If you retreat from the world, and serve only your own needs, you’re bound to get lonely, right? The thing is, writers don’t really get lonely. Liking being alone—even liking loneliness itself—is part of what makes a writer a writer. After I had children, I was an almost full-time mom, working about a quarter time at freelance writing. I thought to myself, how lucky that I am a writer, so that when I am working I get all this lovely restorative alone time. It was years before I realized: Oh. I became a writer so I could be alone all the time. It wasn’t a by-product, it was a motivator.
We’re all wandering around in a mistaken daze of failed telepathy.
This can benefit the artist (she sells more books); but mostly it benefits tech behemoths that monetize these relationships and—in the words of the social psychologist and philosopher Shoshana Zuboff—use your information to trade on “behavioral futures markets.” In this sense, all of us who participate in parasocial relationships are workers creating money for somebody else.
The way you consume art doesn’t make you a bad person, or a good one. You’ll have to find some other way to accomplish that.
But hold up for a minute: who is this “we” that’s always turning up in critical writing? We is an escape hatch. We is cheap. We is a way of simultaneously sloughing off personal responsibility and taking on the mantle of easy authority. It’s the voice of the middlebrow male critic, the one who truly believes he knows how everyone else should think. We is corrupt. We is make-believe. The real question is this: can I love the art but hate the artist? Can you? When I say “we,” I mean I. I mean you
This impulse—to blame the other guy—is in fact a political impulse. I talked earlier about the word “we.” “We” can be an escape hatch from responsibility. It can be a megaphone. But it can also be a casting out. Us against them. The morally correct people against the immoral ones. The process of making someone else wrong so that we may be more right.
The feminism I knew of was a feminism that found fault. That pointed—j’accuse. As I understood it, there were two ways of being: you could be a feminist who called men monsters, or you could ignore the problem. I considered myself a feminist, but at the same time I had an uneasy feeling that the pointing was not the whole story. A feminism that denounced, that punished, was starting to feel like a trap. My feminism, which was in essence a liberal ideology, was coming into conflict with my increasingly leftist politics, my growing desire to look at a bigger picture of where and how material power coalesces
When someone says we ought to separate the art from the artist, they’re saying: Remove the stain. Let the work be unstained. But that’s not how stains work. We watch the glass fall to the floor; we don’t get to decide whether the wine will spread across the carpet
The principle of retroactivity means that if you’ve done something sufficiently asshole-like, it follows that you were an asshole all along.
The problem is, we don’t get to control how much we know about someone’s life. It’s something that happens to us. We turn on Seinfeld, and, whether we want to or not, we think of Michael Richards’s racist rant. This movement toward knowingness began with the birth of mass media, grew in the last century, and has flowered in our moment. There is no longer any escaping biography. Even within my own lifetime, I’ve seen a massive shift. Biography used to be something you sought out, yearned for, actively pursued. Now it falls on your head all day long.
Nostalgia, personal experience—these things become meaningful in terms of calculating the badness of the act against the greatness of the work. Greatness isn’t something that is simply agreed upon by authority—as we’ve seen, that authority too often runs contra to the interests or the experiences or simply the aesthetic tastes of too many people. What makes great art depends on who we are and what we live through. It depends on our feelings.
The contemporary ideal of the genius is a two-headed figure: both master and servant.
We think about Wagner and we ask the question: what should we do about sins from the past, now that we’re enlightened? But what if we rephrased it: what should we do about sins from the past, when we haven’t improved?
Nabokov himself of course would have had contempt for any attempt to guess what was in his heart. Even the idea of Nabokov having a heart is a bit hard to imagine. This reader wonders if maybe he had novels instead of a heart.
Consuming a piece of art is two biographies meeting: the biography of the artist that might disrupt the viewing of the art; the biography of the audience member that might shape the viewing of the art. This occurs in every case.
It’s easy to think of the quality of genius as justifying bad behavior, but maybe it works the other way around too. Maybe we have created the idea of genius to serve our own attraction to badness. Maybe we ask these artists to live out our darkest fantasies—and if we give it the label “genius,” then we don’t have to feel guilt for enjoying the spectacle. We can get off on the performance of badness, we can consume the biography, and remain in good taste. Well, he’s a genius. You can’t blame him. (Or me.)
There are many qualities one must possess to be a working writer or artist. Talent, brains, tenacity. Wealthy parents are good. You should definitely try to have those. But first among equals, when it comes to necessary ingredients, is selfishness. A book is made out of small selfishnesses. The selfishness of shutting the door against your family. The selfishness of ignoring the pram in the hall. The selfishness of forgetting the real world to create a new one. The selfishness of stealing stories from real people. The selfishness of saving the best of yourself for that blank-faced anonymous paramour, the reader. The selfishness that comes from simply saying what you have to say.
Every writer-mother I know has asked herself this question. I mean, none of them says it out loud. But I can hear them thinking it; it’s almost deafening. Does one identity fatally interrupt the other? Is your work making you a less-good mom? That’s the question you ask yourself all the time. But also: is your motherhood making you a less good writer? That question is a little more uncomfortable.
What the artist or writer or musician needs desperately is time. And what the family needs is time. This conflict is not necessarily solvable.
The truth is, art-making and parenthood act very efficiently as disincentives to one another, and people who say otherwise are deluded, or childless, or men.
The novelist John Banville told the Irish Times that he was, not to put too fine a point on it, a shitty dad, and what’s more, probably most writers are. “[Writing] was very hard…on the people around me, on my children. I have not been a good father. I don’t think any writer is. You take so much and suck up so much of the oxygen that it’s very hard on one’s loved ones.”
This kind of thinking is conditional: If I’d been in x place at y time, I would’ve done z thing. There’s actually a name for this construction in grammar. It’s called the third conditional tense, and is explained thus: “The third conditional tense describes something that did not happen, but could have happened given the right conditions.”
Given the right conditions, we would’ve done the right thing.
“The resentment, the anger, is impersonal. It is the disease of women in our time…. The unlucky ones, who do not know it is impersonal, turn it against their men.”
These latter days I feared I might be one of Lessing’s unlucky ones, taking it personally over and over, finding in my husband’s inability to overcome the privileges of millennia and do the fucking dishes evidence of his lack of love and respect for me.
Condemnation of the canceled celebrity affirms the idea that there is some positive celebrity who does not have the stain of the canceled celebrity. The bad celebrity, once again, reinforces the idea of the good celebrity, a thing that doesn’t exist, because celebrities are not agents of morality, they’re reproducible images.
The fact is that our consumption, or lack thereof, of the work is essentially meaningless as an ethical gesture.
We want the asshole to cross the line, to break the rules. We reward that rule-breaking, and then we go a step further, and see it as endemic to art-making itself. We reward and reward this bad behavior until it becomes synonymous with greatness. Not just because the gatekeepers and publishers and studio heads have traditionally been men, but also because we ourselves yearn for plot and action. We yearn for events!
And then we are furious when this eventful asshole commits a crime.
When we ask “what do we do with the art of monstrous men?” we are putting ourselves into a static role—the role of consumer.
Passing the problem on to the consumer is how capitalism works. A series of decisions is made—decisions that are not primarily concerned with ethics—and then the consumer is left to figure out how to respond, how to parse the correct and ethical way to behave.
An autobiography of the audience should be subject to the same rules that govern all memoir, including the rule that the writer of memoir must be onto herself. Which is to say that bad memoir happens when an author is a little in love with herself—when she can’t see her own faults. The same thing could be said of the audience: we think we’re fantastically enlightened, but are we really so much better than the people who came before us?
Even to this day, I feel my interest in a story waning if a pregnancy occurs. And I speak as someone who has loved being a mother—in fact, I even liked being pregnant. But as a reader, a pregnancy makes my heart sink. Pregnancy is the end of narrative. All the doors shut at once. Don’t cut yourself off from options! I want to yell at the pregnant characters in these books.