The Disobedient Subject
Advaita Vedanta and the Disruption of Authorized Subject Positionings in Christopher Isherwood’s Life-Writing
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/post.v4i3.259Keywords:
Advaita Vedanta, homosexual, interpellation, heteronormativity, identity as narrative, queer spiritual autobiographyAbstract
In conservative religious discourse, “homosexuality” is configured as mutually incompatible with a sincere engagement in religious belief and praxis, and the subject positionings common within the gay liberation project have tended to reinforce the opposition. Here I suggest how some marginalized subjectivities have liberated themselves from the toxic representations of hostile discourses by exploring new possibilities for being and becoming that are distinctly different from those provided by dominant, heteronormative models of identity, especially those held in place by conventional religious teaching. From recent literary theory I adopt the notion of self as a constructed narrative, and examine the extent to which the emerging genre of “queer spiritual autobiography” (Stewart 2002), in particular, contributes to a reverse discourse, becoming a site for contestation and resistance. First-person testimony in the form of memoir and autobiographical writing takes up the project of renarrativizing the self and disrupting authorized versions of male identity, spirituality and sexuality. I illustrate this through the work of the British expatriate writer Christopher Isherwood, a seminal proponent of the genre, to delineate how the positioning of self is renegotiated in queer spiritual autobiography. I draw attention to the integrative potential that Isherwood found in particular teachings and practices of Advaita Vedanta, in which he was trained by his spiritual teacher, that are often misunderstood in Isherwood scholarship. The impact of Vedanta on Isherwood’s textual personae, his experiments with first-person point of view, his interrogation of the problematics of writing religion, and a sustained engagement with a religious inquiry and praxis not predicated on a repudiation of his sexuality, all contribute to make him a writer of exemplary interest today.
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———. 1997. Excitable Speech: Politics of the Performance. London: Routledge.
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———. 1990b. “Marginality as a Site of Resistance.” In Out There, edited by Russell Ferguson, et al., 341–344. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art.
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———. 1939. Goodbye to Berlin. London: Hogarth Press.
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———. 1965. Ramakrishna and His Disciples. London: Methuen.
———. 1966. “The Problem of the Religious Novel.” In Exhumations, 136–140. London: Methuen; New York: Simon and Schuster. [Reprinted in 1987. The Wishing Tree: Christopher Isherwood on Mystical Religion, edited by Robert Adjemian, 164–168. San Francisco: Harper and Row.]
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———. 1971. Kathleen and Frank. London: Methuen.
———. 1976. Christopher and His Kind. New York: Avon.
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———. 2008. Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
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———. 1994. “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom.” In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, edited by Paul Rabinow, translated by Robert Hurley et al., 281–301. New York: New Press.
———. 1999. “Michel Foucault and Zen: A Stay in a Zen Temple.” Religion and Culture, edited by Jeremy R. Carrette, 110–114. New York: Routledge.
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Halperin, David M. 1995. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. New York: Oxford University Press.
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Herdt, Gilbert. 1997. Same Sex, Different Cultures: Exploring Gay and Lesbian Lives. Boulder, CO: Westview.
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———. 1990b. “Marginality as a Site of Resistance.” In Out There, edited by Russell Ferguson, et al., 341–344. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art.
Isherwood, Christopher. 1938. Lions and Shadows. London: Hogarth Press.
———. 1939. Goodbye to Berlin. London: Hogarth Press.
———. 1951. Vedanta for Modern Man. New York: Harper.
———. 1952. “Address to the Vedanta Society of N.Y.” March 26, 1952. Huntington Library: CI 1014.
———. 1962. “Biographical Introduction.” In What Religion Is in the Words of Swami Vivekananda, edited by John Yale, i–xxi. London: Phoenix House.
———. 1963. An Approach to Vedanta. Hollywood, CA: Vedanta Press.
———. 1964. A Single Man. New York: Simon and Schuster.
———. 1965. Ramakrishna and His Disciples. London: Methuen.
———. 1966. “The Problem of the Religious Novel.” In Exhumations, 136–140. London: Methuen; New York: Simon and Schuster. [Reprinted in 1987. The Wishing Tree: Christopher Isherwood on Mystical Religion, edited by Robert Adjemian, 164–168. San Francisco: Harper and Row.]
———. 1969. Essentials of Vedanta. Hollywood: Vedanta Press.
———. 1971. Kathleen and Frank. London: Methuen.
———. 1976. Christopher and His Kind. New York: Avon.
———. 1977. My Guru and His Disciple. London: Eyre Methuen.
———. 1996. Diaries, Volume One, 1939–1960. Edited by Katherine Bucknell. London: Methuen.
———. 2000. Lost Years: A Memoir 1945–1951. Edited by Katherine Bucknell. New York: Harper Collins.
———. [No date.] “Girish Ghosh, Playwright.” Lecture. Audio CD. Hollywood: Vedanta Press.
Isherwood, Christopher (with Swami Prabhavananda), trans. 1944. The Song of God: Bhagavad Gita. Los Angeles: Marcel Rodd.
———. (with Swami Prabhavananda), trans. 1947a. Crest Jewel of Discrimination by Shankara. Hollywood: Vedanta Press.
———. (with Swami Prabhavananda), trans. 1953. How to Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali. New York: Harper.
———. 1999. “What is Evil?” Parabola 24(4): 55–58.
Kamel, Rose. 1982. “‘Unraveling One’s Personal Myth’: Christopher Isherwood’s Autobiographical Strategies.” Biography 5(2): 161–175. doi:10.1353/ bio.2010.0956
Lehmann, John. 1987. Christopher Isherwood: A Personal Memoir. New York: Holt.
Luckmann, Thomas. 1967. The Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern Society. New York: Macmillan.
Lyotard, Jean-François. 1986. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Marsh, Victor. 2007. “The Journey of the Queer ‘I’: Spirituality and Subjectivity in Life Narratives by Gay Men.” Ph.D. dissertation. School of English, Media Studies and Art History, University of Queensland.
———. 2009. “Advaita Vedanta and the Repositioning of Subjectivity in the Life- Writing of Christopher Isherwood, ‘Homosexualist.’” Theology and Sexuality 15(2): 93–116.
Masterman, Len. 1992. “The Case for Television Studies.” In Media Education: An Introduction, edited by Manuel Alvarado and Oliver Boyd-Barrett, 45–51. London: BFI/Open University.
Matousek, Mark. 1998. “Interview: Ken Wilber. Up Close and Transpersonal with the Philosopher King of Consciousness.” Utne Reader (July-August): 50–55, 106–07.
McDonagh, Joshua. 2003. “Nagarjuna as Philosophical Reformer.” Religious Studies 460 (5 December): http://www.as.ua.edu/rel/stdesksstudentessays.htm.
Merton, Thomas. 1975 [1948]. The Seven Storey Mountain. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
———. 1992. The Way of Chuang Tzu. Boston and London: Shambhala.
———. 1999. Mystics and Zen Masters. Farrar Straus and Giroux. Mol, Hans. 1976. Identity and the Sacred: A Sketch for a New Social-Scientific Theory of Religion. Oxford: Blackwell.
Nagarajan, S. 1972. “Christopher Isherwood and the Vedantic Novel: A Study of ‘A Single Man’.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 3(4): 63–71.
O’Byrne, Robert. 2004. “A Fraudulent Rebel.” Review of Isherwood: A Life by Peter Parker. The Irish Times (26 June): 13.
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Published
2010-12-10
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Marsh, V. E. (2010). The Disobedient Subject: Advaita Vedanta and the Disruption of Authorized Subject Positionings in Christopher Isherwood’s Life-Writing. Postscripts: The Journal of Sacred Texts, Cultural Histories, and Contemporary Contexts, 4(3), 259-301. https://doi.org/10.1558/post.v4i3.259
