The Anxiety of Dissolution

Berlant and Warner (in “What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?”) would like to resist an easy categorization. Varying ideas and works should not be grouped under the term “queer theory” insofar as this term might be assumed to have “stable referential content and pragmatic force” (344). They are proposing that queer commentary describe a set of ideas and works united, perhaps, only through their emphasis on a kind of practice—particularly the practice of dissolving existing identity categories.

Heartbreak House describes a group of people caught in a corrupt structure. Many of the characters attempt to take advantage of this structure in order to benefit (often by taking advantage of the others), but each finds him/herself ultimately powerless. What they celebrate, in the end, is the partial destruction of their home. This destruction also comes with the death of two of the most reprehensible characters: the Burglar, who has previously attempted to swindle the rest out of some money, and Mangan, whose position is the result of both his exploitation of laborers and his lies to Ellie’s father. As an audience, it is to be expected that we might celebrate the end of these two villains. And yet there is something decidedly disturbing about watching Ellie, for example, after the threat has passed:

MRS HUSHABYE. But what a glorious experience! I hope they’ll come again tomorrow night.

ELLIE (radiant at the prospect) Oh, I hope so.

Randall at last succeeds in keeping the home fires burning on his flute (117).

The audience may rejoice to see the end of two such obviously harmful figures; but, by celebrating, we also seem to join in Ellie’s wish for her own destruction. In other words, we are implicated in the desire to simply end everything—to let the whole corrupt structure come crashing down.

Shaw wrote Heartbreak House in 1913—just before the outbreak of WWI—but the play remained unpublished and unproduced until after the war, explicitly because of its odd relationship to the idea of destruction. There is a deep ambivalence, I would argue, throughout the play. It asks for the downfall of corruption, and criticizes the immobility of its characters. And yet the destruction of the characters’ world, as a solution to their dissolute ways, does not seem to offer an acceptable answer. It leaves us simultaneously celebrating and abhorring the end of their world.

Both of the terms used by Berlant and Warner—queer theory and queer commentary—have an investment in the political. Fundamental to the destruction of categories is a resistance to the power structures that imbue such categories. And Berlant and Warner are careful to explain that this destruction is not meant as a loss of political possibility, but rather as a resistance to problematic political modes. They write, “the failure to systematize the world in queer theory does not mean a commitment to irrelevance; it means resistance to being an apparatus for falsely translating systematic and random violences into normal states, administrative problems, or minor constituencies” (348). And yet, I think Heartbreak House points to the anxiety that such an approach can lead to. The destruction of categories, as a political project, is valuable. But it does not seem to have an answer for how people might live, except in continually exercising this facility. Heartbreak House describes the temptation to destroy systems. But is also leaves us with the fear that this is not enough—that we will be left with a house in ruins and nowhere to go.

Despite Derrida’s discussion of the endless creativity and celebration that we should associate with the realization of an empty center, his arguments seem as though they might leave us without the possibility of political action. Queer commentary, as described by Berlant and Warner, is of course unwilling to give up the possibility of political action. But it is inherently unstable, a program that by its very nature seeks to undercut itself, “a culture whose marginal history makes it inevitably controverted” (349). Heartbreak House expresses the fear that destruction, without simultaneously introducing new modes of being, is empty. And it reminds us of just how much courage it will take to move away from those places in which we are comfortable. “Let us all go out into the night and leave everything behind us,” cries Hector. But not one of the characters can bring him/herself to do it. It is cold outside. And besides, there is breakfast in the morning.