A Small Boy and Others.

By Michael Moon. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 195 pp. $16.95.

Nayland Blake

How do homosexuals reproduce? If queerness is performative, how is the script acquired? These could well be the questions that Michael Moon is attempting to answer in A Small Boy and Others. In this examination of six artists (Henry James, Andy Warhol, Joseph Cornell, Jack Smith, Charles Ludlam, and Ethyl Eichelberger), Moon tries to reconstruct the moment at which his subjects came to conciousness as producers of queer meanings, ranging with ease from eighteenth-century aesthetics and the lyrics of Roy Orbison to the back rooms of the Mineshaft.

Moon seems most engaged by Henry James. He discusses in depth the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century paintings that James declared responsible for his "initiation into style," and makes a compelling argument for a more complex reading, rooted in psychoanalysis and social history, of James' writing. In other chapters, Moon examines James' exposure to New York's early twentieth-century Yiddish theater and weaves together powerful readings of a James tale ("The Pupil"), E.T.A. Hoffmann's story "The Sandman," and David Lynch's Blue Velvet, presenting differing narratives of initiation and arguing for the creative act as a conflicted site of repetition, submission, and liberation.

But Moon's individual successes fail to cohere into a whole, perhaps due to the fact that most of these chapters have been published previously as separate essays in various venues. Opportunities are often missed for developing ideas into complete arguments. This problem is most evident in Moon's chapter on Joseph Cornell. While quite rightly pointing out that previous commentators have tended to neuter and sanctify Cornell's image by focusing on his boxes to the exclusion of his writings and other practices, Moon is then led to counter this by spending most of his time decoding what he terms Cornell's "oralia," thereby excluding works that might advance and enrich his overall argument. For example, Moon reproduces Cornell's Medici Boy Box, and mentions his boxes for Lauren Bacall, but then neglects any discussion of the ways in which Cornell's strategies in these works of repetition, mingled cultural reference, star-struck tribute, and kitschy materials might have provided tools for Warhol or other artists of the same generation. More egregiously, Moon makes no mention of Cornell's collage film Rose Hobart, which had a profound effect on, among others, Jack Smith. Moon seems to be anticipating the objection that since there is no evidence of any homosexual activity on Cornell's part, it is inappropiate to discuss him in this context. While he successfully makes the case for inclusion, in doing so he fails to take up the more intriguing question of why Cornell's work provided a template for so many queer artists.

Scant mention is made as well of Smith's influence on Warhol, or of the complex interaction among Smith and Charles Ludlam, Robert Wilson, and Ronald Tavel and how these artists taught each other what it meant to be queer in the early '60s. Early on, Moon raises the interesting notion of the depiction of orgies as an element in the initiation of queer consciousness. This raises the question, Is there a way in which Henry James' initiation into style by the orgiastic painting The Romans of the Decadence resonates with the orgiastic excesses of Flaming Creatures and When Queens Collide? The compartmentalized structure of the book, however, makes further exploration of this point impossible.

Moon is an elegant reader, at his best when revealing layers of disruption and elusive motivation embedded within seemingly reticent texts. Ultimately, however, A Small Boy and Others leads one to ask, "Whither queer theory?" That intellectual project, born out of the practice and activism of a decade ago, seems to be wandering ever further into the somnolent groves of academe. It is disturbing that Moon tackles no living subjects, that he seems most content to pile commentary on previous commentary, most comfortable with those topics that are at a far chronological remove. One wishes that he had found the way to queer the discourse of the academy to the same degree that his subjects queered art.

Nayland Blake is an artist, curator, and teacher who lives in Brooklyn. His latest project is Weird Little Boy, a CD collaboration with Dennis Cooper and John Zorn.