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| A tale of bad sex… Need I relate to it for the story to work? | A tale of bad sex… Need I relate to it for the story to work? |
| (30 days later) | |
| Sun 17 Dec 2017 00.04 GMT | |
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| Possibly not since Dickens fans in New York shouted, at disembarking English passengers, “Is Little Nell dead?”, has any piece of fiction aroused as much interest, as speedily, as Cat Person, a skilful short story by Kristen Roupenian. | Possibly not since Dickens fans in New York shouted, at disembarking English passengers, “Is Little Nell dead?”, has any piece of fiction aroused as much interest, as speedily, as Cat Person, a skilful short story by Kristen Roupenian. |
| Published in the New Yorker, it went viral within days, and confirmed, if nothing else, that Twitter still has far more to offer than the now routine ganging-up and self-promotion. For a time, last week, that platform felt more like a massive, fantastically welcoming book group – albeit a book group in which most of the members were saying the same thing. Before I’d even read Cat Person, an engrossing account of a delusional romantic encounter, I knew that thousands of women admired it as, above all, “relatable”. | Published in the New Yorker, it went viral within days, and confirmed, if nothing else, that Twitter still has far more to offer than the now routine ganging-up and self-promotion. For a time, last week, that platform felt more like a massive, fantastically welcoming book group – albeit a book group in which most of the members were saying the same thing. Before I’d even read Cat Person, an engrossing account of a delusional romantic encounter, I knew that thousands of women admired it as, above all, “relatable”. |
| Told from the perspective of 20-year-old Margot, Cat Person relates her flirtation with Robert, a 14 years older, faintly creepy-sounding man, whom she rapidly – though not quite rapidly enough – comes to find repulsive. But getting shot of Robert is complicated by another impulse, so familiar among women that it may be the main reason for the story’s lightning soar through social media: that of not hurting his feelings. | Told from the perspective of 20-year-old Margot, Cat Person relates her flirtation with Robert, a 14 years older, faintly creepy-sounding man, whom she rapidly – though not quite rapidly enough – comes to find repulsive. But getting shot of Robert is complicated by another impulse, so familiar among women that it may be the main reason for the story’s lightning soar through social media: that of not hurting his feelings. |
| Responding to the story, women exchanged comments such as, typically: “JFC this is the most painfully relatable thing I’ve read in the New Yorker in the last 10 years and I’m totally not crying in the bathroom at work over it or anything.” Or: “It’s like an excerpt from my imaginary memoir.” And even when it didn’t evoke memories of near-identical disasters, Cat Person’s depiction of unwanted but politely endured sex accorded with the bigger picture being created by #MeToo disclosures, of the relentless pressure on young women sexually to submit or, less dramatically, to keep men from getting upset. | Responding to the story, women exchanged comments such as, typically: “JFC this is the most painfully relatable thing I’ve read in the New Yorker in the last 10 years and I’m totally not crying in the bathroom at work over it or anything.” Or: “It’s like an excerpt from my imaginary memoir.” And even when it didn’t evoke memories of near-identical disasters, Cat Person’s depiction of unwanted but politely endured sex accorded with the bigger picture being created by #MeToo disclosures, of the relentless pressure on young women sexually to submit or, less dramatically, to keep men from getting upset. |
| Maybe, given this widespread reading of the story as politically, as well as emotionally, affirmative, it was inevitable that readers of a more witch-hunt/“it’s all gone too far” mindset, would promptly declare themselves alienated. | Maybe, given this widespread reading of the story as politically, as well as emotionally, affirmative, it was inevitable that readers of a more witch-hunt/“it’s all gone too far” mindset, would promptly declare themselves alienated. |
| Relatable, increasingly used as a prime measure of literary value, plainly has its downside, and only partly because, like its cousin, “likeable”, it shuts down so much literature, from Beowulf to Conrad, Nabokov, Roth, Highsmith, Pamuk, Kureishi. Not many women, as was pointed out when the latter published Intimacy, were likely to see their experiences reflected in Kureishi’s Jay, an instructively ignoble shagger of a husband. | Relatable, increasingly used as a prime measure of literary value, plainly has its downside, and only partly because, like its cousin, “likeable”, it shuts down so much literature, from Beowulf to Conrad, Nabokov, Roth, Highsmith, Pamuk, Kureishi. Not many women, as was pointed out when the latter published Intimacy, were likely to see their experiences reflected in Kureishi’s Jay, an instructively ignoble shagger of a husband. |
| Shortly after the word began to gain currency in the US, a theatre critic warned that a production of King Lear, though competent enough, fell short of what he, personally, found relatable. The reviewer just wasn’t the kind of person, you gathered, who would ever disinherit his favourite daughter or get mad in a rainstorm. Classic drama is notoriously short on protagonists as provenly (confirmed by polls) relatable as Jeremy Corbyn. | Shortly after the word began to gain currency in the US, a theatre critic warned that a production of King Lear, though competent enough, fell short of what he, personally, found relatable. The reviewer just wasn’t the kind of person, you gathered, who would ever disinherit his favourite daughter or get mad in a rainstorm. Classic drama is notoriously short on protagonists as provenly (confirmed by polls) relatable as Jeremy Corbyn. |
| Even for a current literary phenomenon like Cat Person, if relatable is its most prized quality then that probably diminishes its chances with readers lucky enough never to have had stoical sex with someone whom they’ve already gone off. The role of self-deception in Margot’s behaviour, as she pursues an encounter with a man who plainly has his own reservations, did not placate male readers who felt, just as plainly, got at. Someone started an anti-Cat Person group. | Even for a current literary phenomenon like Cat Person, if relatable is its most prized quality then that probably diminishes its chances with readers lucky enough never to have had stoical sex with someone whom they’ve already gone off. The role of self-deception in Margot’s behaviour, as she pursues an encounter with a man who plainly has his own reservations, did not placate male readers who felt, just as plainly, got at. Someone started an anti-Cat Person group. |
| Why, some disappointed readers wanted to know, was the story all about Margot anyway? What about poor Robert? Where was the validation for awkward single men? At the BBC, this seemed such a staggeringly important literary point, that it decided to make good Roupenian’s oversight with a new story (writer unknown) called, Cat Person: What Robert (probably) thought. Maybe to even things out, it also downplayed the identity of Cat Person’s author. “The New Yorker told Margot’s story,” it said, “Here’s Robert’s.” The protracted exercise showed that Robert could definitely have been the main character in a story, if the New Yorker could have been bothered to make up a different one. | Why, some disappointed readers wanted to know, was the story all about Margot anyway? What about poor Robert? Where was the validation for awkward single men? At the BBC, this seemed such a staggeringly important literary point, that it decided to make good Roupenian’s oversight with a new story (writer unknown) called, Cat Person: What Robert (probably) thought. Maybe to even things out, it also downplayed the identity of Cat Person’s author. “The New Yorker told Margot’s story,” it said, “Here’s Robert’s.” The protracted exercise showed that Robert could definitely have been the main character in a story, if the New Yorker could have been bothered to make up a different one. |
| In the absence of any rationale for this intervention we can only speculate on whether, given the authorial bias in all too many works of fiction, the BBC’s revision of Cat Person is just the first in a series correcting women writers. Emma: What Mr Knightley (probably) thought. Middlemarch: what Mr Casaubon (probably) thought. Mrs Tiggy-Winkle: What Cock Robin (probably) thought. All of them keenly anticipated if the BBC really does reinterpret its commitment to impartiality to embrace, henceforth, products of the imagination. | In the absence of any rationale for this intervention we can only speculate on whether, given the authorial bias in all too many works of fiction, the BBC’s revision of Cat Person is just the first in a series correcting women writers. Emma: What Mr Knightley (probably) thought. Middlemarch: what Mr Casaubon (probably) thought. Mrs Tiggy-Winkle: What Cock Robin (probably) thought. All of them keenly anticipated if the BBC really does reinterpret its commitment to impartiality to embrace, henceforth, products of the imagination. |
| Its unwillingness to privilege Margot over Robert certainly suggests that, just months after it apologised for presenting Nigella Lawson’s father as a major challenge to the scientific consensus, prominent writers can expect, like any other experts, to have their work balanced, at the BBC at least, by hostile, ignorant, or completely irrelevant contributions. | Its unwillingness to privilege Margot over Robert certainly suggests that, just months after it apologised for presenting Nigella Lawson’s father as a major challenge to the scientific consensus, prominent writers can expect, like any other experts, to have their work balanced, at the BBC at least, by hostile, ignorant, or completely irrelevant contributions. |
| Similarly, last week’s Today item featuring a man who dislikes reading Jane Austen, debating another man who does like reading Jane Austen, signalled with the accompanying tweet, “Do you hate Jane Austen?”, hearty approval of Twitter’s binary approach to literary criticism. The manly ding-dong, even with its accidental misrepresentation of Austen’s literary predecessors, was a reminder to guardians and revisers of the literary canon to take nothing for granted. To the pressing questions already raised by trigger warnings and anti-imperialist challenges, university English departments may now want to ask, about any supposedly key text: would it appeal to a fatphobic Esquire contributor from north London? | Similarly, last week’s Today item featuring a man who dislikes reading Jane Austen, debating another man who does like reading Jane Austen, signalled with the accompanying tweet, “Do you hate Jane Austen?”, hearty approval of Twitter’s binary approach to literary criticism. The manly ding-dong, even with its accidental misrepresentation of Austen’s literary predecessors, was a reminder to guardians and revisers of the literary canon to take nothing for granted. To the pressing questions already raised by trigger warnings and anti-imperialist challenges, university English departments may now want to ask, about any supposedly key text: would it appeal to a fatphobic Esquire contributor from north London? |
| As for readers whom “do you hate Jane Austen?” was designed by the BBC to enrage, not a few will have been reminded of what they love. My copy of Pride and Prejudice fell open, by chance, on one of the pages where Austen uses reading habits to reveal character – another damning example appears, most respectfully, on the £10 banknote. Ghastly Mr Collins (his status, improbable as it now sounds, deriving entirely from a chance of inheritance) is invited to read aloud. “A book was produced; but, on beholding it (for everything announced it to be from a circulating library), he started back, and begging pardon, protested that he never read novels.” A reaction that might be quite relatable, in fact, for some of the men who have been heaping scorn on Cat Person, and on its fans. “I can’t believe,” writes one, “we’re talking about short stories as if they’re relevant.” | As for readers whom “do you hate Jane Austen?” was designed by the BBC to enrage, not a few will have been reminded of what they love. My copy of Pride and Prejudice fell open, by chance, on one of the pages where Austen uses reading habits to reveal character – another damning example appears, most respectfully, on the £10 banknote. Ghastly Mr Collins (his status, improbable as it now sounds, deriving entirely from a chance of inheritance) is invited to read aloud. “A book was produced; but, on beholding it (for everything announced it to be from a circulating library), he started back, and begging pardon, protested that he never read novels.” A reaction that might be quite relatable, in fact, for some of the men who have been heaping scorn on Cat Person, and on its fans. “I can’t believe,” writes one, “we’re talking about short stories as if they’re relevant.” |
| In comparison with “do you hate Jane Austen?”, much of the online debate about Cat Person has indeed projected an excitement about the text, and an interest in authorial intention, which may be as welcome to publishers, libraries and English teachers as it is to Roupenian’s agent. | In comparison with “do you hate Jane Austen?”, much of the online debate about Cat Person has indeed projected an excitement about the text, and an interest in authorial intention, which may be as welcome to publishers, libraries and English teachers as it is to Roupenian’s agent. |
| For once, social media was cultivating reading, and talking about reading, and not the opposite. Can the great Cat Person book group keep going? Even attract a whole new audience to accomplished fiction? The more the responses to Cat Person dwell on its relatability – its spooky insights into the reader’s own experience, its amazing #MeToo timeliness – the more the whole thing looks like a brilliant one-off. But at least it happened. | For once, social media was cultivating reading, and talking about reading, and not the opposite. Can the great Cat Person book group keep going? Even attract a whole new audience to accomplished fiction? The more the responses to Cat Person dwell on its relatability – its spooky insights into the reader’s own experience, its amazing #MeToo timeliness – the more the whole thing looks like a brilliant one-off. But at least it happened. |
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