Beside Reparative Reading

Brian Glavey (bio)

A review of Tyler Bradway, Queer Experimental Literature: The Affective Politics of Bad Reading. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

For better or worse, queer theory has always had, if not a bad reputation, at least a reputation for badness. Animated by a commitment to subversion and non-conformism on the one hand, and organized around bad feelings such as stigma, failure, and shame on the other, queer theory’s badness paradigm helps to explain what Heather Love calls the “puzzling centrality of queer critics in the promulgation of new reading methods” (162). When it comes to reading against the rules, queer theory has had a lot to say: its investment in bodies and affects and its refusal of disciplinary norms have lent momentum to recent versions of bad reading, attempts to resist disciplinary histories, and professional modes of interpretation. One might certainly wonder how far such innovations deviate from the norms they propose to upend. As Merve Emre writes in her study of a different sort of bad reading, “Are these practices of reading really as non-normative, as radical, or as bad as their practitioners want them to be?” (255). The question highlights a set of central tensions at play in much queer theoretical discourse, which finds itself grappling with the paradox of a discipline that normalizes the rejection of norms and professionalizes a sort of anti-professionalism. More broadly, the questions of the status of close reading and of other protocols in literary studies have been vexed ones. Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan have shown that recent methodological debates have tended to conjure a particular kind of bad reader to serve as a muse for critics weary of practices that have come to seem rote or ineffectual. They note the potential oddness of this situation, asking, “How have our reading practices come to seem merely professional—meaningful only in relation to our institutional positions and professional desires?” (114).

Although the proliferation of these new modes of reading has been especially vigorous in recent years, the most generative variant of this kind of queer reading likely remains, after twenty years, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s essay on paranoid and reparative reading, a work that sets out to think through what does and does not count as good reading, and to consider why pushing back against such strictures might be especially important for queer readers. However, even the anti-normative energies swirling around Sedgwick’s early and justly famous attempts to shake up disciplinary protocols have risked distillation into a rather limited spectrum of routinized interpretative techniques. For all its anti-dualist capaciousness, Sedgwick’s account of paranoid and reparative reading has in practice often led to the replication of stark oppositions, in effect adding one more fossilized binary to the Theory and Methods syllabus. Removed from the specific instances of Sedgwick’s own generative hypothesizing, reparative reading often tends to equate queer reading with a limited set of practices that do not stray very far from the graduate seminar table. Keyed to producing interpretations, in other words, it remains a matter of generating readings more than the experience of relating to a text. There is of course nothing wrong with this. To the extent, though, that such practices are queer, they are queer in a rather constricted way, giving the misguided sense that queer reading was invented by English professors. As a result, it too can seem rather far removed from the queer ways in which reading might be a powerful affective experience, the way it might turn you on, say, or even turn your stomach.

Tyler Bradway’s ambitious and brilliant Queer Experimental Literature: The Affective Politics of Bad Reading responds to these paradoxes with the provocative question: “What if reading is less like criticism and more like sex?” (244). The analogy is intended to be more than titillating, suggesting that queer studies would do well to recognize reading not just as a process of producing interpretations but also as a mode of relationality that is transformative and unpredictable in its own right, that engages with and changes bodies and minds to create, Bradway suggests, “immodest and unforeseen possibilities for becoming and belonging together” (244). Reading is queer long before the theorists get involved. But Bradway’s embrace of bad reading is not, as many others seem to be, a call to move away from the professional practices that have been central to the formation of queer literary studies as a disciplinary tradition. Instead, the story he tells in Queer Experimental Literature might be seen as something like a reparative attempt to understand those practices as having always existed within a broader conversation about queer politics, a conversation that works to put books and people and communities in contact with one another. To understand reparative reading practices only in relation to so-called postcritical reading is to miss the extent to which Sedgwick’s own thinking on these issues, for instance, is marked by her inheritance of a broader queer literary history concerned with hermeneutic problems shaped as much by the catastrophic losses of the AIDS crisis as by strictly theoretical concerns. “When we debate the relative value of suspicion or empathy in the abstract,” Bradway insists,

we miss the specific meanings that paranoid and reparative reading had (and has) for queer communities. But more importantly, we perpetuate a debate over good and bad modes of reading without attending to the historical relations of power that made paranoid or reparative reading queer in the first place. (xxix-xxx)

To highlight these historical relations, Bradway elaborates the concept of a “para-academic” mode of experimental writing that explicitly engages with institutionally produced forms of academic writing, but that nonetheless stands to one side of such discourse, resists its sanctioned genres, and is not recognized from within it as knowledge. Such work is in the university without being of the university. Some of Sedgwick’s writing occupies this para-academic space: Bradway suggests that Sedgwick’s turn to positive affect is best understood in relation to her own experimental literary texts—particularly the poetry/prose hybrid memoir A Dialogue on Love—and that such works provide the key to understanding reparative reading within a larger political and artistic context. An important precursor to this work, according to Bradway, is Samuel L. Delany. Although Delany’s writing—in particular The Motion of Light on Water and Times Square Red, and Times Square Blue—is block-quoted time and time again in influential queer theoretical texts, much of Delany’s literary production resists assimilation into academic discourse and indeed remains antagonistic to it. It is true that Delany’s novels and stories engage in constant conversation with critical theory. As Bradway notes, “His fiction offers a kind of ‘works cited’ that makes evident to academic publics, including the critics named in his work, that he is conversing with them, albeit in a different idiom” (57). But, like several of the authors featured in the book, at a certain point in his career Delany turned away from semiotics and toward hermeneutics, a shift that deprioritized theory in favor of an attention to the way that reading establishes forms of relationality between readers and texts. For Delany it was specifically the representational crisis occasioned by AIDS that spurred him to recognize the importance of paying attention not only to the grammar of signs and symbols but also to the manner in which readers take up and relate to texts in creative ways. The AIDS crisis, in other words, created a context in which it became urgent to ask fundamental questions about the nature of reading: what it means, what it does, what sort of social relations it might foster. For Delany, Sedgwick, and other queer experimentalists in this tradition, the question of good and bad reading was not merely academic but also a matter of life and death, a necessary struggle to find a way to survive.

The writers Bradway studies occupy different positions in the history of queer reading. William Burroughs’s midcentury experimentation, for instance, is linked to the problem of trying to imagine forms of queer political desire and collectivity prior to the emergence of a gay liberation movement, and was rendered nearly unthinkable by the homophobic currents of the period. Burroughs’s novels—subversive, obscene, even trashy—have always worn their badness on their sleeves. But Bradway explains that the nature of the kind of bad reading that such works make possible has often been misunderstood. Indeed, the terms under which Naked Lunch was able to skirt a charge of obscenity underline the paradox of queer politics at the heart of the queer experimental tradition. Ultimately, the Court found that Burroughs’s novel was acceptable because its representations of queerness were read as hallucinatory—animated by drug abuse—rather than imaginary. “The queer text,” Bradway explains, “is thus not pornographically filled with depraved sex acts. It is a text that is itself expressive of the collective agency and social imagination of queers” (3). The subversive threat posed by Burroughs’s novel is in effect defanged, its transgressions coded as a matter of pharmacology—and thus linked to a private individual’s malady—rather than expressive of something powerful and compelling in its own right. Burroughs’s aesthetic project was to resist this demarcation, precisely by imagining reading as an immersive, affectively disorienting mode that attempts to dissolve the boundary between fantasy and reality. Burroughs solicits bad reading, asking his readers to be turned on, turned around, freaked out by trashy novels, because reading is itself a kind of queer relationality that breaks out of private, subjective desires and instantiates an intersubjective collectivity.

Kathy Acker is one of the most significant perpetuators of this aspect of Burroughs’s project. Critics have tended to see Acker’s relation to her predecessor chiefly in terms of her cutup aesthetics of shock and plagiarism, missing the extent to which she is also perpetuating a queer tradition that locates an incipient sociality in the embodied experience and radically intersubjective relationality of reading. Acker famously wanted her writing to be unreadable, but Bradway insists that this unreadability should not be exclusively understood as an aggressive assault on the reader. Instead, illegibility becomes for her an invitation to experience her text as a transformational affective event. Again, the paradox of the critical success of Acker’s writing mirrors the problem of queer theory’s own institutionalization. “The irony of Acker’s proclaimed unreadability is that she was—and continues to be—manifestly readable within the now-institutionalized discourses of continental theory” (106). Acker grew increasingly frustrated by this problem, a problem that reflected and exacerbated her distaste for the commodification of the avant-garde. Art and theory both found their potential for subversion and critique absorbed by the market. Acker’s search for a solution for this situation involved not merely more shock, but rather an investment in the relational possibilities at work in the affective, embodied experience of reading.

The work of Jeanette Winterson might seem less directly subversive than Acker’s, and her relation to theory less fraught. The early reception of Winterson’s novels was shaped by the simultaneous emergence of queer theory as an academic discipline in the 1990s and the degree to which her work was seen as a model for those theoretical developments. And yet Winterson’s work has also been seen as less queer—less disruptive, less political—to the extent that it appears to couch its account of sexuality in terms of private, emotional experience. Combined with her commercial success, this investment not only in feelings but more specifically in positive feelings—love, happiness, care, and the like—has encouraged some critics to see her as an emblem of a kind of homonormativity, engaged in the transformation of homosexuality into a personal and ultimately depoliticized identity category. Bradway insists, on the contrary, that Winterson’s apparent interest in love rather than sex is part of a broader attempt to resist the affective logic of neoliberalism. Like her queer experimental predecessors, Winterson focuses on affective relations created between readers and aesthetic artifacts as the realm where new forms of queer belonging might be constituted. This “queer exuberance” is a step toward critique: “Not merely exposing the writing ‘on’ bodies,” Bradway argues, “queer fiction can also affectively write ‘with’ the bodies of its readers, exposing them to new relational possibilities” (147).

With nuanced readings of Winterson and Sedgwick, the final two chapters of Queer Experimental Literature underscore one of Bradway’s chief accomplishments: the elaboration of a powerful argument for the political and intellectual valence of positive affects. Though these feelings may be cruel, they are not always so. Tracing with subtlety and nuance the patterns of identification and desire that run through each of his author’s works, Bradway is himself an important inheritor of Sedgwick’s queer experimental project. And yet part of what is so compelling about the book is the fact that the canon of texts to which Queer Experimental Literature attaches its interest is not an especially Sedgwickian one. Bradway concludes, for example, with a discussion of Chuck Palahniuk’s “Guts” (2005), which depicts scenes of masturbation and bodily trauma in a fashion that famously led to a minor epidemic of faintings at public readings. The difficulties posed by such a work are not readily described by the poetics of opacity and preterition that stem from the epistemology of the closet, and many of them do not appear ready candidates for a reparative ethics of care. In its way, Bradway’s attention both to Sedgwick’s intersubjective poetics and to Acker’s embodied resistance, to Winterson’s embrace of love alongside Palahniuk’s experiment in revulsion, is central to his contribution to affect studies, a field that still tends to divvy up its feelings into the good, the bad, and the ugly. That one can—and indeed must—attend to both positive and negative affects, to their coexistence and interaction, is signaled by the fact that the queer experimental tradition has never taken sides in this way.

Queer Experimental Literature is an exciting and powerful work with important implications for both queer theory and the study of contemporary literature, offering much needed historical context for recent methodological discussions about the status of critique and form in literary studies. The recognition that reading is an embodied practice that solicits a wide and unruly range of affects—some good, some bad, most a bit of both—is by no means a recent academic discovery. On the contrary, the exploration of the political and aesthetic possibilities of this kind of reading has been central to queer writing all along. At the same time, tracing the longer history of the way that this “bad reading” has influenced the development of academic queer theory also reveals that the professional reading practices central to queer literary studies are not relics of bad faith or a bloodless exercise in paranoia. Queer reading has always relied upon a complicated choreography of affirmation and critique, of shock and discombobulation alongside the promise of new forms of belonging. Offering theoretical insights in every chapter and a fresh perspective on each of its subjects, Queer Experimental Literature is a dazzling reminder that the discipline of queer literary studies can still produce bad readers as good as Bradway.

Works Cited

• Buurma, Rachel Sagner, and Laura Heffernan. “The Common Reader and the Archival Classroom: Disciplinary History for the Twenty-first Century.” New Literary History, vol. 43, no. 1, 2012, pp. 113-135. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/nlh.2012.0005.
• Emre, Merve. Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America. U of Chicago P, 2017.
• Love, Heather. “Critical Response IV: Strange Quarry.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 44, no. 1, 2017, pp. 153-163. The U of Chicago P Journals, doi:10.1086/694136.