Men (19 page)

Well, that
is
frank. So let's be equally frank. One recalls on reading this that Sartre himself was not exactly physically prepossessing, in fact he was rather ugly—about five feet tall, wall-eyed, and with a serious indifference to hygiene, Menand notes, though he could still rely on charm and charisma as seduction tools, not to mention his status as a famous philosopher. Who needs hygiene when you have charm and charisma? Still, the ugliness had to rankle for someone so attuned to aesthetics. Indeed, in his wonderful memoir about his childhood,
The Words
, Sartre writes devastatingly about the shattering effect that realizing that he was ugly had on him. Always having been an adored child, at age seven his grandfather snuck him off to get his long blond ringlets cut off. This turned out be a grave error since without the hair as distraction, his ugliness became undeniable. From that point on, the mirror showed him what a monster he was—and from that point on he became a little imposter, he writes, overplaying his part “like an aging actress” to court his family's attention and adoration.

The description of childhood bad faith, of impersonating an adorable child, is one of the more brutally honest descriptions of childhood I've read—reading it brings horrible memories rushing back of performing for adults as a child myself, in hopes of a few crumbs of love. (In my case I pretended to know how to read by memorizing a Peter Rabbit picture book at the age of three or so, including exactly where to turn the pages, astounding any relative who was willing to sit through a rendition.) You feel, reading
The Words,
that this is an author who knows about inauthenticity firsthand, and is well equipped to diagnose it in himself and his fellow sufferers. Of course, here you'd be wrong.

Back to that uncooperative young woman. According to Hazel Rowley's superbly gossipy excavation of the self-mythologizing relationship between Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre spent two years trying and failing to seduce a seventeen-year-old student of Beauvoir's named Olga (Beauvoir had already slept with her); he finally gave up and spent another two years trying to seduce her sister Wanda, at which he eventually succeeded. These campaigns do sound awfully similar to the seduction vignette from “Bad Faith.” If the seducer's position in the story is less thoroughly investigated than that of the young woman, if it's taken for granted that her acquiescence is his due, the reader finds herself pondering whether there's something simply inaccessible to “philosophical” knowledge here. That is, whether contrary to Sartre's theories,
not
everything in the mind
is
completely available to consciousness.

When Sartre pronounces, of the recalcitrant young woman, that she possesses “a certain art of forming contradictory concepts which unite in themselves both an idea and the negation of that idea,” I have a hard time seeing why it's
she alone
who's in bad faith. The whole thing reeks of falseness. To put it bluntly, he's deceiving himself.

To a philosophical philistine like me, what we have are a lot of words being thrown at the world's most banal situation, which is a disparity in levels of sexual attraction between two people, something the less-desired person both knows and refuses to know. When Sartre proclaims that this woman is free, then rebukes her for refusing the possibilities of her own freedom—while simultaneously attempting to pinion her within the most constricting forms of submissive femininity—you feel the narrator is desperate to persuade you that if she
were
fully conscious of her freedom she'd jump on her companion and start humping away.

How is it that Sartre, who doesn't believe in self-deception, doesn't allow himself to see how self-deceptive he's being?

I'm pressing a bit hard on this example because it's astounding how enshrined it remains to this day in the literature on self-deception, with succeeding generations of philosophers circling around it still like some sort of talisman. Take an anthologized article by a philosopher named Bruce Wilshire that opens by retelling Sartre's vignette: “A young woman is invited out by a man who she knows will try skillfully to seduce her. This troubles her. Nevertheless she accepts his invitation, for she finds him attractive.…” But nowhere does even Sartre say that the woman finds the man attractive. What a strangely reverent alteration, as if to retroactively airbrush the great man's grotesqueness! Wilshire does update the vignette with a little psychologizing of his own: “She colludes with him to relieve herself of responsibility,” because “in all likelihood she's acting out archaic responses to early authority figures who molded her mimetic life.”

Well, maybe so—after all, she's a fictional character and I guess anyone can say what they like about her mimetic life. And since this isn't 1970 and I'm not Kate Millett, I'll refrain from grumpy commentaries on the gender assumptions and asymmetries that stud our philosophical inheritance since it would sound too obvious at this late date. But I suppose this example especially rankles because I myself am old enough to recall once being called “bourgeois” for not wanting to go to bed with an unattractive man (who also seemed to think sexual compliance was his due), which felt not unlike being accused of bad faith. I too was playing a false social role, he was saying, just like the comedic waiter in the café.

The setting was some kind of Marxist summer institute we were both attending, though even then the accusation sounded musty; it smacked of party meetings and sectarian correctness. Doris Lessing's early Communist stories are full of scenes like this—male radicals recriminating their female counterparts for their bourgeois failings, and indeed, my miffed accuser was a left-wing South African academic, so perhaps a bit behind on North American advances in female autonomy. He'd been caught up in real political struggles back home, his tales of which impressed me. But being called bourgeois stung—nowadays I'd readily agree and whip out my Barneys charge card, but back then I always felt I had something to prove. Still, the label didn't make me change my mind. I just wasn't attracted to him, though it wasn't something I was capable of saying.

Or that's how I remembered the evening. Not long ago I happened on two rather passive-aggressive letters from the man in question, in a stash of old correspondence. In the first, which arrived out of the blue some six months after the institute concluded, he lamented that something had been left unconcluded between us. “Perhaps writing is closer to ping pong” he wrote elliptically, and I recalled that we'd spent part of an evening playing ping-pong (being Marxists, we were housed in some kind of shitty dormitory). I suppose he meant to imply something about playfulness in lieu of heavy scenes, though the letter wasn't really playful, it was somewhat cutting, even though written in an elegiac mode. He mused about why he hadn't called me before he'd left the States; wondered why he was bothering to write now, and concluded with hopes that my work was going well but who knows, “time slides by so rapidly these days, maybe you're into something else—perhaps even babies.” It didn't take an expert in textual analysis to read the condescension, though there was also a pleasing postscript about his sharp images of me not having been blunted by time.

Or I suspect it would have pleased me—I wanted to be found attractive, and being memorable would suffice—though apparently I sent a caustic reply, reminding him that he'd called me “bourgeois” and chiding him for being such a leftist cliché. I don't actually have a copy of my reply, but he quotes portions of it back to me in his second letter, which was addressed “Dear Unsuspecting Young Thing,” and chides me for chiding him for what he calls “mere linguistic excesses.” “Tsk tsk” he faux-reprimands himself, then accuses me of trying to transpose our encounter into the battle between “Feminism” and the “Male Left,” where according to him, we hardly belonged. “I mean, what we have here is Laura and J—–, after an evening of food, drink, ping pong, and artful sparring, unaccountably in Laura's room, sitting on Laura's bed, when WHAM! By the effect of some camera obscura, we are transposed onto the larger screen of History itself. Don't our protagonists feel a mite swallowed-up by the clash of battle so skillfully sketched?”

What kind of Marxist thinks we aren't actors on the screen of history? However, it was another line that caught my attention. “What
was
Laura doing on the bed that evening after all?” This was followed by a few semi-pornographic speculations about the memories that might have been ours to treasure, in lieu of the paltry ones we were stuck with, if only I hadn't been so unwilling to lose my cool.

On my bed? What
was
I doing sitting on my bed with this smug and annoying man, I now wonder. The locale seems awfully equivocal, given that I was so definitely not attracted to him. And did he take my hand, like Sartre's seducee? Did I pretend not to notice? As to how we found ourselves on this bed, I've conveniently forgotten the relevant details. The problem is that for a long time this story had been one of my comedic staples about the blunderings of the male Left: the time an unattractive Marxist accused me of being bourgeois for not wanting to go to bed with him. Clearly I needed a new anecdote for my repertoire.

But back to Sartre. If the most canonical example of bad faith seems so steeped in bad faith itself, reeking of sexual disappointment with an overlay of self-exoneration and preening, can any of us ever know our own motives sufficiently to avoid falling into similar swamps of failed self-knowledge, particularly when it comes to sexual pride or your own good opinion of your charms and acuities?

“People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception,” says David, the unreliable narrator-seducer of James Baldwin's
Giovanni's Room.
This would be a great insight, but it's one no authentic self-deceiver ever actually manages to voice—it's Baldwin's insight into his character, not the character's into himself. But what other options are there for any of us, such predictably unreliable narrators of our own lives? One solution: we become experts on the existence of these traits in others. On which point, I suppose my rebuke of Sartre isn't so unlike his rebuke of the unseducible young woman. He reproaches her, I reproach him, my South African confrère and I reproach each other.… And we all heartily condemn John Edwards, who made us watch those horrible televised tributes to his authenticity.

What strikes me most in the Edwards webisode is how
happy
he looks, beatific even. He was adored by the woman holding the camera—certainly more than he was at home, by all accounts—and it shows. Clearly it was mutual, and mutuality is hard to come by. Knowing that one true thing, he forgot everything else.

Other people's failures of self-comprehension make such tempting targets: you get to forget all similar occlusions of your own, while luxuriating in the warm bath of imaginary self-awareness.

 

IV

HATERS

 

The Critic

When I was growing up there was a game called Spanking Machine. I believe it may have originated as a birthday party ritual, and from there took on a life of its own. The rules were simple. One person was designated the spankee, the rest of us played the role of spankers. Everyone lined up in a row, back to front, legs apart to form a tunnel. The spankee started at the front of the line, then scurried through the tunnel on hands and knees while getting spanked on the butt by each spanker in succession. The spankee then took up his or her place at the end of the line, whereupon the first spanker became the spankee and scurried through the tunnel on hands and knees while getting spanked on the butt. And so on, until everyone had a turn.

That was the whole game. There were no scores, there were no winners or losers, there was just a lot of spanking. At that age we were all switch-hitters, so to speak—no one had yet formed fixed preferences or roles. The only variation was that occasionally someone spanked too hard, and someone else ran home crying.

What I find myself wanting to know, from the vantage point of “adult” life, is whether these mysteriously gratifying childhood reveries are simply abandoned in the course of growing up, or do such impulses live on? Maybe my Chicago neighborhood was a particular enclave of polymorphous perversity, but you don't have to be Freud to notice just how many opportunities for spanking and being spanked persist into later years. No, I don't just mean in the privacy of your boudoir or the pages of publications with names like
Mommy Severest
, but deflected elsewhere, into—let's say—“higher-minded” realms. Cultural pursuits, for instance.

In other words, could those have been professional critics-in-training, the over-zealous spankers? I ask because somehow it's these childhood games that spring to mind when I reflect, these many decades later, on the lofty enterprise we call Criticism.

It's not exactly news that a lot of symbolic violence gets played out in the form of cultural judgments, but there's one figure in particular whose work really slams the point home. This would be the literary critic Dale Peck, who propelled himself to the epicenter of book world buzz for his savage reviews of fellow writers; those he finds overrated or not up to his standards are publicly eviscerated, their entrails hung from a pole in the public square (in other words, the back pages of the
New Republic
). Nor has he feared to mete out slashing appraisals of literary luminaries like David Foster Wallace, Philip Roth, and Julian Barnes, admirably intrepid when it comes to attacking superior writers in inferior prose.

But it was one rather shrill sentence in particular—“Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation”—that set the book world to fretting about the ethics of criticism, since it seemed more like butchery than run-of-the-mill critical vehemence. You got a slightly queasy feeling about the whole thing, the impression that more was going on here than should be. Such questions resurfaced when some of the most scathing reviews from Peck's oeuvre were collected in a winkingly titled volume,
Hatchet Jobs: Cutting Through Contemporary Literature
.