Harmony H. Wu”: Harmony H. Wu is pursuing her doctorate in the Division of Critical Studies in University of Southern California's School of Cinema-Television. Her dissertation is on international horror hybridity and the intersections of genre, gender, sexuality and national identity.
The central thesis of Judith Roof's COME AS YOU ARE: NARRATIVE AND SEXUALITY is simple yet stunning—narrative and sexuality are intertwined in such a way that narrative engenders sexuality and sexuality produces narrative. Roof is not talking about narratives that are ABOUT sexuality, or even simply sex, but rather she asserts that the structure of any so-called “good” narrative is intricately interwound with sexuality. COME AS YOU ARE is concerned with unwinding this relationship, seeing how “understandings of narrative inflect, mold, determine and/or reproduce understandings of sexuality and how…understandings of sexuality influence, define, configure, and and/or reproduce narrative” (xiv).
This careful attention to the structure of narrative and its ideological effects and influences is important because, as Roof carefully delineates, beyond the simple telling of stories, narrative is pervasive, mediating nearly any and every interaction one has with daily life. Narrative organizes events and circumstances in such a way that we can understand causes and effects and how these come together, finally, to make a “sensible whole”(xv). Narrative's pervasiveness is very much like ideology, where that which seems natural, transparent and always-already given is actually a construct. Indeed, narrative and ideology often work hand in hand.
Roof asserts that the project of any narrative is structured by its goal such that the getting-there of the narrative is always structured by the anticipation of the end of the story. The so-called “satisfying” ending of any narrative, whether involving “knowledge, mastery, victory, another narrative, identity, [or] even death” (xvii), is indicative of what Roof calls narrative's “reproductive” mode, where we expect something to be produced by the end. Roof goes further, asserting that this reproductive aegis of the “good narrative” and “satisfying ending” is working within a specifically heterosexual reproduction: “our very understanding of narrative as a primary means to sense and satisfaction depends upon a metaphorically heterosexual dynamic within a reproductive aegis” (xxii).
These claims are illustrated through an intricate deconstruction of one of Freud's “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.” Roof persuasively shows how sexual “perversions” are added to Freud's “story” of the development of “normal” sexuality IN ORDER THAT heteronormative sexuality might be read as a “hero” which must overcome the dangers and obstacles of sexual “aberrations” in order to victoriously ascend to the reproductive heterosexality that it was “always” meant to assume in the first place. The story of sexuality and the sexuality of the story are thus shown to be working together in an extraordinarily revealing way (with important ramifications, alluded to but not followed through here, for how we understand psychoanalytic narratives of sexual development).
From this point, Roof posits that the threat of narratives, that which impedes the heroes from their goal (metaphoric heterosexuality) is (metaphoric) homosexuality. It is, then, homosexuality that must be vanquished for heterosexuality to be (re)established and the proper narrative to come together. Roof illustrates this point through analyses of various popular culture texts that literally have homosexuals who appear in the middle of the narrative and threaten the hero's ascendance to a whole, victorious ending. Roof's insights into the operations of narrative go a long way toward explaining how and why the appearance of lesbians and gay men in a narrative seem only to be present for their titillation and threat to heteronormativity, yet this heteroideology is reestablished by the ending, such as in the case of television's ROSEANNE's infamous lesbian kiss and the STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATIONâs frequent engagement with gender bending plots.
Roof's work is an important step in the study of the function and operation of narratives. Yet, the book suffers somewhat from an overly structuralist sensibility—the potential liability of which Roof herself is quite aware. But even her self-consciousness does not mitigate against an overly pessimistic attitude; she seems at times to be completely convinced that narrative and heteroideology are hopelessly entrenched, when her very analysis suggests that it not necessarily be so. Her reliance on texts that actually contain a lesbian or gay male character also somewhat undercuts her overall argument: if any/all narrative is heteroideologically informed, then it would be more convincing to see the operations of hetero-narrative in such narratives that do NOT have any overt concern with sex or sexuality. This bespeaks another shortcoming: in spite of the structuralist-inflected totalizing claims about narrative's complicity with heteroideology, what Roof is missing that makes other structuralist works so persuasive is a much more rigorous engagement WITH the structures, rather than the story-lines, of actual texts. Instead, the central argument, laid out in the introduction, falls sometimes frustratingly into abstraction and academic circumlocution, and relies on assertion rather than evidence and explanation. At times, the reader must either believe in her position or reject it on pure faith.
In spite of these shortcomings, COME AS YOU ARE is an important work that brands new questions into the debates and discussions about narrative. And one of her political justifications for her apologetically structural stance is that in pointing out so emphatically the sexuality of narrative, we might begin to interrupt narrative's seemingly inexorable movement toward heteronormativity. The subversive potential of this awareness is most successfully played out in her chapter “The Second Coming,” where Roof looks at certain lesbian narratives to seek how the “perverse middle” might be exploited AGAINST heteroideology. The political advantage of being structuralist is that once one knows the structure, taking the structure apart becomes that much more viable. The insights of COME AS YOU ARE are an important tool in the destruction of the hetero-narrative.
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