Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Dederer

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.

We Had To Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets

    In my mind, when writing We Had To Remove This Post, Hanna Bervoets had a critical choice to make. Providing real-world news stories in a bibliography, the novel is about the dark world of online content moderation and it seems to me the central question is how to grapple with the terrible, unrelenting barrage of awful content. It would be tempting to emulate a deluge of graphic horrors, like Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, but Bervoets resists the allure, favouring a minimalistic approach over the draw of maximalism.

    In fact, the novel starts with a deconstruction of its own audience. The opening question is “So what kinds of things did you see?” (1) and the narrator, Kayleigh, criticizes the people in her life (a formerly estranged aunt, a new colleague, even her therapist) for prying into the horrors, continually wanting to know the most disturbing thing she ever saw. Everyone wants to know how dark it is in the depths, and I think Bervoets plays on the audience’s sadism. We, too, want to know how dark content moderation can get, and Bervoets’ minimalism seems to be an act of resistance. She will not feed the darkness within us.

    The novel uses a framing device wherein Kayleigh addresses the reader directly. In turn, the reader is positioned as Mr. Stitic, a lawyer working on a class action lawsuit against Hexa, a thinly-veiled version of Facebook whose horrible working conditions sparked PTSD in a number of its former employees. Kayleigh passes information along tactfully to influence the case, remaining vague when possible. The framing device itself is clever because we are essentially placed in the role of judge—a content moderator of sorts—evaluating whether to admit Kayleigh’s testimony.

    Kayleigh herself is an unreliable narrator of sorts. I won’t spoil the ending of this short novella, but there is a moment that calls into question the reliability of her account. There’s a moment where she is encouraged to record herself in an intimate act at work with her girlfriend. It’s posited as an erotic gesture which is later granted an entirely new significance, which is a clever twist. Even when the twist is revealed, it is understated: the key detail is implied but not replicated directly; Bervoets refuses to delve into the deepest horrors. The very end of the book continues in the minimalist vein. Kayleigh resorts to an ill-conceived plan with some horrific implications and, at the moment she realizes it, she asks herself, “What the hell am I doing?” (134). Finis. 

    Moments like that make me wonder whether maximalism would have been a better approach. The suggestion of the fallout is a cliffhanger to end on, but I would love to have read more. We don’t get quite enough information to decide Kayleigh’s fate—

    —oh darn, that’s exactly like her role at Hexa. We’re placed in the same frustration the employees there have. The content moderators are given a Kafkaesque set of rules to follow. For instance, bodily harm is not allowed on the platform (unless for clearly comedic purposes), death and suicide are not allowed (but someone can leap from a window as long as you don’t see them hit the ground), you’re not allowed to hate protected groups, but you can phrase things to imply that terrorists are all Muslim because terrorists are not protected and being Muslim is not in itself an insult. You can’t threaten politicians but you can threaten public figures. At one point, the characters are forced to decide whether to leave a video up where a man is playing in bed with dead cats; the video doesn’t give definitive proof that they’re dead, but as content moderators they know that they had to take down footage of him killing them. You can see why these decisions get complex: their ever-changing 300 page rule book could use a flow chart.

    Having to navigate these rules leads to some detrimental effects on the employees. In one gruelling scene, the moderation team sees someone (in real life) on the roof across from their complex. They watch while he contemplates the fatal jump. Kayleigh reads the situation as an act of content moderation: “In videos of this sort of thing you usually didn’t see the ground, in which case we could leave them up, but this wasn’t a stunt or a joke or some activist making a statement. We would definitely see blood and maybe even bits of his insides, so this isn’t allowed, I remember thinking” (46-47). The fact that events in the world “are not allowed” hints at a disturbing ineptitude; in fact, only one member of the moderation team goes to help the distressed man while the others are rendered paralyzed witnessing this “content”. The most cynical of the group even calls out for the man to jump. Then, someone says, “We have to do something” (47) and “although people immediately started murmuring in agreement, no one did anything” (47).

    The callousness of the characters is replicated throughout the book. At a climactic moment in the text, several of the employees find themselves susceptible to flat Earth and Holocaust denial conspiracy theories. Perhaps it’s a sign of how jaded our society is and the normalization of horrific content that these revelations seem almost quaint. Another example is that as Kayleigh becomes more desensitized, she starts exploring increasingly disturbing pornography. An interesting side effect here is that Kayleigh is routinely masculinized throughout the text. At least once she is referred to as “a gentleman” and several times her masturbation is referred to as “jerking off”, which I generally would associate with men. I suspect her alignment with masculinity is a commentary on the link between men and sexual violence.

    Between all these moments, there seems to be an inherent love of transgression. When Hexa tells employees not to smoke, drink, or have sex on premises, those behaviours increase, Similarly, situations seem to escalate (cf. Kayleigh’s final excursion in the book), as though cultivated by content moderation. Being responsible for enforcing regulations only seems to increase the pleasure of their personal transgressions.

    While the book is infused with social commentary, a surprising amount of the novel is rooted in the relationship between Kayleigh and her girlfriend. Their work lives fade into the background somewhat and a domestic novel comes to the fore, offering its own doubts and concerns (especially given that Kayleigh alludes to being too affectionate in a previous workplace—does that remind us of the man with two split videos of the cats? Do we see the second video, as it were, of Kayleigh’s narration, while the previous, more obviously objectionable content has been censored out?).

    We Had To Remove This Post was, admittedly, not exactly what I expected. There were times I felt disappointed in how Bervoets delivered on the engaging premise it establishes. At the same time, though, I think this book could not have been written any other way to produce the same destabilizing effects. As much as we may thirst for disclosure, the quiet nuance of the novel allows us to maintain our humanity and allows us the space for the thoughtfulness such disturbing technological situations require.

    If this post is itself not taken down, I wish you some happy reading, however dark it may be.