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Isherwood’s Impersonality: Ascetic Self-Divestiture and Queer Relationality in A Single Man
- Author(s):
- Octavio Gonzalez (see profile)
- Date:
- 2014
- Group(s):
- CLCS 20th- and 21st-Century, GS Prose Fiction, LLC 20th- and 21st-Century American, LLC 20th- and 21st-Century English and Anglophone, TC Sexuality Studies
- Subject(s):
- Sexual minority community, History, Gay culture in literature, American literature, Twentieth century, British literature
- Item Type:
- Article
- Tag(s):
- christopher isherwood, Gay Writings, memoir, Sexuality in literature, Anglo-American modernism, Queer history, Gay and lesbian literature, 20th-century American literature, 20th-century British literature, Modernism
- Permanent URL:
- http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6X57W
- Abstract:
- Part of the Introduction in lieu of an abstract: Christopher Isherwood's celebrated novel A Single Man portrays a gay man as an ordinary human being. For its time, the novel's depiction of homosexuality as a legitimate minoritarian identity, rather than individual pathology, was a radical political gesture. Given this context, literary critics see the novel as anticipating gay liberation. The critical commonplace shows acceptance of the novel's incontrovertible identity politics: A Single Man champions an ordinary gay man as synecdoche for a burgeoning homosexual community, a political minority consciousness. Yet, as my argument will demonstrate, A Single Man endorses an ascetic ethos of queer impersonality, which pervades the majority of the novel's scenes of sociability and attachment. That impersonal asceticism severely qualifies the notion that A Single Man celebrates identity politics as the primary strategic weapon of literary-cultural gay activism. More broadly, my argument is that Isherwood's ethos of impersonality is evident in a broader conception of the Isherwood archive, from Berlin Stories to My Guru and His Disciple. The standard readings of Isherwood fall victim to the notion, critiqued by Michel Foucault, that the truth of the self is a sexual truth—a tendency still rampant in accounts of the 1960s, an era defined in hindsight by the cultural logic of gay liberation and the sexual revolution.
- Metadata:
- xml
- Published as:
- Journal article
- Status:
- Published
- Last Updated:
- 6 years ago
- License:
- All Rights Reserved
project_muse_534072.pdf