| Tuesday, April 27, 2010 10:38AM | | | | Women Sex and Fiction: A Recap | Posted By: Anderbo.com
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| Tags: Claire Messud, Lorraine Adams, Norman Rush, Esther Allen, Alex Epstein, Gender, Translation, Diversity | It’s been known since the novel was invented that the imagined readership of fiction has been women, not men. Today, 80% of fiction’s readership is women, yet men seem to be winning all the awards. Yesterday’s event, “The Diversity Test: Gender and Literature in Translation,” sought to address this issue. Lorraine Adams, one of the event’s panelists, gave a telling anecdote: after informing one of her Princeton professors that she was going to write her paper on the poetry of Sir Philip Sidney, he exclaimed: “Good! Fiction is for women and babies.”
The panel, led by novelist Claire Messud, was largely a response to Messud’s month-long fiction editorship at Guernica, where she prefaced her series with an essay about gender inequality in fiction. Although we would like to believe that in the 21st century, “Art is art and to separate writings, paintings, musical compositions, etc. into two sexes is to emphasize values that are not art,” as Elizabeth Bishop believed, disturbing statistics prove otherwise.
“There are two numbers you have to remember,” said Joel Whitney, the Editor at Guernica, during his introduction of the panel. “Eight and three. Eight for the number of women included in the Modern Library’s list of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century, and three for the percentage of books read in the United States that are translated.”
The panel, originally to be called “Women, Sex, and Fiction,” included Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lorraine Adams, translator and co-director of PEN World Voices Esther Allen, Israeli novelist Alex Epstein, and novelist Norman Rush.
Messud began by asking the panel: So does it matter? Does it matter who writes what? Or is it all just “art”? Rush responded by saying that at one time his book, written from a female, first-person perspective, was boycotted by many women's book clubs. These women felt that a man had no right to write this story, that in fact it was an act of appropriation. What right do writers have to “represent” anything—whether that be sex, culture, ethnicity, language?
Epstein illustrated that while he organizes his books at home by country and language, it would be preposterous to put all books written by men on one side and women on the other, suggesting that intuitively, our brain does not make distinctions based on sex.
“And yet,” Messud said with a wry smile (one of her favorite lines throughout the discussion).
Allen suggested that representation is not only difficult for women, it is even more difficult for writers who write in other languages. After asking whether Espstein celebrated after he found out he would be published in English, he joked: “I don’t remember, I was too drunk.”
Interestingly, as the conversation continued it seemed to become two-pronged. Half of the panel wanted to talk about whether American literature represented enough diversity to properly “have a conversation with humanity,” and the other half wanted to talk about whether women writers were being ignored.
Adams, afraid she would not have time to air this opinion before the panel was over, declared that “guys always get more attention than women.” She added that it was a subject nobody wanted to mention in public, as they will inevitably say: but what about Zadie Smith? Jhumpa Lahiri? Toni Morrison?
Messud later added: “Nobody wants to be the kid in the back of the room with a wet hanky.” (As in, nobody wants to be the whiner.)
What is it with men and fiction? Men don’t read fiction—and proudly declare this—yet they are the ones winning all the prestigious awards. Messud writes in her Guernica essay that while serving as a judge for an international literary prize, she herself nominated a man. Is this a problem? Why should there only be eight women writers on the Modern Library list when 80% of fiction’s readership are women? Have we all somehow absorbed and incorporated this cultural expectation that only men can be literary?
After Adams finished her speech she was met with a round of applause.
There is a subversive, angry feeling among women novelists that “we’re not really anything in the culture,” Adams said. “We want to be post-racial, like Obama, but we can’t be.”
As a woman writer myself, I wanted to agree with Messud and Adams, but I still wasn’t sure if I was totally convinced that women writers were being “ignored.” It wasn’t until Messud brought up Joyce and Flaubert that I really began to change my mind.
In Edmund Wilson’s review of Joyce’s Ulysses, Wilson said that aside from Flaubert, who else has had the “supreme devotion and accomplished the definitive beauty?” The idea of “literature” that Flaubert introduced was one that required the writer to put aside all things, live in seclusion, and write. “A woman’s life has many more compartments,” Messud argued. “Women may find this template for supreme devotion quite difficult.”
This seemed to me like the first time anything was mentioned about the difference between a male aesthetic and female aesthetic. (Earlier, Adams had said, “My books are more masculine than they are feminine,” but didn’t elaborate.) As context necessarily comes from a body, it is inevitable that men and women would write differently. Perhaps there is something coming out of the male body of writing that we, as a society, automatically recognize as “the literary.” If this is the reason behind why only men writers get recognized for their work, then I agree, there is a problem.
And to return to why men don’t read fiction, Rush suggested—in earnest—that it might be the increased availability of pornography. Or perhaps male notions of peculiarity, pride, insularity are not being addressed in contemporary fiction. “A successful man is one that has got it figured out, and those tapping into fiction don’t have it figured out.”
Adams added that most successful men don’t read fiction, they read non-fiction.
Perhaps there is truth in what Woolf says in “A Room of One’s Own”—where she identifies the male aesthetic as being assertive, declarative, and full of “fact.” For Woolf, good fiction had to include the feminine part of the brain, which operates through suggestiveness and uncertainty.
If men find that fiction is not real and therefore doesn’t matter, I say: if fiction is to be feminine, let the women win the awards.
--Anelise Chen | | |
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5 Comments | Add a Comment |
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| 8-18-10 5:00PM: Sara Paretsky said...
When I helped start Sisters in Crime in 1986, women wrote 40 % of crime novels but got 13 % of reviews and about 2 % awards. We were told that women read books by men but not vice versa, so there was no point in considering women's books. We were told that my and Sue Grafton's books were masculine so they could be reviewed. We were told many odd things, but we did force reviewers and the industry to modify their posture to some extent. However, you and all your panelists raise important questions that I can't address in a simple blog comment.
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| 4-29-10 10:43AM: shaun said...
JK Fowler reported on the event for The Mantle:
What was completely absent from the discussion (and in fact, the whole panel's foundation was based upon the assumptions of cohesive notions of male and female) was what it would mean to work at dissolving or calling into question the gendered constructions of male and female. And while at times, Lorraine Adams successfully called into question the continuing predominance of males ("gatekeepers") in the business of the written word, no one on the panel dared to exit the confines of the traditional notions of male/female. As an aside, the contributions of "gays" to the discussion of gender was noted once.
Read more: www.mantlethought.org/content/pen-2010-women-sex-and-fiction
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| 4-29-10 6:02AM: Helen DeWitt said...
My impression is that following even one professional sport takes up a lot of time (never mind, as it might be, the baseball, basketball and football seasons - and then there's tennis and golf...); also that video games are extremely addictive; and that women are in the minority of those whose leisure time is claimed by these activities. I don't think these have any equivalents in women's lives. In the circumstances, if 20% of fiction readers are men that's actually pretty good going.
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| 4-28-10 2:22PM: Marie Chen said...
My opinion about why men don’t read fiction, which always portrays unpleasant but truthful reality, is that most of men don’t, or, choose not to understand, sense, or face the vulnerability of human nature. Why? Because they are “born” men and they are not supposed to? To give the answers for this question is not complex, but it’s not easy as well. I discovered some truth: the great writers, even statistically men take the most parts of them, have very keen understanding of human being, and because of that, these male writers contain more feminine characters—sensitive, thoughtful, humble, considerate, vulnerable, oppressed, etc.
I always see great male writers more as women than men, or, I think they are female in a male body.
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| 4-28-10 10:51AM: AM HOMES said...
Much thanks for this-I am reminded of what Grace Paley once told me--"for years women have done men the favor of reading their work--and men have not returned that favor" For whatever reason (and it remains unclear) although women buy books--women writers remain 2nd class, There is a glass ceiling that is deeply uncool to mention--to point it out is to seem whiney or worse--like a feminist!
AM HOMES
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