COOPER’S QUEER OBJECTS

Abstract

Queer objects are crucial to the narrative strategies of Dennis Cooper’s George Miles cycle where they support his exhaustive inventory of what it means to have (in all senses) a sexual type. In Frisk (1991), Cooper transforms some objects into media to blur the boundaries between the writing subject and the objects he desires. The snuff photos, seen at too young an age, form the point of reference for Dennis the narrator’s erotic life but they acquire their force in a looping narrative structure that calls into question their status as representation as well as their capacity to communicate. The novel thus elicits a new theorization of the relation between objects and media that discloses the stakes for fiction in a queer subjectivity that takes the self as another object at the same time as it probes the limits of realism. I situate Cooper in a genealogy of autofiction that extends back to Marcel Proust and Jean Genet and forward to J.T. LeRoy, Ben Lerner, Maggie Nelson, and Sheila Heti. The essay concludes by contrasting Cooper’s narrative achievements to the collapse of the writing subject into the autobiographical self in the more recent examples.

Keywords:

• Dennis Cooper; Frisk
• autofiction
• realism
• queer theory
• Ben Lerner
• Maggie Nelson
• Sheila Heti
• J.T. LeRoy
• photography
• vivacity
• objects and media
• the new sincerity
• contemporary fiction

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 See Dennis Cooper’s blog for the author’s account of the genesis and structure of this cycle of novels: <http://www.dennis-cooper.net/georgemiles.htm> (accessed 6 Jan. 2018).

2 Alan Sinfield explored the novel’s investment in fantasy in On Sexuality and Power (Sinfield).

3 In his introduction to Dennis Cooper: Writing at the Edge, Danny Kennedy argues that Cooper should be understood in the context of European avant-garde literature and theory (Kennedy, “Introduction” 1). The collection includes two such discussions of Frisk: Matias Viegener, “Philosophy in the Bedroom: Pornography and Philosophy in Dennis Cooper’s Writing” (Viegener), and Paul Hegarty, “The Self Contained and its Emptying in Frisk” (Hegarty).

4 As Wayne Koestenbaum puts it, “He exhibits a taste for inarticulateness – not for silence, but for unresolved, unformed communication” (Koestenbaum 188).

5 Silvan Tomkins cited in Sedgwick and Frank 5.

6 It is worth considering the possibility that the idea that using memories uses them up emerges historically alongside the development of photography.

7 On Proust’s use of music to this effect, see Clune, Writing Against Time. Scarry is important to Clune’s characterization of Proust’s vividness.

8 Wikipedia offers a slightly different though related genealogy, crediting the term to Serge Dubrovsky, who used it in 1977 to describe his own novel, Fils.

9 Adam Kelly uses the term to characterize a different set of writing in “The New Sincerity” (Kelly).