Ash Jayamohan – ECR Spotlight

Ending our ECR Spotlight Series for 2023, Ash Jayamohan shares their research on queer erotics, assembling a Modernist archive of “fretwork” through attention to the often feminized and overlooked affects of the slight, marginal, weak, and amateurish. Fretting as a conceptual category offers what they call a “groove of relation” that produces queer attachments in unlikely places. This piece follows the Academic Writing for the Public workshop that GENDER.ED conducts annually.

Fretwork: Writing and Worrying in Modernist Literature

By Ash Jayamohan

War, death, economic collapse – accelerated logics of race, coloniality, sexuality, and medicine – industrial and technological booms – “the scenario of our chaos” [1] – “the age of anxiety” – BLAST– “make it new!”

This is the feverish story of Anglo-American modernity that has become the easiest to narrate, and therefore which endures, in the modernist classroom. I explain to my students, in a now all-too-familiar refrain, how the modernist literary form reaches out to the material-psychic density of modernity with a firm grip, iterating explosive new ways of living, feeling, dying, and becoming historical in the twentieth century. In recent years, however, scholars have become steadily interested in telling a new kind of story about modernism. This is not one that reactively counters the bombastic tale with which this post began but, rather, seeks to linger in its interstices: at the commas and the en-dashes, within each kerning. As Sara Crangle asks: “Where might quotidian longing arise amid all the chaos and obliqueness?” [2] My doctoral research on the queer erotics of the ordinary responds to Crangle’s call for a more ‘prosaic modernism’ through my emphasis on the minor forms and queer feelings that make up the ‘fretwork’, or the work of fretting by early twentieth-century writers. I use this term to draw my reader’s attention to how such writers dwelled on, grappled with, complained about, and otherwise fretted over exceedingly ordinary crises of daily life.

For example, D.H. Lawrence returns, over and over, to write about a man with whom he made a short-lived, irritating connection; Mulk Raj Anand briefly touches, over and over, on being seen as “stupid and gauche and naïve” by his peers in London; E.M. Forster dwells on moments where, among friends, we find ourselves conscious about not quite knowing how to look at art. The objects of these fretworks do not soar up to meet the grand contours of something like the object of ‘trauma’, a weighty twentieth-century construction, the essential irrepresentability of which compels writing about worrying, and worrying about writing, in the aftermath of crises of exceptional violence (embodied, psychic, national, and so on). My own project draws on the recent work of Lauren Berlant to demonstrate how the crisis-object around which fretting orbits is better understood in far more dialled-down terms, such as the inconvenience, the squabble, the misunderstanding, or the gripe [3]. Fretting is, therefore, distinguished by the apparent slightness of its objects and, so too, its forms; across the short story, essay, poem, and chapter, we find modernists sweating the small stuff.

In its capacity to underscore such “minor and generally unprestigious feelings” [4], fretting, as a conceptual category, refocuses our attention on postures that are variously slight, marginal, weak, quaint, and amateurish. Far from the masculine virility of the original story of modernism, then, my male modernists fret about the slightest of slights that we risk brushing off, which is to say, feminize, as ‘unserious’: petty gossip, silly grievances; complaining, whining, yapping about nothing. Indeed, not unlike Berlant’s conceptualization of the ‘female complaint’ as “hyperbole projected out of a consciousness” [5], fretting stands out for its capacity to make something (mountain, minor text) out of nothing (molehill, minor feeling).

My own interest as a literary critic is in how this productive double-move is consolidated by fretting’s additional, more embodied register: the act of rubbing or wearing away through repetitive movement. For instance, consider the sentence, ‘the groove that remained from the water’s fretting’. In this analogy, the newly generated groove signals not the absence of water but the presence of something far more slippery. The groove left behind is the dent of intersubjectivity, figured by the dynamic co- and re-constitution of rock and water alike. This, I propose, is the groove of relation that fretting makes legible through strategies of repetition, repetitiveness, return, and redescription that rub away at the rock of the text. That these fret-moves leave behind the fuzzy, trembling outline of a knowledge that is urgently relational consolidates what Teagan Bradway understands as the work of ‘relational formalism’ in queer literary criticism. Here, “relational possibilities are not merely representations but also forms… attachments need more than hallucinations of fantasy to endure. They depend on rules, rituals, and patterns. They require labor to be sustained over time.” [6]

The textual labour of fretting indeed produces a number of queer attachments in my project’s small, eclectic archive. For Lawrence, repetitive redescriptions of his not-a-friend illuminate the ‘acquaintance’ as an idiosyncratically Lawrentian form of male intimacy borne (counter-intuitively) out of distance, not proximity; for Anand, complaining about being accused of bad manners unexpectedly clarifies the queer, feminist possibilities of ‘gossip’ as a material mode of relation; for Forster, a preoccupation with museum and gallery scenes that go just a little wrong produces nothing less than one of modernism’s greatest experiments in relation: the homosexual couple-form. In these works, and I borrow from Berlant again, “repetition might generate knowledge beyond itself despite the manifestation of repetition as a kind of paralysis” [7]. Fretting, here, is not traumatic repetition but the energetic ‘labour’ of relationality.

Despite the common image of the solitary person fretting away, and always ‘fretting over nothing’, fretwork is essentially the queer work of embracing, rejecting, and negotiating with modes of relating to one another and, or in, the world. I believe that, through the kinds of textual labour and attention I have briefly gestured towards, fretting thus allows for something like a collective erotic life to come to light – and, perhaps, just as quickly, queerly, disappear. It is in this way that fretwork, as a queer conceptual category, begins clarifying the aesthetic and social possibilities of our infinitely ordinary ways of being, a little badly, together.

References

[1] Bradbury, Malcolm and James McFarlane. ‘‘The Name and Nature of Modernism,’’ in Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930, edited by Bradbury and McFarlane, London: Penguin, 1991, p. 27.

[2] Crangle, Sara. Prosaic Desires: Modernist Knowledge, Boredom, Laughter, and Anticipation, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010, p. 21. https://doi-org.ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/10.1515/9780748642861.

[3] Berlant, Lauren. On the Inconvenience of Other People, Durham: Duke University Press, 2022.

[4] Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005, p. 6. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ed/detail.action?docID=3300232.

[5] Berlant, Lauren. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture, Durham: Duke University Press, 2008, p.19.

[6] Bradway, Teagan. “Graphic Attachment: Relational Formalism and Queer Dependency” in “Graphic Formalism”, ASAP Journal, 27 Mar 2023, https://asapjournal.com/graphic-formalism-graphic-attachment-relational-formalism-and-queer-dependency-tyler-bradway/.

[7] Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism, Durham: Duke University Press, 2011, p.138.

Author Bio

Ash Jayamohan is a PhD researcher in English Literature at The University of Edinburgh. Their doctoral project draws on sexuality studies and affect theory to explore how the twentieth century worries about the everyday. You can find them on Twitter at @ajayamoh.