On Monsters
Reading Claire Dederer's upcoming essay collection MONSTERS: A Fan's Dilemma
Housekeeping:
Happy holidays! Please take time to relax and unwind with family and friends. Stay healthy! If you make your way to the movies, I hope that you go see Sarah Polley’s Women Talking which will be released theatrically tomorrow. Oprah Daily published my essay about the film, Miriam Toews’s novel from which it’s adapted, and the reasons why I avoided reading it when it was first published, and why I didn’t go to a movie theater for nearly five years. I’d love to hear what you think if you see the movie. In the coming weeks, I hope to share author interviews with you. If there’s anything you hate or love about author interviews, please let me know.
On reading MONSTERS:
Claire Dederer’s upcoming essay collection, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, demanded that I take my time. This went against my initial impulse to devour it. I love Dederer’s sharp, observant prose that makes space for vulnerability. Hers is a voice I trust. I’ve been a consistent reader of her memoirs and reviews, but her 2017 Paris Review Daily essay “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?” sailed exactly to the heart of questions I asked myself in the wake of #metoo. Once we waded through our immediate conflicts with monstrous men, it was clear that the same scrutiny that we brought to bear in our personal and professional circles should also be applied to the art we’d loved, but winced at for any number of reasons.
We all have guilty works of art that we can’t let go of. My friend Gautam calls Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums his “problematic fave.” Call them what you want. Make a list of your own. Michael Jackson’s music tops my list, but, most recently, Win Butler of Arcade Fire joined the list. Polanski’s “The Ghost Writer” and Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters” are wedged in my subconscious in ways that are so hard to shake. Sadly, this list grows all the time.
Before you assume where this is going, please don’t bring up the phrase “cancel culture.” It’s a reductive hot take that traffics in the fairy tale that anything is ever obliterated from this social and cultural landscape. Let it go. No, we know that we are stuck with these monsters for the long run because even if we do manage to scrub them from the masthead or the books and films go out of print, we’re left with the damage they created in their wake. That and, I mean, in spite of everything, I can’t erase the Jackson Five’s “I Wanna Be Where You Are” from my Spotify.
No, even if we lived in a world where cancel culture existed (From my end, I really have no problem never hearing about J.K. Rowling or Harry Potter ever again, but I digress.), we would need to perform some critical intake. This book confronts this problem head on. Dederer’s critical analysis walks through the paces with guarded confidence. She takes the time to evaluate her own subjective lens by guiding us through her evolution as a critic. This detour provides the book with a necessary transition from our initial engagement with the problem: namely, our acknowledgment of disgust and disappointment. So quickly and so often without any warning, that sensation of horror shifts from the object of our debate to ourselves. We ask ourselves how we could be fooled or why we loved something or someone. Dederer also examines parasocial relationships created through social media and fandom. It’s the intimacy we create through our attachment that makes this project so complicated.
Dederer moves from a survey of herself back to the monsters themselves—in all their various disguises. I’ll leave it to you to walk the paces with Dederer as she examines the work of Nabokov, Hemingway, Picasso, Wagner, Gaugain, Woolf, Cather, Carl Andre, Doris Lessing, Joni Mitchell, Valerie Solanas, Plath, Miles Davis, and more. Ultimately, how can we detach ourselves from the nostalgia that grafts a personal affection onto a work of art? On another level, how do we rank or measure their behavior? Can we? Even if our judgment means nothing in a larger scheme of things, what does it say about us or do to us when we hold onto art made by malevolent individuals? Doesn’t the stain (Dederer’s turn of phrase) linger no matter the rehabilitation?
This struggle is a complicated knot of mind and heart, aesthetics and passion. Dederer comes to this book as a critic and as a now sober woman in middle age grounded in a place of peace after a divorce. But that’s my reductive read of what she’s presented about herself as a subjective figure. The more you look at this work and its project, the more you find yourself in a looking glass.
And that’s the point! There is no clear answer for what to do with these artists and their work. Again, we can’t cancel anyone; that stupid myth has to die. But we shouldn’t play dumb. The book leads to a larger conversation about humanity. I’m not sure that I felt her conclusion landed squarely enough for me, but then again, is it possible to land this argument on anything less than a sponge? The reality that we keep coming back to is the fact that we are dealing with fallible human beings. It’s a personality trait we all share.
Perhaps the answer is to take these figures off a pedestal and find more art–better art!–elsewhere. At the end of the day, we all possess the potential to create and share art. Why leave genius (a problematic word in and of itself) in the hands of ill tempered (at best) men? Wrestle back that title and maybe let it go. Writing is hard enough without setting impossible expectations. At its best, art depends upon dedication and heart more than anything else. The role of circumstance, connections, luck, and money complicate a path to success but I found myself wishing for a larger conversation about how we step beyond these fractured, poisonous figures to return to art outside their influence. Perhaps Dederer trusted we’d get to that conclusion on our own. This was a terrific book of criticism that invigorated and empowered me to keep plowing ahead. It’s available this April.