UC Berkeley

This project reconsiders literary engagements with space through a queer theoretical lens. How, I ask, do writers challenge the social and generic constraints that propel narratives along familiar routes? What is the role of desire in narratives that re-route or queer the quotidian, urban, or social navigations they set in motion? The texts I examine (by Samuel Delany, Renee Gladman, Thomas Pynchon, and Kazuo Ishiguro) unfold in worlds upended by material and social crises. Their geographies change, their landmarks vanish, and their subjects are confronted by energies greater than their own. These agential spaces often obscure the “human” story that James Wood, among others, takes as the proper subject of fiction. In the process, they invite us to develop new modes of reading that dissociate desire from the “human” subject and find it instead in the frictions and movements the text constructs.

Each of the texts in my archive constructs what I call an impossible map: a setting whose boundaries, distances, and proximities cannot be articulated by any static representation. The impossible map is neither improbable, given that it resembles the real but for its changeability, nor unknowable, given that it is, in most cases, relentlessly articulated. The material world we encounter is not a thing but a process, a gathering of intensities and affects that partake in the feelings we associate with getting our bearings but never allow us to “get” them. I refer to this process as orientation. One of the wagers of this project is that reading for orientation allows us to encounter subjects that are, like the worlds they traverse, given to a certain waywardness. Another is that getting lost might have its own politics and pleasures. The texts I study engage in more local and embodied efforts than those we might associate with Jameson’s challenge for the postmodern novel, namely, to produce an “aesthetic of cognitive mapping” capacious enough to account for the complex dimensions of multinational capital. These texts commit themselves to spaces and intervals where Jameson’s “positioning” is indistinguishable from the more indeterminate effects of movement and change. They struggle to map even the shortest trajectories, and they seek—with an abundance of affects that include something like pleasure—new traction in the experience of getting lost.

The texts I examine allow me to develop a reading process that accounts for literature’s agential spaces and wayward desires. Each of my chapters centers around a different form of momentary orientation, understood as an instance of directionality that does not cohere into a stable map. Chapter 1 considers how cruising is activated by the figure of the periplum that informs Samuel Delany’s peripatetic defense of New York’s gay cruising scene in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999). Chapter 2 tracks how Thomas Pynchon’s 9/11 novel Bleeding Edge (2013) animates a tension between “loss” and “getting lost” that forsakes the cognitive map and troubles the myriad affective, political, and spatial connotations those terms have come to designate. My third and fourth chapters explore two texts that resist the “the end” that Peter Brooks and Frank Kermode, respectively, identify with narrative and apocalyptic desire. Chapter 3 zooms in on the figure of “turning” in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled (1995), where discrete acts of turning around frustrate the decisive “turning point” the crisis-weary city longs for. Chapter 4 carries this line of argument into the more speculative terrain of Renee Gladman’s Ravicka novels (2010-2017), a series of four cross-genre texts that investigate a fictional city in crisis. Taking its cue from the narrator of Gladman’s second book, I argue that Gladman transforms the “circumstantial” and thus inadmissible evidence of crisis into a narrative method that privileges the accidental, wayward, and circuitous orientations that texture subjects’ encounters with social and urban space.