The Feminist Theory Reading Thread, part 2

I started the other day Maryse Condé's 1986 Moi, Tituba sorcière... (I, Tituba, black witch of Salem). Tituba is the child of rape by a white sailor of an African girl slave, raised (after her mother's murder) and introduced into the magic arts by an African "wise woman". She is promised a difficult life full of woe so I'm reading with some trepidation.

Still have to finish Per Faxneld's Satanic feminism, which I must credit at least for introducing me to a gallery of forgotten feminists of the 19th century.

More Beauvoir on the horizon, along with the eventual return to The second sex.

What are you reading?

The Power of Andrea Dworkin's Rage
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/02/15/the-power-of-andrea-dworkins-rage/

In her commonly ridiculed yet brilliant and enduring Intercourse (1987), the titular act is subject to radical skepticism. Critics took her sweeping description of patriarchy behind closed doors as evidence of a conviction that men are irredeemable, heterosexuality is hopeless, and, most famously, all sex is rape. Though that is not what she wrote, Dworkin, rhetorically at least, seemed to take pleasure in walking right up to the line, arguing that the cultural notion of consent in the political context of gross gender inequality is, in fact, something more like compliance.

The book is purported to be a kind of "Essential Dworkin" which I find a little strange -- she was a person who wrote and spoke as though everything she needed to say was "essential."

And then there's this:

Andrea Dworkin: Not the Fun Kind of Feminist

And so Dworkin, so profoundly out of fashion just a few years ago, suddenly seems prophetic. “Our enemies — rapists and their defenders — not only go unpunished; they remain influential arbiters of morality; they have high and esteemed places in the society; they are priests, lawyers, judges, lawmakers, politicians, doctors, artists, corporation executives, psychiatrists and teachers,” Dworkin said in a lecture she wrote in 1975

She was not wrong.

Most people are invested in maintaining all sorts of social lies. Trumpoid rampage makes some stark truths harder to deny.

>3 southernbooklady: It's strange to me that she's described as "prophetic," as though she is foreseeing something to come and not in fact describing the world as it was in 1975 and continues to be now.

A few men have expressed their surprise to me about how Kavanaugh has kept his position as though this stuff is new and I find it perplexing. It isn't new. Misogynists (and racists, etc.) have always held positions of power without consequence for their actions.

Has anyone read Carol Gilligan's new book with Naomi Snider, Why Does Patriarchy Persist?

I'm reading it now. It's very thought provoking for me. Essentially they argue that patriarchy serves a psychological function by protecting men from loss by preventing them from truly loving and being emotionally vulnerable. This explains the visceral reactions that men often have to dismantling patriarchal traditions and institutions -- it literally feels threatening to their psyches not just in their power over others but in their likelihood of being hurt.

Trying the touchstone again:

Why Does Patriarchy Persist

>6 sparemethecensor:

The psychology seems plausible enough--after all, patriarchal values and institutions shape men such that they would want to preserve those values and institutions--but I would hope attention would be paid to systemic reasons first of all. After all, the patriarchy is a social phenomenon, not something dependent on any individual's psyche.

It seems to me that on a basic, practical level, whose very intractability may be overlooked because it seems so trivial, even tautological, patriarchy persists already simply because it exists. That is to say, no single man, or groups of men, or even all men collectively, need to do anything special to uphold the patriarchy--it's enough that they accept the status quo. And that the vast majority of them finds very easy to do (or very hard not to do).

>8 LolaWalser: Yes, absolutely. It is remarkable to me how often people don't understand that saying nothing is tacit complicity with the status quo. Is it Elie Wiesel's quote? Something like silence always supports the abuser, not the abused.

Right... by the way, I didn't mean to distract from your focus, just wanted to make sure the systemic dimension gets introduced.

Also, am I missing something or does it not quite make sense to say that men get emotionally upset at the threat of loss of the patriarchy because the patriarchy protects them from feeling vulnerable? I mean, that fear is emotion and vulnerability itself.

I think it's about something different really--the patriarchy doesn't prevent men from feeling emotions, it absolves them from feeling guilt, it gives them a carte blanche to commit all sorts of atrocities and still feel good about themselves.

Analogies to racism are enlightening, I think. One could ask a similar question about why racism persists (or similarly observe, simply, that it still exists). The loss of privilege is obviously perceived as a grievous loss by the privileged no matter how absurd the idea that their lives are materially affected by this loss.

>10 LolaWalser: I think it's about something different really--the patriarchy doesn't prevent men from feeling emotions, it absolves them from feeling guilt, it gives them a carte blanche to commit all sorts of atrocities and still feel good about themselves.

Patriarchy rationalizes their fears. It doesn't just absolve them of guilt, it actually demands they commit those atrocities -- small and large, major and minor -- as a justified response to those fears.

I think another analogy, at least on an individual level, would be a religious person confronted with the idea that their faith was not only unfounded but actually wrong and evil, and that far from being the good person they have congratulated themselves on being, they are actually a bad person, who has done irreparable harm.

I think male resistance to feminism is at heart a purely visceral response to what feels like an attack on who they have always, unquestioningly believed themselves to be.

Well that's what sparemethecensor's book's message seems to be--it all seems very obvious tho.

Since a patriarchal system instills in men (and women) the sense of male superiority at women's cost, i.e. men are superior because women are inferior, obviously if you question the latter you are undermining the former.

In short they are bastards and we ought to cull them and start afresh.

I am reading Melinda Gates' The Moment of Lift and she keeps emphasizing that empowering women is also better for the men.

But, of course if they would rather feel superior than have the advantages of an equal society...

That's the question... to the average schmoe, it may be far more comfortable to receive the message that his genitals automatically make him special, society be damned. Besides, I think a lot of this is subconscious, ingrained from the earliest days, and pretty much inescapable given that the notion that men are better and worthier than women still rules on the planet.

So, yes, "empowering" women may be demonstrably better for a society--less poverty, better childcare, higher quality of life etc.--but it may not seem better to the schmoe who now has to make a real effort to find a partner (as opposed to buying one or having her bought for him by his parents) and to prove his worth beyond the automatically bestowed privilege.

I am now trying to decide whether or not to purchase and read a book that I just discovered. The reviews here on LT are depressing enough, but still, it looks to be something that is important, and has important points to make.

Mothers of Massive Resistance implies something I think I knew was true, but haven't wanted to think about; the idea that women are still fighting on the (in my not so humble opinion) *wrong* side breaks my heart.

Book sounds fascinating but surely it's not a surprise that white women upheld racism (just as women everywhere uphold misogyny).

The handmaidens know which side their bread's buttered on...

>2 southernbooklady:

Another NYRB article about Andrea Dworkin that's available in full (free):

Fighting for Her Life (a review of Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin edited by Johanna Fateman and Amy Scholder)

Her intuition that the violence was impersonal opened the door to a feminist reading of domestic battery (and its tacit social acceptance) as a heavily gendered phenomenon, one of several kinds of violence that help maintain women’s social, legal, and financial subordination to men. Having seen the feminists’ point, Dworkin became severely disillusioned with the Left for its slowness to recognize female subordination as an injustice.

STILL too fucking slow, fifty years later.

Of that whole era of radical feminists, I think Dworkin was the most genuine and ruthlessly honest.

A Lab of One's Own: One Woman's Personal Journey Through Sexism in Science by Rita Colwell (with science writer Sharon Bertsch McGrayne).

I thought I'd skim this but ended up reading every word, and in one go. Excellent and often harrowing first-hand picture of misogyny and sexist practices in American science from a woman who not only witnessed them for more than five decades, but also actively fought them and other forms of discrimination.

The last section has abundant practical advice for young women starting or contemplating a scientific career.

White Feminism by Koa Beck is a relentless takedown of the elitist middle-class white women's feminist movement. There is a lot of interesting economic data in it and a relatively speedy historical interpretation of the movement that makes very good points, but the upshot of the book so far (I'm about three-quarters of the way through) coalesces into a couple of things I find myself in complete agreement with:

--That by positioning the feminist movement as a demand for equality within the existing system women -- white women with money and education -- are basically fighting for the right to be part of a patriarchal white supremacist system. They are fighting for the right to be part of the problem and to oppress other people.

-- That the general push in US white feminism towards self-empowerment pushes the definition of "feminist" towards individual success at the expense of communal goals

--That US white feminism is capitalist in conception, and usually portrayed in terms of branding, fashion, and marketable concepts. This turns feminism into a transaction -- a lifestyle choice you buy into like signing up for a yoga class or shopping at Whole Foods -- rather than a commitment to critique patriarchal and white supremacist institutions and cultural values and to work for real systemic change.

All of this means that cis-gendered white middle and upper-class feminists in the United States are actively oppressing poor women, marginalized women, Black and Brown women, queer and transgender women if they aren't trying to dismantle the patriarchal, capitalist, and white-supremacist culture they are trying so hard to find a foothold in.

Incidentally, I am exactly the kind of white feminist the book is criticizing. Not a one-percenter, but certainly educated, middle class, mostly self-sufficient, and with an economic safety net if something terrible happens. Also childless, with no real dependants, and free to dictate my work schedule towards whatever personal goals I find satisfying. About the only thing I don't fit in with is that I'm not inclined to demonstrate my feminist credentials by wearing a T-shirt with a snappy slogan.

Also childless, with no real dependants, and free to dictate my work schedule towards whatever personal goals I find satisfying.

I don't see a problem here...

>21 LolaWalser: well I'm not complaining :)

What resonates with me about the book is Beck's own background in writing for popular culture magazines like Vogue and Marie Claire. So she's great at zeroing in on how "consumerist" movements can become, especially in a capitalist system where making money is its own justification. I work in that kind of industry as well, where everything is about marketing and packaging ideas and concepts, and it doesn't take long for that kind of culture to flatten and defang progressive movements like Black Lives Matter or #MeToo in a series of hashtags and t-shirt slogans. While in the meantime cops are still shooting Black people and still not getting punished for it, and it was probably women in sweatshops that made those T-shirts people are buying to show they are "woke."

>22 southernbooklady:

Yeah, I wouldn't question the media omnipresence of this consumer, liberal white feminism in the US. But it can't be the whole story. Radical feminism of the past must have involved leftist women, with wider and truly egalitarian horizons. And as one example, I don't think lesbians in general would have adhered to middle class values.

it doesn't take long for that kind of culture to flatten and defang progressive movements like Black Lives Matter or #MeToo in a series of hashtags and t-shirt slogans.

True, but this is also a way to spread "the word" and declare yourself to others, so... I wouldn't mind the presence of these in society, I'd just hope people don't limit themselves to such things, or do them unthinkingly, like your sweatshop example. That would indeed be only "performative".

However, there are very many places in the world, and even in the US, where even words on a T-shirt can trigger serious consequences for the bearer. A negligible gesture in one place may take a real act of courage elsewhere.

>20 southernbooklady:

Those are important points. I wonder (and it's a long time since I've thought about her) how different Emily Pankhurst and her sisters in the struggle were. My recollection is that they were more about forcing their entry into the patriarchy than replacing it.

Would it be inaccurate to say that social movements tend to gentrify? At the turn of the millennium I was conflicted about same-sex marriage, concerned that the legal equality would come at the cost of the counter-cultural side of queerness. And that's what's happened; you can have a place at the table but you have to learn not to use the salad fork for the fish course.

>24 librorumamans: Beck talks a little bit about the Pankhursts when she talks about the early Suffragist Alice Paul. She credits them with radicalizing Paul and showing her an example of how to fight for a cause that was not of the polite, gentile, drawing room meetings variety espoused by socially acceptable white literate women, but was disruptive, in your face, public, loud, and even violent.

Would it be inaccurate to say that social movements tend to gentrify?

anytime a movement goes from "radical" to "mainstream" it is charged with compromising its principles. In the US we say it has "sold out" to corporate interests that see potential profits in what is clearly a hitherto unknown, untapped consumer demand. But I don't think that's Beck's point. I think what she is saying is that finding a mainstream foothold is not a de facto success for the cause.

When Obama was sworn in as president in this country I was in tears. It is hard to describe the moment even though I'll never forget it. But mostly what I was thinking was "look, this is possible. It has actually happened." There is a real victory in that, in just the visual of a Black man sworn into the highest office of a country that has down everything it possibly could to keep him from it. But it didn't erase racism overnight, or even over four years. Or eight years. In fact, I could argue that life became more dangerous for Black people -- such as the runaway militarization of police forces. Obama didn't do much about that. He didn't do much about the problem of Black poverty. He certainly sided with the banking industry no matter how predatory they were.

Beck says something similar about successful white women who say they are feminist. Their success can be an inspiration, but is not a de facto feminist act. To say it is is to conflate feminism with the acquisition of power and personal success. If that success doesn't bring with it a real commitment to change the system that preys on poor and working-class people, then it isn't feminist at all, despite the slogans, hashtags, and t-shirts.

I think, ultimately what she is saying is that there is an inherent conflict between capitalism and social justice movements that will always surface, despite everyone's best intentions. In any case, it has me thinking A LOT about what it means to be a feminist in a capitalist framework. And I do agree with her that it does not mean turning feminism into some kind of consumable brand.

>25 southernbooklady:

Their success can be an inspiration, but is not a de facto feminist act.

Right. Thatcher becoming the Prime Minister was a personal success that owed something to feminism, as any advancement in women's political status does, but it certainly didn't bring on gender equality or improved women's (or anyone's but the ruling class') lives in general.

This is, incidentally, why I remain ambivalent about the notion of conservative and religious "feminism". Providing all women with equal opportunities, and opportunities equal to men's, seems to me the only feminist outlook. Any ideology that presupposes hierarchies, to say nothing of tolerating gender discrimination, falls short of that.

Obama

His limitations and failures are the limitations and failures of liberalism. Otoh, a Martin Luther King in the White House, specifically the King of his last year, when he publicly denounced capitalism and the war in Vietnam, was impossible in 2008.

I also don't want to discount, as a white person, what just having had a black man as POTUS might have meant to PoC, especially young generations. We talk a lot about representation, how it matters. Well, then this mattered. It's not the only thing, but it does matter.

>19 LolaWalser: I'm reading A Lab of One's Own now, and it is just so good! Women in science is still a big issue. I like her emphasis on this being the way to get better science. If all scientists are white men, you are only drawing from a third of the nation's talent.

>27 MarthaJeanne:

That's great to hear. Yes, the problems are unfortunately still omnipresent and painful. I can't even tell anymore in which direction we're moving...

>19 LolaWalser: and >27 MarthaJeanne: As a woman in biomedical science myself, I will be interested in reading this. Thank you!

How to Read Now by Elaine Castillo

Having read this book earlier this summer, I have been shoving it at everyone I can. It is an absolute joy -- one of the more beautifully intimate and forthright accounts of a reading life I've ever encountered. And it is a joy, especially, for her relentless line-by-line takedown of Joan Didion and Peter Handke. (Her pithy, on-target analysis reminds me of lolawalser, actually!) And also for her brilliant discussion of what she calls "the unexpected reader" -- the reader who is never considered by either the author who wrote the book, or the critics who review it, or the people from a white supremacist heteronormative patriarchal society who praise it.

Here's part of what I wrote about the book for booksellers in our newsletter:

"White supremacy makes for terrible readers, I find." is the often-quoted opening line to Castillo's razor-sharp analysis of how white culture reads non-white writers, artists, and people. "When I say white supremacy makes for terrible readers, I mean that white supremacy is, among its myriad ills, a formative collection of fundamentally shitty reading techniques that impoverishes you as a reader, a thinker, and a feeling person; it's an education that promises that while swaths of the world and their liveliness will be diminished in meaning to you. Illegible, intangible, forever unreal as cardboard figures in a diorama."

When Castillo talks about reading, she is not just talking about books. She uses the verb "to read" in its larger sense -- the way we use it to, say, "read a room," "read the writing on the wall," "read a situation." That is, to engage with, to interpret, to understand. And despite her insistence that she did not write this book to "make better white people," it is nevertheless a heartwarming, wrenching, furiously funny account of all the ways white supremacy trains white people to fail at all those things.

How to Read Now takes aim at a number of comfortable but faulty truisms book people often tell each other, as evidenced by the titles of her chapter titles:

"Reading Teaches Us Empathy, and Other Fictions"
"The Limits of White Fantasy"
"Main Character Syndrome"
"What We Talk About When We Talk about Representation."

"The problem is," she notes at one point, "if we need fiction to teach us empathy, we don't really have empathy, because empathy is not a one-stop destination: it's a practice, ongoing, which requires work from us in our daily lives, for our daily lives--not just when we're confronted with the visibly and legibly Other." That is, books by people of color are not "ethical protein shakes for white people" and they are not written so white people can learn things, as what Castillo calls, unforgettably, "the gooey heart-porn of the ethnographic."

In other words, white readers tend to read writers of color for their specific experiences. But they read other white readers for their sense of the universal. That is reading as a white supremacist.

I don't tend to rate books but this gets six out of five stars.

Wow. Thank you. Yet another book you've convinced me to order.

It would be a fun book to do a group read on.

>31 southernbooklady:
Thank you! Now I know what to give my niece's partner for Christmas.
(And what I'll read myself before I wrap it.)

>31 southernbooklady:

Too kind, ma'am, clearly you've missed my mile-long meandering mumblings... :)

That book sounds very interesting and on point although I must say I feel I've heard (and even made, in Reading Globally for example) those arguments many times by now. Also, I'd like to think that reading fiction DOES help to develop empathetic capacity, at least if we're talking about young readers, those without deep-rooted habits (yet). If it didn't, it would be difficult to explain the generally noted fact that women don't have a problem identifying with male characters, which is usually ascribed to being constrained to absorb male-centred media from an early age.

But that there's no guarantee that the well-read and "cultured" can't be monstrous to others-- of that there is no doubt.

Btw, I don't get the bit about exercising empathy in the absence of "visible, legible" Other. If you can't tell that there's an Other, then... is there one? How does one Other register except through some sign, visible or legible? I feel stupid here.

>35 LolaWalser: I must say I feel I've heard (and even made, in Reading Globally for example) those arguments many times by now.

Like I said, her voice reminded me of you

Btw, I don't get the bit about exercising empathy in the absence of "visible, legible" Other. If you can't tell that there's an Other, then... is there one?

Well, I'd be interested to know what you think if you do read the book. But in general, she charges well-meaning white readers with reading books by people of color in place of doing the real hard work of being empathetic in their daily lives. I think she means white readers compartmentalize their racism, such that by some twisted rationale they can congratulate themselves for their diverse reading lists but at the same time expend a truly unbelievable amount of time and energy following the funeral of the Queen, or complain because the new Little Mermaid is Black.

But here is the full text from the page of that quote:

But the idea that fiction builds empathy is one of incomplete politics, left hanging by probably good intentions. The concept of instrumentalizing fiction or art as a kind of ethical protein shake, such that reading more and more diversly will somehow build the muscles in us that will help us see other people as human, makes a kind of superficial sense--and produces a superficial effect. The problem with this type of reading is that in its practical application, usually readers are encouraged--by well-meaning teachers and lazy publishing copy--to read writers of a demographic minority in order to learn things; which is to say, as a supplement for their empathy muscles, a metabolic exchange that turns writers of color into little more than ethnographers--personal trainers, to continue the metaphor The result is that we largely end up going to writers of color to learn the specific--and go to white writers to feel the universal.

The problem is, if we need fiction to teach us empathy, we don't really have empathy, because empathy is not a one-stop destination; it's a practice, ongoing, which requires work from us in our daily lives, for our daily lives--not just when we're confronted with the visibly and legibly Other. Not just when a particularly gifted author has managed to make a community's story come alive for the reader who's come for a quick zoo visit, always remaining on her side of the cage."

She also says, in her introduction, "I have no desire to write yet another instruction manual for the sociocultural betterment of white readers. I don't know any writer who, if asked what they wanted their work to do in the world, would reply: "Make better white people."

>36 southernbooklady:

I think it would be interesting to hear what pedagogues might say on the subject, because clearly reading has been traditionally used to educate and "make better people" (white or other). As for such "covertly racist" white readers, defined so specifically as bad readers and racists, there's nothing to do but agree.

And, sure, what's there to do but agree about such superficial instrumentalization of literature; it's dumb, it's pointless, certainly won't cure society's ills...

For sure I'm interested. I stopped doing the "representation" analyses of old SFF but still like to hear what others, especially non-white, think about the subject.

>36 southernbooklady: But writers do want to educate, or, if uncomfortable with that word, at least spread their message. So making better people is precisely what many writers hope to achieve. Why expose little-known lives to the broader world if not to gain empathy for their struggles -- (along with myriad other reasons -- but why else would we argue, for instance for the representation of POC in publishing)? Surely it's not just for rubber-necking, though obviously there's that kind of reader. We all don't have the $ or opportunity to experience many different peoples/places so reading literary fiction (note that those empathy studies always stress it's literary fiction -- which makes specific demands on a reader -- that increases empathy) allows us a deeper connection with those worlds than we might get from a simple newspaper story. That influences how we vote, consume, act, thus (ideally) making us better people.

I feel like I believe what I just wrote but it also feels too pat to me so I'd love some pushback.

>38 susanbooks:

I think the problem is that for white readers there is a strong temptation to read literature by non-white people (sorry about the clumsy term) as more information than "fun" and, if I'm reading the argument here correctly, that there is a difference in whose characters white readers empathise with--yes for Austen's (say), not so sure or no for Achebe's.

I feel like there is some argument to be made (not for the first time) about the pressures of publishing--is this equally or even more of a seller's problem? Have publishers as much as readers created certain niches, such as "ethnic books for white readers", "the first-generation immigrant" saga etc?--and market them in ways that entail impressions of books as cod oil "it's ghastly but it's good for you"?

>39 LolaWalser: Yes, absolutely, I get that point. Like, if I read this book by a POC then I understand all people of color & I don't have to do any more thinking about their lives, issues, etc. But that's an argument made by the lazy & ignorant. Surely the rest of us work against such reductive thinking, reading, etc. Otherwise, taking her point to the extreme, what is the point of reading any voices but those of straight, economically privileged, abled, white men? University faculties & library bookshelves are still dominated by them, so they have centuries worth of info to share. After all, if reading other literary voices doesn't produce empathy, only informs, why not read what some white guy has to say about the black lesbian experience?

I appreciate the questions. Please keep going -- if you're interested!

(edited to replace "gay" with "lesbian" in the main paragraph since it's what I meant in the first place)

The more I think about it the more I fear I may have inadvertently distracted from the significance and weight of the argument specifically about white supremacy and how it biases the white reader's outlook. Not something I meant to do, and definitely want to go back to that.

ETA: posted before I saw >40 susanbooks:

Castillo's book is definitely an indictment of the (especially American) publishing industry and how it fails to serve its writers of color. She says something like that in her intro to why she wrote the book: that not only do those writers have to be professional writers, they have to be professional people of color.

But the more important thing is that she charges white readers in a white supremacist culture (like me), with not ever bothering to ask who a book was written for, because we always assume it is written for us. If for nothing else, I deeply appreciate having to answer that charge because it makes me re-assess my reactions to, well, almost everything.

Most of How to Read Now is an examination of what white culture looks like to people who are not part of that dominant culture. She points out people of color have to constantly "translate" their own lives into something white people can see, understand, and accept. -- a feeling women are surely familiar with as they navigate a patriarchal society. For example, she points out that a favorite story trope is "The Only One": "The only Asian in the white town, the one minority beset on all sides by white people."

White people like these kinds of stories because it doesn't make them feel guilty. Hardship can be conquered by individual grit and determination. Society isn't racist because these people have managed to succeed against the odds.

What Castillo points out is that reading such a story in this way makes "whiteness" the central fact of the character's existence. It's still all about white people. It also does not distinguish between "difference" and "oppression" because it ignores the possibility -- even likelihood -- that to be the only person of color in a white community suggests a class privilege that is being ignored. Because let's face it: the reality is if you are poor and a person of color in the United States, you probably don't live in a neighborhood surrounded by white people. It's more likely you live in neighborhoods with other Black and Brown people.

So whether or not people write books to teach things, or read them to learn things, they are doing both in a world that assumes white supremacy and has been constructed to maintain white supremacy. "Bad reading isn't a question of people undereducated in a more equitable and progressive understanding of what it means to be a person among other people. Most people are vastly overeducated: overeducated in white supremacy, in patriarchy, in heteronormativity. Most people are in fact highly advanced in their education in these economies...it's a question of bringing people out of their deliberately extensive education."

I wonder if and to what extent this is an American/Anglo problem. I hasten to add--this is not to say other "types" of white people aren't racist or can't endorse "a" white supremacy. But, it's a historical phenomenon as much as a sociological one and the US exhibits a whole array of specificities deriving from its legacy of slavery. (As for the UK, the British Empire was not just the vastest embodiment of white supremacy, the apotheosis of Whiteness--English whiteness specifically--is pretty much its original invention.)

But there's also the question of capitalism, another thing that's seen in a particular, and particularly intense, "terminal" form in the US. Capitalism and white supremacy go hand in hand. Capitalism needs an underclass, white supremacy offers the eternal sacrifice of the non-white, at home and abroad.

Meaning, for both historical and ideological reasons the existence of white supremacy in the US is a persistent fact and therefore it's no wonder if it intrudes into people's lives when it comes to questions of literature, even mere "entertainment".

>42 southernbooklady: "Most people are vastly overeducated: overeducated in white supremacy, in patriarchy, in heteronormativity. Most people are in fact highly advanced in their education in these economies...it's a question of bringing people out of their deliberately extensive education."

Okay, and wouldn't this new education, then, produce empathy? How can we be empathetic with lives we don't understand? Imagine a person just did unspeakably horrible things -- so I have no empathy. Then I read about a life like theirs in a novel & really live it: bombed in a refugee camp since birth, no clean water, food, all sorts of horrors, loves their families/friends, has sense of humor, wishes, habits. Did horrible things, it turns out, in revenge for worse things that had been done for decades. Now I have empathy.

A moment from one of my classes comes to mind. A student wanted to write on Anne Bradstreet's "Before the Birth of One of Her Children" (because it was the only class he came to) but he didn't understand it so we went through it together line by line. Eventually this tough kid, all tattooed and bro'ed and couldn't care less, gets this look on his face & says something like, "so she's just saying she loves her kids? I have a daughter & I don't want any other guy raising her. I get that. I can write about that." There's no great teaching story here: he never wrote the paper, never finished the class, but for that one moment, he understood this Puritan woman deeply. He stood in her place. (I cut & pasted the poem below)

I guess I feel like when I first read Castillo's point in >36 southernbooklady::
"The problem is, if we need fiction to teach us empathy, we don't really have empathy, because empathy is not a one-stop destination; it's a practice, ongoing, which requires work from us in our daily lives, for our daily lives--not just when we're confronted with the visibly and legibly Other. Not just when a particularly gifted author has managed to make a community's story come alive for the reader who's come for a quick zoo visit, always remaining on her side of the cage."
It seemed smart but now it seems obvious. Yes, empathy is not a one-stop destination. Once you get it, you have it & you use it. Empathy isn't just something you have for the moments you spend between the covers of a book. That speaks to me of an impoverished view of reading, as if books don't live on in us long after we've finished them.

Zadie Smith has a great essay on this that I excerpt & share with my students:

from “Note to Readers: A Novel is a Two-Way Street “
Zadie Smith (The Guardian, January 13, 2007)

A novel is a two-way street, in which the labour required on either side is, in the end, equal. Reading, done properly, is every bit as tough as writing - I really believe that. As for those people who align reading with the essentially passive experience of watching television, they only wish to debase reading and readers. The more accurate analogy is that of the amateur musician placing her sheet music on the stand and preparing to play. She must use her own, hard-won, skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift she gives the composer and the composer gives her.
This is a conception of "reading" we rarely hear now. And yet, when you practise reading, when you spend time with a book, the old moral of effort and reward is undeniable. Reading is a skill and an art and readers should take pride in their abilities and have no shame in cultivating them if for no other reason than the fact that writers need you. To respond to the ideal writer takes an ideal reader, the type of reader who is open enough to allow into their own mind a picture of human consciousness so radically different from their own as to be almost offensive to reason. The ideal reader steps up to the plate of the writer's style so that together writer and reader might hit the ball out of the park.
What I'm saying is, a reader must have talent. Quite a lot of talent, actually, because even the most talented reader will find much of the land of literature tricky terrain. . . . The skills that it takes to write it are required to read it. Readers fail writers just as often as writers fail readers. Readers fail when they allow themselves to believe the old mantra that fiction is the thing you relate to and writers the amenable people you seek out when you want to have your own version of the world confirmed and reinforced. That is certainly one of the many things fiction can do, but it's a conjurer's trick within a far deeper magic. To become better readers and writers we have to ask of each other a little bit more.

It seems to me that if you're this kind of reader, or working towards becoming this kind of reader, then the empathy you gain from a novel isn't going to fade when you finish the book.

Before the Birth of One of Her Children -- ANNE BRADSTREET

All things within this fading world hath end,
Adversity doth still our joyes attend;
No ties so strong, no friends so dear and sweet,
But with death’s parting blow is sure to meet.
The sentence past is most irrevocable,
A common thing, yet oh inevitable.
How soon, my Dear, death may my steps attend,
How soon’t may be thy Lot to lose thy friend,
We are both ignorant, yet love bids me
These farewell lines to recommend to thee,
That when that knot’s untied that made us one,
I may seem thine, who in effect am none.
And if I see not half my dayes that’s due,
What nature would, God grant to yours and you;
The many faults that well you know I have
Let be interr’d in my oblivious grave;
If any worth or virtue were in me,
Let that live freshly in thy memory
And when thou feel’st no grief, as I no harms,
Yet love thy dead, who long lay in thine arms.
And when thy loss shall be repaid with gains
Look to my little babes, my dear remains.
And if thou love thyself, or loved’st me,
These o protect from step Dames injury.
And if chance to thine eyes shall bring this verse,
With some sad sighs honour my absent Herse;
And kiss this paper for thy loves dear sake,
Who with salt tears this last Farewel did take.

I guess what she's trying to say is that we can't act as if our reading replaces political action? In which case I agree with her (but then again -- even reading, where we buy our books -- shop indies! -- what authors/presses we support -- matters). But is that about empathy?

>43 LolaWalser: I wonder if and to what extent this is an American/Anglo problem.

I think she's talking primarily to British and Americans -- her essays range on subjects from New Zealand and climate change to Filipinx cinema to Marvel Comics and The Watchmen to the abolitionist movement in Jane Austen's era. So the scope of the book is pretty far-ranging. But she lived in London for a long time and clearly is still attached to it. I liked her comments on how heavily invested her fans are in a certain portrayal of Jane Austen compared with what Austen's society was really like and how much she would have been aware of it.

And the whole book is clearly something she was driven to write after her experience of her first book tour as a debut novelist, which sounded both exhilarating and harrowing.

But at the same time, it feels more nuanced than that. I think she is saying that we all bring a "political" perspective to the art we create and the art we encounter -- that there is no avoiding this, so best be aware of our own baggage when we engage with it. She makes a convincing case, for example, that there is no such thing as a non-political, "purely aesthetic" Peter Handke novel, that the author's politics loom over your shoulder as you read his books.

Mostly, I'd say for Castillo reading is an intimate experience because she is a person whose life was both created and constantly saved by books. She calls herself "the unexpected reader" because she feels, with justification, that none of the white writers she reads ever imagined someone like her reading their books: If the book uses the phrase "Filipino houseboys" it suggests that no one expects a Filipinx person to be part of its readership.

>44 susanbooks:so she's just saying she loves her kids? I have a daughter & I don't want any other guy raising her. I get that.

Okay, I may be off base here, but that doesn't sound to me like empathy. It sounds more like reading comprehension. Like the student got past the poetry and the early colonial American spelling and syntax, and figured out what Bradstreet was talking about. Which, you know, is great. That's a skill unto itself, to read in a different dialect without it being an obstacle. And maybe that student will be that little bit more confident the next time they run up against something that is hard to read. That's fantastic. (Also, I'm totally pro-tattoo, even though I don't have any myself!)

But empathy isn't exactly "understanding," and it isn't really "identifying with." It's an act of imagination, to comprehend someone's feelings and point of view even if they are not your own. I don't have children, have never wanted to have children, am not at all maternal, but I can empathize with women who do have children or want children and have lives where raising children is a consuming, celebrated part of who they are.

I don't think Castillo is saying reading doesn't create a connection with others -- isn't that why we tell stories, after all? But she might be saying that the empathy we feel for characters in a book or movie, or whatever, is a kind of practice run with very little at stake for the reader. You can always shut the book if you get too uncomfortable, right? What is the point of all that empathy we are supposedly building, if wethen look right past the people in our own lives that deserve it?

My neighborhood facebook group was recently talking about a book (Of Women and Salt) which they say they all loved, and yet they were able to go from talking about that book to making jokes about Martha's Vineyard -- a situation that makes me incandescent with rage -- without batting an eye. It was surreal.

Ultimately, I think what writers want to do is tell stories. And what they'd like from readers is to listen to their stories.

>47 southernbooklady: I guess I'm not explaining it right. It wasn't as if he just understood the poem. He really got Bradstreet. She had been utterly foreign to him, then she & her culture became real, human in a way that they hadn't been before, so much so that he could imagine writing 3 pages connecting himself to her. The book group you're talking about don't sound like they got the characters & their lives in a real way so much as just enjoyed a good story. And I think that experience is what Castillo is talking about, but, again, I wouldn't define that as even approaching empathy -- more like passing interest.

For decades I led a reading grp with a pretty constant population of white, economically privileged, women. I assigned -- sometimes to their delight, often to their upset -- as diverse a list of authors as I could. We had a great discussion about Emmanuel Dongola's Little Boys Come From the Stars; they had been moved by the book. The next week I walked in in the midst of their chatting about how much better off Africa had been under colonialism. "Those people can't run themselves," I remember a woman saying. I never fooled myself that most of those women had any empathy for the people we read about, no matter how much they said they liked the books.

It's like the countless discussions of American Dirt I've seen online in which people say they love the book but those people need to stay in their own countries. No one is saying reading literary fiction (not that I'm saying American Dirt is lit fic. I don't know; I haven't read it) automatically makes you empathetic. The implicit argument is that if you do the work Zadie Smith describes, the work lit fic requires, it's likely side-effect is to develop empathy in you as a reader. But as Smith says, most people think of reading the same way they think of watching TV, as an utterly passive, no-work activity.

"Ultimately, I think what writers want to do is tell stories. And what they'd like from readers is to listen to their stories." Agreed.

There's a whole lot to refer to, but I'll try to generalise instead of going quote by quote... re: empathy, to me it means "we're all human and by that fact poised to understand/feel for any other human". (Note: this expresses a possibility, not a guarantee.) As a child reading stories about African children or Inuit children, their adventures, emotions, wishes, would automatically become mine (and as some non-European friends tell me, it was the same for them even with in retrospect racist material like the early Tintins). Appearances differ, conditions of life are different, cultures are different, but the essential, the humanity, is always the same. Again, that, to me, is the basis of empathy... reflexive in germ, but needs active application too.

I think some later on over-emphasise culture as some impenetrable separate society. I don't think a particular subset of, say, rich white ladies is incapable of empathising with "Filipino houseboys"--I think they don't want to.

Which brings me back to white supremacy and what it means in fact, in daily life. It means that, among other--teaching white people NOT to empathise with the "subordinate" class. This is of course easier the stronger the barriers between people are.

This is part of the class war. Liberals and conservatives alike can't cling to their Filipino houseboys and sincerely empathise with them in literature. What I mean is, this is not their failure in reading, it's our failure to understand what is going on.

>49 LolaWalser: Which brings me back to white supremacy and what it means in fact, in daily life. It means that, among other--teaching white people NOT to empathise with the "subordinate" class.

Yes. exactly. And in so far as we are talking about the publishing industry, it also therefore means being complicit in teaching white people not to empathise. And as readers, allowing ourselves to be taught not to empathise.

>49 LolaWalser: "I don't think a particular subset of, say, rich white ladies is incapable of empathising with "Filipino houseboys"--I think they don't want to."

Exactly. And that's one problem of white supremacy, that it inculcates intellectual laziness.

But I think the point the empathy & lit fiction studies make is that if you do the real hard work of reading, in the way Smith describes, you won't have your Filipino houseboy, or your Mexican gardener, or your African American underpaid maid once you've read novels about people like them. Or if you do, you'll work to significantly better their lives by increasing their salaries, improving their living conditions, advocating for policies that better serve them & people like them.

To use Zadie Smith's metaphor, to come away from lit fiction and not empathize is the equivalent of carelessly playing the violin & muddling the notes. You still gets a sense of the tune & it's fun to waltz to, but it's in no way a performance truly representative of the piece.

You know? I'm writing all of this & now I'm thinking of my really good friend & colleague who teaches 19th-century immigrant lit & thinks Biden is doing a great job at the border. Maybe you're right. Maybe reading & empathy is bullshit.

In which case what the f have I been doing for 30+ years?

Tin House did an extensive interview with Castillo on their Between the Covers podcast:

https://tinhouse.com/podcast/elaine-castillo-how-to-read-now/

>52 susanbooks:

Don't beat yourself, the whole point here seems to be that literature alone isn't enough--and who could argue with that...

>53 southernbooklady:

I listened to the first hour +++ but must break for stuff now; very interesting and engaging. (Although I admit the astrology bit exercised my patience... :)) I requested her book; must experience that whaling on Handke. As for Didion, I have dim recollections of some discussions we had here? I'll try to look them up later.

Didion? I guess we were talking about self-involved economically privileged white women (I know it's cos of Castillo, just cdn't pass up the chance at a snide passing slam)

I listened a bit more (about 45 minutes left), but I think it would be better to wait for the book before commenting further. There are some things that bother me but could turn out to look different in the book, as phrasing is more casual in conversation.

Just a preliminary notice about Handke's book she (apparently) eviscerates... The German title, Der Chinese des Schmerzes, is grammatical but weird in German, and retains the grammatical correctness but weirdness in the languages where it was faithfully translated (Italian: Il cinese del dolore; French: Le Chinois du douleur; Spanish: El Chino del dolor; Swedish: Smärtans kines...) However, it is NOT obvious that it means, as she says, "the suffering Chinese man", nor is there in German in general (as far as I know) some idiomatic or stereotypical link between pain and the Chinese. "The suffering Chinese man", if that's what one wanted to convey, would far more naturally (and I would bet, practically uniquely) be rendered as "der leidende (schmerzhafte etc.) Chinese".

Perhaps this is explicated further in the text, but as she goes on to imagine that the English publishers baulked at the "suffering Chinese man" as a title, presumably out of PC concerns (whereas no other-language publisher would have?), it appears that she is convinced of this interpretation. Now, I read this in the previous century or two, in German, but rack my mind as I tried, I could not recall anything about the narrator likening himself to a suffering Chinese man. (So in addition to waiting for her book, I requested the Handke too--unfortunately they only had it in English... :))

While, as I said, all may become clear on reading the essay, I think it's fair to suggest right now that the reason the English-language publisher may have gone for an entirely different title is that only in English (compared to other languages which retained the original construction) the original sounds not just weird but inordinately clumsy. "The Chinese of sorrow (I'd translate "Schmerz" as sorrow sooner than suffering in this instance--Handke is FAMOUS for his sorrowfulness) loses the coordinates of the subject being "Chinese man", "The Chinese man of sorrow" becomes too long and somehow risible, while "The Chinaman of sorrow" is out of the question since we're not jazzin' 'round with Shanghai Lily or something.

My point is that it's not clear, as Castillo implies, that this is about Handke and every other publisher except for the English ones being racist. I don't remember what the title is referencing, but I seriously doubt Handke (or the narrator) is seriously saying something like, and right up in the title, "Woe is me, I am like unto the suffering Chinese". It makes no sense whatsoever.

>55 susanbooks:

I found one convo starting at this post:

https://www.librarything.com/topic/256572#6040919

Oh my, apologies for serial posting--I just want to note before it slips away--right now the host, David?--has mentioned Alfonso Cuaron's film "Roma", which I saw recently and was confused by all the high praise it was getting (I thought it was racist)--and YES!--he expresses exactly what bothered me, how this Indigenous servant's role was "emptied" and "occupied" in order for her eyes to convey the image of the master-family's experience.

Sorry about the digression--if anyone else saw this and wants to talk about it, please do.

>54 LolaWalser: I listened to the first hour +++ but must break for stuff now; very interesting and engaging. (Although I admit the astrology bit exercised my patience... :))

Yeah, the astrology bit drove me bats for many many reasons that would totally derail this conversation if I went into them. I will say this, though. One of the reasons I really, really liked the book is that I almost always got where she was coming from. Castillo is younger than me by almost twenty years. Her cultural touchstones are not mine, her epiphanies and a ha moments often come from things I'd never read, television shows I'd never had the slightest inclination to watch, music that is just not my thing. But I still always got what she was saying. And her moments of revelations in her reading life frequently mirror mine, even though they came from different experiences and trigger points.

So a lot of that language she uses, like "bossy virgo bitch" or "my villain origin story" I read as a kind of generational dialect or something and it didn't bug me so much.

The Handke thing, now, I can't speak to the idiosyncracies of her translations. But what I really loved about the essay in the book is how she uses Handke, his novel, and its critical reception to lambast the way we excuse, tolerate, and even admire racist, misogynistic, bigoted work in the name of "art" and free expression.

>59 southernbooklady:

If she's calling that work of Handke's racist, misogynistic and bigoted, then I'm flabbergasted. But, again, I should wait, although various reactions to things that were said keep popping in my mind. One BIG thing that bothers me is that she presents Handke as someone who is read "apolitically", presented to the public as being "apolitical". I have to wonder, on what planet was this ever true? If his obsessive focus is pure language, that has never belied his constant public political interventions. I don't mean now; from the earliest days. This work deals with a murder of a Nazi, in Austria, in early 1980s. That sentence alone "signifies" enough politics and "current affairs" to fill a newspaper, regardless of what else gets explored.

Something similar is true with how she talks about his getting the Nobel. To listen to her, you'd think he was unanimously fêted and glorified, this "fascist" (meaning not only the Nobel committee in A.D. 2019, but all his readers, the sympathetic ones anyway, are/lean fascist? Meaning no one until her noticed his fascism, racism, misogyny, bigotry? Or cared?) But in fact the Nobel created a huge scandal, was roundly excoriated widely in the press, and the backlash is still going on (I just searched and there's another teardown of Handke in The New Yorker from this past March... not to mention others.)

He's really not some sort of rare and unjustly neglected target.

And, of course, he's not the first nor the only "problematic" writer, even as a Nobel. There's Hamsun, there's Céline... there's any number of such cases (and we discussed this so often...)

Yeah, the astrology bit drove me bats for many many reasons that would totally derail this conversation if I went into them.

Ooh, I wouldn't mind hearing about this. I just never think about it. Not many people in my business would flaunt a belief in astrology. But she KEPT bringing it up! and it really got on my nerves.

How old is she? I was pinning her as lateish twenties. There's this vernal "no one has thought of this before!" sheen to her arguments.

>60 LolaWalser: She was born in 1984, so late thirties, not late twenties. She does feel young to me, mostly because I'm a child of Star Trek and pulp science fiction magazines, whereas she's clearly of the generation of Marvel Comics movies and social media memes.

One BIG thing that bothers me is that she presents Handke as someone who is read "apolitically," presented to the public as being "apolitical." I have to wonder, on what planet was this ever true?

Not Handke specifically, but I see this sort of thing all the time in the US -- works justified as "art" and therefore somehow "apolitical" no matter how nasty they are. I think she has a point that there is something decidedly skewed about the fact that our test of how free our freedom of expression is, comes in how much effort we put into tolerating the execrable.

I've never quite worked out where do we go from here. One certain thing for my part is that I don't want censorship or "cancellation" (and she too in conversation--although it's almost inaudible and not pursued--says she doesn't mean to turn readers off Handke--possibly not her exact phrasing). Once you made your criticism, what then? Obviously those now writing can take these sensibilities in consideration, but it's too late for Steinbeck and Roth.

She starts on Roth but then the host says "Roth saved my life" and they seem to agree--I wish this had been developed--that one must read "monsters".

I finally received Castillo's book! I hope I'll be able to tackle it, or at least the bits we discussed, this weekend.

It's easy to do in small pieces, since it's basically an essay collection.

ETA: Meant to say, I re-read some of the book after your comment that Castillo seemed young, and I concur in the sense that it's clear she's much younger than me. But I decided I still found her basic perspective valid and appealing, and her language -- although it is steeped in cultural language that's about two decades after mine -- is still vivid and effectively makes her point.

Yeah, I read the intro, and it's very easy to get pulled in, although--maybe because I listened to the podcast--I can't help feeling it would be great to have a real conversation with her. I didn't mean anything negative by the young comment (at least I don't think it's something essentially negative...), it's just that it strikes me more and more how there's ever less and less common ground between generations, and it's typical--perhaps inevitable--for the newest people on the scene not to know the history. (Again, this is true for everyone who was ever "newest on the scene".)

Clearly this in itself isn't a new argument, but we have sped up so much, the abysses seem to be opening earlier and deeper.

For an example, which is not the best example because I use myself (and I'm already old although yesterday I was young), as I was reading finally the seventies feminists I kept being surprised by ideas that I somehow thought had come up during "my" special time, the nineties. And if one really wants to talk radicalism, THAT was the most radical, avant-garde period, not today's sad sinking into wishy-washy liberalism.

But the whole question of what history is getting reduced to in the age of Twitter and Tik Tok is a big subject...

I've now read the first and second essays and I'm thinking it might be best if I said nothing about her take on Handke (which takes place in the second essay), so of course I'm gonna say something... As I feared, she's using the Yugoslav war in labelling Handke a fascist. Not only that, she does it in a way that not only reflects the canned imperialist US official version, but she self-servingly adopts that imperialism's own fascist worldview. Milosevic may be "the first sitting head of state charged for war crimes", but he's neither the first nor the only one to have deserved such charges. Let's never forget that the US itself doesn't recognize the jurisdiction of this supposedly "international" tribunal--the US, whose successive governments have bombed millions into death and exile unceasingly since the WWII. To say nothing of the murderous dictatorships it supported, invasions and sabotages. But this is allowed, because the US can do whatever it pleases to whomever it pleases and will remain untouched, minus some freak terrorism.

I mean, maybe the fact that post-Yugoslav Serbia was a total pariah, a weak, impoverished country with no friends and no value whatsoever to anyone had something to do with the fact that Milosevic ended in front of the tribunal? (And died before he was actually proven, or at least "found" guilty.) I'm sure Castillo must be aware of these contrasts.

Whether Handke or Milosevic are fascists I consider a serious, categorical question in a time when fascism is resurgent. IOW, I don't consider it an appropriate slur against Very Bad People, or even Evil People (I really don't care how evil anyone thinks Milosevic was, and I'm only slightly more concerned about doing right by Handke.) But the point is, the word "fascist" has a specific meaning, it is not to be used as a mere curse or intensifier, any more than we need Hitler to be proven ALSO to have been a cannibal before we can properly begin to execrate him.

If Handke were fascist, why would he choose to die on the Milosevic hill? Why choose to exhibit his fascism uniquely in connection with some two-bit Balkan warlord? Does he fraternize with other fascists around, of which there is no shortage, does he espouse fascist agendas, in what exactly does his fascism today consist in? Castillo repeats another statement that's been propagated through the media, that Handke is "a genocide denier". Unqualified as this is, by parallel to Holocaust denialism one might first think that he denies the massacre (in Srebrenica) ever happened--but he has never done that; the issue (no less ugly to be sure), is that he recoiled at calling the massacre of estimated 8000 Muslim men by Bosnian Serbs, a "genocide".

It's not nice, but it's also not nice that genocide politics are a thing, in which the West and the US in particular excel. But hey, it's far easier to call Handke a fascist for quibbling about what the murder of 8000 people is to be called, than to take a look at not just other massacres of that scale, but something like the Armenian genocide as well, which the US didn't recognize as a "genocide" until a few years ago.

My thesis is that Handke's weird and self-destructive stance on the Yugoslav war isn't proof of his "fascism", but that it stems from an idiosyncratic and extremely complicated mess of circumstances that include his biography, character, outlook, and past experience in ways that are virtually unintelligible to anyone outside those geographico-historical parametres. I can't prove this, it's my (and some other people's, thankfully more articulate than me) reading of the situation. I could discuss it at length but I don't see that anyone would or could care. It would be a good subject for a book, but I'm not about to become a writer.

I'll tackle in another post some things relating to Castillo's reading of Der Chinese des Schmerzes.

First, Castillo chose Handke as an example within a larger argument about how people read differently white authors to non-white authors (the products of the former are more often seen as "pure" art, whereas the latter are seen as instructors, teachers, especially on faraway places and tragic topics). And she began by a truly low-hanging fruit, an article defending Handke by Brett Stephens. Brett Stephens is an alt-right moron and if Handke were only half as controversial, being endorsed by this asswipe would already be the kiss of death. But Stephens' stupidity doesn't let us down, by the end of the article it's clear that he actually hasn't read Handke at all (something, btw, that Handke reproached with his Serbian "fans" as well, in effect telling them he knew they were using him for political scoring) and is inspired to 'add his books to his shelf" solely BECAUSE of the controversy.

My first criticism for Castillo is of this choice of a person to voice the "pure art" argument. Why an idiot like Stephens? Why not Harold Bloom, someone of that calibre? I mean, who seriously gives a fuck what Brett Stephens thinks "is art"? It's just so, as the kids would say, random.

But, going on...

I read Handke's book a few days ago, when I got the notice that Castillo's book had arrived. This was in Ralph Mannheim's translation, which Castillo quotes from. I don't have the German text, which I regret, but there's plenty to mention anyway.

Overall: I am shocked by Castillo's representation of the book, it's almost an inside-out version of my reading. Unfortunately, I must call it a singularly malicious reading, one where she clearly mobilizes everything in favour of an argument about Handke's... it's hard to sum up: total iniquity?

At this point I entreat anyone who might care to read Handke's book for themselves (preferably before reading Castillo's essay), because what follows will call only upon my subjective reading (at least as fallible as anyone else's), and no critical support of any sort.

Now I can't wait to hear what you think of her take on Joan Didion!

I'm going to note my overall impression of the book before tackling specific points of (most often) discord with Castillo's reading.

Handke's monotonous prose with myriad minute observations results in something like a mosaic--hundreds of disparate elements all treated the same, with the same polish on the surface. A deaf visual, there is very little sound to it (even the sight of an exclamation mark jars).

The narrator, Andreas Loser, is a teacher of classics (Greek and Latin) and a hobbying archaeologist with a special interest in thresholds. He's an Austrian living basically where he was born, a middle-aged man who separated from his family and temporarily stopped teaching due to an indefinable malaise.

He reveals from the start that his quiet exterior conceals a capacity for violence: the incidents when he deliberately pushed someone to the ground, the slapping of his girlfriend (he specifies, once, when she asked him to, after she kissed another boy in front of him), the more heavily weighted slapping of another schoolboy. Further evidence of this violent streak is the narrator's in-story vandalization of political signboards next to the canal, presaging the ultimate violent act, that of murder. The person he kills is presumably a neo-Nazi--Loser gives chase to him when he discovers a freshly painted swastika on a birch tree--and the killing felt as a resolution of the melancholy, not just Loser's own but that of the entire country. Loser is, he says, "sick with my country" (a phrase that occurs elsewhere in Handke as well). But he doesn't revive after the murder, he takes to bed, has nightmares, and lastly seems to succumb to amnesia concerning the murder.

To me Loser is Austria, its dark past and unencouraging present. It's a high civilization that engendered ultimate barbarism (or at least helped to--there is the part where he comes close to the border with Germany, and "{e}verything in {him} shrank back from the country on the shore -- as though that were the beginning of nothingness forever and ever."

At least, a homo austriacus, deceptively "without qualities", but at bottom conservative, earth-bound, driven mad by fear--of one's own crimes--and loneliness--brought about by one's own crimes.

>68 southernbooklady:

Well, I linked above the previous conversation on Didion we had here. I'm certainly no fan of hers.

Incidentally, I'm very sorry how it looks as if I'm being extremely negative about Castillo, when we basically agree on all her major points (as far as I could make from the podcast). If only she had picked someone other than blasted Handke! (and I hadn't already been pissed on by one cow from the great heights of her superior American righteousness on his account...)

I want to keep this as brief as possible, while knowing it will probably end up looking gigantic. To repeat just one thing: it would be best if anyone interested were to read Handke's book and make up their own mind.

I want to stress that I'm not arguing that Castillo's reading is invalid. If a person like her--non-white, non-European, 30-something--finds him racist and sexist, so be it. I explained above why I think accusations of fascism demand more.

The essay is very disorganized, which gives it its conversational tone, but makes it difficult to answer without becoming equally disorganized. Not only is the discussion of Handke interrupted by a lengthy digression on Austen and slavery, when she comes back to Handke's book she jumps back and forth within it, creating (I can't tell whether deliberately or not) a far worse impression than when the examples are tackled in the order in which they occur. I'll try to point out where the jumps occur and hope for least messy outcome...

1. About the title. I already covered this upthread. I disagree with her that "The suffering Chinese man" would be an accurate translation of the German title in any case, because the translation has to take in account the author's intention. And here, as Castillo herself notes (and deplores), the Chinese is one of the metaphors for foreignness.

There'll be more about this.

2. The Austen digression. She goes on for pages, which are summed up with a provocative "TLDR": "A contemporary Austen character would wear that Dior feminist slogan T-shirt."

I had to stop and wonder: which one character? Maybe the rich Emma? One of the more vapid Bennett sisters? I'm not a Janeite, but I thought Austen's humanity and perspicacity was generally recognised as being of a higher order than might be assigned to a "Dior feminist".

Castillo of course isn't beholden to do the Not All White Women, Not All White Middle Class Women, Not All White Middle Class Tea Drinking Women thing, but it is ironic when the subject of your (well-placed) critique nevertheless remains the more nuanced one.

3. Back to that albatross, Handke. She begins (anew) with this extraordinary notion that people read Handke "apolitically" and/or present him/think of him as an "apolitical" author. I've already discussed this upthread and can only reiterate/sum up: no. This is not true. Handke has been politically engaged since youth, beginning with anarchist theatre, and the very book she discusses as an example of white-man would-be "apolitical" art is a totally politicized attack on the uneasy Austrian (and let's note--AMERICAN) compromises and silences that have enabled old Nazis like Kurt Waldheim not just to remain in power but represent Austria to the world.

But the problem is that Castillo finds ways to damn Handke no matter what he writes. Everything that may be lauded in another writer, or is seen as ordinary literary devices, in his case becomes a sin. He is "slippery", he "obfuscates" (also known as being an unreliable narrator), he--the horror!--employs something she calls "sleight of hand", as if he were a magician. But what do these things amount to, and why are they framed as accusations? As far as I can see, bluntly--it's because she decided that he's a fascist, and from there onward anything he does is either a direct proof he's a fascist (being racist and sexist, for example), or an indirect proof (oh look, he's making anti-fascist noises--exactly what a clever fascist would do.)

Because of this, her reading to me appears downright perverse in places. In my interpretation, Loser is a villain, but of the most insidious kind--he is "us" (or, if you're feeling virtuous, at least he's Handke... maybe?) The book is a chilling account of how he gradually comes face to face with his villainy, only to--forget it. This, incidentally, is more or less modern Austrian history, although of course the "amnesia" is just a mask--the knowledge of what was done only sinks out of sight, like the body Loser disposes of. (A propos Austrian amnesia, one could do worse than take in the extraordinarily strange film 1. April 2000, from 1952, made as a plea to the occupying Western forces to bugger off already, Austria being back to being its jolly old sweet self. Not a single mention of the catastrophe it ushered or any of the Austrian Jews hounded or murdered, the very people who contributed so much to the most valuable in Austrian culture.)

Castillo, meanwhile, constantly bemoans the "lack of responsibility" and the passive voice, as if Loser/Handke must come out and pin a great big Moral of the Story at the end or it's all pro-Jack the Ripper. But the whole point--in my view--is in Loser's lack of catharsis, lack of remorse! It is this lack of catharsis that kept (and keeps) Handke out of Austria, the country he loves, the country that is his. It's this that made him a global wanderer, and it's this (I speculate), among other factors, that caused his "cathexis" of inappropriate objects, like the heroic Yugoslavia and its anything but heroic post-civil-war cosplayers.

Castillo next takes issue with reviews admiring Loser's powers of observations and notes (in a tone which I can't help but find catty) that he sure observes fairly many foreigners. She mentions the very first instance and then goes on to pile other references, regardless not only of where they occur in the text but whether they are real, imagined, ongoing, or past. The most egregious example of this (I'm tempted to say, "sleight of hand") is when she jumps from the page about a foreign adolescent with a small child coming into Loser's tavern (page 28) to Loser's historical, imagined but not uttered retort when a bunch of foreigners (or foreign tourists) were being noisy "Quiet!--this is Austria"... which occurs on page 84.

But Castillo not only doesn't refer to page numbers, she directly links the two references as if they a) BOTH actually happened and b) the second happened directly after the first. (She writes after quoting the first encounter, in the tavern, 'Walking back to his housing development, Loser thinks...' and tacks on here the "Quiet!--this is Austria!" historical, imagined retort from a totally different situation.)

I'm not saying this was deliberate, but the order of events she gives creates a wholly different impression of Loser's observations and Handke's gradual employment of the "foreignness" metaphors. However, she deals similarly with the mentions of the "Chinese man", which really looks like nothing but an agenda to prove Handke is an anti-Chinese and probably anti-everything racist.

There are three mentions/uses of "der Chinese", occurring at a considerable distance from each other. Castillo leaves the impression that Loser thinks of himself as "a Chinese", but this is not strictly true--it is other people that label him as foreign. In the first instance, on the bus, a young woman and then a child apparently refer to him as "an Indian" (she talking to a man next to her; the child to his mother). This occurs on page 24. Some indefinite time later (days, weeks, months?), on page 81, there's a second instance, when Loser is slow to quit the bus and says goodnight to the driver taking "elaborate leave" and being "verbose", and the driver sees him off with a "Goodnight, Mr. Chinaman". Loser doesn't comment on these labels but I think we're allowed to imagine they not just registered but lodged within him, confirming and adding to his malaise.

Ugh, this is enormous... To Be Continued

>71 LolaWalser: Incidentally, I'm very sorry how it looks as if I'm being extremely negative about Castillo, when we basically agree on all her major points

I'm not. Above you said, "I've never quite worked out where do we go from here...once you've made your criticism, what then?" And you're right, I think there is a tendency for a lot of people to read the criticism, then write off the book accordingly. Subject closed. Conversation over.

I'm not built that way, so Castillo's reading of Handke, and your response, only makes me want to read the book (I haven't) and, you know, decide for myself. Maybe join that conversation on my own terms. I find real pleasure in the point/counterpoint here.

I'm not invested in defending Castillo, who I don't think needs it. I've already decided I like her attitude -- I tend to like rebellious angry young women. And I already know that what bugs her about American and British publishing seriously bugs me too. But it's not like she walks on water. I have my own issues with some of her opinions and obsessions (astrology!) and I have a hard time giving some of her cultural touchstones the weight they probably deserve. I predate the generation that grew up on Marvel Comics movies.

But past all that, I love the way she dives into what's bugging her, I like people who take the time to close-read a text, and I really like her version of "the reader from Mars" -- what she calls the unexpected reader, the reader the author never considered. I think that reader might count the most when we are trying to gauge the significance of a text. I do think that "Art" is never an abstract self-justified thing. It is always infused, infected, inhabited by the, well, realities of the artist and the viewer/reader. "Art for art's sake" has always come off to me as a kind of entitled position.

I also identified with how she grew up as a reader, encouraged by a parent, allowed to read what she liked, and discover books in her own way. That very much mirrored my own childhood, although of course being a middle-class white girl I was generally praised for being a good reader, not doubted or treated with suspicion as Castillo remembers.

All of which is to say, have at it. I am actually enjoying your responses.

>73 southernbooklady:

Thank you, that is typically generous of you. I too like her and actually agree on the essentials 100%--but this does make me all the more dismayed about some of her tactics in the anti-Handke essay which, frankly, I can't help seeing as downright dishonest. I don't mean this with hostility, it's stuff that I would point out to a friend or pupil in alarm because I'd want them to do better since they ARE better than that.

Onto another Walle O' Texte... (I'm so sorry about the length...)

The second occurrence of "Chinese" is in Loser's nightmare in the days after the murder. Castillo quotes the nightmare only in part, and again, deliberately or coincidentally, leaves a different impression than one might reasonably have. But here she is all bent at making a cheap jab about fear of immigration straight out of "Stephen Miller's" imagination, failing both in literary interpretation and Dreams 101--nothing in dreams is as it seems. And she again juxtaposes the "Chinese" and foreign references out of order, here tacking the #1, driver's remark to Loser, AFTER the #2, the nightmare, and mentioning the very first instance ("an Indian") as if Loser were thinking about it NOW (after the nightmare), when he does no such thing.

I'm going to quote the nightmare passages as fully as I think is necessary for at least some context (of course the only real context is the entire book...)

Remember, the actual order of relevant events in the book is as follows (usually with days or longer period in-between):

1. a woman and a child refer to Loser as "an Indian" 2. Loser vandalizes political signage, kicking it into the canal 3. Loser kills a neo-Nazi 4. Loser returns home but is reluctant to leave the bus; the driver sees him off with "Good night, Mr. Chinaman". 5. Loser has a nightmare figuring "Chinese" people

All through the weekend I lay stretched out on my bed, incapable of the slightest movement, clenching my teeth and fists, if you can call that lying. Early in the morning, a woman down in the street, who evidently worked in the pastry shop, said: "We're having a heavy run on Easter eggs." At noon, the shutters of the supermarket were pulled down for three days. For a long while, in the afternoon, a little bird fluttered up and down outside my window.

With a package tour from somewhere, I landed on the airfield of the moon. From the lobby of the air terminal building, a stairway led down to a restaurant that was jam-packed with Chinese. It was a sinister den, dimly lit and low-ceilinged. In the middle there was a platform--this was a place of slaughter. Naked men with long, curved, two-handed swords flung themselves on other naked but unarmed men. There was no struggle. Nor did the unarmed men run away. They buckled like apes overtaken by a pursuing lion, bared their teeth, and hissed (or rather squealed) their last cries of terror at the butchers. The soles of the victims' feet seemed also to buckle and formed high, loudly creaking arches on the platform. A moment later, the whole body was gone. Not only had it been cut into little pieces, but almost simultaneously it had been devoured by the people in the room below. What an instant before had been part of a gesticulating human being was now a chunk of meat vanishing into someone's gullet. The mouths with these unceasingly active gullets marked, as it were, the innermost core of the Chinese quarter, which at one time had been the hub of all world happening. The slaughter would never end. Time and again, new loads of arms and shoulders were brought in, and in the place of these arms and shoulders there would once again be nothing. We travelers were separated by ropes from the place of slaughter. Bags in hand, we quickly left the airport. The moon was not our final destination; we now went to an elevator at the edge of the airfield, which was to take us back to earth. On the way, we walked under the open sky. Tall acacias rustled in a pale light such as foreshadows a cloudburst. It was not, as one might have expected, easy to walk in the lunar atmosphere--we didn't hover. From step to step, our limbs grew heavier. I had no difficulty breathing, but felt that I soon would have. It was still a long way to the elevator shop, a windowless, sheet-metal shack, which was ringed by people waiting with suitcases. The only hope was to wake up. But I couldn't manage to. {wakes up}

Castillo says about this: "A paranoid fantasy of inevitable and endless slaughter at the hands of foreign hordes; perhaps Stephen Miller read Der Chinese des Schmerzes as a primer to his immigration policy. Is this were we locate our elusive suffering Chinese man, at least? No. Besides the dream, there are no speaking Chinese characters in the book."

Where to begin... It's about at this point that I decided a "conversational" tone can be too much, when it sinks the issue like this into glib inconsequentiality.

First, yes, "Chinese", as well as "Indian", is deployed in the book as a metaphor, and refers to the narrator, an Austrian, and not any actual Chinese or Indian people. The whole time I've been trying to recall what my first reading impressions had been (back when I first read the book, in German, at about twenty) but I had little success recalling details, except for feeling overall surprised by where Castillo has taken it. Which, you might think, proves her argument that white people read badly, or we are all racists (or both).

Fact is that to me this time either nothing like HER interpretation came to mind. The sequence of events makes it clear Loser gets "Chinese" stuck in his mind after he notices suddenly three people see him that way--as unusual, non-native, outlandish: foreign. This may be due to how he behaves (as he actually almost explains in the driver's case), AND/OR his behaviour may have changed due to these cues, as well as his restlessness, so that he IS becoming "non-native".

So it's not surprising that the "Chinese" motif gets carried over into his dreams. Let's look at the nightmare now. Is it about "immigrant hordes"? On the contrary--in it, the travellers are Loser and his group, and they arrive on the moon. Loser has left his realm, gone outside himself, and given that "Chinese" is a metaphor for him, does it not make more sense to consider that the Chinese men he observes slaughtering other Chinese men* are a metaphor for his murder?

That's another thing Castillo obfuscates--that Handke writes only that "the room was jam-packed with Chinese", from which I, at least, deduced that both the killers and the victims in the room are "Chinese". Loser and his group are actually separated from this scene "by ropes". They observe the carnage and move on. No white people were harmed by the "Chinese" in this scene, nor is that the reading it reasonably suggests.

Moreover, there's that strange remark about the mouths (which are devouring the hacked flesh), once being the innermost core of the Chinese quarters, "which at one time had been the hub of all world happening". Now, we all have our biases, but I'd wager that this too has got nothing whatsoever to do with anything Chinese, immigration, or Stephen Miller, but is again a pointer to Austria's past. I read this nightmare as a metaphor for Austria's past, specifically the endless slaughter located in what was once a world hub to me inexorably brings to mind the almost total vanishing of Vienna's and Austria's Jews, with subsequent sinking of both Vienna, once an imperial city, and Austria, Europe's largest empire, into glum provincial irrelevance and pettiness both physical and moral.

Castillo crowns this egregiously malicious interpretation with sneering, for good measure, about the single sex scene in the book. I'm thinking there's probably no writing about sex that someone somewhere wouldn't find the grounds to excoriate; about this example all I can say is that struck me as fine and unexceptional. If sex scenes there must be, then this kind--short and demure--are probably the easiest on the reader.

Castillo paints it as ridiculous, cringeworthy, describes as a "fuck" (not a word in Handke's vocabulary), and, in the same vein as complaining that "there are no speaking Chinese characters", criticises the woman as a "paper-thin character". It's as if she doesn't expect anyone to read this book after they have read her... and notice that "paper-thin characters" are all there are, with the arguable exception of the narrator.

Again, these are such superficial, cheap criticisms, I wonder an obviously smart and sharp person would make them.

But there's more to say on the deployment of the "foreign" metaphors...

The third and last occurrence of the "Chinese" is in the conversation between Loser and the woman he sleeps with. Loser asks the woman to describe him, and she tells him an anecdote about "a man in a doorway", who was very ill but nevertheless went to visit a friend. The friend noticed his pain, which made his eyes tense so that they became slits, and said, 'Goodbye, my suffering Chinaman'. Loser asks the woman if the two met again, she laughs and replies: "In the end, the friend said to the friend, 'At last a Chinese--at last a Chinese face among so many native faces."

Castillo despises everything about this--how dare eyes "tensed to slits" remind one of a Chinese, how dare a white man imagine he's suffering, and in this suffering experience his alienation as a metaphorical foreigner etc. She calls Handke an "edgelord" (I wonder how this will age) and derides the "excuses" of his harsh upbringing by comparing him to her mother, in a paragraph I found to be pure sub-blogger babble. (If her mother hasn't won the Nobel prize--"yet!"--that may not in itself be further evidence that the jury prefers white male fascists to Filipina non-Trump voters.)

There is a discussion to be had about the metaphors for foreignness, and not just in relation to Handke. No doubt we seem to be getting to a time--and in many places already are in that moment--where using "Chinese" or "Indian" to signify remoteness and alienation simply won't occur to anyone. But no one is claiming that Handke's or any book is for "all time".

Castillo herself, after castigating Handke for noticing foreigners (would it be better if he didn't notice them at all?), notes that she experienced Salzburg in 2010s as an oppressively, homogenously white place. What does she think the villages on the outskirts of Salzburg, such as the one where Handke's book is located, looked like in 1981?

You bet that foreigners were noticed and observed in such contexts. One might even find it positive that Loser, at least, observes them with the same equanimity as the trees and the birds--his gaze actually integrates them into his world, which, given that he's a traveller, is larger than that of the real rural hicks.

Castillo complains that Handke doesn't mention the whiteness of the white characters, that he sees them as "default". But that's what they were. It's funny how parochial Castillo can come across as she's reproaching others with a lack of cosmopolitanism. What's the point of imposing on, say, Moldova, an American lens on race and ethnicity? Or even on Brazil, or Mauritius? A truly cosmopolitan outlook must take in account that histories vary.

I've gone on for an outrageous length of time and I still can't cover everything I could say. Handke is a difficult writer both for technical and "outside", political reasons. I don't wonder nor regret if people find him odious etc. (I'm not a fan myself). However, I do know that he can be extremely rewarding, that he has the power of weaving incredibly beautiful and moving texts, that he takes multiple readings and stands multiple, possibly even contradictory interpretations. In short, there be riches, for those who might bother.

By no means do I think my interpretations here did justice, let alone exhausted, what this book is about. (For example, the whole threshold theme, which is actually the core of the story.) I do need to mention, at least, that contrary to Castillo's harshly reductive take on Handke's attitude to "foreignness", he may be one of the most consciously "cosmopolitan" authors. His vision telescopes geography, overlaying vastly remote places with each other, cognizant that everywhere on the globe is a "centre" to itself, and that the word for one's own nation in most languages refers to the notion of "THE people".

Rather than racism, I think it's this cosmopolitanism that made possible for him to use "Chinese" to say "Austrian", to see a Hindu temple in the shadow thrown by a Kirche, to end Loser's journey with a reference to the Maya and the Yucatan.

Why didn't Castillo notice that in the most beautiful piece of writing in this book Handke has an Austrian pair of lovers acquire, in their passion and concentration on each other, "Egyptian profiles"?

I'm not saying I understand completely this alchemy by which Handke transmutes people and places into one another, nor what it means to him. Only that I have never felt from it hate, but longing and kinship.

There was one other issue I thought I would skip but the topic of an article in the latest NYRB changed my mind. It goes back to the general remark about history I made at the beginning, the different visions/versions different generations inevitably have on it, to say nothing of divergences when we add ethnic and other variations to the mix.

But before I tackle this I want to sum up what I think about Castillo's essay that is largely on Handke's book -- I think it's bad, shoddy, unethical, and would stand not just rewriting and recomposing but deep rethinking about the book itself.

The larger argument which she meant to prove on Handke's example remains, to my mind, completely valid. But I think the example itself was badly chosen and badly treated--that she was blinded by the agenda to, having labelled him a fascist, then "prove" him a fascist at any cost. This involved not just heavily biased interpretation, but dodgy practices like tendentious quoting (partial quoting or even, as I described, cutting up and mixing the text in such a way to create a different situation, a different impression--without indicating that she's doing that) and even simply incorrect "quotes" and statements. For an example of the latter: she writes that Loser kills "in cold blood", but it's completely the opposite--the sight of the swastika jolts him out of his torpor and he tears after the trail of the culprit in an incandescent rage, in an attack of passion unique in the book. If you can mistake or represent that as "in cold blood", I'd pause before going on to talk about bad readers.

Not that I think Castillo is a bad reader of Handke--she's worse, a tendentious reader. She has conflated Loser and Handke completely and so if one is a fascist the other must be, and whatever the character does also directly reflects on Handke.

To the last example. It concerns Loser's reaction to the swastika. Castillo berates Loser for not thinking about "the Jewish people's systematic genocide", but "only of himself". Leaving aside the comically specific remark about the Jews for the moment, anyone who reads the book ought to note that Loser "thinks" very little, relative to how much he observes and sees. We get to hear precious few opinions of his and practically no explanations for why he does anything he does (I remarked above how unusual it was when he almost "explains" to us the bus driver's "Chinaman" remark to him by noting that previous to that remark he behaved in an unusual, outlandish manner--took "elaborate leave", was "verbose"...)

So, saying that Loser "thinks only of himself" isn't entirely fair because outside of Loser's subjectivity there is no book. It's also not literally true precisely at this moment. This moment is actually one of those rare moments when we get a glimpse of something under the surface, Loser's painful attitude toward his country and its past. He sees the swastika and at first tries to see anything else in it, but no--it is what it is.

No, a swastika is a swastika. And this sign, this negative image, symbolized the cause of all my melancholy--of all melancholy, ill humor, and false laughter in this country. And this accursed mark had not just been daubed on out of caprice or thoughtlessness; it had been traced with malignant precision and black determination, laid on thickly and thoroughly; the exaggerated hooks were intended to threaten evil, to hit the viewer full in the face; and indeed, they did hit me in the face. Me? I? One great burst of passion.

Nicki, if you're still with me, compare that to Castillo's anecdote about her reaction to the defaced sign in New Zealand--when she describes herself as having "zero chill" and going into a rage and on the spot asking for a marker to fill in the erased letters.

She should understand Loser here intimately. It's exactly the same thing, this passionate response to an outrage.

But as I pointed out before, because she's committed to the most malicious interpretation possible, she overlooks the passion and even somehow changes the charge of the scene into "cold blood".

She also refuses to contemplate that Loser may be feeling outraged here on moral ground, that he hates the sight of the swastika because it represents evil. Although he finally reveals in plain words something about the unease and gloom that hang over him and the entire country--that the swastika is at the root of it, and that the humor of the country is "ill" and the laughter "false". But no--there's no mention of "the Jewish people's systematic genocide", so Loser is just acting out of some hurt narcissism or something.

And the nightmare about the armed men killing unarmed naked men, who don't even offer any resistance but fall to the ground like animals, making animal noises? Oh, right, that's about "immigrant hordes".

At this point, I can't even say I think Castillo read Handke's book (more than a little ironic, that...)

Finally to finish, with "the Jewish people's systematic genocide" and experiences and knowledge of history. I hope I don't need to explain at length that what I found to be comical about Castillo's remark is her pedantic and cliched phrase (like a mechanical crossing oneself in sight of a crucifix), as if only the employment of this magical formula might prove Loser's good faith, that his rage is righteous--in short, and for once it applies, prove his political correctness.

I also hope I don't need to explain at length that Loser may yet in this scene act as a person who genuinely execrates Nazism as a moral evil, who cannot be at peace because his own conscience and that of his countrymen is chronically beset by dampened but restless memories of crimes committed and unexpiated--memories of the endless slaughter.

And here we get to history, what history looked like then vs. now, what it looked like to Handke, and to the majority of his countrymen, what it looks like to me, and what it looks like to Castillo... we all share a lot of the same facts and knowledge, but we have different visions. Handke, the oldest, the most torn, certainly knew and suffered for what was done in Austria and in Austria's name. His countrymen wanted to forget. (They still want to forget.) Handke's book deals with this subterranean knowledge. It's absolutely savage on the theme of silence and burying the guilt. He knows, he sees, old Nazis rehabilitated (and eventually, at which point he leaves Austria for good, even leading the country), and he can't stand it. (Castillo couldn't comprehend this because she knows nothing about Yugoslavia, but there's a direct connection between Handke being unable to stand Austrian fascism, and his tragic paying of respect to the likes of Milosevic.)

For Castillo the young American, all of WWII and the evil of Nazism has come to be represented by "the Jewish people's systematic genocide". She glibly comes out with this formula, so familiar and obvious to her. But it wasn't so in 1981. Not even in the US. Not that the knowledge of it as such was lacking, absolutely not. But it didn't exist in the culture, in the mainstream, in pop culture, in the same way the "six million" exists today.

Handke WAS thinking about the Jews (and possibly other victims), only Castillo's deliberately malicious misreading of his book prevents her from understanding this. And this was in fact somewhat unusual, back then. There were books out about the Holocaust, there was everything from historiography to sleazy exploitation, but literary works about it were mostly coming from Jews, survivors, communists--and were extremely rare in German.

For one thing (which is what the NYRB article is about), the occupying Western forces had decided that securing West Germany's and Austria's cooperation was more important than eradicating antisemitism, let alone seeking justice for the Jews. They wanted this rich region to recover and contribute to the capitalist bulwark against the Soviet Union, and dwelling on the Holocaust wasn't useful to that goal at all. All the easier to quietly set aside as antisemitism was as widespread in the US (the Jewish quotas at Ivy League universities would last through the sixties) as anywhere in Europe. So it happened that it was the USSR and East Germany who tackled first and earliest (already in the late 1940s) this topic in films and books--but conveniently the West blocked "Communist propaganda".

The Holocaust as THE major theme of the WWII won't surface globally until the mid-eighties, with a TV series in the US and eventually Claude Lanzmann's Shoah in 1985.

Still with you! I'm en route to a conference but when I get settled at my hotel I'll chime in. I have some questions.

Cool! Enjoy your conference!

I finished Castillo's book. I'm afraid the problems with the Handke essay cast a pall on the rest... not that I encountered anything as objectionable as that, it's just that I became wary.

On Didion--I haven't read the novel she criticises and frankly don't recall enough about the two essay collections I did read (The White Album; Slouching toward Betlehem) to be able to make pertinent literary criticisms. I do know that I don't like Didion's world-weary patrician attitude (this much I share with Castillo) and when I found out in that former conversation that she voted Republican, it didn't surprise me in the least. So, I'm poised to agree with Castillo's takedown in general terms, but I'm not sure about all the conclusions she draws from the quotes she gives us.

I noticed that she accuses Didion too of "sleight of hand"--so, this is now a pattern, a thing, and I'd be interested if she'd explain it in abstract, give definite form to this notion, which I must say I don't get in relation to writing at all. It's an accusation of some sort of... trickery? bad faith? the wish to mislead the reader?... but none of that makes sense to me outside some very specific examples I can think of, say a murder mystery, or political propaganda... but in literary fiction? This idea--if I'm even on the right track--that it must communicate limpidly and honestly, and presumably the author's actual mind... just seems to me amazingly naive and, well, anti-literary. But, again, depends on what she means by the phrase, and I wish this would be elaborated.

In the pop culture essays I didn't follow well. I have some dim memories of Singer's X-Men trilogy and I know about the old identification of X-men mutants with the marginalised in society, but that's about it.

In the essay about the photography book whose subject was children born of sex tourism (and the US military) in the Philippines, that she was invited to introduce but inadvertently crashed the whole project... I guess I'm in two or maybe even three minds. One, I can see why a story about misery in a country one loves and strongly identifies with would piss one off--but--Two, is her framing of the photographers' intention as "to show how awful it's been since Daddy's been gone" fair? This is impossible to judge without seeing the photos, but even from her descriptions it seems they shied away from over-focussing on these children or adult offspring, with more emphasis on the dereliction of the previous military base, the evidently difficult environment these children live in. I just don't see how a topic like that could be ever interpreted as a call for the "absent daddy", when the criticism of the behaviour that causes the problem must be evident? Who on earth cheers for sex tourism and exploitation of minors rampant in countries like Thailand, the Philippines, Cuba...?
She goes on about the kind of photos SHE gets from her contacts, the strong happy faces, but isn't that simply changing the subject? And the remark that the "white Swiss photographers'" agenda is obvious from the first photograph, of an altar of the Virgin and the Holy Child ("both white"), doesn't take in account that the vast majority of the Filipinos declare themselves Catholic. Yes, the faith was brought and imposed on the land on the end of colonizers' swords--but is it today for that reason less real, less really felt? I'm just saying--and I'm of the same mind as Castillo when it comes to colonization and the missionaries and all that--that with this she runs the risk of disrespecting the very people she identifies with. Who is to say they are not "really" Catholic, and that to them that statue of the Virgin means what it means to her?

Regarding Polyphemus--I'm not hostile to the reading of Odysseus as a sort of villain (or at least a knave, my good sir), BUT, here I must quibble again, I can't accept completely the vindication of Polyphemus as a stand-in for an innocent victim of European imperialism. Yes, Odysseus and his men broke into the giant's cave and partook uninvited of his food, and had the gall to ask for hospitality after these breaches of protocol. In their defence, they were weak and starving. And Polyphemus, who I fully agree should not be dismissed as "savage", and might have "invented culture" by inventing Feta, nevertheless ate two of Odysseus' men on the spot, reserving the same fate for the rest.

Castillo seriously wants us to consider this a mere difference in culture, and that is as may be. God knows the Greeks weren't always piously dedicated to cherishing strangers as dear guests. That said, I don't really see that "difference in culture" being THE issue here. Rather, for Odysseus and his remaining men it's just about preserving naked life. And life, I think all would agree, is worth more than some stolen Feta.

I'm all for recasting Polyphemus as the Hannibal Lecter of the ancient world; I just would consider escaping by any means necessary utterly fair and square, should either put me on the menu.

I have to return Handke's book on the 20th, and with the holidays imminent, even if I request it again immediately I probably won't get it until next year. I realise I haven't given a coherent interpretation of my own (although I hope none of what I did say about that is grossly contradictory), and in fact maybe I can't, because of how I see the book and think about literature in general... which involves much more freedom for the ambiguous than I get from Castillo. For one thing. But I do need to say more about the translation, and why (I think) Handke chose the Chinese metaphor at all.

Well, I better finish with this before everything fades.

Up in >56 LolaWalser:, before I read the translation, I made fun of the possibility of using "Chinaman", so I was surprised that Manheim went that route (twice). IMO that was a terrible choice and he ought to have known better and avoided it at any cost. The problem, of course, is that "Chinaman" has strong associations to the turn-of-the-century anti-Chinese (or Asian) racism, the Yellow Peril and all that. Presumably that's exactly why the term is obsolete and not used in normal speech (unlike, say, Englishman or Frenchman...)

In German, "der Chinese" has no such associations, it's the normal term and in common and current use.

So, partly it may be Manheim's fault if someone reading the translation picks up racist vibes--again, "Chinaman" arguably IS a racist term.

Fwiw, the fact that nothing of the sort registered when I read the original is also visible from my efforts up there to guess from what angle one COULD pick up racism... and failing. There is no "suffering Chinese man", no "Chinese man" of any sort, and, in German at least, there is no "Chinaman".

What there is is Handke's metaphor. As described, other people sense Loser's alienation in terms of his visibly not "belonging". They speculate that he is Indian, and then Chinese. The "Chinese" resemblance gets an explanation when the woman tells him an anecdote about a person in pain (whether physical or mental anguish we don't know, it's left ambiguous), whose face is changed by pain--his eyes narrow "to slits", and this prompts his friend to call him--humorously and sympathetically--a Chinese ("my dear Chinaman").

The "Chinese" label gets picked as the metaphor because of this simple visible difference to a "native" Austrian face. Virtually no other nationality/ethnicity would make sense. "Mongol" might--but this word unfortunately carries negative associations of its own in all European languages, since "mongoloid" was for a long time used as a descriptor of certain disabilities. (Amusing to think, if I'm on the right track, that Handke might have considered and rejected "der Mongole" out of some finer feeling...)

There are other ethnicities with eyes with epicanthic folds--Japanese, Koreans...--but the question is, who would occur most readily to some ordinary Austrians? "The Chinese" seems to be the obvious answer.

Anyway, just my suggestion--only Handke knows the genesis of the story and the metaphor. But to me it seems very vividly possible, that he notices someone one day and takes him for a "Chinese", then realizes he made a mistake and why would he make such a mistake? I can even see the whole story beginning to take shape with some incident like this.

My first complete read of an early feminist: In times like these by Nellie L. McClung, published in 1915. McClung (1873-1951) was Canadian, born in a farmer family in Manitoba, and knew what struggle for survival meant. She began supporting her family with her writing and public work early on and was the main breadwinner.

I was interested to get some direct insight into this activism since nowadays it's common to encounter blanket condemnation of early feminism (as exemplified by white women) in a completely ahistorical fashion. Of course, these women didn't think the same about everything, but McClung is as good a start as any.

The following notes are very casual and superficial, for which I apologise, but I'm neither a scholar in this field nor at my best at the moment.

Mainly two themes interested me in particular--how did McClung's feminism position itself in regard to racism, and which problems that we still encounter today were addressed already more than a century ago. On the latter, I found that McClung and presumably other feminists and certain people of that era were perfectly aware of what we'd call "toxic masculinity", "double standards", "sexism", "domestic violence"... of course, without employing precisely those terms.

Regarding racism, two things become salient--that McClung assumes a broad antiracist stance, explicitly invoking Canada's commitment to being a "Land of the Fair Deal" for all: "where every race, color and creed will be given exactly the same chance", but ignores (does not write about) practical discrimination facing First Nations and (presumably) people of colour. I'm just observing--it's impossible to tell whether she does so because she doesn't know any better, doesn't care, or doesn't feel up to tackling the subject.

Interestingly, McClung strikes some decidedly anti-colonialist and anti-white-supremacist tones (consistent with that broad anti-racist stance):

"England did not draw her policy from the open Bible when in 1840 she forced the opium traffic on the Chinese."

"Take the case of the heathen -- the people whom we in our large-handed, superior way call the heathen. Individually we believe it is our duty to send missionaries to them to convert them into Christians. Nationally we send armies upon them (if necessary) and convert them into customers!"

"We Anglo-Saxon people have a decided sense of our own superiority, and we feel sure that our skin is exactly the right color, and we people from Huron and Bruce feel sure that we were born in the right place too. ... Hens are like that too!"

"We have no reason to be afraid of the foreign woman's vote. I wish we were as sure of the ladies who live on the Avenue."

McClung had more rapport with the immigrant working women than with the well-off "Angels in the House". She met many of the former in her capacity as an anti-drinking activist. All sorts of connected lessons emerge from this experience: alcoholism as the scourge of the poor, and particularly women who are legally incapacitated from protecting themselves and the family against the husband (she describes a case in which a largely absent alcoholic and abusive husband one day simply sold off the cottage the wife had paid for, overnight pauperising the woman and his own children), the link to domestic violence, to the insight that "the whole {human} race is suffering from masculinity."

I was particularly moved by the remarks about misogyny and sexism (as we'd say) that accompanies girls from the moment we are born because such things always drive home the point of just how enormous is the historical suffering, this unjust, monstrous burden that falls on us at a time of our utter innocence, of being born into what should be a wonderful world.

A newborn girl is a disappointment to her parents and everlasting object of scorn (to begin with) to everyone.

"Look at the fine scorn with which small boys regard girls! You cannot insult a boy more deeply than to tell him he looks like a girl -- and the bitterest insult one boy can hand out to another is to call him a 'sissy'."

"...even in the sacred precincts of the church, women are held in mild contempt." (McClung clearly wasn't a Catholic, or she wouldn't be employing terms like "mild"!)

Other observations that have lost none of their truth more than a century later include that the men are "human beings, but women are women", that men and women alike propagate misogyny, that men kill women by the thousands (writing in 1914, McClung quotes a statistic about more than 3000 wives killed by their husbands in one year in the United States), not to mention the topic with which she begins the book--war, a preeminently male activity that, like all preeminently male activity, lays waste to the world, to life, to happiness we might otherwise have.

But I digress.

One last note--I just skimmed a few articles about McClung and apparently she is another early feminist getting flak for eugenicist beliefs. Fwiw, I haven't noticed any in this book--but that's not to say she didn't have them. The thing is, most of people of her times would have and, most to the point, eugenics didn't mean simply anti-Black racism, which is what it gets conflated with nowadays. This is not to exonerate her from whatever it was she thought, but to indicate that the ideas involved are more complex, which is how someone who believes in a society where everyone is treated equally regardless of "race, color or creed" can also at the same time have eugenicist beliefs.