" Since high school, I’d known people, some of them intimate friends, who wanted to desperately escape their own whiteness. I felt that the longing to escape our own racial bodies was everywhere, from silly acts of what Shriver calls “trying on other people’s hats,” to identity-switching and disguise, and finally to radical plastic surgery. But this desire was found almost nowhere in contemporary fiction. I knew it would be risky—“don’t write that book,” my agent at the time told me, “you don’t want that kind of trouble”—but I thought there was a way I could do it. I’d build the novel out of a series of charged, ongoing arguments, in which no one voice “wins,” focusing on where our racial desires and fascinations come from: sadness, incompleteness, the inarticulate places where our most unacceptable urges begin. But I also wanted Your Face in Mine to be at least a little bit funny, to acknowledge the inherent awkwardness of a white writer arriving late (as we always seem to) to a conversation about race. As I wrote in an essay published at the time, I wanted to make use of “the tension, the friction, the rich possibilities of embarrassing oneself for a good cause.”...
The white writer, in this Shriver/Franzen formulation, is entitled to a zone of absolute privacy and limitless artistic autonomy; if a critic makes an observation about their work on the order of, “this person is depicted stereotypically,” or “this wide-ranging, ambitious urban American social novel lacks a single nonwhite character,” that critic is attacking their private imaginative process, their dream-life, rather than simply reading the work itself...
In a speech he gave in 1987 upon winning the Jerusalem Prize, J.M. Coetzee spoke about what he perceived to be the fatal flaw in white South African culture, and its literature in particular: “At the heart of their unfreedom,” he said, “is a failure of love.” This passage haunted me after I finished reading Franzen’s interview: Where, I wanted to know, was the self-reckoning, the doubts about spiritual and artistic failure, the feeling of wishing he could know, and love, his own country and culture more deeply and completely? In the same breath, one might also ask: Where is Shriver’s curiosity, and where is her compassion, when it comes to the perspectives of people who associate symbolic acts, like wearing sombreros, with deeper historical traumas? Is that not, too, part of fiction’s purpose? Part of what she accurately describes as “the astonishing reality of other people”?
FB: "We still live in a culture in which white people are very seldom stopped from doing anything they want to do, and when they are stopped or challenged, get extraordinarily upset about it."
No comments:
Post a Comment