The Modalities of ‘Coming Out’
T.P. Sabitha I propose to look at the dynamics of the production of two kinds of subjects, the autobiographical and the fictional, and attempt to see how a gay identity informs and transforms the two in sometimes similar and sometimes differing ways. Let me look at Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man (subsequently to be referred to as SM in the course of this essay) and Christopher and His Kind (to be referred to as CK). What makes the “subject” a specifically Modernist one in these texts written in 1964 (SM) and 1964 (CK)? And what makes it specifically gay? The last question will of necessity imply a look at the notion of the subject –my proposed objective – in that both the texts are narratives informed by the gay identity of the subject, fictional or autobiographical. And lastly, what are the implications of looking for a gay narrative or gay subject in these texts? These are the questions I wish to explore in the course of this essay. It is, I confess, is only a pointer in the direction of possible answers. So, how is the subject a “Modernist” one in these narratives? The novel, A Single Man, is not a first-person narrative, but it uses certain first-person narrative techniques like the Woolfian stream of consciousness and a certain Bergsonian idea of subjective time or durèe both of which are characteristic of what has come to be labeled “Modernist”. There is a certain interiority to the Modernist subject which comes from a self-awareness of this subject capable of objectivising itself and indeed reading itself. The fictional subject in A Single Man, George, is both the subject of this narrative and also the object. In the beginning as well as at the end of the novel, there is a pseudo-clinical objectivisation of the subject: Fear tweaks the vagus nerve…But meanwhile the cortex, that grim disciplinarian, has takes its place at the central controls and has been testing them, one after another; the legs stretch, the lower back is arched… And now, over the entire inter-communication system is issued the first general order of the day: UP…It stares and stares. Its lips part…It knows its name. It is called George” (SM 7-8). The novel here curiously resembles an autobiographical narrative in that there is an explicit rupture between the subject “George” and the George that this subject objectivises in the third person narrative of this novel. The opening lines of the novel establish the subject as the subject in two principal ways: first through a self-recognition (“I am”) and through the recognition of itself as George in the eyes of others, in a dialectical cognitive process. Its existence is confirmed by its self-awareness and its recognition by others. The public affirmation that this self desperately needs in order to establish its identity is a persisting idea in the text. Look at these lines for example: “George slips his parking-card into the slot (thereby offering a piece of circumstantial evidence that he is George); the barrier rises in spastic mechanical jerks, and he drives in” (SM 34) and “[a] veteran, calm and assured, he pauses for a well-measured moment in the doorway of the office and then, boldly, clearly, with the subtly modulated British intonation which his public demands of him, speaks his opening line, ‘Good morning!’ And the three secretaries – each of them a charming and accomplished actress in her own chosen style – recognize him instantly, without even a flicker of doubt, and reply ‘Good morning!’ to him” (SM 35). However, the recognition by others is also a misrecognition. They fail to read in George his not-so-concealed secret: his queerness. All the characters in the novel – including those who know about his liking of men – either fail to read altogether or misread this essential constitutive of the subject called George. In a conversation with his married student, Dreyer, George learns that his wife has taken up a teaching job and teasingly asks him, “ ‘So you’re fixing your own breakfast?’ ” and Dreyer replies, “ ‘Oh, I can manage. Till she gets a job nearer in. Or I get her pregnant.’ ” The narrative continues, “[h]e visibly enjoys this man-to-man stuff with George. (Does he know about me, George wonders; do any of them?)” (SM 40-1). There is misrecognition even by friends who “know” he is gay: After a few drinks with Charlotte, a close friend, when George gets up to leave, we are told, “As they embrace, she kisses him full on the mouth. And suddenly sticks her tongue right in…It’s one of those drunken longshots which just might, at least theoretically, once in ten thousand tries, throw a relationship right out of its orbit and send it whizzing off another” (SM 122). Even the possibility of a true understanding – I am referring to the Kenny episode at the end – is shown to be impossible. This misrecognition is what makes George feel truly alienated. Indeed, the whole novel is marked by an acute feeling of alienation. And the only other self who will have understood this queer subject, Jim, is dead. Jim is an absent presence in the novel. Time, space and the alienated fictional subject – all bear markers of his absence. The absence of Jim is a signifier of a larger absence of understanding, sharing and desire – an absence of the returning gaze of the queer subject. And since subjectivity is presented in the novel as constituted as much by others as by the self, the queer subject remains partly unconstituted. However, the unreturned gaze of desire has been compensated through a fictional device in the text – that of making the subject the third person “he”, thus creating a rupture in the self (the self as observing and desiring subject and object that is observed and desired.) This fictional device of a fissure in the self creates a space for the acknowledgement of his homoerotic desire. This is further enacted