On the subject of Coca-Cola, there’s a good joke from the repertoire of Cold War humor. Ronald Reagan is woken in the middle of the night:
“Mr. Reagan, sir, the guys from the evil empire are up painting the moon red!”
“What the hell?!”
“The Russians are on the moon and they’re painting it red!”
“Get our boys up there and write ‘Coca-Cola’ on it, pronto,” Reagan replies groggily.
If we leave the political connotations of the joke to the side (these days even the gung-ho Chinese are into graffiti!), then the mytheme of the Tower of Babel appears ghostly on its semantic field. The world is divided into losers — who clamber toward the moon seduced by the poetic idea of painting it red — and winners just waiting to write Coca-Cola on a red backdrop. Losers win the right to the consolation of “symbolic capital,” the winners get the fame and money. Until recently the realization of “symbolic capital” underpinned the entire literary system, with its evaluatory codes, publishers, critics, theorists, translators, university literature departments, journals, literary prizes and so forth. Today that system is in ruins. Hope is gone; getting paid is all that remains. And as far as the book goes, yes, a book can save your life. But only if it is bulletproof.
1According to Forbes magazine, in 2010 James Patterson took top honours with $84 million in earnings, followed by Danielle Steel ($35 million), Stephen King ($28 million), Janet Evanovich ($22 million), and Stephenie Meyer ($21 million), with young adult novelists Rick Riordan, Jeff Kinney, and Suzanne Collins further down the list.
A WOMEN’S CANON?
NOT SO LONG ago I found myself in Norway at the invitation of the Norwegian association of literary critics. The Norwegian critics were all in a lather, the old-fashioned word canon buzzing in the air. My hosts were embroiled in voting to select a Norwegian canon, ten works representative of Norwegian national literature. The results were disheartening: Eight of the writers were men, only two were women. I had very short odds on the Norwegians being far more progressive on the gender question, which I guess explains my disappointment.
National literatures are — irrespective of (or perhaps as a result of?) globalization — in fighting form. National canons are organized like soccer teams. The players are men. And the referees are too. The winners of the ever-swelling number of literary prizes are inevitably men. But now they make sure prize juries have a more-or-less equal number of men and women, so when a man again lifts the trophy, no can say it was a gender fix. The European literary canon is in fine fettle. Its representatives are men, too.
They say that literature is a hobby right up until the author’s literary message reaches its recipient. But to whom do we send our artistic messages? Women writers most often cite men as their literary idols. Men almost never cite women as theirs. Research confirms that men never, or only very rarely, read books by women. Having carefully collated the data, VIDA, an American women’s literary organization that crunches the numbers on gender discrimination in literature, concluded that three-quarters of books reviewed in prestigious American newspapers and magazines were written by — men. Women’s Studies is no longer an academic eccentricity as it once was, but rather an academic necessity. Feminism and postcolonialism instigated the long process that eventually led to an increased awareness of the gendered and racially colonized nature of women’s cultural history. Today, young women writers from Africa, South America, and Asia, their print runs the envy of literature’s canonized men, raise their flags from all corners of the contemporary cultural map. And moreover, their gender, ethnic, and religious identities — serious hindrances until recently — today serve to enhance their commercial clout. A woman is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature about once every ten years.
But have women managed to establish their own “cultural canon,” or something that might be called “women’s culture”? How do women perceive themselves today? Which prominent women do they mass identify with? Who are their female cultural icons? What causes do they advance, for what are they pushing, and who are they addressing? While we’re at it, to whom am I sending my literary messages? Be they women or men, who are my potential readers? How do they see me?
In contemporary culture women still construct their cultural values on self-colonizing assumptions. Let’s run through a few female icons, who in our “in today, out tomorrow” world are, of course, easily substituted. Hugging the beloved American before and after formula, Oprah Winfrey went from being a dumpy, promiscuous, sexually-abused, and deprived young woman to a slim and sexy mistress of the small screen, one of the most influential women in America. Diana, “the Princess of Hearts,” now a somewhat faded icon, crippled by the brutal rituals of royal everyday life, ended hers in a tragic traffic accident. Hillary Clinton, today a sun that is setting, maintained her dignity throughout the scandal of her husband’s infidelity, held her family together, and emboldened, went on to win new political victories. Paris Hilton (not to mention the plethora of lookalikes!), a celeb who resembles a cheap statuette of the Virgin Mary sold at a newly-built church, she’s “a victim of the media,” a symbol of emptiness, one whose every move is followed by every tabloid in the world. Frida Kahlo (and a long line of contemporary female artists boasting the same “aura”) is a “martyr” whom the culture industry has transformed into a “saint.”
The self-victimization (and here we need to bear in mind that “victimization” is a broad term, one some cultural theorists also claim includes shopping) formula women use to win green cards for entry into the orbit of cultural icons is worryingly patriarchal. A fleeting glance at many female public personalities (pop-stars, actresses, models, artists) reveals that beneath the star’s shine — in a camouflaged, perverted, or real shape — crouches the figure of the female “martyr.” Even a third-grade pop-starlet knows the drilclass="underline" Slip a sextape to the media, accuse the same media of destroying her moral integrity, then kick back and watch her popularity skyrocket. Why? Because of a homemade sextape? No — because she’s done the perp walk of public humiliation and emerged from the other side, into the glow of moral redemption. Mainstream women’s culture presently revolves around traditional dialectic formulas of whore — virgin — martyr — saint, the stuff of men’s wet dreams, dreams served up to them by women.
Think of the manifold TV series, films, books, and celebrities, that owe their status as walking cultural texts to the media. Like a virus, the same formula also lies hibernating in so-called “serious” literature, from classic novels by men (Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary) to romance novels, which are chiefly written by women for women. The same formula might also explain why women dominate the memoir genre, and why it is mostly women who read them. As a genre, the memoir is built on the very same religious-confessional basis.
Women “colonize” themselves, adapting themselves to the stereotype of woman-as-victim (or are they authentically such?), because it seems that communication with the world only works when packaged as such. With the likes of Frida Kahlo as their icon, time and time again women double down on their symbolic capital, the martyr Kahlo having replaced Sylvia Plath (who in the 1970s united the feminist world like a magnet) in the millennial turn. Kahlo’s “Diego on My Mind,” a self-portrait in which Kahlo bears a mini-portrait of Diego Rivera on her forehead, proffers an unsettlingly powerful message about a woman in whose life the central role has been given over to a man. But Sylvia Plath might have painted a similar picture, a portrait of Ted Hughes on her forehead. Taking home a literary prize, a Croatian woman recently told reporters: “I hope I didn’t win the prize because I’m a woman.” “I hope I didn’t win the prize because I’m a man” is a sentence uttered by — no man ever!