A Man Looking at A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women, A Review — Part 5
5. Hustvedt on Wim Wenders and more reflections on art, women objectification and gender biases. My counter-arguments.
Hustvedt uses the experience of Wim Wenders’ difficulty of translating the experience of watching a dancer in person vs. watching her cinematically. She cites Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, where he said: “To be a body, is to be tied to a certain world…our body is not primarily in space: it is of it,” (Hustvedt, p. 46). This means, I would assume, that unless we are in that space, where the body exists, we cannot sense the affect, that experience is not communicated in the same way it would be if we were watching in the first row of a performance in an auditorium. She did say something in that, “We enter [cinematic space through our] imagination,” (Hustvedt, p. 46).
Hustvedt said that Wenders’ solution was to incorporate the technology of 3-D, which she said created the “illusion of depth,” (Hustvedt, p. 47). He used the technology to create intimacy with her dancing and she said that it “honored the startling experience of watching her,” (Hustvedt, p. 47)
In seeing a live performance, Wenders wept. Hustvedt suspected that this experience made Wenders both eager and cautious of his translation to film. Hustvedt said that you cannot “encapsulate in words” what one has experienced, (Hustvedt, p. 47). I would disagree, in that there are relationships to experiences in the human domain that all of us have felt or at least can appreciate if they are linked to a word set that triggers them. But, I think as writers, perhaps as individuals, who think about this stuff, we might think that we have some kind of access other humans do not. Because I work in the restaurant business, for example, I often marvel at how a Chef can season food so that nearly everyone else feels that it needs nothing more. Our tongues, in this case, share common responses to food. Hustvedt said that the dancer’s work, in question, provides “multiple and often ambiguous meanings,” (Hustvedt, p. 47).
“The work did not tell them how to think and feel, and [a] lack of orientation generated suspicion, discomfort, and anger,” Hustvedt said, (Hustvedt, p. 48). “Search[ing], meeting, seduction, rejection, and retreat taking place to Purcell’s music, evokes… rhythmic narrative of…undying physical need for other human beings… Reminiscent of dreams,… [which] are more emotional than [real] life. The choreographer exploits the mysterious vocabulary to achieve insights into affective, often erotic and destructive, pulse of human desire, (p. 48).”
Hustvedt said that “The viewer’s emotion is born by recognition of himself in the story that is being played out… [where this person] engages in an… embodied mirroring…, which evades [linguistic] articulation…,” (Hustvedt, p. 48). And yet, through her words, she communicates how this event occurs, what are its components, and therefore, if the writer is able to accurately reflect circumstances, then perhaps, as she said, through our imaginations, we can put ourselves there and given the inherent commentary on the events coming through, we are told how we might react.
Filmmakers shoot thousands of frames that they then have to edit for a movie that may take a year and a half. Thousands of decisions are implied in this undertaking. When Wenders’ film was completed, It had become a rhythmical sequence through visual repetitions and editorial leaps that are felt in the body of the viewer.
Wenders’ film, Hustvedt said, demonstrates an acute understanding of what might be called complex levels of our imaginative entrance into the artist’s world, (Hustvedt, p. 51). People grow and shrink in the film (Hustvedt, p. 51) and, in effect, this witnessing as a viewer affects the intention of the dance. Wenders can also translate the loss of Bausch, the dancer. There is an intimacy of collective feeling that moves from pleasure to pain and back again, (Hustvedt, p. 51). Dance for love is what a student of Bausch told her colleague when he felt confused about how to act in a new environment. Wenders was able to translate Bausch’s work into film and does so through acute visions and filmic rhythms that become another dance in another genre, another dance for love, (Hustvedt, p. 51), where Tolstoy, for example, expressed that the emotional content of an artist can be translated. It is a feeling, catharsis, for example, that shares various aesthetic modalities.
Hustvedt questions why she allows her daughter’s hair to be longer than her son’s and talks about the meaning of it and asks why a hairstyle is a subject of sexual difference, (Hustvedt, p. 52). The framing of hair on one’s head causes one to focus in on the face. We recognize people by their faces, especially their eyes. The communication of the style of hair by a particular person we might respect or admire then becomes something we might adorn because of the political implications or because of how it represents a clique of knowledge or access to a philosophy of life, which in my experience is often how “burners” appear in Burning Man attire and how unless you have been there, you might not understand the kind of philosophy it attempts to emulate, which is universal love, but because I go to Harbin Hot Springs, I find these and others who adhere to this kind of universality to actually be cliquish in how they apply this love or acceptance. As a balding, 56-year-old man, who, for example, goes to these clothing-optional venues alone, I find that women are suspicious. While I am usually without glasses and thus unable to make out any detail of the physicality of women, who I might run into, I am still seen, at least via body-language and feeling, that there is an inherent thought that I might be disingenuous or interested in “taking it all in.” This is probably because I do not maintain eye contact, because it is awkward to look into another person’s eyes, and I am always trying to respect the privacy of others. The point of my being at the hot springs, for example, is to relax given how stressful and populated my job is. I want to get away from people and make these hot to cold to hot water plunges to break down the stress. Plus, I like to be around “enlightened” individuals, who find solace in nudity. Still, my desires to fit in are not necessarily wanted by other parties, so I remain separate from them. The point is that just because you say you want to welcome all and love one another, there is a distinct breakdown, when as my friend, a psychic, said to stay away from people, who exude negative energy. This may also complement the sense of exclusivity that people generally practice. There just isn’t time in one’s day to give everyone money or make friends and support them in sociological terms.
Hustvedt said there can be a “transitional object” in that the hair of the mother that the baby twirls while drinking milk, may become the aspect that quells the child’s feeling of loneliness and thus refrains from crying, which also represents an “intermediate area of experience,” where this distancing from the actual human being it comes from it still symbolizes or satisfies the person using it for comfort, as would a lullaby sung by a child’s mother serve this outside of the individual but not actually in the external world, (Hustvedt, p. 54).
The blond Hustvedt did not want to shave off all her hair in an effort to maintain some connection to her former self. Appearance is actually not superficial, (Hustvedt, p. 56).
Important human experiences in life and literature, Hustvedt tells us, involve shock, …the link between the estranged qualities pornography, surrealism, the new novel, and shock cannot be made. Sontag’s connection is subliminal. Even if it’s characters are not psychologically “real,” even if pornography depends on objectification of human beings as things, it has shock value; It is the private public, the hidden revealed. She mentions Henry James and his long winding sentences that withhold knowing. She maintains that knowing in James arrives only at risk. I would add “to know” in Henry James’s novels is actually explosive, knowing inevitably turns on the sexual, the secret, “the beneath,” what is finally unspeakable, (Hustvedt, p. 64).
Books that appropriate reality too quickly are deficient according to Susan Sontag. They create a “spiritual triviality” and an injustice to the rich complexities of life, (Hustvedt, p. 64). I can see that Sontag would not be impressed with my work. I am too real. There is no spirituality. There is no complexity, only the lumbering lingo of an infatuated man.
Hustvedt does admit, “Objectification, idealization, and distance are…at work in the pornographic imagination, and it is hardly an imagination owned by men,” (Hustvedt, p. 71).
It could be argued given an ape’s appeal to pornography that it is a bestial event, Hustvedt said. We possess a sexual internal life, both animals and men and women, according to Pablo Herreros, (Hustvedt, p. 73).
Emily Dickinson is startlingly difficult, according to Hustvedt. She never finished Finnegan’s Wake, a long, roiling prose poem filled with multilingual puns. Difficulty should never be an excuse, nor should something so profound as Finnegan’s Wake be dismissed as “filled with multilingual puns,” (Hustvedt, p. 76).
What a silly statement: “If you live on a diet of best-selling thrillers will you be able to feel the suspense in Henry James?” — Hustvedt’s having written “the best review” of The Great Gatsby, according to Susan Sontag because Hustvedt wrote it from “the inside, not the outside,” (Hustvedt, p. 77).
Auto-fiction and no competition, according to Hustvedt regarding Knausgaard, (Hustvedt, p. 83). Complete openness is not normal for a man. Is she kidding?
A novel feels right to a writer and to the reader then it is a success. My book A Man Looking at Women is not a novel although it felt correct. Does it feel correct to a reader? I don’t know. One bookstore denied it. A friend said that other women who denied it must be facing some molestation post-traumatic stress. They are seeing it and cannot thus see it in a positive light, which of course is that it is simply a manifestation of the male gaze. That gaze is horrifying to them like a preemptory strike.
Hustvedt said that she felt sorry for a man who had spent a number of volumes crying like a girl only to realize that he never actually got to understand what a woman was since he dismissed them all except for one, (Hustvedt, p. 94). In A Man Looking… I don’t cry per se, but I will admit that the idea of understanding what a woman is profound. I say this because, I ordered a salad from a cashier and she both smiled and qualified her friendliness. Her smile quickly changed to derision and back again. When handing change, she practically threw it at me as if not to want to touch me. I could tell she had analyzed me and because I am much older, she must have thought, like all old men, I probably liked her. This wasn’t the case. While a portion of her breast was visible in the V of her neckline and she was certainly beautiful, that presumption defeated all interest. To be reduced, to be assumed, is to harken aversion. As the gay man so aptly put it, “No one wants to be with someone who doesn’t want to be with them!”
Hustvedt says there is a woman in man that men should consult, (Hustvedt, p. 95). We (men) speak in earnest, but we are truly silly. We write thousands of pages of self-examination and still manage to avoid enlightenment, and so the fate of literary works cannot be decided by non-competition clauses, which are appended to spurious homo-social contracts (contracts written between persons of the same sex) and supported by fear. I think she is talking about what Jenny Zhang said on BuzzFeed entitled “They Pretend To Be Us While Pretending We Don’t Exist,” “The long con of white mediocrity may never be exposed because there are too many people invested in making sure not a single instance of white excellence is overlooked but quickly drop the vigilance when it comes to the excellence so those of us where were never afforded such protection.”
When a person utters a word, Hustvedt said, depending on who they are, the meaning of that word, or the credibility of that word in the mouth of that person is dependent upon them, (Hustvedt, p. 105). I like this because it addresses the truth about what we intend. Even though we may say certain things, I often, for example, will simply mouth a random series of words that come to me as an experiment in trusting the freedom of speech. I don’t know what they mean as individual words nor do I know what they mean in the series within which they spew. But, I am interested in them nonetheless. I think we should not hold people to their words. We should ask them to say what they mean to say and even then ask them if in saying that they were sure of their intentions. We think that we know what words mean, but we often do not. And there is play in the words given connotations and denotations. Time encapsulates meaning as well. Context does. I think we need to respect the possible fallibility of human beings. When they say things that don’t make sense to us, we need to paraphrase them and then give them an understanding as to why we might disagree with them.
All responses are welcome. First twenty minutes were devoted to writing, reading aloud, and then the rest would comment on it. Hustvedt said that she was in love with a member of her class, who would read a poem by Keats and respond by writing another poem in twenty minutes, in the same rhyme and meter. He was bipolar. Mania played a role in his writing facility, (Hustvedt, p. 105). I know people like this. There is a beauty in applying them to the concept of poetry, which can be good when it hints at abstraction, the kind that makes us think between the rungs of a ladder rather than the steps themselves.
“Word salad” is how Hustvedt described the work many of her students engaged in when writing. It is characterized by a mixture of phrases that are meaningless to the listener and, as a rule, also to the patient producing them, (Hustvedt, p. 107). She goes back to this process I engage in, yes ‘word salad’ when constructing a poem as Julia Cameron advised when she talks about “Morning Pages,” which is to wake up in the morning and simply free write without self criticism or interjection for 3–4 pages or a half-hour. Cameron advises against being concerned with quality, but rather wants us to engage in quantity, from which we can extract quality. Hustvedt apparently condemns this process calling it “meaningless,” (Hustvedt, p. 107).
