Maggie Nelson Blunts her Teeth

By Natasha Roy

ON FREEDOM:
Four Songs of Care and Constraint
By Maggie Nelson

I am something of a Maggie Nelson disciple: a veritable fanatic, in fact. When I read the majority of her oeuvre in quick succession a few years ago, her writing opened up my whole world. I then proselytized her to all my friends—successfully, too. Steeped in intertext and plastic in form, Nelson’s books generated for us a whole new reading list. To read Maggie Nelson is to further receive an education in Anne Carson, Eileen Myles, Paul Preciado. In short, I owe her a lot.

It feels sacrilegious to criticize a writer who has fundamentally restructured your reading practice. But try as I did to love Nelson’s latest book, On Freedom, its listless tone only made me miss her usual lustre. 

In her review of On Freedom, which is a critical study of freedom as an idea, critic Andrea Long Chu comments on the book’s flat tone. She argues: “Its lyrical subtitle—‘Four Songs of Care and Constraint’— is an overpromise; the chapters are ‘songs’ exclusively in the sense that they have musical names: ‘Art Song,’ ‘The Ballad of Sexual Optimism,’ ‘Drug Fugue,’ and ‘Riding the Blinds.’ In fact, they are bits of straightforward academic criticism. They do not sing; they talk.” It’s a disappointment because Nelson’s writing has, in the past, consistently sung. Steeped in lyric, experimentation, and queer form, she has birthed a whole microgenre of hybrid writing. For Nelson to now publish such a lifeless work of criticism strikes me as a denial of the sort of homecoming expected of her after the feverish success of her last book, The Argonauts. 

Early in The Argonauts, Nelson uses the term “autotheory” to classify it as an inherently unclassifiable memoir/criticism hybrid: a portmanteau of “autobiography” and “theory.” Though she borrows the term from Paul Preciado’s Testo Junkie, it speaks to Nelson’s singular writing ethos. She has an uncanny ability to activate critical theory to better serve the emotional landscapes usually elided by standard academia. Nelson’s brand of autotheory does not merely blend critical and memoiristic writing but, more interestingly, attunes us to theory’s ability to guide us through our sticky personal lives. In fact, when I discuss my love for Bluets to my friends (as I am wont to do), I explain that when I go through periods of feeling flat, that slim volume of criticism/poetry reminds me how to feel. And even in her rather biting review of this latest book, Chu still credits Nelson’s singular ability to eke out “the emotional world of theory.” 

This was Nelson’s promise as a public intellectual: to feel us through ontological freedom. She instead repackages old discourses to little effect, offering theory with no teeth. In her third chapter, Nelson herself criticizes “the realm of academia proper” as “a field known for articulating libertory possibilities in language that often excites little to no felt sense of them.” Yet On Freedom leans away—formally at least—the felt sense of any argument.

Chu argues that this latest book falls flat because in it Nelson elides autobiography: “If it sounds like I’m saying Nelson writes best when she’s writing about her personal life, instead of writing essays, I suppose I am.” As a fan of Nelson’s academic writing, I disagree—my gripes with this book do not concern its critical register. In fact, she laces her criticism with cutaways to her writing process, her anxieties as a mother, and other anecdotes, so this book hardly lacks a personal tone. I also hardly expect her to repeatedly undertake the extreme emotional cathexis of memoir writing: the “auto” portion of “autotheory.” 

Rather, I need her criticism to sing, as she falsely promises it will, and as her more formally inventive writing does. Nelson advocates in On Freedom for “robust, generative, even reparative means of telling and taking it slant, asserting difference where others would presume sameness.” She echoes, of course, the Emily Dickinson dictum Tell all the truth but tell it slant. But in Nelson’s latest book there’s no slant rhetoric: there’s no lyric. In this sense, there’s almost no Nelson. 

Go Where? On Freedom is infuriatingly noncommittal. On the book’s first page, she criticizes the word “freedom” for being “depleted, imprecise” and then unpacks its connotations with such ambivalence that her own arguments teeter on imprecision. 

In “Art Song”—the most compelling of the four chapters—she uses the subheader “Go Where?” to ask where “offensive” art should go when the public takes issue with it. According to Nelson, when we decree that the painting must go, “the repressed inevitably returns, in part because our turbulent coexistence—with each other, ourselves, history, images, noxious ideologies that predate us—comes with no eject button, no ‘outside.’” It’s a handy way to reify Nelson’s central idea that there is no getting “outside” of our claustrophobic discourses; we can hope only to redouble our engagement with them. But you can understand how this all gets a little tumid. At some point your reader is going to want a discursive “outside:” you want the arguments you’re reading to go somewhere. These chapters— while beautifully, often incisively written—left me constantly returning to Nelson’s own question. Go where? Where is she trying to take us with these gnomic affirmations of open-mindedness?

In the Introduction, Nelson clarifies that she does not wish to diagnose or fix a crisis of freedom, but rather seeks to “bear down on the felt complexities of the freedom drive.” Zeroing in on complexities: interesting, necessary, quintessentially Nelsonian. But where do we go from here? Throughout On Freedom Nelson picks out these complexities and then reminds us to grow comfortable with ambiguity. Okay. But where do we go from there?

While reading this book I kept thinking back to something I’d read in a Dazed interview a few years ago: “I’m always an interrogator of concepts more than I am somebody who buys into them, whether it’s radicality and the avant-garde, or normativity and assimilation.” It’s precisely Nelson’s interrogative impulse that made me first fall in love with her: her writing breathes new openings rather than coming down hard on a given stance. She has toyed with ambivalence for ten books now. Most strikingly, in The Argonauts, she wonders “how to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy.” But where in her previous books Nelson’s disinterest in buying into concepts—to use her verbiage—felt refreshing, in On Freedom it feels evasive. 

On Freedom’s vacillating tone has a practical bend. In Nelson’s introduction, she frames Foucault’s idea of “practices of freedom” as the “guiding principle of this book.” These “practices of freedom” situate liberation as a meticulous process of ongoing labor—Nelson calls this the freedom drive—rather than one triumphant moment of release. In her Afterword, she offers: “Thinking aloud with others, as I’ve tried to do here, is one such practice [of freedom]. It is an ongoing and even dialectical process, in that it involves allowing oneself to be interpenetrated and transformed while retaining the capacity to differentiate and assert.” And while it’s true that dialectics necessitate a comfort with ambivalence and conflicting truths, this fact does not acquit a writer from writing with conviction. 

In her November 18th talk for NYU students, Nelson accounted for the frustrating nature of thinking aloud: “Thinking aloud with others [is] a practice of freedom even though it doesn’t always feel free—it doesn’t always feel like driving in a car fast along the road.” It’s a noble writerly ethos: to generously think aloud rather than to boorishly proclaim. But two hundred and twenty pages of thinking aloud makes for a rather tepid book of criticism. Each subsection falls into a rather tidy organizational pattern: Nelson presents a sundry array of philosophical reflections on a topic, lends each one some credence, and wraps up by reaffirming that multiple conflicting ideas can and do coexist. Okay. 

In “Art Song,” she reminds us: “If one is so vulnerable to what others say or think in a world drunk on scapegoating…that one cowers, overcompromises, or petrifies, that’s a problem. If one becomes a reactionary asshole whose art (and life) would likely be a lot better were one capable of taking in, even if on occasion, the sage feedback of others, that’s a problem….One has to find one’s way.” Find one’s way—okay. A few pages later, she calls us to “think critically about our tactics, habits, and presumptions about power.” Think critically—come on, now. In her Afterword (which is prosaically gorgeous and far more emotionally evocative than the book that precedes it), she leaves us with this: “Awakening to the choices we have in such matters is a practice of freedom, and one worth our time.”  Awaken to choices—I mean, sure. 

Again I ask, go where with these axioms? I offer only a course summary of ideas explored much more subtly throughout her book, but these passages reify the book’s fundamental lack of spine. Why mute every provocative argument with the sheepish call to embrace ambiguity, reject binaries? 

Perhaps I’ve simply read too much Maggie Nelson over the last few years and have grown too used to her embrace of ambivalence—Maggie Nelson blinders, so to speak. Nonetheless, I would still wager that most of this book’s readership already agrees with its central call to think generously. I suppose I’m just not quite sure with whom she’s arguing. 

Take her art chapter, in which she pens a sort of open plea to reductionists. “To those who…have come to see art as just another bankrupt concept or damaging tributary of capital, I offer no rebuttal, save a reminder that it can be other things, too—things that to some of us matter as much as or more than the fruits of demystification.” Who is she confronting here? Those who genuinely consume art with the close-mindedness Nelson describes don’t feel like worthy adversaries, and at the very least they are not reading this book. 

Nelson takes up the question of readership in the same chapter. She invokes Alice Notley’s “poetics of disobedience” which encompassed, among other ideas, disobedience to what was expected of her as a writer, and a woman writer in particular. Here, Nelson associates freedom with “disobedience to a sociality someone believes the artist has an obligation to serve, or to serve differently.” Nelson here strikes me as correct, if again a little obvious: a writer cannot be discursively or formally inventive if she caters (i.e., capitulates) to any past or future readerships.

Perhaps I shouldn’t criticize her for repackaging discourses with which her readers are already familiar. Perhaps she is correct in implying that the very question of readership is misplaced. But I cannot shrug my feeling that any book—let alone one written by such a singular thinker—should offer us something new, or at least an old idea newly spun.

Maggie Nelson Leaves Home. During her talk for NYU students, I asked Nelson about how the question of readership figures into her writing process, if it does at all. She responded: 

Eileen Myles—who was a teacher of mine and is a dear friend—used to always talk about prognosticating their audience: bringing an audience that didn’t yet exist into being. And I think Eileen’s work has done that. They once said ‘I put lesbian content into the New York School and therefore created a whole new readership.’ My point is I think there’s a much more complicated relationship [between a work and its readership]. I don’t agree that there’s a pre-existing readership for anything. I think you have to write to please yourself and solve your problems, and if you’re lucky you’ll prognosticate audience rather than serving or finding it (that’s kind of a marketing viewpoint).

This is a wise, generous view of readership applicable to Nelson’s own writing. Maggie Nelson’s chef d’oeuvres—genre-bending works like Bluets, The Argonauts, and The Red Parts—accomplish a poiesis not merely of ideas but of intellectual community. Her singular brand of emotionalized theory has created a veritable thought community of apostles (like me) who ideally, take up her charge of thinking aloud with others. But I just cannot envision On Freedom prognosticating any such community. Its ideas are too familiar, its form too generic, and its attitude too feeble.

Maggie Nelson writes within a tradition of form-breaking, subversive thinkers: queer theorists, poets, and memoirists from Eve Sedgewick to David Wojnarowicz. In The Argonauts, she credits these figures as the “many gendered mothers of [her] heart.” It’s safe to say that Nelson’s literary home is amongst these writers and their poetics of play.
Maggie Nelson, to be sure, is a genius: a stylistic vanguard. Despite its surprising lack of gloss, I will still recommend it liberally, as I do all her other books. I even sent friends passages from the sex and desire chapter, the most textured of the four, which strikes me as perceptive and true. In a particularly hilarious passage in this chapter, Nelson critiques our culture of “bottoming:” this is the freedom drive “that longs to be self-forgetful, incautious, overwhelmed.” Suffice it to say that even at her most flat, Nelson is still deeply compelling. 

But it is not enough for Nelson to merely deliver fluid prose. Every book has a context, and Nelson writes into the context of her many gendered mothers. Why now, after such widespread success, write a book with no teeth? Why write so normatively? Why leave home?

 

ON FREEDOM:
Four Songs of Care and Constraint
By Maggie Nelson
Graywolf Press. 288 pp. $27.