I started out on this book with some ideas about desire and power. However, the great pleasure in the work has been encountering so many marvelous lesbian- and gay-themed novels and films. I have been delighted with the seriousness and humor, the inventiveness and responsibility, the imagination and abundance that have been revealed. As I say in chapter 1, my use of such resources is not designed to deduce facts from fiction, but to investigate the kinds of representations that have been circulating. My aim has been to explore how our experiences have fed into books, films, and cultural commentary, and how we, in turn, have read and pondered them, recognized and reframed ourselves through them. The pleasure in reading has derived partly from artistic achievement, but mainly it has been about registering the kinds of people that we have become, or aspired to become. If you read Leavitt or Monette differently from me, this will almost certainly be, not just a literary judgment, but a way of thinking about sexuality and power. We may have our most ambitious conversations and contests through fiction.
I am scarcely concerned, therefore, with whether a book is likely to become part of a literary canon. At the same time, if it transpires that the processes of subcultural exploration and self-recognition are effective, in part at least, and other readers and commentators frame their ideas through some of these texts, the outcome will in practice be something rather like a lesbian and gay canon. Now, insofar as canon means “law, rule, edict,” that is not what I have in mind. However, “canonical” also means books that are accepted as “genuine and inspired,” and those we have.1
In effect, this is what gay people have always done. There was little lesbian fiction around when Alison Hennegan was young, but she cultivated her own investment in the classics. A passionate identification with Achilles, distraught at the death of Patroclus, helped “by offering me a world free from the assumption that human completeness exists solely in the fusion of male and female.” Hennegan went on to Petronius, Horace, and Virgil, and subsequently to Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, gay poets of the Great War. “I did as most young gay and lesbian readers of the time—older ones, too, for that matter—had to do. I created my own ‘popular fiction,’ developed my own much cherished canon.”2
My ambition to make the discussion of texts subculturally effective has been challenged by Stanley Fish, who takes me as exemplifying the approach of “The Cultural Critic.” This arises out of my book Faultlines, where I agree with Fish that it is the academic profession that determines which readings will pass as plausible, but accuse him of wanting to head off such political potential as English literature may have.3 Fish responds by reiterating his assertion, that it must be futile for people working with literature to aspire to political influence:
Changing the mode of literary analysis or changing the object of literary analysis or changing the name of literary analysis will not change the material effectiveness of literary analysis and make it into an instrument of political action. That kind of change, if it is ever to occur, will require wholesale structural changes of which literary analysts might take advantage, but which they could never initiate.4
At one level this is plainly correct. Literary criticism is designed, precisely, to head off any real-world engagement that literary intellectuals might seek. The application of the categories “art” and “literature” amounts to a way of distracting us from contemporary issues (which we might do something about), by asserting that the important writing will be “universal” (and hence probably beyond remedy). The overthrow of such deep-set ideas would indeed require a notable structural change. However, feminists, for instance, have succeeded in writing novels and criticism that both create and respond to urgent political issues. I discern in Fish’s pronouncement a typical conservative strategy, whereby the terms for significant action are set at such a demanding level that they will never occur. Revolution appears unlikely, so it is not worth trying to change anything. In my view, writing of all kinds may change the boundaries of the plausible, and hence of the effective scope for action, and it may be especially valuable in subcultural formations.
The most considered discussion from a radical perspective of minority reading has been made by John Guillory in Cultural Capital. He believes that the goal of minority groups must be to place a sample of their culture in mainstream venues—“opening out the canon.” Such a process, Guillory says, falls within the American tradition of liberal pluralism: through representation, groups who have been excluded from full citizenship expect to make their presence felt. Insofar as this has the implicit aim of redressing the inadequacies of public political process, and of universities in particular, Guillory argues, it can be only an imaginary politics. Installing minority groups in canonical venues gestures toward a national oppression which it cannot affect.5
Partly for this reason, Guillory adds, the valorization of noncanonical texts tends to depend upon theoretically unsophisticated notions, such as the identity and authentic experience of the author, and reading is imagined, naively, as a transparent process. It is not inevitable, however, that the purposive invocation of texts by and about marginalized groups will succumb to these theoretical pitfalls. Compare the situation of racial minorities. Commentators such as Stuart Hall, bell hooks, and Paul Gilroy have pointed out that there can be no essential grounding for racial and ethnic identities. In an initial stage, Hall notes, black people sought to make their own images, challenging hegemonic versions of themselves; but today it is understood that representation is formative—active, constitutive—rather than mimetic. “Black,” according to Hall, “is essentially a politically and culturally constructed category, which cannot be grounded in a set of fixed transcultural or transcendental racial categories and which therefore has no guarantees in Nature.”6 It is the same with lesbian, gay, and bisexual. There was a time for positive images—indeed, for visibility of any kind. Today a developed theory of ideology, the human subject, and cultural production affords opportunities for new engagements with textuality, and with the anxieties and hopes of a subcultural constituency.
Indeed, it is awareness of identity as constituted that affords opportunities for intervention. One inference from antiessentialist theory should be that we cannot simply throw off our current constructions. We are consequences of our histories—those that have been forced upon us and those that we have made ourselves. At the same time, it is because we believe that culture constructs the scope for our identities that we may believe those identities to be contingent and provisional, and therefore may strive to revise our own self-understanding and representation. If gay subculture is effective for its constituency, it is not because it evades poststructuralist insights, but because it responds to them.
The concept of “cultural capital” from which Guillory begins (in my view a very useful concept) leads him to present a static impression of how a group inhabits a culture. While it is true that mainstream cultures are under pressure to incorporate their treasures into authoritative state and national monoliths, subordinated groups have more urgent and particular concerns. For lesbians and gay men, though some ground may be gained by remarking how traditionally canonical authors have displayed a significant streak of homoeroticism, it is not important simply to possess this or that statusful icon.
The reply to Guillory is that the success of subcultural intervention may not reside primarily, or even at all, in infiltrating the mainstream. Indeed, insofar as that occurs, a consequence is usually distortion or appropriation; we are used to coping with hostile and patronizing images. The quality of our canon is not to be measured by the extent to which it impresses the mainstream, but in terms of its contribution to shared self-understanding. The point is to mark out a space in which to compare stories, for consolation, insight, and new imaginative awareness.