When the art you love was created by a monster: Claire Dederer examines ‘A Fan’s Dilemma’

In River Halen’s 2022 memoir/poetry hybrid “Dream Rooms,” the author writes about curating a section of their personal library dedicated to books written by men who had been accused of assaulting women. Halen’s “scuffed white Ikea unit” contained a “growing pile of pulled volumes,” all of which, the author was aware, were written by men who had some stain of violence attached to them. “Here were the words of the rapists and manipulators and assailants written down,” Halen observes. “If I studied very carefully, maybe I could identify the warning signs, learn to spot danger in an aesthetic, in a grammar.”

The word “maybe” in this sentence does a lot of heavy lifting; how, one might reasonably ask, is one to separate a violent aesthetic from violence IRL; where is the demarcation point between a violent subject or character and a violent creator? How carefully, in other words, should one work to separate the art from the artist who created it?

This is the problem that occupies Halen, and it is recapitulated in “Monster: A Fan’s Dilemma,” the latest volume by U.S. memoirist and critic Claire Dederer. In a series of interconnected essays examining figures from numerous art forms and different time periods, Dederer provides an extended meditation on the question, what do we do with the art of monstrous men?

Like Halen, Dederer starts by making a list. Her roll call of men who have behaved badly includes rapists and killers and wife beaters and all manner of perfidy from the ranks of writers, filmmakers, actors, artists, and sports figures: “Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, William Burroughs, Sid Vicious, V.S. Naipaul, John Galliano, Norman Mailer, Ezra Pound, Caravaggio, Floyd Mayweather.” Surely she could go on. And she does, in carefully argued, densely nuanced essays examining her own conflicted emotional and intellectual responses to consuming art created by people she knows have harmed others.

The fact that Dederer personalizes her inquiry is essential to the core of her approach. She distrusts the critical recourse to the vague first-person plural pronoun “we,” which in her mind is “an escape hatch,” and “cheap,” and “a way of simultaneously sloughing off personal responsibility and taking on the mantle of easy authority.” Dederer wants assiduously to avoid appeals to authority, in part because no such authority is achievable, especially in such a thorny thicket of tangled brambles and burrs, and in part because she is determined not to let herself off the hook.

“This tension between authority and subjectivity has marked my whole life as a critic,” Dederer writes, though she here leans into the subjectivity of her conflicted responses to rewatching Polanski’s “Knife in the Water” or hearing the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back,” which still “sounds as good as it ever did” in her estimation, notwithstanding the charges of child molestation levelled against deceased pop star Michael Jackson. Her subjectivity is a way of separating herself from the declarations of genius that have so frequently been used to give cover to men’s bad behaviour — Dederer identifies Picasso and Hemingway as the twin avatars of this phenomenon.

But the subjectivity is also in service of a much less talked about notion: the idea that monstrosity exists on a sliding scale of being human, and that each of us, if we were honest, could identify elements of it in ourselves. Monsters, Dederer notes, are people, and subject to the same complex network of influences, traumas, and challenges as anyone else. (One particularly bracing section of her book involves interrogating whether it is possible to have empathy for people who behave in monstrous ways.) This is especially true in a capitalist system that encourages and rewards material success at the expense of others’ autonomy and choice.

It is this ubiquity of monstrousness, its ordinariness, that makes answering the question of what to do with the art of monstrous men (and some women — Dederer also looks at Doris Lessing and Joni Mitchell, both of whom abandoned children to pursue their careers, and Valerie Solanas, the radical feminist who attempted to murder Andy Warhol) so difficult to answer. And this ubiquity will constantly rub up against our sometimes life-altering love of enduring works of art.

Love, in the end, is what keeps Dederer, like Halen, returning to the art of problematic creators. “The occasion of everything — however indirectly — is love,” writes Halen. “[P]retending the love doesn’t exist, or saying it oughtn’t to, doesn’t help anything,” concludes Dederer. “Those facts might not be ideal, might even be depressing, but they are true.” Her final assessment may be contingent, but given the slipperiness of the human condition, it could hardly have been otherwise.

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