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language: English
country: USA
year: 1966
form: novel
genre(s): erotica, speculative
dates read: 13.9.23-16.9.23
what to say about Richard Amory’s Song of the Loon. it is wild, and that’s signaled from the very beginning by the author’s note that begins the novel:
The author wishes it clearly understood that he has, unfortunately, never known or heard of a single Indian even remotely resembling, for instance, Singing Heron or Tlasohkah or Bear-who-dreams. He has taken certain very European characters from the novels of Jorge De Montemayor and Gaspar Gil Polo, painted them a gay aesthetic red, and transplanted them to the American wilderness. Anyone who wishes to read other intentions into these characterizations is willfully misunderstanding the nature of the pastoral genre, and is fervently urged not to do so. The same might be said for those who love to point out anachronisms and factual improbabilities.
on the one hand, this just boils down to “I’m not being racist, it’s just the Genre Conventions” (a familiar refrain…). on the other hand, there’s something almost refreshing refreshing about the fact that he does implicitly acknowledge that he’s being racist?
the book follows a white…trader? trapper? very unclear…named Ephraim MacIver, on the run from his abusive ex-boyfriend and a missionary named “Calvin”, which I think was a bit on the nose. he’s following directions from an “Indian” named Ixtlil Cuauhtli, who of course is from…central Oregon. it’s the nineteenth century and this is all a frontier, of course. Ephraim is looking for the “Loon Society”, a group of local Indigenous people who are all gay men. through a series of guides — “Singing Heron”, a nameless young man struggling with internalized homophobia, another white man named Cyrus (one of Singing Heron’s lovers), “Tlasohkah”, and the enigmatic “Bear-who-dreams” — Ephraim slowly learns to move forward from his troubled past relationship and starts to deconstruct monogamy and (some of) the values of the dominant culture.
I can see why it was so well-received at the time, in its systematic effort to challenge monogamy and, especially, to present an alternative, positive vision of gay sexuality and sociality as an expansive, welcoming counterculture. it’s an appealing world!
unfortunately, it rests on an intensely romanticized and stereotyped appropriation of (imagined) Indigenous culture and values in the form of both a flattening of multiple cultures (as with the obviously pseudo-Nahuatl “Ixtlil Cuauhtli” being in…the Willamette Valley, and the fact that there is one singular “Indian language”) and an obvious “Eating the Other”-type narrative — at one point Ephraim literally frames his sexual desire for Tlasohkah as a desire to “devour” him. he encounters the Other and is Transformed by the experience — but, crucially, as summer ends and he decides to settle on a single lover for (at least) the winter, it’s not Singing Heron or Tlasohkah he decides to commit himself to “forever” but Cyrus, the one other white guy in the Loon Society. while their relationship ultimately remains (cyclically) open, such that they live together for the winter and part ways temporarily during the summer with the promise to reunite the following winter, this seemed like both a narratively odd and an extradiegetically predictable choice.
this is exacerbated by the fact that the emotional climax of the novel — following Ephraim’s “spirit-quest” — is a reunion-confrontation with Ephraim’s ex at a settler trading post-town. the Indigenous characters essentially disappear for the final ~quarter of the book.
it’s also full of mediocre erotic poetry, some of which is truly bad, but it was so earnest about it that I mostly found this endearing. look at this, though:
Softly in the moonlight your form
Silvered softly in the dark night
Leading me downward in the pale light
Onto your flesh your hair your lips
Downward drifting into desire
Passion’s penis rising higher
Seeking your chest your loins your hips
My hardened penis downward dips
Into your asshole darkly tight
Warmly endlessly lost from sight.
there’s a certain tension throughout the novel between the stylized pastoral language and the large quantities of sex:
[Cyrus] looked briefly into into Ephraim’s eyes, noting their questioning, their confusion. Ephraim only half understood, and willfully refused to pursue the hints any farther in his own mind. Cyrus continued, haltingly. “Tlasohkah is – the only person who has been able, and willing – to accommodate my, to be perfectly frank, rather embarrassingly cumbersome organ – in another way of making love, Ephraim: my organ in his body; that is, up his backside.” He paused, then continued quickly. “And of course I learned the strange pleasure of accommodating him.”
the sex scenes themselves are fine. a little abrupt, but stylistically interesting, at least. a weird mix of matter-of-fact and poetic; it’s kind of endearing — feels like stuff I’ve read on Nifty.
bizarre, messy book.
EDIT: forgot to mention the sort-of-counterpoint to the romantic racism, namely that the novel is unequivocally anti-missionary (including a comment on boarding schools) and has Ephraim explicitly say he thinks it’s his responsibility to learn the “Indian language” rather than making them learn English. to a limited extent, the novel’s overall takeaway is that settlers should assimilate into Indigenous culture — except that the “Indigenous culture” in question is a settler fantasy. it doesn’t engage in any way with the material politics of settler colonialism.
moods: adventurous, emotional, hopeful, horny, wacky