More in “It” than in I: Isherwood's Vision of Queer Identity
Chester Yap
“But the worst of it is, we now run into another liberal heresy.
Because the persecuting majority is vile, says the liberal, therefore
the persecuted minority must be stainlessly pure.”
–Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man, 1964
Because the persecuting majority is vile, says the liberal, therefore
the persecuted minority must be stainlessly pure.”
–Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man, 1964
In Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man, the title character, George, spurred by a remark regarding anti-Semitism, delivers a impromptu lecture on minority politics to his literature class. George critiques the neoliberal misconception of the “toothless” minority, acting here as Isherwood's mouthpiece in a novel that argues broadly against conceptions of queerness as identity. Such conceptions characterized the politics of queerness that emerged during the mid-to-late 20th century, following the aftermath of the Stonewall Riots. In addition to being present within A Single Man, Isherwood's critique of queer identity permeates his other literary works as well as his own diaries and letters. Through these texts, Isherwood constructs a revolutionary vision of queerness, centered around the idea of queerness as self-annihilation rather than cohesive identity. Ultimately, however, Isherwood's ideas do not follow him into the post-Stonewall gay liberation era, during which homosexuality becomes its own distinct minority identity.
This essay will try to piece together Isherwood's vision of queer spirituality from his mid-to-late 20th century body of work, particularly from within his 1964 pre-Stonewall novel A Single Man. Embedded within this text is the idea of an “other,” a unified entity beyond carnal existence, to which all humans, on a spiritual level, belong. Isherwood saw the category of human as existing uncomfortably between the “spiritual,” the Vedantic reality shared by all living things, and the “animal,” the full realization of the instinctive desires of the flesh. This profound model of human consciousness acts as a framework for Isherwood's ideas regarding queer culture and activism: social stratification that results from emphasizing homosexuality as a separate minority identity conflicts with Isherwood's belief that everyone is interconnected on an immaterial level.
Isherwood's writing was heavily influenced by fellow writer E.M. Forster, whom he met in 1931. Forster—who was homosexual, but not publicly—would frequently seek advice from Isherwood regarding his unpublished novel, Maurice; due to the novel's relatively positive representation of homosexuality, he would not end up publishing it until after his death for fear of the controversy he would have to endure. Isherwood recalls in his memoir discussing the ending with Forster, trying to decide what would happen to Maurice and Scudder (Christopher 127). Whereas Forster himself turned back toward the greenwood as a necessary queer hideaway, Isherwood saw queerness as a pervasive force that could induce change in tandem with existing society without fashioning itself as a minority identity. The original conclusion to Forster's 1913 novel Maurice was a self-proclaimed “happy ending” that involved Maurice and Scudder running off together to become lumberjacks. For Forster, two gay men in a novel could only be truly happy together living outside of society, in the sanctity of natural spaces untouched by the dirt of homophobic civilization. Isherwood disliked Forster's endings; his novels, on the other hand, are based more so in realism: they envision a society in which queerness is not only ubiquitous, but also less turbulent than heteronormative relationships. Such a society is recognizable as the war-era society Isherwood himself experienced, yet through its representation of day-to-day life, it is subtly queered in a way unusual for his time. Isherwood's conflicting perspective would manifest itself in his own body of work.
Having examined Isherwood's ideas, I would like to recover the politics of Isherwood's writing, tracking his departure from the culture of identity that would influence both heteronormative society and later, the mainstream gay liberation movement. I intend to do this by drawing upon two separate critiques of identity that influenced his work, camp and Vedanta, and examining their respective influences within his writing, particularly within A Single Man. Based on these results, I look to produce an image representative of Isherwood's vision of queerness.
Vedanta and Camp
Isherwood's spiritual beliefs were closely related to the Hindu philosophy of Vedanta, and much of his work shows his commitment to introducing and explaining Vedanta to the West. He wrote several articles for Vedanta for the Western World, a 1948 anthology of articles published by the Vedanta Society of Southern California. Most of the works included were written with the intent to inform a Western audience generally unfamiliar with Eastern religion. Isherwood himself wrote the volume's “Introduction,” which takes the form of a dialogue between his hypothetical self and a teacher of Vedanta. In this conversation, the character of Isherwood asks what steps one must take in order to achieve spiritual fulfillment, leading into a extended line of inquiry that illuminates many of Vedanta's key principles and practices. The process is methodical: the character of Isherwood first poses a question or raises an objection, and the teacher responds in kind with an explanation. This exchange reveals Isherwood's own interpretation of Vedanta: he is not directly quoting doctrine, but using the avatars of the teacher and the student to offer his own dialectical understanding of the religion. Moreover, by assigning the imaginary skeptic his name, Isherwood implicitly adopts the reservations it holds as well: when the construct asks “Why? How? Who says so? How does he know?” (Vedanta 3), so does Isherwood himself. The “Introduction” is a reflection of Isherwood's own interpretation of Vedanta, and the ideas he poses within it are echoed within his literary works.
Weary of human existence, the character of Isherwood, in his search for spiritual fulfillment, turns toward the Atman, the spiritual self analogous to the concept of soul in many Western religions. He is told, however, that he is the Atman; what impedes him from realizing this is his human identity:
Christopher Isherwood is only an appearance, a part of the apparent universe. He is a
constellation of desires and impulses. He reflects his environment. He repeats what he has
been taught. He mimics the social behaviour of his community. He copies gestures like a
monkey and intonations like a parrot. All his actions are conditioned by those around him,
however eccentric and individual he may seem to be. He is subject to suggestion, climate,
disease and the influence of drugs. He is changing all the time. He has no essential reality.
(Vedanta 4)
According to Isherwood, relinquishing one's human identity is necessary in order to achieve spiritual fulfillment. The self has no intrinsic value; it is merely an environmental construct: malleable, reflective, and socially defined. Humans, like any other animal species, are motivated by their base instincts in correspondence with external stimuli. Consciousness and free will have no basis in reality; they are conceptions that reinforce notions of individual human identity and stand in contradiction to the unified spiritual nature of the Atman. This Vedantic definition of self simultaneously challenges the reality and value of human sentience: consciousness is not only a construction, but also a distraction.
In one sense, to be human is to embrace an essentialist construction of the self, to locate an internal characteristic that signifies one's state as a distinct individual. In another sense, to be human is to react to climate, to respond appropriately to one's cultural constraints and be socially understood as a human. Specific patterns of behavior are encoded as socially or culturally normative and reinforced through mimicry, ultimately contributing to an image of human identity. By rejecting notions of consciousness and instead highlighting the influence of environment on human behavior, Vedanta draws attention to the artificial nature of society's framework. The teacher says to the character of Isherwood, “Judge every thought and every action from this standpoint: 'Does it make me freer, less egotistic, more aware of the Reality; or does it attach me more tightly to the illusion of individual separateness?” (Vedanta 6). Isherwood here calls for a closer examination of human behavior: in order to achieve spiritual fulfillment, one must systematically identify and reject actions that reinforce false conceptions of human identity.
Isherwood's framing of Vedanta as an apparatus for social deconstruction bears notable resemblance to critical conceptions of queer camp. Moe Meyer, in “The Politics and Poetics of Camp,” locates the basis of camp in the “gay male perception that gender is, if not quite arbitrary, certainly not biologically determined or natural, but rather that gender is socially constructed, artificial, and performed” (160). Vedanta is likewise marked by a greater awareness of the artifice of social constructions: when Isherwood refers to a dichotomy between “illusion” and “Reality,” he characterizes the difference between Vedanta and human essentialism as a matter of perception—the Vedantic conception of human identity as a social construction is developed from a more sophisticated understanding of the world than a view based in human essentialism (Vedanta 6). Meyer also argues that camp seeks to “displace bourgeois notions of the Self as unique, abiding, and continuous while substituting instead a concept of the Self as performative, improvisational, discontinuous” (2). Though camp's primary focus is the deconstruction of gender, the political critique inherent within camp implicitly challenges more general conceptions of identity as well. In this sense, both Vedanta and camp are based on a perception of the self that differs from the state, and both seek to destabilize the dominant social paradigm of identity. In “The Cinema of Camp,” Jack Babuscio makes the following observation on camp:
Present-day society defines people as falling into distinct types. Such a method of labeling
ensures that individual types become polarised. A complement of attributes thought to be
'natural' and 'normal' for members of these categories is assigned. Hence, heterosexuality =
normal, natural, healthy behaviour; homosexuality = abnormal, unnatural, sick behaviour.
Out of this process of polarisation there develops a twin set of perspectives and general
understandings about what the world is like and how to deal with it; for gays, one such
response is camp (118).
Queer camp seeks to create an aesthetic that demonstrates the artificiality of gender, which invalidates the positive associations made between heteronormative gender and nature. By disturbing conceptions of the natural while celebrating that which is perceived as unnatural, camp challenges the significance and stability assigned to nature. Vedanta, too, is interested in deconstructing the state's definition of nature, offering in its stead a conception of universal divine human nature. Isherwood refers to the Atman as “our essential nature” (Vedanta 3). The social conception of nature is constructed human individualism; the true conception of nature Vedanta revolves around is based on participation within a greater spiritual union.
Understanding Isherwood's particular conception of camp is essential to understanding how he applies Vedanta to queer identity. In his 1952 novel The World in the Evening, Isherwood identifies two types of camp, “Low Camp” and “High Camp.” Of Low Camp, Isherwood offers an example of “a swishy little boy with peroxided hair, dressed in a picture hat and a feather boa, pretending to be Marlene Dietrich” (The World 177). According to Isherwood, drag is a form of Low Camp. Of High Camp, Isherwood writes, “You can't camp about something you don't take seriously. You're not making fun of it; you're making fun out of it. You're expressing what's basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance” (The World 178). Though the irony and performativity may remain the same across both camp aesthetics, the mood differs between them: High Camp is serious, and Low Camp is ridiculous. Isherwood seems to be disdainful of the less serious Low Camp: his description of Low Camp in The World in the Evening is unflattering, marked by a tone of disdain, and he calls Low Camp “an utterly debased form [compared to High Camp]” (The World 177). In his analysis on camp, Dennis Denisoff attributes the distaste Isherwood seems to hold towards drag and other forms of what he calls Low Camp to its effect on an audience: “Isherwood finds camp (as he defines it) more effective as a strategy of inclusion than the type of drag depicted above because camp does not distance the performers from the audience, but aims to invoke a sympathy between the two groups in order to form a single community” (86). The distance in question is formed and maintained through Low Camp's use of irony. In her essay on gay sensibility, Cynthia Morill writes, “The use and deployment of irony in 'camp role playing' can only produce a reification of (hetero)sexual difference since irony cements difference into a binary set of standards and commentaries (97). Low Camp is dependent on irony in order to produce an affective response from its audience; however, because such irony is based on an oppositional distancing between performer and audience, Low Camp continues to reinforce the dominant structures of identity that it set out to subvert in the first place. Accordingly, the type of camp Isherwood uses as a critical apparatus within his works is more serious and more indicative of High Camp.
The Human
A Single Man chronicles the entirety of a single day in the life of George, a university professor living alone ever since the death months earlier of his partner, Jim. At the beginning of the novel, morning comes, and existence appears to creep into George's sleeping body. Like the malleable figure of the human Isherwood describes in Vedanta, George is a construct influenced by his biology and his environment. He is animated, but not alive, more automaton than man. His behavior is the result of various chemical reactions within his body; whether or not he has anything resembling a consciousness is indeterminable from the vantage point established by the narrator. For a significant portion of the introduction, George has no name; the narrator refers to him by his body parts or just as “it.” Only after the first section does the narrator acknowledge George by name. This shift in address is more than just a change in narrative style: in moving from “it” to “George,” narrator suggests that George's condition changes. Through performing his morning routine, he acquires an identity and its corresponding name:
By the time it has gotten dressed, it has become he; has become already more or less
George—though still not the whole George they demand and are prepared to recognize.
Those who call him on the phone at this hour of the morning would be bewildered, maybe
even scared, if they could realize what this three-quarters-human thing is what they are
talking to (A Single Man 4).
George becomes a socially-defined person through recognizing and acting upon his social obligations. His initial responses are to bodily functions: he awakens, he urinates, he breathes. Gradually, George recalls his job and his responsibilities and reacts accordingly. In preparing for the day ahead of him, he alters his appearance in order to conform to the socially presentable image others expect of him. As George does this, his human persona begins to emerge. The transition is finalized by the acquisition of his own name. The figure of Isherwood in Vedanta for the Western World asserts, “I'm Christopher Isherwood, or I'm nothing” (4). This dichotomy associates the condition of being named with the state of being something (or someone), rather than nothing. Accordingly, George's name represents his state as a distinct, human individual. This transition from “it” to “he,” from formally non-human to human, signals George's recognition of his own identity and his commitment to maintaining it.
This shift in address also corresponds with the act of George dressing himself. In his 1997 lecture on animal and human ontology, The Animal That Therefore I Am, Jacques Derrida discusses the idea of nudity, identifying it as a distinctly human concept, one inapplicable to animals. Non-human animals may lack clothing, but they are not naked. Derrida writes, “There is no nudity 'in nature.' There is only the sentiment, the affect, the (conscious or unconscious) experience of existing in nakedness. Because it is naked, without existing in nakedness, the animal neither feels nor sees itself naked” (5). Conversely, nudity exists with respect to humans because it is recognized as a distinct state, a condition defined by the self-awareness of bodily exposure, rather than the exposure itself. As George stares at himself in the mirror, he is bombarded with a series of human compulsions, among them the imperative “Its nakedness has to be covered” (A Single Man 3). Though still addressed by the non-human “it,” George experiences the distinctly human impulse towards clothing himself, which appears to be triggered by the sight of his own reflection. This scene is reminiscent of the Jacque Lacan's mirror stage theory, in which he theorizes that infant subjects develop conceptions of themselves as observable objects when they first see their own reflections (76). George undergoes a similar experience: he sees himself in the mirror and becomes conscious of his individual self, as well as the various human compulsions he has come to associate with his individuality. Because he is naked, he feels shame and must dress himself. Having automatically resigned himself to his socially-defined role, George complies without question, leaving the inclination unexamined. The urge to clothe himself does not disturb him because he is now “human”—or three-fourths, at least.
At the same time, Isherwood maintains a distance between the so-called human George and its associated physical body. In describing George, he writes, “Its voice's mimicry of their George is nearly perfect” (A Single Man 4). George has not so much become a human as he has adopted the guise of a human; he is impersonating a construct manufactured and owned by the public. The identity of George is non-essential to him; it is merely a costume he dons in the same manner he puts on his clothes. This performative representation of identity plays through Isherwood's other works: Octavio Gonzalez, in his analysis of asceticism in A Single Man, notes that Isherwood's body of literary work is characterized by his constant use of third-person self-references, a notable example being his own memoir, Christopher and His Kind, in which the third-person is immediately apparent from its title. Isherwood's tendency to refer to himself in this manner signaled his adherence to an “aesthetic doctrine of impersonality” (Gonzalez 760). In some instances, this “impersonality” took the form merely of a third-person “Christopher Isherwood,” as in Vedanta for the Western World. In others, Isherwood demonstrated that he would not be confined to human identity: he adopts a perspective that celebrates independence from human constructs.
The Animals
Though the Atman is the Vedantic spiritual ideal, Isherwood conceives of its earthly parallel, a lower, carnal plane that acts as its physical reflection. He establishes this paradigm in “Hypothesis and Belief,” an article included in Vedanta for the Western World in which he discusses the popular notion of the religion-science dichotomy, commonly presented as a conflict between spiritualism and materialism. Isherwood claims that science is too human to be materialistic: “The absolute materialist, if he existed, would have to be some sort of non-human creature, completely lacking the human faculty of intuition, a mere machine for measuring and making calculations. If a human being could become a truly convinced materialist, he would never have the heroism to get up in the morning, shave, and eat his breakfast” (Vedanta 37). Through this definition, Isherwood acknowledges a hypothetical opposite to spiritualism, and by extension, an opposite to the spiritual Vedanta-defined Reality. The materialist is George if he had stayed in bed. As with the Vedantic ideal of Atman, the materialist ideal he defines exists outside of human identity.
George is only three-fourths human; his other fourth is this materialist, or animal, which is also reflected in the narrative style of the opening to A Single Man. Isherwood narrates George's morning in a style befitting of a wildlife documentary, establishing a controlled distance between George and the reader. For a brief moment, George is not a person whose life we are experiencing, but merely “the creature we are watching” (A Single Man 3). Without sentience, George becomes less than human; Isherwood reduces him to an animal acting on his biological urges, an entity that cannot be well understood from the reader's perspective—a human perspective. Although the animality within George quickly subsides as he assumes his human persona, it lingers, occasionally emerging as his day progresses. During the evening, he encounters one of his students, Kenny Porter, at a bar and begins to socialize with him. Eventually, the two make an amorous excursion into the sea, at which point they undergo a brief transformation: they shed their clothes, abandoning the final vestiges of their humanity, and as soon as Kenny touches the ocean, he becomes a “water-creature,” George following suit shortly after (A Single Man 80). As they forsake civilization for raw nature, the animal within them eclipses the human. In her ecological analysis of A Single Man, Jill E. Anderson identifies this scene as that which most resembles a sexual liaison between George and Kenny. Whatever inhibitions that prevent Kenny and George from having sex before this moment and afterwards vanish with their transformation into non-human entities. As animals, they are capable of deriving pleasure without worrying about its associated social conventions. Anderson locates the transformative erotic power that influences Kenny and George within the beach itself: “The beach is a natural, queer site because it remains, until the end of World War II and the consequent Baby Boom, untouched by encroaching suburbia and its destructive residents and their attachment to heteronormativity” (56). The isolation of the beach is what makes it paradisaical; Isherwood makes clear that passage between two distinct worlds is occurring by calling George and Kenny “refugees from dryness” (A Single Man 80). Their transformation reverts only when they return to George's house; George and Kenny don their clothes, and by the time they have re-entered the domestic sphere, they have become merely “an elderly professor with wet hair bringing home an exceedingly wet student in the middle of the night” (A Single Man 81). Isherwood establishes a conflicting relationship between the human and the animal, an internal coexistence of opposing natures, influenced by environment.
Isherwood further explores this relationship between human and animal identities through his correspondence with his lover, Don Bachardy. Bachardy was an artist thirty years Isherwood's junior, only eighteen when the two first met in 1953 (Diaries 389). For the remainder of Isherwood's life, they would remain romantically affiliated, though to a varying degree: at times, their relationship faltered because the demands of their respective careers forced Isherwood and Bachardy to spend a considerable amount of time apart. In an effort to bridge the distance that continually threatened to separate them, the two constantly wrote letters to each other, starting in 1956 (The Animals i). Isherwood and Bachardy each took on an animal persona and used it throughout the majority of their correspondence. Isherwood was an old horse called Dobbin (“Dub”), Bachardy was a young cat called Kitty, and they referred to themselves collectively as “The Animals.” In their correspondence, each adopted his respective character's physical features and character traits, but not its exact point of view: The Animals wrote their letters from a first-person perspective but acknowledged their animal personae as separate, third-person entities. In one such case, Isherwood transitions seamlessly from third-person to first-person in the same sentence, writing, “Dobbin didn't mean to see Inadmissible Evidence without his Dear, but it was so obvious that it wouldn't last at that theater and it may very well not appear again, so I didn't want to risk it” (The Animals 341). Isherwood's human identity exists alongside Dub as an implied first-person subject, the entity who hears Kitty or Bachardy. Because his animal identity, Dobbin, is observed by his human identity, the two must coexist—Isherwood and Dub are present at the same time. This style of writing serves to emphasize the simultaneous union and separation of the animal and the human within Isherwood and Bachardy. This relationship between human and animal is characterized by tension: Isherwood saw the animal as the full realization of one's primitive instincts and desires, a condition unattainable to humans. His relationship with Bachardy is a partial realization of these desires, but he is ultimately bound by his own humanity and unable to achieve full animality.
The presentation of The Animals mirrors that of George in A Single Man: the third-person format used within the letters distinguishes both Dub and Kitty as detached, performative identities. Additionally, Bachardy and Isherwood consistently address each other in an exaggerated fashion: in one letter, for instance, Isherwood writes that he misses “that silver mew and the touch of that treasured paw and the beat of that huge heart within that tiny envelope of fur” (The Animals 192). This style of writing continues throughout their entire correspondence—even their greetings, which changed from letter to letter, were noticeably elaborate, ranging from “Dearest & best Pinkpads” to “Darling SugarHoof” (The Animals 344, 421). The general aesthetic of these letters is reminiscent of camp, from the exaggerated performativity to the attention to (animal) detail. Specifically, the Letters reflect Isherwood's conception of High Camp: the tone apparent in nicknames such as “Beautiful Sacred FurSaint” exemplifies an exaggerated, spiritual devotion indicative of his commitment to The Animals. As with queer camp, this animal-inspired camp holds an implicit political critique: Isherwood and Bachardy challenge the arbitrary distinction between conceptions of human and animal. By exposing the performative nature of animality, they expose the constructed nature of a system that determines what is animal and what is human, thereby undermining essentialist conceptions of humanity similarly to how camp destabilizes gender. Derrida, too, examines various distinctions made between humans and animals as a subject he terms “limitrophy,” (29). What camp is to gender, Isherwood and Bachardy's animal-inspired camp is to limitrophy. The aesthetic Isherwood and Bachardy create highlights the constructed nature of the human / animal dichotomy.
Queer Consciousness
Scattered throughout the letters are various hopes that one day, The Animals can be together. This is where Isherwood's desire for continuity manifests itself. At the end of one of his letters, Isherwood signs, “All my love and kisses and longing thoughts of The Animals’ sweet meeting” (The Animals 70). At the most basic level, Isherwood refers here to the physical reunion between himself and Bachardy, but he also seems to be referring to a greater, spiritual union between an uncountable number of other Animals. The word “meeting” carries a communal connotation, and “The Animals” is a name that evokes a sense of a plurality greater than two. Isherwood echoes the interconnectedness of The Animals through various images within his work, particularly the one he constructs at the end of A Single Man: as George dozes off, Isherwood imagines a series of tide pools. When the tide ebbs, these pools appear to be separate entities partitioned by rock boundaries. But when the tide floods, they become a single, unified entity. Isherwood compares the tide to “that consciousness which is no one in particular but which contains everyone and everything, past, present and future,” washing over George as he sleeps at the day's end (Isherwood 92). The analogy Isherwood makes here mirrors the unification represented by the Atman that Isherwood discusses in Vedanta: just as the tide inevitably floods at the end of the day, obliterating the rocky boundaries that distinguish the individual pools, so will the Atman envelop every individual consciousness as each human life comes to an end. When Isherwood expresses his hope for a “meeting” amongst The Animals, perhaps he waits for the day when the boundaries of human identity are swept away, from which all The Animals—not just himself and Bachardy—may emerge.
The image of the tide pools represents a unified consciousness composed of a multitude of separate yet individually insignificant entities; it reflects Lauren Berlant's concept of lateral agency, an idea Gonzalez locates within the body of Isherwood's literary works. Lateral agency refers to the a horizontal movement of expansion, as opposed to a vertical movement of building, or even bildung (Gonzalez 763-764). During the modernist period in which Isherwood was writing, queer novels tended to emulate the format of the bildungsroman, tunneling in on the development of the queer child. Isherwood eschews this trajectory for lateral agency, perceiving self-development as the product of self-dissolution. As George walks out into the ocean with Kenny Porter, he undergoes this very process: “George staggers out once more, wide-open-armed, to receive the stunning baptism of the surf. Giving himself to it utterly, he washes away thought, speech, mood, desire, whole selves, entire lifetimes; again and again he returns, becoming cleaner, freer, less” (A Single Man 80). Isherwood describes this transformation as baptism, but it is a baptism of unbecoming; George's initiation into the natural world is marked by the loss of multiple aspects of his human identity. This process of dissolution is positive, however, as Isherwood juxtaposes images of loss and liberation. Moreover, when Kenny emerges from the water, George observes that he has seemed to grown in size (A Single Man 81). Water acts simultaneously as an agent of both growth and dissolution.
To embrace lateral agency and reject bildung also entails rejecting notions of futurity. In Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Lee Edelman argues society is structured around futurity, represented by the child and the potential it embodies. By rejecting the valuation of self-development as intrinsic to society, Isherwood aligns himself with the “death drive,” which “refuses identity or the absolute privilege of any goal” (Edelman 22). Under the death drive, seemingly infallible values such as social continuity and growth are rendered uncertain. Isherwood accordingly challenges these values, conveying a desire to not be influenced by the constraints of futurity: as he has George kill some ants attempting to invade his pantry, Isherwood writes, “Life destroying life before an audience of objects—pots and pans, knives and forks, cans and bottles—that have no part in the kingdom of evolution. Why? Why? Is it some cosmic enemy, some arch-tyrant who tries to blind us to his very existence by setting us against our natural allies, the fellow victims of his tyranny?” (A Single Man 5). This passage echoes of Vedanta, once again conjuring the idea of the unity between all living creatures, ants and humans included. George gets rid of the ants because it is culturally ingrained within his mind that they do not belong in a human habitat; however, he feels remorse, because as living creatures—fellow participants in a greater spiritual union—they ought not to be treated in this dismissive manner. As George laments having to kill the ants, he also expresses his envy he feels towards the inanimate pots and pans. Kitchenware lacks the burden of thought and therefore exists uninhibited by notions of time and development; it need not concern itself with the upkeep of George's habitat or the ants' aborted lives. Isherwood portrays this state of being as superior to that of humanity, since by Vedanta, human consciousness distracts from the Atman by reinforcing notions of individuality. Instead of a person, George would be better off as a mindless pot or pan.
Isherwood anticipates these critiques, challenging the significance assigned to the human trait of conscious thinking through constructing an animal framework that only he and Bachardy can apprehend. He writes in a letter to Bachardy, “I really don't think The Animals' language is intelligible to humans” (The Animals 97). They use their own code, a developed style of camp only they find meaningful. The Animals, rather than the humans, are the ones defining the actual meaning of existence; moreover, Because Isherwood refers only to himself and Bachardy (for the time being) whenever he uses the term “The Animals,” an implied tension between The Animals and a wider queer community emerges within these letters. The dichotomy Isherwood constructs between High and Low Camp suggests as much, and Denisoff notes that Isherwood, in his 1962 novel Down there on a Visit, goes as far as to reclassify what he originally considered Low Camp as not even camp at all (85). What this suggests is that the principles embodied by Isherwood's version of camp differ radically from those embodied by other forms of queer camp to the degree that Isherwood views them as an ineffective response to the anti-homosexual sentiment prevalent within society during his time. What Isherwood considers Low Camp may challenge normative views of gender, but it does not do enough: it ultimately continues to reinforce a system of identity upheld by society, as does the conception of queerness as a minority identity. When George delivers his lecture on minorities, he notes how according to “pseudo liberal sentimentality,” a minority only comes into existence “when it constitutes some kind of a threat to the majority, real or imaginary,” and when it does, it is considered to be unequivocally and unjustly oppressed by the majority (A Single Man 31). This conception of the minority forever defines itself in relation to the state: though the values held may differ, the structures remain the same. Such an ideology did not align with Isherwood's vision of queerness, one in which it is necessary to eliminate human notions of identity in order to achieve unity. Isherwood envisioned queerness as existing within society without regard for social constraints; the ongoing recognition of queerness as a minority identity stands in stark contrast to his vision.
In a copy of his 1962 novel Down There on a Visit that he gave to Bachardy, Isherwood inscribed, “Let's put our faith in The Animals. They have survived the humans and will survive” (The Animals i). The word “survive” suggests that certain conditions of society or environment may allow for only one group, The Animals or the humans, including the wider queer community, to exist. These conditions revolve around terms of essentialism used by the state, such as “nature” or “natural.” Analyzing Plato's Athenian Stranger, a treatise on same-sex intercourse and the threat it poses to nature, Edelman writes, “Nature here is less the ground for arbitrating sexual values than the rhetorical effect of an effort to appropriate the natural for the ends of the state” (52). The concept of nature is defined by a society for its own purposes—in this case, to ensure the continued growth and sustainability of the state through constant sexual reproduction. The state's possession and continued use of the term “natural” encourages the queer community to oppose the natural and embrace the unnatural; however, Edelman argues that because the two are inexorably intertwined, to recognize the natural while at the same time opposing it necessarily entails opposing the idea of reproductive futurity. To oppose the continuation of humanity is not an impulse necessarily shared by the queer community, and thus, Edelman claims that queerness cannot be defined oppositionally: “Queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one” (17). As such, to adopt the unnatural as a direct response to the state-defined natural is unsound as a method of truly changing the state. Isherwood instead reappropriates the natural as an image defined as acting in opposition to the idea of a state itself. Whereas the aesthetic Isherwood defines as Low Camp seeks to distort the natural quality of state-enforced structures such as gender through modes of performance such as drag, Isherwood's High Camp locates queerness within what the state normally perceives as natural, such as animals.
Gonzalez considers A Single Man an “imagining of an alternative or nonconformist mode of minoritarian subjectivity, marked by affects and postures that embrace impersonal detachment and ascetic self-abstention rather than normative filiation and self-interest” (769). In this sense, Isherwood moves away from the characterization of queerness as minority identity and instead characterizes ideal queerness as a rejection of minority identity, parallel to the awareness and rejection of self-identity acknowledged in Vedantic doctrine. To perform actions that continue to reinforce one's own identity is to prevent the realization of the truth that is spiritual unity via the Atman; in the same way, to continue to reinforce the notion of queer minority identity prevents the queer community from achieving a similar sort of unity. George objects to the notion of Kenny viewing him as “a dirty old man” because the label is indicative of a mentality that almost prevents the two from having sex (A Single Man 87). The system of identity by which the category “dirty old man” exists does not do anything but produce inhibition; it instills within Kenny a fear that he cannot engage in sexual relations with George in the event that he is not queer. The establishment of queerness as an identity represents the existence of an Other in opposition to a majority, to the benefit of the majority and the detriment of the queer community. It is only through George rejecting the systematic categorization of queer identity—and encouraging Kenny to do the same—that he ends up having sex with Kenny. The act of sex acts as a smaller representation of the greater spiritual unity within Atman. Under Isherwood's vision, in which everyone is absolved of identity, neither unity nor queerness need be impeded by social semantics.
As Kenny emerges from the ocean, he heads back towards the highway, naked. George attempts to stop him, to which Kenny responds, “Nobody would have seen us. We're invisible—didn't you know” (A Single Man 81). Naked, both George and Kenny are as liberated from the confines of culture as they are from their clothes. They are amorphous, indistinguishable from the surrounding environment; just as the language Isherwood and Bachardy share is incomprehensible to the non-Animal humans, the state of non-identity George and Kenny find themselves in can be neither perceived nor understood by a society that relies on form to make meaningful observations. For Isherwood, a society in which form was nonexistent, one that mirrored the spiritual unity of Vedantic Atman, was the only society in which queerness in its purest form was possible, unburdened by heteronormative associations. His vision did not exactly come to fruition: today, queerness is more human than ever, while The Animals rest on the brink of extinction as the culture of identity continues its consumption.
Works Cited
Anderson, Jill E. “'Warm blood and live semen and rich marrow and wholesome flesh!': A Queer Ecological Reading of Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man.”Journal of Ecocriticism 3.1 (2011): 51-66. Web.
Babuscio, Jack. “The Cinema of Camp (AKA Camp and the Gay Sensibility).” Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader. Ed. Fabio Cleto. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999). 117-135. Print.
Bucknell, Katherine, ed. The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. Kindle file.
Denisoff, Dennis. “Camp, Aestheticism, and Cultural Inclusiveness in Isherwood's Berlin Stories.” Performing Gender and Comedy: Theories, Texts, and Contexts. Ed. Shannon Hengen. Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association, 1998. 81-94. Print.
Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Trans. David Willis. Ed. Marie-Louise Mallet. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Print.
Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Print.
Gonzalez, Octavio. “Isherwood's Impersonality: Ascetic Self-Divestiture and Queer Relationality in A Single Man.” Modern Fiction Studies 59.4 (2013): 758-783. Web.
Isherwood, Christopher. A Single Man. 1964. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978. Print.
---. Christopher and his Kind: A Biography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976. Print.
---. Diaries: 1939–1960. Ed. Katherine Bucknell. London: Methuen Publishing, 1996. Print.
---. “Hypothesis and Belief.” Vedanta for the Western World. Ed. Christopher Isherwood. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1948. 36-40. Print.
---. “Introduction.” Vedanta for the Western World. Ed. Christopher Isherwood. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1948. 1-28. Print.
---. Letters to Don Bachardy. 1 Feb 1956-18 May 1970. Bucknell 1-439.
---. The World in the Evening. 1954. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013. Kindle file.
Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” Écrits. Trans. Bruce Fink, Héloïse Fink, and Russell Grigg. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 75-81. Print.
Meyer, Moe. “Introduction: Reclaiming the Discourse on Camp.” The Politics and Poetics of Camp. Ed. Moe Meyer. London: Routledge, 1994. 1-19. Print.
Morill, Cynthia. “Revamping the Gay Sensibility: Queer Camp and dyke noir.” The Politics and Poetics of Camp. Ed. Moe Meyer. London: Routledge, 1994. 94-110. Print.
This essay will try to piece together Isherwood's vision of queer spirituality from his mid-to-late 20th century body of work, particularly from within his 1964 pre-Stonewall novel A Single Man. Embedded within this text is the idea of an “other,” a unified entity beyond carnal existence, to which all humans, on a spiritual level, belong. Isherwood saw the category of human as existing uncomfortably between the “spiritual,” the Vedantic reality shared by all living things, and the “animal,” the full realization of the instinctive desires of the flesh. This profound model of human consciousness acts as a framework for Isherwood's ideas regarding queer culture and activism: social stratification that results from emphasizing homosexuality as a separate minority identity conflicts with Isherwood's belief that everyone is interconnected on an immaterial level.
Isherwood's writing was heavily influenced by fellow writer E.M. Forster, whom he met in 1931. Forster—who was homosexual, but not publicly—would frequently seek advice from Isherwood regarding his unpublished novel, Maurice; due to the novel's relatively positive representation of homosexuality, he would not end up publishing it until after his death for fear of the controversy he would have to endure. Isherwood recalls in his memoir discussing the ending with Forster, trying to decide what would happen to Maurice and Scudder (Christopher 127). Whereas Forster himself turned back toward the greenwood as a necessary queer hideaway, Isherwood saw queerness as a pervasive force that could induce change in tandem with existing society without fashioning itself as a minority identity. The original conclusion to Forster's 1913 novel Maurice was a self-proclaimed “happy ending” that involved Maurice and Scudder running off together to become lumberjacks. For Forster, two gay men in a novel could only be truly happy together living outside of society, in the sanctity of natural spaces untouched by the dirt of homophobic civilization. Isherwood disliked Forster's endings; his novels, on the other hand, are based more so in realism: they envision a society in which queerness is not only ubiquitous, but also less turbulent than heteronormative relationships. Such a society is recognizable as the war-era society Isherwood himself experienced, yet through its representation of day-to-day life, it is subtly queered in a way unusual for his time. Isherwood's conflicting perspective would manifest itself in his own body of work.
Having examined Isherwood's ideas, I would like to recover the politics of Isherwood's writing, tracking his departure from the culture of identity that would influence both heteronormative society and later, the mainstream gay liberation movement. I intend to do this by drawing upon two separate critiques of identity that influenced his work, camp and Vedanta, and examining their respective influences within his writing, particularly within A Single Man. Based on these results, I look to produce an image representative of Isherwood's vision of queerness.
Vedanta and Camp
Isherwood's spiritual beliefs were closely related to the Hindu philosophy of Vedanta, and much of his work shows his commitment to introducing and explaining Vedanta to the West. He wrote several articles for Vedanta for the Western World, a 1948 anthology of articles published by the Vedanta Society of Southern California. Most of the works included were written with the intent to inform a Western audience generally unfamiliar with Eastern religion. Isherwood himself wrote the volume's “Introduction,” which takes the form of a dialogue between his hypothetical self and a teacher of Vedanta. In this conversation, the character of Isherwood asks what steps one must take in order to achieve spiritual fulfillment, leading into a extended line of inquiry that illuminates many of Vedanta's key principles and practices. The process is methodical: the character of Isherwood first poses a question or raises an objection, and the teacher responds in kind with an explanation. This exchange reveals Isherwood's own interpretation of Vedanta: he is not directly quoting doctrine, but using the avatars of the teacher and the student to offer his own dialectical understanding of the religion. Moreover, by assigning the imaginary skeptic his name, Isherwood implicitly adopts the reservations it holds as well: when the construct asks “Why? How? Who says so? How does he know?” (Vedanta 3), so does Isherwood himself. The “Introduction” is a reflection of Isherwood's own interpretation of Vedanta, and the ideas he poses within it are echoed within his literary works.
Weary of human existence, the character of Isherwood, in his search for spiritual fulfillment, turns toward the Atman, the spiritual self analogous to the concept of soul in many Western religions. He is told, however, that he is the Atman; what impedes him from realizing this is his human identity:
Christopher Isherwood is only an appearance, a part of the apparent universe. He is a
constellation of desires and impulses. He reflects his environment. He repeats what he has
been taught. He mimics the social behaviour of his community. He copies gestures like a
monkey and intonations like a parrot. All his actions are conditioned by those around him,
however eccentric and individual he may seem to be. He is subject to suggestion, climate,
disease and the influence of drugs. He is changing all the time. He has no essential reality.
(Vedanta 4)
According to Isherwood, relinquishing one's human identity is necessary in order to achieve spiritual fulfillment. The self has no intrinsic value; it is merely an environmental construct: malleable, reflective, and socially defined. Humans, like any other animal species, are motivated by their base instincts in correspondence with external stimuli. Consciousness and free will have no basis in reality; they are conceptions that reinforce notions of individual human identity and stand in contradiction to the unified spiritual nature of the Atman. This Vedantic definition of self simultaneously challenges the reality and value of human sentience: consciousness is not only a construction, but also a distraction.
In one sense, to be human is to embrace an essentialist construction of the self, to locate an internal characteristic that signifies one's state as a distinct individual. In another sense, to be human is to react to climate, to respond appropriately to one's cultural constraints and be socially understood as a human. Specific patterns of behavior are encoded as socially or culturally normative and reinforced through mimicry, ultimately contributing to an image of human identity. By rejecting notions of consciousness and instead highlighting the influence of environment on human behavior, Vedanta draws attention to the artificial nature of society's framework. The teacher says to the character of Isherwood, “Judge every thought and every action from this standpoint: 'Does it make me freer, less egotistic, more aware of the Reality; or does it attach me more tightly to the illusion of individual separateness?” (Vedanta 6). Isherwood here calls for a closer examination of human behavior: in order to achieve spiritual fulfillment, one must systematically identify and reject actions that reinforce false conceptions of human identity.
Isherwood's framing of Vedanta as an apparatus for social deconstruction bears notable resemblance to critical conceptions of queer camp. Moe Meyer, in “The Politics and Poetics of Camp,” locates the basis of camp in the “gay male perception that gender is, if not quite arbitrary, certainly not biologically determined or natural, but rather that gender is socially constructed, artificial, and performed” (160). Vedanta is likewise marked by a greater awareness of the artifice of social constructions: when Isherwood refers to a dichotomy between “illusion” and “Reality,” he characterizes the difference between Vedanta and human essentialism as a matter of perception—the Vedantic conception of human identity as a social construction is developed from a more sophisticated understanding of the world than a view based in human essentialism (Vedanta 6). Meyer also argues that camp seeks to “displace bourgeois notions of the Self as unique, abiding, and continuous while substituting instead a concept of the Self as performative, improvisational, discontinuous” (2). Though camp's primary focus is the deconstruction of gender, the political critique inherent within camp implicitly challenges more general conceptions of identity as well. In this sense, both Vedanta and camp are based on a perception of the self that differs from the state, and both seek to destabilize the dominant social paradigm of identity. In “The Cinema of Camp,” Jack Babuscio makes the following observation on camp:
Present-day society defines people as falling into distinct types. Such a method of labeling
ensures that individual types become polarised. A complement of attributes thought to be
'natural' and 'normal' for members of these categories is assigned. Hence, heterosexuality =
normal, natural, healthy behaviour; homosexuality = abnormal, unnatural, sick behaviour.
Out of this process of polarisation there develops a twin set of perspectives and general
understandings about what the world is like and how to deal with it; for gays, one such
response is camp (118).
Queer camp seeks to create an aesthetic that demonstrates the artificiality of gender, which invalidates the positive associations made between heteronormative gender and nature. By disturbing conceptions of the natural while celebrating that which is perceived as unnatural, camp challenges the significance and stability assigned to nature. Vedanta, too, is interested in deconstructing the state's definition of nature, offering in its stead a conception of universal divine human nature. Isherwood refers to the Atman as “our essential nature” (Vedanta 3). The social conception of nature is constructed human individualism; the true conception of nature Vedanta revolves around is based on participation within a greater spiritual union.
Understanding Isherwood's particular conception of camp is essential to understanding how he applies Vedanta to queer identity. In his 1952 novel The World in the Evening, Isherwood identifies two types of camp, “Low Camp” and “High Camp.” Of Low Camp, Isherwood offers an example of “a swishy little boy with peroxided hair, dressed in a picture hat and a feather boa, pretending to be Marlene Dietrich” (The World 177). According to Isherwood, drag is a form of Low Camp. Of High Camp, Isherwood writes, “You can't camp about something you don't take seriously. You're not making fun of it; you're making fun out of it. You're expressing what's basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance” (The World 178). Though the irony and performativity may remain the same across both camp aesthetics, the mood differs between them: High Camp is serious, and Low Camp is ridiculous. Isherwood seems to be disdainful of the less serious Low Camp: his description of Low Camp in The World in the Evening is unflattering, marked by a tone of disdain, and he calls Low Camp “an utterly debased form [compared to High Camp]” (The World 177). In his analysis on camp, Dennis Denisoff attributes the distaste Isherwood seems to hold towards drag and other forms of what he calls Low Camp to its effect on an audience: “Isherwood finds camp (as he defines it) more effective as a strategy of inclusion than the type of drag depicted above because camp does not distance the performers from the audience, but aims to invoke a sympathy between the two groups in order to form a single community” (86). The distance in question is formed and maintained through Low Camp's use of irony. In her essay on gay sensibility, Cynthia Morill writes, “The use and deployment of irony in 'camp role playing' can only produce a reification of (hetero)sexual difference since irony cements difference into a binary set of standards and commentaries (97). Low Camp is dependent on irony in order to produce an affective response from its audience; however, because such irony is based on an oppositional distancing between performer and audience, Low Camp continues to reinforce the dominant structures of identity that it set out to subvert in the first place. Accordingly, the type of camp Isherwood uses as a critical apparatus within his works is more serious and more indicative of High Camp.
The Human
A Single Man chronicles the entirety of a single day in the life of George, a university professor living alone ever since the death months earlier of his partner, Jim. At the beginning of the novel, morning comes, and existence appears to creep into George's sleeping body. Like the malleable figure of the human Isherwood describes in Vedanta, George is a construct influenced by his biology and his environment. He is animated, but not alive, more automaton than man. His behavior is the result of various chemical reactions within his body; whether or not he has anything resembling a consciousness is indeterminable from the vantage point established by the narrator. For a significant portion of the introduction, George has no name; the narrator refers to him by his body parts or just as “it.” Only after the first section does the narrator acknowledge George by name. This shift in address is more than just a change in narrative style: in moving from “it” to “George,” narrator suggests that George's condition changes. Through performing his morning routine, he acquires an identity and its corresponding name:
By the time it has gotten dressed, it has become he; has become already more or less
George—though still not the whole George they demand and are prepared to recognize.
Those who call him on the phone at this hour of the morning would be bewildered, maybe
even scared, if they could realize what this three-quarters-human thing is what they are
talking to (A Single Man 4).
George becomes a socially-defined person through recognizing and acting upon his social obligations. His initial responses are to bodily functions: he awakens, he urinates, he breathes. Gradually, George recalls his job and his responsibilities and reacts accordingly. In preparing for the day ahead of him, he alters his appearance in order to conform to the socially presentable image others expect of him. As George does this, his human persona begins to emerge. The transition is finalized by the acquisition of his own name. The figure of Isherwood in Vedanta for the Western World asserts, “I'm Christopher Isherwood, or I'm nothing” (4). This dichotomy associates the condition of being named with the state of being something (or someone), rather than nothing. Accordingly, George's name represents his state as a distinct, human individual. This transition from “it” to “he,” from formally non-human to human, signals George's recognition of his own identity and his commitment to maintaining it.
This shift in address also corresponds with the act of George dressing himself. In his 1997 lecture on animal and human ontology, The Animal That Therefore I Am, Jacques Derrida discusses the idea of nudity, identifying it as a distinctly human concept, one inapplicable to animals. Non-human animals may lack clothing, but they are not naked. Derrida writes, “There is no nudity 'in nature.' There is only the sentiment, the affect, the (conscious or unconscious) experience of existing in nakedness. Because it is naked, without existing in nakedness, the animal neither feels nor sees itself naked” (5). Conversely, nudity exists with respect to humans because it is recognized as a distinct state, a condition defined by the self-awareness of bodily exposure, rather than the exposure itself. As George stares at himself in the mirror, he is bombarded with a series of human compulsions, among them the imperative “Its nakedness has to be covered” (A Single Man 3). Though still addressed by the non-human “it,” George experiences the distinctly human impulse towards clothing himself, which appears to be triggered by the sight of his own reflection. This scene is reminiscent of the Jacque Lacan's mirror stage theory, in which he theorizes that infant subjects develop conceptions of themselves as observable objects when they first see their own reflections (76). George undergoes a similar experience: he sees himself in the mirror and becomes conscious of his individual self, as well as the various human compulsions he has come to associate with his individuality. Because he is naked, he feels shame and must dress himself. Having automatically resigned himself to his socially-defined role, George complies without question, leaving the inclination unexamined. The urge to clothe himself does not disturb him because he is now “human”—or three-fourths, at least.
At the same time, Isherwood maintains a distance between the so-called human George and its associated physical body. In describing George, he writes, “Its voice's mimicry of their George is nearly perfect” (A Single Man 4). George has not so much become a human as he has adopted the guise of a human; he is impersonating a construct manufactured and owned by the public. The identity of George is non-essential to him; it is merely a costume he dons in the same manner he puts on his clothes. This performative representation of identity plays through Isherwood's other works: Octavio Gonzalez, in his analysis of asceticism in A Single Man, notes that Isherwood's body of literary work is characterized by his constant use of third-person self-references, a notable example being his own memoir, Christopher and His Kind, in which the third-person is immediately apparent from its title. Isherwood's tendency to refer to himself in this manner signaled his adherence to an “aesthetic doctrine of impersonality” (Gonzalez 760). In some instances, this “impersonality” took the form merely of a third-person “Christopher Isherwood,” as in Vedanta for the Western World. In others, Isherwood demonstrated that he would not be confined to human identity: he adopts a perspective that celebrates independence from human constructs.
The Animals
Though the Atman is the Vedantic spiritual ideal, Isherwood conceives of its earthly parallel, a lower, carnal plane that acts as its physical reflection. He establishes this paradigm in “Hypothesis and Belief,” an article included in Vedanta for the Western World in which he discusses the popular notion of the religion-science dichotomy, commonly presented as a conflict between spiritualism and materialism. Isherwood claims that science is too human to be materialistic: “The absolute materialist, if he existed, would have to be some sort of non-human creature, completely lacking the human faculty of intuition, a mere machine for measuring and making calculations. If a human being could become a truly convinced materialist, he would never have the heroism to get up in the morning, shave, and eat his breakfast” (Vedanta 37). Through this definition, Isherwood acknowledges a hypothetical opposite to spiritualism, and by extension, an opposite to the spiritual Vedanta-defined Reality. The materialist is George if he had stayed in bed. As with the Vedantic ideal of Atman, the materialist ideal he defines exists outside of human identity.
George is only three-fourths human; his other fourth is this materialist, or animal, which is also reflected in the narrative style of the opening to A Single Man. Isherwood narrates George's morning in a style befitting of a wildlife documentary, establishing a controlled distance between George and the reader. For a brief moment, George is not a person whose life we are experiencing, but merely “the creature we are watching” (A Single Man 3). Without sentience, George becomes less than human; Isherwood reduces him to an animal acting on his biological urges, an entity that cannot be well understood from the reader's perspective—a human perspective. Although the animality within George quickly subsides as he assumes his human persona, it lingers, occasionally emerging as his day progresses. During the evening, he encounters one of his students, Kenny Porter, at a bar and begins to socialize with him. Eventually, the two make an amorous excursion into the sea, at which point they undergo a brief transformation: they shed their clothes, abandoning the final vestiges of their humanity, and as soon as Kenny touches the ocean, he becomes a “water-creature,” George following suit shortly after (A Single Man 80). As they forsake civilization for raw nature, the animal within them eclipses the human. In her ecological analysis of A Single Man, Jill E. Anderson identifies this scene as that which most resembles a sexual liaison between George and Kenny. Whatever inhibitions that prevent Kenny and George from having sex before this moment and afterwards vanish with their transformation into non-human entities. As animals, they are capable of deriving pleasure without worrying about its associated social conventions. Anderson locates the transformative erotic power that influences Kenny and George within the beach itself: “The beach is a natural, queer site because it remains, until the end of World War II and the consequent Baby Boom, untouched by encroaching suburbia and its destructive residents and their attachment to heteronormativity” (56). The isolation of the beach is what makes it paradisaical; Isherwood makes clear that passage between two distinct worlds is occurring by calling George and Kenny “refugees from dryness” (A Single Man 80). Their transformation reverts only when they return to George's house; George and Kenny don their clothes, and by the time they have re-entered the domestic sphere, they have become merely “an elderly professor with wet hair bringing home an exceedingly wet student in the middle of the night” (A Single Man 81). Isherwood establishes a conflicting relationship between the human and the animal, an internal coexistence of opposing natures, influenced by environment.
Isherwood further explores this relationship between human and animal identities through his correspondence with his lover, Don Bachardy. Bachardy was an artist thirty years Isherwood's junior, only eighteen when the two first met in 1953 (Diaries 389). For the remainder of Isherwood's life, they would remain romantically affiliated, though to a varying degree: at times, their relationship faltered because the demands of their respective careers forced Isherwood and Bachardy to spend a considerable amount of time apart. In an effort to bridge the distance that continually threatened to separate them, the two constantly wrote letters to each other, starting in 1956 (The Animals i). Isherwood and Bachardy each took on an animal persona and used it throughout the majority of their correspondence. Isherwood was an old horse called Dobbin (“Dub”), Bachardy was a young cat called Kitty, and they referred to themselves collectively as “The Animals.” In their correspondence, each adopted his respective character's physical features and character traits, but not its exact point of view: The Animals wrote their letters from a first-person perspective but acknowledged their animal personae as separate, third-person entities. In one such case, Isherwood transitions seamlessly from third-person to first-person in the same sentence, writing, “Dobbin didn't mean to see Inadmissible Evidence without his Dear, but it was so obvious that it wouldn't last at that theater and it may very well not appear again, so I didn't want to risk it” (The Animals 341). Isherwood's human identity exists alongside Dub as an implied first-person subject, the entity who hears Kitty or Bachardy. Because his animal identity, Dobbin, is observed by his human identity, the two must coexist—Isherwood and Dub are present at the same time. This style of writing serves to emphasize the simultaneous union and separation of the animal and the human within Isherwood and Bachardy. This relationship between human and animal is characterized by tension: Isherwood saw the animal as the full realization of one's primitive instincts and desires, a condition unattainable to humans. His relationship with Bachardy is a partial realization of these desires, but he is ultimately bound by his own humanity and unable to achieve full animality.
The presentation of The Animals mirrors that of George in A Single Man: the third-person format used within the letters distinguishes both Dub and Kitty as detached, performative identities. Additionally, Bachardy and Isherwood consistently address each other in an exaggerated fashion: in one letter, for instance, Isherwood writes that he misses “that silver mew and the touch of that treasured paw and the beat of that huge heart within that tiny envelope of fur” (The Animals 192). This style of writing continues throughout their entire correspondence—even their greetings, which changed from letter to letter, were noticeably elaborate, ranging from “Dearest & best Pinkpads” to “Darling SugarHoof” (The Animals 344, 421). The general aesthetic of these letters is reminiscent of camp, from the exaggerated performativity to the attention to (animal) detail. Specifically, the Letters reflect Isherwood's conception of High Camp: the tone apparent in nicknames such as “Beautiful Sacred FurSaint” exemplifies an exaggerated, spiritual devotion indicative of his commitment to The Animals. As with queer camp, this animal-inspired camp holds an implicit political critique: Isherwood and Bachardy challenge the arbitrary distinction between conceptions of human and animal. By exposing the performative nature of animality, they expose the constructed nature of a system that determines what is animal and what is human, thereby undermining essentialist conceptions of humanity similarly to how camp destabilizes gender. Derrida, too, examines various distinctions made between humans and animals as a subject he terms “limitrophy,” (29). What camp is to gender, Isherwood and Bachardy's animal-inspired camp is to limitrophy. The aesthetic Isherwood and Bachardy create highlights the constructed nature of the human / animal dichotomy.
Queer Consciousness
Scattered throughout the letters are various hopes that one day, The Animals can be together. This is where Isherwood's desire for continuity manifests itself. At the end of one of his letters, Isherwood signs, “All my love and kisses and longing thoughts of The Animals’ sweet meeting” (The Animals 70). At the most basic level, Isherwood refers here to the physical reunion between himself and Bachardy, but he also seems to be referring to a greater, spiritual union between an uncountable number of other Animals. The word “meeting” carries a communal connotation, and “The Animals” is a name that evokes a sense of a plurality greater than two. Isherwood echoes the interconnectedness of The Animals through various images within his work, particularly the one he constructs at the end of A Single Man: as George dozes off, Isherwood imagines a series of tide pools. When the tide ebbs, these pools appear to be separate entities partitioned by rock boundaries. But when the tide floods, they become a single, unified entity. Isherwood compares the tide to “that consciousness which is no one in particular but which contains everyone and everything, past, present and future,” washing over George as he sleeps at the day's end (Isherwood 92). The analogy Isherwood makes here mirrors the unification represented by the Atman that Isherwood discusses in Vedanta: just as the tide inevitably floods at the end of the day, obliterating the rocky boundaries that distinguish the individual pools, so will the Atman envelop every individual consciousness as each human life comes to an end. When Isherwood expresses his hope for a “meeting” amongst The Animals, perhaps he waits for the day when the boundaries of human identity are swept away, from which all The Animals—not just himself and Bachardy—may emerge.
The image of the tide pools represents a unified consciousness composed of a multitude of separate yet individually insignificant entities; it reflects Lauren Berlant's concept of lateral agency, an idea Gonzalez locates within the body of Isherwood's literary works. Lateral agency refers to the a horizontal movement of expansion, as opposed to a vertical movement of building, or even bildung (Gonzalez 763-764). During the modernist period in which Isherwood was writing, queer novels tended to emulate the format of the bildungsroman, tunneling in on the development of the queer child. Isherwood eschews this trajectory for lateral agency, perceiving self-development as the product of self-dissolution. As George walks out into the ocean with Kenny Porter, he undergoes this very process: “George staggers out once more, wide-open-armed, to receive the stunning baptism of the surf. Giving himself to it utterly, he washes away thought, speech, mood, desire, whole selves, entire lifetimes; again and again he returns, becoming cleaner, freer, less” (A Single Man 80). Isherwood describes this transformation as baptism, but it is a baptism of unbecoming; George's initiation into the natural world is marked by the loss of multiple aspects of his human identity. This process of dissolution is positive, however, as Isherwood juxtaposes images of loss and liberation. Moreover, when Kenny emerges from the water, George observes that he has seemed to grown in size (A Single Man 81). Water acts simultaneously as an agent of both growth and dissolution.
To embrace lateral agency and reject bildung also entails rejecting notions of futurity. In Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Lee Edelman argues society is structured around futurity, represented by the child and the potential it embodies. By rejecting the valuation of self-development as intrinsic to society, Isherwood aligns himself with the “death drive,” which “refuses identity or the absolute privilege of any goal” (Edelman 22). Under the death drive, seemingly infallible values such as social continuity and growth are rendered uncertain. Isherwood accordingly challenges these values, conveying a desire to not be influenced by the constraints of futurity: as he has George kill some ants attempting to invade his pantry, Isherwood writes, “Life destroying life before an audience of objects—pots and pans, knives and forks, cans and bottles—that have no part in the kingdom of evolution. Why? Why? Is it some cosmic enemy, some arch-tyrant who tries to blind us to his very existence by setting us against our natural allies, the fellow victims of his tyranny?” (A Single Man 5). This passage echoes of Vedanta, once again conjuring the idea of the unity between all living creatures, ants and humans included. George gets rid of the ants because it is culturally ingrained within his mind that they do not belong in a human habitat; however, he feels remorse, because as living creatures—fellow participants in a greater spiritual union—they ought not to be treated in this dismissive manner. As George laments having to kill the ants, he also expresses his envy he feels towards the inanimate pots and pans. Kitchenware lacks the burden of thought and therefore exists uninhibited by notions of time and development; it need not concern itself with the upkeep of George's habitat or the ants' aborted lives. Isherwood portrays this state of being as superior to that of humanity, since by Vedanta, human consciousness distracts from the Atman by reinforcing notions of individuality. Instead of a person, George would be better off as a mindless pot or pan.
Isherwood anticipates these critiques, challenging the significance assigned to the human trait of conscious thinking through constructing an animal framework that only he and Bachardy can apprehend. He writes in a letter to Bachardy, “I really don't think The Animals' language is intelligible to humans” (The Animals 97). They use their own code, a developed style of camp only they find meaningful. The Animals, rather than the humans, are the ones defining the actual meaning of existence; moreover, Because Isherwood refers only to himself and Bachardy (for the time being) whenever he uses the term “The Animals,” an implied tension between The Animals and a wider queer community emerges within these letters. The dichotomy Isherwood constructs between High and Low Camp suggests as much, and Denisoff notes that Isherwood, in his 1962 novel Down there on a Visit, goes as far as to reclassify what he originally considered Low Camp as not even camp at all (85). What this suggests is that the principles embodied by Isherwood's version of camp differ radically from those embodied by other forms of queer camp to the degree that Isherwood views them as an ineffective response to the anti-homosexual sentiment prevalent within society during his time. What Isherwood considers Low Camp may challenge normative views of gender, but it does not do enough: it ultimately continues to reinforce a system of identity upheld by society, as does the conception of queerness as a minority identity. When George delivers his lecture on minorities, he notes how according to “pseudo liberal sentimentality,” a minority only comes into existence “when it constitutes some kind of a threat to the majority, real or imaginary,” and when it does, it is considered to be unequivocally and unjustly oppressed by the majority (A Single Man 31). This conception of the minority forever defines itself in relation to the state: though the values held may differ, the structures remain the same. Such an ideology did not align with Isherwood's vision of queerness, one in which it is necessary to eliminate human notions of identity in order to achieve unity. Isherwood envisioned queerness as existing within society without regard for social constraints; the ongoing recognition of queerness as a minority identity stands in stark contrast to his vision.
In a copy of his 1962 novel Down There on a Visit that he gave to Bachardy, Isherwood inscribed, “Let's put our faith in The Animals. They have survived the humans and will survive” (The Animals i). The word “survive” suggests that certain conditions of society or environment may allow for only one group, The Animals or the humans, including the wider queer community, to exist. These conditions revolve around terms of essentialism used by the state, such as “nature” or “natural.” Analyzing Plato's Athenian Stranger, a treatise on same-sex intercourse and the threat it poses to nature, Edelman writes, “Nature here is less the ground for arbitrating sexual values than the rhetorical effect of an effort to appropriate the natural for the ends of the state” (52). The concept of nature is defined by a society for its own purposes—in this case, to ensure the continued growth and sustainability of the state through constant sexual reproduction. The state's possession and continued use of the term “natural” encourages the queer community to oppose the natural and embrace the unnatural; however, Edelman argues that because the two are inexorably intertwined, to recognize the natural while at the same time opposing it necessarily entails opposing the idea of reproductive futurity. To oppose the continuation of humanity is not an impulse necessarily shared by the queer community, and thus, Edelman claims that queerness cannot be defined oppositionally: “Queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one” (17). As such, to adopt the unnatural as a direct response to the state-defined natural is unsound as a method of truly changing the state. Isherwood instead reappropriates the natural as an image defined as acting in opposition to the idea of a state itself. Whereas the aesthetic Isherwood defines as Low Camp seeks to distort the natural quality of state-enforced structures such as gender through modes of performance such as drag, Isherwood's High Camp locates queerness within what the state normally perceives as natural, such as animals.
Gonzalez considers A Single Man an “imagining of an alternative or nonconformist mode of minoritarian subjectivity, marked by affects and postures that embrace impersonal detachment and ascetic self-abstention rather than normative filiation and self-interest” (769). In this sense, Isherwood moves away from the characterization of queerness as minority identity and instead characterizes ideal queerness as a rejection of minority identity, parallel to the awareness and rejection of self-identity acknowledged in Vedantic doctrine. To perform actions that continue to reinforce one's own identity is to prevent the realization of the truth that is spiritual unity via the Atman; in the same way, to continue to reinforce the notion of queer minority identity prevents the queer community from achieving a similar sort of unity. George objects to the notion of Kenny viewing him as “a dirty old man” because the label is indicative of a mentality that almost prevents the two from having sex (A Single Man 87). The system of identity by which the category “dirty old man” exists does not do anything but produce inhibition; it instills within Kenny a fear that he cannot engage in sexual relations with George in the event that he is not queer. The establishment of queerness as an identity represents the existence of an Other in opposition to a majority, to the benefit of the majority and the detriment of the queer community. It is only through George rejecting the systematic categorization of queer identity—and encouraging Kenny to do the same—that he ends up having sex with Kenny. The act of sex acts as a smaller representation of the greater spiritual unity within Atman. Under Isherwood's vision, in which everyone is absolved of identity, neither unity nor queerness need be impeded by social semantics.
As Kenny emerges from the ocean, he heads back towards the highway, naked. George attempts to stop him, to which Kenny responds, “Nobody would have seen us. We're invisible—didn't you know” (A Single Man 81). Naked, both George and Kenny are as liberated from the confines of culture as they are from their clothes. They are amorphous, indistinguishable from the surrounding environment; just as the language Isherwood and Bachardy share is incomprehensible to the non-Animal humans, the state of non-identity George and Kenny find themselves in can be neither perceived nor understood by a society that relies on form to make meaningful observations. For Isherwood, a society in which form was nonexistent, one that mirrored the spiritual unity of Vedantic Atman, was the only society in which queerness in its purest form was possible, unburdened by heteronormative associations. His vision did not exactly come to fruition: today, queerness is more human than ever, while The Animals rest on the brink of extinction as the culture of identity continues its consumption.
Works Cited
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