Absence, resistance and visitable pasts: David Bowie, Todd Haynes, Henry James

Abstract

A massive part of the production of ‘David Bowie’ was, and remains, the deft employment of an aesthetics of absence. The ‘killing’ of Ziggy Stardust in 1973, the passage across the silence between one side of a vinyl album and another – most notably on Low and Heroes (1977) – were all employments of the power of what was suddenly no longer there or the force of empty spaces. This essay explores Bowie’s relationship to absence by reading two texts from which he is himself absent – Henry James’s novella The Aspern Papers (1888) and Todd Haynes’s film Velvet Goldmine (1998). It argues that Aspern provides an uncanny aesthetic, sensuous and formal template for Hayne’s cinematic exploration of glam rock and its legacies. In making this argument, it explores the extents to which absence is a generative energy in James’s work and Bowie’s. Using close reading, the essay examines how the novella and the film explore questions such as affective (mis)placement in time and the relationship between absence and resistance. It also reads the role of sensuous phenomena – most notably sound, fire and colour – in making, for both texts, the past amenable to touch and visitation.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Steve Bottoms and Angus Brown for reading earlier versions of this essay and to Joe Collier for his advice and encouragement.