Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration

by Wayne Koestenbaum

Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer on hysteria, J.A. Symonds and Havelock Ellis on sexuality, a novel by Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad, The Waste Land of T.S. Eliot (and Ezra Pound), even the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge: men making books together. Wayne Koestenbaum's startling interpretation of literary collaboration focuses on homosexual desire: men write together, he argues, in order either to express or to evade homosexual feelings. Their writing becomes a textual intercourse, the book at once a female body they can share and the child of their partnership. These man-made texts steal a generative power that women's bodies seem to represent.

Seen as the site of a struggle between homosexual and homophobic energies, the texts Koestenbaum explores - works of psychoanalysis, sexology, fiction, and poetry - emerge as more complex, more revealing. They crystallize and refract the anxiety of male sexuality at the end of the last century, and open up a deeper understanding of connections today between the erotic and the literary. Drawing upon the work of feminist critics, Koestenbaum connects male collaboration and the exchange of women within patriarchy: he peers into both medical texts and imaginative literature, disturbing our ready acceptance of the co-authored work. This strong and unsettling book transforms our understanding of the creative process, providing a new sense of what both collaborative and solitary artistry mean.

214 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Wayne Koestenbaum has published five books of critical prose, including The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; and three books of poetry, including Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems. He is a Professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Reviews

[Hayley]

read for an essay i'm writing about contemporary collaborative porn writing courtesy of t... essays on the psychoanalysts and the final essay are most insightful, i think some of the ways in which one gets into the psyche of another person (and also struggles) is evident in the essay and at times feels like a reach. idk if the book has a thesis about what collaborative writing entails and that's okay, at the same time it feels like whatever i'm reaching for in my essay is a different formulation from that which has been described now. so interesting! glad to have read! i think i take from t in that the best takeaway about this book is that the collaborative writing is its most interesting/fruitful when the writers are as interested in each other as they are the subject matter