"Notions of the Sacred" by Ayşegül Savaş Seems Mistitled

 "Values" is a word frequently tossed about.  Although there can be an overlap, one's values are not the same as one's morals. Values are what one thinks are more important as opposed to less important, or not important at all.

For instance, while it is far from immoral to pull out a cell phone and answer a message at dinner, an important family value might be no electronic devices at the dinner table. 

I bring this up because values seem to loom large in "Notions of the Sacred," a short story by Ayşegül Savaş in the Dec. 26, 2022 electronic edition of The New Yorker.

The story begins with an unnamed protagonist relating how she had entered a new dimension upon learning that she had become pregnant -- almost as though she had become like the Virgin Mary in scenes of the Annunciation. 

She's unmarried and the pregnancy was unintended, the product of a brief affair with a man she would prefer not learn what happened and become upset. "I just wanted to enjoy my new state."

Thus far, it seems what is important to this woman -- what she values -- is her pregnancy and presumably the welfare of the child since she isn't inclined to get an abortion. 

But as time goes by, it becomes increasingly clear that what she actually values most is her lost friendship with a college friend named Zoe -- lost because they had "grown apart over the years," in part as a result of a careless comment one had made. But then one day, after Zoe and her husband had moved to a nearby town, it was Zoe who had gotten back in touch, in part to disclose her own pregnancy.

Eventually, a certain development occurs (I won't totally spoil the story) and it turns out what is most important to Savaş' protagonist is whether Zoe will still like her or not after what has happened. I found it a curious sense of values. Somehow, this woman doesn't appear to have her priorities straight.  

A question along those lines does come up in the usual New Yorker author interview, but Savaş' answer fails to explain why the protagonist considers one thing more important than another. Rather, she ends a somewhat rambling response with a complaint about "the way that the sacred and the body have been commodified in New Age discourse" -- which seems to relate more to the title of the story than to what the tale comes across as being all about.  It's about values in my humble estimation. 

The Nature of Women, and Sociopolitical Observations

 "What do women want?" is an age-old question and one that is particularly relevant for writers of fiction -- male authors in particular, I suppose.

With men it is easy: they want power, money, sex and celebrity in no particular order since one of those objectives often brings all or most of the others along with it.  Endless books revolve around such themes. 

With women it has been more of a puzzle, but two articles in the Nov. 11, 2021 New York Times may be of some help. Both -- one in the arts section and the other in the sports section -- involve violence on the part of women toward other women.

The arts section article concerns "Yellowjackets," a film about to appear on "Showtime" that depicts first what happens when a place carrying a U.S. girl's soccer team crashes in a remote location and then what happens to the survivors. Essentially, as the NYT article suggests, it's a gender-reverse version of "Lord of the Flies." Instead of young boys turning against each other in a sadistic fashion, this time it is girls.

"It argues for the savagery of girlhood -- with or without an aviation disaster -- and how that savagery reverberates throughout women's lives," the article says.

Let's pause for a moment and consider a major current of sociopolitical thought these days: that white males are responsible for most if not all of the world's ills.  Suppose the patriarchy is successfully toppled; what sort of a world are we in for next?

"The show abounds with strong women, none of whom you would want to share a bottle of chardonnay with," is one observation contained therein. Another is: "There's a very specific feminine way of brutalizing each other."

But even before the plane crash, some of the girls are depicted as malevolent at home in up-scale suburbia. One betrays a friend and another grievously injures a teammate.

Which brings me to the NYT sports section article. It reports on the arrest -- and subsequent release -- of a French professional woman soccer player suspected of being instrumental in the beating of one of her teammates by a couple of thugs who concentrated on injuring the victim's legs while stealing nothing from her. The accused woman was described to be an understudy of the victim and, indeed, replaced her as a starter when the victim, a French national team veteran, was unable to play in a subsequent match.

While no charges have been filed, an investigation by French authorities is continuing,

It is now necessary to pause for a second time and consider another prevailing sociopolitical issue: racism.

The two NYT articles on the incident -- reporting the arrest and then the release -- did not mention the race of either of the two women, but large photos accompanying the pieces showed clearly that one -- the suspected perpetrator based on names in the caption -- is black and the victim white.

Let's think about that for a moment. If this incident had occurred in the U.S. and the race of the victim had been black as opposed to white and the alleged perpetrator white rather than black, this incident would have been trumped as another example of the endemic racism that is said to characterize American society.

Authors Don't Get to Decide How Their Books Are Read

The salient message in Katy Waldman's Feb. 11, 2021 New Yorker review of "Bina: a Novel in Warnings," goes as follows:

"Anakana Schofield’s new novel, 'Bina,' is almost as recalcitrant as its narrator; both demand, grouchily and wittily, to be taken on their own terms."

Good luck!

When an artist releases a work of art, while he or she may retain legal rights to it, it's in the public domain as to what, if anything, it means. There is absolutely no requirement that it be "taken on its own terms." which seems to imply a certain reading is required. But, Waldman had to come down somewhere in her review and that didn't appear to be easy since Bina, the character, is a grouchy old woman "aged out of economic value and conventional desirability."

"It’s tempting to interpret 'Bina' as a pointed challenge to the feminist marketplace: do you actually care about this lady?" Waldman asks. In other words, if one is a feminist, is one required to care about all women no matter how pedestrian or lackluster in nature? Among other things, does one have time for that?

Waldman is quick to point out that this is a novel of character, not a novel of plot, and in that sense is yet another child of literary modernism -- along the lines of "Casting Shadows" by Jhuma Lahiri, which  I talked about in my previous post.

The intimacy and directness of Bina's interaction with readers is the book's greatest strength and as a result, over time, she makes for great company, Waldman says. As is the case with "Casting Shadows," it's a window into a woman's world and may well be highly illuminating in that respect if one is interested in "getting women right" as male writers of fiction might be. 

But there is no need to take Schofield's writing on any particular terms.  Whatever you make of it is what it is. 

How Female Wrestlers Illuminate Everyday Women

 As a male who has dabbled in writing fiction, I'm always interested the lives of woman -- what is important to them and what they want. Not long ago I published one take on this matter and now here is another.

On Dec. 3, 2020, the Arts section of the New York Times, carried a piece by Scarlett Harris lamenting the apparent premature end of a Netflix series about woman wrestlers entitled "GLOW." It ran for three seasons and was supposed to have one more, but that was cancelled. According to the NYT, Netflix cited production delays as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

Harris said she liked the series because, along with women pummeling each other with such things as fly-tackles and face slams, the series dealt with subjects faced by "everyday women."  These, she said, include "motherhood, friendship, queer identity, ambition, reproductive rights, racism and eating disorders."

Racism was apparently one topic the show, created by Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch, both white women, didn't successfully address in the context of putting the series together.

"After the show was cancelled, it was revealed that the principal cast's women of color had asked the producers for more inclusivity, criticizing the show for sidelining their characters and making them feel like check boxes on a list," the NYT article said.  In other words, they wanted bigger roles. 

Well, OK, as Harris said earlier in her article, racism is one of the things contemporary women have to deal with.

On another front, it appeared GLOW didn't actually break much new ground.  Sex sells and the more transgressive, the better. Early in the series, one of the main characters discovers the other, a best friend, is sleeping with her husband. But, thanks to having to trust each other in the ring when both become wrestlers, they get their personal relationship back on track, leading Ms Harris to say that for her, GLOW was at its core a love story between the two women. Well, as we learned above, queer identity is one of the issues "everyday women" currently face.

Lots of ideas for aspiring writers here.

A Little Help From Manohla Dargis on What Women Want

"Like many women, I have spent a lot of time thinking about how to move through the world. How to walk with confidence but not too much swing. How to stand with my shoulders back without sticking out my chest. How to smile, like a nice girl. How to cross my legs, like a lady. How to speak up, within reason. How to take up space but not too much. Yet I love watching women who take up space, who swagger and sometimes wildly crash."

That quote is the first paragraph of a recent article by New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis and it is interesting in the context of writing fiction. How should women be depicted (much, of course, depends upon the era in which a story is set) and what do they want?

In a nutshell, Dargis wants to see women in action and the more extreme, the better. She's an advocate of what one might call "the alpha-female." As is the case with respect to the proverbial alpha-male -- a stock character of popular fiction -- the alpha-female is a person who exerts control over other people and her environment. She makes things happen and if people get in her way, they better have more physical clout than she has.

Among others, Dargis points to actress Charlize Theron who she praises for kicking butt "again and again" in "Atomic Blonde," an action thriller released in 2017, and who now stars in "The Old Guard," described by Washington Post critic Ann Hornaday as "a violent, fantastical action thriller about a group of supernatural mercenaries."

"The Old Guard" has recently received a lot of critical attention because it is directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood and as such, is said to be the first graphic, or comic book-based, film directed by a black woman.

The secret power of the supernatural mercenaries is that they are impossible to kill -- sort of like kick-boxing cockroaches, one suspects.

One of things Dargis said she liked to watch on YouTube were stunt videos from action films centered on women.

"Only recently did I grasp that the behind-the-scenes videos I was looking at were showing women kicking and punching their way to different kinds of female representation," she said.

This is in sharp contrast to women of the relatively recent past.

"In the films I saw growing up in the 1970s, including those from the classical era, women didn’t register as especially physical unless they were swimming, riding a horse or dancing, like Eleanor Powell and Ginger Rogers, whose athleticism was bound up with the feminine ideals of their era. Women in movies — the stars, at any rate, the desirable and desiring ones — were elegant, small, tidy and contained, even at their curviest," Dargis said.

"And then," she continued, "there was Shelley Winters, whose heroic swim in the 1972 disaster flick 'The Poseidon Adventure' destroyed me. Her matronly Belle, a former competitive swimmer, takes the plunge to save the leading man. She succeeds but dies."

We're all familiar with the objectification of women -- the male gaze. But it seems women can objectify women as well.

Here's Dargis again:

"There’s a potent feminist critique that women have long been made to be looked at for male pleasure in movies and elsewhere. But women also look, and the female gaze always complicates that dynamic. Winters’s big, powerful, fish-pale thighs complicated it for me."

There's more on that theme (the female gaze) in the article by Dargis plus and a lot more on how violence -- as brutal as possible -- becomes women. Who needs men at all, one begins to wonder, except perhaps as a punching bag when women aren't slugging it out with each other?

But back to "The Old Guard" and it's director.

In the above-referenced Washington Post article by Ann Hornaday, Prince Bythewood is quoted as that her identity as an African-American woman informed every decision she made, some of which involved making sure fight scenes were depicted from a different angle than the usual "white male gaze."

One scene in particular -- a fight between two women on a cargo plane -- was said to be particularly sensitive for the director.

"I didn't want anyone to look at that and say, 'That's a sexy cat fight' [as white, but not males of other races, apparently would]," Prince-Bythewood was quoted as saying. "No, I want you to see two badass women going toe-to-toe, but also see their vulnerability within that. Because for me that's what badass is: that swagger, that strength, but also empathy and vulnerability."

Anyway -- all of the above is offered by way of providing a few clues to help those interested in coming  up with a contemporary answer to the age-old question: "what do woman want?"

The Invisible Woman (or Man)

Invisible people are generally associated in the world of fiction with ghost stories or tales making use of what is known as magical realism -- or outright magic.

But in truth, invisibility is common in everyday life and can be written about as part of the Importance of the Ordinary.

Good examples of this can be found in a recent New York Times article entitled "New Women's Groups Focus on Generational Mix."

The article opens with an anecdote about a woman lamenting the difficulties of aging. "She said she felt invisible … generally silenced. Unseen. As if she had nothing to contribute to the world." Other women were said to have then echoed the same feelings.

"These were all women who had college degrees, were married or had a significant other, were well traveled and led very nice lifestyles, but every one of them felt invisible. They didn't feel pretty any longer. No one was looking at them."

So reported Susan Good, a woman who has launched an initiative to combat the affliction.

Among other things, the article mentions a monthly reading series in various major cities where women from multiple generations read short stories and essays loosely centered around a theme. It was founded by novelist Georgia Clark after a conversation during which her mother spoke about "disappearing" in later life.

"She said that as she had gotten older people looked right through her," Ms. Clark told the NYT. "If we're walking down the street together, they'll just look at me, and if she's alone, it's as if she's not there."

This, by the way, is not unique to women.  Older men experience it as well, but they are perhaps more reluctant than women to admit it.

"The dominant culture tells you that when you reach a certain age, you can't be included any more," Devorah Bry, a dance and couples therapist in Nevada City, was quoted as saying.

In truth, advancing age is not the only reason people feel invisible. Marginalization, such as by virtue of mental illness or severe financial setbacks, is another.  That may be a factor behind recent, seemingly inexplicable mass shootings.  Those carrying them out are invisible no more, even if it is only on the way out.