Resisting the Apocalypse: Telling Time in American Novels about AIDS, 1982-1992
(Doctoral Dissertation by Lisa Garmire, UCSB 1996)
Chapter 3: Resisting the Apocalyptic AIDS Narrative in David Feinberg's Eighty-Sixed and Spontaneous Combustion
3.1 Introduction
This chapter explores how David Feinberg uses memory and humor in his two AIDS novels, Eighty-Sixed and Spontaneous Combustion, to resist the apocalyptic AIDS narrative. Following a brief history of Feinberg's life, the chapter moves into a discussion of the problematics of memory and AIDS. Recounting stories from the past or remembering is one of the most popular structuring devices used in novels about AIDS and my analysis moves beyond Feinberg's novels to also include a more general discussion of other AIDS novels that use memory. In the second portion of the chapter, I examine how humor can constitute another narrative strategy for disrupting the apocalyptic AIDS narrative and its emphasis on linear, forward-moving temporality. Feinberg’s two AIDS constitute some of the best examples of AIDS novels that use humor for talking about AIDS.
3.2 Biographical Context
David B. Feinberg was born in 1956, in Lynn, Massachusetts and grew up a member of a Jewish family in Syracuse, New York. He graduated with a math degree from MIT in 1977 and then moved to Los Angeles, where he wrote his first, yet unpublished novel and where he came out. He then moved to New York City, where he spent the rest of his life, working as a computer programmer for the MLA (Modern Language Association) and writing in his spare time. As AIDS began to affect his world, he became an active member of ACT UP (Carducci 90). B.J. Rosenthal, the first-person narrator of his two AIDS novels, reflects autobiographical aspects of Feinberg's identity and personality as a young gay Jewish man living in New York City, who has a witty, ironic, guilt-ridden, "Jewish" sense of humor. Eighty-Sixed was Feinberg's first published novel and was published in 1988. It was the first book to win both the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men's Fiction and the American Gay/Lesbian Book Award for Fiction (Carducci 90). Spontaneous Combustion was published in 1991. In his final book, Feinberg moved away from fiction to compile a collection of autobiographical essays, speeches and previously published essays. Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone was published the week he died in November 1994 of AIDS-related complications.
3.3 The Problematics of Memory
Memory and one's relationship to the past form a central problematic in much AIDS literature, including many of the novels about AIDS. As critics like John Clum point out, "a major theme of gay AIDS literature is what to do with a lost past, which was both affluent and carefree" (201). As Clum notes, for many gay authors the past seems divided between the "then" of before AIDS and the "now" of living in the time of AIDS. One aspect of remembering, then, becomes a way to commemorate the history of gay liberation and the time before AIDS, when the sexual revolution had liberated many homosexual men, enabling them to come out and to claim membership in gay communities across the United States, particularly in San Francisco and New York. But to consider this past is also to face the problematics of one's own sexual history, a history that was in part connected with the spreading AIDS epidemic. Though Clum aptly remarks that "a crucial issue for gay writers is how to recollect the pleasure principle that allowed urban gay communities to become a breeding ground for the AIDS virus" (201), his essay reflects silences that permeate much of AIDS criticism, which I will explore in Chapter 5 of the dissertation. He speaks of gay AIDS literature and the larger gay community as unified wholes, whose lost past “was both affluent and carefree.” The underlying assumption is that these groups are composed of white, primarily middle-class gay men. Indeed, most of the gay AIDS literature has been written by or about this population, but not entirely. Indeed, novels like Steven Corbin’s A Hundred Days From Now, E. Lynn Harris’ Invisible Life, Elias Munoz’s The Greatest Performance and Michael Nava’s Henry Rios detective novels illustrate the diversity of gay populations and experiences as well as the problems some minority men who have sex with men have with aligning themselves with “the gay community.” Their stake in constructing narratives of memory are not synonymous with those described by Clum of white gay authors, and their novels lack much of the elegaic and sentimental tones of novels about white gay men who live with AIDS.
For many of the AIDS novels, however, memory does serve an elegaic or memorializing function, which commemorates those who have died of AIDS-related diseases. Timothy Murphy cogently describes this function as testimony: "Testimony is witness in front of an indifferent world about the worth and merit of persons. And thus one writes, for the world unconvinced, that someone was here and that, death notwithstanding, a presence remains" (317). This process of commemoration in the face of larger societal indifference and/or hostility has a political aspect. Testimony functions to break silence, a process that is reminiscent of the activist organization ACT UP whose central purpose is to combat the dangers represented by its slogan, that SILENCE=DEATH. Testimony also serves more personal needs and memory can serve a healing function. For AIDS novelists both gay and straight as well as for many others who write about AIDS, remembering in their writing the loved ones who have died can help their mourning process.
3.4 Risky Sexual History
... I recognized the baths as the most direct path to sexual gratification. No deceptive advertising or flashy packaging here. Nothing to unwrap, unzip, unsnap, or unbutton: no complicated configuration of slip-lock belts and long johns to unravel, no adult equivalent of a child-proof medicine cap to struggle with. And everyone was there for one reason only: sex. (Feinberg, Eighty-Sixed 19)
One danger of looking backward in the age of AIDS is the risk that the past threatens. Is the past a source of pollution, guilt, shame, and conviction? "Guilty, guilty, guilty" for sexual crimes that are now being punished by divine retribution, as conservatives like Patrick Buchanan have indicated? In “Placing Blame for Devastating Disease,” Dorothy Nelkin and Sander Gilman describe this process of ascribing morality to disease: "Disease is a means to reinforce sexual mores. It serves as a public sign of the violation of socially defined boundaries. The sick man becomes a sinner; pestilence is the punishment unleashed by divine retribution; disease is the means to cleanse the sin" (46). Focusing a narrative on the past risks engaging aspects of these homophobic cultural narratives, which see venereal disease as a fitting crime for having violated biblical sanctions against non-procreative sex.
Part I of Feinberg's Eighty-Sixed, entitled "1980: Ancient History," recounts the life of the first-person narrator B.J. Rosenthal in the era before AIDS. Told in the past tense, B.J. describes how his life during this time revolved around sex, from popper-enhanced sexual encounters at New York City's famous St. Marks Baths, to summer days at the gay section of Jones Beach, to anonymous encounters in Central Park, to failed attempts at developing longer term relationships, first with a priest named Dennis and later with a recovering alcoholic and drug addict named Richard.
Though Feinberg's memory project remembers the days of B.J.'s sexual freedom before AIDS, the narrative is tinged with foreshadowing. Immediately following B.J.'s sexual encounter at St. Marks, he comes down with veneral disease: "...the primordial ooze emanating from my member was not in fact precum but the drip of a social disease" (23-24). Subsequent sexual encounters are also followed with descriptions of B.J.'s trips to the public health clinic, but each subsequent disease seems worse than the last. Following the gonorrhea, he then comes down with intestinal parasites: "I had had the runs now since that night at the Stud. Oh, feckless youth!" (56). In this episode, like the episode at the baths, the narrative implicitly sets up a connection between anonymous sexual encounters and disease. The diagnostic procedure for confirming intestinal parasites is more humiliating and difficult, however, and B.J. recounts the embarrassing episode in which his first attempts at pooping in a cup are not acceptable to the nurse, so he has to repeat the procedure. The recounted event is softened by his use of humor: "I didn't know which was worse, to be insulted for your feces or complimented on them" (59).
As the narrative of “1980: Ancient History” moves forward in time, B.J.’s different sexually transmitted diseases become more difficult to treat. In a foreshadowing of the complexities of AIDS medications, B.J. complains about how complicated his medication schedule has become in treating the latest round of infections: "'It got so complicated I had to make up charts and set alarm clocks to remind myself which pill to take when'" (61). The big difference in history, however, between "Ancient History" and the years of AIDS is that B.J. can take his medication and get better; the worst he really has to suffer at this point in time is not being able to have sex for a while: "Dejected, I went to my next class. It looked as if I was going to be out of commission for another extended period of time" (61). When he eventually contracts herpes, he can no longer be totally cured by medication, but he can avoid having sex when the herpes flares up. As the narrative moves forward and B.J.’s infections become more frequent and more complex, the narrative seems to presage the ominous beginnings of the AIDS epidemic in New York City’s gay community.
Indeed, one of B.J.’s tricks in Part I becomes a casualty of AIDS in Part II, which links B.J. sexually with AIDS. In Part I, Bob Broome seems to serve an ominous symbolic function for. B.J. B.J. is not attracted to Bob but has sex with him because he has just been rejected by two other men he is attracted to. B.J. reflects, "I should know not to go home with the first man that came along just because I felt lonely or horny. Whenever I did this and substituted whoever was handy for the person I was attracted to, disaster struck" (51). B.J. does not specify at this point what he means by “disaster,” but it is just prior to this sexual encounter that B.J. and his friends have discussed being “Eighty-Sixed” from different places. In “Part I: 1980: Ancient History,” “Eighty-Sixed” has quite a different meaning from the one it will develop in the age of “Part II: 1986: Learning How to Cry.” Memory fails B.J. when he tries to describe the sex he had with Bob, because he blacked out: "What happened next I don’t recall. I'm not exactly sure what transpired. A few cocktails later, enough to addle my memory, I found myself in bed with Bob. The next thing I knew it was the following morning" (51). Bob is a troubling, recurring figure in B.J.’s “ancient history.” When B.J. again encounters Bob, he cannot remember Bob’s name. Repeatedly B.J. asks himself, "Now, what was his name?" (84).
In Part II of Eighty-Sixed, B.J.’s life during the age of AIDS is continually shadowed by Bob’s presence. B.J.’s description of Bob’s life with AIDS in Part II reenacts the apocalyptic AIDS narrative, as first we see Bob hospitalized for PCP, then grow sicker, and ultimately die of AIDS. Through the course of Bob’s experience of AIDS, B.J. reluctantly develops a friendship with him, visiting him in the hospital. Part II, unlike Part I, only once explicitly describes a sexual encounter B.J. has with a trick and Bob’s presence once again inserts itself. Coming toward the end of Part II, B.J. describes what it is like for him to have sex in the age of AIDS: “There is no such thing as sex without angst anymore. The specter of death cannot be ignored, forgotten. Every action is accompanied with caution; every invention with doubt” (318). B.J.’s encounter is plagued by fear - of infecting or being infected. As his trick begins to hump his stomach, the phone rings. The answering machine clicks on and Bob’s presence once again inserts itself, becoming “the specter of death” that “cannot be ignored”:
Dave Johnson speaks tersely to the machine. His voice is hoarse. “B.J., it’s Dave. I got a call from St. Clare’s a few minutes ago. Bob Broome just died. His lungs filled with fluid, and he drowned. I didn’t want you to go there and visit him straight from Rochester and find out he was dead.” He hangs up. I go limp. (319)
Bob ultimately symbolizes the mortal effects of B.J.’s sexual history, a haunting which squelches B.J.’s sexuality of the present time.
In the latter portion of Part I of Eighty-Sixed, we finally see B.J. develop a longer-term relationship with Richard, but even their relationship is tinged with foreshadowing. When Richard wants to instigate S and M with B.J., B.J. yells out, "'Do not molest what's left of my innocence. Listen, I've got it all charted out. At twenty-eight I become a tired old jaded queen and get into light S and M. At twenty-nine I graduate to heavy stuff: fist-fucking, slings, the works. By thirty I'm dead’" (113-4). Part II begins with B.J. telling us five years have passed and he is now 29. Though he has not died by the time he is thirty, at the end of the book, most of his friends are dead or dying, including those he had been sexually active with in Part I. B.J.'s relationship with Richard finally fails in the course of Part I and B.J. continues to long for an intimate relationship with someone. Part I of Eighty-Sixed ends full circle with him at the baths again, but now, anonymous sex leaves him empty: "Disgusted with myself, frustrated, I left, vowing not to return. What was the point? The St. Mark's Baths was ultimately depressing: always a matter of waiting for such fleeting satisfaction that afterwards my mood would only worsen" (148).
The ambivalence to sexual history represented in Eighty-Sixed can also be seen in many of the other AIDS novels that construct narratives of memory which predate the AIDS epidemic. The only exception to this is Castro Street Memories by N.A. Diaman, which details the history of an unnamed, first-person narrator and which does not blame the past as a source of infection. The novel ends with the narrator continuing to celebrate his sexual history, though he is being evicted from his apartment on Castro Street along with the other tenants because the landlord wants to perform costly renovations: "So much had happened to me here. So many people had passed through my life. Only a few brief weeks remained before I would have to say good-bye but I would certainly never forget this wonderful period and place in my life" (206). Though Christopher Davis' Valley of the Shadow also extensively celebrates the sexual history of its first-person narrator, Andrew, its celebration is problematized at the end of the novel when Andrew renounces sex and destroys the symbols of his sexual history, including all of his sexual paraphenalia and pornography:
I guess I really only had sex about a dozen times after I got out of the hospital before I stopped, for good...as I began to live more easily with the knowledge that I was dying I began to feel guilty about what I was doing, and one night I made a careful, deliberate decision not to do it again. (199-200)
In the final pages of the novel, however, the narrator returns to more distant memories of celebration: "My life now has become memories: memories of my youth, memories of Teddy..." (206) The novel’s narrative ends in mid-sentence, refusing the closure of a period: "I remember what it felt like to be well. To be strong, when my body was lean and hard. I remember " (208). Death is excluded from Andrew’s narrative and is only alluded to by an impersonal newspaper obituary, which is attached on a separate page at the end of the novel.
Other novels that recreate sexual histories before AIDS tend to be darker. Oscar Moore's A Matter of Life and Sex and Elias Munoz’s The Greatest Performance tell histories of sex tied to homophobia and violence. In their novels, AIDS reads like the latest punishment men who have sex with men must suffer. More recent novels, like Dale Peck's Martin and John, Felice Picano's Like People in History and Paul Reidinger's Good Boys, tend to continue this trend. For example, in Good Boys, the gay protagonist Chris feels sex in the age of AIDS threatens doom:
It is the same San Francisco, the same Castro, and not the same...Then sex was fortissimo, full speed ahead, all you can eat. Now it is hip to be square, or at least cautious.
Underneath the veneer of continuity lie layers of doom, gloom, grief, hysteria. In how many of the people on this street, Chris wonders, is the time bomb already ticking? In how many is it not? It is possible they will all die. (228)
Sharon Mayes' Immune is one of the only novels to narrate the experiences of a heterosexual woman who acquires HIV sexually. Like the gay AIDS novels, sexual history in Immune is dangerous. The narrative constructs a memory project by beginning with the knowledge that Suzanne has committed suicide and then by recounting the events of her life that led up to her suicide through a rereading of her diary by her boyfriend, Chris. Her diary describes a lengthy sexual history which parallels her research on HIV. The diary ultimately reveals that her test for the HIV antibodies yielded a positive result, which led her to commit suicide. The narrative thus reenacts a punitive chain of events linked to her sexual history - the past as sexual excess, the subsequeent punishment of HIV infection and then death.
In the AIDS novels by gay authors, the AIDS epidemic places gay authors in a particularly awkward position with respect to memory and history. Does the recollection of one's prior sexual history become a source of explanation for what has happened? Does the past come to solely represent the source of infection, thus implying shame and/or guilt for one's past sexual behaviors? Does this lead to a condemnation of gay communities and their sexualities? Many of the AIDS novels wrestle with these questions. In Joel Redon's Bloodstream, for example, the protagonist, Peter, retreats from New York City and the gay sexuality it represents to live again in Portland, Oregon, with his parents in their wealthy, heterosexual, suburban comunity. As he struggles to maintain his failing health through the course of the novel, he condemns his sexual history as an "unhealthy lifestyle,” and in his friendship with Yale, another PLWA, he renounces sexuality altogether.
There is also a tendency in many of the AIDS novels to focus on the plight of individuals affected by AIDS rather than that of communities, which, as Simon Watney has argued, promulgates certain stereotypes of gay men who have AIDS as “helpless victims.” Watney writes,
On the one hand we are told that literally hundreds of thousands of gay men are directly affected, whilst at the same time we are only permitted to “meet” them singly, or at most in pairs. Thus the entire structure of urban (and rural) gay culture is conveniently erased as if it had never existed. (335-6)
Feinberg, like Paul Monette in Afterlife, is one of the few AIDS novelists to comment extensively on the larger gay communities in which his narrator resides.
There is a danger in Feinberg’s representation of these communities, however. As John Weir writes, “If David was popular among heterosexual readers, I suspect it was in part because his writing satisfied certain preconceptions about homosexual men. Of course, gay men like to believe cliches about themselves, too” (11). Feinberg's representation of gay sexuality possibly does feed into stereotypes about urban gay culture. Throughout Eighty-Sixed, sexuality forms the center of B.J.’s life. He is his sexuality. He wants a monogamous relationship, something condoned by dominant societal sexual norms, and yet, he is constantly being led around by his sexual desires, promiscuously engaging in more-or-less anonymous sexual encounters which leave him infected with a plethora of "social diseases." According to homophobic logic and the logic of sexual activity=disease depicted in the "Ancient History" section of Eighty-Sixed, is it any surprise then that in "1986: Learning How to Cry," we find B.J. terrified that he may be infected with HIV?: "I sit at the desk with my calculator and figure the odds. My hands are trembling; my palms are sweaty; my fingers stick to the keys...By the time you read these words I may in all likelihood be dead" (151-2). Indeed, by August 1987, depicted in Spontaneous Combustion, B.J. tests positive for HIV. The trajectory of time represented in Feinberg’s two AIDS novels, from a past time of uninhibited sexuality to a present time of fear in Eighty-Sixed and then to a subsequent present time of infection in Spontaneous Combustion reenacts the dominant cultural narrative, which represents gay sexual history as a source of mortal infection.
3.5 Mourning Processes
A central function of many of the AIDS novels that construct narratives focused on the past is to mourn the past. For novels with primarily gay points of view, this involves multiple processes of mourning, including mourning such losses as one's own sexual past, lost loved ones, gay communities drastically decimated and altered by the epidemic. As we have seen in the discussion of Eighty-Sixed, B.J.'s memories of life before the AIDS epidemic revolve around the sexuality that no longer can exist as it once did. In the latter part of Eighty-Sixed, we witness B.J.'s plight in the present tense, as he experiences first-hand the devastating descent of the epidemic, his friends and lovers becoming sick and dying. HIV seems to be closing in on him and he is afraid. Following a visit to his friend and ex-lover, Bob Broome, who has been hospitalized for PCP, B.J. finds himself drawn to a sex bar:
I wonder what draws me so urgently to the Spike tonight. The criminal's compulsion to return to the scene of the crime? The microbe's urge to return to the site of the infection?
After seeing Bob Broome, I don't want to be left by myself tonight. I'm afraid to be alone. (199)
Though he suspects he may be infected with HIV in Eighty-Sixed, B.J. does not actually take the HIV antibody test until Spontaneous Combustion. The latter portion of Eighty-Sixed involves his coming to terms with his emotions and the plight of the altered New York gay community. The sessions with his therapist help him cope with his emotions and the mourning process he must go through. Ultimately, he “learns how to cry,” and the novel ends, “It begins as a gentle rain. Just a drop, for each illness, each death. And with each passing day it gets worse. Now a downpour. Now a torrent. And there is no likelihood of its ever ending” (326).
In Spontaneous Combustion, Feinberg's narrative works more explicitly to mourn those who have died of AIDS, periodically remembering those who B.J. had known and loved who have now died of AIDS-related illnesses. For example, Chapter 9, "Snap Out of It!: Untidy Endings" ends:
Lonnie was dead.
Seymour was dead.
Howard was dead.
Bob was dead
Charles was dead.
William was dead.
Gordon was dead.
And I was last seen laden with pills on a Trailways bus headed toward Canada, my Canada, clutching a copy of Bob Damron's guide in one hand and a liberalized safer-sex guidelines in my other. (174)
Unlike Feinberg’s novel, many of the AIDS novels that construct narratives of memory focus on mourning the loss of a particular loved one who has died of AIDS. Clayton Graham's Tweeds and Carole Maso's The Art Lover, as well as more recent novels like Rebecca Brown's The Gifts of the Body, Nisa Donnelly’s The Love Songs of Phoenix Bay, Paula Martinac's Home Movies and Reynolds Price's The Promise of Rest tell stories that remember the life and loss of particular loved ones. These novels exemplify Murphy's point that testimony, not death, becomes the last word. Unlike AIDS novels for young adults and the novels that describe other people who have died of AIDS, these novels unanimously describe the deaths of gay men. The novels told from a non-gay point of view are often told by women, many of whom have been caregivers for people living with AIDS (Rebecca Brown, for example, is a nurse). These novels tend to focus on individuals in private settings, telling stories of one-on-one relationships set within the domestic spaces of families. The tone of many of these novels is elegaic.
Besides describing how AIDS has personally affected B.J., both Eighty-Sixed and Spontaneous Combustion also acknowledge the devastation the AIDS epidemic has ravaged upon the gay community of New York City. In Eighty-Sixed, for example, B.J. reflects on how AIDS has altered the sexual life of the gay community: "In the age of anxiety gay men go to the gym five nights a week just to keep out of trouble. On weekends it's home with the VCR, watching porno, 'Masterbates Theatre'...Any way to sublimate desire; anything to avoid sex" (201). The AIDS novels told from gay points of view about the past tell more complex stories of mourning than the other AIDS novels of memory. The toll is much higher and it is harder to live on, surrounded by so many reminders of those who have died in the gay community. En route to another ACT UP meeting in Spontaneous Combustion, B.J. fears the loss he has experienced will overwhelm him:
Soon the memories of the dead would overwhelm me. It would be impossible to go anywhere without thinking of the dead. New York was the city of the dead...Was I caught in the web of my past, spending all of my waking hours remembering my dead father, my dead tricks, my dead friends? (163)
Besides Feinberg’s AIDS novels, many of the other gay AIDS novels also deal with mourning multiple losses. For example, Geoffrey Main's Gentle Warriors, Joseph Puccia's The Holy Spirit Dance Club, and Joel Redon's Bloodstream mourn the loss of different gay communities destroyed by the AIDS epidemic.
Part of the mourning process for Feinberg, as with other AIDS novelists who confront the politics of AIDS, is coming to terms with one’s rage about the epidemic and how American society has been dealing with AIDS. Besides Feinberg’s two novels, other AIDS novels like Paul Monette’s Afterlife and Halfway Home, Jed Byran’s A Cry in the Desert and Elias Munoz's The Greatest Performance also express a great deal of rage about the bigotry and homophobia toward gay people living with AIDS expressed by society and the government. In Spontaneous Combustion, B.J.’s rage about the AIDS epidemic threatens to consume him:
I was worried that if I kept up this high level of anxiety, one day I would spontaneously combust: I would walk down the street and suddenly burst into flames, becoming the literal embodiment of the proverbial flaming faggot...At other times I was so angry at the whole damn mess that I thought that under the pressure I might evaporate into steam. (160)
When B.J. finally gains enough courage to reveal his HIV+ antibody status to his mother at the end of Spontaneous Combustion, Ryan White preempts his admission, by appearing on national television to tell the nation that he has AIDS. Unlike B.J., however, Ryan is an “innocent,” young child, and the rhetoric Ryan uses to describe himself enrages B.J.:
What I want to know is, why did Ryan White have to pick the weekend I finally got around to telling my mother I was taking AZT to bag it? Was he maybe trying to help me as an object lesson? Ryan White was America's most favorite innocent victim, which left me guilty, guilty, guilty. Verdict first, trial afterward, just like in Alice in Wonderland. (189)
His mother’s reaction to his news is negative: “She sighed heavily, a sigh that took her sixty-two years to perfect. With harsh sadness, my long-suffering mother said, ‘It’s a wonderful life.’ I realized that this was where I had learned irony. It’s a wonderful life-style, was what I think she meant” (196-7). B.J. then leaves and returns to New York City.
His initial emotional response to his mother’s reaction is subdued by guilt, but then the rage takes over: "It turned out that I was so furious, I was so incredibly angry, it took me an entire week to admit it. I was so concerned that I had done the wrong thing, that I had hurt my mother unintentionally, that I couldn't even recognize my own fury at her" (200). A mourning process that is contained by sadness is apparently the most acceptable to critics of Feinberg. The oustandingly positive critiques of Eighty-Sixed give way to negative if not outright hostile reviews when critics encounter the anger expressed in Spontaneous Combustion. For example, in his review of Spontaneous Combustion for Christopher Street, Bob Satuloff complains that “Instead of expanding his knowledge, [Feinberg] throws a temper tantrum on paper, the literary equivalent of holding his breath and banging his fists on the floor...” (4).
3.6 Resisting the Apocalyptic AIDS Narrative
Several well-known gay writers including Edmund White and Andrew Holleran have avoided writing directly about the AIDS epidemic in their novels. In order to write about gay life free from AIDS, they construct narratives that take place in a historical time period that safely predates the epidemic. For those writers who tell stories set in the more recent history of AIDS, the past does not always easily stay the past. Especially for HIV+ writers, the past, which in part symbolizes the time of infection, threatens the present with the progression of one's HIV disease. In Feinberg's Eighty-Sixed, the narrative of Part I: “1980: Ancient History” successfully remains history, because AIDS has not yet irrevocably changed B.J.'s life. In Part II: "1986: Learning How to Cry," however, B.J.’s narrative breaks into the present tense, the present time of AIDS. Part II begins with a prologue-like paragraph that utilizes scientific discourse - present-tense, acronym-infested and impersonal - to describe the historical onset of the epidemic: "Studies in San Francisco show that in January 1986, up to 80 percent of the gay men have been exposed to human T-cell lymphotropic virus type-III (HTLV-III), known by its French discoverers as lymphadenopathy-associated virus (LAV)" (151). This factual first paragraph ends with chilling words, which form a literal “bottom-line” to the paragraph and to the meaning of AIDS, emphasizing the apocalyptic “truth” of an AIDS diagnosis: “Most doctors and clinicians believe AIDS to be universally fatal. At present there is no cure for AIDS" (151). The next paragraph begins, "I sit at the desk with my calculator and figure the odds" (151). Death looms large for B.J. in Part II. Where "Eighty-Sixed" had meant getting kicked out of parties, dance clubs and YMCA saunas in Part I, in Part II, “Eighty-Sixed” means death:
"Don't write him off; don't give up on him,” I tell Joey, cringing at his words. “Isn't there always hope?”
"Hope for what? Don't fool yourself, B.J. He's got 'Eighty-Sixed' written all over his face. He's not going to make it through the winter.” Joey is certain. “It's painful, but you have to face reality. The man is walking towards his grave." (267)
The narrative of Spontaneous Combustion temporally reenacts aspects of the narrative of Eighty-Sixed. Spontanous Combustion begins in the past tense, describing B.J.'s life since the end of Eighty-Sixed but now B.J. is fairly certain that he has been exposed to HIV. His narrative is no longer as carefully controlled and constrained as it was in Eighty-Sixed. For example, Chapter Two ends with a section, "The Little Disturbances of Man," that breaks out of the past into the present tense: "For the past several years it seems that I have turned into a mass of symptoms and inchoate disease" (16). When B.J. describes what causes his herpes to flare, the final, page-long paragraph of Chapter Two becomes a single run-on sentence that is tinged with hysteria, or perhaps more of a mind-numbing verbosity - anything to keep him from thinking that his ex-lover Richard has ARC, which would imply his own infection with HIV.
The stakes are raised for B.J. in Spontaneous Combustion as AIDS closes in on him. Rather than the narrative breaking between an historical past before the AIDS epidemic and the present historical period of AIDS as it did in Eighty-Sixed, in Spontaneous Combustion the narrative breaks temporally around B.J.’s own HIV status. The narrative fails to maintain its focus on telling a story of the past, when B.J. is directly confronted by his HIV status and when death comes too intimately close. For example, toward the middle of Spontaneous Combustion, B.J. finally takes The Test. Following a positive test result, his narrative suddenly breaks into the present tense, moving from a recounting of past events to a description of his life now, in the present time: "So this is what I do: I go on with my life" (80). This life, however, is one ruled by fear and concern that time is running out: "And now I never sleep through the night...Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, I sit, watching helplessly as my T-cell count drops every three months, the sands of time running out" (81).
The narrative of Spontaneous Combustion is conflicted with respect to the apocalyptic AIDS narrative, which represents AIDS as a forced march forward to impending death. On the one hand, B.J. regards AIDS as a death sentence and he is ashamed of his HIV status. When, for example, he has a nosebleed in a restaurant, he is ashamed of himself: "All I could think of was infection and disease. All I could think of was the virus that was coursing through my blood. I blotted it out with the napkin and sat there ashamed, frightened, in despair" (81). On the other hand, Spontaneous Combustion resists the smooth linearity of the apocalyptic AIDS narrative. B.J.’s narrative is broken into many chapters, each with sub-headings, and the narrative resists moving the story forward in a linear, predictable fashion. Indeed, the choppiness of the narrative has been one of the primary complaints by critics of the novel. In The New York Times Book Review, for example, Scott Bradfield writes, “Although the stories describe B.J.’s anxiety over a period of five years, they do not develop any momentum; instead, they are a series of jazzy riffs on the subjects of diagnosis, treatment, disavowal and safe sex (mainly you talk about it a lot)” (11).
My argument that Feinberg attempts to disrupt the apocalyptic AIDS narrative in Spontaneous Combustion is further supported by the last two sections of the novel, which break out of the past tense and the perspective that HIV means doom. The last chapter, "The Rules of Attraction, June 1990," resists a linear narrative altogether, by consisting of a listing of ten rules of attraction. Additionally, through the course of this listing, B.J.’s tone is uncharacteristically tinged with hope (quite a shift from the tone of the rest of the novel) and his list reveals the hopeful possibility that he has found a new lover, Mitchell, who cares for him. The final section of the novel, entitled "Appendix: After the Cure 1996," further denies that AIDS has the last word. Like the last chapter, it too is told in the present tense and humorously recounts life after a cure for AIDS has been found. The novel ends, "But the nightmare is now over. The disease has been vanquished. And now, if you will excuse me, I have an engagement with an as-yet unidentified prospective boyfriend at some unseemly cocktail lounge near the docks. Wish me luck" (226). At the end of Spontaneous Combustion, sex is no longer a source of fear and B.J. joyously returns to a life of celebratory gay sexuality.
3.7 Is Humor an Acceptable Way to Deal With AIDS?
In an article for The Advocate, entitled "Is Humor an Acceptable Way to Deal with AIDS," Feinberg begins by quoting Edmund White: "'If art is to confront AIDS more honestly than the media has done, it must begin in tact, avoid humor, and end in anger'" (96). White goes on to say in his essay, which Feinberg quotes at length, that humor is inappropriate for dealing with AIDS because it does not do justice to the calamity of AIDS:
“Humor puts the public (indifferent when not uneasy) on cosy terms with what is an unspeakable scandal: death. Humor domesticates terror, lays to rest misgivings that should be intensified. Humor suggests that AIDS is just another calamity to befall Mother Camp; whereas, in truth AIDS is not one more item in a sequence but a rupture in meaning itself. Humor, like melodrama, is an assertion of bourgeois values; it falsely suggests that AIDS is all in the family." (Feinberg 96)
Feinberg then responds to White’s claims that humor is an unacceptable way to deal with AIDS and ultimately rejects them. In a consideration of AIDS literature, including Monette's Afterlife and John Weir's The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, Feinberg notes that "Indeed, it is hard to find any work that does not deal with humor at least peripherally, save the Death Be Not Proud school of humorless literal-minded writing" (96). Feinberg then discusses how humor can be used to talk about AIDS. He provides five arguments in favor of using AIDS humor. First, humor is central to everyday life. Second, black humor, like Joseph Heller's Catch-22, achieves great emotional impact by juxtaposing humor and tragedy. Additionally, "In an absurd world,” Feinberg asserts, “humor may be the only appropriate response" (96). He also mentions that "Humor is a survival tactic, a defense mechanism, a way of lessening the horror" (96). Finally, he notes that gallows humor allows emotional release through an appalled, oxymoronic desire to laugh and cry: "I'm interested in the joke that makes you wince as you laugh or suppress a smile: the joke that simultaneously appeals and appalls" (96). His two AIDS novels reflect aspects of his philosophy of AIDS humor.
AIDS humor does not always succeed, however. Feinberg points out that humor is a tricky narrative strategy to employ and that it sometimes fails: "Humor is extremely subjective. If it misfires, it trivializes tragedy, offending the reader, as I'm sure I've offended many" (96). Indeed, Feinberg’s AIDS humor has bothered a number of his critics, including Daniel Mendelsohn, who complains that Eighty-Sixed “was ultimately dulled by too many Borscht Belt gags” (78) and that Spontaneous Combustion’s humor falls short: “If only Spontaneous Combustion had gotten hot enough to burn away its dross, leaving comic gold” (78). Feinberg insists that if a reader is offended by an author’s use of humor, the reader should consider the intent of the author: "If you dislike a work, consider the intent of the author. This is not how you judge a work on literary merits but how you forgive it" (96). If we consider Feinberg as author, then we understand that he wrote both his novels on the side while holding down a full-time job and that by the time he wrote Spontaneous Combustion, his health was beginning to suffer. Perhaps we can forgive him that.
3.8 Humor as Survival Strategy
Reviewers of both of Feinberg's AIDS novels support Feinberg's claim about the subjectivity of humor and their reviews tend to fall into two camps. Catherine Texier of The New York Times Book Review finds the humor of Eighty-Sixed successful: "The deadpan dialogues, the constant sexual innuendoes, the sick jokes, the horrific puns, the hysterical shriek of the 'queen' in heat - it is all there, and it is wickedly funny" (9). She, like the other critics who respond positively to Feinberg’s humor, see it as a survival strategy. As she notes, "Sarcasm is both a weapon and the shield that keeps B.J. from falling apart..." (9). Those critics who object to his use of humor in Eighty-Sixed tend to complain that it distances the reader from "truly" feeling the "tragedy." For example, Sybil Steinberg writes in Publisher's Weekly that "Feinberg relates events without enabling the reader to feel or understand the tragedy he gradually unfolds" (73).
Though many of the critics comment on Feinberg's campy style, none of them note how he actively aligns himself with what he sees as a Jewish sense of humor. They tend to describe him, as Bob Satuloff does, as “a snippy, self-involved, decidedly hostile, fussily neurotic, gay New Yorker...” (6). In an interview following the publication of Eighty-Sixed, Feinberg describes himself as a gay Jewish writer: "I always thought of myself as 'the gay Philip Roth.' That was my goal. He's my favorite writer, almost. I also like Woody Allen a lot. Those are my two Jewish heroes. For a long while I was fighting against 'the Jew that lives inside me,’ but I gave in" (Weinberg 47). Like Neil Klugman in Roth's Goodbye, Columbus and like the many different characters Allen has played in his movies, a key component for B.J.'s emotional survival is his use of wry wit and humor to deflect threat. Self-abasement is one strategy B.J. uses to ironically and humorously deflect threat. An example of this can be seen in a conversation he has with his friend Dennis in Eighty-Sixed:
“Me in therapy? What a joke. I think I’m too advanced for therapy. You know, Dennis, people have this overwhelming compulsion to try and fix me. Strangers on the street straighten my collar, and point out the fact that my socks don’t match. Little old ladies tell me to work on my posture. Even lesbians tell me that I need a haircut. Am I such a mess? What is it about me?” (160)
Both of his novels actively depict B.J. as a gay Jewish man whose biting ironic humor is tied to his neurotic and guilt-ridden Jewish heritage.
3.9 Jokes: Circling Time
To hear or read a joke, absorb it and understand its humor requires a halting of linear, forward-moving time. In order for the joke to register, the auditor/reader has to stop, process what has been heard, reflect on it, and hopefully "get” it. Feinberg's humor does not work so much as punch-line jokes but as shaggy dog, drawn-out, funny tales with concluding one-liners for humorous effect. A good example of this can be seen in Eighty-Sixed when B.J. is trying to escape a trick:
The hour was late, and I had to go. The air in Mr. Mackenzie's apartment had become so rarefied that I found it difficult to breathe. Moreover, my artificial plants needed watering, the stuffed dog on the mantel needed walking, the linoleum needed Hoovering. There were a thousand and one immaterial reasons to vacate the premises, not the least of which being Mr. Mackenzie himself. (65)
B.J.’s description is humorous and yet also laced with a degree of contempt for the object of his sarcastic humor. The chapters of Eighty-Sixed are also interspersed with humorous interludes, from "Why I Always Wanted to Be a Clone" to "How to Stay Celibate in the Age of Anxiety," which includes a series of grotesquely humorous digressions:
Acquire unattractive personal-grooming habits. Floss your teeth in public: at the opera, in major metropolitan museums. Better yet, use wooden toothpicks. Chew tobacco and spit... [etc., etc.] Blow your nose by holding one nostril shut and forcing the mucus to shoot out the other. This is particularly effective at cocktail parties. When questioned on this, remark upon the disgusting habit many Americans have of wrapping up their mucus in cloth and carrying it around in their vest pockets. (238)
In Spontaneous Combustion, Feinberg no longer uses humorous sections to divide the chapters of his novel. Instead, the narrative is broken into many small sections, each with their own heading. In her review of Spontaneous Combustion, Sybil Steinberg notes of the novel, “Feinberg reins in the one-liners as the tone grows less determinedly fey, and there is real poignancy in one character’s final days” (48). Indeed, Spontaneous Combustion does not maintain the highly humorous tone of Eighty-Sixed.
3.10 The Disruptive Force of Laughter
M.M. Bakhtin in his chapter on chronotopes in the Dialogic Imagination discusses how laughter is subversive of the established order. He writes,
...laughter was never "infected," even slightly, by the "red tape" of moribund officialdom. Therefore, laughter could not be deformed or falsified as could every other form of seriousness, in particular the pathetic. Laughter remained outside official falsifications, which were coated with a layer of pathetic seriousness. Therefore all high and serious genres, all high forms of language and style, all mere set phrases and all linguistic norms were drenched in conventionality, hypocricy and falsification. Laughter alone remained uninfected by lies. (236)
Though Bakhtin speaks of an "ancient laughter" that predates the bureaucratization and totalitarianism of the modern state, he wants to show through his praise of Rabelais that there is something the present can learn from this ancient past. Afterall, doesn't what he say still hold true in the modern world - that laughter continues to have subversive value, disrupting dominant, “serious” and "institutionalized" discourses? I would argue that in the case of novels about AIDS, the laughter generated by AIDS humor contradicts the dominant discourses of AIDS, which represent AIDS as unmitigated tragedy and assured doom (what I have been calling the apocalyptic AIDS narrative). In this respect, then, I would urge that AIDS laughter "remains outside official falsifications." I am not saying that there is no truth to the evidence that suggests that HIV disease is a fatal disease. I am saying that it is an official falsehood that there is only one way to represent AIDS. As my dissertation argues, there are many different ways to represent living with HIV disease.
Feinberg has observed the bifurcation between tragic AIDS novels and novels that use humor as a way to redescribe life with AIDS. In a review of Peter McGehee’s Boys Like Us, he writes,
There seem to be two schools of fiction writing about AIDS. One might be called the "Death Be Not Proud" school of noble suffering: innocent victims cossetted in flowing white robes sit uncomplaining in the dark, clutching comforting stuffed animals. Then there is the Diseased Pariah News school of caustic black humor: queens in black leather jackets kvetching about hospital-room decor and disorderly orderlies. DPR, an underground magazine in San Francisco, takes a mordant view of the epidemic. (7)
Perhaps it is no surprise that critics respond more favorably to the “Death Be Not Proud” school of AIDS literature, considering the prevailing dominance of the apocalyptic AIDS narrative for representing AIDS in the novel. Serious, “truthful” accounts in this respect seem more appropriate than the use of AIDS humor for talking about living with HIV disease. For example, Bob Satuloff finds the literature of Paul Reed (author of Facing It, a classic example of the apocalyptic AIDS novel as I discussed in Chapter 2 of the dissertation) more appealing than Spontaneous Combustion. He compares Reed in his latest work, The Q Journal: A Treatment Diary, to Feinberg in Spontaneous Combustion: “...the San Francisco author has no axe to grind but that of his own well-being...Being that, unlike Feinberg, Reed’s will to live seems more powerful than his ego, a reader can identify with his work” (7). Besides Feinberg’s two AIDS novels, Paul Monette's Afterlife and Halfway Home, Peter McGehee's Boys Like Us and John Weir's The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, as well as more recent novels like Harry Kondolean's Diary of a Lost Boy, use humor as a way to disrupt simplistic conventions of representing life with AIDS as unmitigated tragedy. Unlike these novels, however, Feinberg’s last AIDS novel, Spontaneous Combustion, does not temper its angry humor. Indeed, anger tends to predominate.
3.11 "Rage, Rage, Rage": When Laughter Is Not Enough
In the end, Feinberg’s humor fails to keep AIDS at bay. His last book, Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone, is dominated by feelings of fear and anger. David Kirp notes this in his review for The New York Times Book Review: "...the humor is starting to give out in 'Queer and Loathing.'...Mostly, though, the one-liners are simply angry" (29). In an obituary for his friend, the novelist John Weir writes "His last book, Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone, which was published the week he died, is the least wise-cracking, and the hardest to read of all his work because it is the most unmitigated by irony" (11).
Indeed, I would argue that even in Spontaneous Combustion Feinberg's ironic humor is already beginning to lag. As we have seen in his essay on humor and AIDS, Feinberg notes that there should be a careful juxtaposition and interplay between tragedy and humor for AIDS humor to work effectively. And yet in this essay, Feinberg makes no mention of anger, which comes to dominate so much of his later writing. In Eighty-Sixed, he achieves the difficult and delicate balance between humor and tragedy, but in Spontaneous Combustion, it is almost as though HIV is pressing too close to his own daily lived experience for him to be able to obtain the needed restraint for successful AIDS humor. In his obituary, John Weir notes something similar when he says of Feinberg, "He used irony to distance himself from pain, but irony failed in the end, and all that was left was his devastating fear and rage" (11). Indeed, few other AIDS novelists express so much rage in their work. Though he does not use ironic humor to achieve his purpose as Feinberg does, Monette is the only other prominent AIDS novelist to expresse extensive anger about AIDS in his novels. Unlike Feinberg, however, Monette's rage is ultimately lessened by his greater emphasis and belief in the importance of love, as I will discuss in the next chapter.
3.12 Conclusions
Memory and humor are two ways that David Feinberg disrupts the apocalyptic AIDS narrative in his two AIDS novels, Eighty-Sixed and Spontaneous Combustion. As we have seen, by foregrounding memory in Eighty-Sixed, Feinberg disrupts the apocalyptic narrative's emphasis on apocalyptic future time. This narrative strategy of foregrounding memory is the one most often used in those AIDS novels that attempt to resist the apocalyptic AIDS narrative. This strategy is not always a successful one, however, because it risks aligning itself with aspects of the dominant AIDS discourses, particularly the homophobic ones that represent the past as a source of infection and homosexuality as diseased. Feinberg also uses ironic humor in both Eighty-Sixed and Spontaneous Combustion and his narratives resist a progressive, forward momentum. AIDS humor has been most often used by novelists like Feinberg who themselves live with HIV disease, and as we will see in the next chapter, Paul Monette is another of these novelists.
Resisting the Apocalypse: Telling Time in American Novels about AIDS, 1982-1992"
(UCSB English Department Doctoral Dissertation 1996, Lisa Garmire)