“Orgasm of Nostalgia”: Narrative and Sexual Desire in Aleksandar Hemon’s Nowhere Man

Abstract:This essay encounters Aleksander Hemon’s Nowhere Man (2002) in light of Bosnian War refugee Jozef Pronek’s geocorporeality: the extent to which issues of geopolitical consequence are inscribed onto his body as well as the bodies of those who desire him. In evoking Peter Brooks as a precedent for reading erotic desire alongside narrative desire, I argue that Nowhere Man’s fraught representations of sexuality function as a critique of teleological literary genres as an untenable means of telling Pronek’s story. For example, in conflating the nostalgia of the Bildungsroman with masturbatory nationalism, the novel suggests that the narrative desires of the genre are proto-fascistic. Likewise, in adopting the voyeuristic gaze of the American travel writer, the novel exposes the reader’s potential to orientalize Pronek. To conclude, I demonstrate how the narrator achieves a level of narrative-sexual intimacy with Pronek that mirrors the intersubjective suspension of the self that occurs while reading.