This chapter takes up a half-forgotten novel fragment of 1941-2 by André Malraux based on first-hand accounts from the 1914 War, as well as two, neglected photographs of targeted civilian casualties of poison gas made in a Macedonian town in 1917 by the German Jewish criminologist R. A. Reiss. It moves beyond conventional archives to uncover complex histories, interweaving cultural artifacts with archival material to represent at two distinct moments the experimental poison gas war on the eastern front. Prussic acid -- by 1917, the base for an early form of Zyklon – provides the constant in these episodes. Eastern Europe, an area historically associated with colonialism and post-colonialism, furnished the choice terrain in 1915-17 of poison gas warfare, and so, premonitions of a Nazi continental imperialism which relied on gas, a weapon designed for colonial use, to enforce racial hierarchies. These cultural artifacts –Malraux’s Bolimów/Bolgako and Reiss’s Monástir -- map the head of the “Zyklon trail,” in Lemkin’s phrase. The experimental poison gas war on the eastern front substitutes premonitory vistas for the classic, western battlescapes of Wilfred Owen’s poetry by redrawing the templates and boundaries of the developmental logic of Nazi “scientific violence” amidst occupation, subjugation, and ethnic/racial warfare.

This chapter queries the notion of “the queer essay” and the idea of the essay as an intrinsically queer form. The author considers a particular tradition of essays in which “queer literary critics writ[e] about famous queer literary critics,” with emphasis on Terry Castle’s memoir of Susan Sontag, focusing on the desire for the writer to “come out” in an essay, a form by its very nature not interested in the full, disclosive out.

This chapter offers a a brief survey of Mailer’s ongoing artistic responses and reactions to the postmodern period. Mailer is indebted to his Modernist predecessors but also experiments with perspective and structure in a way that aligns him more closely with definitions of Postmodernism. While this is most evident in his avant-garde films, it is also apparent in the self-referential nature and thematic focus of his nonfiction, as well as in his preoccupation with notions of metamorphosis.