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ABSTRACT
In the first decade of the 2000s, the friendship between Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop was drawn into one of the most acrimonious debates to befall Queer Theory. Known as the “antisocial thesis,” this debate erupted around the question of whether queerness should be understood as a negative withdrawal from normative social modes of being or as a desire for social togetherness that normative social scripts prohibit. In accounts that have yet to receive sustained attention, Kathryn R. Kent and José Esteban Muñoz – siding with queer relationality – turned to the Moore-Bishop friendship to illustrate ostensibly divergent modalities of queer being in the world, with Bishop modeling a queer poetics of “invitation” in contrast to an antisocial Moore. This essay refutes these portrayals by thinking of queer relationality as “efforts of affection,” a term both poets used to name the freedoms and the burdens relationality entails. In close readings of Moore and Bishop, and by drawing on canonical and recent Moore scholarship, the efforts of affection that pass between Moore and Bishop will resemble what Jacques Derrida thought of as the work (or effort) of mourning.
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Notes
1 Bishop, Elizabeth Bishop, 740.
2 See also Mari Ruti’s extended discussion and critique of this debate in The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory’s Defiant Subjects (2017), in references.
3 By turning attention to this episode, this essay takes up recent calls for scholars to develop more complex understandings of the “mutual influence” that often ran between Marianne Moore and her friends. See Gregory and Hubbard, “Introduction,” 5.
4 See Muñoz’s comment in his response to the 2005 MLA conference panel: “It has been clear to many of us, for quite a while now, that the antirelational in queer studies was the gay white man’s last stand” (825). In a footnote, Muñoz narrows his target: “I do not mean all gay white men in queer studies. More precisely, I am referring to gay white male scholars who imagine sexuality as a discrete category that can be abstracted and isolated from other antagonism” (825). See, also, Robyn Weigman’s discussion of Muńoz’s emphasis on thinking through the intersection of race and queer sexuality, in references.
5 Muñoz aligns himself with political critiques of Moore as a “spinster” that have circulated since the 1970s. Linda Leavell cites Adrienne Rich’s “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision” from 1972 as one of the earliest examples of queer critiques of Moore’s sexuality based on a perceived inability to identify with Moore in the wake of sexual liberationist politics (“Politics of Celibacy” 220). Leavell revisits this issue in Holding on Upside Down, where she suggests that the association between Marianne Moore and the figure of “ the spinster” may have originated in Hilton Kramer’s review of the 1981 Macmillan and Viking edition of The Complete Poems in which Kramer criticizes the media for having turned Moore into “the very archetype of the quaint literary spinster” (Kramer, in Leavell, Holding On 380). According to Leavell, “[v]irtually all of Moore’s critics since then have agreed with this assessment” (380). See also Benjamin Kahan’s compelling discussion of spinsterhood in Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life (2013), where he argues that Moore’s embodiment of the spinster, as a public persona, actually critiques “the inadequacy of the lonely spinster model” as well as “romantic friendship models and more pro-sex models of female-female relations” (59).
6 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 188.
7 Interpreting the poem as “a plea for aesthetic openness made through a meal,” Robin Schulze notes that an invitation to a rat “is not … normal procedure” (21).
8 “Rat” happens to be one of the pet names Marianne went by in the Moore family. Leavell notes that “Rat” was a name Moore gave herself, tying the appellation specifically to her identity as a poet, or the “scribbler of verses” (Holding On xvi). Moore’s invitation to the “Rat” may thus be read as a possible reference to herself and her own queerness.
9 Noting that “resistance to tyranny, in its various forms” is the “most pervasive theme” of Moore’s poetry (15), Linda Leavell comments that “[s]weeping generalizations of any kind were” also “a form of tyranny” for Moore, who “repeatedly warned against typecasting as lazy first impressions” (Holding On xiv-v). See also Cristanne Miller’s two excellent essays on the merits and limits of Moore’s antiracism.
10 I refer the reader to Robin Schulze’s excellent reading of the play between plenty and multiplicity in “A Propos of Mice.” This distinction is reprised by Moore in another “rat” poem, “The Jerboa” (1932), as plenty and abundance.
11 Moore hand-picked this phrase from a 1923 article by M.C. Carey in London Graphic. See The Complete Poems, 273.
12 Here, I must depart from Paulina Ambroży’s excellent reading of Moore’s deconstruction of borders in “An Octopus.” Ambroży seems to conflate Moore’s critique of the Greek predilection for smoothing over complex surfaces with “neatness of finish,” arguing that Moore points out “the dangers of relentless accuracy” (109). But to me, it’s clear that Moore celebrates neatness of finish and links it to “relentless accuracy,” which represents the “nature” of the octopus’s “capacity for fact,” or, its ability to countenance complexity and difference, or the “ruggedness” that Ambroży rightly sees Moore as holding onto.
13 Reading the “feet” of “An Octopus” with Moore’s early poem “Man’s Feet Are a Sensational Device” could be a fruitful avenue of future research. See Grace Schulman’s The Poems of Marianne Moore, 65.
14 For an extended discussion of the agrarian politics that may have been informing “Virginia Britannia,” see Fiona Green, in references.
15 Heidegger defines polemos as an ongoing hierarchizing event, “a strife that holds sway before everything divine and human,” though, “not war in the human sense”: “As Heraclitus thinks it, struggle [read: polemos] first and foremost allows what essentially unfolds to step apart from each other in opposition, first allows position and status and rank to establish themselves in coming to presence” (67). Clarifying this gloss, Heidegger asserts: “Confrontation does not divide unity, much less destroy it. It builds unity, it is the gathering (logos). Polemos and logos are the same” (67-8).
16 It feels important to mark that this essay was largely written in 2020, during the early months of the COVID-19 global pandemic. Then American President Donald Trump repeatedly and publicly refused to be held accountable for his demonstrably insufficient response to the many warnings his administration had received about the possibility of a major coronavirus outbreak in the United States. In a press conference held on March 13, 2020, as thousands of Americans were beginning to succumb to the deadly virus, the President responded to questions about his leadership with this statement: “I take no responsibility at all” (Blake).
17 For more on Derrida’s distinction between visitation and invtitation, see Peggy Kamuf’s “Visitation,” in references. On the to come of hospitality, see Derrida: “What we call hospitality maintains an essential relation with the opening of what is called to come [à venir]” (“Hospitality” 11).
18 “But is one obliged to accept the invitation to think what one is invited to think?” Derrida, “Psyche,” 219, n.2.
19 See Crépon: “Mourning effects the trace because there is no living being for which we can determine, by decree, in advance, that we will not someday have to preserve its memory” (108).
20 Costello, “Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop,” 140–41. For more discussions of “influence” between Moore and Bishop see Joanne Feit-Deal and David Kalstone, in references.
21 Most scholars of modernist poetry will know about the falling out that took place between Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop following Marianne and Mary Moore’s unsolicited re-writing of Bishop’s poem “Roosters.” For an extended account, see Leavell (Holding On 281–2).
22 A borrowing from Eric Lott.
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Ryan Tracy
Ryan Tracy is a PhD candidate at The CUNY Graduate Center working at the intersections of deconstruction and trans-Atlantic literary modernism, with a specialization in women's literature and the New Negro Renaissance. His scholarly writing has appeared in Arizona Quarterly, Derrida Today, The Journal of American Studies in Italy (JAm It!), and NANO: New American Notes Online, for which he coedited the special issue This Is What Makes Us Girls: Gender, Genre, and Popular Music with Erin Kappeler (Tulane). Ryan has written about opera, art, and culture for The Brooklyn Rail, The New York Press, and The American Reader. He is working on a manuscript on RuPaul, drag, and radical pedagogy forthcoming from Punctum Books. His first book of poems, Tender Bottoms, was released in 2022.