The Argonauts

by Maggie Nelson

Winner, 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism

Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of ‘autotheory’ offering fresh, fierce and timely thinking about desire, identity and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. At its centre is a romance: the story of the author’s relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes the author’s account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, is an intimate portrayal of the complexities and joys of (queer) family making.

Writing in the spirit of public intellectuals such as Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, Nelson binds her personal experience to a rigorous exploration of what iconic theorists have said about sexuality, gender, and the vexed institutions of marriage and child-rearing. Nelson’s insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry for this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.

Maggie Nelson is a poet, a critic, and the author of several nonfiction books, including The Red Parts, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, Bluets, and Jane: A Murder. She teaches in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts and lives in Los Angeles, California.

‘A superb exploration of the risk and the excitement of change…An exceptional portrait both of a romantic partnership and of the collaboration between Nelson’s mind and heart.’ New Yorker

‘Maggie Nelson slays entrenched notions of gender, marriage and sexuality with lyricism, intellectual brass and soul-ringing honesty.’ Vanity Fair

‘A magnificent achievement of thought, care and art.’ Los Angeles Times

‘Nelson’s writing is fluid—to read her story is to drift dreamily among her thoughts…She masterfully analyzes the way we talk about sex and gender.’ Huffington Post

‘One of the most intelligent, generous and moving books of the year.’ STARRED review Publishers Weekly

‘A book that will challenge readers as much as the author has challenged herself.’ STARRED review Kirkus Reviews

‘So much writing about motherhood makes the world seem smaller after the child arrives, more circumscribed, as if in tacit fealty to the larger cultural assumptions about moms and domesticity; Nelson’s book does the opposite.’ New York Times Book Review

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Queer, Feminism, LGBT, Essays, Biography

183 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 5, 2015

About the author

Maggie Nelson is the author of nine books of poetry and prose, many of which have become cult classics defying categorization. Her nonfiction titles include the National Book Critics Circle Award winner and New York Times bestseller The Argonauts (Graywolf Press, 2015), The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (Norton, 2011; a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), Bluets (Wave Books, 2009; named by Bookforum as one of the top 10 best books of the past 20 years), The Red Parts (Free Press, 2007; reissued by Graywolf, 2016), and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (U of Iowa Press, 2007). Her poetry titles include Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull, 2005; finalist for the PEN/ Martha Albrand Art of the Memoir). In 2016 she was awarded a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship. She has also been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction, an NEA in Poetry, an Innovative Literature Fellowship from Creative Capital, and an Arts Writers Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation. She writes frequently on art, including recent catalogue essays on Carolee Schneemann and Matthew Barney. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and has taught literature, writing, art, criticism and theory at the New School, Pratt Institute, and Wesleyan University. For 12 years she taught in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts; in fall 2017 she will join the faculty of USC. She currently lives in Los Angeles.

Reviews

[karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

HAPPY PRIDE MONTH!

this is the opening paragraph of the book:

October, 2007. The Santa Ana winds are shredding the bark off the eucalyptus trees in long white stripes. A friend and I risk the widowmakers by having lunch outside, during which she suggests I tattoo the words HARD TO GET across my knuckles, as a reminder of this pose’s possible fruits. Instead the words I love you come tumbling out of my mouth in an incantation the first time you fuck me in the ass, my face smashed against the cement floor of your dank and charming bachelor pad. You had Molloy by your bedside and a stack of cocks in a shadowy unused shower stall. Does it get any better? What’s your pleasure? you asked, then stuck around for an answer.

and i rolled my eyes.

this is the second paragraph of the book:

Before we met, I had spent a lifetime devoted to Wittgenstein’s idea that the inexpressible is contained - inexpressibly! - in the expressed. This idea gets less air time than his more reverential Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent, but it is, I think, the deeper idea. Its paradox is, quite literally, why I write, or how I feel able to keep writing

and i rolled my eyes.

if you enjoy reading about penetration AND impenetrable abstractions, this here’s your friggin’ peanut butter cup:

I am not interested in a hermeneutics, or an erotics, or a metaphorics, of my anus. I’m interested in ass-fucking.

for me, this is all like baby pictures stuffed with math. which translates through the karen-filter as “things i recognize as having appeal to others, but make me bored and impatient.” which is how i felt during a lot of this book.

opening your memoir/sociology book with anal sex is either meant to be très bold and shocking, or voyeuristically titillating to the reader, but it just made me a little embarrassed for her - that she thought anal sex would be either shocking or titillating in this day and age. i’m by no means a prude, but unless i’m actually participating in the carnal arts, reading about it or seeing it carried out in front of me does nothing for me, and reading about other people’s sex lives has the same level of appeal as looking at their vacation photos - it’s something you both shared and i’m glad you had a good time doing it together, but i’m an outsider to your experience. i’m all for people rutting any way they please, as long as it’s consensual and age-appropriate, but if i’m not involved, hearing about it neither offends nor arouses nor interests me.

this book doesn’t have a ton of sex in it; but there’s a ton of intellectual masturbation that is just as tedious to me. i’ve never seen the value in jargon-heavy thinkerydoo with no practical application - all these intellectual cubbyholes, tunnel-visioned and stubborn, milking abstractions, parsing intangible shit into more specific intangible shit until everyone’s exhausted, everything’s inconclusive, and during all that time spent blathering, someone’s designed and built a friggin’ bridge. and it’s weird, because she seems to acknowledge the hollowness of these kinds of exercises:

In one of my favorites of your drawings, two Popsicles are talking to each other. One accuses, “You’re more interested in fantasy than reality.” The other responds, “I’m interested in the reality of my fantasy.” Both of the Popsicles are melting off their sticks


but it doesn’t stop her from contributing to that hollowness - examining and probing and dissecting, melting off her own stick.

i’ve always been a bit theory-resistant. i was a wee english major undergrad at NYU, and even then, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and presumably full of intellectual suppleness, i balked when it came time to play literary theory roulette; reading a single text through a variety of different filters: today we are lacanians! and now feminist theorists! and new historicists! i understand the purpose; to introduce young minds to the exciting possibilities of critical approach, but it always struck me as intellectual busywork, and an incredibly limiting exercise to shoehorn a text into some rigorous discipline, interpreting through such a narrow and frequently inappropriate channel, imposing meaning instead of just listening to what the text itself had to say. fortunately for my gpa, i was very good at bullshitting, but it was never comfortable for me, corsetting a voluptuous book into a narrow vision without regard for authorial intent, and the experience of critical chameleonism reminded me of that scene in Ridicule which i cannot find quoted on the internet, but if you’ve seen the film, you know which one i mean. shallowly parroting someone else’s dogma is way less interesting than finding one's own voice and critical perception. and that's what i think of lit theory.

but it could have been worse.

‘cuz shit like this just makes me go into hulk smash mode:

A few years ago, she told me the story of a subsequent feminist theory class that threw a kind of coup. They wanted - in keeping with a long feminist tradition - a different kind of pedagogy than that of sitting around a table with an instructor. They were frustrated by the poststructuralist ethos of her teaching, they were tired of dismantling identities, tired of hearing that the most resistance one could muster in a Foucauldian universe was to work the trap one is inevitably in. So they staged a walkout and held class in a private setting, to which they invited Christina as a guest. When people arrived, Christina told me, a student handed everyone an index card and asked them to write ‘how they identified’ on it, then pin it to their lapel.

i have no issues with the index card element, apart from my antipathy for the spectacle and hippie-dippery undertone at play here - where it’s all just a stagey opportunity to flaunt participants’ tolerance and inclusiveness and commitment to diversity which - if you really are all of those things, you don’t need to broadcast in such a clumsy way. it’s the squirm-equivalent of saying “i have a black friend.” and it’s incredibly superficial - being a lesbian or genderfluid doesn’t make you interesting any more than liking asparagus or being color blind does - it’s a detail of who you are, and if you are only defining yourself by whether the genitals of the people you fuck are innies or outies, you need to aim higher. build a bridge or something.

the thing is, she actually sums up perfectly my own approach to sexuality, before she goes prancing back off into the land of ever-more-granular labeling of sexual expression:

There are people out there who get annoyed at the story that Djuna Barnes, rather than identify as a lesbian, preferred to say that she “just loved Thelma.” Gertrude Stein reputedly made similar claims, albeit not in those exact terms, about Alice. I get why it’s politically maddening, but I’ve also always thought it a little romantic - the romance of letting an individual experience of desire take precedence over a categorical one.

i mean, doesn't that make the most sense? if we're acknowledging that sexuality is a spectrum, and adopting the sensible approach of "letting an individual experience of desire take precedence over a categorical one," why even bother with labeling where you stick your pin on this spectrum? sure, i have idealized aesthetics as far as what i find attractive in both men and women, but my individual experiences of desire have frequently deviated from this aesthetic, because how swoony you feel when you're around someone you love transcends whether their junk is inside or outside their body, or whether they align with whatever your preferred 'type' is - tall/short, blonde, asian, whatever.

but as tolerant as i am (although clearly intolerant of hammy displays of tolerance), i have no time for people with identity-dismantling fatigue who are so easily vexed by poststructuralist ethos. i’m too practical to be impressed by empty performance, sound/fury that is ultimately unproductive and noncontributory. and while the author is also made uncomfortable by the students in this anecdote, she is nonetheless devoted to the bombastic argot of the world of gender/feminist/queer theory - all “reproductive futurism” and “sodomitical mother” and intellectualizing her own pregnancy, fretting about the symbolism inherent in being a pregnant woman, specifically a pregnant lesbian; how that defines her in the larger context of the new queer family - if it smacks too much of homonormativity and what it all meeeeans. you’re a lesbian? and you want to have a baby? so maybe just be a lesbian who has a baby and focus on raising your son to be a decent human being full of vitamin C and good grammar without wasting time worrying yourself about the “smug autoeroticism,” the “obscene” nature of “the pregnant body in public” and all the circuitous thought-diddling that should only preoccupy stoners.

Is there something inherently queer about pregnancy itself, insofar as it alters one’s “normal” state, and occasions a radical intimacy with - and radical alienation from - one’s body? How can an experience so profoundly strange and wild and transformative also symbolize or enact the ultimate conformity?

somewhere, an unbuilt bridge weeps.

fortunately, the book isn’t all hifalutin’ contemplation; the best parts (for me) revolve around nelson's relationship with harry, her pronoun-slippery spouse, who is her perfect partner, both sexually:

Why did it take me so long to find someone with whom my perversities were not only compatible, but perfectly matched? Then as now, you spread my legs with your legs and push your cock into me, fill my mouth with your fingers. You pretend to use me, make a theater of heeding only your pleasure while making sure I find mine. Really, though, it’s more than a perfect match, as that implies a kind of stasis. Whereas we’re always moving, shape-shifting. No matter what we do, it always feels dirty without feeling lousy.

and whose pillow-talk (or concrete-floor talk), demonstrates a similar proclivity for passionate balderdash:

In whose world is the morphological imaginary defined as that which is not real?

when nelson is writing about their relationship, particularly the summer of our changing bodies. Me, four months pregnant, you six months on T, it’s lovely - the juxtaposition of their experiences transforming what was formerly abstract into something more tangible and meaningful:

On the surface it may have seemed as though your body was becoming more and more ‘male,’ mine more and more ‘female.’ But that’s not how it felt on the inside. On the inside, we were two human animals undergoing transformations beside each other, bearing each other loose witness. In other words, we were aging.

and, during that same time, living in a hotel after harry’s top surgery and coincidentally coming across a reality program featuring a woman with breast cancer recovering from her own mastectomy:

It was uncanny to watch her performing the same actions we were performing — emptying her drains, waiting patiently for her unbinding — but with opposite emotions. You felt unburdened, euphoric, reborn; the woman on TV feared, wept and grieved.

that is some wholly powerful shit.

and i did enjoy coming across this passage, since it made me feel bad for all my earlier eye-rolling:

Shame-spot: being someone who spoke freely, copiously, and passionately in high school, then arriving in college and realizing I was in danger of becoming one of those people who makes everyone else roll their eyes: there she goes again. It took some time and trouble, but eventually I learned to stop talking, to be (impersonate, really) an observer. This impersonation led me to write an enormous amount in the margins of my notebooks - marginalia I would later mine to make poems.

this writing-in-the-margins habit comes through in the structure of this book - it’s a little indulgent, personal, scattershot and messy, with frequent quotes whose authors are attributed in the margins, and this shape is actually perfect for its subject matter, which frequently addresses the inability to categorize things tidily, including harry:

How to explain - “trans” may work well enough as shorthand, but the quickly developing mainstream narrative it evokes (“born in the wrong body,” necessitating an orthopedic pilgrimage between two fixed destinations) is useless for some - but partially, or even profoundly, useful for others? That for some, “transitioning” may mean leaving one gender entirely behind, while for others - like Harry, who is happy to identify as a butch on T - it doesn’t? I’m not on my way anywhere, Harry sometimes tells inquirers. How to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy?

and i think that’s the main takeaway for me - sometimes shit stays messy, no matter how many labels you throw at it, no matter how much time you spend spinning your thinking-wheels. the difference between her conclusion and mine is that shit staying messy is my endpoint, not an invitation to throw more scrabble-words at the situation.

*********************************************



the second book in my second quarterly literary fiction box from pagehabit. huzzah!

review to come!

come to my blog!

[Julie Ehlers · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I was in my early twenties and just out of school, I was lucky enough to get a job as a production/copy editor for a smallish academic press. My women's studies minor was enough to get me put in charge of the women's studies and LGBT studies offerings, and over the years I copyedited probably thousands of journal articles and book manuscripts on these topics. It was a wonderful education in many ways. At the time, marriage for same-sex couples was a distant dream, and I was a witness, in the form of their writings, to the work people who'd been shut out of the mainstream were doing to carve out their own lives. I don't want to idealize this time, of course--the discrimination gay people faced regarding marriage (among other things) was hideous and wrong, and no one supported marriage equality more than I did. But there was something inspiring about seeing people really ask themselves: If I can't have (or don't want) what the mainstream has, what kind of life do I want? Over and over again I got the message: You don't have to live your life the way everyone else does if you don't want to. You can decide for yourself what you want your life to be. My young self absorbed this message like a sponge. At every turn I asked myself: Was I just going along with convention? Was I just reacting against convention? Or was this what I really wanted? I can't say my life has been perfect as a result, but I can say it's always been authentic. I have those writings, which raised me and guided me like nothing else, to thank for that.

Reading The Argonauts reminded me of those days while still being as fresh and bracing as a cobweb-clearing winter draft. I admired and was grateful for the way Maggie and Harry refused to be boxed in, refused to be pinned down, refused to be labeled; always thinking, always resisting conventional ideas, for themselves, for their marriage, for their relationships with their kids. Naming something, Nelson points out, limits it. Why, this book makes you wonder, are we so quick to nail things down? Why are we so inclined to believe there are only one or two ways to be happy? The complicated freedom this book represents is something I want to clasp to myself and keep with me always.

This is not an overly intellectual or complex book, but it's a smart one, and it requires some focus, and reading it made me realize how much I love and miss writing that demands such focus. Here is a book that feels no need to dumb it down for anyone, that asks for your attention and gets it, and I became addicted to that feeling of thinking about only what Maggie Nelson was saying and not the million other things that tend to crowd my mind. This is a short book, but I put it down many times because I didn't want to finish it too quickly. I knew I would be sorry when it was over, and I was.

The title of this book is a metaphor for the idea that love, while it may always be present, needs always be remade as the people involved change and grow and evolve. Ideally, love shows different sides of itself over time, is, as Nelson puts it in her acknowledgments, "an infinite conversation, an endless becoming." I finished this book the day before Valentine's Day, and what an antidote it was to the fake idealized commercialism of that occasion. Maggie Nelson and I have next to nothing in common on the surface, but I can think of no book that has better reminded me of where my own heart lies.

[TJ · Rating 2 out of 5]

Here's what I liked: I liked the way Nelson writes about motherhood. Honest, unashamed, full of a joy with a hugeness to it. I've read some great writing on motherhood published recently (see: Eula Biss' On Immunity) and I deeply appreciate this work, as someone for whom the desire to birth and parent a child is very alien. I have been at times a little bratty in my attitudes towards those who chose to parent, so work that is critical of that attitude and helps demystify parenting feels invaluable to me.

That said, I really didn't care for Nelson's... methodology. She's trying to write in a way that mirrors the messiness of thought, the messiness of processes of learning and growing. Maybe it was unavoidable that this would leave me cringing frequently, but, I don't know, maybe it wasn't? In any case, it was at times really painful. Like, when Nelson describes the sense of mourning she felt as she learned that her baby was a "boy," her mourning for "the fantasy of a feminist daughter, the fantasy of a mini-me." She takes us through the process of accepting the body her baby would be born with, but disappointingly this acceptance does not come at the realization of how very wrong the act of gendering a fetus is; instead it comes when she realizes that she might still "braid his hair!" She tells us about how she felt "surprised" that her body could "make a male body." It's bizarre that someone with a trans spouse could be so oblivious to her own essentializing of her child's gender.
Another example: Nelson briefly takes her reader through her decision to give her child a name of Native American origin. To paraphrase, it goes like this: "Would it be weird for us, as white parents, to give our white child a native name? Probably, but I think we'll do it anyway. And oh! a 'full tribe member' gave us her blessing!" Like...

This review is turning out to be longer than I meant it to be. I guess it feels as if Nelson in this work was grasping at a way of writing that cuts to some authentic and fleeting affect -- but too often it feels like she's gliding over the surface of things, trying to keep up a momentum, trying not to lose something. And some other thing IS being lost. There's not always enough self-reflection, and I just don't know what, really, many of her readers will get out of these moments. She would have done well to step back a little and ask herself what she was really offering us.

[Orsodimondo · Rating 4 out of 5]

METAMORFOSI


Louise Bourgeois: Pregnant Woman.

Le parole “Ti amo” mi sono uscite di bocca come un singulto trasognato, la prima volta che mi hai inculato, con la faccia schiacciata sul pavimento di cemento del tuo pittoresco e umidiccio rifugio da scapolo.
Il viaggio degli Argonauti comincia da qui.

Il titolo è preso da un brano di Roland Barthes che paragona qualcuno che dice ti amo a uno degli Argonauti che ripara e rinnova la sua nave durante il viaggio: alla nave man mano furono cambiati tutte le parti componenti – chiglia, vele, alberi – ma la nave rimase la stessa, con lo stesso nome, Argo, pronta all’impresa di cercare il mitico vello d’oro. Il riferimento è alle trasformazioni transgender, argomento a lungo dibattuto in queste pagine.


Louise Bourgeois: Pregnant Woman.

E di vero viaggio si tratta, non solo perché il titolo è un invito al viaggio: ma perché si entra in un mondo di pensieri, riflessioni, sessualità, sentimenti, non proprio, almeno ancora, dominanti, ai quali non è scontato essere abituati.
Basterebbe a esemplificare, il percorso fisico compiuto da Harry Dodge, nato Harriet, ora marito della Nelson e padre di suo figlio, ovviamente non biologicamente – ma che importanza ha? Nessuno più di me crede che la paternità (come anche la maternità) sia questione di qualità del tempo e dell’amore condiviso piuttosto che di sangue.
Una grande storia d’amore quella tra Maggie e Harry, un grande viaggio nell’amore.


Louise Bourgeois: Pregnant Woman.

A livello superficiale, era possibile che il tuo corpo desse l’impressione di diventare sempre più “maschile, mentre il mio sempre più “Femminile”. Dentro, però, non è così che ci sentivamo. Dentro eravamo due animali umani che stavano attraversando una trasformazione fianco a fianco, utilizzandosi a vicenda come testimoni incidentali. In altre parole, stavamo invecchiando.

Dice Maria Nadotti:
Sulla copertina italiana c’è un disegno a guazzo e matita colorata su carta di Louise Bourgeois: Pregnant Woman, 2008. A lettura ultimata, la potenza muta del sanguigno torso femminile abbozzato dall’artista mi sembra il solo modo adeguato di descrivere la massa filamentosa, ‘sporca’, agerarchica, di pensieri, esperienze, teorie, ipotesi, sperimentazioni racchiusa nel testo di Nelson.


Louise Bourgeois: Pregnant Woman.

Non sono interessata all’ermeneutica, o a un’erotica o a un sistema metaforico del mio ano. È il sesso anale che mi interessa. Quel che mi interessa è il fatto che il clitoride, mascherato da bottone discreto, estenda la propria influenza all’intera area, come una manta. È impossibile dire dove le sue ottomila terminazioni nervose comincino e dove finiscano. Quel che interessa è il fatto che l’ano umano è una delle parti del corpo più innervate.

È stata Caterina Venturini a farmi incontrare Maggie Nelson e a portarmi tra le pagine di questi Argonauti. Il memoir molto free della prima mi ha condotto a questo memoir-saggio, un misto di scrittura autobiografica, commenti e citazioni, ricordi e riflessioni, che parla di molte cose, una delle quali è l'amore, e tra tutte forse la più importante è proprio l’amore. Anche se molto spazio è dato alla sessualità e identità di genere. Che per la Nelson è assolutamente da ampliare. Anzi, superare. Fare a meno dell’identità sessuale sarebbe quanto di più utile e necessario.


Aida Muluneh.

PS
Nelson inanella una fitta teoria di nomi di artisti/e visuali americani/e, performer, scrittori/rici, poeti/e, docenti, psicologi, uomini e donne di cultura di cui non ho mai sentito parlare prima: ma per fortuna il ricco corredo di note dell’editore italiano (Il Saggiatore) mi rivela ogni aspetto che occorre conoscere per restare dentro il testo, per non sentirsi allontanato e annichilito dall’ignoranza. Peccato solo che di note non ce ne sia neppure una.

[emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

just lovely.

i love memoirs because they are as close as you can get to the readability of fiction while being true, and because people are cool and i like them, and because i'm addicted to stories, but above all because i'm nosy.

this satisfied all of those reasons.

this is more academic than it is poetic, especially when compared to my surprise favorite of the year, bluets, but it is just as endlessly interesting all the same.

bottom line: maggie nelson!!!!!!

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currently-reading updates

is there anything more exciting than starting a book by an author you've five starred before

[Lisa of Troy · Rating 2 out of 5]

While The Argonauts is classified as feminist literature, I felt like I was falling off a mountain covered in vegetation, struggling to find purchase, grasping wildly at the brush, and ultimately coming up short.

The Argonauts is told in a stream of consciousness manner without any chapters, detailing the author’s feelings of being in a transgender relationship and the author’s feelings of becoming a mother. Maggie Nelson gives off the vibe that she wants to be counterculture, wants to be revolutionary, yet she comes across as someone trying too hard to be cool and shocking.

And the story is told in such a way that it feels as though the reader has missed the first bit of the conversation. For example, Nelson loves to drop in quotes with little underlying context. Even as someone with a specialization in Women, Gender, and Social Justice, I wasn’t very familiar with most of the sources. Apparently, I’m not cool enough. Story of my life. But, seriously, accessibility?

Nelson states, “But I have also never been less interested in arguing for the rightness much less the righteousness of a particular position or orientation.”

The author disdainfully looks down upon a set of students who want to overturn the oppressive, authoritarian education system. The students would sit in a circle as equals, and they had name tags to identify themselves. Although it is easy to criticize others, those who live in glass houses shouldn’t cast stones.

Dissatisfaction with classifications isn’t an original idea. Philip Roth tackled this concept in The Human Stain, published in 2000.

Further, classification in and of itself isn’t a bad thing – even animals of the non-human variety classify: threat or non-threat. Bill, my trusty cat, will jump into my arms while he slinks past my partner.

The issue lies in the area where the classifications slide into judgement and societal expectation based on those classifications, where society shames people for not adhering to traditional gender norms.

But Nelson does little to progress the conversation about changing these judgments and belittles those attempting to do so.

The Green Light at the End of the Dock (How much I spent):
Hardcover Text – $22.90 at Powells
Audiobook – Free on Libby

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[aPriL does feral sometimes · Rating 2 out of 5]

Um.

'The Argonauts' is about gender, pregnancy, and other things. The name 'Argonaut' is borrowed from a book passage in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. It refers to a boat, and the answer is if you replace every particle of the boat, it is still the same boat called Argonaut, and how that compares to saying "I love you" to a person, renewing the meaning by each use, "the very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new." The author thinks the passage is romantic. Her partner sees it as a possible retraction.

o _ O

I know, right? Too too precious.

I'm supposed to either love or respect this book because of the intellectually elastic writing interwoven with high-end educated philosophical musings with a lot of quotes and passages from famous Intellectuals and writers pasted in here and there; and because of the author Maggie Nelson, who is a respected poet and critic; and because its disjointed narrative pieces and paragraphs of subject matter are artistically wobbled about and around in a post-modern literary style, which amounts to stray thoughts, philosophy, autobiography and TMI medical shi* pasted in willy-nilly, perhaps artistically.

A subject is dropped for awhile for a digression, which is examined briefly before the author returns to what she had been thinking about or doing, or not. Ideas and musings and autobiographical bits are mixed in with no particular linkage, except the subject rolls around female body issues and pregnancy. Some bits are extremely clinical and detailed about the vagina and anus, other bits are dealing with personal and public confusions with gender definitions which have become as fuzzy as quantum physics (my interpretation and words - I finished a science book recently about quantum effects).

There is a lot of brief intellectualized literary sketches of bliss, wonder and fear about babies, the process of getting pregnant, the pains of carrying a growing fetus, how various types of people react to babies and pregnancy filtered through culture and gender perceptions and unwanted medical fad advice given on the streets or standing in line for a movie or with smokers, etc.

Actually, despite the literary clever Modern/Post-Modern academic filter of the author's writing, she appears to me like a 13-year-old girl who wore a dubious fashion choice to school (I mean the pregnancy and her sexuality), and is alternating between defending and explaining the effect she was going for, while harboring secret doubts that it is a really stupid outfit and so she asks all of her best friends in the bathroom if she should go home and change..

The author feels outraged or conflicted or confused or thoughtful in language which is written in poetic university-speak code words usually used for Ph.D. thesis-level papers, only fragmented and memoir-personalized, although this stuff is what every mother goes through whether she is a Ph.D. Literature or Philosophy professor or a 16-year-old. The difference is the author has the ability to use $5 words, concepts and ideas in a post-modern stream of consciousness layout (at least it is punctuated and in paragraphs), about a subject most people would rather read if written more familiarly like in a typical memoir using 5-cent words and jokes.

The author is a lesbian, the book chronicles her pregnancy and some of her relationship with her partner, the artist Harry Dodge, who is a transgendered FTM. I understand why pregnancy is fraught with emotional and intellectual baggage for her, after all, she is a brain who processes everything in a prism of high-end thinking and academic literary concepts, but this book is an ego project, self-centered and unpleasant to read.

I found the book a chore to read and boring once I understood it is about her personal angst about pregnancy, with heavily-freighted emotional and philosophical observations filtered through her education, cultural experiences, relationship and gender anxieties, written in a style only academic literary intellectuals would want to bother with deciphering. A book club selected this for the read of a month; I don't know if it was for the challenge, if so, I don't think it is worth the struggle. If, gentle reader, you want to simply enjoy a read about person having a typical pregnancy while having lesbian anxieties on top of the usual issues of having a baby, written in literary academic coded language so that this little 100-page or so fragmented, name-dropping, literary- and philosophical-loaded allusion-heavy memoir will take you a month of re-reading to understand, this is perfect.

[Lucy · Rating 1 out of 5]

“You pass as a guy; I, as pregnant. Our waiter cheerfully tells us about his family, expresses delight in ours. On the surface, it may have seemed as though your body was becoming more and more “male,” mine, more and more “female.” But that’s not how it felt on the inside. On the inside, we were two human animals undergoing transformations beside each other, bearing each other loose witness. In other words, we were aging.”

This book explores Maggie Nelson's relationship with Harry Dodge, who is fluidly gendered. It describes their love, the birth of their son and their changing bodies. Nelson from her changing body from pregnancy, and Dodge from the changing body of surgery and T hormones. This book questions the freedom to be who we want to be, the freedom to love who we want to love, our identity and sex. It analyses the worlds notion that things need to tick certain boxes: love, sexuality, instead of viewing them on a spectrum. Throughout this book Nelson adds references from various people, such as psychologists, and their views on gender, sex and love.

I, however, found this a difficult one to read. I really had to work on reading this. Usually I love a challenge and I really wanted to enjoy this as it is enjoyed by so many readers, but I just found this difficult. I really had to concentrate on it to understand what the author was saying. She writes in such a way that is intelligent, but, if like me, I found it didn't flow too well and I didn't understand what she was referencing to at times. This book is also one continuous prose, without chapters, and while you would think it would flow well, it just didn't for me. It made it hard to understand and appreciate the perspective and messages she was trying to convey.

From what I can gather, this taught me about identity, freedom and compassion for others. However, this was just not the book for me.

[♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎ · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book cracked me open like a walnut. One of those messy walnuts where the nut ends up shattered to pieces in your hand. While reading I was frequently on a vertiginous edge close to weeping, not really from any feeling with a name, just from all the feeling that was going on as I read. Part of it was a feeling of recognition. A feeling that comes from having a very long conversation with someone who expresses what you thought were your most private thoughts, who puts into words what didn't have words before. Like the feeling of falling in love, the vulnerability of it.

Nelson writes about the power of words, their power to define, their power to set limits on a thought, their power to constrain and diminish. Take "queer," for instance. Is it a kind of liberation to call my family "queer" or does it put us in a box that conforms to what others suppose it means? Does it mean something different if I call us a queer family in private, vs. when speaking with others? Or take the term "same-sex marriage;" the limitations of that utterance are fully explored here, in such interesting ways, as when Nelson writes: "Whatever sameness I've noted in my relationships with women is not the sameness of Woman, and certainly not the sameness of parts. Rather, it is the shared, crushing understanding of what it means to live in a patriarchy." If all Nelson did was remind me of the flimsy trickiness of words, of their power to obscure as much as they enlighten, then this would be a tremendous book. She does so much more.

[Adam Dalva · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really sharp, lovely synthesis of emotional memoir and critical theory, reminiscent of a more outrageous version of Barthes and formatted in a canny way that allows your eyes to fly down the page even as you're taking in some relatively heavy-hitting quotations. The overall theme of the Argo as a metaphor for a relationship (parts keep on changing, but the boat's identity remains the same) is brilliant and her self-described queer relationship with Harry Dodge is depicted movingly. There's one sequence where he's cycling up on testosterone and she is four months pregnant that's a fascinating riot of hormones. Other moments stand out - the birth scene in particular, but also Harry's description of his mother's death and her views on being pregnant while on book tour. I've taught this book to several non-fiction classes at Rutgers and it always delivers - students radically change their approaches after reading this, after seeing what non-fiction can do.

[Warwick · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Argonauts opens with Maggie Nelson getting fucked in the ass and thinking about Wittgenstein, and I was like, whoa whoa whoa – you can't write about this stuff in a world where The Surrender by Toni Bentley already exists. Trying to write another book about anal sex and its implications for European philosophy would be futile – like trying to write another novel about a day in the life of Dublin.

This isn't that kind of book, it turns out. Opening paragraph aside – and despite the surprisingly prudish note to some reviews here – this isn't really about sex, it's about motherhood and gendered identity. It takes the form of a memoir of Nelson's relationship with her husband, the artist Harry Dodge, who was assigned female at birth but who considers himself neither male nor female; they have a son together, as well as one from Dodge's previous relationship.

I had never heard of Harry Dodge, and I spent a long time at the start of this book (like the straight square that I am) unsure of what kind of gender identity he represented exactly – so much so that when Nelson describes how the two of them were rushing to get married before Prop 8 passed in California, I was genuinely confused about why it would affect them. It was only much later in the book that I realised the state considered Dodge legally female. Such disorientation – and the space it gives you as a reader to think about your own priorities and prejudices – is very much in the service of Nelson's story. ‘How to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution,’ she frets at one point, ‘that sometimes the shit stays messy?’

And the messiness comes from many sources. At the same time that Nelson is injecting Dodge with testosterone, flooding his system with hormones and changing his body, Nelson herself is pregnant, her own system flooded with hormones and her own body going through changes. ‘Is there something inherently queer about pregnancy itself,’ she posits elsewhere. I sometimes felt that she was at risk of appropriating this ‘queer’ identity without justification, but nevertheless she allows these things to sit next to each other in juxtapositions that are surprising, productive, enlightening.

Nelson also says that pregnancy ‘occasions a radical intimacy with—and alienation from—one's body’, and the vocabulary here, as well as that irritating habit of rephrasing what you're saying halfway through, point up the baleful influence of critical theory on this book. Indeed that's one of the things it's about, which was tricky for me because I've never read a theorist I didn't dislike. Lacan, Foucault, Butler, Iringaray et al. duly make their appearances, and Nelson leaves plenty of space in the margins to note their names whenever she incorporates some of their bullshit into her own paragraphs. She is generous enough to take what they say seriously, and rewrite some of their ideas in far more luminous terms, but nevertheless I sometimes had to grit my teeth. Nelson is just from that American academic environment that takes that stuff seriously; I'm not and I don't. So where you stand on Theory will inevitably affect how you experience this book.

Nelson herself is way less humourless and more self-aware than the writers she quotes, despite an occasional phrase that will stop you in your tracks for unintended reasons (‘The ghosted scar offers a rebus of sodomitical maternity’, well, here are some words that have never been assembled in that order before). But you have to be going some to write about theory this much and still make me feel full of happiness and fascination – in the end, the interest in Nelson's story and the sharp clarity of her writing overwhelm all the theoretical scaffolding. There are situations and ideas in here that I've never encountered anywhere else, and the overriding sense of love that motivates the book moved me a great deal.

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

Serious props to Maggie Nelson for breaking free from the binaries that plague contemporary life. Female vs. male, gay vs. straight, assimiliationist vs. revolutionary - Nelson deconstructs all of these restrictive categories and argues for a richer, more nuanced way of being. My favorite part of The Argonauts centers on how Nelson describes love as an evolving process, one that we must renew and revitalize every single day. In addition to discussing theory, she incorporates details from her own life, with a focus on her marriage to her fluidly gendered partner as well as her foray into motherhood.

This book's structure disappointed me though. Nelson includes no chapter or section breaks, so her ideas sprawl in a jumbled, confusing way. Because of the book's stream-of-consciousness writing style and layout, I felt that Nelson only scratched the surface of several ideas instead of developing them to their fullest potential. I appreciate her commitment to nontraditional prose and to circumnavigating literary convention. But the mixture of discursive analysis and autobiographical bits did not leave room for a unified, cohesive message or takeaway.

Overall, recommended to anyone interested in an essay/memoir that tackles queerness in a smart, stylish way. The ending of The Argonauts, when she contrasts the birth of her son to the death of her partner's mother, almost made me cry. Again, kudos to Nelson for encouraging us to think deeper and to love harder.

[Meike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism 2015
Okay, this is really something special: In this work of autotheory (so in a mixture of memoir and critical theory), Nelson writes about love and gender by pondering bodily fluidity as it manifested when she was pregnant with her son Iggy while her partner, artist and transperson Harry Dodge, had a double mastectomy. The title refers to Roland Barthes' pioneering autofictional novel Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes which contains the thought that to love someone is like being an argonaut who constantly replaces parts of their ship without the ship changing names - and above all, Nelson's book is about loving her partner and her children.

To investigate what that means, exactly, she retells numerous vignettes from their relationship while creating a montage with the ideas of thinkers like Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Žižek, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. And Nelson also adds some of her own experiences as a female critic, writer and theoretician, and it's both sad and hilarious. What renders this text so fresh and moving though is that it is reaching way beyond theoretically discussing gender and false binaries: It's liberating in its emotional power, a force to be reckoned with when talking about love. The absurdity of heteronormativity is most visible when juxtaposed with the love that reigns supreme between the people depicted here. This doesn't mean that Nelson glosses over the complexities and challenges, but of course, that makes the text even more relatable (and I'm saying that as a cis het person). Nelson is also very explicit when describing all kinds of bodily functions, which evokes various effects when put into the context of heady theory: Sometimes contradictory, sometimes revelatory, sometimes very funny (the book begins with anal sex and Ludwig Wittgenstein - I listened to the audiobook while walking my dog and starting laughing at a traffic light, which raised some eyebrows).

A transformative work about physical and emotional transformations.

[Emily B · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is in no way an easy read. It requires a lot of concentration and brain power. I often felt like I wasn’t understanding much at all.
However at the same time I found it uniquely fascinating, particularly it’s honesty. Which means it’s hard for me to rate but I decided on 3 stars.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

(4.5) The opening paragraph is so sexually explicit that I nearly dropped the book (this is something I’ve struggled with in Nelson’s other books too). Thank goodness I kept going, as this is an exquisite interrogation of gender identity and an invaluable reminder that the supposed complications of making a queer family just boil down to your basic human experiences of birth, love and death.

Like Bluets, this is often composed of disparate paragraphs and quotations from cultural theorists. I definitely preferred those passages where Nelson allows herself to string her fragments into more extended autobiographical meditations, like the brilliant final 20 pages interspersing her memories of giving birth to her son Iggy with an account of the deathbed vigil her partner (artist Harry Dodge) held for his mother; it had me breathless and in tears, on a plane of all places.

I like to think of myself as a pretty tolerant person, but as I observed myself groping around to figure out who Harry is – wait, this is actually a woman, right? – that illusion faded pretty quickly. Nelson acknowledges that we may be evolutionarily hardwired to categorize people (friend vs. foe, woman vs. man) but appeals to what I think must be a higher impulse, “to pay homage to the transitive, the flight, the great soup of being in which we actually live.”

I know precisely one trans person: she’s friends’ housemate, so I see her fairly often. My first inward response (under outward friendliness, of course) was to protest that someone was trying to trick us. I know that’s really a man. But terms like pre-op MTF don’t help; they only reinforce a smug sense of superior knowledge. Better to stay in the uncertainty while accepting the person as they wish to be known in the world. As Nelson puts it, “the best way to find out how people feel about their gender or their sexuality—or anything else, really—is to listen to what they tell you, and to try to treat them accordingly, without shellacking over their version of reality with yours”.

An important book every college student should read, especially the sheltered, religious ones.

Some of the many amazing lines:

On loving a particular woman rather than identifying as lesbian: “I get why it’s politically maddening, but I’ve also always thought it a little romantic—the romance of letting an individual experience of desire take precedence over a categorical one.”

On pregnancy: “How can an experience so profoundly strange and wild and transformative also symbolize or enact the ultimate conformity?”

“evolution strikes me as infinitely more spiritually profound than Genesis.”

“As my body made the male body, I felt the difference between male and female body melt even further away.”

[and one unbearably jargon-y one: “The ghosted scar offers a rebus of sodomitical maternity”]

[reader · Rating 1 out of 5]

In sum, this book was written by a white woman in a long term stable relationship with a white ftm and therefore male partner, in a two parent, mom and dad household with two children, who is made very happy by this domestic arrangement, but since this makes her appear, essentially, the most heteronormative white woman ever, she felt the need to write a booklength blog entry about how out there and special and cutting edge and sexually perverted she really is, for really reals!

Give me a fucking break. That this book was listed as a Notable Book of 2015 or 16 by the NYTimes is just a marker for white privilege in that the presumed readers of that paper who are also living totally normative lives also want to feel like they are doing something transgressive just by living their comfortable, prosperous lives.

NO YOU ARE NOT.

She keeps insisting that she's SO out there but all she can marshall is that she has seen some very avant garde photo exhibits and has had anal sex. Whoopdedoo

Oh and she uses words like hermeutics and idetic and slippage and other post modern lit crit lingo which actually doesnt make her sound incisive, just pretentious. Gosh and the name dropping!!! Judith Butler, Zizek, Irigaray etc etc.

This was a hate-read. I'm so glad I went to law school and became a corporate lawyer for a global corporation because I went to a college that had classes wherein people talked JUST like this woman and I'm sure a lot of them grew up to BE her.

[Peter Mathews · Rating 1 out of 5]

Reading The Argonauts was a disorienting experience. Here is a narrator who repeatedly uses an intellectual framework that draws from my own interests in literary and critical theory, whose politics, outwardly at least, largely align with my own, and yet whom I found utterly, poisonously repellent.

"Ah yes, I think, digging a knee into the podium. Leave it to the old patrician white guy to call the lady speaker back to her body, so that no one misses the spectacle of that wild oxymoron, the pregnant woman who thinks. Which is really just a pumped-up version of that more general oxymoron, a woman who thinks." (p. 91)

This passage occurs in a part of the book when Nelson is giving a book talk at a NYC university. Sure, the playwright's question was insensitive, but the unspoken thoughts she expresses here give the reader a glimpse into a seething resentment that seems to underlie everything she does.

It's a resentment that is multiplied by her hypocrisy: initially, she looks down on women who are mothers because they follow a traditional, non-queer way of being female, for example, but suddenly she has compassion for the difficulties of motherhood when she has a child of her own.

She rails against the idea of "sameness" in homosexual attraction, insisting that it is all about a shared form of difference, but then has an emotional meltdown when she learns that her own baby is male, since she harbors a fantasy of a daughter she can shape into her own ideal: "I guess I had to mourn something— the fantasy of a feminist daughter, the fantasy of a mini-me. Someone whose hair I could braid, someone who might serve as a femme ally to me" (p. 87).

The Argonauts is a long list of these resentments that, as Nelson actually gains experience of the things she reviles, metamorphose into other resentments. There is no sense of compassion here, just an increasing refinement of Nelson's resentful condescension.

More disturbing, though, is the way in which Nelson engages in the relentless performance of her own virtue. She reads the right books, goes to the right performances, enjoys all the right things. It is clear that this putative moral uprightness does not come intrinsically - there is an inauthenticity to Nelson's desires, a sense that her ethics, politics, tastes, her very identity have been formed in the name of a politically-correct superego that commands: "Thou shalt!"

What is Maggie Nelson if not a postmodern puritan? Sure, it is a puritanism that outwardly preaches a message of revolutionary queerness, but this performative "subversion" operates only at the level of the signifier. Actions are a much better indicator of who we are than our words, so it doesn't matter to me how many references to Barthes or Sedgwick she throws in: The Argonauts reads like an act of revenge, a high-handed admonishment of an existence that has failed to live up to the author's moral standards.

The result is an inauthentic mixture of hypocrisy and resentment, devoid of the love and compassion that is the true remedy for our broken world.

[Rae Meadows · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many GR friends have written incredibly thoughtful reviews of this book. I wanted to love it. I liked it a lot. (I love that it was a bestseller and that many people have read it. Progress!) Nelson is a beautiful writer. The Argonauts is a mosaic of theory, self-examination, and an investigation on the limits of language, the possibilities of love, and the uncompromising belief in fluidity in identity, gender, family. "An endless becoming" is a repeated motif, and the overarching metaphor of the Argo:

“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.”

Nelson is a sincere guide, mixing straight theory quotes--I felt a little like I was back in grad school but okay--with memoir. The book made me think, and it was very readable. My main issue with the book was the pregnancy/parenting thread. Not that these sections weren't lovely and heartfelt, but to me they were not anything I haven't read/felt before. Nelson spends a lot of time describing pregnancy and birth like any first time mother might. (I get it, having babies rocked my world too, but..) For a book that purports to push boundaries, I'm not sure "The way a baby literally makes space where there wasn't space before" is to the level of the other material.

And one more small thing. I have no issue with Nelson liking anal sex. But I felt the first paragraph of the book was problematic: "Instead the words I love you come tumbling out of my mouth in an incantation the first time you fuck me in the ass, my face smashed against the cement floor of your dank and charming bachelor pad." I think Nelson was a) trying to "catch" the reader into the binary thinking she rails against in the book, and b) set a transgressive tone, which I don't think she needed to do.

Perhaps this is my cynicism peeking out, but there seems a razor-thin line between self-reflection and self-indulgence, and I felt Nelson at times slip over the edge. But I would still recommend this book, as I think it's important and timely, and Nelson is a smart, exciting, and superb writer.

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is my fourth book by Maggie Nelson, and she is a good and entertaining and provocative writer. I read her books about the murder of her aunt in Ann Arbor because I recalled that serial killer story from that time when I lived in Michigan, and "enjoyed' her take on the scene. She's unpredictable, "genre-bending," as her publisher says, and is never boring, though she is by now predictably unpredictable. The first paragraph either invites or repels, as she discusses anal sex with her partner, the gender-fluid Harry Dodge. In other words, if you can handle this, dear reader, read on! It's like a password. But not to worry, in case you want more of that kind of talk/sharing, just when you least expect it, boom, you will get it, right in the. . . nose.

What you will only discover if you keep reading for awhile (because there is no clear indication for a long time) is that she is, surprisingly, angling toward the main "thrust" of the book, about a queer couple making a baby. Though Dodge is largely out of this, except as gender-fluid rep. This is mainly about a woman who refuses to be categorized who is having a baby. Ach, and this is my second unconventional baby birth book this spring, the first from Lucy Knisley. I recall at the moment another, too, A. K. Summers' Pregnant Butch.

So, Rebel Yell Nelson as wife and mom and domestic worker?! Well, yes, this is her radical intervention into queer theory, a work of "auto-theory" carefully designed to speak to gender and women's studies students, as she references every bit of theory from her own women's studies education, and updates that theory by reflecting on how a queer couple can possibly justify actually procreating. At one point she jokes that a friend saw an oversized coffee cup from which she was drinking and said, "That must be the most hetero-normative thing I have ever seen!" Uh, that is, unless you are making a baby!

People who feel uncomfortable saying the word hetero-normative or who have to look it up now, or better yet, are inclined to say screw that, let her use words I can effing understand, will not enjoy this book, it was not written for you, you will not feel welcome to its world. So if one central potentially off-putting aspect of this book is about the viscera, the body, sexual acts, bodily fluids, a virtual home movie of the actual birth, (deal with it, she would say, this is me, I must be naked when I write!), the other is an almost constant stream of quotations from psycho-social feminist/gender queer theory, ugh.

The second paragraph signals this second emphasis, this here, take it or leave it aspect of Nelson; she quotes and glosses the quote from Wittgenstein, and then throughout the book quotes everyone on the planet from poetry to music to film to queer theory, jumping from High Theory to Lowbrow Shockmom sometimes in the same paragraph.

So it sounds as if I hate it. I actually don't. I'm kinda channeling her here, truthfully, this ballsy stop reading if you don't like it dimension of her. . . life. Some of it, I love, some ideas, and some of what she expects will be highly quotable nuggets (for your paper!), as here when she tries to justify how "born this way" may not be true for everyone; can a woman who does not identify as a lesbian love a woman and still identify as straight (or cis-gendered)?!:

“I get why it’s politically maddening, but I’ve also always thought it a little romantic—the romance of letting an individual experience of desire take precedence over a categorical one.”

Nelson can be kind of charming and funny about her complicated relationship with her mother. And also sometimes about becoming a mother; finally, when all is said and done, when all of the Jane Gallop and Eve Sedgwick and Winnicott and every teacher she has ever had is swept away, just plain making this baby Iggy (whoa, a gender neutral name!) and loving this child, is the most important thing for her. And this is the point she wants to make to gender and women's studies, that becoming a mother is more than okay, it is good. Whoa, revolutionary! She makes a baby! Could we have done this without all the theorizing and skipped straight to the baby love? Nope, not Maggie, she is what she is.

I often love her voice, which I heard because she read the (shortish) book I heard on audiotape. And I sometimes am moved by her poetic juxtapositions, as much as the moves seem familiar to me now. And the central story is interesting to me: She became pregnant in 2011, at the same time that her partner was starting testosterone injections; she writes about “the summer of our changing bodies. Me, four months pregnant, you six months on T.” I thought often as I read of the complex making of a son that my sister and her wife went through, with me as straight male cheerleader to my Trump-happy, anti-glbtq family (this is the part where the cis-gendered guy tries for some queer cred, right?).

So five stars, I loved it, I'm a total Nelson fan, she says screw you, I can say whatever I want, she's the Bukowski and Robert Crumb of Women's Studies, you go, Maggie. . .

and one star, I hated the pretentiousness and the stooping to speak theory to her various audiences as if to make her experiences reasonable to them (yes, she doesn't care what y'all think, and then she so does!). I am a straight older white dude, I'm like a joke I'm so far from the intended audience of this book, but on the whole I love/hate it in equal measures.

[britt_brooke · Rating 1 out of 5]

The Argonauts has been touted as “genre-bending” nonfiction, but honestly, it just felt like a lengthy college essay that had no idea what it wanted to be. I found it incredibly inaccessible. The opening paragraph was so utterly pretentious that I almost bailed 10 seconds in. Since it’s short, I sped up the unemotional, robotic audio and continued. I didn’t like the writing nor style, which tremendously hindered my ability to reap any connection - not even the motherhood bits - with Nelson. Though, I doubt she cares as she peers down from her esoteric high horse.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this book up because Carrie Brownstein mentioned reading and loving it in the Q&A to her most recent audiobook, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl. It is hard to explain what this book is but I will try - it is simultaneously an academic exploration of current (and seminal) works on gender, identity, love, dependence; written in a way where sources are listed by author names along the margins of the pages and the direct quotations are only indicated with italics (although sometimes she uses italics for other purposes.)

Inside this academic exploration is Maggie Nelson's own story, of being with a person who is gender-fluid and doesn't fit into a box, of seeing her partner's body change through Testosterone and surgery while her own body is changing through childbirth. The questions that get asked under the current of sources and story are about our identities, how much do we change when we love, when we change who we love, when we create something that we then love? Near the beginning, Nelson explains the starting (and ending?) point:

"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 anew."

This book, while seemingly brief, goes deep - into the personal history, into the research. It takes longer to read than one might expect, and even longer to process.

"You're a great student because you don't have any baggage, a teacher once told me, at which moment the subterfuge of my life felt complete."

[Kyriaki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Να ένα βιβλίο που γέμισα post-it!

Μπορεί να μην ταυτιζόμουν πάντα με όλα όσα καταπιάνονταν (πχ μητρότητα), ήταν όμως γεμάτο πολύ ωραίες σκέψεις πάνω σε πολύ σύγχρονα θέματα.
Μου άρεσε πολύ!



(Τελικά μου τη βάρεσε κι έγραψα κάτι παραπάνω εδώ.)

[somuchreading · Rating 5 out of 5]

Σώματα, ορμόνες, σεξουαλικότητα, μητρότητα και ξανά από την αρχή.

Δεν υπάρχει καμία αμφιβολία στο μυαλό μου: Η Maggie Nelson έχει γράψει ένα από τα πιο challenging και σημαντικά απομνημονεύματα [κάποια στιγμή να τη συζητήσουμε αυτή τη λέξη, δε μου αρέσει καθόλου] των τελευταίων ετών.

Κι αυτό συμβαίνει σίγουρα γιατί οι Αργοναύτες της είναι ένα αυτοβιογραφικό βιβλίο που συνδυαλέγεται ανοιχτά με την εποχή μας. Η συγγραφέας μιλά για τη σχέση της με τον τρανς σύντροφό του, για την απόφασή της να γίνει μητέρα και για την εγκυμοσύνη της, για τις αλλαγές των σωμάτων τους. Κι άλλα βιβλία έχουν καταπιαστεί με τα ίδια θέματα. Είναι όμως η ελευθερία της σκέψης της Nelson που κάνει αυτό το βιβλίο να μοιάζει τόσο τώρα.

Πέρα από τις συμβάσεις με τις οποίες έχουμε μάθει όλοι να μετρούμε τους άλλους, τις σχέσεις μας μαζί τους και τα γεγονότα της ζωής μας, η συγγραφέας αποτυπώνει σκέψεις, προβληματισμούς, αισθήματα και φιλοσοφικά θέματα πάνω στο χαρτί, προκαλώντας τ@ αναγνώστη να παρακολουθήσει τον ειρμό της και να φτάσει, μαζί της, σε μια βαθύτερη κατανόηση του ατόμου. Όποιου ατόμου. Όλων των ατόμων.

Εκτός όμως από απομνημονεύτα [γκρρρ], αυτό το βιβλίο καταφέρνει να είναι και το χρονικό μιας σχέσης, καταγραφή της πολιτισμικής ιστορίας των gender θεμάτων και η τρυφερή ιστορία μιας σύγχρονης οικογένειας που ξεκινά με μια σκηνή πρωκτικού σεξ, σε ένα σύνολο που μοιάζει με δύσκολο ανάγνωσμα αλλά δεν είναι, μιας και η συγγραφέας καταφέρνει να κάνει κομματάκια τα θέματα με τα οποία καταπιάνεται, σε ένα καθαρότατο και ευφυές, και γι' αυτό χρησιμότατο, point of view στα θέματα της μητρότητας και του queerness.

[MichelinaNeri · Rating 2 out of 5]

Your enjoyment of this book will be 100% tied to your tolerance for theory. If your idea of a good time is seemingly endless quotes from Roland Barthes and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, references to Butler and Zizek, the use of terms like the "sodomitical mother" and enough analyses of the symbology of the anus to impress Freud, you will like this book.

At one point, Nelson describes an awkward scene she witnesses at a panel discussion - one theorist has recently become a mother and has moved her thinking from the abstract to the personal, relating the history of art to her own feelings and experiences. The other panel member eviscerates her, accusing her of letting her own self-involvement cloud her mommy brain with half-baked theories and bad nude self-portraits. Nelson admits the first panel member's talk had been muddled, but sides with her in a fury of feminist indignation. This conflict basically foreshadowed my opinion of the whole book - which consists of tiresome descriptions in minute detail of mundane personal moments in Nelson's life used as the jumping off point for relentless dives into theory. At one point she tries to take her baby to a burlesque show and is turned away at the door - it is bar with an age restriction. This is the world's most unremarkable story, but somehow Nelson plumbs its depths for a whole chapter until she hits Freud. By the time she was discussing the ontology of contractions in childbirth, I was so done with this book.

There were a few good bits, a few interesting anecdotes, a few interesting thoughts. I liked reading a book about family that upsets the traditional, conservative view of family, about a family that fucks with gender. But it is strange to address the whole book to your partner, Harry, and then spend less time fleshing out who Harry is as a person than you spend recounting an entirely pedestrian argument you once had with him about the assimilationist politics in X-Men: First Class. Who cares? This books is like being trapped at a bad cocktail party with a bunch of blowhard, self-involved professors trying to one-up each other with Foucault quotes. No thank you.

[Takisx · Rating 5 out of 5]

Σπαραχτικη απεικόνιση ενός απίστευτου ερωτα, μέσα απο τα μάτια μιας γυναίκας βαθιά ακτιβίστριας, αλλά κι απόλυτα ερωτευμένης, σε ενα κείμενο που ανατρέπει όλους τους κανονες:δοκίμιο, μυθιστόρημά, ημερολογιακες καταχωρήσεις, αλλα κι ερωτικά γράμματα, αλλά και μπορεί κι αν θελει να γίνει και πολιτικό μανιφέστο, αλλά αν θυμώσει πολύ, μπορεί να γίνει κι εντελώς bitch, να ξεφύγει εντελώς από το θέμα της(;) ιδίως αν της εχουν αργήσει πολύ τα χατήρια που περιμένει και που δεν γίνονται ποτέ.

Πάνω από όλα είναι ο αγώνας μιας γυναίκας άφοβης που θέλει όσο τίποτα αλλο το παιδί που λαχταραει απο εναν άντρα που λατρεύει, που τυχαίνει να ηταν μια πρώην γυναίκα, αλλά ποιος δίνει σημασία σε τοσο ανούσιες λεπτομέρειες.

Για να συνεννοηθούμε βέβαια, το βιβλίο δεν είναι εύκολο, οι πρώτες 20-30 σελιδες έχουν μιαν αμηχανία, αλλά μπορεί και να το φαντάστηκα. Το θέμα είναι οτι όταν παίρνει μπρος η μηχανή δε�� θέλεις να σταματήσει.

Και κατι σημαντικό :καταλαβαίνεις ότι ενα βιβλίο σου είναι απαραίτητο οταν τελειώσει, και ζητάς απεγνωσμένα να ξαναγυρίσεις από την αρχη.

Τελειώνοντας να πω οτι η μετάφραση είναι ενα κόσμημα, και περιμένω με αγωνία και περιέργεια τα επόμενα βιβλία της Κυρίας Μάγκι Νέλσον.

[Roula · Rating 5 out of 5]

"το τελευταίο μας βράδυ στο Σερατον, τρώμε στο απίστευτα υπερεκτιμημένο" χαλαρό μεξικανικο" του ξενοδοχείου, το Dos Caminos. Εσύ περνάς για άντρας, εγώ για εγκυος. Ο σερβιτόρος μας μιλά με εύθυμο τρόπο για την οικογένεια του, εκφράζει χαρά για τη δική μας. εξωτερικά μπορεί να έμοιαζε λες και το σώμα σου γινόταν όλο και περισσότερο αρσενικό, το δικό μου όλο και περισσότερο θηλυκό. Αλλά μέσα μας δε νοιωθαμε έτσι. Εσωτερικά ήμασταν δύο ανθρώπινα ζώα που υφίστανται μεταμορφώσεις ο ένας δίπλα στον άλλο, που γινομασταν ελεύθερα μάρτυρες αυτής της αλλαγής του άλλου. Με άλλα λόγια μεγάλων αμέ. "

Το βιβλίο αυτό μου χάρισε μια υπέροχη αναγνωστική εμπειρία.
Μια ακόμη έκπληξη πολύ ευχάριστη, σχετικά με το ότι ακόμη υπάρχει πρωτοτυπία, φρεσκάδα και γνησιότητα μέσα σε ατελείωτους τίτλους βιβλίων. Η Νέλσον μας ανοίγει την ψυχή και το μυαλό της σχετικά με τα πιστευω της σε ότι αφορά στο να είσαι μητέρα, συγγραφέας, γυναίκα, άνθρωπος. Τόσο μέσα από τις δικές της σκέψεις, όσο και μέσα από αυτές αγαπημένων της συγγραφέων, φιλοσόφων και ανθρώπων που την επηρέασαν στον τρόπο σκέψης της, διάβασα μερικές ιδέες που πραγματικά με έβαλαν σε σκέψεις, αλλά κυρίως με έκαναν να δω τον κόσμο μέσα από ένα άλλο πρίσμα, διαφορετικό. Κι αυτό γιατί η Νέλσον είναι παντρεμένη με έναν  άντρα που γεννήθηκε γυναίκα και ορίζουν τους εαυτούς τους ως queer ζευγάρι. Είναι βιβλίο βαθιά ειλικρινές, συγκινητικό, Αληθινό, που μας δείχνει πως είμαστε όλοι αργοναύτες, ταξιδιώτες που αλλαζουν μορφή, σώμα, αλλά όλοι έχουν τον ίδιο τελικό προορισμό, να βρουν τον εαυτό τους.

"ποτέ δεν έχω νιώσει έτσι αλλά εγώ έγινα μαμά αρκετά μεγάλη. Είχα σχεδόν τέσσερις δεκαετίες για να γίνω ο εαυτός μου προτού πειραματιστώ με την εκμηδενιση μου."


"Άστον, για το θεο, να στριφογυριζει μέσα στο σάκο του, σκεφτόμουν, διπλωνοντας βλοσυρη τα γενετήσια  τριπτυχα στο πορτοφόλι μου,βδομαδα τη βδομάδα. Άστον να αγνοεί - για πρώτη και ίσως τελευταία φορά--το καθήκον να επιτελεί έναν εαυτό για τους άλλους, το γεγονός ότι αναπτυσομαστε, ακόμη και μέσα στη μήτρα, ανταποκρινομενοι σε μια ροή προβολών και αντανακλασεων που εξοστρακιζονται πάνω μας. Τελικά αποκαλούμε αυτή τη χιονομπαλα, εαυτό (Αργώ). "

[Maria Bikaki · Rating 3 out of 5]

«Τα μέρη της Αργούς μπορεί να αντικαθίστανται αλλά το πλοίο λέγεται πάντοτε Αργώ. Μπορεί να μαθαίνουμε σιγά σιγά να φεύγουμε πετώντας, όμως αυτό δεν σημαίνει πως έχουμε ξεμπερδέψει με όλα τα κλαδάκια μέσα στο κλουβί μας».

Κάτι μεταξύ σε δοκίμιο και memoir, οι Αργοναύτες της Μάγκι Νέλσον είναι αδιαπραγμάτευτα ένα βιβλίο πρόκληση, μια από τις πιο ιδιαίτερες αναγνωστικές εμπειρίες που εγώ είχα τελευταία τουλάχιστον. Και σου εξηγώ παρακάτω το γιατί. Μετά μπορείς να με πεις τρελή δε θα σε αδικήσω. Κάνε δουλειά σου. Έχουν ανέβει αρκετές κριτικές για το συγκεκριμένο βιβλίο σε τούτο εδώ το χώρο.
Παρατηρείς κάτι; Δύο εκ διαμέτρου αντίθετες κριτικές. Σε αυτό το σημείο μπορείς να με πεις θέοτρελη όπως σου επέτρεψα παραπάνω γιατί το πιστεύεις ή όχι ταυτίστηκα και με τις δύο. Ελα δε γίνεται αυτό θα μου πεις. Hold my beer.
Ας τα πάρουμε όμως από την αρχή. Σ’ ένα αυστηρά προσωπικά προσωπικό βιβλίο, η συγγραφέας αναλαμβάνει να μας μιλήσει για την σχέση της με τον τρανς καλλιτέχνη Harry Dodge, την άποψη της για τη μητρότητα, τις σχέσεις της με την μητέρα της, την εγκυμονύση κ.α. Στο ταξίδι της αυτό θα έχει άξιους συνταξιδιώτες, συγγραφείς που στηρίζουν την ιδεολογική της αυτή ταυτότητα και ανατρέχει σε αυτά ανα διαστήματα παράλληλα με τις δικές της προσωπικές εμπειρίες. Σε ένα κείμενο φρέσκο και ιδιόμορφο θα την απασχολήσουν καίρια ζητήματα όπως αυτό της σεξουαλικότητας και της μητρότητας.

Το τελευταίο μας βράδυ στο Σέρατον, τρώμε στο απίστευτα υπερτιμημένο “χαλαρό μεξικάνικο” του ξενοδοχείου, το Dos Caminos. Εσύ περνάς για άντρας, εγώ για έγκυος. Ο σερβιτόρος μας μιλά με εύθυμο τρόπο για την οικογένεια του, εκφράζει χαρά για τη δική μας. Εξωτερικά, μπορεί να έμοιαζε λες και το σώμα σου γινόταν όλο και περισσότερο “αρσενικό”, το δικό μου όλο και περισσότερο “θηλυκό”. Αλλά μέσα μας δεν νοιώθαμε έτσι. Εσωτερικά ήμασταν δύο ανθρώπινα ζώα που υφίστανται μεταμορφώσεις ο ένας δίπλα στον άλλον, που γινόμασταν ελεύθερα μάρτυρες αυτής της αλλαγής του άλλου. Με άλλα λόγια μεγαλώναμε.
Αναλύει, αμφισβητεί, ενίοτε αστειεύεται με αυτά και με ένα τρόπο το λιγότερο ωμό και αυθεντικό τα γραφόμενα της δε θα περάσουν σε κανέναν απαρατήρητα σ’ ένα πολύτιμο για κείνη ταξίδι με προορισμό την αυτογνωσία και όχι μόνο αυτό. Νομίζω απώτερος και πιο βαθύς σκοπός της είναι καταθέτοντας τη δική της οπτική των πραγμάτων για την οποία δε σε πιέζει απαραίτητα να την ασπαστείς, να οδηγήσει τον αναγνώστη στο πώς να κατανοούμε αν θες λίγο καλύτερα τους ανθρώπους όπως και αν είναι αυτοί με την όποια διαφορετικότητα τους.

συνειδητοποίησα ότι όσο μεγαλώνεις δεν κερδίζεις αναγκαία και κάτι άλλο, πέρα από το ότι μεγαλώνεις. Τα υπόλοιπα είναι προαιρετικά

Βιβλία σαν τους Αργοναύτες της Νέλσον θα είναι πάντα απαραίτητο να υπάρχουν. Ξέρεις λόγω αυτής της αντισυμβατικότητας τους απέναντι σε δοκιμασμένα είδη γραφής και απέναντι στην εικόνα μιας επιτηδευμένα συντηρητικής κοινωνίας που ενώ το παίζει προοδευτική στην πραγματικότητα πάντα θα εμμένει σε πεπαλαιωμένες απόψεις βασισμένες στην άγνοια.

Πώς να δώσεις σε κάποιον να καταλάβει ότι ο καλύτερος τρόπος για να μάθεις πώς νιώθει ένα άτομο για το φύλο ή τη σεξουαλικότητά του – ή για οτιδήποτε άλλο, εδώ που τα λέμε – είναι ν’ ακούσεις αυτό που σου λέει και να προσπαθήσεις να του συμπεριφερθείς αντίστοιχα, χωρίς να καπελώσεις τη δική του εκδοχή της πραγματικότητας με τη δική σου;”

Εδώ κάπου προκύπτουν και τα δικά μου αντιφατικά συναισθήματα για τούτο εδώ το βιβλίο. Από τη μια γεμίζεις με σημειώσεις, post it και λοιπά τσιτάτα να έχεις να τα ποστάρεις ως αποστάγματα σοφίας. Παράλληλα αχ ένα δάκρυ κύλησε και όχι μωρέ δεν κλαίω γιατί ταυτίζομαι με αυτά που διαβάζω απλά ένα σκουπιδάκι μπήκε στο μάτι μου, αλλά από την άλλη μωρή Μάγκι Νέλσον μήπως είσαι λίγο δήθεν κουκλίτσα μου;. Δεν ξέρω, δεν ήταν λίγες οι φορές που ένιωσα άβολα εναντίον της και έβρισκα χαοτικές τις απόψεις της ίσως και ανεπαρκείς τουλάχιστον για τη δική μου κοσμοθεωρία με αποτέλεσμα να αμφιταλαντεύομαι αν διάβασα ένα πραγματικά μεγάλο βιβλίο ή οι αργοναύτες είναι το χαρακτηριστικό παράδειγμα διανοούμενης πνευματικής τσιχλόφουσκας οκ άλλες λέξεις ήθελα να χρησιμοποιήσω κάνε το συνειρμό που καταλήγουν στο τέλος να εκμηδενίζουν την πραγματική αξία του γραπτού. Κάνε και εσύ καμιά δουλειά. Δε θα στα λέω όλα εγώ. Διάβασε το και κρίνε.
Θα το ξαναδιάβαζα πάντως. Ενδιαφέρουσα εμπειρία που για κάποιους θα είναι λίγο παραπάνω επώδυνη απ΄οσο ίσως μπορει ν’ αντέξει.

PS Δεν είμαι σίγουρη για τ΄αστεράκια. Ξαναρώτα με. Μπορεί να είναι και 4, μπορεί και 2, μπορεί και 5 δεν εχω αποφασίσει.

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 5 out of 5]

To absolutely no one's surprise, Maggie Nelson has delivered yet another exceptional and essential book. It's a middle finger to identity politics, a desperate call to re-evaluate that which we understand as "radical," and an incredibly moving memoir about motherhood, navigating queerness, and partnership. Of course, it's also a million other things, too.

[Pauline]

Un livre un peu ardu (le commencer à 1h du matin avec un début de migraine n’est pas une bonne idée par exemple) mais profondément réjouissant. Ça va dans tous les sens, donc c’est parfois un peu confondant mais c’est drôle, en colère et plein d’amour aussi. Quand Nelson parle de sa grossesse et de la transition de Harry, c’est d’une beauté incroyable.

Cependant, si je n’avais pas une certaine éducation féministe derrière moi, j’aurais été perdue par plein de concepts et de citations. Pas forcément pour tout le monde donc, à mon avis.

[Michael Meeuwis · Rating 2 out of 5]

All kinds of people that I know--people who I can unfeignedly say are smarter than I am--really liked this. And it's going to be one of the most-taught novels of these next ten years; I didn't really like it, and *I* want to use it in the classroom. But for my purposes, I found this pretty tepid. The writer sort of takes usual-suspect theorists off the shelf--Winnicott via Bechdel, Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick--and name-checks their theories; these bits felt oddly uncerebral. A lot of the energy comes from a resulting paradox that I find utterly dull: that the narrator, into high theory up to her eyeballs, is beside herself because she finds a conventional thing--in this case pregnancy and child-rearing as a middle-class academic--deeply satisfying and enjoyable. And this is done without much unpacking: without describing the theory or art or whatever being described in terms that would open it up for the reader. If Maggie Nelson had written "Pride and Prejudice," it would have been seven pages of Elizabeth wooing Darcy and four hundred pages of Elizabeth, post-marriage, wrestling with how a good marriage troubles her ability to read Deleuze.
I mean, look: we live our lives among half-formed theories, which we (like the piece-by-piece reassembled book of the title, no doubt what will sneak it into a few Great Books syllabi) sort of live amidst the general interpretative wreck of, as what we read is unable to account for how we live. But this book was so lacking in sympathy for anyone being merely conventional that it felt quite stale and (horrors) normative: whether tut-tutting Eve Sedgwick for having post-shower (as opposed to properly sodometrical) sex with her husband; or invoking the people who watch mainstream pornography, as opposed to the subtler kinds of anal eroticism the narrator prefers; or duly noting brand names at a Ramada Inn stayed at while her partner recovered from gender transitioning surgery, the better to note off one's special place in late capitalism. And this lack of sympathy often made the normative bits quite dull, as the narrator never really tries to make connections between the high and the mass, the aesthetic and the deeply embodied. There's no interesting crisis: it turns out a single human life really can contain a partner one has hot-hot sex with, a bathroom with a selection of dildos in it, *and* maternal love for a child.