The XX Factor: What women really think.

Why I Don't Yawn When I Talk About Women Writers

E.J., it was actually W.H. Auden who wrote that "poetry makes nothing happen," and the line you cite is perhaps one of the misinterpreted and misquoted lines of our time. Auden, I believe, meant the opposite of what you imply in your post; he was, in fact, arguing that literature (including poetry) is crucial to our self-conception as humans, as cultures. That is, it is influential, even if few of us can say that reading a novel has, say, gotten us a job or stopped a country from going to war. The line you quoted is from his elegy for W.B. Yeats, and the rest of the stanza is quite relevant to our discussion:

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

That is, a poem is a "way of happening," something that survives by being read and absorbed by the culture.

Another poetic quote came to my mind while reading your post: Marianne Moore, who famously wrote "I, too, dislike it." She was talking about poetry, but I thought of it in relationship to our discussion. Yes, like you, I'm not crazy about the discussion of Why Aren't There as Many Great Female Novelists, etc. But I don't think I can just yawn either. "Best-of" lists may be the province of geeks, but I think it's important to keep asking whether women writers get short shrift. Because even if prize-giving and list-making is highly subjective, prizes and honors help give you the financial freedom to write (either directly, by handing out $$$ or, indirectly, by helping you get a good job with a low teaching load). Call me selfish, but I'll be pissed if in my poetic career I have to do twice the work as my male peers to get half the salary and concurrent freedom.

I guess that means I should be all for your idea of a special prize for female writers—except that it bugs me that women might still need to be considered separate but equal. Why not just equal?

The Danger of Over-Awarding

But E.J., if we make too many of these niche prizes ("Best Sestina by a Black Poet," "Best Article Written by a Gay Man in February"), don't we risk further ghettoizing the people who have historically been kept out of the great canons, and continue to hamper their ability to reach that more universally accepted level of greatness? I certainly found that to be the case in terms of reading material in college. Once black and female authors become the stuff of Africana studies or gender studies courses, it's like a free pass to professors in the good old-fashioned English department to keep packing the syllabus with white men. It's a detriment to the system to have an implied "white, male" in front of any major prize or course, and I think that's likely to happen if we slap "black" or "female" in front of too many other ones.

And a minor quibble, E.J.: it was W.H. Auden, not Pound, who wrote that "poetry makes nothing happen." Although I guess the fact that you forgot who said it only furthers your (and Auden's) point about the power of poets.

There's Just No Such Thing as "Bestest Writer Ever"

No yawning allowed? Noreen, I'd like to see you enforce that. It'll take a lot of IV-delivered caffeine. Sure, maybe it's easier for me to yawn at the literary canon now that I've switched over to journalism and no longer hope for prizes in fiction and poetry. And as far as your argument that same-sex marriage and equal pay depend on equal representation in literature ... well,  I'm sorry, but I switched over because I don't actually believe literature is all that influential. As Ezra Pound wrote, "poetry makes nothing happen." Nothing is very important, the Buddha would tell you. And yes, I do want more women's imaginations and tastes recognized. But I don't think it has to happen by forcing men to like The House of Mirth more than Brideshead Revisited (although I'll pick Wharton first any time, thank you). Literature is just too subjective for that.

Which is my point. I think I'm suggesting a proliferation of lists and prizes precisely because I don't respect the ones that exist; prize committees include a carousel of people handing out back-pats to their friends and back-stabs to their enemies. We don't have to pretend that there really is a Best Writer or a List of Best Books or a Bestest and Most Sophisticated Literary Sensibility that can Best Detect the Platonic Best Novel. That concept always makes me think of that movie that made Jack Black famous—can anyone remember what it was called?—in which a bunch of loser dudes who work in a music store are constantly making lists about such things as the five best bass guitar lines in a rock album ever. Oh, please. Yes, I believe in being transported by literature and art; I survived adolescence because of Tolstoy, picked up girls by reciting poetry from memory (Shakespeare sonnets and Japanese tankas ... the practical benefits of an MFA degree!), and regularly worship at MOMA. But I want more lists, more prizes, less pretense that we can definitively declare the Best One Ever and more reality-checking about how different our tastes all are, shaped by our varied experiences.

P.S. I remember the movie now! It was High Fidelity.

No Yawning Allowed

Canon building is empire building. Canon defense is national defense. Canon debate, whatever the terrain, nature, and range (of criticism, of history, of the history of knowledge, of the definition of language, the universality of aesthetic principles, the sociology of art, the humanistic imagination), is the clash of cultures. And all of the interests are vested.

I buy that hook, line, and sinker. So, E.J., if you want a mainstream culture that supports everything you've advocated for, like gay marriage and equal workplace treatment for women, I think you've got to stifle those yawns!

Why Are There No Great Women Writers (Yawn)

Well, Dayo, if the Guardian is making a reading list, you can bet it's going to be overwhelmingly male and European. How you've lived your life influences what you like to read. Am I the only one who thinks it's silly to pretend otherwise, that it's ridiculous to pretend that we can be Platonic Guardians deciding absolute merit?

Which brings me into the discussion of Why Are There No Great Women Writers—which I sat out last week, since it always makes me really, really sleepy. Maybe I just got worn out by the English dept. culture wars in the 1980s and 1990s. Or maybe it reminds me too much of the enraged fights my father and brothers used to have over who was the greatest baseball player of all time—fights that sent me off to my room, where (being a total nerd) I escaped into War and Peace. Is Edith Wharton better or worse than Herman Melville? Is Jane Austen better or worse than Evelyn Waugh? Are Great Pitchers Better or Worse than Great Catchers or Great Hitters or Great All-Around Players? Why even debate it, when we need all of them to enjoy the game?

But when it comes to the Platonic Guardians making their lists of 1,000 necessary books, well, whether because of nature, nurture, or culture, men and women—on average—have different interests and tastes in life. Not all of us, not all the time; I find reading chick lit to be as much fun as a bumpy flight in a tiny prop plane, while I couldn't put down Bleak House. But on average, over time, what women and men find more riveting tends to be different.

So here's a modest proposal. Why not have separate prizes—and lists—for male and female writers? The queer community realized long ago that we would slit one another's throats (figuratively speaking) if we had to decide whether Frank O'Hara was Better or Worse than Adrienne Rich—so our groups give prizes for Gay Poetry and Lesbian Poetry, and so on. Why can't all lit prizes—or lists of great literature—do the same?

Now I have to go take my nap.

Women and the Quest to Write the Great American Novel

Noreen, Nina, and Bonnie were discussing the vexed question of why so few women have produced what might be called “the great American novel,” and I want to jump in belatedly. Maybe the problem is, as Laura Miller suggested, that that few (white) women take on "big novels." But the reasons behind this are complicated. First, until recently, most women didn't have the social and economic wherewithal to make a life for themselves as artistic writers; read the big new Elaine Showalter history of American women's writing, A Jury of Her Peers, and you’ll be struck by how many of what Nathaniel Hawthorne called "that damned mob of scribbling women" were writing to support themselves and their families—which is different from writing to fulfill ambition. Second, Noreen, I think you’re right to suggest that the way we define "ambition" in the novel skews toward a, well, masculinist project—a bias toward the big and sprawling novel, an adventurous quest novel, rather than anything that can be defined as "domestic." (I touched on this indirectly on a piece praising the “small novel.”) Third, it’s been hard for female novelists to persuade critics of the seriousness of their endeavor.

But I think we do have some great American novels by women. Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, in my mind, is not just a good novel, but one of the most important novels of the latter half of the 20th century. It's the first female quest novel of any real stature. And, paradoxically, it is also a domestic novel. It's just that the heroine chooses to break free of the routinized monotony of "housekeeping" in order to be a itinerant, a traveler. The novel is profound on its own terms. But it's also a powerful critique about how we think about the novel in America. By no means is Housekeeping an explicitly "feminist novel," and yet on a certainly level it's the most feminist novel I can think of: one that decisively complicates some very tired gender categories.