Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

by Claire Dederer

I wanted to be a virtuous consumer, a demonstrably good feminist, but at the same time I also wanted to be a citizen of the world of art, a person who was the opposite of a philistine. The question, the puzzle, for me was how I might behave correctly, confronted with these twin and seemingly contradictory imperatives. I felt pretty sure the problem was solvable. I just needed to think harder.

This was a very specific way of being an audience—watching something compulsively, as if you could somehow change it or take responsibility for it by keeping your eyes on

Donna Haraway says that objectivity is “a conquering gaze from nowhere”; “an illusion, a god trick.” If objectivity is a god trick, then maybe we can think of subjectivity as a human trick. It’s our job to be humans, not gods.

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.

No one is solely a monster, after all, and Hemingway had complicated relations with wives, friends, children. The fact that they always seemed to end in divorce, estrangement, recriminations, tears doesn’t mean that these relationships weren’t tender and vulnerable.

In The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing says, “That sacred animal the artist justifies everything, everything he does is justified.” Just to be clear, she is not saying this in an approving manner. The genius’s freedom does not concern itself with the care or schedules or feelings of other people. The genius has absolute license. The genius gets to do what he wants. When I tried that, all I ended up with was a drinking problem and a lot of annoyed friends.

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.)

The liberal fantasy of effortless enlightenment simply assumes we’re getting better all the time. But how on earth can we improve unless we listen to people saying what’s wrong?

Memoir is, at its worst, a long howl about one’s own specialness.

If I were more selfish, would my work be better? Should I aspire to greater selfishness? 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.

The erosion of the self that comes with motherhood has been very difficult on every meaningful level—personally and politically. (What a world of pain is contained in those cool words.) But it’s also been the making of me. It’s taught me how to be a person who is for something other than myself. I’m not saying the childless don’t learn that lesson as well—I’m saying that, in my case, it was motherhood that taught it to me.

Larkin shows us the ideal writer’s life: the (male) author whose needs are tended to, whose emotional connections are secondary to his work, whose selfishness is unquestioned, whose freedom is total. I mean, it sounds heavenly, right? From the point of view of a regular well-adjusted member of society, you would think that loneliness would be a serious problem. 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.

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.” No palaver about compromise. More generally he says of writers: “Well, we are ruthless. We’re not nice people. We might be interesting, we might be diverting…but mostly [living with us is] just slog.” And then he goes on to say of his youngest daughter: “She is so furious, indignant, about all this, in a good way—which is the best state for women to be in. If I were a woman I’d be so furious all the time.” Is it pathetic that I’m grateful for his empathy?

When one described working through Thanksgiving and Christmas, I made a note of it. When another described leaving his wife with their child so he could work while they vacationed in Nova Scotia, I said to myself, hmm. It turned out, of course, that they in fact didn’t arrange their lives. That was the essential point. They had someone else, a wife, to do it for them. In the main.

When you finish a book, what lies littered on the ground are small broken things: broken dates, broken promises, broken engagements. Also other, more important forgettings and failures: children’s homework left unchecked, parents left un-telephoned, spousal sex un-had.

When women do what needs to be done in order to write or make art, we sometimes feel like terrible mothers. Oops, slipped into “we.” When I do the writing that needs to be done, I sometimes feel like a terrible mother. And because motherhood is so close to the core of me, I feel like a terrible person. Like a monster.

This is the job of any good novel, or maybe even piece of writing: to reveal felt and lived experience, rather than what you think you ought to feel.

And here in Marfa, away from my family, I was one of them, a person defined not by my care for others, but by my work. Not by my giving, but by my taking—taking time, taking a house, taking financial support. It was a little bit lonely and scary to be that person. If I wasn’t giving, wasn’t useful, would I still be loved? Well, that old question.

Our experience of Plath’s biography is essentially involuntary, and yet there’s a whole area of Plath scholarship that seems largely to consist of smart people telling other smart people to forget about her suicide, and then the other smart people basically saying, “I tried to forget about it and I can’t!”

The misdeed was a biography-ender. A full stop. Redemption was not something that entered my imagination; you messed up and you were out. You were finished. The internet agreed with me. It was waiting for you, with its deathly arms spread wide; once it embraced you, you were dead. So much for second acts in American lives.

To say someone else is consuming improperly implies that there’s a proper way to consume. And that’s not necessarily true.

In his 2009 book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Mark Fisher tries to wake us up to the atmosphere of capital in which we all move—an atmosphere so pervasive that we can barely see it, let alone critique or resist it. We are corralled into the role of atomized, individual consumer, even when we’re not actively buying something. Given the role we inhabit, it’s natural for us to try to solve injustice and inequity through our individual choices. This feels like a great idea, but unfortunately it doesn’t really work. “The problem is that the model of individual responsibility assumed by most versions of ethics” can have “little purchase on the behavior of Capital or corporations.”

Fisher uses the idea of recycling to explain how the consumer is required to be the enforcer and practitioner of ethics. “Everyone is supposed to recycle; no-one, whatever their political persuasion, ought to resist this injunction…. In making recycling the responsibility of ‘everyone’, structure contracts out its responsibility to consumers, by itself receding into invisibility…. Instead of saying that everyone—i.e. every one—is responsible for climate change, we all have to do our bit, it would be better to say that no-one is, and that’s the very problem.”

We attempt to enact morality through using our judgment when we buy stuff, but our judgment doesn’t make us better consumers—it actually makes us more trapped in the spectacle, because we believe we have control over it. What if instead we accepted the falsity of the spectacle altogether? 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 are left with feelings. We are left with love. Our love for the art, a love that illuminates and magnifies our world. We love whether we want to or not—just as the stain happens, whether we want it to or not.

There is not some correct answer. You are not responsible for finding it. Your feeling of responsibility is a shibboleth, a reinforcement of your tragically limited role as a consumer. There is no authority and there should be no authority. You are off the hook. You are inconsistent. You do not need to have a grand unified theory about what to do about Michael Jackson. You are a hypocrite, over and over. You love Annie Hall but you can barely stand to look at a painting by Picasso. You are not responsible for solving this unreconciled contradiction. In fact, you will solve nothing by means of your consumption; the idea that you can is a dead end.

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.

“The beautiful is a social construction. It’s a set of ambient community standards as to what constitutes an appropriate visual configuration. It’s what we’re supposed to like. Beauty is what we like, whether we should or not, what we respond to involuntarily.”

Hickey goes on: “So beauty is not the product of communities. It creates communities. Communities of desire, if you wish.” This is another way to say fandoms. Beauty—our experience of it, rather than our idea of it—is a powerful force, an emotional force.

George Avakian, who signed Davis to Columbia Records, said with great simplicity of his playing: “It was a vulnerable sound.”

The album became a personal totem, woven through the eras of her life. Miles saw her through it all: “The Bohemian Woman Phase. The single again after a decade of married phase. The last time I had a date I was eighteen and oh, god, now I’m thirty phase…. The cool me out quick cause I’m hanging by a thread phase. For this frantic phase, Miles was perfect.” This is just what happens when we fall in love with a piece of art—especially when it comes to music, which tends to become, just as Cleage shows here, epoch-defining in our lives. Jurassic, Cretaceous, Tertiary; Beatles, Dinosaur Jr., Belle and Sebastian.

It was a cold July evening in the north. The kind of night when all my life’s decisions seemed, in retrospect, to have been good ones. They must have been good, to have ended up here, among friends and children. The adults were cooking or drinking, the teenagers were drifting around in a loose clump, a little phone-tranced but basically okay. Or maybe it had nothing to do with my decisions, maybe it was just dumb luck, the luck I was born into.

What do we do with the art of monstrous men? This question is the merest gnat, buzzing around the monolith that is the bigger question: what do we do about the monstrous people we love? We’ve all loved terrible people. How do I know this? Because I know people, and people are terrible. Sam went to the real problem at the heart of everything: the problem of human love. The aesthetic and ethical issues presented by men from Caravaggio to Michael Jackson are a kind of parable for this larger problem.

What do we do about the terrible people in our lives? Mostly we keep loving them.

Families are hard because they are the monsters (and angels, and everything in between) that are foisted upon us. They’re unchosen monsters. How random it all seems, when you really consider it. And yet somehow we mostly end up loving our families anyway. When I was young, I believed in the perfectibility of humans. I believed that the people I loved should be perfect and I should be perfect too. That’s not quite how love works.

maybe I had been a monster too. I thought of this feeling I had, the feeling that I had abandoned my children simply by drinking. My children who still loved me, who loved me no matter what. I was, in a way, more like Fred than like Sam: loved despite my flaws. Unfairly loved. Undeservedly loved. What do we do about the terrible people we love? That question comes with another question nestled inside it: how awful can we be, before people stop loving us?

In her haunting little book Love’s Work, the British philosopher Gillian Rose writes: “In personal life, regardless of any covenant, one party may initiate a fundamental change in the terms of relating without renegotiating them, and further, refusing even to acknowledge the change…. There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy.” That is: Love is not reliant on judgment, but on a decision to set judgment aside. Love is anarchy. Love is chaos. We don’t love the deserving; we love flawed and imperfect human beings, in an emotional logic that belongs to an entirely different weather system than the chilly climate of reason.