[13] Glück, Communal Nude, 244.
[14] Glück, Communal Nude, 244.
[15] Glück, Communal Nude, 245.
[16] Bellamy, The Letters of Mina Harker, 9.
[17] Bellamy, The Letters of Mina Harker, 10.
[18] Kevin & Cedar, dir. Cecilia Dougherty (2004), https://vimeo.com/103933172.
[19] Rob Halpern, “‘Where No Meaning Is’: Appropriation & Scandal in the Writing of Robert Glück,” in From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice, eds. Rob Halpern and Robin Tremblay-McGaw (Oakland: ON Contemporary Practice, 2017), 220.
[20] Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian, “Notes,” in Writers Who Love Too Much, 488.
[21] Lauren Michele Jackson, White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation (New York: Beacon Press, 2019).
[22] Jennifer Lynn Stoever, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New York: New York University Press, 2016).
[23] Bellamy and D’Allesandro, Real, 4.
[24] Bellamy and D’Allesandro, Real, 6.
[25] Bellamy and D’Allesandro, Real, 21.
[26] Bellamy and D’Allesandro, Real, 11.
[27] Bellamy and D’Allesandro, Real, 3.
[28] Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 176, 178.
[29] Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 70.
[30] Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, 70.
[31] Bellamy and D’Allesandro, Real, 91–92.
[32] Trisha Low, “Views of the Same Light: On Nostalgia, Collective Making & How It All Bends,” Open Space (November 29, 2017), https://openspace.sfmoma.org/2017/11/views-of-the-same-light-on-nostalgia-collective-making-how-it-all-bends/.
[33] Low, “Views of the Same Light.”
[34] Low, “Views of the Same Light.”
[35] Low, “Views of the Same Light.”