You wish to be perceived a certain way, and you tend to become agitated and embittered when your work is misinterpreted. You’re sick of people seeing you the way they see you and not the way you want to be seen. You trusted them and they betrayed you. You never trusted them and their views still register as bottomless disappointment. You resent these obtuse outsiders for questioning your worth, the nature of your project, the value of your cultural contribution. These critics take no time, have no courage. You grapple with their ontological judgments. This is your art they’re talking about.
You are a female novelist who wants to be read like a male novelist. You are a white American poet who wants to be read like a Chinese poet. You are a female visual artist who wants to be treated like a male visual artist. You are a writer with a name who wants to be read like a writer with a different name. You are a writer with a name who wants to be read as anonymous. You are an Asian Poet who wants to be read as a Poet. You are a famous author who wants to be read as a debut author. You are a young and beautiful novelist who wants to be read like a novelist without a body. You are a middle-aged author who wants to be read like a literary ingénue. You are a Serious Male Poet who wants to be read as “a lesbian writer of girls’ school stories.”
I’ve always had a severe distaste for all the mindless biographical drivel that serves to prop up this or that writer,” Pearson admits in an interview in a publication called Cow Eye Express, part of the auxiliary Web material associated with the novel. “So much effort goes into credentialing the creator that we lose sight of the creation itself, with the consequence being that we tend to read authors instead of their works. In fact, we’d probably prefer to read a crap book by well-known writer than a great book by a writer who may happen to be obscure,” the unknown writer asserts.1
It’s human nature to take mental shortcuts, to deposit individuals into preexisting accounts. Art is expansive, but first it must be seen. Art can hold multitudes, but first the mind must consent to dilation. Other people are complicit in creating your art. You don’t have the privilege of prescribing their brush strokes.
All intellectual and artistic endeavors, even jokes, ironies, and parodies, fare better in the mind of the crowd when the crowd knows that somewhere behind the great work or the great spoof it can locate a cock and a pair of balls. (“Harriet Burden” in Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World)
You’re desperate to transmit signs that will communicate your value and challenge the reigning taxonomies. The female novelists with medical degrees are read differently than the female novelists without, despite the relative merits of their fiction. The women with PhDs are automatically granted more substantial intellects, no matter what field they’re in. You’re not as smart as they are. Perhaps you’ll go back to school. But school would be more of the same:
The gender of the faculty participants did not affect responses, such that female and male faculty were equally likely to exhibit bias against the female student.2
And your credentials can only do so much. You’re a woman citing a canon of dead male philosophers and dead male scientists who would discount you at the first opportunity. You reflexively assign them an authority that you don’t naturally assign to yourself. Your brain is a bedlam of footnotes and references, each clamoring to prove something vital to the skeptics and reductionists. You’re like a lawyer whose whole case is based on the testimony of expert witnesses. You no longer know why you know what you know.
“I have observed that male writers tend to get asked what they think and women what they feel,” she says. “In my experience, and that of a lot of other women writers, all of the questions coming at them from interviewers tend to be about how lucky they are to be where they are – about luck and identity and how the idea struck them. The interviews much more seldom engage with the woman as a serious thinker, a philosopher, as a person with preoccupations that are going to sustain them for their lifetime.”3
You sense that it’s futile to dictate the terms of your critical reception in the maddening world that exists outside your head. Rationally you get that you can’t control the brains of other people. You can’t always overcome their generalizations and implicit biases. (Often you fear you’re just as guilty of these charges.) You’ll run yourself ragged trying to counteract their sexism, racism, homophobia, myopia. Unless you intentionally exploit their cognitive failings. Unless you beat them at their own game! And so you carry out hoaxes. You employ subversive tactics that will, when discovered, either endear you to your audience or forever lash you to the whipping post. You try to manipulate perception in order to be pure. You try to be someone you’re not in order to be pure. Be nobody in order to be pure. Have no mythology, no smiling photograph, no biography on your book jacket, in order to be pure. You erase or distort yourself in order to please the tastemakers.
And it’s the way, frankly, that many of us read, regardless of background, identity, or politics: we bring our own dreams or baggage to bear upon whatever we have chosen to lay our eyes on. We might abide by different critical cues, but we are all looking for something. And when culture turns into an extended game of “gotcha,” it can be an act of self-preservation to assume that everyone is always acting in bad faith.4
What is the upshot of all this masquerading? You want to befuddle the establishment so every critic responds to new work with the fear that Thomas Pynchon might have written it or that Picasso might have painted it. To avoid embarrassment, they’ll learn to treat every piece as authoritative, at least until it betrays them. But you are not a trickster. You just want to examine things as you see them. You want to be considered legitimate, whether you’re appraising the walls of a bedroom or the fucking Milky Way.
[Diane Johnson] observes that male readers at least “have not learned to make a connection between the images, metaphors, and situations employed by women (house, garden, madness), and universal experience, although women, trained from childhood to read books by people of both sexes, know the metaphorical significance of the battlefield, the sailing ship, the voyage, and so on.”5
You write a story about a dollhouse. You write a story about a war. Your war might as well take place in a dollhouse.
Recently, when the novelist Mary Gordon spoke at a boys’ school, she learned that the students weren’t reading the Brontës, Austen or Woolf. Their teachers defended this by saying they were looking for works that boys could relate to. But at the girls’ school across the street, Gordon said, “no one would have dreamed of removing ‘Huckleberry Finn’ or ‘Moby-Dick’ from the syllabus. As a woman writer, you get points if you include the ‘male’ world in your work, and you lose points if you omit it.”6
You want to transcend this phallocentric point system. You can’t keep up with it. You’re too bad at math. (You kid, you kid.)
Have you heard anyone say recently about any book written by a man, It’s really a woman who wrote it, or maybe a group of women? Due to its exorbitant might, the male gender can mimic the female gender, incorporating it in the process. The female gender, on the other hand, cannot mimic anything, for is betrayed immediately by its “weakness”; what it produces could not possibly fake male potency.7
You write a poem about a black man. You write a poem about a white man. The poems might as well be about blackness, about whiteness.
You pretend to have authority as they define it. You fake it till you make it. You can only make it on their terms. But wasn’t your ambition to be pure? And good? And lasting? What is “making it” with regard to eternity? And the few in your boat who are victorious only demoralize you further because they substantiate your deepest fear: that it’s you who’s not good enough. That it’s not the establishment at all. But that’s the power talking. You’ve internalized it. You’ve turned it against yourself.
You’re underrepresented and you seek acceptance from the same dominant culture that subjugates you. You need to be validated by the mercurial patriarchy. You let the existing power structures dictate your worth. Because the same power structures helped create you. You’re the artist you are in part because you’re reacting to their mold.
Subjection exploits the desire for existence, where existence is always conferred from elsewhere; it marks a primary vulnerability to the Other in order to be. (Judith Butler in The Psychic Life of Power)
But what if this subjection can be reversed? What if you pull the sovereigns into your system? Make them vulnerable to your vision, and not the other way around.
Yes, I hold that male colonization of our imaginations—a calamity while ever we were unable to give shape to our difference—is, today, a strength. We know everything about the male symbol system; they, for the most part, know nothing about ours, above all about how it has been restructured by the blows the world has dealt us. What’s more, they are not even curious, indeed they recognize us only from within their system.8
You want your audience to be colorblind, but you don’t want your color obliterated. You want your audience to proclaim the death of the author, but you’d rather not be murdered. You want your audience to commit to a list of rules before judgment, but not everyone can be so circumspect. You want to be a cyborg, but you feel your flesh and blood. You want to be a god yourself, but this country breeds disciples. You want to be the judge, but you keep pleading your case to the jury. You want to tell them all to fuck off, but you also need to make a living.
Heller did survive, of course, and four years later the critics decided that the flighty little upstart who had had such trouble piecing together a sentence, or narrative, worth more than a few minutes of their precious attention had undergone some miraculous metamorphosis in which infelicities were replaced by seamless elegance, plodding one-liners with timeless apercus.9
They tell you there’s a chip on your shoulder. It doesn’t look like a chip to you. Informing people of what is and isn’t on their bodies is the height of lunacy. But then you remember: the way we see each other is always part hallucination. And then you return to your work.
