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Precious Perversions: Humor, Homosexuality, and the Southern Literary Canon

2018; Penn State University Press; Volume: 4; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/studamerhumor.4.1.0107

2333-9934

Phillip Gordon,

The difficult task that Tison Pugh sets himself in Precious Perversions is made clear by his subtitle. His goal is to carve a coherent category from three distinct areas: humor studies, LGBT studies, and southern literary studies. Each of these areas independently encompasses more than cottage-industry-sized fields of inquiry, and each are rife with internal disagreements about what constitutes inclusion in their discrete canons. Connecting two fields to bring into focus a new reading of literary works is a necessary part of any scholarly project—for example, gay writers who are also southern, southern writers who are also humorists, or humor writers who are also gay—but adding a third field can threaten to disrupt the whole project. Pugh's study attempts such a triple connection, and were it not for the flaw of excluding nonwhite voices, it would succeed.The most immediate alignment for Pugh's study is the growing canon of studies documenting gay life and expression in the “South,” a contested term delineating a space of uncertain borders. He cites historians and sociologists such as John Howard, E. Patrick Johnson, and Bernadette Barton to foreground his argument that “the discrimination, often accompanied by physical, mental, and spiritual violence, that queer men and women have faced” (2) in the South has given rise to unique strategies for humor as a means of confronting the challenges of this life and as a means of formulating communal shibboleths recognizable to gay people because of their shared queer southern experiences. One could also read Pugh's study as a companion to Gary Richard's Lovers and Beloveds (2007) or Michael Bibler's Cotton's Queer Relations (2009), both of which focus on southern queer literary production and share with Pugh's work the anchor of the Southern Renaissance as the starting points for their larger canon constructions. Pugh begins his study by considering the arch-queer southern writers Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote before branching out to take up post-renaissance lesbian writers Florence King, Rita Mae Brown, and Dorothy Allison. He concludes with a chapter on David Sedaris in order to question what “postsouthern” gay humor might entail.The chapters devoted to each writer undeniably offer important insights into their individual works. For example, Pugh's aligning Williams and Capote with camp to suggest that one could read them for their over-the-top style is, by itself, novel. To make Williams's and Capote's camp visible, Pugh cannot speak of camp by itself. Rather, he accesses its appearance through sadomasochism in Williams and gothic traditions in Capote. He views the humor of the other writers in the study through similar mitigations: Pugh approaches King's humor through gender politics and conservatism, Brown's through gender politics and feminism, and Allison's through “humor's ambiguity” and trauma (116). Including Sedaris allows Pugh to expand on who has claims to being southern, and he relies on Sedaris's established reputation as a gay humorist to lay the groundwork for his innovative addition here.The consecutive chapters on Williams and Capote highlight the broader tensions and possibilities of the study. One troubling tension in the study emerges in Pugh's reading of A Streetcar Named Desire, which traditionally belongs to the canon of dramatic tragedy. Pugh suggests that “it would be challenging (though by no means impossible) to stage Blanche's rape scene as camp” because Williams's “depiction of female protagonists suffering from the “southern belle complex” frequently evinces their masochistic tendencies, even when this masochism is not expressed as a manifestation of their erotic desires” (37). Apparently, if an actor were to play Blanche as asking for it behind the guise of her prim southern manners, the rape scene could have humorous potential—or so this tethering together of erotic desire, masochism, and rape seems to imply. On the other hand, he offers an insightful account of Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms by reading it against the grain of its contemporaneous reviewers who saw its gothic excess as evidence of the nightmare of Joel's homosexual awakening. Pugh explains that the novel's “humor is sometimes challenging to distill” (64), but he reads its gothic excess as camp and asserts that the novel's “accomplishments come into sharper focus, and its unique place in the southern literary tradition shines forth more clearly” (64) for those willing to dig into that excess without homophobic inhibitions. The potential for camp readings allows Pugh to find humor in these works; if Pugh's linking of camp and sadomasochism in Williams proves troubling (to put it mildly, rape is not something to laugh at), then his use of gothic/camp excess moves Capote's work more fully into the southern canon and achieves his primary goal. The homosexuality of these writers subverts much of what places them in or displaces them from traditional canons. By treating these authors together as southern, humorous, and gay, Pugh works to make visible what previous scholars have overlooked. Generally, this approach to literary studies is a good one.Nonetheless, Pugh struggles in his sense of who belongs to this canon (or any canon, for that matter). In his conclusion, Pugh singles out Nancy Walker for her efforts to include women in canons of comic writers. He also singles out Henry Louis Gates Jr. for writing a “provocative salvo” that helps ensure the “parameters” of the general literary canon do not “remain uncontested” (162–63). Accordingly, Pugh includes women in his study; his chapter on Sedaris has a section on race and politically incorrect epithets. However, all the writers included in this study may be gay, southern, and humorous, but they are also all white. Of Zora Neale Hurston, who is often included in discussions of queer and southern literature, Pugh concedes that she might “on occasion employ a lighter tone” but generally groups her with “southern writers not primarily known for a mirthful style” (9). Even if one fails to discover at least pockets of humor in Their Eyes Were Watching God, then surely Dust Tracks on a Road merits an occasional chuckle. He does not include Alice Walker or Randall Kenan, black icons of queer southern literature who are at least as funny as the sadomasochistic rape scene in Streetcar. If LGBT people crack jokes in the face of their oppression, one must imagine black folks in and of the South did (and do) more than listen to sad blues music and sing old spirituals while marching for the right to vote. This exclusion is a major flaw in Pugh's study. Failure to consider black voices from the South is a failure to understand even the basic premise and origins of southern literature, perhaps of gay and lesbian writing and identity, and maybe even of American humor traditions as well. For all the insights Precious Perversions offers, its sole focus on white authors is a questionable approach to queer literature, to southern literature, or to humor studies.