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“Against Interpretation” and other essays, by Susan Sontag

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on May 22, 2012

It’s a little intimidating to try to comment upon this essay collection. Its first two essays–”Against Interpretation” and “On Style”–are so fascinating and so lucid that I am afraid my commentary can only impose a gloss of half-understood meaning on top of Sontag’s clear structure. After reading these first two essays, I was convinced that I was reading a work of literary criticism that was like nothing else that I had read: a work where it was actually possible to understand what the author was trying to say.

If any of you have tried to read a French theorist, then you know what I mean. They’re interesting as all hell, but you’re never quite sure that you’re “getting it” (unless you have a professor to walk you through it…but then there’s a persistent fear that he’s misinterpreting it for you). These two essays don’t have that problem.

The first makes a fairly straightforward case against the act of imposing an interpretation upon a text. As Sontag says: “For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else.”

As an example, she cites the work of Kafka, which she says:

“…has been subjected to a mass ravishment by no less than three armies of interpreters. Those who read Kafka as a social allegory see case studies of the frustrations and insanity of modern bureaucracy and its ultimate issuance in the totalitarian state. Those who read Kafka as a psychoanalytic allegory see desperate revelations of Kafka’s fear of his father, his castration anxieties, his sense of his own impotence, his thralldom to his dreams. Those who read Kafka as a religious allegory explain that K. in The Castle is trying to gain access to heaven, that Joseph K. in The Trial is being judged by the inexorable and mysterious justice of God.”

Sontag’s objection is that interpretation destroys our understanding of the text. When we see The Castle as an allegory for totalitarianism, those rather simplistic metaphors systematically undermine the complexity of what Kafka has written. In the end, we come away from a text feeling satisfied at “getting” it and dissatisfied that what we’ve “gotten” is so trite.

In contrast, Sontag proposes that if there is to be any literary criticism, it should be a criticism that describes the form or the appearance of the work of art. Criticism should be more about the experience of reading a book and less about the ideas that pop up in our head after we’re done reading it.

 

In the second essay–”On Style”–Sontag takes on that old whipping horse, the antithesis of style and content. You’ll have to forgive me for groaning a little when she began the essay. I’ve heard numerous SF critics (Mamatas, Duncan, and Delany) explain how style is not simply something that is layered on top of content and how books are really nothing but style.

Sontag has clearly heard the same thing, though. The first paragraph of the essay is:

“It would hard to find any reputable literary critic today who would care to be caught defending as an idea the old antithesis of style versus content. On this issue a pious consensus prevails. Everyone is quick to avow that style and content are indissoluble, that the strongly individual style of each important writer is an organic aspect of his work and never something merely ‘decorative.’

“In the practice of criticism, though, the old antithesis lives on, virtually unassailed. Most of the same critics who disclaim, in passing, the notion that style is an accessory to content maintain the duality whenever they apply themselves to particular works of literature. It is not so easy, after all, to get unstuck from a distinction that practically holds together the fabric of critical discourse, and serves to perpetuate certain intellectual aims and vested interests which themselves remain unchallenged and would be difficult to surrender without a fully articulated working replacement at hand.”

The essay goes on to examine various ways in which our literary discourse perpetuates the notion that style and content are separate. For instance, when critics praise a book, despite what they call its crude or careless style. Or when someone says that a style is “ornate” or “flowery”–as if the style is a decoration that is being put on top of some otherwise pellucid object (the content)

Sontag then speaks about the function of “content”–why, to some critics, the notion of content cannot be easily abandoned.

This then segues into an old argument about the purpose of art. Most aestheticians fall (it seems to me) into one of two camps. There are those who believe that art’s only duty is to be beautiful (Oscar Wilde, Sontag) and there are those who believe that art should fulfill some moral purpose (Tolstoy, John Gardner). To Sontag, content is the surface gloss and style is the deep interior of a work of artwork. She writes:

“In art, “content” is, as it were, the pretext, the goal, the lure which engages consciousness in essentially formal processes of transformation.”

Art’s subject-matters are merely objects that are being subjected to some kind of transformation or disfigurement by the artistic work. The process of transformation is the interesting thing about the work; not the object of transformation. Clearly, the best examples of this are avant-garde works. Proust’s novel is about high society in fin de siecle France, but that’s almost beside the point. His novel could be about any milieu and any set of characters; what’s more important is how he describes his subject matter in a way that the reader has never before experienced. The primary thing that a reader will take from Proust is not some knowledge about French culture; it’s a new way of looking at the world and a new way of experiencing his or her own life.

 

These essays will be red meat to anyone coming from a science fiction background. I get the feeling that we’re all pretty anti-litcrit out here in the sci-fi world. And we’re particularly anti the whole “this stuff is symbol for some other stuff” kind of literary criticism, because that sort of litcrit ends up being hopelessly reductionist re: the whole SF/Fantasy enterprise. I mean, I’m consistently shocked by the extent to which spaceships are actually just ships that fly through space and dragons are actually just huge monsters that breath fire. I mean, maybe they do have some deep psychological meaning, but that’s not the primary way that they’re understood by SF readers. If SF/F tropes were primarily symbols, then I don’t think we’d have the phenomenon of people getting all bent out of shape because the science is wrong or because the magic system isn’t internally consistent. For instance, in literary criticism, I don’t think anyone ever worries about whether the Very Old Man With Enormous Wings from the Marquez story has hollow bones or whether his wingspan is actually large enough to generate sufficient lift. Which is not to say that SF/F tropes aren’t more than monsters or inventions…it just means…hey, you know…this shit is pretty complicated. It’s not easily understandable. If we could explain it, then we wouldn’t actually need to read the book, would we?

Anyway, after reading the introductory essays I was totally revved up for the rest of the book. When a person throws down a gauntlet and essentially says, “All of you other literary critics are doing it wrong,” I expect the following essay collection to be full of examples of How To Do It Right.

But it wasn’t. Actually, she sidesteps the whole literary criticism angle: none of the subsequent essays is about a novel; most are about films or the theater.

Still, I enjoyed the collection alot. I particularly enjoyed her spirited defense of the avant-garde. In literature, no one pays very much attention to the avant-garde. And Sontag is quite contemptuous of that state of affairs. She considers the novel to be a stale form, as compared to film or music or painting (in the last of these, the avant-garde has almost entirely taken over the form).

My favorites amongst the rest of the essays were “The imagination of disaster”–an essay about the way that science fiction films imagine apocalyptic scenarios–and her most famous essay, “Notes On Camp”–a description of the celebration of the kitsch and celebration that seems to have, with the recent entrenchment of hipsterism, become a permanent part of our culture.

But, for me, the most influential essay was one where she attempted to explicate the genius of Jean Luc Godard’s film Vivre sa vie. I have absolutely no idea what she was trying to say with this essay. I can understand the words, but I don’t understand how her final argument proceeds in any way from what she’s written. I even went and watched the film to see if I’d understand better afterwards. I did not. The essay is, to me, impenetrable. However, the film was excellent and made me think that perhaps these arty French flicks might have a little to teach me.

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Three pretty good stories that were published in April 2012

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on May 21, 2012

“Mother Ship” by Caroline M. Yoachim (Lightspeed) – A short, sharp story that is successful based on a single image: that of a jury-rigged, crippled biological ship that’s pregnant with a deformed offspring–a ship that can’t quite come to terms with the strange manner in which it came to be and yet is willing to bestow that same confusion onto its child. As was done to it, so it will do…and yet it hopes that its child will find a way to imbue some meaning and purpose into this sloppy process.

“Area 54″ by Hunter Liguore (Strange Horizons) – I was blinded by this story about  father and daughter conspiracy theorists who can hear mysterious transmissions from aliens over the shortwave radio. All the way through it, I kept saying to myself, “Oh, they seem crazy but the aliens will turn out to be real.” It was only after thinking about it that I realized it didn’t matter. Are stories only justified by their ends? Don’t the means matter too? This is a beautiful story. I loved the daughter’s mix of hard-headedness and vulnerability; she’s willing to cut and run and try to make it on her own, but all of her interactions with other people have this unworldliness to them. And at the same time, her narration has an ironic edge to it. I loved the working-class trappings of the story, too. Upper-class geeks futz around with computers and try to sense aliens in the background radiation of the universe; working-class ones hear them over the shortwave. Upper-class geeks picture aliens as beings that are coming to enlighten us; working-class ones picture them as beings who’ve come to kidnap and torment us.

“The Sympathy” by Eric Gregory (Lightspeed) – Halfway through the story, I realized that I’ve met Eric Gregory. He was one of the students in NC-State’s MFA program, and we had a long talk when I visited. Anyway, I enjoyed his fairy story quite a bit. It has a line very early in the story–”Lauren had expected some frisson at the threshold, a shiver as she shrunk from a we into an I.”–that is great in exactly the way that I can appreciate. It’s simple, clever, and doesn’t require me to visualize anything. Most of the story takes place along a stretch of highway that runs between Louisiana and Tennessee, and the story is great at conveying some of the heat and brightness of the open road. The road has a timeless, illusory quality. You get frenzied when you’re driving. The outside world stops mattering and the inner world starts to matter way too much. The plot of the story had to do with a waifish hitchhiker who’s on the run from some evil fairies, but that hardly matters. The heart of the story lay in those long stretches of road. It’s another story where the ending was less important than the destination.

P.S. Has anyone else noticed that Clarkesworld almost never publishes Fantasy? What’s the deal with that? They came close in April, but the story was still set on the moon.

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God’s Harvard, by Hannah Rosin

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on May 17, 2012

I’ve just read the most entertaining non-fiction book ever. Long-time blog readers will know that I am a huge fan of trashy non-fiction books about weird subcultures. My previous most entertaining book ever was Neil Strauss’ examination of the pickup artist subculture, before that my most entertaining book ever was Carolyn Jessop’s Escape, which is about a woman who was raised in the compound of a polygamous Mormon off-shoot.

But Hanna Rosin’s God’s Harvard is way better than both of those books, because it lacks much of the underlying creepiness. It’s just about a nice Jewish Washington Post reporter doing some in-depth year-long reporting on a bunch of happy-go-lucky kids at a small fundamentalist Christian college near DC: Patrick Henry University (which is also, btdubs, the name of the made-up university in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged).

This college’s niche is homeschooled kids. It basically markets itself as the post-secondary destination for kids whose parents kept them home from public school because they were afraid of tank tops and evolution. This is a book about the most fundamentalist Christians that you could ever find. Their parents taught them that evolution was wrong. They don’t even believe in kissing before marriage. They don’t think that Mormons, Catholics, and Jehovah’s witnesses are Christians at all, and they’re not too sure about Anglicans and the other mainline Protestant sects. Many think it’s a good idea to ask a father’s permission to date his (adult) daughter. They don’t watch any movie that has profanity or nudity. They’re not allowed to drink or smoke on campus. They believe the earth was created 6000 years ago. The reporter never met a single kid at the college (even amongst the “rebels”) who thought that homosexuality was not a sin.

And these kids are huge type A nerds. I swear, if you went to college, you’ve met people who are exactly like them. They’re total student council president types. The author interviews a dozen people who want to be President of the United States. They volunteer for political campaigns. They intern at the White House. They all wanna go to law school.

The university has positioned itself right at the junction between politics and evangelical Christianity. It basically requires its students to engage in political activity. And for most of them, this is the attraction. They’re kids who were kept at home for eighteen years and told that everyone outside their doors was corrupt and desperately in need of saving…and now they’re ready to do the saving.

They’re incredibly slick and sure of themselves. And they have a seriousness that can’t help but be compelling. They really do think deeply about whether it’s right to watch a movie with a sex scene or to wear lipstick. They suffer panic attacks over having consumed a few beers in their rooms and then go to the dean and start confessing and snitching on everyone. And some of them get all bent out of joint and have crises of confidence. They start to wonder whether God really cares about their hemlines or their CD collections. They start traveling to the dark side: Anglicanism! Yes, for these kids, rebellion means becoming a regular centrist Republican who just attends church on Sunday. Basically, it would not be an exaggeration to say that George W. Bush is significantly to the left of these kids.

I just found the whole thing so adorable. It’s all so terribly serious, you see. If there’s one thing that I admire about the right, it’s how they really do take the youth seriously. They’re the ones who start schools like these with the express purpose of grooming kids with the right mindset and action. They founder of this school basically started the place out of a dream of creating some kind of Kwizatch Haderich-style hybrid who is equal parts religious warrior and political operative.

And the kids lap it up. They absolutely believe in the hype. They have nervous breakdowns over the thought that they might not someday become senators. They schedule each moment of their day, breaking it into fifteen minute segments where everything, even Bible study, is slotted into just the right place.

I’m not sure how representative these kids are of fundamentalist / evangelical Christians (and yes, I do use the terms interchangeably, even though these kids are way more on the fundamentalist than the evangelical side). I mean, Wikipedia says there are only 330,000 or so kids in the U.S. who are homeschooled for religious reasons, so I imagine that they’re somewhat on the minority side.

But part of me hopes that kids like these are incredibly numerous. It’s so adorable to think of them going through their chaste courtship rituals and trying to find R&B songs that are sexy enough to groove to but not sexy enough to make anyone wanna get all sexy. The girls in this book often have a thing for Jane Austen. They see themselves as a modern embodiment of the culture that Austen depicts. And I can totally see that. They definitely have some thrilling Regency action going on. I mean, there are all kinds of silly moralistic parts of Jane Austen. Like remember how Fanny, in Mansfield Park, considers her cousins to be unspeakably depraved because they dared to put on a play in the living room? Or remember how Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy, in Pride and Prejudice, constantly imply that Mrs. Bennett’s levity and lack of strictness will eventually lead to Dire Consequences?

Yes, these evangelicals seem to have all the highly mannered fun of the 19th century, and I salute them for it. I am happy to know that they’re out there doing their thing.

It’s hard for me to feel scared of evangelical Christians. Yes, I know that many of them feel my sexual preference to be an abomination and that many of them would be happier if it was against the law. And they’re in favor of a whole bunch of other bad stuff that I don’t believe in. And they’re also very numerous and quite politically powerful.

But they’re also stuck in the same boat as the true liberals. They’re patsies. They get strung along by the centrists and tossed a little red meat here and there, but their social agenda never even comes close to being implemented. They’re sort of our mirror image.

You know, it’s like…when you grow up on the East Coast, you just never think of the rest of the country. Even California is kind of a mythical place. Sometimes when I was growing up, I’d think, “Wow, isn’t it weird that there are thirty million Americans living in a state that is so unimaginably far away and only tenuously connected to my life.”

And it’s the same with the evangelical world. It’s kind of weird that, like, a quarter of America is a part of this world that is so utterly different from my world.

Some people make fun of Christians for the way that they use all this embattled rhetoric. There’s a portion of Christianity that very clearly feels itself to be a minority that is struggling to survive. Critics will say something like, “Umm, 78% of the country is Christian.”

I think that’s missing the point. There’s a huge portion of U.S. Christendom that is really culturally distinct from the rest of America. They’re so distinct that stuff from their world only leaks into our world by accident. Like, the Left Behind series sold millions and millions of copies through Christian bookstores before anyone in the mainstream literary world even realized that it existed. They’re the reason why the 700 Club–a show whose host practices faith healing–appears on a major network. They’re the listeners for the notches on the radio that I skip immediately.

They possess the cultural hallmark of a minority: they’re familiar with majority culture, but that culture contains few depictions of them. Well, God’s Harvard is definitely a mainstream cultural depiction. It’s written in a highly exoticied way, and it’s clearly meant for liberal elites, like me, who’ll use it to laugh at them in sophisticated ways. But, like most underrepresented minorities, they’re probably just happy to be getting a little attention.

P.S. I’ve always wondered why so many liberals have such a problem with the notion that fundamentalist/evangelical Christians believe that we’re all going to hell. To me, that’s not a problem at all. We believe that their hell is totally made-up place. Why get worked up about who they put there?

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The Pillow Book, by Sei Shonagon

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on May 16, 2012

I finally got around to reading this diary about courtly life in Heian era (right about the year 1000) Japan. I’ve been meaning to give it a go ever since my friend Becca blogged about it (wow, that was three years ago). Anyway, this one of the best books I’ve ever read. No seriously, after reading this book, I started composing a list of the best books that I have ever read just so I would be able to give the book its due.

The book is composed of three general things: i) lists; ii) moments; and iii) anecdotes.

Many of the lists are quite bizarre. She makes lists of mountains, plains, beaches, flowers, types of dress, etc. But she also makes wonderful lists with titles like: “Annoying things”, “Embarassing things”, “Things that are both annoying and embarassing”. I mean, sure, there are lots of positive lists (“Things whose outcome you long to know”, etc…) but I much preferred the bitchy lists, like the following:

Deeply irritating things – A man who sets off alone in his carriage to see an event such as the Kamo Festival or the purification ceremony that precedes it, something that the men all love to go to. What sort of crassness is this? Surely he should invite along some other young men who’d love the chance to go, even if they aren’t of particularly high birth. There he sits, oblivious, a vague, solitary figure dimly seen behind the blinds of his carriage, gazing intently at the proceedings. How boorishly mean-spirited and horrid, you think at the sight of him.

Rain on the day when you’re to go out for some special event or a temple pilgrimage.

Happening to hear one of the people in your service complaining that you don’t like her, and someone else is your favourite of the moment.

Someone you don’t particularly care for, who jumps to ridiculous conclusions and gets upset about nothing, and generally behaves with irritating self-importance.

Guys, there are so many of these bitchy lists, and I love them so much. They make me wish that me and Sei Shonagon were best friends. I bet half the court loved her and half the court really hated her.

The other great part of the Pillow Book were the one or two paragraph long sections where she’d describe some striking element. My favorite was:

[170]* A place where a lady lives alone, in a badly dilapidated dwelling surrounded by a crumbling earth wall, the garden pond full of water weed, and the courtyard, if not literally overrun with wormwood, at any rate with patches of green weeds showing here and there through the gravel, is a truly forlorn and moving sight. There’s nothing more boringly unromantic than a place where the lady has got down to business and had everything repaired and smartened up, meticulously locks her gate each evening and generally keeps the place run in punctilious fashion.

And

[182] It’s the middle of a fiercely hot day, and you’re finding it impossible to stay cool – your fan only moves the warm air about, and you keep dipping your hands in ice water and moaning about the heat. And then someone brings you a message written on brilliant red thin paper, attached to a flowering Chinese pink, also bright crimson – and you sense how hot he must have felt as he wrote it, and how much you must mean to him, and find yourself unconsciously laying down the fan (that was anyway proving so useless even when plied while the other hand soaked in ice water), your complaints suddenly forgotten.

It seems rather artistically daring for Shonagon to put so much poetic feeling into the minutiae of her own lifestyle. The other Heian-era work I’ve read, The Tale Of Genji, also takes courtly life as its subject and it also contains many beautiful descriptions, but it doesn’t seem to get really involved with moments–real moments–like this. It’s more about some sort of abstract and highly stylized court life in which Shining Genji swoops in and romances everybody. If Shonagon wrote the Tale of Genji, there’d be alot fewer gently falling cherry blossoms and alot more complaining about how terribly flustering it is to have to think up a poem at a moment’s notice or how deeply irritating it is when someone’s carriage has a squeaky wheel.

Of course, The Pillow Book does have a narrative component, too. Some portion of the anecdotes related in the book are just utterly incomprehensible to me. It sounds like a joke, but most of the anecdotes revolve around composing poems and sending poems and thinking up the right responses for poems. Often, they’re just Shonagon boasting about how wonderful it was that she was able to think up of a perfect poetic response at a moment’s notice. And quite a bit is lost in translation. There are at least two lengthy anecdotes that are about poetic gaffes–a person accidentally saying the wrong thing in a poem–that I found completely incomprehensible, even after perusing the footnotes. Seriously, it was like trying to understand the literature of space aliens.

And alot of the anecdotes are just her talking about how wonderful the woman whom she served (Shonagon was a kind of attendant to the Empress of Japan). It’s kind of hilarious to see her extolling the wisdom and wit of an Empress who’s only like sixteen years old.

But although the anecdotes are not as exquisite as the lists and the moments, they do contain some of the stuffness of life. They give a glimpse of its routines and its rituals. For instance, despite their high station, the women at court seem curiously exposed. They’re not behind stone walls, they’re only kept hidden by these reed or ricepaper blinds. Everything is surrounded by these outdoor pavilions. The indoors and the outdoors seem very commingled. And although there is a kind of gender segregation–women were not supposed to allow men to see their bodies–men are constantly dropping by and talking to the women through the blinds. They’re constantly passing notes and poems to each other. People are coming into and out of their lives, including a few instances where men invade their domiciles, Genji-style. It’s a world with alot of movement. Shonagon seems to be constantly shuttling from place to place–the Empress has to switch palaces every few months, and Shonagon also makes pilgrimage trips and visits and has her own changes in housing. It’s very mannered and very light; Shonagon never even alludes to the notion that the people around her are, like, even marginally involved in ruling a country.

In many ways, it contains all the virtues of modern realist fiction. It’s an intensely detailed portrait of a time and place. It contains short, sharp descriptive passages that are surprisingly moving. Its freedom from plot and chronology allow it to skip around and discuss everything within its world. And it has vividly realized characters. Well, one vividly realized character. Shonagon herself seems utterly delightful. Her voice sings out across a thousand years; even translation is not enough to disguise its uniqueness. Her voice suffuses the book. It’s embedded in her cadences and reversals. Even throwaway phrases are delightful because they come packaged in that voice:

Disconcerting things. An ox cart that’s overturned. You’ve assumed that something of such enormous bulk must of course be thoroughly stable, and you’re simply stunned to see it lying there, and deeply disconcerted.

Spilling something is always very startling and disconcerting.

or

Cats – Cats should be completely black except for the belly, which should be very white.

It’s a beautiful voice, and it induces an emotion that one does not often get from books. Reading The Pillow Book conjures up a stillness inside the heart. And that’s not a feeling that I’ll soon forget.

(Also, for those who were put off by my review of The Tale Of Genji, I’d like to announce that The Pillow Book is one hundred percent rape-free).

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The Feminine Mystique and dillettantism

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on May 15, 2012

In my last post on The Feminine Mystique, I asked why Betty Friedan seemed so gung-ho on shepherding women in the same working world that men of her era often found to be such a disheartening place. Well, towards the end of the book, Friedan addresses my exact point:

[A woman] can find identity only in work that is of real value to society—work for which, usually, our society pays. Being paid is, of course, more than a reward—it implies a definite commitment. For fear of that commitment, hundreds of able, educated suburban housewives today fool themselves about the writer or actress they might have been, or dabble at art or music in the dilettante’s limbo of “self-enrichment,” or apply for jobs as receptionists or saleswomen, jobs well below their actual abilities. These are also ways of evading growth.

…

The “arts” seem, at first glance, to be the ideal answer for a woman. They can, after all, be practiced in the home. They do not necessarily imply that dreaded professionalism, they are suitably feminine, and seem to offer endless room for personal growth and identity, with no need to compete in society for pay. But I have noticed that when women do not take up painting or ceramics seriously enough to become professionals—to be paid for their work, or for teaching it to others, and to be recognized as a peer by other professionals—sooner or later, they cease dabbling; the Sunday painting, the idle ceramics do not bring that needed sense of self when they are of no value to anyone else. The amateur or dilettante whose own work is not good enough for anyone to want to pay to hear or see or read does not gain real status by it in society, or real personal identity. These are reserved for those who have made the effort, acquired the knowledge and expertise to become professionals.

I both agree and disagree with Friedan on this. I agree that it is difficult for a person to derive meaning in life from dabbling or amateurism. But I also don’t think that there are enough top-level professional jobs in the world to provide meaning to all the people who need it (…which is, like, everyone, right?) If it’s not possible to find meaning as a receptionist, then that’s kind of a problem, right? Because there are always going to be receptionists and saleswomen.

And if the only way to find meaning is to be a “professional”–meaning paid–artist or politician or scientist or doctor then that’s a huge problem, because the world just doesn’t need that many professionals. In fact, for most artistic production, it barely needs anyone at all. If only 500 novels came out in America every year, the vast majority of Americans–including most of those who read novels for pleasure–wouldn’t notice. That’s not good or bad, it’s just how things are. The production of art for money is always going to be an elite act. And it’s the same with politics or science or anything else you can imagine.

Friedan seems to say that the amount of meaning that a job provides is somehow equivalent with its status. She says: “The amateur or dilettante whose own work is not good enough for anyone to want to pay to hear or see or read does not gain real status by it in society, or real personal identity.”

But getting a high-status job is really, really, really hard. Every high-status profession (and I certainly do count ‘writer’ as a high-status profession) in America is marked by a tremendous number of aspirants as compared to practitioners. Friedan seems to imply that the majority of those aspirants are doomed to have no meaning in their lives. They’re out of luck.

So…yeah, that kind of troubles me. But on the other hand, I see Friedan’s point. I spent five years as a dabbler and dilettante of a writer (although I guess by her definition, I still am one, since I am definitely not a professional), and although the dream of being a writer was a pleasant enough daydream, it certainly did not fulfill me in the way that my writing activities do nowadays.

As I was saying to a friend today, there is a deep power in purposefulness. In most of my life and for most of my life, I’ve only worked at about 20% capacity. Only in the last few years have I learned what it’s like to work really hard.

It’s fun. And what’s more, there’s a definite level of satisfaction in laying down to sleep and being able to say to myself, “Today was a perfect day; I did everything that I needed to do.”

I don’t think you get that from amateurism. Or at least, I didn’t.

I think it’s a shame that for most people, purposefulness is so bound up in the economic system. We’re socialized to think that our purposefulness can only really be employed at the behest of an authority figure: a teacher or a boss or, perhaps, a child.

I’m glad to have found a way to be purposeful that does not involve too much overt interference from the outside world. I’ve never been a serious hobbyist, but I wonder if sports players or serious World of Warcraft gamers or fanfic writers or model trainset builders are also tapping into this same well of purposefulness. Some of them display a level of dedication and perfectionism that seems to exceed the effort that most people put into their jobs.

If hobbies can unlock purposefulness, I wonder if they might not be a better route for pursuing meaning than the professions. With the proliferation of hobbies, there are many more ‘slots’ for high achievers. As a casual gamer, I can appreciate the dedication of some insanely good gamer. I can pay him with respect (and maybe by dying to him online, repeatedly), but he can feel rewarded without necessarily requiring monetary attention.

Of course, it all circles back to failure. Does the joy of purposefulness hinge upon success? Certainly, my own joy in my writing has deepened with each success I’ve had. Is there something about the success that fuels the joy? Or does the joy come from the deep immersion in the activity itself?

I’m not sure. My feeling is that, for me, purposefulness depends on a sense that I am progressing towards some goal. I think that if I ever come to realize that success is impossible, then my happiness will substantially decrease. But I also think that I could happily spend my life pursuing a success that never actually materialized.

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The Feminist Mystique, by Betty Friedan

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on May 10, 2012

I’ve been reading Betty Friedan’s 1963 feminist polemic, The Feminine Mystique. It’s been pretty interesting (and not just for historical reasons). For one thing, it’s interesting to note that the primary point that the book is trying to make is a very specific one. It is not trying to say–in general terms–that women are oppressed and don’t have opportunity. Instead, it’s narrowly focused on a subset of American–non-working middle-class and upper-class housewives–and what Friedan calls “the problem with no name,” which is the growing depression and emptiness that (she claims) these housewives are feeling.

Friedan’s solution is for these women (and she often says that she herself used to be one of them) to start finding some meaning in work outside of the house. But she identifies their primary obstacle as “The Feminine Mystique”–which is the notion that a woman can, and should, be fully satisfied by housework, child-rearing, and general wifery.

Now, when you review a book like the Feminine Mystique, you’re supposed to say, “Wow, I am sure glad that we don’t have these archaic problems anymore.” But in this case, that’s not true. The Feminine Mystique didn’t go away. It’s still around. It’s alive and well.

At times, Friedan frequently states outright that she does not believe that a life of pure housework can be satisfying for any woman, as in this quote:

For no matter how much the “home-and-family career” is rationalized to justify such appalling waste of able womanpower; no matter how ingeniously the manipulators coin new scientific sounding words, “lubrilator” and the like, to give the illusion that dumping the clothes in the washing machines is an act akin to deciphering the genetic code; no matter how much housework is expanded to fill the time available, it still presents little challenge to the adult mind.

That’s a pretty bold statement, and not one that I think many people would be inclined to make today. Nowadays, housewives are celebrated. Indeed, being a housewife has something of an exotic and upper-class tinge. I think that few people would state, publicly, that they’ve never met a fully-satisfied housewife; or that most household tasks require no more intelligence than that which is possessed by an eight year old; or that housewives tend to make their (relatively minor) tasks expand to fill all the available time because they’re afraid of facing the meaninglessness of their lives.

While most people would say it is just fine if a woman chooses to stay home with the kids, I am not sure that Friedan would agree. Friedan was not just writing about the patriarchy–she was also writing about the way that the patriarchy had infected the brains of her peers and made them commit themselves to lifestyles that could not make them happy.

 

Anyway, what’s startling to me about The Feminist Mystique (and most other 50s and 60s polemics that I’ve read) is the degree to which the issues raised have not been solved, but have, rather, been rendered moot by a general decline in the standard of living.

For instance, at the same time as Friedan was encouraging women to seek careers, there were plenty of men–like Richard Yates in Revolutionary Road or William Whyte in The Organization Man or Joseph Heller in Something Happened–who were pointing out that the middle-class workplace kind of sucked (just as Studs Terkel was doing for the blue collar workplace in Working). Did Friedan really want her women to enter into mind-numbing time-filling jobs where they had to sublimate their creative impulses just to get enough money to live?

No, of course not. The jobs she’s exhorting women to take are the ones in “the professions”. She wants them to become doctors and artists and writers and lawyers and scientists and professors. And it’s true, there are way more women doing those things now than back then.

But mostly, women don’t do those things. Women were forced into labor market by falling hourly wages. Nowadays, real household income is only a bit (15ish percent) higher than it was in 1976, but the total number of hours of spent doing paid work is much higher. Nowadays, the vast majority of women–even those with young children–are trading their labor for money. But most of them are doing so in jobs that are just as dull and stifling as the ones that Terkel and Heller and Yates decried.

Reading The Feminine Mystique, it’s hard not to wish that things had turned out differently. Why do all of our social revolutions have to be sucked up through this capitalist straw? If women want more fulfilling labor, why must their repressed energy be taken up and frittered away by the commercial world?

The world that Friedan describes–one in which a circa 40 hour workweek was enough to support two adults and 3+ children–seems like an incredibly wealthy one. I understand that political economy pressures made it difficult for non-working women to assert their right to their own time within their marriages, but it seems like there should’ve been a better compromise. Why couldn’t we have a world where both partners worked twenty hours, and instead spent the remaining time pursuing education or intellectual interests or political activity or their own business ventures. I am glad that we live in a different world now, but I am not happy that in arriving at this world, we also somehow managed to lose our grasp on the leisure and wealth that the old world managed to produce in abundance.

 

Another thing that strikes me about The Feminist Mystique (and similar polemics like The Organization Man) is their complete absence of anything that I would call real scientific evidence. Like…the way that Friedan found out about “the problem with no name” was by surveying the graduates of her college class, and then, later, by going out across the country and surveying housewives. But…I don’t get the impression that the survey was very scientific. And even if it was, there was definitely no differences-within-differences analysis. I mean, were women more dissatisfied than they had been twenty years ago? Were they more dissatisfied than their husbands? These are very simple and obvious questions, and they are ones that The Feminist Mystique only attempts to address anecdotally.

As such, it’s very easy to dismiss Friedan’s arguments. She has proved none of them. And that’s okay. But it does mean that The Feminist Mystique can only work through sympathetic force. You either feel the arguments to be true, or you do not. Since I am not a housewife, I have no idea whether they’re true or not. And now that we’re 50 years distant from the time of publication, it’s easy to wonder whether this book is actually saying anything accurate about the mental state of housewives at the time.

Of course, we do know that it captured the cultural moment and that a great many people felt it to be deeply true. And, for me, that’s enough to make it worth reading.

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Why We Can’t Wait, by Martin Luther King Jr.

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on May 8, 2012

Dr. King’s account of the 1963 Birmingham nonviolent direct action campaign against segregated businesses is not really a historical or even a narrative work. Its purpose isn’t to describe what happened. It is not addressed to people like me, sitting at a remove of fifty years from those events.

No, this book was published in 1963. It came right just a few months after the March on Washington–the point that marks the end of our conventional narratives of the civil rights struggle. In this book, King is clearly speaking to a contemporary and mostly white audience. And the bulk of the book is devoted to answering the titular question. Time and again he steps out of the narrative to rebut various criticisms from contemporaries who said that his movement was too militant, too extreme, too impractical, too disorganized, too out-of-touch with ordinary people, too disengaged from the political process.

Reading this book, it’s kind of a shock to be transported into a time before the historicization of the Civil Rights Movement. Every American of my generation (and most Americans of all the other generations) believe that Martin Luther King is a demigod and that the nonviolent campaigns undertaken as part of the Civil Rights Movement comprise some of the most beautiful and courageous events in American history.

But back in the day, people weren’t so sure. And they were right to be skeptical. America had seen a hundred years of failure on the civil rights front. Men had grown up dreaming of equal rights, they had devoted their whole lives to trying to achieve that goal, and they had died without even approaching it. Even then, America’s political system was very good at taming, co-opting, and eventually destroying mass movements.

So yeah, I don’t blame them for nay-saying. If I’d been around back then (and if I’d been a white person), then I’m sure that I’d have been one of the nay-sayers. As King describes it, there’s a certain class of white moderate that believes strongly in order, even at the expense of justice. Intellectually, they believe in equality, but they’re viscerally terrified by disorder. They’re the ones who see television footage of people being assaulted by dogs and firehoses and decide that it’s the protesters who must be at fault.

Reading a book like this is a strange experience. While I was taught to venerate the Civil Rights movement, I was also basically taught that all that shit was over. I distinctly remember thinking, sometime in the late 90s, “Wow, it’s kind of a shame that there’s really no rights left to fight for.”

Of course I knew that this country had problems, but I didn’t think that any of those problems were so severe that they invalidated the moral authority of our government. America’s problems were problems of disagreement. Some people believed in one way of doing things and some other people believed in another way of doing things and the right and proper way to sort it all out was through the political process.

But I don’t believe that anymore. When America can unilaterally decide to murder people in other countries, that is an injustice which should not be left up to political debate. The people that we kill have no say in our decision-making process. It is simply horrific that I have a vote in whether a child in Yemen or Somalia or Pakistan gets to live or die.

It is the kind of situation that calls out for direct action. And for a significant fraction of the last year, there’ve been people around six blocks away from me, in Oakland, who’ve been trying to utilize direct action in order to end these, and other, injustices. I was definitely present at the right time and place to put King’s principles into action. I had the time, money, energy, and sympathy that could have motivated me to become more involved. And I did often consider becoming more involved. But I decided not to. My non-involvement was primarily based upon self-interest. I preferred to do spend my time on things that would directly benefit me. And I also don’t really want to be arrested.

But I noticed that many of my fellow upper-class liberals justify their non-involvement differently. They often make the same sort of critiques of the Occupy Campaign that their forebears about against King’s campaign. I have no doubt that these critiques are sincere, but I wonder about the extent to which they’re also a psychological defense mechanism.

They, like me, have been taught to view the Civil Rights Movement as the apotheosis of political action in this country. But we were never taught about the costs of participation. We were never taught about the kinds of risks people took. Or rather, we were taught about those risks, but we were taught about them in such a way as to make the risks seem laughably minor. Of course if you balance a short jail sentence or losing your job or catching a beating against achieving freedom and dignity for an entire people, then the risks seem wholly justified.

But in real life, that is never the calculation. In real life, you often lose your job or waste your time or get tear-gassed or acquire a criminal record…and have nothing at all to show for it. In real life, mass movements usually fail. And in some cases, that’s because of structural weakness, but, often, it’s just because the time wasn’t right.

It’s likely that the Occupy Movement will fail. It is likely that it–as is already happening to the Tea Party–will someday be seen as some strange historical curiosity. If that happens, then we will remember our criticisms and think with relief about how we were right.

But if it grows in power and moral authority, and someday succeeds, well…we’re going to be in the same position as those white moderates whose cowardice and hypocrisy was relentlessly decried by Dr. King.

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Distrust That Particular Flavor, by William Gibson

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on May 7, 2012

I just finished reading William Gibson’s essay collection Distrust That Particular Flavor. And towards the end, I ran across a passage that made me realize something: many science fiction writers actually care about technology. The passage was:

Isaac Asimov wrote a whole shelf of novels working out a set of  hardwired ethics for intelligent robots, but I never got into them. The tin guys didn’t, by the Sixties, seem to me to be what was interesting in science fiction, and neither did spaceships. It was what made Asimov’s robots intelligent in the first place that would have interested me, had I thought of it, but I didn’t.

Now, I loved Asimov’s Robot stories. And I read them in the mid-to-late 1990s, long after the whole idea of the intelligent robot had been reduced to hokum and after the Information Age had started to demolish all of Golden Age sci-fi’s visions of the future. But that didn’t matter. Although twelve-year-old me probably didn’t think of it this way, the robots functioned for him as a symbol. Not a metaphor, precisely, since there was no explicit comparison between them and something else. Rather, the robots were a symbological consturct that allowed disparate themes like adolescent alienation and underclass resentment and the dialectical struggle and all kinds of other things to be fused together in a variety of interesting ways.

Now I am not going to say that with his fiction William Gibson tries to predict the future. He repeatedly makes the point in his essays that this is what’s trying _not_ to do. At the same time, Gibson clearly thinks that technology is important and I think what he’s trying to do is map out some of the ways in which changing technology affects human nature and society. And that’s awesome. When William Gibson writes, in an offhand way, something like, “all cultural change is essentially technologically driven,” it makes me really happy, because I also believe something like that. But at the same time, I don’t think that I have quite the same interest in technology as Gibson does. Because when he talks about the impact of the Internet and of computers, he writes things like this:

The human species was already in the process of growing itself an extended communal nervous system, and was doing things with it that had previously been impossible: viewing things at a distance, viewing things that had happened in the past, watching dead men talk and hearing their words. What had been absolute limits of the experiential world had in a very real and literal way been profoundly and amazingly altered, extended, changed. And would continue to be. And the real marvel of this was how utterly we took it all for granted.

And that paragraph leaves me very cold. Because it seems to imply that technology has changed something about the experience of living–about what it feels like to be ourselves. And…I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think that the feeling of listening to the top artists in the world produce flawless performances over and over again at our command actually provides any more pleasure than it did, two centuries ago, to gather around your daughter’s piano and hear her croak out a tune. Our peaks and our valleys are fixed. Our emotions remain the same. The only thing that changes are the routes to get there.

In his essays, Gibson seems to write quite a bit about the aesthetic of technology. The way that it transforms people and makes them alien and enables all kinds of strange new behaviors. In particular, he seems to return, again and again, to a kind of isolated obsessiveness–whether it’s Japanese teens locking themselves in their rooms for years; or auteurs making one-person films in which they use digital technology to control every aspect of the movie; or spending hours browsing eBay to swap and trade digital watches–that perhaps feels, to him, like a hallmark of technological culture.

But I’m not really interested in any of that. To me, technology is interesting primarily for the way in which it changes our relationships with each other and our methods of social organization. The classic example (whose truthfulness will probably be forever unknown, of course) is that the car allowed teenagers to get away from their parents and provided them with a second space for private activity and that the combination of these effects resulted in our modern hookup culture. That, to me, is fascinating. It’s people relating to each other in a totally different way than they had previously.

On the other hand, where do I really differ from Gibson in this? It’s still, in some ways, a primarily aesthetic difference. The thrill that teens in the fifties got from making out was probably the same as the thrill that teens in the oughts got from dancing together or that teens in the 18th century got from being sewn up in the bundling bed.

It’s really tempting for someone like me to become very reductionist and conclude that nothing ever really changes. It’s kind of startling to think that the humans who were alive 40,000 years ago were anatomically modern people. If you were to go back in time and bring back one of their babies, he or she could easily grow up to become a computer programmer or a deconstructionist English professor. And if one of them was to reach forward and snatch your kid, then the modern babe would…well…he’d probably annihilate them with all kinds of futuristic diseases. But if that didn’t happen, then he’d fit right in as he ran across the savannah and flung his spear at the antelope.

Maybe it all does come down to window-dressing. But the window-dressing that I find aesthetically appealing is very different from the window-dressing that Gibson finds appealing.

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Reading literary essays

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on April 27, 2012

I’ve been reading a bunch of essay collections recently. I began with John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead, went on to Tom Bissell’s Magic Hours: Essays On Creators and Creation, and am currently working on Elif Batuman’s The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books And The People Who Read Them.

I liked them all. How can I dislike it when an intelligent writer tries to work through a knotty problem in as simple a way as he or she possibly can? Of course, I did have my quibbles here and there. Sullivan’s book seemed a little too focused on providing colorful bits of the author’s personal experience and sometimesfailed to actually provide much insight into whatever he was writing about. This was particularly notable in one of his essays on attending a Christian rock concert, where he failed to answer what seems like the most basic question: “Why does this music excite people? Why have 100,000 people–most of them teens–come to this festival?”

Perhaps that was the point of the collection. Sullivan is willing to shine as much light on a subject as he is able, but he’s not willing to BS up some insight that he doesn’t actually possess. And, okay, that’s fine, but at some point I’m kind of going to prefer the writer who’s actually able to say anything. The David Foster Wallace style thumbsucking faux-innocence is cute enough when it actually pays homage to the basic complexity of the world, but it ceases to be cute when it is used as a way to avoid coming to a conclusion.

But that’s just a minor gripe. In general, I enjoyed the essays. Tom Bissell’s collection was particularly good (especially for aspiring writers). He had a great essay in which he categorized all the different kinds of writing books, and another in which he dissected a literary movement by a bunch of angry writing aspirants. Both were fascinating glimpses into literary culture.

Mostly, though, I just want to know how a person gets into this whole essay-writing racket? It seems awesome. I’d like to pontificate about stuff at length. Also, what exactly qualifies novelists (and aspiring novelists) to spout off about stuff? This whole form–the literary essay–seems rather odd. It’s a bunch of people who are using the literary skills acquired as fiction writers in order to write non-fiction. The result, presumably, justifies itself through its high prose quality.

It would kind of have to, right? Because if it doesn’t, there doesn’t seem to be any reason for the literary essay to exist. None of these essayists seem to have done much research on their topics. None of them seem to have any journalistic training. They don’t pretend to have much more information (or even expertise) on the topics that they write about. But the implication is that their novelistic training allows them some kind of insight that ordinary journalists don’t have.

I like that. It’s a kind of talismanic faith in the power of a writer. A novel is measured against other novels. It’s either better than other novels or worse than other novels. Literary essays, though, are measured against our own insight and our own experience. If an essay exceeds the quality of our own thinking on a topic, then it’s sublime. If not, it’s pointless. It’s like philosophy, but not quite as ambitious.

Anyways, after Batuman’s book, I am thinking of going on to Bissell’s Extra Lives or Franzen’s How To Be Alone. Anyone have any other good essay collection recommendations? I considered Jonathan Lethem’s The Ecstasy of Influence, but it was way too long for me.

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Pursuit of Love, by Nancy Mitford

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on April 25, 2012

Okay, so there are three super-famous sets of sisters that everyone knows about. The first needs no introduction, they’re the bad-ass Brontes. The second are China’s Soong Sisters. And third are England’s Mitford sisters. The Mitfords are the least accomplished sisters, but in some ways they’re the most colorful. Diana Mitford married British fascist Oswald Mosely and suffered for her beliefs by being imprisoned during WWII. But before the war, her sister Unity fell in love with Hitler and went to Berlin and hung around in coffee shops until the Fuhrer saw her and introduced her to everyone in the jack-booted gang. Then Unity and Diana introduced their parents Lord and Lady Redesdale to Hitler and turned them into Nazi sympathizers as well. But meanwhile, sister Jessica was becoming a communist rabble-rouser in America and sister Deborah was marrying a Duke and becoming a famous socialite. And, finally, sister Nancy was writing novels that satirized all of the above shenanigans.

And those novels are pretty excellent. Before I write about the Pursuit of Love, though, I just want to call attention to its cover. As you can see, this novel–originally published in 1945–has been given a totally standard chick-lit cover. It could easily pass for a Helen Fielding or Sophie Kinsella novel. It’s a masterpiece of rebranding and I applaud the publisher for it.

The novel is narrated by Fanny, a cousin and frequent guest of the “Radlett” family–a thinly disguised stand-in for the Mitfords. It’s a comedic novel: one devoted to the various shenanigans and peculiarities of this large noble family. But the novel focuses primarily upon the various love affairs of Linda Radlett.

The book is densely written, and at times it’s possible to get rather lost amongst the various characters and details, but the language also provides the novel’s primary joy. This one of the very few novels that has ever made me laugh out loud. The way that some of the characters laugh is simply too funny. The best is Fanny’s long-estranged mother, who shows up about 85% of the way into the book and totally steals the scene. Every word that comes out of her mouth is hilarious. For days, I was able to elicit a laugh from myself by repeating some of her lines. I won’t quote any here, since I think that showing them to you out of context would ruin them.

I wonder: Do ruling-class novelists like Nancy Mitford still exist? They were rather common back in the day. If you do the math and figure out how large the competency of someone like Mr. Darcy would have to be, you’ll find that Jane Austen pretty much only wrote about millionaires. And in America, we had Edith Wharton and Louis Auchincloss. Nowadays there are more inheritors of great wealth in America than ever before. It would be interesting for a novelist to show us how they live. Certainly it would be a change from reading about another middle-class upbringing on Long Island.

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