Abstract
This article explores contemporary novels by Dennis Cooper and Umberto Eco, together with the works of medieval romance by Gottfried von Strassburg and Thomas Malory, and seeks to bridge their distances in time and context by reading them in the light of the HIV/AIDS crisis. To make such connections possible, I will frame my analysis within Mikhail Bakhtin’s and Julia Kristeva’s work on the grotesque, Douglas Crimp’s and Michael Moon’s notions on mourning and melancholia, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s ideas on shame, and Geraldine Heng’s account of the historical development of medieval romance.
Under the guise of the fantastic and the grotesque, contemporary novelists have abandoned expressions of nihilism, pastiche and irony in favour of a return to affect, sincerity and authenticity. This undermining of the prevailing postmodernist aesthetic and the reassertion of the power of the artist to heal can be tied to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. For most of the 1980s and 1990s, public depictions of people with HIV/AIDS overwhelmingly prevented the representation of the act of mourning and were instead devoted to the horror of dying. The cold abstraction of the gay male body during the initial AIDS crisis was an instantiation of Fredric Jameson’s idea that the “waning of affect” characterises postmodern culture. However, seeking a means to combat the failure of sentiment and empathy for those with HIV/AIDS, novelists inspired a return to a love of affect, allowing literature to become again a place for the sincere representation of the beauty of memory and consciousness.
With the rise of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, artists and subcultural movements concerned with fantastic representations of the body and sexual identity often turned to the pre-modern aesthetics of the medieval romance. Writers of medieval romances believed in the power of the artist to disrupt and reorder the reader’s perception of the world by reaching beyond the text and offering an alternate reality in which to define the tragedies of one’s body and sexual identity. The fictional expressions of mourning I examine here encourage and contribute to a rise of affect. Melancholia is re-envisioned as a political form of affection on behalf of the dying and the dead.
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Notes
- 1.
Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan. fl. 1210, trans. A. T. (Hatto. London: Penguin, 1967).
- 2.
Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 1917, in General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 174.
- 3.
Von Strassburg, Tristan, 42.
- 4.
Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds. The Affect Theory Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 1; emphasis in the original.
- 5.
Ibid., 1–2; emphasis in the original.
- 6.
David L. Eng, and David Kazanjian, “Introduction: Mourning Remains,” in Loss: The Politics of Mourning, ed. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, afterword by Judith Butler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 1, 4. See also Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 1955, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 253–64.
- 7.
Von Strassburg, Tristan, 138.
- 8.
Ellis Hanson, “Undead,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991), 324.
- 9.
Ibid., 325, 328.
- 10.
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).
- 11.
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 1980, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 2.
- 12.
Ibid., 207.
- 13.
Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 166.
- 14.
Ibid.
- 15.
Ibid., 165.
- 16.
Michael Moon, “Memorial Rags,” in Professions of Desire: Lesbian and Gay Studies in Literature, ed. George E. Haggerty and Bonnie Zimmerman (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1995).
- 17.
Ibid., 238–39.
- 18.
Ibid., 239.
- 19.
Phillip Shaw, The Sublime (London: Routledge, 2007), 115.
- 20.
Jean-Michel Ganteau, “The Logic of Affect: Romance as Ethics,” Anglia. Zeitschrift fur Englische Philologie 129, no. 1–2 (August 2011): 79–92.
- 21.
Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega, eds. Trauma and Romance in Contemporary British Literature (Routledge: London and New York, 2013).
- 22.
David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 13, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 151–94.
- 23.
James Wood, The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 179–80, 185.
- 24.
Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
- 25.
Heng, Empire of Magic, 2.
- 26.
Ibid.
- 27.
Ibid., 2–3.
- 28.
Richard Dellamora , Apocalyptic Overtures: Sexual Politics and the Sense of an Ending (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 16, 28.
- 29.
Bonnie Wheeler, “Grief in Avalon: Sir Palomydes’ Psychic Pain,” in Grief and Gender: 700–1700, ed. Jennifer C. Vaught and Lynne Dickson Bruckner (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 65.
- 30.
Dellamora, Apocalyptic Overtures, 25. See also Jacques Derrida, “The Rhetoric of Drugs: An Interview,” 1989, Differences 5 (Spring 1993): 1–25.
- 31.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 1965, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1984), 7.
- 32.
Douglas Crimp, “Mourning and Militancy,” October 51 (Winter 1989), 10.
- 33.
Ibid., 10–11.
- 34.
Ibid., 11.
- 35.
Ibid.
- 36.
Ibid.
- 37.
Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 151.
- 38.
Ibid., 37.
- 39.
Ibid., 38.
- 40.
Wheeler, “Grief in Avalon,” 75.
- 41.
Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur, ca. 1422–1491. The Original edition of William Caxton now reprinted and ed. with an Intro. and Glossary by H. Oskar Sommer, with an essay on Malory’s prose by Andrew Lang (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative, 1997), 2779.
- 42.
Cooper, My Loose Thread, 1.
- 43.
Ibid., 3.
- 44.
Ibid.
- 45.
Ibid., 5.
- 46.
Ibid., 1.
- 47.
Ibid., 57.
- 48.
Ibid., 43.
- 49.
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 3; emphasis in the original.
- 50.
Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 151.
- 51.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 36–37.
- 52.
Cooper, My Loose Thread, 119.
- 53.
Ibid., 15.
- 54.
Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 14.
- 55.
Cooper, My Loose Thread, 72.
- 56.
Ibid., 21.
- 57.
Heng, Empire of Magic, 168.
- 58.
Cooper, My Loose Thread, 45.
- 59.
Ibid., 113.
- 60.
Ibid., 94.
- 61.
Heng, Empire of Magic, 175.
- 62.
Cooper, My Loose Thread, 118.
- 63.
Ibid., 118.
- 64.
Umberto Eco, Postscript to the Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (San Diego and New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 67–68.
- 65.
Ibid., 19–20, 32.
- 66.
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, 1980, trans. William Weaver (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 11.
- 67.
Ibid., 228.
- 68.
Ibid., 457.
- 69.
Crimp, “Mourning and Militancy,” 8.
- 70.
Dennis Cooper, “DC on Mark Lewis, the Inspiration for ‘My Mark’.” Dennis Cooper, n.p., http://www.dennis-cooper.net/other_mymark.htm/.
- 71.
Ibid., n.p.
- 72.
Ibid.
- 73.
Ibid.
- 74.
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 16, 26.
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Brumit, J.P. (2017). Medieval Romance After HIV and AIDS: The Aesthetics of Innocence and Naïveté and the Postmodern Novel. In: Onega, S., del Río, C., Escudero-Alías, M. (eds) Traumatic Memory and the Ethical, Political and Transhistorical Functions of Literature. Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55278-1_7
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