Friday
I recently came across an article in GQ (Gentleman’s Quarterly, for those of you not in the know) contending that “men need to read more novels.” Needless to say, you’ll get no disagreement from me, although I do have some questions about the article.
Comparing reading lists with her boyfriend, Ash Sarkar was struck by the absence of “literary fiction”:
I flick through the tomes on his e-reader; it’s science fiction, politics, or politics in space. He’s halfway through Kim Stanley Robinson, following hot on the heels of China Mieville, Vincent Bevins, and Ursula K. Le Guin. He peers over at the pages of my Jane Austen, and wrinkles his nose. “It’s all chitter-chatter.” I ask him to explain what he means. “Well, there’s just a lot of talking.” He hunkers back down with the expanse of Red Mars and leaves me in the drawing rooms of Mansfield Park.
This surprises Sarkar because, as she notes, her boyfriend is not “a protein-powder-where-a-brain-should-be bro.” Indeed, she notes, “he bears all the hallmarks of a fully reconstructed man: NTS on the radio, bell hooks on the shelf, a yoga membership used at least thrice-weekly.” But, she adds,
literary fiction, as opposed to non-fiction, history, or sci-fi, just doesn’t interest him. Why prod the nooks and crannies of the human heart, when you can terraform planets, or dig into the CIA’s murky psy-ops in Indonesia
Now, it should be noted that, of the authors she sees on his e-reader, three of the four are novelists. Furthermore, one of those novelists—Ursula Le Guin—blazed new ground for science fiction by making it more about relationships than about Star Wars-style shootouts. The Left Hand of Darkness, to cite one of her novels, is a fascinating exploration of gender and gender roles. China Miéville’s Perdito State, meanwhile, is an amazing multicultural, steampunk fantasy involving fallen angels, tech wizards, insect humanoids, and prickly cactus people. The fact that her boyfriend is reading Le Guin and Miéville is entirely consistent with his yoga-practicing ways. And probably a sign that he’s the right man for her.
Oh, and I wouldn’t use Mansfield Park as a marker. I love the novel but it’s literally the last Austen work I would recommend to get someone interested in the author.
In fact, the more I think about it, the more confused I am about what Sarkar means by “literary fiction.” It’s important to know since she makes a big deal of the fact that “men account for only 20% of the audience for literary fiction, despite making up half the population.” To support this stat, she observes that reading fiction itself is regarded as mostly a female occupation and has been seen as such for a long time. As she observes, in the past
men who spend too much time indoors, reading novels and living their lives vicariously through the trials and tribulations of others, were widely considered cucks. A man’s literary interest had to be justified by ambition, linked to his masculine capacity for action, or contextualised in real-world exploration.
I’ll agree that men are more likely than women to pooh-pooh fiction. We see this prejudice voiced in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, where the doltish John Thorpe expresses contempt for novel-reading. However, he makes an exception for Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1747) and Matthew Lewis’s gothic novel The Monk (1796), and then goes on to acknowledge that he also likes Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho, the novel that has gripped protagonist Catherine:
“Have you ever read Udolpho, Mr. Thorpe?”
“Udolpho! Oh, Lord! Not I; I never read novels; I have something else to do.”
Catherine, humbled and ashamed, was going to apologize for her question, but he prevented her by saying, “Novels are all so full of nonsense and stuff; there has not been a tolerably decent one come out since Tom Jones, except The Monk; I read that t’other day; but as for all the others, they are the stupidest things in creation.”
“I think you must like Udolpho, if you were to read it; it is so very interesting.”
“Not I, faith! No, if I read any, it shall be Mrs. Radcliffe’s; her novels are amusing enough; they are worth reading; some fun and nature in them.”
“Udolpho was written by Mrs. Radcliffe,” said Catherine, with some hesitation, from the fear of mortifying him.
It’s not that men don’t read novels. It’s just that real men are not afraid to admit they like reading. Henry Tilney proves to be the right man for Catherine by being an unapologetic Radcliffe fan. Catherine starts a conversation with Tilney expecting him to echo Thorpe’s contempt for novels:
“But you never read novels, I dare say?”
“Why not?”
“Because they are not clever enough for you—gentlemen read better books.”
“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid. I have read all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, and most of them with great pleasure. The Mysteries of Udolpho, when I had once begun it, I could not lay down again; I remember finishing it in two days—my hair standing on end the whole time.”
“Yes,” added Miss Tilney, “and I remember that you undertook to read it aloud to me, and that when I was called away for only five minutes to answer a note, instead of waiting for me, you took the volume into the Hermitage Walk, and I was obliged to stay till you had finished it.”
And later:
But I really thought before, young men despised novels amazingly.”
“It is amazingly; it may well suggest amazement if they do—for they read nearly as many as women. I myself have read hundreds and hundreds. Do not imagine that you can cope with me in a knowledge of Julias and Louisas. If we proceed to particulars, and engage in the never-ceasing inquiry of ‘Have you read this?’ and ‘Have you read that?’ I shall soon leave you [ ] far behind me…
But would Sarkar count gothics as literary fiction? Maybe the real difference she has in mind is not between novels and non-novels but novels filled with (in her boyfriend’s phrase) chitter chatter and novels that are more action oriented. Mysteries of Udolpho, in which the heroine is kidnapped and locked up in a castle, where she subsequently explores secret passageways and stumbles over dead bodies, is pretty action oriented. No wonder Thorpe and Tilney like it. Steven King’s gothics, which also have a large male following, also feature lots of action. If Sarkar were to contend that such novels don’t “prod the nooks and crannies of the human heart,” I would disagree. They just do it in a different way than chitter-chatter novels.
As proof, take the novel I’m currently listening to while driving, written by that most macho of writers, Ernest Hemingway. I can testify that For Whom the Bell Tolls is obsessed with issues of the human heart. True, its male characters don’t speak openly about their feelings—often, one has to read between the lines to figure out what they’re feeling—but we are given special insight thanks to their interior monologues. Here, for instance is protagonist Robert Jordan thinking of how he may not have much more time with his new-found love Maria, given that he’s supposed to blow up a bridge in two days and may well be killed, either in the attempt or trying to escape afterwards:
So if you love this girl as much as you say you do, you had better love her very hard and make up in intensity what the relation will lack in duration and in continuity. Do you hear that? In the old days people devoted a lifetime to it. And now when you have found it if you get two nights you wonder where all the luck came from. Two nights. Two nights to love, honor and cherish. For better and for worse. In sickness and in death. No that wasn’t it. In sickness and in health. Till death do us part. In two nights. Much more than likely. Much more than likely…
And further on:
If this was how it was then this was how it was. But there was no law that made him say he liked it. I did not know that I could ever feel what I have felt, he thought. Nor that this could happen to me. I would like to have it for my whole life. You will, the other part of him said. You will. You have it now and that is all your whole life is; now. There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that? There is only now, and if now is only two days, then two days is your life and everything in it will be in proportion. This is how you live a life in two days. And if you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.
Through such interior monologues, then, Hemingway shows there are lots of feelings. Sarkar doesn’t acknowledge this, however, claiming that men miss out when they don’t read “literary fiction”:
But the thing is, women don’t just read novels to understand ourselves: we read them to understand each other. Literary fiction is how we can study human frailty, making the world of feelings, friendship, love, personal dilemma, rivalry, money and psychology rich terrain for exploration.
I guess all I’m saying is that Sarkar doesn’t realize how much of the above is going on in the kind of genres that guys are traditionally drawn to. Emotional insight can be gleaned from Hemingway no less than from Jane Austen, from sci-fi authors like Ursula Le Guin no less than from some of the authors Sarkar admires (Bernardine Evaristo, Anna Burns, Marian Keyes,Torrey Peters, Candice Carty-Williams). Sarkar appears to think that, if people aren’t talking openly and constantly about their feelings, the feelings aren’t there.
She’s far from the only one who thinks this way. Indeed, the fact that we now associate melodrama with female emotion and think that emotion is absent from the action-adventure genre shows how we underestimate the latter. Men’s action films are filled with feelings. They may be stereotypical guy feelings but they are feelings nonetheless.
Indeed, if one looks at the history of melodrama in Hollywood, one discovers that it is only in recent decades that the genre has become associated with women’s pictures (“women’s weepies,” as they used to be called). Steve Neale, an expert on Hollywood genres, notes that, from around 1910 to about 1970, when people in the film industry said “melodrama,” they meant
action thrillers with fast-paced narratives , episodic story-lines featuring violence, suspense and death-defying stunts. Dastardly villains, heroines in peril and daring adventurous heroes populated these films, their actions speaking louder than their words. Cowboy films, gangster films, crime thrillers and horror movies were typically labelled “melodramas” in the trade press. (Melodrama, Mercer and Shingler, p.6).
In fact, what we now call action-adventure movies were sometimes referred to as “mellers,” Neale says. It’s only since the 1970s that our associations with melodrama have done a complete 180.
I suspect that, contra Sarkar, men are still reading plenty of novels—certainly her boyfriend is—and are using them to process any number of significant issues in their lives. Of course, I’m in favor of them reading even more than they do, and I’d like them to read chitter-chatter novels as well as spy novels and westerns. In fact, I think that both men and women should branch out since, the more variety they encounter, the richer their lives will become.