Fleshbags and distant grace
Last night I went to see Siri Hustvedt in conversation with A.O.Scott. Hustvedt's A Plea For Eros was the first collection of essays I ever read and it knocked my socks off. I've enjoyed her novels and her criticism and was more than a little excited to go and see her talk. It is more New York to me - in the sense of my former perceptions of NY - than anything I've yet done.
It was a difficult experience. Hustvedt talked over Scott a lot. She described some of the argument in his book about criticism as 'mush'. She disagreed vehemently with his assessment that Sontag's essay 'Against Interpretation' was rigorous, additionally stating that Sontag - in that and 'On Photography' - was plain wrong. Scott said, at least twice, that he wasn't sure what she was asking him to defend, and if that felt awkward, you can just imagine the mood of the room when Hustvedt went to talk over Scott again and was audibly shushed by a member of the audience.
There's an issue of style over substance here, as well as my own discomfort around gender. Baudelaire, Hustvedt said, described the best criticism as 'partial, passionate and political' and so I'm not ashamed to be sensitive about gender. I've seen many men act in the way that Hustvedt did - cutting sentences short, making veiled criticisms, hammering home a point - and I've found it distasteful and disrespectful. But precisely because I've seen men act like that, I instinctively think that Hustvedt has every right to act in this way. The trouble, though, is that my reaction to this confrontational style gets in the way of my ability to analyse the substance of the argument. I wonder if this blockage is also an aesthetic judgement: the Hustvedt on paper, in words, is articulate, strong, clever and even sensitive and humorous - and that sets an expectation of a person, in the flesh, that is attractive, graceful and a font of clarity.
I came home and finished a sumptuous book called The Lonely City, Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing, and the penultimate page spoke about this strange impulse to claim a version of a person:
It was a difficult experience. Hustvedt talked over Scott a lot. She described some of the argument in his book about criticism as 'mush'. She disagreed vehemently with his assessment that Sontag's essay 'Against Interpretation' was rigorous, additionally stating that Sontag - in that and 'On Photography' - was plain wrong. Scott said, at least twice, that he wasn't sure what she was asking him to defend, and if that felt awkward, you can just imagine the mood of the room when Hustvedt went to talk over Scott again and was audibly shushed by a member of the audience.
There's an issue of style over substance here, as well as my own discomfort around gender. Baudelaire, Hustvedt said, described the best criticism as 'partial, passionate and political' and so I'm not ashamed to be sensitive about gender. I've seen many men act in the way that Hustvedt did - cutting sentences short, making veiled criticisms, hammering home a point - and I've found it distasteful and disrespectful. But precisely because I've seen men act like that, I instinctively think that Hustvedt has every right to act in this way. The trouble, though, is that my reaction to this confrontational style gets in the way of my ability to analyse the substance of the argument. I wonder if this blockage is also an aesthetic judgement: the Hustvedt on paper, in words, is articulate, strong, clever and even sensitive and humorous - and that sets an expectation of a person, in the flesh, that is attractive, graceful and a font of clarity.
I came home and finished a sumptuous book called The Lonely City, Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing, and the penultimate page spoke about this strange impulse to claim a version of a person:
Equating words with a persons 'selfhood' is a mistake I think I'll go on repeating as long as I read. The ability to put oneself at arms reach is not unique to writing - it is in fact a huge component of the modern (social, digital) world. I am tired of selfie-culture, in which the aim seems to be to present a polished version of the self to the world at large. But I wonder if writing is not also a way of polishing oneself - of removing ums and ahs, even of being able to finish a sentence and therefore make one's meaning clear. The distance between our fleshbag selves and the 'grace' we place on distant shelves (book shelves, social platforms) is perverse and fascinating. Ultimately, the facade we present online doesn't bother me because it is a reflection of vanity - we probably all suffer from vanity in different ways. It bothers me because it seems to privilege a mediated self, a construction - and that the act of creating this self impinges so considerably on the other self that is immediate, messy, unreliable, mutable. Criticism at its best, claimed both Hustvedt and Scott, is an embodied act - it begins with this body, in this space, reacting immediately, viscerally. It is - in providing space for analytical and reflective thought - a celebration of our fleshbag selves and our ability to make meaning from physical and sensory impulses, rather than a denial of the complex physiology and behaviour that make us human."[Art] does have some extraordinary functions, some odd negotiating ability between people, including people who never meet and yet who infiltrate and enrich each other's lives. It does have a capacity to create intimacy; it does have a way of healing wounds, and better yet of making it apparent that not all wounds need healing and not all scars are ugly."
In a week, I will troop over to Park Slope to hear Olivia Laing read. But instead of fearing that Laing will not live up to the tender wisdom of her written self, I will revel in all the ways that she is not her words.
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