You’ve probably heard by now that Katie Roiphe wrote an essay for the New York Times in which she lamented the loss of virile sex writing as practiced by my favourite writers-I-hate, Updike, Roth and Mailer. Her argument, such as it is, is that the “provocativeness” of their take on sex is aesthetically valuable, and that the modern tendency to ridicule the prose of said passages is unfair. (Some NSFW examples may be found here.) In any event, Roiphe contends, the “new generation” of writers (which she identifies as the rather motley crew of David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer and… Benjamin Kunkel? (!)) have reacted too strongly to criticisms of the Updike/Roth/Mailer aesthetic: “[t]hese 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.”
Nevermind how bizarre it is to call any of those authors in their present incarnations particularly concerned with “irony” (Eggers in particular has long since moved on) – except maybe Kunkel but oh God that book displays a severe misunderstanding of what irony actually is. Roiphe isn’t really all that interested in hastening the death of irony. Her big issue is this: feminism totally has killed the male literary boner.
The book blogosphere promptly exploded with reactions, almost uniformly negative, which I’ve spent the past week reading and thinking about. Some are more interested in rescuing David Foster Wallace from this mess than anything else. And I actually agree that Roiphe – whose essay is really just a riposte to an essay DFW wrote well over ten years ago in which he termed Updike, Roth and Mailer the “Great Male Narcissists” – doesn’t do much of a job of understanding, let alone deconstructing or refuting, the DFW essay. She appears to have read it once, perhaps a long time ago, and simply thinks DFW was trying to position his writing as less self-absorbed or the pinnacle of some kind of feminist-informed male fictional perspective.
In fact, I think, as the above-linked post by Seth Colter Walls at the Awl notes, that he was simply saying that the celebration of self-absorption – the solipsism of feeling that the inner lives of these men had something to offer without reservation – doesn’t really make much sense to modern audiences. On this point Roiphe is silent; she seems mostly eager to dispel some kind of feminist embrace of the writers she quotes. And yet I’m not aware of any feminist followers of contemporary lit who make a claim to any of these male writers as writing informedly about gender. As Roiphe notes, the only novel worth reading that Franzen has ever committed to print (The Corrections) contains the line: “Denise at 32 was still beautiful.” It’s hard to feel that Franzen is holding hands with the sisterhood in that context. Point taken.
But more trenchant, it seems to me, are the folks, like Andrew Seal at Blographia Literaria, who have pointed out that the reason Great Male Narcissist sex writing is more comedic than affecting to contemporary sensibilities is that at a certain point, the transgressiveness of just about anything can become attenuated. This is why phrases like “his throbbing member” are hilarious – not because they were set to paper by a dude, or even by a dude who once stabbed his wife. (Hi, Mailer! That would be your grave I’m dancing on over here!) It’s hilarious because it’s a cliché, and as such can’t be taken seriously. Like a word you’ve stared at for too long, it stops making sense as an appeal to meaning. And as Steve Almond pointed out in a much-forwarded essay on The Rumpus (WARNING: he injudiciously refers to himself, early on, as having “an occasional trannie impulse”), the culture at large does think about sex differently these days. Sex is everywhere, all the time, in American culture today and that alone dates Updike/Roth/Mailerian sex scenes. The lack of shock enables us to evaluate them differently. And it’s just not possible to think, for example, of Updike’s phrase “he felt his cashew become a banana, and
then a rippled yam, bursting with weight” as erotic when you can simply tune in to Xtube and have a look for yourself.
The funny thing here is that, all things considered, Roiphe really had to shoehorn the whole castrating feminists idea in. Because as I mentioned earlier, it seems to me that most feminist literary critics, academic or otherwise, are concerned with the writing of women. Rescuing it, talking about it, and otherwise granting it an audience it would not otherwise have had. A few of these critiques have made the point that female (or, hell, gay) contemporary novelists are, indeed, writing about sex, and it’s strange to write an article that takes as its premise that the interjection of female perspective has changed American writing without actually, you know, citing to any documentary evidence of the female perspective. But that isn’t See, the lack of mention isn’t remotely surprising to me because this is the New York Times Book Review. The NYTBR has a particular audience, and its particular audience reads particular books, and thus, they will be familiar with DFW or Eggers or Kunkel, and they will be familiar with the notion that this limited set of writers is the vanguard of the literary scene in America. But this view is hardly unique to the NYTBR. I spend all of my non-feminist online reading and thinking time on book blogs of all shapes and sizes, and even in their supposedly more democratic attitudes they tend to acknowledge these men as leaders and visionaries. (Not all of them all the time, of course.)
One of the things I struggle with a lot, as a feminist who tends to be a bit of a book snob at least as far as her own particular bookshelf goes, is that I wonder all the time if I’m ever going to entirely divest myself of the notion that the prime subjects of any debate about literary quality are and ought to be men. Obviously I would never put it this way in a room full of women writers, where we are all trying to motivate each other. Obviously I would say that I don’t think talent is more innate to one gender than another. What I might say, though, is that the world at large, and even the literary world at large, has invested “talent” with a meaning that seems, in every context, all the time, to be predicated on the notion that it is something belonging primarily to men. Celebrated young writers are overwhelmingly male, and male protagonists seem to attract the most interest and the most attributions of that elusive quality of “ambition” that is the brass ring for writers today. This can no longer be talked away as men having better “great subjects” within their grasp – young men today didn’t go to war, don’t have a monopoly on work outside the home. (And why is work in the home considered such a mundane subject for fiction today? I’ll give you three guesses.)
This is the kind of ontological sexism that I wonder if we’re ever going to be able to get out of. Literary folks like to talk about the universal, but they sure get upset when it’s pointed out to them that the “geniuses” they idolize as having access to it are all men. Am I saying that men never can have access to the universal? Isn’t it monstrous to have a litmus test for “proper kind of writer”??? DON’T I UNDERSTAND THAT PATRIARCHY IS NOT HEMINGWAY’S FAULT?????
I am, of course, not saying any of these things, but I am saying that there is something very sad about the fact that hundreds of years of women’s writing hasn’t really shifted the demographic of what the Powers That Be consider Important Literature. I get that in some sense this can be brushed off as snobs being snobs, given that they take no account of what people are reading, en masse, in the world. But they’re my kind of snobs, and it’s my kind of question they’re discussing, and goddamnit if it isn’t infuriating that they never seem to realize the act of exclusion that they are performing.
I also like the swipe at the “college girlfriends”, just so we thoroughly understand that even know Roiphe is criticizing the writings of men, they were put up to it by wiley young women’s studies majors, to whom they must have capitulated just to get sex. See, even when the writers to be criticized are male, it’s still a woman’s fault.
This article pissed me right off. When I read this stuff from Katie Roiphe, all I can think is that she should deal with her mommy issues and stop punishing the female gender for her rivalry with her mother. After all, Anne was a writer first, so don’t be surprised that people might think of her first when they hear the name “Roiphe”.
I’ve read a little Bellow (in high school, when I didn’t understand it), some Updike and a little Roth, and I found the latter two tiresome and repulsive. Roth I found to be not just a woman-hater but an anti-semitic Jew as well, always an attractive combination. They were both so utterly uninterested in the pieces of meat they happened to be putting their all-important penises into that it was a demoralizing and depressing experience to read them. They didn’t take joy in the sexual experience; they were triumphant, the way someone might be if they won a boxing match. It wasn’t a mutual experience at all. And, yeah, a female writer may just want to express the woman’s experience, but I haven’t read much in which a woman character has sex with a collection of body parts rather than a human being.
I had a long chat with our mid-20′s son about this. He’s read more of the younger writers Roiphe listed than I have-I’ve read a little Lethem and Foer and all of Chabon. Our son said that he found the writing of that group to be disturbing because of its very sexual unsureness. According to him, they express sexual guilt and fearfulness because of their awareness of the terrible ways men have treated women. It’s not any less solipsistic necessarily, just not as sexually combative.
I have to say that I missed that, but it may be that I took it as so reasonable and natural that it didn’t grab my attention the way it should have. In any case, I’d rather read men who know that their gender has a lot to change than to read penises with pens.
I was sad she chose that “penis with a thesaurus” insult to quote. I preferred the DFW friend who said, of Updike, “Has that son-of-a-bitch ever had one unpublished thought?”
I don’t know that I’d call any of these men overly concerned with the “terrible ways men have treated women.” I think maybe it’s in the background, but I don’t know that that’s what’s informing their sexual reticence.
Well, it’s a bit silly to object “that most feminist literary critics, academic or otherwise, are concerned with the writing of women” in this context, isn’t it? Haven’t feminists – “academic or otherwise,” remember – had a great deal to say about the writing of men? (Isn’t that, I have to point out, exactly what this conversation is? Feminists talking about the writing of men?) I don’t think Roiphe needs the entire world of feminism to be obsessed with men’s lit in order to make her case.
The far stranger thing is that it’s an entirely speculative claim. She could, at least in theory, have actually asked these guys about their writing, couldn’t she have? Or at least found some interviews, or something. Just because she can construct a just-so story from A to B doesn’t necessarily mean that’s how it happened. (And, then again, there has been A LOT said about this without any of it suggesting an alternative. Right? Because even if they’d rather not write the same sex scenes as Updike et al, that doesn’t necessarily mean they have to write despairingly or tentatively about sex.)
The only one of those authors I know well is Chabon* and I find him to be quite gender-conscious. But then again, the last book of his I read was his collection of mini-essays about masculinity and gender, not all of which I agreed with but the book as a whole was very interesting and I’m looking forward to re-reading him with it in mind.
However, my boyfriend and I watched Brief Interviews with Hideous Men the other day. I have no idea how faithful an adaptation it is. But, in the movie version at least, I found it interesting that a movie essentially about the ways in which men dehumanize and use women for their own purposes had a female protagonist with no character development, who was used as a mouthpiece for DFW?/John Krasinski. I couldn’t decide if that was extremely clever meta-commentary or the writer(s) being hoisted on their own petards.
*Except that I know Jonathan Franzen is a pretentious shit. He’s an alum of my school and came back when the theater department put on his translation of Spring Awakening (the German play that the musical was based on) and he gave a talk and he was soooooo into himself. And his translation was incredibly boring and also into itself. Blurgh.
A Non, I guess we’re thinking of different sets of critics, but the ones I’m mostly thinking of spend very little of what I would call their feminist time kicking men out of the canon. They spend most of the time trying to shove women in the door. Sure it’s a generalization based on my experience, but if you have someone specific in mind go ahead and name them, I won’t complain.
And yes, the just-so story is way too much. My suspicion is that that had a lot to do with word count, and she seemed to want to quote from different people a lot. (Though in general she did not appear to have actually read many of the books she quoted.)
As for the alternative… well, I guess I’m willing to come right out with it and say that I’m okay with not hearing about sex from straight men for awhile unless they have something useful to say about it. I’m okay with them feeling reticent and ashamed to talk about it if their reason is, as some are claiming, that the introduction of other perspectives on sex has made them feel like their contribution to that particular strain of the discourse isn’t as valuable. Because if the only way they can think of to write about sex is this sort of prurient cashew-banana garbage – and their complete silence on other modes of description seems to suggest they can’t think of another way – than I shall learn to live with their silence for awhile.
I’m okay with them feeling reticent and ashamed to talk about it if their reason is, as some are claiming, that the introduction of other perspectives on sex has made them feel like their contribution to that particular strain of the discourse isn’t as valuable.
Amen, sister. Especially as so much of that discourse devolves into “Let me Mansplain the sexual experience to you ladeez.” Because apparently though we participate in the act, we won’t truly understand it without a detailed, entirely self-centered recap from the male p.o.v.
(Argument aimed at KR, not PS, follows.) I guess I’m sort of at a loss as to why virile sex writing is presumed necessary. Some of that, yes, comes down to the fact that we can basically encounter portrayals of sex whenever we want. Porn, romance novels, fanfic, etc. are freely available. Regardless, why are these specific men supposed to responsible for continuing it? Why are “great authors” expected (by KR anyway) to talk about sex? I don’t think that expectation existed prior to the Updike/Roth/Mailer set, so I’m not sure why it’s oh so necessary now. My grandmother reads voraciously and mostly manages to avoid books with sex scenes.
If anything, I think feminism would have made discussion of sex much less risque and more common. Men should be able to write about sex more often and more honestly under today’s conditions. Maybe we’re just over reading about sex in books that are not inherently sex-oriented. How necessary are graphic depictions of sex in books about family interactions, murders, tennis, etc.? When does knowing who was on top really matter? Now that sex scenes aren’t shocking and/or special, they’re probably just unneeded.
J.K. Rowling is the best writer ever. Enough said.
@ DangerMouse
Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head.
Maybe feminism has made it more acceptable for men to write about sex and emotions where they are not the alpha-male conquerors because they don’t need to be in that role anymore.
It’s more accepted that men can be/are sensitive and tender in the bedroom and outside it. That they want to share the experience with their partner. That it’s OK for him to want to cuddle (gasp!) with his partner. So of course writing today would reflect this change.
People still consider anything Updike, Roth and Mailer wrote “aesthetically valuable”?
I spend too much time reading stuff that was written before America was invented.
As for feminist criticism and The Canon–Elaine Showalter edited an awesome anthology called Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, Theory that is really wonderful, and lots of the essays in the first part of the book deal with canon formation. Bring a pencil because you’ll be underlining and dog-ear-ing pages all over the place all “fuck yeah!” and “ahhh makes so much sense!!!!!” It’s excellent.
I’m really interested in the canon. I study Shakespeare, but am a feminist (shocker, eh?), and so studying the most canonical English writer with an interest in revising the whole canon is always interesting. But sometimes I’m like, well, this is all from the 80s and early 90s, I guess it’s kind of over, etc etc. But my partner came home with the syllabus from the World Civ 102 class he’s TAing this semester–not a single woman writer on the list, not a single lecture devoted or dealing with women at all. It’s like, were women just not a part of civilization, you stupid asshole professor who is now totally dead to me? Apparently not. Mr. Cimorene got an earful about it. Also several suggestions of what he should do for the week he lectures and gets to choose the assignment. I did suggest he look at Dworkin’s “I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape” or selections from Intercourse, but he shockingly said no. Which I suppose I expected. But he’s at least considering doing Gloria Steinem’s piece on being a playboy bunny (surely the kids will pay attention!). He’ll probably do something on the mass sterilization of Puerto Rican women from the 30s to the 70s, though. Which is good, but how depressing is it that this dudely professor didn’t think that any women were important from Columbus to today? For reference, they’re doing selections from Columbus’s diary, the transcripts to the Final Solution meetings, the American Constitution, something from the Black Panthers. Interesting, but really–no women? At all?
Sorry that got kind of off topic. I’ve been steaming on that one for a while.