From the author of the international bestseller What I Loved, a provocative collection of autobiographical and critical essays about writing and writers. Whether her subject is growing up in Minnesota, cross-dressing, or the novel, Hustvedt's nonfiction, like her fiction, defies easy categorization, elegantly combining intellect, emotion, wit, and passion. With a light touch and consummate clarity, she undresses the cultural prejudices that veil both literature and life and explores the multiple personalities that ...
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From the author of the international bestseller What I Loved, a provocative collection of autobiographical and critical essays about writing and writers. Whether her subject is growing up in Minnesota, cross-dressing, or the novel, Hustvedt's nonfiction, like her fiction, defies easy categorization, elegantly combining intellect, emotion, wit, and passion. With a light touch and consummate clarity, she undresses the cultural prejudices that veil both literature and life and explores the multiple personalities that inevitably inhabit a writer's mind. Is it possible for a woman in the twentieth century to endorse the corset, and at the same time approach with authority what it is like to be a man? Hustvedt does. Writing with rigorous honesty about her own divided self, and how this has shaped her as a writer, she also approaches the works of others--Fitzgerald, Dickens, and Henry James--with revelatory insight, and a practitioner's understanding of their art.
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"A Plea for Eros" is a rarely insightful and succinct title for an essay. It summarizes the subject matter and importance of what the essay itself has to say in many more words. The essay, "A Plea for Eros", gives its name and theme to this collection of twelve essays published as a book in 2006 by the American author Siri Hustvedt. I read the essay and the book of which it forms the key part after reading Hustvedt's novel, "What I Loved" (2003). My book group has just disscussed Hustvedt's novel. Hustvedt's essay on the importance, and frequent neglect, of eros captures for me a great deal of the theme of her difficult novel, as do other essays in the collection. I tried to use the essays to increase my understanding of the novel. While there are several other good and related essays in this collection, including "Being a Man" in which Hustvedt discusses her use of a male narrative voice in "What I Loved", I want to focus in this review on the title essay as it relates to the novel.
The climactic scene in "What I Loved" occurs near the end of the novel where the aging narrator, Leo, makes a strong romantic overture to a woman named Violet, the wife of a deceased close friend, Bill. Leo has loved Violet for many years. Violet strongly, and with unmeant cruelty, rejects Leo's love. It becomes clear that Leo and Violet had different views of the relationship between them that has developed over the years. Neither of the two characters, but particularly Violet, understands human sexuality and expression well. There is an irony in this lack of understanding in the context of the entire novel, as Violet's professional career involves writing on various expressions of female sexuality.
Hustvedt's essay "A Plea for Eros" first was published in 1995. The essay discusses the pervasive and ambiguous character of human passion, romance, and eroticism. Hustvedt describes how erotic passion tends to be unduly marginalized, rigidified, or even demonized. Much of the essay uses as a foil certain forms of American feminism and political correctness which Hustvedt describes (p.47) as having "a puritanical strain, an imposed blindness to erotic truth." She discusses the claim of some feminists that women are wrongfully seen as sex objects and works to the conclusion that "desire is always between a subject and an object" (p.49) "Women are sexual objects", Hustvedt writes, and "so are men." She continues "every person is keenly aware of the fact that sexual feeling is distinct from affection, even though they often conspire, but this fact runs against the grain of classic feminist arguments." (p. 47)
Hustvedt proceeds to illuminate her essay with stories drawn from her own experience. The most telling of these stories seems to me to illuminate both her understanding of erotic ambiguity and the climactic scene of "What I Loved." Hustvedt describes how, as a graduate student in her 20s, she met a fellow-student, a young man who shared many of her literary enthusiasms. At the time, Hustvedt was romantically involved with another man in a relationship that was not proving successful. Over the course of several months, she and the student began to socialize together, having coffee, reading books and poems, sharing Chinese dinners, and going to movies. The young man never made any sexual comments or made any romantic overtures towards Hustvedt; and she says in the essay that she never had sexual feelings for him.
Several months into the relationship, Hustvedt shared with her fellow student a poem she had written that described the sexual prowess of her boyfriend. The young man was hurt and crestfallen. "Perhaps never in my life have I so misinterpreted a relation with another person", Hustvedt writes. The young man had interpreted the time alone with Hustvedt, the dinners, movies, and conversations, as the opening stages of a possible romance or courtship, as these forms of activities have long been so understood in American life. Hustvedt had taken them more impersonally and less intimately. She viewed them simply as showing friendship, of the sort she had with many men and women, and which did not suggest any further closeness or sexual involvement. She had no sexual interest, she tells the reader, in the man. In the usual harsh euphemism for these matters, Hustvedt considered the young man as a friend.
This little story, expanded many times and writ large, forms the basis for the ultimate rejection in the relationship between the older and seemingly more experienced people, Leo and Violet, in "What I Loved." The story also makes the point that Hustvedt makes at the end of the essay. The essay form, of course, is a much more appropriate vehicle for drawing an explicit and abstract conclusion than is a novel. Hustvedt writes: "This is my call for eros, a plea that we not forget ambiguity and mystery, that in matters of the heart, we acknowledge an abiding uncertainty. I honestly think that when we are possessed by erotic magic..... we are living a story of exciting thresholds and irrational feeling. We are living in a secret place we make between us, a place where the real and unreal commingle." (p. 60)
Hustvedt's essay and her novel describe the undercurrent of erotic passion which runs through human life and which all too often is deprecated, ignored, or misinterpreted. Readers with some sense of the ambiguities and mysteries of human passion may enjoy Hustvedt's novel, "What I Loved" , her essay, "A Plea for Eros" and the volume of which it is a part.
