Renee Gladman Fulfills Literary and Romantic Desires in ‘My Lesbian Novel’

In My Lesbian Novel, Renee Gladman is clear about her book’s relationship to reality: the protagonist ‘R’ is a stand-in for Gladman herself. Beyond that, things remain up in the air, with R hoping to retain, as long as possible in the process of composition, her own sense of ongoing discovery. The novel takes the form of an interview, in which R discusses the lesbian romance she is in the middle of writing. In between reciting excerpts of this book-within-a-book, R reminds her interlocutor not to confuse the character June – a heretofore heterosexual whose ‘memories are becoming like mushrooms’ as she descends further into a mysterious, erotic amnesia – with R herself. But R stresses that she wants happiness not just for the fictional couple, but also for their writer, who should have the chance to satisfy her own desire for discovery without capitulating to market demands for purposeless worldbuilding, set descriptions or rote, pre-planned narrative. It’s a novel, then, about sublimation, the conversion of the artist’s drive into form.

Published this fall alongside To After That (TOAF), a reprint of her 2008 account of an earlier abandoned novella, My Lesbian Novel extends Gladman’s work on the question of art’s conditions. Dorothy, a publishing project – a feminist press that consistently puts out the most compelling contemporary English-language literature, and just two books per year – was started, we learn in co-founder and editor Danielle Dutton’s introduction to TOAF, for the explicit purpose of publishing Gladman’s incredible ‘Ravicka’ series (2010–17). My Lesbian Novel takes on a new genre for Gladman, the Happily Ever After, a romance in which you know that the lovers will find their way. This requires Gladman to set up two couples: as she figures out how to get June and Thena into each other’s arms, she also arranges a marriage between romance and literary fiction. In her writing and visual art – where she makes ‘plans for sentences’, architectural drawings built out of cursive that never quite forms letters and other non-semantic prose – Gladman has always been comfortable with self-referentiality, but My Lesbian Novel is her most explicit account yet of the creative act.

For the writer, R tells the interviewer, she wants ‘sublimation that feels like a very hot bath’, or like physical movements – running, the splits – that release endorphins, rather than the painful, frenzied version of the creative process, one akin to illness, that we hear so much about. For the characters, she wants them not just to fall and stay in love (a narrative arc unavailable to most fictional lesbians of the last century), but to get there without passing through the common narrative trappings of failed heterosexuality, infidelity or miscommunication. Even a traditional comedy would be too dark, in this model, given the reliance on people not understanding each other’s desires; Gladman searches for a cleaner structure of love’s path.

Sublimation has always been a tricky word. The second time R uses it, the unnamed interviewer asks for clarity: ‘Can you say more? What is sublimation in the context of the lesbian romance and whose are we speaking of – yours, or June and Thena’s?’ R worries she has been using the word wrong. She hopes it conveys hypnosis, new states of consciousness, crossing ‘into freer territory’ and ‘a porous field’. Freud himself struggled to articulate a working theory of the concept; in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933), he loosely defined it as ‘a certain kind of modification of the aim and change of the object, in which our social valuation is taken into account’. The version of the concept that passes for common usage is perhaps best represented by the fantasy of a repressed homosexual, who, unable to love freely, becomes a talented painter or writer – a fantasy that often overlooks the great deal of literal gay sex the artist winds up having. Here it is always erotic or romantic desire that is redirected to a new aim: the production of art, science or some other activity that society seems to appreciate more. Colloquially, though, sublimation tends to be confused with repression, which is something else entirely; the whole point is that the aim is directed, rather than quashed. In chemistry, ‘sublimation’ describes the conversion of a solid into a gas, without passing through a liquid state along the way, and we might think of artistic sublimation with the same analogy: an instinct that takes a new form without passing through repression.

Later in the novel, R tries to explain how ‘world-building is secondary’ to this question, a claim against which the interviewer pushes back, unpersuaded. In reply, R lays out a theory of aesthetic ‘porosity’, of which the first example is when a jazz musician ‘crosses into freer territory’. The artist’s task is to go in search of these openings that offer opportunities for freer motion. Ever a writer of space, Gladman extends this idea along two perpendicular axes:  

I see the horizontal plane as that of the sentences, the gathering paragraphs, and let’s say above or below the plane of writing are various planes of experience and reflection for the writer. The vertical plane belongs to the world of the book, and it represents the space between characters or between fictional objects. If you drew it like the x and y axes you find in geometry, where these planes make a kind of cross shape when brought together, the porosity could be demonstrated by a dotted circle that crosses both axes, showing flow from the horizontal planes through the vertical ones – the ones you can see and the ones you can’t. So, for me, to sublimate would be to ride that curving line through all these fields. The surprise is wanting to do that in this kind of story.

Gladman is describing, in part, the tension between her formal ambitions and her desire to ‘write something that made people feel good – women, I guess’. Writing about the importance of nipples to the romance genre, Gladman describes the brushing of a nipple up against fabric as ‘a moment of sublimation for the reader’. The book, she says, ‘creates a fold, like where your body is overtaken’. Explicitly, she describes the experience of getting wet as one that can bring a reader in or out of a story. If R and Gladman are the same, it might surprise some readers that this desire to please would find expression in the form of a meta-interview about a text only exposed in fragments. But I think Gladman is suggesting that a real Happily Ever After involves the reader in formal satisfaction.

Renee Gladman’s My Lesbian Novel is out from Dorothy, a Publishing Project, on 17 September

_{Main Image: Renee Gladman, My Lesbian Novel, 2024, cover image. Courtesy: Dorothy, a Publishing Project}