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E.J., it was actually W.H. Auden who wrote that "poetry makes nothing happen," and the line you cite is perhaps one of the misinterpreted and misquoted lines of our time. Auden, I believe, meant the opposite of what you imply in your post; he was, in fact, arguing that literature (including poetry) is crucial to our self-conception as humans, as cultures. That is, it is influential, even if few of us can say that reading a novel has, say, gotten us a job or stopped a country from going to war. The line you quoted is from his elegy for W.B. Yeats, and the rest of the stanza is quite relevant to our discussion:
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
That is, a poem is a "way of happening," something that survives by being read and absorbed by the culture.
Another poetic quote came to my mind while reading your post: Marianne Moore, who famously wrote "I, too, dislike it." She was talking about poetry, but I thought of it in relationship to our discussion. Yes, like you, I'm not crazy about the discussion of Why Aren't There as Many Great Female Novelists, etc. But I don't think I can just yawn either. "Best-of" lists may be the province of geeks, but I think it's important to keep asking whether women writers get short shrift. Because even if prize-giving and list-making is highly subjective, prizes and honors help give you the financial freedom to write (either directly, by handing out $$$ or, indirectly, by helping you get a good job with a low teaching load). Call me selfish, but I'll be pissed if in my poetic career I have to do twice the work as my male peers to get half the salary and concurrent freedom.
I guess that means I should be all for your idea of a special prize for female writers—except that it bugs me that women might still need to be considered separate but equal. Why not just equal?
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As of late, some blogs have made a sport out of calling out advertisers for being misogynist, but this one I really don't get. For some reason, Jossip (Jossip?) has deemed this IMO totally hilarious ad for U by Kotex misogynist. In it, a beaver uses a maxipad as a sleeping mask to drive home the point that users can "sleep easy with maximum protection." Of this joke, Jossip opines "this week misogyny ran rampant." Really? Now we're supposed to be offended by animatronic beavers wearing sleeping masks? "Nice to know the ad industry is opening its doors to vulgar 7th grade boys." Ugh, I say. Get over it! It's a beaver! It's a joke! (FYI, the campaign's been around for a while.) Does feminism mean we can't make beaver jokes? Maybe we American ladies could learn something from the Aussies.
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But E.J., if we make too many of these niche prizes ("Best Sestina by a Black Poet," "Best Article Written by a Gay Man in February"), don't we risk further ghettoizing the people who have historically been kept out of the great canons, and continue to hamper their ability to reach that more universally accepted level of greatness? I certainly found that to be the case in terms of reading material in college. Once black and female authors become the stuff of Africana studies or gender studies courses, it's like a free pass to professors in the good old-fashioned English department to keep packing the syllabus with white men. It's a detriment to the system to have an implied "white, male" in front of any major prize or course, and I think that's likely to happen if we slap "black" or "female" in front of too many other ones.
And a minor quibble, E.J.: it was W.H. Auden, not Pound, who wrote that "poetry makes nothing happen." Although I guess the fact that you forgot who said it only furthers your (and Auden's) point about the power of poets.
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Businessweek's Michael Mandel has some interesting BEA
numbers on how consumption patterns changed between January 2008 and
January 2009. Spending on medical care, education, recreation, and
housing are all up. Spending on "user-operated transportation,"
clothing, alcohol and tobacco are all down over last year. Spending on
food is down by 55.7 billion dollars, and Mandel wonders whether "the
incessant public drumbeating about 'fat Americans' and obesity is
helping propel the decline in food consumption."
It's hard to know how seriously to take a drop of that size in the absence of
information about total food expenditure, but even if it's hugely
significant I'm not ready to declare a win for the Meme Roth
contingent. It's not as if the demographic that spends the highest
dollar amount on food is also the demographic with the highest caloric
intake or highest rate of obesity. Fritos are calorically dense but not
particularly budget-busting; they are considerably more affordable than
the organic grass-fed beef for sale at my local co-op. On the other
hand, if people are eating at home rather than eating out, they might
actually be trading bacon burgers for canned soup. But that seems
recession-driven, not public-shaming-campaign driven.
There
is ongoing debate about whether recessions might actually push people into more healthy habits (more time on the treadmill, less time sucking on pricey cigarettes). I tend to assume that these kinds of behavioral changes will be swamped by the health effects of financial stress, but smart people with actual data might disagree.
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Michael Lewis has a super-engaging, hilarious piece in this month's Vanity Fair about Iceland's economic crisis. (Sample quote, "Because Iceland is really just one big family, it's simply annoying to go around asking Icelanders if they've met Björk. Of course they've met Björk; who hasn't met Björk? Who, for that matter, didn't know Björk when she was two?") He concludes that if you're looking for someone to blame for the country's supernova-sized financial meltdown, look no further than a bunch of erstwhile fisherman with a jones to be swashbuckling heroes who refused to take advice from women. Or, in other words, if women ruled the world, we wouldn't be in this mess. What do you all make of that? Here's a related excerpt from the article:
Back in 2001, as the Internet boom turned into a bust, M.I.T.'s Quarterly Journal of Economics published an intriguing paper called "Boys Will Be Boys: Gender, Overconfidence, and Common Stock Investment." The authors, Brad Barber and Terrance Odean, gained access to the trading activity in over 35,000 households, and used it to compare the habits of men and women. What they found, in a nutshell, is that men not only trade more often than women but do so from a false faith in their own financial judgment. Single men traded less sensibly than married men, and married men traded less sensibly than single women: the less the female presence, the less rational the approach to trading in the markets.
One of the distinctive traits about Iceland's disaster, and Wall Street's, is how little women had to do with it. Women worked in the banks, but not in the risktaking jobs. As far as I can tell, during Iceland's boom, there was just one woman in a senior position inside an Icelandic bank. Her name is Kristin Petursdottir, and by 2005 she had risen to become deputy C.E.O. for [Icelandic bank] Kaupthing in London.... In 2006, she quit her job. "People said I was crazy," she says, but she wanted to create a financial-services business run entirely by women. To bring, as she puts it, "more feminine values to the world of finance."
Today her firm is, among other things, one of the very few profitable financial businesses left in Iceland. After the stock exchange collapsed, the money flooded in. A few days before we met, for instance, she heard banging on the front door early one morning and opened it to discover a little old man. "I'm so fed up with this whole system," he said. "I just want some women to take care of my money."
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No yawning allowed? Noreen, I'd like to see you enforce that. It'll take a lot of IV-delivered caffeine. Sure, maybe it's easier for me to yawn at the literary canon now that I've switched over to journalism and no longer hope for prizes in fiction and poetry. And as far as your argument that same-sex marriage and equal pay depend on equal representation in literature ... well, I'm sorry, but I switched over because I don't actually believe literature is all that influential. As Ezra Pound wrote, "poetry makes nothing happen." Nothing is very important, the Buddha would tell you. And yes, I do want more women's imaginations and tastes recognized. But I don't think it has to happen by forcing men to like The House of Mirth more than Brideshead Revisited (although I'll pick Wharton first any time, thank you). Literature is just too subjective for that.
Which is my point. I think I'm suggesting a proliferation of lists and prizes precisely because I don't respect the ones that exist; prize committees include a carousel of people handing out back-pats to their friends and back-stabs to their enemies. We don't have to pretend that there really is a Best Writer or a List of Best Books or a Bestest and Most Sophisticated Literary Sensibility that can Best Detect the Platonic Best Novel. That concept always makes me think of that movie that made Jack Black famous—can anyone remember what it was called?—in which a bunch of loser dudes who work in a music store are constantly making lists about such things as the five best bass guitar lines in a rock album ever. Oh, please. Yes, I believe in being transported by literature and art; I survived adolescence because of Tolstoy, picked up girls by reciting poetry from memory (Shakespeare sonnets and Japanese tankas ... the practical benefits of an MFA degree!), and regularly worship at MOMA. But I want more lists, more prizes, less pretense that we can definitively declare the Best One Ever and more reality-checking about how different our tastes all are, shaped by our varied experiences.
P.S. I remember the movie now! It was High Fidelity.
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Separate but equal lit prizes, E.J? Haven't we decided that the first adjective always negates the second in practice? I totally get why you're bored by the whole thing, and sure, listmaking of this kind can be pretty pedantic, but since I was a little too young for the culture wars of the ‘80s, I got to sidestep the tedious infighting and just read the highlights, like this from Toni Morrison:
Canon building is empire building. Canon defense is national defense. Canon debate, whatever the terrain, nature, and range (of criticism, of history, of the history of knowledge, of the definition of language, the universality of aesthetic principles, the sociology of art, the humanistic imagination), is the clash of cultures. And all of the interests are vested.
I buy that hook, line, and sinker. So, E.J., if you want a mainstream culture that supports everything you've advocated for, like gay marriage and equal workplace treatment for women, I think you've got to stifle those yawns!
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The Supreme Court just handed down a 6-3 decision in Wyeth v. Levine, a blow to the pharmaceutical industry and a big win for quirky Vermont guitarist Diana Levine, who can now get in line behind Lily Ledbetter and Susette Kelo as the human (female) faces of recent Supreme Court controversies. Tony Mauro notes that Chief Justice Roberts joined the dissenters, even though his most recent financial disclosure forms indicated he owned stock in Pfizer. With the announcement that Pfizer and Wyeth would merge, and in light of Robert's practice of recusing himself from cases in which Pfizer was a party, it had been suggested that he might withdraw from this case as well, since the outcome would likely have an effect on the value of Wyeth. Of course, Roberts may have shed his Pfizer stock since he filed the disclosure form. But the occasion of all this unseemly Dumpster-diving into the justices' portfolios highlights the problem of allowing judges to police their own conflicts of interest in secret.
At oral argument in a major case about judicial recusal heard just yesterday by the court, Roberts said in the strongest possible terms that "the recusal rules are, you know, if you have one share of AT&T stock and it's in AT&T, you have to recuse." He sided with Wyeth today.
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Well, Dayo, if the Guardian is making a reading list, you can bet it's going to be overwhelmingly male and European. How you've lived your life influences what you like to read. Am I the only one who thinks it's silly to pretend otherwise, that it's ridiculous to pretend that we can be Platonic Guardians deciding absolute merit?
Which brings me into the discussion of Why Are There No Great Women Writers—which I sat out last week, since it always makes me really, really sleepy. Maybe I just got worn out by the English dept. culture wars in the 1980s and 1990s. Or maybe it reminds me too much of the enraged fights my father and brothers used to have over who was the greatest baseball player of all time—fights that sent me off to my room, where (being a total nerd) I escaped into War and Peace. Is Edith Wharton better or worse than Herman Melville? Is Jane Austen better or worse than Evelyn Waugh? Are Great Pitchers Better or Worse than Great Catchers or Great Hitters or Great All-Around Players? Why even debate it, when we need all of them to enjoy the game?
But when it comes to the Platonic Guardians making their lists of 1,000 necessary books, well, whether because of nature, nurture, or culture, men and women—on average—have different interests and tastes in life. Not all of us, not all the time; I find reading chick lit to be as much fun as a bumpy flight in a tiny prop plane, while I couldn't put down Bleak House. But on average, over time, what women and men find more riveting tends to be different.
So here's a modest proposal. Why not have separate prizes—and lists—for male and female writers? The queer community realized long ago that we would slit one another's throats (figuratively speaking) if we had to decide whether Frank O'Hara was Better or Worse than Adrienne Rich—so our groups give prizes for Gay Poetry and Lesbian Poetry, and so on. Why can't all lit prizes—or lists of great literature—do the same?
Now I have to go take my nap.
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As Meghan points out, until recently “most women didn't have the social and economic wherewithal to make a life for themselves as artistic writers.” But what about that “recently?” Allow me to suggest one minor culprit from my perch at Iowa: the rise of literary memoir. At the moment when it became plausible for a woman to write about major social issues in the context of a novel, writing mostly about one’s own history became massively marketable. We saw a convergence of gender norms and literary fashion; women had long been told that they could write competently about the domestic sphere, and suddenly literature that took family life as central was exactly what publishers wanted. American women could do what the culture assumed they were best suited for (and let’s not forget that our first national best-seller was a woman-authored memoir) while collecting a six-figure advance.
I don’t mean to denigrate literary memoirs or suggest that there is something small about taking a single life as a subject. But I do see the women around me devoting a tremendous amount of talent and creative energy to the crafting of memoir, and I wonder where that energy would go if we did not live in the age of Mary Karr.
I agree that we’re defining the ambitious novel in a suspect and narrow way—sprawling, thick—but I do not like the idea that male authors dominate the genre we are so defining. Major publishers don’t sell books; they sell “packages.” If a publishing house believes that it cannot market a woman writer as a credible author of an "ambitious" book, it won’t buy the book. This seems to me a case in which the implicit biases of the audience shape the market in a potentially ugly manner.
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The Guardian has published a list of 1,000 novels to read before you die. As it should, the list contains, for me, some beloved texts—and some totally unheard of. In search of a riff on your post on domesticity-vs.-sweeping drama, Meghan, I perused the list for signs of gender difference.
Evelyn Waugh, easily one of my favorite authors (and not, as I discovered in high school, a woman), gets eight nods; I totally agree with such praise, but even the most decorated female (Jane Austen) gets only six. A full accounting was too taxing for today, but males do dominate the “war and travel,” “science fiction and fantasy,” and “crime” categories. Throughout, Carson McCullers, George Eliot, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, and Elizabeth Gaskell keep things interesting, but the only category that approaches gender parity is in “love” (at least it’s not all chick lit).
Sure, the list-makers have excluded short stories and nonfiction and poetry (all of which, you’d assume have the same gender imbalance), but what gives with the lack of XX authors? Equally understandable but more troublesome, perhaps, is the list’s Eurocentrism—does it have to be so white and so male? Of course, there is no comprehensive list of books about women (Flaubert, Nabokov, Lewis Carroll, and Jeffrey Eugenides are some male authors who might anchor that list). Maybe in 50 years we’ll have a different roster entirely?
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The New Yorker just published a profile of English pop star Lily Allen that's behind their pay wall, but the podcast with the writer of the piece, Sasha Frere-Jones, is not. In it he observes that Allen is a distinctly British phenomenon, the type of female performer we just don't have in the States. "We tend to reward people who are cipherlike, like Britney, or people who seem much more like good girls, like Beyonce. There aren't that many women that age who are that witty and vulgar and brash," he says.
There aren't that many people, on either side of the Atlantic, who are as witty, vulgar, and brash as Allen (just last week she snapped at the New York Times on her blog after they sold pictures of her to OK, which, she's right, is pretty déclassé), but I take Frere-Jones' point. These qualities, and wit in particular, are not ones American popstresses are known for. They're more likely to possess the exact opposite attribute, some virulent strain of anti-wit that renders all of their speech impossibly lifeless. But are our male performers so much more outspoken and clever? Or, rather, any of our male performers besides Lil' Wayne? And, getting to the heart of it, why don't we Americans appreciate wit like the Brits?
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Noreen, I share your obsession with all things Meghan McCain. And while I agree with you that being a Carrie Bradshaw also-ran perhaps is not the best career move for young Meg, I wonder what else she could be doing at this point that's more fulfilling. Since she interned at Newsweek, she is probably interested in a career in journalism, and as we all know, even entry level jobs in magazines are in short supply. Sadly, overshares on the Daily Beast may be her best bet. I found her first-person dating piece more compelling than most of the Bradshavian drivel that gets published. At least she has had a life experience (being the daughter of a failed presidential candidate) that's unique, unlike certain other young female Daily Beast contributors.
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Noreen, Nina, and Bonnie were discussing the vexed question of why so few women have produced what might be called “the great American novel,” and I want to jump in belatedly. Maybe the problem is, as Laura Miller suggested, that that few (white) women take on "big novels." But the reasons behind this are complicated. First, until recently, most women didn't have the social and economic wherewithal to make a life for themselves as artistic writers; read the big new Elaine Showalter history of American women's writing, A Jury of Her Peers, and you’ll be struck by how many of what Nathaniel Hawthorne called "that damned mob of scribbling women" were writing to support themselves and their families—which is different from writing to fulfill ambition. Second, Noreen, I think you’re right to suggest that the way we define "ambition" in the novel skews toward a, well, masculinist project—a bias toward the big and sprawling novel, an adventurous quest novel, rather than anything that can be defined as "domestic." (I touched on this indirectly on a piece praising the “small novel.”) Third, it’s been hard for female novelists to persuade critics of the seriousness of their endeavor.
But I think we do have some great American novels by women. Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, in my mind, is not just a good novel, but one of the most important novels of the latter half of the 20th century. It's the first female quest novel of any real stature. And, paradoxically, it is also a domestic novel. It's just that the heroine chooses to break free of the routinized monotony of "housekeeping" in order to be a itinerant, a traveler. The novel is profound on its own terms. But it's also a powerful critique about how we think about the novel in America. By no means is Housekeeping an explicitly "feminist novel," and yet on a certainly level it's the most feminist novel I can think of: one that decisively complicates some very tired gender categories.