I was going to start this review with an anecdote about my own moral outrage towards a once-inspirational artist. I typed a few sentences about a particular band, then erased them. I wrote and cut out a part about some poet that disappointed me. I considered a particular actor and then backspacedbackspacedbackspaced. Truth is, if I continued in that vein, we’d shortly have a laundry list of abusers, misogynists, and predators and Claire Dederer’s fantastic book would have been unjustly drowned out by my own ranting.
Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma explores a question that is increasingly critical in our contemporary discourse: what do we do with the art of monstrous men (and women)? I am completely confident that everyone reading this review (all four of you) has had an experience where learning about an artist’s biography has tainted your view of the work and you’ve had to decide: do you keep watching? Do you re-read that classic? Do you write a scathing review? What is our capacity for blindspots?
I really admire the tact and nuance that Claire Dederer brought to this work. In the opening of the book, she admits that she began her research by looking to experts to help dictate whether or not we should still watch the movies of, in her examples, Roman Polanski or Woody Allen. I admit that I turned to this book from a similar impulse. I wanted to know how to respond to the horrors of contemporary society and their relationship with art.
Dederer does not profess to be an expert (though I’d argue she is), but there are three main facets of the argument that I find particularly useful in considerations of flawed art. She does not separate the art from the artist, necessarily, but she does separate ethics from emotion. One of the key pillars of her argument is that when we are outraged at an artist, we experience an emotional response rather than an ethical one. It’s a tricky argument to make, but I find it plausible, and it does establish the capacity to discuss “cancel culture” in a different way.
A second key pillar of the argument is that artists’ work is stained by their biography, which is an involuntary and amorphous experience. Dederer’s work really resonates with me because she has such a strong grasp of literary theory, and she explicitly references the New Critics, who famously wanted to bracket artworks from their creators. Instead, the focus is on the internal logic of the artwork and whether the form and content function together and provide everything we need in order to appreciate it. Dederer exposes the limitations of New Criticism with the discussion of the Stain. Borrowing from Stephen Fry’s response to Richard Wagner, Dederer discusses The Stain of an author’s biography leaves on their work and affects our understanding of it. It’s like a tapestry with a stain that you can’t ignore—but you can try to appreciate the other parts.
I can hear Dederer’s critics rejecting the separation of the art and the artist. Dederer, though, offers two brilliant takes to dismantle that argument. For the first, she talks about how her own experience of art is already hard-won and how she refuses to let beauty be taken away from her: “My own ability to experience pleasure, specifically pleasure arising from consuming art, was imperilled all the time — by depression, by jadedness, by distraction. And now I was finding I must also take into account biography: an artist’s biography as a disruptor of my own pleasure.” There’s a certain kind of privilege in being able to simply let go of great art with a morally objectionable creator. The second piece that I find really compelling is her discussion of Mark Fisher. She refers to Postcapitalist Desire and Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Fisher discusses the idea of recycling as a bit of a scam. Corporations who produce massive amounts of waste put the responsibility on individuals to recycle rather than changing their own practices or taking on the financial burden. Dederer draws the parallel with “cancel culture.” We can opt to not listen to a certain musician, we can choose not to stream a TV show, but ultimately that does not change the practices that allow rampant misogyny and abuse. The way she phrases the argument is perfect, but in my own words I would say that consumerism puts us into a position of divisiveness and supposedly ethical consumerism (no such thing) won’t get us out of this mess.
So in that respect, there are a lot of arguments that Dederer makes throughout Monsters that I find persuasive. Her reading of texts is stunning, as well. There’s a whole chapter about Nabokov that I find offers another brilliant reading of Lolita (showing once again how it is such a rich text!). You’ll be pleased to know that Nabokov, for all we can tell, is not a monster in real life—only in fiction. Dederer also gives a rich reading of Roman Polanski and Woody Allen films that add to an appreciation of their beauty. There are readings of Doris Lessing, Sylvia Plath, and Raymond Carver—but I have less experience with their work, so it wasn’t as resonant.
More than that, Dederer is funny. Her prose is simply fantastic, with stunning turns of phrase—especially when she is insulting people. Some of the phrases that she applies to monsters are so hilariously scathing that I would never want to be on her bad side. She reviews The Garden of Eden by Ernest Hemingway. Incidentally, The Garden of Eden is, in my opinion, an underappreciated novel. Hemingway doesn’t do much for me, but I have a good memory of The Garden of Eden, which I learned was originally over 1000 pages and later abridged to about three hundred by an editor. But Dederer’s review is simply fantastic: “I’m here to say I’ve read it and it seems to be 90% about people getting haircuts.” She’s not wrong. She continues to discuss about the “ostensibly frivolous preoccupation with appearances” but how it’s a preoccupation that is worth considering in terms of gender. The central character is being feminized by his wife Catherine and I think there’s something interesting there, given Hemingway’s reputation as a man’s man. It’s worth considering how this text offers a glimpse into Hemingway from a different angle.
Throughout Monsters, there is a discussion of what constitutes a genius and how men are able to engage in their craft despite (because of?) their monstrosity. Dederer makes a comparison between men and women in terms of monstrosity, with a woman’s prime monstrosity being abandoning or not having children. There’s an extensive discussion of how children hinder or alter genius, which is interesting, but drifts a little farther away from the moral quandary of the audience.
I appreciate, also, the tenderness of Dederer’s approach to Raymond Carver and the problem of redemption. We want to admire beauty, of course, but the capacity for forgiveness (through the recognition of the monstrousness in all of us) takes centre stage towards the end of the book. I really admire the humanizing principle of Monsters and allows it to serve as a wonderful testament to the idea of being hard on systems but soft on people.
There’s a fascinating section of the book that deals with antisemitism. Dederer documents Winifred Wagner in an interview, commenting on politics and art. Dederer notes that “to [Winifred Wagner’s] mind, things were not only better but realer in the old days when we didn’t pretend politics were so important, what she calls ‘the fuss.’” I think the anecdote offers some good insight into what is happening currently. Dederer explains how Wagner’s daughter-in-law “presents her antisemitism as a kind of realness” and how she and Hitler “used to laugh about all the fuss.” Winifred notes that she does not care about politics, she complains about the intellectualization and politicization of art, and she sincerely believes the racist things she says are true. Dederer notes that “she believes she is only saying what’s true and those who don’t say it don’t know it, or are simply not admitting the truth.” In Dederer’s words: “Like a good fascist, she believes she and her kind are the ones who are free of politics—free of ‘fuss’ [...] There is no regret, no sorrow, no compassion, no understanding: there is only this devastating impassivity interrupted by mischievous, chilling smiles.” In all of this, I see a funhouse mirror of Alex Jones, Q-Anon supporters, Trump supporters, and other conspiracy theorists. These people that claim that there are truths that you just don’t know about—but of course, this isn’t political. Reality isn’t political (or so they say).
To the credit of the interviewer, he interrupts Winifred Wagner to offer the quotation from Walter Benjamin: “Thus, fascism aestheticizes politics, and communism answers with the politicizing of art.” It’s a great way to interrupt this discourse that aims to suggest art as an apolitical haven.
When I consider the implications for Dederer’s argument, I find myself once again enmeshed in the discussion of whether it’s worth reading / watching / listening to artists that have done harm. I still have the same questions: is it different if the artist is alive? Is it different if I don’t pay for it? As much as Dederer exposes how we can’t simply bracket all biography, I do think there is a difference between consuming art that is created by someone awful but is beautiful versus art that is created by someone awful and also shows that awfulness. Comedy might be a good example here—a transphobic person in real life gets on stage and tells a transphobic joke—the content itself is reprehensible.
Dederer offers an amusing tone here in discussing Woody Allen’s film Manhattan, in which a middle-aged man dates [I use this word here, but manipulates and abuses is probably a better descriptor] a highschooler. “The really astonishing thing about this scene,” Dederer writes, “is its nonchalance: nbd I’m fuckin’ a highschooler.” She comments on the way that Allen as a filmmaker is “fascinated with moral shading except when it comes to this particular issue: the issue of middle-aged men having sex with teenage girls. In the face of this particular issue, one of our greatest observers of contemporary ethics [...] suddenly becomes a dummy. [...] One senses Allen performing a kind of artistic grooming of the audience or maybe even of himself. Just keep saying it’s okay until somehow, miraculously, it becomes okay.” This would be a clear instance where the film itself is promoting a message that is itself morally reprehensible: the author’s biography is immaterial.
I highly recommend this book. To me, it’s the definitive book on this highly contemporaneous and fraught issue. Dederer is a model of insightful reading, thinking, and writing. Her style is precise, entertaining, and clear. I love how she incorporates highly theoretical influences into a practical context and offers personal anecdotes that are as intimate as they are relatable. It’s some really excellent work that is well-worth exploring, even when—maybe especially because—the issues of misogyny, abuse, sexual assault, and violence remain so pervasive in our media industry that it seems inescapable. Until the day that some non-problematic AI gets invented and we have no use for authors anymore, we should probably consider for ourselves how to best confront this issue of harmful artists and the beauty they nonetheless create.
Happy reading. May it be forever unfraught.
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