As a writer and thinker, my life is divided into two chapters: B.N.—before Nelson—and A.N.—after Nelson.
Before dipping into Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, I was thoroughly anxious about using the first-person whenever I set pen to paper. For years I avoided the pronoun “I” because respected authorities urged me to keep at bay this self-referential mode. Beginning a sentence with “I” felt like handling scissors or climbing into a van steered by a panicked stranger. Simply put: don’t go there.
The first-person was depicted as a gateway to a lazy, inward-looking subjectivity, an abrupt surrender of hard-won credibility, a doorway to marginality, and a treacherous slide toward the purgatory of “opinion” writing.
Before Nelson, I clung to the pretenses of airtight professional authority because they promised an escape from what Barthes—whom I revered, perhaps realistically—called “the muck of language.” Yet I now recognize that chasing respectability and factual precision is a Faustian bargain, and reclaiming my own essence proved essential for surviving the brutal early 2020s. Like Nelson, I have always cherished Barthes—my personal touchstones are The Pleasure of the Text and the devastating Camera Lucida. And I’ve come to value the writerly muddle that follows Nelson. That mud has become indispensable.
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 win readers’ trust through the first person by accident; she earns it through how she uses it. Yet that trust feels less earned than assumed. Her closeness is radical and immediate, and this is what drew me into The Argonauts even before her delicate and painful little book touched on themes that would come to shape my own work. I’m talking about gender, sexuality, pain, pleasure, ideas, and critical theory—as perceived by a liberal mind and body now besieged by troubling times.
What was this about respectability? Nelson opens her memoir with a real-time scene of bottoming out on the floor, face pressed into cement, with her transitioning partner-to-be Harry Dodge above her. And note, it’s the kitchen floor against which Nelson’s body is sprawled—the most humbling and violated surface of the home.
Nelson’s mind quickly voyages from the grittiness of floor-level practicality to lofty theory. The raw honesty of that moment leads to the question, “Does it get any better?” and soon enough to Ludwig Wittgenstein. This towering thinker of language and thought becomes The Argonauts’ first glimmer of clarity, weaving the lofty with the intimate right from the very first pages. “Before we met,” Nelson tells Harry in the kitchen, “I had spent a lifetime clinging to Wittgenstein’s idea that the inexpressible is contained—inexpressibly!—in the expressed.”
I can’t get enough of this opening to The Argonauts; I relish its glide from visceral awkwardness to extraordinary insight, from body to mind. In its stark frankness, the book echoes perhaps the earliest modern memoirs, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions. To borrow Rousseau’s characterization of his own memoir, Nelson presents herself “in every way true to nature” and holds nothing back. These acknowledgments allow Nelson a tone of confessional honesty within her intricate self-narrative on motherhood and gender fluidity, which she namingly called “the argonauts” after Barthes’s allusion to the perilous search for love.
I must acknowledge my own professional envy. While Nelson navigates poetry, memoir, and pedagogy—fields that higher education still brands as creative writing—I come from the more restrictive domain of historical musicology, with hard-won Ivy-League expertise in paleography, provenance, post-tonal analysis, and the histories of causal style. Yet the moment I encountered her free-range, cage-free thinking (in The Argonauts, and even more poignantly in her lyric Bluets), my disciplinary walls began to crumble, loudly and decisively.
(Okay, I will admit that those walls had already been breached by Barthes, T. W. Adorno, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Eve Sedgwick. But Nelson delivered the coup de grâce.)
After earning a doctorate, I spent more than three decades trying to earn the trust of my readers: convincing them through demonstrations of scholarly training, authority, knowledge, credentials, archival skills, and intellectual orientation. And now, here in a mere half-page, Maggie Nelson—New York Times bestsellerist, MacArthur Fellow, and USC English professor—elicits reader trust almost instantaneously by recounting a scene of sex on the floor in vividly candid detail. It’s anal sex. And the audacity is heightened by the absence of footnotes.
Under her spell, I began to reexamine my earlier “scholarly” work through the lenses of intimacy and honesty. Almost at once, I found myself comparing Nelson with my own roles as a published scholar—and as a sexual partner. How could those two functions possibly be separated? she left me wondering.
It’s a cliché to think of one thinker “giving permission” to another. Yet Maggie Nelson, in her way, gave me leave to do what I must.
Reflecting on my own days spent shuttered in both sexual and intellectual closets…my debut essay was a densely researched and footnoted piece in the top journal in my field. The article earned a major prize—the “Heisman Trophy” of American musicology, as I’ve called it. Yet, looking back, I’d describe the piece as evasive. I can’t locate my own sense of self within it. Every sentence reeked of a bid for trust, with grandiloquent terms inviting dullness. And now that the world and its meritocracies are aflame around us, who cares?
The best scholarly work often bears autobiographical undertones, and Nelson is unquestionably learned in her own right. Yet she won my readerly trust by forgoing a disciplinary history that foregrounds her own place within it—a standard device of most published scholarship. In truth, I found genre distinctions counterproductive while reading The Argonauts. “Am I reading fiction, or perhaps a kind of ‘talking cure’ from a highly literate subject?” “Is this person caught in a real existential crisis, or counting how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” Such questions quickly fade beneath her rich writerly texture and expansive array of ideas.
Yes, it’s a cliché to imagine one thinker granting permission to another. But I can only conclude that Maggie Nelson allowed me to do what I need to do. The ultimate mark of her influence on my own work is that I’m now pursuing a path that seems wholly unconnected to music. My new project on the computer centers not on songs or symphonies but on cruelty, injustice, deceit, and the politics of everyday language. As I write this, the old ideal of respectability clings stubbornly to my prospective title. I hope this will be the last such platitude, and that it will yield soon. My upcoming study must growl and sing with every turn, and it must tell a story. Maggie Nelson’s legacy as a writer deserves nothing less.
____________________________
My 1980s Gayboy Playlist by Arved Ashby is available from Punctum Books.
