On Queer Joy in Literature
Guillaume Dustan's Nicholas Pages (1999, trans 2023)
In Bret Easton Ellis’ novels, people fall in love or lust with other people irrespective of gender. It’s beautiful, the idea of being attracted to a person beyond the construct of gender, rather than feeling so little for approximately half of humanity. Or of course, you could say that the possibility of love/lust for all of humanity is greedy or somehow a reflection of the amoral, attachment-free promiscuity of modern times. Both could be true; it depends on one’s perspective and personal philosophy.
Ellis wrote his first novel in the mid-1980s, when he was only twenty-one. It’s a beautifully bleak take on life growing up in sunny California and going to a private liberal arts on the East Coast. Amoral, empty, ennui, boredom, complete disregard for others, even though the characters have wealth, beauty, and each other1. In Nicholas Pages (1999, trans 2023), someone asks Guillaume Dustan if the rumor that he (Dustan) has only read Ellis for the past seven years is true. It’s the second reference to Ellis in the book, and it’s apt because the influence of Ellis on Dustan’s work is quite clear. They are both calling attention to the disconnection and lack of care for others in their time. In a blurb on the back, Constance Debré2 speaks to Dustan being an intellectual who “reflected upon his time…informed reflection on the society around the, a society which remains, through his analysis, our today”. Except that F. Scott Fitzgerald did so in the 1920s, then Ellis in then 1980s3, then Dustan twenty years later…we’re probably due for another author who reflects on the bleakness-bored-ennui of the time, with several dashes of the bored-shallow-ennui-hyper-anxiousness of the social media and internet age; they’ll probably be called a sage of the ages. Any age could have a sense of hopelessness, especially when life has little struggle because all you could want is provided…I cannot recall a writer of the working class or outside the West with that strong ennui and disconnection. To be middle or upper class in the West is to be a minority when one consider the global population. Thus, these writers are not per se a reflection of the time for all, but for a slim subset of people, probably a subset that includes critics at prestigious publications and people who get jobs at publishing houses4, the subset that has an outsized voice. For me, Ellis, Dustan, even Fitzgerald are voyeuristic reads, a glimpse into lives of far greater privilege than my own mindset. I seldom if ever feel bored, I sometimes feel terribly depressed, I care too much about other people and have been told I need to put my own needs first, but almost never do I feel hopeless5.
Touching back on an idea in the above paragraph: Ellis’ novels read quite bleak, more horrifying than horror because his work reflects upon reality rather than the fantastical. Dustan’s work only touches upon that horror but similarly addresses the disconnection of its era. Thus, it’s rooted more strongly in reality, it’s autofiction, stream-of-consciousness…but it never reads dystopian or horror-like. It focuses on the joy of the daily experience, as there are friends who help and there’s a desire for connection. When the shallowness and disconnect peak through, it’s sharp in a way that lingers and has an emotional effect. He writes of the in-the-moment pleasure at doing drugs, dancing on tables at home alone or in some club, in staying out all night, hopped up on ecstasy (MDMA), and the pleasure in smaller things, in phone calls with his mom, grocery shopping, eating cauliflower pureé he’s made himself, spicy pork, or making that tomato sauce from the Daft Punk video. Then, he writes about shallowness of the obsession with weight and bodies, and he’s equally deadpan when he writes about being “raped” (molested) on a bus, about a long-term partner expressing himself in the way that “poor people do”, by beating him (Dustan), once putting his arm in a cast, he talks about the frequency of rape in clubs and in the gay scene, he rages calmly at racism in America6. In that balance of the mundane cataloging of everything he does in a day in contrast to the supposedly glamorous partying with its dark side7, Dustan captures his era more precisely and believably than Ellis’ more relentless, over-the-top horror.
Another blurb on the claims that the point of Dustan’s gay literature was gay joy, in contrast to “suffering” (or pornography)8. It’s time we retired the notion that queer literature has been primarily about queer suffering and some book written in the 1990s (Dustan) or 2000s (Sarah Waters) is an early example of a writer choosing, oh so boldly, to instead write about queer joy and queer sex. The vast majority of queer books, even the older ones, on my shelves are joyful, or at least, not about suffering; most are a balance of happiness and suffering, as is life itself. This balance makes the queer experience and reading of it feel sophisticated, more true to life, and reflective of the rich range of experiences of queerness. Since the early 1900s, critics have hailed at least a dozen books as being the forerunner of this new outlook on queerness, books including but not limited to Liane de Pougy’s Sapphic Idyll (1901), Anna Elisabet Weirauch's The Scorpion (1932), Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt (1952), Jane Rule’s Desert of the Heart, Qiu Miaojin’s Notes on a Crocodile, Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet…
Looking over this piece, it’s philosophical and pontificates quite a bit. To sum up the book itself: I liked Nicholas Pages but it’s not for everyone. I’d highly recommend it. Especially if you’re a fan of Bret Easton Ellis or Constance Debré, though it’s less on-the-nose than those two writers. I appreciated it over In My Room as it’s more complex and more reflective. It centers around a failed relationship but it’s not about the relationship at all. It’s more about society, Dustan is aware of his own shallowness at times, it’s about loneliness and fear, about need, anxiety, and precarity. The book by Semiotext(e) also includes The Story of Rabbit and Little Bear, which is sort of a novel about other failed relationships that’s part of Nicholas Pages? I’m not sure if the book is one or more novels, but I read the whole 400-page thing.
When I discovered Ellis at the end of undergrad, I read through his novels, stopping about halfway through Glamorama and not getting around to Lunar Park. College is the right age to read his work; I presume I’ll never feel that sense of moral superiority or existentialist dread again. Maybe the moral superiority, admittedly I think most people who know might agree that I have retained my youthful moral superiority.
When asked by an interviewer in the Guardian, Debré said her writing didn’t borrow from others. When pushed by the interviewer, who explicitly named Dustan, Debré (seemingly reluctant) admits the interviewer is probably right that her writing is influenced by Dustan because she was reading Dustan when she began writing. I find her writing, especially the sentence structure, the short basic phrases clipped together to create long sentences joined by commas in a way that reads like a drifting stream-of-consciousness, the anxious-bored-ennui, the fixation on the mundane, the hyper-sexuality, the deadpan way of writing about things that a less sophisticated author would turn into tragedy and gloomy victimhood are very similar. Where Dustan differs is that he reflects more on society overall, and Debré on class. Though in more recent materials by Semiotext(e) (US publisher of both Debré and Dustan), there’s acknowledgement of the influence.
This list is definitely incomplete. You could add Holden Caulfield of The Catcher in the Rye, and I suspect other 1960s male writers that I do not have enough experience reading to comment upon.
What I know of jobs in publishing houses in the US: the very few folks I know who went into publishing had to be subsidized by their well-off families for the first years of their careers, as entry-level jobs in publishing do not pay a living wage in a major city…which makes them untenable and out-of-reach for working class folks.
I’ve had several friends comment on how perpetually hopeful I am that things will get better, while also being prone to depressive episodes. The world does get better, and it gets worse in other ways…eg, could Ellis, Dustan, or Debré engage so openly in same-sex sexual relationships 150 years old?
The French also have a problem with racism. As do Americans.
In my first review of Dustan’s work, I wrote of how I personally do not see anything glamorous in the drugs and easy sex party scene. However, most critics seem to find Dustan’s descriptions of city-gay-life partying and sex glamourous. I believe it to be bleak, showing disconnection and a sort of empty hopelessness.
The pulp pornography novels that were published en masse in the midcentury have faded, the deeper literary novels have outlived them. Yet, those deeper novels have been around for over a century, so their existence doesn’t date back to the 1950s, 1990s, 2000s, etc…