The Melancholy of Literature; Or the Discredit of Holding On

THE MELANCHOLY OF LITERATURE; OR THE DISCREDIT OF HOLDING ON BRAD EPPS Harvard University 1. Fame, Theory, and Pedagogical Practice "The constitutive identifications of an autobiographical narrative are always partially fabricated in the telling" Judith Butler, Gender Trouble A queer thing happened on the way to a conference in London a couple of years ago.1 The day before I was to leave, a student, slurping a cone of runny ice cream, appeared at my office and, with an impish grin on his face, asked me to save him from Judith Butler. So interpellated, I barely had time to ponder how to perform —short of smiling rather impishly in return. For even as Butler's name was ringing in my ears, I was hearing that salvation, as it were, lay not so much through me as through literature, or more precisely, through the study ofliterature under my direction. The student had identified his object ofinterest, moreover, as French and British literature ofsame-sex desire. However parodically, he had also identified me as one ofa handful ofprofessors working on literature and same-sex desire at "our" university and as someone who was supposedly not, any longer, in theory's thrall. Judith Butler —in the repudiation of whose name he hoped to bring us together— was merely a symptom, for him, of a star-studded, extraordinarily daunting, willfully complex phenomenon known, in the academy, as theory, the turgid cousin ofcultural studies and its uneasy attendants, queer, post-colonial, and subaltern studies. I was a symptom too, read by "my" student (for I did indeed take him on) as lying on the other side of the much-ballyhooed divide between literature andtheory. Afew public, half-serious declarations by me, since increased, to the effect that I had grown weary oftheory had come back to haunt me, and to haunt me as yet more work. Interpellated as a defender of literature and, in the same blush, as a gay man (only intermittently queer), I found that it mattered little© 2000-2001 NUEVO TEXTO CRITICO Vol. XIII-XIVNo. 25/28 58______________________________________________________BRAD EPPS how I pondered my performance: I was performing already. Performing what was, at least in part, another's performance, I learned that should I respond favorably to the student's plea, I could even teach what he had heard I was wont to teach: same-sex desire in Spanish, Latin American, and even Catalan literature. Now, in an academic system that often as not divides literature and culture and that divides them, furthermore, along national and linguistic lines, even in order to "compare" them, it is instructive that something else is perceived by our students as being at play. Simply put, I am not, in the eyes ofthis student and many others, a Hispanist, Peninsularist, or LatinAmericanist —international, metropolitan , parochial, or otherwise— but someone who is openly gay and who reflects on gayness, studies it, in and around literature. That I expend my energies on the study of Spain and Latin America, or Catalunya and Cuba, or on art, architecture, urbanism, immigration, or theory too, that I have read Butler and benefited from reading her, is for such students less critical than other things. Ifthere is a "nation" here, it is of a decidedly queer sort: a troublingly, ideally inflected transnational community ofhistorically marginalized sexual subjects that come together, ostensibly , through a complex interplay of oppression and resistance, laws and habits, travels and translations, bodies and pleasures. My interest and investment in Hispanism —it too an ideality that suffers from, yet also enjoys and exploits, relative marginalization in the United States— was to the student in question oflittle if any consequence. The student, whom I had never met and who knows neither Spanish nor Catalan, had heard, as I have said, something about me that presumably outstripped established disciplinary parameters and departmental divisions. Presumably, I say, for the student was quite familiar with other parameters and divisions, newer and arguably more stylish, which, though yet to be officially recognized at many universities, Harvard included, have proven quite fruitful: queer theory, gay and lesbian studies, transgender studies, and so on. He was also familiar with much that characterizes, or caricaturizes, those working within these...