In “In A Queer Time and Place” Halberstam notes that, “because we experience time as some form of natural progression we fail to realize or notice its construction” (p 7). We experience time linearly and therefore we extrapolate from our experiences and emotions in a linear context and tell stories in chronological order. It is how we experience our life therefore it is how we make sense of ourselves for other people. Linear time is our norm, making it “invisible” and of no note. Written on the Body rejects this norm as the narrator fails to tell their story in chronological order. The novel starts off with acknowledging of the narrator and Louise’s affair. The narrator then peppers in stories about past lovers and begins to tell the events that took place before/while they and Louise began their affair. All this time the narrator jars the reader by skipping back to previous lovers while giving very little to no chronological context to where these lovers fit in. This “queering” of the storytelling is one of the many deviant/queer facets of the novel.
Another deviation that is present in the novel is the extramarital affair Louise is having with the narrator. Halberstam says, “Queer subcultures produce alternative temporalitites by allowing their particiants to believe that their futures can be imagined according to logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience—namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death” (p 2). Each of these facets of life is expected to occur within a specific timespan. They are expected to happen linearly. You are born, you fall in love, you marry, reproduce, raise your offspring, retire, travel, die. Deviating from this formula is queer. Louise disrupts her linear progression by having a marriage with the narrator, “I’m going to leave him because my love for you makes ay other life a lie” (p 98). An affair not only interrupts the progression from marriage to (more if there was any) reproduction, but can completely halt this progression with the correct timing. An affair can leave a cheater without stability to raise a child or without another person to have a child with. One deviant act (cheating) can lead to a complete derailing from the expected path. Halberstam’s analysis of time (and how it is expected to pass) explains the cultural rules pertaining to time that the narrator from Written on the Body breaks.
Salvador Dali 1943
Geopolitical Child Watching the Birth of a New Man
Your connection between Halberstam’s notion of “queer time” and methods of writing in Written on the Body is interesting. I know you are limited to word count in this post, so expanding this argument may be a good idea for your paper! I think it is intriguing how queer time affects the narrators’ notions of death and how Louise is dying in an “unconventional” manner by having cancer at a young age. Do you think the narrator comes to terms with death through an understanding of “queer time” at the end of the novel? I think it would be worth exploring if you are interested. Also, the Dali painting is a nice touch!
What do you think this disregard for conventional time says about the narrator? What about ze’s relationship with Louise?
Wanted to add how I loved the way you analyzed Louise and the narrator’s relationship in regards to going against the norm.