Bianca Steele

Lemony Snicket on the Midwestern Novel

While I’m hung up writing something about Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, occasionally remembering that I have a couple of months of movies backlogged, including, now, Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, here’s a quote relevant to both of those titles, from Daniel Handler in the New York Times Book Review this past Sunday:

“[C]alling a writer ‘Midwestern’ seems like a way to start up that familiar and imaginary battle between Plain Novels Full of People With Integrity and Dirty Fingernails versus Showoffy Books About People Having Martinis in Penthouses.”

That’s obviously relevant to Franzen, and also to Eugenides, both of whom offer up contrasts between humble men of the Midwest and more sophisticated Easterners, but also to F. Scott Fitzgerald.

(I’ve actually never read any Lemony Snicket.  I guess I should remedy that.)

More on Women Novelists and “Likability”

Commenting on the Messud kerfuffle, Rohan Maitzen points to this article by Meredith Maran.  Maran writes about women she knows, or has heard of, who’ve been asked to revise their novels to make characters more “likable.”  She’s specifically talking about “literary” novels.  This generally means the more sophisticated reaches of the “mainstream,” books that are reviewed in the ordinary books pages of papers like the New York Times, instead of being banished to the one paragraph per book “crime” or “mystery” section (unless they’re best sellers or by seriously big-name authors like Stephen King, in which case they’re promoted to the front page and get extra space).  Some genre writers, notably China Miéville, an English writer of literary-tending science fiction, have argued against the “mainstream” definition itself, on the grounds that “mainstream” is just another kind of genre, like thrillers or “chick lit.”  Be that as it may, in the US, at least, it seems to be the case both that “mainstream” is treated as the default (or “unmarked”) variety of fiction, and also that the dividing line between literary and mainstream is not clear and bright.

Look at two “women’s” books that my mother lent me more than a year ago (neither of which I’ve yet been able to read more than a dozen pages of).  The Help is billed as literary fiction, and clearly has literary aspirations, but I’d call it basically “mainstream.”  The way it plays with point of view and with dialect is unusual for a genre novel, but somehow it seems to be aiming squarely at the middle—if not at “what will sell,” then at least at what by far the majority of people wouldn’t object to—and it seems odd to call that “literary.”  Lisa Scottoline’s non-legal thriller, Look Again, strikes me as a kind of Sue Grafton novel with the focus on an ordinary person, rather than a professional detective; and on her personal journey, rather than on catching whodunit.  It’s very well written, hitting all the creative-writing class marks, making none of the mistakes that are sometimes allowed to true crime or science fiction authors, but it’s clearly a mainstream, almost a genre novel, not highbrow or literary.

Mark McGurl’s The Program Years talks about the rise of the creative writing program in the United States, and the resulting professionalization of the American novelist.  Most working writers in the US today have MFA degrees, and make their living teaching college students to write.  But this means, also, it seems, that all writers—mainstream, as well as literary—are coming out of the same programs, for the most part (the most prestigious programs excepted).  Is it not until after the first novel is accepted and published that it becomes clear whether a writer will be “literary” or “mainstream”?

This seems to be a problem especially for men, because the market for “mainstream” men’s novels isn’t really there to the same extent as the market for women’s novels is.  There are Brooklyn-literary novels, maybe (say, Keith Gessen’s All the Sad Young Literary Men), but it seems difficult to make a career of that.  There are novelists who mark themselves out as “literary” by their style, like Paul Auster or David Foster Wallace.  There are writers who at first might have seemed to mark themselves out for a kind of mainstream men’s market, by apparently masculine subject matter, like Neal Stephenson (who, after his first novel, moved on to science fiction), or Richard Powers (also science fiction), or Bret Easton Ellis (ultra-violence), or Tom Perrotta (who actually does comfortably straddle the line between mainstream and literary, I think).  There’s Jay McInerney, but he seems to be an exception.  Similar writers seem inexorably to be drawn back from the initial celebrity of their youth into a more literary obscurity, like Tobias Wolff, possibly making a pit stop in a different kind of career, as Ethan Canin did.  On the other hand, a Gish Jen, Allegra Goodman, or Mary Gordon can continue publishing novels that earn out their advances by straddling the line between “popular” and “sophisticated”; and a Jennifer Weiner or Kathryn Stockett can publish blockbusters (which also might happen to get decent reviews in places like the Times) by appealing to the extremely large market for classy women’s novels.

But it’s a problem for women, too, that the line between mainstream and literary is so ill-defined.  Women novelists, like those Maran cites, presumably face pressure to become more mainstream, in order to find a market.  If a few changes, here and there, can double or triple the number of readers a book might find, why would a publisher not want to make them?  There are very few young female writers I can think of who seem likely to have their manuscripts read as aspiring to literariness (which, in any case, can be a matter of prestige more than sales).  Someone like Vendela Vida or Heidi Julavits can rely on her association with an established literary circle (in their case, around Dave Eggers and The Believer).  There are probably some women who can gain a reputation within their grad school programs for being literary.  Other than that—especially if they have no interest in science fiction type themes or in postmodern stylistic tricks (or in the kind of intellectuality displayed by, say, A.S. Byatt, who wrote her first novel as an imagined encounter between D.H. Lawrence and F.R. Leavis, and who in any event is British)—I don’t know what space there is for a first “literary” novel by a woman, unless it really tries hard to also appeal to a more “mainstream” market.

Silly Novels Interviews by Lady Novelists, by George Eliot Katie Roiphe

Claire Messud’s latest novel, The Woman Upstairs sounds interesting, certainly more so than her previous one, The Emperor’s Children (oh no, another novel about young people obsessed with David Foster Wallace!).  The title makes me think of Hilary Mantel’s early novel, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, which is one of my favorites, an Orwellian gaslight mystery set behind the walls of purdah, but it could also fit well into my next “Boston-area novels” series, if there ever is one.  But on the Internet, there’s been much brouhaha over the interview Messud did with Publisher’s Weekly, part of which, presumably edited down from something a bit longer, they published online.  As the interview presented, the interviewer, a woman, asks Messud, “What are we to make of Nora Eldridge, [the protagonist]?  Because she is angry, really angry.”  Messud answers at length, talking about the kind of novel she intended to write.  The follow-up question is, “I wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you?”  To this, Messud replies, in essence, that the question is a mistaken one.

Writing a brief piece in Salon, David Daley characterizes Messud’s response as a statement that the interviewer’s question was sexist.  Let’s leave aside the definition of “sexist.”  Obviously what is meant is that the question wouldn’t have been asked of a male novelist, and that it’s wrong to have different standards for women and for men.  Messud alludes to this question herself, earlier in the interview: she explicitly says that she had decided she wanted to see a book about a woman who has characteristics she only sees in novels (which she thinks are very good, and in fact loves) that are written by men about men.  In other words, she recognizes that there’s a kind of novel that’s generally written only by men.  She also explains that she doesn’t believe that fact equates to a prescription that has to apply to her.

At this point in the interview (as it was published), the interviewer suggested that she thinks characters in fiction ought to be likable, and that Messud’s character isn’t.  Messud responded by objecting to the question.  She listed, again, some of the same novels she’d mentioned earlier: those she’d already identified as the kind only men, and not women, are thought to be able to write.  There are two ways of taking this.  First, she could be saying, “Surely you think Sabbath’s Theater is great?  Then why do you criticize me?  It must be because I'm a woman.”  Or, she could be saying, “You must think Sabbath's Theater is bad, too, and it isn't.”  I think it’s more likely she intended to say the second of those, which is a common enough sentiment.  But it was actually Messud who’d brought up the question of gender in the first place, and it’s not that surprising if people took her to be saying the first.

But then Katie Roiphe chimed in, linking to Daley’s piece.  Where Daley had mildly noted that Messud implicitly criticized the reviewer’s question for being sexist (Daley mentions Laura Miller’s review of the novel in his own publication, though he doesn’t link to it[1]), Katie Roiphe attacks Messud for implicitly criticizing the reviewer’s question for being sexist.  It’s worth noting that Roiphe doesn’t only attack Messud for the accusation of sexism, Roiphe actually goes on to attack Messud for being insubordinate towards the interviewer.

([1] For that matter, it’s odd that Slate has a column called “Double X,” which is written by Roiphe, and a blog called “XX Factor,” which is written by a slate of four women.)

And as is usual for Roiphe, she gives a whole pseudo-Freudian explication of why Messud might do that and why it’s wrong.  What she says about Claire Messud is, in short, this: that she displays a “tendency to blame the world for a blanket, raging sexism that only partly exists,” that she unfairly “devour[s] her interviewer with her superior, more sophisticated literary approach,” that she throws a tantrum at the injustice of being subjected by a journalist to “indignities, like being asked if you would be friends with your character.”  This is vaguely less insufferable, actually, than Roiphe’s columns so often are.  Here, at least, she’s attributing to Messud attitudes that other writers have laid claim to, in similar situations.  She simply describes those attitudes in a one-sided way that makes them and Messud all look like whiny adolescents—that misunderstands the situation entirely (as if the idea that novelists might know more about literature than book-journalists do, for instance, was entirely novel)—and sets Roiphe up, if only for the amount of time it takes the reader to finish her column, as a voice of reason, almost as a saint.  No one will ever blame Katie Roiphe for seeing sexism where it doesn’t exist, especially if she accuses every other woman of that failing first (though you’d think she’d already secured herself on that point by now).  The most infuriating among Roiphe’s columns, at least for me, are those where she attacks women she simply doesn’t like, for some reason she doesn’t bother to articulate, but has something to do with some domestic task they do and she doesn’t herself think is necessary.  Then, she tars them with the “probably a man-hating feminist” brush, not to mention the (I am not making this up) “probably watches TV with her husband instead of having sex with him, which is a thing I’d never do” brush.  This one is just barely normal enough that many readers, following the link from other mentions of the column, won’t know why Roiphe’s name arouses such outrage.

The really bizarre thing in this case is that Roiphe goes on to give Messud publishing advice.  I suppose what’s going through her mind is, “She’s a writer (a little like me), I have a newspaper column, maybe she would like to someday have a newspaper column, so I’ll tell her what she would need to change if she’d like someday to be me.”  And the advice that Roiphe gives Messud, who’s just published her fifth novel (and is two years older than Roiphe is), is based on Roiphe’s experience with her first book of nonfiction, which she published when she was twenty-five.  Roiphe made such and such mistakes, she says, she learned some lessons in such and such a way, and made such and such changes, and she’s sure Messud can profit from making exactly the same changes.  What it comes across as, however—at best—is tribalistic defense of a journalist (the Publishers’ Weekly interviewer) against a perceived attack from an outsider.

Scott Esposito and D.G. Myers have literary responses to the fracas.  Myers’ is colored by the fact that he habitually defends exactly the kind of novel Messud would seem to be defending in the interview, as here, in a discussion of Roth’s The Human Stain, which happens to be just about at the point in Roth’s career where I started questioning my ability to go along with what he seemed to be up to. -via  For that matter, so does Mr. Claire Messud, James “hysterical realism” Wood.

A Blast from the Past, To Cure Grumpiness

I’ve been in a bad mood for a little over a week.  I think it’s because I’ve still got a copy of Backlash in the house.  Every so often I feel compelled to give it another chance.  I pick it up and flip through it.  Oh, the Republican Party decided it wasn’t so much in favor of abortion rights, equal rights and equal pay for women, or NOW, after all.  I can see how that would be disappointing, especially since it made future legislation more difficult.  But is that evidence that US culture is now “backlash culture,” really?  Or: Oh, in the late 1980s there were very few woman attorneys.  But is that evidence that the number of woman attorneys was actually not increasing, or that by 2000 or 2010 we could still expect to see almost no more women working as attorneys than we saw in 1970?  Or: Oh, here are a small handful of self-help books, summarized at length, that tell women how to attract men who want to marry them; and the writers think being a feminist or speaking your mind won’t do it.  But are they so very different from the self-help books of any other decade?  Are they even typical of the 1980s?  Are they evidence that the feminist-inclined young woman of the 1980s is internally conflicted, demonstrating by her actions and beliefs that she’s under pressure to be less independent and more childlike than she feels is right?  And what’s this “feminist psychotherapy” that the author keeps mentioning but doesn't specify?  And: Why does she mention Moonlighting to talk about media coverage of on-set politics between the director and the stars, but doesn’t discuss the show itself, when (though it was awfully entertaining) it would be a better example of backlash culture than any she’s included?  And how could anyone draw political conclusions from the data point, “male fashion designers aren’t very sympathetic to feminist ideas about fashion”?

Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system . . .  I’ll just mention that the second time I picked the book up, someone had said I should read it again, suggesting that there would be some payoff if I read it as evidence for a Marxian or quasi-Hegelian narrative.  And I’ll just say that I tried all the permutations, but none of them worked for me.

I’ve also been grumpy about the bombings at the Marathon.  I live a couple of miles from the marathon route, a couple more miles from the starting line, and like a lot of writers from Hopkinton, where the race starts, it feels irrationally like it hit especially close to home.  Friday seemed quiet, though there couldn’t have been that much of a drop-off in commuter traffic, and apparently traffic on the main roads was still pretty heavy.  Ungraciously, it occurred to me that if Boston and Newton weren’t opened up, people would have to come here to Framingham if they wanted a semblance of night life, and it would be even harder to drive anywhere or get a restaurant table.  And as with the Newtown shootings, and the rape case from India right after it, I haven’t been able to put on NPR the way I like do at lunchtime.

So here are two clips of dances by Mark Morris.  The first, “Dad’s Charts,” is of a solo performance by the choreographer from 1980.  The second, from the Met production of John Adams’ opera Nixon in China, is “The Red Detachment of Women.”  Both are pretty cool.

Excursions Into Film History (March Films): Mean Streets

It’s a little hard for me to see, forty years after the fact, the importance of Mean Streets.  It was Martin Scorsese’s first major outing as a writer and director, and marks his appearance as a major star—he was recognized as such almost immediately.  From a film-historical point of view, Mean Streets illustrates several of what would become Scorsese’s hallmarks: the long tracking shots, the director’s cameos, the preoccupation with, well, mean streets.  It’s a terrific opportunity to see a very, very young Robert De Niro, and an equally young and callow Harvey Keitel.

But why has this movie been so loved, when an arguably “deeper” film like Papillon (released the same year) was so much less well received?  Mean Streets is by no means a really arty film, and it doesn’t draw on European or avant-garde from preceding decades.  I think I can detect, in the voiceover that accompanies the trailer for Mean Streets, a note of incredulity, almost asking whether this film really needed to be made, whether these kind of people really needed the validation of appearing in the place of heroes.

It is a very ordinary story, about a couple of ordinary guys.  They’re kind of doofuses, really, wandering around the streets at all hours of the night, drinking, overturning trash barrels, fistfighting, and generally acting as if they were twelve.  Charlie would like to own a restaurant, but right now he works for his uncle as a collector, taking protection money from other restaurant owners.  Johnny is still a ne’er-do-well.  They have two friends their own age, a bar owner and small-time loan shark.  They hang out in their friend’s bar and deal with the issues that walk in: Johnny’s debts and his inability to keep appointments, another friend’s trouble collecting on a bet with a bookmaker across town, an interloper in the bar who murders another customer.

Charlie’s uncle disapproves of Johnny and wants his nephew to have nothing to do with him or his family.  But their friendship dates to their childhood, and Charlie is loyal.  Plus, he's having a secret affairn with Johnny’s cousin.  She has epilepsy.  Charlie’s uncle believes this means she’s mentally ill, and there’s no way he’ll ever approve.  So the affair has to remain as secret as the fact that Charlie has been backing Johnny’s debts.

The film depicts contemporary New York, but it was based on Scorsese’s own experiences there, more than ten years earlier.  This may account for the uncertainty with which the social changes of the 1960s and early 1970s are depicted.  With a couple of prominent exceptions, the kids’ wardrobes could have been taken from a production of Guys and Dolls, and so could a lot of their dialogue.  Blacks, Jews, and hippies are nowhere to be seen (UPDATE: except in the form of Jewish hippie chicks looking for fun).  A couple of kids from the outer boroughs, or maybe Jersey, come by, looking for drugs, and outsmart Charlie’s two friends to the extent of getting ripped off for less than they were in store for.  There’s a crowd in the plaza outside of the church, for the Feast of San Gennaro, and presumably a lot of these people are tourists—the crowd gives a sense of the outside world pressing in on the Lower East Side tenement slum, trying to get a little for themselves of what it has to offer, maybe in a little while threatening to push out the kids who’d made their home there—but there’s not much sense that these kids perceive the gentrification of the Village as a threat to them or their way of life.  A rich guy wanders into their local bar, a gay man’s brought in one night by the gay bartender, but these threats are easily warded off by the combined bullishness of the guys the neighborhood belongs to.

The only threat they can’t ward off comes from within.  One of their own (Johnny) is a loser.  He keeps engaging in business transactions, asking his friends repeatedly to vouch for him, when he has no intention or ability to make good on those debts.  Charlie is his best friend and is drawn—at first by loyalty—to stand by his side.  Eventually, Johnny finds the means to blackmail Charlie.  He threatens to ruin his standing with the uncle who’s staking him, and ruin his prospects of owning a restaurant.

Charlie is on the verge of making it.  He’s about to get his restaurant—his uncle took it after the owner couldn’t make payments any longer.  He’s got a new wardrobe of crisp blue suits, white shirts, and red power ties, bought by his mother.   But when Johnny blackmails him, he doesn’t know what to do.  He drives around aimlessly and the two of them both end up dead, bleeding in the street.

The gunman is played by the director, riding around in the back seat of a loan shark’s car.  There are elements that lend this story more gravitas than you’d get in a simple story of what life is like on the mean streets of an ethnic slum.  Charlie sacrifices himself for his friend, for loyalty—in effect, to protect the people he grew up among—and the idea that he’s just thoughtful enough to do it consciously has been played up throughout the film.  He’s preoccupied with religion.  He insists that he believes a priest who, at a retreat, tells the same story about his personal experience, with a couple punished for having premarital sex, as another priest tells on another occasion.  He insists he still has faith despite the teasing of his friends.  He regularly wakes up in the morning, preoccupied by thoughts of sin and his inability to properly repent.

The very beginning of the movie benefits greatly from religious imagery, with Charlie in a church, lighting a candle—experimenting with feeling, for himself, the pain of being burned—and contemplating religious paintings—which the filmgoer sees from Charlie’s perspective.  Here are the kind of lush visuals we later came to expect from Scorsese.  The next scene introduces the Scorsese tracking shot, following Charlie from a point just behind his back, as he glides around his friend’s bar.  The silhouette of Harvey Keitel’s back remains motionless, centered on the screen, as the character’s surroundings move around and past him.  The shot suggests the character’s cool, his self-absorption, his local importance, and also intoxication: we’ll see a similar shot later, in a scene that ends with Charlie passed out in the storeroom.  But the attention to visual style isn’t carried through consistently, and later scenes are reminiscent of TV cop shows.

So Mean Streets appears to be two different films.  On the one hand, it’s an expose of life in the slums, where the bad kids are heading for an early grave, and the good kids are too often pulled down by their own good intentions.  On the other, it’s a sensitive meditation on friendship, community, religion, and self-sacrifice.  I don’t think the two themes are particularly well integrated.  Also, the movie is kind of long, and the lion’s share of it holds together poorly.  There’s not much to like about the characters (and I say this as someone who found something to like in the characters in Less Than Zero).  But as a first attempt, it’s admirable.  See it to see where Scorsese started out, to see De Niro and Keitel near the beginnings of their careers, and what was considered a “celebrated” film in a year in which The Sting, The Exorcist, and American Graffiti all took home awards.

Faludi’s Backlash contra Carol Gilligan and Difference Feminism

In the comments section of Crooked Timber, in which I mentioned Susan Faludi’s Backlash (first published in 1991), Corey Robin (whose book I really liked) accuses me of talking about a book I’ve only skimmed.  That isn’t true, but I’m not going to argue with him on his blog about the way he teaches the book (though I think it might be useful to raise the question why a partisan contribution to a political debate that’s still going on should be treated as canonical history).

So I borrowed the book from the library for the third time and sat down with it.  Why?  Do I feel guilty for opining on a book I haven’t formed a proper opinion on yet?  No.  Am I going to finish it this time?  Probably not.  But I’m still too annoyed to put it down.  On the one hand, there’s no way in heaven or hell I’m going to be able to read this book without whining in writing about how annoying it is.  On the other hand, if it’s so easy to criticize that I have to ask myself why in the world it was published, why would I want to bother reading it at all?  But having a blog means that whining in my private notes can be transformed into something that seems almost but not quite like useful activity.  Even if nobody actually reads it.

So: one thing, at least, even if the rest of it stays in my scratch files:

(Okay, I feel bad now, because I saw that today is Susan Faludi’s birthday.  Happy Birthday!  But I’m supposed to write a thousand words and then sit on them for twenty-four hours?)

In the couple of hours I spent with the book yesterday, I was intrigued by Faludi’s treatment of Carol Gilligan and her book In a Different Voice [1].  There’s more about this discussion a little farther down, but I wanted to note a paragraph from a review of Backlash, by Jean Bethke Elshtain, in the conservative Catholic magazine, First Things:

“When I was an undergraduate in the 1960s out in the Western provinces (Colorado, it was), my instructors (Democrats to a man, no women in what was called the History and Government Department at Colorado State University in those benighted times) not only encouraged me to make the most of myself, they taught me that conspiracy theory was the hobgoblin of little minds, like those of the local John Birchers. We studied one of their texts in a Government course, unpacking the way the author crossed every t and dotted every i with his overriding paranoid theory, if it may be called that, that the Communists and their dupes ran everything, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. He had lots of facts too. It all made sense—if you shared the initial paranoid starting point. We mocked this stuff and marveled that anyone could believe it. The Birchers were pretty much defeated by this sort of humorous dismissal, as was a local group that launched a campaign against the Beatles as the instruments of Satan.”

In most of the public libraries where I’ve lived since I graduated from college, Elshtain’s books have been shelved under “feminism.”  She is a person whom Backlash does not mention.

The third section of Backlash lists a string of anti-feminist figures of the 1980s, ending with right-wing feminist Sylvia Ann Hewlett (Faludi calls her a “neofeminist”), Second Wave feminist pioneer Betty Friedan, and psychologist Carol Gilligan.  What are Friedan and Gilligan doing there?  Friedan wasn’t willing to give up the idea of traditional femininity that some of her younger colleagues in the movement wanted to reject.  Faludi accuses her of being unaware that her rhetoric is borrowed from the right; and of thinking, or at least writing, in such a muddled way that it’s impossible to tell what she really believes. 

As for Gilligan, on close inspection, the chapter is actually in praise of her.  Faludi begins the discussion by attacking difference feminism, after correctly noting that it was the preferred stance of feminist academics and theorists throughout the 1980s.  She goes on, also largely correctly, to introduce Gilligan as a participant in that same school.  She incorrectly claims that those who championed “difference” tended not to care about equality.  Then she moves on to the media discussion of Gilligan’s work.  At this point, the argument shifts to an attack on the media for taking Gilligan up as an example of their preferred narrative.  For several pages, Faludi discusses Carol Gilligan’s own statements, in which she attempted to show that the broad narrative painted by the media wasn’t an accurate representation of  her work, and a critique by another scholar, pointing out flaws in Gilligan’s research.  (This section could serve as a good illustration of some of the flaws introduced by Faludi’s writing style, which uses the journalistic, faux-objective, non-voice “voice,” in which the point of view and even apparent argument meanders from here to there and back again, following the train of thought of each major source, in turn.)  She concludes that Gilligan’s work is very important, and largely correct, but doesn’t actually make the claims most people (misled by the media) believe it does, and (as shown by Zella Luria’s scholarly critique) properly understood, only makes very modest claims in the first place.

So this chapter, like the rest of the book, is an attack on the mass media for promoting anti-feminism.  It’s not an attack on Carol Gilligan or her work.  It is an attack, also, on difference feminism.  But Gilligan, the only scholar Faludi actually discusses [2], is not (as Faludi argues) a difference feminist[3], and so her work is not part of difference feminism, and so she’s fine.  She’s a victim of the media[4].  It remains unclear why Gilligan was included in the list of horribles at all.  Why not describe a more typical member of the difference-feminist crowd?  Perhaps it’s only because Faludi wanted to write a book about the state of media coverage of feminism in the late 1980s, and Carol Gilligan had gotten a lot of press.

Is it also an attack on difference feminism?  It’s hard to say.  By the end of the chapter (save for a cryptic reference to the feminist scholarly journal, Signs), the reader has forgotten that “feminist scholarship conferences [were] awash in papers on women’s special virtues [emphasis added].”  We’re back to an attack on the media, and the media’s putative invention of an anti-feminist narrative, and an unnuanced defense of “feminism” with no apparent effort to investigate what people mean by the word.  In 1991, to be sure, it could seem unclear whether difference feminism would be a flash in the pan, or whether it would endure.  I’ve never been an enormous fan of it myself.  But it seems unseemly to attack it in the same breath as Hayes Tim and Beverly LaHaye[5].  (Here, as in other places in the book, I imagine I hear Camille Paglia off in the wings, waiting for her cue.)

Moreover, there’s that huge nugget of cultural criticism clogging up the lion’s share of the book.  A commenter at CT pointed out, helpfully, that criticizing popular culture is not, by any means, the only thing Faludi does in Backlash.  But actually doing the math shows that the popular culture section makes up a whopping one-third of a nearly 500-page book.  It comes as the second section of the book, and the first substantial section, following the kind of historical survey that you might find in an academic book, and that many readers will presumably skip.  And much of it consists of the kind of movie and television criticism that is very, very closely affiliated with difference-feminist ideas.  In other words, a difference feminist would agree with what Faludi says in this section.  A difference feminist, talking to another feminist and finding that she disagrees with Faludi’s criticism of the shows she discusses, would point to theories and writings from difference feminism in support of her own views.

I’m not saying that Faludi is arguing in bad faith in either one of those sections.  Here, she appears to be in agreement with what, say, a Second Wave feminist might say: both that difference feminism is wrong and actually anti-feminist, and that those movie and television critiques are actually correct.  Feminism in the 1980s and 1990s was fraught and tangled.  But, also, this puts Faludi in much the same position as Friedan.  Whom she attacked as on a par with Allan Bloom, George Gilder, and Phyllis Schlafly.  Why were these writers included in this book in this way?  And now the reader is back at the beginning again.

 

[1] I look forward to returning this to the library, so my four year old will stop trying to convince me that it’s a book about animals.  Because people don’t have different voices.

[2] She mentions three other books, including Suzanne Gordon’s Prisoners of Men’s Dreams, in introducing the topic, by way of demonstrating that bookstores and publishers were marketing a “difference” narrative.

[3] For what it’s worth, Google Search completion begs to differ.

[4] Says Faludi, who writes for the Wall Street Journal.

[5] Who appear in the index under the name Tim Lataye.

O Brave New World

Four times a year, Phi Beta Kappa puts out a newsletter, the Key Reporter, with capsule book reviews, an essay or two, maybe the text of a speech at a PBK event.  For the past few years, the Key Reporter has been getting smaller, as the cost of postage rises, presumably, and it's now only printed and mailed two times a year, with all the issues available in PDF format online.

As of this issue, though, the Key Reporter consists of a pamplet, about 5"x8".  Instead of articles, it prints blurbs promoting the articles, and those square barcodes so you can read the whole thing on your device.

April Movies Already: Papillon

I just saw Papillon (1973), and I have a lot to say, and it’s already written, so I’m going to post on it now.

March movies, still coming up, will include From To Rome with Love, Mean Streets (also 1973), Rock of Ages, and Friends with Benefits.

Papillon is a prison-break movie starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman.  (Cameos or small roles are taken by Vic Tayback, Bill Mumy, Victor Jory, Gregory Sierra, and Don Gordon.)  McQueen plays “Papillon,” a thief who claims that he was framed for murder.  Hoffman is Dega, the perpetrator of a counterfeit war bond scheme.  Both have been sentenced to prison labor in the West Indies, after which sentence they’ll become indentured laborers, and after which time they’ll be free, to live in French Guiana though not to return to France.  Papillon is a thug who promises to protect Dega in return for cash, to pay for bribes and boats, in what any filmgoer will recognize, way before the fact, are entirely futile attempts to escape.

I realized while watching this movie that it’s an important movie.  It’s aware of its place in the history of cinema and the history of its own times, and it moves both forward.  In this film by a director of the pre-film school era, when this kind of intertextualism would really take off, there are allusions to Kubrick flicks like A Clockwork Orange and 2001 (even, it seemed, to The Shining, which didn’t appear until 1980!), to The Ten Commandments, even to Kafka and Waiting for Godot.  (There’s something of interest for fans of A.S. Byatt’s novella “Morpho Eugenia,” too.)  The cinematography morphs from straight war- or prison-movie grunge at the beginning, to a groovy Technicolor dream by the end.  I assume that it is, in large part, the screenplay, co-written by Dalton Trumbo and Lorenzo Semple, Jr., from the popular memoir of an escaped French prisoner, that makes the movie so interesting—though, as I suggested above, the direction, by Franklin J. Schaffner, who’d recently done the Coppola-scripted Patton and earlier in his career directed high-middlebrow drama series for television, makes a contribution, too. 

Moreover, I can easily see this style of writing potentially having been influential among much younger artists who saw Papillon at an impressionable age.  For me, knowing who the writer is affects how I interpret the work.  To the extent that Dalton Trumbo’s Papillon is an allegory of the Vietnam War, for example, it’s not a personal expression of the emotions felt by an American grunt, filtered through the elements of art.  Rather, it’s an explanation by an older man of the universal elements of the Vietnam experience, perhaps for the benefit of a younger one.  Similarly, it interests me to know that the end of the film, after fourteen years have passed, and Dega and Papillon are old friends, hanging out together and making plans mostly because there’s nothing else to do, is the work of a man who’s fifty-three years old; where it seems to be a comment on the ending of 2001, it interests me to know that Kubrick was only forty when that film was produced.  I’m not sure the writing here makes a good role model for younger writers and filmmakers (at least for those who aren’t themselves Communists, as Trumbo had been, making his view of life informed by a very specific set of circumstances and institutions, like his understanding of art).  But it is what was being done at the time, and it could serve as a useful example of how to meld deep themes and larger concerns with the elements of a straightforward entertainment.

On the minus side, about halfway through the film, there are obvious visual elements of what’s still recognizable as a kind of Prisoner theme.  Unfortunately, I’m just about the right age that this hits me like bell bottoms, horizontally-striped velour tops, denim short-shorts on men, and long sideburns and love beads on middle-aged men with pot bellies.  Out of this world movies or TV shows are fine, but way-out stuff in straight media, just as a pretense of being “cool,” is somehow not.  At this point, I began asking myself whether this was a very different kind of movie from what I had expected, or whether the director had become caught up in a trend and lost control of the film.  But I can’t actually say it’s done badly.  At a couple of other moments, similar problems threaten to rear their head—for instance, where the story of two men trying to do a difficult job (wrestle an alligator) becomes, apparently inadvertently, comic—and it’s to the movie’s credit that I wondered whether a more serious theme had always been inherent in those Abbott and Costello movies, not whether the filmmakers had suffered a lapse in taste.

In fact, critical opinion in 1973 was pretty much negative on this film.  Roger Ebert panned it.  Victor Vincent Canby, of the Times, was respectful but ultimately couldn’t buy it all.  More recently, bloggers and younger critics seem divided.  Steve McQueen’s performance here is referred to as his best.  (Dustin Hoffman’s is described as a rehash of his Ratso Rizzo from Midnight Cowboy, with some justice.)  Film buffs and film students seem to like it, while many others don’t.

What nails this film’s importance, for me, in fact, is just that nearly everybody today who sees it knows, instantly, what the theme is, the subtext.  Yet this is not, and never was, what the film is “about.”  You could argue that this blatancy doesn’t actually make the film good, that even at the time it was obvious that Papillon was trafficking in clichés, that at best the movie is of historical importance, as illustrating one of the many ways a common preoccupation of the early 1970s could have been interpreted.  The bait-and-switch that allows viewers to think they’re watching a prison escape movie with traditional overtones that might appeal to older veterans, then jolts them with a new-wave-y second half of dubious continuity, could be viewed as artful . . . or not.  I think it’s the viewer’s choice, here.  If Papillon were a novel, we could call it “postmodern,” but it doesn’t feel like the right label in this case.  Would we think the film was better if it did?

UPDATE: Kael's blurb for Papillon, in 1001 Nights at the Movies, is diametrically wrong in just the right way to explain why Ebert is (somewhat more mildly) wrong.  Reinforcing my feeling that the contemporary critics got this one wrong.

Don't Leave Your Laptop on Your Bed

Half of Framingham State’s new dorm sustained severe water damage after a fire that started when a student left a laptop on, sitting on top of a comforter.

Kate Mosse’s Labyrinth

I’ve mentioned a few times that I was planning a blog post on women’s Templar novels.  I’ve never got around to it; I have too much material to boil it down, and my feelings about these books are complex.  But while poking around the Internet, trying to decide whether to start that post or not, I discovered first, that there’s a new one, available in the UK and Canada but not in a US edition as yet (Guardian review here), and second, that there’s a miniseries playing right now on the BBC’s Channel 4 of Kate Mosse’s novel, Labyrinth (Guardian review here, trailer here).  Mosse’s first two novels in what’s now a trilogy, Labyrinth and The Winter Ghosts, and her other novel (of the three currently available in the US), Sepulchre, were the “women’s Templar novels” I was planning to write about.

Labyrinth is a big book, and it will tell you a good deal about it to say that, though it appeared nearly simultaneously with The Da Vinci Code, it was accused of copying from it.  Mosse’s books are much less ridiculous than Dan Brown’s are, however (though if you’re used to reading this kind of silly, conspiracy-oriented pseudo-historical romance, quite possibly you might not have seen Brown’s books as all that far from the normal).  The historical plot concerns the Albigensian Crusade in the Languedoc region of France, in the Pyrenées, and the preservation of a mystical secret through the joint actions of two religious sects, a kind of enlightened fraternity stemming from the Near East, and the adherents of Catharism, a break-off Christian sect being persecuted by the Parisian authorities in alliance with the Roman Catholic church.  The present-day plot concerns an amateur archeologist who, after finding a secret and keeping it illicitly, in following it up discovers tremendous truths about herself and the world.

The Winter Ghosts is more concise and ordinarily literary, less of a genre blockbuster.  The protagonist is a young man who’s trying to find his way, a recent veteran of the First World War, who suddenly and mysteriously experiences the past history of a woman persecuted in a similar crusade, also in the Languedoc region.  Again, the experience of confronting the past allows him to move forward in the present.

The books are appealing and disconcerting at the same time.  In the miniseries, John Hurt plays a peculiar, mystical figure whom the present-day young woman consults to learn more about the artifact she’s found.  Hurt is just the right type for this character, but I have to assume something is going to be lost from the book.  His character, in the novel, was by far the most interesting of all of them, and there’s just no way all his dialogue is going to be transferred to the screen fully and accurately.

Easily Amused

If you’ve ever taught a small child to play “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on the piano, you may have discovered that the notes for “Mary” are the same notes the name is sung to in Nirvana’s “All Apologies” (sing, over and over again, and slowly, “Ma-ry,” and it becomes obvious).

Also, “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” and “The Bear Went Over the Mountain” are the same melody, but you probably already knew that.  Also “Simple Simon” and “Yankee Doodle.”

If you’ve ever taught a small child to play “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on the piano, you may have discovered that the notes for “Mary” are the same notes the name is sung to in Nirvana’s “All Apologies” (sing, over and over again, and slowly, “Ma-ry,” and it becomes obvious).

Also, For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow and The Bear Went Over the Mountain are the same melody.

More Administrivia: Interesting Yet Inexplicable

Well.  In the two days since I put up that last post, traffic has been very significantly higher than usual.  Is there a connection between the two events?

Between 9:00 and 10:00 this morning, there were nine clicks on what’s by far my most popular post, the one on Ray Bradbury’s story, “All Summer in a Day.”  Yesterday there were at least a dozen clicks on the same post (as well as several on other posts—thanks!).  This story is apparently taught to middle school students in US-run schools all over the world, so that’s not so surprising, and based on TypePad stats (assuming these are accurate) I get references from search engines in a wide range of different countries.  It’s also not unusual for the Bradbury post to get several extra clicks (statistically speaking) apparently through search engines, right after I put up a new post on a different topic, while the new post gets one or two or none—though I haven’t done a real analysis and this might be an observer effect.  Eight downloads in less than five minutes, from the same Google search, is a little odd, though.  What could I attribute it to?  Who would click on the same old post several times, as a result of the appearance of a different post?  Why?  Is there a connection between my discussion about traffic and the generation of extra traffic?  How could that be, when as far as I know, nobody read that discussion?  It’s probably a coincidence.

Administrivia: RSS Feeds and Blog Traffic

This blog gets an average of between five and 10 clicks a day.  The number goes up occasionally, when someone clicks around the blog a while and looks at different pages or at the archive, or when I post a comment to a different and more popular blog on a broadly appealing topic like science fiction.  It goes down during universities’ winter break and during the summer, and then eventually increases again throughout September and into October.  Traffic seems to have increased slightly since I started the blog, nearly four and a half years ago.

Those statistics come from TypePad’s basic statistics function, which tells me what pages people viewed, what other page linked to those pages (if any: usually this is Google Reader, a search engine, or a comment thread  on a more popular blog), and at what time.  It doesn’t tell me the IP addresses of the people who clicked, or how long they continued looking at the page.  I could install Google Analytics and get some more information, but I’ve never gotten around to it.  I’d have to set up an account with them, I think, and poke around to see how to use the tool, and from what I’ve seen, Google Analytics can slow web page loading.

I also use FeedBurner.  A couple of years ago, I switched the link at the side of the blog to allow the RSS feed to go through FeedBurner, instead of using the feed supplied by TypePad directly.  FeedBurner has some additional stats, which have also gone up very slightly over time.  Right now, it reports between 35 and 40 subscribers using RSS readers, plus between 15 and 25 subscribers using browsers.  The split between different applications varies, and it seems unlikely that anyone is switching back and forth between Firefox and Chrome from one day to the next, so it seems reasonable to conclude that the numbers are slightly higher than that.  There’s also a smattering of spiders and search engine builders.  Anyone who gets at the feed before it goes through FeedBurner isn't collected in those numbers (as far as I know, there's no way to get that kind of data, the people subscribing to and reading a raw RSS feed, much less their identifying data).  And it's possible that there are ways of reading the blog that bypass all these statistics-gathering mechanisms entirely, which I'd learn about if I really researched how to build and promote a blog, but which I don't know about, so conceivably a handful more.  Sixty people on the entire World Wide Web who are looking at the blog isn’t really a lot, but as an increase from thirty a year ago, on a blog that’s really only a hobby (or at most an experiment), it’s mildly satisfying.

BUT.  Experimenting with releasing only excerpts on my RSS feed has had exactly ZERO effect on the numbers above.  (I’m currently releasing only excerpts, but I’ve switched this back and forth a few times.)  This means either that nobody is actually reading the posts, or that there’s a way to get around the excerpts-only mechanism.  As a matter of fact, from fooling around with a family member’s iPod Touch, I seem to remember, Google Reader (which made the blog much more readable than the default browser settings did) displayed the entire post without going into a separate browser app, regardless of the “excerpts” setting.  And it occurs to me that everyone one of those subscribers could all be scripts, for all I know.  There may be ways to figure out how best to use these features and how to distinguish between different users’ ways of accessing them, but finding those ways turns out to exceed the available Quality Assurance/Systems Engineering budget and personnel schedule.

MOREOVER.  For a while the number of subscribers to this blog used to go up dramatically, to judge from FeedBurner’s stats, the day after I put up a new post, though it would drop back down again the next day.  This was incredibly gratifying.  But at some point, it stopped.  In fact, at least three times, the day after I put up a new post, the number of subscribers dropped to zero, only to rise again the next day to exactly the point it had been at before.  This is almost certainly a bug in FeedBurner, and not real data.  In fact, it’s actually possible that FeedBurner detected a sudden increase, assumed it was “noise” or in some other way fake, and tried to compensate for it—but in compensating for what it assumed wasn’t real data, threw out all the data available.  It might even be the case that the data really was fake.  I used to see similarly transient, extremely high spikes in usage—up to 100 or more in a single day—from the basic TypePad statistics.  In some cases these spikes were easily traceable to some script or other that seemed intended to drive up usage.  In other cases they might have been legitimate attempts to randomly select new blog posts and increase their visibility.  I don’t see these anymore at all.  But the fact that I can no longer see subscriber statistics that might result from a new post is frustrating.

ALSO.  I guess everybody knows that Google Reader is going away: Google won't be improving it or fixing bugs, and at some point won't be providing the service on their end anymore.  There have been rumors that FeedBurner is going away, too.  The FeedBurner API, which I think permitted more detailed stats than what’s available on the basic dashboard page, is now unsupported, and TypePad no longer offers the option I used a couple of years ago to provide the FeedBurner feed in place of the basic RSS feed.  Apparently the intermittent “zero statistics” bug is one people have been seeing for a while, and at some point last fall, for some customers, FeedBurner ceased to work entirely.  I’ve put the link for the vanilla feed back on the side of the page.

Upshot: For you: if you’re using FeedBurner to get an RSS feed for this blog, you might want to re-subscribe, to the RSS/Atom feed, using the link labeled Subscribe to this blog's feed that’s now on the side of the main site page.

For me: I seem to have a choice of believing there are a few dozen readers of this blog (at least potential readers of any given post), or the half dozen I actually know about.  This isn’t a complaint.  It’s only a hobby, after all.  But it makes me feel ridiculous to be giving advice about getting an RSS feed, if the actual RSS “subscribers” are in fact bots.

February Movies

UPDATED to fix actor information for Dinner for Schmucks.

The Tempest: The Shakespeare play, with Helen Mirren playing the usually male role of Prospero, the magician-duke exiled with his daughter.  Ben Whishaw plays Ariel (usually, though not completely, nude), Djimon Hounsou plays Caliban (made up as half albino, half mud-man).  Russell Baker Brand, Alfred Molina, David Straithairn, Alan Cumming, and Chris Cooper are also in the cast.  It seemed to me to be a reasonably good interpretation of Shakespeare.  It was generally easy to tell what was going on and what was being said. 

Making Prospero a woman permitted a kind of intimacy between her and her supernatural servants (Ariel as air and light, Caliban as the earth), which might have been awkward otherwise, and also made her manipulation of her daughter a little less cringeworthy than it usually is.  It also added a little extra awkwardness to her manipulation of Ferdinand, as her daughter’s suitor—she’s preparing him for entry into her very female world, not for entry into the world of adult men, as a male Prospero could have been claiming to do.  The interpretation is very much that her magic, as much as her brother’s jealousy of her position, has alienated her from the social world, and that at the end she’s giving over attempts to exert power over other’s actions, not just Faustian attempts to peer into the unknown.  I’ve never seen this play performed, so I don’t know how much of this is usual in productions of it.

Farewell (French, with a good deal of Russian and some English): This movie is based on the true story of a French intelligence operation in the USSR, in the early 1980s.  An engineer with a French firm, working in Moscow, is tapped to pass information from a senior official in the KGB to the French.  He’s reluctant at first, his East German-born wife even more so, then he goes along.  The movie was reasonably entertaining, and it was interesting to see the French view of history, around the time Mitterand was elected, during Reagan’s first term as president.  A scene with a senior CIA agent explaining, to senior Washington officials’ apparent surprise, how the KGB runs agents in just about every institution of Russian society, seemed to me to be a little naïve, as did the jumps back and forth between French desire to be a big player on the world stage, and the French engineer’s feeling that he’d gotten caught by a game played specifically by the Americans.  Willem Dafoe plays the CIA agent, Fred Ward plays Reagan.  The two major roles, the engineer and the KGB officer, are apparently played by well-known directors of French films (neither of whom I'd heard of before, but that means little).

Dinner for Schmucks:  This movie is based on a French film, which, from what I can see on YouTube, had a very different feel.  A stock analyst finagles his way into almost but not quite getting a more prestigious broker’s job.  To seal the deal, he has to make a good impression at his boss’s “special” dinner.  He has to bring a guest who is, as his coworkers describe it, “remarkable”; but when they give examples, he realizes he’s supposed to bring a loser.  He struggles with the idea, but meets someone he thinks is the perfect candidate, and changes his mind.  His girlfriend, who works at an art gallery, is offended by the idea and leaves him.  This is his big dilemma: he wants to make lots of money to impress her and her art-gallery friends, but she prefers someone with morals.  Then his chosen “schmuck” intervenes and makes matters worse.

Of course, by the end of the film, he realizes that these “losers” are better people than his boss.

The movie wanders back and forth between slapstick, cringe comedy, and clever stuff that’s probably, however, basically filler.  The loser who keeps annoying the straight guy is a well-trodden path, and Steve Carell does it well.  Russell Brand (Yikes!) Jemaine Clement is funny and horrifying as the girlfriend’s client, who’s about to take her to San Francisco for her first big museum show.  Paul Rudd, whose roles sometimes don’t work for me, is good here, as the cool guy who doesn’t deserve to have an annoying person making his life miserable, in a slightly older version of the type (he has a bad back).  The “schmucks” at the dinner party, including a ventriloquist who claims his dummy is his wife, a woman who communes with the spirits of dead birds, and a blind fencer, are also amusing (and their shticks aren’t run into the ground as much as they could have been).  So it’s a basically competent comedy.

But such a bland movie really cries out for some cult-stud over-analysis: The Carell character’s “remarkable” hobby is to stuff found dead mice (as in taxidermy), dress them, and shoot pictures of them in dioramas of his own making.  The camera lingers lovingly over these, as if they were dream sequences in a Wes Anderson movie.  Brand's Clement’s character, on the other hand, is a real artist.  He has gallery shows and people buy his works.  What his works are, are wall-sized photographs of himself in various, usually vulgar, costumes, poses, and settings—like himself dressed as a satyr in gross, hairy jodhpurs.  He’s as impossible as the mouse-artist is.  The film fairly begs for the viewer to compare the two, especially at the end, where they go off together in a “this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship” moment.  But that’s impossible, because the entire movie, until this set-up heartwarming moment, has been about rich versus poor, successful versus unsuccessful, and the certainty that these two characters are on opposite sides of the divide.

The film also begs the user to compare the “remarkable losers”—an assortment of artistes who wouldn’t be out of place in a movie about Greenwich Village in the 1980s—with the analysts whom the Rudd character yearns to surpass.  Perhaps, in rejecting the executive suite, he’s reclaiming his allegiance to his longtime colleagues.  But we don’t see those colleagues again (we don’t see any office space at all, after the first fifteen minutes).  Whatever critique of Wall Street might have been implied in the movie’s first scenes, by the second act what’s at stake isn’t whether Wall Street values are right or wrong, only whether the guys on top in this particular firm are incompetent jerks.  So in the end, the movie shares their condemnation both of the lowly analysts and of the annoying, tasteless artists.

Though of course that’s reading a lot into what is almost certainly simply basically competent commercial filmmaking, going for a series of focus-grouped checkoffs and not for any unified artistic vision, to which in all likelihood a very large number of people contributed ideas and improvements.

(My brother really ought to see it, if he hasn’t already.)

X-Men: First Class:  I sort of liked the first X-Men movie but I can’t recommend this one.  I guess I had gotten the idea that Xavier and Eric (Magneto) meet at Oxford, and that the movie was going to show the psychological origins of the X-Men versions both of their selves and both of their rivalry, but I didn’t get what I expected.  There’s hardly anything about the beginning of their friendship.  We’re not shown any real reason for them to bond; it seems they bond just because they’re both there, and the only people in the room who are one another’s equal.  There’s not really anything here about origins at all, not of the individuals.  Even as a graduate student, Xavier/Dr. X is already committed to defending the status quo and its institutions.  Similarly, Eric/Magneto is determined on revenge from the very beginning of the story.  The movie gets the institutions started—it brings the X-Men together, shows them to the rest of the world for the first time, and shows how they split into two factions—and that may be enough for true fans.  It does have a really excellent supervillain, played by Kevin Bacon, with muttonchop sideburns and speaking German. 

"Face to Face" on Anarres

Somehow I had become convinced that I’d read lots of books by Ursula Le Guin, and only had to catch up on a few of them, like the young adult Earthsea trilogy.  It looks, however, like I’ve read barely any of them: a lot of essays, a couple of non-SF young-adult novels, The Lathe of Heaven (just a few years ago), and something set in a Central European city that I now can’t find at all .  More recently, I read the linked stories in Changing Planes (which I’m happy to see has apparently been moved back to the adult section, if only for the illustrations).  I began catching up with The Dispossessed.  Instead of writing one big post on The Dispossessed (I may write a big post or two about it later), I think I’ll post short pieces, from time to time, about various things in the novel that I think are interesting.

The novel is about a two-planet system, one of the planets of which has been colonized by anarchists fleeing the other one.  The story follows Shevek, a physicist from Anarres, the anarchist planet.  He has chosen to be the first one from his home world to visit Urras, their ancestral home.  Urras is much like earth, and the nation Shevek ends up visiting is a totalitarian version of a typical capitalist (or late-capitalist) society, much like North America or any country in Europe.  There are two interleaved storylines.  One begins at the moment Shevek leaves Anarres.  The other begins with his childhood and leading up to that moment.

Near the end of the novel, Shevek’s friend Bedap watches him enter a room.  Le Guin writes that Bedap “saw him as one occasionally sees a very old friend . . . like many others among the Anarresti, a people selected by a vision of freedom, and adapted to a barren world, a world of distances, silences, desolations.”

This reminded me of Adrienne Rich’s poem, “Face to Face,” which appeared in 1974, the same year that The Dispossessed was published.  One stanza of Rich’s poem runs as follows:

How people used to meet!
starved, intense, the old
Christmas gifts saved up till spring,
and the old plain words

This seems a good description of Anarresti culture generally and of Shevek in particular, as do the lines that follow: “with his God-given secret, spelled out through months of snow and silence.”  Developing and articulating his brand-new theory, understood as yet by nobody else on Anarres, alone and justified only by his personal understanding of his society’s belief system, is exactly what Shevek does for most of the book.  His great dream is to be able to publish his work, and then to be able to live among people who appreciate it, because they do similar work.  And the Anarresti are subject to frequent job reassignments, which can be anywhere on the planet, separating even spouses from each other, and parents from their children.  The poem could equally well describe their reunions after long sojourns in the wilderness and wearying voyages home.

Anarres, however, is a society very unlike our own, and not necessarily an unambiguous utopia.  (In fact, the title has the subheading “an ambiguous utopia”!)  For that matter, Rich’s feelings about “the old plain words” and the effort to work out an idea “through months of snow and silence” don’t seem to be unambiguously positive.  She begins the poem, “Never to be lonely like that,” and as the poem goes on, it reads like a lament: modernity is a loss, because the way we live now means, unfortunately, never to be lonely like that.  But in the end it is a wish: I shall live my life so as never to be lonely like that.  The poet associates the will to live that way with patriarchy and narrowness: “one’s will to be law and prophet for all that lawlessness.”  And she associates the will to work out such an idea with madness: she compares the mind of the man who works it out—unduly influenced, perhaps, by “the prairie wolves in their lunar hilarity circling one’s little all,” now approaching his neighbors after long absence and preparing to share it with them—to “a loaded gun.”

I don’t think Le Guin would accept this comparison for her protagonist.  Shevek, after all, is bound and determined not to allow his discovery to be used for building weapons.  But I think she might welcome the suggestion that Anarres, at the stage of development it’s reached at the time The Dispossessed is set, is to be compared with the United States at the time of the settling of the frontier.  The novel is by no means a straight allegory, and the laws and customs of Anarres are not those of the United States.  But the two societies, real and fictional, are similar enough in some aspects that the one is perhaps a commentary on the other.