Personal Problems

One of my father’s favorite sayings—and one of my least favorite things to hear growing up—was “that sounds like a personal problem.” Maybe for that reason, one of the things that attracts me to writing about other people’s ideas is that I don’t have to find out until much later that I was really writing (about) something personal. For example I wasn’t very aware in writing an essay about Barthes’ doomed crush on a student that I had just gotten through (although not yet over) something similar myself.

I certainly didn’t, and still don’t, have any interesting thoughts about what that something similar meant in my own life or reveals about love in general—whereas the essay on Barthes, which I think is one of my best, does, in a spiraling, digressive, or oblique way, end up saying about life, love, and even about me specifically things I couldn’t manage by tackling such subjects without the frame-story that this is just commentary. Indeed, one of the themes of that essay, which I get at via a reading of Foucault’s response to Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche, lol, is that trying to know oneself and what one wants directly is a crazy-making endeavor—the project of a post-objective way of knowing that centers the knowing subject is a bad dream.

Over the past couple of years, my father has been dying—sometimes very fast, sometimes in temporary recovery or gradual decline, so that for a while it seemed like one of those rug stores that’s always having a ‘going out of business’ sale, but now indeed the sale is final. Looking back, I’ve been writing about him, or about fathers and sons, or the problem of son-hood (son-ship?) since he was diagnosed, finding him/us/it in, for example, such portentously vast abstractions as the supposed matrix of Western political and religious ideology:

“Judaism,” in Kristeva’s terms, is the innermost content of every Western old regime, since it was from the Bible and its God that our forebears, whoever they were, first learned to obey the law and command in its name. But it is also the essence of every call to suspend or revise the law for the sake of a higher one, of renewed connection to its transcendental—but utterly intimate—source. Thus every old regime is also threatened by the biblical inheritance of prophethood, and the emissaries and propagandists of the former are, in a sense, not wrong to oppose its enemies—refusers, free-thinkers, loners, whoever follows an inhuman appeal beyond the limits of the ordinary and decent—by calling them Jewish.

If all Western fathers are Jewish, so too is every rebel son. And thus “everyone,” Kristeva stressed, is at least potentially antisemitic in our culture, because the figure of the Jew—the Jewish father, the Jewish rebel, the Jewish God authorizing both—is part of our family romance and our civilizational myths...

Now, to say the least, not all Western fathers are Jewish—mine isn’t and Kristeva’s wasn’t! Although maybe for both of us it seemed more intellectually stimulating or emotionally tolerable to route the problem of our dads through a larger, abstracter, faker problem composed of such figures as ‘The Father,’ ‘The Jew,’ and ‘Our Civilizational Myths.’

Or again, in a reading of Larry Kramer’s Faggots I end up saying the task of learning to live with (though I suppose I really meant after) our fathers is what the novel, and everything, is about:

Abe continues, “How can you live such subterfuge?” He condemns his closeted interlocutor—like Philip Roth, famously, condemning Edward Albee for his mincing, unconvincingly opaque plays about women—“I go. With sorrow and sadness that you deny your heritage. You do not like yourself very much.”

Strikingly, Abe says not that Dildough is denying his sexuality, or his desire (or as today’s gender-nauts say, his truth, his real self)—his accusation has nothing to do with some fictive inner core of Dildough’s personal essence. Rather he says that the filmmaker is denying his heritage, transposing onto his case the terms that would more obviously apply to someone rejecting his Jewishness. We hardly think of homosexuality as a heritage, as something handed over to us—although our sexuality, our very body, was given to us without our consent by our parents, who created us out of their own sexualities, which they were given and so on and so forth back to God’s originary whim.

Like everything else our parents gave and did to us, we may as we come into adulthood wish to transform or even reject this or that element of the inheritance that we are, but we have for doing so only such resources as they themselves gave us (no one can hurt us like our parents—but who else taught us to bear, or even forgive, such hurt?). And, beyond our own parents, such worlds we have as Americans, Jews, gays, whatever we are—the cultural spaces and forms by which we can expand and change ourselves to be something other than the mere repetition of our parents’ lives, through which we pursue the desires that make and unmake us—are a heritage, things we are given and may resist or condemn but cannot, at the risk of being irredeemably warped and stunted, deny.

Actually, quite a lot of my writing over the past few years has been in some way about the problem of an inheritance that seems unbearable, or in contradiction with itself, and would have to be reimagined to be sustainable as a tradition—a having to as it were queer the family to save it, as in the conclusion to my essay on Hart Crane and Harold Bloom:

Crane concludes the poem asserting that he is:

Not soon, nor suddenly,—no, never to let go

My hand

in yours,

Walt Whitman—

so—

This ending, which seems to be a loving, intimate tribute to Whitman (inaugurating a tradition that continued with Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California”), in fact is a refusal of Whitman’s own demand in “Song of Myself”: Whoever you are holding me now in hand… release me and depart on your way.

Whitman repeatedly enjoined, in his poetry and political tract Democratic Vistas (which Crane read and recommended to friends), that Americans to take up the mission of emancipation from all tradition outlined by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay “Self-Reliance.” Crane, however, in a move never rightly appreciated by Bloom, rejected the Emersonian-Whitmanian cult of the self-liberated individual—and rejected in advance the Satanic American Religion that Bloom championed. Son of a kooky half-Bohemian mother taken up with Christian Science, Crane perhaps knew only too personally the dim, morbid vacuity of Americans’ self-obsessive quests for ‘inner light.’

Crane seems, in his grasping of Whitman’s hand, in his refusal to “let go” as Whitman ordered, to place himself and invite us along with him into a new relation to tradition in America, accepting the need for ancestors and moving beyond the “anxiety of influence” towards a complex stance in which our forebears’ insistence on self-reliance can be at once ironically judged (seeing how Whitman depended on Emerson, or Bloom on Crane) and admiringly appreciated as the basis for our own, more consciously dependent, late-coming, and nevertheless still original and generative, gratitude.

There’s the danger of bringing the same boring personal issues to bear on texts that ought to be excitingly different from each and from myself, of making the energy that animates the essays be the excitement of trying on disguises. Luckily, I suppose, I have more than one unresolved problem—I’m sure there are plenty I don’t even know about yet!