A Visitation of Spirits by Randall Kenan

What does a young man replace the world with, when the world is denied him? True, the world was never his, but if the promise of the world, free of charge, is suddenly plopped in his lap and then revoked? If the rights and freedoms of patricians are handed to him and then snatched away? If he is given a taste of a shining city of no limits, and then told to go back to the woods?

Horace had no alternative but to retreat into a world of guilt and confusion, not understanding the reasons for his exile.

When we first meet Horace Cross, a Black teenager living in the small town of Tims Creek in Eastern North Carolina, he's planning on transforming himself into an animal. He considers his options carefully, and concludes that he'd like to be a bird; perusing the bird guide at the local library he chooses a red-tailed hawk. At midnight, he sneaks out of his grandfather's house to perform the rite he's discovered in reading, one which requires, among other things, the blood of an infant, for which he has substituted a kitten. But he fails to be transformed, and dejected in the rain, he takes up his grandfather's gun and begins to wander nude around Tims Creek. Though the rite hasn't worked, it's unleashed something: a host of demons that propel Horace forward, making him face the agonies of his life. Chief among these: being gay in a community where his desires constitute a mortal sin.

Horace's story is interspersed with sections narrated by his cousin, the reverend Jimmy Cross, who was the last person to see Horace on the night of the demons. We know, from Jimmy's narration, that Horace committed suicide that night, unable to bear his guilt. Horace's death is just one of the failures haunting Jimmy; his words of conciliation--"You're normal; you'll change"--having been worse than useless. Other failures include the death of his beautiful, radical wife, Anne, and his inability to reconcile two of his elderly relatives. (The plot, such as it is, of Jimmy's sections mostly involves taking his elderly aunt to see another relative, Asa, on his deathbed, and the bitter spitefulness that emerges from the woman's confrontation with death.) Jimmy longs to be a good pastor, to shepherd and to guide, but where is the wisdom that might have saved Horace? Is it in Tims Creek, or does one have to look elsewhere?

This weekend we visited the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame, which is a single room lined with framed photographs in a genteel house in genteel Southern Pines. I was pleased to see there the face of Randall Kenan, who died rather young a few years back, along with the faces of a few other authors I have loved but who are not well known, like novelist John Ehle and poet A. R. Ammons. What struck me about Kenan's A Visitation of Spirits was how it emerges from the tradition of the Southern Gothic. It's got one foot in the ordinary rhythms of Black life in Eastern N.C., and another in the wizards and comic book heroes that make up Horace's reading material. The demons that haunt him include a pair of eyeless women and a bison wearing a dress. As Horace wanders through Tims Creek, they chip away at his sanity, and ultimately he loses himself, succumbing utterly to the grotesque visions that his guilt and shame bring forth.

On one level, A Visitation of Spirits is a loving evocation of a culture: the celebration of a hog being killed for barbecue, the simple country church, the binding of strong family ties. But it also poses hard questions about the difficulty of being gay, or out of any kind of ordinary, in small towns like Tims Creek. Kenan makes explicit connections to the Civil Rights movement; suggesting that the strong moral clarity that defeated Jim Crow has faltered in the case of men like Horace. I don't think it's a stretch to read the hapless Pastor Cross as an image of the Black church, diminished in its post-Civil Rights era, unable to provide guidance for those who need it most. "It is good to remember," the last lines of the novel read, "for too many forget."

Gender Trouble by Judith Butler

If the inner truth of gender is a fabrication and if a true gender is fantasy instituted and inscribed on the surface of bodies, then it seems that genders can be neither true nor false, but are only produced as the truth effects of a discourse of primary and stable identity.

A couple years ago, journalist Spencer Bokat-Lindell wrote a piece titled “Turducken is Performative” and received, to his surprise, a response from Judith Butler. First, they complimented his article, then very graciously cautioned him against associating “performative” with fake, clarifying that performance can emulate desired realities, and sometimes even bring them about. It’s funny, yes, that one of the most famous scholars in the world would fire off a note about a seemingly trivial misreading, but having read Gender Trouble, it makes sense: the entire work could be flippantly summarized by the famous Vonnegut quote, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.”

Of course, it’s more complex than that. Much, much more complex. Gender Trouble is one of the most difficult texts I’ve ever completed, not due to Butler’s supposedly-impenetrable prose--I found it dense but generally quite lucid--but because it’s such a thorough investigation and dismantling of a number of theories of sex/gender, most notably Lacan and Freud but secondarily Levi-Strauss, Derrida, Foucault, Wittig, Irigaray, and structuralist theories of sex/gender as a whole. I won’t attempt to summarize their specific arguments, not that I could, except to say that they consistently tug at one particular thread: is there a pre-symbolic/pre-linguistic/ontological foundation to sex/gender, or are they entire constructed through performance of both socially acceptable and culturally heterogeneous acts?

The structuralists and their immediate predecessors--especially Lacan and Freud--say yes. As I understand it, the origin of both sexuality and language can be found in, uh, incest, the original and strongest taboo. Sexuality is a discursive effect of the repression of the Oedipal desire; because they cannot have sex with the parent, their sexual desires are projected outward toward other members of the opposite sex who can temper but not slake the original desire. Language, on the other hand, grows from the pre-verbal cries of desire, transforming, as the child gains distance from the parent, into other symbols and signifiers, and so on.

Even a cursory reading of the above makes clear the foundational binary at play; there are heterosexual men and women who have heterosexual desires, there are heterosexual men and women who have homosexual desires (caused by the much rarer Reverse Oedipus, really). Ultimately all these desires must either be subsumed in (ersatz?) heterosexual acts or suppressed entirely, because the only alternative is literally madness.

Yeah.

While this may look regressive, the binary is equally strong even in some radical feminist approaches to gender. Wittig, the mother of political lesbianism, makes great headway at dismantling the necessity of heterosexuality but only imagines a wholesale rejection of opposite-sex acts as a response, finally serving only to further establish rejection of heterosexuality as the basis of a new binary, and starting the cycle again. Even Foucault, the thinker Butler seems most in sync with, envisions sex/gender primarily as the abolishment of all sexual identity, resulting in some sort of post-gender paradise, perhaps a nice idea but not one that seems coherent with the way people are.

Butler, on the other hand, thinks bigger. Her ideas are perhaps not as shocking as they once were--though who can say, as we live through Gay Panic 2.0--but it’s still bracing, in 2023, to read about the radical deconstruction and reconstruction of sexual and gender identity in such stark (such as it is) language. A section about how sex is as socially constructed as gender, supported by Foucault’s ideas of gender as a construct of social control, was especially thought-provoking, as it posits that splitting humanity into a binary based on sexual anatomy is just as arbitrary (and no less non-binary) than divisions based on hair color, skeletal structure, or whether one has an innie or an outie--that is, unless the primary purpose of your society is to reproduce the family structure as a means of consolidating power. Then it makes perfect sense to keep the women pregnant in the kitchen while the men go out hunting and gathering and waging war.

A sense of “there is no there there” pervades the last section of the work, in which performativity is presented in its full (at the time) academic form. As I understand it (and as Butler helpfully summarized in her Turducken letter), performance can be oppressive, mandated one’s place in the cultural hierarchy. But they can also be liberative, joyful, constructive, as in a drag show where the absurdities and disjunctions of sex and gender identity are banged together until they break (I understand why drag shows scare conservatives so much now). But even performance is circumscribed by cultural laws and expectations, as Butler discusses below:

The subject is not determined by the rules because signification is not a founding act, but rather a regulated process of repetition that both concerns itself and endorses its rules precisely through the production of substantializing effects. In a sense, all signification takes place within the orbit of the compulsion to repeat; agency then is to be located within the possibility of a variation on that repetition. If the rules governing signification not only restrict but enable the assertion of alternative domains of cultural intelligibility, then it is only within the practices of repetitive signifying that a subversion of identity becomes possible.

The above was like a light at the end of the tunnel after two hundred pages of theories that presented sex and gender as either immutable, posited a post-patriarchal society that still used the binary as a load-bearing wall, or critiques that identified problems but seemingly offered no way forward. The answer, Butler seems to say, is to do what we can, to make small changes in the acts of repetition that, after all, form us and the society we live in, until finally we can look around and see that things have changed in meaningful, liberating ways.

On a personal level, a few years ago, I thought my kids would be growing up in a world where aggressive queerphobia was verboten; seeing it make a comeback has been dispiriting in a way I can't describe. In a time when conservatives at home and abroad are targeting sexual minorities, where trans high schoolers are being stabbed to death, where men kill trans women after sex, Gender Trouble is necessary, a dense, difficult work that still sounds like the future. May the future get here soon.

Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

I remember that life in that room seemed to be occurring beneath the sea. Time flowed past indifferently above us; hours and days had no meaning. In the beginning, our life together held a joy and amazement which was newborn every day. Beneath the joy, of course, was anguish and beneath the amazement was fear; but they did not work themselves to the beginning until our high beginning was aloes on our tongues. By then anguish and ear had become the surface on which we slipped and slid, losing balance, dignity, and pride.

David is an American in Paris: not rich, perhaps, but of the kind of class where it's typical to take the Grand Tour before returning to the States to begin a real life. He has a girlfriend, Hella, who's off in Spain thinking things over, leaving David to his friends, which consist mostly of older gay libertines. David himself once had an affair with a boy, but it left him so confused and ashamed he cut his then-friend from his life, and though he insists to men like Jacques and Guillaume that he is straight, a young bartender named Giovanni catches his eye, and their instant attraction puts the lie to all of David's claims. David begins a passionate affair with tempestuous Giovanni, even moving into his room, a dirty closet on the edge of Paris. The room becomes the novel's controlling symbol, a space of intense intimacy, beset by chaos, cut off from the world.

When Giovanni's Room begins, the affair has already ended, and David is waiting in the south of France to hear about Giovanni's execution by guillotine. Until the novel's end, we don't know what it is Giovanni has done to deserve this fate, but we understand it has something to do with David's ultimate rejection and abandonment of him. Of course, Giovanni's room is not the world, and David has a life, and a girlfriend, then fiancee, outside of it. But it's only in Giovanni's room that David can truly be real, that "real world" outside is really a falsehood, whether David is able to admit it to himself or not. Giovanni's Room is a novel about repression, and the power the social world has even over our most inner lives. Yes, David betrays Giovanni--but what world is possible where David does not? Jacques, David's older gay friend, and even sinister bar-owner Guillaume, give a glimpse of David's future, one in which he's not able to accept his sexuality until it's soured and curdled inside of him.

It took me a long time to get to Giovanni's Room. I read Go Tell It On the Mountain, which I didn't like: too abstract, too melodramatic, too internal. I thought, well, he must be one of those guys that's an amazing essayist who doesn't write fiction very well. So I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Giovanni's Room. Baldwin's long, stacked sentences bring out a lyric beauty in David's devastation, and the characters, Giovanni especially, are lively and vivid. There's a slightly antiquated quality to it that reminds me of an author I can't quite identify. At times I thought it was Fitzgerald, and at other times Forster--not even because of the gay-love-across-class-lines plot that resembles that of Forster's own doomed Maurice.

To have published a book like Giovanni's Room in 1956 seems like an act of suicide, or madness. Perhaps we've come some way since then. But it's hard not to wonder, in 2023, how many Davids are out there, how many Giovannis, gay or perhaps trans women and men, whose lives are contained in their little rooms because there's no place for them.