Myth in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
I was once asked about my thoughts on Ocean Vuong’s use of the Narcissus myth in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous compared with Ovid’s take. Although Vuong’s book’s core focus explores many themes—ranging from sex work, single mother-child and immigrant dynamics, substance abuse, and love—Vuong returns to his burgeoning identity as a gay male as he thinks through the memoirish period of time covered by the book. A lot of Vuong’s writing, like his first name, also pulls the reader along poetic flights that do not perfectly align with a specific meaning. I think that poetic style is how he uses the Narcissus myth in talking about his emerging understanding of his sexuality and identity.
I come to Vuong’s writing as an outsider and do not empathize with his gender or sexual identity, including how others perceive him and how he experiences sexual chemistry. Part of my identity could be described by stating that I am a queer woman who doesn’t perceive a misalignment between my social gender identity and the sex that one doctor assigned to me at birth. So I am grappling with my attempt at understanding his view with the tools at my disposal. (I am also no Aegean scholar, so bear with me for my functional use of this myth.)
Ovid’s poetry, for whatever reason, has traveled through the mists of time to a corner of my brain. The Romans used these versions of poems in furtherance of empire. I am not sure there was always a takeaway to the Narcissus myth before Ovid got off a version so good it set the tale in stone (See Metamorphoses Book III, A. S. Kline’s Version, https://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/Metamorph3.htm). Maybe some of the Peloponnesian tradition was just extravagant plot details that made for a good story. I think the nutshell take of Ovid’s Narcissus is that both Narcissus and Echo are rendered empty shells from Narcissus’s alluring beauty. Narcissus, cursed by a jealous woman with the powers of the Gods, wastes away in conceited desire to think only about himself. And Echo literally wastes away thinking only about Narcissus and is hollowed out to sound waves forever repeating back, never speaking out. Both characters reflect back antisocial behaviors within the received Roman culture (female jealousy and yearning for the male self and male self-obsession and/or fixation on physical beauty), and reflect back the Roman culture that felt a need to propagate the myth.
Coming from an Anglo-Saxon culture, the Narcissus represents an exotic example of male beauty so sirenic it is like some sort of glitch in a program that ruins people. There is a tract of Anglo-Saxon cultural and political tradition where women were/are treated as lineage-maintaining vessels for use in marriage transactions. From that tradition arose a particular tract of “romantic” writing. That classical romance formula went: men’s pursuit of a woman for reasons other than maintaining proper lineage was inevitably a tragic endeavor. This tragic endeavor had to be punished by the narrative for a proper emotional conclusion. Many tragic Lancelots and Romeos, but fewer Narcissuses.
Vuong first has an interpretation of Naricussus thrust upon him by a person in a position of relative authority. A teacher dumps on him an interpretation of Narcissus, comparing homosexuality to an ultimately self-destroying vanity – being so pulled into sameness that one wastes away. For Vuong, in that moment of being drawn towards a male classmate, Trevor, he finds comfort in their gender similarities as a refuge. But as he describes his relationship with Trevor, whose personality is different in just about every way possible, Vuong appreciates that he doesn’t glance at a reflection at all yet is still sexually pulled towards the sameness of body.
Throughout this book, Vuong continually nods to literary greats and adds his gloss. When he comes back to this Greek myth, it is when he described his first experience being anally penetrated by Trevor. He writes:
“The Greeks thought sex was the attempt of two bodies, separated long ago, to return to one’s life. I don’t know if I believe this but that’s what it felt like: as if we were two people mining one body, and in doing so, merged, until no corner was left saying.”
From his Oceanic viewpoint, he considers how the Greeks thought sex with another brought two once separate souls into being again — like some oneness that was more authentic from some halcyon day. Also for Vuong, he experiences sexual allure from the moment when two similar bodies experience oneness. The physical intimacy merges the chasm of personality distinction and can make a male face like Narcissus, peering into the pond, actually touch the reflection in every part, seeable or unseeable.
I can only understand Vuong through contrast with my own inner workings. For me, understanding heterosexuality and homosexuality has come to me only through reading and listening. I know that the emotional experience of dating women has been completely different for me, and that dating queer women was a deeply experience from dating lesbians, which was very different from dating bi men or straight men. I once dated a woman who told me something so similar to Vuong. She had slept with men, and did sleep with men on occasion, but it bore no reflection on herself and what she wanted in a relationship. For a relationship, something that necessarily brings in outside parties as members of the “community” or public, it was important to her that her gender and sexual alignment included with it a desire for an aligned political existence as a woman, and everything that came with that, through this life and the next.
For me, I would not be able to make a singular proclamation about what sex is to me, or has been, or what sexual appeal is. I know that at the very least, Echo, left as a shell of yearning, did not appeal to me, yet Narcissus has. Rather than a focus on the corporeal differences or similarities, my attraction to others has been to their distinct existence as self-contained wholes, possessed with an internal logic rife with differences from my own.
(A version of this was originally published to Substack)
