ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the operation of queer time in Christopher Isherwood’s novella Prater Violet (1945) and Edmund White’s autobiography My Lives (2005) as they curate space for queer utterances and avowal by interrogating linearity. Specifically, the chapter examines the use of Instantaneous photography and montage as narrative strategies to disrupt the linearity of the narratives to introduce discourse about queer lives. In Prater Violet, Isherwood’s innovative reading of the cinematic spectacle and translucent coding of his queerness finds echoes with the deployment of pauses in My Lives by White. If Isherwood’s pauses turn the narrative inward, White’s seizure of the plot pushes for an extrospective glance that not only recounts historical oppression but also incorporates political gestures that lead towards a relational aesthetic. I propose that Isherwood’s and White’s attempts at curating queer time can be thought of as exercises in queer coding and decoding (in other words, reading) of the heteronormative world.
