I first heard about The Argonauts either shortly before or shortly after I moved to New York, and it seemed like everyone was talking about it. I got it out from the library about a year ago, thinking I would read it over winter break, but never did. I’m glad— I feel like the book talks about questions that are already on my mind now, both personal and scholarly (but of course they are not mutually exclusive), and not so much a year ago.
Some questions/themes:
What are the limits of language? What can be expressed, what is inexpressible? Should we feel limited or liberated by it?
How is pregnancy simultaneously extremely (hetero)normative and extremely not normal at all? What does it even mean to be “queer”?
How do you write about your life when that means writing about other people’s lives too? (When those people might be very private people, or not agree with your representation of them, or be too young to be able to consent to being represented)
How relationships continue being themselves and growing even when the people and dynamics within them change a lot
It reminds me of a prose-poem by Heidi Priebe that my partner read to me recently: “To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be. The people they’re too exhausted to be any longer. The people they don’t recognize inside themselves anymore. The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into. We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out; to become speedily found when they are lost. But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be. It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honour what emerges along the way. Sometimes it will be an even more luminescent flame. Sometimes it will be a flicker that disappears and temporarily floods the room with a perfect and necessary darkness.”
Again, with this book I was confronted with what feels like my own puritanism, or maybe just self-consciousness. I was shocked that Nelson would essentially begin the book with anal sex, and later write about BDSM— a book her friends would read, her professors, her family. I know that this is common, I know that many people write scholarly and literary texts in which they talk about their sex lives. I know many of the books I’ve already read for this orals list did it, and I know that many more will. I even enjoy and appreciate it when people do— I just can’t imagine doing it myself. What makes me feel like my sex life ought to be totally separate from my scholarly/writerly/public life, when of course I know that my body and my emotions and my relationships with others shape my thinking about everything all the time, and vice versa?
And how do you know, as a reader/critic or as a writer yourself, when it is gratuitous/for “shock value” or marketing juiciness, and when it is….”important”? Meaningful? I’m not sure what the right word is, because all of the words that come to mind set up a moral dichotomy that I’m not comfortable with. What do “important” and “meaningful” mean, anyway? Why can’t people just write about sex? Surely something that permeates our time, stories, culture, lives, etc. so much is already important and meaningful.
When I was discussing this book with someone close to me, they asked me if I thought the book would be as popular and widely praised as it is if she wasn’t writing about loving and parenting with a trans person. Their implication was no. I agree. I think it’s beautifully written, and I found many parts personally meaningful, and when I briefly met Nelson at an event last year I certainly found her likable and compelling, but I do agree that part of the hype and pull for the book is around the queerness, but specifically Harry’s gender.
On the one hand, Nelson quotes Harry as asking, “Why don’t you ever write about the queer part of your life?” and I read that as, “Why don’t you ever write about me/us?” She also discusses how they revised the first draft together until he felt comfortable with how she represented him. Yet on the other hand, she directly says he was angry and uncomfortable with however she portrayed him in the first draft, and he describes himself as an “epileptic [a very private person] married to a strobe light [a professional memoirist].” I took this as a metaphor for their extreme differences in relation to privacy, but the person I was discussing the book with pointed out that there is a more concerning layer: it’s not just that they are very different, but that the epileptic is directly vulnerable/put at risk in relation to the strobe light. GGG consent seems so gray and foggy when it comes to this issue—when you’re highly emotionally intertwined with someone, and their career is involved, how can you not feel some pressure? When you’re the memoirist, how can you ever know if you really have their full consent, how can you ever know you’re not pressuring them to be okay with how you’re portraying them, or that you’re writing about them at all? I don’t know.
Comedian Bo Burnham has apparently said in interviews that all of the stories he tells about his family are lies, because he feels that only he decided to be a comedian, and none of his family or friends decided it, so it would be unfair to talk about and make fun of them for money. This seems admirable and ethically responsible to me.
But I also love memoir, I think it’s important and meaningful and beautiful. Especially for LGBTQ+ memoirs and memoirs by people from other oppressed groups— as Fun Home and Trans: A Memoir especially show, LGBTQ people need/want/crave/benefit from these stories to help us figure out who we are and how we want to view ourselves and our community/community history and what we want our place in the world to be.
Nelson’s partner also writes parts of the book toward the end himself, parts about being with his mother in hospice. Presumably he wrote them how he wanted to write them and feels comfortable with those sections. But I find that to make the situation even more politically complicated. How did that composing process go? Nelson says they originally talked about writing a book together, but decided the process would be too fraught to be worthwhile. What was this process like? Why did he write those sections and only those sections, why are those sections there at all? Whose idea was it? Even framing it that way is false, since composing is such a recursive process.
And what can we do as critics, if so many of these questions can’t be known from the book itself? Theoretically one of them could talk about it in an interview, or write about it elsewhere, or if I knew them personally I could ask, but that would only resolve the questions for this particular book, and there are many more like it. If so much of the ethics and ethos of a book depend on unknowable things, what to do?