Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies
by Sam See
Fordham U. Press. 336 pages, $30.
SAM SEE was a professor of English at Yale who died in 2013 at age 34. For those interested in the strange details of his short life, involving his husband, escort services, court orders, and miscellaneous strife, the news media has all those. See’s specialty was queer issues and themes from the classics through the early 20th century. This collection contains previously published and complete but unpublished material, with an introduction and three essays by other writers. It is essentially a Festschrift focused on the main themes of See’s work. The book is long, dense, academic in nature, and thus largely of interest to specialists in the field. If you are comfortable navigating a text featuring “anacoluthon, chiasmus and catachresis,” this book is your natural habitat, deep in the bayous of critical technical English.
Nature is one of its major themes, with a long chapter on rooting ideas of queerness in the works of Charles Darwin. This chapter is frustrating, as it trawls Darwin’s writings for examples of uncertainty and the inherent unpredictability of the natural world, using those as hooks on which to hang a broad speculation that queerness as a cultural fact exists as a consequence or an inevitable parallel of constant variability in nature.
The question of what queer really means is a constant in this collection. Sometimes See seems to use the term to mean homosexual, or at least not mainstream heterosexual; at other times queer seems to mean anything that isn’t in a majority or part of a received tradition. This fuzziness around a key term causes some of the essays, especially the one on Darwin, to feel slippery: the fish may be there but we never quite catch it.
A curious lack of understanding of science—perhaps simply a dismissal—bubbles throughout See’s work. Academia traditionally values the fact-finding role of science, yet Heather Love notes in her superb closing essay that “See’s writing on myth is linked to his writing on nature by a willingness to credit feeling as both evidence and justification. … to foreground feeling in this way—at the expense of truth—is to break with the norms of academic discourse.” This tracks with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s view, revisited by Love, that living within a personal myth that brings happiness is superior to knowing the truth.
There are, to be sure, some real gems in this collection. The segment on Langston Hughes and how his work has drawn up Havelock Ellis as from a hidden spring is much clearer than the Darwin segment and, though still requiring serious attention, the leaps and connections that See makes are easier to follow. This is also true in the discussion of Hart Crane’s The Bridge, in which See does not attempt to find queerness under random rocks but leads the reader to the lovely segment in which Crane closes by gently clasping Whitman’s hand. Eliot’s The Waste Land also lends itself to a fairly straightforward commentary owing to the presence of Tiresias, that mythical character with snake issues and an alternating set of sex organs.
Whitman has his own chapter, more or less, in which his interactions with Wilde are discussed. See concludes that “Whitman seems to have had no use for Wilde’s aesthetic practices, even as Wilde had use for Whitman’s: Indeed, Wilde admired that Whitman ‘carries nature always in his heart’ and claimed that Whitman was ‘the simplest, most natural and strongest character that I have ever met in my life.’”
One difficulty in any kind of poetic exegesis is that what can be read into a poem changes based on changes in the reader’s knowledge base and æsthetic sensibility. It is impossible to state in most cases that what the poet “meant” can only be one thing. The very nature of poetry suggests the possibility of multiple meanings. This necessity of accepting and even celebrating ever expanding meanings is particularly necessary with writers such as Whitman, Crane, Eliot, and Pound, and See’s deep knowledge of all of them provides for a lush if sometimes strained tour of poetic possibility. I wish he had lived long enough to give us his tour of Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover.
There are discussions of beauty and art here, including Wilde’s concern that art should not raise nature on high (reminiscent of J. D. McClatchy’s view that nature was an uncongenial subject for poetry, suitable only as a backdrop for human issues). One of the best is a revisit to Crane’s “The Bridge,” in which the phrase “Appalachian Spring” appears, the source for the title of Aaron Copland’s ballet score (courtesy of Martha Graham). In the poem, it is not a season but a source of pure mountainside water, one for which we constantly strive. Sam See burned bright and fast like Crane; those who study queer imagery and myth-making will be glad to have this compilation.
