Reviewers of Maggie Nelson’s much-heralded, award-winning 2015 book “The Argonauts” often noted the book’s sense of cumulative achievement. The Guardian called it a “triumphant love story.” Olivia Laing wrote that she had “never read anything as luminous and exacting” as the book’s final pages. A reviewer for n+1 wrote that it “reads like the culmination of a career.”
Graywolf Press ($27)
This praise is well-deserved, but it makes me wonder how readers will react to Nelson’s new book, “On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint.” The book features essays on freedom in four distinct realms: art, sex, drugs and climate. In the introduction, Nelson announces the book’s “deepest call” as the attempt to “forge a fellowship” without ignoring or purging difficult human desires such as the desire for flight, disobedience or subjugation.
The chapter on drugs answers this call most straightforwardly. In the chapter, Nelson reads drug literature like Ellen Miller’s novel “Like Being Killed” and Iris Owens’ “After Claude” as evidence of the human desire to be subjugated or dominated. These readings expand our sense of human freedom much the way writing about cruelty did in Nelson’s “The Art of Cruelty.”
Other chapters are less expansive. The essay on art pushes back against calls for art to contribute to social justice. The chapter on sex asserts the possibilities of sexual liberation against what Nelson sees as a current trend (which she links to the #MeToo movement) toward “detailing the gruesomeness and pervasiveness of (hetero)sexual power relations.” In other words, both chapters primarily fight against restrictions instead of exploring new possibilities.
The final chapter on climate looks outward, but only tentatively. Toward the chapter’s end, Nelson admits that she experienced several “somatic freakouts” during her research, then concludes that these were early attempts to acknowledge the reality of climate change without “the skills or solidarity that can keep one from collapsing into the whirlpool of individuated suffering.” She assures readers that that solidarity exists, but unlike her experience with queer community, she doesn’t know what it looks like.
“On Freedom” closes with a short afterword in which Nelson tries to orient readers towards “practices of freedom,” which she describes in consequential but modest terms. She admits that she has never experienced anything like total liberation but also notes that she has become aware of habits of thought that are more likely to produce openness than anxiety. She lists “thinking together” as a practice of freedom, and comments that this practice doesn’t require agreement, only that we not abandon each other. One might characterize these pages as examples of “deflation without dismissal,” an approach that served Nelson well in “The Argonauts.”
This limited conclusion may disappoint some Nelson fans, particularly those (like me) who were so moved by “The Argonauts.” But the author is more focused on creating a practice of freedom with her style than on any triumphs her style might produce.
Early in “On Freedom,” she labels her practice “weak theory,” and explains that this sort of work emphasizes difference, invites nuance and tolerates inconclusiveness. “My wager,” she writes, “is that a rigorous devotion to [weak theory] … enacts its own form of care, both for the issues of our day, and for art as a force that blessedly does not reduce to them.” Nelson’s most remarkable achievement, not only in “On Freedom” but across all her books, is that she consistently makes good on this wager to enact a form of care through her style.
Of course, readers may recognize this achievement and still be left with a feeling of disappointment at the book’s modesty. If so, they should recall Nelson’s comment in her essay on art: “The patient labor giving form to our impatience for liberty rarely fruits. At least not totally, and perhaps not in one’s lifetime. This is disappointing, but also fine.”
Dan Kubis teaches in the English department at the University of Pittsburgh.
First Published: September 21, 2021, 10:00 a.m.
Updated: September 21, 2021, 10:08 a.m.
