This is the third post in the Succession IV: Queering the Environment – “Queer Joy” series. This series, edited by Jessica DeWitt, Tina Adcock, and Sarah York-Bertram, invites contributors to build off of scholarship and lived knowledge that envisions queer joy as a way of knowing and being in relation with the environment and more-than-human beings.
“Doth the hawk fly by thy wisdom, and stretch her wings toward the south?”
— Job 39:26
After T.H. White quit teaching in 1936, he retreated to a country house and wrote two books. The second of these books was The Sword and the Stone (1938), based on Thomas Mallory’s Morte d’Arthur, the book firmly secured White’s literary reputation. The first book did not see publication until 1951 (under some protest from White himself), White’s chronicle of trying to become a falconer, titled The Goshawk.
While White is generally seen as a misanthropic figure, I read his difficult kinship with the goshawk as an example of a kin relationship that formed outside of hereditary bonds and through a queering of domesticity; one that shows a difficult love and connection outside the bounds of the human. This short piece aims to think through human-animal intimacy through a complicatedly queer literary figure and his relationship to the non-human world. My hope is that such a project represents a small step toward imagining forms of queer sociality beyond frictionless relation and the confines of anthropocentrism.
“I read [White’s] difficult kinship with the goshawk as an example of a kin relationship that formed outside of hereditary bonds and through a queering of domesticity; one that shows a difficult love and connection outside the bounds of the human.”
The most popular reading of The Goshawk comes from Helen Macdonald’s painful and beautiful memoir H is for Hawk that is also a complex biography of White. She distances herself from White and what she sees as the narrative of battle between White and Gos, (what he names the goshawk he tries to train).1 I take some of Macdonald’s insights here especially around White’s profound loneliness when it came to connecting with other humans, however, I can’t read The Goshawk in quite the same way.
There is a great feeling of love and connection that thrums through the text. One grounded in a kind of joy. As White reflects, “I always loved the unteachable, the untouchable, the underdog … For every minute of patience in quarrel my understanding of him and queer affection for his brave and somehow pathetic mania had grown insensibly. I felt lonely without him and caught myself wondering what I ought to be doing now.”2 This line is after Gos escapes. It’s difficult to read it as anything other than love and the feel of missing a being that you were close to even in the midst of antagonism. Indeed, White directly says while stroking Gos, “We were again in love.”3 White reads a difficult love in his relationship with Gos, one that remains only partially requited in the first half of the book and then is lost in the second half.
More compelling to me is Macdonald’s observation that The Goshawk is part of a literary lineage of “gay writers who wrote of their relationships with animals in lieu of human loves of which they could not speak.”4 It is these moments of identification and freedom from the norms of propriety through a difficult interspecies intimacy that I want to index as queer misanthropic joy. In his efforts to “man” Gos (get him used to people), White notes that Gos is unaccustomed to “the bustle of the modern world” reasoning that “he had to learn to stand that bustle, as we all have to do, however little we visit it.”5 The slip from “he” to “we” is telling here and speaks to the way White identifies with Gos precisely through this rejection of normative social life.
The push against modernity and need for kinship (which does come out of White’s complicatedly conservative politics) is also a reaching for history through falconry. Macdonald, going through White’s unpublished papers, reads White seeing in the history of falconry a history of men “like him,” ones that write a queer mode of living inside history.6 Indeed, White sees in the history of the austringer, the trainer of short-winged hawks, men devoted to a solitary mode of living—dedicated to a specific craft—outside the institutions of family and normative sociality.7
“White sees in the history of the austringer, the trainer of short-winged hawks, men devoted to a solitary mode of living—dedicated to a specific craft—outside the institutions of family and normative sociality.”
Worth noting here is White’s interest in sadism and not-acted-upon desire for young boys that stages a much more complicated queer history. This complication opens up into what Jack Halberstam has recently identified as an epistemology of the ferox and a “constellation of odd singles, fairies, and freaks.”8 The epistemology of the ferox is a term Halberstam uses to think through a competing epistemology in the history of sexuality to Sedgwick’s epistemology of the closest, one that substitutes “the image of an interior room representing a secret self for a wide-open space across which an unknowable self is dispersed.”9 Instead of coming out of the closet as a disclosure, the epistemology of the ferox (a Latin term for fierce or wild) indexes something messier and less familiar to standard accounts of the sexual subject within a queer-straight dyad.
White then is perhaps less lonely per se and more searching for a language for his desire for ferality. The poetics of difficulty White evokes points to a new way to understand kinship relations, one that aims to wrestle with the difficulty of being in relation to one another, within and beyond the human. The fact that White was not simply a melancholic gay writer (though he also was) indexes the need to move beyond simple ways of doing queer history that is reliant on the poetics of the closet and a homo/hetero binary, instead we see a more complicated relationship to desire and mastery shaped by a relationship with a non-human animal.
The joy White describes while training Gos is expressed as freedom. Despite his lack of stability White notes that he “had no master, no property, no fetters.” He alights on being “free as a hawk” to describe this state.10 If one way of understanding queerness is a status outside “family, property, and the couple-form” then White’s joy is expressly queer and draws on the interspecies relation that he is cultivating.11 Being free as a hawk then is a way of being queer and delighting in such disidentifications through the invocation of the hawk. Such identifications put White within a literary tradition of twentieth century writers to find freedom in the hawk or falcon, as Halberstam has noted.12
This queerness extends to a blurring of boundaries between himself and Gos, White describes as having “gone half bird” staging such a transformation in the rhetoric of romantic attachment and domestic relation, White notes that he is “transferring [his] love and interest and livelihood into its future, giving hostages to fortune as madly as in marriage and family cares.”13 Here White very literally points to the way that his relationship to Gos is one that replaces or subverts a normative attachment to heterosexual love, marriage, and livelihood.
“… a sense of joy in the queer disidentification with the normativity and isolation of a heteronormative and ecologically destructive present.”
My hope here is to open lines of inquiry at the intersection of animal studies and queer literary studies, one that sees intimate relations with animals as sometimes difficult and unfulfilled that nevertheless speak to a sense of joy in the queer disidentification with the normativity and isolation of a heteronormative and ecologically destructive present.
Feature Image: “Goshawk (Explored)” by hehaden is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
Notes
- Helen Macdonald, H Is for Hawk (Penguin, 2016), 33. Macdonald slots it into the same literary tradition as Moby-Dick and The Old Man and the Sea. ↩︎
- T. H. White, The Goshawk, New York Review Books Classics (New York Review Books, 2007), 146–47. ↩︎
- White, The Goshawk, 134. ↩︎
- Macdonald, H Is for Hawk, 41. ↩︎
- White, The Goshawk, 100–101. ↩︎
- Macdonald, H Is for Hawk, 115. ↩︎
- White, The Goshawk, 32. ↩︎
- Jack Halberstam, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire, Perverse Modernities (Duke University Press, 2020), 96. ↩︎
- Halberstam, Wild Things, 10. ↩︎
- White, The Goshawk, 39. ↩︎
- Christopher Chitty, Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System, Theory Q (Duke University Press, 2020), 26. ↩︎
- Halberstam, Wild Things, 96. ↩︎
- White, The Goshawk, 125. ↩︎
