Of monsters and men
Claire Dederer’s book of essays wrestles with the dilemma of great art made by morally flawed people
In her new book of critical essays, “Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma,” Claire Dederer asks how to negotiate the great art of flawed people — men, mostly. Forged in the crucible of #MeToo, “Monsters” opens with a pair of essays that contend with Dederer’s love of Woody Allen’s and Roman Polanski’s films, despite knowing that both directors have been accused of rape.
“[Over] the past few years of thinking about Polanski, thinking about Woody Allen, thinking about all these complicated men I loved,” writes Dederer, “the word [monster] had come to take on a new meaning. It meant: someone whose behavior disrupts our ability to apprehend the
work on its own terms.” Dederer’s shorthand for this disruptive experience is “the stain” — the shadow that biography casts over a work of art. It’s language that describes the inescapable intermingling of the moral and the aesthetic.
Throughout her critical examinations — which include the “brutish” genius of Picasso and Hemingway, the predation of Michael Jackson, the antisemitism of Virginia Woolf, and even the selfishness of women who abandoned children in pursuit of their art, illuminating the double standard between male and female “monstrousness” — Dederer weaves her experiences as a working writer, mother, and teacher, writing what she calls, “an autobiography of the audience.” That is, an autobiography of Dederer as an audience member at this particularly fraught cultural moment.
Her essay on alcoholism, redemption, and the midcentury short story writer Raymond Carver displays the rewards of this autobiographical approach. In it, she twins Carver’s journey to sobriety with her own. “All those years I had chimed to Ray
mond Carver as a Pacific Northwest writer, as “my Pacific Northwest writer, there was something else I recognized as well: the lost man, the drunk man,” Dederer writes. “I was him.”
Carver’s story is also crucial to Dederer’s worldview, recovery, and survival. “[Monsters] are just people. I don’t think I would’ve been able to accept the humanity of monsters if I hadn’t been a drunk and if I hadn’t quit,” she suggests. “If I hadn’t been forced, in this way, to acknowledge my own monstrosity.”
Dederer wants her readers to face the ethical consequences of making judgments without reflecting on their own flaws. As she points out in her Carver essay, flawed people deserve our empathy. Yet, it’s her very ability to empathize with monstrousness — to recognize that we are all equally capable of behaving badly — that pushes her final arguments toward an apolitical, amoral nihilism.
“Given the role we inhabit [as consumers], it’s natural for us to try to solve injustice and inequity through our individual choices,” Dederer argues. She smartly links art, consumer culture, and capitalism, outlining the problem with forcing individuals to make up for the poor ethical decisions of global capital. (Think: recycling plastic containers while oil companies continue to pollute the earth at apocalyptic rates.)
“The fact is that our consumption, or lack thereof, of the work is essentially meaningless as an ethical gesture,” Dederer concludes. “We are left with feelings. We are left with love. Our love for the art, a love that illuminates and magnifies our world. We love whether we want to or not — just as the stain happens, whether we want it to or not.”
Dederer’s rejection of agency here does a disservice to her book, which is intelligently nuanced even if I disagreed with it frequently. To collapse categories of privilege and agency in the face of capitalism is to pretend that a person of privilege doesn’t have agency at all — a cruelty to those who have even fewer choices. It’s a way to disengage with the agency and privilege one does have, even within the many interrelated, oppressive systems that constrain one’s movements.
The antidote to individualist thinking — whether in art or in politics — is to broaden from the individual to the relational: to communities, to works of art, to others who are affected by those works of art, or their creation. There is something of this in Dederer’s reading of Pearl Cleage’s essay, “Mad at Miles,” an examination of the author’s relationship to Miles Davis’s work and his abusive, often violent, behavior toward Black women. Cleage pushes Dederer to think about what it means to be in relationship to art and to continually negotiate that relationship — from love to horror and back again.
For me, the calculus goes something like this: if we enter into what Garth Greenwell, in an essay for the Yale Review, calls “moral relationship” with the great art of bad people; if we recognize that everyone is capable of bad behavior, including ourselves; then one obligation of our moral relationship to art is to limit the harm that befalls others as a result of our love.
The truth is, many of the contemporary artists Dederer considers in “Monsters” have had second acts and third acts to their careers. Most haven’t experienced consequences for their actions beyond public shaming. Some have barely left the public stage, let alone apologized for their behavior. They still wield power within a system that normalizes harm and abuse.
None of us exists outside of that system, but some people are more harmed by it than others. Maybe, as Dederer suggests, our debates about moral relationship to art must be fought on the rocky terrain of individual feeling. But I sincerely hope they don’t end there before making bigger, more collective leaps in the name of accountability and repair, harm reduction and change. To believe this is possible, however, you also have to believe that the actions you take in a rigged system matter — even if they only matter to you.