Queer Atlantic: Masculinity, Mobility, and the Emergence of Modernist Form by Daniel Hannah

Abstract

Reviewed by: Queer Atlantic: Masculinity, Mobility, and the Emergence of Modernist Form by Daniel Hannah Robert L. Caserio Daniel Hannah. Queer Atlantic: Masculinity, Mobility, and the Emergence of Modernist Form. McGill-Queen's UP, 2021. xii + 228 pp. Daniel Hannah argues that in two American and three English fictions written between 1886 and 1915, "transatlantic masculinity [was] a site demanding [the] narrative redirection and experimentation" (165) associated with literary modernism. The demanding site, a "'queer' Atlantic" (5), is for Hannah an in-between space. It means at once a literal ocean and a figurative expanse, a locale within national borders yet beyond them, and an "interstitial" (140) relation to gender identities. That "interstitial" aspect is what Hannah broadly denominates queer, a term he thinks best suits the innovative characterizations of men in Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Master of Ballantrae, Henry James's The Golden Bowl, Joseph Conrad's Nostromo, and Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier. He contends that these writers' portraits of masculinity at sea—of masculinity that sails transatlantic oceans and is adrift from representational conventions—undermine identifications of maleness with masterful conduct and complementarily verge on homoeroticism. The unsettling and homoeroticism, Hannah concedes, are largely implicit: explicit countercurrents resist them in the same texts. Nevertheless, the instability of gender that the novelists convey amounts to a suspension of manhood's meanings. This suspension required expression through new formal devices at the narrative level as well as in character-drawing. Hence the formal constituents of modernist novels—ambiguity and uncertainty, emphasis on narrative space rather than narrative linearity, refusal of closure, and unstable perspectives ("mobile" [10] perspectives)—resulted, according to Hannah, from the ways these authors came to terms with their invented men. Melville and Stevenson, in effect protomodernists, initiated the change. One might conclude from Hannah that we couldn't have had modernism as we know it without a queer sapping of masculine paradigms. As I'll note later, the cause-and-effect aspect of Hannah's argument is not without its problems; also problematic is the critical armature that leads to his conclusion about queerness's fit with these authors and modernism. But examples of the merit of Hannah's focus on "interstitial" (140) fictive males rightly takes precedence over my demurrers. All told, Hannah's five main chapters treat some twenty men. A strong illustrative instance is his reading of Nostromo. When Nostromo enters the novel, Hannah reminds us, he is cutting [End Page 567] off the decorative silver buttons of his coat. That swaggering gesture (to seduce a girlfriend) seems rooted in a virility that is masterfully self-assured. Retrospectively, however, the gesture becomes legible as a forecast of Nostromo's undoing, by himself and by powerful men who simultaneously exploit him and dote on him homosocially—unintentionally compromising their own virility. Nostromo surrenders his masculine integrity to these manipulators. His disintegration, Hannah points out, and the erosion of any assured significance of his manliness, is mirrored in the hide-merchant Hirsch who, "interstitial" (to begin with) by being a Jewish outsider in Costaguana, is twice literally suspended in air and left hanging, the last time fatally. Thus, these two characters (like the five others in Nostromo Hannah addresses) express their gender as an agonizing hang-up, a pathos that queers masculinity across the novel's extent. Moreover, Nostromo, Hirsch, and the others arguably inspire, or are reflected in, Conrad's narrative form, which, disabling its own putatively masterful forward drive, becomes as queerly suspended in its structure and meaning as its male figures. Hannah emphasizes the immobilization of manly ability and power, but he also finds that experiments with masculinity's unmooring propels, paradoxically, a mobilizing political effect. The effect is "a critique of imperialism as narrative, . . . as a claiming of time and space in the name of a masculine autonomy that . . . is inevitably . . . hollowed out" (148). Nostromo and Hirsch are vehicles of this "critique" and "hollow[ing] out." They have counterparts in the other fictions Hannah examines. In James's The Golden Bowl, Hannah contends, Prince Amerigo is meant to represent, in his marriage and his adultery, a masterful imperial manhood—even though he seems...