Queer Cryptograms, Anarchist Cyphers: Decoding Dennis Cooper’s The Marbled Swarm: A Novel

Concentrating on Dennis Cooper’s latest work, The Marbled Swarm: A Novel, a fiendishly complex, experimental tale of murder and cannibalism in Cooper’s adopted home city of Paris, I show that both the subject of the text and its formal architecture are suspended between twin principles of secrecy and concealment. I argue that a consideration of these secret strategies allows us to perceive the implicit connections between Cooper’s writing and communities of queer dissidents and anarchist dissenters who used similar covert techniques in earlier centuries in order to persist in the face of public prosecution. Following an in-depth historical appraisal of these modes of communication, and their provenance in the back-streets of Paris, London and New York, I conclude by considering the contemporary significance of Cooper’s most recent novel