i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

60 / Neel’s Social Realist ArtJoe Gould is a blithe and emaciated little man who has been a notable in the cafeterias,diners, barrooms, and dumps of Greenwich Village for a quarter of a century. . . Every day, even when he has a bad hangover, he spends at least a couple ofhours working on a formless, rather mysterious book that he calls “An Oral Historyof Our Time.” . . . He estimates that the manuscript contains 9,000,000 words, all inlonghand . . . Gould puts into the Oral History only things he has seen or heard.“What we used to think was history [Gould says]—kings and queens, treaties, inventions,big battles . . . is only formal history and largely false. I’ll put down the informalhistory of the shirt-sleeved multitude . . . or I’ll perish in the attempt.” 47Gould’s oral, proletarian history was not unique in its time: in the mid-1930s, the Federal Writers’ Project of the WPA initiated a ƒrst-person narrativeproject that collected thousands of interviews with people in marginalized professions.Indeed, Ralph Ellison, one of the Project writers who conductedthese interviews, developed speciƒc methods to transcribe their vernacularspeech that he subsequently would put to use in his in„uential The InvisibleMan. 48 Indeed, Gould’s own description of his Oral History’s contents (as transcribedby Mitchell) could read as a prospectus for the Writers’ Project as wellas a précis of Village life. 49 Unfortunately, his voluminous notebooks turnedout to be empty. Yet, although his project was a sham, his concept of history ascontingent and relative, to be assembled bit by bit through the recording of interviewswith the broadest possible segments of the populace, was perfectly applicableto Neel’s portrait gallery. By representing Gould as a fraud, she by implicationauthenticated her version.In posing Gould for a second, nude portrait, 50 Neel violated the decorum ofportraiture so violently that it was censored. The scrawny, pathetic physiquewas so transgressive of the tradition of the heroic male nude that the portraitcould not be “hung,” so to speak, before a viewing audience until 1973. 51 Whyis Gould so threatening? The little goblin is hardly a convincing embodimentof evil. The mephistophelian aura of the pointed beard and the infernal glowof the ground only play up the utter powerlessness of his musculature. In hismisplaced pride in his physique, he is as pathetic as Daumier’s The HandsomeNarcissus. Instead of the “imposing male apparatus” Freud found so impressive,the male genitals are presented as they appear to women. Turning thetables on Freud, Neel suggests that if anatomy is destiny, Joe Gould is doomed.Magniƒcently endowed, spectacularly unerotic, Gould’s unwarranted appendagesare grotesque because Neel has multiplied that which is always assumedto be single and intact: male sexual identity. Her pictorial repetition is the equivalentof the gleeful taunt of the sexually curious child. Mocking rather thanfetishistic, the excessive penises effectively desexualize the man; as the viewermentally removes one set of extra genitals, they all become expendable. One