A Formal Feeling Comes

In a fragment near the beginning of A Lover’s Discourse (1977), Roland Barthes outlines a phenomenon he calls annulation, or annulment: an “explosion of language during which the subject manages to annul the loved object under the volume of love itself: by a specifically amorous perversion, it is love the subject loves, not the object.” This process necessitates the disenfranchisement or desubjectification of love-objects (the beloveds) so that lovers may reinstate themselves at the center of power. It’s a self-defense mechanism deployed to prevent, dislodge, or defer the kind of meaningful vulnerability or injury that attends the loss of loved ones. Reading Barthes on love calls to mind another great French interrogator of desire, Annie Ernaux, who, at the end of an affair with a married Soviet diplomat, considers that their coupling had become “a passion because I wanted it to be a work of art.” She documents the liaison’s raptures and griefs to calibrate the unruly feeling between them. Art tames. Abandoned to the annihilations of the affair’s end, Ernaux molds the rubble into a story, becoming god of her own suffering.

Like any storyteller, a lover may manipulate narrative as an instrument of control. To write about the ways we love, to produce love as a discursive field, is often a savage campaign. The love poem is never merely for the beloved—it ranges beyond the privacies of person-to-person conveyance, instantiating intimacy in a cultural public. It dreams an audience, establishing its lovers as passion-actors regarded by unknowable spectators. Love, after all, is a needful and petted thing: it demands spectacle, and, like any speech act, accrues power in repetition. When dealing with the ways love is orchestrated for the aesthetic arena, we must ask ourselves a question I once believed rhetorical: what is a love poem for?

Maggie Millner’s Couplets (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023) is billed as “a love story” but might more accurately be subtitled A Tale of Two Breakups. It is a kind of novel in verse, the story of the unnamed narrator’s seduction (by a new lover), her betrayal (of her old lover), and a queer coming out recounted in alternating sequences of open heroic couplets and lyric-ish chunks of prose. This formal split is mirrored by a perspectival one: the couplets are in the first-person, acutely self-conscious of the limitations of “the myth of the grammatical singular” but nevertheless distorted by certain opacities foundational to desire. The proem sequences, by turn, are told at an analytical remove, frequently digressing into meditations on writers and theorists the narrator invokes as experiential guideposts. This formal dyad is the inciting apparition of the couple in Couplets, bounding the book in a dialogic mode less interested in the potentially oppositional narratives of the lover and love-object and more in the dispute the narrator seemingly has with herself over the account being laid out. In both indicting and defending itself within the matter of the text, this mode seeks a totalized narrative, one capable of absorbing its interior disturbances into a deceptively smooth tableau.

At the book’s outset, the narrator and her long-term boyfriend revolve within the self-replicating heterosexual banalities of “sex and teaching, kale and NPR.” The fabric of their existence is a “familiar openwork” of patterns immediately recognizable to anyone who digested the last decade of jokes about white millennial Brooklynites. The boyfriend is a climate researcher, studying the genetic adaptations of species as they respond to warming ocean temperatures. The narrator is a professor of writing and composition who “wrote poems in the prevailing style.” Their cat prefers his father; the narrator makes sense of her world through books. I confess the broad outline of the narrator’s life, if not its particular desires or mostly invisibilized class stabilities, resembles mine. I once lived off the same avenue in Bed-Stuy as she does, trawled the same blocks, tended bar in the neighborhood dives at probably about the same time—a reminder, even as I am aware the story is an invention, that the city is always more hemmed-in than I remember.

The narrator’s day-to-day is, in short, routinized. She’s bored but can’t or won’t admit it, choosing instead to shoulder the hairshirt of self-reproach for “failing [her boyfriend for] many years.” Though she does not outline these failures, guilt commands her attention. Her boyfriend, on the other hand, becomes sublimated as the pretext for her contrition. Barthes, again: “I suffer at seeing the other (whom I love) thus diminished, reduced, and somehow excluded from the sentiment which he or she has provoked.” In other words, we divest the other of agency in order to occupy our own feeling in the matter, to showcase our own suffering. Simone de Beauvoir, too, contends that women in love (and women falling out of love) mythologize the beloved to remap the damages caused by vulnerability and subordination as the wages of worship.

Enter queer drama: a friend organizes a “platonic meeting” between the narrator and a magnetic, ostensibly out, queer woman who edits periodicals and, apparently, reads Middlemarch something like every other year. The chemistry is immediate: it “charg[es] the space / between [them] like a ray, the knowing gaze // of Destiny.” This woman is the sort who spends each evening at a book launch or gallery opening, at ease hobnobbing with New York’s indistinguishable culturati, all decked in “Eckhaus and Givenchy.” The narrator wonders whether her life appears “trivial”; it is, at any rate, a known quantity, dressed in the beige and taupe trappings of the straight world—in both meanings of straight. This new woman, who remains unnamed, and her endless networking events—illumined by the green blinking lights of vape pens—are presented as an alternative and “vivid new reality” for the narrator. But this reality appears from the outside as just another joke about a slightly wealthier, possibly older crowd of Brooklyn transplants—those allegedly all-powerful conspirators known as the coastal elite.

The narrator acknowledges that her “theory” of this woman’s life is both “marvelous and false,” distorted as it is by the consumptive blush of first longing; her crush obliterates critical distance. She finds herself entranced by the woman and her patina of literary glamor, even as the bars they frequent are ones the narrator would have patronized anyway, as she later realizes. Despite her feeling of alienation from the “trendy” tapestries of this new woman’s life, the narrator’s sociocultural status as poet and professor means she’s already achieved entry into these same circles, even if she hasn’t yet ascended to the tier in which everyone wears designer clothes. I’m reminded of a friend’s remark that the increasing infiltration of the New York literary scene by the fabulously wealthy has made measuring one’s distance from or nearness to material privilege more difficult. If your rent is paid but you aren’t drenched in Margiela, where do you stand? One wonders: in a book as self-reflexively embroiled in an institutional literary-academic context, how far can cultural capital reach?

Couplets has an unsettled relationship to class. Its signifiers and aspirations—the banter over George Eliot in cocktail bars, trips out West, trips upstate, rich friends who threaten to leave the city for their second homes—firmly situate it among the upwardly mobile, both in economic and cultural terms. At another point, the narrator summons the peril of “the precariat” to suggest it “was almost everyone,” a diagnostic conflation that flirts with the erasure of critical distinctions within the category consequential to class struggle.

I say this not to prosecute but to call attention to the fact that an unacknowledged economic anxiety weaves through the narrator’s desire: it is not only the new woman’s novelty or queerness that seduces but also her glitz, her Eckhaus, her comfortable assimilation into the upper crust. In light of her newfound yearning, the narrator asks her boyfriend permission to fuck women and is granted it—at first. He almost immediately revokes this license, after which the book’s sense of its own moral universe grows, shall we say, a touch wobbly. The particulars of what was or wasn’t allowed—and when—appear smudged. In one instant, the narrator convinces herself, “I tried to stay away from her” and confides to friends that “Today’s the day // it stops. Nothing right should feel / this dirty.” In the next, she insists, “I told my boyfriend immediately.” The narrator makes clear she is turned on by the erotic frisson of prohibition but refuses to name these line-crossings for what they are: an affair. Don’t mistake my inquiry into the book’s accounting logs for priggishness; my skepticism is narratological, not moral. Though the book’s formal conceit is lyric, its reliance on certain linearities of narrative and the machinations of plot ground its broad affinities more deeply inside the novel. Plot elisions, omissions, holes, and half-gaps matter, particularly if this story about “love” shelters betrayal, that snake in the garden, at its breast.

Are we to trust the narrator's version of the story as reliable? Or believe her recitations of exposure are, as positioned within the book’s search for a radically honest self-knowledge, entirely transparent? This is not to say there’s no nod to the opposite possibility: some gaps are baked in, and the narrator knows—or tells readers she knows—that “each account obscures // some other version equally true.” Still, whether the narrator leaves meaningful latitude for competing narratives is shaky. She considers one version might be that “I lied to everyone I knew” but in the space of a further line protests that the truly believable story is “for years I loved him more than me.” Well, that’s that then. Even the more methodical voice of the second-person sequences is party to this persuasion, theorizing that experiences no longer “belonged to people in the first place; they were always the outcome of forces beyond the strictly personal.” There’s that knowing gaze of destiny again, thrusting responsibility for the entanglement onto some distant cosmology. But readers would do well to remember that one technique of the love story’s discursive apparatus is the apologia—an account formulated defensively, arcing toward a longing for absolution.

Events unfold in more or less the manner one might expect. “‘The accidents happen,’” the narrator reminds herself, quoting Adrienne Rich, “‘we’re not heroines.’” And, of course, this is so. People do harm the ones they love, a difficult truth built into the condition of mutual vulnerabilities. Readers might, nevertheless, wonder about the narrator’s motivation for presenting this series of events as somehow beyond her control. In any case, the new woman supplants the boyfriend, whose only response is to say that she will make the narrator suffer, and the narrator—awakening to an ambiguously dormant queer identity—passes through the usual seasons of love. There is its first bloom and the pleasures of the new partner, the naming of this particular coupling—then a longing for possession, anxiety, conflict, discontent, severance. The narrator’s literary referents shift between the straight to the queer—from George Eliot and Natalia Ginzburg to Rich, Audre Lorde, H.D., Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf—but the sketch of her brave new world appears, finally, not so different from her old one.

Such a continuity need not be mapped as tragedy. Couplets is most compelling when the narrator writes her history of love not as a linear sequence but as an atemporal, echoic triangulation of desire—one in which her past and future lovers overlap, interpenetrate, and commune. In fights with the woman (now the narrator’s girlfriend), she finds herself parroting “the same old // dialectic I’d tried to leave behind” with the ex, but there are other, more generative remainders that have followed her across time, too, into this new coupling. In soothing her girlfriend through depressive episodes, she confesses, “I was drawing from the well / of love he filled.” The narrator becomes “a kind of conduit / between them: a conversation they conducted // with my mouth.” In these moments, the transpositional capacities of intimacy take on a wiser, more tender quality, and what has chiefly been a mechanically narrative queering of the narrator’s experience appears emotionally stranger and more textually surprising. The passage is also a powerful instance of reversal: here, it is the lovers who transform the narrator into their shared story, not she who subordinates them to hers.

If there is a notable divergence between the narrator’s straight and queer lives, it’s manifested in her burgeoning affinity for light BDSM. Her feelings of guilt and shame, exiled in favor of the onward march of new love, are transliterated as aesthetic signs to be worked out in a theater of the erotic. The play itself reads in a pedestrian manner, neither particularly sexy nor particularly shocking: “I had let my life become a story,” the narrator concedes, in which “degradation was a theme” and “the only moral was the pressure of her hands.” Having exhibited her world as, at least superficially, “trivial,” “familiar,” “nothing so profound,” and broadly homogenized—even the IKEA bed she’s tied to is the same one “everyone had”—these forays into domination and submission seem as though they should more dramatically cleave the narrative, carrying some spark of sexual electricity. But they, too, are written as unexceptional, even blandly expected, turns of event, and fall flat. “Fascism had come / back into vogue,” the narrator says:

It was hard to know which aspects
to feel guilty for, so I was like my Catholic
 
mother, always rounding up. Maybe that’s why
I felt most free when I was choked and tied
 
with cables to the bed; when bound and gagged;
when told that I was very, very bad.

It’s an odd account, one in which the narrator renders apparently novel pleasures as entirely nonspecific (“choked and tied,” “bound and gagged,” “very, very bad”) and invokes clichéd cultural frameworks such as Catholic women and timeworn rituals of sexual abnegation. This is not to say that I long for titillation or total originality, but Couplets—or at any rate its narrator—offers generalities, particularly on the level of philosophies of gender, femininity, and sexuality, apparently presuming that readers will do the rest. What’s more, the heel turn from nebulous uncertainty concerning the global rise of fascism to a meditation on the individual “freedom” found in the sensual potential of subjugation seems to me a troubling ideological deflation. The unnerving proximities between civilizational obliteration and the domestic erotic are not, of course, unprecedented. These conflations are precisely what shocked early readers of Ariel (1965), vis-a-vis the contiguities Sylvia Plath drew between the subject/ive annihilations of marriage and the atom bomb or between the tyranny of the patriarch and the atrocities committed by the S.S. officer. Plath, moreover, was not the first; writing Three Guineas at the dawn of World War II, Virginia Woolf likewise suggested a convergence of fascistic daddies, both domestic and political.

By contrast, the likeness in Couplets falters because it’s left unexamined. Fascism becomes no more than a buzzword. What extremism and the apocalyptic tenor of contemporary life have to do with the narrator’s sexual scenographies is an open-ended question. The comparison is inert. There is something to be said about the ways a perpetual onslaught of information trains people to throw up their hands in the face of cascading catastrophes, but the narrator, and Millner, refuse to sit with the terror or truly investigate how the intimate becomes embroiled—from the French, embrouiller, to muddle—in the world historical. The personal is indeed political but not at the expense of one or the other; the point is that individual disenfranchisement and liberation is a non-individualist project, one produced by, and that speaks to, broader inequities in ideological systems.

These sorts of abbreviations are not limited to this scene. They illuminate a struggle I reckoned with throughout the book: Couplets’ inclination toward gestural political and intellectual moves is divested from rigorous engagement. It’s not enough to off-handedly say that “the world was tilting into Hell” if one does not take up the disruption of these systems in a serious manner. Even as the narrator admits to her “spottiness on politics,” I wonder if fascism should be invited into the narrative only to be shrugged off as incidental to the mise-en-scene of her guilt. One might argue that the problem is the narrator’s, not the book itself. However, if that were true, one might assume that the analytic speaker of the second-person passages could recenter the first-person narrator’s tunnel vision into more critical contexts—as happens elsewhere in the book’s account of the breakups. If the book is best at its most interior, its most private, it stumbles when attempting to situate the singularity of the narrator’s experience in the global precarity of the modern. This lapse is mirrored in sweeping statements on identity categories, such as the narrator’s contention that “Sexuality is, // after all, a formal concern” or her observation that “gender and genre share one root.” They do—the Latin, generare, to “generate, beget, produce”—but what this begetting has to do with the book’s abiding framework is unclear. The narrator seems to regard both statements as self-explanatory. H.D. is being read on the girlfriend’s phone but to what end? With so much radical sexual indeterminacy in the works of H.D., Woolf, and Cather—the narrator actually does engage with Lorde—why utilize them mainly as intellectual signposts? Not every text must divert its attentions to lead a course in feminist theory, but it does seem strange that a book so explicitly citational concerning its inheritances of queer and lesbian traditions and that pivots so crucially on the revelation of desire between women would leave its sense of the basics so muddied.

I am uninterested in takedowns and rest assured that there has been and will continue to be much rapturous praise over the book’s emotional fabric. As a breakup poem, Couplets has moments of great beauty and wisdom, and the familiarity of its textures will, I suspect, grant it a wide and eager readership. My purpose here is not to belabor negativity but to regard Couplets as a serious book and to wrestle with it in a serious critical manner. To my mind, these oversights matter, not because every book must do all things but because I think readers must ask—particularly in a moment when queer communities face a horrifying renewal of homophobic and transphobic energies, even, or especially, within the supposedly liberal and left-leaning mainstream—what work is being done with the coming-out narrative. Is a queer recapitulation of the love poem itself interventionist? Many of my quibbles could be a happenstance of form. There is an inexorable rigidity to the heroic couplets that make up much of the book, leaving little room for minutiae and dailiness or the sorts of abstractions that disrupt narrative thrust. Even though the rhymes are often slant or absent, Millner must fit her story into a predetermined silhouette, and the strictures of form in Couplets frequently asphyxiate rather than expand its narrative. However, it’s not impossible for a love poem to work expansively within a scrupulous formal parameter—I think of Marilyn Hacker’s Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons (1986), which provocatively rewrites the Shakespearean sonnet from a polyvocal and bilingual lesbian perspective.

I confess I found myself dreaming up another iteration of Couplets, patched together and fleshed out by its prose sequences, in which the book feels most urgent, reads most confidently, and engages most directly with its intertexts because it is formally freer. I imagined something hewing nearer to Maggie Nelson’s cult hit Bluets (2009), a book to which Couplets is certain to be compared. I insist readers look, for example, at “1.6,” a proem fragment recounting the narrator’s first night with the other woman: a breathless, recursive call-and-response between lover and love object:

Then she asked you to share a cab with her; you did; she asked you to walk her in; you did; she asked you to come upstairs; you did; to get into her bed; you did; to press yourself lengthwise against her; you did; […] to remove your pants; you did; to let her taste you; you did; to come again, inside her mouth; you did […]

This is both a surprisingly hot treatise on consent and, in the repetitions of you did, an understated, canny retooling of the recursive eruptions of yes from the mouth of Joyce’s Molly Bloom. It’s a sequence worth the price of admission.

Perhaps the truly radical revelation of Couplets is that queer and nonmonogamous relationships in the book are as discordant and mundane as their supposed opposites. That these alternative aggregations of sexual life exclude, say, some inequities that feel (but are not) inherent to male-female couplings—or to the politics of erotic ownership and exclusivity—does not mark them as axiomatically revolutionary. Queer people can be boring. Nonmonogamous partners can treat each other transactionally, unpleasantly, and with jealousy. Sadomasochism can be performed perfunctorily. I mentioned before the narrator’s insistence on sexuality as a formal concern, and it’s true; within the presiding philosophies of Couplets, formalism is the framing mechanism used to get the better of desire—which, let’s face it, is a structure of feeling resistant to interpretation, something that may be rendered legible in a story but can be felt, when felt truly, only outside it.

This process, too, calls back to Barthes’s sense of annulation: the explosions of language in Couplets work to smooth the disturbances of love, of political unrest, of the instabilities in people’s perceptions of the other. I alluded earlier to the unresolved betrayal that I see as the disruptive fulcrum of the book. It is a love story, yes, but crucially, one oriented toward the self. It is a project less interested in the outside world or in the intersubjectivities of relationships than in self-making, in no small part because of the narrator’s irresolution concerning the original betrayal. Such transgressions—“accidents” the narrator calls them, an ethical dispersal that fits hand in glove with a particularly contemporary mode of passivity—have constituted, by way of the seduction narrative, an especially fruitful body for the history of literature: Hester Prynne, Emma Bovary, Sula Peace and Nel Wright of Toni Morrison’s Sula, the narrators of Anne Sexton’s Love Poems (1969)—the list is extensive and well-appointed.

But the erotic theater of the literary, as Elizabeth Hardwick observed, underwent a profound shift between the 19th and 20th centuries: the “illicit has become a psychological rather than a moral drama.” People are no longer invested, she suggests, in whether an act is right or wrong but in “how the delinquent ones feel about their seductions, adulteries, betrayals.” (Shall we agree, for a bit of fun, to provisionally blame Freud?) Sex, Hardwick continues, can no longer be the seed of a narrative; sex no longer has the texture of a story but is a passing gull against the horizon of the omnipotent I. The love story of Couplets must be oriented toward shoring up the self because it cannot look directly at the event that sets its happenings in motion. The political precarity of modernity is transformed—annulled—into a list of personal bafflements because to regard them would be to unmoor a streamlined process of self-discovery. In the book’s coda, a point at which the couplets assimilate a second-person voice, the narrator tells herself “You could have had everything you wanted, / had it been what you wanted.” She looks over the city, which “is absolutely overcome // with stories like these.” Another sameness, another smoothing. Couplets subordinates the injuries of the intersubjective, the vulnerabilities of the erotic-as-encounter with the other, to better deal in assembling an architecture of affect, a totalizing psychogeography of the self. The narrator requires the scaffolds of the system. It’s what remains.