Reading Men's Writing

I have been working on a chapter in my dissertation in which I begin to think about “men’s writing” and what it means to write as a man, read as a man, and so on. I am not simply inverting “women’s writing” and studies of it, but rather, genuinely interested in why we do not read “men’s writing” in the same fashion as “women’s writing.” For instance, we find no course taught at the university that explicitly concerns itself with “men’s writing” and I imagine a laughable scenario of students reading a course calendar and coming across “Introduction to Men’s Writing” and wondering, well, how is that different from “Western Literature” which has been dominated by men. My point however is one which asks, what happens when we pay as much attention to gender identities in literature written by men as we have done with literature written by women?

Proust, of course, becomes an interesting example to consider here – so would Joyce (Ulysses for the long novel; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) and Mann (Magic Mountain); I imagine Lawrence could fit into this equation too, though, his novels do not seem to have the same concern as Proust, Joyce, Mann (though I welcome thoughts on this).

In his book, Male Confessions: Intimate Revelations and the Religious Imagination (2010), Björn Krondorfer argues that we must develop, as he does,

A consciously male-gendered reading [that] is a critique of hegemonic masculinity and heteronormativity (and the concomitant social privileged bestowed upon men of certain classes) without giving up on the category of ‘men’ altogether. It is an acknowledgement of difference (and we always need to ask, ‘difference from what?’) as well as an awareness that such differences may not exist in any essential or natural sense but are constituted by the way of articulating oneself in contradistinction to (often fictionalized) others.

In addition to this praxis of ‘male-gendered reading’ – a term that uneasily rests between the essentialism of biology and the constructed-ness of gender – Krondorfer elaborates:

A critical and consciously male-gendered reading, then, assumes a male difference without claiming that men constitute a homogenous whole. Put simply, but no less thorny in its implications: men are men, but not all men are equal; men become men by articulating their distinctiveness from women; men become ‘straight’ by distinguishing themselves from ‘deviant’ male behavior; men become heteronormative by mistaking sameness of discrete groups of men as universal; men become ‘real men’ by reiterating the fictions they have helped fro construe about the other.

Unpacking all of this is surely no easy task, but it does seem to me that this could be an instructive example or model to follow when reading through Proust. We have all addressed the questions of gender and sexuality (and also class) in Proust, but have we done this from the starting point of “men’s literature.” I think back to the questions of sleep, dreams, fantasy, and sexuality. What would a “male” response to these instances be? How does a man write about these and is it any different from the way a woman writes about them?

These are some of the questions that are currently occupying my time as I write about virginity, adolescence, puberty, and sexuality in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. I will follow this entry with more observations soon enough. For now, I am still not entirely certain how all of this can or will unfold.

J.A.

Photo: Oliver Ray's "Man Writing"