There was an interesting review by John Banville of a new Rilke biography somewhat recently, in which Banville comes very close to stating (or conceding?) that Rilke /had/ to be an awful person, a real abuser of humanity as it manifests in actual, living human beings, in order to write his poems--not in order to be an artist generally but in order to write those precise, aesthetically & spiritually & psychologically inimitable works that he did. Banville so very nearly says this! And does not.
And the more pertinent question would be why it even matters to the reader, given that social climbing and womanizing (I looked up the review!) are hardly the content or counsel of those poems, even if a certain psychologically sophisticated skepticism about romantic love may be detected. Literary biography may have been a mistake. Anyway, I like Simon Leys's line on the subject, from his essay on Simenon:
"It is not a scandal if novelists of genius prove to be wretched fellows; it is a comforting miracle that wretched fellows prove to be novelists of genius."
To once again, ignore the body and focus on a footnote, I have basically the same stance on Chu, although I appreciate Smith’s repeated assertion that she’s not a representative specimen of transfemininity. There’s definitely a place for what she does, for the telling the embarrassing truths that we shield from outsiders, and I do think you probably need to leaven that stuff with a bit of irony and humor, I just think there’s a bit too much trolling and bad faith in her work for me.
I'm not trying to be controversial but I guess I'm not sure I believe she's really that unrepresentative, at least among the intellectual set, at least among our contemporaries. Or, to put it another way, she's aware and articulate enough to enunciate the premises less aware and articulate people are either mutely enacting or enacting to the accompaniment of unconvincing liberal platitudes. This is spelled out more in my Myra Breckinridge review, linked in the footnote. (I don't hold this against her, BTW; what I hold against her is the smug boilerplate socialism.)
And yes, the boilerplate Socialism is an enormous turn off. I’m reminded of something I read recently from a trans woman with similar aesthetic tendencies to yourself and myself, who mourned the generally gender critical line that tablet takes (I dimly remember you calling tablet a centrist publication at one time, but it seems to me they’re more like a neotenous preservation of the earliest stages of neoconservatism, when it was more about anxiety over the changing position of the Jewish American vis a vis persons of African descent within the liberal coalition and a kind of conservative-homophobic resistance to shifting sexual mores post-1960s) while stating quite frankly and accurately that a magazine of that political persuasion is the only place she could be published today.
Amongst the intellectuals, I think I agree with you, (a perfect example of this would be Ulysse Carriere, whom I once pitted against you as a joke, but whose antics as human embodiment of everything you and to a lesser extent I loathe has begin to grate even on me of late.) and to a limited extent, amongst the rest of us. (The degree to which I consider myself an intellectual vs a dilettante who just learned too many multisyllabic words is as always in question.) I don’t think the Solanas-esque “killing the inner man” thing is quite as ubiquitous as Chu makes it out to be but it would be naive to say that it isn’t there, and indeed, it’s more common than anyone likes to admit. I have indeed read your Myra Breckinridge review, another one of your finest essays I think.
I do respect Ulysse's troll game, but I'm not sure where the trolling ends and the argument starts.
You're probably right on Tablet's general editorial line—though their often anti-war populism is an ethical advance on '70s/'80s Commentary, I'd say—but I admire them for the kind of thing they're willing to publish in the culture section just in terms of complexity and superficial unsexiness of topic, of which Blake's less controversial essays (on Laura Riding, for example, or Jacob Taubes) might be the premier examples. Specifically on "gender-critical," though, I agree; ironically, the essay Blake published with them just prior to the Chu piece is a demolition job on a French intellectual who arrives at TERFism through poststructuralist theory:
"Marty concludes his book, despairingly, with a sweeping condemnation of gender ideology and transgenderism as the first step in a post-human apocalypse—a perspective that appeals equally to conservative TERFS and academic trans theorists. Here, as with his inveterate anti-Americanism, he seems unable to find within the resources of “neutral thought”—the “second liberalism” of Barthes; the privately radical and publicly conservative structuralism of Lacan; the semi-ironic celebration of communitarian “sameness” of Foucault—a means to suspend his anger at the state of the world." https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/gender-neutral
"Privately radical and publicly conservative" is a really good phrase. If only Kant weren't unreadable—I seem to recall this is what he meant by "the Enlightenment."
Well said! Certainly I have more sympathy for early neoconservatism than many (I wrote my thesis on it! Or a part at least) although I could do without the homophobia and transphobia and the racism. “Privately radical and publicly conservative”probably fairly describes myself as a person one interacts with in the wild, whereas as a writer of prose fiction I think the inversion is more correct: “Publicly radical and privately conservative.” Funny how that works.
Thanks! I'm probably ill-placed to comment on my in-person demeanor—I take it that people find me not-unpleasantly strange—but I'm reasonably sure "publicly conservative, privately radical" describes my fiction. I use quotation marks and everything.
There was an interesting review by John Banville of a new Rilke biography somewhat recently, in which Banville comes very close to stating (or conceding?) that Rilke /had/ to be an awful person, a real abuser of humanity as it manifests in actual, living human beings, in order to write his poems--not in order to be an artist generally but in order to write those precise, aesthetically & spiritually & psychologically inimitable works that he did. Banville so very nearly says this! And does not.
And the more pertinent question would be why it even matters to the reader, given that social climbing and womanizing (I looked up the review!) are hardly the content or counsel of those poems, even if a certain psychologically sophisticated skepticism about romantic love may be detected. Literary biography may have been a mistake. Anyway, I like Simon Leys's line on the subject, from his essay on Simenon:
"It is not a scandal if novelists of genius prove to be wretched fellows; it is a comforting miracle that wretched fellows prove to be novelists of genius."
Literary biography is redeemable if we go back & edit in the Muses
A biography of an artist narrated by the Muse: someone should do this.
The 1840s andd 1850s were a time of genius: Lord Kelvin, Balzac, Flaubert.
To once again, ignore the body and focus on a footnote, I have basically the same stance on Chu, although I appreciate Smith’s repeated assertion that she’s not a representative specimen of transfemininity. There’s definitely a place for what she does, for the telling the embarrassing truths that we shield from outsiders, and I do think you probably need to leaven that stuff with a bit of irony and humor, I just think there’s a bit too much trolling and bad faith in her work for me.
I'm not trying to be controversial but I guess I'm not sure I believe she's really that unrepresentative, at least among the intellectual set, at least among our contemporaries. Or, to put it another way, she's aware and articulate enough to enunciate the premises less aware and articulate people are either mutely enacting or enacting to the accompaniment of unconvincing liberal platitudes. This is spelled out more in my Myra Breckinridge review, linked in the footnote. (I don't hold this against her, BTW; what I hold against her is the smug boilerplate socialism.)
And yes, the boilerplate Socialism is an enormous turn off. I’m reminded of something I read recently from a trans woman with similar aesthetic tendencies to yourself and myself, who mourned the generally gender critical line that tablet takes (I dimly remember you calling tablet a centrist publication at one time, but it seems to me they’re more like a neotenous preservation of the earliest stages of neoconservatism, when it was more about anxiety over the changing position of the Jewish American vis a vis persons of African descent within the liberal coalition and a kind of conservative-homophobic resistance to shifting sexual mores post-1960s) while stating quite frankly and accurately that a magazine of that political persuasion is the only place she could be published today.
Amongst the intellectuals, I think I agree with you, (a perfect example of this would be Ulysse Carriere, whom I once pitted against you as a joke, but whose antics as human embodiment of everything you and to a lesser extent I loathe has begin to grate even on me of late.) and to a limited extent, amongst the rest of us. (The degree to which I consider myself an intellectual vs a dilettante who just learned too many multisyllabic words is as always in question.) I don’t think the Solanas-esque “killing the inner man” thing is quite as ubiquitous as Chu makes it out to be but it would be naive to say that it isn’t there, and indeed, it’s more common than anyone likes to admit. I have indeed read your Myra Breckinridge review, another one of your finest essays I think.
I do respect Ulysse's troll game, but I'm not sure where the trolling ends and the argument starts.
You're probably right on Tablet's general editorial line—though their often anti-war populism is an ethical advance on '70s/'80s Commentary, I'd say—but I admire them for the kind of thing they're willing to publish in the culture section just in terms of complexity and superficial unsexiness of topic, of which Blake's less controversial essays (on Laura Riding, for example, or Jacob Taubes) might be the premier examples. Specifically on "gender-critical," though, I agree; ironically, the essay Blake published with them just prior to the Chu piece is a demolition job on a French intellectual who arrives at TERFism through poststructuralist theory:
"Marty concludes his book, despairingly, with a sweeping condemnation of gender ideology and transgenderism as the first step in a post-human apocalypse—a perspective that appeals equally to conservative TERFS and academic trans theorists. Here, as with his inveterate anti-Americanism, he seems unable to find within the resources of “neutral thought”—the “second liberalism” of Barthes; the privately radical and publicly conservative structuralism of Lacan; the semi-ironic celebration of communitarian “sameness” of Foucault—a means to suspend his anger at the state of the world." https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/gender-neutral
"Privately radical and publicly conservative" is a really good phrase. If only Kant weren't unreadable—I seem to recall this is what he meant by "the Enlightenment."
Well said! Certainly I have more sympathy for early neoconservatism than many (I wrote my thesis on it! Or a part at least) although I could do without the homophobia and transphobia and the racism. “Privately radical and publicly conservative”probably fairly describes myself as a person one interacts with in the wild, whereas as a writer of prose fiction I think the inversion is more correct: “Publicly radical and privately conservative.” Funny how that works.
Thanks! I'm probably ill-placed to comment on my in-person demeanor—I take it that people find me not-unpleasantly strange—but I'm reasonably sure "publicly conservative, privately radical" describes my fiction. I use quotation marks and everything.