"how weakness is despised, how weakness can be cunning"
December 2, 2015 5:14 AM Subscribe
Mary Gaitskill and the Life Unseen by Parul Sehgal
Loved Gaitskill since Bad Behavior, and am always happy to read her. Thanks for posting this.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 9:45 AM on December 2, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 9:45 AM on December 2, 2015 [1 favorite]
Incidentally, if anyone's wondering about the "old man in a Chekhov story who refers to women fondly, almost reverently, as 'hatchets,'" that's Костыль ("Crutch") in В овраге ("In the Ravine"), who calls a group of women "Топорики мои любезные" 'My dear/kind little hatchets.'
posted by languagehat at 9:50 AM on December 2, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by languagehat at 9:50 AM on December 2, 2015 [1 favorite]
Sorry, I don't want to dominate the thread, but I just read Stacey D'Erasmo's excellent NYT review of The Mare and thought this paragraph was worth quoting here:
The response to Gaitskill’s work, however, often throws around coded terms like “sadomasochistic” and “taboo themes” and “bad girls,” without pausing to ask what these terms actually mean or whose labels they are. In the film version [of “Secretary”] , the secretary and her boss realize they are in love, marry and presumably live happily ever after. How difficult it can be to see ambiguity even when it is presented with as much clarity, vividness, humor, insight, tenderness and power as it is by Gaitskill. When women, sex and pain are involved, the world resists opening that space at all. If a woman’s darker emotions, experiences and desires don’t resolve into true love and marriage, she probably “really” wants to die, or should. “Bad girls” don’t have lives, just fates for which they are still expected to repent, not least in fiction. Cue discussions of “likability.”posted by languagehat at 10:38 AM on December 2, 2015 [3 favorites]
The excerpt languagehat posts above brought back a memory of a creative writing class I took once, in which the instructor assigned numerous texts by men but only one by a woman, Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." I lent my copy of Gaitskill's second collection to a fellow student and she mentioned in class that she was writing her paper on it. "Oh yes," the instructor sniffed, "one of those women who wrote about incest in the '80s."
I've never forgotten the comment not only because of the dismissiveness in his tone but because that was one of the qualities that first drew me to Gaitskill: her honesty about sexual violence, her refusal to let her characters' pain reduce them in individuality or agency. Nobody writes better about the tenuous, shifting grasp of power that beauty gives you, nor about how complex women are rendered invisible in its absence. The one thing that mitigates the anger that still rises up in me at remembering that instructor's statement is a certain smugness in knowing that he'll probably never bother to read Veronica and will never write better female characters as a result.
posted by thetortoise at 1:05 PM on December 2, 2015 [3 favorites]
I've never forgotten the comment not only because of the dismissiveness in his tone but because that was one of the qualities that first drew me to Gaitskill: her honesty about sexual violence, her refusal to let her characters' pain reduce them in individuality or agency. Nobody writes better about the tenuous, shifting grasp of power that beauty gives you, nor about how complex women are rendered invisible in its absence. The one thing that mitigates the anger that still rises up in me at remembering that instructor's statement is a certain smugness in knowing that he'll probably never bother to read Veronica and will never write better female characters as a result.
posted by thetortoise at 1:05 PM on December 2, 2015 [3 favorites]
Thanks so much for posting the cat essay, Obscure Reference. I hadn't read it before, and it got me to run out and buy a copy of The Mare tonight.
posted by thetortoise at 12:55 AM on December 4, 2015
posted by thetortoise at 12:55 AM on December 4, 2015
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posted by languagehat at 8:58 AM on December 2, 2015 [1 favorite]