To me, the point of an introduction to a work of literature (especially one that is 199 years old) should be to highlight and contextualize its alien qualities. I think it’s hard to frame anything about The Last Man as contemporary. One of the things I loved about it, both from world it was created in, and the world Shelley created within it, is that it was like this missive from a dying culture. I want to call its underlying spirit a kind of optimistic pessimism. Everything is heightened because it will probably be gone soon. I read in, I think, I don’t have the copy with me right now, the introduction to the Oxford edition, that she wrote it in the wake of a volcanic eruption and a cholera outbreak. The scenario she was laying out within the novel was much more plausible. Compare that to the fiction of the 21st century, which I would say is pessimistic optimism. We have a sense that the world drags on, specialists find cures, we’ll be ok, but because of that, a lot of what we experience just kind of softly, consistently, sucks.
It’s a nitpicky thing I know, but Rebecca Solnit says “The Last Man was coyly credited to ‘the author of Frankenstein’”. But wasn’t that the usual? Thomas Hardy’s first novel, Desperate Remedies, was published anonymously, and his second, Under the Greenwood Tree, was credited to “the author of Desperate Remedies.” It’s not until his third novel we see his name on the title page.
there's just so much she gets wrong or overly simplifies in that essay, it's sad. it's a wikipedia-level engagement with her life and the text.
as I'm trying to do some research for the episode we're going to record about the Last Man I am struck by how much recent writing about her and this book is divided into two groups: the extremely dry academic stuff written in painfully obscure language and this shallow and muddled stuff that is more about Shelley as a martyr or a girlboss than as a writer. there is almost nothing between these two extremes, something that takes her seriously as a writer but is written for a non-specialist audience. even the Miranda Seymour bio is pretty silly.
I re-read DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk over the pandemic and got the Penguin Classics version, which had an introduction by (lol) Ibram X. Kendi.
The thing about Rebecca Solnit is that she's so often tapped to write about stuff she has no knowledge of or association with. She edited a book about New Orleans that I absolutely hated (and which a LOT of reviewers and bookstores love) called "Unfathomable City". It was an extremely visual book "inspired by the atlas" from a social perspective - why was she the editor of it? What does she know about visual works and why the fuck is she writing books about New Orleans? She's never studied graphic design! She doesn't live here! She's never lived here! She has no family here! She didn't even go to Tulane as a kid! She did not experience Hurricane Katrina - not directly, not indirectly through family, not at all - which is a disaster she now writes about constantly because she published some very basic weather predictions plenty of people had been saying for years right before it happened! Go write your atlas on San Francisco and leave us alone, Rebecca Solnit! I mean the name alone made me so annoyed ("Unfathomable City" - is this like when a pickup artist "negs" a woman? Thanks for telling me I live somewhere not just vulnerable but so absurdly so its unfathomable?) Most hilariously, in one of her books where (again) she decides to write about Hurricane Katrina, she sang the praises of a white guy who "rescued" a former Black Panther - that was then exposed as an FBI informant sent to spy on and disrupt the grassroots relief work being done by said Black Panther after the book was published.
I mean the irony that Solnit is the woman who coined "mansplaining" to describe the phenomenon of arrogant men talking down to women with expertise or education or experience they do not have and yet constantly tells everyone else about themselves or about things she has no depth of knowledge, perspective, or nuance on drives me up the wall. She is that person! She's been that person over and over and over again, so many times!
god, these Penguin Classic intros are all so dismal. and they all sort of reinforce this idea that literature should be read literally. so much of Solnit's intro to TLM was reading the book as if it were some feminist manifesto rather than a novel with individual characters.
she is definitely one of those writers who feels totally entitled to write about any topic and never question whether she has enough experience or knowledge to do so. she wrote an essay about monuments for Harper's, back when she had a column there that was always Intellectual Lite. (more new orleans references!) anyway, it doesn't get anything huge wrong, but it's very skimming on the surface. a reference to Berlin and Nazis, a lukewarm survey of political discourse, a few lines she clearly thinks of as profound but are empty, all with a kind of I am a Cosmopolitan Writer tone. it manages to illuminate nothing but takes itself pretty seriously.
Hahaha. I got about halfway through it. Solnit here plays dumb, pretending that the evidence of Jim Crow racism that exists in the south isn't due to Republican Northern Elites who sold out the Reconstructionist cause to form financial alliances with the Dixiecrat Southern ruling class and its businesses, but some poetic and hilariously false notion that "the Union Army actually lost the civil war".
What was interesting about that time period, with all the drama over the monuments, is how uninterested anyone seemed to be in thinking up replacements. The Robert E. Lee monument (which like most was of course erected as soon as Reconstruction ended by the Daughters of the Confederacy) has literally been an empty pedestal for almost 10 years now and was recently the site of a sacred heart sculpture by Raul de Nieves which I think looks rather nice but isn't intended to be permanent. Beauregard & the Jeff Davis pedestals also remain empty. The White League monument, which has been roundly unpopular and hidden from view most of my life, was literally fashioned from a piece of cemetery statuary from a mail-order catalog. There was a mural put up around the time the monuments came down by piece of railroad where Homer Plessy was asked to leave the whites-only railcar - and none of the people behind the mural, neither the benefactor nor the artist, bothered to find out there are no extant photos of Homer Plessy, so embarrassingly, they erected a falsely-identified mural to PBS Pinchback who appears in every Google image search for Homer Plessy.
And so it goes with Rebecca Solnit. Zero interest in history or context or place or any of that and what its future could be, no optimism to speak of really, just a very grim obsession with the contours of a culture war someplace she's not even that deeply connected to.
To me, the point of an introduction to a work of literature (especially one that is 199 years old) should be to highlight and contextualize its alien qualities. I think it’s hard to frame anything about The Last Man as contemporary. One of the things I loved about it, both from world it was created in, and the world Shelley created within it, is that it was like this missive from a dying culture. I want to call its underlying spirit a kind of optimistic pessimism. Everything is heightened because it will probably be gone soon. I read in, I think, I don’t have the copy with me right now, the introduction to the Oxford edition, that she wrote it in the wake of a volcanic eruption and a cholera outbreak. The scenario she was laying out within the novel was much more plausible. Compare that to the fiction of the 21st century, which I would say is pessimistic optimism. We have a sense that the world drags on, specialists find cures, we’ll be ok, but because of that, a lot of what we experience just kind of softly, consistently, sucks.
It’s a nitpicky thing I know, but Rebecca Solnit says “The Last Man was coyly credited to ‘the author of Frankenstein’”. But wasn’t that the usual? Thomas Hardy’s first novel, Desperate Remedies, was published anonymously, and his second, Under the Greenwood Tree, was credited to “the author of Desperate Remedies.” It’s not until his third novel we see his name on the title page.
there's just so much she gets wrong or overly simplifies in that essay, it's sad. it's a wikipedia-level engagement with her life and the text.
as I'm trying to do some research for the episode we're going to record about the Last Man I am struck by how much recent writing about her and this book is divided into two groups: the extremely dry academic stuff written in painfully obscure language and this shallow and muddled stuff that is more about Shelley as a martyr or a girlboss than as a writer. there is almost nothing between these two extremes, something that takes her seriously as a writer but is written for a non-specialist audience. even the Miranda Seymour bio is pretty silly.
I luv that we are doing this. I also feel very intimidated and I am lazy. So there's that.
I re-read DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk over the pandemic and got the Penguin Classics version, which had an introduction by (lol) Ibram X. Kendi.
The thing about Rebecca Solnit is that she's so often tapped to write about stuff she has no knowledge of or association with. She edited a book about New Orleans that I absolutely hated (and which a LOT of reviewers and bookstores love) called "Unfathomable City". It was an extremely visual book "inspired by the atlas" from a social perspective - why was she the editor of it? What does she know about visual works and why the fuck is she writing books about New Orleans? She's never studied graphic design! She doesn't live here! She's never lived here! She has no family here! She didn't even go to Tulane as a kid! She did not experience Hurricane Katrina - not directly, not indirectly through family, not at all - which is a disaster she now writes about constantly because she published some very basic weather predictions plenty of people had been saying for years right before it happened! Go write your atlas on San Francisco and leave us alone, Rebecca Solnit! I mean the name alone made me so annoyed ("Unfathomable City" - is this like when a pickup artist "negs" a woman? Thanks for telling me I live somewhere not just vulnerable but so absurdly so its unfathomable?) Most hilariously, in one of her books where (again) she decides to write about Hurricane Katrina, she sang the praises of a white guy who "rescued" a former Black Panther - that was then exposed as an FBI informant sent to spy on and disrupt the grassroots relief work being done by said Black Panther after the book was published.
I mean the irony that Solnit is the woman who coined "mansplaining" to describe the phenomenon of arrogant men talking down to women with expertise or education or experience they do not have and yet constantly tells everyone else about themselves or about things she has no depth of knowledge, perspective, or nuance on drives me up the wall. She is that person! She's been that person over and over and over again, so many times!
god, these Penguin Classic intros are all so dismal. and they all sort of reinforce this idea that literature should be read literally. so much of Solnit's intro to TLM was reading the book as if it were some feminist manifesto rather than a novel with individual characters.
she is definitely one of those writers who feels totally entitled to write about any topic and never question whether she has enough experience or knowledge to do so. she wrote an essay about monuments for Harper's, back when she had a column there that was always Intellectual Lite. (more new orleans references!) anyway, it doesn't get anything huge wrong, but it's very skimming on the surface. a reference to Berlin and Nazis, a lukewarm survey of political discourse, a few lines she clearly thinks of as profound but are empty, all with a kind of I am a Cosmopolitan Writer tone. it manages to illuminate nothing but takes itself pretty seriously.
https://harpers.org/archive/2017/01/the-monument-wars/
Hahaha. I got about halfway through it. Solnit here plays dumb, pretending that the evidence of Jim Crow racism that exists in the south isn't due to Republican Northern Elites who sold out the Reconstructionist cause to form financial alliances with the Dixiecrat Southern ruling class and its businesses, but some poetic and hilariously false notion that "the Union Army actually lost the civil war".
What was interesting about that time period, with all the drama over the monuments, is how uninterested anyone seemed to be in thinking up replacements. The Robert E. Lee monument (which like most was of course erected as soon as Reconstruction ended by the Daughters of the Confederacy) has literally been an empty pedestal for almost 10 years now and was recently the site of a sacred heart sculpture by Raul de Nieves which I think looks rather nice but isn't intended to be permanent. Beauregard & the Jeff Davis pedestals also remain empty. The White League monument, which has been roundly unpopular and hidden from view most of my life, was literally fashioned from a piece of cemetery statuary from a mail-order catalog. There was a mural put up around the time the monuments came down by piece of railroad where Homer Plessy was asked to leave the whites-only railcar - and none of the people behind the mural, neither the benefactor nor the artist, bothered to find out there are no extant photos of Homer Plessy, so embarrassingly, they erected a falsely-identified mural to PBS Pinchback who appears in every Google image search for Homer Plessy.
And so it goes with Rebecca Solnit. Zero interest in history or context or place or any of that and what its future could be, no optimism to speak of really, just a very grim obsession with the contours of a culture war someplace she's not even that deeply connected to.