Queer Love Come Undone

In Unmaking Love: The Contemporary Novel and the Impossibility of Union (2017), Ashley T. Shelden brings together a diverse archive of modernist and contemporary novels to "account for love" with a difference, exploring narratives of heterosexual and same-sex romance from across the long twentieth century (1). Indebted to the antisocial thesis within queer theory, which shines a light on the importance of negation, failure, and desubjectivization in love relationships, Unmaking Love expands our understanding of the role of negativity in reconceiving love beyond an idealized fantasy of transcendent union. Foundational to her argument is the contention that "queer love does not name homosexual attachments; instead, it marks social forms that are deformed, affective bonds that do not bind, and social structures that threaten to come undone" (2). Shelden engages current debates over the potential universality of queer theory's rejection of categorical, humanistic notions of the self, pointing to a broader, anti-identitarian definition of queerness that signifies a wide constellation of "social forms that are deformed." Unmaking Love employs post-structuralist, psychoanalytic, and narrative theory to extend the reach of queer negativity toward new subjects and unexpected sites of literary analysis.

To do so, Shelden thoughtfully engages psychoanalytic and deconstructive writings on love and negativity, taking critical inspiration from Barbara Johnson in particular and her notion of "destructive love" (6–7). Shelden riffs on Johnson's definition, which turns on the paradoxical "[positing] and erasure of difference," to explore love not as an idealized emotional state vulnerable to destruction but as a complex feeling that is often experienced alongside aggressivity and hate. Love, for Shelden, then, is both a "psychic" and a "figural" structure that is represented in the contemporary Anglophone novel as an intrapsychic experience of fantasy where the other may never be fully recognized or known. Her goal in the monograph is to reveal the otherness within the self to illuminate how the most "universal" experience is riven by incoherence and failure; rather than offer up an idealistic mirror, contemporary love gives us "blinding refractions of light that distract and disturb our vision, throwing doubt on who we think we are and what — and how — we think we love" (136).

In the first chapter, "Lesbian Fantasy: Psychoanalysis, the Legacy of Modernist Love, and Djuna Barnes's Nightwood," a deft reading of the figure of lesbian love within psychoanalysis elucidates how love between women "functions as the coherence-producing screen of fantasy that attempts to elide and erase negativity" to shore up the "ego" of psychoanalysis itself (29). Here Shelden focuses on deconstructing the conservative Freudian notion equating lesbianism to narcissistic, symbiotic union through a careful formal analysis of Barnes's 1936 novel, a formally experimental text that easily upends these assumptions. Shelden's analysis of Nightwood accounts for the monstrous, yet narratologically productive, negativity underlying same-sex romance, and argues for the modernist lesbian as the ironically "paradigmatic figure of love" to which the contemporary novel's turn toward negation implicitly responds (55).

From there, the book covers a broad swath of Anglophone literary history, analyzing works as varied as James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled (1995), Hari Kunzru's Transmission (2005), and David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (2004). In bringing together these disparate texts, Unmaking Love displays a methodological investment in critical theory and formal analysis as the binding agents of a far-reaching figural analysis of negation in all its romantic guises. The monograph's greatest strengths are thus evident in Shelden's careful readings of persuasive figurative structures such as Bloom's romantic attachment to shit in Ulysses or the sad, aesthetic "gleam" Alan Hollinghurst ascribes to nostalgia in The Line of Beauty (2004). However, in foregrounding formal analysis and literary critical genealogies, this study tends toward the trans-historical. In her third chapter, "Amorous Time: Nostalgia, Temporality, and the Pursuit of Optimism in Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty," Shelden speaks directly to this question, contemplating how historicism has become an inadvertent...