Maggie Nelson writes like no one else on the planet. Her work dives—headlong, yet gracefully—into the ugly, messy, or simply complicated; she treats our bodies’ instincts, whether fear, desire, or violence, with the same erudite analysis more often accorded to art and literature, the offspring of those instincts. She buttresses her own sharp sentences with the words of philosophers and other writers, and part of the fun is seeing where she waves those words along and where she checks them—taking issue with the masters (Carson, Didion) whose lineage she is sprung from, and admiring of, and may have already surpassed. The result is frank, smart, and remarkably sensuous; Nelson’s latest work, The Argonauts, begins with the author facing off against two undeniable physical forces: the Santa Ana winds and sex with someone new: “What’s your pleasure? you asked, then stuck around for an answer.” Pleasure—sexual, intellectual, artistic, and maternal—seeps through the following pages.
Nelson has called the book a piece of autotheory (as distinct from autobiography); Terry Castle writes that, in the seventeenth century, The Argonauts “might have been called an anatomy, by which I mean it’s a learned, quirky, openhearted, often beautiful naming-of-parts.” Prominent among those parts are Nelson’s romance with her partner, the artist Harry Dodge, and the birth of their child; around this central thread, Nelson weaves larger, ongoing questions about queerness, maternity, family, and art.
Below such a complex song of topics thrums the bass note of The Argonauts: its language, both allowance and obstruction. All at once, the book is an argument, a testimony, a love letter. After a period of solitude spent “learning to address no one,” Nelson speaks directly to Dodge throughout most of the book. Because Dodge is genderqueer, this “you” allows Nelson’s readers to live, as the author did, in a space without the problem of pronouns.
Those liminal spaces are where The Argonauts takes place; the book is full of transition that never seems transitory. Moments continually shift and rub up against each other: Nelson gives birth between pages dedicated—heartbreakingly—to the death of Dodge’s mother; Dodge goes on T and has top surgery while Nelson is pregnant. “On the surface,” she writes, “it may have seemed as though your body was becoming more and more ‘male,’ mine, more and more ‘female.’ But that’s not how it felt on the inside. On the inside, we were two human animals undergoing transformations beside each other, bearing each other loose witness. In other words, we were aging.”
In the end, The Argonauts always returns to pleasure, the pleasure of these transformative acts—writing, loving—in which the joy is in the doing rather than the having done. “I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure,” Nelson writes. “The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margins, return to the same themes in one’s work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again—not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.”
Nelson and I spoke by email last week.
“I love language,” you told Guernica. “It doesn’t bother me that its effects are partial.” Can you talk a little more about how your relationship to the medium has changed, if it has, since you started publishing?
To the medium of language? I love it as much as I ever have, though increasingly I feel myself squeezed in some kind of strange paradox, of feeling more and more circumscribed in my efforts (i.e. not feeling like I can do just anything, and more certain that I can do only the one pressing thing in front of me), and more interested in challenging myself, both.
What might those challenges be? If you know.
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