The Picaresque (not a new, hot band, although maybe it should be)
The world is so taken up of late with novels and romances, that it will be hard for a private history to be taken for genuine, where the names and other circumstances of the person are concealed, and on this account we must be content to leave the reader to pass his own opinion upon the ensuing sheet, and take it just as he pleases.
- from the author's preface to Moll Flanders.
To add to the whole discussion about whether or not the actual life experiences of an author are relavant to the text, and in response to econoclast's comment about Daniel Defoe framing his novels as "true stories," I decided to re-read "Moll Flanders," which is my favorite Defoe novel. To be honest, I'm not sure if Defoe posited (DISCLAIMER: being in English-major-dork mode, I am required to say "he posited" when in fact I mean "he said") that the stories were really-truly real, or just "real," wink-wink. I could research it, but if memory serves, I'm inclined to go with the latter. I studied the early novel rather extensively in college, but at the time I also enjoyed many recreational pharmaceuticals, which might have caused me to confuse Daniel Defoe with Willem Defoe, or for that matter caused me to confuse the oeuvre of Daniel Defoe with my left buttock. (Not that I would grossly exaggerate about my use of drugs, because that would be wrong. I was, however, in prison in 3 states, unlike that liar James Frey. Hence the tear I have tattooed under my eye, for the homeys I cut down in prison).
Daniel Defoe clearly wanted Moll Flanders to be sympathetic and taken seriously, which she remains despite her "thieving and whoring." Moll Flanders is a classic of the picaresque tradition, which is one of my all-time favorites. For those of you who might not be familiar with the picaresque, because you were smart enough to study subjects that might allow you to "get a real job," and "have more than $1.27 in net assets," a picareque novel is essentially a story in which a social underdog type travels around and has varied adventures, while offering a satirical commentary on the events and people he/she encouters. In Defoe's novels in particular, the main character always achieves a kind of redemption, usually of a religious nature, in the end.
What occured to me is that novelists and "memoirists" like James Frey and JT Leroy are, essentially, the direct heirs to the 17th-century picaresque. Their characters are margnialized by addiction, cross-dressing, prostitution, or all of the above; they travel around the United States and act as the moral arbiters (ahem)of their circumstances. Leroy's oeuvre, which is just a stupid French world for "oeuvre," would have been a biting commentary on child prostitution in West Virginia, or something, if only it were even remotely true. (While the author never said these stories were nonfiction, the idea that it was based on actual life experiences was strongly implied by the author, publisher, and others.)
The moral salvation which occurs at the end of either Leroy or Frey's works (either through rehab, or moving in with a social worker and her cross-dressing husband, etc.) simply reinforces the eerie ties between these novels and Defoe's picaresque. Defoe, after all, was raised and educated by puritans, and Moll Flanders spends a part of her time in the plantations in the new colonies of Maryland and Virginia. Because Defoe's father was a Dissenter (essentially, a Puritan), and even though he was as English as bad teeth, I would posit that, in a sense, his were not just among the first novels, but among the first American novels. (As an aside, it's like how Modern American English is structurally more similar to 17th c. English than Modern British patterns of speech, in the way that people in Montreal or Dakkar sound more like 17th c. Frenchmen than the modern French, because the language in the colonies remained more attached to this older structure.) The structure and sensibility of Defoe's works was even a moral and aesthetic precursor to 21st Century American televison and film. For instance, Moll Flanders arguably has a 3-act structure, sort of like, say, Pretty Woman, and other feel-good hooker/drug addict/gruff-but-lovable football coach movies. So begins tradition of the "very important lesson" that Arnold or Willis has to learn on every episode of "Differ'nt Strokes."
Defoe's novels were popular, in part, because he exposed the "underbelly" of society. Fortunately for him, they didn't have a lot of editorial fact checkers in the 17th/18th centuries. I'm pretty sure that any actual women in Moll Flanders' circumsatnces in that time and place would have had a much less riviting, much more drudgery-filled existance, and probably died of syphillis or consumption long before she achieved fame and fortune enough to look back on it all and have a moral epiphany. The details of Defoe's characters' lives were rather racy for the time, and even now, in parts, they read like pulp fiction. But the important thing, for Defoe, was the rather simplistic (and very puritanical) redemption the characters must experience in the end. In JT Leroy's case, this redemtion is mostly extra-textual (not to be confused with "extra-terrestrial"), because we're to believe that the "real" character is actaully now living with a couple and their child in San Francisco (which is true, as she's the 40-year-old housewife/mother in this scenerio).
Although we all like the idea that a novel or story should exist on its own merit, sometimes the text interacts with fictions that are outside the actual text (or, "extra-terrestrial"), to the extent that the author's persona becomes somehow central to the denouement. Which of course is just a pretentious French word for "denouement."
On a web site called Bookslut, someone named Litsa Dremousis says:
It was two years ago, the night I finished Sarah, LeRoy's 2000 tale of a boy who becomes a "lot lizard" (truck stop whore) to compete with his mother, assuming her identity in the mouths and arms of tricks. In his quest for a bigger raccoon bone (a signal to others of his prowess as a whore) "Cherry Vanilla" endures rape, beatings, and the ritual shearing of his hair. Abandoned by his mother and forsaken by his pimp, he is alone and desecrated because he had the hubris to want a better life. I sobbed until I threw up.
Hyperbolic, much? Litsa then goes on to tell us:
LeRoy's reviews are uniformly spectacular, but reporters fixate on his friendships with Madonna and Winona Ryder, his penchant for female attire, and his years as a prostitute. Insightful readers, though, tune out the hype like so much static. They know LeRoy's work is the stuff of cave painters -- ash and blood -- and that he crawls through the same dark, jagged spaces to create.
AND YET ... when it comes to her first question for the author (in a telephone interview, of course), her FIRST question - and clearly the one she most urgently needs answered, is: Did you guys have a wrap party for the film ["The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things"]?
HELLO? Your FIRST QUESTION is about a celebrity party that has nothing to do with the "ash and blood" of the novel you SOOOOO love! OMG! What is this, Tiger Beat? Of course, "Leroy" doesn't seem vexed, but is quick to note that Chloe Sevigny did get past the bouncers, even though they wanted to keep her out. I hate to say it, but Laura Albert is a fcuking genius. Not a genius as a writer, by any stretch, but she should sell this shit to the Guggenheim as a big, weird, strangely beautiful "installation."
I could go on and on on the subject, but I won't. I was really hankering to go off on JT Leroy/ Laura Albert's position as a woman-as-man-wanting-to-be-a-woman as it relates to "l'ecriture feminine" and post-structuralist feminist thought on language and identity, but I restrained myself, thankyouverymuch.
Next time, I promise to go back to writing about frivilous sh*t, such as why I don't have any money left this month.
- from the author's preface to Moll Flanders.
To add to the whole discussion about whether or not the actual life experiences of an author are relavant to the text, and in response to econoclast's comment about Daniel Defoe framing his novels as "true stories," I decided to re-read "Moll Flanders," which is my favorite Defoe novel. To be honest, I'm not sure if Defoe posited (DISCLAIMER: being in English-major-dork mode, I am required to say "he posited" when in fact I mean "he said") that the stories were really-truly real, or just "real," wink-wink. I could research it, but if memory serves, I'm inclined to go with the latter. I studied the early novel rather extensively in college, but at the time I also enjoyed many recreational pharmaceuticals, which might have caused me to confuse Daniel Defoe with Willem Defoe, or for that matter caused me to confuse the oeuvre of Daniel Defoe with my left buttock. (Not that I would grossly exaggerate about my use of drugs, because that would be wrong. I was, however, in prison in 3 states, unlike that liar James Frey. Hence the tear I have tattooed under my eye, for the homeys I cut down in prison).
Daniel Defoe clearly wanted Moll Flanders to be sympathetic and taken seriously, which she remains despite her "thieving and whoring." Moll Flanders is a classic of the picaresque tradition, which is one of my all-time favorites. For those of you who might not be familiar with the picaresque, because you were smart enough to study subjects that might allow you to "get a real job," and "have more than $1.27 in net assets," a picareque novel is essentially a story in which a social underdog type travels around and has varied adventures, while offering a satirical commentary on the events and people he/she encouters. In Defoe's novels in particular, the main character always achieves a kind of redemption, usually of a religious nature, in the end.
What occured to me is that novelists and "memoirists" like James Frey and JT Leroy are, essentially, the direct heirs to the 17th-century picaresque. Their characters are margnialized by addiction, cross-dressing, prostitution, or all of the above; they travel around the United States and act as the moral arbiters (ahem)of their circumstances. Leroy's oeuvre, which is just a stupid French world for "oeuvre," would have been a biting commentary on child prostitution in West Virginia, or something, if only it were even remotely true. (While the author never said these stories were nonfiction, the idea that it was based on actual life experiences was strongly implied by the author, publisher, and others.)
The moral salvation which occurs at the end of either Leroy or Frey's works (either through rehab, or moving in with a social worker and her cross-dressing husband, etc.) simply reinforces the eerie ties between these novels and Defoe's picaresque. Defoe, after all, was raised and educated by puritans, and Moll Flanders spends a part of her time in the plantations in the new colonies of Maryland and Virginia. Because Defoe's father was a Dissenter (essentially, a Puritan), and even though he was as English as bad teeth, I would posit that, in a sense, his were not just among the first novels, but among the first American novels. (As an aside, it's like how Modern American English is structurally more similar to 17th c. English than Modern British patterns of speech, in the way that people in Montreal or Dakkar sound more like 17th c. Frenchmen than the modern French, because the language in the colonies remained more attached to this older structure.) The structure and sensibility of Defoe's works was even a moral and aesthetic precursor to 21st Century American televison and film. For instance, Moll Flanders arguably has a 3-act structure, sort of like, say, Pretty Woman, and other feel-good hooker/drug addict/gruff-but-lovable football coach movies. So begins tradition of the "very important lesson" that Arnold or Willis has to learn on every episode of "Differ'nt Strokes."
Defoe's novels were popular, in part, because he exposed the "underbelly" of society. Fortunately for him, they didn't have a lot of editorial fact checkers in the 17th/18th centuries. I'm pretty sure that any actual women in Moll Flanders' circumsatnces in that time and place would have had a much less riviting, much more drudgery-filled existance, and probably died of syphillis or consumption long before she achieved fame and fortune enough to look back on it all and have a moral epiphany. The details of Defoe's characters' lives were rather racy for the time, and even now, in parts, they read like pulp fiction. But the important thing, for Defoe, was the rather simplistic (and very puritanical) redemption the characters must experience in the end. In JT Leroy's case, this redemtion is mostly extra-textual (not to be confused with "extra-terrestrial"), because we're to believe that the "real" character is actaully now living with a couple and their child in San Francisco (which is true, as she's the 40-year-old housewife/mother in this scenerio).
Although we all like the idea that a novel or story should exist on its own merit, sometimes the text interacts with fictions that are outside the actual text (or, "extra-terrestrial"), to the extent that the author's persona becomes somehow central to the denouement. Which of course is just a pretentious French word for "denouement."
On a web site called Bookslut, someone named Litsa Dremousis says:
It was two years ago, the night I finished Sarah, LeRoy's 2000 tale of a boy who becomes a "lot lizard" (truck stop whore) to compete with his mother, assuming her identity in the mouths and arms of tricks. In his quest for a bigger raccoon bone (a signal to others of his prowess as a whore) "Cherry Vanilla" endures rape, beatings, and the ritual shearing of his hair. Abandoned by his mother and forsaken by his pimp, he is alone and desecrated because he had the hubris to want a better life. I sobbed until I threw up.
Hyperbolic, much? Litsa then goes on to tell us:
LeRoy's reviews are uniformly spectacular, but reporters fixate on his friendships with Madonna and Winona Ryder, his penchant for female attire, and his years as a prostitute. Insightful readers, though, tune out the hype like so much static. They know LeRoy's work is the stuff of cave painters -- ash and blood -- and that he crawls through the same dark, jagged spaces to create.
AND YET ... when it comes to her first question for the author (in a telephone interview, of course), her FIRST question - and clearly the one she most urgently needs answered, is: Did you guys have a wrap party for the film ["The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things"]?
HELLO? Your FIRST QUESTION is about a celebrity party that has nothing to do with the "ash and blood" of the novel you SOOOOO love! OMG! What is this, Tiger Beat? Of course, "Leroy" doesn't seem vexed, but is quick to note that Chloe Sevigny did get past the bouncers, even though they wanted to keep her out. I hate to say it, but Laura Albert is a fcuking genius. Not a genius as a writer, by any stretch, but she should sell this shit to the Guggenheim as a big, weird, strangely beautiful "installation."
I could go on and on on the subject, but I won't. I was really hankering to go off on JT Leroy/ Laura Albert's position as a woman-as-man-wanting-to-be-a-woman as it relates to "l'ecriture feminine" and post-structuralist feminist thought on language and identity, but I restrained myself, thankyouverymuch.
Next time, I promise to go back to writing about frivilous sh*t, such as why I don't have any money left this month.
posted by Marguerite at 12:53 PM
6 Comments:
M--
You raise some interesting points re "Moll Flanders", James Frey and JT LeRoy.
You quote my Bookslut interview w/ LeRoy and don't seem to like it, which is fine. We can agree to disagree.
You seem stymied, however, in your reading of the first question. Read the last sentence of the intro: it's an editing fuck-up and it's pretty obvious that it is, in fact, LeRoy's comment. I.e. I didn't start the interview w/ a question about the wrap party. Said party occurred the night before the interview and he launched into an anecdote about it.
We discussed literature and art throughout most of the interview and your Tiger Beat comparison is bemusing. Also, if you don't mind, please correct the spelling of my name. (You got it right the first time, then lost the "t".)
And of course, I no longer believe LeRoy exists.
Best to you and yours,
Litsa Dremousis
http://theslipperyfish.blogspot.com
Hi Litsa,
First, my apologies for the misspelling of your name; my first name is chronically misspelled as well, and I know how annoying that is.
Thanks for the insight into the editorial structure of the interview. I was, in fact, stymied. I'm often stymied. I've been using an ointment for that ...
As for the "Tiger Beat" comparison, it was not intended as a legitimate criticism (FULL DISCLOSURE: I am NOT actually a licenced literary critic). It was, rather, what's known commonly as a "joke," in other words, an exaggeration indended for ironic effect. (FULL DISCLOSURE: I am not a licenced comedian, so taking any jokes seriously must be done at the reader's own risk.)
However, it did seem to me that in your interview, although less than in many others I've read, Leroy/Albert was more interested on name dropping (including literary celebs, however "fourth-tier" they may be) than discussing his work.
Upon a closer reading of your interview (and in light of the recent revelations), many of the points made by Leroy/Albert are downright fascinating, and I'd love to know your thoughts. For instance, in talking about social workers, he/she says: "Because I never had any power with these fuckers, so I was like, wow, I get the power."
This seems like a commentary on the author's power issues with other "social workers," in other words, people in the social hierarchy (celebrities, people with literary "legitimacy," etc.)from which she felt excluded before inventing this persona. The author clearly has more power, whether real or percieved, as a very young man wanting to be a woman than as a 30-something straight woman. This recalls Derrida's idea (or was it Saussure? I'm not saussure, if you'll pardon ...) about how the structure of language/ the symbolic order is inherently masculine, so female writing essentially takes place within a masculine structure, further obscuring the signified (in this case, female identity).
In one interview (I don't remember which one), Leroy/Albert says, "I used to identify as a man, so I wrote like a man, but now I identify as a woman."
Talk about female ventriloquism. Entering into the symbolic structure as a man, but wanting to be a woman. Like a fcuked up, transsexual Pinnochio. A case of a woman using masculine language to create, however cautiously, a female identity. But I digress.
Sometimes, when an author sits down to write, she finds that a 14-year-old transsexual is the voice inside of her. But would anyone have taken it seriously if they knew that Sarah was written by a married, middle class (by all accounts) woman who was 35 (or therebouts) at the time of publication? I'm thinking, no.
In your interview, Leroy/Albert says, "I really feel like in order to be an artist in our society, we have to fight. To me, an artist is like the face of God. It's telling the story of who we are, our connections, the more true we can be."
Which sounds ironic now, but, just because she didn't personally experience the things that happened to her characters, that doesn't necessarily make them less true. Faulkner once said that his characters were more real to him than his daughter. This is always quoted in a way that makes him seem like a good writer, if arguably a bad father (his daughter must have loved being less real than a retarded kid in love with a cow, but oh well.).
Anyway, I would be curious to know if you stand by your original assessment of the text. I personally didn't like the novel Sarah (the only Leroy novel I've read) but that of course doesn't mean it's bad. You, like many legions of others, were legitimately moved by his works. Does the revelation of his/her identity call for a revaluation of that, and if so, why do you think that is?
Thanks again for taking the time to offer another viewpoint. Hope no hard feelings.
I love reading your posts. All of them, even though the past few are a little over my accounting major head. Some of the blogs I've come across that are written by English majors are so damn pretentious I can't even bear it. However, you have something that not every English major has and that's a sense of humor. You just can't be taught that.
Thanks, Jolynn! Yeah, we Eng. major types do tend to take ourselves WAY seriously. I think this might be because our studies were all based on completely theoretical information with extremely limited practical application. Maybe the uber-seriousness is to make up for the fact that most of us have about $1.27 in net assets (speaking for myself, anyway).
However, I find that accounting majors tend to have a great & often downright bawdy sense of humor (shout out my home girl April, CPA!).
Marguerite--
No, no hard feelings. I address a lot of your questions on my blog. (See previous post.) Unsurprisingly, the interview I did w/ LeRoy for Poets and Writers was considerably more erudite. (I only wrote for Bookslut during some health-related downtime. Their editing leaves something to be desired.)
All the best,
Litsa
Wow! I'm impressed with this tossed off essay re Defoe and the picaresque. Not to mention Derrida and I.M. Saussure. I can't make any intelligent comment about these (having been a biochem major).
Don't worry about the spelling. Some of the best writers were terrible spellers. Evelyn Waugh. And, I believe, Nabokov (some would say a good writer, not one of my faves, as it happens). I nominate Fielding/ Tom Jones as fave exponent of picaresque. And Laurence Sterne as fave post-modernist (you know, the one they're making a movie about right now).
As for Tiger Beat, well, please don't knock it. An excellent publication.
Also, an interesting trivium: many of the most fashionable rich are now going over to England to have their cosmetic dentistry done. It is reckoned among connoisseurs (yes, fancy French word for connoisseurs) of la belle bouche that slight irregularity is much more attractive than the "tombstone" look beloved of our anal/ order-obsessed US dentists. In Harley Street, apparently, they know how to introduce just that little strangeness without which true beauty etc (Pope, wasn't it?)
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