WE HAVE THE ingredients for a cautionary tale here. No sooner does Maggie Nelson have a breakout, crossover hit with The Argonauts than she gets wrong-footed by the zeitgeist.
Seeing as she wrote an eloquent apologia for transgressive art that abrades our sensibilities (The Art of Cruelty), it seems ironic the her arrival at literary celebrity coincided with the "stay in your lane" moment, with artists like Sam Durant and Dana Schutz getting stiff blowback for abrading sensibilities, and without the consolation of culture-hero standing that Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe got.
Seeing as she has also written frankly about owning and pursuing our erotic desires (in The Argonauts, for example), it again seems ironic that her arrival at literary celebrity coincided with #MeToo and a kind of renaissance for Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin.
At moments in On Freedom, she does not seem best pleased with these developments. In the first of the four essays, on art, one hears subtextual tongue-clucking when she writes, "Suggesting that certain pieces of art should be treated as acts of violence, or on par with the violent power of sovereignty, plays into the same arguments that have long been used to undermine art's legal protections."
She brings in a similar guilt-by-resemblance charge in the second essay, on sex: "Even--or especially--when we are in pain, it's worth taking the time to make sure our pain is not partnering with our puritanism or punitiveness, as such partnering reinforces the flawed dichotomies of innocent/guilty, dangerous/non-dangerous, disposable/worthy, upon which the carceral state depends."
I don't know how many would find this persuasive. Probably a lot of people are quite reconciled to the carceral state's getting a hold of Harvey Weinstein.
The third essay, on drugs, has some interesting things to say about a good many literary expressions of drug experience. The fourth, on climate change...I don't know. Not her wheelhouse.
I wonder if she will ever get back to doing things like Bluets and Jane? I hope so.
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