Margery Kempe by Robert Gluck

Jesus gazed up past his brow at Margery. His irises were disorganized blue geodes. He had been crying all weekend--it was Monday morning and he was still crying. He whispered, "I'm so abandoned." He raised his head in sadness and his face held the slow joy of deep sky above the sky.

He stood and turned on the balls of his feet and began to ascend. Margery fell half asleep when she saw the deity turn away. She felt the strongest sensation of her life, a welling of aspiration and desire embodied in the blue of dusty gold, the long smeared shadow of neck and spine, his broad hips, the semicircles of his ass, his long slightly knock-kneed legs. He rotated near the ceiling; she became conscious of the weight of her breasts and the hair down her back. The played tips of his long toes floated past her eyes. He raised his arm as darkness closed in. Later she concluded he was pointing to heaven.

A few years back I took a class on Medieval literature in graduate school; we read part of The Book of Margery Kempe, sometimes called the first autobiography in English. Margery was a 15th century Englishwoman who claimed--if I'm remembering correctly, and there's a good chance I'm not--to be married to Jesus Christ. From the perspective of our era we might think that Margery described some kind of spiritual ecstasy, but in fact she was quite literal about it: Margery considered herself the literal, physical bride of Christ, and therefore practiced celibacy with her "earthly" husband. And after all, why not? The Catholic religion is based on the mystery of a real, physical presence.

Robert Gluck's fictionalized version of Margery's story brings that physicality to the forefront: Margery and her husband Jesus enjoy each other's bodies with literal intimacy. He fondles her nipples; she fingers his asshole. Margery gives herself up to Jesus with a physical desire that is an analogue of spiritual ecstasy. Against this backdrop Gluck presents a second story: the story of his desire for L., a wealthy man many years his junior, for whom his desire is also a kind of ecstasy, but also a kind of grief or pain.

"How can the two halves of this novel ever be closed or complete?" Gluck asks. "Or the book is a triptych: I follow L. on the left, Margery follows Jesus on the right, and in the center my fear hollows out 'an empty space that I can't fill.'" The juxtaposition between Margery-and-Jesus and Bob-and-L. is sometimes foggy and sometimes quite clear: like Jesus, L.'s appeal is the stuff of mystery, in its religious meaning, a property beyond understanding and accessible only through practices of mysticism. Like Jesus, L. has power; though love forms the structure of divine creation, what power do mortals have to deny it, or withhold their own love? And like Jesus, L.'s diffidence is painful; as Jesus begins to show his boredom with Margery, so L. begins to drift away from Bob. God's love for us, if the word even suffices, may not resemble our love for God. Margery Kempe makes clear how grief and loss, in a cosmic sense, is inextricable from love.

Though Gluck's prose is often brittle and fragmented, I admired the physical language of Margery Kempe: the book is full of asses, cocks, tits, cunts, cumming, shitting, farting, etc., etc. We often project our squeamishness back onto the past; we assume that medieval people avoided talking about sex because we do. We love to think of ourselves as the endpoint of progress instead of what we are, which is the inheritors of a Victorian disdain for the body. It maybe that queer literature, disposed as it is to expose our false notions of the human body and the desire for the human body, reunites us with a medieval sense of the body as real and meaningful. Margery Kempe identifies the body as the site not only of love and lust, but of grief, loss, frustration, despair.

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

How to explain--"trans" may work well enough as a shorthand, but the quickly developing mainstream narrative it evokes ("born in the wrong body," necessitating an orthopedic pilgrimage between two fixed destinations) is useless for some--but partially, or even profoundly, useful for others? That for some "transitioning" may mean leaving one gender entirely behind, while for others--like Harry, who is happy to identify as a butch on T--it doesn't? How to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy? I do not want the female gender that has been assigned to me at birth. Neither do I want the male gender that transsexual medicine can furnish and that the state will award me if I behave in the right way. I don't want any of it. [Beatrix Preciado] How to explain that for some, or for some at some times, this irresolution is OK--desirable, even (e.g., "gender hackers")--whereas for others, or for others at some times, it stays a source of conflict or grief? How does one get across the best way to find out how other people feel about their gender or their sexuality--or anything else, really--is to listen to what they tell you, and try to treat them accordingly, without shellacking over their version of reality with yours? 

Maggie Nelson's theory-memoir The Argonauts tells the story--peripatetic, looping--of her marriage to Harry Dodge, a non-binary sculptor and playwright, and the birth of their son, Iggy. The title refers to the ship Argo, which, according to myth, was rebuilt plank by plank, provoking the question: is the new ship the same as the old? And if not, when did the transition occur? The word transition makes the metaphor plain, but hides much of the nuance: Nelson dwells at length on the nature of bodies and identities that change in all sorts of ways, not just because of the presence of prescribed hormones, but because of the nature of aging and childbirth. For Nelson, the body is a site of indeterminacy and slippage, but this is one of its wonders. We want our gender roles, like our bodies, to be clear and coherent, but as she writes above, "the shit stays messy."

One of the peculiar things about The Argonauts, especially for a book that is relatively popular, is that it's absolutely dripping with theory: Lacan, Freud, Deleuze and Guattari, Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, and many, many others. You might be forgiven for picking up and putting it down, thinking it pretentious, but to me, one of the marvels of The Argonauts is that it is anti-pretentious: by weaving the words of theorists into her own paragraphs and sentences--Nelson highlights them by italicizing, and places the names in the margin, even as her "borrowing" makes it clear that she speaking for herself with their voices--Nelson removes theory from the realm of the brain and claims it as a way of understanding her own body, her own husband, her own child. She's contemptuous of the trendy notion that our words are tragically incapable of conveying real truths; it may be true, but still they do much for us, and The Argonauts is clearly a book by someone for whom words are a mode of self-exploration.

One of the remarkable things about gender is that, even though it permeates our lives in ineradicable ways, we seem to be unable to talk about it. The conservative understanding is, as Nelson writes, like a child's drawing of a mommy and a daddy, all simple triangles and squares, but even thoughtful and accepting people have trouble being able to even say what gender is. I appreciated Nelson's attempt to mine the words of others to communicate her own experience, as a woman, as a pregnant body, as a lover, as a wife, etc., etc. But I appreciated, too, the honesty with which Nelson approaches the messiness of it all, and the way gender, like so much about our identities, refuses to be pinned down, like a butterfly to a board. 

The Twyborn Affair by Patrick White

She would have had to admit she had not existed in any of her several lives, unless in relationship with innocents, often only servants of ignoble masters, or those who believed themselves her parents or lovers.  She was accepted as real, or so it appeared, by the girls she farmed out for love, and who, if she were to be honest, amounted to fragments of a single image.  Yet whatever form she took, or whatever the illusion temporarily possessing her, the reality of love, which is the core of reality itself, had eluded her, and perhaps always would.

To read descriptions of the plot of The Twyborn Affair, all of them out of date, you might expect something psychologically supernatural, like the connection between Laura and Voss in Voss.  The back of the book speaks of "a single soul" living "three different lives."  I was expecting reincarnation.  But in truth The Twyborn Affair is about something much more realist, and more familiar to us than it might have been when White wrote the novel: it's about being transgender.

When we first meet the protagonist, Eudoxia Vatatzes, she's a young woman renting a house in the French Riviera with her older husband, a Greek named Angelos who suffers from fits where he thinks he's a Byzantine Emperor.  Probably Angelos is based on White's lover, the Greek Manoly Lascaris.  In the second part, Eudoxia has resumed her birth name, Eddie Twyborn.  (Twice-born, that is--once as a man and once as a woman; or perhaps tri-born, for the three parts of the book.)  Eddie, back home in Australia and living as a man, becomes a hired laborer in the Outback, where he gets caught up in affairs with both his boss' wife and the male manager of the ranch.  In the third, thirty years later, Eddie has escaped to London where he has become the madame of a brothel under the Eadith Trist.  (No analysis on that surname needed, I think.)

Although like all of White's novels the line between the mental world and the real one is pretty blurred, it seems clear to me that The Twyborn Affair was ahead of its time in thinking about the psychological and social travails of a transgender woman.  The old reviews shy away from it, but there is a genuine pathos in Eudoxia/Eddie/Eadith's search for an identity that stands out among White's darker psychological explorations.  Eudoxia records her sense of rootlessness in a diary:

My olive-tree is standing.  The garden would seem an argument for permanence--only one or two insignificant, dispensable branches lying uncouth amongst the silver tussocks, the hummocks and cushions of lavender, dianthus, southernwood, and thrift.  My rented garden.  Nothing is mine except for the coaxing I've put into it.  For that matter, nothing of me is mine, not even the body I was given to inhabit, nor the disguises chosen for it -- A. decides on these, seldom without my agreement.  The real E. has not yet been discovered, and perhaps never will be.

Is "the real E." ever discovered?  There's a nice scene at the end where Eadith meets her estranged mother by chance in London.  Her mother, speechless, writes on thy flyleaf of a prayer book: "Are you my son Eddie?"  And Eadith writes back, "No, but I am your daughter Eadith."  Of course, White can't leave it at that; the end has to be less sentimental and more ghoulish.  But he allows his protagonist a moment of recognition, face-to-face with the mother with whom she has long identified herself, a mother with her own history of conflicted gender identity and sexuality.  Neither the Eddie nor the Eadith portions are as vivid or as captivating as the first section, but this moment feels true because the sensual and adventurous Eudoxia still remains in the body of Eadith, searching for "the real E."  It makes you wonder, without wanting too much to project the work onto its author, what path White himself might have taken in a different time and place.