Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction by Benjamin Bateman (review)

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• Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction by Benjamin Bateman
• Michael Dango

BATEMAN, BENJAMIN. Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. 208 pp. $85.00 hardcover; $85.00 e-book.

The superfine close readings of Benjamin Bateman’s Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction support an important argument about the linkage between a queer refusal of visibility and an environmental ethic of leaving no trace. Attending both to canonical queer texts (e.g., E. M. Forster’s Maurice) and to more recent entries (Shola von Reinhold’s Lote), Bateman advances the study of queer ecology through a nuanced update to the antisocial thesis. At the same time, he intervenes into critical assessments of novels that overly romanticize a conflation of queerness and the great outdoors.

Key to Bateman’s analysis is his introductory development of what he calls the “perish-performative,” inspired by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s sense of the “periperformative” sometimes overshadowed by the more heroic performative speech act. Joining the ranks of Anne-Lise François’s “recessive action” and Lauren Berlant’s “lateral agency,” the perish-performative is a paradoxical appearance of withdrawal. As an activist form, ACT UP’s die-ins provide a concrete example. For Bateman, it is a strategy attuned not only to the politics of death, however, but to the politics of the Anthropocene, modeling a kind of queer underachievement that, building on the queer ecological work of Nicole Seymour and Sarah Ensor, declines neoliberalism’s exhausting drive for self-actualization and instead provides “an affective corollary to the material restraint of ecological conservation” (33).

The queer can disappear in a variety of ways, which Bateman explores through reading five novels. In Forster’s Maurice, queerness is “a way of relating to life that decenters the human and fuzzes distinctions between life and its others” (59). Fuzzing is also at stake in Lydia Millett’s reverse-Bildungsroman How the Dead Dream, whose protagonist T. gives up on what Jonathan Crary has called late capitalism’s 24/7 culture of alertness and finds in sleep the loss of both his masculinity and the separateness of the human, sensing out interspecies “solidarities to be found in prostration rather than productivity” (134). In Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, the identities of characters are canceled and “overwhelm[ed]” by the [End Page 108] “engulfing” environment of the Great Plains, and so, too, the author—whose first name ends with the letter that begins her protagonist’s—“disappears into her novels” and “haunts them as a sort of internal death drive, allying herself with snakes and wolves that bite back at multiple forms...of domestication” (81). The beautiful and elusive Malone from Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance practices the “alone” embedded in his name and shows “that aloneness can be not only tolerated but also supported—and that, viewed somewhat differently, disappearance can be a tie that binds and a practice handed down from one generation to another, a legacy whose constitutive impermanence is inseparable from its endurance” (103). A different intergenerational legacy plays out in Shola von Reinhold’s Lote, whose protagonist Mathilda is visited, in hallucinations she calls “Transfixions,” by a modernist Black queer crowd disappeared from the white archives of Bloomsbury or the Bright Young Things. Drawing from Marquis Bey on Black trans feminism and Christina Sharpe on a politics of “redaction,” Bateman understands this disappearance not just as loss, but as fugitivity—and as a confirmation, too, that “queer disappearance possesses a community spirit” (152). In his conclusion, Bateman realigns this fugitivity with his ecological concerns through a creative essay by J. Drew Lanham that links slavery and the extinction of the Carolina parakeet.

As a whole, Queer Disappearance is a formalist model, demonstrating the continued vitality of resting arguments on close reading. For instance, a particularly striking moment in the introduction reads the imperfect parallelism in José Esteban Muñoz’s theorization of a “queer life-world...in which we are allowed to be drama queens and smoke as much as our hearts desire,” allowing “smoke” to signify not just as verb but as noun: a dissipating vapor that queers...