For the past few days
I've been fooling around with Goodreads, after a friend mentioned it
again. I've developed a fidgety past time of cataloguing my reading,
so I thought I might as well do it on the internet, like everyone
else. My Goodreads account isn't a matter of boasting, though; it's
more of a source of shame.
As I suspected, despite
the designation “reader” being at the core of my identity, I
haven't actually read that much. In the internet era, anyone who
might be timidly inclined to congratulate themselves on their
knowledge of literature or film has learned that the true bibliophile
has read thousands, not hundreds, of books, as the true cinephile has
watched thousands, not hundreds, of movies. If you exclude the
picture books and children's novels I read as a child, or the popular
fiction I read from 10 to 15 (probably around 80 novels), from 12 to
nearly 37 I've only read around 300 “books.” I suspect, based on
just how slow and picky a reader I am, that in another 25 years I
will have only read another 300, at most. In fact, such is my desire to be free of the
obligation to read the thousands and tens of thousands of great books
out there, that I'm toying with the idea of drawing the line and not
reading any more fiction after my 50s, except perhaps new works.
Right now, my “to read” tag contains around a hundred
books, and I don't particularly want it to grow much more; the only
books I want to add to it are those I haven't heard of yet, new ones
especially.
Now look at this picture, which I will come back to at the end of this post:
In the meantime, back to dry reflections that are only of interest to myself.
Of course “books”
is a dubious way to quantify one's reading. Though not so dubious
that I don't think it gives a fairly accurate representation of my
shame. First, individual plays and some long short stories, essays,
and poems count as a “book,” but so do collections of them. I'm
inclined to choose the anthology I read if I can find it in the
database; however, that doesn't allow you to rate the individual
works in it.
Other kinds of reading
are left out entirely. It's hard to say where to draw the line, of
course: do magazine articles on how to apply eyeshadow count as part
of your “reading”? Does the newspaper? At the moment I follow the
NYRB and LRB, and
several online literary sites; in university I had to read all
kinds of academic essays and book chapters; as a teenager I read a
lot of criticism for pleasure. I could track down some of those
books, but it seems pointless; I wasn't reading out of interest in
the essay-writer, but in the book under discussion, the same way I
might, now, read a blog post without taking note of the author if I
find it through a google-search for a topic. Such reading is
enormously important in helping me form my opinions, but authorial
“anonymity” seems an essential part of it. On the other hand,
I've included classics of criticism in my Goodreads catalogue.
Another inaccuracy is
that I often can't find the translation I read, or not without
searching through many pages, which I don't have the patience to do.
The ratings seem to apply to particular works, not editions –
meaning not translations either. I can't help feeling odd
recommending a translation I didn't read. The difference a
translation makes is obvious in the case of two different collections
of Robert Walser that I rated, with different translators: one got 5
stars from me, the other 2. In rare cases I couldn't even find the
work, in any edition, either on its own or in a collection –
for example, I found Colette's Innocent Libertine, but not its
sequel, Minne.
Other interesting
quantifications that Goodreads allows me to perform on my reading: I
have forgotten nearly a quarter of what I've read (mostly books I
read before the age of 21); and the books I read as a teenager
account for nearly a third of my reading. (Which I suppose makes
sense, since that was nearly a decade of my life, and since then
there has been another decade and another near-decade.) Books I read
for university, on the other hand, account for only a miniscule
amount of my reading, which doesn't surprise me, although it was even
less than I'd thought.
Reading, Memory,
Mortality
Preparing my Goodreads
catalogue has made me reflect on what I've only thought about
glancingly in the past: what it means to “remember,” or not
remember, a book. To begin with, I was surprised and pleased to
discover that in about 80 per cent of cases I remembered the covers
of the books I read (which is how I knew what editions I'd read) even
if I read them 20 years ago or more, no longer own them, or have them
in storage and have seldom looked at them since. On the other hand,
if the editions I read were clothbound volumes from the library or
purchased second-hand, they'd be impossible to identify even if
Goodreads included pictures of hardcovers without their dust jackets.
In some cases I selected editions that I owned at one point, although
I may have first read – or only read – another edition from the
library.
Some prolific authors
I've read in numerous collections over many years – such as Freud,
whom I've read in volumes I've owned and in volumes I've taken out
from the library. I know which works I've read, but I can't always
remember which collection they're in. If I took the volume out from
the library I was only interested in a particular essay and would
have left everything else in the volume alone. With Emerson, again,
I've read him in a number of editions, both owned (second-hand, new)
and taken out from the library; I summarized this in Goodreads by
choosing a complete works I've never touched and tagging it with
“partial reads.”
Reading is, simply,
much less tidy than the idea that one reads authors in the form
of particular, discrete volumes assumes. Again, if I read a play in
an anthology of drama for university, I'm disinclined to look up the
anthology and mark it as even a “partial read,” since I may have
read less than a third of it for the course; instead I'll find and
review a random edition of the play; however, I will also have no
idea who the translator was if it was a foreign play.
But the question of
recalling the content of a book is the most fascinating, and
depressing, of all. In many cases, I don't remember the book itself,
but plot summaries and thematic analyses from the criticism I've read
(e.g. Pale Fire). In most
cases, even if I can only recall one or two scenes from the book, I
do remember my reaction: it may have been violently negative (1
star), or blissful (4 or 5 stars), or indifferent and a little
contemptuous (2 stars), or indifferent but respectful (3 stars):
there you have my interpretation of the 5-star system for rating
books (subjective in all cases, no doubt). There are two cases where
I feel I can't give a book a rating even if I do remember it: if I
didn't actively dislike it, but the pleasure I got from it did not
outweigh the effort, and consequent frequent boredom, of reading it
(the case with monsters like Paradise Lost
and Middlemarch); and
if I read it largely for its reputation of being sexually subversive
(the case with many books I read as a teenager, such as Naked
Lunch and Story of the
Eye).
In
almost all cases where a film adaptation (or, even better, audio
book) hasn't prompted my memory and I haven't read much criticism of
the book, I will not remember most of the events in any novel or play
I haven't read several times without looking up a summary online.
Because I'm such a slow reader, I seldom re-read; exceptions include
the Shakespeare plays I've read (most of them twice or three times,
Hamlet around a dozen
times), Jane Austen's novels (most of them twice, Pride and
Prejudice around half a dozen
times), Henry James's Portrait of a Lady
and The Wings of the Dove
(twice each), Jane Bowles's Two Serious Ladies
(twice), and a few other favourite plays (e.g. Importance
of Being Earnest, Streetcar
Named Desire, Hedda
Gabler). “Pure” cases of
forgetting a novel include Tess of the D'Urbervilles,
which I read as a teenager and remembered enjoying, but didn't recall
a single event from it, and The Brothers Karamazov,
which I read in my late 20s and enjoyed, but couldn't recall a thing
that happened in it almost immediately afterwards. To my
mortification, I'm in that position with Roberto Bolano's The
Savage Detectives and 2666
now: although I read both recently and loved them more than almost
anything else I've read, I recall few of the characters by name and
very little of what happened to them. In this case, though, I will
certainly re-read.
Then
there's the problem of applying ratings to books you haven't read in
over a decade. As I said, I can always recall my reaction even if I
can't recall anything about the book; that doesn't, however, mean I'd
have the same reaction if I read it now – either again or for the
first time. Many Goodreads users mention this phenomenon and give the
context of their reading in their reviews. The sense of dissonance
arises when trying to list one's all-time favourite books; it would
be more accurate, perhaps, to list them by decade, keeping to the
books read that decade. Or even by year.
Films,
oddly, seem to be a different case, at least for me. It's far easier
to rewatch a film than to reread a book, and while I may like a film
slightly more or slightly less than the first time I saw it in
subsequent decades, my tastes in film were more formed by my 20s then
my tastes in literature will ever be: there is nothing I liked or
loved in my 20s (in contrast to my teens) that I'm likely to
repudiate now, although there are things I hated in my 20s that I may
appreciate now. My taste in films follows the course that Northrop
Frye considered ideal for the literary critic: an increasing
catholicism. (Though, I have to admit, incrementally increasing.) I
can't think of many books I've loved that I'd repudiate now, either,
but I'm not sure that Pride and Prejudice
would have had such an impact on me if I hadn't read it at 16, or
Portrait of a Lady or
Wings of the Dove if I
hadn't read them in my early 20s. Often, my favourite novels are
those in which I powerfully identify with the protagonist due to
perceived psychological or circumstantial similarities. One may
consider this a limited response to literature, but the fact is that
I expect literature to translate my experience into literary terms,
and in the process help me to make sense of it and help to make it
more endurable. I do not have that expectation of film; I expect,
from a film, to be entertained, perhaps moved, perhaps even gain a
little insight into myself, but I don't expect it to explain me to
myself. For one thing, movies usually only follow the main
character's life for a few weeks or months; novels follow the main
character or characters for years, concentrating on a period of
formative development and typical experiences – growing up,
struggling to acquire money or achieve fame, falling in love, falling
out of love, getting married, getting divorced. Movies are a type of
drama, and also (as Hitchcock, I think, pointed out) related to the
short story: they deal with a particular event or episode in a
character's life that changes them forever. (Often, it destroys
them.) The novel is... the novel. It encourages the application of
one's entire life story to the character's entire life story. In the
best cases, it encourages the conscious or unconscious reassessment
of one's entire life story, or large portions of it.
There
is another kind of book I can't review, and those are the books that
changed my life as a teenager. With the exception of Paglia's Sexual
Personae, the most important of
them, which I gave 5 stars; I am still reasonably confident that it's
a masterpiece, though every year that I have to hear more out of
Paglia shakes my confidence. I'm also reasonably confident that
Ellmann's Oscar Wilde
is a masterpiece of the biography genre, although some of its
interpretations have since been challenged; however, I can't review
it, because the 5 stars wouldn't be for that,
but for the impact it had on me when I read it at 13. What one reads
as a teenager has an impact that nothing ever will again, because it
forms one's identity and view of the world. One is also, of course,
unconsciously shaped in many little ways by the things one reads,
watches, and listens to as a child and teenager; but I don't believe
that any of it is as important as the conscious influences of
adolescence: the books (and in rare cases, popular culture) that
challenged the assumptions with which one was raised (the assumptions
of parents, class, and mainstream culture) and made one aware of
additional, or alternative, possibilities.
At
one end, there are movies and books; on the other, music and visual
art. We are expected to remember the basic plot of narrative fiction
to say that we “know” it, even though we will also insist that
knowing the plot a work of fiction is not equivalent to reading the
work, or we could all read the Sparks notes (and anyone who thought
that knowing the plot of a movie was equivalent to watching the movie
would be considered crazy). But it's the texture of a novel that
makes up the bulk of our experience of it – the prose, the wit, the
observations, the descriptions, the dialogue – and that it what is
likely to escape our memory, except in the form of a general
impression. It's a rare reader who can recite prose from a novel or
story; not so with dialogue-based works: most movie and play fans can
recite lines from their favourites; monologues, like poems, lend
themselves to memorization.
We
are not, however, expected to “memorize” music or paintings.
There's no shame for the classical music fan in only being able to
hum a bar or two of a composition, or in having forgotten how it goes
completely. And we don't know what it would mean to memorize a
painting; I can vaguely call to mind most of my favourite paintings
(particularly the figural ones) as well as others I've seen often,
though not in any detail. (I should add that, as a Canadian who
hasn't travelled much, almost all of my experience of famous
paintings is through books, posters, and the internet; I think I saw
one Picasso during a
trip to San Francisco, but I can't remember which one.) But this is
simply a fact about memory; it's not an accomplishment.
Contemplating
the books I've read and haven't read, and making decisions about what
I still want to read and what I have determined inessential, is one
of the ways in which I come to terms with my mortality; I've started
to wonder whether, since I'm not religious, it's the main
way. I feel more shame and regret over the number of books I've
forgotten than the amount of events in my life I've forgotten (who
remembers more than a handful of days, a dozen experiences, from
every year, despite the number of minute events that obsess and
oppress us daily?), perhaps because reading time is time stolen from
life – not time deliberately wasted, however, like watching junky
TV or piddling around on the internet, but time that is supposed to
be invested; the
experience of art is transcendence at one's command, taking time away
from one's life but, in return, giving an experience that's worth any
number of mundane days spent obsessing about minute things one will
not remember and watching junky TV and piddling around on the
internet.
Arrested
Development: Brideshead Revisited and
Archer
What
if readers approached books as the music fan approaches music (in the
age of recorded music, at least): re-read a favourite book whenever
they want to in order to experience the pleasure it gives, without
expecting to remember anything about it (except that pleasure)
between readings? Consider the difference between books and movies
here: most cinephiles think that you must watch a good film many
times in order to see all of the things in it, and that,
consequently, a critic like Pauline Kael, who refused to watch movies
more than once, was irresponsible, or just plain crazy. But although
everyone would readily admit that a great 19th
century novel like Middlemarch
is more complex than even the most complex film, I don't think any
literary critic would claim that you have to read them many times in
order to “get everything out of them.” A single careful,
attentive reading will do.
Are film critics more
pretentious than literary critics? Or are they unconsciously
motivated by the fact that watching a movie is, for most people,
considerably less time-consuming, as well as far easier, than reading
a novel? Or is there the idea that meaning is far less contained in
films – because of its visual nature – than in novels, so that,
as with poetry, the meanings that can be discovered are
potentially infinite? In any case, although readers who are at once
faster and less ambitious than I am (slowness and ambition: what a
terrible combination) are doubtless more inclined to re-read than I
am, unless you're Harold Bloom – you knew that he had not only a freak speed-reading ability but a medical condition that makes it unnecessary for him to sleep – you will probably, as an
adult, read most books once. Whereas, in contrast, if I like a movie
I am extremely likely to watch it more than once, and I can think of
dozens of favourites that I've seen anywhere from half a dozen to
several dozen times.
Recently
I read Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisisted for
no reason except the pleasure of reading it: I went to it straight
from watching the 1981 mini-series, a roughly 13-hour affair that's
such a faithful adaptation that there is practically no difference
between watching it and reading the book; somehow, however, it made
me want to read the book anyway. The major departure was in the
ending: the screenwriters wisely dramatize incidents related in the
novel in dialogue. Otherwise, between Waugh's strong reliance on
dialogue and the screenwriters' use of great swathes of the
first-person narration in voice-over, the mini-series is practically
a word-for-word, scene-by-scene adaptation. The only odd note was in
the casting: Anthony Andrews as a blonde Sebastian is
iconographically correct as a homoerotic beautiful boy, but it
underlines how little he resembles Diana Quick as his twin, Julia.
(In the novel as in the mini-series Julia is dark-haired; the colour
of Sebastian's hair is not given in the novel, that I noticed.)
I
gave Brideshead a miss
when I read Waugh's satires as a teenager, having read that it was
his most “conservative” novel. While that may be true
politically, it certainly isn't true sexually: although Catholic
theme of the novel is the working of grace in the lives of the main
characters, Waugh's attitude (and the attitude of those main
characters) towards sexuality is startlingly worldly for a novel
published in 1946. Not only is Charles, the narrator, depicted as
being reciprocally in love with the beautiful young aristocrat
Sebastian, but he later goes to what he specifically refers to as a
“pansy bar” with their flaming queen friend from Oxford, whom he
specifically refers to his “pansy friend” – both to his
mistress, Sebastian's sister Julia. Neither Charles's love for
Sebastian nor his friendship with Anthony is ever repudiated, nor
does Waugh depict Charles as feeling any shame over them – other
than his early ambivalence towards the outrageous Anthony.
One
of the most interesting things about the novel is how much Waugh
leaves opaque about the characters and their motivations – and I
don't mean just the depiction of Charles and Sebastian's
relationship, which is at once elliptical and absolutely direct. We
never learn precisely what causes Sebastian's disintegration,
although we know that in his own mind it is connected with his
family, especially his mother. From what I've seen on the internet,
readers love projecting their own issues with their mothers onto Lady
Marchmain, complete with early 21st
century babble about “narcissistic” parents (as if there were any
other kind) – just as Anthony and Sebastian himself love to do. It
almost makes me wonder if Waugh was influenced by T. S. Eliot's essay
on Hamlet, Gertrude, and the objective correlative. Waugh gives no
objective correlative for Sebastian's distress; it is simply the case
that families do this to one; it is part of what we understand, in
20th
century literature, the family to be.
And
nothing seems to bring out the pressures and repressions of the
nuclear family – whether middle class or aristocratic – like the
depiction of addiction: the horror of the addict's misery and
uncouthness intruding upon the family's calm, respectable surface,
its failure, dysfunctions, and deeply buried disorders personified;
the attempts to control the addict without ever directly broaching the
problem, at least to him. I found myself frequently thinking
about Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,
and was therefore struck when, late in the novel, Charles calls the
thwarted, hysterical Julia, “Cat on a roof,” and wondered if
Brideshead could have
influenced Williams. Waugh's blackly comic depiction of the dying
paterfamilias's favouring of Julia and Sebastian, the adulterous but
aesthetically pleasing scapegraces, over his pious but aesthetically
displeasing eldest son and his vulgar new wife, also brought to mind
the battle between Maggie and the “no necks” for Big Daddy's
regard. And of course, in both play and novel, the alcoholic is also
implicitly homosexual. Is Sebastian's homosexuality the sufficient
cause for his depression and self-destruction? Is that
what his family is trying to control? Waugh gives us very, very
little indication of this, although the defender of this
interpretation could argue that Waugh could not emphasize this
interpretation without making the homosexual theme completely
explicit. The mini-series – made 35 years later, after the
legalization of homosexuality – gives a few more hints: in one
Heavenly Creatures-esque
scene that's not in the novel, after Charles and Sebastian are kept
apart from each other in the evenings at Oxford due to their
shenanigans, a drunk and sobbing Sebastian shows up outside Charles's
rooms to wail pathetically, “I just want to see
you!” If Lady Marchmain had allowed Sebastian and Charles to take
up residence together as planned, instead of trying to put Sebastian
under religious supervision, would they have lived happily ever
after, with Charles – as he argues to her – able to keep
Sebastian's alcoholism in check? I suspect that Waugh's answer would
be the same as the Jesuitical Bridey's when Charles argues that
Sebastian would be better off if he'd been raised without religion:
“It's quite possible.” (On the other hand, it doesn't turn out
too well when Jeremy Irons applies this logic to his homoerotic
relationship to his drug-addicted twin in Dead Ringers.)
As
it is, however, the novel testifies to the enigmatic nature of
human character and relationships; in particular, the mystery of
self-destruction, which always has too many causes and never enough.
The heterosexual reader who is uncomfortable identifying with a
homosexual character can argue that Charles's homosexuality was an
adolescent phase (albeit one he never repudiates); the homosexual
reader or more open-minded heterosexual reader can argue that Charles
is bisexual or that he suppresses his homosexuality due to the social
pressures of the time – the outwardly conservative Charles can't
live like either Sebastian or Anthony. Whatever sociological or
psychological explanation ones gives for Charles's sexuality in the
novel, Waugh seems to be pursing the theme of a bisexual ideal,
between Anthony's recitation from the Tiresias section of The
Waste Land and Charles's
transference of his love from a male to female twin (does “Sebastian”
refer to Shakespeare's twins as well as the early homosexual icon St.
Sebastian?); also a Platonic ideal of progression from the sensual to
the spiritual in which his homosexual love for Sebastian is a
forerunner of his “mature” love for Julia, which is in turn a
forerunner of his fully sublimated love for God.
It
doesn't quite work: mysteriously, Julia, although also conceived as a
sort of charismatic androgyne, is not as successful a representation
as Sebastian. Is it because the section that depicts the idyllic
early days of Charles and Sebastian's relationship is drenched in
nostalgia for the prelapsarian last days of youth and illusion –
into which adult sexuality, to say nothing of responsibility and,
worst of all, reality,
is always a painful intrusion? The novel is as much in love with this
adolescence, in a Gothic, regressive way (as Wuthering
Heights is obsessed with the
freedom of Cathy and Heathcliff's childhood) as Sebastian is with his
childhood; this vision ruins Charles, as Anthony sees: he sees that
charm has ruined him, just as it has led many homosexual men to
destruction, starting with Wilde, who represented it as a beautiful
boy in The Picture of Dorian Gray;
but Charles is ruined by the charm of a family
– insular and doomed.
Charles's
– and Waugh's – fetishization of the upper class is made either
better or worse, depending on the reader, by the fact the family,
their estate, even or especially their Catholicism all stand in for
the aesthetic way of life, as the aristocracy did for Wilde and
Proust. Charles's bowels may shrink when his vulgar wife chatters to
party guests that he “lives only for beauty,” but she's
absolutely correct. There is nothing more to Charles: the modern
world is vulgar and ugly; the fading past is beautiful; if the war
does not bring about the end of the world, it will most certainly
bring about the end of everything good and permanently usher in the
modern. After reading over the years that Wilde's trial made things
extremely difficult for male homosexuals for decades afterwards, it's
astonishing to see, in Brideshead Revisited,
1920s Oxford represented as though it's the 1860s Oxford of Pater and
Wilde's 1895 trial had never intervened. Anthony Blanche is more than
up to the small amount of bullying from the macho element at Oxford
that he receives, and aestheticism, hedonism, and homosexuality as a
single education of the senses and cunning method of rebellion
against social convention and parental expectation (with conversion
to Catholicism as the seal upon one's aestheticism); it is all
excitement, even the bit of shame that Blanche's shamelessness makes
Charles feel; there is no fear or furtiveness.
Poor
old conventional heterosexuality can't live up to this glamour, at
least for some readers, though I'm not one of those who thinks
there's less emotional conviction in the Julia section of the novel.
On the contrary, the storm at sea drenches their affair in an
atmosphere of roiling emotion and the overcoming, however briefly, of
tremendous sexual repression. I don't think there's any way to get
around Charles's psychosexual excitement at discovering his lost male
love in the person of his twin sister, which also allows him to make
an attempt to recreate that lost love and all it came to represent by
entertaining fantasies of becoming the master of Brideshead. That he
does not suggests the Oedipal fantasy underlying this ambition (also
suggested by the adultery angle). At heart this is a Gothic novel,
haunted by the ghosts of the family romance, which give it its
emotional energy.
I
came to the mini-series by hearing it mentioned in the same breath
with Downton Abbey,
which even in its first season is a poorly-written soap opera (I was
too bored to go on to the second season, which I've read on the
internet is supposed to be the bad one). It is also truly unfortunate
in its social implications: the servants are either pure good or pure
evil; they are good if they are loyal to their masters, evil if they
harbour any class resentment; the only servants who are permitted to
have social ambition move in the orbit of the cause-y aristocrat
sister, presumably to make her look good. Fans of the massively
popular series – a phenomenon in the UK, a cult hit in North
America – appear to defend it as “escapism,” but I can't escape
when the series keeps rubbing the ugliness of social divisions in my
face with its retrograde assumptions. The character of Daisy, the
simple-minded, childlike, superstitious young servant girl, is a
throwback to Prissy of Gone With the Wind,
but since she's white, I'm not even sure if fans have realized that
this is an offensive characterization of the rural peasantry. Not
that I know anything about the rural peasantry of the early 20th
century, but I did find myself wondering, as I watched the servants
of Downton, “Did
anyone, anywhere, ever talk or act like this?” I doubt it: Julian
Fellowes is working from melodrama archetypes that haven't changed in
hundreds, maybe thousands of years. If Downton
was well-written I could forgive it its basis in snobbery; but then,
its class condescension and poor writing are inseparable: the problem
with the servant characters is that they are written like no human
beings anywhere, ever. (The aristocrats don't correspond to any known
human types, either, but at least they're allowed to have flaws and
virtues without being depicted as strictly good or evil.)
The
difference between Downton Abbey
and Brideshead Revisited
isn't the difference between bad and good writing; it's the
difference between TV writing and real writing. Many contemporary
novels, both commercial and “literary,” are so dreadful that
sometimes I wonder if real writing exists or if it's something I made
up; Waugh reminded me that it does exist, and it's not the unique
preserve of untouchable masterpieces: the writing in Brideshead
isn't flawless, nor does it exhibit Modernist difficulty; it seems to
be absolutely lucid, but the characters and their dilemmas are
finally opaque and their psychology murky. If Brideshead
reminded me of how good even the lesser masterpieces of the early
20th
century Anglo-American novel could be, Downton
reminded me, with a thud, of how bad TV writing usually is. TV is not
especially good at realistic drama; it is very good at fantasy and
sci-fi adventure (my own favourites are Buffy the Vampire
Slayer and the revamped
Battlestar Galactica),
and in the best series, sneaks realistic depictions of relationships
into these genres.
It
is also very good at comedy; the sitcom seamlessly took over stage
comedy (unchanged in its essentials since Greek New Comedy, as Frye
observed) and combined it with the pleasures of the serial. Besides
Brideshead, I also
checked out the adult cartoon series Archer
last month. It's ostensibly a spoof of the spy genre, with lots of
gross-out comedy involving vomit and kinky sex, but its interest, for
me anyway, lies in its satire of 21st
century masculinity in the figure of the main character, a Don
Draper/James Bond type whose “retro” appeal is a cover for his
thoroughly modern metrosexuality – and whose adventurous,
womanizing ways are undercut by the fact that he works for his actual
mother, who runs the
spy agency – and who's played by the same actress who played the
mother on Arrested Development.
The adolescent boy's fantasy of being a misogynous, babe-magnet spy
is acknowledged as such; Archer's inability to settle down, respect
women, or get a real, grown-up job is attributed to his screwed-up
relationship with his domineering, manipulative, cold, and neglectful
mother – openly depicted as all the things readers tend to project
onto Lady Marchmain. Waugh, by keeping the mother-son relationship
enigmatic, sidestepped the Freudian explanation for Sebastian's
arrested development; Archer,
as a satire on ideas of masculinity, revels in it. Most of the
reviews I've read note the quality of the voice acting, and when
Archer and Malory are allowed to tear into each other with rapid-fire
sitcom insults, it's a testament to the genius of H. Jon Benjamin and
Jessica Walter that they manage to generate some kind of emotional
truth and stakes; while the timing of the cast and the
Bogey-and-Bacall energy they bring to Adam Reed's endless barrage of
deliberately infantile sarcasm often produces small miracles of
comedic ensemble work.
Early
on, before serial plotting takes over and characters become more
dramatic and less inclined to be the butt (or boobs) of the satire,
much fun is had at the expense of the equivalence of Archer and the
show's action girl babe, Lana, as sex objects; both are inclined to
prance around in their underwear, wiggling and jiggling, but Archer
is more of a narcissist and exhibitionist – or at least he's more
out about it than Lana, who must cling to her feminist principles
even as she prances around in post-feminist clingy mini-dresses or
designer underwear “knock offs,” as Archer camply accuses her. As
cartoons they can effortlessly embody the fantasy ideals for male and
female bodies – which, as Mark Simpson argued in "
Transexy Time!", are so similar, in the end, that it's hard to believe that they
belong to opposite – or even different – sexes. I thought of that
article as I watched Archer and Lana traipse across the screen in
their undies and listened to them compare notes on the sleekness of
their depilated genitals: these are not opposite sexes; they are
one sex, the product of the pornographic imagination, which isn't
interested in gender, but simply in sex – sex that has nothing to
do with nature and everything to do with the perverse imagination.
