Drag and the Aesthetics of Free Speech in the Mosaic of Mary McCarthy’s Postmodern Affinities

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Notes

¹ It is worth noting that Miller’s book, which covers roughly one hundred and fifty years, features one woman and eleven men.

² Ironically, Miller’s complaint that McCarthy failed to give everyone “pleasure” invites us to consider the extent to which her writing was ultimately more invested in pleasure than in the politics.

³ The publishing history of the title of Burroughs’ novel is complex and confusing. We see an exemplary instance of this inconsistency within McCarthy’s review. Her essay is entitled “Burroughs’ Naked Lunch,” but throughout the essay, she refers to it as The Naked Lunch, consistent with the way she writes it when quoting Burroughs discussing his own novel.

⁴ A.O. Scott pairs McCarthy’s review of Burroughs’ novel with her review of Pale Fire, “Bolt from the Blue,” in his collection of the same name, A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays.

⁵ In Out of Touch: Skin Tropes and Identities in Woolf, Ellison, Pynchon, and Acker, I wrote about this particular skin trope and what it signifies for Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man, published a decade before McCarthy undertook these reviews of Nabokov’s and Burroughs’ novels. I make the case that the currency of the conceit among both writers and critics – including the esteemed art historian Clement Greenberg – speaks to a certain modernist emphasis on surfaces and a corresponding resistance to history.

⁶ Schryer observes, “… McCarthy was impressed with the intellectual leadership of North Vietnam – a group that, she noted, were mostly university-educated professionals from minor mandarin families,” who, she wrote in a letter to friend, Dwight Macdonald, ran the country “on aristocratic principles [as they were] largely … aristocratic persons with a traditional code of manners and morals” (Schryer 93).

⁷ Abrams’ invaluable remarks about McCarthy’s 1974 lecture follow her extended analysis of Birds of America in which she observes that McCarthy, like one of her characters, “believes that works of visual art are best enjoyed in near solitude” (101). A fairly mundane point on its own, McCarthy’s insistence on the centrality of solitude in appreciating art runs parallel to her admonition about free speech likewise requiring solitude and serves to confirm a larger pattern: McCarthy conflated art and politics across her oeuvre.

⁸ On February 5, 2019, the Center for Constitutional Rights reported, “a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit filed against Dr. Steven Salaita over the American Studies Association’s (ASA) resolution to endorse the call to boycott Israeli academic institutions as part of the Boycott Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.” A few weeks later, The Chronicle of Higher Education put the news in its historical context: “Salaita, formerly a professor of English at Virginia Tech, was going to assume a new post at Illinois in the fall of 2014. But a string of tweets that he posted about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict drew considerable outrage. Illinois trustees denied him the offer …. Salaita then took a position at the American University of Beirut, from which he was ‘ousted,’ he says, due to pressure from U.S. Senators and university donors alike.”