Subject: (urth) Wolfe: Misogynist? and accessibility

From: Jack Redelfs <jackredelfs at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 23:20:55 +0000

b sharp said:
> On one end there are men who fear and/or
> loathe women, on the other end are men who feel
> women deserve a higher degree of respect,
> protection and caring than men

Wolfe is a misanthrope. "All men are wolves,"
says Latro, and I don't think that it's far off from what Wolfe believes. He
is NOT a humanist. He has no faith in human rationality, science, law,
philosophy, or even priests. I think he believes that all of the
institutions of man, no matter how positively spun, are twisted into tools
or weapons by carnal men (and women). Wolfe puts his faith in higher things,
and he believes that people of goodwill are rare pearls, gemstones to be
treasured.

In that light, how can Wolfe fill his pages with honorable female
characters? Or male?

I just don't see how we can neatly say that a
chivalrous author will refuse to put his female
characters in harms way. That's like saying only
an anti-semite would write novels about Auschwitz,
isn't it?

In order for there to be a true appreciation for chivalry, perhaps you
should make it clear that women are in great danger? Perhaps if, as an
author, you shepherd your female characters from indignities, you paint
a rose-colored picture of the world. And if your readers believe in that
picture, they will feel no urgency to be chivalrous in their own conduct.
They will feel that it is a nicety, not a necessity.

> Mo's observation that few women seem to
> become Wolfe fanatics is germaine.

Perhaps it is. I don't know. Tolkien is incredibly masculine, perhaps more
insulting to women by reason of simply ignoring them, treating them as
nonentities, bit players. Yes, Eowyn, Arwen and Galadriel notwithstanding
(and the latter two are mythical creatures, not ordinary human women).
And yet vast throngs of women are in love with his writings.

How do we explain Mo's observation, if it is correct?

1. despite the fact that his writings are kind of beyond genre, he is
pigeonholed into SF, a male-dominated genre, and 2. even in the genre, his
profile is rather low. Sure, he may be a highly influential author, and a
critical darling, but in flat numbers, his readership is quite small.

b sharp also said:
> I think we can all agree Wolfe is
> writing from his heart and his deeper feelings
> about women are expressed.

Perhaps. Wolfe's writing is so oblique, I am hard pressed to identify what
his feelings are on ANYTHING. Even what I said earlier in this post is based
mostly on his interviews. His political leanings are also inscrutable in his
fiction, beyond generalities like an abhorrence of despotism. The fact is,
Wolfe has a gift for presenting contradictory arguments (through the
dialogue) that are very intelligent.

Wolfe's writing is so unusual, and so varied, that I have a very hard time
identifying a consistent Narrative Voice. Every Wolfe novel seems to come
from a different world. Maybe he does really find them in ancient urns, or
floating in space?

On a related note, vis-a-vis Wolfe's small profile, I think a lot of the
blame lies with _The Book Of The New Sun_. It's a great achievement and an
anchor holding him down. It's widely seen as his best series, and not
unreasonably so, and so I'll bet that many curious readers pick "Shadow Of
The Torturer" as their first foray into Wolfe. I know did. And I was
delighted by the bizarre vocabulary, philosophical discursions, and the
baroque feel of the writing. But in my experience, most people find it to
be a very inaccessible book. I wonder how many people tried to read it and
gave up early on because it was too "hard."

I really hope we'll start inviting curious people to start with _Nightside
The Long Sun_, _Devil In The Forest_, _The Knight_, even _Soldier Of The
Mist_.
Anything, really. No matter how delightful we may find it, _Shadow Of The
Torturer_ is Wolfe's least accessible novel.

One more thing: this may be a strawman, but perhaps it has been said by
someone, somewhere that Wolfe is incapable of writing a sympathetic female
character. How about Io? She seems to be totally respectable and good. She's
honest, wise, loyal, kind and brave. She does unsuccessfully try to seduce
Latro, at one point, but only after travelling with him for the better part
of a year and falling in love with him. One does not get the impression that
she is unreasonable or wanton.
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From: Jeff Wilson <jwilson at io.com>
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2006 05:02:46 +0000

> an anti-semite would write novels about Auschwitz,

If an author complusively wrote novels about Jews being tortured and 
killed, I'd at least suspect him of anti-semitism.

> someone, somewhere that Wolfe is incapable of writing a sympathetic 
> female character. How about Io? She seems to be totally respectable and 
> good. She's honest, wise, loyal, kind and brave. She does unsuccessfully 
> try to seduce Latro, at one point, but only after travelling with him 
> for the better part of a year and falling in love with him. One does not 
> get the impression that she is unreasonable or wanton.

The Latro books are great counterexamples for the suggestion that Wolfe 
is a misogynist himself and can't write women otherwise; Latro is 
physically very capable, but is socially vulnerable and depends on the 
kindness and guidance of friends, many of whom are strong, sympathetic 
women. There are no unqualified female villains; those who participate 
in vice are at least partners in their exploitation rather than pawns 
kept by a male pimp.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
< http://www.io.com/~jwilson >

---

From: Daniel D Jones <ddjones at riddlemaster.org>
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2006 11:13:15 +0000

> killed, I'd at least suspect him of anti-semitism.

So you suspect Agatha Christie of harboring a secret desire to murder?  I'd 
shudder to hear what you must suspect of Stephen King and Clive Barker. :-)

---

From: Bob Miller <bob_bageera at hotmail.com>
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2006 12:19:58 +0000

Tolkien's writings are permeated? with two things that lend them an 
attractiveness that is immeasurable.  The first is the identification the 
reader gets with wonderful, in all senses of the word, characters.  The 
second is the love of his universe, with all its difficulties, that is 
obvious to any reader.

Many of Wolfe's leads are ambiguous and he deals with a great deal or horrid 
situations.  I would submit this tends to reduce his readership in some 
quarters.  And even his "best" chars show a great deal of self change in 
those books that allow development.

I think the Wizard Knight is one of the very best novels ever written.  When 
I read it to my wife, there were multiple occasions where I would stop and 
we would just stare at each other going "wow".  And it's fun, the chars, 
except Bold Berthold, are not far above us; they are, compared to me, better 
focused.

I think Wolfe, like many of us, while beinig driven by youthandhormones at 
one time, has long been coming to a more complete and cooperative 
orientation in his female characters for all the 35 years I've been reading 
him.  Perhaps the queen in the Wizard/Knight is a nod toward that elder 
orientation (a particular funhouse mirror of reality) as Zelazny once 
characterized his own work?
Thank you all again for stimulating my mind

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From: Hmpf MacSlow <hmpf1998 at gmx.net>
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2006 13:34:36 +0000

>she is unreasonable or wanton.

To weigh in as a female Wolfe fan for a moment, I seem to remember 
rather liking the female soldier in, is it the third or the fourth 
part of TBotNS? I forgot her name and don't have time to look it up 
now. Also, wasn't there a sympathetic female sailor in TUotNS?

Clearly, I have to read the books again...

Hmpf

---
"You broke metaphysics. Fix it."
- Triangle & Robert

---

From: Jeff Wilson <jwilson at io.com>
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2006 15:00:31 +0000

Daniel D Jones wrote:
> So you suspect Agatha Christie of harboring a secret desire to murder? 

No more so than most people. Murder mysteries were already established 
as a category of polite literature before she chose to write them; 
misogyny isn't.

> I'd 

With Stephen King, I don't suspect, I know he's personally tickled by, 
for example, seeing authority figured being eaten by vicious animsls, 
because he cops to it. King is a subscriber to the theory that a 
writer's hangups emerge in his work, to the extent that they can 
identify the author of a story in which they appear. It's part of his 
musing in DANSE MACABRE and appears as a plot device in "The Ballad Of 
The Flexible Bullet", and particular hangups are discussed in the 
commentary sections of some of his story collections.

---

From: Stanislaus <sbocian at poczta.fm>
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2006 17:35:57 +0000

Hello Jeff,

> killed, I'd at least suspect him of anti-semitism.

There is a technical term for this kind of criticism = "the poetic of a
police informer."

I don't think the aim of reading books is to find some crime to accuse
author of.

-- 
Best regards,
 Stanislaus                           mailto:sbocian at poczta.fm

----------------------------------------------------------------------
PS. >>> http://link.interia.pl/f19a6

---

From: Nathan Spears <spearofsolomon at yahoo.com>
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2006 18:23:51 +0000

> killed, I'd at least suspect him of anti-semitism.

You have good reason to suspect Elie Wiesel of anti-Semitism, I suppose.

I agree with the poster who said that Wolfe is a misanthrope.  Many of his characters suffer terribly.  The abuse that men inflict upon other men takes different forms from the abuse that they inflict upon women, and Wolfe is aware of this fact.  Perhaps your reaction to the former is less pronounced because you are yourself a man.  Also, perhaps Wolfe finds himself writing more about the ways in which men abuse women than about strong, realistic female characters, because he is a man, not because he hates women.  Any realistic man knows that he does not understand what it is like to be a woman - portraits he paints of her are from the outside looking in.

Anyway, most of this discussion has been centered around a kind of *cough*misogynist*cough* accusation rather than any sort of organized statement, and it's getting tiresome.

---

From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2006 18:58:41 +0000

On 10/19/06, Stanislaus quoted Jeff and wrote...
> > If an author complusively wrote novels about Jews being
> > tortured and killed, I'd at least suspect him of anti-semitism.

> There is a technical term for this kind of criticism = "the poetic of
> a police informer."
>
> I don't think the aim of reading books is to find some crime to
> accuse author of.

Nor do I. I think Jeff's comment, tho apt, oversimplifies -- a
persons who "compulsively" (which I take to mean that this
is a theme that crops up in all her work, regardless of its
ostensive plot, theme, etc.) writes about the torture and
murder of Jews may be an anti-Semite, or may be an
propagandist fighting anti-Semitism, or may just have a
weird mental kink that she herself doesn't understand. A
lot of how I would respond to such a writer would depend
on the attitude with which she described the torture and
murder: is it written as a sort of "torture porn," or is it written
to horrify, or is it written clinically and coldly, or ...

Wolfe does not (in my opinion) step across the line into
"torture porn." Though there _is_, in my opinion, an
amount of "violence against women" in his work that must
be considered, it's clear to me that _at a minimum_ we
can say that he is not consciously indulging a desire to
actually rape, torture, and kill women, nor pandering to
one, the way (say) "John Norman" does. Beyond that I
am not prepared to go.

-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes, writer, trainer, bon vivant
-----
http://www.livejournal.com/users/sturgeonslawyer
http://www.danehyoakes.com
Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open
sewer and die.
  - Mel Brooks

---

From: Hmpf MacSlow <hmpf1998 at gmx.net>
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2006 19:42:07 +0000

>Any realistic man knows that he does not understand what it is like 
>to be a woman - portraits he paints of her are from the outside looking in.

Actually, as a woman who has spent most of her life reading books 
written by men, from a male perspective, and hasn't found that 
perspective mind-bogglingly alien, I'd say the differences between 
men and women are somewhat (or, depending on which depiction we're 
actually talking about, often even *hugely*) exaggerated. Neither our 
emotions nor our thought processes seem greatly different to me. Of 
course, I can only go by what I know from literature, movies, 
conversations with members of the opposite sex... but I'd say that's 
quite a corpus of evidence.

Sorry, that was OT, I know. Just a personal pet peeve.

Hmpf

---
"I'm not sure that's ethical."
"It's not, it's vodka."
- Life On Mars

---

From: Daniel D Jones <ddjones at riddlemaster.org>
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2006 21:59:22 +0000

> Sorry, that was OT, I know. Just a personal pet peeve.

It seems not all women agrees with you:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/core/Content/displayPrintable.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/09/14/bamen14.xml&site=6&page=0

As the above will almost certainly get mangled by email, this is the same 
page:

http://tinyurl.com/mkela

---

From: Nathan Spears <spearofsolomon at yahoo.com>
Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2006 03:48:47 +0000

I agree with you that our emotions and our thought-processes may not be as different as they have been portrayed. Our experiences, however, are far more divergent than the tools with which we process them.  I also believe that the best women writers, generally being more empathetic and observant, can create better male characters than male writers create female characters.

So Wolfe could probably create more strong central female characters, but perhaps he feels that he would be writing a male character in a female body, not because he doesn't believe there are strong women, but because he doesn't know how to write them well, and would revert to the strengths he is familiar with.

I did think that many of the women in Castleview were convincingly spun.

----- Original Message ----
From: Daniel D Jones <ddjones at riddlemaster.org>
To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
Sent: Thursday, October 19, 2006 4:59:22 PM
Subject: Re: (urth) Wolfe: Misogynist? and accessibility

http://tinyurl.com/mkela

---

From: Jeff Wilson <jwilson at io.com>
Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2006 04:39:13 +0000

> I don't think the aim of reading books is to find some crime to accuse

No, it's not, but I'd be a pretty superficial reader if I never wondered 
why an author writes what he writes.

---

From: Jeff Wilson <jwilson at io.com>
Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2006 04:52:29 +0000

> You have good reason to suspect Elie Wiesel of anti-Semitism, I suppose.

Please, there is some considerable distance between suspect and convict. 
Rather than doing it compulsively, Wiesel was reluctant to do it at all 
without considerable outside encouragement.