The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

Maggie Nelson's Autotheory

The genre-bending aspect of this book comes from Nelson's unique conflation of academic references (specifically feminist/queer) and autobiography.

Her intent to explore both her own private life—a romance with Harry and, arguably, her baby—and engage in her knowledge of queer/feminist literature is expressed through self-applied critical theory in the form of quotes—lots and lots of quotes.

Style & Tone

The Argonauts is a carefully-cultivated text of intentional stylistic and tonal contradictions.

It could be argued that these contradictions—which Nelson seems to relish in—contribute thematically to the idea of queer exploration and identity (so, Harry's exploration and identity).

Or, it could be a radical statement on the inseparability of body (as in the human body) and theory—drawing from critical sources, Nelson (most profoundly, in my opinion) attributes philosophy and emotion to natural biological processes (like pregnancy, sexuality, gender, etc.)

Either way, this technique (of intentionally juxtaposing commonly-viewed-as dissimilar things) creates a quietly radical discourse, forcing the reader to re-examine assumptions surrounding gender, sexuality, the female body, pregnancy, etc.

Strategies of Creative Non-fiction

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

Presented by Marcie LaCerte

"A day or two after my love pronouncement, now feral with vulnerability, I sent you the passage from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes in which Barthes describes how the subject who utters the phrase 'I love you' is like 'the Argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name.' Just as the Argo’s parts may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the Argo, whenever the lover utters the phrase 'I love you,' its meaning must be renewed by each use, as 'the very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new.'"

Barthes and the Argo

Key players:

• Maggie Nelson, author
• Harry Dodge, partner
• Iggy, baby/fetus

Key ideas:

• (Gender)queer identity
• Pregnancy/family
• Love and sexuality
• Birth and death
• Academic theory

Structural separation between personal and theoretical

The Argo by Konstantinos Volanakis

Incorporation of other people's writing

The end of the book—the climax—is marked by a textual conversation between Harry and Maggie. Maggie writes about giving birth to Iggy. Harry, in his own words, writes about his mother's death.

Structurally, the book contains no chapters. Paragraphs are clumped together in "moments" or "scenes," which in turn are separated only by extended space.

These separations are frequently of thematic and tonal importance; Nelson will write about some personal event in the past, then switch back to a present moment with Harry or Iggy, then switch again to a more philosophical, introspective inquiry. It's not random, though—there are clear connections between paragraphs in the text.

the juxtaposition of Nelson's pregnancy and Harry's transition

“I spent another 5 hours with her body, alone, with the light on. she was so incredibly beautiful. she looked 19. i took about a hundred pictures of her. i sat with her for a long long time holding her hand. i prepared a meal and ate in the other room and returned. i kept talking to her. i felt like I lived a hundred years, a lifetime with her silent, peaceful body. i turned off the AC unit. the ceiling fan above her was whipping air, holding the space of cycle, where her breath had been.”

This direct use of another person's words within an autobiography is powerful without being overbearing, and the structure of the end works beautifully.

In a similar vein, though perhaps not as dramatic, Nelson will pluck relevant phrases from quoted sources (like Argo from Barthes) and use these words throughout the text, sprinkled throughout her personal thoughts.

Second-person voice

Repetition of thematically-relevant phrases

“If it weren’t such a lengthy moniker I might call them the "many-gendered mothers of my heart". . . which accomplishes the nearly impossible feat of constructing an ecstatic matriarchal cosmology while also defetishizing the maternal, even emptying the category out, eventually wondering: “But is ‘mother of’ precise? / Should I say ‘singers of’ instead? . . . Is it good to call these others as my moms the way I have? Is it care, & if it is have I gave honor in my song?’”

“What if where I am is what I need? Before you, I had always thought of this mantra as a means of making peace with a bummer or even catastrophic situation. I never imagined it might apply to joy, too.” –quoted from Deborah Hay

At times, Nelson will resort to using second-person voice, referring to Harry. This creates a sense of intimacy, as if the reader is privy to the privacies of their relationship.

the juxtaposition of biology and theory, objectivity and emotion, collective and personal (because lots of people go through pregnancy)

In addition to Barthes' Argo, Nelson, citing poet Dana Ward, refers to her sources and significant persons in her life as “the many-gendered mothers of my heart.” Throughout the book, she repeats this phrase, bringing to attention this theme of "matriarchal cosmology"—and also, probably, because it's a pretty cool phrase.

She's also pretty funny:

“They would have had a pathological relation to carrot juice.”

Nonlinearity

“. . . it took me by surprise that my body could make a male body. Many woman I know have reported something of the same, even though they know this is the most ordinary of miracles. As my body made the male body, I felt the difference between male and female body melt even further away. I was making a body with a difference, but a girl body would have been a different body too. The principal difference was that the body I made would eventually slide out of me and be its own body. Radical intimacy, radical difference. Both in the body, both in the bowl.”

“The mother of an adult child sees her work completed and undone at the same time. If this holds true, I may have to withstand not only rage, but also my undoing. Can one prepare for one’s undoing? How has my mother withstood mine? Why do I continue to undo her, when what I want to express above all else is that I love her very much?” –quote from Eula Bliss

Nelson jumps from past to present tense, from pre- to post-birth, from her childhood to Iggy's.

“On the one hand, the Aristotelian, perhaps evolutionary needs to put everything into categories—predator, twilight, edible—on the other, the needs to pay homage to the transitive, the flight, the great soup of being in which we actually live.”

objective vs personal

theoretical vs corporeal

academic vs sentimental

Exercise!

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/riding-the-blinds/

either cited directly, sourced in the margins

or used in context

"I am not interested in a hermeneutics, or an erotics, or a metaphorics, of my anus. I am interested in ass-fucking. I am interested in the fact that the clitoris, disguised as a discrete button, sweeps over the entire area like a manta ray, impossible to tell where its eight thousand nerves begin and end. I am interested in the fact that the human anus is one of the most innervated parts of the body . . . [Mary] Roach explained that the anus has 'tons of nerves. And the reason is that it needs to be able to discriminate, by feel, between solid, liquid and gas and be able to selectively release one or maybe all of those. And thank heavens for the anus because, you know, really a lot of gratitude, ladies and gentlemen, to the human anus.' To which [Terry] Gross replied: 'Let's take a short break here, then we'll talk some more. This is Fresh Air.'"

While not many of us have written memoirs, most of us have probably written in a diary or journal at some point.

In the spirit of The Argonauts, gather a few quotes/soundbites, those that either resonate with you or were spoken by a "many-gendered mother" of your heart, and incorporate them into some diaristic form. Whether this is a diary entry about your day or an autobiographical retelling of a significant event inyour life, utilize your favorite quotes in a personally-applicable way.

“The mysteries of psychology pale in comparison, just as evolution strikes me as infinitely more spiritually profound than Genesis.”