I really like your writing on this topic, it’s totally reframed the way I see literary history and even gender war stuff in general, and I’m a lot more at peace seeing it as an inevitable dialectic. That Perez interview, though I agree with most of the specific points, still nags at me a whole year and a half later. Such calls for a “masculine” fiction are inevitably stupid and hollow — the act of locking yourself in your room and imagining the interior lives of others — that’s a bit effete, bro! A bit female coded! Better to recognize that sometimes groups of men can paper over this inescapable fact with bullfighting, going to war, fistfights at NYC parties, or writing immense and complicated epic poems or systems novels, sometimes they can’t.
Thank you! Yes, I definitely agree with your last point and think I said as much in my first piece responding to Alex. There will always be a problem in trying to "gender" writing or art too much. You could make the same point in the other direction against certain strains of feminism seeking a "feminine sentence" or "feminine writing," usually counter-positioned against what Didion would remind them is the "male-coded" aspect of writing: the aggressive attempt to dominate others with one's own worldview and sensibility.
I love the bit about novels needing to be windows, not mirrors. Reminds me of Becca Rothfeld’s scathing treatment of the
fragmentary female novel in her new book. And you’ve persuaded me that we need something like literature to adequately capture the complexity of ourselves and our societies.
Thank you! Rothfeld's book sounds very agreeable—I didn't manifest myself a review copy, alas. Coincidentally, I just read another of the celebrated fragmentary novels (No One Is Talking About This) for internet-lit background to my forthcoming Honor Levy review and disliked the gesture all over again. (Though this one really would have worked as a long poem or poetic sequence in an Anne Carsonish vein: not everybody has to write a novel!) On the other hand, I finally read Less Than Zero for the first time, also as Levy background ("it-kid voice-of-a-generation Bennington alums" was the category in this case) and really loved it, which proves that fragmentary anhedonic fiction can be written beautifully if sufficiently animated by a buried but palpable passion.
Ahh! I actually thought Locksmith sort of rose above the internet-poisoned fray through sheer power of prose. I guess I hear you though re: format. Mostly she reminded me of Sarah Manguso in long-form.
It was definitely the most effective version of that type of novel; I find her style—in her nonfiction and poetry too—somewhat cloying in its canny loopiness, but often (I admit) bittersweetly funny too. (Also how I feel about Speedboat, the grandmother of them all. No One might be another though different instance of Renata-Adler-of-looking-at-your-phone-a-lot.)
Great thoughts here agree about theorists, that Barkin essay is one of the few I’ve seen that phrases the issue without becoming shrill or almost juvenile. On the civil war point I think the sesquicentennial driving interest was the occasion for that stuff. It was also the victory of certain (in my view correct) historiographical developments in the study of the origins of the war: specifically a return to the consensus that the war was about slavery and thus both unavoidable and in some sense morally correct from the revisionist, more south-sympathetic lost cause and economic determinist arguments of the early and middle parts of the last century. If we must find sinister ulterior motives and metanareatives in that era, I think the place to look is actually probably not so much justification for war itself (cultural or shooting) as the connection between Obama-era liberals and their essentially technocratic vision and the reformist ambition of abolitionists and postwar radical Republicans.* I'm more ambivalent-to-positive about this tendency than you are, but this is maybe where I should say that I’m (*extremely* distantly) related to John Brown and someone in the family died in Andersonville!
* You can make this claim from the other side too- their proposed methods are very different, but the Claremont school have essentially the same goal of a reengineering of the other half of American society to arrive at desired virtue, derived from the same 19th century Lincolnian ideals.
I defer to your distinguished ancestry—my people arrived long after that war—and to your greater knowledge of the historiography. I just remember getting mental whiplash from hearing the same people who said in 2003 that you can't use the military to democratize Iraq, at least not without killing *everybody*, then go on in 2013 to scourge America for its spiritual sins over the betrayal of Reconstruction, saying, well, if all else failed, the North should simply have killed *everybody.*
I agree with you about the technocrat strain in the Obama liberals, but then I think they also somewhat cynically relied for emotional ballast to their bloodless project on rhetoric like Coates's, which was then starting to veer into Fanon-type territory about the subjectification of African Americans through the war's revolutionary violence. Technocratic imperialism + militant identitarian messianism (= "wokeness") seems like a disastrous combination to me.
I am also something of a "moderate postmodernist" when it comes to the uses of history. History is just every single thing that ever happened until a millisecond ago, so the tales historians sculpt out of that chaos, the ones directed to the general public anyway, should conduce to peace and freedom, not to the endless reanimation of feuds and grievances. Leave the management of dark myths to us artists—we don't claim not to be inventing.
lol it’s no great shakes about the ancestry-it’s too distant a thing to mean anything really, I like to use it as a punchline. I agree about history and postmodernism (or something like it) actually: it seems to me sometimes that the study of history predisposes one either to a kind of nihilism or the desperate search for some transcendent escape from the bloody miseries of the time that Thomas Mann said was a bottomles well. Which is not really addressing the more militaristic side of history, which is its own issue!
I'm deep in a civil war phase right now and while it was probably inevitable and necessary I do think we could use a few more ambiguous notes among the liberal triumphalism -- ask a Plains Indian circa 1870 how they feel about the consolidation of the Northern machine.
“The academics speculate that one reason for the drop of female authors, which reversed around 1970, could be the “gentrification” of the novel. In the mid-19th century, novel-writing was not a “high-status career”, but as it increasingly became so, it became more desirable to male writers.”
If, indeed, as you say, a bit of an overstatement, I think we can see the trend happening on the other, administrative side of the ledger. One reason publishing houses and literary agencies are something like 75% female is because in the aggregate it’s young women graduates who are willing to grind it out on 30k a year in New York for X number of years after graduation (and there’s tremendous turnover in these positions). Of course the same dynamic and demographics can be observed in other arts & culture fields like museums and various non-profits.
And, fair enough, it’s a chicken/egg question about why wages in these fields didn’t keep pace with cost of living (I can hear Alvin Gouldner somewhere in the background, along with Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, “Not on your salary, George. Not on an associate professor’s salary!”)
Yes, we need a larger analysis that I could perform (not an economist, not a sociologist, not a historian) on "who lost culture." Conservative complaints that it was lost "to women" are getting it backward, not least when, as I keep observing via social media, conservatives' own patrons refuse to fund any culture on their side with no strings attached, even though only "no strings attached" as an approach will get us anything good. (The fall of culture into the NGO and academic complexes on the other side does present the same problem.)
I really like your writing on this topic, it’s totally reframed the way I see literary history and even gender war stuff in general, and I’m a lot more at peace seeing it as an inevitable dialectic. That Perez interview, though I agree with most of the specific points, still nags at me a whole year and a half later. Such calls for a “masculine” fiction are inevitably stupid and hollow — the act of locking yourself in your room and imagining the interior lives of others — that’s a bit effete, bro! A bit female coded! Better to recognize that sometimes groups of men can paper over this inescapable fact with bullfighting, going to war, fistfights at NYC parties, or writing immense and complicated epic poems or systems novels, sometimes they can’t.
Thank you! Yes, I definitely agree with your last point and think I said as much in my first piece responding to Alex. There will always be a problem in trying to "gender" writing or art too much. You could make the same point in the other direction against certain strains of feminism seeking a "feminine sentence" or "feminine writing," usually counter-positioned against what Didion would remind them is the "male-coded" aspect of writing: the aggressive attempt to dominate others with one's own worldview and sensibility.
I love the bit about novels needing to be windows, not mirrors. Reminds me of Becca Rothfeld’s scathing treatment of the
fragmentary female novel in her new book. And you’ve persuaded me that we need something like literature to adequately capture the complexity of ourselves and our societies.
Thank you! Rothfeld's book sounds very agreeable—I didn't manifest myself a review copy, alas. Coincidentally, I just read another of the celebrated fragmentary novels (No One Is Talking About This) for internet-lit background to my forthcoming Honor Levy review and disliked the gesture all over again. (Though this one really would have worked as a long poem or poetic sequence in an Anne Carsonish vein: not everybody has to write a novel!) On the other hand, I finally read Less Than Zero for the first time, also as Levy background ("it-kid voice-of-a-generation Bennington alums" was the category in this case) and really loved it, which proves that fragmentary anhedonic fiction can be written beautifully if sufficiently animated by a buried but palpable passion.
Ahh! I actually thought Locksmith sort of rose above the internet-poisoned fray through sheer power of prose. I guess I hear you though re: format. Mostly she reminded me of Sarah Manguso in long-form.
It was definitely the most effective version of that type of novel; I find her style—in her nonfiction and poetry too—somewhat cloying in its canny loopiness, but often (I admit) bittersweetly funny too. (Also how I feel about Speedboat, the grandmother of them all. No One might be another though different instance of Renata-Adler-of-looking-at-your-phone-a-lot.)
Great thoughts here agree about theorists, that Barkin essay is one of the few I’ve seen that phrases the issue without becoming shrill or almost juvenile. On the civil war point I think the sesquicentennial driving interest was the occasion for that stuff. It was also the victory of certain (in my view correct) historiographical developments in the study of the origins of the war: specifically a return to the consensus that the war was about slavery and thus both unavoidable and in some sense morally correct from the revisionist, more south-sympathetic lost cause and economic determinist arguments of the early and middle parts of the last century. If we must find sinister ulterior motives and metanareatives in that era, I think the place to look is actually probably not so much justification for war itself (cultural or shooting) as the connection between Obama-era liberals and their essentially technocratic vision and the reformist ambition of abolitionists and postwar radical Republicans.* I'm more ambivalent-to-positive about this tendency than you are, but this is maybe where I should say that I’m (*extremely* distantly) related to John Brown and someone in the family died in Andersonville!
* You can make this claim from the other side too- their proposed methods are very different, but the Claremont school have essentially the same goal of a reengineering of the other half of American society to arrive at desired virtue, derived from the same 19th century Lincolnian ideals.
I defer to your distinguished ancestry—my people arrived long after that war—and to your greater knowledge of the historiography. I just remember getting mental whiplash from hearing the same people who said in 2003 that you can't use the military to democratize Iraq, at least not without killing *everybody*, then go on in 2013 to scourge America for its spiritual sins over the betrayal of Reconstruction, saying, well, if all else failed, the North should simply have killed *everybody.*
I agree with you about the technocrat strain in the Obama liberals, but then I think they also somewhat cynically relied for emotional ballast to their bloodless project on rhetoric like Coates's, which was then starting to veer into Fanon-type territory about the subjectification of African Americans through the war's revolutionary violence. Technocratic imperialism + militant identitarian messianism (= "wokeness") seems like a disastrous combination to me.
I am also something of a "moderate postmodernist" when it comes to the uses of history. History is just every single thing that ever happened until a millisecond ago, so the tales historians sculpt out of that chaos, the ones directed to the general public anyway, should conduce to peace and freedom, not to the endless reanimation of feuds and grievances. Leave the management of dark myths to us artists—we don't claim not to be inventing.
lol it’s no great shakes about the ancestry-it’s too distant a thing to mean anything really, I like to use it as a punchline. I agree about history and postmodernism (or something like it) actually: it seems to me sometimes that the study of history predisposes one either to a kind of nihilism or the desperate search for some transcendent escape from the bloody miseries of the time that Thomas Mann said was a bottomles well. Which is not really addressing the more militaristic side of history, which is its own issue!
I'm deep in a civil war phase right now and while it was probably inevitable and necessary I do think we could use a few more ambiguous notes among the liberal triumphalism -- ask a Plains Indian circa 1870 how they feel about the consolidation of the Northern machine.
“The academics speculate that one reason for the drop of female authors, which reversed around 1970, could be the “gentrification” of the novel. In the mid-19th century, novel-writing was not a “high-status career”, but as it increasingly became so, it became more desirable to male writers.”
If, indeed, as you say, a bit of an overstatement, I think we can see the trend happening on the other, administrative side of the ledger. One reason publishing houses and literary agencies are something like 75% female is because in the aggregate it’s young women graduates who are willing to grind it out on 30k a year in New York for X number of years after graduation (and there’s tremendous turnover in these positions). Of course the same dynamic and demographics can be observed in other arts & culture fields like museums and various non-profits.
And, fair enough, it’s a chicken/egg question about why wages in these fields didn’t keep pace with cost of living (I can hear Alvin Gouldner somewhere in the background, along with Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, “Not on your salary, George. Not on an associate professor’s salary!”)
Yes, we need a larger analysis that I could perform (not an economist, not a sociologist, not a historian) on "who lost culture." Conservative complaints that it was lost "to women" are getting it backward, not least when, as I keep observing via social media, conservatives' own patrons refuse to fund any culture on their side with no strings attached, even though only "no strings attached" as an approach will get us anything good. (The fall of culture into the NGO and academic complexes on the other side does present the same problem.)
Looking forward to your Levy review. My guess is Harper’s?
Thanks! Not Harper's—a different zone of the discourse. (Has anyone tried this tactic of drumming up suspense for a review before, I wonder?)
Mars Review, then, lol. Hope you would come to New York for the issue launch.
So how long into the overproduction of Theory until its poverty becomes obvious to everyone?