After hitting Hollywood with a high profile takedown (Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, etc.), nailing the newsmen (Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Tom Brokaw, etc.), popping the pop stars (Seal, R. Kelly, Nick Carter, etc.), and picking on the politicians (Al Franken, Roy Moore, John Conyers, etc.), MeToo is taking aim at literary luminaries.
The latest is Junot Diaz, an M.I T. professor, MacArthur fellow, and author of successful novels, including "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," which snapped up a Pulitzer Prize in 2008. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say he's one of the leading novelists writing in America at the moment.
But now a raft of accusations over forceful advances and misogynist verbal abuse toward his grad students and fellow writers has caused a firestorm. His enemies have called the Dominican Republic, Diaz's Caribbean homeland, an "island of toxic masculinity."
Writer Roger Morgan called Diaz "a survivor of abuse and a purveyor of it" and declared: "Men are coming to terms with their own boorishness and brutality, the monster within and the monster next door." Penalties are starting to pour in for Diaz: withdrawals from writing festivals, books pulled off bookstore shelves, the soaring career you just know has been hit with a damaging, perhaps fatal missile.
Sometimes the penalties include being dropped by one's literary agents, as was the case with children's author James Dashner, whose dystopian "Maze Runner" series was made into three feature films that made a billion dollars in box office worldwide. Native American literary hero Sherman Alexie, author of "Smoke Signals" and "Reservation Blues," has been disgraced, accused of trading on his literary celebrity to forcefully kiss and undress unwilling women. One of Young Adult literature's biggest stars, Lemony Snicket, aka Daniel Handler, has a reputation for inappropriate sexual and racial remarks. For unwanted touching and libidinous emails directed at another employee, NPR canceled writer and radio personality Garrison Keillor's contract, drained Lake Wobegon, and ended "Prairie Home Companion" after nearly a half century on the air.
One of the brightest literary lights of the last half-century, David Foster Wallace, went far past these men in the area of misbehavior. Writer E. Price calls him an "abusive, explosive man who cashed in writing about his own misdeeds." Mary Karr, the married lover Wallace met in rehab and a talented writer in her own right, claims: "He tried to buy a gun, kicked me, climbed the side of my house at night, followed my son home from school, and (prompted me to) change my phone number twice." Other times he stalked her, punched out her car window, threw her from a speeding vehicle, and threw a coffee table at her.
Certain male authors should be glad they're not at their literary peak in this current climate. These include notorious misogynists like Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Martin Amis, and John Updike. Imagine the reception Nabokov's brilliant but hebophiliac "Lolita" would get from SJWs if its publication date were 2018!
E. Price lobs this grenade at David Foster Wallace: "I believed he was a complex, hauntingly beautiful soul. Now that I know the truth about him, I find most of his work unimpressive, and I feel grateful that he is dead. If he were still alive, he'd be abusing students, harrassing exes, and tiptoeing around his own capacity for evil in his hand-wringing, exhausting prose."
Yikes! She reminds me of the people who vandalized the books of Ted Hughes over his adultery and tyranny while married to fellow poet Sylvia Plath. After Ted Hughes' crucifixion by feminists, which included attempts to chip his surname from Sylvia's gravestone in a Yorkshire village, a number of contentions are being reassessed: Ted's editing and reordering of the poems in Sylvia's magnum opus "Ariel" looks savvy, Ted's own Sylvia-soaked "Birthday Letters" is now considered a masterpiece, and Hughes' own abilities as a poet seem close behind hers. Like "Brangelina" or "Bennifer," "Tedylvia" was a synergy, a married couple who bounced ideas off each other and finished each other's sonnets and sentences.
Here is where MeToo runs into trouble. Richard Morgan wonders: "What do we want men in to MeToo reckoning to be, besides apologetic, broken, and punished? Do we even know? Don't we want them to be BETTER?" Morgan suggests that Junot Diaz has already changed, his violations now 4-12 years old. He has mended his ways and invited other men to do the same. In a stunning piece for the New Yorker last month, Junot declared:
* "I was raped when I was eight years old by a grown-up that I truly trusted."
* "(There was) no more me, only an abiding sense of wrongness and this unbearable recollection of being violently penetrated."
* "The rape excluded me from manhood, from love, from everything...By fourteen, I was holding one of my father's pistols to my head."
Scratch a misogynist, and you often get a man who when he was a boy was mistreated or abandoned by older men. MeToo, a muckraking movement, only goes so far. It exposes the gross, squirming life beneath certain rocks, but it isn't a movement of repair, healing, or change. That isn't its responsibility anyway. Men need a movement of our own.
LET'S TALK ABOUT THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM. There's no female Shakespeare, Mozart, Michelangelo, nor anyone with the XX chromosome anywhere near their stature in their respective art forms. One can blame oppression and bigotry, but then one has to recall that Milton wrote poems blind, Beethoven wrote sonatas deaf, Sade wrote novels in his own blood while incarcerated, and James Baldwin wrote as a gay black man before civil rights was achieved for either minority. How's THAT for overcoming obstacles?
Compared to women, men have more "culture babies," i.e., produce more novels, murals, gadgets, bands, businesses, symphonies, and scientific discoveries. Women, who often have ACTUAL babies, feel less motivated to make culture babies, impressive exceptions noted like Mary Barra (CEO of GM), J.K. Rowling, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Mead, Frida Kahlo, Madonna, Elizabeth Warren, etc. It isn't I who is claiming this. It's HISTORY that is proving this.
Camille Paglia sees teen boys as being passed "from control by their mothers to control by their wives" with only a "brief season of exhilarating liberty" in between. Many men learn to resent the way their awakening sexuality makes (the hetero majority of) us need women for another compelling set of reasons long before we're out of the shadow of our mothers, who in this post-patriarchal age of divorce, rule the familial roost ever more utterly, our first witness, first boss, and first love.
The dual power of mother and female lover that so affects and controls men has rarely been better expressed than in the vaginal, uterine imagery of Kurt Cobain's "Heart-shaped Box":
"Meat-eating orchids
forgive no one just yet.
Cut myself on angel's hair
and baby's breath.
Broken hymen of your highness
I'm left back.
Throw down your umbilical noose
so I can climb right back.
Hey! Wait!
I've got a new complaint,
forever in debt to your priceless advice."
Kurt's "new complaint" refers to a humiliating male dependency on women that leads to the kind of resentful misogyny and misbehavior that MeToo is exposing across the board, in the worlds of television, film, pop music, politics, and literature. Now that it is in the open, however, what will we do about it? That's where MeToo runs out of answers and also where iconic minds like Camille Paglia's and Jordan Peterson's come in to offer a fresh perspective.
--C. Schmitz 5/10/18
