There Are Men Eating Menstrual Pads

For those who haven’t read it, The Dying Animal is the one where Roth has the aging professor detail his m.o. for seducing and fucking his students.

@5: you mention the Satyricon, but more generally, of course, if you go back before the nineteenth century a bit, you find tons of explicit descriptions of sex, though not, I think Belle is right to say, descriptions of “much of the trivial daydreaming that passes for waking life.” This is more the point, I think: even in nineteenth-century English novels you can find people who are very clearly having sex, but not the kind of detailed descriptions of lust and sexual obsession that you get (one side of) in Roth, etc.

As for being shocked by Tropic of Cancer, you might be surprised, though I suspect they’re not shocked in the way Gilmour thinks they are. I mean, I haven’t read ToC, but my experience is that, while students are of course generally aware of how sex works, and capable of talking about it without fainting, they start with a very strong sense that (a) that kind of stuff doesn’t go in the literature you read in school, and (b) no author who wrote a long time ago (variously defined) ever had the idea of mentioning sex at all.

I should clarify that I’m trying to help Phil with his argument, not argue with Belle.

“Does no one else do this? I don’t understand why everyone seemed so resistant to the idea when I said I read certain things without enjoyment (not that this is true for Lawrence) but don’t other people read things just because they think they should, in an eat-your-vegetables way but also, maybe it’ll turn out this author is the new best thing that ever happened.”

I used to do that, but not anymore. There are too many good things to read to spend overmuch time on stuff thats not enjoyable (and there’s no way I’ll ever read all the good stuff – I’ve added half a dozen to my list just following the last 500 comments).

Sure, my judgement might be dead wrong on some books I quit or never take-up – but I’d rather accept missing a good one occassionally vs. suffering through lots of bad lit on the off chance it will prove rewarding. Besides, if enough people tell me I’ve missed a good one I can always give it a second chance.

Its a little like drinking bad wine. Bad wine if fine for getting drunk. Bad literature is fine for getting stupid. I occassionaly indulge in both with that in mind.

P.S. completely with the strand on Faulkner. I favor Light in August to Absalom, but love them both.

Got sidetracked

Over the phrase “Serious heterosexual guys…” in the David Gilmour quote.

It’s been my experience that it’s precisely the guys who claim to also be heterosexual who just aren’t serious about me, so that phrase seems kind of an oxymoron. I hope the readership here is sophisticated enough this late in the term to appreciate my point of view, even if I don’t make it in the approved heterosexual serious guy way by referencing the ingestion of menstrual impedimenta. I try not to be judgmental, but if that’s how serious heterosexual guys get their rocks off, that sure explains a lot about the world that I have found mysterious.

(That is to say “Gilmour”. Also I read a second interview with him which I cannot be bothered to look up again wherein he points out that all of his students are girls, apropos I’m not quite sure of what.)

If David Gilmour were a character in a comic novel, where he taught Literature for Men at a women’s college and was pissed off whenever anyone brought up Pink Floyd, I would read the shit out of it. Give him hemorrhoids, and a limp from gout, and make him too shy to actually hit on any of his students, even when they give him obvious openings. It should end with him marrying the volleyball coach, who everyone had assumed was a lesbian all these years.

Belle, I’ve been following the comments in the other threads with some bemusement. Your points were clear from the beginning but it doesn’t hurt to reiterate, apparently! I don’t know that I have much to contribute (which is why I lurked in the other thread) but I felt I had to raise my hand to be counted, at least.

Your thread title did make me hesitate to read because my gag reflex has never been the same since I was pregnant more than twenty years ago. :( But I did read, and ugh, David Gilmour is a compatriot of mine. But he’s not my fault! And Philip Roth…I read one book of his decades ago and that was more than enough.

You know, sometimes you see sexism and it’s hard to point out to other people. It can be subtle, or complicated. But sometimes it’s as easy to see as reversing the “he” and “she” in a situation. So with David Gilmour: if a female prof didn’t love any male writers enough to teach them so she only taught “real heterosexual gals”….is this even imaginable? Could such a prof keep her job?

Sexism lives, yes it does, but just point it out in one hallowed place and watch the multitudes contort themselves.

Well, you just did.

GY – exception that proves the rule (in the strict sense of the phrase, i.e. tests the rule & leaves it intact). The clock-winding joke (and the sash-window joke, and probably others) wouldn’t be nearly so good if Sterne wasn’t dancing round saying things you can’t possibly say.

But (also to Walt) there’s a broader point, on which I completely agree with you, which is that not being able to write about sex in no way prevents a writer from writing about people who are sexual beings. Pip may not be the best example – in fact Dickens may not be the best example, ten children and a long-term extra-marital affair or no – but it’s pretty much always there. What possible sense could you make of Pride and Prejudice without sex? (Never mind Mr Darcy – think of Lydia. Conversely, think of Mr Collins – the horror & the comedy of his character is largely supplied by the absence of sex.)

The main (but not title) character in Pere Goriot gets ahead in French society by his ability to please married French women.

As I recall this is also a major plot point in Bel-Ami.

Lynne,

No, sometimes you think you see ‘sexism’ and you have to be corrected by those of us who are wise enough, virtuous enough or just lucky enough not to have drunk the feminist Kool Aid. Personally, I am more interested in whether a writer illustrates the good, the true and the beautiful than whether he matches up to the political fashions of the present day, whether it be feminism or any other fashion.

“if a female prof didn’t love any male writers enough to teach them so she only taught “real heterosexual gals”….is this even imaginable? Could such a prof keep her job?”

Exactly! This guy is so ridiculous that I thought at first it had to be a parody or Onion thing.

The previous post is great, but this one is better. But, Belle: it sounds like you read so voraciously that you’d have to end up reading novels you “think you should” even if you didn’t think you should, just to have something to read. There must be some medical term for this condition. Certainly — you’ve read enough of what “you should” that there’s nothing else you should read for that reason.
Except Beyond A Boundary, which everyone should read, obviously.

Personally, I am more interested in whether a writer illustrates the good, the true and the beautiful than whether he matches up to the political fashions of the present day…

Socrates might wonder how exactly it is that you tell one from the other. At the very least, it seems like a useful talent.

Oh virtuous, wise and lucky Hector (I’m sure it sounds better in the original Greek), please tell us lesser mortals whether a story in which men eat menstrual pads is good, true, or possibly even beautiful.

Keep fighting the good fight, Belle. You have more patience than I.

And another question for Hector – if these gender roles that you are so deeply invested in are so natural, in born, God given and immutable, why are you so worried? The vast power of feminism can’t possibly succeed! Just sit back, leave it alone and your world view will inevitably overcome all challengers.

The whole strand of discussion keeps reminding me of the line from the movie as good “As Good as it Gets” when Jack Nicholson’s author character, Melvin Udall responds to the question:

Q: How do you write women so well?
Udall: I think of a man, and then I take away reason and accountability.

The Udall character, undoubtedly a mash-up of the various ‘dillweeds’ being discussed.

I think Belle’s reading speed (of which I’m heartily jealous) explains a lot. There are exceptions (Kazuo Ishiguro, Kate Atkinson) but mostly anything with any depth or texture slows me right down, to chapter-a-day-and-not-necessarily-every-day sort of speeds. If you’re not enjoying something at that speed, it’s not going to get finished. If I read a book in 2-3 days it’s probably a Pratchett or a Nicholas Blake.

No.

they’re far more sophisticated than they are in the beginning. So they can understand the differences between pornography and great literature

That strikes me as a very, very, very modest goal for a literature class. Though perhaps on the outer limits of what Gilmour is capable of teaching.

Gilmour is a “natural teacher,” I grant, in the sense of being untutored, untrained, unformed ….

Given his predilections, for the life of me, I can’t think what Woolf story he imagines suitable.

Previous to these inimitable BW Posts and threads, I’d never given much thought to the sex of a novelist, nor that of a literary critic. Maybe I was, well, wrong not to do so.

It happens that the list of GMNs whose female characters Belle doesn’t find believable/convincing pretty much coincides with my own list of writers I read but don’t love, which has led to me wondering why I don’t care for Hemingway (at all), or Updike (much) or Roth (ugh). I’m not sure it’s entirely their portrayal of women that puts me off, or something else/more, and I need to return to Updike and Roth’s novels and try them again to figure it out. Which I will do, despite a glacial as opposed to breakneck reading speed.

Re: Mr. Collins and his horror and comedy resulting from the absence of sex (Phil@20 above): I read his character and Austen’s authorial intentions differently: to my mind, Elizabeth is sexually repulsed by Mr. Collins, and utterly bewildered that her most intimate friend could overcome such repulsion, marry him, and produce an heir.

I am following these threads with a too-keen interest, even while starting to feel they’re devolving to “he said, she said” (lit-critically and actually). Maybe we could request that our resident arbiter elegantiae propose we all read, like, the same novel and then have a little lit-crit forum on same. I’d like to hear in-depth literary analyses by the CT male commentariat of … anything Belle might care to suggest.

Tristram Shandy is great, but sexist even by the somewhat limited standards of the 18th century. I mean, most of the first half of the book takes place in the sitting room where Walter and Toby are having a long digression on the subject of noses while Tristram’s (unnamed!) mother is engaged in a difficult birth upstairs. The male characters all get to endlessly soliloquize about their Hobby-Horses, but pretty much all that we learn about Mrs Shandy is that she has no strong opinion on the subject of breeches.

Let me fix that for you:
Men deeply resent the fact that young and extremely hot women are not continuously interested in sex with them. Women deeply resent the fact that men are continuously feeling entitled to sex with young and extremely hot women.

I could use your comment in so many different ways to dissect all the ways that men and women’s sexuality are wrongly placed in conflict with one another. But that was the funniest.

@52

Dear Belle, I’m really quite sympathetic and, like most of your readers here, greatly entertained by the gusto with which you are throwing around the furniture, smashing crockery, and bloodying all comers. Unfortunately, apart from a few giants like George Eliot, women haven’t written as many great works of literature as men. They have also launched fewer wars and genocides. Women writers are not under-represented in modern literature courses because of the vile character of the male-dominated establishment; they are less studied because they don’t produce as many great works. Where are the female equivalents of Mann, Kafka, Nabokov, or (yes) Pynchon?

As to my personal failures and frailties, I assure you that they are abundant and richly deserving of your scorn, but I hope you will reserve your ammunition for more conspicuous targets, such as the unfortunate Mr. Franzen.

56 cannot be real. Why are you doing this to me, Belle?

On the subject of women’s interest in sex and literature, it turns out that the most popular book OF ALL TIME ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/9459779/50-Shades-of-Grey-is-best-selling-book-of-all-time.html ) is a book about sex written by a women and bought by women in vast numbers.

This has made a lot of people very angry, sometimes for valid reasons (consent issues, bad writing).

I do wonder how much anti-diversity is just driven by myopic casual selfishness, in the way that fanfic writers refer to as “Mary Sue”; Gilmour is basically objecting to anything unlike himself, anything unlike his fantasy version of himself, in which he enjoys Hemingwayesque masculinity. If he could get away with it he’d run an entire course on The Awesomeness of Books About David Gilmour.

58: you’re on to something. I think Belle herself wrote all of “Philip Roth’s” novels!

I mean, what makes more sense: (a) the most amazing hoax in literary history, or (b) that someone can really be as obtusely sexist & narcissistic as Roth? I vote for (a).

This also explains why John is “too busy” to read novels: he’s just now getting out from under the burden of having to write everything supposedly by “John Updike.”

62: Belle knows that by making him write that much purple prose about infidelity, it will ruin the prospect forever.

58: you’re on to something. I think Belle herself wrote all of “Philip Roth’s” novels!

So at the very moment Belle Waring needs evidence to support her thesis on Roth, Updike etc, David Gilmour oh-so-conveniently gives an interview with exactly the ammunition she is looking for. Coincidence? There are no coincidences.

Gilmour is a troll, right? One whose trolling is on a long march through the institutions, but still. His private beliefs might still be odious, but I doubt they match exactly with the interview quotes here. Those seem carefully crafted for public consumption and outrage

“I doubt that Belle takes much comfort in the stupendous “success” of EL James and JK Rowling, whose book sales likely exceed those of any living male writer.”

I haven’t read any EL James but JK Rowling is fantastic. Her latest one, Cuckoo’s Calling (Written under a pen name) is fantastic.

Joseph@61: In the other thread your explanation for my failure to appreciate the characterization of Val in Antarctica was that I “might need to hang out with
outdoors jocks a bit to get that”. And now your explanation for my detection of sexism in the fact that the male characters in Tristram Shandy get hundreds of pages of dialogue while the female characters are unnamed and offstage, is that I have missed “the fact that Tristram Shandy is a comedy”. Oh, a comedy? Really?

This is of course the same pattern as with the reactions to Belle. It can’t possibly be the case that it’s the books that are at fault, so it must be that I lack the life experience, or simply am too stupid to understand them.

Gareth, perhaps it would be good if the women got more page-time in Tristram Shandy, but Mrs. Shandy is a character with a discernible inner life from the very first page.

I want to join a couple of other commenters and ask you your thoughts on Bellow– surely the most canonical post WWII American male author and an odd omission.

In Hector’s day, men were required only to eat the hearts of their enemies. Modernity has its own dietary laws. Be there, or be square….

Belle,

The OP seems to me a pretty damned dishonest summary of those other two threads. When I first used those fatal words “then stops,” Anderson IMMEDIATELY challenged me and I IMMEDIATELY clarified thus:

Perhaps I should have said “stops paying attention” or “tunes out.” How did I deduce that? It was the only way I could make sense of the notion that it’s pretty much impossible to enjoy Bellow, Roth, Cheever, Updike, Mailer, Malamud, Vidal, Powers, Percy, Penn Warren, Taylor, Naipaul, Rush, Price, DeLillo, Banks, Barnes, Yates, Dubus, Trevor, Maxwell, Bowles, Pynchon, Stone, Connell, Stegner, McCarthy, Ballard, Carey, Amis, Amis, Shacochis, Coetzee, Vargas Llosa, Garcia Marquez, Cortazar, Grass, or any other important male novelists (except William Burroughs) of the mid- to late-20th century (nor, it goes without saying, D.H. Lawrence). It may be impossible not to want to give each of them a piece of one’s mind, or even rip all of them a new one. But inability to enjoy any of them suggests a lack of tuned-in reading.

Subsequent comments (from me, at least) contained NO speculation about your reading habits, honesty, or intelligence. None at all. In fact, virtually none of them mentioned your name except to disavow any interest in such speculations. Then as now, the question of your character and intelligence is of zero interest to me. As I assured John in one comment, and am happy to repeat here, I admire your wit, erudition, and moral passion. I just thought you were wrong in one of your literary judgments, and wrong in a way that raised some interesting questions about literary criticism generally.

What interests me instead, as I explained in nearly every one of my 15-20 subsequent comments in those two threads, are questions like:

Are Roth’s, Bellow’s et al superficial or mean-spirited portrayals of some of their women characters aesthetic or moral flaws, and for that matter, what are the boundaries between aesthetic and moral judgments? 2) If we do decide that sexism is an aesthetic flaw, how should it affect our overall judgment of a novel that has a number of outstanding aesthetic virtues?

Or again:

Writing a novel is, like playing tennis, a complex practice — far more complex, I would say. It requires mastery of characterization (creation of a wide range of psychologically plausible characters, of both genders and every age, race, class, profession, or ethnic background, including their interactions over a wide range); plotting (pacing, level of detail, ingenuity, structural proportion and symmetry); ability to choose and deploy resonant, revelatory symbols; atmosphere (creation of alive, emotionally evocative settings); tone (maintaining a balance between humorous, satirical, edifying, etc); authorial voice (absent, mystified, authoritative); and style (rhythm, color, precision, formality/informality). There are an enormous variety of aesthetic choices to be made and, in turn, judged. Just as with tennis, you have to acquire some knowledge about these things, and practice in perceiving them, in order to make authoritative, or even interesting, judgments about a novel’s success or failure. But once you’ve acquired a taste for such judgments, and skill in conducting the arguments that lead to them, your enjoyment of fiction is multiplied.

Of course … a crude, reductive, even vicious attitude toward some potential class of characters (women, blacks, gays, poor people) will probably produce inadequately realized characters of that class (though of course there are genuinely hateful people in those and every other class). We should notice when that happens and say so. I’m just arguing that there are a lot of other things to notice and say about novels, which may be equally or more important in rendering aesthetic judgment.

Or yet again:

the heart of the matter [is]: … whether there really is something like aesthetic merit. … I’d say yes, and in the case of novels it includes things like the structural integrity and ingenuity of the narrative, the moral/psychological depth of the characters, the subtlety and intricacy of the symbolic architecture, the vividness and fullness of the atmosphere and environment, the quality of the wit, the force of the rhetoric, the richness of the prose style. Of course it’s a single novel (poem, painting, symphony), but it has various aspects or qualities, just as people do, and the purpose of criticism is to notice them, describe them, relate them, and finally evaluate the whole they make up. There will almost certainly (as with people) be shortcomings, but to allow them to obscure the merits is faulty criticism.

And many more to the same purpose. These may have been banal, boring, pedantic, pompous-sounding, even somehow (I don’t see it, though you seem to see nothing but) “patronizing” comments. They certainly didn’t seem to engage most other commenters, and the discussion I was hoping to start up didn’t occur. Which is fine, and I don’t think I was a bad sport about it. I hope not. But to claim these comments argue that, or betray the slightest interest in whether, you “in fact didn’t read such books at all, but merely checked the covers for sexist content and then threw the books away in the trash” or “stopped reading books completely after you reached a sexist sentence! Because that’s manifestly what ‘reading fast’ means” — this is, as I think you put it when referring to some or all (it wasn’t clear — it often isn’t, I’m afraid) of those who disagreed with you, “weird and obtuse.”

When I first used those fatal words “then stops,” Anderson IMMEDIATELY challenged me and I IMMEDIATELY clarified thus

I have said insulting things and apologized, but the insulting thing was said.

Most people probably don’t know that one of the greatest living composers is…a woman! A very rare moment in history, probably because we don’t know the names of many of them after Hildegard of Bingen (12th century). Her name is Kaija Saariaho. Her early chamber piece Lichtbogen is for me the best example of the spectralist style, and the most beautiful thing written in the last 30 years.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9y1b91uVuA
If you find a CD of Saariaho’s ballet “Maa”, check out the movement named “Windows”. I guarantee that you have never heard anything like it. Puts anything by the men to shame, except maybe Ingram Marshall’s “Hidden Voices”.

Straightwood@56: alas, I feel the need to rise to the bait.

Most of the authors to whom you refer are considered “world writers” (Mann, Kafka, Nabokov) whereas (most of ) the discussion here, at least as originally framed in the OP, concerns “American writers”, primarily of the second half of the 20th century. There is not alot of overlap; my view is that Pynchon doesn’t belong in the World Canon. Of American authors who do, there are precious few of either sex; in fact the only ones who comes readily to mind are Henry James (who, btw, did depict fully-rounded female characters) and William Faulkner, also perhaps John Steinbeck.

Jane Austen, btw, is normally included in the World Canon; it is she who, while not the inventor of the novelistic genre per se, really opened the way for the 19th century realistic social novel – a genre with particular requirements which overlap but are not identical to any number of fictional offshoots mentioned in these threads (sci-fi, fantasy, detective, etc.). Also: cf. the Bronte sisters.

Sticking to the canon at hand (American), and having felt challenged, I can think of a good number of really, really fine women writers – some more specialized in the short-story genre, some deemed “regionalists”- who are superior qua writers to any of the GMNs under initial discussion, though their production may have been more limited. These include, inter alias, Edith Wharton (whose Age of Innocence stands tall beside James’s The Europeans), Willa Cather, Kate Chopin, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and Harper Lee, to mention those that come to mind immediately. We might recall as well that one of the greatest American playwrights of the 20th century was a woman: Lillian Hellman. Another significant playwright: Lorraine Hansbury. More recently (in fiction): Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Bobbie Ann Mason (an outstanding Appalachian writer).

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, and (yes I know, but still, I read it in a single sitting when I was 14) Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind are all occasionally included in various lists of “America’s 100 Greatest Novels.”

Re: other popular American writers who are rarely, though sometimes mentioned in The Canon, Edna Ferber certainly was the equal of John O’Hara in the thirties-forties (i.e. the generation prior to that under consideration in the OP).

Ranging slightly further afield, re: major Anglophone women writers of the second half of the 20th century: consider Doris Lessing, A.S. Byatt, Margaret Drabble, Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Bowen, Edna O’Brien, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro. Again, all of them are superior as writers to any of the GMNs of the OP. (By “superior,” I am suggesting that they are better at plot, characterization, and setting, and are overall finer stylists than Updike, Roth, Pynchon, Mailer, or Wolfe).

Your comment re: the presence of so few women in the World Canon has long been noted, and I can think of nothing other than to recommend the all-time classic response, A Room of One’s Own (Virginia Woolf), supplemented by Doris Lessing’s To Room 19, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, and Florence Perkins Gilmore’s The Yellow Wallpaper.

I taught Intro to Lit courses for many long years, and certainly taught many works by male authors (though not necessarily American ones). However, my criteria were always those noted above (characterization, plot, setting, style), and there are many women authors who produce superior realistic fiction. In fact, now that I think of it, it’s pretty remarkable that there as many as there are, given the patriarchal history of the West and all its consequences for women.

” Seriously, am I the only one who thinks there is something deeply wrong with this list?”

I seriously think they have not change the English Curriculum in 40 years.

@80

That’s a great catch. Also worth noting: trolling has already begun in the comment section on amazon. [Sept 26: “Sorry, but I don’t read guys. I don’t truly, truly love books by guys. And I’m a teacher, too. And I will neither read nor teach an author unless I truly truly love them, because there would be zero value in assuming young students may love, or get something from, a book or author I do not truly truly love. Duh.”]

@etv13.

Wow. The 1980s called, and they want their syllabus back.

Seriously, this could be my 10th grade English class in 1983, except I happened to draw a teacher who was obsessed by Shakespeare. I think she stole the time by shortchanging AQotWF, which was OK by me.

Belle@4: “Does no one else do this?”

I am willing to read the first 50 pages of anything. Life is too short — there are too many good books — to wade through garbage. Dostoevsky, for example, fails the 50 page test, but Tolstoy grabs you by about page 10. What have I missed?

First of all, any list of “should-be-canonical world or American writers of the 20th century” that doesn’t include Ursula K. LeGuin is what we technically call “wrong”. It’s perfectly clear to me that she is the living American writer best-qualified to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, given that the terms stipulate that the body of work must be “in the ideal direction” — that is, with a political or world-improving bent. Though how that didn’t include Tolstoy, I have no clue.

In any event, obviously the “literary canon” is a genre list, just like the “best SF books of the 90s” would be. If it were truly a “best-of-the-best books” list, it would include works classified as genre. As Austen would be, were she writing today.

Actually, I consider my ability to get through the whole of ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ to be my greatest feat of mental stamina. It was a bit daft though, because I’d have got more enjoyment and gained more understanding from reading the telephone directory.

“Dostoevsky, for example, fails the 50 page test.”

I agree with Phil that this is hard to believe. Maybe The Possessed or A Raw Youth or even The House of the Dead? But surely not Notes from Underground or The Idiot or The Brothers Karamazov!

While I don’t object to the 50 page test in principle, I’d never use it, in part because it seems it would only be appropriate/reliable for certain kinds of novels with certain approaches to the structure of novels, ones that rely principally on plot and seek to establish the basic characters and the stakes right away.

That Dostoevsky *might* (but no! I don’t believe it!) fail that test it is partly due to the strangeness of his novels: their wonderfulness often takes a lot of time to reveal itself, sometimes reaching full blossom at, say, page 300.

“If you wish to ascribe the disparity to prejudice and sexism, you will bear a heavy burden of proof.”

Because the Nobel committees are, by definition, not sexist?

(They’re not even competent judges of great literature. Woolf, Joyce, Lawrence …)

THIS IS A VERY MODEST MOTHERFUCKING THESIS.

Where were you when I was searching for a dissertation title, Ms. Waring?

Tom Slee @ 55 (quoting Holger Syme):

(Christopher Marlowe called to complain: What makes Chekhov so cool? Whom did Chekhov ever kill? Did Chekhov ever catch a knife in the eye? Or get done for coining? Fuck that milktoast Chekhov.)

Is Professor Syme already married, I wonder? And if so, perhaps all parties would be agreeable to a Hermine Danglars – Lucien Debray arrangement?

Anyway, kudos to Ms. Waring as usual, soldiering on through the blogging world with panache, even as her CT posts continue to attract a … certain style of criticism. “Mansplaining” might cover it, except (1) I find that an extremely inelegant neologism, and (2) it seems too sweeping a term to apply to all the cases here.

@103

Any craft can be elevated to a high degree, so Belle Waring has earned her black belt in mixed martial arts literary blogging.

@Anderson 09.26.13 at 7:58 pm
“Crime and Punishment.”

My least favorite, so I’m tempted to grant it. But how many pages in does the double axe murder happen?

And really, it’s another one where the structure’s completely unusual and unsuited to a 50 page test. It presents itself as a thriller murder mystery: murder! will he get caught? But then almost immediately we find out the cop knows he did it. So the real interest in the story is in the second half–somewhat like the Tell Tale Heart–watching the kid unravel while the cop sadistically plays with his mind.

And really, it’s another one where the structure’s completely unusual and unsuited to a 50 page test.

And yet Dostoevsky published in instalments.

@100 One reaction one might have to that last is , “wow, not only are most of those people men, but one of the few women who did make the list is Pearl S. Buck, of all people. Maybe perhaps this is an indicator that their ability as literary arbiters is inconsistent at best, and therefore it would be really, really stupid to use the list as evidence of massive gender disparity in writing talent.”

Then again, if one were more concerned with trying to make a contentious point than anything else, one might have a different reaction.

Geo, there is more to talk about in the context of the thread:

Many people who seem to know what they’re talking about say that (late) Schoenberg, Ligeti, and Cage are great composers. I wouldn’t deny it, even though I don’t enjoy any of their music. I just assume that I don’t have the necessary knowledge or critical vocabulary or patience to judge of it. I hate Waugh’s snobbery, rancor, and contempt for the ideals of solidarity and rationality that I cherish. But of course I enjoy reading him, and of course I recognize his literary greatness. I enjoy Tolkein, dislike his ideas, and have mixed feelings about his literary merits. We can have all kinds of reactions to any cultural product, or anything at all.

I can be charitable and say “This is just geo’s response to Janie M regarding sadness over a personal failure to appreciate art, and he is not necessarily suggesting that anyone anywhere at all should concede, as he does, that they are ignorant or impatient upon being frustrated by those held up as great artists.” I don’t see why others need to be so charitable.

Arguing that important English-language literature is not roughly divided evenly between men and women is not a serious, or defensible position. I suppose you could invent some elaborate scoring system that would show that men come out slightly ahead, but come on. For the 19th century novel, women writers are practically the totality of the canon.

I can believe the Brother Karamazov, while a masterpiece, could fail the 50 page criterion. Doesn’t it begin with a long section on a particularly saintly monk?

“Henry emailed me this link and a commenter in the thread below as well—please remind me who you are and I will tip my hat.”

I guess that was me.

Decent = good (colloquialism), rather than decorous etc

@116 “The guy is at least plotting a brutal murder in the first 50 pages. Whaddya want?”

I wanted this to be the first sentence in the novel: “Because he was so short the axe struck her full on the crown of the head.” If you’re going to go all Hollywood action, Fyodor, go all the way. Really, though, you’re right: it passes the 50 page test.

“tons of movies and TV shows use the ‘hedunnit, but how’s he gonna get caught?’ schtick.”

But there’s not even that: you know the whole time exactly how he’s going to get caught. When the policeman gets bored of toying with him, he’ll arrest him.

Any suggestions? I’m tempted to say Mann’s Magic Mountain

No, but Mann’s Joseph tetralogy has a really rough start.

Walt @ 16

“If David Gilmour were a character in a comic novel, where he taught Literature for Men at a women’s college and was pissed off whenever anyone brought up Pink Floyd, I would read the shit out of it. Give him hemorrhoids, and a limp from gout, and make him too shy to actually hit on any of his students, even when they give him obvious openings. It should end with him marrying the volleyball coach, who everyone had assumed was a lesbian all these years.”

Hasn’t John Irving written that novel 6 or 7 times? The Gilmour character was a wrestler in high school, right?

@124 Mao Cheng Ji: “Yawn. Could someone from The Management post something crookedtimeber-like, please.”

Mao apparently has a 123 posts reading rule…

I was kind of enjoying the uncrookedtimber-likeness, myself. Sometimes all crooked, no timber.

And even more than Finnegans Wake, Joseph and His Brothers might be the most difficult book I have ever read. This is Mann’s masterpiece, and is not so different than B or MM or DF. Doktor Faustus is in some ways a lighter book than Joseph. By this time Mann had achieved a use of irony that really does approach madness, and J is drowned in symbolism and allegory. Buried in there somewhere somehow are Mann’s preoccupations with autobiography, homosexuality, decadence and disease, the demonic, current politics and current philosophy. It is about the West, especially Germany, in the 30s. It is about despair.

The first 50 pages question, I would say Underworld. But then everyone else would say, well the rest was shit
But I liked it, I must admit
All that .. ‘he speaks in your voice..’ nonsense goes a long way with me

dbk @108

I am more than willing to deviate from CT form and have a rancor-free discussion. Let me begin with the observation that any sensitive reader of literature will acknowledge the tremendous impact, at least on first encounter, of the masterworks of the Western canon. For me, examples are works like Hamlet, The Magic Mountain, The Metamorphosis, The Sound and the Fury, and Gravity’s Rainbow. The only book by a woman writer that has ever had a nearly comparable impact is The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula Le Guin). I admire Austen’s subtle insight and George Eliot’s virtuosity, but their works simply don’t have the stunning effect of the great male-writtten masterpieces. Now it may be argued that women have the capacity to achieve the same results, but the question is how long must we wait.

“Yawn. Could someone from The Management post something crookedtimeber-like, please.”

One, don’t be a dick. Two, this thread strikes me as very “crooked timber-like” in that it is interesting and a great number of the comments, and the OP, remind me how little I know.

Bell your argument, to the extent that it reaches the level of argument and not just complaint, seems to be that self centered male authors are bad because they are male. You might plausibly argue that being self centered makes you a bad author (you might, but plenty of counter examples abound and writing is probably at least a little bit inherently narcissistic). In truth very few authors create “plausible interior lives” of any sort at all, let alone for the majority of characters in a novel. Indeed if you look across the whole of literature you might be tempted to find another rubric for greatness other than “plausible interiority”.

Perhaps it’s the fictional wrapping that makes this post’s Author upset. Because these are stories and not true accounts, the blogger has trouble accepting that the writers don’t want their characters to spend more time with female characters who have plausible interiority. I can understand that, I prefer to interact with humans that are not hollow machines as well.

Still belle doesn’t demand like-ability only plausibility. I guess maybe the problem is with the concept “plausible”. Plausible as far as I can tell means something that you can imagine a person doing without causing narrative hiccup of some sort. However I’m afraid that the plausibility that we are bandying over is actually of a more subjective flavor. With implausibility defined as “something I couldn’t imagine myself doing given my political values.” But that seems to be more of a failure of imagination on the part of the blogger. Many people do things that I cannot myself imagine doing. I often read books about those people and frequently I find, given the circumstances of the book that those actions I wouldn’t take are still plausible. But of course I’m not a woman in 19xx year or a woman in 2013.

Perhaps belle’s argument is not that male self-centeredness is inherently bad, but that only novels with plausible interiority for female characters are good. I think that this is probably a little broad too though, since it would exclude us from enjoying virtually anything written before 1900. (I’m tempted to discount all of human cultural production sometimes, but for some reason it doesn’t help me win many arguments.) So before we toss the baby out maybe we should stop to consider why we read. Personally I don’t read for the experience of having my own brain reaffirmed. I get plenty enough of my brain and the internet QED. I read for great writing, for new perspectives and for occasionally for escape.

Take one example: the male characters in Austen’s novel have no interior life– this doesn’t prevent the novels from having something important to say. In fact, I love the novels because I get to spend time in the somewhat unfamiliar brains of females who lived long before anyone I’ve ever gotten to personally know.

Granted it is interesting when an author steps outside a personal perspective and imagines the lives of others, but doing so is not a pre-requisite for good writing. The number of author’s that can plausibly write in a voice other than their own is vanishingly small, which, I think, causes this argument to collapse even further. It’s as if the author believes that any insight from a politically imperfect perspective or a politically imperfect time is fatally flawed. That would disqualify nearly every work.

That said, much American literature from the time period in question does stink. While Naked and the Dead is good, Mailer is a buffoon, and Roth is an even bigger buffoon (although Our Gang is genuinely hilarious). Updike writes beautifully and has nothing to say. Generally most of these post-war authors failed, not because of sexism, but because of a more general lack of humanity.

They were depressed and scared to take on the huge subjects of their day so they filled the depression with empty sex. Then they wrote about the depressingly empty sex as if it was a topic of general interest. Critics liked it because it affirmed their lifestyle and because they could pretend that writing about sex was new. Certainly the success of these novels reflects the fact that they were written an received in a male dominated culture (the patriarchy, you might hiss), but attacking them based on their lack of quality female perspectives is letting these mid-century giants off too easily. Mailer, Roth, Bellow, Updike et al are bad mostly because they don’t have much to say at all.

I’d give Franzen a partial pass, his books are bit like that scene in Being John Malkovich where everyone is John Malkovich, but at least they make a pass at bigger themes.

Gilead’s the only one I’ve read. And it’s brilliant.

Could someone from The Management post something crookedtimeber-like, please.

You boys and your penises.

straightwood:
I admire Austen’s subtle insight and George Eliot’s virtuosity, but their works simply don’t have the stunning effect of the great male-written masterpieces.

I’d put Middlemarch up against prob. the vast majority of “male-written masterpieces”.

Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive, for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.

Or take the opening sentence of Felix Holt (the introduction I mean, not the first chapter)

Re: What I was trying to intimate in the last two paragraphs of my comment @85 was that there are longstanding socioeconomic reasons for the relatively low literary production of women vs. men in the so-called “Western Canon” (American, Anglophone, World).

Socioeconomic? Ah, yes, of course. It couldn’t possible be that there are *natural*, *innate*, “physiological* reasons for it.

I suppose you’re going to blame the relative dearth of women Congress representatives, Senators and Presidents on sexism too.

“Hector_St_Clare has to be a performance piece or a holodeck version. There is no, NO possibility that this is a real person!”
I have long maintained that Hector is as fine an example of Poe’s law as you are ever likely to find poco.

You know Hector this is the third time you have claimed ignorance of Poe’s law when questioned about it. Very suspicious if you ask me.

but their works simply don’t have the stunning effect

It’s as if you they . . . I don’t know, lack a certain thrust or force . . . I can’t quite put my finger on it . . . their books aren’t ravishing . . . like the right pegs aren’t lining up with the right holes . . . .

(Dude has never, apparently, read Wuthering Heights).

LFC @142

George Eliot is undoubtedly a peerless master of expression in the English language, but her choice of subject is always narrow-gauge. English provincial life is not a heroic canvas. She does not write about people at the limits, but, like Austen, creates meticulously observed dramas of quotidien life. Now, you may argue that the existential tension of life is a fractal structure, as easily depicted in a village political intrigue as in a sword duel, but the difference remains. Talented novelists who choose to write about life and death struggles take precedence over those who write about the vicissitudes of social life in a country village.

Neither Austen nor Eliot could have written War and Peace, or even A Tale of Two Cities. They didn’t have enough canvas. So while I accord them top honors in expressive facility and observational acuity, they fall short in thematic range.

The list of Nobel Prize winners as an arbiter of merit is hilarious. Because everyone reads Erik Axel Karlfeldt today!

Talented novelists who choose to write about life and death struggles take precedence over those who write about the vicissitudes of social life in a country village.

…because you say they do? Well I’m certainly convinced!

@157

The pianoforte displaced the harpsichord because of its superior dynamic range. Symphonies are greater achievements than chamber music compositions because they deploy greater resources. By analogy, literary works that encompass the extremes of human experience are superior to those which examine human phenomena in a narrow range.

Here is an excerpt from Hemingway’s Farewell To Arms that is so disturbingly rendered that I have never forgotten it. Lieutenant Henry, a volunteer in the Italian ambulance corps in WWI, shoots one of his men who tries to desert:

“Halt,” I said. They kept on down the muddy road,
the hedge on either side. “I order you to halt,” I called.
They went a little faster. I opened up my holster, took
the pistol, aimed at the one who had talked the most,
and fired. I missed and they both started to run. I
shot three times and dropped one. The other went
through the hedge and was out of sight. I fired at him
through the hedge as he ran across the field. The pistol
clicked empty and I put in another clip. I saw it was
too far to shoot at the second sergeant. He was far
across the field, running, his head held low. I com-
menced to reload the empty clip. Bonello came up.

“Let me go finish him,” he said. I handed him the
pistol and he walked down to where the sergeant of
engineers lay face down across the road. Bonello leaned
over, put the pistol against the man’s head and pulled
the trigger. The pistol did not fire.

“You have to cock it,” I said. He cocked it and
fired twice. He took hold of the sergeant’s legs and
pulled him to the side of the road so he lay beside the
hedge. He came back and handed me the pistol.

“The son of a bitch,” he said. He looked toward
the sergeant. “You see me shoot him, Tenente?”

Find the equivalent passage for me in Jane Austen.

Straight Wood,

Your right of course. But don’t expect the Georgetown cocktail party types to agree. In the view of many of today’s cultural liberals, instead of fighting Franco, Hemingway’s boys should have sat down and sung Kumbaya instead. I suspect a lot of your critics on this thread are deeply uncomfortable which literature which treats good and evil as what they are, and which embraces the traditional masculine virtues.

geo, if I, random pseudonymous commenter, may:

1. Partly, it’s what Substance says. The Schoenberg analogy really kinda rubs the wrong way. Given the way the analogy works, you’re failing to even acknowledge that the problem may lie with the works under consideration, rather than with the perceptive faculties of the listener/reader.

2. Partly (to me) it’s that you ask questions, and fair ones, like:

Are Roth’s, Bellow’s et al superficial or mean-spirited portrayals of some of their women characters aesthetic or moral flaws, and for that matter, what are the boundaries between aesthetic and moral judgments?

And then, when these questions get answered in no uncertain terms, you ask them again. And you seem to think that these questions aren’t getting play even though they are being directly addressed by Belle (and John, in earlier comments; others too). This is why I think your mode of engagement can start to seem a bit “obtuse”. It seems to me at least that not only do you want these questions discussed, you want them discussed according to a set of particular criteria (as you suggest here) that you think are the right and proper ones. And if your interlocutors don’t discuss the questions at issue according to the very particular criteria that you have set out, then you think that they aren’t addressing your questions at all. Even after Belle has repeatedly and at length explained that and exactly why novels written after ca. 1950 that fail to portray credible female characters are artistic failures.

Honestly, I am loathe to rehearse the argument because I would just say what Belle has said, except a lot less well. Here’s more or less completely at random:

One wishes only that the subsidiary female characters behave as plausibly like autonomous beings as the subsidiary male characters do. The novel may be one in which realistic characters are not an important aspect at all—so be it! One merely prefers that such characters as do exist, exist to an equal extent, rather than having the male characters photographed, plainly, while the female ones are merely sketched in chalk. That’s it! I’m saying that, when that doesn’t happen, the novel tends not to be a good novel. Again, that’s it.

The argument is clear, and it’s now been repeated like 10 times at least. And the thing is, it’s manifestly unfair to demand that not only the questions you are raising be addressed, but that they be addressed only in the very particular terms you seem to think are the only appropriate ones. Again, more or less at random, this pretty much answers the questions you raise at 79:

The point is rather, I judge novels that were written during a time when men perfectly well could have known that the women they spoke to were intelligent human beings, in which the authors nonetheless fail in varied awful incredible ways to represent the 51% of humanity involved, to have failed qua novels. It is a necessary result of the Updike-version sexist writing that your novel fails to be even a passable novel. It is actually somewhat embarrassing for everyone.

Imagine how much better (more disturbing, more extreme) the Hemingway passage would have been if he had curb stomped the deserter!

The curse of our times is that every foolish, idiotic, or evil ideology that has been completely hashed out and discredited in the past will be revived by trolls on the internet. Like Sisyphus, reasonable people have to constantly refight old battles against barbarism and bigotry, only to start all over again.

Ah, blockquote, how thou dost wound me! “No, of course not. etc.” is me, obvs.

@165

I’m being unfair to Hemingway because I am not providing enough context. Lieutenant Henry’s soldiers have little loyalty to him, and when their ambulance gets stuck in the mud, they fear for their lives. The moment of supreme tension in this excerpt is the decision Henry makes to give his pistol to Bonello, with no assurance that Bonello will not shoot him in order to desert or to avenge his comrade. It is a supreme achievement of Hemingway’s minimalist style that he can communicate so much fear and courage with so few words.

I quite would like to make the Georgetown cocktail scene

I don’t know. A Manhattan martini bar sounds better (can’t find the HSC comment now, but that’s another nihilistic horde favorite, I gather). Funnily enough, I’ll have to make do with Pittsburgh beer lunches as well.

“the Georgetown cocktail party types”
Not that it matters but I grew up in a small town and most of my immediate ancestors were/farmers. I have driven a tractor and worked with cattle. Can you say the same?

Adam Smith,

I don’t know about you, but I would much rather read about battles and heroism than about drawing room society. It is no accident that the modern west has such a dearth of good art nowadays: prosperity and comfort don’t exactly make for great art.

Jerry Vinokurov @ 167:

While I doubt that anyone, Eliot included, is capable of making sheep-shearing seem interesting

Coincidentally, I was present at a sheep-shearing demonstration on Tuesday, and the topical patter of the gentleman performing the shearing was actually rather interesting, and tinged with melancholy to boot. So no, no theme too small.

yeah, what Tom says. If you can’t understand underlying themes in literature (i.e. if you think that Austen is about “drawing room society”) and like some good ol’ violence and clear good/evil delineations, I recommend action movies. I’d be more generous and even allow you decent movies like Die Hard I-III. Lots of violence, manliness, and good vs. evil there. I think at least in 1 and 2 he’s even married and there is no morally dubious hanky-panky with other women, so that should work for you, too. Lord of the Ring is excellent, too, especially the movies. There is a bunch of boring philosophy stuff in the books, so I’d recommend against those.

Pynchon can do Austen

I’d like to see him try.

It is more difficult to write a good symphony than it is to write a good string quartet because it is harder to command the greater resources of a full orchestra. By analogy, it is harder to write a good novel that encompasses a broad range of human conflicts, characters, and situations than it is to write novel about a small set of individuals in a narrow range of circumstances. Proust and Joyce pioneered expansive novels devoted to uninhibited exploration of vast inner spaces of memory and consciousness, and this was a sharp departure from the more narrowly observed narratives of 19th century literature. Joyce’s Ulysses is named after an ambitious epic because it is an equally ambitious epic of inner life.

I submit that the ultimate measure of an artist (in any branch of the arts) is the product of his/her facility and the scope of the work. Big themes multiplied by big talent result in great works. Smaller themes multiplied by big talent result in lesser works.

Most of the great female writers don’t write about violent death in an understated and deadpan manner. However, some of the minor ones do, and they do it at least as well as the passage from Hemingway you quoted. Take Grace Paley, for example:

Fear struck the kidnappers, you can see that. You may ask, Where are the children? Perhaps in another country, perhaps kindly treated by a frightened wife. Perhaps they will forget, go to school, they will think –oh, that other childhood was a dream. Perhaps they were thrown into the sea. Or the garbage. Not good. Not good.

On a tangent, because I have nothing to add to Belle’s wonderful posts – they did start me thinking about pre-19th century fully-rendered female characters, and I wondered if Belle had not been perhaps too generous to earlier writers. Even in sexist, patriarchal, macho societies, and writing for the same, and mostly about battles and the other manly stuff that turns Hector on, it was possible to depict women as themselves IF you were a good enough writer. Even then, you did not HAVE to be a sexist dillweed. An eclectic few came to mind – Clytemnestra, Medea and Antigone, Maebh in the Tain, Hallgerda and Bergthora in Njal’s Saga – all very much themselves, no cardboard visible.

Substance @113: ignorant or impatient

Where did you get that? How about just “mistaken” or “overlooking something”?

it is harder to write a good novel that encompasses a broad range of human conflicts, characters, and situations than it is to write novel about a small set of individuals in a narrow range of circumstances. Proust and Joyce pioneered expansive novels devoted to uninhibited exploration of vast inner spaces of memory and consciousness, and this was a sharp departure from the more narrowly observed narratives of 19th century literature.

I like Joyce (and Woolf and Forster) a _lot_ more than I like Victorian shit (and here the fault truly lies in the reader), but this is what I found just found in the dictionary when I looked up “talking out of my dumb ass”. If you want “grand scope” and shit like that, you obviously go to the Victorians, not the high moderns. Like, have you read Orlando? No, obviously you haven’t. Go read it, then come back. Actually, don’t—first read To The Lighthouse and The Waves as well. Then come back. We still won’t talk, but at least you’ll have read some essential fiction of the 20th century.

“I’m glad we know now who the greatest composer of all times is. Mahler had the biggest orchestra _and_ a bunch of choirs, _and_ soloists, so clearly he wins. Take that Bach &Beethoven!”

Yah, it’s a darn shame all those baroque polyphonists didn’t know they were wasting their time with their claviers and harpsichords and fugues and crabs. If they’d known where the real action was, they’d have saved themselves about a century or so and slid straight into kettledrums and trombones. We’d have been spared the feminine harpsichord and treated to the manly piano instead. Boys could have practiced their scales with a good conscience and no doubt the world would have been a better place.

Dear bekabot,

MOAR PLS

Bekabot,

Barkley is a perfectly finely portrayed character, I don’t know what your complaining about.

Well, hello and welcome to Women’s Literature. In many circumstances, Women’s Literature is a sad anti-climax after the exciting events described in Boy’s Literature and Men’s Literature. We hope to avoid this pitfall by making our Women’s Literature into the most exciting and action-packed Women’s Literature that you’ve ever read. In a lot of cases, Women’s Literature contains purely feminine matter, and in others explosions are still only part of the dramatic action, but not so any more… We say: get a move on, female novelists! and let’s have more Women’s Literature like this:

…of her dress as it rode up over her thighs, her slender body thrust forward by the enormous power of the 6,000 h.p. engines, as Horst hurled the car into a shrieking, sickening slide across the wet tarmac. The lion tore savagely at his bronzed thighs as the car soared into the air, turned, twisted, and plunged down the treacherous ski slope, that no man had ever survived. Tenderly Eunice caressed him as the fighters screeched out of the darkness, flames ripping towards him. The sea was coming nearer and nearer, and though neither had eaten for eight weeks, the stark terror of what they saw, gave them the last drop of energy to push their bodies to the limits. Eunice groaned, the dark figure of Shahn-el-Shid, dagger raised, hurled himself from the sheer wall of the palace. Horst reversed, swerved, coughed and threw himself into the gorge. Never had Horst known such exquisite pleasure, as far above him a million Dervishes swept into the fort, looting and pillaging. The Colonel screamed an order, and with one enormous blast the refinery was a sheet of flame – a wall of fire six miles long and eight miles high. Eunice groaned as the spacecraft roared low over the silent, darkened surface of this eerie world, a million light years from the Earth they had left only seconds before, a planet doomed to extinction, when suddenly…

How about that for Women’s Literature? Wake up Morrison! Wake up Walker! Let’s show the World that Women’s Literature gets on with it!

That makes me want to go and listen to the partitas for about the fifth time this year…

“It is more difficult to write a good symphony than it is to write a good string quartet… absurd to declare Beethoven’s 9th or Hamlet to be no better or worse than the other smaller scale attainments of those artists.”

No, it It is probably much much harder to write a good string quartet because you have less resources to draw upon. But then, the entire world can be in a string quartet. Or in a little poem by Keats. Beethoven’s favorite composition of his own was his string quartet op. 130. “Never did my own music produce such an effect upon me; even now when I recall this work it still costs me a tear.” His late quartets are for me among the finest things in music.

All this art and music terminology goes way over my head, so I will just say this: men will always have an extra factor driving them to create art, viz. status competition with the intention of using high status to attract women. There are plenty if other reasons men and women create art, but intra male competition is one extra factor that drives males to create art. Therefore one should not be surprised if among the best artists, just as among political leaders, we see a preponderance of men.

To my mind, a writer is at his best when he evokes the basic and eternal truths of human nature. Since one of those truths is that the classes are essentially different, with different talents, interests and roles, the best writers will probably be considered politically incorrect among the Hollywood crowd.

I am a class complementarian, not a classist. There’s nothing better or worse about being a count or a serf. They are just different roles. Some people have an inherited propensity to give orders and others to receive them. Due to status competitions among titled aristocracy the greatest art disproportionately comes from the upper classes. It was Tolstoy who wrote War and Peace and not one of the nameless forgotten who worked on his estate — this no mere coincidence.

If you look at the evidence without politically correct blinkers on you will see that titles and property are highly heritable. You can’t argue with reality. It all goes back to the Serengeti.

Lee A. Arnold: moreover, a string quartet shares the sonata form with a symphony, and takes up about the same amount of time.

I wanted to argue that no major composer after Schubert wrote more than a handful of quartets (except of course Shostakovich) because there’s less money in it; the audience is too small. The problem is that Schumann & Brahms both bequeathed us 3 quartets and 4 symphonies. Tchaikovsky wrote 3 quartets and 6 symphonies. Perhaps a rough equivalence between symphonic & quartet production is the norm, and Verdi, Debussy, Ravel, with one quartet each and no symphonies, and Bruckner, Mahler, Sibelius, and Nielsen with no quartets (as far as I know) are the outliers. Presumably they were dealing with different markets.

Belle Waring,

You are simply incorrect about premodern England. in Christian societies (as opposed to various oriental cultures) marriage always required the consent of the parties involved , and forced marriage was not permitted under canon law.
It is also rather silly of you to say that ‘no one let women do anything’, historically. And I find your comparison of Christian civilisation to Saudi Arabian barbarism to be outrageous.

Havergal Brian wrote bigger symphonies, with larger musical forces, than Mahler. Why isn’t he in this discussion of the greatest composer of all time? Surely there’s someone out there who will champion his cause? Bueller? . . . Bueller? . . . Straightwood?

“Tristram Shandy” is a book about the way human brains are
broken: nearly everyone in it is obsessed with some sort of
trivial nonsense. Are they oblivious to a woman’s suffering?
Sure, but then, they’re oblivious to everything else, too.

The main characters are not heroes in any sense, the way they
think and behave is not at all exemplary: you can have sexist
characters without having a sexist narrative.

But bad Jim, does anyone imitate anyone after Romanticism de-legitimizes imitation?

To be fair, Straightwood’s 133 makes clear he’s only interested in the big themes: war, peace, and what happens when you’re suddenly turned into a bug.

When I was in college, I overheard a conversation between my girlfriend at the time and another friend on the subject of my reading habits. They agreed that in general I had good taste in books, that my love of Farewell to Arms was inexplicable because that book was terrible. My girlfriend hated it so much that she hid it somewhere in my room where she would never have to see it.

b9n10nt, I assume you’re joking. Romanticism and Impressionism became default settings in their respective genres. Originality gets attention, but familiarity sells.

It always gets down to meaning and purpose. Half kidding, since meaning is typically a category error, but for an artist, purpose is pretty clear: getting paid for your work.

I like Dostoevsky fine, but it’s easy to see how people would have trouble with him, given that very long stretches of his novels consist of dour people dourly expostulating on dour topics at very great length. I read Karamazov back-to-back with Karenina, and the difference really couldn’t have been more pronounced. Tolstoy’s writing felt bright and brisk, whereas Dostoevsky’s felt grim and claustrophobic. It’s not a value judgment; I like them both, but there’s a pretty durned vast gulf between them.

Coming in (or piling on) late, but I don’t think anyone’s challenged Straightwood @172 on the close-reading front.

The moment of supreme tension in this excerpt is the decision Henry makes to give his pistol to Bonello, with no assurance that Bonello will not shoot him in order to desert or to avenge his comrade.

That’s these three sentences:

Bonello came up. “Let me go finish him,” he said. I handed him the pistol.

It is a supreme achievement of Hemingway’s minimalist style that he can communicate so much fear and courage with so few words.

As my English supervisor used to say, show me in the text. Show me where he does that. All I can see is unusually laconic Boys’ Own action writing. You’ve brought your own fear and courage to it, inferred from the narrative (which has set up the situation you describe). You can get that effect from anyone who can write narrative (which isn’t everyone, admittedly).

See the post bianca linked to on the other thread. Some writing does that thing, some (most) doesn’t. I haven’t read enough Hemingway to pass judgment on his work in general, but that extract certainly doesn’t.

Substance McGravitas, that was a good bit of Monty Python re-purposing. :)

In Straightwood’s “subsumption” theory of Great Literature, Lois McMaster Bujold subsumes them all because she can write an epic space battle about traditionally feminine themes.

I’ve just remembered my first encounter with Jane Austen, which came via a book of quotations when I was about 14. I read out the one about

the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour

and said, in so many words, “She’s actually admitting that she writes next-to-nothing about next-to-nothing! How can that possibly be worth reading? She’s practically saying herself that it’s not worth reading!” Just down the page was a quote from Mr Woodhouse (An egg boiled very soft is not unwholesome) – “I mean, look! A boiled egg! She’s writing about – one of her best lines is about a soft-boiled egg!”

My family collectively gave me a resigned stare and said, “You just have to read it.” (They were right, of course.)

I think Heller really only had one book in him, and after he wrote that he didn’t know what to do. So in Something Happened he’s imitating the Important Male Novelist style, which he’s worse at than his contemporaries.

Whether you honestly believe that it can’t be Great Literature without violent death, or you simply enjoy speccing out fanfic in which we add explosions to the literature of the domestic: NOTES TOWARD AN INFERNOKRUSHER MANIFESTO.

And for scope and scale, there’s Olaf Stapledon. More happens in two paragraphs of Star Maker than happens in most entire novels. Entirely ordinary example (Ch. 8, “The Beginning and the End,” Section 2, “The Supreme Moment Nears”):

The supreme moment of the cosmos was not (or will not be) a moment by human standards; but by cosmical standards it was indeed a brief instant. When little more than half the total population of many million galaxies had entered fully into the cosmical community, and it was clear that no more were to be expected, there followed a period of universal meditation. The populations maintained their straitened utopian civilizations, lived their personal lives of work and social intercourse, and at the same time, upon the communal plane, refashioned the whole structure of cosmical culture. Of this phase I shall say nothing.

(The paralipsis! Even more laconic than Hemingway! And he repeats his refusal, e.g., “Of the other insectoid worlds, I shall say nothing.”)

bad Jim at 223, would you mind expanding on that? (Also, is your nickname a Moxy Früvous reference?)

Sumana, by a weird coincidence I was trying to remember the infernokrusher joke yesterday, but I couldn’t. (“Steampunk” came up in one of those rare conversations not near a computer.)

Talking about comic novels from that generation, I have to admit I found JP Donleavys The Ginger Man pretty funny when I first read it (in secondary school though, so probably ages 13-17)
It seems to always show up in those top 100 most important novel lists (though I cant see how its important, and its problematic on any number of levels IIRC) I dont know what Id make of it now though

Just a little correction: The Lensman series doesn’t have an anti-matter planet from another dimension, the negasphere was created by the Galactic Patrol after a Conference of Scientists determine how to make one.

Have you ever seen a negasphere strike a planet?
The negasphere is built of negative matter. This material–or, rather,
anti- material–is in every respect the exact opposite of the every-day
matter of normal space. Instead of electrons, it has positrons. To it a
push, however violent, is a pull; a pull is a push. When negative
matter strikes positive, then, there is no collision in the usual sense
of the word. One electron and one positron neutralize each other and
disappear; giving rise to two quanta of extremely hard radiation.
Thus, when the spherical hyper-plane which was the aspect of the
negasphere tended to occupy the same three-dimensional space in
which the loose planet already was, there was no actual collision.
Instead, the materials of both simply vanished, along the surface of
what should have been a contact, in a gigantically crescendo burst of
pure, raw energy. The atoms and the molecules of the planet’s
substance disappeared; the physically incomprehensible texture of
the negasphere’s anti-mass changed into that of normal space. And
all circumambient space was flooded with inconceivably lethal
radiation; so intensely lethal that any being not adequately shielded
from it died before he had time to realize that he was being burned.

It was a planet from N-space, another dimension where the physical laws of our universe didn’t apply, which had an intrinsic velocity greater than that of light, which of course, is impossible in “our” universe, that was also used as a weapon against the ostensible home of the Boskone conspiracy, Ploor.

Belle Waring,

Yes I know what an analogy is, I just thought your was a remarkably poor one.

Arguably, if the Manhattan cocktail party crowd had been running things a frw centuries ago, Muslims might have conquered Europe, and then your dystopia might actually have come to pass. happily for all of us, they weren’t.

Once more unto the breach of the aesthetic philosophical peace.

As an artist develops facility, he or she attempts to command progressively greater resources. Short story writers attempt novels and song writers attempt operas. They don’t do this out of boredom or experimentation. They move from simpler forms to greater ones because the larger forms are more demanding tests of ability. Success in the deployment of a wide range of artistic materials is a measure of artistic merit. This is why we regard actors who undertake a broad range of roles as superior to character actors trapped in the same part. The argument that thematic scope and scale are irrelevant to quality of literary work leads to the absurd assertion that a Haiku is potentially as great a work as an epic poem.

Confusing thematic scope with wham-bam pulp fiction is a deliberate misreading of my argument. A symphony can contain within it the most delicate notes of a solo instrument, but the solo performance cannot include the symphonic crescendo. This is what I mean when I say that writers who have broad thematic scope subsume the techniques of those who engage more limited topics. Shakespeare would not be Shakespeare if all he wrote were comedies of manners with clever repartee.

The aversion to quality comparisons seems to be a deeply-rooted modern intellectual neurosis, but such comparisons are an overwhelming fact of life. Writers are ranked and rated. Their works are ranked and rated. Even their critics are ranked and rated. I grant that it is unfair to expect women of past centuries to have tackled the grandest literary themes. Certainly their confined social circumstances limited their thematic scope, but women have had free access to literary endeavor for decades in America and Europe. Where is the female Camus? Where is the female Pynchon? Where is the female McCarthy?

Straightwood’s latest is easily refuted merely by silently mouthing the syllables “Jorge Luis Borges”. The greatest author of the twentieth century never progressed beyond the simplest, least demanding form of literature.

David Gilmour

Now this is interesting. The author wrote a book ‘Lost Among Houses’ about attending Canada’s premier private school Upper Canada College, in the early 1960s, and having a father who committed suicide.

The novel is autobiographical.

That and Doug Bell’s ‘Run Over’ (Bell went to another Canadian private school, but lived near UCC in the exclusive neighbourhood of Forest Hill, Toronto) are the 2 books which really speak to my high school experience, more than ‘Catcher in the Rye’ or ‘The Chocolate Wars’. There really was a very ‘Lord of the Flies’ sense about what was going on.

There are parallels to my own experiences (not the father bit) at another Canadian private school in the 1970s. But very much a UCC clone– Branksome Hall girls would far rather date a UCC boy than one from our school, there was an absolute pecking order on which school had the ‘best’ boys from the perspective of the cloistered girls schools. The UCC boys would wander round the first year at university asking ‘why would anyone attend ?’

It is worth understanding how intensely *male* that environment was. And heterosexual male. The worst thing possible was to be called ‘gay’ or a ‘fag’.

The teachers, especially the phys ed teachers, reinforced this. Although there was an undercurrent of paedophilia (in interest if not in act), eg in the music programme, the phys ed teachers were the archetype of the homophobic repressed homo-erotic desires (see World According to Garp). Casual violence towards students was common, either in ‘fun’ or in anger– I remember being beaten up by a wrestling coach for some imagined slight of indiscipline, and a science master who took a sadistic delight in caning us for various infractions.

Be it as it may, this was in the much more liberal 1970s.

Women were a myth. It was as close to an Army boot camp, or a monastery, as you could get.

It was an environment designed to cultivate misogyny and an aggressive heterosexuality.

So Gilmour is straight out of that environment, and from the pre liberation era.

It has obviously affected him quite deeply.

Nowadays as a teacher it would make him quite striking, and memorable, because of course nobody talks that way any more (well, I thought nobody talks that way). At least not in a modern literature classroom. He’s a bit like the Straussians in the political science world, finding a genuine right winger in a politics department is such a shock. And indeed Alan Bloom, Thomas Pangle and Cliff Orwin had precisely that impact at U of Toronto political science at that time, and were at total odds with their department colleagues. Saul Bellow’s portrayal of the late Bloom in ‘Ravelstein’ still makes me laugh.

Not to defend Gilmour nor his views, but to understand, psychologically, where he is coming from. For a man whose father committed suicide, it must be hard to define yourself as a man.

.

“Where is the female McCarthy?”

Umm… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_McCarthy_%28author%29

Whats the problem with cocktails? I wouldnt drink them every night but they’re (by and large) delicious

@259

Thus, you would assert that there is no vector from smaller to greater forms, and it would be common for writers to begin as novelists, then progress to short stories, and end up with Haiku compositions as their supreme efforts?

@264

Damn you, uneditable CT posting system! I remembered Mary as soon as I clicked the submit button.

Coincidentally, b/c of this thread I was googling Edna O Brien and came across this article which Hector might enjoy

” Last summer, I was invited to a book party at the somewhat unlikely venue of Mahiki, the Sloane nightclub much frequented by Prince Harry, Kate Middleton et al. All around me were the usual suspects: novelists, publishing people, lots of journalists. It was fun, but noisy, and crowded, and you had to move carefully in order not to spill your cocktail.”

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/feb/06/edna-obrien-ireland-interview?INTCMP=SRCH

As an artist develops facility, he or she attempts to command progressively greater resources.

[citation needed]

Short story writers attempt novels and song writers attempt operas.

Some do, some don’t. Some short story writers remain short story writers for their entire lives; some go on to write other things. There’s no obvious sense in which short stories are inferior to novels; in many cases, they are superior. In any case, there’s no way of telling from the number of pages whether a work is good or not.

They don’t do this out of boredom or experimentation. They move from simpler forms to greater ones because the larger forms are more demanding tests of ability.

This presupposes some serious mind-reading on your part. The motivations of artists are diverse; some really might think that way, and some might just be trying to write novels because they’re operating under the mistaken assumption that you seem to share that the “larger forms” are somehow more aesthetically “valid.”

Success in the deployment of a wide range of artistic materials is a measure of artistic merit. This is why we regard actors who undertake a broad range of roles as superior to character actors trapped in the same part.

I like it when you speak for me. Or maybe it’s the royal “we” that’s being used here?

The argument that thematic scope and scale are irrelevant to quality of literary work leads to the absurd assertion that a Haiku is potentially as great a work as an epic poem.

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.”

I will read this 100 times before I read e.g. Don Juan once more, and not because it’s short and the latter is long, but rather because I consider this to be a far and away superior work of art.

Confusing thematic scope with wham-bam pulp fiction is a deliberate misreading of my argument.

No, the problem with your argument is quite simple. You want to extend a certain interpretive charity to male writers (e.g. Hemingway) whose work is every bit as circumscribed as what you complain about, but you refuse to extend the same charity to female writers. In other words, you want to say, of course Hamlet/A Farewell to Arms/Ulysses is not just about a prince/some soldiers/some dude’s day; if you read it like that, you’re missing the substance of the novel for the frame on which it is hung. But you refuse to allow female writers like Austen the same level of subtextual reading; if Austen sets her novels in drawing rooms, then you take it for granted that they are just about drawing room society, and not simply another way of exploring larger themes. Now where have we seen double standards before…?

The aversion to quality comparisons seems to be a deeply-rooted modern intellectual neurosis, but such comparisons are an overwhelming fact of life.

I’m more than ready to go to bat for various writers whose work I love, and to laud them over others. I simply don’t believe that the criteria you are trying to impose on the rest of us are a valid way of doing that. Also, “THIS IS LIFE, LIBS, DEAL WITH IT,” is the laziest form of argument ever.

Writers are ranked and rated. Their works are ranked and rated. Even their critics are ranked and rated.

This is an idiotic way of approaching literature.

Certainly their confined social circumstances limited their thematic scope, but women have had free access to literary endeavor for decades in America and Europe.

Ahahahahahahahaha

It would be funny if it weren’t so sad.

Where is the female Camus? Where is the female Pynchon? Where is the female McCarthy?

WHY THE FUCK DOES THERE NEED TO BE A FEMALE PYNCHON

There isn’t even another male Pynchon, though not for lack of trying! Why is it necessary to somehow map writers across gender to each other? What a stupid and reductive way of thinking! We don’t need female Pynchon’s or female McCarthy’s, because their absence doesn’t tell us a single goddamn thing about the quality of female authors. I mean, what is this other than the very same bullshit dudes have been pulling over millenia: assume that the standard is male and demand that women measure up to the standard, rather than allowing for the fact that there are simply different kinds of writers and different kinds of writing, and that “male fiction” isn’t the measuring stick of quality.

This is bullshit. Total, complete, fatuous bullshit. You’re not interested in a dialog about literary merits, you’re interested in forcing your aesthetic straightjacket on people who have no use for it, and when you get push-back, you get all huffy about Universals and Thematic Scope and fuck knows what else.

Thus, you would assert that there is no vector from smaller to greater forms, and it would be common for writers to begin as novelists, then progress to short stories, and end up with Haiku compositions as their supreme efforts?

HO HO HO HAVE I GOT YOU NOW CLAIMING THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT WE KNOW TO BE ETERNAL VERITIES?!

Are you just secretly a time-traveler from the 19th century? Fess up!

Each time it happens to Belle, to Maria, to Eszter, to Ingrid, to Tedra I feel as if there’s some hidden underlying pattern to it, but I just can’t figure out what that pattern might be for the life of me. Can anyone help me here?

Well, those posters are all unlike me; they’re also unlike (for example) Chris Bertram and John Quiggin, to name but two CT regulars. They differ from me (and from Chris and John) in a very straightforward and obvious way: their names are all either five or six letters long, and they all have a vowel in first or second position.

So there’s your problem, Henry.

Certainly their confined social circumstances limited their thematic scope, but women have had free access to literary endeavor for decades in America and Europe.

Have they? News to me. Or maybe, you were just looking in the wrong places.

One of these things must be true.

Someone needs to goad Straightwood into claiming that his principles also show that astronomy is innately more worthy than epidemiology, and bridge-building more worthy than nanotechnology.

Say what you will, Straightwood is mounting an interesting defense of his views.
Speaking of the importance of Haiku and Borges, let’s quote him on the matter:

On Salvation by Works
One autumn, one of the autumns of time, the Shinto divinities gathered, not for the first time, at Izumo. They are said to have numbered eight million. …

They were downcast, but did not show it: the visages of divinities are undecipherable characters. They seated themselves in a circle on the green crest of a hill. They had been observing mankind from their firmament or from a stone or from a snowflake. One of the divinities spoke:

Many days, or centuries, ago, we gathered here to create Japan and the world. The fishes, the seas, the seven colors of the rainbow, the generations of plants and animals have all worked out well. So that men should not be burdened with too many things, we gave them succession, issue, the plural day and the singular night. We also bestowed on them the gift of experimenting with certain variations. The bee continues repeating beehives. But man has imagined devices: the plow, the key,. the kaleidoscope. He also imagined the sword and the art of war. He has just imagined this weapon which could put an end to life. Before this senseless deed is done, let us wipe out men.
They remained pensive. Without haste another divinity spoke:

It’s true. They have thought up that atrocity, but there is also this something quite different, which fits in the space encompassed by seventeen syllables.

The divinity intoned them. They were in an unknown language, and I could not understand them.

The leading divinity delivered a judgment:

Let men survive.

Thus, because of a haiku, the human race was saved.

Women writers, for a variety of reasons subject to endless debate, generally do not create works that have the scope and complexity, and thus universal appeal, of their male peers. (Where is the female David Foster Wallace?)

Say what? David Foster Wallace has “universal appeal” in a way that (say) Carol Shields doesn’t? I don’t want to browbeat you, but do you actually know what you think you’re talking about any more?

written brilliantly about a sheep-shearing competition

Playing this over in my head I ended up thinking of the brilliant comic poem from The Cyberiad (“a poem about a haircut! But lofty, nobel, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter ‘s’!”)

Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.
She scissored short. Sorely shorn,
Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed,
Silently scheming,
Sightlessly seeking
Some savage, spectacular suicide.

But, really what I wanted to say was that one of the songs I remember my dad singing when I was a kid is “Waiting For The Rain and, based on positive associations, if nothing else, I claim that it is a brilliant story about sheep shearing.

That reminds me of the other song I know based on a Banjo Patterson poem, “Song Of The Artesian Water”

Looking that up now and finding the poem it reads as almost a parody of excessively masculine writing:

Though the shaft is always caving and the tubes are always jamming,
Yet we’ll fight our way to water while the stubborn drill is ramming —
While the subborn drill is ramming deeper down.

(Is that too juvenile, perhaps. I do have fond memories of the song.)

To the stout defenders of Japanese poetic concision, I should point out that minimalism poses a kind of black hole problem of aesthetics that leads to the music of John Cage and films of Andy Warhol. Those who repudiate scope should consider the collision of musical cultures in Asia and the West. Americans and Europeans have not been swept up in a movement to adopt the limited tonal palette and artistic confines of Asian music, but Asians have become prominent participants in the culture of Western Music. Western music simply provides a broader range of expression for musical artists. QED

There, I said it. One group’s artistic achievement’s are superior to those of another. May the CT gods strike me dead.

Incidentally, Jerry Vinokurov’s remark about sheep shearing being dull is remarkably classist.

As an artist develops facility, he or she attempts to command progressively greater resources. Short story writers attempt novels and song writers attempt operas.

straightwood, I guess Bach (only wrote church music, geeze) is the lesser composer compared to Pete Townsend of the Who (TWO rock operas, dammit), amiright?

St. Matthew Passion is basically an opera, even if it’s religious.

@260: The Modesto Kid 09.27.13 at 2:02 pm: “and Kafka was a better short story writer than novelist.”

Absolutely. And a better aphorism writer than short story writer. But they’re all great.

@295: MG 09.27.13 at 3:01 pm: “Gogol is the bomb.”

Very on the nose.

@292

The pipe organ, for which Bach composed, is called the “King of Instruments.” This grand title is granted because of the tremendous range of musical resources the organ provides as compared to, say, the drum, or the piccolo. There was active competition for hundreds of years in the construction of progressively greater and finer pipe organs because it was deemed important to give composers GREATER SCOPE OF EXPRESSION. Arguments that scale and complexity don’t matter fail to explain the emergence of the costly pipe organ and its appeal to composers and performers.

Anon:
isn’t it a mistake to identify the subject matter too closely with the setting?

Yes, exactly. This is Straightwood’s mistake w/r/t Middlemarch. It’s set in the English countryside but what it’s about, in large part, is the perennial tension between ideals and reality as refracted through the situation of a talented woman in a society that denied women full opportunity to use those talents. It’s about the great themes that have attracted novelists forever: politics, class, hypocrisy, exploitation, marriage, love, ambition, human weakness, self-delusion (see Casaubon), and how the pressures to conform can undermine, warp, and finally crush the resolve/ability to do something significant with one’s life (see the doctor Lydgate).

To say that Middlemarch is about “the vicissitudes of social life in a country village” (straightwood @158) because most (not all) of it is set in the countryside is wrong. This confuses what a novel is *about* with where it is *set*. It would be like saying that Hamlet is about “the vicissitudes of court life in a castle in Denmark” or Heart of Darkness is about “the vicissitudes of traveling by boat on a river in Africa.”

Arguments that scale and complexity don’t matter fail to explain the emergence of the costly pipe organ and its appeal to composers and performers.

Ah, the mighty pipes that great art requires! It seems… emasculating that I can do as much and more with my phone nowadays.

I must congratulate Straightwood for courageously taking on the entire CT ‘commentariat’ and keeping his answers classy and honest. For responding to powerful reasons against his views, to brilliant counter-examples, even to rudeness and ridicule with thought and earnestness.

If I’m reading him right, he’s proposing two things: a sexist, racist thesis, which is shallow and wrong (as many on this thread have already proven), and a separate, different theory for a standard way of measuring artistic achievement based on scope and complexity; this argument has depth and cannot be so easily dismissed except by modernist appeals to the relativity of all aesthetic values. Since Straightwood obviously doesn’t buy post-modernist or deconstructionist arguments, attacking his views from this angle will not be very productive.

As an artist develops facility, he or she attempts to command progressively greater resources. Short story writers attempt novels and song writers attempt operas.

Mmm, right, okay. Longer=better. Got it. But I can’t help but note that, by this extremely sophisticated and sensical measuring stick, George Eliot kinda kicks the shit out of your beloved Hemingway. Thoughts?

No, you don’t get it. You see, George Eliot write about, and only about, English village life, which is very parochial, while Hemingway is very concerned with men doing manly things, which is very universal because

/farts
/sniffs own farts

As we all know, no woman has ever written anything interesting about murder or revenge or life or death. I mean, has anyone ever been revengedly murdered to death in a drawing room? I think not! QED.

There, I said it. One group’s artistic achievement’s are superior to those of another. May the CT gods strike me dead.

That’s a bit extreme, but if you were to dial it down to “may they strike me bored with this whole thread, while obscurely feeling that I won the argument so conclusively as to need no further comment”, I’d say Amen.

Cleanthes @305

The problem is not so much the “scope and complexity” thesis per se, it’s the way Straightwood is APPLYING it.

Straightwood at 158:

She [George Eliot] does not write about people at the limits, but, like Austen, creates meticulously observed dramas of quotidien life. Now, you may argue that the existential tension of life is a fractal structure, as easily depicted in a village political intrigue as in a sword duel, but the difference remains. Talented novelists who choose to write about life and death struggles take precedence over those who write about the vicissitudes of social life in a country village.

Middlemarch is not ‘about’, in the most relevant sense for this discussion, “the vicissitudes of social life in a country village” any more than Henry V is “about” the Hundred Years War.

If you were a student and were set the question “what is Henry V about?” and the sum total of your answer was “Henry V is about a king who leads his soldiers to victory in battle” and didn’t write anything else about, you know, the themes of the play, you would flunk.

What is Moby Dick about? It’s about a whaling voyage.
What is Middlemarch about? It’s about “the vicissitiudes of social life in a country village.”

Right.

Straightwood:
I posted 315 before seeing your 308. Sorry. (Further response forthcoming.)

@312

Discard the Nobel list and choose any rating list you wish. How about the Modern Library Hundred Best Novels?

http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/

Belle is certainly right about historical and cultural impediments, but what about the last 50 years?

@MPA @263: Thanks for asking about the Georgetown vs Manhattan cocktail party crowds and whether they overlap. Are these people the “literary” set in NYC and DC (DC has a literary set?) … ?

Phil@236 and @283
There’s also the opening line of P&P: It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. – which employs the same sort of Austenian irony. And glad you caught Austen’s own disclaimer in her two inches of ivory remark. The short story as a genre, it’s still my favorite.

Contra some commenters here, the short story is not a wanna-be novel , but a different literary genre; the problematic genre is the so-called “novella”, which requires the gifts of both short story and novel writer to produce something that may be very great (think: Death in Venice/ Notes from the Underground / Billy Budd/ The Awakening ), but which very rarely ends well. A fascinating hybrid.

Today I had a discussion with two close friends who read alot (more than I’ve ever heard of, much less read) of literature in several languages, and the consensus seems to be that de gustibus non est disputandum in matters literary – or musical. That said, they certainly believe there is such a person as a cultivated, experienced reader/listener (i.e one who has read/listened widely and thought deeply about what they have read/heard) and who, even given his or her own personal tastes, is able, ceteris paribus, to recognize even a novel (musical work) he doesn’t personally care for as “great”. It’s not all a matter of opinion, of “I just like that because I do.”

I can acknowledge Thomas Mann’s MM as very great. I just don’t want to read it again, though I would be interested in Buddenbrooks and Dr. Faustus. I’ve had enough Dostoevsky; other writers like Pushkin and Turgenev and Gogol beckon. And why not? They’re not Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, but they’re great writers – and I acknowledge this by wanting to experience them as well.

As regards George Eliot and limited/limiting English country life-qua-subject, I find her thematic range vastly greater – intellectually and morally – than her setting and subject matter per se. Sometimes we identify an author almost exclusively with a single novel (I assume people are thinking of Middlemarch with its English countryside setting), but she wrote other important works of considerable interest. I always longed for a chance to teach Daniel Deronda with The Princess Casamassima, or Silas Marner and The Merchant of Venice, or …

Hector@150: Was that a joke? I can’t figure out whether you’re making fun of us, or whether you genuinely believe that the West hasn’t featured patriarchal structures throughout its 2,500 or so years (or 3000). Or do you think they’re a thing of the past? Because I could contribute to a thread – actually, I could write the entire thread, on late 20th century sexism towards women. Anyway, you’re kidding, right?

Cleanthes: anyone defending Hemingway as an exemplar of “scope and complexity” is not, in fact, making a serious or interesting argument. Hemingway has his virtues, but not those two.

Late to the party, but the $25,000/mo in child is simply wonderful, as are you Belle.

@326

Yes, that is what I am getting at. My problem is that I am overloading artistic “scope” to accommodate size, complexity, harmonics, and stylistic range. This has led to a lot of confusion, which is mostly my fault. Words are poor tools when our thoughts outrun our vocabulary.

Straightwood @327: “Words are poor tools when our thoughts outrun our vocabulary.”

…so perhaps Belle’s (and everyone else’s) points about the skill and artistry required to depict “plausible interior lives” using those “poor tools” is a bit stronger than you’re crediting, whatever scale the authors elect to write at?

329: cha-CHING!

I take it that Straightwood thinks the cello is a more advanced, complex and intellectual instrument than the violin.

When our son was little he thought that the biggest person in the room was, by definition, the oldest. Our son, however, grew out of his childish understanding.

Yes, that is what I am getting at. My problem is that I am overloading artistic “scope” to accommodate size, complexity, harmonics, and stylistic range. This has led to a lot of confusion, which is mostly my fault. Words are poor tools when our thoughts outrun our vocabulary.

The thing you’re implying all along is that there is some kind of essentialistic or biological reason why—according to you—women have not produced as much writing with your definition of “artistic scope.”

1. Could it be instead that the question of “scope” is a bit subjective? That you aren’t seeing the “scope” in women’s writing that, e.g., a female reader might see?

2. Why can’t I make this argument about any number of identity-slices of the population? Like racial ones, for example.

People are still talking about a pay and opportunities gap for women. It shouldn’t be any surprise that in the hierarchy of Highly Valued Novels Of The Literati, there are fewer women. Patriarchy is hardly “solved”.

@329

I think Belle is just railing against poor craft, but the deeper problem is the post-modern conclusion that the complexity of phenomena is not decipherable by any artistic strategy based on mimetic accuracy. The modern interplay of character, accident, and reason is so turbulent and unstable that coherent literature is impossible. That’s why the quasi-fantastic world of Pynchon’s novels is oddly more realistic for a modern reader than the solid, precisely rendered worlds of Austen or Eliot.

M
andos @ 334
I disagree a little bit with you. When it comes to literary works post 1960, the issue of the patriarchy dis-empowering women writers has largely been solved . Just look at the explosion of talented female writers we’ve had in the last 60 years or so:

Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Marguerite Yourcenar, Nathalie Sarraute, Clarice Lispector, Kathy Ackerman, Cynthia Ozick, Carole Maso, Eudora Welty, Shelby Hearon, Marilynne Robinson, Shirley Hazzard, Grace Paley, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Penelope Fitzgerald, Angela Carter, Fay Weldon, Nadine Gordimer, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark, Hilary Mantel, Edna O’Brien, Carol Shields, Karen Russell, Olga Tokarczuk, Ana Blandiana, Christa Wolf, Ingeborg Bachmann, Elsa Morante, Agatha Kristof, Elfriede Jelinek, Herta Muller, Marie NDiaye and a very long etc.

To get back to the original topic for a moment, the University of Toronto has put out a statement about David Gilmour which reads:

On Wednesday September 25th, the University of Toronto and Victoria College learned of comments made by David Gilmour, a noted Canadian author and journalist, relating to his literary preferences and choice of teaching materials. Mr. Gilmour is not a member of the University of Toronto faculty. However, Mr. Gilmour teaches University of Toronto students taking an elective seminar course through Victoria College.

Mr. Gilmour’s comments have received a great deal of attention through both traditional and social media. The administration has heard from faculty, staff, students and alumni alike who were understandably dismayed by the remarks made in his recent interview.

One might hope that, in a university environment, teachers would encourage respectful airing of differences of opinion, and that, by airing their own views in a respectful way, they would encourage students to examine critically their own beliefs as well as those of their teachers and classmates.

Mr. Gilmour has since apologized in several venues for the offensive implications of his remarks. The University and Victoria College will also ensure that students in his class are under no misapprehensions that Mr. Gilmour’s literary preferences may be translated into assumptions about their innate abilities.

Eliot was never afraid for her life.

If you think women in the 19th century never had to fear for their lives, you… might want to sit this one out.

I’ll retract my support for Mr. Straight Wood’s remarks about battles and heroism vs. quotidian village life, as on further consideration I think rural life and sheep shearing can be quite interesting. However, I still think my remarks about male on male sexual competition providing an impetus to great art and achievement, and about the essential differences between the sexes, are well taken.

If you accept Straightwood’s ‘grand themes’ thing you are left with the argument that Emma Bovary is somehow diminished as a novel, or is not among the greatest novels ever written — which seems totally ridiculous to me.

Same with ‘Remembrance of Things Past’.

I don’t think his claim is really even worth the extensive arguing-with its getting here.

This seems relevant here.

Thanks Bell. My gripe was not whether or not you’d read Pratchett, but that, if you had, why’d you still think Pynchon et al were, as you put it, “Important”.

Talking about humourlessness, I think that ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ (that’s by Phillip Roth, if anybody needs telling) is a genuinely funny book. Praising Roth isn’t going to go down well with most of the people here, but let’s give it a shot.

Possibly to get ‘Portnoy’ you need to have been a teenage boy. I don’t know what masturbation is like for teenage girls: whether it can become the same nearly all-consuming compulsion that, for about a couple of years, it was for me and all my male school friends. (Yes, I know, way too much information there.) ‘Portnoy’ didn’t describe how I felt as a teenager, but it did capture almost perfectly a big part of my adolescence, one that all respectable writers before Roth had never admitted to.

The problem with ‘Portnoy’ isn’t that Roth is humourless. Rather, I’d say that the problems are:

1) Roth can’t write women with any depth at all. Portnoy’s mother is a funny carictature, but still a caricature. As to the other women in the book: literally all I can remember about The Monkey is her nickname, and I can’t remember anything about the others.

2) Roth has no idea how the novel should end. And that’s true of all six Roth novels I’ve read.

3) ‘Portnoy’ falls pretty much to pieces when the protagonist leaves his home town and embarks on adulthood.

4) And I think that in the end, ‘Portnoy’ isn’t really a novel. It’s a prose rhapsody- on masturbation, chiefly, but also on how it feels to grow up bright and trapped (and male) in a small town in a loving but sometimes claustrophobic family.
I felt there was a groping (forgive the term) towards significance in ‘Portnoy’, perhaps so that Roth could justify it as being an important novel. But the significance at the end just feels bolted-on and phony.

Lots of teenage boys have over-protective (they think) mothers, exhausted fathers, boring hometowns, and hugely over-active masturbatory lives. Roth depicts the young adult Portnoy as crippled by his adolescence, but why would he be? Your dad was a bit quiet, your mother was a bit loud, you did a lot of wanking- get over it.

I still think it is an important piece of writing, because it was the first book to capture a significant part of many male (and perhaps many female) adolescents’ lives, and to make that funny. As I say, I just don’t think it succeeds in the way that Roth wanted it to.

Apart from ‘Portnoy’, my favourite Roth is the short story (forget the name) in ‘Goodbye Columbus’ about the Second World War soldier who comes back from the front line to a training job, and begins reflecting on his survival, and thinking about his future, while being importuned by a pushy recruit. It’s the only story in ‘Columbus’ that doesn’t have a female character, IIRC, and that’s probably why it’s the strongest.

I thought ‘American Pastoral’ also didn’t work as a novel, but again, parts of it are extraordinarily evocative: especially the easiness of middle-class life in New Jersey for ‘Swede’ Levov after he comes back from the war, and then how completely things fall apart for him, and for Newark, after Vietnam and the race riots. The passage where Zuckerman attends his high school reunion was really fine, I thought: again, more of a prose rhapsody, or a short story, than part of a coherent novel.

I’ll stick my neck out even further and say that I thought that the portrait of Merry Levov as an angry adolescent was very good, even compelling, and not actually sexist: perhaps the only really good piece of writing about a woman that I can remember from Phillip Roth. But again, the ending was feeble, and much of the plot aims at realism but just isn’t believable.

I think Roth certainly has great gifts, but I don’t know that he wrote any really successful novels- and part of the reason for that was that he had difficulty seeing women as anything much except objects of desire. But he had quite a lot of problems in seeing men with any depth as well: for ‘Portnoy’s complaint’ to be the really great novel that Roth wanted it to be, Alex Portnoy would have to be interesting for more than just his masturbation.

LFC @ 320 is onto the right of it. Sure, it is a misconstrual of Straightwood’s argument to characterize it as “more complex = better.” But that hardly matters because the argument at hand is not really much better.

It’s more complex = more potential to be better. The main problem, however, is that the music analogy here is complete bullshit. Settings, subject matter, and theme are not sorted in a hierarchy of complexity and dynamic range. There is not a quantitative difference in the scope of “grand narratives about war” and “not-so-grand narratives about whatever those poor stunted women write about,” in the way that there is such a hierarchy between triangles and pipe organs.

Grandiosity is a value judgment (a rather transparently patriarchal one, at that), not a measure of possible complexity. Even if we grant that more potential complexity enables greater potential heights of excellence, it’s simply not the case that narratives about struggles over life and death “subsume” other thematic concerns in the way that a full orchestra “subsumes” a string quartet. Thematic concerns do not stack around each other like Matroyshka dolls. A quotidian novel about daily life (or whatever we’re stereotyping womanly concerns as) can just as much subsume more grandiose themes as vice versa. There’s not a fixed ordinal ranking with “sheep shearing” at the bottom and “going to war” at the top.

VictoriaMPA: Ah, no, ‘The Plot Against America’ is dreadful, and I really recommend against reading it. Read a politician’s self-serving memoirs, a tell-all showbiz book, a Tom Clancy thriller: anything but that.

Not too late for this week’s raves and rants on sex & literature, here’s Edward Mendelson arguing for the resemblance of The Crying of Lot 49 and Mrs Dalloway.

Like all of Virginia Woolf’s novels and, despite their misplaced reputation for high-tech cleverness, all of Thomas Pynchon’s novels, including his latest one, both books point toward the kind of knowledge of the inner life that only poems and novels can convey, a knowledge that eludes all other techniques of understanding, and that the bureaucratic and collective world disdains or ignores.

Belle @229: ‘Hey, do you guys read Gogol enough? God I love Gogol.’

Me too. If you haven’t read ‘Dead Souls’, go out and treat yourself at once. It gave me that experience you get so rarely of reading a book and feeling that you’ve been walking around for your whole life with your eyes shut. And it is truly funny.

Normally I either don’t read footnotes, or read them at the end, but the notes to the most recent Penguin translation are excellent, especially on the meanings of the extraordinary names Gogol gave to his characters.

358: Dan, you will appreciate Derek Parfit’s forenote to his endnotes in Reasons and Persons: “Read these notes, if at all, later.”

@352

My next thought experiment is Jane Austen’s versions of the Illiad and Odyssey. In the first, we focus on Helen and her handmaidens negotiating the intricate politics of court intrigues and love relationships. Occasionally, there is some clattering and a cloud of dust outside Troy, but with each passing day we see more deeply into the rich inner life of a beautiful and talented woman trapped in profound emotional conflicts. In the second, Penelope is abandoned for years by her thrill-chasing husband and struggles with managing a household while besieged by rich, handsome, but unworthy suitors. Odysseus comes home and messes up everything.

Regarding a hierarchy of plot and themes, please explain how it is just as easy for Jane Austen to chronicle great European land battles as it is for Tolstoy to depict family struggles.

Straightwood@362:

You will, of course, want to explain how well Homer, working in dactylic hexameter with the resources of Greek epic, will do in depicting fine-drawn psychological detail of an early Iron Age (contemporary with Homer, not five centuries in the past) civic / domestic plot.

with each passing day we see more deeply into the rich inner life of a beautiful and talented woman trapped in profound emotional conflicts

Admit it, you haven’t actually read any Jane Austen.

Phil wins the thread. (The Straightwood 20% of it anyway. It’s been a looooong slog.)

People who haven’t read Homer shouldn’t comment on him, from the Odyssey:

Awaken’d princess Nausicaa; she her dream
Remember’d wond’ring, and her parents sought
Anxious to tell them. Them she found within.
Beside the hearth her royal mother sat,
Spinning soft fleeces with sea-purple dyed
Among her menial maidens, but she met
Her father, whom the Nobles of the land
Had summon’d, issuing abroad to join
The illustrious Chiefs in council. At his side
She stood, and thus her filial suit preferr’d.
Sir! wilt thou lend me of the royal wains
A sumpter-carriage? for I wish to bear
My costly cloaths but sullied and unfit
For use, at present, to the river side.
It is but seemly that thou should’st repair
Thyself to consultation with the Chiefs
Of all Phæacia, clad in pure attire;
And my own brothers five, who dwell at home,
Two wedded, and the rest of age to wed,
Are all desirous, when they dance, to wear
Raiment new bleach’d; all which is my concern.
So spake Nausicaa; for she dared not name
Her own glad nuptials to her father’s ear,
Who, conscious yet of all her drift, replied.
I grudge thee neither mules, my child, nor aught
That thou canst ask beside. Go, and my train
Shall furnish thee a sumpter-carriage forth
High-built, strong-wheel’d, and of capacious size.

Modesto Kid. You just made a new friend. That link is priceless!

Pleased ta meetcha, Cleanthes. You could repay my good deed by telling me how to pronounce her name; I have been saying something like ‘no-see-KAH-uh’ based purely on guesswork.

@367 – So basically, it comes down to the fact that you think armed conflict is more interesting than other things. Nice “philosophical argument” there.

“he can also write about living down and out on a houseboat and being the lover of a mad prostitutes”

This is ridiculous. It’s just reportage surely? Anyway, why couldnt a woman have such an experience. Are they afraid of the water?
Anyway, somewhat relatedly, I just recently finished Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beatiful Forevers (what life was like over a 3 year period for a family in a Mumbai Slum) and its really good. Well written (reported) non fiction can stand its own against even the best fiction, imo

To the degree that men have lacked access to experience that affords them greater emotional scope, they have a disadvantage versus otherwise equally talented women writers.

I mean, if you want to read what life is like in Mexico’s ‘roughspots’ read Anabel Hernandez’s Narcoland. This argument is bizzare

More generally, listing things you think are really neato (land wars in europe, houseboats, sex with prostitutes, shooting deserters!, you know, the true pathos of what it really means to be human!) and things you think are not so biff bam zoom fantastic (living on a 19th century English estate, dealing with male suitors while your husband is lost at sea) isn’t actually an argument for the “great complexity” of the former and the stunted, narrow vision of the later, it’s just a statement of your own insipid preferences.

women, lacking enough internal fire to really experience things with the same gravitas, will forever be incapable of writing compellingly about fighting for one’s life in prison

Right. Emma Donoghue’s “Room” does not exist. It would only be possible for someone held in prison in a shed for seven years.

@384

I am not making a choice between rough stuff and domesticity as preferred exalted subjects. I am asserting that a greater RANGE of experience and thematic interests puts more colors on the palette, tools in the box, instruments in the orchestra … All other things being equal, this makes a difference in the final literary product. Belle rightly points out that historically women have had narrower options, but for several decades, in Western countries, most of these limitations have been removed. Belle would assert that we are now dealing with a lag effect as women writers shake off the residual prejudices of the academic and literary establishments. I’m not so sure.

But this is just nonsense. Cormac McCarthy would be totally incapable of writing a Jane Austen novel. The idea is self-evidently idiotic.

And yet “having narrower options” is in fact an experience which is different, and incompatible with, the experience of “having many options”. When it comes to “human experience” it is not the case that ‘having done a greater variety of things adolescent minded men consider noteworthy when marking off a list of significant experiences'” means that one has actually had a greater and more complex range of experience. He with the longest fulfilled bucketlist is not he with the most resources upon which to draw in order to write successfully.

The paucity of good women writers in the past is not a function of their lack of sufficient life experiences to write compellingly, it’s a lack of the material conditions necessary for ‘being a writer.’ Belle was not saying in @211 that, because women were constrained, they did not have sufficient experience to produce literary works of merit. She was saying that they were quite materially constrained from engaging in the practice of writing . That is very different from being materially constrained from having things to write great literature about.

Women have not recently become more prominent in the literary scene because only ‘after we got rid of that sexism stuff in 1987’ or whatever women now had access to a range of experience capable of supporting good writing. They have never lacked for the range and depth of experience necessary for good writing. What they have lacked for is sufficient opportunity to work as writers and be taken seriously by others while doing so.

@392

Orwell and HG Wells were both dirt poor and struggled for years before they could make a living writing. The struggling, impoverished writer is so cliched a figure, that your assertion that women are economically inhibited from writing is unsupportable. George Eliot succeeded on the strength of enormous talent at a time when society was totally male-dominated. Arguing from anecdotes is pointless. It is up to modern women writers to deliver the goods. Any woman today who writes something as good as Middlemarch will not lack for success.

Hey, still-talking-Straight-outta-my-ass dude,

Do you actually know _anything_ about Orwell’s biography? Can you get one fucking thing right here?

Sasha @393 –

the original group of authors was cherry picked to specifically include the set of prestigious mid-late-20th c. authors Belle is talking about and whom Franzen seems likely to cite (and/or actively does cite) as his immediate literary forbears. A similar canon grouped and diagnosed by Franzen’s contemporary and friendlike person David Foster Wallace as the Great Male Narcissists, in an essay about Updike. If you want to argue that no real profit or understanding is gained by understanding this group as a Group, cool, but you can’t pretend that other people, prior to Belle, have not arranged them as such.

@396

Well, that’s more like the good old CT warm reception. I was beginning to think this place had lost its raffish charm. I have all four volumes of Orwell’s letters and essays, and I enjoy them immensely. Although his family was middle class, Orwell scraped by on grinding out stories, reviews, and articles until his success with Animal Farm, fifteen years after he started writing. Orwell’s misery as a maltreated scholarship boy at an exclusive school (Such, Such Were the Joys) makes for memorable reading and provides insight into his lifelong hatred of injustice and oppression.

@405

So what is your view? Is it that in a hypothetical world of perfect fairness in academia, publishing and relations among the sexes, that women would create just as many works of great literature as men? Do you believe that they would engage the same subjects as men? Do you believe that the closets and attics of the world are full of neglected unpublished masterpieces by women authors victimized by sexism?

However, Nobel Prizes are a serious red herring: just look at the list of Peace Prize winners. Eg Kissinger anyone?

Argument a serious red herring, as if the same people are dealing with physics and medicine. Not that I quibble with the ridiculousness of the Peace Prize…

Substance @113: ignorant or impatient

Where did you get that? How about just “mistaken” or “overlooking something”?

Lacking “necessary knowledge”=ignorance, lacking “patience”=impatience. Both those “I” words describe ME ME ME in many many areas, but with luck I will manage to avoid circumstances in which self-deprecation – which I think was what you were aiming at – can be mistaken for an insult to someone I respect. Not that I have avoided such mistakes in the past of course…

Actually, Samuel Butler made a very convincing case for the original Odyssey having been written by a woman.

http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/aoto/index.htm

Alongside Katherine’s response to the first of the quite telling questions, I would say that no, I would not expect there to be a difference in the subject matters men and women write about, apart from some quantitative variation, because men and women are capable, and already do, write about all the same subject matters, and Equality Land isn’t likely to change that.

Tim Chambers @417: Tom Robbins? I remember a lot of talk about beets in Jitterbug Perfume.

Katherine,

Your ignoring the reality of male on male status competition as a driving force for art. men seek status in order so they can attract women, and for some, creating art is a means to achieve status.

Nearly a hundred years after Ulysses, which conclusively proved that the epic is regularly found in the mundane, and the mundane in the epic, we’ve had this discussion. Damn.

Joyce, having never borne a child, lived a far safer life than Nora. He was poor, to be sure, but he was a grifter and sponger in ways that only a man could be.

Give me Pynchon, Atwood, Woolf, Proust, David Mitchell, the Brontes, Dickens, Munro–ah hell, there are enough that I could die of old age on the desert island with books unread. And it would be the variety that would keep me happy. Part of Belle’s point, I think, isn’t that the writers critiqued have flaws. It’s that they have the same flaw, which rubs the same spot over and over until a blister appears.

Samuel Beckett’s characters’ world is by far the most limited and constrained of any I’ve read. But, I’ll tell you what, I’m okay with his Nobel. (By the way he risked more than Hemingway, but felt no compulsion to wank on and on about it.

OK, let me restate what I understand to be the consensus in this mighty colloquy:

1. Only a dreadful combination of oppressive circumstances has prevented women writers from creating works the equaling those of their male peers in both quantity and quality. The recognition of a few exceptional women writers simply proves that there is a conspiracy.

2. Quality comparisons across literary forms are impossible and irrelevant, and the excellence of a small or short work cannot be compared to that of a large or lengthy work. A fine haiku is equal in value to a fine multi-volume novel.

3. Analogies between Music, Art, and Literature are worthless. Size, scope, context, and technique mean completely different things in each field.

4. Men and women have the same experiences, see life the same way, and have the same artistic insights. Men who doubt this have sexual problems.

5. The thematic scope of a work has no bearing on its literary quality. A brilliant work written about a single hydrogen atom can be as great as an encyclopedic masterpiece encompassing all the heavens.

6. People who disagree with the CT consensus are ignorant scum worthy of villification.

Have I got it right?

@Hector:
You’re ignoring the reality of male on male status competition as a driving force for art. men seek status … so they can attract women, and for some, creating art is a means to achieve status.

I’m going to ask a simple question that refers to the contemporary period. Do you actually, seriously believe this is why any male writers write novels, plays or anything else in the 21st century? Note: I don’t think it’s esp. *ever* been true, but I want you to say whether you think it’s true today.

I’m really glad btw you have that qualification “and for some.” Otherwise, an author like Tony Kushner wd be interested to hear that he wrote Angels in America in order to make himself more attractive to women! ROFL.

Zamfir @75: “And to focus on the matter at hand: are there many men who eat mentrual pads?”

That must be what happens at those Odd Fellows groups. I always wondered.

LFC@423: Unless that new movie about Salinger is going to reveal something very surprising, the list of authors is entirely male. So is the list of protagonists. And, yes, the curriculum appears to be stuck in time. I read Of Mice and Men in high school back in 1974. They are still reading Flowers for Algernon in jr. high, too. And it can’t be that they’re saving money by passing out the same old books, because I had to shell out $14 to buy her copies of The Catcher in the Rye and Of Mice and Men. Maybe we could enrich Toni Morrison or somebody instead?

To be clear, on further concideration I’d like to dissociate from the thoughts of Mr. Straight wood. My argument here is founded not on literary criticism, but on the unchallengeable realities of evolution.

@431

Does your observed reality recognize critically compiled lists of great literary works?

There are 9 works by women on the Modern Library list of the top 100 novels (Editorial Board’s list). The Modern Library reader’s list of the top 100 has 16 by women.

There are 14 books by women writers on the Time 100 Best Modern Novels list.

The current NY Times Fiction hardcover bestseller list has 5 out of 16 titles written by women.

Are these lists part of some collective delusion?

Epic. Epic. God bless Belle.

To Collin Street go the laurels.

When positivists read cultural criticism that assumes our human, lived, cultural world is socially constructed, sometimes they think the critic is saying “nothing is real” or “it’s all a collective delusion.”

When positivists write cultural criticism themselves, sometimes they assert that socially constructed ideas are Iron Laws of Reality, and end up arguing in circles that what they perceive is real because they perceived it, or that the wisdom of communities is not contestable because that way lies relativism and the collapse of structured hierarchies, such as the Great Chain of Being, or bigger Scales that Subsume Lesser Scales.

I’m trying to be polite and engage your ideas because you are mostly polite, and because you seem reachable unlike Hector “Evo Psych is My God” St. Clare. But, look, your ideas are nonsense on the level of basic assumptions. You are arguing math problems in Base 8 with all of us using Base 10. We are engaged in incommensurable discourses.

Those lists of Great Novels are interesting and have some virtues and I could find both good and bad reasons for the gender imbalance on each of them, but our problem comes before all that. I think those lists are contestable, socially constructed reflections of a culture where patriarchal thinking, sexist assumptions, bias in publishing, and actual material circumstance have all left a legacy; I think those lists are just one more voice in the mix of literary discussion. You are treating them as if they are experimental results of a test of the hypothesis “boys > girls.” Nonsense; that’s not even wrong, as the saying goes.

RM,

Actually, I am a Christian, and the Father, Son and Holy Ghost is my god. Behaviour all ecology and the light it sheds on human society is merely a side interest.

“I know most here understand that, but I fear that the tirelessness of our bullshitting troll may be burying that basic point under a flood of . . . words.”

Well, from Straightwood’s perspective, Straightwood is right, and what he’s protecting is the truth. You can tell ‘Cuz Words, or because of some of at least a few of the words Straightwood releases from his hoard. (He hasn’t heeded Nietzsche’s injunction to be shamefast about sharing: that it matters not what boon of illimitable value you have to give the world, you shouldn’t be eager to start doling it out: let the disciples come and find you. But some people are just too generous.)

For example, Straightwood’s a fan of life-and-death situations, when he isn’t a fan of sheer scale. Stories about the army, stories about Mexican prison fights, that’s the kind of thing which appeals to him. And why? Because, he says, situations like that involve questions of life and death and therefore (there’s an absent connection there, but never mind) are superior, as narrative material, to situations which don’t. It doesn’t matter to Straightwood that many women throughout history have gone in danger of their lives and that if it were a mere matter of one’s life’s being at stake, women writers would not lack for literary fodder. But anyone who’s a woman knows that the kinds of ways a woman’s life may be in danger are not thought suitable as material for the best fiction. Much of that stuff is dull and some of it is biological. Icky-poo, IOW. Straightwood is a victim of the partial blindness which drives men like him to explain to women, passionately and at length, that they (the women) have never been called upon to die in wars. The men who deliver these explanations believe them, mostly because (because they’re not obtuse in the exact same way they seem to be at first) they believe that the ways in which women die in wars are not the correct ways, the proper ways, the decent ways, the ways which get celebrated in the stories. The epics note such deaths without a fuss. If Homer doesn’t make a big deal about it, why should Straightwood?

Then there’s the other thing which can happen, which is that an insignificant death can be recalled out of insignificance by means of the effort of an observer. The observer may even participate in the death, or may have caused the death, but by noticing the death and giving it its due weight the observer redeems the death from obscurity, along with the person who has suffered it. Properly understood, this is a religious exercise, and it seems to make quite an impression on Straightwood. He cites a passage out of Hemingway which is of this nature and presents it as an example of the kind of thing women just can’t do (at least, so I understand him). This means that to Straightwood, women may be appropriate as memorials (gathered in distress around a gravesite, for example) but are no good as memorializers. Women may mourn but female mourning is ineffectual. Women may reminisce, but what their reminiscences are is chatter. Women cannot summon, women cannot compel, women can perform no priestly functions. I have no doubt that Straightwood is very earnest on this count.

So why should Straightwood care about anything women write? If I am confronted with a body of literature produced by people prevented from dying in ways I think valid, prevented from living in ways I think admirable, incapable of redeeming themselves and incapable of redeeming other people, why would I be disposed to like their stuff? Mind you, by that same token I would not be disposed to dislike their stuff, but that would be because it would be so irrelevant to me and so irrelevant to my experiences that there would be no point in my having much of any reaction to it one way or another. Why go there? (I would think). A person might as well join the crowd of kooks who look for messages in chemtrails. Might as well start reading tea leaves. Might as well start thinking kittens really talk.

I’m sorry if the tone of this contribution is intemperate. I’m also sorry if I misunderstand Straightwood, though I don’t expect I do.

Wait, kittens don’t talk?

Bekabot, that was a wonderful look into the heart of the abyss. You just know the abyss is typing out a long response back at you, as we speak.

Hector @ 444

Yes, I too once was a Christian. Those were good times indeed, God had a plan for my life and I had a friend in Jesus. And then, foolishly, I read the following cursed words on a little pamphlet, and it was all over for me, I was alone in the universe, racing towards death.

[spoiler alert, don’t continue reading if you don’t want to have your faith tested, you’ve been warned] “‘And the stars of heaven shall be falling down, and the powers that are in heaven shall be moved’. As you can see, Jesus Christ was just a poor ignorant peasant from Palestine who thought that the stars were little brilliant dots hanging on the night sky and they could fall upon the earth during times of stress”.

Cleanthes,

You’re aware that the Bible uses stars as a literary metaphor for angels? And that, in addition, maybe Jesus Christ talked to his prescientific followers in an idiom they understood? No particular theory of astrophysics is being propounded here.

If that’s your best argument against God, than the new atheists are in much worse shape than I’d imagined.

Hector, I am a Christian too, and I think Cleanthes’s point is obviously irrelevant, but —-

—- dude, what the fuck-all does that have to do with putting your faith in the ridiculous evo-psych just-so stories you are spouting? Those are not the science of evolution, and they are not the science of psychology, and if there is a valid science of evo psych (I’m not claiming to know that) they are not that either, they are bare evidence-free assertions that “women are like this, men are like that, because it’s fact because I say so.” No. No, that will not do. I wonder if you are one of those who misread the Bible to justify patriarchy, and are grasping at sciency-sounding rationalizations for that.

Stanislaw Lem reviews the non-existent book Gigamesh which is obviously better than Ulysses because it has more stuff in it.

I feel I am somewhat closer to Straightwood’s aesthetic than most here because I like heavy metal. Louder=better. Faster=better. More complicated=better. Concept album=better. But, you know, heavy metal is stupid.

434 comments and hector hasn’t referred to “santa monica feminists” yet?

@439

You apparently don’t know much more about people than you say you know about literature. Men more status oriented than women? What do you think women put on designer duds and jewelry for? To attract men or intimidate other women? Why do you think we have the expression, behind every great man, there’s a woman? I live in a society (one of the most sexist on earth) where a woman’s status is measured by what her husband’s company is and what his position is, and women dress up in their finest duds just to go to the supermarket or attend a PTA meeting.
Women are extremely competitive. And it isn’t being sexist to say so.

What Belle said, esp. @438. I have been so absorbed in baseball that all of this has been a relaxing distraction for me. I also read in the last few days a really interesting book about Jews in American academia. (Book was more specific, but you could genus-it that way.) Just to throw a wrench in the works: other dynamics besides male/female are at work, maybe? Like Roth, whom I find really boring: boring to me (even though my first make-out session, in NJ, no less, was with a Jewish adolescent whose experiences with me Roth was maybe capturing?). I feel like Belle is leaving room for my boredom, said adolescent male’s yearnings and confusion, lots of such. But meanwhile asking, why is that adolescent male so privileged?

Yet, a part of me is worried about leaving out Jewish experience. (And Catholic — Joyce, Proust and all. Not to mention Muslim, Hindu, and so forth — there are rich traditions all around) I dunno. There are worlds being overlooked here (says this aged shiksa, who hopes to be a grandmother of Jewish and “Muslim “children, the latter in scare quotes since that side is thoroughly secularized).

Keep reading and read a lot, with sympathy. That’s all I’ve got to say.

Straightwood #424: “Have I got it right?”

Not even close. The point is you think in absolute terms, polar opposites, index-card categories. That is always the ego, trying to avoid expansion of being. I can tell you from experience, the game is not worth the candle.

There’s a Sinatra Rat Pack movie, early 1960’s, where a scene starts with a handful of women sitting around a living room, chatting. Frank comes in with the other actors behind him, says, “Okay you broads, take a powder,” and the women all get up en masse and exit the scene.

If you said that today, of course you’d be killed.

Then came a little something called women’s lib. We are less than 50 years into it, and there are still some traditional women who don’t understand it with some tragic results. But it’s pretty clear that women are now doing good work in all the arts and sciences. And it’s pretty clear that their quantity and quality have begun to match the men. So it seems to me very likely that in literature, Austen, Eliot, Woolf etc. were harbingers of a change that has finally begun to accelerate.

Let’s face it. Men don’t want to read women writing about their lives because, instead of making them look heroic, it makes them look petty and foolish. It exposes a side of life they would otherwise be allowed to overlook. It isn’t gratifying.

It would nice to be able to say that this is something we’ll eventually be able to rectify by doing a better job of balancing household responsibilities, more equitably sharing the care of the young and the old, but that prospect is receding into the mists of the distant future if the spectacle of pulling out a gun and shooting someone seems more vividly real than doing laundry.

Generally speaking, though, how can you tell who the writer is? Print offers a sort of Turing test, and it’s well known by now that you can’t discern gender from the text (Asimov provided a hilarious example in a foreword to a James Tiptree, Jr. collection).

@ #446: Re: “For example, Straightwood’s a fan of life-and-death situations, when he isn’t a fan of sheer scale.”

In some ways, I sympathize more with his life-and-death situation preference than with his preference for scale. I don’t see novels as at all inherently superior to short stories (for instance, though Hemingway does write well in both lengths, I actually like his short stories “Hills Like White Elephants” and “A Clean Well Lighted Place” best of his works). But “push your characters to their limits” has value, and, though life-and-death situations aren’t the only way to do this (the woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is surely pushed to her limits), it can be a good way.

On the other hand, life-and-death situations aren’t all that scarce in women’s writing, whether it’s Eliza escaping on the ice, or the fate of Tessie in The Lottery, or even Beth falling ill and dying in Little Women. (Some such situations are better writing than others, of course, but the same is true of life-and-death situations in men’s writing.)

Katherine,

Your ignoring the reality of male on male status competition as a driving force for art.

Nope, I’m just ignoring you and your cockamamie gender theories. Bored now.

…Roth’s claustrophobic toilet and its minute themes…

Haha! This should totally be an anthology of Roth criticism!

I haven’t read all that much in the Great Male Narcissist canon or whatever, but I want to suggest that the critique that these authors fail to create satisfying female characters is kind of a red herring. It’s a feature for sure, and maybe it’s kind of the best data point you can hang on to through the thick of denialist counterattack, but the truly obnoxious thing about these authors is the murkier situation of how they all perform the “Great and Repulsive Masculine Self” thing as the actual main literary event and then this very thing (again, murkily) is what enables their canonization. It’s instructive to look at aspirants to this tradition that missed the boat worse than Jonathan Franzen. For instance, this thing is the literary thunder Bukowski is trying to capture under the guise of Henry Miller worship, or, similarly, that Exley’s “A Fan’s Notes” (also infused with various occult forms of male-ness worship) is aiming for. If you think about it, I think it’s actually hard to even imagine the possibility of three dimensional female characters in the same fictional universe as religious expositions of Updike’s penis + the autumn foliage, so it seems like their absence can’t really be the problem with that. Rather, it’s the fact that Updike’s novels, and the Updike mythos generally, are just all about the latter kind of thing (rather than that they fail to contain the former kind of thing). Compare with sexist genre fiction of mid-century–the disparity between male and female characters is at least as bad as in important novels, even if there is less “depth” overall–but that stuff isn’t bad in the full spectrum of sexist and misogynistic ways. I think it’s because that stuff generally doesn’t overtly take the Updikean amplified masculine ego as an object of religious contemplation like the mid-century males do, and so became Great. I mean how would they even do what they do with three dimensional female characters in the mix? Literally what I can actually imagine here is Norman Mailer waving around the binder of women. Plus, I want to at least keep an eye on the idea that misogyny is deep down inconsistent with rendering actual masculinity in the highly authentic way that big important literary novels are supposed to. (I haven’t read Bellow, so he is subtracted from my opinions.)

bad Jim @ 466:
Asimov provided a hilarious example in a foreword to a James Tiptree, Jr. collection

Are you perhaps thinking of Robert Silverberg’s introduction to the Tiptree collection Warm Worlds?

(To his credit, Silverberg amended this introduction later with a rather gracious acknowledgment of his error; see the first comment to the post I linked to.)

@ bad Jim:

Love the Dennet quote. Sure, and especially in math, philosophy, science you achieve your heights by your mid-20s and that’s it. And I certainly entertain the though that artists are people and hence driven to achieve status through whatever vehicle is open to them. But acheiving social status and acheiving artistic greatness don’t correlate well. I’m not too familiar w lit; in music, composers often reached their artistic prime well after they had found their metaphorical rock to call home. If there is something other than mating-focused-status-seeking to explain Mozart’s and Beethoven’s and Stravinki’s and Mahler’s latest and greatest works, and if this pattern is found in lit., this would count as speculative evidence against the speculative idea that Hector promotes.

philosofatty:

I wanted to say that the “great & repulsive masculine self” was a unifying theme of the GMN’s, but I hadn’t read enough to know. Now that you say it, I wan to posit this:

Writing is hard. And the ego has little to say about what will happen on the page. One trains and learns various techniques for language and story-telling, one finds a room and a typewriter: the Muses are summoned. The characters and stories that come to you and what is expressed through oneself isn’t at all like the consciously-planned egoic operations that deliberate over wooing a mate or plotting a career.

Thus, it can be misleading to say that the GMN’s underwrote female characters the way they may have written a commencement speech or planned a vacation. The adoration of the maldeveloped male ego came to them perhaps as a reflection of their world, and an indictment of it. Perhaps these flawed characters give evidence of a world deeply in need of feminine assertiveness and gender re-alignment. Condemn these works and their authors? Or celebrate them as guides out and away from patriarchy.

@ badJim: I think the society can learn to grow men that do not have their own femininity sterilized and shamed. Many more male readers can enjoy female authors and feminine themes today now that a repressive masculinity is more commonly exposed as a character flaw and a weakness.

Belle, going back to the OP, here’s someone fighting the good fight, just up the road from David Gilmour.

Look at how many teenagers want to be in a rock band because they think it will make them a magnet for the girls. There is your proof.

@448 “Wait, kittens don’t talk?”

I’m reminded of Martin Buber: “I sometimes look into the eyes of a house cat…. This cat began its glance by asking me with a glance ‘Can it be that you mean me? Do you actual want that I should not merely do tricks for you? Do I concern you? Am I there for you? What is that coming from you? What is that around me? What is that?!’ There the glance of the animal, the language of anxiety, had risen hugely.”

That is, for the record, only a comment on the funny question of whether animals talk and not at all a comment on the thread topic or anyone in it.

Perhaps the strangest part of Buber’s cat channeling is that his cat apparently sometimes did tricks for him?

Stanislaw Lem reviews the non-existent book Gigamesh which is obviously better than Ulysses because it has more stuff in it.

yessss perfect vacuum drop

Meredith,

If you see this post, could you share the title of the book you’re reading about the Jewish academics? I’m curious. Thanks!

Igor Belanov #473 “I don’t think these authors were writing books in order to further the cause of women’s lib.”

Thanks, I did not mean to imply that. I used the word “harbinger” metaphorically for “indicator”, as in the name “harbingers of spring”.

Jerry Vinokurov: I mean, look at Joyce: what did he do with his life? It was nothing but drink, sex, and writing, in some order, all sustained by continual mooching off his friends.

This is a great point, along with the rest of #487.

Asimov provided a hilarious example in a foreword to a James Tiptree, Jr. collection

Any details on this? Mind you, you can’t blame the good Doctor for getting suckered – coming to it cold there’s nothing to give away the writer of “The women men don’t see” or “All the kinds of Yes”, and not a lot to give her away even in retrospect. I think in one of her own forewords Sheldon said that James Tiptree Jr was a man, so to speak.

@ #482: Anecdotally, it’s true that being in a rock band improved your odds of being a Lynn magnet, when I was college age (although those improved odds could be countered if you were a sufficient asshole). On the other hand, anecdotally, I wound up acting in a play, at the same age, because I wanted to make myself an Andre Braugher magnet, so to some degree the sexual inspiration to creativity works on both genders. (Feel free to argue that, for evo psych reasons, it works more powerfully on men.)

Who’s going to claim comment #500?

Ain’t gonna be 500, but:

James Joyce: “Literature deals with the ordinary; the unusual and extraordinary belong to journalism.”

Illuminating, from a fancy gorged
By apparition, plain and common things,
Sequestering the fluster from the year,
Making gulped potions from obstreperous drops,
And so distorting, proving what he proves
Is nothing, what can all this matter since
The relation comes, benignly, to its end?

If Finnegan’s Wake represents the grandest of ambitions, Dubliners represents a modest ambition more than achieved. Let Molly’s final affirmation represent the futility of all ambition. Joyce may not have been a woman, but never was he merely a dick.

Hector, Hector, Hector … what is this “evolution” of which you speak? It certainly isn’t anything like the evolutionary theory developed over the last 150 years or so by actual scientists. So your constant evocation of it, in defense of your ridiculous ideas about how utterly, totally, completely different you are from one of those icky grils you put up the sign about on the treehouse, is — shall we say — one of the dumber efforts I’ve seen in years of reading blog comments. I particularly liked the part about how “one of those truths is that the sexes are essentially different, with different talents, interests and roles.” Who exactly defined those “roles,” Heckyll? How exactly is your “essence” different from that of a person with different genitals? You don’t need food, water, shelter from sunburn and cold? Or perhaps you don’t have eyes or an amygdala?

All your comments — not just the first one, which I’ve quoted — just go to show that what I figured out freshman year in college is really true: there’s nobody more stupid than an educated idiot.

Thehanu,

I may or may not be an educated idiot, but I am a scientist, though I study plants, not people.

#487 – “Wallace Stevens sold insurance; what could possibly be more bourgeois or quotidian?”

Wallace Stevens was a lawyer and insurance company executive who spent most of his career as a VP at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. He was good at his work and enjoyed it, turning down an offer of a professorship at Harvard (his alma mater) because he preferred to remain with the Hartford.

Whoops:

Consider the position Kenneth Burke articulated in his essay, “Literature as Equipment for Living” from The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941). Using words and phrases from several definitions of the term “strategy” (in quotes in the following passage), he asserts that:

. . . surely, the most highly alembicated and sophisticated work of art, arising in complex civilizations, could be considered as designed to organize and command the army of one’s thoughts and images, and to so organize them that one “imposes upon the enemy the time and place and conditions for fighting preferred by oneself.” One seeks to “direct the larger movements and operations” in one’s campaign of living. One “maneuvers,” and the maneuvering is an “art.”

Through the symbols and strategies of shared stories, members of a culture articulate their desires and feelings to one another thereby making themselves mutually at home in the world. Surely professional participation in that activity is an honorable activity.

The point about women facing death in pregnancy is valid, as is the observation that before the advent of sterile surgery and antibiotics, early death was a common occurrence, with women facing as much risk of it as men. But literature is about conflict, and there is no more elemental conflict that that of people trying to kill each other. Consider Patrick O’Brien’s series of novels about British naval action in the Napoleonic wars. The Aubrey-Maturin series is a marvelous mixture of intrigue, nautical lore, natural science, character studies, and naval combat. I wouldn’t call it high art, but it is not the sort of thing that women write. Belle would argue that they will, in time. I’m not so sure.

I figured there’d be something at Do The Math about women and noir and I was right.

http://dothemath.typepad.com/dtm/2012/09/newgate-cs-calendar.html

“I wouldn’t call it high art, but it is not the sort of thing that women write.”

Plenty of women write historical fiction and military (science) fiction. Many of them are themselves veterans of war or come from military backgrounds. Stop making a fool of yourself.

“I doubt that Belle takes much comfort in the stupendous “success” of EL James and JK Rowling, whose book sales likely exceed those of any living male writer.”

Straightwood, why do you reckon these writers use their initials and not their first names as their authorial handles? Any idea?
Your time starts now. You may use notes, but no googling.

Pete, I suspect Fifty Shades of grey is unpopular among the Manhattan martini-bar set, as it reinforces the patriarchy, or whatever the jargon is these days.

Oooh, zing, snap! Got us bang to rights there guvernor! Besides the fact I’m from the Australian suburban pub set, but we are EQUALLY TERRIBLE.
Teh devastating arguments, they are devastating!

Michael Berube will address some of the issues discussed in this thread at an upcoming event at GWU — The Canon Anew on Oct. 25:
http://gwenglish.blogspot.com/2013/09/michael-berube-in-residence-at-gw-as.html?m=1

Peter Erwin: It’s entirely possible. I’m 62 and acutely aware that memories are perishable. I was recently admonished here that something I attributed to Betrand Russell was actually the work of Aldous Huxley. It feels right that it was Asimov; he was not afraid to admit mistakes. Silverberg, whom I love, doesn’t seem old enough to have made a fool of himself in the same way, but you might well be right.

A few years ago my mother hosted a political gathering, and Gregory Benford, a local, was in attendance. He scrutinized our extensive book collection from top to bottom, left to right, without saying anything. (Which anyone would do. Look! Books!) Fortunately we have a few of his, one or two even hardbound. I hope he was gratified.

#510 – I stand behind no man [sic] in my praise for Patrick O’Brian. I’ve read the full series three times.

But as a writer whose subject is war, O’Brian does not come within hailing distance of Pat Barker, who is for me the greatest war novelist of the twentieth century. I admit that perhaps I would find that Vasily Grossman is greater if I read Russian, but as I don’t I can only say what I know and that is that Barker is a writer of unparalleled perception and power.

And Pat Barker, of course, is a woman.

And then there’s pilot Lt. Col Kim Campbell of the USAF, whose single-seat A-10 Thunderbolt was seriously damaged by Iraqi anti-aircraft fire after her group had hit their targets and started heading back. Hydraulics were knocked out and the controls weren’t responding, so she had to use the manual mechanical overrides for the 1 hour flight back to base and the landing.

“On the ground it was discovered that her A-10 had sustained damage to one engine and to the redundant hydraulic systems, disabling the flight controls, landing gear and brakes, and horizontal stabilizer. A detailed inspection revealed hundreds of holes in the airframe and that large sections of the stabilizer and hydraulic controls were missing.”

Apparently few pilots have ever landed an A-10 in manual mode.

And of course there’s Tammy Duckworth, who was flying a Blackhawk and got hit with an RPG, losing both legs and almost losing her right arm.

I feel it’s my duty, as a man, to say this isn’t half as scary as having to take care of somebody: dress this wound, change this diaper. (I only mention these as tasks I shirk, having hired others to perform them.) Acts of violence tend to be brief, but the work of care goes on forever.

That’s not to say one is man’s work and the other woman’s, necessarily; but one story can be told simply, and the other doesn’t have an end. “They lived happily ever after” isn’t true; everyone dies, and mostly squalidly, which isn’t something to regret, but neither very special. Guess who gets to clean up afterwards. I know my way around a mop and a broom, but for some reason women laugh at me when I wield them.

It just occurred that a version of this very conversation, gender roles in fiction, has been taking place in a very different way in another corner of cyberspace: so-called “digital humanities” over at Ted Underwood’s The Stone and the Shell:

Genre, Gender, and Point of View
http://tedunderwood.com/2013/09/22/genre-gender-and-point-of-view/

A new approach to the history of charter?
http://tedunderwood.com/2013/05/08/a-new-approach-to-the-history-of-character/

Straightwood:

Both Hemingway and Eliot closely observed the dynamics of personal relations and the fragile delusions underlying them, but Eliot was never afraid for her life.
(Quote)
In 1954, while in Africa, Hemingway was almost fatally injured in two successive plane crashes…(yada, yada)….

Surely you’re aware, Straightwood, that childbirth was a dance with death for every women in those days? Not to mention common diseases like measles, mumps and various respiratory diseases being much more lethal in the years before antibiotics. Not only could any ordinary woman expect to be in fear of her life several times during her lifetime, she could expect to watch her loved ones battle with these things which we hardly give thought to these days.

Okay – so every time I see the headline for this post, I burst out laughing at the imagined sight of such a thing… Thanks for the laugh Belle!

Belle @ 536
Honestly, you’re way too nice to mr. James. He’s just ignorant. It seems he doesn’t know who Diotima of Mantinea was. He’s also completely unaware of Plato’s Symposium and so he can claim that there are no women on Plato’s dialogues. But, he’s hardly alone about commenting on books he has not read, Schopenhauer recommended doing so to those who had purchased his World as Will and as Idea and didn’t want to read it.

@541

How about Crookedmember, or Peterpecker, or Timbercock? Seriously Belle, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

@543

Doh! As my pennance, I will list the titles and authors of the NINE CONSECUTIVE fiction works by female authors reviewed in the fiction section of today’s NYT Book Review:

“The Signature of All Things” Elizabeth Gilbert

“Almost True Confessons” Jane O’Connor

“Half the Kingdom” Lore Segal

“The People In the Trees” Hanya Yanagihara

“The Lowland” Jhumpa Lahiri

“Burial Rites” Hannah Kent

“The Story of a New Name” Elena Ferrante

“A Guide For the Perplexed” Dara Horn

“Archangel” Andrea Barrett

Nine,

Yes. the facts are the facts, even when they make some people uncomfortable.

Belle Waring,

Jews do in fact have outsize influence in society relative to their numbers, I’m not sure this is at all controversial. I’m also not clear why Mr. straight Wood has to change his pseudonym just because you find it amusing.

” I’m also not clear why Mr. straight Wood has to change his pseudonym just because you find it amusing.”

She’s taking the piss out of him. Get a grip.

Of course, this is all very politically incorrect and anathema in Georgetown, I’m aware

@”Okay – so every time I see the headline for this post, I burst out laughing at the imagined sight of such a thing…”

Me, I wonder if they eat them straight, or with, say, mango chutney.

GiT @548 – Ty for the link, but Clarkson’s claim was abou evolution, so i imagined it might have some basis in the math of reproductive fitness or something of the sort. Does sex-selective abortion/smothering the female child in the cradle count as a mechanism of evolution ? I doubt it.
Hector seems the very personification of Poe’s Law crazy so there’s no way to tell his claims apart from evo-psychobabble.

Since Straightwood and Hector claim to like facts, here are facts.

http://www.vidaweb.org/the-count-2012

One day’s reviews at one newspaper is not a world changed.

“In the matter of gender rolls, evolution agrees with Ephesians.”

I love this. It makes me picture the female rolls lazing around baking in a pan while the male rolls sidle up to squirt them full of meringue.

“they are the sort of ‘thinkers’ who form their belief systems first and then ignore any facts that don’t fit those belief systems.”

Where has it been empirically established that the disparity of male/female publishing success is entirely the consequence of simple sexism? There are Harry Potter sized profits to be made by publishing whatever people want to read, irrespective of the sex of the author. How can a crassly commercial publishing industry also be inflexibly sexist? Certainly sexism is present in publishing, as in most other businesses, but it is not the only possible explanation for the imbalance in what people are reading.

Re: Yes: males are, on the whole, superfluous — indeed, superfluous in many more things than reproduction strategies…

Males are superfluous at the group level, but from the individual point of view (other things being equal) it’s beneficial to produce more of the less common sex, which is why the gender ratio works out to 50:50, plus or minus a bit depending on circumstances (which I mentioned above).

It makes me picture the female rolls lazing around baking in a pan while the male rolls sidle up to squirt them full of meringue.

Am I the only one who thinks of a toilet paper marketing strategy gone horribly wrong upon reading “gender rolls”. That’s straight up awful, isn’t it?

Has anyone else noticed that “straightwood” has made two quite different and arguably incompatible arguments? It’s not just a matter of amendment and mutation; the two are as different as the two creation stories in Genesis, and reconciling them might require equally strained exegesis.

Argument 1, as amended: there aren’t as many great books by women as by men because women in the past didn’t have the necessary life experience to write books with a sufficiently grand subject matter.
a. Some subjects (or maybe themes, or plot elements, or settings; I’m not sure the distinction has been made clearly) are more important than others and art with those plot elements is better than art without them.
b. Stories about life and death and killing inherently have more grandeur and force than other stories.
c. Women haven’t had the life experience to write those stories, because their lives have been too constrained. In particular, female authors of the 18th and 19th century weren’t able to write grand enough fiction because were never in danger of death.
i. Death in childbirth or by disease or starvation doesn’t count. Has to be violent death, preferably in a war, because what’s important is conflict.
ii. The fact that women have always died in wars doesn’t count. It only counts if you’re killed while holding a weapon.

Argument 2: there still aren’t many great books by women, and obviously it’s not just because of sexism because it’s absurd to think that there’s any such thing as sexism today, and obviously there will never be many great books by women because that’s absurd too, and how about that, huh?

Argument 2 is somewhat underdeveloped compared to argument 1, but it ought to be pretty obvious that there’s some tension between the two. If the assertion is that women still have constrained lives compared to men, then that’s in flat contradiction to the claim that there’s no important sexism today. If the assertion is that women are incapable (for some unspecified reason) of writing great fiction no matter what their life experiences are like, then all of the elaboration of argument 1 is unnecessary and can safely be dropped.

@566

Is it impossible that there are at least two factors involved in the lesser success of women in modern literature? Here are the candidates:

1. Sexism, undeniable present historically, but tapering off now in Western culture. With multiple women setting book sales records, it is hard to make the case for gross sexism limiting women’s publishing success.

2. Thematic differentiation, resulting from differential scope of experience and sex-related authorial preferences. Perhaps men write on a broader range of subjects, better matching the range of interests of the reading public. As women gain entry to every field of endeavor, the thematic range of their writing will likely increase, but their subject preferences may not.

Culture changes slowly and prejudices do not vanish overnight. In a few decades we may be able to determine which of these factors was dominant in the current era, but right now, the answer is unknown.

“Perhaps men write on a broader range of subjects, better matching the range of interests of the reading public.”

Please provide an example of a subject about which men write, but which women do not.

If the subject matter men tend to write about better match those of the reading public, this almost certainly has nothing to do with differences in the breadth of subject matter considered by “men” vs. “women,” but rather with frequency of engagement with the subjects.

But matching the interests of “the reading public” also seems rather irrelevant. “The reading public” is majority women and the authors read most are probably women (Christie, Cartland, Steele). If matching the reading public is the game, it seems women are better at it and they’ve already won. All men have left is Shakespeare.

The question is about matching the critical literary establishment which adjudicates questions of canonization and greatness. Of course that game seems a bit rigged when the standard appears to be “what appeals to Straightwood and what he thinks is important.”

Hector, or Hector-bot programmer, I can’t stand this any longer. Sorry to be a pedant, but this is causing me physical pain. Please read:

“Your”:
[yoor, yawr, yohr; unstressed yer]
Pronoun
1.
(a form of the possessive case of you used as an attributive adjective): Your jacket is in that closet. I like your idea. Compare yours.
2.
one’s (used to indicate that one belonging to oneself or to any person): The consulate is your best source of information. As you go down the hill, the library is on your left.
3.
(used informally to indicate all members of a group, occupation, etc., or things of a particular type): Take your factory worker, for instance. Your power brakes don’t need that much servicing.

“You’re”
[yoor; unstressed yer]
contraction of you are: You’re certain that’s right?

(Dictionary.com)

I have just read and loved Fond Memories of Vagina, by Garland Grey. It seems relevant.

http://tigerbeatdown.com/2010/07/01/fond-memories-of-vagina-martin-amis-the-pregnant-widow/

I’m not getting into any opinions about spelling vis a vis your arguments, Hector, just asking you to cut out that annoying thing which is the lexical equivalent of continuously banging your shoe against the table leg.

“Straightwood, why do you reckon these writers use their initials and not their first names as their authorial handles? Any idea?”

It may be true historically that more women used initials to disguise their sex, but I don’t think it is true of Rowling and James. Bloomsbury has no aversion towards women writers for children and James was self published. In many cases. today, it is a positive advantage to be a woman when approaching publishers. The whole industry, in the UK at least, is dominated by women at every level. I am surprised that we don’t have more cases of men writing under female pseudonyms, I think it is probably because there is still something sniggery about me pretending to be women.

And then, how are books marketed? Here, look at this.

Speaking only for myself, Hector, your inability to tell “your” from “you’re” is driving me buggy as well.

You claim to have a higher degree and to work in the sciences and you can’t manage this very basic grammatical rule? I agree with several of the others on this thread. You’re playing us.

Torquil Macneil @581. I think the conventions for YA fiction, which is what Harry Potter is, are different, at least in terms of the covers and marketing. Look at the Potter covers, or the Hunger Games series covers, just to pick two.

De Lurking,

I do work in the plant sciences. Belle Waring can no doubt look up my e-mail and affirm to you that I am who I purport to be.

As I said before and I’ll say again, spelling is the last refuge of men and women stuck with no better arguments to make.

Although I’d much rather pillory Hector simply because his views are not mine, I have to say that some people’s brains just don’t grok the spelling dealie. My hands cannot correctly type “its” and always render that as “it’s” although I actually do know the difference (I have to proof every email for that one). Matt Yglesias is another one who drives me nuts, because although a very heavy and serious writer he makes horrible spelling errors all the time and is very well aware of it. I’m OK with Hector making this confusion or any others, so long as I can understand clearly what it is that I’m disagreeing with.

Cleanthes,

Ahhm not a Smaaht man, but I do know what the Symposium is about.

Surely, you are not advocating not being nice to ignorant people, are you? That’s just plain mean. If anyone deserves a soft hand its the ignorant.

I have read the symposium (although admittedly not it greek and not that well nor that recently.) I was wavering when I wrote the term “Plato’s dialogues” because I am so ignorant that I couldn’t recall whether it was the Crito or the Apology or that other Ph one that I can’t spell that I was thinking of and whether when someone mentions his wife and children and Socrates responds whether that counted and how much… but at least Belle seemed to understand the point.

But to reveal my ignorance even more, maybe Aristotle is a better example, he probably writes about women less accurately than Plato. Are his works less than great because he is inaccurate about women?

Martin James @ 590

I don’t doubt your intelligence at all. And I apologize if I gave you that impression. I just happen to think that people voicing opinions easily contradicted by facts are ignorant of the facts. There are other possible interpretations, some people are trolling, others are malicious, others are just careless. I didn’t think you were doing any of those things, for the record.

Many of us are guilty of posting ignorant opinions on the intrawebs. I myself made that mistake yesterday too, while commenting on rock music, and I was immediately corrected by people who are not ignorant on the subject.

What I advocate for is to correct the ignorant statements and not sugarcoat it, just to be nice.

Sadly, in order to avoid voicing an ignorant opinion, I cannot comment on Aristotle’s works since I have not read him, so I have no clue.

@585

“My point was that Rowling did not need to disguise her sex to find a publisher.”

But this is sort of a red herring, because if Rowling doesn’t have to hide her sex to find a publisher, she still may have to hide it in order to find an audience.

Jezebel again has something relevant:

http://jezebel.com/is-dave-eggers-new-novel-a-ripoff-of-a-female-writers-1428445249

From the medium post by the author:

“Likewise, society makes assumptions about women that make us guilty by default: our work is supposedly minor, less valuable, and limited to the personal, where the work of a white man is presumed to be “universal”, “essential”, and relevant to all…. The assumption the media makes in these instances is that something is not important unless a familiar, male white face does it. So, when Dave Eggers decided to rewrite my book as his own novel about a young woman working her way up through Facebook, the Wall Street Journal called it a treatment of “the essential issues of the day.” From all appearances, it is an unnervingly similar book, and I wrote it first (and I imagine mine is more authentic and better written, because I actually lived and worked in this world and am also a good writer). The difference is that Eggers is a famous man and I am not.”

For some strange reason this all makes me think of unbent lumber.

Oy.

I find myself responding to people from a previous comment thread.

First, I have to be clear about something: if you like reading Faulkner, great. If you like reading Hemingway, fine. But are they *important* in the sense that they were actually *influential in broader culture*? Well, Hemingway’s reporting was, that’s documented; his novels and short stories weren’t, and that seems pretty clear too. There is no meaningful “Hemingway school” of later important writers. Faulkner had no influence whatsoever, as far as I can tell, on anyone except English professors. So: not canon material according to my definition of canon, which is based on influence.

There are a lot of authors I love who don’t belong in the canon because they aren’t actually important.

—-
Second, regarding the Hitchhiker’s Guide: I have an essay which I need to finish and publish about why it is, in fact, the most important novel of the 20th century. The summary: previous generations in the “Western” tradition, since at least the beginning of the Industrial Era but probably for centuries, viewed the world through an “orderly world” tradition: there was some kind of order, whether religious or mechanical, and this was the structure of the world. The few writers who disagreed with this simply wrote kaleidoscopic screams of terror, lacking clarity.

Douglas Adams, in all of his works, examines and discusses the role which chance plays in the world. Not fate; chance. And he goes through it in a hundred different permutations, carefully, and emphasizes it repeatedly. This is a core theme of his, and it’s one which is contrary to the entire worldview of almost all previous authors.

If you’ve studied enough science, you’ll realize where he got these views — it’s based in the world as we know it today. Someone brought up on Douglas Adams is much less likely to believe in “a place for everything and everything in its place” or “everything happens for a reason”.

It’s a book which marked a fundamental change in the views of people, throughout society, and which pushed that change forward. And I can’t find another 20th century fiction book which did the same for any of the other major changes in viewpoint which have happened in society. (I can think of some equally-or-more important nonfiction books, but no such fiction books.)

That makes it the most important novel of the 20th century.

“If an author has a character that goes fly fishing and the description is just completely absurd, does that make it a lessor work? Yes and no, right?”

Here’s the thing, though. If our writer is going to undertake to write about fly-fishing, without bothering to learn about fly-fishing truly and properly, what does this tell us about our writer?

I submit to you that it tells us our writer is either lazy or not very observant or not very bright or not very interested in doing his job, in which case why should we listen to this writer about anything, much less the very important subject of fly-fishing?

Or — you know — 1/2 of humanity?

#604:

“Birthing is hard and dying is mean, so get yourself a little loving in between”- Langston Hughs.

Nathanael: “Faulkner had no influence whatsoever, as far as I can tell, on anyone except English professors”

I suppose Toni Morrison is, technically, an English professor. And most acclaimed American authors of the last seventy or so years have taught creative writing.

I’m sorry, dude, I like Douglas Adams too, but I think your claims are a little over the top. Adams is not the first person to notice that the race goes not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but time and chance happen to them all. And Hemingway’s terse style is of massive influence, as is Faulkner’s gothicness and prolixity and stream-of-consciousness-icity. I can tell you love books, but you need to read with more negative capability and be slower to enthrone one author as The Only One.

Belle,

I not only want to talk in good faith about the issues, I’m trying to learn things from your posts.

In order to learn I’m trying to distinguish between a few different things. The first thing would be cases where someone says, certain authors don’t interest me because they don’t include women (or insert you identity of choice ). That seems like a a pure preference, but not what I understand you to be saying.

One could also say, that an author needs to have a good moral outlook to be a good author. In other words, one could be completely accurate but “choose the wrong side” and therefore be a less than great author. This would be a slaveholders and sexists are suspect on their face type argument. I also don’t think you are making this argument but there might be some influence of this mixed in.

The point I think you are making is that if an author is biased in such a way that that the descriptions of women are inadequate, then that author tends of be a less adequate author overall.

On balance I agree with you. However, I am more inclined to think that if the main subject matter of the work does not directly address gendered perspectives (and I realize in some ways gendered perspectives affect everything) then I want to be able to say we can ignore the characters less completely filled out.

Since there is so little agreement about what makes for a good literary work, its hard to know how central gender issues are to a good literary work. Take Pynchon for example. In Against the Day, the entire cast of characters and plot situations are so diverse that one can never quite tell what the point is and what exactly his humor is. I don’t recall if you have placed Pynchon on the scale of better or worse female character development. Pynchon’s V. is a book that I enjoyed reading but I have no idea if it is a great book or a book with accurate female characterizations.

If you can offer (or point me back in this long thread to) examples of authors with better and worse female characterizations, both male and female, I could make a better assessment of your thesis. How do Nabokov, Bellow, Updike, Mamet, Roth, Steinbeck, Faulkner, etc. compare. And how do they compare to Lessing, Morrison, Cather, McCullers, etc.

Thank you for your responses. I appreciate them.

“Since there is so little agreement about what makes for a good literary work, its hard to know how central gender issues are to a good literary work.”

That has waxed and waned over time. Back in the 1960s it started coming on strong. One can only hope that, from this point forward, there is no retreat, ever.

Next project: give children’s lit more love and respect. After all, as one of those DWMs has said, “The child is father to the man.” Mother too.

551 is what I’ve read — as a setup in a math bio class; we were being led to realize that it’s not the ratio at birth that matters for sex-ratio strategy, but the ratio for generation n+1. There was a footnote remarking that the ratio is a bit more skewed at conception and that higher infant and child mortality in boys is probably explainable by more brittle genetics (that is terrible phrasing, sorry); fewer implant, fewer reach nine months in utero, and fewer live through childhood independent of social norms.

Other belated and nearly-irrelevant detail: I’ve sheared sheep. There is much matter in it. It’s a combat that hurts no-one — if you’re good — it’s quite funny, because mud! and wrestling! sheep look very silly when sheared! and also it’s spring, and everything is new and warming, and the lambs are sproinging. But your hands are so cold, and if you get it wrong you can damage the fleece and the sheep, and the right way to do it is very exhausting, although if you’re small and have a small flock you can build cunning ramps and dead-ends instead. And then wool, and hope of warmth or wealth. But managing animals is psychologically odd; so much care for them in the short term to use and kill them. Even though they’re looking back at you and going about their own lives.

“The true hero, the true subject, the centre of the Iliad, is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relation to force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to.”

I missed anyone patiently pointing out the realistic context of Georgian marriage comedies. Austen’s women had awful possible deaths — Lydia could very well have ended up raped and beaten to death and thrown in a ditch. Wossher who marries the creepy cousin cleric had a fair risk of starving to death slowly in genteel poverty. Most of Austen’s female characters have families rich and decent enough that they *probably* won’t starve, but they own nothing that can support them.

“Should we expect our authors to be so thoroughly knowledgeable.”

About fly-fishing? No, unless they are writing about fly-fishing, which as far as I know very few writers actually do. (Don’t write about Scotland if you know nothing about Scotland, Austen advises. I’ve found that good advice.)

But about humanity? I would say yes.

If we have a writer who can’t be bothered to pay attention to the subject of his craft (which is usually humanity), because he is too lazy or or too bored or insufficiently interested in this subject, then why would we want to hear what he has to say about humanity?

As for your claim that he is not writing about humanity, he is writing about people, and a small group of people at that, why, yes, this is true.

And when he writes about that small group of people, if he has failed to get his details about the women in that group right —

(because he has been too lazy or too bored or insufficiently interested in actually observing the actual women that make up half of his actual world, so that he now has to “bone up” on them, as though they were some arcane subject, like fly-fishing, which he has no real interest in, because girls? Oh seriously! Who would be interested in such a trivial as girls!)

— again, if he can’t do that, why would anyone trust him to be right about the rest of his work?

You know who knew a little something about fishing?

Henry James’s advice to writers: “Be someone on whom nothing is lost.”

I adore that line – worked it effectively in a couple of grad-school application essays – so pardon if I lovingly quote it in context:

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it — this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education. If experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe. Therefore, if I should certainly say to a novice, “Write from experience, and experience only,” I should feel that this was a rather tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!”

Faulkner had no influence whatsoever, as far as I can tell, on anyone except English professors.

Spoken like somebody not familiar with the late-20th-C. fiction of Latin America.

This seems obliquely related to this discussion.

Consder Melville’s Moby Dick, which is a frequent candidate for the Great American Novel honors. It dates back to 1851 and so is way before before the period under consideration. It has no female characters to speak of.

But, as Gregory Jusdanis points out in this post, there’s an early chapter where Ishmael hops in bed with Queequeg, it being the only bed available in the inn, and it’s as though this were the most natural thing in the world. Which, according to Jusdanis, it was at that time and place. If that scene were to happen today we’d assume that they were gay or the author would be scrawling “no homo” all over the place and we’d be scratching our heads: WTF?

(Sigh)
Martin James @609

As for half the population [that is, women] being ignored, most literary novels concern themselves with a very small slice of the population, usually, but not always, the interesting ones.

You do realise what the corollary of that statement is, don’t you?
Or don’t you?

And this:

All I can do know is bow down and whimper that its just not fair because women really are inscrutable. They are, they are, they are…

Some, or most, of the difficulty in highlighting sexism is that it is so deeply embedded in the thinking of many people that they simply can’t see it.

Belle,

I have one additional comment based on reading your other thread on this topic.

I think the reason that many of the male writers do not write female characters well is that they are somewhat slutty and it blinds them to accurately observe and interpret women.

So, there are 2 ways to be less sexist about the double standard that women are termed slutty for behavior that men are not so termed. One can stop thinking of the women as slutty or one can start calling the men slutty as well. Most people choose the first some choose the second. Solzhenitsyn is an example of an author more inclined to call both slutty. It was in his works and those of other Russians that the contrast to American authors first became so noticeable to me.

Slutty is not the word I really should use – disloyal or just myopic might be better. They generalize from the women that have sex with that most or all women want to have sex with them. They are generalizing from a small sample of people attracted to them, that most others are attracted to them and lose perspective.

You frame it that they blame their lack of control on the women, I would tend to frame it that they confuse their personal experiences with human experience. People with a smaller circle of sexual partners may be less experienced, but also more objective in observing human relations. They have less need, hence less bias and therefore more clear powers of observation. This obviously depends on the degree to which humans are motivated by sex. I am not saying authors are more motivated by sex, I’m just saying 20th century male author’s need to overstate their sexual attractiveness plays out as poorly drawn female characters.

It would be nice to read now an then an author whose sexual passion was unrequited. (I know I’ve set myself up for he’s projecting his lack of sexual experience onto others) but that might not be right. I’m saying that I know what male macho is like, all men do, what I want in an author is instead clearheadedness.

Eunuchs of the world, write!