Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Dederer

Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Dederer is Dederer's examination of her own fandom of artists who have created works of brilliance, but who have grave personal failings.  What do we do with people like Woody Allen and Roman Polanski? Does it matter if the sins are smaller, like JK Rowling's? 

I've grappled with this myself. Is it okay to separate the art from the artist? Dederer's thesis is a bit more nuanced than that - thinking about the question as a meeting of two separate people with two separate histories:

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. (page 80)

And it will depend on your personal biography how you react to the physical abuse Pablo Picasso rained on the women in his life or to the knowledge that Miles Davis regularly beat his wife. It will depend on your personal biography if you decide that Bill Cosby's sins are unforgiveable. And Dederer eventually lets us all of us off the hook with these lines:

In other words: There is not some correct answer. You are not responsible for finding it. Your feeling of responsibility is a shibboleth, a reinforcement of your tragically limited role as a consumer. There is no authority and there should be no authority. You are off the hook. You are inconsistent. You do not need to have a grand unified theory about what to do about Michael Jackson. You are a hypocrite, over and over. You love Annie Hall but you can barely stand to look at a painting by Picasso. You are not responsible for solving this unreconciled contradiction. In fact, you will solve nothing by means of your consumption; the idea that you can is a dead end.

The way you consume art doesn't make you a bad person, or a good one. You'll have to find some other way to accomplish that. (page 242)

I thought this book was interesting, but I thought she picked examples of men behaving really badly (I mean, can anyone at all defend Roman Polanski? - I mean, of course, people do, giving excuses about his parents' experiences in the Holocaust, a mother dying at Auschwitz and a father spending time in a concentration camp and how his wife and unborn child were murdered by the Manson family - but those are excuses for a grown man sexually assaulting a thirteen-year-old girl. I have written about Polanski before if you want to read it.).

But the examples she picks of women artists behaving badly are not really on par. JK Rowling has done untold damage with her anti-trans statements, but she has not physically harmed anyone. Sure, Doris Lessing abandoned her children on another continent so she could write without the distraction of childrearing. But there are examples of women who have done harm on par with Polanski (consider Marion Zimmer Bradley who sexually assaulted her own daughter and helped her husband harm many other children) and Dederer doesn't really focus on that because she's pretty focused on the parallels between artists who have left their children and her own life. 

I guess she's allowed to choose her examples with any criteria she likes, but I just didn't feel like it was a critical enough interrogation of the vast reality of human behavior. And that's another rather large criticism I have of the book. These people aren't monsters, they're human beings. And that's a distinction that matters. Calling them monsters is a form of distancing - I would never behave like that because I am not a monster. But we all fail in our behavior sometimes and that does not make us monsters. This is why we should be really aware when someone calls another person a pig or a sheep - that language indicates you no longer see someone as human and deserving human kindness and respect. 

So, overall, it was an interesting book and it made me think. It also made me a little mad at the things it didn't grapple with. 3.5/5 stars

Lines of note:

I'm here to say I've read it and it seems to be 90 percent about people getting haircuts. (page 101) - Referring to Hemingway's posthumously published novel The Garden of Eden. As someone who occasionally writes pithy book reviews, this one struck me as hilarious. 

Reading was my vocation, if a vocation is what you do when you are left entirely to your own devices. (page 180)

Reading is definitely my vocation by this definition. 

"Most of my heroes are monsters, unfortunately, and they are men. If you separate their personalities from their art, Miles Davis and Picasso have always been my major heroes." For [Joni] Mitchell, separating the life from the art was not an aesthetic question, but a point of view necessary to her survival. In other words, she wasn't confronting the problem as an audience member, but as an artist. In that way, I am like her. Just trying to figure out how to do it. (page 201)

Ugh. Maybe our heroes should be people who create good art without abusing people? (JK Rowling, you have let me down so hard.)

The idea of having empathy for the monster - this was uncomfortable for me. I consumed the art of monsters, but it was with a bit of steel in my heart. How could I have empathy for Polanski or Woody Allen? Their misdeeds - their biographies - were something to be ignored. To lock the door against. 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. (page 225)

I don't know. I guess everyone deserves empathy, but maybe not forgiveness. 

Things I looked up: 

Valerie Solanas (page 31) - American radical feminist known for the SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto, a critique of patriarchal culture. 

pettifoggery (page 31) - a quarrel about petty points - what a fun word!

synecdoche (page 154) - a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole or vice versa, e.g., a hired hand for a worker (hand is part of the whole worker) or new wheels for a car (wheels representing the entire car)

Hat mentions (why hats?):

In her men's vest, tie, chinos, her unsure, down-dipping eyes peering out from under a big black hat. (page 21)

I remember at the University of Washington there was a chemistry professor who wore two coats and at least as many suit jackets, a battered felt hat, and the general air of erosion that comes with sleeping outdoors. (page 105)