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  In Which I Do Not Yawn as I Humbly Declare That Alice Munro Is a Writer Much Superior to John Updike or Saul Bellow

  Posted Thursday, March 05, 2009 3:50 PM | By E.J. Graff

  Meghan, Sam, how embarrassing to be caught mixing up Ezra Pound and W.H. Auden! Clearly, it's time to revoke my poetic license. But Meghan, I did understand perfectly well that "making nothing happen" was intended as a declaration of importance; the Buddha declares nothing to be of supreme importance. And it is, in the inner world—but not necessarily in the outer world. I used to have, over my poetry-writing desk, Shelley's declaration that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind. It took me years to recognize how utterly silly that was. I'm not saying literature is worthless, by any means. I'm saying its worth is, quite naturally, overstated by the literarily inclined who believe that everyone is affected by their discipline and passion as much as they are. It's just not so.

  Still, all of you have beaten me into a slight retreat from my tongue-in-cheek stance that I just don't care anymore about the "great women writers" debates. Of course, it does matter that men acknowledge female writers. Yes, of course, money, prizes, jobs, opportunities to write, and other kinds of influence (influence on the literary-minded, if no one else) are distributed based on such recognition. I guess I'm suggesting that we knock the men down to size by pointing out that they're not as all-important as some of them like to think and that it's ridiculous to declare that men and women will necessarily appreciate imaginative renderings of one another's worlds in equal measure. For instance, I would pick Alice Munro as a greater writer than John Updike, hands down. And David Foster Wallace never did anything to me that even came close to what Jhumpa Lahiri can do (although I would drop just about anything else to read Dave Eggers). The Orange Prize has helped knock the importance of the (Man) Booker Prize down to size. If women and men had two equal sets of writing awards, wouldn't it help us all acknowledge that men's writing is necessarily limited by their maleness?

  Filed under: gender differences, women writers, fiction

About E.J. Graff

• E.J. Graff is associate director and senior researcher at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, where she directs the Gender & Justice Project. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center. As a journalist and author, her work has appeared in such venues as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy magazine, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Good Housekeeping, The Nation, The New Republic, and in more than a dozen anthologies. She collaborated on former Massachusetts Lt. Governor Evelyn Murphy's book Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men--and What To Do About It (Simon & Schuster, 2005). Her first book, What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, has been widely cited in legal journals, reprinted for academic use, entered as courtroom exhibits, and quoted by government policymaking bodies.

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