Why did I get this book?
Great reviews, plus it’s such a perennial subject of conversation (and introspection) that I was eager for some fresh takes on the issue.
Is it what I thought it was?
Even better! It’s pretty much my dream of what public culture should be like. Not a bunch of shouty partisan bulls lining up behind their own piles of accumulated bullshit and flinging it at some other group of shouters, but a kind of conversational, self-reflective, self-doubting, complex evaluation of something that troubles our lives as citizens and people. Complex without being difficult to read, or so wishy-washy that it qualifies every statement into mush; an appreciation of why an issue troubles us, divides us (even within our own souls), but also pushing forward some of the standard argumentative positions.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
I would love to read it with a book group of thoughtful people. I think it would make for a fun reading with humanistic scholars but I kind of suspect a lot of folks who have big investments in one body of critical theory or cultural interpretation would drain some of the life and fun out of the book in order to drag it towards a more theoretically conventionalized position (or to shove it as far away from one as possible).
I’d gladly assign this in any course on culture wars, on the moral philosophy of culture, on the history of film or the novel, etc.; I guarantee every student in the class would end up referencing it repeatedly.
Quotes
I could literally dump the whole book here; it’s incredibly quotable.
“The room was furnished haphazardly—frankly a bit shabbily—and filled with books and paintings. It was the kind of room that would be recognizable the world over as the living quarters of a culture worker, or at least a culture lover. It was a room that suggested—all those books—that human problems could be solved by the application of careful thought and considered ethics. It was a humanistic room. I mean, if you were in a certain mood, you could call it a room descended from the Enlightenment. That’s a lot for a room to signify, especially when the bookshelves are from IKEA.”
“But hold up for a minute: who is this ‘we’ that’s always turning up in critical writing? 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 middlebrow male critics, 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.”
“Normally I might have rejected the word ‘feelings,’ with its weakness and its vagueness and its, its womanliness. But Sara was so smart that I read carefully what she texted. Sara was the very model of an enlightened audience member. If she couldn’t manage her feeling about Woody Allen, what hope was there for the rest of us?”
“We call it causality. We yearn for a reason behind the terrible acts of men, and we rest in the explanation.”
“This is the voice I would grow up to possess. But it’s not exactly the voice of authority. Just a never-ending flow of judgment, which nestles together with subjectivity.”
“I always sat toward the back, popping snacks and cracking up and covering my eyes during the scary bits. I knew I was supposed to be a cultural arbiter, but I kept slipping up and being the audience.”
“I struggled with the problem of authority. I was supposed to tell readers what now? I was supposed to tell them what to think? How on earth did I know what they ought to think? And why should they listen to me? I was a person who’d watched a lot of movies, sure. I had taken a couple of film theory classes in college because it seemed like something you should do if you wore as much black as I did.”
“Hemingway’s wife, 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…But the question has to be asked: Are all ambitious artists monsters? Are all finishers monsters? Tiny voice: [Am I a monster?]”
“That barbarism doesn’t need to be something as explicit as a rape or an assault—it can be, simply, the taking of resources. Selfishness. Entitlement. Luck. Whatever you want to call it.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
I loved her choices of figures to engage and the refusal to make her discussions exhaustive or easily generalizable. I also really appreciated the chapter on Nabokov that deems him the anti-monster, in a sense, the person who helps us to see the ordinariness and ubiquity of monstrosity by insisting on locking us inside a monstrous mind that cannot allow itself to see the damage it is doing.
Dederer does a great job at articulating something I’ve struggled to express, which is why a certain kind of middlebrow, almost invariably male, writer about culture and debate, is so frustrating when he pronounces himself open-minded, heterodox, committed to free speech, able to appreciate complexity, because that writer is never introspective, is never doubtful about his own tolerance and openness, is never struggling with feelings, is never of two or three minds, and never ever takes an interest in positions that do name some work of culture—or some producer of culture—monstrous, anathema, beyond the pale. It’s ultimately why I disliked the famous Harper’s letter so much—it was so pious, so above-the-fray, so without ambiguity, so without self-doubt or self-examination.
Dederer tries hard to think of ways to extend her introspection about monstrous producers of culture to women when the easy default, for good reason, is male writers and artists. There’s a chapter on Rowling that I think boils down less to a specific critique of her views on trans rights and more on the thought that a creator who is not in the end a tender steward of the hopes and dreams of their readers, is exhibiting a kind of careless cruelty, that the queer embrace of Rowling’s work early on was not just a source of wealth for her but also ought to have been a responsibility. If a beloved garden grows where you planted seeds and saplings, there’s a sort of awfulness in bulldozing it down because you’ve decided you want a swimming pool instead.
Elsewhere, Dederer focuses on the monstrosity of abandonment—women artists who leave children for the sake of their art and their sanity, or who leave life altogether because of art, with children left behind. (Lessing and Plath are the obvious focal points here.) I do think there’s a few examples of female monsters who were abusive in the ways that some of the men considered in the book were. I remain preoccupied with the case of Marion Zimmer Bradley, for example, where she was sexually abusive alongside her husband and shielded him from consequences as well—not so much just because of the awfulness of what she did, but because it compels any reader of her fiction to see that work as ideological justification for her activities. But it’s a pretty rare thing, and that’s the point—it’s not even so much the frequency or prevalence that Dederer is interested in, it’s the excuses that get made for it. Men get excused, even by some women. (Even by some of the women to whom they were monsters.)
There is a kind of monstrous thing about art that Dederer touches on indirectly with some smart thinking about its selfishness? or its self-centeredness? But one issue I could have heard more about would be simply whether the truth of some art is also monstrous because truth is cruel. E.g., some literature, some film, ends up being painful not just because it reveals interiority in a hard way to its audiences, but because the artist is being cruel to someone by representing that person in their art. She does see this as a part of the work of people like Picasso or Hemingway, and it comes up here and there throughout the book, but this feels like one of the hardest problems for me that I flip back and forth on. To see the world clearly is something to see it cruelly; to be cruel even with a purpose is often monstrous—to essentially be Godzilla destroying a neighborhood and saying “Well, it’s for their own good, those were shabby old buildings and needed to be demolished anyway”.
The chapter on Wagner and other anti-Semitic writers and artists is just so so so good. Dederer gently and politely eviscerates Stephen Fry here for his desire to time-travel and write an affectionate letter to Wagner saying “Your music is so wonderful, so please don’t write anti-Semitic things because you don’t realize how much this will make people cringe later on.” It’s such a loving critique of Fry (properly; I quite like him too) that she almost mirrors Fry by wanting him to not make this unperceptive statement about Wagner and so save him from the evisceration that she is obligated to dish out. The point being that Fry—and most other similar apologetics—are often inclined to portray laudable people in the past as just being not very self-aware, of not really understanding what it is that they were saying, of not having heard the enlightened thoughts that we self-compliment ourselves for having here in the present—when in fact those people in the past were entirely aware of those ‘enlightened views’ and were setting out to attack and reject them. Antebellum white supremacy in the U.S. was not the product of benighted ignorance, of a kind of innocent lack of exposure to the humane or Christian critique of racial prejudice—it was more often than not articulated as a conscious and principled rejection of humane anti-racism or abolitionism. Wagner wrote his most infamous manifesto of anti-Semitism as an attack on liberal critiques of anti-Semitism.
Anyway, I should just simply say: read it and leave it at that. If even a small fraction of our public conversation sounded more like what Dederer initiates in this book, we’d be so vastly better off. I think the only people who are likely to really dislike it are folks who have a really strong polemical view on the topic (including those ‘heterodox’ writers who inveigh against ‘cancel culture’) and people who want to consume strong polemics (e.g., do not want a long essay full of reflection, contradiction and ambiguity but who want a highly instrumentalized manifesto that proceeds in a straight line from A to Z). Or people who don’t want feelings and self-reflection mixed up in their analysis, who want their public sphere totally uncontaminated by the emotions and life experiences of the private and domestic world. (Which, you know, is kind of already in the tank on this entire topic, because that’s the position that pre-emptively forgives artists for what they have made in public regardless of what they do in private—why someone who is already settled in that view wants to read anything that troubles it, I’m not sure.)
I'm empathetic to this acceptance of truth's many unresolved possibilities, and the stance of an author who leaves her conclusions provisional in a public, didactic, critical work. But, Tim, I think you're missing a couple of things in favoring this 'intuition'---that the monstrous creative "writer is never introspective, is never doubtful about his own tolerance and openness, is never struggling with feelings, is never of two or three minds, and never ever takes an interest in positions that do name some work of culture—or some producer of culture—monstrous, anathema, beyond the pale." -1 Call it merit or luck or accident or "The Lottery in Babylon," but some people [NotWE but 'like me'] often?/always find? we're put on the spot to express aloud those things we think and fee---but with self-control/ audience-awareness of what's economical and timely. Possibly, that person knows she only has time and space to 'satisfice' by expressing *one* opinion. She hasn't the authority to consider "negative capability" or second-guessing about nuanced things that concern her. She has just an instant's opportunity to sound-out WH Auden's "voice." -2 I find [and people like me find] that Stephen Frye 'seems' like an intolerably smug, self-involved late-Enlightenment personification of highly 'civilized' Latitudinarian humanism. His willingness, seemingly always, to acknowledge the multivocal, dialogical potentials unrecognized in those self-proclaimed experts' embarrassingly explicit restrictive, monological arguments that prove their reductive authority is a dramatic proof of his sense of transcendent, inarguable rational and aesthetic discernment---of his acknowledged privilege as one of 'nature's aristocrats' who doesn't have to account for himself. Is it that Stephen Frye *doesn't* acknowledge views that are beyond-the-pale, or could it be that he is too careful of his public propriety to risk reputation by being drawn into controversy? Take the example of another of 'nature's aristocrats', who's always willing to acknowledge---and support without reservation---any alternate, contingent claim that might be a fruitful avenue for self-aggrandizement---the pathologically toxic narcissist and liar, our former president. Sometimes easy willingness to admit the contingency of human judgments isn't an allowance of how arrogant and flimsy our certainty is in a mysterious world but a demonstration of the iron fist of a 'master's social control: ‘You are a slow learner, Winston.’ -‘How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.’ -‘Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.’
So excited to read this one! Hadn't heard of it until now. Yes I've gotten so tired of reactionary centrists telling me to appreciate complexity and nuance. It's silly. It reminds me of the Bush years when my liberal friends would say "God I wish instead of watching Fox News, those right-wingers would learn to appreciate news that is fair and balanced." And I'd say, "Is that a joke" And they'd say, "No, what're you talking about, Fox news is so slanted and awful." And I'd say, "Because the tag-line of Fox News is literally 'Fair and Balanced'"
Nobody is anti-complexity in the abstract, or anti-fair and balanced news in the abstract. But what complexity am I supposed to be appreciating? What nuance am I supposed to be missing? Reducing all these conflicts to abstraction is so foolish. Not everyone's anti-Semitism was the same! Charles Dickens's anti-semitism was different from Edith Wharton's, and hers was different from Wagner's. That's the complexity people need to appreciate. The complexity shouldn't just boil down to, "We should overlook anti-semitism."