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A contribution to: On Forgetting

Edited by Alma Prelec and Emily Di Dodo

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 17

Modern Humanities Research Association

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Abstract.  A once influential writer, editor and theorist of lesbian identity, the North Carolina-born novelist Bertha Harris is today best remembered for Lover (1976), a fragmentary and difficult to summarise novel that explores questions of fabrication, memory, and queer desire through the lives of a shifting family of saints and art forgers. Harris expressed scepticism about the conventions of queer life-writing, arguing that writers who ‘continually reproduce the coming out process’ in their work were ‘act[ing] like a heterosexual’. In both her fiction and her life-writing, she articulates what she considered to be a specifically lesbian literary practise that prioritizes the pleasures of artifice and disguise over what she dismissed as the dull work of ‘telling it like it is’. How, then, should the literary historian seek to remember and reconstruct Harris’s life and work? This essay explores two, at times contradictory, threads. The first is the attempt to draw on the ephemeral genres of the mid-twentieth century lesbian archive — rumour, oral history, personal correspondence — to recover and remember Harris’s life and work. The second is Harris’s articulation of what she described as the ‘gay sensibility, whose practice hinges [...] on decisively choosing as if over is’, treating the queer past as a site of speculation and invention. Taking these threads together reveals the limits of feminist literary recovery and considers practises of misremembering and fabrication as queer archival method.

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