The Politics of Male Friendship in Contemporary American Fiction

253 Pages·2021·3.135 MB·English

by  Michael Kalisch

Michael Kalisch - 9781526156365
The politics of male friendship
in contemporary American fction
Michael Kalisch - 9781526156365
CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN AND CANADIAN WRITERS
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Michael Kalisch - 9781526156365
The politics of male
friendship in contemporary
American fction
Michael Kalisch
Manchester University Press
Michael Kalisch - 9781526156365
Copyright © Michael Kalisch 2021
The right of Michael Kalisch to be identifed as the
author of this work has been asserted by them in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988.
Published by Manchester University Press
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Michael Kalisch - 9781526156365
Introduction
Set in 2003, with the Iraq invasion looming, Norman Rush’s Subtle
Bodies (2013) is the story of a group of male college friends reunit-
ing in middle age to mourn the death of Douglas, the charismatic
leader of their group.1 At New York University together in the
mid-1970s, the young men had thought of themselves as a clique of
‘wits’ who aspired to be ‘social renovators of some unclear kind […]
by somehow generalizing their friendship’ (SB 9, 11–12). In the
intervening decades, however, both their friendship and their politi-
cal commitment have waned: one friend owns ‘an agency dedicated
to creating public service announcements for television’; another
is a stockbroker; a third, a cynical lawyer (41). Douglas became
‘half-famous’ in later life for debunking literary ‘forgeries’, but
the friends begin to wonder whether he was in fact the real fake
among them: were the politically tinged practical jokes they carried
out together at college under Douglas’s direction really incisively
satirical, or just irritating (10)? And, given how they have all drifted
apart, was their friendship genuine, or merely a kind of counterfeit?
Only Ned, the novel’s protagonist, still seems to value the
group’s original idealism. Working for a Fair Trade co-operative, he
devotes his spare time to organising a mass rally against the war and
spends much of the novel trying to persuade his old friends to sign
his petition opposing the invasion. Recalling his 1970s college days,
Ned fnds it ‘embarrassing’ how ‘seriously he had taken the whole
thing, the world remade, friendship at the core of everything’ (48).
But he remains invested in the idea that friendship might inform
and inspire a broader kind of political engagement and solidarity.
His wife, Nina, notes that Ned ‘could still get solemn’ talking about
Michael Kalisch - 9781526156365
2 The politics of male friendship
the group’s hope for what they called ‘molecular socialism’ – a
progressive politics grounded in their personal relationships that
ofers an alternative to normative family life (12, 48). As such, ‘far
from being spiritual as the title might imply, the question of friend-
ship becomes a political one’ in the novel.2 Nicholas Dames sug-
gests that Subtle Bodies mourns the political culture of the 1970s, a
period marked by the ‘decline of sixties radicalism’, but in which a
‘ramshackle’, attenuated utopianism founded in collective action
and community living still captivated the American New Left’s
imagination.3 As well as an elegy for the counterculture, the novel
is also a paean to an older ideal of male friendship. In his eulogy
for Douglas, Ned reads from his friend’s favourite book – a book
partly about a male friendship: Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson:
‘We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed’
(234). If male friendship can seem utopian in the novel – capturing
the promise of a ‘world remade’ – then Subtle Bodies also suggests
that the time of male friendship and the time of mourning might be
somehow linked. But by the end of the book the time of male friend-
ship seems to have given way to another temporality, that of con-
ception. As the narrative opens, Ned and Nina have been trying for
their frst child, and, as it closes, Nina fnds out that she is pregnant.
In an interview, Rush suggests that although ‘it’s an old idea […]
I discovered when I began the book that the subject of male friend-
ship is not a common one in literary fction’.4 Noting that ‘the
utopian function of friendship’ pervades the ‘old New Ages of
Whitman and Edward Carpenter’, and their celebrations of the
democratic potential of comradely love, Rush claims that the theme
of male friendship is largely absent from modern literature, and
especially from the novel.5 Speculating as to why this might be,
Rush suggests that a ‘refexive tendency to analyze male friend-
ships’ as ‘homosexual in nature would undoubtedly [have been] an
inhibiting factor’ throughout much of the twentieth century, while
there ‘has also been a shadow interpretation of many male friend-
ships in literature as enactments of the search by a disillusioned son
for a replacement father’. In other words, male friendship has often
been read suspiciously, in literature as in life, as a cover story of
sublimation or displacement of one kind or another, rather than as
a relationship in its own right.
Michael Kalisch - 9781526156365
Introduction 3
Rush is not alone in suggesting that the pathologising of homo-
sexuality in the late nineteenth century made male friendship a site
of cultural anxiety, and consequently a less popular and prominent
literary theme. In fact, it has become something of a commonplace
in histories of sexuality ‘before homosexuality’ to contrast the
‘valences and nuances of love between men in pre-homosexual cul-
tures’ with the rigidity of the ‘homosexual–heterosexual binary’ of
the twentieth century, and to suggest that male friendship became
‘less visible and less of a topic to be discussed in literature’ as a
result.6 In the twenty-frst century, however, Rush wonders whether
this is still the case. ‘Times have changed radically’, he asserts, ‘and
there is now more freedom to address the subject itself’. No longer
such a source of defensive suspicion and misunderstanding, Rush
argues, male friendship can again be explored in fction.
This book argues that Rush is partly right. I demonstrate that
male friendship does indeed re-emerge as a signifcant theme in late
twentieth- and twenty-frst-century American fction, and I ofer
extended analyses of works by a broad and eclectic range of novel-
ists, including Philip Roth, Paul Auster, Michael Chabon, Jonathan
Lethem, Dinaw Mengestu, and Teju Cole. But I argue that the
reasons behind this re-emergence are not only to do with changing
societal attitudes towards male intimacy, as Rush implies. In fact,
I argue that the tendency to understand the history of male friend-
ship as only a facet of the history of sexuality obscures friendship’s
discrete philosophical and political genealogy. Moreover, it over-
looks the central organising role friendship has played in how we
imagine and practise citizenship, community, and democratic life
more generally. Sharon Marcus makes a similar argument regard-
ing friendship’s place in the history of sexuality in Between Women
(2007), her study of female friendship in Victorian fction. Marcus
notes that feminist critics from the 1970s through to the early
1990s placed women’s friendships ‘on a continuum with lesbian
relationships’. And, while she acknowledges that the concept of
a ‘continuum’ was ‘once a powerful means of drawing attention
to overlooked bonds between women’, Marcus contends that it
has also ‘ironically obscured everything that female friendship
and lesbianism did not share’.7 Something similar might be said
about recent critical studies of the literary and cultural history of
Michael Kalisch - 9781526156365
4 The politics of male friendship
male same-sex intimacy, wherein a corresponding concept of a
‘continuum’ between homosexuality and homosociality – derived
from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s study Between Men (1985), to
which Marcus’s title alludes – has uncovered the historical con-
gruencies between practices and representations of male friendship
and homosexuality, but often at the risk of eliding the diferences
between them.8
Reading beyond the paradigm of sexuality, this book situates
the re-emergence of male friendship in recent American fction
within three, interlinking critical contexts. As Rush notes, male
friendship is ‘an old idea’, so I argue that, frstly, it is crucial to
understand something of its importance in classical philosophy.
Secondly, I suggest that portrayals of friendship between men in
contemporary American fction need to be contextualised within
the long literary and cultural history of male friendship’s distinctive,
integral yet contested place in the US civic imaginary. And thirdly, I
argue that the resurgence of interest in male friendship as a literary
theme belongs to a broader cultural moment generally overlooked
by literary critics, a moment in which not only novelists but also
political theorists, sociologists, and philosophers turned to friend-
ship to reimagine citizenship and political community. In Subtle
Bodies, Ned and his college gang hope to ‘somehow generaliz[e]’
their friendship into a broader politics. In the next section of this
Introduction, I show that, over the past four decades, there has been
a far-reaching revival of critical interest in this very possibility.
Friendship, community, and liberalism’s ‘crisis of citizenship’
Joris – the cynical lawyer whom Ned has the most trouble convinc-
ing to sign his anti-war petition – is reading Morris Berman’s best-
seller The Twilight of American Culture (2000) (38). Mourning the
collapse of civil society, Berman’s diatribe draws a parallel between
America at end-of-century and the fnal days of the Roman empire.
Joris is similarly nihilistic. He tells Ned there is no point in political
protest, or in fact in any form of civic participation: ‘you can spend
your whole life on it’, he says, ‘and you can die, and the next day the
market is doing the same thing’ (42). Twilight of American Culture
Michael Kalisch - 9781526156365
Introduction 5
takes its cues from Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American
Mind (1987), the ur-text of the modern American jeremiad. But
whereas Bloom’s neo-conservative ire focuses on the university,
Berman’s critique is more eclectic, tackling not just education but
corporate multinationalism and ‘the replacement of intelligent
citizens with mindless consumers’.9 As Michiko Kakutani writes
of the book’s follow-up – the even bleaker Dark Ages America
(2006) – Twilight of American Culture is ‘the kind of book that
gives the Left a bad name’, a description that captures something of
what Ned feels about Joris’s fatalism.10
But there is another reason why Rush has Joris reading Berman’s
book. Joris realises that much of his pessimism stems from his
increasing isolation after falling out of contact with the college gang.
He acknowledges that ‘he couldn’t tell anyone’ about difculties in
‘his private life, because he didn’t have any friends’ (38). Berman
argues that Joris’s situation is not unusual. In Twilight, he suggests
that, ‘real friendships require risk and vulnerability, and more and
more Americans feel that they lack the psychological strength for
that’. Instead, ‘bottled rage and resentment are the norm as millions
live in isolation, without any form of community’.11 There ‘is no
genuine friendliness here, no community’, Berman argues in Dark
Ages America, because ‘Americans care only about their individual
lives’.12
Connecting a lack of friendship to a loss of community, and to a
wider critique of liberal individualism, Berman (and Rush) echoes
a concern that was widespread in late twentieth- and early twenty-
frst-century cultural criticism, political philosophy, and sociology.
As Anthony Giddens, writing in the mid-1990s, notes, ‘on each side
of the political spectrum today we see a fear of social disintegra-
tion and a call for a revival of community’.13 In Liquid Modernity,
published in the same year as Twilight, Zygmunt Bauman similarly
observes that Western liberal democracies are beginning to experi-
ence the ‘corrosion and slow disintegration of citizenship’.14 For
Bauman, the problem is that ‘somewhere along the line, friendship
and solidarity, once upon a time major community-building materi-
als, became too fimsy, too rickety or too watery for the purpose’.15
This critique of liberalism’s crisis of citizenship permeated main-
stream American culture. Taking the decline of the local bowling
Michael Kalisch - 9781526156365