Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

“A friend who was gang-raped in high school says that any and all work by artists who’ve exploited and abused women should be destroyed. A gay friend whose adolescence was redeemed by art says that art and artist must be separated entirely. It’s possible that both these people are right.”

As Dederer grapples with Objectivity Versus Subjectivity in Art Consumption—the central tension of her book—she ambiguates her friends by using the article “a” instead of “my,” transforming them into universal figures, recognizable to her readers. The emphasis on ordinary community members, and their feelings about art, forms a thread that she weaves through her analysis.

“To accept the idea that Woody was not Soon-Yi’s parent does violence to the very idea of my relationship with Larry, one of the most cherished of my life. And perhaps that was the key to my response, when the news of Woody and Soon-Yi came out: I was even more disgusted by the whole mess than I might’ve been otherwise, because I myself had a mother’s boyfriend in my life—in my case, someone I adore and respect to this day. The story of Woody and Soon-Yi—at least the way it came to me—perverted this delicate relationship.”

Dederer finds her own biography colliding with Woody Allen’s as her personal experiences with stepfather Larry lead her to reject and denounce Allen’s treatment of Soon-Yi Previn. This anecdote illustrates a point she pursues further in Chapter 4 (see quote 10), that art consumption is a process of biographical encounter between artist and consumer.

“I had failed in what he saw as my task: the ability to overcome my own moralizing and pettifoggery—my own emotions—and do the work of appreciating genius. But who was in fact the more emotional person in this situation? He was the one storming from the virtual room. I would have a repeat of this conversation with many men, smart and dumb, young and old, over the next months: ‘You must judge Manhattan on its aesthetics!’ they said.”

In her contentious online encounter with a man over Woody Allen’s “Manhattan,” Dederer portrays her opponent as assuming the role of objective authority, setting an analytical goal for her to meet as a critic. The commenter sets this standard despite not being a critic himself and despite his inability to respond to Dederer unemotionally. Experiences such as this one help Dederer to realize that there is a widespread illusion of male objectivity in art consumption, which devalues and discriminates against the perspectives of women, whom they view as inherently more emotional and subjective.

“The stain is simply something that happens. The stain is not a choice. The stain is not a decision we make. Indelibility is not voluntary. When someone says we ought to separate the art from the artist, they’re saying: Remove the stain. Let the work be unstained. But that’s not how stains work.”

The metaphor of the stain invokes the imagery of juice spilling on clothing, or perhaps a carpet, permanently changing its appearance. This image emphasizes both the passivity of the object that has been stained (metaphorically the art) and the lack of simple solutions to the problem.

“We live in a biographical moment, and if you look hard enough at anyone, you can probably find at least a little stain. Everyone who has a biography—that is, everyone alive—is either canceled or about to be canceled.”

Dederer grounds treatment of Biography as “Stain” in the historical context of the digital age, which brings people closer to each other’s personal information than ever before. Her assertion that everyone is stained, by virtue of having a biography, foregrounds her concluding arguments in Chapter 13, which hinge on the imperfection of both artists and the people who love them.

“When what you like becomes important, becomes defining, becomes an obsession, then an artist’s biography has even more power than before. You have not just admired, not just consumed the art, you’ve become it. And therefore you have some new, much closer relationship with its maker.”

Building on her argument about the unique circumstances of consumption in the digital world, Dederer highlights fandom as an integral part of self-image in the 21st century. Her use of the second-person point of view applies this principle directly to her readers, encouraging them to consider their own engagement in fan culture.

“I was beginning to feel that I wasn’t going to solve this problem of monstrous men by thinking. In fact, I was beginning to wonder if it might be solved instead by feeling.”

As early as the first third of the book, Dederer begins to embrace the value of subjectivity in the conflict of objectivity versus subjectivity in art consumption. This instinct defies her initial liberalist conviction, passed down from the Enlightenment, that any problem can be solved by thinking hard enough.

“I didn’t know it when I was a young critic, but I now know this: my subjectivity is the crucial component of my experience as a critic, and the very best thing I can do is simply acknowledge that fact. It was a hard thing to learn, as a young female surrounded by men who saw their role differently. Indeed, they never had to question their subjectivity, because of course it was perceived as the universal, default point of view, and often as not the same point of view as that of the artist himself. Hence they were able to make pronouncements that, when examined closely, have the whiff of insanity about them.”

An illusion of objectivity, witnessed by Dederer in many of her male colleagues, is one of the many misogynistic structures in the art world that she criticizes in “Monsters.” Here, she juxtaposes her insecurity as a young woman new to her field, with the certainty of older men. In retrospect, Dederer sees her subjectivity to be one of her greatest artistic strengths.

“Consuming a piece of art is two biographies meeting: the biography of the artist that might disrupt the viewing of the art; the biography of the audience member that might shape the viewing of the art. This occurs in every case.”

In the context of biography as “stain,” Dederer undergirds this argument with the subtext that consuming a piece of art is also two stains meeting. Though Dederer does not emphasize the flaws of the consumer in this early stage of the book, moments such as this one foreshadow her eventual turn in that direction.

“Genius is the name we give our love when we don’t want to argue about it; when we want our opinion to become fact. When we want to push our obsession onto the next guy. When we don’t want to hold our heroes accountable.”

Dederer reduces the meaning of the word “genius,” ordinarily a grandiose word, to essential emptiness. Her definition emphasizes its casual usage in the popular vernacular, which waters down its potency.

“The sometimes-truth is that we are interested in and, yes, even attracted to bad people. When the latest news comes out and we’re all aflutter with outrage, we’re ignoring a truth: Part of the reason so much attention has been trained on men like Picasso and Hemingway is exactly because they’re assholes. We are excited by their asshole-ness. Wasn’t that what we saw with Trump?”

By comparing Trump to Picasso and Hemingway, Dederer relates her analysis of the art world to a contemporary political landscape—a connection that re-emphasizes the context of the #MeToo movement, highlighting the sexual abuses of a wide range of public figures in both political and artistic fields.

“Fry is certain he could save Wagner, or at least try to, because he, Fry, knows better. Someone else who knew better? Wagner. It goes against every belief we have about the Past, but the fact is, Wagner was well aware of the arguments against anti-Semitism. We know this why? Because he told us so.”

Dederer’s use of rhetorical questions, followed immediately by answers has the effect of a philosophical dialogue. Conversing with herself, playing the role of both the affirmative and opposing positions, she lays out a simple argument against apologist treatments of Wagner’s antisemitism.

“What do we do with the art of monsters from the past? Look for ourselves there—in the monstrousness. Look for mirrors of what we are, rather than evidence for how wonderful we’ve become.”

Dederer rejects the notion of progressive history, which she believes to be overly self-congratulatory. Instead, she compares history to a mirror, one that reveals an eternally imperfect human nature, and modern shortcomings.

“If Humbert is ordinary, then Lolita is too. She too is everywhere. She’s all around us—the girl whose life has been destroyed. The ubiquitous victim of the ubiquitous monster. And it’s her ubiquity that ultimately concerns Nabokov. The clue is in the title. The book is actually about what it says it’s about: a mere girl.”

Dederer concludes her analysis of “Lolita” in a forceful tone, proclaiming what she believes were Nabokov’s noble intentions in writing it. This conclusion challenges common perceptions of the Russian author and marks a shift for Dederer away from complete adherence to popular notions of artistic monstrosity.

“Nabokov is in fact a kind of anti-monster. He was willing to have the world think the worst of him. By doing so—by telling the worst story, and letting himself be implicated in that story—he created a way for us to understand, to feel, the enormity of what it is to steal a childhood. The book seems to be a portrait of a monster. But Nabokov has done something even more miraculous. He has caught hold of a bit of iridescent fluff—retrieved for proof of an ordinary life’s destruction.”

The “iridescent fluff” referred to here is an allusion to Nabokov’s description of a hummingbird obliterated by a shotgun in “Lolita.” Dederer adopts this metaphor for the purposes of her arguments, later writing that the bird’s hum is more important than its visibility, and that erased survivors of violence and abuse can regain power by making noise.

“It’s wrongheaded to think that people from historically oppressed groups will never be monstrous. A person’s identity does not automatically make them bad; and it does not automatically make them good either. I don’t think that if institutions start supporting women and people of color and queer people and trans people, all those people will turn out to be good. But I do think the institutions will be better, simply because they will be fairer.”

In Chapter 8, Dederer addresses the racial components of misogynistic structures in the art world, arguing for the inclusion of marginalized groups in institutions such as museums. Such an argument underscores the intersectional sensibility of radical feminism, which Dederer becomes increasingly aligned with over the course of the Trump presidency.

“The female artists and writers I know yearn to be more monstrous. They say it in offhand ha-ha-ha ways: ‘I wish I had a wife.’ What does that mean, really? It means you wish to abandon the tasks of nurturing in order to perform the selfish sacraments of being an artist. What if I’m not monster enough?”

The tongue-in-cheek remarks of Dederer’s female colleagues, jokingly wishing for a wife, reveal the gender-based injustice they experience daily. At the same time, the joke highlights the gender-based inequity of the notion that wives exist in service to their spouses. This tension between monster and not monstrous enough that Dederer describes in her discussion of mother artists seeks to hold the art world—and, by extension, the world at large—accountable for its own misogynistic structures.

“This is what female monstrousness looks like: abandoning the kids. Always. The female monster is Doris Lessing leaving two children behind to go live the writer’s life in London. The female monster is Sylvia Plath, whose self-crime was bad enough, but worse still: the children whose nursery she taped off beforehand.”

In this moment, Dederer adopts the voice of society as a whole, indicated by the certainty with which Dederer labels Lessing and Plath “female monsters.” This shift in narrative draws attention to the misogyny inherent to the discussion and judgment of female artists—specifically mothers—in contrast to male artists.

“My initial list of female monsters was short and the sins had to do, but entirely, with motherhood. To be precise: negligent motherhood. If the male crime is rape, the female crime is the failure to nurture. The abandonment of children is the worst thing a woman can do.”

Dederer admits to applying an entirely different standard of monstrosity to women than she does to men. Her instinct to focus on “negligent motherhood” is later contextualized by the guilt she admits to feeling about her own struggles with mothering.

“You start to see how abandonment could become an option for a mother-artist, even one who passionately loves her children. Perhaps—radical thought—especially one who passionately loves her children.”

Using the second person once again, Dederer implicates the reader in her empathy with Lessing, Plath, and Mitchell’s abandonment of their children. This POV switch marks a shift away from the repulsed tone she used to describe other “monsters;” here, she sees herself, and the reader, in the monstrosity of the artists.

“When female artists do violence, what story do we tell? Do we tell any story at all? Or is it a biographical black hole around which we must nervously edge, in order to somehow apprehend the work? Female violence is no different from any other violence—because femaleness isn’t an inherent quality, but something we’ve agreed upon, and one of the things we’ve agreed is that it’s not violent.”

Dederer continues to unpack her struggle with how to handle violent women, presenting female violence as a sort of cultural oxymoron, in which gendered understandings of violence make it incompatible with femininity. Her analysis allows the reader to view her metaphor of biography as “stain” through a gendered lens.

“My feminism—which was elastic enough to allow me to consume the work—was not elastic enough to countenance empathy for these men. They had behaved terribly; they had abused positions of power; they had brought shame upon themselves. They had me as an audience; they did not also deserve my sympathy.”

In placing empathy for monsters at the forefront of her concluding chapters, Dederer stretches the limits of her own feminism. Her struggle to adopt an empathetic attitude illustrates that even after pondering the issue of how to treat monstrous artists and their art for years, it still raises emotional turmoil for her. The conclusions of the book, therefore, are not absolutely final, but merely a stopping point in an ongoing internal conflict for the author.

“I guess all of this is a long way of saying: monsters are just people. I don’t think I would’ve been able to accept the humanity of monsters if I hadn’t been a drunk and if I hadn’t quit. If I hadn’t been forced, in this way, to acknowledge my own monstrosity.”

Dederer finds meaning in her struggles with alcohol use disorder and recovery by relating them to the flaws of art monsters. Whether or not her alcohol use disorder is monstrosity in the same sense as the sexual abuse of other “monsters” discussed in the book remains open to interpretation by readers.