Transparent Figures

Heather Love’s Feeling Backward contributes a perspicuous and often eloquent set of literary analyses to the ever-fomenting discourse of queer negativity. Love’s study complicates (rather than reconsolidates or differently hypostasizes) a possible politics of negative feeling, in part to the extent that its theoretical vocabulary adheres to (rather than anticipates) the particularities of the authors at hand. Through readings of Walter Pater, Willa Cather, Radclyffe Hall, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, Love argues for a politics capable of preserving and learning from the contretemps that make such a politics necessary in the first place.

Feeling Backward arises from Love’s troubled sense that queer studies has inoculated or alchemized an archive of negativity, thereby emptying that past, that “queer history,” of the negative qualities by which it was constituted. Despite the dexterity of Love’s local arguments, the specific occasion for Love’s intervention feels less persuasive, more familiar. The book’s opening gambit is to claim that “many contemporary critics dismiss negative or dark representations entirely, arguing that the depiction of same-sex love as impossible, tragic, and doomed to failure is purely ideological” (1). Feeling Backward is peppered with formulations such as “contemporary critics,” “recent critics,” “a long [critical] tradition,” but when it comes to those critics and participants of queer studies who imagine “utopian desires . . . at the heart of the collective project of queer studies and integral to the history of gay and lesbian identity” (3), these critics go unnamed. Does it go without saying that we know who these critics are?

Love is not alone in conjuring this spectral queer “utopian” critic (I think, for instance, of the work of Ann Cvetkovich, Lee Edelman, and David Eng, whom Love cites as influences). But Love’s readings are strong enough on their own not to require the straw figure of a sort of criticism that doesn’t (as far as I’m concerned) so self-explanatorily exist. This is to say that Feeling Backward feels most persuasive as a complication of negativity’s own terrain rather than as an intervention in the mirage of utopian queer thinking — which may at most be analogous but by no means equivalent to an “upgrade in gay, lesbian, and transgender life in the United States during the last couple of decades” (189).

The pas de deux between thought and action — texts and lives — recurrently strikes me as one of this study’s most interestingly undertheorized sites. It is interesting, as opposed to debilitating, insofar as this dance is Feeling Backward’s theoretical and methodological heart. How to learn from the relationships between characters (or authors and characters, or authors and readers, etc.)? How to move from the rhetorical to the ontological when Love seeks even in the moment of movement to recalibrate the terms and conditions of both categories?

Sometimes, as in her tendency to describe her book’s terrain as modernism’s “dark side” (4) — a formulation that conjures a queer Darth Vader (as though Darth Vader weren’t already queer) — Love admits that her archive of negativity is ineluctably, rhetorically imbued. Love likewise telegraphically suggests that feeling backward is itself a “figure of figuration” (5). Other times, however — as in her claim that “sometimes damage is just damage” (27) — Feeling Backward intimates a preference for the nonrhetorically tautological over the rhetorically transformative. What does it mean for damage to be “just damage”?

That a referent and its referend could “just” align themselves with each other overlooks the extent to which these readings are predicated on “figures of figuration.” If we are speaking of loss at the level of text (which seems safe enough a guess, given the book’s literary provenance), then the slippage or nonslippage of referents does seem a pertinent issue. Feeling Backward tries to have it both ways (figure of figuration/damage = damage) by positing “figures of backwardness as allegories of queer historical experience” (5). Without, however, a keener sense of figuration (not to mention allegory), I am left wishing for more explicit an account of...