The ethics of writing about a lover
Have we taken confessionalism too far?
About a month ago, I speed-ran family therapy by making my parents sit down and watch Anatomy of a Fall with me. I'm only half kidding, I liked it too much to not want to share it with them, the same way that a dog wants to present a spit-covered toy to its favourite person. I wanted them to experience the screenplay that won it its sole Oscar - and yes, I was curious how they'd react to it.
Being raised by two English literature majors has its decisive effects, though they show up at different stages of life. It becomes the cornerstone of your personality, a self-effacing conversation opener for when you're bored at parties. Your parents buy you The Bell Jar at age 13 as a hopeful kind of counter against failed literary talent. You win spell bees left and right (childhood) and become a hopeless neurotic (later). You also develop a penchant for placing Chekhov's guns around the scenery of your daily life, wondering if they'll go off with all the detachment of a newspaper review critiquing your technique: "6 out of 10. Good interiority coupled with almost masterful attempts at reader immersion, but predictable to anyone who has read the oeuvre". Anatomy of a Fall was one such gun. I waited to see if my parents saw themselves reflected in the film's primary relationship - a successful writer married to an unsuccessful (and dead) one, resentment coloring their love for each other, the boundaries of privacy effaced in the name of art. The last point is incredibly – almost unbelievably – prescient in the plot: it is revealed that the dead husband, Samuel, had been secretly instigating and recording tempestuous arguments with his wife to serve as ‘inspiration’ for ‘art’. (The inverted commas indicate part incredulity, part horror. Why do men?)
When I asked my parents to tell me what they thought of it, my efforts had clearly been in vain.
"I liked it, but I'm impressed you sat through it when it wasn't entertaining in the least," said my dad.
I pressed him for another opinion: "The motherfucker had no business doing that to the dog!"
Perhaps the neuroticism isn't hereditary.
In March this year, over the better part of two flights - one domestic, one international - I sat down and read Molly by Blake Butler, a memoir chronicling the tumultuous relationship between two poets, and the breakdown of its facade in the aftermath of the author's (titular) wife's suicide. She had borderline personality disorder, was unfaithful, and wove a web of lies deep within her marriage and other personal relationships. Butler's response was in the form of a long introspective work that was equal parts memoir, equal parts creative non fiction. It outlined their shared lives in painstaking detail – I felt like a ghost daughter, witnessing their lives, act by act, from the dinner table. It was all so easy to picture, like I had already watched it with the technicolour lenses of an eight year old’s perspective: the chickens in their backyard, Molly’s passion for baking, the simmering tension in their final days. Though this was written, and the recordings made in Anatomy of a Fall verbal, my reactions to either piece of media were miles apart. Where I felt scathing and dismissive of the film, I intuitively felt protective of Butler's right to tell his story. Why did I have these prejudices?
Browsing Reddit's forum for people involved in intimate relationships with those suffering from borderline personality disorder, I was struck dumb by a comment that recounted - in grave detail - the previous marriage of Molly Wojak as Blake had described her, by an anonymous user claiming she had left them to marry someone else. I couldn't believe my eyes. It was her, indisputably. I felt like the window into their marriage painted by Butler had changed my purview forever. If I hadn't read Molly, I wouldn't have been able to recognize the details of the relationship, identifying her on what was a platform meant entirely for anonymity. It made me viscerally uncomfortable to hold this truth in my hands. Was it any different than walking into an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, turning to a geriatric attendee and announcing that I knew the intimate details of his life because I'd read his wife's autofiction?
Anatomy of a Fall dances around these questions. The successful writer is noted to be an imperfect widow – and heavily implied to have been an imperfect wife and woman. (She's bisexual and raises her voice when angry.) Her emotional reactions are seen as cold, detached, and perfunctory, because her life has not fallen apart with her husband’s death. In a very French, very improbable proceeding in court, she is accused of murdering her husband precisely because she has written about a character plotting to do the same to her husband.
Quoting from the script, the offense accuses her thus:
[ Mme Voyter a déclaré en 2016 je cite « TOUS mes livres entretiennent un lien étroit avec ma vie et celle des gens que je connais. » ]
Mrs. Voyter said in 2016, and I quote, that “all my books have a close relationship with my life and the lives of people whom I know”.
While the defense replies:
[ Je m’oppose à ça, elle a toujours revendiqué écrire des FICTIONS. ]
I’m opposed to this: she has always claimed to write FICTION.
She is damned by the prosecution (and by us, the easily-swayed audience) because she has claimed to rely on real life for fictional writing before. What is left for us to wonder is just how much of her husband’s death has been simmering in her work for years as an unbelievable foreshadowing of the catharsis of her frustration. But how far does this divide between fiction and nonfiction go, and what are the ethics of thus arguing? What is the moral value of creating two-dimensional, fiction narratives out of real people, which they are unable to defend themselves against?
It is a particularly Lucaksian stance to present oneself as opposed to said two-dimensional self-serving representations of the world. Being a Marxist, Lukacs of course had a vested interest in accurate representations of the material world. But he took particular offence to the reduction of the subjective to the objective. does not allow for a portrayal of human development in conditions of a dialectic between the subjective self and objective conditions. In particular, modernism (the name I will use here for the ideology of modernist literature) argues, implicitly, that humans have an unchanging human nature, and this human nature is that which is described as thrownness or being "thrown-into-being" by Heidegger.
Is auto-fictionalizing then a consequence of modernism, or of neurotic obsession? Is one worse than the other? When writing with ‘muses’ or inspirations in mind, are we creating commodities out of people?
I am somewhat biased, because I do have the firsthand experience of being the muse for such 'art', of having my words withdrawn from an intimate conversation to be recast, verbatim, and cast, publicly. When a friend first informed me of said art existing, I felt as though my privacy had been violated in front of some thousands of followers. It felt like a direct provocation, a challenge for me to respond to defend myself in front of a nameless audience. Momentarily, I wanted to inform the world of the other party's transgressions, some of which hinged on borderline criminality. I wanted to scream, like the defense in Anatomy of a Fall: "Vous ne contextualisez pas! (You are not contextualizing!) I did send it to my friends, and I have never seen them so vehemently united in their negativity except on Letterboxd. (One of them tried to get it taken down for being offensive to her intellect, but Instagram does not recognize that as a protected characteristic.)
Il ne l'ai contextualise pas. And I realized that my presumed villainy actually had very little bearing on my life and future, except for the attempts to recast my self-image. Such is the power of the narrative voice that I nearly believed someone else's rendering of my own self.
While beginning to write this, I didn’t have a clear answer to why I supported one man and not the other, to be entirely honest. I did put off finishing my initial idea for a month, so that I could marinate my thoughts at length. This is what the brine has to say:
I think using muses inevitably casts them in an unchangeable, fixed light that they are mute to defend themselves against. Once a story is told – as in Anatomy of a Fall – it is very hard to separate the ‘story’ or the ‘narrative’ from what can be considered the objective truth: the only measure at hand left is to simply write another story and hope it will stand the test of the cynics and audience. We see this in PR narratives about celebrity breakups, and we see it in the film: ultimately, the blind son faces the same dilemma of crisis invention: either he tells a story and saves his mother, or he finds the truth and loses her in the meantime. Is it commodification, then?
I think it is: the human object of narration acquires a fetish that is infinitely more valuable in its presentation before the audience, than it is within the relationship between itself and the narrator. It is now monetizable in the form of artistic inspiration, song lyrics, diary entries, and hidden literary clues. The muse has acquired the identity of the muse which they never asked for – and never personally identify with, I dare say. Slowly, the personal essence of the social relationship fades, with the only tangible memories being of the public perception of the relationship. I still sympathize with the author of Molly, however, because I see his work as a last-ditch attempt to maintain his own sanity: to tell a story and by means of it, save his own life, because his wife’s is no longer his to protect.
In that sense, I don’t think this form of literary – or artistic – commodification can be linked to modernism (on the other hand, neuroticism is the very cornerstone of modernism; ask Woolf). Blurred lines between personal lives and public art have always been redrawn and tweaked: the word ‘muse’ itself is drawn from the ancient Greeks’ supposed source of inspiration for poetry, music and theatre, well before the advent of even the hint of capitalism. Perhaps the ideal form of artistic dedication is to vaguely thank nine beautiful women for all your achievements.
