Author: Ophelia Benson

The subject of yesterday’s Comment interests me perhaps out of proportion to its importance…but then again perhaps not. It does involve certain habits of thought and silly ways of arguing (what one might call bad moves) that one finds in a lot of fashionable nonsense. Or to put it another way, there is some fashionable nonsense going on in Colgan’s diatribe.

For one thing there’s the sly business of motive-questioning – which in fact in cases like this surely backfires on the perpetrator. What does it amount to saying, after all? ‘There can’t possibly be a legitimate reason for thinking and writing that my novel is bad, therefore anyone who does think and write so must have some invidious motive.’ Surely the flaw there is all too embarrassingly obvious. ‘Why can there not possibly be a legitimate reason for thinking and writing that your novel is bad? Why is it ruled out in advance that your novel is in fact bad? Because you’re perfect? Because you’ve been given some special dispensation (from whom, by whom?) that prevents you from ever writing anything bad? Or is it just because you’re you? If it is just because you’re you, do you not realise that you are the only person who is you, and that as a result that ‘reason’ has no force whatsoever with anyone else on the face of the earth? Because all the rest of us are ourselves, and don’t put your claims ahead of our own? Life is like that, and you might want to start noticing that about now.’

I once saw Woody Allen make the same embarrassing mistake – definitely a bad move. He was being interviewed on the US tv program ‘Sixty Minutes’, and the interviewer (Morley Safer I believe) remarked in passing, in asking a searching question about Allen’s subject matter, that many of his friends didn’t much like Allen’s movies. Allen ignored the substantive question and instead began urgently asking Safer why his friends didn’t like Allen’s movies. Safer tried to brush that aside and get to the question he asked (he said something like ‘They just don’t, they’re not to their taste,’) but without success, Allen wanted an answer, he wanted to know Why. And then he said what I thought was an extraordinary thing. I’m paraphrasing but not much, he said something very like ‘Since they’re your friends they’re obviously intelligent people with good taste, why don’t they like my movies?’ The brazen flattery was surprising enough, but the assumption behind the question is downright stunning. Intelligent people with good taste like Woody Allen’s movies – always, apparently, according to Allen. Their failure to do so is an anomaly that requires explanation.

Beware, oh beware, turning into a person so confident of her own brilliance that she can’t wrap her mind around the idea that not everyone will love her work. And beware the back to front thinking that results. ‘There can’t be a legitimate reason for criticising my work, therefore there must be an illegitimate one, so I’ll just work out what it is and then announce it.’ No; that is not the best way to approach the subject.

And then another aspect is the guilt-trip one. This business of people ‘looking down their noses’. When you don’t have a good case, resort to political accusation, is apparently the thought. These mean wicked people who dare to say a harsh word about popular novels, they are mocking The People’s pleasures, they are horrible sneering monocle-wearing aristocrats. It’s a useful tactic in a sense, it does often work, but it’s dirty pool all the same.

Well we’ve seen this kind of thing before. For instance we heard it in a story also in the Guardian, and by the same reporter. Perhaps she specializes in silly self-flattering self-justifying whinges by bad novelists. What a dismal career choice.

But never mind that. The point is, what makes people think it’s a good idea to say things like this? Do they not realize how stupid and self-serving it makes them look? Yo! You wrote a novel, you got it published, you put it out there. Now people have a right and even a duty to say whatever they like about it. That’s how the system works. You do not have a right to prevent them. Got that? You do have a right to try to prevent them, to be sure. You do have a right to do what you’re doing – a legal right at least. To moan and bleat and fuss and make asinine accusations in the hope that your critics will stop pointing out how bad your novels are. But you don’t have a right to succeed, and that being the case, you might ask yourself if it’s really worth making a fool of yourself in the attempt.

She said female critics were most guilty of this damaging generalisation, and rose to the defence of Helen Fielding and her bestseller Bridget Jones’s Diary, which she said had suffered “unjust attacks from people who haven’t even read it. It’s a terrific book and it has sold more than two million copies.

Ah. Well I’ve read Bridget Jones, so allow me to make a just attack on it. It is, as many people have pointed out, quite funny. But it’s also stupid and irritating in more ways than I want to take the space to go into here. The most obvious, of course, is the dreary portrayal at this late date of a supposedly adult woman with nothing at all in her head except her appearance and her quest for a man. Yes, granted, it’s just a piece of fluff, and as a piece of fluff it is amusing, but so what? Does it follow that it should be immune from criticism? I don’t see why. But hey, it has sold more than two million copies, therefore it must be of surpassing excellence, and it’s elitist and snobbish and pretentious and undemocratic and downright evil for anyone to say a harsh word about it. Popular taste never errs, everyone knows that.

And then Colgan has the effrontery to use words like insulting, derogatory, rubbishing, and condescending, when she chooses to refer to the female critics she is angry at as ‘hairy-leggers’. That’s a cute phrase, I haven’t heard it before. But what’s really interesting about all this is that it’s yet another example of the kind of pre-emptive attack that is such a feature of intellectual discussion these days. Rather than addressing criticisms on their merits, rather than answering the substance, the tactic is to try to forestall by means of guilt. ‘You can’t say that about me/us. It is racist/Orientalist/elitist/whateverist to say that about me/us, so you can’t. It may or may not be true, it may or may not need saying; never mind that; we are downtrodden victims and you are a privileged oppressor, so if you say our novels are crap, we will say you are jealous and wicked and hairy-legged, so sucks.’ But I guess that’s how it is with chicks who write chick-lit.

Here is Part III of the story of the professor of English at Brooklyn College who was prevented from continuing to teach because he refused to inflate the grades he gave his students. At least his account of the story. It is the account of one party in a dispute rather than an impartial account by a disinterested observer. I find it all too credible, but I also keep in mind that I don’t know the facts, that we haven’t heard from the others involved, that Frederick Lang could be telling us less than the whole story.

But then again quite possibly not, because what’s in dispute is not so much what happened as whether what happened is a good thing or not. It may well be that if we heard from Tremper she would say ‘Yes, that’s exactly what happened, and here’s why I did what I did.’ It may well be that she would defend with passion and zeal the idea that it’s cruel and elitist, excluding and Eurocentric, mean-spirited and racist to give bad marks to students who haven’t learned to write. It may indeed be that she thinks it is doing students a favor to give them automatic high marks.

But Lang is quite eloquent on his reason for not thinking that’s doing students a favor. No doubt he learned to be eloquent with the help of the demanding education he cites as his reason. No doubt he thinks teaching students to be eloquent is doing them a much, much bigger favor than one does by giving them meaningless high marks and no eloquence.

If I am as well educated as my record indicates, it is because I was held to the same standards as the students who were paying tuition at NYU and Columbia. Were I currently a student at Brooklyn College, I would receive high grades, but I would quickly realize that I was not being required to meet high standards. I would not study as hard, learn to write as well, or strive to distinguish myself. In short, I would probably graduate with honors and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa, as I did at NYU, but I would not be nearly as well educated. In short, my personal, perhaps selfish, reason for refusing to inflate my grades is that I can easily imagine myself being victimized by the practice.

Pretty convincing, however partial.

This is a rather strange piece of comment. I used to quite like Karen Armstrong’s books, though I found her a bit too woolly about religion even then, but I suppose now that I’m older and less forgiving I’m more aware of…well, special pleading.

The religions are all committed to the quest for truth, however uncomfortable…There is unanimous agreement that the religious quest cannot begin until we see things as they really are. We cannot function effectively while trapped in enervating structures of denial, and a church that ignores the suffering of those it has injured in order to shore up its own authority has lost its way. There can be no healing for either the church or its victims unless the hierarchy learns once again to speak the truth that sets us free.

Hmm. Is that really true? Is it even close? Are religions all committed to the quest for truth however uncomfortable? You could have fooled me. They seem to me to be very much committed to the quest for untruth. For comforting fictions, for ways of thinking about ‘uncomfortable’ facts that make them seem less uncomfortable, for ways of thinking about the world that allow religions to go on interpreting the evidence in such a way that they have things right and non-religious people don’t. That’s not exactly my idea of the quest for truth. It is in fact my idea of an enervating structure of denial. I suppose Armstrong must have in mind some special definition of ‘the quest for truth’ that makes it match up with what ‘the religions’ do – spiritual truth, emotional truth, poetic truth, something woolly like that – which is why I call it special pleading. But that’s a perversion of the word. And if that’s not what she means, I truly don’t understand her assertion. Uncomfortable truth seems to me to be exactly the thing ‘the religions’ are not at all committed to the quest for.

There is an interesting convergence on Arts and Letters Daily today: one article about Ibn Warraq and his disavowal of Islam, and one by Christopher Hitchens taking issue with Edward Said, especially his new preface to Orientalism. This pairing interests us at B and W, of course, because we have a fascinating article by Ibn Warraq critiquing Edward Said’s Orientalism, and also because we admire Christopher Hitchens’ writing, particularly the anti-godbothering variety. So there we all are.

I’ve been wondering for some time what Hitchens’ opinion of Orientalism is now. I know they are friends of long standing – the friendship was Htichens’ defense, or at least reply, when Martin Amis shouted at him for insisting on quarreling with Saul Bellow over Israel, despite Amis’ multiple advance warnings to refrain from doing exactly that. ‘But Edward is a friend of mine,’ Amis reports Hitchens as saying, in Experience, to Amis’ fury (‘I’m a friend of yours too!’). But I also know, as who doesn’t, that Hitchens’ views on some things have changed since September 11. I also know, what is probably less common knowledge, that there is a highly enthusiastic blurb for Ibn Warraq’s Why I Am not a Muslim by Christopher Hitchens on the back cover (‘My favorite book on Islam is the rationalist critique Why I Am not a Muslim…’). I’ve been wondering, ever since we published ‘Debunking Edward Said’, exactly what Hitchens thought of Said’s best-known book. The answer turns out to be, not altogether surprisingly, that he has some reservations.

When he addresses the general Arab audience, he makes admirable use of this duality or multiplicity. In his columns in the Egyptian paper Al-Ahram he is scornful and caustic about the failures and disgraces of Arab and Muslim society…Every year more books are translated and published in Athens than in all the Arab capitals combined. Where is there a decent Arab university? Where is there a “transparent” Arab election? Why does Arab propaganda resort to such ugliness and hysteria?…He is a source of stern admonition to the uncritical, insulated Arab elites and intelligentsia. But for some reason-conceivably connected to his status as an exile-he cannot allow that direct Western engagement in the region is legitimate.

Hitchens also mentions point-missing on a heroic scale, as well as pointing out many ways he considers Said got things right, and a certain amount of sly wit.

To the extent that American academics now speak about the “appropriation” of other cultures, and seldom fail to put ordinary words such as “the Other” between portentous quotation marks, and contest the very notion of objective inquiry, they are paying what they imagine is a debt to Edward Said’s work.

Yes. If I’ve seen one capital-O Other decorated with quotation marks, I’ve seen a million. What is it about American academics that makes them as slavishly sheepishly fashion-following as any pathetic junior high school girl in her little Britneyesque midriff-baring shirts? Now that would be a good subject for a book.