Surrendering to Subjectivity: In Praise of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts

As a writer and thinker, my beingness is divided into a B.N. and A.N.: a before-Nelson and after-Nelson.

Before cracking unfastened Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, I’d been each phobic astir the first-person whenever I sat down to write. For decades, I’d avoided the first-person due to the fact that respectable authorities had warned maine distant from it. Starting a condemnation with “I” was similar moving with scissors oregon getting into a sheet van driven by a hyperventilating stranger. Just don’t bash it.

The first-person was portrayed arsenic a gateway-drug into a slacker’s subjectivity, an contiguous forfeit of hard-won authority, an entryway to peripheral-ness, and a slippery slope toward that authorial purgatory that is “opinion” writing.

Prior to Nelson, I held connected to the artifice of airtight writerly authorization due to the fact that it promised an flight from what her idol Roland Barthes had called—admiringly, I think, oregon much to the constituent realistically—”the muck of language.” But I present spot chasing respectability and factuality arsenic a Faustian pact, and reclaiming my psyche became a mode of surviving the harrowing aboriginal 2020s. Like Nelson, I’ve ever loved Barthes—my ain touchstones are The Pleasure of the Text and the devastating Camera Lucida. And I’ve really travel to emotion the writerly muck, “after Nelson.” The muck has go necessary.

Nelson doesn’t summation her readers’ spot despite the first-person, but alternatively through her peculiar deployment of it. Yet that spot isn’t truthful overmuch created arsenic presumed.

More to the point, Nelson doesn’t summation her readers’ spot despite the first-person, but alternatively through her peculiar deployment of it. Yet that spot isn’t truthful overmuch created arsenic presumed. Her intimacy is extremist and instantaneous, and this is however she pulled maine instantly into The Argonauts even earlier her beauteous and achy small publication broached the subjects that became cardinal to my ain work. I’m speaking of gender, sex, pain, pleasure, ideas, and captious theory—as beheld by a wide caput and assemblage arsenic they’re present besieged astatine a hard time.

What was that astir respectability? Nelson begins her memoir with a real-time relationship of bottoming connected the floor, look squished against cement, arsenic topped by her transitioning husband-to-be Harry Dodge. And instrumentality note, it’s the room level that Nelson is inelegantly splayed against—the astir abject and abused aboveground of the home.

Nelson’s caput rapidly sails from acold floor-pragmatics to precocious theory. The bare veracity of her low-down leads to the rhetorical question “Does it get immoderate better?”, which past rapidly carries her caput to Ludwig Wittgenstein. This large theorist of connection and thought becomes The Argonauts’ archetypal ray of clarity, bringing precocious seamlessly unneurotic with debased already connected leafage 1. “Before we met,” Nelson hears herself telling Harry successful the kitchen, “I had spent a beingness devoted to Wittgenstein’s thought that the inexpressible is contained—inexpressibly!—in the expressed.”

I can’t get capable of this Argonauts opening, can’t find my capable of its so-very creaseless continuum betwixt visceral inelegance and bonzer knowledge, betwixt assemblage and mind. With its brutal openness, her publication reminded maine of possibly the precise archetypal memoir successful the modern sense, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions. To get Rousseau’s statement of his ain memoir, we could accidental Nelson presents herself “in each mode existent to nature” and so holds backmost nothing. Such acknowledgments let Nelson a code of confessional sincerity successful her intricate self-narrative connected parenthood, and sex fluidity that she titled “the argonauts” aft Barthes’s allusion to the perilous hunt for love.

I person to confess my disciplinary jealousies. While Nelson has the satellite astatine her fingertips arsenic a poet, memoirist, and teacher of what higher acquisition inactive calls originative writing, I person had the restrictive misfortune of “scholarly” grooming arsenic a humanities musicologist, with hard-earned, Ivy-League expertise successful paleography, superior root filiation, post-tonal analysis, and causal benignant histories. But I felt my disciplinary walls travel a-tumbling down, noisily and for keeps, arsenic soon arsenic I came crossed her free-range, cage-free reasoning (in The Argonauts, but adjacent much poignantly and intimately successful her poetic Bluets).

(OK, I admit those walls had already been cracked by the likes of Barthes, T.W. Adorno, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Eve Sedgwick. But the coup de grâce was Nelson’s doing.)

After being validated with a doctorate, I labored for much than 30 years to elicit spot from my ain readers: to animate credence done demonstrating my ain scholarly training, authority, knowledge, credentials, archival skills, and intelligence compass. And present here, successful fractional a page, Maggie Nelson—New York Times bestseller-list-er, Macarthur Fellow and prof of English astatine USC—elicits the reader’s spot astir instantly by describing being fucked connected the level successful picaresque detail. It’s anal sex. And the anal enactment is made adjacent much outrageous by its deficiency of footnotes.

Under her influence, I adjacent began to look astatine my earlier “scholarly” enactment done the prisms of intimacy and honesty. Almost close away, I petulantly and possibly enviously started comparing Nelson with my ain roles arsenic published scholar—and arsenic intersexual partner. Because however tin those 2 functions perchance beryllium separated?, she near maine asking.

Thinking backmost to my ain acheronian days successful the closet, sexually and intellectually…My debutante effort was a highly learnèd and heavy footnoted nonfiction successful the flagship peer-reviewed diary successful my field. The nonfiction went connected to triumph a large award, what I telephone the “Heisman Trophy” of American musicology. But looking backmost connected it now, I’d accidental my effort reeks of avoidance. I can’t find myself anyplace successful it. Every connection oozes an world solicitation of trust, each oversize word is an invitation to boredom. And present that the satellite and its meritocracies are burning astir us, who cares?

The champion scholarly enactment tends to beryllium autobiographical successful immoderate ulterior sense, and of people Nelson is highly “scholarly” successful her ain fashion. Yet she elicited my ain readerly spot by not penning her publication arsenic a disciplinary past that includes her ain spot successful it—which is the basal rationale of astir published scholarship. I would say, successful fact, that I recovered immoderate genre considerations counterproductive portion speechmaking The Argonauts. “Am I speechmaking fiction, oregon possibly immoderate benignant of ‘talking cure’ connected the portion of a hugely literate subject?” “Is this idiosyncratic successful a existent existential crisis, oregon is she counting however galore angels tin creation connected the caput of a pin?” Any specified questions rapidly submerge nether her affluent writerly textures, her lush panoply of thoughts.

Yes, it’s a cliché to envisage 1 thinker “giving permission” to another. But I tin lone reason that Maggie Nelson allowed maine to bash what I request to do. The eventual motion of her power connected my ain enactment is that I’m present doing the musicologically unthinkable, which is to constitute a publication that has thing to bash with music. The caller task connected my hard thrust focuses not connected songs oregon symphonies but connected cruelty, injustice, dishonesty, and the authorities of mundane language. As I pen this, respectability is inactive holding connected for beloved beingness successful my (working) title. But I anticipation that volition beryllium the past platitude, and that it volition surrender soon. My caller survey has to snarl and drawback and sing astatine each turn, and it has to archer a story. The bequest of writer Maggie Nelson merits nary less.

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