Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

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Part of her problem is that she struggles to convey the beauty and greatness of much of the art she describes I had high hopes for this one and I’m not saying it was bad, but it felt like the author had this weird taste in so many monstrous artists (so far it’s okay) and just wanted to excuse herself from feeling bad and responsible about it. There was somewhere toward the end that she brought up capitalism and consumerism all of a sudden which was very random and more of an excuse for being a fan of a “monster” and didn’t sit well with the overall content and it was also too late to bring up and required more depth.

Only a monster could know a monster so well. Surely Lolita must be some kind of mirror of its author?... Just how did Nabokov come to understand Humbert so perfectly? And just like her I wandered through my thoughts and feelings, I agreed, disagreed, I pondered, wrote down so many quotes (SO MANY), shared them with my husband. I knew within the first chapter this would be a 5* and here we are. I find it difficult to sum up in brief what is so great here: you should just read it. But maybe it was simply so fantastic for me because this topic was on my mind so much. The internet can often make you feel alone and wrong when so many people loudly and self-assuredly throw out their voices about how we should cancel certain people. I felt small and maybe wrong when thinking that cancel culture is not the way, that people deserve redemption and I am not sitting on the high horse with a perfect moral compass to judge people. I truly believe we all are the sh*tty person at some point: we all have lied, looked away, have been ignorant, have had prejudices, have been wrong, etc. (and if you think you were not, you are lying, no discussion). Why should I call for judgement on other people? And why is it sometimes easier and sometimes harder to separate art and artist? Why do we sometimes love the art no matter what? This book dives into that, Dederer is just as lost and confused at times as me, she is trying to find a solution, an answer. Claire Dederer is a memoir and essay writer who I had never heard of but she decided to look into this topic once she hit a weird personal wall when struggling to come to terms with the fact that she still is able to absolutely adore Polanski's movies while knowing of and being repulsed by the atrocity he committed. Why? How? Why? So she started thinking and exploring art by what we now like to call "problematic" people and our relationship with that, and then #Metoo happened and suddenly cancel culture for all kind of things was en vogue and she realized her subject of interest had gone viral. So she expanded and wrote this book (and I believe a viral article in between).The tainting of the work is less a question of philosophical decision-making than it is a question of pragmatism, or plain reality. That's why the stain makes such a powerful metaphor: its suddenness, its permanence, and above all its inexorable realness. The stain is simply something that happens. The stain is not a choice. The stain is not a decision we make.

Knyga ne tiems, kuriems nerūpi. Knyga tiems, kuriems skauda ir kurie klausia – o ką dabar su ta meile daryti? Ką daryti su meile kūriniui, jei kūrėjas – monstras? Autorė ramiai, empatiškai, išmintingai ir su humoru kalba apie genijus ir menininkus, labai žinomus ir menkiau aptartus, aptardama jų nuodėmes – nuo baisiausių iki tokių, kurias beveik galėtume pražiūrėti ir atleisti. Beveik. Kalba apie pateisinimus, kuriuos tokiems kūrėjams kuriame – ne dėl to, kad patys būtume prievartautojai, antisemitai, moteris mušantys alkoholikai, pedofilai ar žudikai, o todėl, kad menas – ne prekė, kuria vis dar prekiaujama rusijoje. Visokiems saldainiams ir tepamiems sūreliams pakaitalą rasti lengva. O vat kai kalba pasisuka apie kūrinius, kurie pakeitė gyvenimus, kito brand‘o jau nebepasirinksi. Galbūt noras mylėti, net kai problematiška, yra egoistiškas prieš aukas, tačiau labai žmogiškas. Ir man reikėjo šios knygos. Nes nepraeina diena, kai nepagalvoju – o ką man daryt su Rammsteinais? Jie gi šeši. Bet gi visi žinojo, jei vyko prievarta. Užsimerkė. Negirdėjo. Nusisuko. O ką daryti su kūryba, kuri ėjo mano gyvenime koja kojon pastaruosius 15 metų? However, as mentioned above, Claire Dederer seems ultimately disinterred in actually evaluating a lot of the deeper questions around these phenomena and I think this is for two reasons. Part of this is her personal desire to humanize the category that she identifies with - monster - and the other is because she seems to believe that people are fundamentally interested in this question for some sort of desire to be "good" and promote their morality and separate themselves from those they call monsters. Dederer seems to be interested in evaluating this as a philosophical question and therefore her answer is a philosophical answer about theory and ideas. But real people were and are being hurt by these people. She quotes a woman who experienced sexual abuse's changing relationship with Miles Davis, but not those who experienced sexual abuse by prominent artists. Everything is one level removed. Were none of Danny Masterson's victim's available for comment? Could you not find anyone actually working on enacting alternate means of justice willing to be interviewed? Monsters is an honest, elaborate meditation on the separation of the art and the artist’s biography and whether or not it is possible at all. Monsters is a lot of things--smart, incisive, insightful, absorbing--but more than anything, it is such an impressively thoughtful book in so many ways.

Customer reviews

The chapter on Nabokov is called “The Anti-Monster” because Vlad himself was in no way shape or form a monster but he wrote an appallingly accurate book about Humbert Humbert, the pedophile, leading CD to worry Bringing erudition, emotion, and a down-to-earth style to this pressing problem, Dederer presents her finest work to date.” Thus near the end of the book the author stopped being a fellow judge with me as a reader viewing others, and instead changed into an author confessing her own monster-hood. Suddenly the question of whether monsters deserve forgiveness became intimate and personal. (It's interesting to note that the public is more forgiving of alcoholic fathers than they are of alcoholic mothers.) But the book becomes personal for her when it comes to her children where it somewhat slips into memoir. This was a choice that took too long to get to, and a choice I don't think particularly fit into the book completely well (and I find this particularly amusing given how Dederer critiques memoirs and explicitly tells us what a memoir is and should be), but, without it, I wouldn't have known about Joni Mitchell or how to review the sixties and feminist violence through Plath and Solanas. Thankfully, the last few chapters tie the pretty bow on how we should go about monstrous artists with Cleage's 𝘔𝘢𝘥 𝘢𝘵 𝘔𝘪𝘭𝘦𝘴.

To get things going, Dederer offers up her own monstrousness. She is a mother who is also a writer, which means that she has been guilty of negligence on those occasions when she has accepted invitations for residential fellowships which have taken her away from home for weeks at a time. Worse still, she has hugged herself with relieved glee while doing it. On top of this, she spent 10 years as a functioning alcoholic, which is not something that usually combines well with engaged and committed family life. Yeah, Vlad. Answers please. According to your biographer, you didn’t do anything nasty with little girls. We accept that. But you sure seem to have thought a lot about it. Hemingway I would consider to be one of the the greats of classic literature with his earlier works, not so much the later stuff. But no matter how much you love a piece of their work, of course it doesn’t excuse their behaviour. A lot to be discussed here. There are two names I could bring up right now who work in television currently where it’s an open secret amongst the public what they have done, with concrete proof by victims, and yet they have kept their careers firmly afloat. As I finish this book and review - the net is slowly closing in on one of them actually. Weirdly enough, he just lost his main job as of 20/05/2023! So hopefully this is the beginning of the end. Time’s up. Your actions have consequences, especially if it ruins people’s lives.

Claire Dederer discusses in Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma if we can separate art from artist/their biography? Dederer explores this. Comes to the idea of a stain. Does a single stain ruin a silk dress? So much so that the stain becomes the dress? Perhaps for some, but for others, it's just a stain. It'll wash out. It can be taken to the cleaners. It can be fixed. But the stain should not totally ruin the dress.