Max Briggs

4/7/19
Queer Studies
Adaptation and Survival

The House of Impossible Beauties. Po-Mo Style

Alt title: Why the House of Impossible Beauties is a Perfectly Queer Post-Modernist Novel

Meta Narratives, or Grand Narratives, is where we start. Grand Narratives are the stories

that a society collectively agrees on, or rather the expectation of how to make sense of the

world around us.

It feeds into the Ideologies of the society it belongs to, in other words the Grand

Narrative is a universal truth with a capital “T” that a society bases other ideas upon. (West).

Western ideologies have a lot of these that we as a society hold onto without a question. For

example what is gender? Historical Western thought would align the idea of gender with the

idea of sex, that it is an immutable, inarguable category based on chromosomes or genitalia. Or

What does it mean to fall in love? What does a romantic relationship look like? By Western

Ideals we assume it to be heteronormative,and ciscentric, that is the idea that it is supposed to

look like a man and a woman together, that both are born with the corresponding genitalia that

all allow for them to conceive a child biologically which the woman carries in her uterus.

These ideas and more are things that as a society we hold as a universal truth to our

understanding of the world, which is fine for things like gravity, and the passage of time, but

when it comes to the human condition it gets more complicated and messy. “The problem with

grand narratives is that in their effort to generalize, they fail to account for experiences and

beliefs that do not fit within their parameters or confines.” (Matos). Post Modernism realizes this

issue with grand narrative and seeks to deconstruct it, to challenge these grand narratives and

to find solutions to the narratives society imposes on us. (West).

 Joseph Cassara does just that in his novel ​The House of Impossible Beauties​. He

challenges western grand narratives by showing you the characters that don’t fit within those

truths. Joseph Cassara uses postmodernist thinking and methods throughout his novel. His

choice of characters in both their historical and cultural context utilizes vicious circles. His Style

incorporates pastiche and fragmentation along side the main point of postmodernism which is

the questioning of grand narratives. Cassara’s novel can also be examined with postmodernism

to dissect his themes, mainly: love, gender, grief and family and how they too attempt to

deconstruct or find solutions to the metanarratives we have been fed.

Cassara’s choice of characters implements a very specific literary postmodernist

characteristic: vicious circles. Vicious circles are created when “boundaries between the real

world and the world of the text are collapsed” (Matos). The characters which Cassara uses are

a blend of fictitious characters, historical figures, and characters who are a mix of both. Purely

fictional characters found in the novel are: Daniel, Juanito, and Miguel. Whereas characters

who lived in the 1980s in New York are Dorian, Hector, and Venus Xtravaganza. Finally,

Cassara utilizes characters who are a blend of both imaginary and are based in fact. One such

character that clearly has a person who they were based off of but have had an imposed

creative experience placed on to them, is the case of Angel Xtravanganza.

Having a hodgepodge of all of these characters is his use of vicious circles, Cassara is

connecting historical figures to those he has manifested, piecing them together and weaving

their stories to be interconnected, but loosely, allowing them to interact with one another without

completely dismissing historical accuracy. He uses characters, or rather people who had lived,

and their stories in order to ground his novel in some semblance of reality, giving his audience,

a place of capital “T” truth, for western society values historical record and “realness”.
 Cassara uses the assumptions of his audience’s faith in historical realness as a way to

examine and criticize the grand narrative of gender and sexuality of the same audience. More

specifically Dorian and Venus, historical characters, and Angel, a character based of a real

person, are all transgender, or gender variant, which in itself challenges the meta narrative

surrounding gender, in this sense he pits two meta narratives against one another, either these

people didn’t exist, or ideas of gender are wrong, or in blatant post modernist fashion, neither

are completely true but neither are completely false either, they exist simultaneously and

paradoxically in the same space, much like the characters he presents.

The blending of both the real world and the literary world that Cassara has constructed

allows for a dissection of the grand narrative in a way that allows the reader to challenge the

ideas they have assumed to be a universal truth while projecting it onto something as seemingly

harmless as a fiction, while having its roots in truth. The choice that Cassara made in picking

characters who lived is to bring the novel into a middle ground of reality and fantasy, a place of

in between which allows the reader to suspend their own beliefs and bias enough to be

malleable without losing its connection to the world that a contemporary reader exists in. This

conceptual blending allows for the deconstruction of the grand narrative in that Cassra himself

challenges the ideas of gender binary, ciscentric and heteronormative concepts that western

society is based on.

One of the more notable aspects of Joseph Cassara’s novel that demonstrates the

influence of post modernism is found in his writing style itself, his choice to cut the narrative into

parts each with a central theme, and his rapid switch of point of view, as well as his

conglomeration of past, present and future, are pieces that each incorporate pastiche and

fragmentation.
 His choice of point of view is never consistent and each portion neither begins with a

traditional beginning nor ends with a solid conclusion to the event or scene in which he is

displaying. Each section is only portions of their lives, pieces of the whole. It almost alludes to

the feeling that the characters are telling their own stories, only bringing in the relevant

information to any given moment, only allowing the reader to see as much as they are willing to

share, former relationships and familiar history only comes up when it's contextually important.

This fragmentation of their lives is done so that the reader themselves are constantly in a state

of pasting these portions together, causing the reader to create a patchwork of understanding of

the story, utilizing pastiche.

Cassara’s choice in this fragmentation causes the readers to accept what he gives them,

for example the connection of Venus, to her previous name Thomas, only comes after a portion

in which she is exclusively viewed and spoken of as a woman, not allowing the reader to

immediately default to masculine pronouns when her gender assigned at birth becomes known.

This fragmentation makes readers cling to the information provided, the pastiche allowing

characters to exist in multitudes and breaking binaries of where they have come from, where

they are going, and who they are. The pastiche of his narrative choices allows us to hold a

liminal space where the characters are constantly evolving while never taking away from who

they were, even if that is in direct conflict with who we see now.

Another important stylistic choice that Cassara made was through his language choice

itself. Through various parts of the novel his language choice can be used to either deconstruct

the grand narratives present or to reinforce them upon the characters. Dependent upon the

situation his linguistic choices contribute to the fragmentation and paranoia in the text.

The most significant linguistic choice that Cassara makes is his choice to misgender his

own protagonists which is a fragmentation of character, a break down of the characters he has
created and is representing, this breakdown comes from the dissonance between who they are

and who they are perceived to be. Cassara uses this aggressive shift in language as a

representation of the protagonists own paranoia in the post modernist sense, their doubt of their

own sense of self based on the societies grand narrative. A part of the universal truths that

construct the Meta narratives of a society, is based on cultural standards “When you say

something is true, it means it has passed a culture’s standards” (West.) This is the idea that

Cassara is bringing about in his use of misgendering and deadnaming, in which he is alluding to

the fact that his characters don’t pass those standards of gender, or at least they do not feel

they meet the cultural standards thus enforcing the grand narrative (ciscentrism) back upon

themselves, which is represented in their language.

This stylistic choice of language not only forces these standards and ideas upon the

characters, but it is so sudden and violently forced into the narrative that it connects emotionally

to the reader. The reader then is forced to emotionally experience at least an echo of what it is

like to be misgendered, this connection of reader to story becomes in itself an experience of

vicious circles, not in the traditional sense of the author placing themself in the story, but of the

author placing the reader into the story to absorb and feel those moments personally.

Joseph Cassara has a multitude of themes within his novel, most of which are used to

examine the grand narrative, either in a dismantling way or in order to reinforce the ideas they

perpetuate. One of the most profound and notable themes in ​The House of Impossible

Beauties​ is the concept of found families, or close interpersonal ties with people who you have

no blood relation to, which is the whole point of houses of the ball scene. The house that this

novel examines is the Xtravaganza family which was founded by Angel and Hector, and later

incorporates the characters, Venus, Juanito and finally Daniel.

 The entire novel follows these characters as they adopt one another into their lives,

Angel very much being the mother of the house, and Venus is equally in a position of being both

her daughter and sister. Through these close interpersonal relationships Cassara examines

what it means to be a family, with the grand narrative of western society assuming family is

nuclear, based on blood relation, with loyal ties to one another.

What do the individuals who are marginalized by those same meta narratives do? Are

they not worthy of family? The way they reconcile losing their traditional families due to not

fitting into society’s views of normal is by creating a new normal from those like them. This is

seen in the love that each of the characters creates with one another, with the way that Angel

takes in Venus, Juanito and Daniel in turn and the love that those three characters cultivate

with one another.

However Cassara isn’t attempting to overthrow one meta narrative, of traditional families,

with another binary opposition of found families. In true post modernist style he combines both

the grand narrative with its opposite, both existing in conflict and paradoxical nature at the same

time, which is most evident with Angel, and her relationship with her biological brother Miguel

who accepts her gender with open arms and remains in close contact with her for all of his life,

even as she forms family with other characters after leaving home.

Throughout the novel through a significant amount of literary aspects Joseph Cassara is

implementing post modern theories and critiques into his narrative in order to challenge and

provide solutions to the grand narratives we as a culture have consumed. Cassara instead

urges us to look into the micro narratives, the individual experiences for our sense of truth and

understanding of the world around us, especially when it comes to gender, love and family.