The Case of the Disappearing Literary Man
The young men need better stories, says David Morris in the New York Times, in an op-ed published last Saturday.
They have disappeared from the literary world, he argues, absconded to the “manosphere” of Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan as a consequence (or cause) of the past two decades of women’s dominance in literary fiction.
Novels are increasingly written by women and read by women. In 2004, about half the authors on the New York Times fiction best-seller list were women and about half men; this year, the list looks to be more than three-quarters women. According to multiple reports, women readers now account for about 80 percent of fiction sales.1
Literary men have disappeared. And this is a shame, Morris says, because what will become of men if they’re no longer readers and writers? How will they understand women if they do not read what they write, he wonders?
The question for me is: What will become of literature — and indeed, of society — if men are no longer involved in reading and writing? The fortunes of men and women are intertwined. This is why, for example, I make sure that my male students read “The Handmaid’s Tale.” It’s not just their edification that matters; women also benefit from the existence of better men.
I agree with Mr. Morris that young men need better stories. But the literary men Mr. Morris is looking for, unfortunately, do not exist. Not as he would like them to, anyway. The sort of literary man Mr. Morris has in mind reads literature as a way of downloading the latest cultural software, as a way of staying up-to-date on the “right way” to be. This kind of man (not really a literary man) has abandoned literary fiction, because he can stay up-to-date better with podcasts and videos.
But even if they were interested, these men Mr. Morris is so desperate to court would never take his opinion all that seriously, because he is not a very good writer, so why should they believe what he says about the importance of literature?
Here’s how Mr. Morris pitches the value of novels:
These young men need better stories — and they need to see themselves as belonging to the world of storytelling. Novels do many things. They entertain, inspire, puzzle, hypnotize. But reading fiction is also an excellent way to improve one’s emotional I.Q.
Reading fiction is an excellent way to improve one’s emotional I.Q.
If I were one of these men Mr. Morris were looking for, I couldn’t think of a better way to chase me far away from literature. The obsequiousness is enough to make one cringe. What literary man reads literature for the same reason he opens up Duolingo or Wordle? What literary man reads literature for the same reason he takes his blood pressure medication?
Novels do many things. So does my phone. So does a new car. So does Disney’s streaming bundle with Hulu and ESPN. Is this really the best The New York Times can be muster in defense of the novel?
The problem, as it seems to me, is that the actual literary men Mr. Morris is looking for do not read The Handmaid’s Tale for its moral guidance, for the same reason they do not read Milton to study Christianity. They read Paradise Lost because Milton was a genius. And they’ll read The Handmaid’s Tale if they come to a similar conclusion about its merit as a work of literature, and not as a form of mental calisthenics.
Real literary men have certainly not substituted the pursuit of literature for listening to podcasts, as if those things were in anyway the same, or satisfied the same need. That Mr. Morris believes this tells me what sort of literary man he is: not just a bad writer, but a bad reader too.
To be clear, I welcome the end of male dominance in literature. Men ruled the roost for far too long, too often at the expense of great women writers who ought to have been read instead. I also don’t think that men deserve to be better represented in literary fiction; they don’t suffer from the same kind of prejudice that women have long endured.
Mr. Morris is a bad reader because he believes reading is first and foremost about representation. He believes that what really matters about reading is how many different voices one reads, and not the literary quality of those voices. He might qualify his position by saying that “of course it matters if a work is good,” but this “of course” would not reflect an implicit belief or first principle about aesthetics, but rather a secondary, ancillary consideration, an afterthought. And if pressed to pursue such a thought, he would most likely admit that such things are anyway subjective, and that what really matters is reading lots of different voices whatever their perceived quality.
If there were a committee to decide what books ought to get read, I bet Mr. Morris would want a seat on it. And I bet he would concern himself more with picking the “right” committee members than he would with picking the best books to read. Thank goodness canons aren’t decided by committees like these. The real process of literary inheritance is out of the hands of people like Mr. Morris. The great works last because they get passed down despite what people ought to read instead.
It’s my hope that one day soon the sort of literary man Mr. Morris is will disappear. It’s my believe that he will fade into obscurity, too, because he’s a bad writer and a bad reader. The disappearance of this sort of literary man is inevitable. I only wish that it would happen sooner. May this post of mine speed it along so that we can return to talking about the things that actually matter in literature. Not representation or consensus-forming, but imagination and intellectual power and wisdom.
The literary men in my life share two qualities generally: they truly delight in the works they read and they read them again and again. In a sense, they come to incarnate the works in their personality, especially by tending toward a particular author--let's say a Chesterton, Tolkien, or Lewis. An especially cherished friend "gifted me" with his love of Aristotle. This is the real social value of literary men (and women): their love is infectious.
it's probably hyperbolic but I recently read someone speculating that we might be entering another kind of 'dark age' for culture. a worrying thought; but dark ages come - and go