By Prof. T.

Poetry Corner: Transformations

Early in my pregnancy, when the changes were subtle and undetectable, I compared the experience to music playing in the background: something you would tune into or out of many times over the course of a day, without fully realizing it. At the same time, actual music was taking on more weight: instead of having the ipod on and being half tuned in while I read, it took all my attention to keep up. Along with music, poetry seemed more interesting than anything else I was reading: against all the books and columns and blogs of deadly literal advise and polemics, nothing seemed more appropriate than the metaphoric. Not surprisingly, Plath’s “Metaphors” has held on as a the ur-text through all eight syllables (and counting) so far.


Anne Sexton’s classic 1971 collection Transformations is among other things a fascinating combination of the literal and the metaphoric. The back of my edition describes it use of fairy tales as “reenactments, parodies” but that doesn’t seem quite right to me. True, there’s a lot of humor in juxtaposing the stories to contemporary language and metaphors: the miller’s daughter in Rumplestiltskin is a “poor grape with no one to pick./Luscious and round and sleek./Poor thing./To die and never see Brooklyn.” Later, after she becomes queen, and tries to bargain with Rumplestiltskin for her child, she is “as persistent as a Jehovah’s Witness.” But the stories themselves are mostly told straight: dwarfs and Kings and death behave much as they’re supposed to. It’s the language and, especially, the more generalized openings of each of the poems, prior to the start of each narrative, that cast them in a their frame. Thus “Cinderella” begins: “You always read about it:/the plumber with twelve children/who wins the Irish Sweepstakes./From toilets to riches./That story,” while “Rapunzel” begins with the witch Mother Gothel’s apologia: “A woman/who loves a woman/is forever young.” It’s the sympathies and not the stories that bring in the revisionism. Interestingly, along with Gothel, Rumpelstiltskin, another child-stealer, also comes in for sympathy: “She offered him all the kingdom/but he wanted only this -/a living thing/to call his own./And being mortal/who can blame him?”

The so-called “confessional poets” have fascinated me for a long time. A lot of people seem to look at them the way a lot of people look at second-wave feminism: a necessary step, but incomplete, and certainly less sophisticated than what’s come since. There are a lot of connections, of course, and Transformations especially resonates with the feminist criticism of the period, with “images of women” and the rereading of the existing canon. But for lots of contemporary readers and feminists it’s all too blunt, too much about the body and babies and breasts, and did Sexton really have to write “The Ballad of he Lonely Masturbator”? But I don’t think so: no social movement or body of work is perfect or even complete, but that doesn’t mean that those of the recent past should be seen as relics or as stages on the way to where we are now, the way the fairly recent past is so often judged.

“A strange vocation to be a mother at all,” Sexton writes in “The Maiden Without Hands.” Even when children are not stolen, they are everywhere contested, made strange; they transform and are transformed. At its best, the project shares the ambition of the feminist classics of the period. The movement says, what has been is not what what will be, and the poetry says, what is is already not as it is.


Talking to Strangers

When I was a kid, I was afraid of talking to strangers, especially under certain circumstances. I was scared of picking up the phone to call someone, or of knocking on someone’s door to sell Girl Scout cookies or what have you. Even recently, working on political campaigns that involve phone banking or door knocking fills me with dread. When I was in college I tried to write for our school paper. I remember interviewing a professor of mine – not a stranger, but close enough – about a new policy on student-faculty dating. I remember sitting there trembling while he said something about how student-teacher relationships were inevitably erotic, but you couldn’t get such a subtle point across in an article, so please don’t include that. (Yes, he was an English prof.) I didn’t include it and the story went on the front page and soon after I switched to writing reviews.

I’ve always looked at this as a kind of political as well as a personal failing, as if a little timidity was all that stood between me and becoming Studs Terkel or Anna Deveare Smith, two folks whose work fascinates me probably partially because the thought of doing what they do is so terrifying to me.
One thing about being pregnant is that it involves a good deal of talking to strangers. I haven’t had the experience people talk about where strangers try to touch you, but lots of strangers and casual acquaintances will engage short conversations with the standard questions – the answers are easy enough, and it’s not like you had to initiate – but there’s something about it that takes me back to that fear.
Miranda July is no Terkel or Deveare Smith. Like other indie filmmakers, her work is apolitical in a specific way – it’s a world where people exist in the thinnest of social environments. In her collection of short stories, No One Belongs Here More than You, this isolation works to brilliant psychological and existential ends, but it feels like a fun house mirror version of the world, where everyone’s ultimate unknowability becomes literal. They can’t really connect – ok, fine who can – but they also can’t have a normal conversation.
So perhaps the high concept premise of her new book It Chooses You – interviewing people who place ads in the Penny Saver while procrastinating endlessly over the completion of her new screenplay – isn’t so odd or surprising. It’s exactly what you’d expect when a performance artist tries to force herself to overcome social phobias and normal taboos and make herself into an existential Studs Terkel. At first glance it’s an odd book even for her – she describes her own struggles with the screenplay in the same elliptical, beautiful, searing weirdness as we get in No One Belongs Here. Except that fictional characters have a reason to speak in heightened metaphors; it’s odd to hear a somewhat public figure use this for her own state of mind. Except, you realize, it’s not a literary conceit: she actually thinks things like: “it was as if he’d just thrown some confetti in the air and called it words.”
July says at the beginning that it’s a book in part about L.A., which makes a lot of sense. A lot of the obsession with atomization in indie films might have something to do with that city. There you have to seek out strangers to talk to; here in N.Y. you have to dodge them. And not only when you’re pregnant. It’s also in part about older people in a younger world – the people who sell things in the Penny Saver don’t have computers.
July seems to think these people exist in a different emotional space than the rest of us – I’m not so sure. If nothing else it reminds us that the internet sure as fuck didn’t invent shut-ins. July works hard at being her best Terkel-like populist self. When she interviews Andrew, a seventeen year old trying to sell tadpoles, she seethes when he tells her how he was shunted into special ed classes for no reason he understands and encourages him to see his obvious gift with animals as something he can use, test scores be damned. But then she runs up against Ron, also known as the kind of person who makes you think you’re right not to talk to strangers:
“Ron was exactly the kind of man you spent your whole life being careful not to end up in the apartment of. And since I was raised to go out of my way to make such men feel understood, I took extra-special care with his interview. But as he talked on and on (the original transcript was more than fifty pages), I realized that I don’t actually want to understand this kind of man – I just want them to feel understood, because I fear what will happen if I am thought of as yet another person who doesn’t believe them. I want to be the one they spare on the day of reckoning.”
Later she notes how much more willing to run from the situation she is than she was at sixteen, when she corresponded with a prisoner. But it would be too glib to say, ah yes, well, there’s talking to strangers and then there’s going to the houses of strangers when you’re a woman and when it’s the latter you know where the fear comes from, and that it may be a gift, like the self-help books say. What is being an artist or a creative person if not the fantasy that we will be something other than another person who doesn’t understand, and that the understanding may spare us? Ron may not deserve it, but we do.

More Gaitskill

When I was about eleven, I wrote a story for English class about a teenager who wanted to be a model. I found it a few years later and my budding feminist self was mortified:  it seemed the sort of thing written by an eleven year old reading certain magazines, the worst possible topic for a young girl who understandably wants to write about the only thing young girls can write about, which is wanting.

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Me, Elsewhere

I have a review of Vivian Gornick’s short biography of Emma Goldman up at the November issue of Open Letters Monthly.


In the same issue, be sure to catch Rohan Maitzen’s great takedown of Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot. It does sound pretty dreary – really, deconstruction-bashing, how novel! There’s nothing worse than a novel editorializing and theorizing to you about the superiority of art to editorializing and theorizing. Well, yes, then, why don’t you get on with it? Even Roth is completely dreadful when he gives in to this. Because I’m a masochist, I recently caught Sam Tanenhaus on his podcast bitching about Eugenides not being nominated for a National Book Award: as with Franzen, supposedly it’s a conspiracy against “major” or “popular” authors by judges who don’t recognize that books that sell can also be good. It’s a clever way (well, not that clever really) to give a populist spin to a standard lament for the eclipse of your pet white males, who by definition have something big to say, no matter how parochial their subject matter. Can’t it ever be that sometimes they’re just not that good?



Poetry Corner: Dedication

Right now I’m working on a review of Vivian Gornick’s new biography of Emma Goldman for Open Letters Monthly. Over at The New Inquiry, The Jacobin‘s Bhaskar Sunkara takes issue with Gornick for spending too much time on her romantic life and failing to present an adequate analysis and critique of the limits of Goldman’s brand of radicalism, deeming the book “a trite celebration of the ‘good fight’ and some parlor gossip.”
But what does it actually mean to fight the good fight? Are the contours of a life of struggle really so familiar to us? Of course, from a certain radical perspective, this is besides the point: one struggles to change the world, not to live a meaningful life. Yet given the precariousness of radical victories, part of the story is always the lives left behind across decades of difficult and sacrifice, and, often, seeming failures. By aiming for more than a meaningful life for oneself, meaningful lives are constructed: this is one of the central tensions at the heart of Benjamin Balthaser’s wonderful new collection of poems, Dedication, (you can get it here.)
Drawing on experiences and interviews with relatives who were activists and members of the American Communist Party, the book meditates on the lines of blood and memory that extend from the long-ago epiphanies, cherished books, and conversations across decades that erode their power, both through the active repression of HUAC and named names and the less deliberate but no less intolerable diminishments of age, separations, and silences. “Dedication for Arrival” implicitly rebukes all those who have seen American repression as somehow insignificant because it lacks the familiar icons of state repression:
When they came, they did not come,
in darkness, as they did,
they did come with greased faces,
black with smoke, as they did,
_________________________
They came in the middle of the day,
they came in suits, they knocked on the door,
and read from a warrant, signed by a judge,
and when the children wept, they patted them on the head,
and gave them sweets, and the neighbors
peered from darkened windows
not knowing and prayer but silence, and rumor.
Finally, though, it is in the construction of meaningful lives that the losses and gains are measured. In “Dedication 4 for Sid Grossman: Service,” we see a captain ridicule his commitment – (“we know what your background is”),
to run their logistics, the Lieutenant called on you.
Grossman will talk to those niggers, and when
you walked through the tropical darkness,
and onto the other side, and you spoke
with the ease and directness one grants to men,
it was obvious you had not learned this in the Army.
I don’t buy or recommend poetry that often, but do yourself a favor and pick up Dedication here.

Reading for the Plot

I remember, back when I was still a student (I say this as if it was some little brief fling instead of how I spent more than half of my life), reading a preface to one of Doris Lessing’s novels. I think it was Martha Quest, although it might have been the namesake of this humble blog. In any case, the preface quoted Lessing crediting her literary accomplishments to her lack of formal schooling. It gave her the freedom, she said, to read the way one should read: haphazardly, without a plan, wherever one’s interests and fancy took one. Well. I set her aside for awhile and guiltily went back to whatever I was supposed to be reading for a seminar. Now that I’m out of school (as much as a teacher can be), working on fiction as much as anything academic, I read more this way than I probably ever have. I don’t know if I agree completely with Lessing: there’s something to trying to discipline oneself to read deeply into a certain topic, even through the boring parts. In any case, I had something of an odd summer, and at the end of August I realized that what I’d read over the last two months – the good bad and ugly, made no sense together whatsoever, except that it made perfect sense. One feels, nonetheless, some need to account for What is Found There (the remnants of the good student, perhaps).

In any case, then, some discoveries and some embarrassing confessions:
– Eileen Myles, The Importance of Being Iceland. I came to read this in a way that’s probably something like Lessing’s ideal, but that almost never happens with me: I saw it at the bookstore, was struck by it although I’d never heard of it, and read it right away. I’d heard of Myles as a poet: this is a collection of prose pieces: some you might call reviews, some you might call essays, I suppose. There’s a lot about art, but the best, for my money, are the responses to Times articles and the like: she takes some throw away, completely conventional line and runs with it, as if the writer had actually meant what he wrote. Her anti-advice commencement speech is pretty great too.
– Jane Green, Babyville. On to the ugly. Every once and a while I get momentarily fascinated by “chick lit.” I kind of liked Bridget Jones and the one Candace Bushnell book I read. I tend to be of the “if it’s popular there must be something there, and well-done pure entertainment is harder than it looks” school. But good god, this was awful. Somehow one can take a TV show where there is “the career girl with her one night stands” and “the housewife obsessed with babies” – just being played by an actor inevitably gives them at least a touch of something recognizable. But sitting through descriptions explaining to you that’s who they are, in case you missed the point. Blech. The sex scenes sucked too.
– Carrie Fisher, Wishful Drinking. Borrowed from a friend while at a country house. I imagine that, good or bad, celebrity memoirs are far more entertaining that chick lit with “relatable” characters. There were funny pictures, plus it makes you curious to re-listen to mid-period Paul Simon.
– Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 100 Years of Solitude. The only reread among the bunch, for an online reading group. My first read was in a grad seminar, overburdened by its reputation in Latin American literature and how much my Latin Americanist friends get annoyed by it as a result. I did enjoy it more this time, but it was still all a bit much for me. I think I’ll always be a minimalist or a realist at heart, and usually both at the same time.
– Leslie Chang, Factory Girls. A bit of a cheat on the arbitrary reading plan, since I’d taught a chapter in my composition class on work, and wanted to see how the other pieces fit together. It’s a great read. Chang isn’t a lefty, and she clearly doesn’t want her story about young migrant workers in China’s new cities to be primarily a story about exploitation. What she does instead, though, works well, showing us how her subjects navigate a truly strange world. The chapters on the instant schools that have cropped up to teach the ways of the capitalist world and on the dating market among young migrants are particularly captivating. After reading the latter, at least, it’s really really hard to complain about how “artificial” OkCupid is.
– Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle. J.K. Rowling gave this classic from 1948 a boost with her blurb, and you can see why. I guess you’d call it Y.A., though not everything with a teenage narrator and point of view merits that, does it? Is Catcher in the Rye YA? In any case, it brought me back to a lot of childhood reading – the Britishness, the propriety, the girl discovering the library in the old house, the way first crushes or loves bump against trying to be a good person. I wonder how many books for teenage girls stage this conflict, about what is given up to win someone else. It’s probably not up there as a theme for the vampire and end of the world types, but it still does it for me.
– Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go. The best of the bunch and probably the best novel I read this year. I have a New Yorker cartoon on my fridge that shows two farmers looking over a pen of cattle. “Before we slaughter them,” one says, “we give them each an achievement award.” Yes, the novel is about clones, but it’s really about kids who are like us, only more so: they go to schools where they are told they matter, that they are cared for, that what they think and feel matters. That the teachers are interested in their art because it reveals something about them. The unwinding is in discovering that this isn’t true, that they are a product, being prepared. And unlike our visions of youthful liberation, this is one set of raw materials that, despite any Mario Savios lurking among them, doesn’t love the machine, but isn’t about to throw itself into the gears, either. Taking it a step further, you think about what it means to create children – of the regular non-clone kind – and have to explain to them they’re going to die. Cheery stuff! But way less depressing than Babyville.

– Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer. A delight from the first infamous sentence, as I knew it would be. Takes one of the oldest and well-worn topics – the problem of subjectivity, and plays it out in the concrete in all its horrors. Worth several shelves of philosophical monographs on the nature of truth.
– Annie Murphy Paul, Origins: How The Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives. Read this for the obvious reason. The subtitle tells you exactly why this book might be terrifying for a lot of moms-to-be, but I really appreciated actually reading some of the science behind all the recommendations, speculations, and confusions. Reading blog posts at Babble or wherever I just want to go around with a red marker and write “citation please.” It’s especially interesting to read about the “natural experiments” a lot of these ideas rest on, given that obvious ethical problems with traditional studies, and the history of what used to be believed is pretty hilarious. Paul was pregnant herself when she wrote the book and does a good job trying to frame the information without mother-blame, though her confidence that this is how it will be used seems overblown, to say the least.
– Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City. Another cheat, since I’m teaching some of it in my America in the World class. An ethnography of the Green Zone from the bad old Bremner/CPA days. He sides a little too much towards the “hubris/mistakes were made” interpretation, I think – giving the stories of well-intentioned young staffers and their disillusionment leads one a bit to the conclusion that things might have been different if there had been more competence, intelligence, what have you, instead of to the point that, as Jamaica Kincaid said of the British in one of our readings for the class, the problem was that they just should have stayed home. Still, an important document. The little “scenes” in between chapters – descriptions of things like where young staffers lodged in big communal bunks went to fuck, or the support group for Democrats – are the best part. Ah, remember the aughts? How much younger we were then.

Gloria: Four Decades of Not Taking the Bait

“Our job is not to make young women grateful, it’s to make them ungrateful.”

This quotation from Susan B. Anthony serves as something of a touchstone throughout the recent HBO documentary about Gloria Steinem. It’s a short film, just 60 minutes (Stephen Colbert quipped that it’s 75% as long as documentaries about men), and because it takes a personal approach, structured around interviews with Steinem, it doesn’t offer a comprehensive history of the second wave movement, or a lot of context for viewers unfamiliar with that history. Dana Goldstein has a good piece about the shortcomings of the film, especially regarding the treatment of race. It’s too bad, because I think a lot of that history is really under-known and discussed. I don’t mean the frequent specious charge that younger women are ignorant and therefore ungrateful about what the movement did for us. First of all, as Steinem points out through the Anthony quotation, gratitude should not be the goal. Certainly it’s hard for any of us to really have a visceral sense of what the pre-(this round of)-feminism world felt like, which I think is part of the spell that Mad Men casts on so many of us. But as Steinem, who always rises above the media’s attempts to bait her into trashing younger feminists, has pointed out, young women, when you look at actual poll numbers – let alone how we vote with our feet – are far more feminist than earlier generations. What I mean is that feminism often isn’t really integrated into people’s sense of social movements and how they work. Most well-educated progressives probably couldn’t name the main civil rights laws except the non-passed ERA or the main court cases except for Roe. This doc. does little to address this, but the personal angle works well on its own terms, as Steinem talks about how she came to politics as a young journalist sent to cover a hearing on abortion laws, the ways the pre-feminist world led to her mother’s breakdown, how her mother’s own aborted writing career spurred her own ambitions and drove her from her family, the impact of being in the media spotlight, and her first marriage at 66. And it does a great job with what documentaries do best, showing us photographs and archival footage that evokes lost worlds: all the talk shows where, as Steinem points out, they hadn’t yet gotten to anger against feminists and were still stuck on ridicule, and she navigated with wit, humor and grace, never taking the bait, gamely avoiding all their cajoling of her to diss other feminists, to diss on wives and mothers, to talk about nothing but her personal life – they made her deny she was dating Henry Kissinger after a White House visit, which tells you about what you need to know. As Gandhi said, first they ignore you, then they laugh, then they fight, and then you win – or, you sort of win and then you keep fighting.



The Stakes

A couple episodes into the fourth season of Breaking Bad, my fears about the direction we’re going in seem to have been justified: now that there’s no facade, now that there’s just Walt, criminal mastermind, it’s more of a really well-written and beautifully shot crime drama than anything else. Skyler’s own transformation as she “breaks bad” promises to be very interesting this season, although it’s unclear if this will be treated as more than a side plot. Amanda has an interesting post arguing, persuasively to my mind, that what’s happened is not really a moral transformation on Walt’s part – he’s just become fully realized as the asshole he always was underneath the nerdy facade of his previous life. She’s responding to an interesting but odd post by Chuck Klosterman, which argues that Breaking Bad is the best of the widely agreed-upon group of “TV as great art” shows of the last decade (the others being The Wire, The Sopranos, and Mad Men). As always, what’s interesting is not which is actually best, but the reasons given and what the tell us about the reader, and Klosterman’s are odd, if not unfamiliar. Klosterman likes Breaking Bad‘s clear morality:



Breaking Bad is the only one built on the uncomfortable premise that there’s an irrefutable difference between what’s right and what’s wrong, and it’s the only one where the characters have real control over how they choose to live.

This is different than The Sopranos, Klosterman argues, because it was always clear Tony and the people around him were fundamentally immoral (again, he’s assuming that this can’t be true of Walt, because he’s not actually killing people at the start.) The Wire is too morally nuanced, its characters existing in a world where the lines between doing good and evil, intentions and results are hopelessly convoluted. As a result,

The conditions matter more than the participants. As we drift further and further from its 2008 finale, it increasingly feels like the ultimate takeaway from The Wire was more political than philosophical. Which is not exactly a criticism, because that’s an accomplishment, too … it’s just that it turns the plot of The Wire into a delivery mechanism for David Simon’s polemic worldview (which makes its value dependent on how much the audience is predisposed to agree with him).

Ah yes, the old the “political makes things narrower” argument – which is odd since Klosterman has just said that The Wire is the most morally complex of the shows, but because that moral complexity takes place in a context (which is by and large what makes it complex), it must be somehow diminished, less than universal (as opposed to Breaking Bad, which is I guess universal because it involves a middle-class while protagonist who presumably makes his purely immoral decisions in a social vacuum.)

But the discussion of Mad Men is odder still:

Mad Men is set in the 1960s, so every action the characters make is not really a reflection on who they are; they’re mostly a commentary on the era. Don Draper is a bad husband, but “that’s just how it was in those days.” Characters can do or say whatever they want without remorse, because almost all their decisions can be excused (or at least explained) by the circumstances of the period. Roger Sterling’s depravity is a form of retrospective entertainment, so very little is at stake. The people on this show need to be irresponsible for the sake of plausibility, so we can’t really hold them accountable for what they do.

I hear people say things like this all the time, and I just don’t get it. Isn’t it clear that the characters do navigate their restricted environment in very different ways? That they not only exist within its strictures but help enforce them on one another? I guess people who say things like that think that they live in morally correct times, that their own choices and morality aren’t shaped by anything but their own inborn and universal compass. Maybe the drama of choosing to act badly in a fundamentally morally correct world has a purity that Klosterman appreciates, but it’s not the world anyone (even Walt) lives in.



Perhaps the most revealing moment came in this aside to the discussion of Mad Men:

Semirelated: Of these four shows, Mad Men is the only that doesn’t regularly involve violence. This also changes the gravity of the characters’ decision-making, because the worst thing that can happen to anyone is merely losing a job or being humiliated.



It shouldn’t be necessary to belabor what’s wrong with this: the stakes on Mad Men are never a problem, given the gut-wrenching emotional violence that “merely” being humiliated entails. Also: the “worst that can happen” also includes being raped, regularly sexually harassed, the daily violence of living the closet, having to conceal a pregnancy and giving up your child, having your life choices thoroughly constrained by sexism and racism, being a young child and having parents who are completely emotionally distant if not abusive. So yeah. (Of course then your definition of ‘anyone’ has to go beyond Don and Roger.) People rail on about violence in popular culture, but what’s often under that discussion is the assumption that violence, when properly dealt with, is the necessary condition of moral seriousness, that anything else is just an updated costume drama. It doesn’t matter to me which of these shows people think is best, but I do think Mad Men has done something important in how it dramatizes emotional violence – which can be particularly challenging for the viewer as we aren’t given the release physical violence often provides. This should put to rest the “costume drama” insult once and for all – except that Wharton, Forester, James et. all knew a thing or two about emotional violence as well. . .

The Critique of Pure Feminist Reason

Although The New Yorker has been called out for the relatively low proportion of female bylines, they’ve gone a long way towards winning me over by making Ariel Levy a regular. She’s brilliant on any topic, but it’s especially gratifying and sanity-restoring to read articles on feminism, or feminist-inflected pieces, like her brilliant profile of Cindy McCain, in a mainstream publication that not only don’t make you want to throw things across the room, but that actually make you say, yes, that’s it exactly.
I didn’t have quite that reaction to Jane Kramer’s profile of Elisabeth Badinter, in last week’s issue, but I was fascinated by it. Badinter is a French philosopher, the author of a “three-volume social history of the French Enlightenment”and co-author with her politician husband of a biographer of Condorcet. She’s also the author of five polemics on what, in her case, it doesn’t seem archaic to call “the woman question,” from a 1980 attack on the idea of maternal instinct through her recent indictment of “what she regards as a spreading cult of ‘motherhood fundamentalism’ in the West.”

Badinter’s books, Kramer tells us, are popular in the provinces and found at supermarket checkouts, but the context is very different from, say, the last time this was true of feminist polemics in this country. Friedan and Steinem, whatever their flaws, were extremely effective popularizing writers, but they were also of course crack activists, organizers, and institution builders. Badinter tells Kramer that “The daily work of militancy is not for me. As a feminist, I can only do one thing – put into relief something that has been ignored.” Which is of course her right – but the intellectual-turned polemicist poses certain problems distinct from the polemicist/activist. Badinter’s popular works sell, but outside of a movement, we end up with the equivalent of dueling bloggers saying, “I’m not judging the choices of other mothers, but . . .” – This is pretty much where Badinter goes when it’s pointed out to her that there’s little evidence her country is in the grips of some maternal cult: France actually has low rates of long-term breast-feeding and high rates of mother’s participation in the workforce. The empirical is accidental; it’s the polemics that matter.
Part of this seems to be about the role granted to “public intellectuals” in France. Anyone who’s been unfortunate enough to have more than five minute’s exposure to Bernard Henri-Levy’s imperial gasbagging should suspect that the much vaunted greater stature given to “intellectuals” in that country is at best a mixed blessing. Even in a case, like Bandinter’s, where someone has done serious, intense archival work, it takes us to the the idea that everything someone has to say thereby becomes important regardless of how it stands on its own merits. Sometimes the results are mostly silly, as in a Princeton talk Joan Scott recalls in Kramer’s article:

Badinter was saying all sorts of banal things about how the French were sexier than Americans, better at sex, how American women washed too much, how they were embarrassed by bodily odors, by oral sex. We asked hostile questions, like, ‘How can you say these things off the top of your head?’

Of course, feminism has long had this effect on people, and it’s not feminism’s fault: gender, sex, family, mother, work: these things cut so deep, matter so much, who can stop from saying these things off the top of one’s head? But sometimes the results are not just silly but dangerous – as in Badinter’s advocacy of the headscarf ban in French school and the more recent ban on niqabs in public (incorrectly referred to as burqas, as Kramer notes.) More on that in a minute.
There’s something going on here besides the temptations of a public platform. From her beloved Enlightenment figures Bandinter has inherited a love of categorical abstraction. Atheists hate it when people point out any similarities between their approach and that of religion, but in this case it’s hard to avoid. For Badinter, attachment parenting is bad because it coincides with the “naturalistic ideology” that’s been ruining things since Rousseau. How different is that from the religious position that birth control is bad because it’s “unnatural”? She concedes that ‘motherhood fundamentalism’ isn’t actually a major trend in France, but it could be. This gets even worse, not surprisingly, when she turns her philosophical devotion to secularism on the hot button issues of the moment:

She sees her defense of the burqa law as consistent with her concern for the rights of Afghan women . . . There are five or six million French Muslims, and, for now, she says, the percentage of Muslim mothers with full-time jobs is no less than the national average; she wants to keep those women out in the world assimilating.

In other words, there’s no evidence that religion is keeping women from the workforce, but she wants to ban their religious expression – just in case it does! Badinter is upset that women are have abandoned the liberating ideas of her beloved Enlightenment – “never mind,” Kramer points out, “that the citoyennes of 1789 lost those rights before they ever had them, or that they got to vote only after the Second World War.” And never mind that, at its best, “the personal is the political” meant that there was something important in testing the abstract categories passed down by tradition – be that tradition religious, secular, intellectual – against the realities of one’s lived experience. Kramer makes Badinter seems like a compelling figure in a lot of ways, and points out that she deserves credit for embracing the label and intellectual work of feminism, unlike most of her peers in the French elite. But I couldn’t help but find the way Kramer describes the debate depressingly familiar, echoing the worst press-driven “debates” that pit one group of women against another. The intellectual weight (or baggage) Badinter brings to the table doesn’t help matters. She may reflect the problems of the current xenophobia among European secularists, of intellectuals in the public sphere, or just of philosophy as a discipline, but in any case, it all seems, as Joan Didion once said (wrongly in my estimation) of the women’s movement itself, to have become a symptom rather than a diagnosis or a cure.

Gaitskill

After reading Mary Gaitskill’s amazing “The Other Place” in The New Yorker a while back, I poured through her three short story collections over the spring: Bad Behavior, Because They Wanted To, and Don’t Cry. What to say about Gaitskill? I guess she’s best known for the way she writes about sex, partly because of the story that was the basis for Secretary. And understandably so. She makes Roth look like a Victorian. (If Katie Rophie had any sense, she’d be raving about what balls Gaitskill has, but of course she doesn’t count.) It’s not because she’s more “explicit,” whatever that might mean. Partly it’s generational: go back to Goodbye Columbus with the hidden diaphragm that ruins everything and you remember, this is a writer who’s always living in the shadow of the newness of the sexual revolution. No matter how old his (male) characters get, you can always hear little Alex Portnoy somewhere in the background: look at what I’m getting away with! Gaitskill, some twenty-one years younger, has her characters simply live in the world that Roth’s can’t stop proclaiming from the rooftops. It’s become somewhat usual to say about this, across the aesthetic and political spectrum, well, now that sexual liberation is taken for granted of course sex has lost its sacredness/meaning/profundity/metaphorical possibilities/aesthetic interest, transcendence. It’s such a commonplace we don’t think about how odd it is: if more people were to engage in a wider variety of, say, artistic and political activities, would we say, oh, now art or politics has lost its meaning? Perhaps we would. (“If everyone’s an artist, no one is, etc.”). The logic of scarcity runs deep, and yes, this is saying that sex under capitalism is still thought of primarily as a commodity, but so are all experiences, so we shouldn’t dwell on this too much.

In any case, Gaitskill shows how ridiculous all of this is. There’s a lot of S&M in her books, which is perhaps an imperfect way of heightening the stakes, of recasting sex as a metaphor. But in any case, it works. Which is the other, deeper way in which she departs from someone like Roth: sex as metaphor works because it’s about something besides breaking taboos or trying to cope with aging and mortality. Call it the sublime or just call it the soul, as Gaitskill does in “Mirror Ball.”
So I decided to kick off this summer’s reading by moving to Gaitskill’s novels. I’ve been thinking a lot about my preference for short stories over the novel, but in Gaitskill’s case I also think she may be better suited to the form: the intensity and strangeness she does so well are just that much harder to sustain with a single story and set of characters over a few hundred pages. Reading Gaitskill sometimes feels a little like having sex: not because the writing gets you off, although it might, and you don’t get the sense she’d mind. People talk so carelessly about being “transported” by a good story, but most of the time we don’t mean it – we mean, oh, a couple hours went by and I didn’t notice. But distraction and transportation are not the same. With Gaitskill, you might forget and hour has gone by but probably not three. At a certain point you want to or have to come up for air, and go back to pretending you are this well articulated person in the world, that there is a boundary between you and that world, that you a person with opinions and ideas who just happens to have a body you must tend to now and then.
So I wasn’t surprised that I found Gaitskill’s first novel, Two Girls, Fat and Thin, less satisfying than the stories. It felt, as so many novels to do me, like a story stretched beyond its size. Two women who seem very different meet by chance: in this case, because one, Dorothy, responds to an ad from the journalist Justine for an interview. We start with their early interactions, are then presented with alternating scenes from their childhoods, and then reconnects them on the way to some kind of climax. What I wasn’t quite as prepared for was the strangeness: all of Gaitskill is strange, but here it’s less the uncanny perfection achieved in so many of the stories but the strangeness which leaves one perplexed. Let’s just say this is probably, thankfully, the only novel whose main themes are S&M and the followers of Ayn Rand. If anyone could pull this off, it would be Gaitskill, but it doesn’t quite work. I like the idea of playing with a relationship between women with disparate amounts of power, and the Ayn Rand stuff (she calls her “Anna Granite” and the philosophy “Definitism”) is interesting, especially as she manages to show why this would appeal to women, and to people without power more generally. After all, if everything around you already affirms your superiority, you don’t need a bullshit philosophy and thousand page novels to confirm it. But we’re still left with a story stretched beyond its normal life. And the treatment of Dorothy as “fat girl” – well, it just feels like something a thin girl would write. (Though as a thin person I obviously might be as clueless as anyone about this.) She’s trying to do the thing the “Definitists” or whoever have contempt for, to write about someone without power clearly, without sentiment or pity or condescension or cheeriness but still not take you to pure despair – it’s just a really hard thing to do. Interestingly the more widely known and praised Veronica seems to work with a similar dynamic between two women – on to this one next.
I also kicked off the summer with the completely strange – in the wonderful, sublime sense of the Gaitskill stories – collections of essays and assorted prose by the poet Eileen Myles, The Importance of Being Iceland. More soon.