When I think about how the monstrous acts of men have affected my consumption and love of the art they made, I think about a scene in High Fidelity, the tragically short-lived television adaptation of the film of the same title, which aired in Hulu in 2020 and stars Zoë Kravitz the Crown Heights record store owner Rob, in a remarkably self-effacing performance.
In the show’s second episode, a blonde twenty-something is trying to buy Michael Jackson’s 1979 record Off The Wall, which was produced by Quincy Jones, for her boyfriend. Cherise, who works at the store, refuses to sell it to her, saying she is someone "who clearly has never been on the internet before."
"How does it benefit society to hold Quincy's genius hostage just because the dude who sang over his sh*t ended up being a full-blown child molester?" Rob responds. “Alleged,” the blonde girl says. Rob bows out and leaves her employees to play rock, paper, scissors to decide the record’s fate. Whether or not they sell it is the least interesting thing about this scene.
There have always been monstrous men. In 2017, the #MeToo movement, which was founded by Tarana Burke in 2006, exploded, offering up the Internet as a public place to talk about them.
Claire Dederer had been preoccupied with the topic for a few years already. She started writing Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, an extraordinary and ambitious study of the slippery problems of biography when it comes to consuming art, in 2014.
For Dederer, few things are as sacred as art. She wasn’t so quick to toss her Woody Allen books in the Little Free Libraries in her Pacific Northwest neighborhood. It is rare, she explains, to feel truly moved, and it is a complicated decision to cast aside people whose work truly moves us.
“That idea of looking at something in as clear-eyed a way as possible, that's how I want to look at art, but it's also what the book is trying to do,” Dederer tells NYLON. “The book is not meant to be prescriptive. It is meant to be descriptive of what happens inside us as we, or me, a person, as I navigate this problem.”
The last several years have sometimes felt, to me, like one impossible math problem: weighing out the math of watching a Roman Polanski film; laughing at a Louis C.K. joke; or enjoying a Picasso painting in the wake of revelations around acts of monstrosity. Dederer encourages herself to avoid the “we,” so I will say that I often feel tempted to throw my hands up and abdicate responsibility, to say “It’s complicated!” and leave it at that.
But Dederer dove in headfirst – and what she found is a gray area that neoliberalism generally tries to avoid. It’s a book that’s not afraid to say, “I don’t know,” written by an author who isn’t afraid of her mind changing as she unpacks everything from Woody Allen’s Manhattan to Vladimir Nobokov’s Lolita to J.K. Rowling, full stop. Most notably, the book’s greatest feat is in its refusal to spit out any absolutes. It will not give you an answer to the math equation that plagues a lot of us: “I wished someone would invent an online calculator — the user would enter the name of an artist, whereupon the calculator would assess the heinousness of the crime versus the greatness of the art and spit out a verdict,” Dederer writes. “You could or could not consume the work of this artist. A calculator is laughable, unthinkable.”
Dederer doesn’t tell us what the outcomes of our own equations should be; she tells us to throw the math problem out entirely. After all, these are issues of feeling. Dederer doesn’t want anything, ultimately, to affect her ability to consume and appreciate art, stained and all. “We're lucky,” Dederer says, “to love something.”
NYLON spoke with Dederer about how she is protecting her relationship with art now, and why she thinks the number one artist that people ask for permission to still love is David Bowie.
How do you think that writing has changed you or how you look at art now?
Because of this special role I now have as somebody who's thought about this really hard for years, I feel like I have almost a more intensified experience of what we all have, which is I have this feeling of: I want to protect my experience of art from what I know. This idea of biography falls on our heads all day long. We can't escape it. We're constantly experiencing art within the context of biography. In some ways, the way that I use the word biography in the book is almost as a perfect synonym for the internet, because they're so one and the same in my mind. I think that that relationship that we have with the internet and biography is unavoidable, that's the problem.
But coming out of the book, what I almost have is a sense of urgency about protecting my relationship with art, not just from biography, but from my own performance of consumption, my own performance of identification with the victims. These things don't really help anyone, per se. It's important to listen to victims, but that's different from consuming art in a performative way. I guess what I'm thinking about is the idea of: how do I protect my art love from being public, and how do I move through the world in a way that is allowing things to happen? I use this line from Shirley Hazzard in the epigraph, where I talk about the submission required by art. I think oftentimes that that's my desire, is to be more inside that submission. Where I'm not performing my reaction to it, or constantly measuring it against the biography, but then I'm allowing myself to be moved in that way.
Do you ever want to just totally disassociate yourself from the conversation? Do you feel like that's something that you would even be able to do at this point?
I definitely think it's something I can do, and yes, I'm happy to have the conversation insofar as it then becomes a useful way to look at the problem for other people. But I also feel that I do have the power to escape it, I do have the power to listen to music or go to the museum or read a book and undergo that submission.
I went to the Chicago Art Institute the other day and I sort of jogged through the Picasso rooms. I was on my way to look at a special exhibition of Dalí's work there. I walked through Dalí and I just couldn't escape the conversation while I was in that room, about history, about biography. I left, and I went and wandered around a bunch of other galleries and was able to move from this more determined conversation into that more porous, submissive, transported kind of experience that real looking actually involves.
I always think about this book by Lawrence Weschler about the minimalist artist Robert Irwin. The title of the book is something Irwin once said, which is “Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees.” I feel like that's so much the ideal state. I think that doesn't mean we ignore the biography, I think that it's okay to have a complicated seeing. I think it's okay to know, I think it's good to listen to people when they say something awful has happened, and then also, it's good to try to really apprehend the work as it is.
As an artist yourself, there is that chapter called “Am I A Monster?” I'm curious why you wanted to interrogate your own monstrosity.
I'm going to say an absolute thing, which is very unlike me, but I don't think that you can be a good memoirist and not self-indict. I think that if you're writing about something, or looking at a topic as a memoirist, you have to turn the pointing finger back at yourself. It was a very natural place for me to go as somebody who’s written a memoir. I would say that there's a couple intellectual and political projects in the book, and one of them is to subvert the idea of critical authority and carry a banner for subjectivity, to carry a banner for the idea that we're all writing out of our own subjectivity. It was really important for me that the book reflect that subjectivity in its form, in its structure. I wanted to reinforce that idea in the way the book itself was made, and so that was one of the other reasons I came back to “Am I A Monster?”
The fact that so many people asked: “Can I still listen to Bowie?” really stuck with me. Can you talk about the role of the fan who gets something so visceral out of someone’s art?
I think he does feel so important in terms of that mysterious thing that happens when you're very young, where music simultaneously makes you more your individual self, and also makes you part of a group, whether real or imagined. It's this simultaneous affirmation of your solo identity, and then a belonging to this race of aliens that he seems to belong to. He really captures that, and I think that's why he feels so important to people.
Something about those synapses firing when you're young makes it so much harder to let go of something that you deeply love and feel seen by.
When I think about how the monstrous acts of men have
affected my consumption and love of the art they made, I think about a scene in
High Fidelity, the tragically short-lived television adaptation of the film of
the same title, which aired in Hulu in 2020 and stars Zoë Kravitz the Crown
Heights record store owner Rob, in a remarkably self-effacing performance.
In the show’s second episode, a blonde twenty-something is trying to buy Michael Jackson’s 1979 record Off The Wall, which was produced by Quincy Jones, for her boyfriend. Cherise, who works at the store, refuses to sell it to her, saying she is someone "who clearly has never been on the internet before."
"How does it benefit society to hold Quincy's genius hostage just because the dude who sang over his sh*t ended up being a full-blown child molester?" Rob responds. “Alleged,” the blonde girl says. Rob bows out and leaves her employees to play rock, paper, scissors to decide the record’s fate. Whether or not they sell it is the least interesting thing about this scene.
There have always been monstrous men. In 2017, the #MeToo movement, which was founded by Tarana Burke in 2006, exploded, offering up the Internet as a public place to talk about them.
Claire Dederer had been preoccupied with the topic for a few years already. She started writing Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, an extraordinary and ambitious study of the slippery problems of biography when it comes to consuming art, in 2014.
For Dederer, few things are as sacred as art. She wasn’t so quick to toss her Woody Allen books in the Little Free Libraries in her Pacific Northwest neighborhood. It is rare, she explains, to feel truly moved, and it is a complicated decision to cast aside people whose work truly moves us.
“That idea of looking at something in as clear-eyed a way as possible, that's how I want to look at art, but it's also what the book is trying to do,” Dederer tells NYLON. “The book is not meant to be prescriptive. It is meant to be descriptive of what happens inside us as we, or me, a person, as I navigate this problem.”
The last several years have sometimes felt, to me, like one impossible math problem: weighing out the math of watching a Roman Polanski film; laughing at a Louis C.K. joke; or enjoying a Picasso painting in the wake of revelations around acts of monstrosity. Dederer encourages herself to avoid the “we,” so I will say that I often feel tempted to throw my hands up and abdicate responsibility, to say “It’s complicated!” and leave it at that.
But Dederer dove in headfirst – and what she found is a gray area that neoliberalism generally tries to avoid. It’s a book that’s not afraid to say, “I don’t know,” written by an author who isn’t afraid of her mind changing as she unpacks everything from Woody Allen’s Manhattan to Vladimir Nobokov’s Lolita to J.K. Rowling, full stop. Most notably, the book’s greatest feat is in its refusal to spit out any absolutes. It will not give you an answer to the math equation that plagues a lot of us: “I wished someone would invent an online calculator — the user would enter the name of an artist, whereupon the calculator would assess the heinousness of the crime versus the greatness of the art and spit out a verdict,” Dederer writes. “You could or could not consume the work of this artist. A calculator is laughable, unthinkable.”
Dederer doesn’t tell us what the outcomes of our own equations should be; she tells us to throw the math problem out entirely. After all, these are issues of feeling. Dederer doesn’t want anything, ultimately, to affect her ability to consume and appreciate art, stained and all. “We're lucky,” Dederer says, “to love something.”
NYLON spoke with Dederer about how she is protecting her relationship with art now, and why she thinks the number one artist that people ask for permission to still love is David Bowie.
How do you think that writing has changed you or how you look at art now?
Because of this special role I now have as somebody who's thought about this really hard for years, I feel like I have almost a more intensified experience of what we all have, which is I have this feeling of: I want to protect my experience of art from what I know. This idea of biography falls on our heads all day long. We can't escape it. We're constantly experiencing art within the context of biography. In some ways, the way that I use the word biography in the book is almost as a perfect synonym for the internet, because they're so one and the same in my mind. I think that that relationship that we have with the internet and biography is unavoidable, that's the problem.
But coming out of the book, what I almost have is a sense of urgency about protecting my relationship with art, not just from biography, but from my own performance of consumption, my own performance of identification with the victims. These things don't really help anyone, per se. It's important to listen to victims, but that's different from consuming art in a performative way. I guess what I'm thinking about is the idea of: how do I protect my art love from being public, and how do I move through the world in a way that is allowing things to happen? I use this line from Shirley Hazzard in the epigraph, where I talk about the submission required by art. I think oftentimes that that's my desire, is to be more inside that submission. Where I'm not performing my reaction to it, or constantly measuring it against the biography, but then I'm allowing myself to be moved in that way.
Do you ever want to just totally disassociate yourself from the conversation? Do you feel like that's something that you would even be able to do at this point?
I definitely think it's something I can do, and yes, I'm happy to have the conversation insofar as it then becomes a useful way to look at the problem for other people. But I also feel that I do have the power to escape it, I do have the power to listen to music or go to the museum or read a book and undergo that submission.
I went to the Chicago Art Institute the other day and I sort of jogged through the Picasso rooms. I was on my way to look at a special exhibition of Dalí's work there. I walked through Dalí and I just couldn't escape the conversation while I was in that room, about history, about biography. I left, and I went and wandered around a bunch of other galleries and was able to move from this more determined conversation into that more porous, submissive, transported kind of experience that real looking actually involves.
I always think about this book by Lawrence Weschler about the minimalist artist Robert Irwin. The title of the book is something Irwin once said, which is “Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees.” I feel like that's so much the ideal state. I think that doesn't mean we ignore the biography, I think that it's okay to have a complicated seeing. I think it's okay to know, I think it's good to listen to people when they say something awful has happened, and then also, it's good to try to really apprehend the work as it is.
As an artist yourself, there is that chapter called “Am I A Monster?” I'm curious why you wanted to interrogate your own monstrosity.
I'm going to say an absolute thing, which is very unlike me, but I don't think that you can be a good memoirist and not self-indict. I think that if you're writing about something, or looking at a topic as a memoirist, you have to turn the pointing finger back at yourself. It was a very natural place for me to go as somebody who’s written a memoir. I would say that there's a couple intellectual and political projects in the book, and one of them is to subvert the idea of critical authority and carry a banner for subjectivity, to carry a banner for the idea that we're all writing out of our own subjectivity. It was really important for me that the book reflect that subjectivity in its form, in its structure. I wanted to reinforce that idea in the way the book itself was made, and so that was one of the other reasons I came back to “Am I A Monster?”
In the show’s second episode, a blonde twenty-something is trying to buy Michael Jackson’s 1979 record Off The Wall, which was produced by Quincy Jones, for her boyfriend. Cherise, who works at the store, refuses to sell it to her, saying she is someone "who clearly has never been on the internet before."
"How does it benefit society to hold Quincy's genius hostage just because the dude who sang over his sh*t ended up being a full-blown child molester?" Rob responds. “Alleged,” the blonde girl says. Rob bows out and leaves her employees to play rock, paper, scissors to decide the record’s fate. Whether or not they sell it is the least interesting thing about this scene.
There have always been monstrous men. In 2017, the #MeToo movement, which was founded by Tarana Burke in 2006, exploded, offering up the Internet as a public place to talk about them.
Claire Dederer had been preoccupied with the topic for a few years already. She started writing Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, an extraordinary and ambitious study of the slippery problems of biography when it comes to consuming art, in 2014.
For Dederer, few things are as sacred as art. She wasn’t so quick to toss her Woody Allen books in the Little Free Libraries in her Pacific Northwest neighborhood. It is rare, she explains, to feel truly moved, and it is a complicated decision to cast aside people whose work truly moves us.
“That idea of looking at something in as clear-eyed a way as possible, that's how I want to look at art, but it's also what the book is trying to do,” Dederer tells NYLON. “The book is not meant to be prescriptive. It is meant to be descriptive of what happens inside us as we, or me, a person, as I navigate this problem.”
The last several years have sometimes felt, to me, like one impossible math problem: weighing out the math of watching a Roman Polanski film; laughing at a Louis C.K. joke; or enjoying a Picasso painting in the wake of revelations around acts of monstrosity. Dederer encourages herself to avoid the “we,” so I will say that I often feel tempted to throw my hands up and abdicate responsibility, to say “It’s complicated!” and leave it at that.
But Dederer dove in headfirst – and what she found is a gray area that neoliberalism generally tries to avoid. It’s a book that’s not afraid to say, “I don’t know,” written by an author who isn’t afraid of her mind changing as she unpacks everything from Woody Allen’s Manhattan to Vladimir Nobokov’s Lolita to J.K. Rowling, full stop. Most notably, the book’s greatest feat is in its refusal to spit out any absolutes. It will not give you an answer to the math equation that plagues a lot of us: “I wished someone would invent an online calculator — the user would enter the name of an artist, whereupon the calculator would assess the heinousness of the crime versus the greatness of the art and spit out a verdict,” Dederer writes. “You could or could not consume the work of this artist. A calculator is laughable, unthinkable.”
Dederer doesn’t tell us what the outcomes of our own equations should be; she tells us to throw the math problem out entirely. After all, these are issues of feeling. Dederer doesn’t want anything, ultimately, to affect her ability to consume and appreciate art, stained and all. “We're lucky,” Dederer says, “to love something.”
NYLON spoke with Dederer about how she is protecting her relationship with art now, and why she thinks the number one artist that people ask for permission to still love is David Bowie.
How do you think that writing has changed you or how you look at art now?
Because of this special role I now have as somebody who's thought about this really hard for years, I feel like I have almost a more intensified experience of what we all have, which is I have this feeling of: I want to protect my experience of art from what I know. This idea of biography falls on our heads all day long. We can't escape it. We're constantly experiencing art within the context of biography. In some ways, the way that I use the word biography in the book is almost as a perfect synonym for the internet, because they're so one and the same in my mind. I think that that relationship that we have with the internet and biography is unavoidable, that's the problem.
But coming out of the book, what I almost have is a sense of urgency about protecting my relationship with art, not just from biography, but from my own performance of consumption, my own performance of identification with the victims. These things don't really help anyone, per se. It's important to listen to victims, but that's different from consuming art in a performative way. I guess what I'm thinking about is the idea of: how do I protect my art love from being public, and how do I move through the world in a way that is allowing things to happen? I use this line from Shirley Hazzard in the epigraph, where I talk about the submission required by art. I think oftentimes that that's my desire, is to be more inside that submission. Where I'm not performing my reaction to it, or constantly measuring it against the biography, but then I'm allowing myself to be moved in that way.
Do you ever want to just totally disassociate yourself from the conversation? Do you feel like that's something that you would even be able to do at this point?
I definitely think it's something I can do, and yes, I'm happy to have the conversation insofar as it then becomes a useful way to look at the problem for other people. But I also feel that I do have the power to escape it, I do have the power to listen to music or go to the museum or read a book and undergo that submission.
I went to the Chicago Art Institute the other day and I sort of jogged through the Picasso rooms. I was on my way to look at a special exhibition of Dalí's work there. I walked through Dalí and I just couldn't escape the conversation while I was in that room, about history, about biography. I left, and I went and wandered around a bunch of other galleries and was able to move from this more determined conversation into that more porous, submissive, transported kind of experience that real looking actually involves.
I always think about this book by Lawrence Weschler about the minimalist artist Robert Irwin. The title of the book is something Irwin once said, which is “Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees.” I feel like that's so much the ideal state. I think that doesn't mean we ignore the biography, I think that it's okay to have a complicated seeing. I think it's okay to know, I think it's good to listen to people when they say something awful has happened, and then also, it's good to try to really apprehend the work as it is.
As an artist yourself, there is that chapter called “Am I A Monster?” I'm curious why you wanted to interrogate your own monstrosity.
I'm going to say an absolute thing, which is very unlike me, but I don't think that you can be a good memoirist and not self-indict. I think that if you're writing about something, or looking at a topic as a memoirist, you have to turn the pointing finger back at yourself. It was a very natural place for me to go as somebody who’s written a memoir. I would say that there's a couple intellectual and political projects in the book, and one of them is to subvert the idea of critical authority and carry a banner for subjectivity, to carry a banner for the idea that we're all writing out of our own subjectivity. It was really important for me that the book reflect that subjectivity in its form, in its structure. I wanted to reinforce that idea in the way the book itself was made, and so that was one of the other reasons I came back to “Am I A Monster?”
The fact that so many people asked: “Can I still listen to Bowie?” really stuck with me. Can you talk about the role of the fan who gets something so visceral out of someone’s art?
I think he does feel so important in terms of that mysterious thing that happens when you're very young, where music simultaneously makes you more your individual self, and also makes you part of a group, whether real or imagined. It's this simultaneous affirmation of your solo identity, and then a belonging to this race of aliens that he seems to belong to. He really captures that, and I think that's why he feels so important to people.
Something about those synapses firing when you're young makes it so much harder to let go of something that you deeply love and feel seen by.
It's interesting to think about this idea that maybe we let go of those things when we're older because we're just hanging onto nostalgia. At the same time, maybe the young have a different responsibility, because they are in the throes of this often very painful identity formation, and they need the help of art. They feel things so deeply; they need art, in a way that honestly I feel is a model for how I want my relationship to art to be, because they are undergoing that submission that Shirley Hazzard's talking about. And to me, that's a dream to be in that state. When I find myself in that state as a middle-aged person, I'm thrilled.
Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma Explores the Grey Area of Bad Artists. By Sophia June. Nylon, May 17, 2023.
Abuse of artistic genius comes as no surprise. For
hundreds of years, the work of some of humanity’s most accomplished (and
overwhelmingly male) artists has been tainted by their monstrous biographies,
from Wagner, to Miles Davis, to Kanye West, from Gauguin and Pablo Picasso, to Woody
Allen and Roman Polanski. Their crimes vary in scale and subject, but time and
time again the monsters’ behaviour raises the same questions: how do they keep
getting away with it? And what keeps us coming back to their art, “even after
everything”?
In 2017, the critic and essayist Claire Dederer posed these questions in an article for the Paris Review, “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?”. This was weeks after the New York Times published a damning investigation into Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual assault – triggering the “American #MeToo explosion” – though Dederer had already been writing a book on the subject for some time. As a result, the article was dropped into a polarised landscape of hot takes and open wounds, where an ambiguous approach to historic injustice could easily have fallen flat.
“I had really started working on the book the year previous to [the article’s publication], but all of a sudden it was this free-floating piece and people were really excited about it, or they were getting in arguments with it,” Dederer tells Dazed. “As a writer, to have a lot of attention on something that you’re then going to develop is a little bit daunting. As a citizen, or a person, it was exciting [...] to think that nuance could find an audience. It made me feel more hopeful about my fellow humans.”
Almost six years later, the book itself has finally arrived, in the form of Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. Charting Dederer’s relationship to the artists whose work she’s admired over the course of her life, and how this admiration has been changed (or, more controversially, not changed) by grim biographical revelations, Monsters doesn’t seek to answer the question of what we do with the art of monstrous men, exactly. Instead, the book asks how it is that we can continue to enjoy their work – and that of monstrous women, too – in light of these uncomfortable truths.
How can we continue to dance to David Bowie, when we know he slept with underage fans? How can we watch Rosemary’s Baby, knowing about Polanski’s sexual abuse? Was Joni Mitchell’s music worth putting her child up for adoption? (One of these things is not like the others.) “I’m struggling, honestly, with my love of the work,” Dederer says.
Below, we speak to Dederer about her dislike of the phrase “cancel culture”, the discomfort of loving art made by monsters, and how, ultimately, it could help us locate the monstrousness within ourselves.
Monsters is a very nuanced response to a conversation that was, and still is, dominated by hot takes. How did you resist the pull of that discourse?
Claire Dederer: I am just a very naturally wobbly thinker. I’m somebody who’s thinking about grey areas a lot. I became concerned a couple of years into the writing of the book that I was being ambivalent out of fear of the internet, so that was a really interesting moment where I had to look at what I was writing and say, ‘Am I not taking a side on this because I’m afraid of what will happen if I do?’ But I realised it would be just as false to allow the fear of seeming ambivalent to push me into black-and-white thinking.
Roman Polanski and Woody Allen are two recurring monsters in the book, and you boldly admit to enjoying their work ‘even after everything’. How have you come to terms with that contradiction, and how does it feel to share it publicly?
Clair Dederer: The Paris Review piece [was titled] ‘What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?’ – it’s a brilliant title, and I didn’t write it. But it sort of suggests I’m going to have an answer for you. When I was working on the book, I was more interested in a depiction of the experience of continuing to love the work and wanting to consume the work.
It didn’t feel exposing or nervous-making to write about that, because I was approaching it more as a literary writer might, where I’m looking at the landscape of the experience and what’s really happening when there is beloved work and this terrible knowledge. That took me out of the discomfort. It was just my job to keep going, trying to understand what was happening.
The monstrousness of other figures, like David Bowie, is maybe more contentious.
Claire Dederer: Bowie was always fascinating, because, to me, he had never been stained. I knew that he had had sex with young groupies, but it somehow just bounced off of him. Maybe that was just because I required him so much. As a weird kid, and as someone who was struggling with my own identity, he was so important.
What was interesting was the audience change, for young people. They were really troubled by this knowledge about Bowie. That was one of the fascinating things about him as a character, the way his perception shifted from me, who is 56, to a 20-year-old who was really troubled by this knowledge. We can write off the concerns of the young and say that it’s ‘cancel culture’ or use other dismissive words, but I think the young have been steeped in this moral quandary, and they take it so much more seriously. It’s part of what they’ve experienced growing up on the internet. It was interesting to see something that didn’t trouble me that much, trouble them so much.
What do you think makes some ‘stains’ stick, and others vanish in the wash?
Claire Dederer: One thing that sticks is when someone’s persona is really close to the crime. I think that’s why people find Woody Allen so unsettling, because the work itself reflects the thing that we came to learn about him, right? If you look at Bill Cosby, it’s the exact opposite. It’s kind of at the other end of the spectrum, where his persona is so counter to what he’s been accused of. It can be sticky in different ways, but often it’s when there’s either adjacency or really strong contrast.
In 2017, the critic and essayist Claire Dederer posed these questions in an article for the Paris Review, “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?”. This was weeks after the New York Times published a damning investigation into Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual assault – triggering the “American #MeToo explosion” – though Dederer had already been writing a book on the subject for some time. As a result, the article was dropped into a polarised landscape of hot takes and open wounds, where an ambiguous approach to historic injustice could easily have fallen flat.
“I had really started working on the book the year previous to [the article’s publication], but all of a sudden it was this free-floating piece and people were really excited about it, or they were getting in arguments with it,” Dederer tells Dazed. “As a writer, to have a lot of attention on something that you’re then going to develop is a little bit daunting. As a citizen, or a person, it was exciting [...] to think that nuance could find an audience. It made me feel more hopeful about my fellow humans.”
Almost six years later, the book itself has finally arrived, in the form of Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. Charting Dederer’s relationship to the artists whose work she’s admired over the course of her life, and how this admiration has been changed (or, more controversially, not changed) by grim biographical revelations, Monsters doesn’t seek to answer the question of what we do with the art of monstrous men, exactly. Instead, the book asks how it is that we can continue to enjoy their work – and that of monstrous women, too – in light of these uncomfortable truths.
How can we continue to dance to David Bowie, when we know he slept with underage fans? How can we watch Rosemary’s Baby, knowing about Polanski’s sexual abuse? Was Joni Mitchell’s music worth putting her child up for adoption? (One of these things is not like the others.) “I’m struggling, honestly, with my love of the work,” Dederer says.
Below, we speak to Dederer about her dislike of the phrase “cancel culture”, the discomfort of loving art made by monsters, and how, ultimately, it could help us locate the monstrousness within ourselves.
Monsters is a very nuanced response to a conversation that was, and still is, dominated by hot takes. How did you resist the pull of that discourse?
Claire Dederer: I am just a very naturally wobbly thinker. I’m somebody who’s thinking about grey areas a lot. I became concerned a couple of years into the writing of the book that I was being ambivalent out of fear of the internet, so that was a really interesting moment where I had to look at what I was writing and say, ‘Am I not taking a side on this because I’m afraid of what will happen if I do?’ But I realised it would be just as false to allow the fear of seeming ambivalent to push me into black-and-white thinking.
Roman Polanski and Woody Allen are two recurring monsters in the book, and you boldly admit to enjoying their work ‘even after everything’. How have you come to terms with that contradiction, and how does it feel to share it publicly?
Clair Dederer: The Paris Review piece [was titled] ‘What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?’ – it’s a brilliant title, and I didn’t write it. But it sort of suggests I’m going to have an answer for you. When I was working on the book, I was more interested in a depiction of the experience of continuing to love the work and wanting to consume the work.
It didn’t feel exposing or nervous-making to write about that, because I was approaching it more as a literary writer might, where I’m looking at the landscape of the experience and what’s really happening when there is beloved work and this terrible knowledge. That took me out of the discomfort. It was just my job to keep going, trying to understand what was happening.
The monstrousness of other figures, like David Bowie, is maybe more contentious.
Claire Dederer: Bowie was always fascinating, because, to me, he had never been stained. I knew that he had had sex with young groupies, but it somehow just bounced off of him. Maybe that was just because I required him so much. As a weird kid, and as someone who was struggling with my own identity, he was so important.
What was interesting was the audience change, for young people. They were really troubled by this knowledge about Bowie. That was one of the fascinating things about him as a character, the way his perception shifted from me, who is 56, to a 20-year-old who was really troubled by this knowledge. We can write off the concerns of the young and say that it’s ‘cancel culture’ or use other dismissive words, but I think the young have been steeped in this moral quandary, and they take it so much more seriously. It’s part of what they’ve experienced growing up on the internet. It was interesting to see something that didn’t trouble me that much, trouble them so much.
What do you think makes some ‘stains’ stick, and others vanish in the wash?
Claire Dederer: One thing that sticks is when someone’s persona is really close to the crime. I think that’s why people find Woody Allen so unsettling, because the work itself reflects the thing that we came to learn about him, right? If you look at Bill Cosby, it’s the exact opposite. It’s kind of at the other end of the spectrum, where his persona is so counter to what he’s been accused of. It can be sticky in different ways, but often it’s when there’s either adjacency or really strong contrast.
In the book, you take a critical approach to the phrase ‘cancel culture’. Why?
Claire Dederer: I think people need to have the power to say things that have happened to them. I think that’s really important. I think that we need to listen to accusers, and accusers need to have ways in which they can speak up. But I think that when we call that speaking up ‘cancel culture’, it’s a predetermined invalidation of those statements. It’s a way that we can put a framework around those statements to make them not matter. The term itself, ‘cancel culture’, is so loaded, and so dismissive, and has so many sediments of disdain for the right of these people to speak up. I really detest the phrase for that reason.
Monsters draws out the different conditions for ‘monstrousness’ in men and women. Why do you think the bar for women is so much lower than for men?
Claire Dederer: I think that women do most, if not all, of the nurturing, and a lot of the ways the world moves along are dependent on women doing the work of care. The often unpaid, often undervalued work of care. If women start to abandon the work of care, obviously, that needs to be monstered or made wrong, otherwise everything would just fall apart.
So I think that for women, abandoning the work of care in order to go to work, especially to try to make great art, can be seen as a bad thing and can be internalised by the woman as something to feel bad or guilty about. I was really interested in that tension between the crimes of commission that men are held to account for (or not held to account for) and then the crimes of omission that women are held to account for, which is just, like, not showing up 100 per cent to be caregivers.
And why do you think we don’t see women ascending to the same monstrous heights as the men?
Claire Dederer: So much monstrous behaviour comes from having access to power, to money, to people, to do all of these things. I would love to think that other kinds of people would be better if they were given all that lavish amount of power, but I think that it just comes from their access.
The goalposts for what we find monstrous are constantly shifting. How do you think we can navigate this landscape? Does calling out monstrous artists necessarily open us up to claims of hypocrisy?
Claire Dederer: Let’s turn your question inside out: should we not point out injustice, because we’re worried that it will make us more vulnerable? When you put it that way, the answer is clearly no. We should definitely continue to point out injustice, even though it does make us vulnerable.
Anybody who’s ever had a family and been a leftist or a liberal knows what it is to be making a point and have somebody point out your hypocrisy. It’s an inevitable byproduct of wanting things to be better. There’s always going to be the bad faith argument. A subterranean theme of this book is wanting to engage in a good faith way with the world. There are going to be bad faith arguments against my book, but I had to keep writing for the good faith reader.
Monsters also dispels the myth that we’ve reached the apex of moral and political development, as suggested by thinkers like Francis Fukuyama in the 90s. Could you talk a bit about your own realisation that we aren’t the pinnacle of cultural evolution?
Claire Dederer: When I started writing, I was in a much less interrogative relationship with my own liberalism. I just thought, I’m a good person, people are good, I’m doing my best, and when people are bad, we need to call it out. Then, realising the terrible things that happen in the name of liberalism, even now, really radically altered my perspective. It put me in a much more interesting place in relationship to the subject matter.
When I’m looking back at a historical figure, I’m not thinking everything’s all better now, and that I’m looking back on it from this apex of post-Enlightenment liberalism. I can see that there were some people who knew better in the past, and some people who didn’t know better, and the same thing is the case now. The question then becomes: if you’re not better, what is it we’re not seeing or talking about now that we need to point out, that we need to do better? Rather than looking back on the past and saying, ‘Oh, I would have fought the Nazis’... what is it you’re not seeing now, or not doing now, that in 500 years would seem outrageous?
If a level of monstrousness is, on some level, necessary to make great art, do you think it’s worth the trade-off?
Claire Dederer: For the second half of the book, when I’m thinking about monstrousness and women, and the idea of monstrousness as something to aspire to, I’m looking at it as a kind of selfishness. I don’t think that fucking preteens or punching people in the nose are requirements for great art. I do think setting aside the work of care is. That can feel monstrous. I look at Doris Lessing and Joni Mitchell, and they’re listed as these abandoning mothers, but in many ways I’m looking at them as paradigmatic figures of who I want to be, because they found a way to make themselves great and sort of shut the door against caring.
I do think that is a necessary ingredient in great art. The invisible piece is [that] somebody else has to do the fucking caring, right? This gender essentialism, or this biological essentialism, that says that women, especially women of colour, are going to do all the caring, is actually the problem. The dichotomy I set up is between mother and artist, but really what I’m talking about is caregiver and self-expressor. That’s a universal problem, or should be a universal problem. If we could just get more people to do the care.
So it’s not a question of whether it’s worth it or not, as much as that it’s an inevitable fact of art?
Claire Dederer: Yeah. And how can we create systems where more people can have access to that time, money, power, or whatever is needed to express themselves?
Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma is out now via Sceptre.
Monsters: is it wrong to enjoy great art made by bad
people? By Thom Waite. Dazed, May 15, 2023.
Brad Listi: You say, when it comes to cancel culture,
this moment and the social media environment that we live in, I think in
particular as it applies to 2017 and after—the MeToo moment—you say, “This
trade-off is depressing and maybe even inhuman.” And the trade-off I think
you’re referring to is people being canceled and having to engage at this level
constantly. “The trade-off is depressing and maybe even inhuman, but to my
mind, it’s the bargain that’s on the table right now.
Some people endure shaming, deserved or undeserved, so that some other people can say what happened to them. Instead of accepting that bargain, we make up an insulting and increasingly dumb name—cancel culture—that invalidates half of the equation. The half where people are able to say something is wrong. Perhaps this is the wrong bargain. Probably it is. But this is the reality we live in.” And it goes on from there.
I just found that to be about as right of an assessment as one could honestly make. I mean, it’s complicated, right?
Claire Dederer: Yeah. That was the hardest passage to write in the whole book.
Brad Listi: Was it?
Claire Dederer: By far.
Brad Listi: Maybe that’s why I was drawn to it, because I’ve struggled to articulate that and I was like, oh somebody gave this a shot, like really dug in and tried.
Claire Dederer: I really tried. This book, if you were to be unkind about it, you could say it equivocate or wobbles. The book is really intended to operate like a book-length essay. I’m taking this problem and I’m walking around it, and simultaneously trying to build a trajectory, as you say, toward an attempt at a reconciliation of these various forces. But I am a person, a thinker, and a writer of deep ambivalence. There’s a lot of ambiguity in this book, and that is where I fall naturally. That’s why I’m a more essayistic person, though I have my polemical moments to point my finger.
What was hard in the book was, as I wrote in a really ambivalent and sort of complicated way about the subject—it took me five years to write the book, or six—I came to this moment a couple of years into the project where I was like, am I just afraid? Am I afraid if I take a specific stand, I’m going to get destroyed on Twitter? Am I equivocating? Am I ass-covering? I mean, let’s be real, that’s what we’re talking about. It was the most important moment in writing the book because I had to really think about giving a nuanced and balanced perspective, and whether it was honestly what I thought or if it was something I was doing for the bad faith reader.
Melissa Febos has this incredible interview where she talks about trying to teach her students to write for the good faith reader. Her students are sort of paralyzed sometimes by this inability to write in the Twitter era, or whatever it’s going to be next era. And she said, you have to put the bad faith reader out of your mind and just write toward that good faith reader. So I had this sort of come to Jesus watershed moment where I had to ask, am I dancing around this out of fear? Or am I really engaging in this very gray area, which is what I actually think?
That was great because I didn’t come out of it reflexively taking a stronger stand just to prove I was not scared. I recommitted myself to writing a book I believed was true rather than worrying about any of that other stuff. So then there was this work that took a really long time of going through every sentence in the book and saying, is this true? Do I believe it? Do I believe it? Do I believe it? And there was one spot that was just a squidgy, messy, muddy swamp. And it was this realization that I had to say what I thought about this whole concept of cancel culture. It’s sort of buried—I feel like I lead up to it in a chapter in a way that really makes sense to me, but it’s not a defining point in the book. It’s not a mission statement of the book. But it took me a year to write that one paragraph.
Claire Dederer on Embracing Ambiguity and Writing for the Good Faith Reader
In Conversation with Brad Listi on Otherppl. LitHub, April 25, 2023.
Some people endure shaming, deserved or undeserved, so that some other people can say what happened to them. Instead of accepting that bargain, we make up an insulting and increasingly dumb name—cancel culture—that invalidates half of the equation. The half where people are able to say something is wrong. Perhaps this is the wrong bargain. Probably it is. But this is the reality we live in.” And it goes on from there.
I just found that to be about as right of an assessment as one could honestly make. I mean, it’s complicated, right?
Claire Dederer: Yeah. That was the hardest passage to write in the whole book.
Brad Listi: Was it?
Claire Dederer: By far.
Brad Listi: Maybe that’s why I was drawn to it, because I’ve struggled to articulate that and I was like, oh somebody gave this a shot, like really dug in and tried.
Claire Dederer: I really tried. This book, if you were to be unkind about it, you could say it equivocate or wobbles. The book is really intended to operate like a book-length essay. I’m taking this problem and I’m walking around it, and simultaneously trying to build a trajectory, as you say, toward an attempt at a reconciliation of these various forces. But I am a person, a thinker, and a writer of deep ambivalence. There’s a lot of ambiguity in this book, and that is where I fall naturally. That’s why I’m a more essayistic person, though I have my polemical moments to point my finger.
What was hard in the book was, as I wrote in a really ambivalent and sort of complicated way about the subject—it took me five years to write the book, or six—I came to this moment a couple of years into the project where I was like, am I just afraid? Am I afraid if I take a specific stand, I’m going to get destroyed on Twitter? Am I equivocating? Am I ass-covering? I mean, let’s be real, that’s what we’re talking about. It was the most important moment in writing the book because I had to really think about giving a nuanced and balanced perspective, and whether it was honestly what I thought or if it was something I was doing for the bad faith reader.
Melissa Febos has this incredible interview where she talks about trying to teach her students to write for the good faith reader. Her students are sort of paralyzed sometimes by this inability to write in the Twitter era, or whatever it’s going to be next era. And she said, you have to put the bad faith reader out of your mind and just write toward that good faith reader. So I had this sort of come to Jesus watershed moment where I had to ask, am I dancing around this out of fear? Or am I really engaging in this very gray area, which is what I actually think?
That was great because I didn’t come out of it reflexively taking a stronger stand just to prove I was not scared. I recommitted myself to writing a book I believed was true rather than worrying about any of that other stuff. So then there was this work that took a really long time of going through every sentence in the book and saying, is this true? Do I believe it? Do I believe it? Do I believe it? And there was one spot that was just a squidgy, messy, muddy swamp. And it was this realization that I had to say what I thought about this whole concept of cancel culture. It’s sort of buried—I feel like I lead up to it in a chapter in a way that really makes sense to me, but it’s not a defining point in the book. It’s not a mission statement of the book. But it took me a year to write that one paragraph.
Claire Dederer on Embracing Ambiguity and Writing for the Good Faith Reader
In Conversation with Brad Listi on Otherppl. LitHub, April 25, 2023.
Watch and listen to the podcast Otherppl. April 23, 2023.
Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, William
Burroughs, Richard Wagner, Sid Vicious, V. S. Naipaul, John Galliano, Norman
Mailer, Ezra Pound, Caravaggio, Floyd Mayweather, though if we start listing
athletes we’ll never stop. And what about the women? The list immediately
becomes much more difficult and tentative: Anne Sexton? Joan Crawford? Sylvia
Plath? Does self-harm count? Okay, well, it’s back to the men I guess: Pablo
Picasso, Max Ernst, Lead Belly, Miles Davis, Phil Spector.
They did or said something awful, and made something great. The awful thing disrupts the great work; we can’t watch or listen to or read the great work without remembering the awful thing. Flooded with knowledge of the maker’s monstrousness, we turn away, overcome by disgust. Or … we don’t. We continue watching, separating or trying to separate the artist from the art. Either way: disruption. They are monster geniuses, and I don’t know what to do about them.
We’ve all been thinking about monsters in the Trump era. For me, it began a few years ago. I was researching Roman Polanski for a book I was writing and found myself awed by his monstrousness. It was monumental, like the Grand Canyon. And yet. When I watched his movies, their beauty was another kind of monument, impervious to my knowledge of his iniquities. I had exhaustively read about his rape of thirteen-year-old Samantha Gailey; I feel sure no detail on record remained unfamiliar to me. Despite this knowledge, I was still able to consume his work. Eager to. The more I researched Polanski, the more I became drawn to his films, and I watched them again and again—especially the major ones: Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown. Like all works of genius, they invited repetition. I ate them. They became part of me, the way something loved does.
I wasn’t supposed to love this work, or this man. He’s the object of boycotts and lawsuits and outrage. In the public’s mind, man and work seem to be the same thing. But are they? Ought we try to separate the art from the artist, the maker from the made? Do we undergo a willful forgetting when we want to listen to, say, Wagner’s Ring cycle? (Forgetting is easier for some than others; Wagner’s work has rarely been performed in Israel.) Or do we believe genius gets special dispensation, a behavioral hall pass?
And how does our answer change from situation to situation? Certain pieces of art seem to have been rendered inconsumable by their maker’s transgressions—how can one watch The Cosby Show after the rape allegations against Bill Cosby? I mean, obviously it’s technically doable, but are we even watching the show? Or are we taking in the spectacle of our own lost innocence?
And is it simply a matter of pragmatics? Do we withhold our support if the person is alive and therefore might benefit financially from our consumption of their work? Do we vote with our wallets? If so, is it okay to stream, say, a Roman Polanski movie for free? Can we, um, watch it at a friend’s house?
*
But hold up for a minute: Who is this “we” that’s always turning up in critical writing anyway? We is an escape hatch. We is cheap. We is a way of simultaneously sloughing off personal responsibility and taking on the mantle of easy authority. It’s the voice of the middle-brow male critic, the one who truly believes he knows how everyone else should think. We is corrupt. We is make-believe. The real question is this: can I love the art but hate the artist? Can you? When I say we, I mean I. I mean you.
*
I know Polanski is worse, whatever that means, and Cosby is more current. But for me the ur-monster is Woody Allen.
The men want to know why Woody Allen makes us so mad. Woody Allen slept with Soon-Yi Previn, the child of his life partner Mia Farrow. Soon-Yi was a very young adult the first time they slept together, and he the most famous film director in the world.
I took the fucking of Soon-Yi as a terrible betrayal of me personally. When I was young, I felt like Woody Allen. I intuited or believed he represented me on-screen. He was me. This is one of the peculiar aspects of his genius—this ability to stand in for the audience. The identification was exacerbated by the seeming powerlessness of his usual on-screen persona: skinny as a kid, short as a kid, confused by an uncaring, incomprehensible world. (Like Chaplin before him.) I felt closer to him than seems reasonable for a little girl to feel about a grown-up male filmmaker. In some mad way, I felt he belonged to me. I had always seen him as one of us, the powerless. Post-Soon-Yi, I saw him as a predator.
My response wasn’t logical; it was emotional.
*
One rainy afternoon, in the spring of 2017, I flopped down on the living-room couch and committed an act of transgression. No, not that one. What I did was, I on-demanded Annie Hall. It was easy. I just clicked the OK button on my massive universal remote and then rummaged around in a bag of cookies while the opening credits rolled. As acts of transgression go, it was pretty undramatic.
I had watched the movie at least a dozen times before, but even so, it charmed me all over again. Annie Hall is a jeu d’esprit, an Astaire soft shoe, a helium balloon straining at its ribbon. It’s a love story for people who don’t believe in love: Annie and Alvy come together, pull apart, come together, and then break up for good. Their relationship was pointless all along, and entirely worthwhile. Annie’s refrain of “la di da” is the governing spirit of the enterprise, the collection of nonsense syllables that give joyous expression to Allen’s dime-store existentialism. “La di da” means, Nothing matters. It means, Let’s have fun while we crash and burn. It means, Our hearts are going to break, isn’t it a lark?
Annie Hall is the greatest comic film of the twentieth century—better than Bringing Up Baby, better even than Caddyshack—because it acknowledges the irrepressible nihilism that lurks at the center of all comedy. Also, it’s really funny. To watch Annie Hall is to feel, for just a moment, that one belongs to humanity. Watching, you feel almost mugged by that sense of belonging. That fabricated connection can be more beautiful than love itself. And that’s what we call great art. In case you were wondering.
Look, I don’t get to go around feeling connected to humanity all the time. It’s a rare pleasure. And I’m supposed to give it up just because Woody Allen misbehaved? It hardly seems fair.
*
When I mentioned in passing I was writing about Allen, my friend Sara reported that she’d seen a Little Free Library in her neighborhood absolutely crammed to its tiny rafters with books by and about Allen. It made us both laugh—the mental image of some furious, probably female, fan who just couldn’t bear the sight of those books any longer and stuffed them all in the cute little house.
Then Sara grew wistful: “I don’t know where to put all my feelings about Woody Allen,” she said. Well, exactly.
*
I told another smart friend that I was writing about Woody Allen. “I have very many thoughts about Woody Allen!” she said, all excited to share. We were drinking wine on her porch and she settled in, the late afternoon light illuminating her face. “I’m so mad at him! I was already pissed at him over the Soon-Yi thing, and then came the—what’s the kid’s name—Dylan? Then came the Dylan allegations, and the horrible dismissive statements he made about that. And I hate the way he talks about Soon-Yi, always going on about how he’s enriched her life.”
This, I think, is what happens to so many of us when we consider the work of the monster geniuses—we tell ourselves we’re having ethical thoughts when really what we’re having is moral feelings. We put words around these feelings and call them opinions: “What Woody Allen did was very wrong.” And feelings come from someplace more elemental than thought. The fact was this: I felt upset by the story of Woody and Soon-Yi. I wasn’t thinking; I was feeling. I was affronted, personally somehow.
*
Here’s how to have some complicated emotions: watch Manhattan.
Like many—many what? many women? many mothers? many former girls? many moral feelers?—I have been unable to watch Manhattan for years. A few months back, when I started thinking about Woody Allen qua monster, I watched nearly every other movie he’s ever made before I faced the fact that I would, at some point, have to watch Manhattan.
And finally the day came. As I settled in on my nice couch in my comfortable living room, the Cosby trial was taking place. It was June of 2017. My husband, who has a Nordic flair for quiet drama, suggested I toggle between watching the Cosby trials and Manhattan so as to construct a kind of meta-narrative of monstrousness. But my husband’s austere Northern European sense of showmanship came to naught, for the Cosby trial wasn’t in fact televised.
Even so, it was out there happening.
The mood that summer was one of extreme discomfort. Just a general feeling of not-quite-rightness. People, and by people I mean women, were unsettled and unhappy. They met on the streets and looked at one another and shook their heads and walked away wordlessly. The women had had it. The women went on a giant fed-up march. The women were Facebooking and Tweeting, going for long furious walks, giving money to the ACLU, wondering why their partners and children didn’t do the dishes more. The women were realizing the invidiousness of the dishwashing paradigm. The women were becoming radicalized, even though the women really didn’t have the time to be radicalized. Arlie Russell Hochschild first published The Second Shift in 1989, and in 2017 the women were discovering that shit was truer than ever. In a couple of months would come the Harvey Weinstein accusations, and then the free-fall pig-pile of the #MeToo campaign.
As I wrote in my diary when I was a teen, “I don’t feel great about men right now.” I still didn’t feel great about men in the summer of 2017, and a lot of other women didn’t feel great about men either. A lot of men didn’t feel great about men. Even the patriarchs were sick of patriarchy.
Despite this bolus of opinion, of feeling, of rage, I was determined to at least try to come to Manhattan with an open mind. After all, lots of people think of it as Allen’s masterpiece, and I was ready to be swept away. And I was swept away during the opening credits—black and white, with jump-cuts timed perfectly, almost comically, to the triumphal strains of “Rhapsody in Blue.” Moments later, we cut to Isaac (Allen’s character), out to dinner with his friends Yale (are you fucking kidding me—Yale?) and Yale’s wife, Emily. With them is Allen’s date, seventeen-year-old high-school student Tracy, played by Mariel Hemingway.
The really astonishing thing about watching this scene is its nonchalance. NBD, I’m fucking a high schooler. Sure, he knows the relationship can’t last, but he seems only casually troubled by its moral implications. Woody Allen’s character Isaac is fucking that high schooler with what my mother would call a hey-nonny-nonny. Allen is fascinated with moral shading, except when it comes to this particular issue—the issue of middle-aged men fucking teenage girls. In the face of this particular issue, one of our greatest observers of contemporary ethics—someone whose mid-career work can approach the Flaubertian—suddenly becomes a dummy (I always hear this word in Fred Sanford’s voice: “dummeh!”)
“In high school, even the ugly girls are beautiful.” A (male) high-school teacher once said this to me.
Tracy’s face, Mariel’s face, is made of open flat planes that recall pioneers and plains of wheat and sunshine (it’s an Idaho face, after all). Allen sees Tracy as good and pure in a way that the grown women in the film never can be. Tracy is wise, the way Allen has written her, but unlike the adults in the film she’s entirely, miraculously untroubled by neurosis.
Heidegger has this notion of dasein and vorhandensein. Dasein means conscious presence, an entity aware of its own mortality—e.g., almost every character in every Woody Allen movie ever except Tracy. Vorhandensein, on the other hand, is a being that exists in itself; it just is—like an object, or an animal. Or Tracy. She’s glorious simply by being: inert, object-like, vorhandensein. Like the great movie stars of old, she’s a face, as Isaac so famously states in his litany of reasons to go on living: “Groucho Marx and Willie Mays; those incredible apples and pears by Cézanne; the crabs at Sam Wo’s; uh, Tracy’s face.” (Watching the film for the first time in decades, I was struck by how much Isaac’s list sounded like a Facebook gratitude post.)
Allen/Isaac can get closer to that ideal world, a world that has forgotten its knowledge of death, by fucking Tracy. Because he’s Woody Allen—a great filmmaker—Tracy is allowed her say; she’s not a nitwit. “Your concerns are my concerns,” she says. “We have great sex.” This works out well for Isaac: he gets to hoover up her beautiful embodied simplicity and he’s absolved of guilt. The women in the film don’t have that advantage.
The grown women in Manhattan are brittle and all too aware of death; they’re aware of every goddamn thing. A thinking woman is stuck—distanced from the body, from beauty, from life itself.
For me, the most telling moment in the film is a throwaway line delivered in a high whine by a chic woman at a cocktail party: “I finally had an orgasm and my doctor told me it was the wrong kind.” Isaac’s (very funny) response: “You had the wrong kind? I’ve never had the wrong kind, ever. My worst one was right on the money.”
Every woman watching the movie knows that it’s the doctor who’s an asshole, not the woman. But that’s not how Woody/Isaac sees it.
If a woman can think, she can’t come; if she can come, she can’t think.
*
Just as Manhattan never authentically or fully examines the complexities of an old dude nailing a high schooler, Allen himself—an extremely well-spoken guy—becomes weirdly inarticulate when discussing Soon-Yi. In a 1992 interview with Walter Isaacson of Time, Allen delivered the line that became famous for its fatuous dismissal of his moral shortcomings:
“The heart wants what it wants.”
It was one of those phrases that never leaves your head once you’ve heard it: we all immediately memorized it whether we wanted to our not. Its monstrous disregard for anything but the self. Its proud irrationality. Woody goes on: “There’s no logic to those things. You meet someone and you fall in love and that’s that.”
I moved on her like a bitch.
Things being what they were that summer, I had a difficult time getting through Manhattan—it took me a couple of sittings. I mentioned this difficulty on social media, this problem of watching Manhattan in the Trump moment. (I fervently hoped it was a moment). “Manhattan is a work of genius! I am done with you, Claire!” responded a writer guy I didn’t know personally. This was a guy who had withstood many of my more outrageous social media pronouncements, some of which involved my desire to execute and chop up the male half of the species, Valerie-Solanas-like. But the minute I confessed to having a funny feeling when I watched Manhattan—I believe I said the film was making me “a little urpy”—this man stormed off my page, declaring himself done with me forevermore.
I had failed in what he saw as my task: the ability to overcome my own moralizing and pettifoggery—my own emotions—and do the work of appreciating genius. But who was in fact the more emotional person in this situation? He was the one storming from the virtual room.
I would have a repeat of this conversation with many men, smart and dumb, young and old, over the next months: “You must judge Manhattan on its aesthetics!” they said.
Another male writer and I discussed it over dinner one night. It was like a little play:
Female writer: “Um, it doesn’t really hold up.”
Male writer, sharply: “What do you mean?”
“Well, it all seems a tad blasé. I mean, Isaac doesn’t really seem too worried she’s in high school.”
“No no no, he feels terrible about it.”
“He cracks jokes about it, but he certainly does not feel terrible.”
“You’re just thinking about Soon-Yi—you’re letting that color the movie. I thought you were better than that.”
“I think it’s creepy on its own merits, even without knowing about Soon-Yi.”
“Get over it. You really need to judge it strictly on aesthetics.”
“So what makes it objectively aesthetically good?”
Male writer says something smart-sounding about “balance and elegance.”
I wish the female writer had delivered a coup de grâce here, but she did not. She doubted herself.
*
Which of us is seeing more clearly? The one who had the ability—some might say the privilege—to remain untroubled by the filmmaker’s attitudes toward females and history with girls? Who had the ability to watch the art without committing the biographical fallacy? Or the one who couldn’t help but notice the antipathies and urges that seemed to animate the project?
I’m really asking.
And were these proudly objective viewers really being as objective as they thought? Woody Allen’s usual genius is one of self-indictment, and here is his one film where that self-indictment falters, and also he fucks a teenager, and that’s the film that gets called a masterpiece?
What exactly are these guys defending? Is it the film? Or something else?
I think Manhattan and its pro-girl anti-woman story would be upsetting even if Hurricane Soon-Yi had never made landfall, but we can’t know, and there lies the very heart of the matter. Louis C.K.’s I Love You, Daddy—a tale of a father struggling to prevent his teenage daughter from hooking up with an older man—will meet a similar fate. It will be impossible to view outside the knowledge of Louis C.K.’s sexual misconduct—if it even gets seen. For now, distribution has been dropped and the film is not going to be released.
A great work of art brings us a feeling. And yet when I say Manhattan makes me feel urpy, a man says, No, not that feeling. You’re having the wrong feeling. He speaks with authority: Manhattan is a work of genius. But who gets to say? Authority says the work shall remain untouched by the life. Authority says biography is fallacy. Authority believes the work exists in an ideal state (ahistorical, alpine, snowy, pure). Authority ignores the natural feeling that arises from biographical knowledge of a subject. Authority gets snippy about stuff like that. Authority claims it is able to appreciate the work free of biography, of history. Authority sides with the (male) maker, against the audience.
Me, I’m not ahistorical or immune to biography. That’s for the winners of history (men) (so far).
The thing is, I’m not saying I’m right or wrong. But I’m the audience. And I’m just acknowledging the realities of the situation: the film Manhattan is disrupted by our knowledge of Soon-Yi; but it’s also kinda gross in its own right; and it’s also got a lot of things about it that are pretty great. All these things can be true at once. Simply being told by men that Allen’s history shouldn’t matter doesn’t achieve the objective of making it not matter.
What do I do about the monster? Do I have a responsibility either way? To turn away, or to overcome my biographical distaste and watch, or read, or listen?
And why does the monster make us—make me—so mad in the first place?
*
The audience wants something to watch or read or hear. That’s what makes it an audience. At the same time, at this particular historical moment, when we’re awash in bitter revelation, the audience is outraged freshly by new monsters, over and over and over. The audience thrills to the drama of denouncing the monster. The audience turns on its heel and refuses to see another Kevin Spacey film ever again.
It could be that what the audience feels in its heart is pure and righteous and true. But there might be something else going on here.
When you’re having a moral feeling, self-congratulation is never far behind. You are setting your emotion in a bed of ethical language, and you are admiring yourself doing it. We are governed by emotion, emotion around which we arrange language. The transmission of our virtue feels extremely important, and weirdly exciting.
Reminder: not “you,” not “we,” but “I.” Stop side-stepping ownership. I am the audience. And I can sense there’s something entirely unacceptable lurking inside me. Even in the midst of my righteous indignation when I bitch about Woody and Soon-Yi, I know that, on some level, I’m not an entirely upstanding citizen myself. Sure, I’m attuned to my children and thoughtful with my friends; I keep a cozy house, listen to my husband, and am reasonably kind to my parents. In everyday deed and thought, I’m a decent-enough human. But I’m something else as well, something vaguely resembling a, well, monster. The Victorians understood this feeling; it’s why they gave us the stark bifurcations of Dorian Gray, of Jekyll and Hyde. I suppose this is the human condition, this sneaking suspicion of our own badness. It lies at the heart of our fascination with people who do awful things. Something in us—in me—chimes to that awfulness, recognizes it in myself, is horrified by that recognition, and then thrills to the drama of loudly denouncing the monster in question.
The psychic theater of the public condemnation of monsters can be seen as a kind of elaborate misdirection: nothing to see here. I’m no monster. Meanwhile, hey, you might want to take a closer look at that guy over there.
*
Am I a monster? I’ve never killed anyone. Am I a monster? I’ve never promulgated fascism. Am I monster? I didn’t molest a child. Am I a monster? I haven’t been accused by dozens of women of drugging and raping them. Am I a monster? I don’t beat my children. (YET.) Am I a monster? I’m not noted for my anti-Semitism. Am I a monster? I’ve never presided over a sex cult where I trapped young women in a gilded Atlanta mansion and forced them to do my bidding. Am I a monster? I didn’t anally rape a thirteen-year-old.
Look at all the awful things I haven’t done. Maybe I’m not a monster.
But here’s a thing I have done: written a book. Written another book. Written essays and articles and criticism. And maybe that makes me monstrous, in a very specific kind of way.
The critic Walter Benjamin said: “At the base of every major work of art is a pile of barbarism.” My own work could hardly be called major, but I do wonder: at the base of every minor work of art, is there a, you know, smaller pile of barbarism? A lump of barbarism? A skosh?
There are many qualities one must possess to be a working writer or artist. Talent, brains, tenacity. Wealthy parents are good. You should definitely try to have those. But first among equals, when it comes to necessary ingredients, is selfishness. A book is made out of small selfishnesses. The selfishness of shutting the door against your family. The selfishness of ignoring the pram in the hall. The selfishness of forgetting the real world to create a new one. The selfishness of stealing stories from real people. The selfishness of saving the best of yourself for that blank-faced anonymous paramour, the reader. The selfishness that comes from simply saying what you have to say.
I have to wonder: maybe I’m not monstrous enough. I’m aware of my own failings as a writer—indeed I know the list to a fare-thee-well, and worse are the failures that I know I’m failing to know— but a little part of me has to ask: if I were more selfish, would my work be better? Should I aspire to greater selfishness?
Every writer-mother I know has asked herself this question. I mean, none of them says it out loud. But I can hear them thinking it; it’s almost deafening. Does one identity fatally interrupt the other? Is your work making you a less-good mom? That’s the question you ask yourself all the time. But also: Is your motherhood making you a less good writer? That question is a little more uncomfortable.
Jenny Offill gets at this idea in a passage from her novel Dept. of Speculation—a passage much shared among the female writers and artists of my acquaintance: “My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his umbrella. Véra licked his stamps for him.”
I mean, I hate licking stamps. An art monster, I thought when I read this. Yes, I’d like to be one of those. My friends felt the same way. Victoria, an artist, went around chanting “art monster” for a few days.
The female writers I know yearn to be more monstrous. They say it in off-hand, ha-ha-ha ways: “I wish I had a wife.” What does that mean, really? It means you wish to abandon the tasks of nurturing in order to perform the selfish sacraments of being an artist.
What if I’m not monster enough?
In a way, I’d been asking this question privately, for years, of a couple male writer friends I believe to be actually great. I write them both charming emails, but really I am always trying to find out: how selfish are you? Or to put it another way: how selfish do I need to be, to become as great as you?
Plenty selfish, I learned as I observed these men from afar. Lock-the-door-against-your-kid-while-you’re-working selfish. Work-every-day-including-Thanksgiving-and-Christmas selfish. Go-on-book-tour-for-weeks-at-a-time selfish. Sleep-with-other-women-at-conferences selfish. Whatever-it-takes selfish.
*
One recent evening, I was sitting in the chaotic, book-strewn living room of a younger writer and her husband, also a writer. Their kids were tucked into bed upstairs; the occasional yawp floated down from above.
My friend was in the throes of it: Her three kids were in grade school and her husband had a full-time job while she tried to carve out her career freelancing and writing books. A cloud of intense literary ambition hung over the house like a stormy little micro-climate. It was a work night; we all should’ve been in bed. Instead we were drinking wine and talking about work. The husband was charming to me, by which I mean he laughed at all my jokes. He was tightly wound and overly alert, perhaps because he was not having success with his writing. The wife on the other hand was having success—a lot of success—with her writing.
She mentioned a short story she’d just written and published.
“Oh, you mean the most recent occasion for your abandoning me and the kids?” asked the very smart, very charming husband.
The wife had been a monster, monster enough to finish the work. The husband had not.
This is what female monstrousness looks like: abandoning the kids. Always. The female monster is Doris Lessing leaving her children behind to go live the writer’s life in London. The female monster is Sylvia Plath, whose self-crime was bad enough, but worse still: the children whose nursery she taped off beforehand. Never mind the bread and milk she set out for them, a kind of terrible poem unto itself. She dreamed of eating men like air, but what was truly monstrous was simply leaving her children motherless.
*
Maybe, as a female writer, you don’t kill yourself, or abandon your children. But you abandon something, some nurturing part of yourself. When you finish a book, what lies littered on the ground are small broken things: broken dates, broken promises, broken engagements. Also other, more important forgettings and failures: children’s homework left unchecked, parents left untelephoned, spousal sex unhad. Those things have to get broken for the book to get written.
Sure, I possess the ordinary monstrousness of a real-life person, the unknowable depths, the suppressed Hyde. But I also have a more visible, quantifiable kind of monstrousness—that of the artist who completes her work. Finishers are always monsters. Woody Allen doesn’t just try to make a film a year; he tries to put out a film a year.
For me the particular monstrousness of completing my work has always closely resembled loneliness: Leaving behind the family, posting up in a borrowed cabin or a cheaply bought motel room. If I can’t detach myself entirely, then I’m hiding in my chilly office, wrapped in scarves and fingerless gloves, a fur hat plopped upon my head, going hell-for-leather, just trying to finish.
Because the finishing is the part that makes the artist. The artist must be monster enough not just to start the work, but to complete it. And to commit all the little savageries that lie in between.
My friend and I had done nothing more monstrous than expecting someone to mind our children while we finished our work. That’s not as bad as rape or even, say, forcing someone to watch while you jerk off into a potted plant. It might sound as though I’m conflating two things—male predators and female finishers—in a troubling way. And I am. Because when women do what needs to be done in order to write or make art, we sometimes feel monstrous. And others are quick to describe us that way.
*
Hemingway’s girlfriend, the writer Martha Gellhorn, didn’t think the artist needed to be a monster; she thought the monster needed to make himself into an artist. “A man must be a very great genius to make up for being such a loathsome human being.” (Well, I guess she would know.) She’s saying if you’re a really awful person, you are driven to greatness in order to compensate the world for all the awful shit you are going to do to it. In a way, this is a feminist revision of all of art history; a history she turns with a single acid, brilliant line into a morality tale of compensation.
Either way, the questions remain:
What is to be done about monsters? Can and should we love their work? Are all ambitious artists monsters? Tiny voice: [Am I a monster?]
What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men? By Claire Dederer. The Paris Review, November 20, 2017
They did or said something awful, and made something great. The awful thing disrupts the great work; we can’t watch or listen to or read the great work without remembering the awful thing. Flooded with knowledge of the maker’s monstrousness, we turn away, overcome by disgust. Or … we don’t. We continue watching, separating or trying to separate the artist from the art. Either way: disruption. They are monster geniuses, and I don’t know what to do about them.
We’ve all been thinking about monsters in the Trump era. For me, it began a few years ago. I was researching Roman Polanski for a book I was writing and found myself awed by his monstrousness. It was monumental, like the Grand Canyon. And yet. When I watched his movies, their beauty was another kind of monument, impervious to my knowledge of his iniquities. I had exhaustively read about his rape of thirteen-year-old Samantha Gailey; I feel sure no detail on record remained unfamiliar to me. Despite this knowledge, I was still able to consume his work. Eager to. The more I researched Polanski, the more I became drawn to his films, and I watched them again and again—especially the major ones: Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown. Like all works of genius, they invited repetition. I ate them. They became part of me, the way something loved does.
I wasn’t supposed to love this work, or this man. He’s the object of boycotts and lawsuits and outrage. In the public’s mind, man and work seem to be the same thing. But are they? Ought we try to separate the art from the artist, the maker from the made? Do we undergo a willful forgetting when we want to listen to, say, Wagner’s Ring cycle? (Forgetting is easier for some than others; Wagner’s work has rarely been performed in Israel.) Or do we believe genius gets special dispensation, a behavioral hall pass?
And how does our answer change from situation to situation? Certain pieces of art seem to have been rendered inconsumable by their maker’s transgressions—how can one watch The Cosby Show after the rape allegations against Bill Cosby? I mean, obviously it’s technically doable, but are we even watching the show? Or are we taking in the spectacle of our own lost innocence?
And is it simply a matter of pragmatics? Do we withhold our support if the person is alive and therefore might benefit financially from our consumption of their work? Do we vote with our wallets? If so, is it okay to stream, say, a Roman Polanski movie for free? Can we, um, watch it at a friend’s house?
*
But hold up for a minute: Who is this “we” that’s always turning up in critical writing anyway? We is an escape hatch. We is cheap. We is a way of simultaneously sloughing off personal responsibility and taking on the mantle of easy authority. It’s the voice of the middle-brow male critic, the one who truly believes he knows how everyone else should think. We is corrupt. We is make-believe. The real question is this: can I love the art but hate the artist? Can you? When I say we, I mean I. I mean you.
*
I know Polanski is worse, whatever that means, and Cosby is more current. But for me the ur-monster is Woody Allen.
The men want to know why Woody Allen makes us so mad. Woody Allen slept with Soon-Yi Previn, the child of his life partner Mia Farrow. Soon-Yi was a very young adult the first time they slept together, and he the most famous film director in the world.
I took the fucking of Soon-Yi as a terrible betrayal of me personally. When I was young, I felt like Woody Allen. I intuited or believed he represented me on-screen. He was me. This is one of the peculiar aspects of his genius—this ability to stand in for the audience. The identification was exacerbated by the seeming powerlessness of his usual on-screen persona: skinny as a kid, short as a kid, confused by an uncaring, incomprehensible world. (Like Chaplin before him.) I felt closer to him than seems reasonable for a little girl to feel about a grown-up male filmmaker. In some mad way, I felt he belonged to me. I had always seen him as one of us, the powerless. Post-Soon-Yi, I saw him as a predator.
My response wasn’t logical; it was emotional.
*
One rainy afternoon, in the spring of 2017, I flopped down on the living-room couch and committed an act of transgression. No, not that one. What I did was, I on-demanded Annie Hall. It was easy. I just clicked the OK button on my massive universal remote and then rummaged around in a bag of cookies while the opening credits rolled. As acts of transgression go, it was pretty undramatic.
I had watched the movie at least a dozen times before, but even so, it charmed me all over again. Annie Hall is a jeu d’esprit, an Astaire soft shoe, a helium balloon straining at its ribbon. It’s a love story for people who don’t believe in love: Annie and Alvy come together, pull apart, come together, and then break up for good. Their relationship was pointless all along, and entirely worthwhile. Annie’s refrain of “la di da” is the governing spirit of the enterprise, the collection of nonsense syllables that give joyous expression to Allen’s dime-store existentialism. “La di da” means, Nothing matters. It means, Let’s have fun while we crash and burn. It means, Our hearts are going to break, isn’t it a lark?
Annie Hall is the greatest comic film of the twentieth century—better than Bringing Up Baby, better even than Caddyshack—because it acknowledges the irrepressible nihilism that lurks at the center of all comedy. Also, it’s really funny. To watch Annie Hall is to feel, for just a moment, that one belongs to humanity. Watching, you feel almost mugged by that sense of belonging. That fabricated connection can be more beautiful than love itself. And that’s what we call great art. In case you were wondering.
Look, I don’t get to go around feeling connected to humanity all the time. It’s a rare pleasure. And I’m supposed to give it up just because Woody Allen misbehaved? It hardly seems fair.
*
When I mentioned in passing I was writing about Allen, my friend Sara reported that she’d seen a Little Free Library in her neighborhood absolutely crammed to its tiny rafters with books by and about Allen. It made us both laugh—the mental image of some furious, probably female, fan who just couldn’t bear the sight of those books any longer and stuffed them all in the cute little house.
Then Sara grew wistful: “I don’t know where to put all my feelings about Woody Allen,” she said. Well, exactly.
*
I told another smart friend that I was writing about Woody Allen. “I have very many thoughts about Woody Allen!” she said, all excited to share. We were drinking wine on her porch and she settled in, the late afternoon light illuminating her face. “I’m so mad at him! I was already pissed at him over the Soon-Yi thing, and then came the—what’s the kid’s name—Dylan? Then came the Dylan allegations, and the horrible dismissive statements he made about that. And I hate the way he talks about Soon-Yi, always going on about how he’s enriched her life.”
This, I think, is what happens to so many of us when we consider the work of the monster geniuses—we tell ourselves we’re having ethical thoughts when really what we’re having is moral feelings. We put words around these feelings and call them opinions: “What Woody Allen did was very wrong.” And feelings come from someplace more elemental than thought. The fact was this: I felt upset by the story of Woody and Soon-Yi. I wasn’t thinking; I was feeling. I was affronted, personally somehow.
*
Here’s how to have some complicated emotions: watch Manhattan.
Like many—many what? many women? many mothers? many former girls? many moral feelers?—I have been unable to watch Manhattan for years. A few months back, when I started thinking about Woody Allen qua monster, I watched nearly every other movie he’s ever made before I faced the fact that I would, at some point, have to watch Manhattan.
And finally the day came. As I settled in on my nice couch in my comfortable living room, the Cosby trial was taking place. It was June of 2017. My husband, who has a Nordic flair for quiet drama, suggested I toggle between watching the Cosby trials and Manhattan so as to construct a kind of meta-narrative of monstrousness. But my husband’s austere Northern European sense of showmanship came to naught, for the Cosby trial wasn’t in fact televised.
Even so, it was out there happening.
The mood that summer was one of extreme discomfort. Just a general feeling of not-quite-rightness. People, and by people I mean women, were unsettled and unhappy. They met on the streets and looked at one another and shook their heads and walked away wordlessly. The women had had it. The women went on a giant fed-up march. The women were Facebooking and Tweeting, going for long furious walks, giving money to the ACLU, wondering why their partners and children didn’t do the dishes more. The women were realizing the invidiousness of the dishwashing paradigm. The women were becoming radicalized, even though the women really didn’t have the time to be radicalized. Arlie Russell Hochschild first published The Second Shift in 1989, and in 2017 the women were discovering that shit was truer than ever. In a couple of months would come the Harvey Weinstein accusations, and then the free-fall pig-pile of the #MeToo campaign.
As I wrote in my diary when I was a teen, “I don’t feel great about men right now.” I still didn’t feel great about men in the summer of 2017, and a lot of other women didn’t feel great about men either. A lot of men didn’t feel great about men. Even the patriarchs were sick of patriarchy.
Despite this bolus of opinion, of feeling, of rage, I was determined to at least try to come to Manhattan with an open mind. After all, lots of people think of it as Allen’s masterpiece, and I was ready to be swept away. And I was swept away during the opening credits—black and white, with jump-cuts timed perfectly, almost comically, to the triumphal strains of “Rhapsody in Blue.” Moments later, we cut to Isaac (Allen’s character), out to dinner with his friends Yale (are you fucking kidding me—Yale?) and Yale’s wife, Emily. With them is Allen’s date, seventeen-year-old high-school student Tracy, played by Mariel Hemingway.
The really astonishing thing about watching this scene is its nonchalance. NBD, I’m fucking a high schooler. Sure, he knows the relationship can’t last, but he seems only casually troubled by its moral implications. Woody Allen’s character Isaac is fucking that high schooler with what my mother would call a hey-nonny-nonny. Allen is fascinated with moral shading, except when it comes to this particular issue—the issue of middle-aged men fucking teenage girls. In the face of this particular issue, one of our greatest observers of contemporary ethics—someone whose mid-career work can approach the Flaubertian—suddenly becomes a dummy (I always hear this word in Fred Sanford’s voice: “dummeh!”)
“In high school, even the ugly girls are beautiful.” A (male) high-school teacher once said this to me.
Tracy’s face, Mariel’s face, is made of open flat planes that recall pioneers and plains of wheat and sunshine (it’s an Idaho face, after all). Allen sees Tracy as good and pure in a way that the grown women in the film never can be. Tracy is wise, the way Allen has written her, but unlike the adults in the film she’s entirely, miraculously untroubled by neurosis.
Heidegger has this notion of dasein and vorhandensein. Dasein means conscious presence, an entity aware of its own mortality—e.g., almost every character in every Woody Allen movie ever except Tracy. Vorhandensein, on the other hand, is a being that exists in itself; it just is—like an object, or an animal. Or Tracy. She’s glorious simply by being: inert, object-like, vorhandensein. Like the great movie stars of old, she’s a face, as Isaac so famously states in his litany of reasons to go on living: “Groucho Marx and Willie Mays; those incredible apples and pears by Cézanne; the crabs at Sam Wo’s; uh, Tracy’s face.” (Watching the film for the first time in decades, I was struck by how much Isaac’s list sounded like a Facebook gratitude post.)
Allen/Isaac can get closer to that ideal world, a world that has forgotten its knowledge of death, by fucking Tracy. Because he’s Woody Allen—a great filmmaker—Tracy is allowed her say; she’s not a nitwit. “Your concerns are my concerns,” she says. “We have great sex.” This works out well for Isaac: he gets to hoover up her beautiful embodied simplicity and he’s absolved of guilt. The women in the film don’t have that advantage.
The grown women in Manhattan are brittle and all too aware of death; they’re aware of every goddamn thing. A thinking woman is stuck—distanced from the body, from beauty, from life itself.
For me, the most telling moment in the film is a throwaway line delivered in a high whine by a chic woman at a cocktail party: “I finally had an orgasm and my doctor told me it was the wrong kind.” Isaac’s (very funny) response: “You had the wrong kind? I’ve never had the wrong kind, ever. My worst one was right on the money.”
Every woman watching the movie knows that it’s the doctor who’s an asshole, not the woman. But that’s not how Woody/Isaac sees it.
If a woman can think, she can’t come; if she can come, she can’t think.
*
Just as Manhattan never authentically or fully examines the complexities of an old dude nailing a high schooler, Allen himself—an extremely well-spoken guy—becomes weirdly inarticulate when discussing Soon-Yi. In a 1992 interview with Walter Isaacson of Time, Allen delivered the line that became famous for its fatuous dismissal of his moral shortcomings:
“The heart wants what it wants.”
It was one of those phrases that never leaves your head once you’ve heard it: we all immediately memorized it whether we wanted to our not. Its monstrous disregard for anything but the self. Its proud irrationality. Woody goes on: “There’s no logic to those things. You meet someone and you fall in love and that’s that.”
I moved on her like a bitch.
Things being what they were that summer, I had a difficult time getting through Manhattan—it took me a couple of sittings. I mentioned this difficulty on social media, this problem of watching Manhattan in the Trump moment. (I fervently hoped it was a moment). “Manhattan is a work of genius! I am done with you, Claire!” responded a writer guy I didn’t know personally. This was a guy who had withstood many of my more outrageous social media pronouncements, some of which involved my desire to execute and chop up the male half of the species, Valerie-Solanas-like. But the minute I confessed to having a funny feeling when I watched Manhattan—I believe I said the film was making me “a little urpy”—this man stormed off my page, declaring himself done with me forevermore.
I had failed in what he saw as my task: the ability to overcome my own moralizing and pettifoggery—my own emotions—and do the work of appreciating genius. But who was in fact the more emotional person in this situation? He was the one storming from the virtual room.
I would have a repeat of this conversation with many men, smart and dumb, young and old, over the next months: “You must judge Manhattan on its aesthetics!” they said.
Another male writer and I discussed it over dinner one night. It was like a little play:
Female writer: “Um, it doesn’t really hold up.”
Male writer, sharply: “What do you mean?”
“Well, it all seems a tad blasé. I mean, Isaac doesn’t really seem too worried she’s in high school.”
“No no no, he feels terrible about it.”
“He cracks jokes about it, but he certainly does not feel terrible.”
“You’re just thinking about Soon-Yi—you’re letting that color the movie. I thought you were better than that.”
“I think it’s creepy on its own merits, even without knowing about Soon-Yi.”
“Get over it. You really need to judge it strictly on aesthetics.”
“So what makes it objectively aesthetically good?”
Male writer says something smart-sounding about “balance and elegance.”
I wish the female writer had delivered a coup de grâce here, but she did not. She doubted herself.
*
Which of us is seeing more clearly? The one who had the ability—some might say the privilege—to remain untroubled by the filmmaker’s attitudes toward females and history with girls? Who had the ability to watch the art without committing the biographical fallacy? Or the one who couldn’t help but notice the antipathies and urges that seemed to animate the project?
I’m really asking.
And were these proudly objective viewers really being as objective as they thought? Woody Allen’s usual genius is one of self-indictment, and here is his one film where that self-indictment falters, and also he fucks a teenager, and that’s the film that gets called a masterpiece?
What exactly are these guys defending? Is it the film? Or something else?
I think Manhattan and its pro-girl anti-woman story would be upsetting even if Hurricane Soon-Yi had never made landfall, but we can’t know, and there lies the very heart of the matter. Louis C.K.’s I Love You, Daddy—a tale of a father struggling to prevent his teenage daughter from hooking up with an older man—will meet a similar fate. It will be impossible to view outside the knowledge of Louis C.K.’s sexual misconduct—if it even gets seen. For now, distribution has been dropped and the film is not going to be released.
A great work of art brings us a feeling. And yet when I say Manhattan makes me feel urpy, a man says, No, not that feeling. You’re having the wrong feeling. He speaks with authority: Manhattan is a work of genius. But who gets to say? Authority says the work shall remain untouched by the life. Authority says biography is fallacy. Authority believes the work exists in an ideal state (ahistorical, alpine, snowy, pure). Authority ignores the natural feeling that arises from biographical knowledge of a subject. Authority gets snippy about stuff like that. Authority claims it is able to appreciate the work free of biography, of history. Authority sides with the (male) maker, against the audience.
Me, I’m not ahistorical or immune to biography. That’s for the winners of history (men) (so far).
The thing is, I’m not saying I’m right or wrong. But I’m the audience. And I’m just acknowledging the realities of the situation: the film Manhattan is disrupted by our knowledge of Soon-Yi; but it’s also kinda gross in its own right; and it’s also got a lot of things about it that are pretty great. All these things can be true at once. Simply being told by men that Allen’s history shouldn’t matter doesn’t achieve the objective of making it not matter.
What do I do about the monster? Do I have a responsibility either way? To turn away, or to overcome my biographical distaste and watch, or read, or listen?
And why does the monster make us—make me—so mad in the first place?
*
The audience wants something to watch or read or hear. That’s what makes it an audience. At the same time, at this particular historical moment, when we’re awash in bitter revelation, the audience is outraged freshly by new monsters, over and over and over. The audience thrills to the drama of denouncing the monster. The audience turns on its heel and refuses to see another Kevin Spacey film ever again.
It could be that what the audience feels in its heart is pure and righteous and true. But there might be something else going on here.
When you’re having a moral feeling, self-congratulation is never far behind. You are setting your emotion in a bed of ethical language, and you are admiring yourself doing it. We are governed by emotion, emotion around which we arrange language. The transmission of our virtue feels extremely important, and weirdly exciting.
Reminder: not “you,” not “we,” but “I.” Stop side-stepping ownership. I am the audience. And I can sense there’s something entirely unacceptable lurking inside me. Even in the midst of my righteous indignation when I bitch about Woody and Soon-Yi, I know that, on some level, I’m not an entirely upstanding citizen myself. Sure, I’m attuned to my children and thoughtful with my friends; I keep a cozy house, listen to my husband, and am reasonably kind to my parents. In everyday deed and thought, I’m a decent-enough human. But I’m something else as well, something vaguely resembling a, well, monster. The Victorians understood this feeling; it’s why they gave us the stark bifurcations of Dorian Gray, of Jekyll and Hyde. I suppose this is the human condition, this sneaking suspicion of our own badness. It lies at the heart of our fascination with people who do awful things. Something in us—in me—chimes to that awfulness, recognizes it in myself, is horrified by that recognition, and then thrills to the drama of loudly denouncing the monster in question.
The psychic theater of the public condemnation of monsters can be seen as a kind of elaborate misdirection: nothing to see here. I’m no monster. Meanwhile, hey, you might want to take a closer look at that guy over there.
*
Am I a monster? I’ve never killed anyone. Am I a monster? I’ve never promulgated fascism. Am I monster? I didn’t molest a child. Am I a monster? I haven’t been accused by dozens of women of drugging and raping them. Am I a monster? I don’t beat my children. (YET.) Am I a monster? I’m not noted for my anti-Semitism. Am I a monster? I’ve never presided over a sex cult where I trapped young women in a gilded Atlanta mansion and forced them to do my bidding. Am I a monster? I didn’t anally rape a thirteen-year-old.
Look at all the awful things I haven’t done. Maybe I’m not a monster.
But here’s a thing I have done: written a book. Written another book. Written essays and articles and criticism. And maybe that makes me monstrous, in a very specific kind of way.
The critic Walter Benjamin said: “At the base of every major work of art is a pile of barbarism.” My own work could hardly be called major, but I do wonder: at the base of every minor work of art, is there a, you know, smaller pile of barbarism? A lump of barbarism? A skosh?
There are many qualities one must possess to be a working writer or artist. Talent, brains, tenacity. Wealthy parents are good. You should definitely try to have those. But first among equals, when it comes to necessary ingredients, is selfishness. A book is made out of small selfishnesses. The selfishness of shutting the door against your family. The selfishness of ignoring the pram in the hall. The selfishness of forgetting the real world to create a new one. The selfishness of stealing stories from real people. The selfishness of saving the best of yourself for that blank-faced anonymous paramour, the reader. The selfishness that comes from simply saying what you have to say.
I have to wonder: maybe I’m not monstrous enough. I’m aware of my own failings as a writer—indeed I know the list to a fare-thee-well, and worse are the failures that I know I’m failing to know— but a little part of me has to ask: if I were more selfish, would my work be better? Should I aspire to greater selfishness?
Every writer-mother I know has asked herself this question. I mean, none of them says it out loud. But I can hear them thinking it; it’s almost deafening. Does one identity fatally interrupt the other? Is your work making you a less-good mom? That’s the question you ask yourself all the time. But also: Is your motherhood making you a less good writer? That question is a little more uncomfortable.
Jenny Offill gets at this idea in a passage from her novel Dept. of Speculation—a passage much shared among the female writers and artists of my acquaintance: “My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his umbrella. Véra licked his stamps for him.”
I mean, I hate licking stamps. An art monster, I thought when I read this. Yes, I’d like to be one of those. My friends felt the same way. Victoria, an artist, went around chanting “art monster” for a few days.
The female writers I know yearn to be more monstrous. They say it in off-hand, ha-ha-ha ways: “I wish I had a wife.” What does that mean, really? It means you wish to abandon the tasks of nurturing in order to perform the selfish sacraments of being an artist.
What if I’m not monster enough?
In a way, I’d been asking this question privately, for years, of a couple male writer friends I believe to be actually great. I write them both charming emails, but really I am always trying to find out: how selfish are you? Or to put it another way: how selfish do I need to be, to become as great as you?
Plenty selfish, I learned as I observed these men from afar. Lock-the-door-against-your-kid-while-you’re-working selfish. Work-every-day-including-Thanksgiving-and-Christmas selfish. Go-on-book-tour-for-weeks-at-a-time selfish. Sleep-with-other-women-at-conferences selfish. Whatever-it-takes selfish.
*
One recent evening, I was sitting in the chaotic, book-strewn living room of a younger writer and her husband, also a writer. Their kids were tucked into bed upstairs; the occasional yawp floated down from above.
My friend was in the throes of it: Her three kids were in grade school and her husband had a full-time job while she tried to carve out her career freelancing and writing books. A cloud of intense literary ambition hung over the house like a stormy little micro-climate. It was a work night; we all should’ve been in bed. Instead we were drinking wine and talking about work. The husband was charming to me, by which I mean he laughed at all my jokes. He was tightly wound and overly alert, perhaps because he was not having success with his writing. The wife on the other hand was having success—a lot of success—with her writing.
She mentioned a short story she’d just written and published.
“Oh, you mean the most recent occasion for your abandoning me and the kids?” asked the very smart, very charming husband.
The wife had been a monster, monster enough to finish the work. The husband had not.
This is what female monstrousness looks like: abandoning the kids. Always. The female monster is Doris Lessing leaving her children behind to go live the writer’s life in London. The female monster is Sylvia Plath, whose self-crime was bad enough, but worse still: the children whose nursery she taped off beforehand. Never mind the bread and milk she set out for them, a kind of terrible poem unto itself. She dreamed of eating men like air, but what was truly monstrous was simply leaving her children motherless.
*
Maybe, as a female writer, you don’t kill yourself, or abandon your children. But you abandon something, some nurturing part of yourself. When you finish a book, what lies littered on the ground are small broken things: broken dates, broken promises, broken engagements. Also other, more important forgettings and failures: children’s homework left unchecked, parents left untelephoned, spousal sex unhad. Those things have to get broken for the book to get written.
Sure, I possess the ordinary monstrousness of a real-life person, the unknowable depths, the suppressed Hyde. But I also have a more visible, quantifiable kind of monstrousness—that of the artist who completes her work. Finishers are always monsters. Woody Allen doesn’t just try to make a film a year; he tries to put out a film a year.
For me the particular monstrousness of completing my work has always closely resembled loneliness: Leaving behind the family, posting up in a borrowed cabin or a cheaply bought motel room. If I can’t detach myself entirely, then I’m hiding in my chilly office, wrapped in scarves and fingerless gloves, a fur hat plopped upon my head, going hell-for-leather, just trying to finish.
Because the finishing is the part that makes the artist. The artist must be monster enough not just to start the work, but to complete it. And to commit all the little savageries that lie in between.
My friend and I had done nothing more monstrous than expecting someone to mind our children while we finished our work. That’s not as bad as rape or even, say, forcing someone to watch while you jerk off into a potted plant. It might sound as though I’m conflating two things—male predators and female finishers—in a troubling way. And I am. Because when women do what needs to be done in order to write or make art, we sometimes feel monstrous. And others are quick to describe us that way.
*
Hemingway’s girlfriend, the writer Martha Gellhorn, didn’t think the artist needed to be a monster; she thought the monster needed to make himself into an artist. “A man must be a very great genius to make up for being such a loathsome human being.” (Well, I guess she would know.) She’s saying if you’re a really awful person, you are driven to greatness in order to compensate the world for all the awful shit you are going to do to it. In a way, this is a feminist revision of all of art history; a history she turns with a single acid, brilliant line into a morality tale of compensation.
Either way, the questions remain:
What is to be done about monsters? Can and should we love their work? Are all ambitious artists monsters? Tiny voice: [Am I a monster?]
What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men? By Claire Dederer. The Paris Review, November 20, 2017
The hardest-hearted woman isn’t a murderer or
rapist—she’s a leaver of children.
In 1949, Doris Lessing left behind two children from her first marriage when she moved to London from then-Rhodesia. Lessing brought along her third child, Peter, as well as a suitcase containing the manuscript for The Grass Is Singing. Once she got to London, the novel was published (or re-published—it had previously been published in Rhodesia) to great acclaim, and Lessing went on to become one of the few female literary lions this planet has ever hosted, however grudgingly. Eventually of course she won the Nobel.
As for Peter, he lived with her until they both died, within a few weeks of each other, in 2013. Even abandoning mothers somehow end up lumbered with children.
A little more than a decade after she arrived in London, Lessing published her most famous novel, The Golden Notebook, which deals with the problem of how to live as a free person. Among other questions, the book examines and illuminates the question of how a female artist is supposed to live in a society that doesn’t really want her to exist and make work.
While The Golden Notebook is shot through with the desire for human liberty—its real subject is the failure of communism to solve human relationships—the problems of motherhood haunt its pages, a kind of boggy murk that sucks and burbles at the ankles of its freedom-seeking females.
The novel is radically experimental in shape, even read from today’s vantage—it’s comprised of several different books, or rather notebooks, as they are called here, identified by color. Woven throughout all this is a more conventional novel-within-a-novel titled “Free Women,” about an alter-ego-like novelist named Anna Wulf. I hesitate to call “Free Women” autobiographical, but only because it seems like Doris Lessing wouldn’t approve of calling things autobiographical, and Doris Lessing scares the bejeezus out of me, even from the grave.
Nonetheless, it is irresistible to imagine the novel about Anna Wulf as the story of Doris Lessing’s own experience of seeking freedom—from her children, from her old life in Africa, from forces that would stop her from making art. The selection of just one child makes her flight even more unthinkable—if all the children were abandoned, the two left behind might have justified it to themselves. But not-abandoning just one child sends such a strong message to the others; you were not good enough.
When I first read The Golden Notebook, I was in fact a free woman. I was 21 years old, a college dropout living in a little house on the wild coast of New South Wales. I had ended up in the faraway antipodes for reasons I didn’t really understand. Okay, I followed a boy there—a relationship that didn’t work out. Now I had a tiny room to myself and I worked in a warehouse and aside from that I spent my time drinking beer, going to punk rock shows, hopping trains, and reading. Reading was my vocation, if a vocation is what you do when you are left entirely to your own devices.
I liked massive books then—like many free people, I found myself confronted with a string of empty days, and the longer a book kept me occupied, the better. The Golden Notebook was picked at least in part for its size, after a long bout with Anna Karenina. The problems faced by Anna Wulf were unknown to me; these were problems that had to do with commitments—to a child, to a politics, to a future. I was committed only to the pleasure of the day. But I chimed to the idea of freedom, and I could feel I was doing it wrong. Freedom, I intuited, ought to have higher stakes, and much much greater rewards than all the time in the world to read fat novels and steal a ride on a train to a rock show in the sticks somewhere.
Even if its concerns were not yet my own, I loved the book. It ate my hours. And I found Anna Wulf, Lessing’s alter ego, irresistible. I loved the honesty of one passage in particular, when Anna Wulf wakes at the crack of London dawn with a lover in her bed and a small daughter in the room next door. She is trying to be a free woman and it’s not easy and the stakes are perhaps altogether too high.
“It must be about six o’clock. My knees are tense. I realize that what I used to refer to, to Mother Sugar [her nickname for her analyst], as ‘the housewife’s disease’ has taken hold of me. The tension in me, so that peace has already gone away from me, is because the current has been switched on: I must-dress-Janet-get-her-breakfast-send-her-off-to-school-get-Michael’s-breakfast-don’t-forget-I’m-out-of-tea-etc.-etc. With this useless but apparently unavoidable tension resentment is also switched on. Resentment against what? An unfairness. That I should have to spend so much of my time worrying over details ..”
It’s not just the doing of the chores that eats at Anna Wulf, it’s the worrying and the thinking and the remembering—what we might now call the emotional labor. She is tense with the fact that she is alone in being the woman/mother self. She goes on, thinking about her analysis:
Long ago, in the course of the sessions with Mother Sugar, I learned that the resentment, the anger, is impersonal. It is the disease of women in our time. I can see it in women’s faces, their voices, every day, or in the letters that come to the office. The woman’s emotion: resentment against injustice, an impersonal poison. The unlucky ones, who do not know it is impersonal, turn it against their men. The lucky ones like me—fight it.
All that was still ahead of me when I first read this passage. I was a free girl, in some ways closer to Anna Wulf’s tiny daughter Janet than to Wulf herself. Freedom came naturally to me. I devoured The Golden Notebook on the train, in my monk-like little room, down at the pub while I waited for a lover to arrive, with his accent that was just normal life to him and a kind of wild excitement to me. In those days I gobbled the parts of The Golden Notebook that were about communism and love and found myself a little frightened of the motherhood passages. Surely that would never be me.
Two decades passed.
When I next came to the book, I was a mother of two. A homeowner, a cook, a wife, a gardener, a teacher, a driver, a cleaning lady. I found myself yearning for enough freedom, just enough freedom, to get my writing done. This time around, I found the passage, to use the parlance of our own day, intensely relatable: “The resentment, the anger, is impersonal. It is the disease of women in our time. … The unlucky ones, who do not know it is impersonal, turn it against their men.”
These latter days I feared I might be one of Lessing’s unlucky ones, taking it personally over and over, finding in my husband’s inability to overcome the privileges of millennia and do the fucking dishes evidence of his lack of love and respect for me.
This is what Lessing calls luck—the ability to fight the housewife’s disease of resentment, to know it’s an impersonal poison. This poison is well known to any woman who’s ever regarded the landscape between the making of dinner and the singing-to-sleep as a vast wasteland, on a par with the bleaker landscapes from Planet of the Apes. And I don’t know any mother who hasn’t at least once felt that way, though they meet the moment with varying levels of despair or sangfroid, depending on their situation, their income, their level of desperation. Depending on how much their husband does the dishes, how accepting their natures are, how radical their politics are. How afraid they are.
But why couldn’t I accept that the situation might be impersonal? Might, in other words, not be my own fault, not be my own individual problem? Why couldn’t I be one of Lessing’s lucky ones?
It’s a strange loop. Lessing is giving voice, through Anna Wulf, to the pressures that make a woman feel it is difficult to get her work done. (Her real work? At any rate, her art.) The pressures that might lead a woman to, oh, say, leave two children behind on a whole other continent.
Anna/Doris’s ambivalence about motherhood is given full throat in what would become one of the most famous passages from The Golden Notebook, a passage that is a perfect tiny bijou portrait of maternal apathy and dissociation:
“Janet looked up from the floor and said, ‘Come and play, mummy.’ I couldn’t move. I forced myself up out of the chair after a while and sat on the floor beside the little girl. I looked at her and thought: That’s my child, my flesh and blood. But I couldn’t feel it. She said again: ‘Play, mummy.’ I moved wooden bricks for a house, but like a machine. Making myself perform every movement. I could see myself sitting on the floor, the picture of a ‘young mother playing with her little girl.’ Like a film shot, or a photograph.”
This is the job of any good novel, or maybe even piece of writing: to reveal felt and lived experience, rather than what you think you ought to feel. The consciousness-raising sessions of second-wave feminism were built on exactly this idea. What if you said how you really felt? Would that be a revolutionary action? I suppose it depends in part on who does the saying. Lessing is doing important work in this passage. For women, laboring in domesticity, otherwise known as anonymity, it’s all the more important to get at this truth of felt experience.
This sense of being an imposter, this quiet chafing against the role of mother—I lived it. For years and years, I lived this fear that I was not, am not a good enough mother because I cannot inhabit the role with my entire being, cannot cast out the artist self, or maybe the true self, a self that is not entirely good. This is why, when my daughter was three years old, I used to pay myself to play with her. I chivvied myself into behaving like a good mother, but inside, sometimes, I felt like Anna Wulf: a machine, a film shot, a photograph, a simulacrum, a bifurcation, an other, a divided self.
The divided self is a common story for female artists. Lessing’s story is echoed in the lives of other writers, from Jean Rhys to Alice Walker. And yet. Even if one stays home, even if one has luck, has money, has help, children and writing often seem stubbornly orthogonal, two forces constantly pitted against one another.
When I began to think of female monsters, Anne Sexton was one of the first names to come up. She was the harpy-mother, the screeching taloned swooping poetess, the housewife artiste who cherished her neuroses more than her children; the mother whose offspring were sacrificed at the altar of her terrible creativity.
Sexton is nowadays arguably as famous for her daughter Linda Gray Sexton’s incendiary memoir Searching for Mercy Street as she is for her poems, although she was once one of the most famous poets in America. Though is there even really such a thing as poet fame? It’s like trying to measure the speed of a butterfly’s fastball.
After Sexton’s death, Linda Gray Sexton found tapes of her mother’s therapy sessions. The transcripts reveal Sexton as a kind of nuclear version of Anna Wulf: her ambivalence has superheated. She is the dissatisfied mother/artist, turned up to 11. [CE183] For instance, this passage:
“I drink and drink as a way of hitting myself.
I started to spank Linda and Joan hit me in the face.
Three weeks ago I took matches and went into Linda’s room.
Writing is as important as my children.
I hate Linda and slap her in the face.”
This writing is so alarmingly good that it’s easy to forget it’s not writing at all, it’s actually tormented talking. The passage is shot through with a kind of brittle, compulsive truth-telling. It will be hard to forget the image of drinking as a way of hitting myself. And obviously “Three weeks ago I took matches and went into Linda’s room” is a great opening line to a poem or story or an opera or pretty much anything.
But where you really feel the transgression is in the line “Writing is as important as my children,” buried in the list of terrible utterances. Is it a truth? Or is Sexton playing at saying the unsayable, as one sometimes does in therapy?
I read the line and immediately it felt like a gauntlet thrown down. Did I believe my writing was as important as my children? I didn’t think so, but I thought perhaps it was important to try thinking it, try saying it, to roll the words like olives in my mouth:
Writing is as important as my children. Just thinking it made me want to throw up.
When I think of Doris Lessing, I think of her abandoned children. Does that mean her biography has disrupted her work for me? Or—scary thought—enhanced it?
Extract from : Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma.
Claire Dederer on Doris Lessing and the Divided Mother. By Claire Dederer. LitHub, April 25, 2023.
In 1949, Doris Lessing left behind two children from her first marriage when she moved to London from then-Rhodesia. Lessing brought along her third child, Peter, as well as a suitcase containing the manuscript for The Grass Is Singing. Once she got to London, the novel was published (or re-published—it had previously been published in Rhodesia) to great acclaim, and Lessing went on to become one of the few female literary lions this planet has ever hosted, however grudgingly. Eventually of course she won the Nobel.
As for Peter, he lived with her until they both died, within a few weeks of each other, in 2013. Even abandoning mothers somehow end up lumbered with children.
A little more than a decade after she arrived in London, Lessing published her most famous novel, The Golden Notebook, which deals with the problem of how to live as a free person. Among other questions, the book examines and illuminates the question of how a female artist is supposed to live in a society that doesn’t really want her to exist and make work.
While The Golden Notebook is shot through with the desire for human liberty—its real subject is the failure of communism to solve human relationships—the problems of motherhood haunt its pages, a kind of boggy murk that sucks and burbles at the ankles of its freedom-seeking females.
The novel is radically experimental in shape, even read from today’s vantage—it’s comprised of several different books, or rather notebooks, as they are called here, identified by color. Woven throughout all this is a more conventional novel-within-a-novel titled “Free Women,” about an alter-ego-like novelist named Anna Wulf. I hesitate to call “Free Women” autobiographical, but only because it seems like Doris Lessing wouldn’t approve of calling things autobiographical, and Doris Lessing scares the bejeezus out of me, even from the grave.
Nonetheless, it is irresistible to imagine the novel about Anna Wulf as the story of Doris Lessing’s own experience of seeking freedom—from her children, from her old life in Africa, from forces that would stop her from making art. The selection of just one child makes her flight even more unthinkable—if all the children were abandoned, the two left behind might have justified it to themselves. But not-abandoning just one child sends such a strong message to the others; you were not good enough.
When I first read The Golden Notebook, I was in fact a free woman. I was 21 years old, a college dropout living in a little house on the wild coast of New South Wales. I had ended up in the faraway antipodes for reasons I didn’t really understand. Okay, I followed a boy there—a relationship that didn’t work out. Now I had a tiny room to myself and I worked in a warehouse and aside from that I spent my time drinking beer, going to punk rock shows, hopping trains, and reading. Reading was my vocation, if a vocation is what you do when you are left entirely to your own devices.
I liked massive books then—like many free people, I found myself confronted with a string of empty days, and the longer a book kept me occupied, the better. The Golden Notebook was picked at least in part for its size, after a long bout with Anna Karenina. The problems faced by Anna Wulf were unknown to me; these were problems that had to do with commitments—to a child, to a politics, to a future. I was committed only to the pleasure of the day. But I chimed to the idea of freedom, and I could feel I was doing it wrong. Freedom, I intuited, ought to have higher stakes, and much much greater rewards than all the time in the world to read fat novels and steal a ride on a train to a rock show in the sticks somewhere.
Even if its concerns were not yet my own, I loved the book. It ate my hours. And I found Anna Wulf, Lessing’s alter ego, irresistible. I loved the honesty of one passage in particular, when Anna Wulf wakes at the crack of London dawn with a lover in her bed and a small daughter in the room next door. She is trying to be a free woman and it’s not easy and the stakes are perhaps altogether too high.
“It must be about six o’clock. My knees are tense. I realize that what I used to refer to, to Mother Sugar [her nickname for her analyst], as ‘the housewife’s disease’ has taken hold of me. The tension in me, so that peace has already gone away from me, is because the current has been switched on: I must-dress-Janet-get-her-breakfast-send-her-off-to-school-get-Michael’s-breakfast-don’t-forget-I’m-out-of-tea-etc.-etc. With this useless but apparently unavoidable tension resentment is also switched on. Resentment against what? An unfairness. That I should have to spend so much of my time worrying over details ..”
It’s not just the doing of the chores that eats at Anna Wulf, it’s the worrying and the thinking and the remembering—what we might now call the emotional labor. She is tense with the fact that she is alone in being the woman/mother self. She goes on, thinking about her analysis:
Long ago, in the course of the sessions with Mother Sugar, I learned that the resentment, the anger, is impersonal. It is the disease of women in our time. I can see it in women’s faces, their voices, every day, or in the letters that come to the office. The woman’s emotion: resentment against injustice, an impersonal poison. The unlucky ones, who do not know it is impersonal, turn it against their men. The lucky ones like me—fight it.
All that was still ahead of me when I first read this passage. I was a free girl, in some ways closer to Anna Wulf’s tiny daughter Janet than to Wulf herself. Freedom came naturally to me. I devoured The Golden Notebook on the train, in my monk-like little room, down at the pub while I waited for a lover to arrive, with his accent that was just normal life to him and a kind of wild excitement to me. In those days I gobbled the parts of The Golden Notebook that were about communism and love and found myself a little frightened of the motherhood passages. Surely that would never be me.
Two decades passed.
When I next came to the book, I was a mother of two. A homeowner, a cook, a wife, a gardener, a teacher, a driver, a cleaning lady. I found myself yearning for enough freedom, just enough freedom, to get my writing done. This time around, I found the passage, to use the parlance of our own day, intensely relatable: “The resentment, the anger, is impersonal. It is the disease of women in our time. … The unlucky ones, who do not know it is impersonal, turn it against their men.”
These latter days I feared I might be one of Lessing’s unlucky ones, taking it personally over and over, finding in my husband’s inability to overcome the privileges of millennia and do the fucking dishes evidence of his lack of love and respect for me.
This is what Lessing calls luck—the ability to fight the housewife’s disease of resentment, to know it’s an impersonal poison. This poison is well known to any woman who’s ever regarded the landscape between the making of dinner and the singing-to-sleep as a vast wasteland, on a par with the bleaker landscapes from Planet of the Apes. And I don’t know any mother who hasn’t at least once felt that way, though they meet the moment with varying levels of despair or sangfroid, depending on their situation, their income, their level of desperation. Depending on how much their husband does the dishes, how accepting their natures are, how radical their politics are. How afraid they are.
But why couldn’t I accept that the situation might be impersonal? Might, in other words, not be my own fault, not be my own individual problem? Why couldn’t I be one of Lessing’s lucky ones?
It’s a strange loop. Lessing is giving voice, through Anna Wulf, to the pressures that make a woman feel it is difficult to get her work done. (Her real work? At any rate, her art.) The pressures that might lead a woman to, oh, say, leave two children behind on a whole other continent.
Anna/Doris’s ambivalence about motherhood is given full throat in what would become one of the most famous passages from The Golden Notebook, a passage that is a perfect tiny bijou portrait of maternal apathy and dissociation:
“Janet looked up from the floor and said, ‘Come and play, mummy.’ I couldn’t move. I forced myself up out of the chair after a while and sat on the floor beside the little girl. I looked at her and thought: That’s my child, my flesh and blood. But I couldn’t feel it. She said again: ‘Play, mummy.’ I moved wooden bricks for a house, but like a machine. Making myself perform every movement. I could see myself sitting on the floor, the picture of a ‘young mother playing with her little girl.’ Like a film shot, or a photograph.”
This is the job of any good novel, or maybe even piece of writing: to reveal felt and lived experience, rather than what you think you ought to feel. The consciousness-raising sessions of second-wave feminism were built on exactly this idea. What if you said how you really felt? Would that be a revolutionary action? I suppose it depends in part on who does the saying. Lessing is doing important work in this passage. For women, laboring in domesticity, otherwise known as anonymity, it’s all the more important to get at this truth of felt experience.
This sense of being an imposter, this quiet chafing against the role of mother—I lived it. For years and years, I lived this fear that I was not, am not a good enough mother because I cannot inhabit the role with my entire being, cannot cast out the artist self, or maybe the true self, a self that is not entirely good. This is why, when my daughter was three years old, I used to pay myself to play with her. I chivvied myself into behaving like a good mother, but inside, sometimes, I felt like Anna Wulf: a machine, a film shot, a photograph, a simulacrum, a bifurcation, an other, a divided self.
The divided self is a common story for female artists. Lessing’s story is echoed in the lives of other writers, from Jean Rhys to Alice Walker. And yet. Even if one stays home, even if one has luck, has money, has help, children and writing often seem stubbornly orthogonal, two forces constantly pitted against one another.
When I began to think of female monsters, Anne Sexton was one of the first names to come up. She was the harpy-mother, the screeching taloned swooping poetess, the housewife artiste who cherished her neuroses more than her children; the mother whose offspring were sacrificed at the altar of her terrible creativity.
Sexton is nowadays arguably as famous for her daughter Linda Gray Sexton’s incendiary memoir Searching for Mercy Street as she is for her poems, although she was once one of the most famous poets in America. Though is there even really such a thing as poet fame? It’s like trying to measure the speed of a butterfly’s fastball.
After Sexton’s death, Linda Gray Sexton found tapes of her mother’s therapy sessions. The transcripts reveal Sexton as a kind of nuclear version of Anna Wulf: her ambivalence has superheated. She is the dissatisfied mother/artist, turned up to 11. [CE183] For instance, this passage:
“I drink and drink as a way of hitting myself.
I started to spank Linda and Joan hit me in the face.
Three weeks ago I took matches and went into Linda’s room.
Writing is as important as my children.
I hate Linda and slap her in the face.”
This writing is so alarmingly good that it’s easy to forget it’s not writing at all, it’s actually tormented talking. The passage is shot through with a kind of brittle, compulsive truth-telling. It will be hard to forget the image of drinking as a way of hitting myself. And obviously “Three weeks ago I took matches and went into Linda’s room” is a great opening line to a poem or story or an opera or pretty much anything.
But where you really feel the transgression is in the line “Writing is as important as my children,” buried in the list of terrible utterances. Is it a truth? Or is Sexton playing at saying the unsayable, as one sometimes does in therapy?
I read the line and immediately it felt like a gauntlet thrown down. Did I believe my writing was as important as my children? I didn’t think so, but I thought perhaps it was important to try thinking it, try saying it, to roll the words like olives in my mouth:
Writing is as important as my children. Just thinking it made me want to throw up.
When I think of Doris Lessing, I think of her abandoned children. Does that mean her biography has disrupted her work for me? Or—scary thought—enhanced it?
Extract from : Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma.
Claire Dederer on Doris Lessing and the Divided Mother. By Claire Dederer. LitHub, April 25, 2023.
Info on the book on Website of Claire Dederer
Last month, I gave a talk at a conference in honor of the late writer Norman Mailer. When I mentioned this conference in class to my Georgetown students, a couple of them blurted out, "But, he stabbed his wife." I could feel the mood in that classroom shifting: The students seemed puzzled, disappointed even. What was I doing speaking at a conference in honor of a man capable of such an act?
The situation was reversed at the conference itself: When I confessed in my talk that, much as I revere Mailer's nonfiction writing, I was just as glad never to have met him, some audience members were taken aback, offended on Mailer's behalf.
If Mailer's writing had always been as bad as his sporadic behavior there would be no problem. But as Claire Dederer points out in her superb new book, Monsters, the problem arises when great art is made by men who've done bad things: men like Picasso, Hemingway, Roman Polanski, Miles Davis, Woody Allen and, yes, Mailer.
Do we put blinders on and just focus on the work? Do geniuses, as Dederer asks, get a "hall pass" for their behavior? Or, do we "cancel" the art of men — and some women — who've done "monstrous" things?
I hope that Dederer herself doesn't turn out to be a monster because I flat-out admire her book and want to share it with my students. As a thinker, Dederer is smart, informed, nuanced and very funny. She started out as a film critic and credits Pauline Kael as a model for grounding her judgments in her own subjectivity, her own emotions.
The subtitle of Monsters is A Fan's Dilemma: the dilemma being still loving, say, the music of Wagner or Michael Jackson; still being caught up in movies like Chinatown or maybe even Manhattan. In short, Dederer wants to dive deep into the murk of being "unwilling to give up the work [of art you love], and [yet, also being] unwilling to look away from the stain [of the monster who created it]."
The #MeToo movement propels this exploration but so, too, does our own social media, biography-saturated moment: "When I was young," Dederer writes, "it was hard to find information about artists whose work I loved. Record albums and books appeared before us as if they had arrived after hurtling through space's black reaches, unmoored from all context."
These days, however, "[w]e turn on Seinfeld, and whether we want to or not, we think of Michael Richard's racist rant. ... Biography used to be something you sought out, yearned for, actively pursued. Now it falls on your head all day long."
Maybe you can hear in those quotes how alive Dederer's own critical language is. She also frequently flings open the door of the stuffy seminar room, so to speak, to take her readers along on field trips: There's a swank dinner in New York with an intimidating "man of letters" who, she says, likes to play the part, "ironically but not — ties and blazers and low-key misogyny and brown alcohol in a tumbler."
When she expresses distaste for Allen's Manhattan normalizing a middle-aged man in a relationship with a 17-year-old he tells her to "Get over it. You really need to judge it strictly on aesthetics." Dederer confesses to finding herself put off-balance in that conversation, doubting herself.
We also march through a Picasso show at the Vancouver Art Gallery in the company of Dederer and her children. At the time, she says they "possessed the fierce moral sense to be found in teenagers and maniacs, [and] were starting to look a bit nettled" at the exhibit's disclosures of Picasso's abusive treatment of the women in his life.
So where does all this walking and talking and thinking and reacting get us on the issues of monsters and their art? Still in the murk, perhaps, but maybe buoyed up a bit by a sharp question Dederer tosses out in the middle of her book:
“What if criticism involves trusting our feelings — not just about the crime, which we deplore, but about the work we love.”
To do that we'll have to think and feel with much greater urgency and, yet, more care than we are currently doing. As Dederer suggests — and Pauline Kael famously did — we should go ahead and lose it at the movies and then think hard about what we've lost.
When art you love was made by 'Monsters': A critic lays out the 'Fan's Dilemma' By Maureen Corrigan. NPR, May 10, 2023.
Claire Dederer is a journalist from Seattle and the author of two memoirs, the most well known of which is Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses. In 2017, she wrote a piece for the Paris Review entitled What Do We Do With the Art of Monstrous Men? in which she described the experience of rewatching the early films of Woody Allen (Annie Hall, Manhattan) in the context of the allegations of abuse made against him by his adopted daughter, Dylan. The #MeToo movement was then just beginning and this piece, according to her publisher, went viral. Six years on, and it has now also been incorporated into Dederer’s new book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, where it loiters alongside her thoughts on several other bad (or badly behaved) men who have made good art, among them Picasso, Roman Polanski and Richard Wagner.
This is a good subject, and a perennial one – it long predates cancel culture: anyone who read English at university in the 80s, when literary theory was enjoying its crazy, ascetic heyday, will have spent at least some of the past 30 years arguing about the degree to which life and art can or should be separated – and Dederer certainly talks a big game as she begins. Her approach will be nuanced, she suggests, paraphrasing the poet William Empson, who believed all of us must somehow exist between contradictions that can’t be solved by analysis. She will, she suggests, inevitably end up saying things some readers may find uncomfortable. For instance: having spent many hours in her cosy, book-lined, “humanist” house watching the films of Polanski, who in 1977 drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl, Dederer’s verdict on his work is (rightly, I think) unchanged: Chinatown is still a masterpiece.
But oh, how quickly her courage fails her! Though she never fully articulates it, the reader senses her particular anxiety: an apprehension that has to do with what people – young people, woke people, the kind of people who might in future be in a position to commission her (or not) – are going to think of her now. She wants so badly to be liked. How otherwise to explain her constant equivocations? Her craven assertion that she may carry “the stain of being a certain kind of white middle-class feminist”?
And isn’t this why she soon sets about throwing JK Rowling under the bus, on the grounds of her disagreement with gender identity theory (though Dederer gets woefully muddled here, writing that Rowling is “aligned” with “the gender identity movement”, which is in fact the polar opposite of her position)? Harry Potter fans are right to be angry, she writes, for Rowling has excluded them from their cherished childhood “dreamscape”. If Dederer is aware that this condemnation sits rather awkwardly, to put it mildly, with what she says elsewhere – like Polanski’s films, Rowling’s novels are still the same books they were a decade ago – she isn’t letting on.
Dederer has seemingly spent years working on Monsters and yet it is so thin, so ill-researched and, frequently, so crude. Part of her problem is that she struggles to convey the beauty and greatness of much of the art she describes, which makes it all the easier for the reader who disapproves of its makers simply to refuse to engage with it. She’s OK on the movies, and her account of Nabokov’s Lolita is fine (though why Nabokov is here at all, I’m not sure: whatever his most infamous narrator does, the writer committed no crimes against children or anyone else). But once she gets to Picasso and Wagner, she’s in trouble. Picasso, she says, sounding like an overgrown teenager, makes her feel (a favourite word, this) “urpy”. He was such “a rat”. What she knows of Wagner, included in the book on the grounds of his strident antisemitism, seems to be based entirely on a documentary about the composer made by Stephen Fry and Simon Callow’s biography.
The feeling grows that she doesn’t know what she’s doing. Thoughts and ideas come and go, explored at various speeds and in various gears, like cars on a busy motorway. You want to flag one down, but they never quite pull over. Why does she suddenly alight on the novelist James Salter? Is his last novel really a “report” from the “vilest backwaters of male desire”? (My italics.) When she moves on to female artists, including Joni Mitchell and Doris Lessing, things get even worse. Dederer isn’t wrong to suggest our culture will always rule against the woman who is insufficiently maternal. But she seems to struggle not to do the same herself, telling us – this is so grim and reductive – that when she thinks of them, she thinks of lost and abandoned children. (Mitchell gave up a baby for adoption; Lessing left two of her children in Southern Rhodesia when she fled to London in the late 40s.)
In her hands, vexed territory is oddly flattened out, its provocations mere mole hills on the way to nowhere. But in truth, I was more often baffled than bored. Virginia Woolf’s antisemitism (Dederer proudly tells a Jewish friend that she has “rumbled” this) hasn’t been forgotten; Allen Ginsberg isn’t better known than Philip Larkin (or not in Britain, anyway); JK Rowling doesn’t live in England. Monsters is populated with auteurs, with people whose instincts are singular and extreme, but its author’s real predilection seems to be for generalisation. An unwarranted detour into the world of scientists has her trotting out all the cliches about their eccentricity, the tattered garments and rope belts she believes they use to burnish their “genius”. Who can tell Picasso’s abused women apart? Not her, she tells us. They’re a “fleshy pig-pile” and she – well done, sister! – can never remember which is which.
I put Monsters down with the feeling I’d been complicit in something – though precisely what, I cannot quite say. I guess, in the end, this is publishing having its cake and eating it. Look! the book says, a little smugly, we’re not closing down debate. Here are a thousand questions, and we’ll get back to you some other time (like, never) about the answers.
Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer review – what’s your cancellation policy? By Rachel Cooke. The Guardian, May 7, 2023.
The stoops of brownstone Brooklyn, on which residents
routinely leave freebies for passers-by, are a reliable metric of current
literary tastes — and distastes. In that fervid summer of 2018 when prominent
men were being publicly accused of bad behavior right and left, I found there
juxtaposed Woody Allen’s “Side Effects” and Garrison Keillor’s “Lake Wobegon
Days,” amusing in a way those humorists never intended. Nearby, someone had
huffily discarded a copy of Mario Batali’s “Molto Italiano.” My shelf of
scandal was getting more stuffed than one of his delectable vongole origanate.
Over on the West Coast, in Seattle, the author Claire
Dederer had discovered a similar phenomenon: a Little Free Library “absolutely
crammed to its tiny rafters with books by and about” Allen, which she decided
to gather as research. “An ill-gotten Woody Allen book was a book I hadn’t paid
for — the perfect way to consume the art of someone whose morals you question,”
she writes in her own new book, “Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma,” a
cross-disciplinary consideration of such polarizing figures, and of the ethics
of a creative life.
“Everyone alive,” Dederer writes, “is either canceled
or about to be canceled.” But she has no use for the term “cancel culture,”
privileging, as it does, the person shamed by the red stamp of accusation,
rather than the one who pipes up about wrongdoing. And she nonetheless wants to
find a way to reconcile her appreciation of great art with the real-life
misdeeds of its creators.
Expanding on a popular essay published in The Paris
Review a month after the exposure of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual predation,
“Monsters” sustains an essayistic, sometimes aphoristic tone throughout 250-odd
pages. Dotted with details of her particular milieu — the ferryboat, the crepe
shop, the rock show that leaves glitter in the eyelashes — “Monsters” is part
memoir, part treatise and all treat. Dederer is continually trying — not in the
adjectival sense, but as the present participle: showing us her thought
process, correcting as she goes and experimenting with different forms.
She renders an argument with an unnamed tweedy “male
writer” about Allen’s 1979 movie “Manhattan,” for example, as a “little play”
set in the marble-lined restaurant at the Met Breuer (itself an echt “Manhattan”
setting), observing “a clink of silverware around the room, as if the knives
and forks were having another conversation, a clearer and cleaner conversation,
underneath or above the meaty human rumble.”
Dederer, the “female writer” — and a nimble, witty one
— has come to believe that the nonchalance with which Allen’s character dates a
high schooler ruins the film, which has always faintly disturbed her,
especially since the director left Mia Farrow for her daughter Soon-Yi Previn. The
male writer takes the New Critical position that she should judge “Manhattan”
just on aesthetics, and that it’s a masterpiece.
Woody Allen has already taken up too much space in
this review. The so-called monster — a term that, handily, can denote success
and size as well as deviance — has a way of doing that.
Dederer flips through an entire rogues’ gallery, which
includes plenty of men yet also a surprising number of women: J.K. Rowling, of
course, whose Harry Potter series had enraptured Dederer’s family before she
spoke about transgender issues; but also Virginia Woolf, whose diaries were
“pocked” with “flippant antisemitic remarks” though she was married to a Jew;
Willa Cather, who dehumanized Black people in “My Ántonia”; Laura Ingalls
Wilder, who dehumanized Native Americans in the “Little House” series; and
Doris Lessing, who left two children behind when she moved from Rhodesia to
London with the third.
“This is what female monstrousness looks like:
abandoning the kids. Always,” declares Dederer, a mother of two still feeling
guilty about a decade of drinking and a five-week retreat to Marfa, Texas. Here
I’d argue with her (and I don’t think she’d mind; she is continually arguing
with herself). Unless not having children, like Woolf, constitutes a kind of abandonment?
“Monster” turns out to be but one of several words the
author carefully palpates, finding it “male, testicular, old world. It’s a
hairy word, and has teeth.” It conjures childhood fear and fantasy, like the
creatures in “Where the Wild Things Are,” whose author, Maurice Sendak, is in
some quarters absurdly demonized, or the works of Roald Dahl: less absurdly
demonized, for unflippant antisemitism. (“If we give up the antisemites,”
remarks one of Dederer’s friends in what is actually kind of a Woody Allenish
joke, “we’ll have to give up everyone.” )
“Am I a Monster?” Dederer titles one chapter,
assessing her own relative rectitude. In the next breath, she assesses her own
career — she has published well-received books on yoga and sex — “maybe I’m not
monstrous enough.” Art requires selfishness; geniuses get a “hall pass” on
having to conform to society’s expectations. If only one could keep the
passionate, voracious part of monsterdom without leaving teeth marks in other
people.
“Stain” is another piece of vocabulary Dederer finds
useful, though Philip Roth’s “The Human Stain” is not among the many works
analyzed here, and Roth is mentioned only in passing, despite the very
interesting case of sexual misconduct accusations against his biographer that
has jeopardized Roth’s legacy.
Maybe that’s because “biography,” to Dederer, seems
not so much noble genre as ubiquitous nuisance, a “disrupter of my own
pleasure”: just a set of personal details you can search for on that most
monstrous of modern entities, the internet. “We swim in biography; we are sick
with biography,” she writes. It “used to be something you sought out, yearned
for, actively pursued. Now it falls on your head all day long.”
Corollary to the “monster,” more passive, is the
“stain”: some ugliness coloring someone’s life that you don’t want to know,
that nonetheless spreads and can ruin perception of his or her work. Stains
seep through time, to the people who hurt the artist and the people the artist
hurt, and in these days of heightened parasocial relationships, the people he
or she hurts include us: the fan who knew too much.
Every fan’s shelf of scandal, the books snatched furtively off the stoop, looks
different. Dederer’s: light on Roth, laden with Vladimir Nabokov. Her exquisitely
reasoned vindication of “Lolita” brought tears of gratitude to my eyes.
But I also found myself disagreeing with or
questioning a lot, resisting her sweeping “we” (a pronoun she herself
interrogates). I don’t think of the comedian Michael Richards’s 2006 racist
tirade every time I catch glimpses of him bursting through the door on
“Seinfeld.” (Should I?) Neither, presumably, does the hilarious young comedian
Troy Bond, who regularly does a modernized parody of the show on TikTok.
I don’t think the word “ambition” attached to a woman
is pejorative anymore. I don’t think women who complete their work —
“finishers,” Dederer calls them — are in any way monstrous or comparable to
male predators. They’re A students! Or just being professional.
And I definitely don’t think, as she asserts, that
“pregnancy is the end of narrative.” This from someone who spends pages
luxuriating guiltily in “Rosemary’s Baby,” trying to solve “the problem of
Roman Polanski.” What about John
Updike’s “Couples”? (Don’t get me started on how The London Review of Books
monsterized Updike, above Patricia Lockwood’s essay, as a “malfunctioning sex
robot.”)
For an author who rightly shudders over the cheapening
of the word “obsessed” to use the phrases “make work” — the new “make love”? —
and “late capitalism” leaves me feeling, as Dederer would herself put it, “a
little urpy.”
But, but … this is a book that looks boldly down the
cliff at the roiling waters below and jumps right in, splashes around
playfully, isn’t afraid to get wet. How refreshing.
Face to Face With Culture’s ‘Monsters’. By Alexandra
Jacobs. The New York Times, April 23,
2023.
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