Queer Times, Queer Becomings

“My Spirit’s Posthumeity” and the Sleeper’s Outflung Hand: Queer Transmission in Absalom, Absalom!

“My Spirit’s Posthumeity” and the Sleeper’s Outflung Hand Queer Transmission in Absalom, Absalom! Kevin Ohi Writers who confront the question of tradition frequently imagine a paradoxical object of transmission and in their reflections on cultural inheritance turn less often to preservation than to loss: writings lost or of equivocal provenance, texts reduced to fragments, epoch-making encounters that fail to take place, tantalizing details left unrecorded by unobservant contemporaries , receptions of texts inalterably shaped by misreading, and pedagogy thwarted by incompetent teachers or by distracted students. Such scenes of thwarted transmission are, for these writers, far from exceptional events in the history of literature, and are far from mere regrettable accidents to which any artifact of human cognition is subject insofar as its preservation depends on the contingences of its material existence. Rather, such scenes raise the question of what constitutes literary knowledge, and whether it can properly be said to be an “object” to be transmitted, preserved, or, on the contrary, lost. For such texts suggest that thwarted transmission is synonymous with the literary tradition as such.1 The larger project from which this essay is drawn suggests that literary tradition, when understood as synonymous with failed tradition, is the site of queer eroticism. For anyone seeking to unveil the homoerotic subtext of Absalom, Absalom!, the first challenge would be to make that unveiling seem as startling as its almost total neglect by the novel’s critics suggests it ought 205 206 KEVIN OHI to be.2 Such thematics are hardly a subtext; to notice them, it suffices to attend to the letter of the text. Among many other such moments: “Because Henry loved Bon. He repudiated blood birthright and material security for his sake. . . . Because he loved Bon . . . he (Henry) who could not say to his friend, I did that for love of you; do this for love of me” (71–72); “Yes, he loved Bon, who seduced him as surely as he seduced Judith” (76). It is open to a reader to understand such lines in a context so thoroughly marked by homophobic presumptions that the love that dare not speak its name is free volubly to speak its name because that name can safely be assumed to name something else. Yet the forthrightness makes one suspect that one isn’t in such a context at all, just as one almost dares to ask oneself, as Shreve feels Quentin shaking in bed, how many beds they have (or use) in their Harvard dorm room (288). (The other boys in The Sound and the Fury call Shreve Quentin’s “husband” [78]; that the earlier novel seems to understand that as a comment on Quentin’s conflicted relation to female sexuality and on the consequent disruption, for him, of homosocial relations, does not make the knowingness there any simpler to understand.) Where heterosexuality in Absalom, Absalom! is nearly always thwarted, male same-sex love affairs are remarkable for not seeming particularly unrequited: Henry and Bon have a good six years together, and Shreve and Quentin, something between a long evening and 103 years. It takes a cultivated obliviousness to fail to notice that a good dorm-room story—for Shreve anyway—is best heard (and told) naked; the novel continually reminds us of Shreve’s noctilucent flesh, and of the fact that, to our gaze on their conversation, he almost always looks nude. For Quentin, too, the culmination of the story involves taking off his clothes: “then he was lying on the bed, naked, swabbing his body steadily with his discarded shirt, sweating still, panting” (298). The markers of time—“sweating still,” “then he was”—are perhaps more central to the queer eroticism of Absalom, Absalom! than either Shreve’s “naked torso pink-gleaming and baby-smooth, cherubic, almost hairless” or Quentin’s naked, sweating, panting body. Absalom, Absalom! is a love story—several such—between men; if one sometimes suspects that the pyrotechnics of the novel’s historical scope and its telling of the bloody history of a continent were merely the occasion for two roommates to express their love in their lamplit Cambridge dorm room, this love is inextricable from that bloody history, from the telling itself, and from the intertwining of the telling with the story told. That intertwining prevents the homoeroticism from being merely thematic: a story about two boys in love (Charles Bon and Henry Sutpen) 207 “MY SPIRIT’S...