From Nabokov to Talking Heads, these insightful and revealing pieces stubbornly reject groupthink
In one of Mary Gaitskill’s best short stories, The Agonized Face, a female journalist watches a “feminist author” read at a literary festival. The author begins by complaining about her biographical note in the festival brochure, which, she feels, has played up her past experiences with prostitution and psychiatric wards to make her seem like “a kooky person off somewhere doing unimaginable stuff”. But just after she has persuaded the audience of the unfairness of such a portrayal, the author reads a funny story aloud from her book, which leaves the journalist unimpressed. The story – about an encounter between a man and an older woman – is flimsy and provocative, where the complaint had been tender and serious. “She sprouted three heads,” the journalist writes, “and asked that we accept them all!” The feminist had evaded something important, according to the journalist, by changing gears so abruptly: “the story she read made what had seemed like dignity look silly and obscene.”
Gaitskill’s characters are often unjustly perceived as kooky people doing unimaginable stuff, but her stories are neither silly nor obscene. In Secretary – later made into a treacly film starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader – you can never quite tell how Debby feels about being abused and spanked by her male boss. Unlike in the movie, there is no blossoming relationship between boss and secretary, but might Debby be looking for dignity in the routine humiliation? In Oppositions, a new collection of Gaitskill’s essays, she asserts that the tragedy of the story is not so much that Debby is a victim, but that a “hunger for contact underlies her perversity and to some extent drives it”. It is a wordless yearning that contemporary feminist discourse now and again skips over in its quest to invert the male gaze and normalise female desire. And yet, as the journalist in The Agonized Face suggests, “sometimes you wish it could be that easy”.