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Monday, 04 January 2010
Slowly but surely (it takes time to get through 250 pages), a few
responses to TDF's Outrageous Fortune are beginning to appear on
the blogosphere. Timothy Braun at Culturebot and J. Holtham (the name behind
99seats) both have interesting perspectives
to offer. There will no doubt be more.
Holtham echoes a commenter on my discussion of the book when he says that, for him,
the "system" itself should be abandoned:
What Outrageous Fortune really drove home for me
is how futile trying to change the system would be. It's not just one
thing that needs fixing and then everything will be fine. It's all an
interconnected nest of problems, assumptions, practices and vested
interests. ...
So. What's next? Let it go. If the ship is heading to the
shallows, or an iceberg, or just heading out to the open sea without
enough coal, let it. We can cast off in dinghys and chart our own
course.
I admit, I raised the issue myself at my original post (provocative
enough, I suppose, to merit a mention by Mike Daisey). It
occurred to me over the weekend that self-production is not a
new idea; Eugene O'Neill (who studied playwriting with George Pierce Baker
at Harvard in the days before playwriting MFAs) saw his first plays
produced in a shack at the end of a disused Provincetown pier, and more
recently Wallace Shawn performed his The Fever in living rooms
before taking it to the Public Theater in 1990. Nonetheless, it remains
wishful thinking that it is the sole solution to the problem. As for
O'Neill and Shawn, self-production is only a first step, however
necessary. The "system" remains populated by people, and it's unlikely
they'll be going anywhere any time soon. The other issues that
Outrageous Fortune illuminates remain to be addressed; I
addressed a few of them here.
Monday, 04 January 2010
Now 47, I grew up on the novels of writers such as Saul Bellow (one of
Beckett's favorite American writers) and Philip Roth; these writers, along
with Henry Miller and Norman Mailer, were so wildly sexualized that they
came in for considerable (and often deserved) abuse and ridicule from Kate
Millett in her Sexual Politics 40 years ago. Mailer riposted
with The Prisoner of Sex; the argument was by no means closed,
but the fight was enlightening, if often bitter.
Well, time goes on. Bellow, Miller and Mailer are now dead. This
weekend in the New York Times book review section, Katie Roiphe,
a feminist not unfamiliar with controversy herself, took up the issue and
offered an intriguing comparison to male novelists of the midcentury and
male novelists now, and especially how they depict the heterosexual
act:
The same crusading feminist critics who objected to Mailer,
Bellow, Roth and Updike might be tempted to take this new sensitivity or
softness or indifference to sexual adventuring as a sign of progress
(Mailer called these critics "the ladies with their fierce ideas"). But
the sexism in the work of the heirs apparent is simply wilier and shrewder
and harder to smoke out. What comes to mind is [Jonathan] Franzen's
description of one of his female characters in The Corrections:
"Denise at 32 was still beautiful." To the esteemed ladies of the movement
I would suggest this is not how our great male novelists would write in
the feminist utopia.
Roiphe also takes on sex in the work of David Foster Wallace, Dave
Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer ("who avoids the corruptions of adult
sexuality by choosing children and virgins as [his] protagonists"). Wait,
there's more:
The younger writers are so self-conscious, so steeped
in a
certain kind of liberal education, that their characters can't condone
even
their own sexual impulses; they are, in short, too cool for sex. Even the
mildest display of male aggression is a sign of being overly hopeful,
overly earnest or politically untoward. For a character to feel himself,
even fleetingly, a conquering hero is somehow passé. More precisely,
for a
character to attach too much importance to sex, or aspiration to it, to
believe that it might be a force that could change things, and possibly
for the better, would be hopelessly retrograde. Passivity, a paralyzed
sweetness, a deep ambivalence about sexual appetite, are somehow taken as
signs of a complex and admirable inner life. These are writers in love
with irony, with the literary possibility of self-consciousness so
extreme
it almost precludes the minimal abandon necessary for the sexual act
itself, and in direct rebellion against the Roth, Updike and Bellow their
college girlfriends denounced. ...
In this same essay, Wallace goes on to attack Updike and,
in passing, Roth and Mailer for being narcissists. But does this mean that
the new generation of novelists is not narcissistic? I would suspect,
narcissism being about as common among male novelists as brown eyes in the
general public, that it does not. It means that we are simply witnessing
the flowering of a new narcissism: boys too busy gazing at themselves in
the mirror to think much about girls, boys lost in the beautiful vanity of
"I was warm and wanted her to be warm," or the noble purity of being just
a tiny bit repelled by the crude advances of the desiring world. ... In
contrast to their cautious, entangled, ambivalent, endlessly ironic heirs,
there is something almost romantic in the old guard's view of sex: it has
a mystery and a power, at least. It makes things happen.
Sex is making a comeback in the drama, or at least some drama, in
the work of Wallace Shawn in the U.S. and Howard Barker and Sarah Kane in
Great Britain. Roiphe's essay is interesting for what it says about how
far young male novelists have come — as well as how far they've
retreated — in the New Puritanical age. Her full essay is here.
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Superfluities
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