Monday, July 20, 2020

Italo Calvino: The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount

"Books are my religion," I said to a friend today.  He is not of a particularly literary bent, so he thought I meant that I just really, really, like them.  I do not like them; at least, I don't particularly enjoy reading as an activity.  I don't read for pleasure.  I read for understanding, and on rare occasion reading leads not only to understanding, but to being understood.  These moments are the equivalent of getting the Holy Ghost in church.  They are the moments where the divine is suddenly accessible to me personally.  I thought Italo Calvino understood me before these novellae.  The Baron in the Trees spoke to myself as a child.  His Italian Folktales (which some digging has revealed are far more his than not) spoke to myself as a scholar and a lover of stories.  But these two.  Man.

It is as though he is writing to me retroactively from the grave.  How did he know that I would be reading "The Nonexistent Knight" at exactly the moment I was struggling to believe that I even exist?  And even more startling, how did he arrange for me to read "The Cloven Viscount" after my own left side had been torn away in an accident?  This latter is far too specific.

I view my own religion, that of Books, with the same skepticism I apply to all religions:  it's fine unless you believe it.  I know very well that it is in my nature as a human to see myself in places that perhaps it is not.  And I know that it was possible for Calvino . . . no, for my friend Italo to have written what he did--not because it's specific to me, but because it is common to all humans.  But I can perhaps be forgiven for taking these moments of religious experience to heart, and allowing myself to be reassured that I not only exist and am whole, but that someone, even if he's been dead for thirty years, cares.

Meredith Talusan: Fairest

During the still incomplete process of trying not to be a trash human, there has been a certain amount of tension between my highly visible privileges (white, cis, and male), and my more subtle membership in less privileged groups (my disability is not obvious, and I can theoretically tone down the queerness if necessary).  The fact that my privileged aspects are the first thing one knows about me means that, even though I am technically disadvantaged, I largely navigate the world as though I were not.

Like any thinking privileged person, I am a vocal ally for trans people, women, and people who experience racial discrimination ("people of color", as some would say).  And like any self-aware ally, I am pained by the realization that my allyship is constantly corrupted by my concern with how I am perceived.  Perhaps I feel the danger of "performative wokeness" so keenly because I am such a performative person by nature that every action is in danger of being insincere.  I actually don't even know if it's possible for me to totally decenter myself.  Even this admission is itself somewhat performative, in spite of the fact that no one I know personally is ever likely to read this.  Everything I do is corrupted by the instinct to center myself, based on decades of being told by society that I am important.  Every action I take on the behalf of others, if I am not careful, could easily turn me into a micro-aggressor, a micro-oppressor even.

And there is a specific variety of performative allyship that pains me: the expression of rightly monnikered "white liberal guilt".  It hurts because it's so very true.  I do feel guilty.  I feel guilty that the black friends I grew up with didn't have access to the same things I did.  I feel guilty that I didn't see it clearly enough at the time to do anything about it.  I feel guilty that my family is comfortable from, in reverse chronological order, blindly accepted advantage, the enslavement of black people, and the theft of native land.  This guilt sometimes grabs the steering wheel and forces kneejerk answers to questions of inequality.  Its instinct is to always take the side of an oppressed group, sometimes thoughtlessly. 

As I read this book, my white liberal guilt kept grabbing for the wheel.  It kept looking for ways to root for the author, a trans woman of Asian descent.  It gave her the benefit of the doubt whenever possible, made excuses for her, and fought tooth and claw against the instinct that she was perhaps not a victim in her story.  How could she possibly be the villain, an oppressor even?  WLG would not allow the consideration of such a possibility.

This battle continued until the point at which she leveraged her white-passing beauty to try and steal her best friend's lover.  It was at that point that my WLG lost.  It wasn't just this grotesque betrayal, a villainy so profound and clear that in a fiction we would criticize it as a caricature, but also the offhandedness with which the author seemed to view it.  There was no glimmer of remorse, of self-reflection in the way she presented the story, and it stunned my WLG long enough for it to become clear what I had been trying not to see all along: this woman is a sociopath.

Nor was I disabused of this notion as I finished the book.  The scales dropped from my eyes, and the deficiency of her narrative popped into focus.  Until that point, I had only been vaguely aware of a general insincerity in her style.  Afterward, it became clear that what I was really feeling was an absence of human warmth.  What had before seemed like an overedited concern with the way she was portraying herself, was suddenly seen for the incapacity for empathy that it truly was. This white-passing trans woman had, seemingly without remorse, become that which I am terrified of becoming,which fear led me to give her the benefit of the doubt for 3/4 of the book: a member of an oppressed group who overcomes that oppression only to become the oppressor.