Reconstruction Vol. 12, No. 4
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Reverse Sexology: Turn‐of‐the‐Century Discourses of Sexuality and the Limits of Identity in David Leavitt’s The Indian Clerk / Helena Gurfinkel
Abstract:
Keywords: Literature; Queer Theory; Gender, Sex & Sexuality
“The Love that Dare not Speak Its Name”: Refusing the Vocabulary of Sexuality
<1> David Leavitt’s most recent novel, The Indian Clerk (2007) runs afoul of the standard position in relation to the politics of sexual identity among modern Anglo-American writers. While working in the same tradition as Christopher Isherwood or Edmund White, for whom being a gay writer is a politically necessary self-identification, Leavitt, inhis latest work of fiction, fights against such a designation. The Indian Clerk explores the potential limitations of sexual identity, which originated in the medical and scientific discourses of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. [1] According to Chris White, these discourses “produce[d] science as the means of truly understanding what is fixed and universal part of human sexuality, and which has an essence which is not provisional or culturally produced” (68), and, in the words of David Halperin,“ …took the form of establishing norms of self-regulation…by constructing new species of individuals, discovering and implanting perversions and thereby elaborating more subtle and insidious means of social control” (47).
<2> To resist the logic of legibility and toleration that characterizes turn-of-the century sexology, The Indian Clerk deploys three strategies. The novel is set during the period when sexology flourished and exerted its strongest influence. Even more crucially, the text also consistently derails the pseudo-sexological researches of its protagonist and occasional narrator, the mathematician Godfrey Harold Hardy. Finally, Leavitt introduces a queer subaltern, S. Ramanujan, the eponymous“ Indian clerk” and world-renowned mathematical genius, who resists Western discourses of gender and sexuality.
<3> I would like to suggest that the novel’s most fundamental argument is not with sexuality, but, rather, with the idea of a “vocabulary” for it. Foucauldian taxonomy-loving regimes of power, buttressed by the fin-de-siècle science of sexuality, invented “the psychological, psychiatric, medical category of homosexuality…characterized…less by a type of sexual relations than by a certain quality of sexual sensibility,…a certain way of inverting the masculine and feminine in oneself” (Foucault 108) and ensured that “sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species” (108). [2] The Indian Clerk is a critical response to these discourses, at work then and now. [3]
<4> In contemporary Western societies, the rhetoric of sexual identity has become, understandably, a part of civil-rights campaigns, as well as of popular-media representations of queer men and women. It is perhaps impossible, or even unnecessary, to take seriously or to imitate the characters of The L-Word, who define “a bona-fide dyke” by the length of her nails or hair, or by her favorite childhood toys or pets, or the eponymous protagonist of another TV series, Noah’s Arc, who attempts to find the signs of obvious gayness” in his lover’s apartment by snooping through his music, book, and pornography collection.
<5> Many such scenes are clearly played up to a comic effect and do not claim the status of a science of sexuality. Nonetheless, these visual texts aspire to mainstream success, or, at least, acceptance, by rendering legible, or giving a verbal or visual “vocabulary” to, the queer subject. This subject, by virtue of his or her convenient signification, fails to be disruptive of the heteronormative narrative. Rather, he or she is marginally acceptable and longing, but unable, finally, to participate in the lofty narratives of heteronormative happiness. Such, precisely, is the logic of toleration inherent in the turn-of-the-century discourses of sexology, which has acquired a contemporary dimension, and against which Leavitt’s novel dares to speak.
Queer Theory and The Politics of Naming: An Overview
<6> Leavitt’s ruminations on the drawbacks of sexual identity in The Indian Clerk certainly resonate with Foucault’s critique of the science of sexuality, as well as with the debate on identity and sexuality that queer theory has held for close to two decades. In a recent essay, David Kurnick has eloquently described the “ productively weird relation” (400) between queer theory and identity politics:
On the one hand, queer critique is founded on a refusal of identity…Queer theory’s formalism, its refusal to know beforehand to what concrete constituency its structural insights might apply, has always been sign of its conceptual ambition. And yet there are limitations to this formalizing impulse, and…queer theory’s intellectual and political success would also depend on how well it accounted for the intransigent facts of the body, identity, gender, and desire that resist such abstraction. (401)
Indeed, since the early nineteen nineties, queer theorists, such as Judith Butler, Lee Edelman, and Leo Bersani, have argued against identity as a re-inscription of reductive and oppressive heteronormative taxonomies.
<7> Specifically, in Gender Trouble: Feminism and Subversion of Identity, Judith Butler has posited that sexuality is not an “essential” characteristic, but rather, a construct imposed on humans by the law that presumes the primacy of heterosexuality. With regard to gender, she has argued that “[t]here is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; ... identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’; that are said to be its results” (25). In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Lee Edelman defines “ the queer” not as an instantiation of a “gay identity,” but, instead, as a linguistic presence that tells us that any identity is a fantasy. The queer, like/as the death drive, is an uncomfortable reminder that “ …an order, an organization that assures our identity as subjects and the coherence of the Imaginary totalizations through which these identities appear in a recognizable form” (7) are illusions. In Homos, Leo Bersani seeks to replace a gay identity with “homo-ness,” “a force not limited to the modest goals of tolerance for diverse lifestyles, but in fact mandating the politically unacceptable and politically indispensable choice of an outlaw existence” (76). In different ways, all three theorists go against the pieties of futurity, reproduction, and the illusory wholeness of the ego.
<8> In its psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, and materialist incarnations, as well as in its efforts to combine the three, queer theory has also critiqued the regulation and naming of desires and the imprisonment of the body in the cage of a presumptively stable identity. In Undoing Gender, for example, Judith Butler speaks against labeling “passions” as “ heterosexual” or homosexual,” claiming, instead, that we should look at their momentary constellations” and “simultaneous and dissonant claims on truth” (141). In the same book, she argues that the body, as a vehicle of these passions, should be viewed not as a “static and accomplished fact, but…as a mode of becoming, that, in becoming otherwise, exceeds the norm, reworks the norm…” (19).
<9> Although, in her earlier writings on gender and sexuality, Butler has worked with the subversion of sexual identity by means of re-signification, as well as by means of admitting to the possibilities of loss and negativity, the discussion of becoming above links her theories of the body and desire as exceeding identity to those of Gilles Deleuze. Butler notes that she has initially opposed Deleuze’s work because she has found “no registration of the negative in his work” (Undoing Gender 198). Recently, however, she has found new ways of incorporating his work in her thinking about sexuality and (non)-identity (Undoing Gender 198).
<10> Like Butler, Deleuze categorically denies the stability, or even the very existence, of (sexual) identity. However, Claire Colebrook notes a difference between the two philosophers: “[f]or Butler, a queer theory is one in which…one must claim to speak as a self, but can only do so through an other who is not oneself…For Deleuze, the conditions of theory require a going ‘beyond’; of the self and the organism” (20). Colebrook contends that, whereas Butler’;s psychoanalytic and poststructuralist antecedents still require that a certain attachment to selfhood be preserved, even through negativity, Deleuze, precisely through his cleaving to materiality, seeks to destroy this attachment.
<11> While poststructuralist theory finds its tools for the critique of identity in the instability of the signifier, Deleuze fundamentally opposes the potential homogeneity of identity inherent in such instantiations of materiality (and ideology) as capitalism. He writes, for instance, that, both in terms of production and in terms of the establishment of identities, capitalism insists on “the worldwide axiomatic, instead of …heterogeneous social formations and their relations” (“Capitalism” 237). To counter the homogeneity of an “axiomatic” identity, Deleuze posits the concept of “becoming,” the process of exceeding constantly the limits of the body/organism, or of a physical (and social) identity. In relation to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and becoming, for example, he writes that “…personal uncertainty…fragments the subject following this double direction” (41). The notion of a “paradox” serves to explain the subject’;s double direction: it “is initially that which destroys good sense as the only direction, bit it is also that which destroys common sense as the assignation of fixed identities” (41). It would seem that, in the process of becoming, Deleuze wants the self to move in the direction of destruction, as well as creation, thus attempting to secure a vestige of selfhood.
<12> However, it is the emphasis on the paradox of following the two at once that delivers the final blow to the “common sense” of “fixed identities.” In her essay on Deleuze and Carroll in Deleuze and Gender, Dorothea Olkowski appropriately describes the destruction of “common sense” as a moment of an open, optimistic possibility: “Carroll points to the idea that, in Wonderland, where causality and reference no longer reign, anything is possible. Causal links of any kind are dissolved. But in fact what occurs is that nothing happens” (120). Similarly, Gillian Howie notes that such an occurrence is “a moment of productive intensity, a process without a determinate outcome…” (84). The dissolution of “ causality and reference,” as well as the lack of a determined telos, forecloses the creating of clearly defined identities and modes of being.
<13> The hopeful moment of “nothing” includes, too, the (im)possibility of a liberated sexual, desiring subject. Slavoj Žižek links Deleuze’s anti-identitarian becoming to desire lucidly: “Event of Becoming relies on the productive force of the ‘schizo,’ this explosion of the unified subject in the impersonal multitude of desiring intensities, intensities that are subsequently constrained by the Oedipal matrix…” (30). Indeed, Deleuze decries the fixedness, limitations, and alleged “ common sense” of identity when it comes to desire. Resisting the consequences of the “Oedipal matrix” is one of his primary tools of dismantling the identitarian regime. Working towards a non-Freudian “schizoanalysis,” he conceives desire as a matter of conditional, situational “assemblages” (“What is Desire?” 136). Forming identities goes against this model of desire: “ Organization of forms, formation of subjects…’ incapacitate’ desire: they subjugate it to law and introduce lack into it” (137). Unlike Freudian, Lacanian and/or poststructuralist philosophers of desire, such as Butler, who posit lack (introduced by castration) as the foundation of any critique of identity, Deleuze notes that desire becomes legalized – that is, imprisoned in identity – precisely due to lack. As a tool of identity-making, the Oedipal complex “…produces a subject whose desire is premised upon lack…rather than upon the creation of connections with the world that unfold creative capacities in living” (Lorraine 63). Submitting to cut of castration, and the resulting lack, then, lead to a prohibitively incapacitated and stagnant model of identity, an outcome that Deleuze’s analysis resists.
<14> For Deleuze, sexuality is not necessarily identical to desire; it can, however, be one of its concurrent “assemblages.” (“What Is Desire” 140). To avoid identitarian tedium, sexuality becomes an unfixed “flux” (140). He asserts, as well, that it is crucial to take such fluid sexuality both beyond the restrictions of monogamous desire and beyond a “theatre of phantasms” rejecting the body (140). The Deleuzean notion of sexuality as a “flux” also, pertinently to my discussion of Leavitt, refuses to recognize gay identity as politically useful. According to Verena Andermatt Conley, the opposite is true, as far as Deleuze is concerned: “For Deleuze, homosexual identity does not exist…To fix gay identity is to try to stabilize what has to be radically destabilized” (25). Such destabilization cannot be achieved through a vocabulary of discrete “sexual identities.” [4] To the contrary, as Žižek notes, Deleuze seeks to “perceive[e] disparate events and propositions (‘immaculate conception,’;‘buggery,’;‘philosophical interpretation’) as occurring at the same ontological level” (46). This simultaneous ontological perception causes the “common-sense” identity to implode.
***
<15> While radically anti-identitarian queer theory, coached in the terminology of performativity, the death drive, or becoming, works against identity, theorists such as Michael Warner, while aware of the limitations of “gay identity,” argue for the necessity of making sexuality a visible and legible part of a self, if any progress is to be made towards equality. Indeed, while David Kurnick makes a reference to Michael Warner’;s non-LGBT-specific definition of queerness as “ a more thorough resistance to the regimes of the normal” (qtd. in Kurnick 401) and a “reject[ion] of a minoritizing logic of toleration” (qtd. in Kurnick 401) from his preface to The Fear of the Queer Planet (1993) one must also mention Warner’s important later work, The Trouble with Normal (1999), in which he explicitly acknowledges that, to depart from the norm, it is necessary to get rid of sexual shame and to assert a sexual identity based on a refusal to have
…truck with bourgeois propriety. If sex is a kind of indignity, we’re all in it together…That, I think is a premise of queer culture, and one reason why people in it are willing to call themselves queer…The lesbian and gay movement at its best has always been rooted in a queer ethic of dignity in shame (36-7).
In fact, Leavitt’s earlier fiction has been critiqued on the grounds of complicity with the “bourgeois” narratives of “propriety” and a refusal to give more attention to “a queer ethics of dignity in shame” upheld by politically-conscious lesbian and gay movements. Alan Sinfield has contended that, unlike, for example, the work of Alan Hollinghurst, Leavitt’s 1994 novel While England Sleeps pays too little attention to matters of gay identity and gay history. [5]
<16> In an epigraph to the third chapter of The Trouble with Normal, Warner quotes Foucault: “There are no societies which do not regulate sex, and thus all societies create the hope of escaping from such regulations” (81). Because, within the Foucauldian network of surveillance and power, discarding sexual taxonomies may merely prove a way of reinstating them, it seems best to use those taxonomies strategically for political ends. In other words, a strategically destabilizing “naming of love” is a necessity, and getting rid of all identitarian vocabularies is a pipe-dream, at best, and a form of elitist scoffing at inevitable differences, at worst. As Steven Seidman asks, “Is it possible that underlying the refusal to name the subject (of knowledge and politics) is a utopian wish for a full, intact organic experience of self and other?” (133). Seidman’s question, asked in the 1990s and mostly, it seems, rhetorical, presages the current analyses of the complex entanglements of sexuality and identity included, for example, by Leo Bersani and Tim Dean in their explorations of barebacking, a practice in which they find precisely the intimate and respectful collision of self and other that Seidman characterizes as utopian. [6] The identity produced in the barebacking subculture is an identity, inasmuch as it acknowledges queer desire, but it is also anti-identitarian because it opposes conventional identity politics premised on difference. As I will show below, Leavitt’s novel consciously avoids any engagement with an oversimplified identity couched in a reductive understanding not only of sexual, but also of racial, national, and class difference.
Decolonizing Silence: The Queer Subaltern
<17> In a novel that portrays a colonial subject traveling, with tragic consequences, to a metropolitan, imperial city, sexuality is not the only flashpoint of difference. In The Indian Clerk, as the title itself suggests, the matters of race, class, and national identity enter into a tense, but, ultimately, productive conversation with sexuality. Leavitt’s most crucial method of engaging the discourse of colonialism is the portrayal of S. Ramanujan as a queer subaltern. Above all, what makes the Indian mathematician a queer subaltern is the pressure to conform to Western models of gender and sexuality, as well as his refusal to confirm these models through speech.
<18> The use of the term “subaltern” here certainly does not fit comfortably with the original definition, put forth by the Subaltern Studies Group and by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. This definition involves not only subaltern’s being working-class and residing in a colonized territory, but his or her having a subjectivity characterized by the state of crisis and permanent exclusion from all the nodes of social mobility (including “ackward” mobility) (Spivak 289). After all, Ramanujan is a married, educated, middle-class male of the Brahmin cast. As Spivak has acknowledged, however, the very formation of the subaltern consciousness is an event aware, at once, of its temporal nature and of the simultaneous necessity and limitations of the very strategic essentialism it deploys. She has noted that, “We are never looking at the pure subaltern…I think the word ‘subaltern’ is losing its definitive power because it has become a kind of buzzword for any group that wants something that it does not have” (289-90).
<19> Strictly speaking, in terms of class and gender, Ramanujan does not belong to an oppressed group “ that wants something that it does not have. ”His portrayal does not comply with the fairly newly emerged category of the queer subaltern either. It must be noted that the very notion of the queer subaltern, though crucial for the expansion of postcolonial theory in the direction of sexuality studies, has been subject to critique. The most fundamental objection to this term is the uneasy correspondence of the word “queer” to the Western, particularly Anglo-American, modes of lesbian, gay, transgender, or bisexual identity. The transposition of LGBT identities (against which, as I have shown, queer theory has worked outside of the postcolonial context) has been a result of what Arif Dirlik, in his book of the same title, has called “colonial modernity.” Dirlik is critical of the very term “postcolonial,” as it is used by the prominent practitioners of the theory, such as Gayatri Spivak herself (98-100). In Dirlik’s estimation, insofar as colonialism and capitalism are intertwined, colonialism has not disappeared (111). Instead, colonial modernity is a more appropriate term for the contemporary geopolitical situation. Under the current circumstances, Euro-American economic and cultural structures (including the homogenous “sexual identities”) have become transformed into “many local guises” (Dirlik 115).
<20> In Excess and Masculinity in Asian Cultural Productions, Kwai-Cheung Lo refers to both Dirlik’s study and Deleuze’s notions of capitalism and axioms of identity. Lo’s study of Asian masculinity (germane here because of the upcoming discussion of the fictional representation of S. Ramanujan) argues that the “logic of modernity” is not necessarily that of change (13), and that, as a result, even now, “capitalist modernity” (13) serves to protect and export Western gender and sexual identities to Asia, broadly defined by the “Western gaze” (1), as well as to adopt these identities to the “consumer market” (140).
<21> The notion of the queer subaltern, then, needs to be reinvented, precisely in order to avoid the homogenizing influences of the consuming (in both senses of the word) Western identities. In his discussion of the gay male subaltern, for example, Shafquat Towheed expresses an agreement with John Hawley, one of the first scholars to acknowledge the intersection of postcolonial and queer subjectivities, stating that the queer subaltern can, and must, speak for him or herself. Towheed, then, qualifies Hawley’s Western, hegemonic use of the word “gay” and begins to “…investigate the contingencies that create and maintain the (homo)sexual subaltern, and the means by which his voice is silenced and misrepresented, often through the enabling intervention of a male hegemonic narrator” (249).
<22> The idea of silence versus speech is more pertinent to my discussion than the subaltern’s sexuality, or, rather, the two are intertwined. When confronted with the suggestion that, despite her claim in “Can the Subaltern Speak?,”the subaltern, male or female, occasionally can and does speak, Spivak notes that subaltern subjectivity is defined not by being unable to talk, but, rather, by not being heard. In relation to her original article, Spivak provides a clarification: “So, ‘the subaltern can’t speak,’ means that even when the subaltern makes an effort to the death to speak, she is not able to be heard, and speaking and hearing complete the speech act” (292). Unlike Towheed and Spivak, I suggest that the queer subaltern subjectivity in The Indian Clerk is marked, and empowered, by voluntary silence. Ramanujan’s refusal both to speak and to be heard changes the definition of the subaltern and removes the imperative to break the silence. In this case, speaking is tantamount to participating in the discourse of sexology, to gratifying its urge to name and control desire, and to contributing to the ineluctable attachment of this definable desire to an equally clearly labeled identity; conversely, silence is a rejection of these acts of complicity with Western genders and sexualities. [7]
“The Many Forms that Love Delights to Take”: Sexology and Legibility
<23> S. Ramanujan, the queer subaltern, who refuses to engage with what Joseph Bristow calls the ceaseless “ chatter” about sexuality at the turn of the century (173), functions at the time when silence is impossible, even perilous, to keep. The purpose of this section is to illustrate the claim made earlier in the essay that The Indian Clerk engages and parodies fin-de-siècle sexology and to provide some examples of the taxonomizing strategies frequently deployed by sexological writings.
<24> With the possible exception of Freud (an exception that Foucault would be unlikely to make), [8] whose Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1896) ultimately defines sexuality as fluid and impossible to sort finally into a catalogue of discrete identities, turn-of-the-century sexologists, including the most tireless, radical, and passionate human-rights advocates, such as Magnus Hirschfield or Edward Carpenter, sought to make sexual identity legible and recognizable not only through a vocabulary of acts-turned-identities but through eminently recognizable physical features, social habits, moral and ethical propinquities, and intellectual gifts. Once recognizable and name-able, the “invert” becomes tolerable, though, precisely because of the need to be tolerated, not equal.
<25> In his 1908 treatise Intermediate Sex, from which the title of this section is taken, Edward Carpenter
sketch[es]– very briefly and inadequately it is true – both the extreme types and the more healthy types of the ‘Intermediate’ man and woman: types which can be verified from history and literature, though more certainly and satisfactorily perhaps from actual life around us. And unfamiliar though the subject is, it begins to appear that it is one which modern thought and science will have to face. (37)
In turn-of-the-century England, sexologists worked in response to, or against, the three landmark events: the Cleveland Street Scandal of 1885, the Labouchere Amendment that followed on its heels by criminalizing the acts of “gross indecency” between men, and the 1895 trials of Oscar Wilde. Because of the punitive role of the legal discourse in defining “inversion,” a number of sexological writings, whether of a personal or “objectively” scientific nature, responded to these events by to typifying, describing, labeling, and issuing a plea for tolerance for (or the toleration of) the queer.
<26> More importantly, to use E. M. Forster’s phrase, “the unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort” (156) could not only speak (briefly and mainly in the courtroom) for himself, but to be spoken about with quasi-scientific facility and precision. The sexologists made a case either for or against the negative moral effect of “inversion” on the health of the middle-class family, or else explained its physiological origins, its key symptoms, both physical and affective, and the reasons for which inversion, unless practiced excessively, should be accepted and tolerated. Typically, the medical and psychological explanations all endeavor to name and to show the visible traits for the recognition of the “inverts,” to acknowledge inversion as a deviant but harmless phenomenon, and thus to oppose its legal prosecution.
<27> In Sexual Inversion, Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds make a distinctly medical comparison:
Symonds compares inversion to color-blindness; and such a comparison is reasonable. Just as the ordinary color-blind person is congenitally insensitive to those red-green rays which are precisely the most impressive to the normal eye…the invert fails to see emotional values patent to normal persons, transferring their values to emotional associations which for the rest of the world are utterly distinct. (101)
If the “inverts” cannot help their affliction, they can overcome the stigma of excess by being put to use, because of their unusual, but eminently recognizable, psychic, physical, and social qualities. In Homogenic Love and Its Place in a Free Society, for example, Carpenter, offers a function, at once pragmatic and utopian, for the instinctive, artistic nature of the male of this class, his sensitive spirit, his wavelike emotional temperament, combined with hardihood of intellect and body; and the frank, free nature of the female, her masculine independence and strength wedded to thoroughly feminine grace of form and manner” (51). The inverts, who have “a certain freemasonry of the secrets of the two sexes, ”can serve as “reconcilers and interpreters” between men and women (51). The logic of toleration, to which Warner alludes above, stems, then, from the idea of “ inversion” as an incurable (though occasionally preventable) condition, and from the possibility that the “inverts” will not upset the heteronormative equilibrium but help maintain it.
<28> To help the inverts redeem themselves and others, one must first be able to recognize them. To that end, Xavier Mayne, in Intersexes: A History of Simisexualism as a Problem in Social Life, offers a handy – in so many senses of the word - “do-it-yourself” questionnaire to determine the presence of the physical symptoms of inversion, in which he asks questions, such as:
Is your skin soft and fine, rough or thick, sensitive or not, clear or muddy? Are your skin and body, in general, strongly odorific? Especially when you are warm? – or of little or no odor at any time? Do you feel bodily pain especially of merely passing sort, with special plainness and nervousness? – as, for instance, a slight, sharp blow, a pinch, a cut, etc.? Do scars soon disappear? (qtd. in White 112)
Similarly, on the clinical list of Richard von Krafft-Ebbing’s “cerebral neuroses” is “antipathic sexuality,” that is, non-heterosexual desire, which “ [f]rom the clinical and anthropological standpoint…offers various grades of development,”from “traces of (psychic) hermaphrodisia” to “incipient inversion” and (in the final stage) “androgyny-gynandry” (19-21).
<29> Before I proceed with showing the novel’s critical response to these writings, a reservation must be made. As Laura Doan and Chris Waters write,
Some welcome the sexological creation of the homosexual for its powerful explanatory models of self-identity and its facilitation of a modern gay and lesbian subculture. Others, however, disparage sexology for the role it thought to have played in the stigmatizing and pathologizing of homosexual desire. (41)
It is important to acknowledge, as Doan and Walters do, the political gains made by the writings of the early gay rights activists, such as Carpenter, Symonds, or Hirschfield, to affirm the importance of the strategic uses of identity and the politics of difference today, and to recognize the undeniable cultural and political gains made by the popular visual texts I have critiqued in the introductory section of this essay.
<30> Going back to Doan and Water’s formulation, however, one cannot help but notice the powerful directness of their endorsement of sexology as a salubrious political tool and the concurrent ambiguity with which they express the other side of the issue: the role of sexology in essentializing identity and thus, sometimes unwittingly, re-inscribing the policing mechanisms. The passive voice and the past tense of the “thought to have played” communicate certain unwillingness to acknowledge both the anti-identitarian critique of sexology and, implicitly, the current strands of queer theory that pay a price in popularity for their resistance to what they consider the punishing and, ultimately, deluded, acts of naming. While showing no direct allegiance with the anti-identitarian struggles of queer theory, Leavitt’;s novel nonetheless makes a contribution to these struggles.
The Indian Clerk and the Failures of Identity
<31> As I have suggested in the preceding sections, the novelseeks to invalidate the taxonomizing effects of what Foucault calls scientia sexualis, or the “science of sexuality” (51). Its protagonist and occasional first-person narrator is the mathematician and Apostle Godfrey Harold Hardy, a Cambridge don, whose taste for rough trade and equal wariness of heterosexual domesticity and anal intercourse may have come directly from the pages of J. R. Ackerley’s memoirs or E. M. Forster’s novels. This portrayal itself may appear a cliché produced by a fin-de-siècle sexological study in “congenital inversion.”
<32> But throughout the novel, in an ironic reversal, which, I believe, is a method of critiquing the notion of identity, Hardy plays an amateur sexologist to his friends, lovers, and colleagues and attempts to define their “sexual orientation” definitively. He does so with the help of the standard fin-de-siècle toolbox. Primarily, in keeping with the postulates of sexology, Hardy espouses the view that sexuality can be known and named on the basis of highly visible characteristics and, as a result, congealed into an identity. While Hardy’s sexual research never gets meticulously medical, he operates under the assumption that psychic and visually obvious physical characteristics can help determine one’s sexuality. Inevitably, Hardy is either wide of the mark, or baffled by a lack of coherence between his assumptions and the “real” desires of the objects of his research. Hardy’s adventures in scientia sexualis vitiate the Victorian and Edwardian sexological principles by making the link between identities and practices aleatory and unstable, as well as by allowing for the existence of pre-identitarian practices and desires that cannot be defined either in the medical and scientific terms of “inversion,” or in the contemporary terms of “gay,” or, for that matter, “heterosexual,” identity. Not only does the novel undermine the Victorian and Edwardian sexual researches, but it also shows that such researches serve to support the dominant institutions of education, class, nationalism, and colonialism. By linking sexual taxonomies to these institutions, the novel undermines both.
<33> The protagonist/narrator of The Indian Clerk is one of the many characters with real-life prototypes in Leavitt’s densely populated novel. A Cambridge Apostle, Hardy is shaped by, and participates in, the contemporary debates on sexuality that took place both among the Apostles and outside of the society membership and Cambridge. “It is also common knowledge that most of the members of ‘that’ society are ‘that’ way,” the narrator states early on (16), with a characteristic reticence about being “ that way.” This sentence conveys the simultaneity of the presence of queer desire in early-twentieth-century Cambridge (“most of the members of ‘that’ society’) and the concomitant institutional effort to erase it (‘that’ way) from a society in which relations between men are still beyond the pale of the law.
<34> This depiction of Cambridge and the Apostles exemplifies Jim Nawrocki’s contention that
[w]hile The Indian Clerk is an examination of the architecture of human love, both platonic and erotic, on a deeper level it is also an indictment of conventionality in all of its forms. Leavitt depicts numerous unconventional erotic relationships (gay and straight) in the novel, but he seems even more intent on highlighting the ossified conventions of institutions. (“Attractive Numbers”)
One might add that the two modes of critique are profoundly intertwined. The hypocritical policing of non-heterosexual relationships is the subject of the novel’s commentary. While, as Hardy notes, “”[i]n Cambridge, it was common in those days for young men to be ‘inseparable,’ and to function as couples, and socialize as couples…” (73), the atmosphere of secrecy and fear hangs over the institution of learning. In Hardy’s Cambridge, as well as outside of the halls of the academy, heterosexual marriage is posited as the norm. Hardy’s reflections (and deflections) on his own and his colleague and friend’;s sexuality below illustrate the oppressiveness of institutional heteronormativity:
Littlewood has no wife. Both of them are fated to die bachelors, Hardy suspects: Littlewood because Mrs. Chase will never leave her husband, Hardy for rather more obvious reasons…The married, he has noticed, are forever trying to persuade Hardy to join their fellowship. They live to advertise that brand of conjugal domesticity to which they have pledged themselves. It wouldn’t be possible to collaborate with a married man, because a married man would always be noticing – questioning – that hardy himself isn’t married…Jackson – the weezy old classicist whose inexplicable fondness for him Littlewood feels as a sort of rush or eczema - puts his mouth to his ear…and whispers, ‘How can you stand working with him? A normal fellow like you.’ (58-9).
The passage interweaves multiple threads of institutional homophobia with the accompanying influence of the middle-class procreative familial ideologies: from silence about gay sexuality (“Hardy for rather more obvious reasons”), to the “normal” (from the point of view of sexology) Littlewood’;s physical revulsion to Jackson’s “inexplicable fondness” for him, and Jackson’;s own internalized homophobia, to the “ advertising” of heterosexual domesticity as a “brand,” itself redolent of Deleuze’;s commentary of capitalism and homogeneity.
<35> Even D. H. Lawrence, a notorious adversary of “selling” and “branding, ”who makes a brief appearance in Cambridge (and in the novel), expresses staggeringly homophobic views: “These horrible little frowsty people, men lovers of men, they give me a sense of corruption, almost of putrescence. They make me dream of black beetles” (231). However, Leavitt’s critique of implicit and explicit homophobia goes beyond announcing the oppressiveness of heterosexuality as an institution, or as a commercial “brand.” The novel’s most subtle anti-institutional and anti-homophobic strategy lies precisely in frustrating Hardy’s own attempts to “buy” the brand, or to deploy the very strategies of naming, or “branding,” that serve to marginalize and silence him. During the time in which the plot of the novel unfolds, the science of sexuality contributed to the branding of both “normal” and “perverse” behavior; Leavitt frustrates the protagonist’s complicity with its researches and, paradoxically, calls for silence, rather than naming.
<36> The pages of the novel are generously peppered by references to the famous queer Apostles, such as (Oscar) Browning, McTaggart, Bell, Moore (with whom the fictional Hardy is in love), Wittgenstein, Békássy, Strachey, Lowes-Dickinson, and Keynes, thereby setting the scene for the discussion of sexuality at a crucial socio-historical moment. [9] Speaking in “The Harvard Lecture” section of the novel, Hardy acknowledges the science of sexuality (that spilled over into the popular media of the day) directly: “Over the years I had heard many newspaper articles decrying what the doctors had just then started calling 'homosexuality,' complaining of its prevalence and making predictions that if the 'disposition' already 'on the rise,' should continue to 'spread,' the human race itself would risk extinction” (100).
<37> Hardy thinks of his own sexuality, rather predictably, in the context of the trials of Oscar Wilde, to whose work he had been introduced by Oscar Browning. Hardy is keenly interested in Wilde’s life and writing:
At this stage in his life, Hardy knew little of Wilde beyond what rumors had managed to slip through the fortifications that his Winchester masters had erected to protect their charges from news of the trials. Now he asked [Oscar Browning] to tell him the whole story, and O.B. obliged: the glory days, Bosie's perfidy, the notorious testimony of hotel maids… O.B. loaned Hardy The Decay of Lying…He devoured the book, and afterward copied out, in his elegant hand, a passage that had made a particularly strong impression on him: ‘Art never expresses anything but itself.’ (26-7)
The description of Hardy’s personal and intellectual connection to Wilde reflects the limitations of identity politics, since it creates an identification only to undo it immediately. Coming of age in the early twentieth century, Hardy identifies with Oscar Wilde as a model of gay manhood and martyrdom. The connection to Wilde, as well as to his trials, now widely known as an instance of the practice-to-species transition described by Foucault, is almost too obvious, except that, of the entire body of Wilde’s work, Hardy is introduced to, and becomes enthralled with, The Decay of Lying, Wilde’s famously anti-identitarian, anti-ideological work. Hardy does not read and re-read Salomé, or the notorious trial speech about Michelangelo and Shakespeare, or Bosie’s “Two Loves,”or the Lippincott version of Dorian Gray, with its explicit references to love between men.
<38> Instead, he falls under the spell of Wilde’s attack on the Victorian truths (including the truth of stable selfhood) and pieties in the manifesto of art for art’s sake. While Wilde’s trials created a principal identity for Wilde as a gay man and writer, The Decay of Lying, several years before the trial, had advocated the erasure of essentialism, privileged “ the telling of beautiful untrue things” (943), derided all things “natural,” and satirized the representational and moral claims of realism. The famous aphorism, “ Art never expresses anything but itself,” particularly resonant for Hardy the mathematician, becomes, for the novel, a meta-fictional credo of sorts that undermines the “truth” of Hardy’;s location of a stable identity in the public persona and legal predicament of Oscar Wilde, prosecuted for what Hardy’s fellow Apostle John McTaggart calls “lower sodomy” (29). The mention of Wilde is requisite, given the setting and themes of the novel, and the dialogical structure of the text certainly echoes the homoerotic/homosocial intellectual exchange of Cambridge, to which Hardy and other Apostles had been habituated. Yet, in the Wildean vein of resisting reductive “truths,” the reference to The Decay of Lying undoes its own ostensible purpose.
<39> Hardy, whom his friend and scholarly collaborator, Littlewood, calls a “non-practicing homosexual” (59) (a phrase cunning in its non-fusion of practice and identity) is portrayed as a something of a fin-de-siècle commonplace: in his youth, his love for the philosopher George Moore is unrequited; he then has a long relationship with the Cambridge classicist Gaye, who commits suicide, partly because Hardy does not fully reciprocate his love. The relationship with Gaye, though presumably not platonic, is never described in explicitly erotic terms. During the war, however, Hardy has a series of sexual encounters with J. R. Thayer, a working-class soldier on leave from the front. The description of their “tea” is a by-the-numbers account of the Edwardian sexual and class politics, which Leavitt has previously depicted similarly in While England Sleeps.
<40> The reversal technique positions Hardy not as an object of sexological inquiry, but, rather, as a researching and taxonomizing subject. The description of the encounter underscores the tenuousness of the link between practices and identities, which sexology sought to render strong and permanent. Hardy attempts to deploy the understanding of queer sexuality that he had apparently internalized from the contemporary sexological writings, but Thayer’s desire and his behavior before and after sex confuse and demolish his presuppositions. The preparation for the encounter is a humorous nod to Hardy’s habit of taking linguistic designations literally, without a trace of irony, a habit which spills over into the realm of sexuality and accounts for his fondness for identitarian labels. In a coded letter from the front, Thayer asks to meet for “tea,” and “[t]he first time Hardy was anxious; he actually took the trouble to purchase biscuits, to boil water and put out the tea things, all of which turned out quite unnecessary” (306).
<41> The expressions of Thayer’s desire confound Hardy, who holds fast to the familiar turn-of-the-century views on the sexuality of working-class men:
That Thayer, as it turned out, wanted to be buggered came as no surprise. Keynes had alerted him to the curious fact that nearly all the soldiers home on leave wanted, when they met up with queers, to take the passive role. ‘Mind you, I’m not complaining,’ Keynes said, ‘only it does strike one as a bit strange, doesn’t it? I’d have thought they’d want to do the buggering, so that they could tell themselves they weren’t ‘really’ queer…- but no.’… It was as if, after so many weeks in the trenches, after taking lives and nearly dying, they required a more extreme variety of erotic stimulation than ordinary intercourse could provide. (307)
Hardy approaches the matters of desire as “curious fact[s],” ones that need a careful economic, scientific, and psychological explanation; the tone here is distinctly scholarly, somewhat pedantic. Hardy’;s need for objective inquiry and knowledge of desire is such that he is calling on the practical and scholarly authority of his famous economist friend. His analysis of Thayer’s behavior is in line with the turn-of-the-century distinction between “congenital” middle-class “inverts” or “queers,” who assume the “passive” sexual position, and the polymorphously perverse, but sexually dominant working class men, “corrupted” or pushed into prostitution by need. After the first “tea,” following precisely such a pseudo-socioeconomic logic, Hardy wishes to pay Thayer, who vehemently rejects the money, thus muddling his lover’s notion that desire is coterminous with a monetary transaction.
<42> Similarly, if we are to include early psychoanalysis in the science of sexuality unconditionally (an inclusion that, as I have noted, I still find problematic), the early psychoanalytic equation of passivity with femininity and activity with masculinity [10] plays a part in Hardy’s attempt to understand and classify Thayer’s sexuality. The explanation of Thayer’s desire to be penetrated is complex in its simultaneous wish to uphold and demolish the early-twentieth-century sexual knowledges, and the narrative ambiguity adds to the complexity. The need to couch Thayer’s wish to experience what Bersani calls “the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman” (18) in the language of wartime trauma is a species of psychological sexual knowledge, a perfunctory explanation of a sudden, inexplicably queer behavior on the part of a “manly” soldier, who is about to marry and to have a child.
<43> And yet, because the third-person narrative voice, here and elsewhere, assumes mostly Hardy’s rather confused perspective, Thayer’s desire ultimately cannot be known. Thayer’s hankering for the “more than ordinary” intercourse is finally not explained by, nor does it itself explain - an airtight, permanent connection between sexuality and selfhood. Moreover, if represented as an abreactive reenactment of battlefield trauma, Thayer’;s destructive desire evokes Bersani’s later idea of sex as anti-identitarian self-shattering, or of Edelman’s reading of the anti-teleological death drive that renders the naming of sexuality impossible, even more than it does a Foucauldian critique of sexology. [11]
<44> Hardy’s first-time participation in the ultimate act of “gross indecency” raises, in his own mind, questions about his own sexuality:
Nor was Hardy unwilling to oblige when Thayer got on his knees and thrust his rear end in the air—this despite the fact that, though he admitted it to none of his friends (not even Keynes), he had never actually engaged in buggery before, his sexual repertoire having been limited to some of the various unnamed 'acts of gross indecency' that the law punished with a less severe sentence. (306)
In an ironic gesture that turns upside down that practice-identity sequence, Hardy is ashamed of never having engaged in “buggery.” Hardy’s enjoyment of, and skill in, penetrating Thayer makes him consider “having it off with a woman” (306) for a brief moment, after which he changes his mind. Like the failed explanation of Thayer’s desire, Hardy’s thoughts evince confusion, rather than clarity sought by sexological taxonomies. But while the way in which he correlates his delight in being a top with heterosexuality goes back to the same, vaguely homophobic, presuppositions about passivity, activity, and gender binaries that had guided his thinking about Thayer, it also suggests a certain pre-identitarian fluidity of sexuality and agency that is not inhibited by the facile sexological explanation of “congenital inversion.” It is the very simultaneity of these currents of thought that resists the labeling of sexuality attached to a coherent self, or comprehended through an apparently coherent explanation.
<45> Resonant with Nawrocki’s point regarding Leavitt’s condemnation of “ossified” social institutions, and with the ways in which the institutions are linked to erotic encounters, the sexual and economic exchange between Hardy and Thayer is a commentary not only on the impossibility of classifying sexuality, but also on the unspoken assumptions about class and warfare in which this exchange is couched. As Jeffrey Weeks has noted, staring in the nineteenth-century, “the imagery of class has become a key element in sexual fantasy” (36). The self-shattering desire that erupts in the passage, like the inevitable, and awkward, offer of a financial remuneration, is structured as more than a fantasy A rigid class hierarchy does not explain or classify desire or sexual identity, as Hardy imagines, but it sets in motion a designation-destroying sexual act and the erasure of identity; it also re-inscribes the fundamental differences between the two characters and their inability to maintain a relationship outside of a phantasmatic exchange.
<46> Socio-economic hierarchies come into play in the novel’s discussion of war, patriotism, and pacifism. During the First World War, an even which takes up a considerable part of the narrative, Hardy’s narrative condemns “the hatred on the Other, on which the war’s popularity depended” (259). He defines the voluntary participation of young Cambridge men in the war as a passageway to manhood:
Rupert Brooke, thanks to Eddie Marsh’s intervention has got himself a commission in Churchill’s Royal Naval Division…Békássy is in Hungary, Wittgenstein in Austria. It doesn’;t matter is that they’re fighting on the other side. What matters is that each is defending the fatherland, and, in doing so, taking part in some exalted, immemorial rite of manhood (211-12).
Patriotism and patriarchal notions of masculinity and aggression are under attack here. Young upper-middle-class gay intellectuals’ imitation of the “immemorial rite of manhood” causes Hardy’s displeasure.
<47> Conversely, however, because of his class, Thayer’s conscription and participation in the war, as well as the psychological trauma that he re-enacts in the act of penetration, is not a matter of choice and agency. While visiting his lover at the hospital, Hardy observes how “[m]en moaned and wailed and asked for cigarettes” (226). After a while, Hardy admits that he “could not bear to visit the hospital anymore, for fear of witnessing too much suffering” (227). In front of him are the reified, non-sexual representations of self-shattering, identitarian and bodily decomposition and abnegation, which call to mind Deleuze’s notion of transcending the organism. Hardy depicts Thayer’s very return to the front as an act that erases the young man’;s personhood in much the same way that, momentarily, their sexual encounter does:
Thayer did not, in the end, lose his leg…A month or so later, he sent me one of those horrible form letters that the government issued to the soldiers in those days, with the line checked off that read “I am being sent down to the base. Letters follow at first opportunity.” Only his signature at the bottom – J. R. Thayer – indicated any connection between the form and the lad who had filled it out. (227)
The governmental letter is itself agency-destroying. The situational, accidental bottom, Thayer, whose full name we incidentally never find out, is only identified by an empty signifier of signature at the bottom of a letter. Just as the sexual act between Thayer and Hardy functions to devastate identity, the narratives of war, class, and nationalism deprive the young soldier of an agency by reducing him to a set of letters. Such a link between the sexual and the social stresses the novel’s investment in the critique of institutions, as well as in unsettling reductive sexual identity politics.
***
<48> On one remarkable occasion, Hardy draws a comparison between a class Other, Thayer, and a national/racial Other, S. Ramanujan. Referring to his lover’s prolonged stay at the front, Hardy expresses his dismay and sadness:
And the amazing thing was that they never let him go. They would break him, and send him home for repair, and break him again. In much the same way, I realized later, we broke Ramanujan, and patched him together again, and broke him again, until we had squeezed all the use we could out of him. Until we could manage no more. Only then did we let him go home. (340)
Just as Thayer becomes the victim of warfare and of what Hardy terms “the hatred of the Other,” so, too, Ramanujan, the colonial subject, is undone, both physically and psychologically, by the demands of his stay in England and by the continuous scrutiny of the colonial(ist) academic establishment. The effort to own and to taxonomize the subaltern’s body and sexuality is thematized, throughout the novel, by the gaze. The British hosts, including Hardy, engage in a considerable amount of looking and seeing, in order to define and identify their guest. His strategy of resistance is deflecting the gaze and not speaking, in order to subvert the identitarian projections.
<49> From the outset of his stay in Cambridge and London, which, ultimately, leads to illness and death, Ramanujan is subjected to caricaturizing observations and to the unrelenting colonizing gaze:
There are regular dinners, to which a variety of Trinity luminaries are invited so that they can lay eyes, at last, upon the ‘Hindoo calculator,’ as one of the newspapers has recently dubbed him…That said, it rather annoys Hardy the degree to which they treat him, at least when others were present, as theirs, an intelligent pet ape in the process of being trained to act like a man. And look! Tonight, as a treat for an ape, we shall dine on bananas! (144-5)
The novel presents the dinner at the Nevilles’, Ramanujan’s Cambridge hosts, from the point of view of Hardy, who attempts to be sympathetic. He notices that Ramanujan, “an intelligent pet ape,” or the “Hindoo calculator,” is both infantilized and dehumanized by the scrutiny. Nonetheless, Hardy himself is not only put off by unfamiliar-sounding Indian names (275), or puzzled by Ramanujan’s reluctance to use a fork (140), but he is also guilty of subjecting Ramanujan to his own brand of a colonizing gaze, the purpose of which is to bring up the Indian mathematician to the Western standards of gender and sexual conformity, or, at least, legibility. The colonizing, racialized gaze is an additional intersection between sexuality and the institutions in the novel.
<50> Though, at times, Hardy’s own sexuality resists easy designations, he is invested in, and is comforted by, the recognition and labeling of the sexuality of others, particularly that of his Indian colleague. By virtue of his stubborn silence, I designate Ramanujan as the queer subaltern figures, who resists (not obviously and vocally, for being vocal and obvious presupposes the use of a vocabulary) the imposition of Western gender and sexual labels invented and proliferated by the science of sexuality. The novel takes a certain risk by making the colonial subject silent, but this strategy is, ultimately, itself decolonizing, because it prevents the metropolitan characters from conferring, or confirming, Western sexual and gender constructs.
<51> Leavitt’s characterization of the queer subaltern Ramanujan as a silent “blank screen” (“The Indian Clerk”) is therefore not a means of disempowering him, but, rather, a part of the novel’s strategic resistance to sexual taxonomies.
Hardy, ever the purveyor of visible taxonomies, tries, as much as he can, to see Ramanujan. Standing in shadowed profile…he might be the silhouette of a Victorian gentleman, cut from black paper and pasted against a white ground. Restraint and discipline, a certain aloofness, or perhaps even elusiveness: these are his most distinguishing traits. Except when they are talking about mathematics, he barely speaks except when spoken to, and when he is questioned, almost always answers by dipping into what Hardy envisages as a reserve of stock replies…He is, after all, in English clothes and on English land, and still Hardy can’t begin to penetrate his carapace of cultivated inscrutability. (Leavitt 177)
Scrutiny, or reaching for the “truth,” means, in Western terms, thrown into relief by Foucault’;s critique of the science of sexuality, achieving an understanding of what (and why) Ramanujan does or does not do with his, or somebody elses, body. Ramanujan mounts resistance to the efforts to pin down his identity by “barely speak[ing]” and by defiantly maintaining the “carapace of cultivated inscrutability.”
<52> Here, for example, Hardy, who speaks in the first person, investigates Ramanujan’s complex relationship with his wife, Janaki, whom he had left behind in India:
According to Mr. Anantharaman, Ramanujan knew no “conjugal happiness” with Janaki…Yet Mr. Anantharaman also reminds me that shortly before his marriage, Ramanujan was operated on for a hydrocele – a swelling of the scrotum due to the build-up of serous fluids… I cannot tell you whether Ramanujan regarded this enforced abstinence, whatever its cause, as a curse or a blessing. (412)
A desire for knowledge, or for the knowledge of desire, is behind Hardy’s attempt to figure out Ramanujan, whose celibacy, impossible to comprehend, must be attributed to a physical sickness or his lack of a particularized sexuality. It is never entirely clear whether Hardy desires Ramanujan, but he looks for a way to identify with him. Hardy produces a colonialist sexual taxonomy by pegging Ramanujan, visually, for someone who “…is not very interested in women, from what I can see” (150). Here is that “see” again, which also appears above in italics. Understanding, after all, requires seeing, and seeing produces a vocabulary. A vocabulary, in turn, would make Ramanujan more acceptable, or tolerable, as an outsider.
<53> Towards the of his colleague’s life, Hardy sees him as himself, not only as a “Victorian gentleman,” but also as a Western gay man. Ramanujan winds up in police custody after a suicide attempt, and Hardy’s mind goes to an explanation that contains the kind of clarity that only identity and identification can provide. The identity, in turn, is constructed and congealed, once again, by the legal discourses of “gross indecency” of the pre-Wolfenden-Report England: [12]
Importuning – that’s the first though that enters Hardy’s mind. Suddenly, he imagines Ramanujan in one of the notorious public toilets near Piccadilly Circus, the ones Norton had told him about, but which he’s never dared visit. Is it only because his own longing has drawn him, time and again, to walk past those urinals, that he sees Ramanujan standing at one, reaching out his hand to touch the trousers of a plainclothes officer? (430)
Ramanujan, who always keeps silent, with the exception of polite “department store replies” (181) that infuriate Hardy, never plays along with the effort to “see” or hear him. Hardy’s efforts to understand Ramanujan’s desire are doomed.
<54> Hardy is not the only character who produces colonial taxonomies. Alice Neville, the wife of one of Hardy’s Cambridge colleagues, who hosts the Indian mathematician at her home, initially sees him “ as a closed door behind which lie untold treasures. Things she cannot guess at. Mysterious Eastern lovemaking techniques, and occult lore, and a certain ancient wisdom” (191). When Alice attempts to seduce Ramajunan, he “would neither encourage nor discourage her… And he doesn’t speak. He doesn’t even move“ (253). Alice’s decidedly Richard Burton-esque fantasies are met with silence. This silence, instead of encouraging the sexual projections on Ramanujan’s blank screen of a body, effectively renders these projections pointless. As Kwai-Cheung Lo notes, the Euro-American narrative of male sexuality pushes the Asian male into the embrace of a white woman, paradoxically, in order to facilitate his escape from colonial oppression (130-1). Here, however, Ramanujan counters such a hegemonic narrative both by refusing Alice’s advances and, even more importantly, by rejecting the opportunity to articulate his desire, or lack thereof, in Western terms. His is not a subaltern desire “ that dare not speak its name”; it is, rather, one that, by not speaking, dares others to name it and to fail.
***
<55> “You can never be sure,” says Littlewood to Hardy, after the latter makes yet another effort to know Ramanujan’s sexuality and to assert that the Indian guest does not appear to like women (150). Causing uncertainty, or disrupting the existing epistemological frameworks, is, according to this novel, the only possible function of sexuality. The interdiction “not to be sure,” or not to attempt to get at a definite “sexual identity,” is directed at the novel’s queer protagonist. The irony inherent in this rhetorical gesture suggests that the very act of knowing, or enforcing speech, already contains in itself the attempt to normalize and to taxonomize.
Notes
[1] This essay addresses primarily the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century (during which the novel is set). My argument is that The Indian Clerk, itself a product of the turn of the twentieth century, critiques sexual taxonomies that emerged during the fin‐de‐siècle and that still contribute to our contemporary urge to know and to create sexual identities. Nonetheless, the two turn‐of‐the‐century periods should not be conflated: both the title and the better part of the argument refer to the earlier one.
[2] I am cognizant, of course, of Foucault’s problem with the “repressive hypothesis” and with the related idea of reverse discourse. In his critique of the repressive hypothesis, Foucault claims that the notion of repressed sexuality is largely false, and that sexological writings, including those serving ostensibly liberatory purposes, created the urgency to talk about sexuality, to define it, and to place it at the core of selfhood. Reverse discourse enabled LGBT sexuality to speak of itself as an identity and therefore both to undermine and to participate in the structures power, broadly conceived. For detailed discussions of Foucault’s thinking about the complexities and consequences of sexual science in The History of Sexuality, see Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science: The History of Attitudes to Sexuality (eds. Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich), Joseph Bristow’s Sexuality, and Jeffrey Weeks’s work, particularly “History, Desire and Identities” in Conceiving Sexuality: Approaches to Sex Research in Postmodern World (eds. Richard G. Parker and John G. Gagnon). The novel, like Foucault’s work, seems to me to be wary of both the repressive hypothesis and the reverse discourse, as well as of the resulting constricting sexual taxonomies and knowledges.
[3] Here and above, I am referencing Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Volume I, especially the “Scientia Sexualis” section, in which Foucault critiques precisely the kind of sexological writing that Leavitt deploys and parodies in his novel. In her new book, Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory, Lynne Huffer offers to “requeer” Foucault by focusing not on The History of Sexuality Volume I, but, rather on the History of Madness. She explains that, due to the subtleties of the French original lost in translation, queer theorists misread the last statement as “a definitive statement about sodomitical acts becoming homosexual identity in the nineteenth century” (70). Foucault’s idea of “personnage” (71), she argues further, has nothing to do with the American concept of identity; the personnage stands for freedom and agency, whereas identity stands for indiscriminate group belonging (70‐71). Precisely because of Huffer’s statement that Foucault does not accept identity politics in the Anglo‐American sense, with which I concur, it becomes even more urgent to show the ways in which Leavitt’s novel critiques the latter view of identity, thereby separating itself from the Anglo‐American tradition of gay male writing.
[4] In relation to Deleuze’s resistance to sexual identities, I also find Tamsin Lorraine’s comments on Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of “faciality function” relevant to my argument. In particular, Lorraine notes that “[s]exed and gendered identities are crucial to the stabilizing identifications required by the faciality machines…and thus “totalize[] a self that can be ranked with respect to the majoritarian subject” (64‐5). Similarly, I argue that rendering a queer subject visible according to particular physical taxonomies renders this subject “palatable” to the heteronormative, “majoritarian” gaze.
[5] See Sinfield’s essay “Stephen Spender’s Bit of Rough: Some Arguments on Art, AIDS, and Subculture.”
[6] See Bersani and Philips’s Intimacies and Tim Dean’s Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking.
[7] I am aware of the deployment of strategically essentialist identity (which is also aware of its totalizing essentialism) in the classic subaltern theory, as a way of producing a politically and historically viable subjectivity. I would build on, and modify, this method by suggesting that the silence and the refusal, especially in Ramanujan’s case, to speak up, even in a self‐aware fashion, is what makes the subaltern here stubbornly queer (or silent) and thus resistant even to a temporary or contingent vocabulary of sexuality.
[8] In Mad for Foucault, Lynne Huffer draws attention the tendency of contemporary queer theory to fuse Freud and Foucault or to suggest that Foucault somehow excludes Freud and psychoanalysis in general from his criticism of the science of sexuality (163‐179). Her critique centers in particular on Christopher Lane and Tim Dean’s introduction to their edited collection Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis. Here, I express a reservation regarding Foucault’s censure of Freud not because contemporary critical theory tends to do so, but because of Freud’s own often anti‐identitarian stance and his assertion that sexuality is fluid and contingent, which, for example, is made quite explicitly at the beginning of the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Specifically, Freud (1896) writes that “[t]he relation between these [sexual] deviations and what is assumed (my italics) to be normal requires thorough investigation” (240) and “…that the choice between ‘innate’ and ‘acquired’ [inversion] is not an exclusive one or that it does not cover all the issues involved in inversion” (243). While the language of the Three Essays is distinctly scientific, Freud here takes a decidedly more thoughtful and flexible approach to the inversion/norm dichotomy than other sexologists of the time. The statements above even point to his effort to collapse or erase this duality.
[9] For the history of the Apostles, see both Robert Deacon’s The Cambridge Apostles: A History of Cambridge University’s Elite Intellectual Secret Society and William Lubenow’s The Cambridge Apostles, 1820‐1914: Liberalism, Imagination, and Friendship in British Intellectual and Professional Life. Deacon’s book considers the significance of the queer Apostles for the group in a more detailed manner, though I find the way in which he addresses the Apostles’ sexuality highly problematic.
[10] See, for example Freud’s “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis” (the case history of “The Wolf Man”), in which he writes that his subject “…discovered the vagina and the biological significance of masculine and feminine. He understood that active was the same as masculine, while passive was the same as feminine” (204).
[11] I am specifically thinking, again, of Leo Bersani’s analysis of self‐shattering in Homos and of Lee Edelman’s recent paper, “Unnamed: Eve’s Epistemology,” which appeared in the Summer 2010 issue of Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts. As its title suggests, the paper responds to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s preface to Epistemology of the Closet, which, according to Edelman, unwittingly seeks to name and know queer male sexuality, despite the very critique of naming and knowing that is at the center of the book. It is precisely such knowing of desire that The Indian Clerk parodies and rejects. I recognize that I am applying contemporary queer theoretically terms to a period in which they did not exist; however, the text at hand is contemporary, and queer theory generally allows for trans‐historical applications, which can work against identitarian specificity.
[12] The 1957 report led to the decriminalization of consensual sexual acts between adult men in England.
Work Cited
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