From the Archives: Ocean Vuong (part 2)
"I think we've limited what it means to be male to the point where we've allowed it to be the furthest thing from being human."
Greetings from the midpoint of this volatile spring week — the cherry blossoms exploded in the sunshine weekend, but it’s going back down to the twenties tonight. I’m reading the 1958 novel Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting (beautifully rereleased by McNally-Jackson) and burst out laughing when the protagonist, needing to maintain the appearance of being “a hysteric,” reminds herself:
“She was expected to be unstable, tears and laughter, a spring morning of a woman.”
This negative association between the flowery, the sentimental, the emotionally extravagant and the feminine is actually the starting point for today’s archival excerpt: part two of our interview with Ocean Vuong. Here, Ocean talks about his interest in writing prose that’s “baroque, purple, sentimental, flowery” and pushing back against the ways this style is devalued as inferior and feminine. (These used to be seen as masculine qualities in prose, he points out!) More broadly, he talks about his interest in pushing back against western tropes about heroism and masculinity. “One of one of my goals, or one of my obsessions, is to not have my characters or my works embody old values of triumph, but rather use what is readily available to marginalized folks and celebrate the power in that.”
Citing Audre Lorde’s “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” he pushes even further: “Maybe I don't like the master's tools. Maybe those tools never worked. Maybe I don't want them at all. Maybe I want something else.”
This conversation happened all in one afternoon, and is released as a single episode, but to keep things feeling bite-sized and readable we’re releasing the written interview in thirds. You can read part one of this transcript here, which includes Ocean’s story of escaping from his job at Boston Market into a cornfield, where he realized he needed to get out of the life to which he’d been born. And you can always listen to the interview and others in our archives.
Thresholds x Ocean Vuong
Originally released August 12, 2020
Ocean Vuong’s poetry collections include Time is a Mother and Night Sky with Exit Wounds. His novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, was a bestseller and won the American Book Award. Ocean himself was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Grant in 2019. He is a professor of Modern Poetry and Poetics at NYU.
Ocean Vuong: I think for some reason I'm always very distrustful of rules and values, especially related to writing and aesthetics. The more I am a student and a scholar of literary history, the more that skepticism is proven valid and necessary. I'm always trying to ask how I can break a rule or subvert expectations in a meaningful way, in a way that's not just merely to make something new or something interesting, but to have a substantial, foundational refusal of a certain mode. For me, I think it was the metaphor.
In my poems and in my novel, I write in perhaps a style that is not very fashionable. It's rich in metaphor, rich in the subordinate clause, and many folks might say it's, baroque, purple, sentimental, flowery. But I was obsessed with that style. When I looked back further, particularly in 19th century American literature, I realized that all of this gendered criticism of this style --flowery purple, in other words, womanly… which is, not direct, not straight enough, not sobering, not clear enough— all these things were once the pinnacle achievement of men à la Dickens, Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman. To remove or delay the period was the equivalent of taking up space— was this virtuoso of masculinity. It was very hypocritical, I found, when when we arrived at modernism and the sentence became truncated and laconic. But in order for men to move beyond or progress from one literary style to another, they had to deem their old tools feminine. I found that so interesting. They couldn't just leave it as it is. They had to say, "Ah that's no use to us because it's purple. It belongs to the to the more weaker minded amongst us." Meanwhile, it was what they [had] celebrated.
Thresholds: That feels resonant to me with other kinds of sort of masculine moving-forward or even colonizing impulses of rejecting what is being left behind so as to reassert into a new space. I'm fascinated by that reading of it as a gendered transition in syntax.
Ocean Vuong: It's familiar in American boyhood. You know, boys are celebrated for moving and doing and as I observed as a child in New England, you see even as young as 3 or 4, the girls are celebrated only for their body. "You're beautiful. The dress is beautiful." But the boys, right away: "Go get ‘em, buddy. Go knock ‘em dead." Not to say that either those are wrong, but they're so limited in scope. I wonder what would happen if we celebrated the girls for doing things as well— and also celebrated for the boys for being beautiful! For their own bodies, to have confidence in just being. So you don't have this anxiety to always perform and conquer. Right away we delineate the gendered restrictions and I think it affects the imagination greatly as well.
The saddest phrase that I learned as a kid was "no homo." And what was that phrase? When we think about that phrase: it was just a magic spell. It was 'Abracadabra.' For what? Touch. That's all it was! To put your arm around your friend, you had to say "no homo" because it was so devastating to be to be perceived as queer or feminine or what have you-- which is then to be perceived as useless.
Thresholds: That's something that you do so beautifully in your writing, in a way that sometimes sounds to my ear Whitmanesque: the celebration of masculine beauty or of male beauty. The celebration of beauty as an agendered thing.
Ocean Vuong: It felt so taboo, you know, to ... You know, in a way, I think so many boys in America wanted to say that to each other, but we didn't know how. It was too risky. You know, the saddest phrase that I learned as a kid was "no homo." And what was that phrase? When we think about that phrase: it was just a magic spell. It was 'Abracadabra.' For what? Touch. That's all it was! To put your arm around your friend, you had to say "no homo" because it was so devastating to be to be perceived as queer or feminine or what have you-- which is then to be perceived as useless. If you're simply decorous, if you're just there for beauty, if you're there for love, you're there for touch, then you're weak. You're not thinking about progress and conquest. I think we've limited what it means to be male to the point where we've allowed it to be the furthest thing from being human. If you need if you live in a world where your boys need a magic spell, a mantra to touch each other? Then the society is really, really primitive, I think, in where it sees its masculinity. We speak of ourselves as a very advanced nation in science and weaponry and all that, but I think when it comes to our understanding of what is possible with masculinity, we're still very primitive.
Thresholds: I was struck by your description of “no homo” as a kind of magic spell, as an incantation that will allow boys and men to, in these very minute and marginal ways, retain some ability to be tender with each other, to touch each other. To engage in that way. And that strikes me that you are noticing the power of language to kind of open a crack in our possibilities of relation to admit this ever-so-slight ability to connect and repair. And that feels to me very connected to the project of your work more broadly, which seems to me to be about the reclamation of the purple, as you say, the reclamation of the tender, the reclamation of beauty, the reclamation of emotion and the spiritual in, in corners of life, of masculinity, of America, of human experience, where those things are routinely forbidden.
Ocean Vuong: Absolutely. That's beautiful. That's exactly-- that's a great way to put it. I think one of one of my goals, or one of my obsessions, is to not have my characters or my works embody old values of triumph, but rather use what is readily available to marginalized folks and celebrate the power in that. In this way, you know, I'm not interested in creating a queer Asian version of John Wayne or Clint Eastwood or Superman. I'm more interested in using what's available to this experience as rehashed sites of power. Another dynamic in this book is that Little Dog is incredibly small, quiet. He's a bottom. And instead of trying to change that in order to fit the mold of something recognizably heroic, he uses all of those tools to change the course of his life and to find power in tools that have been deemed defunct. And so this this goes right back to that literary tradition that I talked about. So he tries to find the tenderness not as a weakness, but a mode and a balm. And he achieves himself through that. I wanted to find those things: How do you find what's most available to you?
Also these women who survive trauma, who survive war... I didn't want them to just suddenly heal or be women warriors, stoic, one-dimensionally triumphant. I wanted them to have complete lives and to live on their own terms and to empower themselves the way I saw my parents empower themselves on their own terms with the tools they had. That is the great interest in me in writing fiction, especially because I see it as a simulation. You have all these questions and then you run the simulation called a novel, and then you say, Well, how do we do it? How do we get there? Not by taking the their tools. You know, I think of Audre Lorde and I'm like, "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." Absolutely. But I think I'm interested in: maybe I don't like the master's tools. Maybe those tools never worked. Maybe I don't want them at all. Maybe I want something else.
"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." Absolutely. But I think: maybe I don't *like* the master's tools. Maybe those tools never worked. Maybe I don't want them at all. Maybe I want something else.
Thresholds: I'm so curious about your description of a novel as starting with a question and then being able to run the question through a simulation, which is the novel. What was the question of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous?
Ocean Vuong: Oh, there were so many. But I think the the biggest one is. What does life in aftermath look like? How do we survive multiple aftermaths? That is American history. That's the large one, you know. I think there are countless books being written about the epicenter, which is also, I think, a very masculinist obsession with "the action," with the war, with the moment. But from my observation, it is often queer folks and women who lived in the aftermath. They're the ones that heal the bodies of soldiers when they come home. They take the brunt of the PTSD that happens. They're the ones that often pick up the dead. This is going all the way back to Greek tragedies, right? They're the ones that bury the dead. They come out of the homes and bury the dead. They literally deal with aftermath. That's a species-wide condition of who we are. And I wanted a novel that dealt with war, but almost refused the war as a central stage, but allowed aftermath as something valid of literature and valid of an elongated gaze. Which is why it drew me to it in the beginning: I couldn't turn away from it.
Mentioned in this interview:
Audre Lorde’s talk “The Master’s Tools”
Walt Whitman’s writing on the beauty of the male body
“No homo” (The Paris Review)
And that’s it! We’ll be back later this week with a brand new interview with New Yorker staff writer and novelist Vinson Cunningham.
Til next time,
Jordan
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