“Most of the great poets today are women.”

In response to a Harriet post by Craig Santos Perez, who is responding to a blog post by Jessica Smth (both pictured above).

Dear Jessica and Craig:

Thanks for raising this issue, one that comes up every so often in poetics.

I always find myself fascinated when I hear the claim “Most of the great (or best) poets writing today are women,” but also startled.

The first thing that startles me about such a claim is its use of quantifying logic. In order to know what most of any group is doing, one needs to have looked at all (or at least a sample large enough to imply all) of the group. The statement contains the implication that the person making it has read so much of the world’s poetry that the total quantity of good poets is apparent. Yet unless the person is truly encyclopedic, it’s likely that the person means “most of the poets among the group of poets I read,” a smaller group from which to take the sample, at which point it’s important to wonder how the sample was selected.

The second thing that startles me is the claim to objectivity. “Great” and “best” means not simply the poets I like, or the poets whose ideology I prefer, but the poets that are superior according to objective standards that should be clear to all who have good sense and reason.

Surely many people know by now that terms like “great” and “best” often come from personal standards, or cultural ones, or ideological ones, and that rarely if ever is there a ground of objective superiority against which people can make no reasonable objections.

I myself then see the claim “Most of the great/best poets writing today are women” as an ideological claim rather than objective or quantifiable. I’m not saying that one could counter the point with some more objective claim, but rather that we’re talking about an ideological question here rather than a factual one.

I don’t say all this to suggest that either of you do not mean the point sincerely. I’m not doubting for a second that you believe what you believe. But it’s out of the sincerity of competing claims that many ideological struggles (especially those regarding art) develop.

Whenever claims regarding gender and “best” poets come up, I look for how they function relative to ideology and power, that is, how they become power moves in a field of power, even when meant sincerely. And here’s a basic ideological map of how I often see that working.

1) A man says, “The best poets writing today are men.” Or, more likely, a man says, “The claim that the best poets writing today are women is ridiculous.” Here, a man defends the value of the writing of men or attacks the value of the writing of women. A significant number of male writers will side with him, and these men will often gather ranks against what they perceive as an unfair assault. Not all male writers however will side with them, and the man who makes such a statement is likely to find very few women writer allies, although he may discover some among those women writers who dislike feminism.

2) A man says, “The best poets writing today are women.” This man is ideologically siding with women, and is likely to receive positive feedback from women writers. He will seem to be allying himself with an understanding of women’s social conditions and an awareness of male oppression. But his statement also has an effect on men. It puts him in a position of critical superiority to the writing of other men; he has seen through its weakness and has in effect become master of it. He thus manages to present himself simultaneously as a successful male judge of men and a supporter of women. This will anger the men fond of statement 1, but will make him allies not only among women writers but also among male writers who believe that there are advantages to being aligned with a similar position.

3) A woman says, “The best poets writing today are women.” She will be seen as supporting and understanding the cause of women, and will have many women writers as allies as a result. Some women writers (I can’t begin to say how many) may be skeptical of the quantifying and objective nature of the claim and may think it’s not be the best way to approach the problem, while simultaneously appreciating and sympathizing with the goals of the claim, that is, with the attempt to create more and better attention to women’s writing. And obviously, men of group one will refuse the claim, while men of group two will side with it.

4) A woman says, “The best poets writing today are men.” I imagine women writers believing such a claim would be very few, if they exist at all. Such a claim certainly can’t help women’s writing in any broad way. Even women who are anti-feminists may not be likely to say such a thing. It would be seen favorably by some men, and so a woman making such a claim may receive more positive attention from those men, but those men would be the ones (in various degrees) least likely to be understanding or supportive of women’s writing (that is, men of group 1). And obviously such a claim would be highly unpopular with other women writers, although I can’t rule out that one or two might grant the woman making such a claim a degree of courage or iconoclasm.

I’m sure it will be taken by some that in saying all this, I am slyly siding with group 1, but I myself don’t see it that way. For me, the flaws regarding quantifiability and supposed objectivity mean that I believe that there are other more preferable ways of approaching gender problems than through assertions of whose writing is “great” or “best.”

It’s arguable I suppose that given the situation of the world, women writers and writers from cultural contexts who have historically had less power to control others through claims about an objective and quantifiable “best” need to seize such terminology for themselves, to take the rights that come from quantifying and objectifying and make them their own. That reminds me though of the infamous Ron Silliman claim, so given who I am, I think such a claim should come from others. But I think also that self-awareness about what’s involved in that power move would be crucial.

Finally, the other argument you make, that it’s “experience” that leads to the best writing, seems uncertain to me. The history of writing contains writers with all sorts of relationships to their own experiences. I think it’s likely that readers will often (though not always) gravitate towards writers whose understanding of experience they share and whose relation to the world feels more powerful and convincing to them, although I have to admit that I’m one of those readers who often likes reading work from or about people very much not like me. I fully believe in and would support your ideological position regarding what writers you like and why. I just wonder whether using terms like “great” or “best” actually causes more difficulties than it solves.

Sorry for the longwindedness. I had to say the whole thing or not at all.

Mark

Gertrude Stein is Overrated Because of Men

In an interview done by Karen Winkler for the publication of Elaine Showalter’s new book, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx (Knopf), described as a “600-page survey of known and not-so-known authors,” Showalter answers one question in a way that really surprised me:

Q. You say a literary history has to make judgments. Give us an example of whom you see as overrated, whom underrated?

Overrated: Gertrude Stein. She played an important role in the development of modernism, but she played it for men. And she is just not readable. She became viewed as a "sister": That doesn't sanctify her work. We can criticize it.

The idea that Stein is unreadable is hardly new, although I’m a little disappointed that such a well-known scholar as Showalter finds work unreadable that not only I have read with pleasure, but many of my undergraduates as well—Stein often ended up being the favorite writer of many students who took a class I used to teach on Modern American Poetry at George Washington University. Still, the unreadability charge, no matter how transparently incorrect, is one I’ve heard many times. Beyond a bit of bored bemusement, it doesn’t get much of a rise out of me anymore.

The point that surprised me though was the idea that Stein played an important role in modernism but only, apparently, for men.

My goal here isn’t primarily to criticize that idea, although I will a bit. Instead, I simply don’t understand it. What does it even mean to play a role in modernism only for men? Can someone explain that?

For instance, I hope Showalter doesn’t mean that Stein wrote on subjects only of importance to men. Leaving aside the problem that if she’s unreadable, it wouldn’t be possible to know what subject she was writing on, there’s nothing inherently masculine that I can identify in the subjects that she writes on: reconsidering of the value of the domestic in Tender Buttons or exploring lesbian sexuality in “Lifting Belly” are only two examples of subject matter that hardly strike me as masculine.

(Note: by unreadable, I know that Showalter probably means "no fun to read," but still...)

Does Showalter mean that the way Stein wrote was only of interest to men? That her concerns with the nature of language and representation are theoretical concerns that only men care about? That one seems wrong also, given the significant influence Stein has had on many women writers since, whether Lyn Hejinian, Joan Retallack, Harryette Mullen or many others.

Does it mean that, politically and socially, Stein’s writing, and perhaps her behavior (“played a role for men” doesn’t automatically suggest that it’s Stein’s writing under consideration here) played no role in the development of feminism or the history of feminist literature? Here I’m a little out of my own area of expertise. I don’t know enough about Stein’s relationship, say, to the Women’s Right Movement in the U.S. or any other kind of feminist social action, so I suppose it’s possible that she had no connection to women’s political movements in her own time, without quite believing that the phrase “played a role (only) for men” really expresses the problem adequately. And again, since many feminist writers of later generations (again, see short list above) have been very influenced by her work, how can it be true that her role was played only for men?

Can anyone help me? What does Showalter mean here? And is the point uniquely her own or have others made it and I’ve simply never heard it before? Is there a discussion going on among experts on women’s literature about what makes literature “for men” or “for women” that involves grounds by which Stein might be seen as a writer for men?

Thanks for anything you can tell me.

Of Pregnant Men and the Definition of Slavery

In the late Octavia Butler’s short story “Blookchild,” a group of humans have left Earth for an unnamed distant planet and entered into a unique social arrangement with one of the species living on that planet. Highly intelligent and evolved insect-like creatures, Tlics are about eight feet or more tall, with multiple legs and body segments and a stinger that puts those who get stung into a pleasantly numb sleep-like state in which they feel no pain. The humans (known as Terrans on this unnamed planet) have agreed to accept protection by the Tlics from elements of the planet never entirely described, although those elements include what seems to be an unpredictable climate, numerous dangerous beasts, and certain Tlics whose intentions towards Terrans are more hostile. The Tlics also offer a health-restoring drink that comes from their own unfertilized eggs. With a fountain-of-youth like effect and mild hallucinatory properties, the egg drink keeps humans looking young and feeling strong and full of a sedating if temporary inner peace.

In return for the never quite clarified protection and as much egg drink as they want, individual Terran families have entered into close, caring, but also sometimes tense relationships with individual Tlics, who become part of the family and help raise Terran children. The essential feature of this relationship is that Tlics now use Terrans to give birth to Tlic young in a startling way. Finding that they get better results than with other animals on their home planet, the Tlics choose individual Terran men to lay their eggs in. They don’t choose women because women have to give birth to babies of their own species. The men are stung to sleep, then their bodies are cut open and eggs (usually six to eight of them) are laid in the open wounds, after which the wounds are sealed up again. At the time that the eggs hatch in their bodies, the men must be stung again, cut open, and the now living Tlic babies have to be removed. The men are quickly restored to good health by the healing properties of the egg drink, which even eliminate the scars from the operation so that the men look like they were never cut. The operation is delicate and, it turns out, dangerous. If the Tlic babies are not removed right when they hatch, they will eat the body that they’ve hatched inside, causing a very painful death for their host. Sometimes a Tlic makes errors in monitoring a man, or grows sick and can’t complete the birth process, and when that happens, sometimes the man involved will die.

While the Terrans have ostensibly agreed to this arrangement, they seem to have done so only under the threat of the loss of the unspecified, vaguely gangster-like protection. Further, they are not allowed to witness the Tlic birth process. Some of them have witessed it though, whether accidentally or out of determined curiosity, and when they do they usually become permanently disgusted and angrily refuse to be part of the Terran-Tlic relationship. They often become proponents of violent revolution against the Tlics, one of the reasons that it is illegal for Terrans to carry guns, although many Terran families keep hidden guns.

Many critics have seen in the social world described in this story an allegory of slavery. Human bodies are used for purposes that humans themselves do not control and in ways that sometimes lead to a violent death, although if the operation is handled properly, they feel no pain. Further, while in theory human men volunteer for this operation, the problem of the ambiguous protection means that the arrangement is actually based in coercion. If the Terrans as a whole refused the relationship, protection would be removed, with the implication perhaps that the birthing process would become one that the Tlics would impose upon unwilling humans, although that possibility is never openly stated. The humans are clearly subject to a degree of control by the Tlics that is not marked by equal authority for both races. Further, this relationship is only maintained through a condition of human ignorance. Drug addiction also plays a role, as most humans have become to various degrees hooked on the miraculous egg drink, even though in this case the drug leads to good health and a youthful appearance. Add to all these details the fact that Butler is African-American, and the idea that this story explores the condition of slavery has become common.

Fascinatingly though, in her afterword to the story that appears in the collection Bloodchild and Other Stories, Butler denies that she thinks of the story as an exploration of slavery. Although she never says so directly, the implication seems apparent that people have assumed the story is about slavery partly because Butler, as an African American, is assumed to be writing about that subject. But Butler herself describes “Bloodchild” as the story she always wanted to write about men becoming pregnant, as well as a tale of how human and non-human creatures might be able to live together and cooperate rather than instinctively treating each other as incomprehensible and disgusting enemies. Many individual Tlics and Terrans have loving relationships. They are part of each other’s families and consult each other’s feelings. And again, no individual man is forced to give birth to Tlic babies. Those who do so have volunteered and those who don’t want to don’t have to, although if all of them refused, the agreement between Tlics and Terrans would break down. Tlics and Terrans talk to each other, tell stories and secrets and share emotional support, although the Tlics seem to do most of the nurturing and the nurturing never seems entirely benevolent.

If Butler’s afterword rejects the slavery interpretation though, her own interpretation doesn’t seem entirely satisfactory either. First, the men in the story aren’t exactly pregnant. Humans give birth through organs designed for giving birth. They don’t have embryos surgically implanted all over their bodies, embryos that grow into fetuses that will eat them alive if not removed at the correct moment. Granted, human organs for birth don’t always work perfectly, and cesarean sections, for instance, involve surgical procedures significantly similar to Tlic birth. So there are similarities to real human pregnancy both in terms of some elements of the operation itself and the physical shock it entails. Also, on some level childbirth is indeed imposed upon women, who never asked to be able to give birth, however they feel about it once they learn they have the ability. And there is also the metaphorical suggestion that parents always risk being eaten alive by the needs of their children. Nonetheless, the Tlic birthing process is one that human bodies were not designed for, one which they hate if they ever actually see it.

Second, even if the interpretation that the story is a slavery allegory is one Butler rejects and did not intend, an interpretation that was imposed on her because of her racial identity, the fact is that thinking about slavery in relation to the story raises worthwhile questions. Slavery, for instance, by definition is not accepted voluntarily. It’s the lack of volition that makes it slavery. The social situation described in the story is somewhat closer to sharecropping or servitude, in which the opportunity to choose this particular way of living is more a legal technicality than a real choice, since other options have been effectively, if not absolutely, eliminated. But even that comparison isn’t quite right, since individual humans can opt out of the Tlic birthing system with no more than emotional consequences. It’s just that changing the system as a whole would potentially lead to the destruction of human life as a whole, or at least to potentially widespread violent consequences. The system depends on the fact that some men must volunteer.

Butler’s “Bloodchild” ultimately isn’t a story about slavery, male pregnancy, or a world in which human and non-human actors cooperate with each other for mutual benefit. Instead it’s a story about the complex intertwining of love and servitude, desire and power, enforced by a social system in which one race has more control than another. It’s a story that suggests that nurturing and control, and birth and violence, go hand in hand. It’s a story that shows how people can come to love those who control them and that those who control others can feel that they do so out of love. It’s a story that shows how our most deeply felt emotions can be constructed by conditions of power that are easier to describe in their totality than to understand in specific cases. In this story, power and love are not opposites. Instead, love takes place under conditions of unequal power, and power exists in even the most apparently loving relationships.