How to Read Now

by Elaine Castillo

All this to say, continuing to read Austen’s work does not require the zero-sum feat of intellectual gymnastics that the art-for-art’s-sake gang seems to fear: acknowledging the truth of colonialism and the slave trade in Austen’s era is no vandalizing act of literary deletion, but an act of literary expansion and restoration, not to mention the barest concession to reality (if anything, it’s quite a politically radical reading to argue that race did not exist as a subject of contemplation in Austen’s world; as bizarre as arguing that it does not exist as a subject of contemplation in ours).

misread the Regency era, not to mention the domestic and the political; to have never seen a Wedgwood patch box circa 1800 with a supplicating Black figure in chains illustrated upon it, pleading, “Am I not a man and a brother?” If Austen’s contemporaries could bear storing rouge in these boxes and spooning sugar out of these pots, we can certainly bear talking about the fact that they existed—and what that existence might mean for us.

Being capable of engaging with both Austen’s work and the historical realities of its time period is not a mutually exclusive exercise, but a mutually formative one, the very stuff of being a reader in the first place. To insist otherwise only reinforces the false universalizing of our art that Morrison once called tantamount to a lobotomizing of our art. The people who think that upholding a heavily edited and whitewashed truth about an author’s historical context is the only viable way to truly protect and honor that author’s work, are in fact protecting and honoring something else entirely.

So when the works of authors like Handke, Pinter, Saramago, and Grass are seen and interpreted as dealing with a universally legible and graciously apolitical soulfulness—and resolutely not seen and interpreted as also being the identity-politics-driven work of a specific white milieu—what we’re really offering them is that precious empathy, which white supremacy levies from us every day and never has to name.

But the convenience of the threshold philosophy of storytelling is kindred with the nonpolitical philosophy of storytelling: it’s how a story about a violent white middle-class Austrian gets to be reviewed as a largely existential drama, not also a political one—how Loser’s long history of violence is obscured, and his major crime transmuted into an overarching story about the universal condition of mankind; the literary version of a headline that describes a white rapist as an upstanding athlete.

Let’s say an Austrian writer of color had written Der Chinese des Schmerzes; let’s say Loser had been, in fact, a Chinese man, a classics teacher, not particularly identifying as political, prone to violence in the street, disgruntled with Austria, who kills a man for defacing trees with swastikas. I guarantee you every single review of that book would be about: immigration, political violence, hate crime, discrimination. It would be a different book, sure. But the point is that Der Chinese des Schmerzes itself is already a different book from the Across that Handke’s New York Times readers think they’re reading. The people who are reading Handke’s work assuming it is nonpolitical are simply not reading Handke.

At the Swedish Academy’s press conference for Handke’s Nobel win, Handke addressed the journalists attending the event, who’d asked the author about his history of genocide denial. Handke declared, “My people are readers, not you.” Only someone who believes that readers must necessarily practice the kind of resolutely nonpolitical critical thinking that would absolve and protect him from deeper scrutiny would make this pointed distinction (are journalists not readers?). It’s a tellingly autocratic vision of the relationship between an author and a readership; that we as readers are an author’s people, and that to be someone’s people is to gaze upon them with a blurry, benevolent eye—ever receptive, ever docile.

I’m the last person who would ask us to read less (although I do often think it would serve us to read fewer books, and more slowly, to dispense with a practice of reading that serves as yet another anxious rite to keep cultural FOMO at bay), to remove authors, even ones like Handke, from our shelves—but we have to push back against the idea that engaging with our art in ways that look beyond the aesthetic is a cheapening of our engagement.

When white readers claim to be made uncomfortable—as many I heard from claimed—by the presence of something like untranslated words in fiction, what they’re really saying is: I have always been the expected reader. A reader like this is used to the practice of reading being one that may performatively challenge them, much the way a safari guides a tourist through the “wilderness”—but ultimately always prioritizes their comfort and understanding.

That art should not serve to make us comfortable is such a basic argument I’m loathe to even repeat it. Yet the arguments about the comforts or disruptions of art cannot be held in good faith if we don’t address the fact that a white supremacist reading culture means we are conditioned to accept that some of our work is in fact routinely expected to comfort; that the work of writers of color must often in some way console, educate, provide new definitions, great epiphanies, and, most of all—that buzzword of both the commercial marketplace and political theater—be relevant. Whereas the work of white writers must be free to: offend, transgress, be exempt, be beyond politics, beyond identity—to delight, in other words, in the myriad fruits of its political immunity.

Reparatively critical reading is not meant to be work performed solely by readers and writers of color. But the logic of empathy would have us believe so: it would have us believe that other people tell stories, which are there to make us feel things, the line between the two neatly delineated. The logic of empathy says “I feel your pain”—but the logic of inheritance knows this transaction has always been corrupt at its core. The story I’m telling is not just something for you to feel sympathy for, rage against, be educated by: it’s a story about you, too.

It reminds me that so much of the well-meaning yet intellectually flaccid liberal language around things like “diversity in film and literature” banks heavily on ideas like “giving voice to the voiceless,” a sentiment I’ve always found repugnant and paternalistic. Mita’s art, not to mention her politics—the aliveness of both—has no patience for that sort of white savior torpor, or for the notion that any of the people she puts onscreen have ever been voiceless. The decolonial point here is not to give voice to the voiceless, but to recognize the voices that have always been there—to recognize them, and to honor them.

I’ve personally never been particularly interested in separating the art from the artist, an impulse of exceedingly mild intellectual rigor, which has only ever really served the powerful and protected abusers (we never hear about separating the art from the artist when a writer of color wants her work to be read beyond the autobiographical, for example—people seem very keen to connect the art and the artist in that case—but god forbid someone tell the fuckboy who wants to read you another mediocre love poem that Pablo Neruda freely admitted to raping a Sri Lankan chambermaid during his posting as a diplomat there).

Democracy sometimes reads like a funhouse mirror Eat Pray Love—they are cut from the same still-somewhat-lucrative cloth, wherein white people, very preoccupied with their own melancholy, are adrift in Asia or Africa or Latin America, the exotic background providing just enough texture and detail to make the old operatic agonies novel again. The inevitable redemption arcs are always scaffolded by the one or two noble-hearted natives in the piece, who usually end up dying in the finale, stage left. “Inez also remembered that the only person killed when the grenade exploded in the embassy commissary was an Indonesian driver from the motor pool.” —

This is such a weird, clumsy accusation-as-deflection by a character who, after his wife left him (“packed her huaraches and her shorty night-gowns and her Glenn Miller records and picked up a flight to Travis”), started fucking a teenager (Inez is seventeen when she and Jack begin their affair: “she smelled of beer and popcorn and Nivea cream”) and began to indulge in a little neocolonial war profiteering (“By September of 1952, when Inez Christian left Honolulu for the first of the four years she had agreed to spend studying art history at Sarah Lawrence, Jack Lovett was in Thailand, setting up what later became the Air Asia Operation”). Of course, like most such apologist literary narratives about the romance of divorced adult men wanting to fuck teenagers, the girl in question is preternaturally cool, mature, and self-possessing.

With the haughty vim of a good colonial soldier, Didion writes: “I do not believe that the stories told by lovely hula hands merit extensive study. I have never heard a Hawaiian word, including and perhaps most particularly aloha, which accurately expressed anything I had to say.” Anyone familiar with the travel genre of dissolute white women finding themselves in the tropics will recognize the tone of the following lines: “I am going to find it difficult to tell you precisely how and why Hawaii moves me, touches me, saddens and troubles and engages my imagination, what it is in the air that will linger long after I have forgotten the smell of pikake and pineapple and the way the palms sound in the trade winds.”

Of course, the motivational thrust of the critique more commonly known as the “why doesn’t this white author ever write about people of color” argument has been feeble since the aftermath of Girls, if not Austen; no one wants your Shein haul of Diverse Characters. So it is with an entirely mathematical spirit that I note for you here that, obviously, not once in the essay does Didion concern herself with the history of Hawai‘i as it might be seen by anyone other than this rarified class of pickled whites—least of all native Hawaiians.

The accommodatingly neutral way Didion makes space for the teacher’s neocolonial racism—“I accepted it in the spirit it was offered,” as the woman literally grabs a Chinese girl’s arm and shows her off like a vase—passes just under the wire for what might constitute journalistic neutrality, but is also akin to those taxing moments when white people, always in a demonstration of their vaunted rationality and open-mindedness, try to tell you, very objectively, all about someone else’s racism, the better to deflect from any scrutiny of their own.

None of the other degenerate colonials remember the islands the way she does—the entire essay is essentially a “not like the other girls” argument about which type of rich white settler loves Hawai‘i best (her, of course).

In fact, there is perhaps no description that captures Didion’s work better than to say that it is consummate pick-me writing. Her pitiless, colonially inflected reportage, and the wider misapprehension of Didion’s style as unsentimental (usually dog whistle phrasing for “unfeminine, thank God”) is at the very core of Didion’s cultural popularity and critical approval. When Didion is praised, it’s often in a specific kind of chiaroscuro: she’s not like other women writers. (If I must contribute to the competition: in the drunk-white-colonial-dame-having-hot-sex-in-Asia genre of literature, I prefer Marguerite Duras; in the white-American-woman-excoriating-her-oppressive-aristocratic-background genre of literature, I prefer Edith Wharton.)

Butler’s translation has Autolycus proclaim: “Call the child thus: I am highly displeased with a large number of people in one place and another, both men and women; so name the child ‘Ulysses,’ or the child of anger.” In the most recent translation of The Odyssey, by Emily Wilson—the first woman to translate the epic into English—she translates Homer thus: “Name him this. I am / disliked by many, all across the world, / and I dislike them back. So name the child / ‘Odysseus.’ ” It’s notable that Butler’s colonial-era translation leaves out the implication that Autolycus is not only displeased by the world, but that the world is displeased by him. Wilson’s translation, on the other hand, preserves that nuance.