Bigmouth Strikes: Gilmour Not the Norm, But Universities Still to Blame

Reflecting on the recent internet furor over David Gilmour's big mouth, I realized just how lucky my experience as a female in academia has been. During the 15 years I was (among other things) getting my two degrees in English at three Canadian institutions, 1995-2010, I was unfailingly treated with respect by my male professors, and in some cases something like awe. As far as gender-specific encouragement goes, I remember in particular the philosophy professor who told me “Don't let him get away with that!” when I backed down during an argument with a male student (I may have been the only woman in the seminar, but I can't remember because I paid no attention to my fellow students in university, only to the professor, the readings, and the ideas); and the high school math teacher who told me I'd be bored and stop attending class if I switched to business math (he was sweet but he couldn't do anything to interest me in math, not as long as there was literature to read). As far as encouraging me as a writer went, I remember the junior high teacher who slammed my screenplay assignment down on my desk with a big “A” scrawled on it and demanded, “Where did you learn to WRITE like that!??”

(Do I sound as pompous as Gilmour? Good, we can get that out of the way.)

I don't know about the rest of North America, but based on my experience, Canadian high schools and universities are far from being rife with male chauvinism. (In elementary school nearly all of my teachers, both male and female, hated me for being intelligent and intellectually curious, but that's another pedagogical kettle of fish.) Clearly these math and philosophy teachers had absorbed feminism's lessons about raising the self-esteem and engagement level of female students in these traditionally male subject areas. It didn't work with math but it did work with philosophy: I was interested in big ideas, not big numbers. Philosophy was my minor as an undergraduate, English my major, and I also have a Master's in English. I don't think David Gilmour is the norm – no, not even for his age. The majority of the male professors I took classes from, or simply socialized with, during 1995-2010 were between the ages of 45 and 65, and if they were 45 in 1995, that would place them within Gilmour's generation. Gilmour has no excuse.

You might think from the foregoing that I don't think that either North American Humanities departments or North American literary culture is male chauvinist, but you would be wrong. It's true that my English professors were 50/50 male/female (that's based on the total number of professors I took courses from, with my course choices dependent on my interests, what was available, and what was required for my program); my philosophy professors, on the other hand, were male straight down the line. Of all of the multiple-author English courses I took, the professor (male or female) managed to fit in a token female in about half the cases. The only course I ever took in which the female writers outnumbered the male writers was a Modernism course taught by a self-declared feminist. As for single-author course offerings: I took five on male authors (Milton, Shakespeare, Keats, Donne, and T. S. Eliot), one on a female author (Austen), and don't recall in the 20 semesters of choosing courses seeing another one offered on a female author.

These experiences jibe with findings about the under-representation of female contributors and reviews of books by women in traditional literary journals like the New York Review of Books and London Review of Books. What's really depressing is that this under-representation is being carried over into new online journals like The Quarterly Conversation, which is ostensibly devoted to reviewing experimental world literature in translation but which you'd be forgiven for thinking is a space where men can hero-worship men, thanks to the shrines to Murakami, Wallace, and Bolano, and the low numbers of female contributors and subjects (in 2013 to date, together they hover at a little over 25%). Incidentally, the proof of my own devotion to Bolano is on this blog, and I have female friends and acquaintances that are among the biggest Murakami, Wallace, and Bolano fans I know. (That's how I discovered TQC: by looking for Bolano coverage.) So why is The Quarterly Conversation such an aggressively male space? And why is this considered literary culture as per usual, while spaces where women hero-worship women (e.g. Sylvia Plath, Margaret Atwood, and Jeannette Winterson) are considered “feminist”? There are non-feminist female-dominated literary spaces on the internet, such as Goodreads, which seems to have been overtaken by chicklit-lovers – because, as Jonathan Franzen once lamented, in America women read and men don't. But that's average men and women. The literary elite is all, well, serious heterosexual guys – the writers and the reviewers. Women can have all of low literary culture to themselves as long as high literary culture remains the preserve of men.

What can we do to rectify this situation? Based on my own experience we are heading in the right direction in the universities, but we still have a long way to go, and it's not as though new media is going to automatically rescue us from ancient cultural assumptions. I can see the serious heterosexual guy contributors to TQC stamping their feet and pulling a Gilmour: “But I like what I like, and you can't make me like anything else! (And by the way, I only like The Best.)” And if the discouragement of women in subjects like philosophy isn't happening at the classroom level – where is it happening? Why have I heard from young female philosophy students that it's easier to get published with a male or gender-neutral pseudonym? If I were doing a minor in philosophy now, would I find more female professors, or not?

As far as my major is concerned, we have got to get female authors out of the Women's Studies ghetto (which should become Gender Studies anyway, and perhaps in some interdisciplinary cases, Sex Studies) and into the canon. Now that we've entered the 21^st century this should be easier than ever, since there are plenty of well-known 20^th century English-language female authors. But it's not as easy as it looks, since the two big “isms,” Modernism and postmodernism, are dominated by a roll call of male heroes (from Joyce to Beckett to Pynchon to DFW). To introduce more diversity into English Studies we might have to de-emphasize the traditional isms, and there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. On the contrary, since Modernism is widely seen (by its practitioners too) as being the end of traditional literary values, why shouldn't the postmodern literary canon be in perpetual flux and subject to perpetual debate?

It remains to be seen whether English Studies is even going to emerge from the demands of diversity, on the one hand, and the challenge of the digital era, on the other, in any kind of recognizable form. Should English finally be liberated from the theological close reading model? Is it possible that the kind of enrichment and pleasure offered by the close reading of aesthetically accomplished texts – the study of the canon – is only one kind, and that others that are just as good can come of reading and literary analysis? Is it coincidence or zeitgeist that I conceived the idea of reading The Recognitions side by side with its cultural evil twin, Peyton Place (the difficult male masterpiece vs. the trashy female bestseller), not long before I read Andrew Seals's Quarterly Conversation article on Franco Moretti's cheeky canon-revising concept of “distant reading,” “We Have Never Been Well-Read”? It does seem as though we're going to have to whittle down the pre-20^th century canon even more, get those Great Dead White Males and smattering of females out of the way so that we can then pick our way through the ensuing flux, realizing that there is absolutely no way for us to read everything of value and interest, so we might as well study whatever we want to? Moreover, in North America this decision to educate oneself in these matters – to spend your youth thinking, to become a contemplative and critical citizen – is undertaken at a gouging cost with little if any financial reward at the end of it – but that's another cultural battle.

Meanwhile, I want to say these things to the commenters who've been defending Gilmour yet who seem to known nothing about either the study of literature or feminism, which pretty much rules them out from commenting:

1. David Gilmour is not a “specialist.” He does not even have a Ph.D.. He's a literary author. He's stated that by his own choice, in fact insistence, he only teaches “what he loves.” That he only loves fiction by ageing white guys doesn't make him a specialist in fiction by ageing white guys. Just like if I only liked to read vampire fiction, that wouldn't make me a specialist in vampire fiction. I would be a specialist in vampire fiction if I chose that as my field of scholarship (with research and theses and discoveries about the genre and all of that), regardless of my feelings about vampire novels. 

2. Yes, there are courses devoted to the exclusive study of literature by women. No, that's not a double standard, given the under-representation of female authors in English literature courses that I've described above. I've also stated that I think it's time to get rid of Women's Studies, but not so that we can go back to the old way of doing things. If the young male university students proclaiming their butthurt at the existence of Women's Studies are being sincere rather than disingenuous, I am sincerely concerned about their ability to reason. As for all of the young female university students (again, I presume that's what these women are) who have rushed to proclaim that they hate female authors too – all I can say is, good luck with that. Seriously, Canada, you're producing real winners.

3. The issue is not whether or not it's important to be “passionate” about your subject matter. The issue is that by declaring himself passionate only about literature by “serious heterosexual guys” (and Proust... but whatever), Gilmour revealed that he's a close-minded, sexist, parochial ninny. Yes it is sexist to only read authors of your own gender, yes I would say that if a woman declared she was only interested in reading books by women.

I can definitely see how, as some commenters have claimed, Gilmour is a popular teacher. It probably is fun for a change to be taught by someone who is not a scholar, who has the privilege of only teaching what he loves (not what best represents his area of speciality, nor what would be best for the students), and who feels no obligation to be objective and distance himself from his feelings about the material. This is one of the benefits of hiring arts celebrity instructors; the other is that in this way such usually-struggling artists can earn a few more peanuts. Gilmour, however, has abused the privilege he's been granted of teaching what he loves by only loving what superficially resembles him. He is absolutely free to love what he wants and read what he wants, whatever anyone may think of it (as we are free to state what we think of it, given that he publicized these views). He is not, however, free to teach whatever he wants. University instructors and universities have obligations to their students. Gilmour is free to be uninterested in diversity in his private life, but not in his pedagogy.

And yet this opens a can of worms, which is presumably why the principal of Victoria College is defending Gilmour and hiding behind that ludicrous (in this context) word “specialized”: can professors be forced to include works by women and other examples of diversity in their syllabi? Should I have been upset that I didn't read anything by women in my philosophy classes? (I don't think I did, though I don't know about all of those analytical philosophy articles, and maybe they were using pseudonyms or initials.) The issue, however, is not that inclusion of texts by women is mandatory, but that Gilmour appears to be excluding certain authors from his syllabus because they are women, and that is discriminatory. The only way that would not be discriminatory is if he were teaching a course on male fiction.

I think it's endearing that the student protestors responded with the mantra “Gilmour! Read more!” (which was the first thing his Hazlitt interview made me think, after “What a nincompoop”) and by dressing up the statue of the great Canadian critic Northrop Frye in drag. Although I think there are grounds for firing Gilmour in his statements, what the outcry should really be about is making not Gilmour but English lit courses in general more diverse. It doesn't matter whether individual serious (white) heterosexual guy professors share Gilmour's sentiments: those sentiments are institutionalized. And we know that in the consumer-student era, students can get what they demand. They might as well use that dubious, debt-bought power for good.

This post belongs to a series on thinking about how cultural criticism should be practiced, and oddly enough, given the occasion, I'm more optimistic in this entry than I was in the first.

Bildungsroman, Modernity and Youth

As I mentioned, I'm reading Franco Moretti's The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. In fact, I'm speeding through it, although I've decided to skip the chapter on Stendhal and Pushkin because I don't want The Red and the Black spoilered for me. (It's on my “to read immediately list” with about 200 other titles, none of which are Eugene Onegin.) Unlike the soporifically dry Benjamin (I look forward to your comments – when I open the posts), Moretti's a good read, although a disconcerting one by the standards of “proper” Anglo-American academic prose. He writes forcefully and breathlessly (however unlikely that combination seems), with liberal italics for emphasis, scattered sentence fragments, and sentences that span sub-sections with the help of ellipses. All of these mannerisms aid the impression of arguments rushing along even though the individual paragraphs are densely packed with references to theorists, philosophers and historians and tangles of complex assumptions that Moretti is evidently in too much of a hurry to spell out. Hence I often feel like I'm missing the finer points, although the basic outline is clear, and all of it is fascinating. The only other Marxist critic I've read at any length (I'm not going to count Terry Eagleton) is Arnold Hauser, who, like Moretti, combines staggering erudition with a passionate and personal critical voice. Not, it would seem either, impassioned about Marxism as a rigid system so much as about (social) history and art and their interpenetration. His references to and quotations from Lukacs's Theory of the Novel actually make me want to brave another Marxist literary theorist, not least because Lukacs's opposition of soul and convention so strongly resembles the Freudian pleasure principle/reality principle I've been thinking of for some time as a basis on which to found a theory of the 19^th century social novel.

The Way of the World was published just three years before Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae, and Moretti's take on what the French Revolution did to Western society is so similar to Paglia's (which for all I know may be a commonplace among historians) that the premise of The Way of the World was something I'd already accepted way, way back, with the first strong intellectual impressions that were made on me, when I read SP at 17: that in the wake of the Revolution, the bourgeois subject discovered that she feared freedom (with its attendant isolation and burden of self-direction) as much as she desired it; and that with the Revolution and the full inauguration into modernity, a new value is set on youth (as the “symbol” of modernity) while maturity is pushed to the periphery. The main difference is one of terminology: for Paglia, the Revolution inaugurates an era of Romanticism from which we've never escaped (even though we went through Late Romanticism and decadence at the end of the 19^th century, as SP goes on to recount, so I'm not sure, or I've forgotten, how that works); while for Moretti Paglia's “Romantic” era is the era of bourgeois modernity.

Ironically, Paglia valorizes the pre-modern ideal of maturity in Sexual Personae (for instance, when she approves of Rosalind's renunciation of her androgyne self for marriage at the end of As You Like It, speculating that otherwise Rosalind would turn into something very much like Moretti's lost soul of an eternally restless modern subject) without ever giving an example of it; instead, Sexual Personae celebrates the decadent in art in all its immature glory of sex and violence, turning its back on what Paglia perceives as the Protestant high seriousness of realism and Modernism. Moretti, meanwhile, devotes himself to exposing the classical Bildungsroman (represented by Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and Pride and Prejudice) as a beautiful deception that attempts to heal the social rift created by the Revolution by imagining an alternative in which the bourgeois subject and the pre-revolutionary authority of the aristocracy achieve an harmonious union. In what amounts to an opposite perspective on Rosalind's renunciation of androgyny and Arden, Moretti argues that the bourgeois subject is persuaded by this vision of a harmonious homeland within society to renounce her individuality; but of course, this vision of social authority is of what social authority ought to be, not what it is, and so the Bildungsroman amounts to a deception – one that soothes the bourgeois reader into reconciling herself to what, after all, she cannot change, not so much to prevent social unrest as to prevent internal despair. Which is, I guess, a long way of saying that the Austen of Pride and Prejudice and the Goethe of Wilhelm Meister are conservative.

But – don't we think that there is such a thing as maturity? And as the capitalist era goes on and on, and youth seems only to grow more central to its self-symbolization, with a new, even more violent outbreak of emphasis on it in the 1960s “social revolution” – do we not think that our youths drag on and on and become ever more of a...drag, perhaps even ending, or becoming a parody, at some point, but with no new mode of equal or greater value that we can move into? I suppose Moretti isn't saying that “maturity is just a trick to make you give up the pleasures, ideals and radicalism of youth”; rather, he's saying that in the classical Bildungsroman, youth represents the impulses of modernity and maturity represents authority; so symbolically, individualism is given up and authority accepted when (in the narrative) youth passes into maturity. However, symbol and “reality” may be, counter-intuitively, interrelated. With the loss of maturity as a cultural symbol of value and the rise of youth to symbolic prominence, we seem to no longer know how to mature; and with that loss, we may feel that it is a valuable thing, after all – and not a mere trick of authority. Or rather – because what we do most deeply believe is that maturity is no more than a trick of authority, and cannot conceive it as anything else, anything of positive content – for that reason we do not know how to mature, even as we are uneasy with our subjectively unending (yet objectively, distressingly, depleting) youth.

Perhaps I'm just showing my admittedly extremely superficial understanding of Marxism, but what's curious is that Moretti appears to be on the side of the bourgeois subject and capitalism here. Or rather, he creates an opposition within modernity between the bourgeois subject, on the one hand, with his capitalist-inspired vision of individuality and progress and mobility without end, and the genuine sources of capitalist power, which do not coincide with him and with which he must come to terms. Or else, presumably, he would revolt against them, as he revolted against the pre-capitalist sources of power; and yet, at the same time, he yearns for social cohesion and authority. And this, perhaps, is the paradox of capitalism for Moretti (or for Marxism, for all I know): on the one hand, the belief in individualism; on the other, the acceptance of authority and tolerance of inequality.

But there are other models for the progress from youth to maturity, in any case, than the acceptance of authority. There is also the progress from innocence – or in any case, from illusion – to experience, or maturity as the gaining of (harsh) knowledge, which Moretti looks at in his chapter on Balzac. In the first case, one renounces one's autonomy and becomes “mature” by accepting that wisdom is located outside oneself (in authority); in the second case, one loses one's illusions and becomes mature by oneself becoming wise (or in any case, gaining knowledge/experience). Except, as Moretti points out, Lucien de Rubempre manages to lose his illusions, and his youth, without gaining wisdom; wisdom is instead located in worldly figures like Jacques Collins and in the omnivorous, totally objective narrative perspective itself. The only figure of wisdom, or model for wisdom, in Lost Illusions is the snake in the garden.

Since the models of the progress from youth to maturity/wisdom above obviously have religious precedents (the Protestant relationship to authority as clerical authority and as divine authority; the Biblical Fall), it's evident that Moretti's historical/sociological reading needs supplementation: the Reformation as well as the Revolution informs Austen, and Balzac is drawing on some pretty old fables. It reminds me of the day I suddenly figured out what was wrong with both Freudianism and Marxism (while I was looking at a book on Marxism), and went running to tell a friend who was nearby. “For Freud – EVERYTHING is about sex! For Marx – EVERYTHING is about economics! But... NOTHING is about ONE THING!!” I guess I'm not a monist.