It has taken a while for a book-length study of Kurt Cobain's writings to appear. Since his death in 1994, the academic reception of his work has largely been sociological. For example, the major scholarly publication on Cobain to date is Jennifer Otter Bickerdike's Fandom and Authenticity: Joy Devotion and the Second Lives of Kurt Cobain and Ian Curtis (2014). Bickerdike explores how Cobain's image has travelled through popular culture in comparison with that of another musician who died young, Joy Division's Ian Curtis. There have been exceptions to this sociological approach, such as articles by Jessica L. Wood (2011) and Arthur Flannigan Saint-Aubin (2013), both of which examine Cobain's posthumously published Journals (2002). With The Pleasures of Death: Kurt Cobain's Masochistic and Melancholic Persona, Saint-Aubin builds on his 2013 piece to assess Cobain's status as a literary figure. Drawing on his expertise in psychoanalytic aesthetics, masculinity studies, and French Romantic poetry, Saint-Aubin sets out with one question in particular: “How does Cobain succeed so uncannily in creating the persona of a young, white, heterosexual man who seeks self-destruction as the ultimate act of pleasure?” (1). His answer takes him through some of the singer's most famous and most obscure lyrics, as well as the sundry materials that make up Journals. In short, Saint-Aubin argues that Cobain's masochistic and melancholic persona challenges hegemonic white masculinity. It does so by taking pleasure in the violent destruction of male corporeality.

An illustrative example of this thesis is Saint-Aubin's reading of “Beeswax,” a song from Nirvana's 1992 compilation album Incesticide. Focussing on the lyric “I got my diddly spayed” (quoted at 105) which Cobain sings throughout the chorus, Saint-Aubin notes that “in this song, not only does the narrator voluntarily submit to a female operation, he is, or desires to be, the receptive partner in intercourse with another man” (106). Indeed, Cobain's career-long interest in depicting a “male body … possessing a ‘feminine,’ receptive function” (106) leads Saint-Aubin to describe his work as “testerical” (58, italics in original). Having theorized this term elsewhere as the male version of “hysterical,” Saint-Aubin uses it here to designate the presence in Cobain's work of a “feminine or feminized self [that] cannot be separated from the experiences of a body that is depicted as composed of decidedly male parts” (58, italics in original). Cobain's attempt to feminize what he presents as an intractably male body thus “call[s] into question the logic of conventional gender categories” (58). However, if Cobain is boldly “antimacho and antiphallic” (102) in this respect, Saint-Aubin finds his approach to racial identity less productive. Discussing Journals, he explains how Cobain identifies with an abject blackness that he sees in the legendary blues singer Lead Belly. This identification strengthens Cobain's investment in his own “reprobate whiteness” (165), thereby undermining his otherwise stringent antiracism by confirming essentialist ideas of black and white masculinity.

Saint-Aubin's attentiveness to how race, sexuality, and gender intersect helps to reveal the complexity of Cobain's writings, which at first blush can seem sophomoric, even juvenile. More ambitiously, Saint-Aubin also argues that Cobain's work can address the patriarchal blind spots in psychoanalytic accounts of masochism and melancholy. For example, he suggests that Cobain's texts “belie the privilege, plenitude, and authority of the masculine subject by ascribing to him the very lack that psychoanalytic theory displaces onto the female subject” (180). Hence the ways in which Cobain glorifies rather than disavows castration help to broadcast “the utter nonalignment of phallus and penis” (181), revelling masochistically in the failure to live up to hegemonic ideas of masculinity. Saint-Aubin furthers this reading in his examination of melancholy, where he provocatively reads the singer's suicide note as another instantiation of the Cobain persona. Even here, though, he is at pains to “take a different strategy from previous writers who have commented on Cobain's writings only to the extent that these texts describe or seem to explain the events and circumstances of his real life” (60). The goal for Saint-Aubin is not to put the historical Kurt Cobain on the analyst's couch (however fascinating that would be), but to show the mutually explicative potential of his writings and psychoanalytic theory.

“Persona,” therefore, is the most important term in this book's title. By emphasizing the fact that Cobain is creating a character of sorts in his lyrics and journal entries, Saint-Aubin moves beyond the preoccupation with personal authenticity that characterizes the vast majority of existing scholarship on the singer. Consequently, The Pleasures of Death succeeds not only in making the case for Cobain's worth as a literary figure, but also in spotlighting the texts rather than the man as a site for further scholarly investigation.