FEMALE IMPERSONATIONS
masculine writing, writing realistic female characters, why ârealism,â a novelistâs duty
FEMALE IMPERSONATIONS
I write noir novels. I write spy novels. I wrote a novel inflected with Western spiciness. I have several chunks of a longer story, the genre of which is what used to be called âsleaze,â or a sex novel. This is masculine. I also attempt to write a lot of female characters. I write poetry. I write sensitive-ass vulnerable essays. I review books by authors of multiple genders.
Whatâs all this about âmasculine writingâ? It depends a little, I think, on what your scope is. How willing you are to let the genre gremlin in through the outer gate. Because much pulp is masculine. Iâd love to write westerns. I want to write about a guy with a gun with only five bullets in it pursuing another man through a landscape of cacti and scree, the desperation and sweat on his brow. No water. Horse is dead. Nothing of importance except for finding and killing that man. And you might die as well. I love reading Elmore Leonardâs westerns which are the earliest books he wrote. I think about my dad. Iâve watched a lot of movies with my dad, and one type of movie that appeals to him, which crosses multiple genres of movies, is the story about the guy who everybody took for granted, abused, spit on. Did wrong. And then when that silent guy finally speaks and reveals his true colors, everybody regrets what they said and did and they have to pay. First Blood. Hombre. Doesnât have to be a guy. My dad loved Lisbeth Salander in Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. The way she was taken for granted and then finally snuck her way back into having the upper hand and turned into a monster of avenging justice. My dad loves those stories.
I think revenge is a common fantasy that Hollywood and by extension a lot of âpulpyâ menâs novels (adventure, action, spy, crime, etc) trucks with. Everybody likes to see the underdog slip out from underneath the pile of rocks and come back in the night when nobody is expecting it and deal out justice to the wrongdoers. Maybe itâs an American thing. And maybe it doesnât correspond to reality whatsoever. But lots of men can relate.
I havenât read a lot of what might be called more contemporary masculine writing in the lit community thatâs within my field of vision but I suspect it doesnât quite feature that pay off of revenge satisfied. Iâm guessing itâs more about the description of life, the slice of life in a workplace thatâs unrelenting. The male experience of the job. Resentful. The ticking time bomb that never explodes, or if it does explode, it does it in a more quiet, artistic way that a minimalist short story writer would respect. Downbeat or offbeat or maybe just beat.
My novel Blood Trip, which I will try not to go on and on about, is about a man who is wronged, or perceives himself to be so, who wants to strike back at the world that has wronged him. In some ways itâs about the male fantasy of seeking a kind of perverse justice that goes horribly wrong. Notice how often âwrongedâ or âwrongâ comes up in these descriptions. Men have developed this mythology of wrongness. Right and wrong. Morality. Personal morality. How does it fit in with a world where you have to be coherent with women. With relationships. Partners. Co-workers. Who bring their own notions of recognizing wrongness to the table. (Hate that cliche by the way: âto the table.â Something domestic about it. Or is it a card table where you gamble things? A board room table where youâre bringing skill sets to help the productivity of the firm? Where did the table come from? Itâs a flat surface where youâre bringing something of yourself to prove against everybody else. A contribution you will be judged for.)
A lot of talk about the âcrisis of masculinity.â I donât know. I know that life as a man has been fucked up. Trying to stay upright in the wind tunnel of work and family, as I put it elsewhere. It knocks a lot of people over and they struggle to get up. I failed at so many of the requirements of American married middle-class conformist life as a man. With all its values. But, as with so much in life, itâs not scientific: I just gave my own life to look at and thatâs a sample size of one, hardly enough to extrapolate to larger principles.
I was thinking about this recently, and Iâve thought about it before. Writers are in a way, their own sex. Their own gender. What do I mean by this outlandish statement? Thereâs men and women. And thereâs the complicated tapestry of a queer critique of sex and gender which is new to a lot of people but with a little research and digging you get to see that itâs very old and there are queer histories untold by the mainstream. But no, something about being a writer, an artist lies outside even of that. Writers, if theyâre being thorough, empathetic, and honest, have to try to inhabit everybodyâs shoes. Iâve always sort of felt like the mark of a good male novelist is somebody who can create credible female characters. Thereâs a lot of talk about this too, how men are terrible writers of women who just donât get it. Acknowledge the awful examples of male writers who write female characters who are overly aware of having boobs. Because to put yourself in a womanâs body for the purposes of writing fiction, you would be just so impressed and turned on by having breasts of your own. A well-endowed body is the boundary of empathy. No, there is much skepticism over whether men can write women. I hear (from my own limited subjective outpost) less about womenâs difficulties at writing men. But Iâm sure they are just as emplaced.
I think that artists, male artists, have to contend with looking at women â whether it is as a sculptor examining a model in silence, or as a opera composer writing voices for a female chorus, or a playwright, or a novelist trying to sketch what little he can see of the life of a prostitute in 19th century Paris â ârealistic women.â They must replicate the woman. And itâs a test for the artist. But the artist has to in some cases leave his own sex behind somehow. An artist is a special category. An artist has to think the thoughts of all humanity. Has to reflect as much of the human picture as possible. They donât have to, of course. They can write about the guy with the gun chasing the other guy in the cacti.
A good male writer is occasionally a âfemale impersonator.â They have to, from a certain perspective, write in drag. Of course, some reactions to drag as an art form seem to be somewhat angryâthat it is a bizarre, shallow caricature of true femininity, and itâs insulting and not reality.
But letâs bring it back to novelists. And this brings me to a larger, separate question, that of ârealism.â The presumption is that, with exceptions, when you write a novel you have to obey the laws of realism. For the most part. This comes up in crime fiction. The police operate in a certain way. If you write a detective novel or a mystery or a crime novel (there are differences between these three) you have to write âreal copsâ or youâll be shouted down by readers who are sticklers of reality. Donât dare write about guns if you donât know guns. But in a bigger sense, what we want to see, ever since the inception of the novel, is ârealityâ reflected back to us. However, I just read Alain Robbe-Grilletâs theoretical book For a New Novel where he seemed to be trying to corrode old notions of what a novel is supposed to do in this regard. As real life changes and warps with the passage of time, realism in the novel must somehow keep up. Thereâs a utilitarian motive behind Robbe-Grilletâs decadent (idiosyncratic?) aesthetic theories: the novel is supposed to help humanity navigate the world. We can only understand the world and live in it, according to our understanding of it, and the novel helps us do that. But if itâs 2022 and everybodyâs writing Balzac, a 19th century realism, we will be somehow blind to reality as it has taken shape for us in the present. I donât know what could be written thatâs newâI havenât read any of Robbe-Grillet or other French ânew novelists.â Iâm realizing that I havenât read much serious fiction of our time. I read David Foster Wallace who wrote a kind of fractured novel that reproduced something of our time. Pynchon tells his tales of the progress of military technology taking on mythical dimensions and shaping history with a capital H. But I have read little else that is post-modern that seems to be of major significance.
(Note: Iâm reading a lot of books from what is tiresomely called âthe sceneââthis niche of dissident writing, cyberwriters, outsider writing, all that imperfect nomenclature that only gives blurry snapshots in a darkened room of what is going on. I feel like the presses Iâm spending time with these days are all too new to even have adequate conversations about. New to me at least. Itâs conceptual quicksand in the literary landscape at large: difficult to map out. What will the larger significance of the cluster of small presses like Expat Press, 11:11, Apocalypse Party, etc be? Unknown. Foggy.)
As usual in my substack posts Iâm all over the place. What does all this have to do with men and women, masculine and feminine writers? I think that good writing clones both gendersâall gendersâwith a high degree of fidelity. But whatâs fidelity when weâre taking on board Robbe-Grilletâs now 65-yr-old critiques of realism? Whatâs the realistic, or surrealistic, or irrealistic, or fanciful female character look like? Especially in a time when gender politics seemingly have never been more complex and politically charged? Art has progressed to a complicated place beyond the average personâs, or even the average artistâs, comprehension. The complexity of human experience far surpasses both realism and the blunt tools we have fashioned to sculpt an object reflecting that experience. The digital thing makes it even more complicated.
I have to say though that I actually hate when people complain about how hard it is to write, to describe experience and reality, to put them into words. I think in some ways this is a sympathetic boundary as annoying as the male novelist getting stuck on feeling his new pair of tits and never progressing farther than that. If you canât put it into words, you shouldnât call yourself a poet. This is the job, to attempt to make a model of what it is youâre looking for. Male writers: Try to put it in words. Construct the woman and get laughed out of the room by readers because you made a stereotypical, insulting android with insufficient capacity to be a true woman. Itâs your best guess. Itâs a tuning fork of empathy that youâd better hit just right. Use your powers of observation. Sink into the ineffable floodwaters of womenâs words, womenâs language, the ecriture feminine (I think I have that right) of which there is such a plenitude, especially online. Know that you will probably fail. Many have. Iâm sure I have.
This is killer! Excellent piece. I always dig your writing.