The Intelligent Question…

I started thinking about this when I decided that I’d better come up with an intelligent question to ask Kat Banyard and Catherine Redfern at the ‘New Feminism’ event coming up on the 23rd of this month.

I wanted to ask about misogyny in literature and popular culture, I wanted to know if that was changing in line with people’s attitudes? But, as with all things, as I thought about it more the question changed and I began to focus on books. Over the last year i’ve read a number of novels that detail (in different ways) extreme cases of violence against women. Along with Don DeLillo’s Point Omega, Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis and Atomised by Michel Houellebecq, the most notable of these books that concerned violence to women was Roberto Bolano’s 2666.

An eloquent sledgehammer…

Circling and probing the murders of thousands of women in Cuidad Juarez, northern Mexico. Bolano, a Chilean novelist, author and journalist died at the peak of his powers leaving us with two great books and many many questions.

I guess that when reading these novels that detail violence towards women you have to pose a question of how necessary or how sensational is the imagery? You seem to have to test it in your own mind as to whether you are shocked or seduced. Has the author’s imagery and the latent misogyny provoked thought, or has it entertained you?  Representing the least sensational of all the books mentioned, it can be said that by no stretch of the imagination is 2666 a light or seductive read. Bolano’s (self declared) magnum opus is not blog material and i’m sorry for boring you. But this big fat chunk of a novel sits on our table as a bottomless hole of ideas, it is truly dense and frightening quite unlike anything else I have read. There is a long section in the middle (long enough to be a novel in itself) through which the details of each murder and the age and background of the victim are rattled off in cold and spare prose. If you are ill-prepared the section is so repetitive and looped around itself that the effect is dumbing. Like the people of Cuidad Juarez you end up desensitised, mechanically ploughing your way through death after death, page after page.

Misogyny as Crayola…

Bolano died before the novel was published and various things changed after his death.  Firstly, it was supposed to be published as five novellas released over the course of five years to pay for his daughter’s University education. This was overruled and the novellas were collected in a single volume. Bolano was a very intelligent man whose heart was certainly in the right place and there is a certain coincidence with the publishing story of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy. Larsson, like Bolano, died before his novel(s) were published and subsequently changes, in this case unnecessary ones, were implemented to allow for maximum saturation with regards to a mainstream readership that they suspected would devour these novels as soon as they were published.  The title, being changed from the blunt and perfunctory The Man Who Hated Women, to the fey and predictable The Girl With The Dragoon Tattoo, is the best example of the publisher’s influence.

Writing in the New Statesman, (the frequently brilliant) Laurie Penny explores this book’s misogynistic themes and asks a question of the self-serving nature of male writers using violence against women as a narrative device. If you’ve read any of Larsson’s novels then you must read this article (click here).

Her key point would seem to be:

Decorating a punchy pseudo-feminist revenge fantasy in the gaudy packaging of crime drama rather muddles Larsson’s message.”Misogynist violence is appalling,” the series seems to whisper; “now here’s some more.”

However, the real problem with sensationalising misogyny is that misogyny is not sensational. Real misogyny happens every day. The fabric of modern life is sodden with sexism, crusted with a debris of institutional discrimination that looks, from a distance, like part of the pattern. The real world is full of “men who hate women”, and most of them are neither psychotic Mob bosses nor corrupt business tycoons with their own private punishment dungeons under the putting green. Most men who hate women express their hatred subtly, unthinkingly.

Misogyny under restraint…

From what I can gather, and bearing in mind the few books that I have read and the haphazard way that I have come to find them, the question of whether or not this use of violent misogyny to colour-in between the lines of both literary and genre fiction seems to be fairly nuanced. Some (male) authors get it right, others don’t. Don DeLillo’s recent novella Point Omega is not essentially a novel about misogyny or violence but the same sense of apathy and loss exists as it does in Bolano’s final work. Compared to 2666 it is austere and couldn’t be any shorter, yet in many ways the spaces and the ideas connect.

I won’t go into too much detail but the book begins with an unnamed gallery attendant watching an installation of Hitchcock’s Psycho, a real piece of art, slowed until it plays only once through a 24 hour day. It is by no means the crux of the novel, but I have to ask, as a means of an opening – is it possible to separate Psycho from the image of the shower scene? I’m not sure that it is and this is very much a deliberate frame that opens and closes the DeLillo’s novel. We are then introduced to a filmmaker who wants to interview an old neo-con intellectual and they sit around in the Californian desert pontificating on grand subjects until the daughter of the old neo-con intellectual turns up. Jessie, the daughter, is nice enough if but a tad detached, she doesn’t seem to have this discernible rhythm that the narrator is so desperate to put his thumb on. Eventually she goes missing and the novel descends – for moment at least – into a thriller with chopped up frames of forensics and when did you last see your daughter questions.  The idea of the Omega Point in the book’s title refers to a supreme point of complexity and consciousness, a sort of infinite tipping point or (in my words) the hitting of a terminal velocity in relation to people and information. In turn, DeLillo’s novel is not to do with misogyny (although it is hinted at) but rather the movement toward something darker and harder to explain or quantify.

Bret Easton Ellis: The Literary equivalent of cutting your fringe with Crayola Scissors...

In almost complete contradiction to Point Omega, and all the ideas latent and silent in DeLillo’s novella, Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis is a dull and sensationalist homage to Ellis’ generation (and hopefully the final generation) of revolting Boomers as they literally rape and murder the young and desperately ambitious who attempt to ascend the path trod by those before them.

Ellis would appear to have read 2666 as he mentions Cuidad Juarez on a number of occasions, but the effect is not the same. Ellis spits his ideas through paper-thin characters and is constantly trying to usurp his own taboos using an oft imitated contrast of vapidity and violence. Again the plot revolves around missing women and the Hollywood idea of the casting coach. The promotion for this novel was pretty shameless, but it’s funny how it defended on the same terms as his writing, click here.  However, Imperial Bedrooms avoids any sort of interrogation on its misogynistic themes because it’s not very good. Bret Easton Ellis’s particular brand of misogyny is like Morissey’s particular brand of racism, a lot of people will defend or quantify it in relation to some idea of a ‘context’ but it’s ultimately just the boring ideas of two people who once commanded a place in popular culture only to repeat, for 20+ years, the things that got them there in the first place. More than any other author mentioned above, Ellis uses violence against women to colour and sell his books. He has developed a fan base and an accompanying narrative that operates as the best defence mechanism a bad author could ever hope for.

It must be annoying to have read this far and to realise that I haven’t answered my own question. I still don’t know if this a trend in literature and that authors are using violence against women as a way of both re-introducing misogyny in a contemporary context, or whether these often bombastic and shocking images are merely a means of garnering attention and selling books? In many ways a misogynistic book could be both titillating and empathy evoking, depending on whether the reader is male or female. If that’s the case, is misogyny marketable? Am I talking about it now because violence against women works for both male and female readers?

On Thursday 23rd September, we welcome Kat Banyard and Catherine Redfern to Pages of Hackney to interrogate the idea of New Feminism against the growing idea that feminism is now generally considered irrelevant, old-fashioned and embarrassing.

The books mentioned above would indicate that the playing field is changing shape and Feminism has to be urgent in responding to the new ways that things can be sold based on violence towards women. I might well try to extract a question from the muddle above.

By David Dawkins