In love and in pain: Cutting into the intersectional being: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous Ocean Vuong (Jonathan Cape).
Let’s start with the least of the deep artistic virtues of this book, in which searing pain, achieved beauty and the potential of degradation and shame vie for position and then shimmer into the beauteous fragments of loss, reparation, eventually emerging into imaginative reassembly. For me personally the story of this book lies in the wonderful and beautiful sexual co-education of ‘Little Dog’ its narrator and Trev. The climactic episode is a first attempt at penetrative sex which is so real it hurts for obvious and less obvious reasons. It has a kind of honesty – that shows that thin descriptions of affect don’t work, even though all else takes awful risks with human ‘display rules’.
The description of Little Dog’s initiation combines so much motility between descriptive possibilities, of analytic coolness, urgent assemblage of memories, even of ‘porn’ films (all there was for this boy), emotional escape through endless piling on of metaphor and a metallic tasting realism, as he takes the cross from around Trev’s neck (‘the one he never takes off’) , lest it keep poking him into unnecessary pain, ‘in my mouth to keep it steady’ and finding it taste of ‘rust, salt, Trevor’.[1]
The same honesty sets the scene of a group of Vietnamese men cutting into and feasting on the brain of a macaque while it still lives – an image so horrible you fear its reoccurrence. But out of this is beauty born, and, with homage to Keats, ‘Truth’. But unlike Keats there is no shamed display of ‘negative capability’. We still seek intellectually with our whole bodies and the cultures these bodies segue into, to decipher signs for both meaning and affect (of course I mean feeling). Hence Vuong’s readings of Barthes and thence into queer theory embody themselves from within but across the gaps in cultural inheritance so that the whole truth be potentiated. Look at this marvel as ‘little dog’ comes out to his mom:
‘“Say what you have to say, Little Dog.” Your tone subdued, watery. The steam from the cup gave your face a shifting expression.
“I don’t like girls.”
I didn’t want to use the Vietnamese word for it – pê-dê – from the French pédé, short for paedophile. Before the French occupation Vietnamese did not have a name for queer bodies – because they were seen, like all bodies, fleshed and of one source – and I didn’t want to introduce this part of me using the epithet for criminals.
You blinked a few times.”[2]
I might have stopped at the steam and how it unpacks the querulous feel of ‘watery’ but I won’t. The blend here of knowledge in retrospection, uncertain but determined agency and its failure in the necessity of trying rams home other truths about how bodies do not stop at the boundaries of our supposed ownership – at skin – but cut deep into cultural sections that make ourselves into parts (‘this part of me’) and makes them part of the mesh of cultural life into whose intersections we attempt either to fit or spread ourselves. It is a new kind of discursive writing that is ashamed of none of its necessary mixed registers.
Do not fear that I have given away what makes the book valuable here. It is not important, as the book so definitely is, nor able to measure up to the questions about ‘art’ that the book asks about itself in itself. It is however the archetypal ‘queer’ book we have waited for. It does not try to pretend that identity is unitary nor fully owned – that we get there by ‘being ourselves (singular intended)’ – but forces us to cut into how the partial sections of being (locked and freed from signs, affect and embodied phatic intercommunion and internal self-communion).
‘Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us?’[3]
We will learn how to read such sentences where cognition and affect blend, self and other in everyday longing (and it is everyday – this novel can prove it to you.
Probably the greatest book of the year. Perhaps of the generation.
[1] 202f.
[2] 129f.
[3] 188
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