Warwick's Reviews > The Argonauts

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.