Fragments 3

1.

“She had the startled eyes of a wild bird. This is the kind of sentence he goes mad for. He would like to be able to write such sentences without embarrassment. He would like to be able to read them without embarrassment. If he could only do these two simple things, he feels, he would be able to pass his allotted time on this earth like a pearl wrapped in velvet.”

2.

“How much of a misogynist is he? This is open to debate. He is certainly playing to the misogyny of his audience, and doing so with remarkable eloquence. His Sixth Satire is yet another instance of what may at first appear to be a paradox: misogyny has inspired more great writing than any other prejudice.”

3.

“She had the startled eyes of a wild bird. Ah, but which one? A screech owl, perhaps, or a cuckoo? It does make a difference.”

4.

“He did a quick run-through of women in his mind, not of the ones he had known or dealt with in the past few months or years so much as all of them: their concern with the surface of things, with objects and appearances, with their surroundings and how they looked and sounded in them, with seeming to be better and to be right while getting everything wrong, their automatic assumption of the role of injured party in any clash of wills, their certainty that a view is the more credible and useful for the fact that they hold it, their use of misunderstanding and misrepresentation as weapons of debate, their selective sensitivity to tones of voice, their unawareness of the difference in themselves between sincerity and insincerity, their interest in importance (together with noticeable inability to discriminate in that sphere), their fondness for general conversation and directionless discussion, their pre-emption of the major share of feeling, their exaggerated estimate of their own plausibility, their never listening and lots of other things like that, all according to him.”

5.

“She had a feral gaze like that of an untamed animal, he read. Reluctantly he put down the book, thumb still inserted at the exciting moment. Metaphor leads him by the nose, into the maze, and suddenly all Eden lies before him. Porcupines, weasels, warthogs, and skunks, their feral gazes malicious or bland or stolid or piggy and sly. Agony, to see the romantic frisson quivering just out of reach, a dark-winged butterfly stuck to an overripe peach, and not to be able to swallow, or wallow. Which one? He murmurs to the unresponding air. Which one?”

6.

“Mentally, he went through the list. The disappointees, the wronged (he didn’t know how he had wronged them, only that they looked and felt and sounded wronged), the upset, the insulted, the abused (he didn’t know how he had abused them etc.), the discontented, the never satisfied or appeased, the unhappy. But then they had all been unhappy. Unhappy when he found them and unhappier when they left. So many unhappy women out there. Such a sea of female misery.

“But none of it his doing, for Christ’s sake.”

1,3,5. Margaret Atwood, “Women’s Novels,” Good Bones and Simple Murders (2005)

2. Jack Holland, A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice (2006)

4. Kingsley Amis, Jake’s Thing (1978)

6. Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question (2010)