#ash sarkar
I’ll save you the click: as we know, women were once the marked category in contrast to the universal category, i.e., men. But the marked category has been universalized in elite spaces as the new elite status (albeit with its elitism cynically disavowed) to replace the universal status previously enjoyed by men qua men. Men, she therefore argues, must now read and write as marked, which is to say, as “women”—on this account, frail, humble, domestic, and unambitious, since the antonyms of these words have been deemed by our new elite permanently elitist (patriarchal, fascist, imperialist etc.)
Humility is the final guise of a killing hubris, my very least favorite of all the available impostures: “He who humbleth himself wishes to be exalted.” And whoever writes without immodest ambition, without a healthy measure of arrogance, is not worth reading for a single second. Such writers are straightforwardly lying to you about what it takes to write a book (intense self-trust) and the motives involved (an immoderate design on the public’s mind and mood).
What these matters have to do with sex and gender is infinitely complicated and finally unresolvable, as the mystery of what men and women mean to each other always is, despite the simplistic solutions offered by every political faction, feminist or masculinist. Consider the problem posed for the above argument by the well-known fact that men invented the sentimental novel. In my essay on Yukio Mishima’s own masculinist testament, I did consider the likely unpleasant consequence of expelling men from the arts unless they conform to some inverted gnostic conception of mutilated female virtue; but then the sad truth about mainstream publishing (likewise academia and journalism) is that women have inherited a kingdom in decline, while men have piratically taken to the roads and the seas to seek life elsewhere, everywhere from the digital utopia of the blockchain to the new right-wing demimonde. I assume when she says “men need to read more novels,” she doesn’t mean Zero HP Lovecraft or even Delicious Tacos, but that’s where we are.
I am interested in the folly and grandeur of those men and women who wanted to take on the cosmos in their works, the Herman Melville who said that to write a mighty book you need a might theme and the Toni Morrison who answered the old desert-island question by saying she would write her own fiction to read if ever she found herself a castaway. Or the much-misunderstood Virginia Woolf, who correctly preserved for literature male and female as categories both marked and universal, and who therefore wrote this:
Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought, looking at Antony and Cleopatra; and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare.
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