Even when passing myself off as “Jenny,” communication at Starbucks still has its limits. In a Dublin Starbucks I recently had the following exchange:
“Name?”
“Jenny. .”
“How are we today, Jenny?”
“Good, thanks.”
“It’s grand to be good, is it not, Jenny. . ”
The kid had clearly passed Starbucks’s customer service training, and it was obviously centered on the mind-numbing repetition of my name.
“Here’s your coffee, Jenny. .”
“Thanks,” I said, taking a seat at one of the high chairs at the bar.
“What are your plans for the day, Jenny?” the kid asked.
“To hang myself. .”
“Good choice, Jenny. .” he replied, his tone of voice unchanged, and served the next customer.
This wee episode illustrates that even as Jenny I still have to accept a standardized form of communication if I want potential readers (and Starbucks’s employees!) to actually hear me, and continue engagement. Because if the global marketplace has undergone McDonaldsification and Starbucksification, if Apple stores, the modern temples of our times, are erected in the most prominent places in our cities, tens of thousands of people circulating through them on a daily basis, then why wouldn’t all other human activities — religion, politics, cinema, television, literature — behave in line with the same market principles, as mega-nodes of standardization? Participants in the market — authors, producers, consumers — all have to master the language of McDonalds, Starbucks, Apple, whomever. Like it or not, it means that I have to be “Jenny.” If by some rare stroke of luck I manage to penetrate the sound barrier as “Dwbra,” I might even enjoy a slight advantage over “Jenny,” because people might then show greater tolerance for my disrespect of the codes of standard communication. She’s “Dwbra,” they’ll say, she’s culturally incomprehensible. That’s the sort of comment Amazon’s online “executors” make, ventriloquists for the genes of the thousands of executors who throughout history got off on their secret duty. Even today it’s a secret one, the difference being that thanks to the Internet, anyone can execute in secrecy. I mean, how the hell would I know who the jerk-off hiding behind the “Batman” avatar is? His comment on one of my books: “something Slavic, completely incomprehensible.”
Those with whom I live in “promiscuity”—my “co-authors,” publishers, editors, booksellers, readers, critics, even “Batman”—beckon me not toward compromise (which would be a violation of my authorial autonomy), but the standardization of my message; its form, volume, language, meaning, tone, the puissance of its tone. . Whether I want to stay “Dwbra” or become “Jenny,” to attempt total or superficial transformation, to submit to standardized communication or remain “coffee-less”—it’s entirely up to me. That I bear the consequences of my decisions is self-evident, and the results are plain to see.
GENDER
I was once a literary guest of a gregarious West European mayor. There was a group of us, writers, invited to dinner at a majestic table in the banquet room of a grand city hall. Stooped under the weight of his chains, the mayor entertained us with a potted history of the city and its most famous denizens. Their oil portraits peered down on us from the banquet room walls, visually underscoring the historical tour. As my gaze slid across the portraits — the shoes with raised heels, the ribbons and bows on manly feet, the tight satin trousers and puffy turkey-like jowls, mini and massive moustaches, wigs and frilly collars, walking sticks and gloves, hats, feathers, and rings — the thought occurred to me as clear as the figures on a cash register: Look at them, they’re all men!
It was an epiphany that worked like a jammed trigger, my brain automatically becoming a montage table on which I assembled shots of similar portraits, similar sculptures of commanders-in-chief and generals, similar images of poets and thinkers, folk leaders and politicians, kings and tsars, fire-fighters and hunters, policemen and soldiers. At breakneck speed my brain pumped out book covers, newspaper headlines, encyclopedia entries, television clips, cinematic fragments. . unbelievable, all full of men! Suddenly — just like the indelible Mr. “Everything comes from India” from the BBC series Goodness Gracious Me! who claims that everything in the world is Indian — it really was raining men, though none were Indian. Looking at Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, the intransigent Mr. “Everything. .” persists in claiming the painter is Indian, the picture “Indian,” and when asked why, he replies: “No women!” Hasn’t gender discrimination become invisible precisely because it is so obvious and so incredibly pervasive? Why are West European and North American women scandalized (if indeed they really are) by the discrimination endured by their “sisters” in Asia or Africa, yet simultaneously fail to see that they themselves live in a gender-discriminating world? Do none of them see it, or have they all simply capitulated and beat their retreat?
The city hall episode isn’t the most judicious of examples, I can admit that. It’s hard to believe powerful moments of cognition occur smack bang in the middle of city halls, and it’s harder still to believe that the realization is hitting me again at this very moment (Hey, sister, where you been all your life?!). Yet it is equally unbelievable to think that men and women are, at any given moment, conscious of the dictates of gender in both their professional lives, and in life in general; that every move they make is not guided by this consciousness. In literary life, this consciousness usually strikes by stealth, like a betrayal, a knife in the back, inevitably so torturous we immediately erase it or fob it off for another day (Ah, I’ll think about it tomorrow!). But tomorrow we delete it all again, fatalistically reconciling ourselves with the order of things, each of us alone, as lonely as a samurai. “Things are the way they are,” we say, playing blind man’s bluff, ready to swallow the insult, marching on, tormented by the same anxiety — the anxiety of authorship — that forever begs mastery anew. Saddest of all, and psychologically the most interesting, the exclusion of women is inevitably accompanied by the silence of other women, who lack the will to intervene.
In contrast to most women, the vast majority of men feel very comfortable in the literary world. Literature is their territory, they’re well “at home”; literature is their armchair, their pair of slippers, their pipe to smoke. The history of literature is the history of men — poets, novelists, dramatists, essayists, thinkers, philosophers; it’s friends and buddies, talking heads and fellow players, idols and inspirations. Literature is an extended male family. Although female authors have participated in professional literary life for some two centuries,1 they’re still classed as arrivistes, immigrants, and stowaways. Most men mentally address their work to other men, and most women address theirs to men too. Literature is a man’s playing field, men jockey for the ball; women can only sit on the sidelines and cheer. Of course, male “players” don’t have anything against women, they’re just not that interested in them; most often, women simply aren’t in their field of vision. Men can’t conceive of sharing the turf with women, but sure, they’re welcome as cheerleaders. On the literary playing field, the “cheerleaders” include translators, librarians, editors, agents, studious critics (of the male oeuvre), archivists. Isn’t it best we all work where we’re most at home? Men feel at ease in literature, they’re masters of polemicizing among themselves, backscratching and backbiting, appearing in public together, critiquing each other, devising little strategies, swimming in formations like dolphins, forming literary clans, backslapping each other, savaging each other — and all the while they mentally hold each other’s hands, as men in some regions do in real life. This collegial intimacy is sometimes so overpowering that they refer to their literary buddies by first or nick names, smug in the assumption that their readers and audiences will know who they’re on about.