A Reader on Reading

In the middle of the third century B.c., the Cyrene poet Callimachus undertook the task of cataloguing the half-million volumes housed in the famous Library of Alexandria. The task was prodigious, not only because of the number of books to be inspected, dusted, and shelved, but because it entailed the conception of a literary order that was supposed somehow to reflect the vaster order of the universe. In attributing a certain book to a certain shelf—Homer to “Poetry” or Herodotus to “History,” for example — Callimachus had first to determine that all writing could be divided into a specific number of categories, or, as he called them, pinakes, “tables;” and then he had to decide to which category each of the thousands of unlabeled books belonged. Callimachus divided the colossal library into eight tables, which were to contain every possible fact, conjecture, thought, imagination ever scrawled on a sheet of papyrus; future librarians would multiply this modest number to infinity. Jorge Luis Borges recalled that in the numeric system of the Institut Bibliographique in Brussels, number 231 corresponded to God.

No reader who has ever derived pleasure from a book has much confidence in these cataloguing methods. Subject indexes, literary genres, schools of thought and style, literatures classified by nationality or race, chronological compendiums, and thematic anthologies suggest to the reader merely one of a multitude of points of view, none comprehensive, none even grazing the breadth and depth of a mysterious piece of writing. Books refuse to sit quietly on shelves: Gulliver’s Travels jumps from “Chronicles” to “Social Satire” to “Children’s Literature” and will not be faithful to any of these labels. Our reading, much like our sexuality, is multifaceted and fluid. “I am large,” wrote Walt Whitman, “I contain multitudes.”

The notion of “gay literature” is guilty on three counts: first, because it implies a narrow literary category based on the sexuality of either its authors or its characters; second, because it implies a narrow sexual category that has somehow found its definition in a literary form; third, because it implies a narrow political category that defends a restricted set of human rights for a specific sexual group. And yet the notion of “gay literature,” albeit recent, doubtless exists in the public mind. Certain bookstores have “gay literature” shelves, certain publishers publish “gay literature” series, and there are magazines and papers that regularly bring out stories and poems under the rubric of “gay literature.”

What then is this “gay literature”?

At the risk of committing a tautology, what is in general understood by “gay literature” is literature concerned with gay subjects. This can swing from obscure hints about “the love that dare not speak its name,” in Lord Alfred Douglas’s self-silencing phrase, apparent in some nineteenth-century writing, to explicit chronicles of gay life in our time by authors who may or may not be gay. Sometimes books dealing with nongay subjects by gay writers (E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for instance) are put on the same “gay literature” shelf as books with an explicitly gay content — Marguerite Yourcenar’s Alexis or Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman—as if the critic, editor, or bookseller were deliberately attempting to catalogue the person, not the person’s work. Certain writers refuse to have their work labeled “gay” (Patrick Gale, Timothy Findley) and refer to it as “books by a writer who happens to be gay.” As usual with this kind of labeling, the exceptions to any proposed definition make the process finally useless, so that every time the label is applied it must be redefined.