“uncatalogued creatures of the deep”: Queer Taxonomy between Melville and Genet

Abstract: This essay takes as its starting point the uncertain and often overlooked possibility that Jean Genet read Melville’s Billy Budd around the period in which he was writing his novel Querelle de Brest . Harnessing this generative uncertainty as form of queer desire that unsettles the relation of the two novels in literary history, Melville and Genet’s experiments with racialized taxonomies of life and eroticized natural histories emerge, as they accumulate across the dialogue strung between their two novels of maritime life and homosexual panic, as both products of and frustrated by the queer frustrations of hermeneutic failure that produces the homoerotic charge which, in turn, makes these experiments possible. It is through their mutual derangements of the human form and the interruption of the desire for taxonomic capture that has shaped its discourses, that, I argue, Billy Budd and Querelle ’s attachments to one another resolve into a critique of taxonomy that crumbles under the weight of its own eroticized impossibility.