To Be of Use

I'm surprised I haven't quoted this exchange from Terry Pratchett's Witches Abroad before:

'A witch doesn't know the meaning of the word “failure”, Gytha.'

They shot up into the clear air again. The horizon was a line of golden light as the slow dawn of the Disc sped across the land, bulldozing the suburbs of the night.

'Esme?' said Nanny Ogg, after a while.

'What?'

'It means “lack of success”.'

They flew in chilly silence for several seconds.

'I was speaking wossname. Figuratively,' said Granny.

'Oh. Well. You should of said.'

It came irresistibly to my mind when I listened to some remarks by Noam Chomsky in conversation with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now:



Here's the relevant part:

Suppose Biden is elected. I would anticipate it would be essentially a continuation of Obama - nothing very great, but at least not, uh, totally destructive, and opportunities for an organized public to change what is being done, to impose pressures. 

It's common to say now that the Sanders campaign failed  I think that's a mistake.  I think it was an extraordinary success, it completely shifted the arena of debate and discussion.  Issues that were unthinkable a couple of years ago are now right in the middle of attention.  The, uh, worst crime he committed in the eyes of the establishment is not the policies he's proposing, but the fact he was able to inspire popular movements, which had already been developing: Occupy, Black Lives Matter, or many others, and turn them into an activist movement which doesn't just show up every couple of years to push a lever and then go home, but applies constant pressure, constant activism, and so on.  That could affect a Biden Administration.

I love Chomsky, but once again I disagree with him.  He's moving the goalposts in a way that I don't think many progressives would accept from anyone else.  (Many on the left, of course, deride him as a collaborationist meliorist, which in many respects he is, but that's only surprising if you ever believed he was a revolutionary.)

Sanders's campaign in 2016 was even more of a long shot than it was this time, and it did succeed in pushing certain issues into mainstream debate that had been easy to dismiss before.  But this time the goal was to win the nomination and put Bernie Sanders into the White House, and this the campaign failed to do.  Claiming that winning the primaries and the general election was not the aim, that changing the acceptable realm of discussion is the important thing, is at best an attempt to rouse the troops with inspiring oratory - and Chomsky has never been good at doing that.  That's not an accusation, or even a criticism: he has always been proud of his lack of charisma, and mobilizing emotion has never been his role.  In this case, though, it just leaves the bareness of his claim naked to the critical eye.

I can sympathize with the desolation a lot of Sanders's supporters and volunteers, especially the younger ones, must be feeling as a result of his suspension of the campaign.  Maybe you can't invest so much energy into a movement without building up false hopes in yourself.  There have been a lot of recriminations, such as an accusation that Barack Obama somehow pressured Sanders into suspending his campaign, with the implication that Sanders sold out to the Man.  As far as I know, that's nuts, but who knows?  If not for the coronavirus pandemic, which blocked the on-the-ground door-to-door, face-to-face campaigning Sanders relied upon, I suppose he would have fought to the end.  But "if" and a dollar will get you on the bus.  As it is, I presume that he recognized that even if he could continue such campaigning, it would put his volunteers at risk, which he wasn't going to do; and it wasn't an option anyhow.  Biden, you'll recall, had no compunction about making voters line up to vote for him in Wisconsin, though he changed his mind three days after that debacle.

Yes, the campaign failed in its primary task, and I won't play with words to make it seem otherwise. (I think Chomsky indulged there in the kind of obfuscation he'd deride in mainstream thinkers.)  But Chomsky is correct that the movement isn't over, and to that extent he's right.  Sanders is keeping his name on the ballot in states whose primaries haven't happened yet, pushing for voting by mail.  The more delegates he wins, the more clout he'll have at the convention, and that matters. It might translate into influence within the party if by some miracle Biden wins in November, and that's important too.

Sanders's movement can also, as Chomsky says, put pressure on governments, especially if Biden wins, but possibly even if he doesn't.  It's certainly time to pay more attention to the down-ticket races Clinton and Obama neglected to use the money for their own narcissistic purposes.  The astroturf organization Obama built in 2008 and then downgraded largely defanged social movements that could have put more pressure on him.  He didn't succeed entirely, and he was very displeased when activists held his feet to the fire.  He also tried to crush, with considerable success, the movements that rose up anyway, independent of his control.  Sanders has always worked with his base to put pressure on the political process, and I expect he'll continue to do that.  I've already contributed happily to the donation process he set up for other organizations through his campaign structure.  If his followers drop him, they're the ones who are failing the people.  Again, I sympathize with them, but if they really believe the movement is about Us rather than Me, I hope they'll pull themselves together.

One thing I haven't seen among Sanders's fans is any consideration of what he must feel, and characteristically he doesn't seem to have made a big deal of his own disappointment, which must be very great.  Maybe I've just missed it, but I see a lot of Sanders people online, and I'm surprised that his fans haven't had much to say in sympathy for his loss or his courage in pushing forward.  He's still a Senator with work to do in one of the greatest crises this country has ever faced -- very possibly the greatest -- and he's still doing his work.  Which brings to mind another literary reference, by another left-wing Jew, Marge Piercy's poem "To Be of Use":

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,

who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,

who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,

who do what has to be done, again and again.

One Wants One's Gender-neutral Pronoun

There's been a fair amount of talk in the past several years about the need for gender-neutral pronouns in English, and as usual when people talk about gender, the talk has mostly been confused and unproductive.  I'm going to touch on some of the confusion today, without trying to be comprehensive.

English already has gender-neutral pronouns: "I," "we," "you," and "they."  It's only in the third person singular that a speaker has to keep track of gender.  Compared to speakers of many other languages, English speakers have it easy.  We don't have to make adjectives agree in gender or number with the nouns they modify, for example, let alone master a maze of honorifics for elders and juniors.  And gender mostly becomes a problem for our pronouns only when we're composing a sentence that doesn't refer to individuals but to people in the abstract, as in: "Everybody should be free to vote for the candidate of ... choice."

As Dennis Baron, a professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois whose Web of Language blog is in my blogroll, wrote in 1981,

The absence in English of a third-person, common-gender pronoun became apparent when grammarians in the eighteenth century began objecting to the apparently widespread use of they, their, and them with singular, sex-indefinite antecedents on the grounds that it violated number concord...

Only [he, the masculine third-person singular pronoun] satisfied the demands of both number concord and style; so despite the fact that it violates gender concord, a requirement the logical-minded prescriptivists were apparently willing to waive, it has become the approved construction.

There was always resistance to that approved construction, however, both principled on the ground that generic "he" is sexist, and populist as many if not most people clung to generic "they" for everyday use.  At the moment (because dictionaries always change with the changes in language), "the major dictionaries tell us that the plural pronoun they can function as a gender-neutral singular too."  In my own writing I boldly waffle, sometimes using "his or her" and variations, sometimes generic "she" (after all, the majority of Americans are female, and majority rules), sometimes "they," sometimes alternating "he" and "she," sometimes invented pronouns from literary sources, and sometimes I just rewrite the sentence to avoid the problem.  ("All people should be free to vote for the candidate of their choice."  Wait, "choices"?  Okay, "whatever candidate they choose.")  The issue is unlikely to be resolved in my lifetime, so I don't feel a need either to choose finally or to take a stand on which solution should prevail.

Something has changed, however, over the past couple of decades.  With the increasing visibility of transgender people and people who claim to reject or transcend the gender binary, there have been many calls for new pronouns to refer to them.  Many such pronouns have been invented and proposed.  This is fine with me, but again, the issue is unlikely to be settled in my lifetime.  I'm happy to comply more or less politely with other people's preferred pronouns for themselves.  I'm not sure how much difference it makes in practice, since most of the time I'll be using the gender-neutral "you" to address them anyway.  Since this is probably true for others as well, I'm not sure how often "Ask me about my pronouns" is going to affect discourse in the real world, except when someone gets written up in the student newspaper and their pronoun will be the main subject of the article.

What I've noticed in most of the coverage I've seen is that most people, whether frothing right-wing gender cops, well-meaning liberals, or frothing left-wing gender cops, don't seem to have noticed that the epicene "they" and the proliferation of supposedly non-binary pronouns are dealing with different phenomena.  This well-meaning blog post is typical.  For example:

“He,” “she,” or “it” won’t do, “one” doesn’t work when speaking of a specific person, e.g. “Sam washed one’s dishes,” and in some cases even a singular “they” just won’t work – specifically when a name is used, e.g. “Charlie tied their shoes” or “Sam thought they were late to the party.”

True enough, but that's because these are different cases, and the writer seems not to realize it.  Epicene "they" doesn't refer to "a specific person": it's not really a singular.  It's a common-gender pronoun, as Dennis Baron called it.  It's not supposed to refer to an individual.  (Though sometimes it does with reference to a person of unknown sex/gender, as in "I was chatting with someone on the internet and they said...")  On the other hand, if "they" achieved acceptance as the gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun in English, it would be the appropriate pronoun "when a name is used, e.g. 'Charlie tied their shoes'".  The real reason why "Sam washed one's dishes" doesn't work is that "one" is a periphrasis for the first person; the sentence would mean that Sam washed my dishes.  I also saw an article linked on Facebook which was headlined something like "Every mother should feel free to breastfeed in public if they want to."  I can't see any good reason why "she" shouldn't be used in this case, but a common-gender pronoun is the solution to a different problem than the special pronoun being sought for non-binary, agender, or other people.

I've also seen some confusion about some literary examples, like my personal favorite from Marge Piercy's 1976 science-fiction novel Woman on the Edge of Time.  In utopian 22nd-century Mouth-of-Mattapoisett, the third-person single pronoun is "person" (for the nominative) and "per" (possessive and accusative).  For children, "child" was used, and their species for non-human animals.  ("If Tilia [the character's cat] takes a flying leap onto my chest at first dawn from the top of the wardrobe, I get a clear notion that cat is dissatisfied with my conduct.")  There was no separate pronoun for persons of ambiguous or unknown gender; from the viewpoint of Connie, the 20th-century visitor to Mattapoisett, most of its citizens were of unknown or ambiguous gender anyway.  I think I've seen some references to this novel as a possible model for gender-neutral pronouns, which also seemed to misunderstand what was going on.  It wouldn't fit with many people's demand for separate pronouns to reflect their gender identities, and I rather suspect they would reject the one-size-fits-all of person/per.

The same would be true of another 1970s feminist literary experiment, The Cook and the Carpenter by June Arnold under the pseudonym The Carpenter.  Arnold substituted na (nominative) and nan (possessive) for "he" and "she" for most of the novel, though she switched to standard pronouns about two-thirds of the way through.  Though I like na and nan, Arnold used them not as proposed changes in English but to stymie readers' attempts to stereotype the characters by sex; hence the reveal toward the end to show who was female and who male.  Again, I don't think this alternative would satisfy advocates of separate pronouns for their gender identities.  If, as the blogger just cited says, there's a "need for a gender-neutral pronoun" in English, it isn't the same "need" felt by those who want not "gender-neutral" but gender-specific pronouns for their multiplying genders.

There are other possibilities, of course.  I seem to have misremembered some details from Samuel Delany's 1984 science-fiction novel Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand.  What I thought he posited as part of the grammar of one of his planets' languages was that "she" was used for any object of erotic desire, regardless of body configuration; to refer to a person as "she" was to acknowledge that one desired him or her; otherwise the person would be "he."  Looking at the text now, I don't think that's what Delany had in mind, but I think it could be a valid grammatical principle.  After all, in America when I was growing up there was a general consensus that only women were beautiful or erotically desirable, so that men felt their masculinity was compromised if anyone of whatever gender called them "beautiful."  To be desired was to be objectified, a position socially reserved for women.  So why not choose pronouns according to the current status of the person you're talking about?

Remember the neutralization of breastfeeding mothers in an Internet magazine: someone pointed out that "she" rather than "they" was appropriate as a generic pronoun, and someone else replied that not all mothers were women, that men could mother too.  Granting that, almost no men can breastfeed (though in Woman on the Edge of Time Marge Piercy imagined a future society where we could and did), why not just refer to all mothers as "she," regardless of their plumbing?  Why not gender pronouns according to the task being performed by a person at the moment, so that anyone fixing a carburetor would be "he" and anyone changing a diaper would be "she"?  Since most of the ostensible nonconformist discourse on gender nowadays is still mired in gender stereotypes and essentialism anyway, why not stop fighting it and go with what people actually think and feel?  The idea that "he" and "she" refer to social status rather than body configuration is a tenet of radical feminism (as well as of gay male culture and of traditional male supremacy), so there's no reason why language couldn't reflect it.

Underlying most of this discourse is a naive version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis about language, that language determines thought and reflects the values and assumptions of a culture.  I think the theory of language created by George Orwell for his novel 1984 is similar: human beings are trapped in the cage of their language, and can't think outside of it.  Orwell's account was seriously flawed, if only because language is not that rigid, and human thought is not absolutely controlled by it.  (The linguist and pundit John H. McWhorter wrote a short book with a misleading title, trying to refute strict versions of Sapir-Whorf; it's worth reading, but read it critically.)  The fact that people are proposing alternative pronouns to suit their personal politics both disproves the thesis that our thought is absolutely controlled by language (or else they wouldn't be able to think about, let alone invent new pronouns) and shows its popularity (because they believe that gender pronouns have thought-controlling power -- if we change them, we change gender norms).

In particular, I'm intrigued by people's evident belief that their gender (conceived as an innate essence) dictates the pronoun that should be used for them, and vice versa.  This shows their general ignorance about language and its relation to culture; they barely know their own language and society, never mind others.  Some years ago I read an awful book I'm not going to name here, in which the author claimed that because some Native American tribes don't have gender-specific pronouns, they do not have sexist expectations about men and women.  I immediately recognized the absurdity of that claim (which I've encountered elsewhere a few times since then).  Apart from the fact that many tribes (including the ones he praised) did have sharply-defined gender expectations, I knew that languages like Chinese and Korean don't have gendered pronouns -- yet those societies are extremely sexist and highly gendered.  There is a loose, variable and very changeable relation between language and culture, so deliberate changing of pronouns might have some effect on gender norms if it's part of a larger program of social change, but by themselves pronouns don't really have any effect.  (The same goes for customs like wives' taking their husbands' name on marriage.  They don't do so in China or Japan, yet they still traditionally lose their separate personhood when they marry anyway, and the different custom is not evidence of a lack of sexism in the culture.)

The blogger I cited before mentioned the case of "Ms.", which is probably an exception that proves the rule.  It gained currency because so many women liked the idea of a title that wouldn't define them by marital status.  In that respect it is more like epicene "they" than it is like "ze."  That there weren't a multitude of alternative possibilities, as with pronouns today, was surely a factor in the success of "Ms."  But why gender the title (indeed, why have a title) at all?  It's as problematic to distinguish between Mr. and Ms. as between "he" and "she," isn't it?  Don't we need a gender-neutral alternative to Mr. and Ms. for the non-binary?  Apparently at least one has been proposed.  I imagine more will follow, as with gender-specific pronouns generally.

Maybe, as with genders, we need a separate third-person pronoun in English for every individual.  I say this not to mock the anxieties that drive these proposals, but to point out their confusion and indeed incoherence.  Instead of progress, concern with pronouns and multiplying genders seems to me a distraction, spinning our wheels in place.  The "need" for new third-person-singular pronouns seems to be psychological rather than grammatical (as is the case with epicene "they").  That doesn't invalidate the felt need, but it needs to be kept in perspective.  By all means, let people choose the pronouns and titles they wish, and I'll use them out of courtesy, but I'm not obliged to agree that they represent even a partial or provisional solution to the problem of gender, in language or in the rest of life.

Doing What Comes Naturally

I considered adding this to yesterday's post, but decided I might as well start a new one.  Midgley also wrote in Heart and Mind:

Now it is exactly this variety, this obstinate innate uniqueness of each human being, that gives real force to the demands for political freedom.  Mill, in his Essay on Liberty, emphasized it constantly and correctly with organic metaphors.  People, he said, are like trees which should have their full shape and not be pollarded; like human feet, which should have their natural growth and not be bound.  

Like human hair, which should have its natural growth and not be cut or bound or dyed?  Like the human body, which should go naked and not be covered by clothing?  “Nature” in this sense starts to stretch too much, and those organic metaphors bump up against real practice, such as longstanding human manipulation of the breeding and culture of non-human species.  Is it bad to trim a tree, to mow your lawn, to domesticate plants or animals for food and other purposes?  We expect a more hands-off approach to human beings (though some of us fantasize about breeding people as we breed dogs or cattle), but the organic metaphors Midgley approves break down there.

But stick to people: I wonder what that Victorian gentleman John Stuart Mill thought about contraception?  Abortion?  Homosexuality?  Celibacy?  Chastity?  For his time he was a very advanced supporter of women's autonomy, but I haven't yet read The Subjection of Women and don't know the details of his opinions.  Sex-reassignment surgery didn't exist then, and it's interesting to speculate what he would have thought of it.  Transsexuals don't think they are going against their natural growth, of course: they insist that they're expressing it.  And who can say?  But human intervention in nature, our own or other organisms', is too widespread and general to be dismissed as lightly as Mill did according to Midgley.

In the real world, “nature” is limited not by innate gifts but by the environment.  But then, "the environment" is often just another word for "nature": a drought for example, or a plague, or a fire, or an asteroid strike.  Or, as in Mill's case, a driving father who was determined to make him into a genius.  As the Encyclopedia Britannica puts it, "His childhood was not unhappy, but it was a strain on his constitution and he suffered from the lack of natural, unforced development."  I wondered when I read this passage if Mill didn't have his own experience in mind when he said these things.  But that raises another point about "nature": Mill would not have been the person he became if not for his controlling father, and would not have written what he did in the way he did.  If he'd been born in England with the identical "nature" a thousand years earlier, he'd have turned out very differently.

They shouldn’t have a single stereotype, he insisted – and that is why we need a rich, varied, hospitable, enterprising society.  But if they were not innately unique, if they were naturally indeterminate, there would be no objection to pouring the lot of them into standard moulds.  It is quite time that the radical Left got rid of this confusion, this dead beetle which is poisoning its concept of freedom [42].

I'm not sure I can disentangle Mill from Midgley here, but I think this passage confirms my impression that when she wrote that "each person is different in kind" from birth, that by "human nature" she meant individual human nature.  That's all well and good, but I don't think it's the usual commonsense meaning of the term; people may say "that's his nature" of an individual's quirks, but "human nature" usually refers to the species.

And what if one's nature drives one to do terrible things?  People have often tried to find a way around this problem, by postulating that the terrible things are not the result of nature but of being carefully taught the wrong way to behave.  I don't think so.  Nature isn't as red in tooth and claw as some romantics like to think, but it's not all sunshine, rainbows and lollipops either.  Hyenas are part of nature as surely as butterflies are.  This only means that we needn't be, mustn't be nonjudgmental about nature either.  It may not be pleasant, but some natures must be bound, pollarded, and even extinguished; and we must take responsibility for our judgments and how we act on them.  (I think this was roughly what Sartre had in mind with his denials of human nature and the necessity of choice.  If I'm wrong about that, no matter: it's what I have in mind.)

What made this passage stick with me, though, was Midgley's apparent assumption that "unique" is the opposite of "indeterminate", and that those unique individual natures are somehow fixed from birth.  That may very well be so, but it needs to be argued, not asserted.  It seems to me that human nature, both at the species and the individual level is indeterminate.  That's not to say it's unbounded, or infinitely malleable, but everything we know about the interaction of genetic endowment and experience / environment, to say nothing of human beings' capacity for learning, tells us that organisms are both unique and indeterminate.

As an example of the uniqueness and determinacy she has in mind, Midgley declares:

The fascinating thing here is not just the capacity, but the interest which goes with it.  Our faculties demand use; we need to do what we are fitted for.  That delightful wood-engraver, Thomas Bewick [1753-1828] was the son of a small farmer in a lonely part of Northumberland.  He tells in his Memoir how from his earliest years he used to draw pictures, with anything he could get and on any surface he could find, although nobody suggested this to him and on the whole people discouraged him.  ‘At that time’, he goes on, ‘I had never heard of the word “drawing”, nor did I know of any other paintings besides the king’s arms in the church, and the signs in Ovingham of the Black Bull and other inns.’

Bewick, in fact, was a born draughtsman ...  Such people exist.  Therefore, there has to be something wrong with a concept of freedom which can’t accommodate them.  Certainly, they show that freedom has its limits.  Nobody is free to have somebody else’s gifts as well as his own, or instead of them [41]. 

This is true of certain individuals, but not of all.  Not everyone has the kind of early-onset vocation that someone like Bewick exhibited.  I'm not sure what I myself was born "fitted for"; it's hard to see how either reading or writing could be inborn, since these abilities are human inventions.  Drawing, we know, is older, but what kind of innate endowment would produce a "born draughtsman"?  I have a good ear for music, a decent voice and the dexterity to play guitar adequately, but no driving need to make music above all else.  I can also draw fairly well but never worked at it.  I sometimes liked to tease people I knew by saying that I was born to be a dishwasher, since I fit so well into that job for thirty years.

In the communitarian society she imagined for her 1976 science-fiction novel Woman on the Edge of Time, Marge Piercy addressed questions like this.  Of one character we are told that she "does not switch jobs but is permanent head of this house of children" because:

Sometimes a gift expresses itself so strongly, like Jackrabbit's need to create color and form, like Magdalena's need to work with children, that it shapes a life.  Person must not do what person cannot do -- you have heard us say that a hundred times; but likewise, person must do what person has to do.

Most people, however, are expected to work at certain service jobs rather than identify themselves with one office.  Even Jackrabbit, the artist also mentioned, must work on food and other production, cleaning and so on; he must also go on defense against the mega-corporations that menace his community.  Connie, the novel's protagonist from the 1970s, is shocked to learn this: he's an artist, shouldn't he be free to commune with his muse?  Why risk such a talented person on defense?

Most of the characters in Woman on the Edge of Time are doubled, in the 1970s present of Connie, the protagonist, and the 2130s of Mouth-of-Mattapoisett.  One reason for this is to suggest how the environment shapes whatever innate characteristics a person has.  Jackrabbit's 1970s counterpart is Skip, a young gay man committed for to a mental hospital for electroshock by his parents in an effort to "cure" him; if he has a "need to create color and form," he never gets a chance to express it.

Luciente, Connie's guide in Mattapoisett, says of her daughter:

"At four, Dawn was timid.  We worried.  Me, my [co-mothers].  We all struggled to bring per out."

[Connie] "But you say you respect difference." 

"Different strengths we respect.  Not weakness.  What is the use in not actively engaging life?  It passes anyhow."

I'm sure that Midgley, who's a mother herself, knows this: respecting each child's individuality doesn't mean that one never intervenes to encourage growth in what seems a desirable direction.  Contrary to her paraphrase of Mill, some interference and shaping, conscious or not, is inevitable in the raising of human children, because of their long period of dependency and their great capacity for learning. What is desirable, though, is not determined by "nature" but by ideological preconceptions, and decided by judgment.  Somewhere I read that in 'the West' babies are seen as dependent beings who must learn to be independent and take care of themselves, while in Japan (and perhaps elsewhere in 'the East') babies are seen as little egoists who must learn to be connected to, and interdependent with other people.  This is probably an overgeneralization, like most generalizations about cultures, but the point is that babies aren't different in Japan and the United States, but the way they are seen and the expectations for them are.  Both of these ways of thinking about babies seem true to me at the same time: they are dependent, but they're also little egoists who must learn to co-exist with others.  "Human nature," whether we're speaking of individuals or of the species, is self-contradictory at its root. Woman on the Edge of Time is, among other things, a book about human nature, but I suspect it would annoy Midgley for dealing with questions she doesn't care to engage.  (A couple of years after Heart and Mind, Midgley co-wrote an awful book on feminism that I hope to dissect here one of these days.)

Another reason why talk about nature, human or otherwise, runs into fatal difficulties is that nature has history -- that is, a sequence of changes that can't be predicted though they can, with luck, be described in hindsight.  The pitfall of doing so is that, no doubt also as part of human nature, the historian is tempted to find a story in the sequence: an ordered, causal narrative, which implies that with a bit more wisdom one could have predicted how it would turn out.  Darwinian evolution is the anti-story of change in Nature.  Not only do languages and other cultural features change over time and from place to place, but the biology of organisms changes too.  It's indeterminate -- not infinitely malleable but not fixed in place either.

Somebody Up There

I'm pretty sure I was no more than seven years old when, after having wakened from a nightmare and gone to my mother for comfort and reassurance, I began to wonder who she went to when she had a bad dream, when she was afraid.  I had just come to realize that my mother was also a daughter, that one of my grandmas was her mother.  But she didn't live with her.  If she had a bad dream, she couldn't get up and run to her mother.  So what did she do?  What did all grownups do?

Democracy Now! broadcast excerpts today from a memorial to the late Maya Angelou, and what they chose to share was mostly gag-making.  First the war criminal and general congenital cheap pig Bill Clinton:

Here is why I think she died when she did. It was her voice. She was without a voice for five years, and then she developed the greatest voice on the planet. God loaned her his voice. She had the voice of God. And he decided he wanted it back for a while.

That got him an ovation.  Of course she really died because God needed another angel.  And this sort of thing, with its amoral sentimentality, is probably inescapable when someone dies, but coming from someone like Bill Clinton it's especially repulsive.

Next up was Michelle Obama, who claimed that "the power of Maya Angelou’s words ... carried a little black girl from the south side of Chicago all the way to the White House."  Well, no, I don't think Angelou should get the credit (or the blame) for Mrs. Obama's ending up married to a President of the United States.  Not even when I consider that Angelou also inspired "a young white woman from Kansas who named her daughter after Maya and raised her son to be the first black president of the United States."  (I'm sure I'm not the only person who reflects from time to time on what difference it would make to the discourse about President Obama if his mother were still alive.  Did she really "raise her son to be the first black president of the United States," or were her standards higher than that?)

Finally Oprah Winfrey took her turn, and she was in many ways the most appalling.

I was in utter despair and distraught and had called Maya. I remember being locked in the bathroom with the door closed, sitting on the toilet seat. I was crying so hard she could barely understand what I was saying. And I had — I was upset about something that I can’t even remember now what it was. Isn’t that how life works? And I called for long-distance cry on her shoulder, but she wasn’t having it. She said, as you all know she could, stop it! Stop it now. And I’d say, what? What? What did you say? And she said, stop your crying now. And I continued to sniffle and she said, did you hear me? And I said, yes, ma’am. Only she could level me to my seven year old self in an instant.

And so on, and on.  Winfrey's remarks sent me to the pages of Marge Piercy's 1973 novel Small Changes.  Piercy had a fair amount to say about the Strong Woman and the women who depend on her.  In Small Changes there's a Socratic dialogue on the subject.

“Don’t try to make me somebody up there,” Wanda said with quiet anger.  “On some higher level.  I’m older than you, yes.  I have a few things to teach you that you want to learn, though most of it is in you already.  But I’m not existing on some easier, calmer level.  If I’m older, I’m also more spent.  I have less reserves, less to spare.  I’m a woman the same as you, and it isn’t easier for me to fight and to survive and to get things done than it is for you!  It makes me angry when you pretend it’s different for me.”

“But you know so much more.  You never wonder who you are, I know you don’t!”

“Beth, it’s recently I stopped being only Joe’s woman and mother of my kids.  That’s all I was for years, and don’t forget it.  Joe, my kids, and radical politics were my life, in that order.  I wasn’t on my own list of priorities.”

“But now you do know!  You do!  I feel you’re pretending.  Because I know you’re stronger than me.”

“You mean I’m louder.  How do you know I’m stronger, Beth?  Because you haven’t seen me break yet?” [454]

And:

She wanted to love, yes, but safely, without demands, from a distance.  She wanted Wanda for her own loud, strong, vigorous dark Madonna.  Part of her froze and tucked in when Wanda wanted to make demands back, when Wanda wanted to talk about her aching legs or to worry about her sons or to be sullenly angry and defeated: when Wanda asked her to be her friend [456-7].

I haven't read that much of Angelou's work, but from what I have read I get the impression that she made her own weaknesses and fears clear enough.  She must have gotten so tired of people attaching themselves to her, demanding to be mothered and inspired.  It's no tribute to her to turn her into a wise, powerful oracle who was always on top of things, a "loud, strong, vigorous dark Madonna" who'd make you whole if you but touched the hem of her garment.  Michelle Obama did better than Winfrey in this regard, recognizing that Angelou was honored better by learning from her weaknesses as well as her strengths.  I wonder who was there for the adult Maya Angelou when she had bad dreams.

Jews at War

I just finished re-reading Marge Piercy's historical novel of World War II, Gone to Soldiers (Summit Books, 1987).  I'd put it off for a few months because of its length, 700 pages (and she says in the afterword that it would have been a third longer if she'd gotten a grant to do research in the Soviet Union), which stopped my project of rereading all her work in chronological order.  Once I got going, it was a pleasure and toward the end I couldn't put it down -- though of course I knew how it turned out: what I wanted to know was how her characters would fare.

I haven't read much fiction set during World War II, and far from enough nonfiction about it, so I can't really compare Gone to Soldiers to anything except Sherri L. Smith's Flygirl (Putnam, 2009), about a young African American woman who passed as white to become a WASP.  I started to read Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead a couple of years ago but only did a couple of chapters; maybe it's time to go back to it.  And I really should read From Here to Eternity and other of James Jones's works.  Piercy's characters are mostly Jewish, both in the Europe and in the US, and often lower-middle class, and as always her perspective is feminist, anti-racist, and pro-labor, so she covers the anti-Semitism that American Jews faced at home as well as what European Jews faced at the hands of the Third Reich and its collaborators.  She describes the harassment that women faced in the factories, and that the women fliers of the WASPS had to deal with.  Her account of the Detroit race riots of 1943 is chilling. White racists were using the same folklore they use today:

The buses and trolleys were overloaded with people jammed into each other, after waiting half an hour or longer. The whites said the colored belonged to bump clubs and sought opportunities to jostle whites [275].

Today it's called the "knockout game," and though according to this article the Justice Department says "there have been similar incidents dating as far back as 1992", Piercy's research turned up the same basic idea from fifty years earlier.  (She declares in the afterword that although the novel is fiction, she wanted everything in it to have really happened to someone.)

Another striking bit: the Nazis "opened the sea war by sinking an unarmed passenger liner, the Athenia, and then claimed the British had blown it up themselves for propaganda" (109).  That's familiar too.  Very familiar.  (Ironically, the best-documented case I know of where something like this actually happened was when US Special Forces soldiers killed three Afghan women -- two of them pregnant -- and dug the bullets out of their bodies, trying to make it look like an honor killing by the Bad Guys.)

Gone to Soldiers isn't a novel I'll reread often, because of its length and because much of it is so emotionally painful, but I'm glad I reread it this time.

I can't say the same for Veronica Roth's Divergent (Katherine Tegen, 2011), now a major motion picture but even more of a drag, as far as I'm concerned, than Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games.  Partly because it's longer: the first volume is 500 pages long.  I picked up Divergent at the library a couple of days ago and am now about halfway through it.  For awhile I wasn't sure I'd read it all, but I think I can finish it in two days so I might as well.  The writing is adequate (she at least uses the verb "diffuse" correctly, which is more than I can say about many pop writers these days) but thin.  I don't think she's built her world very well, and her characters are cardboard. Roth's imagined dystopian future just doesn't make much sense to me.  Maybe I'm just too old for it.

Not Enough Pronouns

Some more thoughts about "universality" in art and entertainment, which I wrote about last week.

Look at this excerpt from the poem "Cats Like Angels" by Marge Piercy, from her book The Moon Is Always Female (Knopf, 1980):

           When I was a girl
I loved spiny men with ascetic grimaces 
all elbows and words and cartilage
ribbed like cast up fog-grey hulls,
faces to cut the eyes blind
on the glittering blade, chins
of Aegean prows bent on piracy.

Now I look for men whose easy bellies
show a love for the flesh and the table,
men who will come in the kitchen
and sit, who don't think peeling potatoes
makes their penis shrink; men with broad 
fingers and purple figgy balls, 
men with rumpled furrows and the slightly
messed look at ease of beds recently
well used.

Now, like most good poetry this is both concretely specific and figuratively general.  The concrete details signify and symbolize.  The poet is a mostly heterosexual woman (though with considerable homosexual history, especially when she was a teenager), married to a man, fourteen or fifteen years my senior, Jewish by ancestry and by observance.  I'm a homosexual man, uncoupled, gentile by ancestry and atheist by choice and the grace of God.  (Joke.)  What we have in common is mainly our working-class backgrounds and that we interact erotically with males.  People who claim to prize "universality" in art, like the interviewer and singers I wrote about last week, would perhaps fault Piercy for using too many nouns instead of comfortably unspecific pronouns: she is explicit that she is a woman, and that her loves have been men, and only certain men at that, though the types have changed over the years.

Yet I recognize a lot of my experience in this poem.  I also liked those lean hungry-looking boys when I was young, and with age I've come to appreciate the different beauty of men with comfortable bellies.  I still like looking at lean men, and wouldn't turn one down if the opportunity arises, though I have come to believe it possible to be too thin; though it's also possible to be too fat, I've come to be more interested in heavier-set men.  Piercy's change of heart as described in the poem is too simple to describe my life exactly, but I wouldn't be surprised if she too lets her eye rest pleasantly, from time to time, on lean angelic boys.  But I return to "Cats Like Angels" regularly over the decades.  It sums up a general change in the way I relate to men; it may even have subtly encouraged that change.

What about lesbians?  Could they relate to this poem?  Maybe: maybe they once liked slender girls but came to relish women of girth and cushioning.  Heterosexual men?  They might enjoy Piercy's lesson that we don't have to look like fourteen-year-old boys forever.  Or not.  Other heterosexual women might disagree with Piercy's tastes in men, but like all of the rest of us, they might be intrigued by an account of someone who is different from them in this respect -- which is part of the work of art and entertainment, just as identifying and recognizing sameness is.   No work can be all things to all people, but gassy indistinctness and lack of specificity won't fix that.  A lot of the problem of "universality" is in the eye of the beholder, whether he or she is willing to find similarities and appreciate the differences.

A Small But Significant We

Continuing my project of rereading all her works, I just finished Marge Piercy's eighth novel, Fly Away Home (Summit Books, 1984).

When I was following these books as they were published, I thought that her novels alternated between so-so and brilliant.  I'm not so sure about that now.  Perhaps because I've become better informed about class, I now appreciate novels like The High Cost of Living more than I did the first time I read them.  Like many readers, I'd lazily pigeonholed Fly Away Home in memory as basically a romance novel, even though I also remembered its background of gentrification and the politics of real estate.

Fly Away Home is the story of Daria Walker (née Porfirio) a forty-three-year-old housewife and author of cookbooks, the mother of two grown daughters, married to a successful Boston lawyer.  Though she initially embraced domesticity, she stumbled onto her second career as a writer and become quite successful at it.  As the novel opens, she feels like a success: a happy woman in love with her husband who loves her back.  Of course things immediately begin to unravel, as she encounters some angry working-class activists who blame her husband for the deterioriating conditions of the houses and apartments they rent, and for a suspicious string of fires that have killed at least one person.  They also blame her, though as far as she knows those properties have nothing to do with her.  Then she begins to suspect that her husband is having an affair with another woman. When her suspicions are confirmed and he leaves her, she falls in with the activists, learning how to research her husband's real estate dealings.  At first she does so to improve her position in the divorce settlement, because her husband does his best to keep her ignorant of his finances, which are also hers.  But when she discovers how shady his real-estate dealings really are, she gradually becomes politicized and consequently becomes romantically involved with one of the activists, a carpenter named Tom Silver who shares her working-class background and her upwardly-mobile aspirations, but also has a background of leftist politics.  In the process she finds community among the activists in a neighborhood much like the one she grew up.

So yes, there are elements of romance here.  But they're interwoven with the politics.  (I suspect that any fiction by a female writer with a love interest will tend to be read as romance, whatever else is going on in it.)  Daria's ex-husband's personal failings are likewise connected to his abandonment of his original ideals of public service, and his embrace of predatory capitalism.  At the same time she's becoming involved with Tom, she also takes in another activist, a young Puerto Rican graduate student and single mother who's been burned out of her apartment, and builds a new household with her and her daughter much more readily than she embraces her coupling with Tom.  Her career as a writer and cooking teacher was already established before these changes in her life, and gives her something to fall back on to support herself as her husband withdraws from her.

It occurred to me as I read that Fly Away Home is a mystery novel, with a political difference.  Even strongly feminist mystery writers like Sara Paretsky tend to protagonists who fit the individualist mold of the genre: lone wolves who solve cases by themselves, whose helpers and informants are part of the furniture rather than full participants in the detection.  But Daria joins a group of people who haunt the city's property records, tracing ownership of the buildings they live in to discover who is responsible for the deteriorating infrastructure, to say nothing of the murderous fires either welcomed or actively set to collect insurance money and drive out lower-income tenants.  Daria is the protagonist and viewpoint character, but she comes late to the research and is never at its center: the other activists are just as important, and teach her the detective skills she uses.

Fly Away Home is primarily a good read.  It starts off slowly to build Daria's backstory, but rapidly picks up steam.  Even though I remembered the outcome pretty well, I kept picking it back up to go on reading when I should have been doing other things, like writing this blog.  Its politics, as usual with Piercy's work, are still timely, and nonfiction books like Samuel Delany's Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999) and Sarah Schulman's The Gentrification of the Mind (2012) cover some of the same territory.

Next will be Piercy's humongous historical novel of World War II, Gone to Soldiers, and its associated book of poems, Available Light.

Small Changes, Very Small

I'm almost done rereading Marge Piercy's third novel, Small Changes, originally published in 1973.  I first read it in the mid-1970s.  It's a long complex book, built around two main characters but with many other secondary ones.  (Two important male characters are Vietnam veterans, interestingly.)  It's typical now to dismiss it as one of the feminist classics of the 1970s, and many contemporary readers claim that it's dated.  I don't think so.  Relations between women and men have changed somewhat since the book was written, and middle-class women are more likely to have careers outside the home than they were previously.  But men still expect emotional and other service from women, and woman still find it difficult to refuse it, let alone demand emotional and other service from men in return.  And there's still reaction, a powerful movement to return us all to the Fifties, though the Fifties were an aberration, a diversion from tradition rather than Tradition itself.  We're not likely to go back to the days when many women could stay at home as housewives because most men can't earn enough to support a household by themselves.  It wasn't feminism that destroyed the "traditional" family, it was capitalism and the Reagan administration.

But although feminism is one of the core themes of Small Changes, it's about other things too.  It's partly an account of reaction against the Sixties, including state repression that most Americans paid no attention to at the time.  One of the characters must testify before a grand jury empaneled to destroy the resistant social movements that had scared our rulers so badly.  This was officially justified, insofar as anyone bothered, because of the violent segments of those movements: the Black Panthers, the Weathermen.  (Of course, the far greater State violence, against American citizens as well as foreigners, was of no great concern to most citizens, even after it was exposed.)  As one character explains:

It isn't like a regular jury.  They're older, richer white people always, and they even run a credit check on them.  They're to bring in indictments that the government wants.  Ninety-five per cent of the time that's what they do -- agree to prosecute.  But Anita says that mainly they're a device for investigating.  They're a way of forcing people to testify against each other.  The F.B.I. can't force you to talk, the police can't, though they try.  But a grand jury can send you to jail if you don't answer their questions [505].*

And Wanda, the character called before the grand jury, explains:

"This is a fishing expedition, Beth.  The questions they want to ask me aren't just about deserters.  They're asking about the whole web of connections in the movement.  They want to know who's friendly with who, who lives where, in what commune, who sleeps with who, who gives money.  They want to fill in all the missing connections so that people can't disappear underground any more."

"But they must know all that anyhow, they have all the phones in the country tapped!"

"Don't exaggerate, Beth.  They don't know everything.  Even when they 'know,' half of what they know is garbage and they want confirmation.  Look, the questions they're asking me include every address I've lived at since the year zero.  Who else lived there?  What vehicles have I owned and who borrowed them?  Who was at the women's conference last year in Boston and where did they stay?  How did I travel from Boston to New York for the health care conference that summer?  What meetings did I attend in that fall that plotted riots, demonstrations, or street actions -- all lumped as one! ... [507].

Yes, the novel is often didactic, but no more than any Robert Heinlein book.  No wonder that I, who grew up loving Heinlein, also love Piercy.  Heinlein's advocates have often pointed to his highly intelligent and competent characters as a feature of his work that sets it above most (especially mundane) fiction.  Piercy also focuses on intelligent competent characters, with the difference that she doesn't set them against straw opponents they can easily beat.

Things haven't changed all that much in American politics; we now have the Patriot Act and the surveillance state, and probably all our phones and e-mail are tapped now.

Another key topic is computers.  Miriam, one of the two principal characters, moves from mathematics to computer science.  This is in the late 1960s, when computers were mainframes that filled whole rooms, and programs and data were input on punched cards, before desktop computers much less tablets, before the Internet and WiFi.  Miriam gets a job with a small research firm on Route 128 near Boston, the only female programmer in the company.  (Come to think of it, Miriam is a lot like Heinlein's smart, sexy, male-identified heroines, though again, she lives in a different universe.  But then Heinlein's men are also fantasy figures.)  Their big contract is writing software for the anti-ballistic missile program that the Nixon administration backed at the time.  Miriam gets shuttled onto that team, which she hates.  There's a scene where she meets her old MIT professor Wilhelm Graben, who scoffs when she complains about being "hired by death."

"What nonsense.  It's scuttlebutt that the system will never operate.  For instance, assuming that the computer technology works out perfectly -- for the first time in history, perhaps -- but assuming that, the crucial interface is that combination of radar equipment and computers.  Now there cannot possibly in any real war situation be enough time to discriminate the raw data in the radar inputs about what would be real missiles and what simply extra junk floating about.  All weapons are programmed to fill the heavens with large quantities of objects that induce noise in the radar.  Chaff for instsance -- aluminum foil -- reflects radar beams quite nicely and produces responses that would indicate serious objects approaching.  The electronic countermeasures will be jamming, with strong transmission at the same frequency that the radar operates on ...

"But forget military questions.  Think about the most amusing aspect of the ABM.  Now you are exploding, say, a five-megaton warhead to knock down a missile no bigger than a barn.  Obviously, this does not require a warhead of five hundred million tons of TNT -- Hiroshima was destroyed by twenty thousand tons' equivalent.  Thus you can deduce that accuracy is simply not in it.  They're figuring on exploding a five-megaton bomb to knock down a missile because they are not counting on being in the same state with it -- states imagined to be lines superimposed upon the air ... "  His voice was calm and mocking.  She grew colder and colder ...

"Defense, it's called.  The rhetoric of defense, of course, is that human beings are being defended.  But the type of weaponry we are discussing is absolutely useless in defending human beings.  It would make little difference, I imagine, to someone on the ground whether he was fried alive because an enemy missile exploded twenty miles to his right hand, or because one of 'his' missiles exploded as far overhead.  The temperature on the ground would instantly rise several hundred degrees, in either case.  Defense is defense of missile sites, not of people or the landscape, which would be eliminated ... But you must admit, the rhetoric with which American politicians address their constituencies about defense spending is amusing" [379-380].

I'd forgotten this passage when, sometime in the early 90s, I leafed through the book looking for another passage I remembered.  The same weapons systems, with super space lasers added, were floated again in the 1980s as the Reagan gang's Strategic Defense Initiative or SDI, commonly derided as "Star Wars." There have occasional attempts to resurrect the program under Clinton and perhaps under Bush, even though the same criticisms Piercy put into Graben's mouth still apply.  What counts is pouring millions and billions of dollars into high-tech industry, not "defense ... of people or the landscape." 

There's a lot of quotable, still-relevant material in Small Changes -- I haven't come close to exhausting it here.  On one hand, while there's nothing wrong with books that focus on stereotypical concerns of women like domesticity and romance, concerns that still dominate what is derisively called "chick lit," it should be clear that Piercy's interests and ambitions include those concerns but aren't restricted to them.  Much as I love, for instance, Jennifer Crusie and her smart heroines, none of her books are as large in this sense as Small Changes or most of Marge Piercy's novels.  But then, the same is true of most male writers today.  I think that the reason many people try to dismiss Piercy's work as dated feminist cliches is that her left politics disturb them at least as much as her critical take on men in relation to women.

*Quoted from a Fawcett-Columbine trade paperback reprint from (I think) 1997.

Good News for Modern Woman

I'm gradually rereading all of Marge Piercy's work this year, and I've just begun her second novel, Dance the Eagle to Sleep, originally published in 1970.  I remembered from my previous reading, long ago, how rough the book had seemed: it's very much a product of the Sixties, full of sex and drugs and rock and roll.  I don't think it's yet a feminist novel yet (that would come in her third one, Small Changes): three of the four main characters are young males, who are a bit more willing than than the norm to recognize their common humanity with women, but they still have to be shocked into it.  For example, the science and math prodigy Billy is surprised when a young woman turns out to be a person:

Ginny hung around and finally out of embarrassment he put her to work with the crew.  It turned out she wasn't stupid.  He could not say why he had assumed she was.  She even asked good questions.  He forgot to be worried about how he should act.  He treated her like the rest of the crew and that seemed to work.

To be fair to Billy, his assumption about Ginny was based as much in class and intellectual snobbery as in sexism, and it's probably significant that he learns to see past it.

Dance the Eagle to Sleep is a science fiction novel (Piercy has published at least three of them), a precursor of her now-classic Woman on the Edge of Time.  The premise is a youth revolt in the later 20th or early 21st century, after a heavy clampdown on the social-justice movements of the 1960s.  Universal service, military or civilian, has been instituted to keep the population under control.

What got my attention and led me to write about the book here was this passage about the climax of a student school takeover (emphasis added):

The fourth night, the police cordon was reinforced by busloads of tactical police, and they knew the crisis had come.  "Four days and three nights to turn five hundred kids into a people," Corey said.  They lay on the roof watching the police bring up a bulldozer and get ready to smash in through the south doors.  It was eerie.  The moon was risen and bright on them.  The police did not move like men, because they were so encased in their weapons and paraphernalia.  They carried side arms, cases for handcuffs on their left hips, a club for head knocking and ball breaking, a gas mask and extra rounds of ammunition.  Some had devices on their backs for spraying gas.  Others carried spray cans or grenades.  They moved with the stiffness of men laden with gadgets and protected from any sense of what they do.  Something that looked like a tank was drawn up.

Since the Occupy movement began, many people have become aware of the increasing militarization of American police forces.  Piercy reminded me that it's not new, but she also foresaw how much it would advance.  It seems to me that most of the countercultural fiction from the 1960s and 1970s read by students today was written by men; but some important work was written by women, and Dance the Eagle to Sleep is a good example.  It even got an enthusiastic blurb from Thomas Pynchon, and it's newly back in print.  It's a reminder that the Occupy Movement is in many ways a replay of what people knew forty years ago and more -- which is depressing on one hand, but also suggests that there are lessons to be learned if the suppression of dissent isn't to be repeated now.

Becoming Real Boys (and Girls)

A P.S. to the previous post, because it was already long enough. In Andrew O'Hehir's review of Weekend he wrote:

I’ve long maintained that gay-straight cinematic equality will finally arrive when a character’s sexuality, however interesting or titillating it may be, is not seen as delivering an important message about tolerance or self-empowerment or some other boring abstraction. I liked both “Brokeback Mountain” and “The Kids Are All Right” a lot, but there’s no doubt they’re both finely crafted teachable moments. The examples I relish are few and far between: Kristin Scott Thomas as the protagonist’s lesbian best friend in “Tell No One,” Kieran Culkin as the title character’s gay roommate in “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” Demetri Martin as the gay hero of “Taking Woodstock” (although his character’s sexuality is, if anything, too irrelevant).

This is a textbook case of the liberalism that Martha Shelley addressed in "Gay Is Good", quoted at the end of the previous post: it's okay to be different as long as you aren't different! In fact, let's not even mention your difference, but I'll talk endlessly about my normality, which isn't a difference at all!

It's also where the paradox I mentioned before comes in, the binary of universality/particularity. If I understand the concept, universality and particularity deconstruct each other: a particular person is still a person, a member of the category or species. You can't have an individual if there isn't a group that he or she belongs to, which connects to what I've written before about individualism and group identity. Critics of "the Western concept of gay identity," for example, claim that it encourages individualism, but gay identity entails my recognizing that I am not a freakish singular aberration but a member of a class of people. This is true of any identity. Even if I give you what might be called my individual identity, embodied on my passport, it represents a constellation of identities: my family, nuclear and extended; the community, along with the state, nation, and planet where I live; the species I belong to; my sex; my age; my height and weight, and so on. By pointing to any of these, I am declaring my membership in various groups, not my uniqueness, and my uniqueness is inseparable from, and perfectly compatible with, my being one among six (or is it seven now?) billions.

So, back to O'Hehir's recommendation for equality in films. Yes, we need films with gay characters who are unmarked in the same way that straight characters are unmarked. Audiences, especially straight audiences, will still try to mark them though: Vito Russo reported that, after seeing My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) that another audience member complained, "I don't get it; why were they gay?" Until human beings arrive at some kind of utopia, differences among people will still matter, socially and therefore artistically. One approach has been genre fiction, which enables writers to give gay characters something to do besides "be gay": to solve murders, say, or to fly to distant galaxies. Mysteries are a better case to examine here, because they generally take place now, in the society we know. It's not necessary to pretend that we live in a society where being gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgendered is no big deal: in genre fiction the problems we have to grapple with are not absent or ignored, they're just dislodged from the center of the story by the genre requirement that the story be about something else, like solving a crime. They are still among the complications that the protagonist has to deal with.

I disagree very strongly with O'Hehir's dismissal of social issues as a "boring abstraction": I think that only a straight white male could make that error. (P.S. Well, not quite: any member of a privileged group -- say, a white female, a black heterosexual, a gay white male -- could make it too.) On the contrary, far from being abstract they are stubbornly concrete. There are other ways to handle them in art than treating them as merely "teachable moments." But to pretend that they don't have to be handled is to leave reality altogether. A gay character who never has to confront homophobia, an African-American character who never has to confront racism, a woman who never has to confront sexism would have to live in another society altogether, if not another planet; hence the usefulness of science fiction and fantasy, which can postulate such a society and explore its ramifications. (Despite the series' severe limitations, the "teachable moments" aspect of Star Trek ended after the first few programs of the first season, since part of its point was that it depicted a future where an black woman and an Asian man could serve on a starship without their "race" being an issue the program had to address. Spock's half-breed alienness was something else again, since it was often mentioned and joked about, but it may have served partly as a distraction, a safety valve for the other differences that weren't on the table.)

One of the strangest exchanges I ever had online happened when I advocated specifically gay pop music. It was in a queer online forum, so I was amazed when other gay people jumped all over the proposal, on the grounds that it wasn't universal. How universal do you want to be? I asked: a song will still be sung by a male or female singer. Even that is bad, someone answered: Madonna wishes she didn't have to occupy a female position in her songs... The solution, I suppose, would be the vocoder, an artificial voice. But I'm still struck by the hatred, or at least revulsion, for human bodies and their differences expressed by the people I was debating. They really seemed to want to get rid of human beings and replace us by mass-produced robots that would be perfectly identical to each other. Or maybe (it seemed likely for some of these people) their own internalized homophobia was so intense that they couldn't bear to hear a man singing a love song to another man, a woman to another woman -- or even a man singing to a woman or vice versa. A machine singing to another machine was okay, though. In which case, why bother? How could these people even bear to touch another human body, let alone have sex with one, with its repulsive lack of universality?

The question comes down to how you read a story (be it on film, in print, or some other medium). It's summed up very well in the story Nicola Griffith tells -- I quoted it here -- about the agent who couldn't understand why Griffith's second novel was about lesbians too.

"Well," she said, "in Ammonite Marghe had a girlfriend because she had no choice, poor thing. But why does Lore like girls?"

"Because she's a dyke, Fran," I said, and I fired her.

The SF grandmaster Poul Anderson once asked, derisively but in all seriousness, why you'd want to put a woman character into a story except as a love interest. Stories are about men: women are merely accessories. Marge Piercy satirized the idea in a way that comes uncomfortably close to reality (as satire should) in a fictional review by a male reviewer of a book of feminist poetry (from her novel Braided Lives [Summit Books, 1982], 400):

Miss Stuart's seventh volume of poetry is crammed with reductionist simplistic snippets of women's lib cant. In describing a series of male/female encounters in which women are injured, raped, maimed, Stuart is unsympathetic to male needs. Individual poems stress only the woman's role and anguish, instead of taking a balanced view. Only the poems about good sex transcend this morbid polemical bias. When we men denigrate women, compare them to mud, death, meat, sows, sloughs, sewers, traps, toilets, when we equate them with mortality, contingency, nature, when we put down women who put out and women who don't, we are merely being universal. Miss Stuart is guilty of special pleading. In art there can be no special pleading for women. Her poetry is uterine and devoid of thrust. Her volume is wet, menstruates, and carries a purse in which it can't find anything. -- Sydney Craw

(Which reminds me: it's about time I reread all of Piercy's work.)

The theme also turns up in the stories African-American pioneers in science fiction like Octavia Butler and Samuel R. Delany have to tell about white editors who couldn't accept black characters in stories unless the stories were about race, which could only (and conveniently) be a very small subarea of the genre. The iconoclastic white editor of Analog sf magazine, John W. Campbell, rejected Delany’s 1968 novel Nova for serialization, “explaining that while he pretty much liked everything else about it, he didn’t feel his readership would be able to relate to a black main character.” Campbell was famous for his rationalism, and for publishing stories critical of religion; but his daring went only so far. A few years later, another white sf editor told Octavia Butler that “he didn’t think that blacks should be included in science fiction stories because they changed the character of the stories; that if you put in a black, all of a sudden the focus is on this person. He stated that if you were going to write about some kind of racial problem, that would be absolutely the only reason he could see for including a black.” A black character couldn’t be Everyman, let alone Everywoman, but a white character, no matter how atypical, could. It was okay to allegorize race by using robots, extraterrestrials, or genetically-modified chimpanzees to represent The Negro Problem, but an actual, concrete person of color as communications officer -- or, The Force forbid -- captain of a starship? What would be the point of such extremism?

By now there have been a good many movies in which a character's sexuality is not seen solely "as delivering an important message about tolerance or self-empowerment or some other boring abstraction," though it may deliver such messages as well. I think O'Hehir's examples are carefully chosen to be marginal, and they reflect the way he sees gay characters, not the ways they can be seen. Yes, I have seen glbt movies which I thought were excessively preachy, though that could easily be due to my inability to read them differently; or it could be Sturgeon's Law. But if you decide at the outset to view a film that way, you may miss what else is going on in it. A favorite example of mine is Torch Song Trilogy, which probably owed some of its popularity as a Broadway play and as a film to its preachiness, but Arnold, the central character, is first of all a character, a person with a story to tell, a person worth knowing, not despite but including all his differences. Or consider the pre-New Queer Cinema independent film Parting Glances, with a gay male couple at the center, and a Person With AIDS nearby, surrounded by their straight friends and co-workers -- just like Keep the Lights On as Andrew O'Hehir describes it!

Are these characters (and many others) universal? Only if they succeed in being particular first.

As Martha Shelley pointed out in "Gay Is Good," heterosexuals are our litmus test. We're human beings among ourselves until they turn their liberal gaze on us, trying to decide whether to let us in to Universality. But it's not their decision to make.

The Present Is a Disputed Area

I've been putting off rereading Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time for the same reason anyone hesitates to return to a much-loved work from the past: for fear it wouldn't be as good as I remember. But if anything, it's better.

I first read it in the fall of 1976, a few months after it was published. A friend had taken me to hear Piercy reading her poems, and then to hear her talking to a class, so she'd already made a big impression on me. Then a few people were passing around a copy of Women on the Edge of Time, and I read it twice within a few days before giving it to the next person. It was a slightly unsettling experience, because I'd never before read a book that felt like it was pandering to my politics. Most science fiction, let alone mundane fiction whether gay or straight, required a lot of filtering as I read it, to compensate for sexism, racism, and homophobia. Reading Woman on the Edge of Time was like stepping on a step that wasn't there; the adjustments had already been made for me. I felt enormously grateful to Piercy for the gift of such a story.

The frame story of Woman on the Edge of Time is set in New York City around 1975. Consuelo ("Connie") Ramos is thirty-seven, a Mexican-American woman living on welfare. She was born in Texas, but gradually migrated north to Chicago, and later moved to New York. When the novel opens she has already been institutionalized once, for abusing her young daughter Angelina while in a long despairing drunk following the death of her lover Claud; previously she'd spent some time in jail as Claud's accomplice as a pickpocket. When her niece Dolly's violent pimp Geraldo follows Dolly to Connie's apartment, Connie attacks Geraldo in Dolly's defense, and is railroaded back into a mental institution. Connie meets and befriends several other patients, and with some of them is drafted into a psychosurgical experiment typical of the period: the doctors hope to control "antisocial" behavior through direct stimulation of the subjects' brains. This is one major stream of the story.

We also learn that Connie has been visited by Luciente, who claims to be a visitor from the future, part of a time-travel project in 2137. Gradually, through telepathic contact, Connie is able to visit Luciente's world. Piercy leaves open the question of whether Luciente is supposed to be real or Connie's hallucination, though within the story it's clear enough. The other major stream is Connie's, and the reader's, introduction to twenty-second century Mouth-of-Mattapoisett in Massachusetts, a community patterned after Wamponaug Indian culture, though with a mixture of high technology -- Piercy had a better sense of where computers would go than most sf writers in the 70s -- and close-to-the-earth poverty.

"Our technology did not develop in a straight line from yours," Luciente tells Connie. "We have limited resources. We plan cooperatively. We can afford to waste ... nothing" (125). And: "We don't have big cities -- they didn't work" [68]. Sometime in the twenty-first century there was a major revolution, and now the ultrarich elites control only the Moon, the space platforms, and Antarctica; a war of attrition is still being waged. (Page numbers are from the Fawcett mass-market paperback, still in print after all these years.)

We get glimpses of a few other communities: Cranberry, based on "Harlem-Black" culture, and Ned's Point, "the flavor of Eastern European Jewry" (153). We're told that the First Nations have their own territory, and Connie meets a young Latina from Texas who tells her that things are somewhat different there too: "What we've done with adobe over the past forty years -- how it glows. We eat plenty of meat too, not like here, where they think one skinny cow makes a fiesta!" (210). The communities aren't isolated from each other, though: there's a lot of trade and other interaction between them, especially for educational purposes. Young people travel to study with masters in their field, and may settle in the masters' communities, move to others, or return home.

I noticed very forcefully on this reading how radical was Piercy's approach to sex/gender and race. Babies are incubated in a "brooder," because as one woman character tells Connie,

It was part of women's long revolution. When we were breaking all the old hierarchies. Finally there was that one thing we had to give up too, the only power we ever had, in return for no more power for anyone. The original production: the power to give birth. Cause as long as we were biologically enchained, we'd never be equal. And males never would be humanized to be loving and tender. So we all became mothers. Every child has three. To break the nuclear bonding [105].

On race, another character explains,

I have a sweet friend living in Cranberry dark as I am and her tribe is Harlem-Black. I could move there anytime. But if you go over, you won't find everybody black-skinned like her and me, any more than they're all tall or all got big feet. ... At grandcil -- grand council -- decisions were made forty years back to breed a high proportion of dark people and to mix the genes well through the population. At the same time, we decided to hold on to separate cultural identities. But we broke the bond between genes and culture, broke it forever. We want there to be no chance of racism ever again. But we don't want the melting pot where everybody ends up with thin gruel. We want diversity, for strangeness breeds richness [103-104].

These are still threatening ideas, not only in mainstream American society but also in multiculturalist circles -- to say nothing of other cultures.

Even more threatening, I think, would be Piercy's handling of gender. Piercy invented neuter pronouns, "person" and "per", for her future, and broke the bond between reproductive organs and gendered expression. (In Mattapoisett, people usually refer to males and females, instead of men and women, except when they're talking about historical conditions and struggles.) This leads to a lot of confusion for Connie, who sometimes can easily discern the sex of the people she meets in Mattapoisett, but more often can't. So we get scenes like this one:

"When I was born, I was named Peony by my mothers --"
"Peony sounds like a girl's name" [says Connie].
"I don't understand. It was the name chosen for me" [77].

And this one:

Finally she heard a high-pitched warning siren and a fast-moving vehicle flashing red lights came shrieking toward them about a foot off the ground. It came to an abrupt halt right outside the tent and settled with a hiss. White Oak [the pilot] hopped out and a person -- the voice [Connie had heard over an audio communicator] had been male, she thought -- about five feet nine, compactly built, slid out of the other side and strode with quick, slithery grace toward the tent. Bolivar, she supposed, had kinky hair worn in braids fully as elaborate as Erzulia's, but his skin was fair and heavily freckled with the sun. He wore a knee-length ... she could not call it anything but a dress, with stripes on the bias [160].

Many readers today, I think, would try to read characters like these as "transgendered," but that's a concept that would have no meaning in a society where gender isn't an important category. I see "transgender" and "genderqueer" as largely conservative if not reactionary trends, attempts to hold on to standard gender patterns -- partly, I suppose, as a result of the influence this book has had on me. (To clarify, however quixotically: this doesn't mean that I think people shouldn't be free to express and label gender, to dress and decorate themselves, and to modify their bodies, as they wish. Of course they should: that's an old Gay Liberation tenet that I still hold to. But I still think that many trans people are very conservative in their view of gender and sex. Someday I'll do a post on that.) A reviewer on Amazon referred to the future Mattapoisett as "a female dominated society," which supports my feeling that many people perceive sexual equality as female domination.

Beyond these matters, Woman on the Edge of Time is a very rich book. Piercy put a great deal of work into her future societies (there's also a chilling dystopian chapter that gives a glimpse into the culture of the "richies," which seems even less distant now than it did thirty-five years ago), but she also describes contemporary American society with a careful and critical eye. Piercy has been a political activist for many years, first in the New Left and then in Second Wave feminism, and in environmental and international solidarity movements since then. She gives a little of this background to Connie, who recalls,

Years ago I was living in Chicago. I got involved that way. Meetings, meetings, meetings! My life was so busy, my head was boiling! I felt such hope. It was after my husband Martín ... He got killed. I was young and naive and it was supposed to be a War on Poverty. ... But it was just the same political machine and us stupid poor people, us ... idiots who thought we were running things for a change. We ended up back where we were. They gave some paying jobs to so-called neighborhood leaders. All those meetings. I ended up with nothing but feeling sore and ripped off [154].

"Paying jobs to neighborhood leaders" ... that rings a bell somehow. Later, I think they came to call themselves "community organizers."

Piercy's depiction of the brain salad surgeons and their self-justifying prattle helped to harden my own distrust of psychiatry. Another reviewer of this novel on Amazon wrote, "I'm certain that back in the 70s, and even today, there are places like this, although I doubt that implanting devices into mental patients' heads (surely a plot device) has ever taken place." His doubt is seriously misplaced; psychosurgery and attempts to control "deviant" behavior by stimulating the brain electrically had a brief vogue in the Sixties and Seventies. It went somewhat undercover, partly because its most distinguished exponent left the US for Spain, but he recently came back, and he's tanned, rested and ready. The writer Arthur Koestler wrote a novel in 1972, The Call Girls, using the same procedure as a plot device, which I think far inferior to Piercy's; but then it's written from the perspective of the doctors, not the patients. (Koestler's question is: What if the technology breaks down?  Piercy's is: What if it works?)  The general mentality has always been with us, of course.

I should add, and stress, that the politics of the book didn't get in the way -- at least for me. If you disagree with them, they probably will. Science fiction and especially utopian fiction are literature of ideas more than action, and tend to be didactic. But Piercy is also good at depicting characters in difficult situations. Her characters are unusual for science fiction: women, people of color, poor people, mental patients. (If you find Woman on the Edge of Time excessively preachy, compare it to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which is at least as driven by sexual politics -- male-supremacist sexual politics -- and is every bit as preachy about the conditions of [male] mental patients. Their plight is, among other things, a metaphor for the suffering of men in a "matriarchal" society, a popular obsession in masculist literature of the period.)

Granted, Mattapoisett has the same weakness that most utopian societies do: it has no subconscious. The guide figure can explain everything to the visitor, and there's no underside; everything is as the guide describes it. For a comparison, imagine a normal, politically sound American of our day explaining the wonders of our society -- our racial and sexual equality, our wonderful economic system, our first-rate health care system, our peaceful coexistence with our neighbors -- to a visitor from a century past. (Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed, published in 1974, is as close as I can think of to an exception, but then it's subtitled "An Ambiguous Utopia.") This is a normal problem in the Utopian genre, though.

What impressed me most on this rereading of Woman on the Edge of Time was how little it had dated, both in its future and in its present; to me Piercy's politics seem more relevant than ever. And above all, it's a great read.