Philip Roth did an interview for Svenska Dagbladet and the NY Times Book Review a couple of weeks ago. There was one interesting question.
In some quarters it is almost a cliché to mention the word “misogyny” in relation to your books. What, do you think, prompted this reaction initially, and what is your response to those who still try to label your work in that way?
Misogyny, a hatred of women, provides my work with neither a structure, a meaning, a motive, a message, a conviction, a perspective, or a guiding principle. This is contrary, say, to how another noxious form of psychopathic abhorrence — and misogyny’s equivalent in the sweeping inclusiveness of its pervasive malice — anti-Semitism, a hatred of Jews, provides all those essentials to “Mein Kampf.” My traducers propound my alleged malefaction as though I have spewed venom on women for half a century. But only a madman would go to the trouble of writing 31 books in order to affirm his hatred.
It is my comic fate to be the writer these traducers have decided I am not. They practice a rather commonplace form of social control: You are not what you think you are. You are what we think you are. You are what we choose for you to be. Well, welcome to the subjective human race. The imposition of a cause’s idea of reality on the writer’s idea of reality can only mistakenly be called “reading.” And in the case at hand, it is not necessarily a harmless amusement. In some quarters, “misogynist” is now a word used almost as laxly as was “Communist” by the McCarthyite right in the 1950s — and for very like the same purpose.
Yet every writer learns over a lifetime to be tolerant of the stupid inferences that are drawn from literature and the fantasies implausibly imposed upon it. As for the kind of writer I am? I am who I don’t pretend to be.
Well, as for the interviewer’s question, “what prompted this reaction initially,” I can say what prompted it in me: it was reading his early novels, and in particular My Life as a Man, which is so frenzied in its loathing that it put me off reading him at all for decades. That’s what.
Interesting that he apparently responded for hundreds of words without ever addressing a specific or saying anything about what is in his books. It’s all vaporous abstract bletherings. Which come to think of it is one of the reasons I stopped bothering to read his books.
Does he really think that hordes of people decided abstractly to declare him a misogynist based on no reason at all? How oddly narcissistic.
Yes, and yes. And probably no, not really, but of course it’s what it suits him to tell the interviewer.
Sounds like a real gasbag.
Methinks he doth protest too much.
I’ve never heard of this author. Has he changed at all? (I ask because you said you refrained from reading for decades. Did something change, or was it morbid curiosity?)
Pretty telling that, in his view, the only misogyny that exists is a “noxious form of psychopathic abhorrence.”
I have read none of his work, but I was reading some news articles about his misogyny and the comment sections. The gist of it seemed to be that his critics were offended at the one-dimensional, vapid, overtly-sexual-for-the-male’s-enjoyment nature of all of his female characters. His fans either didn’t agree (or didn’t care), argued that the male characters were just as bad and that was the point, or just asserted that the one-dimensional, vapid, overtly-sexual-for-the-male’s-enjoyment female character was a perfectly valid characterization that should be written about.
I remember reading something of his in high school (longer ago than I care to specify). Even as a wide-eyed fourteen year-old, I was so put off by the up-to-the-armpits accretions of misogyny, I’ve never looked at another word by him again.
The sad thing is that someone that appalling is not only published but respected. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” was a well-made movie that broke cinematic ground, and yet we don’t have it inflicted on us regularly.
Wylann – he’s changed some, naturally, but I’m not sure he’s changed in the direction of less misogynist. But I’ve read very little of him since that final off-putting time, so I’m no authority.
So 1) gotta get that dictionary definition in, and make sure to imply the conscious in front of hatred and 2) those might be the most pompous aggregations of bs I’ve read all week. As far as Roth’s writing, I can’t comment — reading the blurbs, synopses, and quotes of his writing that I’ve read we’re enough for me. There are too many books to read anyway, why should I subject myself to something I know I’ll loath?
I always find this an ironic analogy, because while McCarthyism was full of sweeping paranoia and unconscionably abuse of innocent people, its core concern, Communist infiltration, was actual reasonably valid.
Thus even is people concerned about misogyny get carried away, the analogy unwitingly suggests our central thesis is correct.
If I knew absolutely nothing else about him, this would be enough to put me off reading him. Pompous git.