Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma

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The author set out to write a book about the art of monstrous men—in the process, she rendered a complex portrait of humanity Slyly funny, emotionally honest, and full of raw passion, Claire Dederer’s important book about what to do when artists you love do things you hate breaks new ground, making a complex cultural conversation feel brand new. Monsters elegantly takes on far more than ‘cancel culture’—it offers new insights into love, ambition, and what it means to be an artist, a citizen, and a human being.” — Ada Calhoun, author of Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis This is a most interesting chapter, a nice addition to lolitological Studies, but every time you are thinking this book has now found its groove CD comes out with some highly dubious apercu that calls forth a groan or a puzzled frown : Excellent . . . Awork of deep thought and self-scrutiny that honors the impossibility of the book’s mission. Dederer comes to accept her love for the art that has shaped her by facing the monstrous, its potential in herself, and the ways it can exist alongside beauty and pathos. Go ahead, she tells us, love what you love. It excuses no one.” — The New Yorker DEDERER: Exactly. And I don't think that that decision is necessarily a decision that's based on forgiveness. And I don't think it's based on forgetting. I think that you can know what you know and live with that complexity and be a complicated person yourself with your own history, and at the same time maybe still engage with the work.

These are just a few of the questions Claire Dederer grapples with in Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. Expanding on her viral 2017 essay for the Paris Review—written a month after the exposure of Harvey Weinstein’s predation—Dederer’s latest offering is part-novel, part-memoir, and all provocation. Over the course of what can only be described as a book-length essay, Dederer turns her gaze first toward the artists, and then toward the audience—asking not only what we should do with the work of monstrous men, but also what consuming it does to us.

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I cannot refrain from pointing out the wretched irony of JK Rowling being considered monstrous these days. Most of the male monsters were raping and abusing girls and women, of course, and she (misguidedly or not) is all about trying to protect the rights of girls and women. We live in strange times. Yeah, Vlad. Answers please. According to your biographer, you didn’t do anything nasty with little girls. We accept that. But you sure seem to have thought a lot about it. DEDERER: But also it comes to stand in for these, like, eras in your life. You know, you remember when you were a teenager or when you were falling in love with your partner or whatever. There's often music that's really tied to that. So the musical examples tend to be the really heartbreaking examples for a lot of people. Dederer first read Lolita at age 13 and was “horrified” by it, including because Lolita herself did not seem like a “real character”, only an “absence”. The adult Dederer comes to see that may be precisely the point, that Lolita is “a portrait of a girl’s annihilation”. Yet Dederer does not disavow her younger self, who after all was onto something.

But it's true. It's love, emotional confidence, that urges us to find joy, pleasure, and a stance in the way we say, "𝘌𝘷𝘦𝘯 𝘢𝘧𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨.." What is feminism if not a daily struggle against forces that are so large, so consuming, that those forces are invisible to – forgotten, taken for granted by – the very people wielding them? For me the answer is always firmly once I find out somebody has abused their position of power to harm others, their work is forever tainted in my mind. The name Woody Allen, for example, makes my skin crawl. I watched a documentary where Dylan and Mia Farrow spoke out about him and it actually broke my heart, whilst also admiring their courage and strength to speak out so candidly and publicly. No matter how “genius” some of his movies are considered to be, I personally won’t be jumping to put them on anytime soon.Men make up the majority of the figures in Dederer’s pantheon of monstrous artists. “The violence of male artists,” Dederer writes, “has a story. The story is this: He is subject to forces greater than himself, forces that are beyond his control. Sometimes these forces get out of hand, and he slips up and commits a crime. That’s unfortunate, but we understand that these forces are the same forces that make his art great.”Dederer brings up Virginia Woolf’s casual antisemitism and Willa Cather’s racism, but the only category of monstrous female artists with enough candidates to justify a full chapter in “Monsters” is “Abandoning Mothers,” and its subjects include Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark, Joni Mitchell, and Anne Sexton. Dederer finds it relatively easy to forgive the sin of child abandonment in women artists. Her tolerance, she suspects, is partly by virtue of her own experience of parenthood. Unlike the he-man auteur, she can identify with the fleeing mother artists, the bind that prompts them to flee. “The truth is,” she writes, “art-making and parenthood act very efficiently as disincentives to one another, and people who say otherwise are deluded, or childless, or men.” Smart, funny, and surprisingly forgiving . . . You can’t read it without thinking of your own literary loves and hates—and wondering how to know the difference.” — 4Columns From the opening chapters on Polanski and Allen, Dederer moves in all sorts of productive directions. Almost immediately she undermines her own title, making a compelling case for the metaphor of “the stain” as a more apt alternative to the rage-filled “monster”. As a female writer I am intimately acquainted with the little savageries Dederer describes, the tension between commitment to one’s work and commitment to other people. Memoir, the art that Dederer and I practice, has its own particular savageries. “As a memoir writer,” Dederer writes, “it’s my job to answer the question: What is it that I am feeling, exactly?” Answering this question honestly can feel like doing violence to others and often requires identifying the monster in myself. In the course of my life, I have followed my appetites to extreme lengths and into some painful, dangerous, and stigmatized places. I was a troubled adolescent who had many fraught early sexual experiences, a teen-age heroin addict, a professional dominatrix in my early twenties. In my thirties, more than ten years clean and sober, I was consumed by an addictive relationship that laid waste to my life. I have written about all these things. It has been tempting at times to sanitize my behavior in my books, to protect the people who loved me from the ugliest details and to avoid the risk of being censured by my audience. But eliding my own or others’ faults does not erase or redeem them, only the real stakes of my stories. There is no sense of freedom in such narrative manipulation—no discovery and no forgiveness. In this unflinching, deeply personal book that expands on her instantly viral Paris Reviewessay, "What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?" Claire Dederer asks: Can we love the work of Hemingway, Polanski, Naipaul, Miles Davis, or Picasso? Should we love it? Does genius deserve special dispensation? Is male monstrosity the same as female monstrosity? Does art have a mandate to depict the darker elements of the psyche? And what happens if the artist stares too long into the abyss?

More than once, Dederer brings up David Bowie, who in life (and now in death) has largely escaped reputational damage from allegedly having sex with underage girls. She does so out of curiosity not condemnation, and with a sense of her own complicity and investment as a fan. Strange idiosyncratic personal rules arise from such knowledge – I have a much easier time watching films that Polanski made before he raped Samantha Gailey. And yet at the same time, Polanski – predator, statutory rapist – collapses into Polanski the preternaturally talented Polish art student, wunderkind, Holocaust survivor. When we stream his 1962 psychological thriller, Knife in the Water, we wish we could give our few dollars to that blameless young Polanski. We wonder: how can we bypass this terrible old criminal? We can’t. We can’t even bypass our knowledge of what he’s done. We can’t bypass the stain. It colours the life and the work. WOODY ALLEN: (As Alvy Singer) A relationship, I think is like a shark. You know, it has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark. Conversational, clear and bold without being strident . . . Dederer showcases her critical acumen . . . In this age of moral policing, Ms. Dederer’s instincts to approach such material with an open mind—and heart—are laudable.” — The Wall Street JournalDederer goes on to state that, in the present day, what you like is not just more important than who you are: The two things have converged, with what we consume becoming a proxy for our own politics. It makes disavowing the work of problematic artists all the more inviting—because, as Dederer puts it, when we possess a “moral feeling” about our consumer decisions, self-congratulation is never far away. “The thing is, as much as capitalism wants you to, you’re not gonna solve [the structural problems that enable these artists] through consumption. Today’s structure wants you to be constantly trapped in your role as consumer. And that’s why the options on offer are individual consumer solutions.” My own feelings were murkier, and it was convenient that the quality of his movies started to descend with his reputation. By the time his daughter Dylan Farrow’s account of his alleged sexual abuse of her started to be widely publicised, I was no longer a fan. (Allen has long denied these allegations). RASCOE: That's Claire Dederer. Her new book is "Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma". Thank you so much for speaking with us. Dederer] breaks new ground, making a complex cultural conversation feel brand new." —Ada Calhoun, author of Also a Poet Her women friends share her “complicated” feelings and emotions. For numerous older, white men of her acquaintance, however, Manhattan remains a work of unequivocal genius, untainted by its proximity to the director’s “real-life creepiness”.

This whole conversation is predicated on a moment and a movement where people say when they were hurt by somebody, when somebody stands up and says, this happens to me. And the way that we deal, what happens after that person says that, is not perfect. But that moment of the person saying that this is wrong is crucial because if we don't listen to people when they say something's wrong, how can we do better? There are no easy answers to these timely questions. But reading MONSTERS is like exploring them with a very wise and funny friend. I highly recommend it." But the book becomes personal for her when it comes to her children where it somewhat slips into memoir. This was a choice that took too long to get to, and a choice I don't think particularly fit into the book completely well (and I find this particularly amusing given how Dederer critiques memoirs and explicitly tells us what a memoir is and should be), but, without it, I wouldn't have known about Joni Mitchell or how to review the sixties and feminist violence through Plath and Solanas. Thankfully, the last few chapters tie the pretty bow on how we should go about monstrous artists with Cleage's 𝘔𝘢𝘥 𝘢𝘵 𝘔𝘪𝘭𝘦𝘴. I mean, I was surprised with the Wagner mention that she didn't mention Leni Riefenstahl. Especially when she glossed over the Allen-apologists for how 𝘔𝘢𝘯𝘩𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘢𝘯 must be looked at for its aesthetics. Riefenstahl was the very queen of aesthetics, a female champion of her time, while also being a nazi. I found myself wishing Dederer had cast her net wider (Sylvia Plath – again?) and challenged some of her own assumptions more. Surely the lives of say, Toni Morrison or Cate Blanchett – genius-mother-artists – would throw some new light on the dilemmas Dederer poses as endemic and perennial among “writer-mothers” like herself and her friends.Dederer presents a lively, personal exploration of how one might think about the art of those who do bad things . . . Even when the subject matter tips into the uncomfortable and upsetting, it’s such a pleasure to stretch out in a big, nuanced conversation about a topic that can be so easily flattened into wrong and right, good and bad; it’s a pleasure to be asked to think.” — Vanity Fair How to separate the art from the artist, and whether certain figures deserve to be “deplatformed” or “cancelled”, are part of a conversation native to social media. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t worth an intellectual intervention. How we decide who’s worthy of support and attention, and what line an artist must cross to have that support withdrawn, should be thought through – it’s just that it requires more care than you’ll generally find online.