The exclusions of heterosexual identification

In my chapter on Denis Johnson's Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, I'm arguing that Johnson's protagonist, Leonard English, forsakes the potentially liberatory world of gay Provincetown, a world that would seem to offer the lost English the possibility of forging a new identity--ostensibly, the reason English goes to Provincetown in the first place. Instead of embracing the town, which English disgustedly describes as a "whole town of gay people," English works to assert a heterosexual identity with the decidedly bisexual Leanna Sousa, and when this fails, he turns to the imaginary identifications of conspiracy theory, finding solace in linking himself with first Gerald Twinbrook, and then the mythic Truth Infantry. Johnson, I argue, casts English as a meloncholic white man, adrift in a post-sixties world where white and male no longer have primacy. The dynamic I'm sketching here is roughly that articulated by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble. As she does throughout, she here describes gender identity and fragile and subject to disruption:

In the Lacanian framework, identification is understood to be fixed within the binary disjunction of “having” [men] or “being” [women] the Phallus, with the consequence that the excluded term of the binary continually haunts and disrupts the coherent posturing of any one. The excluded term is an excluded sexuality that contests the self-grounding pretensions of the subject as well as its claims to know the source and object of its desire” (66).

By excluded term, Butler means homosexuality, an identity she has shown to be repressed in the typical Freudian/Lacanian Oedipal complex--for Butler it's not the incest taboo that's central, it's the homosexual taboo. Butler throughout makes the case that heterosexuality is, essentially, ideological, and needing to be affirmed continually. Her point would seem to be supported by the masculinity scholars like Michael Kimmel who emphasize the centrality of homophobia to straight male identity. While it's not his only problem, English is nothing if not disrupted and haunted, and this disruption and haunting plays out in the largely homosexual Provincetown; Johnson repeatedly calls attention to his uncertain, tenuous grasp on his masculine identity in the context of Provincetown. It's bound up with a larger crisis, of course, but I think it's appropriate to emphasize that English is a hanged man. And in the last third of the novel, English explicitly turns to conspiracy in flight from both Provincetown and his crisis. (Yes, the whole thing can be framed in terms of mental illness, but English's discourse remains contiguous with the rest of the novel, except where he imagines a conspiracy.) I know of no other text that establishes the identificatory dynamic around conspiracy theory in exactly this way, but Johnson's text seems to align with Butler's account of the Lacanian heterosexual matrix as fictional, and, by implication, doomed to fail. English can't possess the Phallus.

Butler sets this binary against what she describes as “multiple identifications [that][…] constitute a nonhierarchical configuration of shifting and overlapping identifications that call into question the primacy of any univocal gender attribution” (66). There's something joyful in the language Butler uses here, the shifts and overlaps and nonhierarchies; later on the page, she seems to identify these multiple identifications with the "subversive and parodic convergences that characterize lesbian and gay cultures," and it's here that I see Leonard English, the lone gunman, rejecting this joy in favor of the stark loneliness of his mental and literal jail cells.

Admittedly, my reading of Provincetown may not exactly gibe with Butler's sense of how law and liberation work. Later in Gender Trouble, Butler offers a sharp, complex reading of Foucault's introduction to the autobiography of Herculine, a hermaphrodite from the nineteenth century. Here, Butler seems to assert that there is no outside to the regulating fiction of the law which produces both heterosexuality and homosexuality as, respectively, identity and non-idenitity:

[T]he law is not simply a cultural imposition on an otherwise natural heterogeneity; the law requires conformity to its own notion of ‘nature’ and gains its legitimacy through the binary and asymmetrical naturalization of bodies in which the Phallus, though clearly not identical with the penis, nevertheless deploys the penis as its naturalized instrument and sign.

Herculine’s pleasures and desires are in no way the bucolic innocence that thrives and proliferates prior to the imposition of a juridical law. Neither does s/he fall outside the signifying economy of masculinity. S/he is ‘outside’ the law, but the law maintains this ‘outside’ within itself. In effect, she embodies the law, not as an entitled subject, but as an enacted testimony to the law’s uncanny capacity to produce only those rebellions that it can guarantee will—out of fidelity—defeat themselves and those subjects who, utterly subjected, have no choice but to reiterate the law of their genesis (106).

So, I suppose, Provincetown is not in an "off season" in regards to the law; the "off season" is within the law itself (the rules aren't "suspended" in Provincetown). The melancholic joy of the drag bar expresses as much. So English's problems don't disappear if he embraces the queerness of his setting; but could he avoid his eventual tragedy? While it doesn't directly relate here, I love Butler's final sentence here, about the law that produces only rebellions that defeat themselves. It's an argument one might make about English's final action--trying to shoot the Bishop, while dressed in drag--but I'm not sure if it's accurate to frame this action as rebelling against any order, gender or otherwise. (If all of this seems a bit far afield from a conflicted white man who begins believing in a conspiracy theory to prop up his weak heterosexual identity, so it goes. Making untenable connections should be a benefit of this medium.)