If Your Novel Involves Others?
After reading Kelly Mccready’s The Males Gaze and Women See in Medium, it reminded me of something I’ve been working over in my mind about writing fiction—how much should a writer move out from behind their own personality, gender, family background, etc. to write seriously about others? If you’ve been paying attention, presumably you know your own story. But how far to stray, to visualize the thoughts and actions of Others; that’s the question.
So the blog begins with this issue of fictional characters. Kelly Mccready’s article in Medium is far from that, but I get to hers eventually…
Sally Rooney’s new novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, is presently receiving lots of praise. I read her first novel, Normal People, and doubt I’ll read this one, despite all the arm-waving pundits. Her characters in that first book sounded too close to her—and I don’t even know her personally, but suspect I’d recognize her if I did. Not fair; she worked hard at her work, I’m sure, but it’s what I took away. Rooney can write closely because she knows these characters, but unless you’re interested in self-absorbed 20 and 30-somethings, you might want to pass. Normal People was like dribbling a basketball and never taking the shot. ‘Take the damn shot, or get off the court,’ was all I was pleading.
“Like Rooney’s previous books… Beautiful World, Where Are You might be reductively summarized as being about the interesting [???] love lives of a set of intellectually discontented young Marxist Dubliners. At its core, it is obsessed with the same set of questions that have always preoccupied Rooney: As the world collapses all around us, is it morally defensible to devote your life to love, relationships, and the aesthetic pleasure of books? What if you get rich from it?”
from In Sally Rooney’s new novel, a celebrity author fights her own brand in Vox by Constance Grady
I have a slightly disfigured book, if anyone’s interested.
Richard Russo has made a good living writing thinly veiled autobiographies. Though he’s on a mission in his stories to dig for the humor—and the humanity I enjoy cheering for. His pathetic excuse for an English professor in Straight Man put me off seeking an academic life, laughing the entire way.
Paul Newman plays an impeccably accurate version of Sully in Nobody’s Fool, the movie. Newman is helped by a few other star turns, but it’s Russo’s dead-eyed aim at his characters that gave the actors something to chew on. Were I to reread the book, Newman’s winking blue eyes would be Sully’s image.
All of which is to say it can be done. So maybe I just don’t find Rooney’s self-absorbed characters appealing. Witless, narcissistic intelligence doesn’t do it for me. Grow up already. Even after the novel’s passage of decades, her characters in Normal People never do—grow up. At best, it’s a set piece.
How Far to Go?
In the 3-day seminar I attended back a while ago in Portland, one of the program’s editor urged me to ask for a ‘sensitivity’ reading by a black woman since I intended to have a black woman as a secondary protagonist in my novel. I didn’t want to take up everybody else’s time to prolong the discussion, so I didn’t ask why I also wouldn’t need sensitivity readings for the black street dealer from the Bridgeport projects, the Texas teenage runaway from redneck parents, the ex-Navy non-comm from New Jersey… seeing as I’d been none of these either.
While during the seminar, I was reminded of the ‘privileged’ white woman author catching so much shit for portraying the struggles of an illegal (unauthorized? unwanted?) Latina mother and child. American Dirt stirred up—some dirt. The novel’s author, Jeanine Cummins caught a bit of it, not being Latina herself.
‘American Dirt’ is a novel about Mexicans by a writer who isn’t. For some, that’s a problem. Wapo’s article by Teo Armus gives a fair description of the so-called controversy. What right? How Entitled did the author think she was, etc. Who gives a flying fig? I tried hard not to hijack the seminar’s discussion—really, I did try, seeing the sympathy in the seminar group for not borrowing from a culture not my own. What I heard, whether intended or not, was not to perpetuate the white man’s reign.
I find it rather funny—ridiculously so—to see myself in the role of the Great White Writer.
What I took from the debate in the press was that a) privileged whites of either gender should never write about Others, and b) some prickly Latins of both genders were jealous of Cummins’s success, like she was stealing their heritage. The only valid criticism to apply to Cummins’s story is asking whether it reads with sufficient authenticity to propel it, and are her characters believable?
How many submarine captains did Jules Verne interview in real life for his opus? And he didn’t have too solid a grasp on submersible research vessels either.
Can one ever aspire to write from the Other’s perspective? Judging from the present furor over micro-cultural declensions, it would due not to stray from one’s ancestral lane. By this, Sally Rooney should anointed to write about young, privileged Irish for her remaining days—and given Ireland’s slow climb into prosperity since Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, perhaps that’s a good enough cause to be cheering.
Keep to your own kind, as Sondheim insisted—then wrote Maria, one of the musical’s best-loved numbers to refute it. The entire structure of West Side Story rests on a clash of culture.
How many fourteen-year-old Italian girls did Shakespeare interview to write Romeo and Juliet?
Maggie Nelson Exposes Freedom’s Paradoxes—Book Review
When the subject is engaged by one’s betters, it’s probably wisest to take notes. Kwame Anthony Appiah’s book review of On Freedom by Maggie Nelson was published in last week’s NY Times Book Review. He doesn’t so much praise Nelson’s writing, as parallel her thinking with his own, which to my mind is superior.
“Nelson originally came to this project, she says, because freedom had turned out to be ‘an unexpected subtext’ in The Art of Cruelty, her 2011 book about the ethics and aesthetics of representing violence in the arts. Amid recent debates over campus no-platforming, campaigns to ‘decolonize the museum’ and efforts to ban ‘critical race studies,’ the questions about what may be represented, and who may do the representing, have grown in urgency. It would be good to have some sensible guidance as to how to think about them.”
From Maggie Nelson Exposes Freedom’s Paradoxes by Kwame Anthony Appiah in NY Times
Unlike the in-vogue writers seeking to stand out through isolation, SHE works toward the center, and Appiah takes that as HIS point of departure, with emphasis on opposing pronouns. Both see this as crucial, if we are to grasp notions of import.
“She expresses sympathy for those who see white artists getting ‘space, attention and financial support’ for work that may evince ‘a paltry or tone-deaf understanding of issues that others have spent their whole lives grappling with.’
“And then Nelson makes a characteristic turn. ‘I think one can say all this,’ she writes, ‘without it following that such work is not art, unequivocally enacts harm, should be removed or should not exist.’ Put aside the absolutist rhetoric, she urges. Instead, acknowledge that ‘expression needs context,’ that ‘art is one such context, and its specificities matter.’ “
From Maggie Nelson Exposes Freedom’s Paradoxes by Kwame Anthony Appiah in NY Times Book Review
Nelson may as well have been writing in response to the bitchy uproar over American Dirt.
I read the NY Times Book Reviews for essays such as Appiah’s. Articles at this level don’t exist in every issue, if enough to renew my subscription—and kickstart my reading subjects.
The Male Gaze
So returning to Kelly Mccready’s essay, the impression I took away after reading it was how questioning the author was—of herself. I can’t speak with any authority about how much indeed women focus on men focusing on women—seemingly in an infinity of mirrors. And I’ll add that generalizing based on gender makes me doubt the premise. No question some women dress for the eyes of others, men and women alike. Though I seriously doubt this is one-way. I doubt it was ever one-way.
Early in the piece, Mccready quotes from The Ways of Seeing, a BBC television series from 1972. She says the quote was “the first articulation of the concept of the male gaze, albeit within the context of European Art.”
“Men dream of women. Women dream of themselves being dreamt of. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. Women constantly meet glances which act like mirrors, reminding them of how they look or how they should look. Behind every glance is a judgment. Sometimes the glance they meet is their own, reflected back from a real mirror… From earliest childhood she is taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and particularly how she appears to men, is of crucial importance, for it is normally thought of as the success of her life.”
from the BBC series, The Ways of Seeing with John Berger
What strikes me first is the date, 1972 and secondly that it is the quote from a man—a rather pompous sounding one at that, with his proper British accent setting it down as INDISPUTABLE FACT. Listen to the opening minutes if you want to get the full flavor, but I call bullshit on it.
Even that far back in the dark, dark age of the 1970s, Berger’s opinion was disputed as grossly overreaching. And that he was an ass for saying it. “I am an ass!” as Michael Keaton played Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing. Say it with me, “I am an ass!”
Wendy Lesser’s book, His Other Half—Men Looking At Women Through Art, is worth reading on gender in the arts. From literature to painting, she covers the subject. First published in 1991, so a few years ago as well. Early this year, I wrote a blog, Writing Ego and included reference to the book—the subject keeps reappearing, so it seems. Lesser’s book blurb is an accurate assessment:
“With great affection for her subject and her audience, Lesser writes in language that is opinionated yet free of cant. Her book avoids—as the best art avoids—prefabricated schemes and ideological presumptions. [say amen] At once exploratory and definitive, original and erudite, His Other Half is critical inquiry at its finest. It says things about art that matter outside the walls of the academy.”
from the jacket blurb for His Other Half, Harvard University Press, 1991
When young, I distrusted the attention-seeking girls. I encountered a few, and I can’t say it wasn’t flattering, but why’s she so forward acting toward me? what’s her gig? Now, I’m more curious to hear her story—still charmed if less easily swayed.
Given the opportunity, I wanted to tell the author who was nervously debating herself she should take a breath and just be. This is simply the truth: she is beautiful because she’s alive.
Added to that, people comfortable in their own skin are comfortable to be around. They can lessen our own anxieties just by their presence.
Who’s winning; who’s winning; who’s winning… oh, go read Rooney for god’s sake; you deserve each other.
Reading Mccready, I get the impression the author is working her way forward from being “that” woman. Her article doesn’t seem a case of parroting a popular fashion; if it were, it wouldn’t come across as honestly as it does.
“So what does it mean to walk through life with an internalized male gaze? In short: it’s frustrating. You second-guess your intentions. Why am I appealing to a man’s likes, even subconsciously? Are my likes my own? Why am I dressing this way? Would I like to be seen as attractive? Would I like to feel good about myself, purely for my own sake and not because I get outside affirmation? It’s a minefield. I tried explaining it to a man recently, and I described it as a spiteful erosion of identity and self-love. Internalized male gaze, real or imagined, creates a cloud of self-doubt, magnifies my insecurities, and chips away at my self-esteem. I second-guess myself constantly.”
from Kelly Mccready’s The Males Gaze and Women See
We all look at each other; start there. Beginning with studying both our parents for clues, father and mother. Then sizing each other up for tag football, or even dolls, before all that hormonal stuff started to confuse our focus. And, yes, the ‘male gaze’ has history behind it, not all admirable. But having balls doesn’t make a person lecherous, just with dangling participles.
In the 70s (again that decade) I became friends with May, a woman architect whose drafting station was next to mine—she had striking features, with long, dark hair, nicely built, and was totally comfortable with herself. She was bright and capable. We never flirted; I was married with kids and she had a boyfriend. Sigh. We were peers doing the same job. We were also friends. Though we never worked together on the same project—my loss because she was, oh yeah, someone worth listening to.
One morning, in the first work hour before the caffeine had kicked in fully, she leaned over. “Bill, you know why women are so bad at math?” asked she who had done way better at calculus. “Because all this time men have been telling women six inches equals a foot.” First time I’d heard the joke.
I don’t think she had a problem seeing herself as a woman.
I can’t recall observing how other men in the office reacted to her, if they flirted, were condescending, hit on her, so I couldn’t confirm or deny what Mccready is wrestling with in her article.
May and her bo spent a year in Italy, and she described the Cinque Terre (Five Villages) so clearly D and I hiked those hills years later. I owe her for the photos now mounted on our walls.
Twenty years later, we met up again at a party thrown in honor of Stan Allan, the firm’s former President and a man to whom I owe a debt of gratitude. An hour into the confab, I ran into May unexpectedly. It had been so long. Still with long tresses, she’d refused to hide the gray, and she still had the same wry sense of humor, the same wry perspective on life. Far as I know, still with her same boyfriend, now living out in Arizona.
Here’s hoping Kelly Mccready is going through but a season in her life, that some person who finds her wonderful will engage her, and she the same. And that they will meet each other’s gaze with affection and equanimity.
For a last turn on the subject of art, sex and gender: If Manet Was Modern, Titian Was What?
It’s my night to fix dinner. Sigh.