REVIEW: Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer

Reviewed by Melinda Gordon Blum

In November 2017, Claire Dederer’s Paris Review essay “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men” documented her personal, lifelong experience of grappling with the problem of separating the art from the artist, exploring whether this is something achievable or even necessary. Monsters is, in part, the book-length outgrowth of that piece.

A genre-bridging hybrid of memoir and criticism, the book examines the histories of several artists who (in current terminology) might be classified as problematic. It describes a journey that began when Dederer was a young woman, whose burgeoning identities of writer, critic, feminist, mother, fan, and art lover intertwined to create conflicts and synergies that informed her selfhood. In telling the story of her own intellectual and emotional responses to these artists’ work, Dederer must interrogate the audience, as well as herself. She seeks to understand and delineate what the roles and responsibilities of an audience are (if there are any, and if not, why not). She also challenges readers of Monsters to ask these questions of themselves. “I wanted to write an autobiography of the audience,” she writes, beginning with herself and spiraling outward.

Art is dependent on a relationship with its viewer or consumer, so to a certain extent, like a conversation, it requires a reciprocity: The artist creates, the audience absorbs and reacts. Monsters invites us to examine our own associations and context insofar as how we form and define our relationships with art and its creators. Dederer acknowledges that any relationship we have with an artist, including but not limited to fandom, is composed at least in part of desire. We want artists to live up to the idealization expressed by and through their art; we often intuit, incorrectly, that artistic merit confers a measure of morality (or at least sensitivity) on its makers. And then, if we are to continue the relationship, we have decisions to make. We must compromise. We must accept that artists, like us, are human beings and that, as such, they are likely to disappoint or challenge us by falling off the pedestals we’ve painstakingly erected.

Dederer, who cut her teeth as a film critic in the late 1980s and early 1990s before many people in that line of work were meaningfully asking these questions, seeks a paradigm shift for what constitutes legitimate criticism. She questions whether the foundational, patriarchal basis for what is considered classical criticism—with its insistence that analysis must be prioritized over emotion if we are to say anything “important” and “useful”—still serves us. Today, it is increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to isolate an artist’s biography from the work itself. Must we, and furthermore, should we attempt to separate the personal or historical contextualization—of the artist and ourselves—from how we view and consume art?

Dederer points out, for example, that we tend to elevate male artistic genius, excusing the various abuses resulting from it, while framing female artists working at the same level as unstable, abdicators of home and family responsibilities. Why, too, the insistence that the only way to serve art is to prioritize thinking (regarded as masculine) over feeling (feminine)? “I found I couldn’t solve the problem of Roman Polanski by thinking,” Dederer writes. Can we find a version of acceptance and resolve within the conflict of loving a body of work while simultaneously side-eyeing its creator? What if discomfort is a given and some questions are eternally unanswerable? By relentlessly examining her own accountability, Dederer prompts readers to do the same.

The unpacking of who “we” is, who it implicates or protects, is something Dederer returns to repeatedly. “We” becomes a device she employs to examine her own and her readers’ motivations. The use of “we” in critical writing is cheap, she says, and “a way of simultaneously sloughing off personal responsibility and taking on the mantle of easy authority…The real question is this: can I love the art but hate the artist? Can you? When I say ‘we,’ I mean I. I mean you.” But later, she reexamines “we” in the context of the #MeToo movement, noting its ability to organize and galvanize a previously invisible and powerless group. We, she writes, “can be an offensive strike on shame. It can be a magnifying glass, a megaphone.” Sometimes, she implies, “we” is used not to bully or gaslight, but to heal. This is the version Dederer writes towards. To do so responsibly, she must interrogate her own complicity.

Authority, when it comes to art, is a notion Dederer challenges. She doesn’t want the artificial boundaries that go along with it, and she argues that neither should we. Dederer suggests that in the human—and as such, flawed and imperfect—relationships between art, artist, and audience there is no one right way to think or feel. In our haste to define one, we erect artificial constraints and limitations. We risk reductionism, and we deny ourselves the deep reckoning and analysis we purportedly seek. “Authority,” she writes, “claims it is able to appreciate the work free of biography, of history. Authority sides with the male maker, against the audience…I’m not ahistorical…That’s for the winners of history (men) (so far).”

If “we” is an accident waiting to happen, “I” is a form of authority, but a personal one—one that had no place in criticism when Dederer was entering the field. Looking back at scoldings over using the “I” in her writing, Dederer is able to reframe remarks that once shamed her. “This ‘I’ was a reaching for an authentic, maybe even heartfelt, response to the work,” she writes. It was honest, she is saying—perhaps more honest than the walls erected by critics seeking to be invisible. “Critic and reader…watch the same movie, read the same book…That knowledge of shared experience has always made reading criticism an intimate act for me…There’s real pleasure and even consolation in this.”

Self-awareness includes an admission of humility, an admission of the inability of any individual to come up with a single, definitive response to any artist or work of art. This is an asset to criticism, Dederer believes. She knows who she is (“a certain kind of white middle-class feminist,” she admits) and doesn’t try to conceal it. She reverses her own early labeling of Woody Allen’s film Annie Hall as “the greatest comedy of the twentieth century,” saying less than fifty pages later that it was a “silly joke on the whole idea of critical authority and objectivity” and that “such things (aren’t) knowable.”

Perhaps the most dangerous weaponizing of “we,” Dederer posits, is when it is “a casting out. Us against them. The morally correct people against the immoral ones. The process of making someone else wrong so that we may be more right.” Early on, discussing Allen, she writes that as consumers of art, we often operate under self-delusion. “We tell ourselves we’re having ethical thoughts when what we’re really having are moral feelings.” The problem is that none of us, even the most moral and ethical, consistently meet our own standards. This is not an argument to forgive the monstruous artist, Dederer clarifies. Rather, it is an argument to accept the imperfections of what she calls “the problem of human love.”

Human love is resistant to formula, resistant to logic. What and whom we love, what and whom we choose to forgive or regard with mercy, is not qualifiable via reason. We—me, you, Dederer, artists and audiences and critics everywhere—cannot simultaneously achieve authority and honesty in our response to art. To be human is to contradict ourselves. It is to hold different artists to different standards, depending on our individual Gordian knots of personal qualifiers. The problem of the monstruous artist is, by definition, one that resists solution. “Pretending the love doesn’t exist, or saying it oughtn’t to, doesn’t help anything,” Dederer writes. What does help: an agreement to continue to live in uncertainty, and within it, an acceptance of our collective, imperfect humanity.

 

Melinda Gordon Blum is a current MFA candidate in UC Riverside-Palm Desert’s low-residency program and is the former managing editor of The Coachella Review. Find her on Instagram @mgordonblum and on Twitter @MelindaGBlum.