Books

Rebecca Solnit interview: laying bare the patriarchy (again)

‘Mansplaining’ author on why women still suffer a near-permanent sense of dread

Rebecca Solnit: ‘I think there are people who are great artists who are also disturbing in various ways’

Peter Murphy
Sat Mar 7 2020 - 06:00

Don’t misinterpret the title – Rebecca Solnit’s new book Recollections of my Non-Existence is no Zen handbook. Rather, it pertains to generations of women learning how to adopt invisibility as a survival mechanism. Not so much the art of not being there, more the act of keeping your mouth shut and your head down for fear of drawing unwanted male attention.

Solnit, a prolific author, essayist, critic and cultural analyst, might be best known for her 2008 essay Men Explain Things To Me, a viral online phenomenon that inadvertently and indirectly coined the word mansplaining, a term now so ubiquitous it has permeated everything from mainstream political discourse to New Yorker cartoons.

Girls are constantly being told from childhood that their safety lies in restricting their behaviour

One of her new book’s central ideas is this: trauma isn’t just a product of sexual, psychological or physical assault. A person can go their entire life without direct exposure to violence and still suffer a near-permanent sense of dread, a sort of Angelo Badalamenti hum in the pit of stomach. Psychotherapists call it hypervigilance: an inability to switch off the fight or flight mechanism.

“I think it’s life during wartime,” Solnit says, early on a February morning in San Francisco. “I think you have a portion of your mind that’s constantly on alert for what could go wrong and what’s safe to do. You know, there’s a thing in American universities where some professors have asked students what they do to be safe from rape, and the women students go into all this elaborate stuff about [how] they don’t go into the park alone at night, and they put their keys jutting out between their fingers, and they have a rape whistle, they go on and on, and [the professors] are dumbfounded because they’ve never really had to take stock of it.

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“Girls are constantly being told from childhood that their safety lies in restricting their behaviour. I had a funny moment decades ago when one of my brothers who lived near San Francisco’s big park – as did I – said he always went running on the back trails, which go through shrubbery and things, to avoid the cars. And I was just like, ‘I always go running on the main trails to avoid the men!’. (Laughs) So we were both running in the same park with completely different criteria about what constituted a space we wanted to be in.”

And, as Solnit concedes, it’s not just a women’s issue either. If you grew up as slight or androgynous or otherwise non-alpha male in a small town, the threat of getting beaten up was a rite of passage.

“There’s a version of masculinity that’s so punitive towards so many categories of people, women for being women, and men for not being manly enough, so to be gay or to be delicate, any of those things gets punished too,” Solnit considers. “I guess one of the things for women is, it feels like the violence that impacts men is mostly categorically hostile from the outside, and for a woman it’s, ‘Is my date going to assault me? Is my teacher going to assault me when I have the meeting about my project?’

“I was at the Winter Institute, the big national conference of American independent booksellers, and an otherwise very powerful and successful woman near my age asked me to keep an eye on her drink to see that nobody slipped anything into it. And it was so weird for me – to see a powerful, successful middle-aged woman still automatically question if somebody was going to try to drug her so they could harm her, [that] was really telling. It’s those weird little moments that give away how pervasive it is, constantly thinking, ‘Is this safe? What’s going on with this guy?’”

One of the subtler ways these syndromes are perpetuated, Solnit argues, is through cultural tropes. She describes in the book a particularly frightening experience decades ago when she was followed on foot, at night, at close distance, by a big man with shaggy hair and a beard who spoke in a low, steady stream the entire time. She was eventually rescued by a motorist who likened her predicament to a scene from a Hitchcock movie. That reference caused Solnit to think long and hard about pop archetypes that fetishise the murders of beautiful young women, from Poe to de Palma to David Lynch. So how does a person reconcile a love of film noir or murder ballads with an acknowledgment of how insidious these images can be?

“It’s interesting, because there are some people I’ve had absolutely no trouble giving up. I saw Woody Allen’s Manhattan when I was about the same age as Mariel Hemingway, and it was just so clearly a creepy movie by and about a creepy guy, that I’ve never seen a Woody Allen movie since. That was the ’70s, and I haven’t missed a thing. There are other artists it’s hard to give up. I do passionately love Hitchcock’s Vertigo, although it’s about two women being destroyed repeatedly in various ways. Ocean Vuong gave a talk a week ago and he said this wonderful thing about the fact that Walt Whitman was both a great poet of liberation in 19th-century America and also an anti-black racist in some of the things he said.

“I think there are people who are great artists who are also disturbing in various ways, and I think it’s possible to engage with their work if you engage with that aspect of their work. I feel like we’ve had very doctrinaire discussions about, ‘This is thrown out, this is not thrown out’, but I don’t feel like I’ve yet had a great conversation beyond things like Ocean’s remarks – particularly given that almost all artists before the last 10 minutes are likely to be problematic in some way. I love James Baldwin, who’s gay and black, but who – and this is not on the same scale – routinely refers to humanity or black people with a male pronoun.

“I think there’s a version in which you have to just give up on art before our time, and that’s also problematic because it imagines that we have now reached peak awesomeness, and have all the insight humanity will ever need. I have always just assumed that in 10 or 20 or 30 or 50 years people will look at this very moment and say, ‘Here’s what they were missing’ too. There’s a kind of censoriousness that assumes our own impeccability, and I just assume we’re kind of peccable.”

What does film noir look like without a punitive violence towards beautiful women?

I suggest, not entirely seriously, that when Solnit partakes in the forthcoming Mountains to Sea festival in Dublin with Sinéad Gleeson, she should ask her interviewer how she squares her politics with a lifelong love of Nick Cave, who has more beautiful dead women in his songs than anyone since Johnny Cash.

“It’s funny, ’cos he’s [Cash] such a traditionalist in a way,” Solnit considers. “I learned to love country music from a wonderful Native American second World War veteran who, as far as we could tell, had the entire Johnny Cash and Hank Williams songbook memorised. Hank Williams just complains a lot, but there are some pretty gruesome Johnny Cash songs: “I shot that dirty bitch down...” And the fact that he did [Delia’s Gone] so late in life is really interesting. It’d be interesting to see what Roseanne Cash says. I felt like some of them were kind of tongue in cheek, like, ‘here’s another murder ballad’, but I don’t know.

“I feel like Johnny Cash overall was a deeply humane person who went further than almost anyone else around him in standing up for prisoners, native people, et cetera, and [he] did have the greatest romance of country music with June Carter Cash, so it seems that what Ocean Vuong said applies to people like that: you have to keep thinking about them.

“But yeah, it’s interesting: could you be goth without romanticising the death of beautiful young women? What does film noir look like without a punitive violence towards beautiful women? Actually my friend Brit Marling, who made The OA [Netflix series] – which was really about trying to reimagine what a beautiful young female protagonist could be, how it sort of oscillates between power and victim and lets her be both – she just did a great piece in the New York Times about how the so-called strong female lead is often just a very masculinised idea of what strength and character look like, and that we need some other model.”

Recollections of my Non-Existence is published by Granta. Rebecca Solnit appears at Mountains to Sea in conversation with Sinéad Gleeson on Sunday, March 29th at the Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire.