The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson review a radical approach to genre and gender

Dazzling language, queer theory and domestic bliss meet in a triumphant love story, now making a long-deserved UK debut for its brilliant author

Fifteen years ago the poet, academic and pioneering writer-of-the-self Maggie Nelson startled the American literary world with the first of a series of books that defied genre, mixing autobiography and theory to question life from every angle. So far none of her nine books (four works of poetry, five of nonfiction) has been published here, and she remains relatively unknown. This is about to change with the publication of The Argonauts, which has been tremendously successful in the US and deserves to be here as well.

Up to now, Nelson has brought her always questioning, sometimes wonderfully lyrical, intelligence to subjects as diverse as the murder of her aunt and the nature of the colour blue. But she has not written about her “queer” life, and The Argonauts is in part an attempt to do so. However, it’s typically oblique in its approach to queerness, which makes the plot, such as it is, hard to pin down.

In essence, the book relates how Nelson encounters a lover (the artist Harry Dodge) who is neither man nor woman, they marry as an act of political protest just before the law enabling homosexual marriage is revoked in California, and together they engage in a series of radical bodily experiments. Maggie becomes pregnant with a sperm donor at the same time as Harry takes testosterone and has breast removal surgery, with the simultaneity of these changes rendering pregnancy itself a queer state.

The appeal of the book is that it’s about love, as much as about queerness: about the conjugal and maternal love that amazes Nelson with its unexpected plenitude, coming after years of solitude. Early on she explains that her title is a nod to Roland Barthes’s suggestion that the subject who utters the phrase “I love you” resembles the Argonaut, constantly renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name. She, like Barthes’s lover, is surprised by the newness of each experience of intense love: the sense that the world is remade.

A question hovering within the book and confronting its more demanding readers is whether Nelson’s love, housed within an increasingly conventional domestic setting, is at odds with her claims to radicality. She follows the queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (a frequent interlocutor in the book) in thinking that queerness can hold together forms of strangeness that have nothing to do with sexual orientation. But she’s conscious of the dangers of “homonormativity” – of the speed with which gay Americans have married and even joined the military – and aware that the more the state opens its institutions to the GLBTQ world, the less that world will “be able to represent or deliver on subversion, the subcultural, the underground, the fringe”.

She offers some examples of people who have tried to get round this by seeking contexts in which homosexuality can still be illicit. The writer Bruce Benderson has gone in search of homosexual adventures in Romania: if he can’t break a few laws through his urban adventures, he says, “I might as well be straight”. This isn’t Nelson’s way. Instead, she, like Sedgwick, wants it both ways – wanting to be both radical and happy. “There is much to be learned from wanting something both ways,” she tells us. So she wants the idyll of happy motherhood. As books about motherhood go, this one is on the soppier side; there’s not much evidence of the kind of maternal ambivalence that characterises riskier accounts by Adrienne Rich or Rachel Cusk. And she wants at the same time to continue to speak on behalf of the subverted and the strange.

Nelson’s claims to continuing radicality are implicit but seem to be twofold. There are her sexual practices. Her partner is the artist Harry Dodge, who though now more male than female, remains nonetheless defiantly somewhere between the two, so determined to reject the binaries of gender that when they first got together Nelson had to look on the internet to find out what pronoun to use (in the book she gets round this by using “you”). And their sexual proclivities are on the radical side of normal. There’s some S&M (Dodge’s gift, Nelson tells us at one point, is to reveal the tenderness of violence) and there’s a lot of anal sex.

Nelson’s second claim to continued radicality lies in the act of writing itself. She tells us that before meeting Dodge she spent a lifetime devoted to Wittgenstein’s idea that the inexpressible is contained in the expressed. Dodge finds this unnerving because he is equally devoted to the conviction that words are not good enough. At one point he says that living with her is like an epileptic with a pacemaker being married to a strobe artist.

But Dodge comes to accept Nelson’s need to find a language to describe their experiences, and even allows her to include a passage of his own writing about watching his mother dying. What presumably compelled him, and what compelled me in reading it, is the specificity with which Nelson interrogates experience. Nothing can be taken for granted. She may love her child but it’s not assumed that she will; she may at this moment find company more satisfying than solitude but this doesn’t mean that she will continue to do so. As a result, though Nelson ends as a contented mother married to a handsome man, this is never taken for granted as a good in itself, and to use the word “end” is misleading because she has succeeded in creating a form that’s consistently open to the process of becoming.

I finished this brilliant book triumphantly convinced of the worthwhileness of the search to capture every aspect of experience in words, and convinced of the necessary daring of specificity, whether we are talking about specific genders, specific sexual practices or specific feelings. I was also convinced of the need to remain constantly engaged in conversations with thinkers or artists we have never met. Some readers may find it off-putting that there are quotations from philosophers, theorists and psychoanalysts on almost every page but there is something about the intimacy of Nelson’s relationship with these writers that stops it being pretentious and instead imbues the dialogues both with a kind of sensuality and with a vital ethical charge.

And the theory is always interrupted or given what Nelson (following Donald Winnicott) describes as “realness” by being grounded in the body. Almost every kind of bodily experience is here, from menstruation to breast-removal surgery to the feeling of the breasts filling with milk (“like an orgasm but more painful, powerful as a hard rain”). The tenderness of motherhood is physical – the amazement that this small body is surrendered to your care – and in a dazzling section at the end, the sequence of birth is juxtaposed with the sequence of death. Maggie’s son emerges into life as Harry’s mother is ushered out of it: this is the beginning and the end of life as two processes of troubled, violent becoming rendered tender by love.

Lara Feigel is the author of The Bitter Taste of Victory: In the Ruins of the Reich. The Argonauts is published by Melville House (£8.99). Click here to buy it for £7.19

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