Book Review + Reflection: The Honeys

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Heaven, Hell, and Homosexuality: A Structuralist Reading of "The Man With Night Sweats"

During the height of the American AIDs epidemic, Thom Gunn poured his heart out into his poetry to construct a world of the raw, encapsulated in the refined. Gunn, an English born, queer identifying artist, relocated to San Francisco in 1954. His poetry is crafted with the usage of traditional form utilizing intentional meter, rhyme scheme, syllable count, and breaks in line or stanza. Gunn’s poems in The Man With Night Sweats is a collection regarding grief, homosexuality, intimacy, drug usage, and the AIDs crisis, one which evokes an image of a world constructed through dialectical metaphors presented through precision, prowess, and a perfectly measured syllabic tempo. Gunn’s poems convert the damned into the divine by describing gay relationships as heavenly, inherently Godly, and natural. The Man With Night Sweats discusses the irrevocably linked nature of opposites such as life and death, health and plague, love and lust, care and abandon, age and youth, drugs and innocence, sleep and waking, or the dead and the living. As Peter Barry writes in Beginning Theory, “for Saussure, language constitutes our world, it doesn’t just record it or label it. Meaning is always attributed to the object or idea by the human mind, and constructed by and expressed through language, it is not already contained within the thing” (Barry, 42). Gunn constitutes a world through his poetry. The precision in his language constructs a capsule of his experiences as a gay man living in San Francisco during the AIDs crisis, but also constitutes a new world that, at the time, he experienced only through his poetry.

With poems like Philemon and Baucis or Odysseus on Hermes Gunn repeatedly equates his gay relationships and lovemaking with men to heaven and nature. As a result, his words construct a world in which gay men can be together in a way that is innate and accepted. By creating images in which gay men were compared with heaven and his suitors were described as pertaining to Godly divinity he battles the image of the gay man that was prevalent during the height of the AIDs crisis. Gay men, including many of Gunn’s students, friends, and lovers, were abandoned by governmental, medical, and religious institutions. Doctors were refusing to treat men if they were gay in fear of contamination, and HIV and AID’s was originally referred to as the “gay related immune deficiency.” Gunn refuses to accept this abandonment, and instead, creates a world in which divinity and queerness coexist peacefully in the same realm. He battles the concept that being gay is unnatural or a sin. He battles the concept that AIDs and HIV are diseases that are inherently exclusive to homosexuals. Through structuralist criticism, one may decode the varied concepts prevalent throughout Gunn’s poetry- a poem of just four lines may converse with dozens of realities. The power of each word, poem, line, title, chapter, and ultimately, the collection as a whole, are extended by the relational and signifying linkage between separate words, poems, or passages. As Ferdinand Saussure discusses in “Binary Oppositions'' the concepts conveyed through each poem “have value only through their opposition…some words are enriched through contact with others” (Saussure, 496).

In Philemon and Baucis, Gunn tenderly describes a physical and emotional connection between the mythical Greek couple that demonstrated hospitality toward Zeuss, and in turn, were saved from genocidal flood.

“Two trunks like bodies, bodies like twined trunks/ supported by their wooden hug. Leaves shine / In tender habit at the extremities. / Truly each other’s, they have embraced so long/ Their barks have met and wedded in one flow/ blanketing both/ Time lights the handsome bulk/ The gods were grateful, and for comfort given/ gave comfort multiplied a thousandfold” (Gunn, 12)

Although Philemon and Baucis are traditionally a heterosexual couple, “their wooden hug” is a signifier for Gunn’s poem The Hug, also included in The Man With Night Sweats. The Hug is about a moment during which Gunn embraced a male lover diagnosed with HIV in consolidarity. Utilizing a myth of a couple who housed a primarily male, but gender fluid God fabled to have had both male and female lovers, allows Gunn to present a reality in which a healthy heterosexual family cares for a divine queer male. It is possible that Philemon and Baucis were reimagined as gay by Gunn, but it is clear that the couple represents those who are saved from plague and disaster. With Philemon and Baucis, Gunn introduces the concept that true, longlasting, surviving love is an image he creates through the pairing of physical human intimacy and fluid or divine nature.

In Odysseus on Hermes, Gunn details an attraction to a younger man. He writes,

“I was seduced by innocence/-beard scarcely visible on his chin- by the god within. -/ the incompletion of youth / like the new limb of the cactus growing/ -soft-green-not fully formed/ the spines still soft and living, / potent in potential, / in process and so / still open to the god/ When complete and settled / then closed to the god. / So sensing it in him / I was seduced by the god, / becoming in my thick maturity/ suddenly unssettled/ un-solid/ still being formed- / in the vulnerability, edges flowing, / myself open to the god. / I took his drug / and all came out right in the story. / Still thinking back / I seek to renew that power / so easily got / seek to find again that knack/ of opening my settled features, / creased on themselves, / to the astonishing kiss and gift/ of the wily god to the wily man.” (Gunn, 13).

Here, Gunn’s poem equates purity to a younger lover, a lover who is a god. Gunn’s line “I was seduced by the god… I took his drug” challenges Christian, Catholic, Muslim, and Jewish religious constructs that being gay, or having gay intercourse, is a sin, one frowned upon by God (Gunn, 13). Instead, he creates a world in which being gay is encouraged and even participated in by God or gods. In this relation, equating something that was so openly protested and oppressed by institutional systems like the government or public and private medical organizations, and heavily lacking religious aid, Gunn escapes earthly limitation and places queer identifying men in heaven. His poetry constitutes the world of the divine homosexual by utilizing the same natural eden-esque imagery to refer to both the heterosexual (or sexually fluid) relationship(s) seen in Philemon and Baucis with the queer relationship described in Odysseus on Hermes. Hermes is described as representing “the incompletion of youth / like the new limb of the cactus growing/ -soft-green-not fully formed/ the spines still soft and living,” which paints the gay man as a natural entity (Gunn, 13).

In Roland Barthes’s The Structuralist Activity, he states “We can in fact presume that there exist certain writers, painters, musicians, in whose eyes a certain exercise of structure represents a distinctive experience...in other words, by the way in which he mentally experiences structure” (Barthes, 871). Gunn constructs a world with his structured poetry, potent with signification, opposition, relational extensions, and linear continuations. Gunn’s poetic world is one that explores the heavenly nature of the homosexual and sheds light upon the carnal plagued nature of man. Gunn creates a collection of memories and writes of an experience that heterosexual-ruled America had “kept their eyes studiously turned away/ from” (Gunn, 48). Gunn presents his experiences and observations regarding the homosexual identity during a pandemic, thus, constituting a memorial and an elegy to an identity that was ignored. He creates a world through his writing in which the homosexual is accepted without controversy. By referring to gay men as heavenly, he challenges institutional homophobia and poses the question- can the gay men he loved only experience peace from physical ailment and systematic abuse in death? Gunn’s creation of the divine homosexual is one that exists as a binary opposition, one that is simultaneously a hopeful ode to heavenly, natural sexualty and an elegy mourning the absence of treatment, acceptance, and ability to exist as an outwardly gay man in HIV-ridden 20th century San Francisco.

Bibliography

Gunn, Thom. The Man With Night Sweats, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992.

Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory, Manchester: Manchester UP, 2009.

Barthes, Roland. “The Structuralist Activity.” The Critical Tradition, by David Richter, 3rd ed., Bedford Books, 1989, pp. 871-874.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. “Nature of the Linguistic Sign.” The Critical Tradition, by David Richter, 3rd ed., Bedford Books, 1989, pp. 492-502.

Recollection Cartography: The Structuralist Sound-Image as Phenomenological Device in The Rupture...

Recollection Cartography: The Structuralist Sound-Image as Phenomenological Device in "The Rupture Tense"

Traversing time and space through polyphonic experimental verse, Jenny Xie’s The Rupture Tense conjures the liminal abyss of diasporic yearning, meditating on intracorporeal tensions between belonging and detachment by dissecting language, memory, history, and loss. Xie’s construction of kaleidoscopic long form poems subvert the lyrical epic to alchemize a “memory map” of phenomenological orientation and disorientation invoked by an interconnected network of Saussarian “sound-images.” The synergetic autonomous voices of the subjects and speakers of The Rupture Tense act as sentient poetic ghosts, echoes of ancestral trauma, resilience, and community soliloquizing “intergenerational memory transfer, state-enforced amnesia, public secrecies, and the psychic fallout of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.” By tracing the intersection of the personal and the political within her aching compositions, Xie actively employs recollection cartography through experimental poetry as a vehicle of survival, resistance, and elegy.

The Rupture Tense opens with a dismembered linear narrative, Controlled Exposure, a septet centralizing the revolutionary photography of Li Zhensheng. Xie aims to “reinscribe” each surviving photograph “with motion and the creases of time” by revisiting Zhensheng’s artifacts in verse, speaking to rebellion art as a vehicle of transcendence past the constructs of totalitarian rule, offering escape by rebirthing the dead “each time one of Li’s photographs is viewed,” as “the image is ingested and inwardly concealed.” Xie reflects on Zhensheng’s bestowal of agency to victims of oppression by “hunting the realm of the unsayable with his camera lens, directing it toward the furnace of the living,” conserving his subject’s memory and centralizing said subject’s gaze, as they “peer back at us from their positions and see, anchored in our eyes, a way out.” Xie accesses that “realm of the unsayable” through her Red Puncta quintet, vignettes that offer closer examinations of individual photographs, named after Roland Barthes’ “punctum,” defined as the “quality of a photograph that disturbs the border between image and viewer.” The puncta “makes itself felt precisely because it refuses to make itself known, conveying meaning that cannot be assimilated into a familiar frame,” a sensory encounter Xie emulates by concentrating on “negative space” and “forgetting’s lining.” Xie reflects on the omnipresent awareness of loss, meditating on excruciating collective inquisition by those “who are made and unmade/ by the dark mass of the unseen.” Xie’s experimental verse reaches across voids to access “the sweat of the unsayable” in flickering visceral “moments when we feel history pulling from behind / the eyes the mouth hooked / But the remainder of this life / is still millions of kilometers away from being born,” effectively rupturing the distinctions between past, present, and future tenses, penetrating the dissonance of punctuated identity.

As Xie archivally eulogizes Zhensheng in Memory Soldier, she encapsulates Asian diasporic disorientation and orientation fabricated in the dual asylum of Zhensheng’s photography and Xie’s verse, extending Zhensheng’s impact past death by detailing that “with the passage out of life, memory-images spill over an / unarticulated margin, dragged across from the warm retinal / currents of those who remain.” Xie’s inclusion of the “memory-image” sonically alludes to Structuralist theory of the Saussarian “sound-image,” a linguistic sign defined as “a double entity, one formed by the associating of two terms… a concept and a sound-image… The linguistic sign is then a two-sided entity...The two elements are intimately united, and each recalls the other.” The “concept,” alternatively referred to as “the signified,” and the “sound-image” as “the signifier,” exist in conversation with one another. For instance, in Xie’s Stereoscope series she “plays with the mechanism of the stereoscope, a viewing device that creates depth of vision through the juxtaposition of two separate images,” to capture the multifaceted voices of her relatives, specifically, those relatives that witnessed the Chinese Cultural Revolution, providing another perspective to expand her Red Puncta and Memory Soldier poems. The stereoscope poems transform into a literary manifestation of the stereoscope itself, allowing the stereoscope in verse to represent a complete “sound-image” subtly containing both “the signified” and “the signifier” within her intentional verse. In 1977 Stereoscope she details the rippling effects of her ancestor’s trauma by describing two images, the first in which her relative “reached for the severance” during a suicide attempt, while on the opposing stanza, formally mirroring the first, Xie reflects that “a memory at the surface could pinch/ at a deeper one, until it inflamed.” Within the “sound-image” of 1977 Stereoscope, another “sound-image” nestles, that of memory, irrevocably linked to the succession of memories evoked upon each recollection.

Furthermore, if one applies Sara Ahmed’s theory of Queer Phenomenology to The Rupture Tense, the infinite “sound-images” summoned within Xie’s experimental verse transfigure into “orientation devices,” which serve as “anchoring points” that “gather on the ground” while simultaneously “[creating] a ground upon which [the speaker] can gather.” As Ahmed writes,

If orientations are as much about feeling at home as they are about finding our way, then it becomes important to consider how ‘finding our way’ involves what we would call ‘homing devices.’ Migration could be described as a process of disorientation and reorientation…[This creates] what we could call a ‘migrant orientation.’ This orientation might be described as the lived experience of falling at least two directions: toward a home that has been lost, and to a place that is not yet home.

Xie’s poems utilizes “the needlepoint of language / which makes thought visible,” by “pulling at the root of consciousness” to serve as orientation devices to the speaker, author, and reader, simultaneously to create a weblike “memory-map” of “starting point[s] for orientation…from which the world unfolds.” Xie emulates “the migrant orientation” by “[tracing] the ragged line / where one country joins / with another by torturous stitches,” dissecting “the years of living two lives, two kinds of speech, two kinds of silences” whispered in a “hush [that] is at a pitch that one can / only make [out] collectively.” Xie’s calcification that “all stitching of narrative alienates” expertly utilizes Ahmed’s theory that “in order to become orientated, you might suppose that we might first experience disorientation.”