A Question of Influence

In recent publicity events for The Last Vanishing Man, I have struggled with the question of influence. It keeps coming up because people seem to perceive the stories in the book as having different structures and styles from what they are used to — not bad, just different. "Where did this come from?" is a natural question following any such response. My answers have all be unsatisfying to me. Not inaccurate, because I always try to speak truthfully, but there is something deeply unsatisfying in saying, for instance, that "After the End of the End of the World" came into focus for me as I was reading the stories of Clarice Lispector and Gerald Murnane. This answer is unsatisfying because it provides hardly any useful information. If you like my story, there's no guarantee you'll like Lispector's or Murnane's stories (or vice versa); nor is it likely that if you read those writers that you will write anything like my story (because you're not me). So the connection between my story and the work of other writers is mysterious, personal, ineffable, and fundamentally useless to anyone other than, at most, myself.

I've taken to saying that I feel more obviously influenced by poetry, music, and film than by prose. This isn't entirely, or even mostly, true, but there is a truth to it. Certainly, you will learn as much about me as a writer from knowing the effect of Tori Amos's Boys for Pele on me (or the poetry of Basho or the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder) than you will from any list of fiction writers I give. I have resorted to this answer because it makes the impossibility of the question more apparent, and perhaps leads to some interesting ways of thinking — you might actually have an interesting experience of the stories if you try to imagine the influence of Tori Amos, Basho, or Fassbinder on them, because that will cause you to stretch your own imagination. But still, much as I love to talk about influences (because it lets me talk about artists I appreciate, and I cherish few conversations as much as those), I am wary of giving too much power to such talk.

Speaking of influence: This week, the New York Times published a fascinating conversation with a pretty terrible headline: "The 25 Most Influential Works of Postwar Queer Literature". The headline is terrible because 1.) it is demonstrably untrue that these are the most influential works of (English-language) postwar queer lit; and 2.) even the people involved don't make this claim.

Despite the inaccurate, clickbaiting headline, the conversation is great because it is a chat between a bunch of smart, well-informed queer lit luminaries about books they love. But as I said, it's not true that these are the most influential works of postwar queer lit — the listers deliberately avoided some of the works that more typically make such lists, particularly if those were were by white cigender men. So no Christopher Isherwood, no Gore Vidal, no Tennessee Williams. All undeniably influential, and arguably some of the most influential figures for the shaping of queer culture in the 20th century, but the kind of queer culture they represent feels a bit passé in a way that James Baldwin does not, even though it wasn't long ago that Baldwin's seemed to be the reputation that had faded most after his death. (Baldwin's reputation alone is a fascinating topic, one deserving more attention — he was unread and misread for a long time. Even now, amid a Baldwin renaissance, his last three novels deserve much more attention. I was glad Edmund White in the Times conversation brought up Just Above My Head.) Then there's Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, neither of whom make the list, both of whom were immensely influential in all sorts of different ways, but Ginberg's association with NAMBLA and Burroughs's drug addiction, (accidental) murder of his wife, and male separatism/misogyny render those two unappealing figures for an era that spurns artists who aren't good role models in life.

(The listers were also instructed not to choose any work by any participant in the conversation, which results in the glaring omission of Edmund White.)

Like many such lists, this one tends toward the present. Roxane Gay even makes the case, saying, "New work can be just as influential as older work, especially when it comes to queer work, where so many voices were overlooked for so long. It’s important to include contemporary voices." That's true for people writing right now — I think, for instance, Detransition Baby (which is on the list) and Gender Queer (which is not) are central to conversations about queerness and literature today — but it's not true if we're talking about influential as a general adjective, because then you would need to include the influence on previous generations of writers and readers. In that sense of the word, we see in this list the conspicuous absence of such writers as John Rechy, Rita Mae Brown, Andrew Holleran, Dorothy Allison, Armistead Maupin, etc. Similarly, on the drama side, a vast history of English-language theatre is unmentioned, whether The Boys in the Band and Torch Song Trilogy or more underground but undeniably influential work like the plays of Charles Ludlam or Sarah Kane.

The participants often sidestep the actual topic and instead discuss work that they think deserves to be better known. That's understandable, even noble — it's better to discuss what doesn't get enough attention rather than shine a spotlight on things that are already well lit. A list that lived up to the inaccurate headline of the Times article would actually be pretty boring, because it would be stuff most people already know about, little more than Queer Lit 101. The actual list is most interesting when it does what an earlier list in The Guardian did: look for undersung work. There's plenty of it. Unless you're a real theatre junkie, you probably don't know about Taylor Mac, so it's exciting to see Hir on the list. And Essex Hemphill's Ceremonies has been out of print so long that most people now access it via pirated copies (thankfully, New Directions will be bringing out a collection of Hemphill's poetry sometime in the next year or so). Ceremonies is a fascinating, even unique, example of a book that is truly and deeply influential while also being criminally under-known.

It's hard to see a list and not want to make one of your own. So I'm going to end here by pretending that I was asked to join in this illustrious company. The instructions, as described by Kurt Soller, are to think through the queer literature that has "been the most influential in making and furthering queer culture?" Additionally,

I’d asked everyone to nominate 10 or so works that we could discuss when we met, and we also exchanged some messages about the assignment’s parameters: We’d focus only on English-language literature (not in translation) that came out after the end of World War II, as queer life became less coded and began to flourish in the West, and we’d exclusively discuss novels, plays and poems (as opposed to, say, memoir or biography or other types of nonfiction — though this rule incited a whole debate within the debate). The writers also agreed not to select works by one another.

Here is what I would have made for a list, were I to make it right now, off the top of my head, without any research or much reflection, just gut instinct:

• Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
• Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown
• The Wild Boys by William S. Burroughs
• The Boys in the Band by Mart Crowley
• Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
• Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg
• The Fall of America by Allen Ginsberg
• A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
• Coal by Audre Lorde
• City of Night by John Rechy
• Diving Into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich
• Suddenly Last Summer by Tennessee Williams

And thus I prove I can't do this exercise, because that's 12 titles and the only one from after the 1970s is Stone Butch Blues! But my deeply inadequate list shows some of what I'm trying to say here about the idea of what is influential. Stunningly incomplete as my list is, the titles on it — unlike the Times list — each seem to me inarguably to be among "the most influential in making and furthering queer culture". (Probably Howl is a better choice than Fall of America, but I chose the latter because it's dedicated to Walt Whitman, has poems written both before and after Stonewall, and includes "Please Master", a poem that still can shock.) What is arguable is whether the titles on my list continue to influence queer culture. At least a few of those titles do not seem to have much influence anymore. Which is fine and good. Cultures change, renew, regenerate.

Once again, I am stuck ruminating on whether influence actually matters. What are we asking when we ask about influences? The Times conversation, for all its interesting insights, doesn't (can't!) answer that because each participant brought a different interpretation of the task. My own interpretation stuck to the brief and ended up mired in history, while still flagrantly incomplete. Maybe such tasks are best completed by aiming toward their impossibility, as a lot of the Times participants did, not even attempting to be true to the letter of the law but rather to a spirit floating around it.

When asking about influence, we're asking: "How did you — we — someone — get to here?" Does influence answer such a question? Is a lineage an explanation? For some questions, sure. (My story was, indeed, influenced by Clarice Lispector and Gerald Murnane.) But "influence" rarely feels like it is addressing the questions that matter, because the questions that matter go beyond influence.

I'm an inveterate Foucauldian, so when thinking about writers and creativity and culture I tend to think in terms of archaeology and genealogy, the systems that render certain concepts visible and useable at any one point in history (while, of course, rendering other concepts obscure, even invisible, and unable to be used). Rather than influence, might we ask about the systems that make particular works of art knowable, valued — even possible?

For instance, having done work on the composition of Dhalgren, I could list out a bunch of titles that were potential influences (conscious and unconscious) on Delany as he wrote that novel, but that would be significantly less illluminating than thinking about the book in relationship to gay male life in New York City and San Francisco in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in relationship to systems of publishing at that time, in relationship to pre- and post-Stonewall/Gay Liberation, in relationship to science fiction, in relationship to Delany's other works, etc. Similarly, rather than look at "the influence of Dhalgren", it would be more illuminating to chart the ways in which it has been read, cited, interpreted, and used over the decades since it was first published in 1975, the ways the book itself has at times seemed more an icon to be referred to than a text to be read. This would, in its own way, be a discussion of influence, but more material and historical than such discussions tend to be, and it would be as much interested in change as in continuity.

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image by Jordan McDonald on Unsplash