Surrendering to Subjectivity: In Praise of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts

As a writer and thinker, my life is divided into a B.N. and A.N.: a before-Nelson and after-Nelson.

Before cracking open Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, I’d been all phobic about the first-person whenever I sat down to write. For decades, I’d avoided the first-person because respectable authorities had warned me away from it. Starting a sentence with “I” was like running with scissors or getting into a panel van driven by a hyperventilating stranger. Just don’t do it.

The first-person was portrayed as a gateway-drug into a slacker’s subjectivity, an immediate forfeit of hard-won authority, an entryway to peripheral-ness, and a slippery slope toward that authorial purgatory that is “opinion” writing.

Prior to Nelson, I held on to the artifice of airtight writerly authority because it promised an escape from what her idol Roland Barthes had called—admiringly, I think, or more to the point realistically—”the muck of language.” But I now see chasing respectability and factuality as a Faustian pact, and reclaiming my soul became a way of surviving the harrowing early 2020s. Like Nelson, I’ve always loved Barthes—my own touchstones are The Pleasure of the Text and the devastating Camera Lucida. And I’ve actually come to love the writerly muck, “after Nelson.” The muck has become necessary.

Nelson doesn’t gain her readers’ trust despite the first-person, but rather through her particular deployment of it. Yet that trust isn’t so much created as presumed.

More to the point, Nelson doesn’t gain her readers’ trust despite the first-person, but rather through her particular deployment of it. Yet that trust isn’t so much created as presumed. Her intimacy is radical and instantaneous, and this is how she pulled me immediately into The Argonauts even before her beautiful and painful little book broached the subjects that became fundamental to my own work. I’m speaking of gender, sex, pain, pleasure, ideas, and critical theory—as beheld by a liberal mind and body as they’re now besieged at a difficult time.

What was that about respectability? Nelson begins her memoir with a real-time account of bottoming on the floor, face squished against cement, as topped by her transitioning husband-to-be Harry Dodge. And take note, it’s the kitchen floor that Nelson is inelegantly splayed against—the most abject and abused surface of the home.

Nelson’s mind quickly sails from cold floor-pragmatics to high theory. The naked veracity of her low-down leads to the rhetorical question “Does it get any better?”, which then quickly carries her mind to Ludwig Wittgenstein. This great theorist of language and thought becomes The Argonauts’ first ray of clarity, bringing high seamlessly together with low already on page 1. “Before we met,” Nelson hears herself telling Harry in the kitchen, “I had spent a lifetime devoted to Wittgenstein’s idea that the inexpressible is contained—inexpressibly!—in the expressed.”

I can’t get enough of this Argonauts opening, can’t find my fill of its so-very smooth continuum between visceral inelegance and extraordinary knowledge, between body and mind. With its brutal openness, her book reminded me of perhaps the very first memoir in the modern sense, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions. To borrow Rousseau’s description of his own memoir, we could say Nelson presents herself “in every way true to nature” and indeed holds back nothing. Such acknowledgments allow Nelson a tone of confessional sincerity in her intricate self-narrative on parenthood, and gender fluidity that she titled “the argonauts” after Barthes’s allusion to the perilous search for love.

I have to confess my disciplinary jealousies. While Nelson has the world at her fingertips as a poet, memoirist, and teacher of what higher education still calls creative writing, I have had the restrictive misfortune of “scholarly” training as a historical musicologist, with hard-earned, Ivy-League expertise in paleography, primary source filiation, post-tonal analysis, and causal style histories. But I felt my disciplinary walls come a-tumbling down, noisily and for keeps, as soon as I came across her free-range, cage-free thinking (in The Argonauts, but even more poignantly and intimately in her poetic Bluets).

(OK, I admit those walls had already been cracked by the likes of Barthes, T.W. Adorno, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Eve Sedgwick. But the coup de grâce was Nelson’s doing.)

After being validated with a doctorate, I labored for more than 30 years to elicit trust from my own readers: to inspire credence through demonstrating my own scholarly training, authority, knowledge, credentials, archival skills, and intellectual compass. And now here, in half a page, Maggie Nelson—New York Times bestseller-list-er, Macarthur Fellow and professor of English at USC—elicits the reader’s trust almost instantly by describing being fucked on the floor in picaresque detail. It’s anal sex. And the anal sex is made even more outrageous by its lack of footnotes.

Under her influence, I even began to look at my earlier “scholarly” work through the prisms of intimacy and honesty. Almost right away, I petulantly and maybe enviously started comparing Nelson with my own roles as published scholar—and as sexual partner. Because how can those two functions possibly be separated?, she left me asking.

It’s a cliché to envisage one thinker “giving permission” to another. But I can only conclude that Maggie Nelson allowed me to do what I need to do.

Thinking back to my own dark days in the closet, sexually and intellectually…My debutante essay was a highly learnèd and heavily footnoted article in the flagship peer-reviewed journal in my field. The article went on to win a major award, what I call the “Heisman Trophy” of American musicology. But looking back on it now, I’d say my essay reeks of avoidance. I can’t find myself anywhere in it. Every word oozes an academic solicitation of trust, each oversize term is an invitation to boredom. And now that the world and its meritocracies are burning around us, who cares?

The best scholarly work tends to be autobiographical in some ulterior sense, and of course Nelson is highly “scholarly” in her own fashion. Yet she elicited my own readerly trust by not writing her book as a disciplinary history that includes her own place in it—which is the basic rationale of most published scholarship. I would say, in fact, that I found any genre considerations counterproductive while reading The Argonauts. “Am I reading fiction, or maybe some kind of ‘talking cure’ on the part of a hugely literate subject?” “Is this person in a real existential crisis, or is she counting how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” Any such questions quickly submerge under her rich writerly textures, her lush panoply of thoughts.

Yes, it’s a cliché to envisage one thinker “giving permission” to another. But I can only conclude that Maggie Nelson allowed me to do what I need to do. The ultimate sign of her influence on my own work is that I’m now doing the musicologically unthinkable, which is to write a book that has nothing to do with music. The new project on my hard drive focuses not on songs or symphonies but on cruelty, injustice, dishonesty, and the politics of everyday language. As I pen this, respectability is still holding on for dear life in my (working) title. But I hope that will be the last platitude, and that it will surrender soon. My new study has to snarl and snap and sing at every turn, and it has to tell a story. The legacy of writer Maggie Nelson merits no less.

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My 1980s Gayboy Playlist by Arved Ashby is available from Punctum Books.