The Reading Experience

Dereliction of Duty

In my previous commentary on Claire Dederer's Monsters, I did not cite the way Dederer, in two later chapters of her book, includes several women as putative "monsters" whose actions might need to be considered when placing value on the work. In one chapter, she makes a curious extended comparison between Valerie Solanis and Sylvia Plath, both of whom are said to be guilty of violence (although Plath's is the violence of her suicide), but the main source of disquiet for Dederer in contemplating questionable behavior by women is in what she characterizes as offenses against motherhood, her two primary examples being Doris Lessing and Joni Mitchell.

Lessing is scrutinized for being willing to abandon two of her children (she left them behind with her ex-husband when she moved to London from Africa), while Mitchell is included because she gave up a child for adoption, allegedly to pursue her career. Dederer doesn't exactly propose that this is "monstrous behavior" comparable to the sexual abuse and child molestation of the male artists she surveys, but it is quite clear that she is bothered by the dereliction of duty by these artists, even though she knows the social expectations placed on women in their situation manifest a double standard and that it's society itself that forces women into these painful choices. She knows that committing oneself to one's art necessarily entails making such choices. Still: "When I think of Joni Mitchell, I think of her lost daughter," Dederer writes. "When I think of Doris Lessing, I think of her abandoned children." 

Dederer's inclusion of these women artists has the feel of a perfunctory gesture, as if writing a whole book that only examines the problematic behavior of male artists would seem disproportionate. But that in choosing the artists to examine she would select these women who were willing to forsake their children seems telling enough. Surely there are women artists who exemplify truly questionable character more than Lessing and Mitchell. Jean Rhys seems to have been a much more unsavory figure than Doris Lessing would ever be, and in the echelons of bad behavior among women rock stars, Mitchell must rank pretty low. The implication seems to be that deliberately neglecting the duties of motherhood is the most monstrous act a woman might commit, if not directly by Dederer herself then through the apparent assumption that many readers would find motherly neglect a shockingly unnatural thing to do.

Should an artist have greater obligations to family or to her art? Should she have to make this decision? Lessing, after all, didn't really abandon her children to the harsh winds of fate. She left them with their father. Mitchell had the option of putting her daughter up for adoption, through which she by most measures seems to have been give a perfectly comfortable life (and never mind that Mitchell has said she took this action because she was nearly destitute, not to serve her career). Were these results sufficient for us to conclude that these women's decisions to pursue their art are justified, since if they had not made them we might not have Lessing's subsequent fiction or Mitchell's music (or at least only a substantially altered version of them)? Further, is there any truly analogous choice demanded of male artists? We might deplore actions taken by male artists, past and present, that seem disrespectful to family and negligent of family responsibilities, but do we therefore wish that their art had reached us in a similarly diminished form so we can say they acted right?

"Mother" is freighted with so many cultural expectations and entails so many presumed responsibilities that perceived violations of its imperatives are nearly unforgivable. This is of course not the only cultural norm that places an inequitable burden on women, but for women artists none may pose a greater obstacle to full artistic autonomy than this one, as is demonstrated by the very emphasis Dederer gives it in her book. Elsewhere Dederer laments that the concept of artistic "genius" seems to be reserved for certain artists who are/have been granted something like an exemption from blame for their real-life flaws and limitations. Women ought to be given the same opportunities to be geniuses as men, but does Doris Lessing get this chance if her actions as an absent mother are still questioned? Will the assumption that women have a natural attribute (the instinct to "nurture") that simply can't be abrogated always interfere with the appreciation of women's art?

"Artistic autonomy" is valuable, of course, only if you think art itself has a value that makes risking moral disapproval for disregarding expectations of proper conduct worth the risk. You must believe that the art created is at least equal in value to the ethical principle you're violating, even if you agree that the principle is valid. The sort of transgression committed by Lessing and Mitchell surely is not the kind of ethical breach Dederer surveys among the male artists she includes in her book--rape, child abuse, other forms of violence--but to defy cultural norms as they did is an act of courage, unlike the unambiguously contemptible actions imputed to the men. Arguably they regarded the pursuit of artistic expression as just as indispensable to human fulfillment (and not just their own) as the other "natural" impulse they were ostensibly ignoring. Like the other geniuses, their strongest impulse was to the creativity and imagination embodied in their art. Do we think this was more blameworthy because they were women?

Fallen Artists

Claire Dederer's Monsters might seem to be an attempt to sort out the issues involved in the now resurgent debate about the relationship between an artist's behavior in "real life" and the art he/she creates, between biography and aesthetic achievement, but what turns out to be Dederer's actual subject is implicit in the book's title. She is not interested in the questions that arise when we wonder how the artist's life might clarify the art, but in the bad behavior of notorious artists (in the essay that is the ultimate source of Dederer's book she more specifically identifies "monstrous men" as her ultimate concern) and the dilemma this creates for a "fan" of any such artist. Dederer seeks to write an "autobiography of the audience," with herself and her own fandom as a stand-in.

Dederer gives particular emphasis to the controversies enveloping the careers of Roman Polanski and Woody Allen, two filmmakers whose work has been important to her in the past. (Dederer was at one time a film critic.) In each case, she finds that the sexual offenses of which both men have been accused inevitably affect the way she now responds to their films, although in neither case do they entirely overshadow the purely artistic qualities the films still possess. For Dederer, the work of Polanski and Allen does not exactly lose its artistic credibility because of the filmmakers' misdeeds, but it does lose the "love" that Dederer once had for it. While surely the value placed on all of the artistic expressions Claire Dederer discusses in her book (films, visual art, music, literary works) arises also from defensible critical standards, the appeal to "art love" and the priority she gives to our emotional responses to art do indeed evoke the attitude toward art expressed by modern fan culture.

Dederer does venture outside her own personal relationship to art to look directly at fan culture in its response to the transgressions of J,K. Rowling and Michael Jackson (although she is also a fan of the latter). With Rowling, of course, the alleged wrongdoing comes not from abusive actions she has committed but from her exercise of speech--speech that has been judged to be transphobic. Dederer expresses sympathy for those of Rowling's readers whose love of her books have been marred by what they believe is a betrayal of what they took the books to be saying to them, but her analysis of the situation is really quite attenuated. She does not consider whether Rowling's words really are transphobic, whether the Harry Potter books or the films adapted from those books are actually marked by some sort of hostility or prejudice toward transgender people, or why Rowling's later publicly stated opinions are at all relevant to the aesthetic experience of those works. Indeed, the source of disappointment among Rowling's fans seems to be that the Harry Potter books are an inspiration to those who feel shunned or excluded, so that further discussion of these questions could presumably illuminate more fully the valid (or invalid) connections that can be made between an artist's public utterances and that artist's work.

If we are entitled to come to our own interpretation of a work of art without deference to the artist's perspective (his/her "intention"), then it is at the least unclear why the artist's unwelcome views on other matters should be given any additional weight, either. If one's "love" of the artwork must be extended to an unconditional acceptance of everything the artist might do or say, then that love is grounded on a shaky foundation. Dederer throughout the book maintains that responses to art are legitimately emotional, but if love of a particular artwork can't withstand the encounter with extrinsic realities such as the artist's expression of opinion, then emotion itself has prevailed over appreciation of those qualities that make the work artistically compelling. Ultimately the whole approach to art exemplified in Monsters focuses on interpretation, the audience's way of emotionally processing and placing value on the work, rather than the actual experience of an artistic creation, during which, if the experience is genuinely attentive, issues relating to the artist's opinions or behaviors in real life play no role.

Dederer would assert, of course, that these non-artistic factors can't help but intrude on aesthetic experience, especially if the artist is a "monster." This is what makes it a "dilemma." But such an intrusion doesn't just happen, unbidden. We allow it to happen. Even want it to. We are in the middle of a cultural phase in which morality takes priority over aesthetics, so that our esteem for the work must be accompanied by esteem for the life. Not only is the artist's interpretation of the work irrelevant, but the artist must be held accountable to our own interpretation: the "J.K. Rowling" who wrote Harry Potter must not be the sort of person who would make questionable remarks about transgendered people; the "Woody Allen" who created all those nebbishy characters portrayed by Allen himself must in fact be in real life a nebbish who could never be regarded as a sexual predator. It's a curious inversion of the proposition proffered by formalist critics that the artist's life be held separate from the art so that we can perceive the latter clearly. Now we must merge the artist and the art into a seamless whole.

Dederer certainly does question the validity of this separation (citing skeptically the male friends and critics who advised her she must approach Allen's films only for "the aesthetics"), although she does not take the reversal of the biographical fallacy quite so far. For the most part, her book is an attempt to think through the implications of the increased attention to the moral failings of prominent artists, not to erase all distinctions between biography and artistic performance. She is alert to the moral ambiguity in some cases and in others (Polanski) concludes that we must simply live with the tension between great art and compromised artist. The best chapter in the book "The Anti-Monster," in fact challenges the facile moralism that would condemn Vladimir Nabokov simply for writing Lolita, with its truly monstrous protagonist, as if Nabokov is projecting his own attitudes in his portrayal of Humbert Humbert. Dederer's scrupulous analysis persuasively demonstrates that in Lolita Nabokov creates a monstrous character, but this does not mean he does so as an endorsement of Humbert's attitudes and behavior. An attentive reading of Lolita reveals that the story of Lolita is the story of a young girl's devastation, actually not by a monster but by an otherwise unremarkable man (a "run of the mill child abuser") giving in to his worst impulses while concocting elaborate justifications.

Nabokov may indeed have descended into his own inner darkness to conceive a character such as Humbert Humbert, but ultimately all artists must have access to this sort of darkness or their art will be incomplete, naïve about human errancy. By the end of her book, Dederer has concluded that we are all in our way monstrous (she cites her own flawed behavior), in a way perhaps like Humbert Humbert in our capacity to wreck the potential inherent in our youthful selves. She suggests that, just as we can extend a kind of empathetic understanding to loved ones who have transgressed without forgetting the transgression, we should extend the same kind of understanding to favored artists and their faults. I myself don't really think this analogy between "art love" and love of people is altogether convincing--they seem to me completely different things, if the former is even real--but Dederer's solution to the problem that she thinks has become more urgent for her may be the only judicious one to be found.

Dederer's examination of this problem doesn't really try to resolve any properly "philosophical" issues underlying it. She mostly sticks to reflection on the emotional turbulence audiences experience trying to reconcile their attachment to the art object with their disgust at the behavior of the artist. In another recently published book, Drawing the Line: What to Do with the Work of Immoral Artists from Museums to the Movies, Erich Hatala Matthes explicitly does attempt to sort through the concerns about "immoral artists" from a philosophical perspective. Matthes, a moral philosopher who teaches at Wellesley College, is interested both in the moral qualities of art itself and in the implications of immoral behavior by artists, as well as whether "cancellation" is an appropriate response to such behavior. Matthes focuses more or less exclusively on the same recent controversies on which Dederer concentrates, without much if any reference to questions about the moral behavior of artists in the more distant artistic/literary past, or to any previous lines of literary or philosophical inquiry into the relationship between art and artist.

In his consideration of the proposition that an artist's immoral behavior diminishes the aesthetic value of the work, Matthes leans on the examples of r & b musician R. Kelley and Woody Allen, specifically in Manhattan. (To judge by these two books, Allen seems to be ground zero in the discourse about fallen artists, even though the relevant charges against him go back thirty years now.) Matthes's determination that a song by Kelley that seems to celebrate sexual exploitation is confirmed in its immorality by Kelley's history of sexual exploitation seems like an obvious conclusion few would dispute. On the other hand, his further contention that Allen's relationship with Soon-Yi Previn retroactively imports an "aesthetic flaw" into Manhattan  because his actions give us "reasons not to respond to the work in the prescribed way " seems to me utterly preposterous. Putting aside whether Allen's conduct with Soon-Yi was in fact immoral (Soon-Yi herself, a college student at the time, has never suggested that it was), the notion that Manhattan "prescribes" that we accept the film's portrayal of 40-something Isaac's involvement with the 17 year-old Tracy as unproblematic is absurd. The film prescribes nothing. It interjects an element of moral ambiguity into the conventional narrative progression of the romantic comedy, but we are free to resolve that ambiguity according to our own moral sensibility. Plenty of people find the central relationship compelling, while others do balk at its moral ramifications. The film doesn't require either of these responses, and to say that it does is at the very least a myopic interpretation.

Although Matthes thus does believe that we can reject the work of immoral artists both on moral and aesthetic grounds--he makes no claim that all artist immorality leads to the latter, however, nor does he think that continuing to patronize an artist's work necessarily makes one "complicit" with the artist's behavior--he doesn't feel that cancellation of individual artists is the most appropriate action to take. It won't really solve the problem, he argues, and the potential for overreach is too great. Instead, the institutions responsible for producing and curating art works should be held more responsible for creating and enforcing standards of behavior. According to Matthes, such action will minimize the number of egregious cases that now provoke cancellation.

This might seem like a reasonable proposal, but, speaking for myself, I fear such a prospect more than the occasional cancellation of this or that artist. To invest these "institutions" (publishers, museums, other arts organizations) with the ability to police the activities of artists is an invitation to interference with artistic freedom, outright censorship and the establishment of a moral autocracy in the arts. Artists are notoriously unreliable as exemplars of moral propriety. If an artist crosses a line into the clearly forbidden, put him in jail. If he merely acts in ways that you deplore, stop being a part of his audience, but don't start imposing rules for correct artist behavior. Someday you could be the one accused of  some alleged dereliction and banished into the void.

Right and Proper

It seems fair to say both that book publishers are increasingly employing “sensitivity readers” in the editing process they use and that there is an equally growing backlash against this practice. The motives for its use seem fairly obvious: to avoid giving undue offense—or, in the more currently preferred formulation, to avoid “doing harm”—to any of the various cultural groups whose claims to accurate representation have become more assertive. The reason for the backlash is perhaps equally obvious, at least on the part of writers, some of whom feel that the desire to minimize harm has been pursued with undue zeal, ultimately encroaching on their artistic freedom or their speech rights.

This backlash has recently intensified as well among readers, with a series of high-profile examples of the application of sensitivity reading to the work of “classic” authors such as Roald Dahl, Agatha Christie, and P.G. Wodehouse. The response to what critics have called the “bowdlerization” of these works has generally been negative, with few commentators seemingly willing to defend such outright revisions of already-existing texts, perhaps because their authors are no longer around to give their consent to them. (Or perhaps the most fervent believers in the eradication of “harm” in literary works haven’t yet fully prepared the case for sanitizing the literary past.) One writer, Imogen West-Knights (who does not seem a zealot), has, however offered a qualified defense of sensitivity reading in the Dahl and Wodehouse controversies, arguing that at least voluntary submission to sensitivity readers can be a responsible act of seeking “accuracy” in a work of fiction.

West-Knight’s contention makes sense if the writer does indeed voluntarily solicit the services of a sensitivity reader, and if the work in question clearly aspires to include accuracy of representation as one of its artistic goals. But this latter ambition is actually not shared by all writers of fiction, or at least in practice it is not an ambition that can always be easily fulfilled, unless we want to insist that a certain kind of realism, in which characters are always “believable,” is now to be compulsory among all writers of fiction. Plenty of writers violate this stricture, either deliberately, by writing fiction that doesn’t require “three-dimensional” characters, or just through following their own artistic instincts, which may not depend upon “lifelike” characterization in the way some readers might prefer. (Writers of “experimental” fiction might be especially wary of the assumptions behind the call for accuracy, since experimental fiction rejects all of the customary approaches of traditional realistic fiction.) It is this perceived constriction of the writer’s vision, the threat to the integrity of that vision, that should make writers uneasy about the whole notion of a “sensitivity reader.”

Even if the writer has no wish to be insensitive to reigning social principles on matters of race, gender, or sexual preference, it remains unclear why the job of prompting the writer to be mindful of these principles is not left to the editor, who presumably wants to safeguard the interests of the writer and the publisher for whom both editor and writer are working. The rise of the sensitivity reader seems to imply a lack of confidence in editors, or perhaps this suggests that ultimately the practice isn’t really about improving the work of writers at all but is a mere cosmetic being applied to keep the publisher’s appearance up. But if the writer and editor working together can’t be relied on to maintain the integrity of the writer’s artistic conception as well as avoid giving gratuitous offense, what’s the point of the editorial process if you then try to cover up supposed imperfections with ersatz words and phrases that only call attention to their mostly feeble artifice?

In another recent article on the controversy, one experienced sensitivity reader says that “Authors and editors can. . .choose to accept her suggestions and implement changes, ignore them, or ask to discuss them further.” One wonders, however, if all readers and publishers are as flexible as this suggests. Surely the pressure on a writer to heed the sensitivity reader must be considerable, and while only a few writers have publicly complained about the process, others have presumably kept quiet for fear of alienating their publisher or causing unwanted controversy. At some point, a well-known and respected writer is going to run afoul of the sensitivity reading machinery and, unafraid of courting controversy, will call it out as the antagonist of artistic expression it can’t avoid becoming, whether explicitly if the writer is forced to submit to the machinery (which will happen, if it hasn’t already), or implicitly through intimidation (which surely has already happened).

Probably the most ominous threat sensitivity reading poses is that we will see continued efforts to deface already published literary works, extending perhaps not just to popular canonical works but to the previous work of still-living writers. No doubt many of these writers would not agree to such retroactive expurgation, but some might, and then the precedent has been set for regarding writers’ work as infinitely malleable—all fiction as fan fiction, except that the purpose is not to imaginatively extend the work beyond the boundaries of the text but to seize control of the text and make it conform to socially accepted standards. Of course this would be the negation of literature as art, the discreet creation of an individual artistic sensibility, but artistic sensibility seems to be regarded as the enemy at the moment by those trying to protect us from its unsupervised expression.

I have no doubt that the bowdlerization exemplified in the Roald Dahl case will be attempted with other writers from the literary past, writers who won’t necessarily exhibit quite the same problematic attitudes seemingly borne by Dahl but whose work will nevertheless be judged questionable (with his unrestrained comic vision, Dickens will be an inevitable target). There will be few writers whose “sensitivity” won’t be found lacking in some way, although there are certainly also writers whose insensitivity can’t be rationalized or ignored. If the preponderance of readers eventually find the racism and sexism of Ian Fleming to be intolerable, his books will no longer be read. But this is the way a writer’s work ought to fall into disfavor: through the collective judgment exercised by actual readers, not a mandate issuing from a process that usurps the authority of that judgment.

The outrage attending the publication of Dahl’s censored work may temporarily dampen the enthusiasm of the book business for outright redactions of published work, but sensitivity reading already seems an entrenched practice, and unless and until the literary moralizers begin to lose their hold on literary culture, it will probably remain in force for current and aspiring writers. Perhaps more writers will rebel and more readers will begin to resent the inherent condescension of the practice. If not, we will have conceded that artistic freedom must not be allowed to exceed the bounds of what the powers that be decide is right and proper.